Joseph's road to the scaffold

by Mike Badham

nWAS Joseph Holden mad? The facts are clear.

He killed a grandson he was fond of. Ten days earlier, he had tried to kill the boy's cousin. Yet only four years before, he had been a respectable working man with a steady job.

But his wife's death left him bewildered and bereft. He turned to the bottle. Soon, his family broke up and in his mind he blamed them for his troubles.

Finally, a desperate act of blind revenge led him to the scaffold. This tragic story shows the chasm that yawned below every Victorian family. From being a member of the respectable working class, it was only too easy to stumble onto a downward path with its end in the workhouse.

After years of supporting his large family, Holden must have felt aggrieved when they failed to support him. Yet they, too, had their problems of survival in a tough era.

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N September 5, 1900, at about 10.30pm, a police sergeant Arrowsmith was approached by a man in Railway Street, Radcliffe, who told him: "I want to be locked up". "What for?" asked the officer. "You'll see" replied the man.

So began the strange case of the grandfather who tried twice to kill a grandchild, and succeeded once. The man was Joseph Holden, 57, unemployed iron turner, who had lost his job at Robert Hall's Hope Foundry in George Street, Bury, about three years before.

And what he told police sent them scrambling 30 feet down a quarry near the Sun Dial Hotel in Bury, where they found a clog, a school cap -- and the body of a small boy in six feet of water. The seeds of this tragedy had been sown four years before.

Holden, previously of the Freetown area of Bury, had lived with his seven sons and three daughters in Ingham Street for 23 years. But since losing his wife in 1896, he had gone to pieces. After taking to drink, he had been dismissed from work. His drunkenness later led to the break-up of the family home. By September 1900, Holden had been in the Bury Union Workhouse on and off for about 16 months. He was first sent there in August 1897 by Bury magistrates as "wandering abroad and being of unsound mind". After a couple of weeks, he was certified fit by a doctor and discharged. There followed six more workhouse visits in the next three years.

Workhouse master William Bailey later said he was just an ordinary inmate and did what he was told, although he seemed a bit simple-minded. But Holden had been heard to say he would rather die than go back to the workhouse.

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n the Monday before the murder, Holden, newly released from the workhouse, turned up at the Nuttall Street home of his daughter Sarah Dawes, now demolished. He stayed with her two nights. On the Wednesday, September 5, he left her house at 8.45am. At 1pm that day he visited his daughter Annie Eldred, in nearby Ingham Street. He was sober, and Annie fed him. At 1.45pm, he got up from the table and said he was going for a walk. What was in his mind we can only guess. From remarks he made at the inquest later, it seems he had decided to kill his daughter Sarah at 18 Nuttall Street.

But he had missed her by a few minutes. After giving her son John his dinner and sent him back to school at 1.30pm, she had popped out. Thwarted in his deadly plan, Holden wandered about, considering his next step. About 3.20pm he turned up at St Thomas's school, Pimhole, and asked for his daughter Sarah's son, eight-year-old John Dawes. He told headmaster Edwin Ashton that the boy was wanted by his mother to run an errand near the Sun Dial pub on Walmersley Road. He could not go himself, said Holden, because he was going to Heywood.

Satisfied with this excuse, the head let the boy go. And so the pair left on their fateful journey; the child smiling happily at missing lessons and the grandfather leading him by the hand. Within two hours, the boy was dead; seven hours later, Holden was in Radcliffe, confessing his crime to startled policemen.

Holden said: "I took him by the scruff of the neck and threw him down the quarry. I then went down to him. He seemed to be bleeding from the back of the head. I picked him up again and threw him in the water." After taking down a statement, Radcliffe police telephoned Bury police station. By first light, officers were dragging the quarry; at 5.30am they recovered the small body.

At the Friday inquest in the Town Hall, coroner S.F. Butcher presiding, a jury took just a few minutes to return a verdict of wilful murder against Joseph Holden, who sat impassive through most of the proceedings. But he did show some signs of emotion. When his daughter Annie Eldred said his children had been supporting him, Holden was seen to sneer.

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he said: "We never turned our backs on him. When he was out of the workhouse we -- that is my sisters and brothers and myself -- supported him among us as far as we could".

Holden had certainly lived with Annie Eldred at 48 Ingham Street. She supported him for about a year, but her husband turned him out because of his strange behaviour. It seems he was always knocking nails in the wall and threatening to hang himself.

