Hats in the canal – a miscarriage of justice?

On the afternoon of Thursday 7^th May 1840, two boatmen were walking along the towpath of the Birmingham and Fazeley canal when they came across a man’s hat, dry and undamaged, sitting on its crown under a bridge. Surprised by this unexpected find, they glanced around and spotted a woman’s bonnet floating in the water a few feet away. The bonnet was soaked and badly crushed.

Alarmed about the fate of the hats’ owners, the men grabbed a boat hook and dipped it in the water. After swishing around for a few minutes, the hook caught on a woman’s dress. To their horror, the men realised they had found the corpse of a drowned woman. The boatmen hauled the body out of the water and called the police. The policeman who responded recognised the hats as those belonging to Harriet Wright, aged 19, and her lover, a 17-year-old apprentice named Josiah Lilly.

The inquest

Harriet’s inquest took place the following day, presided over by Birmingham Coroner John Birt Davies. Numerous witnesses were called and a large audience piled into the temporary courtroom in the Turk’s Head pub. A tragic story emerged of a young woman caught between her love for a mercurial young man and her father’s strong objections to their union. Harriet and Josiah’s relationship had been turbulent, alternating between periods when they cohabited in apparent harmony, and times when she left him to return to her father’s house.  

Lilly was known to the police, who had recorded a list of previous warnings for bad behaviour. A few days before, he had been taken into custody accused by Harriet’s father of stealing her hat and shawl. A policeman noted that Lilly responded aggressively when Harriet asked him to return her clothing, but she declined to press charges, so he was released. On being picked up again following her drowning, Lilly seemed an obvious suspect and was taken into custody.

Josiah Lilly was brought into the inquest looking noticeably young, but self-possessed. The inquest jury had to decide whether Harriet had taken her own life by jumping in the canal, or whether she had been pushed, in which case Lilly could be held guilty of murder. After questioning witnesses for the entire day and listening to the coroner sum up the evidence, the jury retired to a private room to consider their verdict.

The verdict

It was getting on for midnight when they returned to announce their verdict, watched by the large crowd of onlookers gripped by the dramatic accounts. The foreman stood up: ‘We are agreed that the deceased came by her death by drowning and record a verdict of wilful murder against the prisoner.’

The assize court

This conclusion required Lilly to be referred on to the assize court to be formally tried in front of a judge, lawyers for the prosecution and defence, and a jury. The case came before Worcester assize court fourteen weeks later. The same witnesses appeared and were taken over the same ground as in the inquest, but this time Lilly was defended by a very able lawyer.

Claiming Harriet was ‘a person of hasty temper’, Lilly’s defence lawyer argued that he had no motive for killing her. ‘Had the jury never heard of women destroying themselves for love?’   Much of his case rested on the hat and bonnet. Lilly had taken Harriet’s bonnet to persuade her to return to him, but her father had taken advantage of this to accuse him of theft. The fact that Lilly’s hat had been found in the only dry place under the bridge, he suggested, was an indication that Harriet had placed it there to implicate him.

The astonishing imputation that she had taken her own life and, in the process of doing so, had the foresight to implicate Lilly in this way seems incredibly far-fetched. But it served to plant doubt in the minds of the jury, who returned a verdict of not guilty, and the prisoner was duly released.

For more information on this and other coroner’s tales, see Probing Deaths, Saving Lives.