TOM BEFORE THE MAGISTRATES.

“On the first of july I Left Liskeard to Apear at Trecan Gate for to Answer A Charge of what Christains call Blasphamey But Before I Left I took A farewell of my name sake’s or son’s grave and kissed the Earth that was the grave for I knew what Hands I was going into - Clergey Magristrates wear no justice is to be Had.  And, as no shame will Tinge a Clergeyman’s Brow,  I takes my old toy, the Reope, Around my neck for to see wether I could shame them or not”     -   T. Pooley 

I feel I should here inform the reader, although it will no doubt become blindingly obvious, that my sympathies lay primarily with Tom Pooley rather than with the solicitor and the good priests who placed the advertisement below and who were so horrified at his activities.    I have been amused rather than shocked by Tom Pooley’s tilting at the Anglican windmills.   Of course, Tom too was as devout as any man or woman of faith and was more sincere than many, but he was  desperate and lonely in his contrived religion.  I find excuses for poor, mazed Tom but it is more difficult for me to find excuses for the Anglican parsons and the clergy-magistrates and time-serving Christians of Victorian Cornwall.              

For some fifteen years Tom Pooley had been chalking his defiant messages here and there, on the walls of barns and isolated buildings, on stiles and gates and wherever his fancy led him.  He had also occasionally been writing his poisonous, badly spelled and grammatically chaotic messages on the endpapers of the Bibles of his acquaintance. It would seem that in all that time, despite the fact that he was, at the very least, offending by defacing other people’s property, nobody had taken much offence nor yet much notice.  I imagine him walking to his work as a well-sinker or strolling in the leisure of a bright Sunday along pretty Cornish lanes, always with chalk in his pocket, always prepared to indulge his obsession.  Then, however, suddenly, out of a Spring sky, on 25th April 1857, came the first evidence in print that Tom’s activities had been noticed and judged to be offensive.  This was the prominent advertisement smack in the centre of the front page of the Cornish Times which read:  

“BLASPHEMY- Any person who has seen a man writing blasphemous sentences on gates or other places in the neighbourhood of Liskeard, is requested to communicate immediately with Messrs PEDLER and GRYLLS, Liskeard, or with the Rev. R HOBHOUSE, St Ive Rectory.”   The shrill urgency conveyed by the word ‘immediately’ seemed to indicate that the Reverend R Hobhouse and other local clergymen were in a fit of righteous indignation.  This unnamed blasphemer must be stopped!  Tom’s long, carefree pastime of writing whatever he liked wherever he liked was about to come to a dramatic end. 

The hunt was on for the phantom blasphemer of Liskeard, yet curiously, although, according to more than one source, it was common knowledge that Tom Pooley was the local scribbler of ‘blasphemy’, nobody seems to have come forward to lay information against him in response to the advertisement.   When, a month later, a man was at last reported to have been seen writing on a field gate, it was no less a gate than that of the new Rector of Duloe, the Reverend Paul Bush, and it was the Reverend Paul Bush in person who laid information and complaint about this.  The only person who had actually witnessed the man writing was one Mary Bawden, a faithful servant of the Rector. Once the offence was reported to the solicitors, Pedler and Grylls, they seem to have had no difficulty identifying Tom Pooley as the perpetrator.   This would support the later statement by Mr Grylls, that Tom Pooley was already known to be the writer by those who placed the advertisement.  Now they had their evidence.  Grylls’s use of the word ‘those’ suggests that it was not Reginald Hobhouse alone who had made the decision to advertise. Grylls added that the purpose of advertising was to warn Tom and to stop him from further ‘blaspheming.’  Future developments, however, hardly support this claim.  It looks more likely that the intention of the advertisement was to find witnesses on whose evidence Tom might be prosecuted and punished in such a manner that other ‘blasphemers’ might be deterred.  

Reginald Hobhouse was the severe but respected Rector of  the parish of Saint Ive.  St Ive,  not to be confused with St Ives of the artists, was a rural parish which lay a couple of miles to the north-east of Liskeard  and was well within range of Tom’s activities.  That he and other clergymen had involved lawyers indicates that they, from the first, intended to bring Tom to trial for his delinquencies.  He was not being sought to receive pastoral care.  The blasphemer was not to be treated as a stray sheep, rather as a local emanation of Antichrist and a criminal.

 Tom seems not to have been made aware of this advertisement.   His neighbours in Moon’s Court and others who were intimate with Tom Pooley were unlikely to read the Cornish Times.   In any case it the advertisement did not stop him from continuing to chalk in public places and on 22nd May he was seen chalking on the Reverend Paul Bush’s black-painted field gate and on the 27th June, a Saturday, the officers of the law came to the Pooley home and knocked at the door and Tom was served with a summons.

There would have been much distress and excitement among the Pooleys.   The knock on the door, the serving of the summons, the bewilderment of wife and children and the dreadful consideration that Tom might be taken to prison and the family left without its principal wage-earner would have afforded dramatic scenes.  With some difficulty, they must have read the summons over and over again and tried to make out its meaning and guess at its significance for them.  This was the wording of it:

CORNWALL, to Wit. ‘To Thomas Pooley, of the borough of Liskeard, in the county of Cornwall,  labourer.

