Netherby Hall

[Bridewell]

There are several threads covering the Netherby Hall burglary in 1885 and the subsequent murder of P.c. Joseph Byrnes (but all archived); in the latter case there was peripheral involvement by Abberline who identified one of the offenders. Byrnes was shot in the Cumbria village of Plumpton, just north of Carlisle in October 1885 after trying to arrest the three offenders. They threw his body over a wall into a field and left him to die. The site of the murder is just across the road from what was then the Plumpton Rectory, occupied by the Reverend Kennedy who was the officer's great friend - and mortified that he couldn't bury him in the local churchyard (because Byrnes was a Roman Catholic).

The attached is a stone memorial set in the wall at the site of the murder.

[Bridewell]

There is now a small housing estate on the site of the field into which P.c. Byrnes' body was thrown. It is named, at the insistence of the local council (and greatly to their credit) after the fallen officer.

[Mayerling]

There is an account of the robbery murder chase in Major Griffiths' "Mysteries of the Police and Crime". It was quite a news item in 1885, not only due to the murder of Byrne by at least three gang members, but the subsequent tracking down and arrest of three of them over the course of a day and a half chase. Two other constables were wounded confronting this gang.

The reason I said that it was "at least" three gang members, is that there is some evidence of a fourth member who got away. The three who were captured were eventually tried for murder and robbery, and found guilty of both. They were hanged later in 1886. One of them was identified by Abberline as wanted for involvement in the murder of Chief Inspector Simmons at Romford in 1885, for which another man who was captured was hanged. I noted on one of the threads either on this site or it's predecessor site Abberline's activities in this case as suspiciously similar to his later showing up after the arrest of George Chapman in 1903, and saying "You've got Jack the Ripper at last". Here he was referring to one Martin who was captured. It almost looks like Abberline happened to be constantly looking for neat raps up like this to complete incomplete investigations.

Jeff