The Red Cross Murders

Were the murders of John Batey, Dr Robert Stirling, and Ellen Atkinson linked? PLUS: Art fraud, The Rehearsal, AI rapture

Near the top of Blaydon Bank in the ancient village of Winlaton is a blood-red cross. It’s painted on an old stone wall opposite Blaydon Cricket Club on the steep bank that runs from Blaydon up to Winlaton, high above the south bank of the Tyne in the North East of England. The cross marks the location of a brutal murder committed in the early hours of 6 November 1860 — a murder that might be linked to two others.

John Batey was a 38-year-old father of three, described as a “hard-working, decent, and well-behaved man.” On Monday, 5 November 1860, Batey attended a pigeon shooting match at Blaydon Burn. Wagers were placed, and Batey left the match with two or three pounds’ worth of winnings, equivalent to a month’s salary. He celebrated by drinking with friends at Winlaton’s Crown and Cannon pub until 12:15 a.m. A lamplighter saw Batey leave the pub. He was never seen alive again.

At around 2 a.m., two young men were walking up Blaydon Bank when they saw what they believed to be a drunken man lying face down in the darkness. The man was wearing a shirt and neck tie, drawers and stockings, but no shoes or trousers. The young men shouted to him, but received no answer, and decided not to try to assist, fearing “disagreeable consequences”. Instead, they alerted another passer-by, a Winlaton blacksmith named George Nixon, who tried to lift the man. It was John Batey, and he was dead.

Nixon rushed into Winlaton to fetch the police constable, James Kelly, and the surgeon, Dr Callander. It was now around 4 a.m., and the surgeon determined that Batey had been dead for “some time”. Batey had a jagged, triangular wound to the front of his skull. He was taken on a cart to Winlaton’s Commercial Hotel. As the sun came up, the witnesses saw on the wall opposite where Batey had lain a “long and broad streak of blood”.

A coroner’s inquest opened at the Commercial Hotel two days later. An autopsy found that Batey had died from a violent blow to the head with a triangular blunt instrument. He had then stumbled against the wall, causing the blood stain. His body had then been carried across the road, presumably to delay detection. This was not a drunken fall. He had been murdered.

Multiple witnesses said they had seen Batey in the Crown and Cannon in the company of a “strange man” with a Lancashire accent who people called “Lanky”. The man wore a black velvet coat and a cap, and appeared to have bloodied scratches on his face.

On the night Batey was killed, there had been another violent incident in Blaydon. Police had tried to arrest a keelman named Edward Armstrong on a warrant for poaching on land belonging to Joseph Cowen, the famous Winlaton-born founder of the Newcastle Daily Chronicle who would later become a radical MP. Confronted in a Blaydon pub, Armstrong resisted arrest, assaulted a police officer with a “heavy life preserver”, and fled to Winlaton. Armstrong was assisted in his scuffle with the police by the man known as Lanky, whose real name was Thomas Smith.

Armstrong surrendered to police on the following evening and gave a statement regarding the Batey murder. According to Armstrong, after evading arrest he had gone to his father-in-law’s house in Blaydon, and then, at about 7 a.m., to the house of a friend named Thomas Billclough. There, Armstrong found Lanky Smith, who was wearing a fresh pair of boots and trousers and a cap, which he had not been wearing on the previous evening. Thomas Billclough’s wife, Mary, came into the room and told them, “What a bad job it was that poor Batey was found in the lane stripped and murdered!”

Smith immediately asked Armstrong to go with him for a walk, and they went up to Winlaton’s Windy Fields. There, according to Armstrong. Smith made a confession. “I am going to tell you something, but I hope you will keep it secret,” Smith told Armstrong. “I went down the lane with Batey last night, and gave him a blow with a ‘Morgan Rattler.’” This was a “deadly-looking bludgeon”, which Smith promptly hid in a hedge. Smith told Armstrong he had intended to rob Batey, but not kill him. He said he had hidden his clothes close to the murder scene. The fresh clothes he was wearing belonged to Batey.

Police officers recovered the bludgeon, a pair of boots, a coat, a waistcoat and trousers.¹ The clothes were identified as belonging to Smith by his landlady, Ellen Atkinson. But Smith was nowhere to be found.

Map showing Winlaton, Blaydon, Blaydon Bank, Cuthbert Street and the Commercial Hotel

Smith had fled to Whitby, where he obtained work at an ironstone works. He was apprehended 12 days after the murder, when two workers accused him of being involved in the much-publicised Winlaton murder, and he confessed and surrendered.

