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Barnes in Commonthe magazine of Churches Together in Barnes
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The Body In The BoxWhen two men found a roped box on the foreshore opposite The Terrace in Barnes at low tide one morning in 1879, they little knew that they were literally to lift the lid on one of the goriest and most sensational murders of the age. The remains of Mrs. Thomas, a respectable widow of Richmond, lay inside, and the subsequent arrest, trial and execution of her maidservant, Catherine Webster, occupied the gutter press with weeks of stomach-turning detail. Darrol Blake and Tom Stanier, two well-known local media personalities, conceived the idea of turning this and two other sensational affairs connected to Barnes into a short film on behalf of the Barnes & Mortlake History Society, using material from the press of the day and enlisting local amateurs to play the characters involved. This first episode is now complete, featuring suitably Victorian contributions from Robin Bushell as the narrator and Deidre O'Kelly as Catherine Webster, and skilfully interpolated with cuttings from the press of the day, which specialised in some deplorable amateur lyrics, not to mention gruesome artist's impressions of the dismemberment and boiling of the unfortunate Mrs. Thomas (whose head was never located). Two further episodes are promised, one from the Napoleonic period and one from the nineteen-thirties. Tom and Darrol hope these will give the History Society a valuable and entertaining piece of archive material, which may also be useful to social historians. |
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