To family historians she was Elizabeth Clark, daughter of a Dorset dairyman, but most people know her by the name of Martha Brown, the last woman in Dorset to face execution for murder in 1856.

Martha first married a man old enough to be her father and later wed a second partner who was young enough to be her son. Their turbulent relationship ended when she killed her drunk and violent second husband with an axe.

Tried for murder, she was publicly hanged in Dorchester, watched by thousands of people, among them 16-year-old future novelist Thomas Hardy. Thirty-five years later he wrote Tess of the D’Urbervilles, one of his most acclaimed novels, and later revealed that Martha was the inspiration behind the title character, who was also hanged for murder. In recent times she has become a cause célèbre. Two Bridport ladies, Frances Williams and Irene Craig, both descended from Martha’s brother-in-law, campaigned to have her case reconsidered in a BBC TV documentary. They and historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsley, who also examined the death of Martha’s husband John Brown in her BBC Ladykillers series, argued that she was unfairly convicted and executed for the crime of murder and should have received a lighter sentence because of the abuse she had endured.

Elizabeth Martha Clark was born in Whitchurch Canonicorum in or around 1811. Martha, as she was mostly known, married 40-year-old widower Bernard Bearn, a butcher, in Powerstock in 1831. She bore two children but both died as infants in a measles epidemic in 1835. Her husband died suddenly in 1841 while travelling in Hampshire. In 1851 Martha, herself now 40, was working as a servant on Blackmanston Farm in Purbeck where she had met young agricultural labourer John Brown, who was just half her age. Despite the disparity in years, the pair married in Wareham in 1852. Martha was described as an attractive woman with beautiful dark, curly hair. The couple moved to Birdsmoorgate where Martha ran a grocery shop. The marriage may well have been turbulent from the start as a few months later she was jailed for three weeks for ‘fighting and shouting’.

Nearby lived a rival in every sense. Mary Davies was a married shopkeeper and washerwoman who began a liaison with John Brown. Martha was apparently fuelled with anger and jealousy after catching them together in compromising circumstances. On July 5 1856, John rode off on his cart to Beaminster accompanied by his friend George Fooks. Mary walked alongside their two carts for part of the way before going about her own business. On their return from Beaminster, the two men stopped off in Broadwindsor to drink beer and play skittles. John returned home drunk in the early hours of the morning.

After a violent altercation, Martha took an axe and struck him several times in the head. Her claim that he had died after being kicked in the head by his horse was not believed. She claimed she had found him injured on the doorstep, dragged him inside and that he had clung so tightly to her that she had been unable to go for help until he fell unconscious. In the end she went to fetch his cousin Richard Damon at around 5am. Damon found John dead in a pool of blood with multiple head injuries. There was blood and brain matter on the walls. He then went to the field and found the horse locked in the stable. There was no trace of blood in the field or in the passageway leading to the house. An inquest was held the next day at the Rose & Crown in Birdsmoorgate. Two surgeons, Richard Broster and Joachim Gilbert, gave evidence and said any one of three of the blows sustained to Brown’s head would have killed him and that he would have been paralysed by the first blow.

Martha pleaded not guilty at her trial which opened just two weeks later, on July 21, but was convicted of murder, sentenced to death and faced a public execution at the entrance to Dorchester jail, just one month after the crime was committed. Because of her abusive, philandering husband, Martha had some considerable public support but pleas for clemency failed, probably because of her insistence until the last minute that she was innocent. Two days before her execution, Martha finally signed a statement admitting the killing of her husband. She said he swore at her while in a drunken state and she asked him: ‘What makes you so cross? Have you been at Mary Davies’? He then kicked out the bottom of the chair that upon which I had been sitting. We continued quarrelling until 3am when he struck me with a severe blow on the side of my head which confused me so much that I was obliged to sit down… He reached down from the mantelpiece a heavy horse whip with a plain end and struck me across the shoulders with it three times… He then kicked me on the left side which caused me much pain, and he immediately stooped down to untie his boots. I was such enraged and in an ungovernable passion, on being abused and struck, I directly seized a hatchet… He fell on the first blow on his head… As soon as I had done it, I wished I had not and would have given the world not to have done it. I had never struck him before after all his ill-treatment but when he hit me so hard this time, I was almost out of my senses and hardly knew what I was doing.’

Prison chaplain Rev Henry Moule tried his best to stop the execution and travelled to London to appeal to the home secretary Sir George Grey to grant a late reprieve. Unfortunately, Grey was in Ireland and his deputy had no authority to intervene. Between 3,000 and 4,000 people attended the grisly hanging on August 9, including 16-year-old Thomas Hardy. By all accounts, Martha was a strikingly attractive woman and the sight of her hanging gave him some kind of erotic thrill which stayed firmly in his head for decades afterwards. In a letter written some 70 years later Hardy admitted to being ashamed of watching the execution. ‘My only excuse being that I was but a youth and had to be in town at that time for other reasons,’ he wrote. ‘I remember what a fine figure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set off her shape as she wheeled half-round and back.’

One person who was not present was the third person in the eternal triangle, Mary Davies. She had apparently been determined to see Martha hang and set off on foot to walk the 25 miles to Dorchester. But just three miles down the road in Broadwindsor, she came across some angry villagers who sympathised with Martha and who refused to let her pass.

Hardy remained fascinated by the case and on a visit to Birdsmoorgate in 1926 asked his host Lady Hester Pinney to do some research. Lady Pinney found an elderly man named Jim Lane who remembered the events of 70 years previously.

He revealed that local thatcher Thomas Smith had seen Mary Davies with John Brown on the fateful day and that he had then gone to Martha’s shop to buy tobacco and told her: ‘I see’d Mrs Davies riding along of your husband.’ Lane added: ‘That filled her up worse and that very night her killed he. Thomas Smith didn’t ought to have gone in and said nothing.’.

Hardy’s tragic muse

In 1856, Martha Brown became the last woman in Dorset to face hanging for murder – an event witnessed by the young Thomas Hardy and said to have inspired Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Words: Paul Radford

Photo: Getty Images

Family History

THE DORSET & SOMERSET HISTORY SOCIETY

Paul Radford is the editor of The Greenwood Tree, the quarterly magazine of the Somerset and Dorset Family History Society. The Society’s Family History Centre at Peter Street, Yeovil, holds thousands of records and documents, is open on Monday, Friday and Saturday mornings and all day on Thursday and is staffed by experienced volunteers able to help with genealogical research. The Society can be reached at contact@sdfhs.org. Find out more at sdfhs.org