Murder monuments
Hindhead’s reputation in the 18th century as a bleak place, risky for travellers, took a turn for the worse with what quickly became the infamous murder of a sailor on 24 September, 1786.
It’s generally understood that this sailor was visiting the Red Lion Inn at Thursley as he was walking back from London to join his ship at Portsmouth. There, he met three other seafarers, James Marshall, Michael Casey and Edward Lonegon. He paid for their drinks and food and was last seen leaving for Hindhead Hill with them. In the account of the Hampshire Chronicle of 2 October 1786:
‘Sunday last a shocking murder was committed by three sailors, on one of their companions, a seaman also, between Godalming and Hindhead. They nearly severed his head from his body, stripped him quite naked, and threw him into a valley, where he was providentially discovered, soon after the perpetration of the horrid crime, by some countrymen corning over Hind Head, who immediately gave the alarm, when the desperadoes were instantly pursued, and overtaken at the house of Mr. Adams, The Sun, at Rake. They were properly secured, and are since lodged in gaol, to take their trials at the next assizes for the county of Surrey.’
Six months later the three were convicted and sentenced to death. A 30ft gibbet or gallows was constructed on what became known as Gibbet Hill, and the murderers were hanged. Their bodies were then tarred and suspended from the gibbet in metal cages, where they were left to rot for three years as a warning to others.
The murder and the execution were commemorated by the sailor’s stone, quickly erected in 1786 and placed roughly where it stands today, a well as by the sailor’s gravestone in Thursley, which is pictured in the app trail. These objects helped to give the events of 1786 a long cultural afterlife. The gibbet crowns the glowering landscape sketched by JMW Turner in 1808, pictured below. Charles Dickens had Nicholas Nickleby come across the Sailor’s stone and recall the bloody events in the eponymous novel of 1839. In 1890, seven years before he published Dracula, Bram Stoker penned a story called ‘Gibbet Hill’ for a Dublin newspaper. Only rediscovered in 2024, in this Gothic tale Stoker’s narrator meets three children with supernatural abilities at the Sailor’s Stone. Meanwhile, in the Rev Sabine Baring-Gould’s 1896 novel The Broom Squire, the conceit is that the unknown sailor was carrying an infant child, who is orphaned at Hindhead and goes on to marry the broom squire of the title.
Unsurprisingly, the sailor’s murder also had a long afterlife in oral memory. Thomas Wright, who toured the area to gather material for his 1898 book Hindhead, or The English Switzerland, wrote that an old broom squire in Grayshott called Body Hale told him that his great grandmother, Mary Tilman, had witnessed the execution of the murderers with a large crowd. He also claimed his grandfather had arrested the culprits.
The stone carries the words on the back: ‘Cursed be the man who injureth or removeth this stone’. This was added by the family of the man who originally paid for the stone, after it was moved to the new coach road in the 1820s. This didn’t stop it being moved again, several times, but it’s been in its present, original location since 1932.