On the following Tuesday, three weeks after the murder, Smith was brought to Winlaton for the inquest. Hundreds of people gathered around the Commercial Hotel, “hissing and hooting” and trying to get a glimpse of the accused. Inside, Smith sat gazing at the ground, “as if fearfully shrinking”. The coroner summed up the evidence, and, after a short consultation, the jury returned a verdict of “wilful murder”.

Due to Smith’s confession and apparent remorse, the jury recommended clemency, but this was not granted. Smith was hanged from a scaffold outside Durham County Court in front of a crowd of around 7,000 spectators during a snowstorm on 27 December 1860, aged about 35.²

Members of the large crowd were reportedly disappointed that they could not properly see the spectacle due to the heavy snow. According to the Durham County Advertiser, the crowd included “the worst of the population… the scum of Swalwell, Winlaton and Tyneside,” who showed “eagerness without sympathy… curiosity without pity…” as they yelled, swore, and got drunk. “It is impossible to imagine a crowd looking more inhuman.”

Although Smith was dead, the story was not over. Newspapers noted a connection between the murder of John Batey in Winlaton in November 1860 and the earlier murder of surgeon Robert Stirling in the nearby village of Burnopfield in November 1855. The 26-year-old doctor was shot and beaten to death while making his rounds. He was robbed of a silver watch and a small amount of money, and his body was dragged into the woods. He was found five days later by his father.

Newcastle Courant, 9 Nov 1860

Witnesses and a discarded waistcoat button led police to John Cain, known as “Whiskey Jack”, and his associate Richard Rayne.³ The well-read and seemingly intelligent Cain worked as a gardener for Joseph Cowen, with whom he was supposedly good friends.⁴ Rayne was a Winlaton blacksmith. Despite a trail of evidence, including bloody clothing, a jury found both Cain and Rayne not guilty.

The Newcastle Guardian called this a “failure of justice” and suggested that 11 members of the 12-man jury had been prepared to deliver a guilty verdict before being “brought over to a different opinion”. Despite becoming regarded as a “notorious murderer”, Cain emigrated to Australia as a free man.⁵

Before he left, Cain lived near the bottom of Blaydon Bank on Cuthbert Street, the same street as John Batey and Thomas “Lanky” Smith. According to the Newcastle Courant, Smith hurriedly left the area without collecting his wages after the Stirling murder. Smith was known to go poaching in the woods where Dr Stirling was found. The implication was that Smith might have been the murderer, not Cain. The evidence against Cain suggests this was not the case.

Thomas Smith’s landlady was Ellen (or Eleanor) Atkinson, who lived with her pitman husband Matthew. While Smith was in jail awaiting execution, Ellen and Matthew were his only visitors. By 1864, the Atkinsons had moved to nearby High Spen. Both were said to be heavy drinkers, and newspapers reported that Ellen repeatedly went off with other men and had to be fetched home by her husband.

On Saturday, 17 December 1864, Matthew returned drunk from a pigeon shoot, and angry words were exchanged. Ellen yelled, “To the devil with you, Mat,” and ran out of the house. Matthew chased her up the street, struck her in the face, and dragged her back to the house. Neighbours heard Matthew yelling “I’ll kill you” and the sounds of thudding blows. The neighbours knocked on the door, but Matthew told them he would shoot “man or woman, beast, god, or devil” that interfered. Eventually, when neighbours and police gained access to the house, they found that Matthew had beaten Ellen to death.

Matthew Atkinson was sent to the gallows on 16 March 1865, aged 41. At the first attempt of a novice hangman, the rope snapped, and Atkinson crashed through the scaffold. Men and women cried out in horror, and some fainted. The hangman fetched a new rope — to the fury of the 5,000 spectators who yelled at him, “Oh, you villain! You scoundrel!” The new rope was wrapped around the prisoner’s neck, and Atkinson was successfully hanged.

Today, the red cross on the stone wall that had once been streaked with blood serves as a memorial to the murdered John Batey, and also serves as a reminder of the killings of Robert Stirling and Ellen Atkinson.◆

This is another of my series of posts about the weird world of Winlaton (“Win-lay-ton”) — a historic and mysterious village in the North East of England. You can find more posts here.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please sign up for free to receive new posts every month. And if you think you know someone who might like to read Singular Discoveries, please share this with them and encourage them to join us! (We are currently 62 short of 1,000 subscribers…)

