"I'LL STAB YOUR GUTS OUT," EXETER, 1845.

Richard Parish was a lodging house keeper who was imprisoned for two years with hard labour for using a knife in a fight with a bricklayer, a navigator, named Henry Poole, and wounding him in the head.  The fight took place on the 7th March, was judged at the Spring Assizes and was reported in The Western Times of 22nd March 1845.

Parish and Poole had been drinking together at The Black Dog Tavern near Exeter's new Iron Bridge.  They had quarrelled bout the reckoning. Later, Henry Poole turned up at Parish's house, which was near St. John's Bow, which, being a lodging-house had a public room.  We learn from the report that the room where the fight took place had two tables and four chairs, a fire burning, two candles, one on the mantle piece and one on a table.  There were words between the two men which led to a fight which led to the stabbing.   One of the witnesses, Harriet Murphy, was sitting quietly by the fire making a cap when the fight took place.  She gave evidence: 'I was not much frightened till the blood spouted over me.'

Below is her account:  

"I saw the struggle which took place.  When prisoner came in he ordered Poole out, but the latter said "I don't want to go out in a hurry."  Then Parish said, 'If you don't go. I'll stab your guts out.'  They then began fighting, and continued so for a few minutes.  Mr. Parish had more beer in him than the other man.  Poole said, 'You must have been a rogue not to have rubbed out those two chalks at the Black Dog.'  After one of the rounds Poole was getting up, when Parish ran over to him and took his hand from his pocket and struck him on the head. Then Poole cried out, 'My God, I am stabbed.'  The blood then gushed out, and some flowed over a cap I was making...  Poole was on one knee when he was struck on the head.  I saw a cut in his head afterwards.

"Cross-examined.  I have lived three months in the house, and lodged there then, but had not received orders to leave it, except at one time, when I interfered with Parish about kicking his boy.  Mrs. Parish told me to take no notice of him.  He did not accuse me of living with another man, not being married to him.  I don't like Parish; I don't think anybody likes him; no body gives him a good name.  I cried 'murder' but no body takes notice of that - murder is often called there."

*

St. John's Bow was yet another church on the High Street. It was next to a 'bow', a covered way, like the one at St. Stephens, which crossed John St,. hurch and Bow were demolished in 1937 and there is now no trace of either,

The chalks at the Black Dog,  were, of course, records or tallies showing how much beer had been drunk.  I take Poole's words to mean that Parish had miserably failed to cheat the landlord of his due!

This whole scene seems to be wonderfully infused with Dickensian gloom.  Richard Parish , who kept a house where murder was often called and whom no body liked and who kicked his boy occasionally is a type we all know from the novels.   Harriet Murphy was probably a needlewoman by profession.  She was working with her needle, sewing a cap in the half-light and quite inured to the follies of drunken navvies &c. until the blood spouted over her.  She seems to me an ideal type of  a Victorian woman of the humbler classes.