Asked for his comments by the coroner, the prisoner said: "She said she never turned back on me. Didn't she? The last night I was there, the eldest lad said that if I didn't shift I should be a dead 'un in the morning". Giving evidence, the dead boy's mother, Sarah Dawes, was distressed, and had to be given several drinks of water. She said her husband, formerly a cotton overlooker, had left her four years before. He was thought to be in America. She supported her three children by taking in washing.

After she had told the events of the fatal Wednesday, Holden was asked if he had any questions. He replied: "No, but I have something to tell her. It was a bad job she wasn't there, or else she'd have had to gone down in place of the child". At this, Sarah gasped and sank back ashen-faced in her chair. The case caused great excitement in the town. Apart from the crowds which gathered outside the magistrates court to catch a glimpse of the self-confessed killer, thousands more went to the disused and flooded quarry. Among the sightseers were photographers, amateur and professional.

But another sensational revelation came when a Bury Times reporter interviewed Annie Eldred's family. It then turned out that Joseph Holden had carried out almost a "carbon copy" crime previously. Just ten days before the murder, Holden had attacked another grandson, George Eldred, 9, with a boulder at a quarry near Birtle Dean on August 21, a Tuesday.

The little boy was keen on pigeons, and his grandad had taken him for a walk, saying he knew a man who would give him a bird. At a quarry near Birtle, Holden asked the boy to cup up some tobacco for him. While he was intent on this, the man had crept up and hit him from behind with a football-size rock. His grandfather had then bound up the boy's head with a handkerchief and put him on a tram for home. Not surprisingly, the parents back at Ingham Street did not believe the attack story and put it down to concussion. They put the boy to bed and called in Dr France.

Later, after the Dawes killing, Holden was also charged with the attempted murder of young George. When Holden was brought from Strangeways to face this second charge, a young woman dashed from the waiting crowd on Bolton Street station. Shaking her fist in his face, she said: "If I could get hold of you, I'd tear your liver out!"

The death penalty was exacted at 8am, Tuesday, December 4, at Strangeways. The morning was cold and grey, with a cutting east wind. A crowd had gathered outside, all eyes fixed on the fateful flagstaff which would announce to the outside world that the miscreant had paid for his crime.

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s next day's BT report had it: It was a strange and motley crowd, and one in which the Hebrew element was large, if not predominating. Out of the side streets opposite the jail they came by scores, drawn for the most part by idle and morbid curiosity. Passers-by delayed their steps to watch. A milkman and a passing carter reined in their horses. At length it began to strike the hour of eight, slowly, in hard clanging tones, such as one would hardly love to listen to at any time, but least of all as the last earthly sound to reach one's ears. As the knell died away, a black flag slowly rose up the mast and stopped half-way. Among the last relatives to see the condemned man were his daughter Annie and her brother Wilfred Holden. She took along her son George, whom Holden had tried to kill in August, but prison governor R.D. Cruikshank would not let the lad in the condemned cell.

Holden's first words to Annie at that final 20-minute interview were: "I've been a good father once, Fanny". She replied: "Yes you have, father".

Holden then asked Annie to look after his youngest son, who was 15. Among other visitors were Holden's daughter Mrs Lord of Patricroft and his sister Mrs Thornley of Hudcar Lane, Bury.

In his last hours (said the BT) the prisoner was clearly stricken with remorse at the heinousness of his crime -- a crime which becomes more inexplicable when it is remembered that he really had a strong affection for the grandson he had murdered. In the last three weeks, Holden aged greatly, looking at least 70. His leave taking with his relatives were very pathetic, the prisoner several times being quite broken down with grief and remorse.

The night before his execution, Joseph Holden spent some troubled hours, but rose looking calm and resigned at 6.30am the next morning. After a cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter, he walked to the scaffold.

Holden's former workplace. A DIY store now stands there.

Police recovered the child's body at dawn.

Ingham Street. At left: Annie's house.

Joseph Holden, in an 1887 family photo. Behind him are daughters Annie and Sarah, then 18 and 17.

The Sun Dial Hotel.

Grave 629 in Bury cemetery: "In Loving Memory of JOHN DAWES, who dies Sept 5th 1900, aged 8 years. Thy Will be Done".