Manor Farm in Ladbroke dates back, according to the data on British Listed Buildings, to the mid 18th century. For architectural historians, it adds:
Squared coursed lias with quoins and coped gables. Slate roof with brick end stacks. L-shaped plan. 2 storeys plus attic; 3-window range of C20 three-light casements in original openings with stone flat arches to ground floor. C20 door with stone flat arch. 2 gabled dormers. C20 one-storey lean-to to left. Interior: noted as having stop-chamfered spine beams and large open fireplace, refaced C19. C18 central staircase with turned balusters.
In September 1925, the farm had been bought by Cecil Crabtree and his wife, Milly Illngworth Crabtree, (neé Fawcett). The couple had married in 1923 in Halifax, and had a son, Brian, aged eighteen months and a daughter, Betty, just six months old.
Crabtree was clearly a man with ambitions, and also had farming interests at Burton Farm, Neston, Cheshire. When the family moved down to Ladbroke, a young man called George Sharpes accompanied them as stockman. It appears that Cecil Crabtree had taken on Sharpes in a spirit of benevolence, as the the young man had, for four years, been an inmate of the Farm Training Colony, a reformatory for boys at Newton-le-Willows, and was considered to be “a wrong ‘un”. Sharpes’s parents lived in Crewe, where his father was a railway worker.
A young girl called Kathleen Coleman, aged 10, lived in one of the farm cottages with her mother and father – who worked for Mr Crabtree. Kathleen often helped out in the house, and on the afternoon of 13th January 1926, she made a chilling discovery. She went upstairs to Mrs Crabtree’s room, as one of the babies was crying. She told the inquest:
” I saw George lying on the bed with his throat all bleeding, and he told me to tell daddy to come. I ran and told father, who was in the cowshed.”
Her father, Sibert Pearson Coleman ran to the house, and saw George Sharpes, but was about to make another much more terrible discovery:
“His (George’s) throat was bleeding. I asked him what was the matter, and he said —’ Never mind me; go down to the missus. I have killed her.’ I ran down to the sitting-room, and found Mrs Crabtree lying dead in a pool of blood. She was bleeding from wounds in the face and the back of the head. I saw that she was past aid. One of the children was on the settee crying.”
Inspector Cresswell, of Southam, was called to Manor Farm (above, as it was at the time) and when he arrived he found Mrs Crabtree lying on the floor of the sitting room, face downwards. There was a large quantity of blood near the head, and marks of blood on bureau, and also on the wall about five feet up. He found a hammer lying on the sofa, with blood and hair adhering to it. Seeing there was nothing he could do for Mrs Crabtree, the inspector returned to Sharpes, who was lying on the bed in Mrs Crabtree’s bedroom with a wound in his throat. There was a bloodstained shoemaker’s knife on the bed beside him. The wound was slight. There was towel and a suit of pyjamas wound round his head.
On seeing the Inspector, Sharpes muttered,“Let me die! Leave me alone, and let me die!”
The inspector called for a car and Sharpes was removed to the hospital in Leamington Spa, where he was detained. Cresswell said later that it seemed Mrs Crabtree’s skull was crushed in on the left side above and below the left ear.and probably done with one blow.
Cecil Crabtree was contacted and returned as fast as he could, in a state of understandable shock. There was little doubt who was responsible for his wife’s murder, and once the inquest had been comcluded, she was buried in Ladbroke churchyard on a snowy winter afternoon. The report in The Rugby Advertiser of Friday 22nd January was heartfelt:
IN PART TWO – Trial, motive – and justice
England, 1923. Like thousands upon thousands of other young women, Esme Nicholls is a widow. Husband Alec lies in a functional grave in a military cemetery in Flanders. His face remains in a few photographs, and in her memories. Left penniless, she ekes out a living by writing a nature-notes feature for a northern provincial newspaper, and serving as a personal assistant to an older widow, Mrs Pickering. Mrs P has the advantage of being able to visit her husband’s grave whenever she wants, as he was not a victim of the war.
Caroline Scott (right) treats us to a high summer in Cornwall, where every flower, rustle of leaves in the breeze and flit of insect is described with almost intoxicating detail. Readers who remember her previous novel When I Come Home Again will be unsurprised by this detail. In the novel, she references that greatest of all poet of England’s nature, John Clare, but I also sense something of Matthew Arnold’s poems The Scholar Gypsy and Thyrsis, so memorably set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
A rich widower, a self made industrialist, dies and leaves his fortune to be divided between his two nephews. One is a down-at-heel schoolmaster, the other a disreputable roué. The lucky man has to solve a cypher set by their late uncle. The good guy brings the cypher to Hester and Ivy. They solve the conundrum with by way of a knowledge of 18th century first editions, a journey to explore an ancient English church, and by breaking in to a family mausoleum.
Here, Tony Evans (right) indulges in the first of two shameless – but entertaining – instances of name-dropping. Our two sleuths, weary after a succession of difficult investigations, are enjoying some well-earned R & R in the resort of Whitby. So who do they meet? Think Irish writer and man of the theatre, blood, fangs …..? Gotcha! They are engaged by a fellow holidaymaker, a certain Mr B. Stoker to investigate the disappearance of a housemaid. She has been induced to leave her present employment to go and work for a rather dodgy doctor. Much skullduggery ensues, the housemaid is saved, and Mr Stoker says, “Hmm – this gives me an idea for a story.”
