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Murder at Blind Beck

THE LAST WOMAN TO BE TRANSPORTED FROM CUMBRIABARELY OF AGE, eighteen-year-old Flora Mary Graham was found guilty by a jury of twelve good Kendal men and true of the murder in his prime of the Seventh Earl of Fellside, by striking him about the head and sending him to his death in Blind Beck, the town’s stream running in violent spate on the stormy night of Halloween, 1852.Apprehended at the scene bearing a babe in arms, the child swaddled and soaked, three gold sovereigns were found in Flora’s possession, half a year’s wages for a servant girl such as she. The motive ascribed was thus one of robbery, but Flora had been born a deaf-mute and was unable to proffer a defence.It was speculated by the Prosecution that Lord Fellside, great benefactor and philanthropist, had come across Flora in the act of drowning her child, and in a vain attempt to thwart her had forfeited his own life, an altruist to the last.Flora would have been for the gallows, to swing against the bleak wall of Carlisle gaol, but for the recommendation to mercy entered by the jury and acted upon by the judge in the interests of the innocent infant. And thus Flora – with her three-month-old son – became the last woman to be transported by convict ship from Cumbria to Van Diemen’s Land.And yet now a revelation. During the renovation of Kendal’s ancient paupers’ hospital and almshouses, a document has been discovered concealed behind a lath-and-plaster wall, a simple letter – a scrap of paper folded inside a humble locket engraved with the nameFlora Marythat might surely have belonged to her.From Flora, a pitiful entreaty to the Almighty. For Skelgill and his team, a cryptic cold case that boils over into the present day.Read more

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