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Recommended

Book: All That Glitters by Orlando Whitfield

I know next to nothing about fine art, particularly the modern variety, and can’t fathom why anyone would pay a vast sum of money with so many zeroes on the end for something by Damien Hirst, but this insider’s tale of the antics of a fraudulent art dealer is a treat. Orlando Whitfield met Inigo Philbrick as a student, and the pair became friends and business partners. Then, after 15 years, Philbrick disappeared, and Whitfield realised his friend was a massive con artist. It’s perhaps difficult to get too invested in a tale of posh boys ripping off multi-millionaires, but it’s a well-written and entertaining read. You can find All That Glitters on the Singular Discoveries Amazon bookshelf.*

TV: The Rehearsal (HBO / Sky Comedy)

I hesitate to recommend The Rehearsal because it has very little to do with the themes of this newsletter and a lot of people will hate it. Described as a “hybrid documentary”, the premise sees comedian Nathan Fielder create elaborate rehearsals to help ordinary people prepare for personally challenging events. And these rehearsals are really elaborate, funded by an apparently limitless HBO budget.

The first episode sees the socially-awkward Fielder help a New Yorker confess to his pub quiz team that he lied about having a master’s degree by creating an exact full-size replica of the guy’s local bar and getting him to role-play the confession. Things spin off in wild directions and get increasingly elaborate and unhinged in ways that will make the viewer either revel in Fielder’s bizarre genius or angrily change the channel.

By season two, Fielder has, for some reason, decided to tackle the very real and by no means inconsequential problem of airline crashes caused by a lack of communication between pilots and co-pilots. He begins by constructing a huge replica of an airport departure terminal filled with hundreds of actors, and goes on to stretch things to frankly astonishing lengths, culminating in a jaw-dropping finale. It’s TV that will have you questioning what you’ve just watched. Is it real? Is it funny? And is Nathan trying to solve other people’s problems or just seeking some sort of validation for himself?

The Rehearsal is on HBO Max in the US and Sky Comedy in the UK. If so inclined, you should also seek out Nathan Fielder’s much more accessible Nathan For You, in which he outwardly helps struggling small business owners, again in elaborate and bizarre ways, while inwardly navigating his own journey of self-discovery. The finale of that series is also incredible TV.

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Notebook

My article on Oliver Cromwell and the vampire’s grave is published in the Summer 2005 issue of Northern Earth magazine. You can subscribe here. Editor Andrew Chapman also writes a couple of Substack newsletters, the long-recommended Histories (with Paul Lenz) and Northern Earth newsletter The Hare.

The march of AI continues, with one of the co-founders of OpenAI, of ChatGPT fame, reportedly wanting to build an apocalypse bunker before the company’s AGI (Artificial General Intelligence — artificial intelligence that theoretically surpasses human intelligence) causes “literally a rapture”.

I was interested to read a post by Will Storr called Scamming Substack? in which he looks at how some popular Substack authors use AI to partially or entirely write viral posts. He identifies phraseology and other signs that indicate the use of AI, and offers tips to avoid being drowned by AI gruel.

I’m pleased to say that Singular Discoveries will always be written by a human (except for that one edition…). But I do use AI to help make the images that accompany each post. Historical stories can be difficult to illustrate, as they often lack contemporary photos or other images. But perhaps I need to rethink my use of AI image generation. If you have any thoughts on this, do let me know.

Here’s a related tip: Google Search now presents an “AI overview” at the top of its results pages. This is annoying because you have to scroll past it to get to the actual results, and because the overview is often completely wrong. There’s no option to turn off the AI overview, but you can work around it by clicking the “Web” view on the results page, by using a browser extension, or by using a shortcut URL. There’s more info on all of this here.

Finally, a farewell to Brian Wilson, a true musical genius. I loved the guy and saw him perform live multiple times during the Pet Sounds / Smile revival tours. He left us so many perfect pop songs: In My Room, California Girls, Wouldn't It Be Nice, God Only Knows, Good Vibrations, Love and Mercy… and this:

Thanks for reading. More next month. Please subscribe and share!

1. One of the police officers was named Jim Hopper, which might interest fans of Stranger Things.

2. Smith, an illegitimate child, did not know his exact age.

3. One of the witnesses was Winlaton folk hero Coffee Johnny. His wife was Rayne’s niece, and he often saw Rayne, but not on the day Dr Stirling was murdered.

4. Cain considered himself to be an amateur chemist and physician who experimented on himself with nettles, garlic, soot, and other substances.

5. It is worth wondering whether Cain’s apparent escape from justice was related to his relationship with the influential Joseph Cowen.

*This publication features Amazon affiliate links. If you use them, I may receive a few pennies to help fund the newsletter. See our Amazon bookshelf here.