WHEREAS information and complaint hath this day been laid and made before the undersigned,  one of Her Majesty’s Justices of the Peace in and for the said county of Cornwall,  by the Rev. Paul Bush,  of the parish of Duloe in the said county,  for that you the said Thomas Pooley,  on the 22nd day of May last,  at the parish of Duloe in the said county,  did unlawfully and wilfully compose,  write and publish a certain scandalous, impious, blasphemous and profane libel of and concerning the Holy Scriptures, and exposed it to contempt and ridicule, and also for having spoken against Christianity and the established religion.

THESE ARE THEREFORE to command you in Her Majesty’s name, to be and appear on Wednesday,  the 1st day of July next, at eleven o’clock in the forenoon, at Trecan Gate, in the parish of Lanreath, in the said county, before such Justices of the Peace for the said county as may then be there,  to answer to the said information and complaint,  and to be further dealt with according to the law.

GIVEN under my hand and seal, this 27th day of June, in the year of our Lord 1857,  at Liskeard, in the county aforesaid.

‘JAMES GLENCROSS’ 

After a few miserable days Tom’s day to answer for his blasphemous actions and to be dealt with according to the law arrived.  He rose shortly after midnight.   He was unwell and still in a state of shock.  He found a thick slate and with a nail scratched on it these words:  Death and the grave the victory claims.  Bible tyrants can’t destroy its laws nor yet its powers.  The grave gives life, the grave sends death.  Let Bible tyrants behold the tides how grand they ebb and flow.   By the power of this globe, tyrants, be careful, for your life is not your own,  for in a moment it is gone and called to the grave,  and receives judgement.  Thomas Pooley, July the first. He took this slate and laid it on the grave of his son in the Liskeard Cemetery.  In Tom’s own words:  before I left I took a farewell of my name sake’s or son’s grave and kissed the earth that was on the grave for I knew what hands I was going into.  The inscribed slate was later taken away by the constables to be used as evidence in a further count against him.

Tom Pooley took his ‘fancy walking stick’ and tamped eight miles in order to come before the magistrates.   It was a long, winding road and Trecan Gate is not an easy place to find.  Around his neck as he marched along the narrow lanes was the hangman’s noose which he hoped would shame the Christian tyrants.  When he arrived he was tried by two magistrates, the Reverend Arthur Tatham, who, like the Reverend James Glencross who signed the summons, was both clergyman and magistrate, and Francis Howell, a gentleman from Lostwithiel and a former High Sheriff of the County.   The magistrates heard Tom’s case in Trecan Gate’s public house, a wayside inn in a hamlet in the parish of Lanreath.  It was in the middle of nowhere.   Nowadays the house is even lonelier than it was then.  The little cob-walled Wesleyan chapel that served the locality in Tom’s time has been demolished  and the house where Tom was remanded is now called ‘Trecangate.’  Since Tom’s time it had become a farmhouse but is one no longer.   It is an altogether strange and remote place once to have housed Petty Sessions.  

As Tom had predicted the magistrates took no shame when they saw him with the rope around his neck. They could have dealt summarily with his case but they were clearly in no mood to let Tom off lightly now they had caught him.   “I soon found that I was in with spiders.” wrote Tom later.  Without much further ado and contrary to his and the family’s expectations, he was remanded to the prison at Bodmin to await the Cornwall Summer Assize which would be held in the Shire Hall at Bodmin and which was still a month away.   

After Tom  had been remanded he was put in the charge of two constables,  Alfred Stripling and another.  He had walked from Liskeard to Trecan Gate and had not eaten.  Tom wrote an account of what happened next:   “I was committed to take my trial at the Assizes so I wanted refreshment and the policeman Stripling said he could not give me any so I went back to the magistrates and told them that I wanted refreshment.  Parson Tatham told the policeman to give me refreshment so it was the magistrate’s order, so this policeman said he must search me and he took two knives, a tobacco box and this fancy walking stick, policemen loves fancy walking sticks,  and three and a half pence in money.  He booked it and said his duty was to give it into the gaol.”   

It was here, at Trecan Gate, that Tom also said to Alfred Stripling the policeman “that if that blackguard Jesus Christ had not stole the donkey, policemen would not be wanted.”   Tom gives a confused account of how he came to use these words. It had something to do with a woman who had “summonsed a man for an insult.”    Whatever it was that was going on, it was not in Tom’s nature to keep from the fray.  He allowed himself to get involved: “I told the police men that, if that blackguard Jesus Christ had known anything about the One Almighty Laws, man would have known better than to insult a woman as woman is the weaker vessel and this Christ never done his duty for I never will see the female insulted; so I said  ‘if that blackguard Jesus Christ had not stole the donkey police men would not have been wanted.’”  These last defiant words were duly noted down to be used in court and to provide yet another charge against Tom, which, Tom’s defenders later claimed, was hardly lawful as Tom had already been up before the magistrates and had already been remanded for one offence.   Tom Pooley was then taken away by  the two policemen who “were but beardless boys trained to do the Clergy dirty work; perjury and drunkenness is their delight.” to gloomy Bodmin gaol.