So, what is so special about the Carter Family and their songs? AP Carter’s ‘day job’ at one time, was traveling salesman.and he was a voracious collector of the songs that he heard as he moved from town to town. He clearly had a very good ear for melody. The words were almost certainly written down, but the tunes would have been just carried in his head. The songs are from a broad spread of different traditions. Some – in the lyrics at least – are clearly versions of songs that would have come over from the British Isles centuries earlier, while others are clearly 19th century American hymns and religious songs. Regarding the British songs, there is little or no sign of the modal tonality that you hear in later transcriptions of such songs by people like Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp. The astonishing thing is that overwhelming majority of Carter Family songs are what musicians call ‘three chord tricks’. In other words their harmonic structure is Tonic, Sub-Dominant and Dominant. Chord-wise, that means, if we are in the key of C, they use C major, F major G major and G seven. I have listened to dozens and dozens of recordings, and it is quite remarkable that they never seem to use a minor chord. The songs are almost always played using guitar chords in the key of C. That is not to say that the songs are in the absolute key of C, as Maybelle would use a capo. as well as detuning her guitar by as much as three or four semitones.
It is no exaggeration to say that Maybelle Carter was one of the great innovators of guitar music. In terms of what she achieved she is up there with the greats alongside Reinhardt, Hendrix, Clapton, Cooder and – in her own genre, players like Doc Watson and Chet Atkins. I am a guitarist myself, and have been playing for over fifty years. It’s a good job I never had to earn my living from it, but I consider myself a reasonable amateur player. What Maybelle Carter did sounds elementary on the records, but when one comes to try and copy the style it is very, very difficult. She had several different techniques, but her signature style was what is known as ‘The Carter Scratch’. She plays melody with her thumb on the lower guitar strings, while using her index finger to strum out a percussive rhythm of the higher strings. She occasionally uses a different finger picking style, picked up from black blues players, which is more akin to ragtime syncopation.
Sarah’s autoharp is an important feature on all the recordings. It backs up the incessant rhythm of Maybelle’s guitar, but because its strings are tuned much higher, it cuts through in the treble frequencies and provides an important texture to the music. Crucially, though, when you listen to a Carter Family recording it is mostly Sarah’s voice you hear. It would be wrong to call it a thing of beauty. It has a hard edge, with an almost masculine timbre. There is never any vibrato, but intonation-wise it is spot on every time, right in the middle of the note. The lyrics she sings are almost always shorn of pretension or ambiguity. They speak of simple truths – love, life, death, hardship, betrayal, joy and sorrow. Her voice tells it like it is. There is no doubt, no nuance but instead, utter conviction and sincerity.
Thus begins a thoroughly intriguing murder mystery, steeped in the religious politics of the time. For over one hundred and fifty years, religion had defined politics. Henry VIII and his daughters had burned their ‘heretics’, and although the strife between Charles I and Parliament was mainly to do with authority and representation, many of Oliver Cromwell’s adherents were strident in their opposition to the ways of worship practiced by the Church if England. Now, Charles II is King. He is reputed to have sired many ‘royal bastards’ but none that could succeed to the throne, and the next in line, his brother James, has converted to Catholicism. In most of modern Britain the schism between Catholics and Protestants is just a memory, but we only have to look across the Irish Sea for evidence of the bitter passions that can still divide society.
How on earth this superb novel spent many years floating around in the limbo of ‘independent publishing’ is beyond reason. While not quite in the ‘Decca rejects The Beatles‘ class of short sightedness, it is still baffling. The Bloodless Boy has everything – passion, enough gore to satisfy Vlad Drăculea, a sweeping sense of England’s history, a comprehensive understanding of 17th century science and a depiction of an English winter which will have you turning up the thermostat by a couple of notches. The characters – both real and fictional – are so vivid that they could be there in the room with you as you read the book.
There were nineteen B & M novels, beginning with Full Dark House in 2003, plus a quartet of graphic novels and short story collections. I say ‘were’, because although Christopher Fowler (left) is still with us, those who have read London Bridge Is Falling Down (2021) will know – and I am sorry if this is a spoiler – that old age and infirmity finally catches up with the venerable pair of detectives. Where to start to talk about this series? The author himself is, as far as I can judge, a modern and cosmopolitan fellow, but his love – and knowledge – of London is all embracing. Christopher Fowler is a one-off in contemporary writing, and completely individual, but speaking as an elderly chap with many years of reading behind me, I can best put him in context with great English writers of the last 150 years or so by looking at various aspects of the novels.
MJ is alive and well, and still writing, and Peter Maxwell appeared as recently as 2020 with Maxwell’s Summer. The series started in 1994 with Maxwell’s House, a title which (if you were around in the 1960s) will give you some idea of MJ’s wonderful sense of English domestic history – and his inability to resist a pun. The books are highly enjoyable, but never cosy. There is a streak of melancholy never far from the surface, and we are reminded that Maxwell’s first wife died when the car they were in was involved in a fatal collision. Max has never driven since, and his trusty bicycle is a regular prop in the stories. Max eventually marries his policewoman girlfriend Jackie Carpenter, which is only right and fair, since she is the plot device that has given him a very convenient ‘in’ with local murder investigations. MJ Trow has several other CriFi series to his name, and I list them below.
Inspector Lestrade – in which Trow ‘rehabilitates’ the much maligned copper in the Sherlock Holmes stories. 17 novels, beginning in 1985.
fullybooked2017 