 Tom’s unhappy words concerning ‘Christ and the donkey’ were an example, one of many, of his being somewhat familiar with the  stories of the New Testament.   He, like many another before and since, had been puzzled by the account of events before Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem.  Three of the Evangelists record the story.   Saint Luke’s account reads “And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage, unto the Mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto me. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath need of them; and straightway he will send them.”    Tom had a healthy respect for the value of donkeys, “I have seen many donkeys sold by auction for one shilling and sixpence each.”  He was not a student of Old Testament prefigurations of the Messiah and their fulfilment. His reading of the text was simple. It was that ‘this Christ’ had a far too casual approach to other people’s valuable property.  

In 1782 John Howard, the great prison reformer had come to Bodmin to see the gaol which had just been built according to his humane precepts.   He wrote, “By a spirited exertion, the gentlemen of this county have erected a monument of their humanity and attention to the health and morals of prisoners.”   Now, seventy-five years later, the Inspectors had declared this prison unfit for purpose and major improvements had been planned but not yet executed.  Bodmin had been, for the eighteenth century, a model prison,  It had replaced prisons where the conditions had been mediaeval and the warders unchecked in their brutality .  Nevertheless the thick granite walls of Bodmin gaol gave this model prison an air of depressing security which must have daunted generations of prisoners.  For Tom, a childlike and, for the times, an elderly man, sensitive to oppression and with a deep distrust of authority, the gaol, with its narrow cells and its cold stone walls, its hardened turnkeys and depraved inmates,  must have seemed,  as he was later to describe it, the Christian hell. 

 Something of Tom’s state of mind during the four weeks he spent in prison awaiting trial is made clear by his letters home to Mary.  Being remanded did not prevent him from writing.  On the fourth of July he wrote to his wife:  “I have done nothing to cause my face to blush,  nor to disturb my mind,  nor yet my dying moments.’ On the thirteenth Tom wrote, “I am not very well at present.  I don’t know what is the matter with me.  Mary, if I die, I hope you will bring me home and bury me in Thomas Pooley’s grave.  What those Bible Christians mean to do by me I don’t know, but I trust in one Great and Wise and Grand powerful Almighty Power.  No doubt the Rev. Paul Bush wants to taste Thomas Pooley’s blood, but I think he will find it bitter.” and further: “I suppose they would like to hang me if they could.  I will not deny the truth of one Great Grand and Wise Almighty,  but I will go to the gallows against the Christian Bible tyrant God.”   On the twentieth Tom wrote: “Liberty I stand for,  and Liberty I will die for.  Mary, I hope you and the children are well.  As for me my heart is bad and it is still going worse.  I don’t think I shall live much longer.   But the time I have to live I must bring to light the awe of that one Great and Grand and Wise Almighty Power.”  On the twenty-sixth, four  days before his trial, Tom wrote:  “Mary, I hope you and the children are well.  As for me, I am bound in misery.  My life is a burden to me.  Mary, I hope there is nothing the matter.  I keep fancying there is something the matter at home.”  and further: “If I was sure I should be bound in this place much longer,  I would take poison if I could get it.  My life is a burden to me.  Mary, I would take poison, poison, if I could but die in your arms.  I am sick of Christian Bible tyranny.  What will be the end of this I don’t know.”

One might be forgiven for wondering whether Tom was to some extent savouring the drama of his situation but no doubt his anguish was real enough.  His was a free spirit and to be imprisoned was particularly terrible for him.  With confused feelings of self-pity, self-justification, self-importance and self-glorification and in desperate defiance to his perceived oppressors, Tom Pooley, after four weeks of confinement in a granite cell, came to the Assize, unclean, unkempt and unrepresented.  Being a poor man without wealthy friends, he would be obliged to conduct his own defence as best he could and he would be dependent on the good offices of his judge for help and advice.  

Tom was to be brought for judgement, like so many felons and misdemeanants before him, from Bodmin Gaol to the imposing Georgian Shire Hall on Bodmin’s Mount Folly, there to be taken up the narrow steps from the dark and dismal holding cells below to the bright courtroom above, to stand in the dock, blinking, before a formidable Grand Jury, to be prosecuted by an exceptionally able barrister and, if found guilty, to be sentenced by a well-respected learned judge.   

While Tom had been languishing in Bodmin Gaol, sickening from the absence of his wife and family and the comforts of his simple home as well as from his fear of prison and the dramatic notion that he was a martyr persecuted by Christian Bible Tyrants, the man who would be his judge was travelling the Western Circuit for the last time.  He was coming to the end of a long and successful career.  He was accustomed to respect and even adulation and his judgement had never been seriously called in question.  What Tom knew he needed was a judge who was no Christian.  This was a pretty tall order in Britain in 1857 but as fate would have it he was to have the most Christian judge on the circuit.  Indeed, Sir John Taylor Coleridge was, without any doubt, one of the most zealous Christians in the land.