Tales of the Macabre: Within Sight of the Gibbet

Author: Ian Morgan

Tales of the Macabre: Within Sight of the Gibbet

The small hamlet of Litton nestles in the rolling countryside of the Peak District amid green fields and blue skies. Close to Tideswell it is the idyllic retreat for those wanting to get away from the pressures of life. Yet do those that visit realise the hardship and death that abounded there almost 200 years ago?
In 1796 London a small boy was taken by carriage, deposited within the confines of St Pancras workhouse and left to his own fate. As he watched the days drift past he longed to be free and when given the chance to be feted and treated as a young gentleman provided he answered ‘yes’ to one simple question, he jumped at the opportunity. Within days both he and scores of his friends began to realise they had been fooled as they were thrown into the horrors of working in the mills. For years he worked in tortuous conditions at Lowdham mill near Nottingham before being sold to Litton mill set in the picturesque Peak District. Life in Lowdham had been horrific but his treatment at Litton was a living hell. Punishment was relentless, escape was futile and death lurked around each corner.
While the mill worked unremittingly on, a short distance away in the hamlet of Litton itself, the Lingard family struggled on trying to keep their heads above water. Was it this struggle to survive that led Anthony Lingard the younger to commit murder or his younger brother William to commit highway robbery? Anthony Lingard became the last man to be executed and gibbeted in Derbyshire yet while his rotting corpse swung in the wind near to his home Hannah Bocking repeated his murderous crime beneath his gibbet when she poisoned Jane Grant. William Lingard committed Highway robbery within sight of his brother’s decaying body and was transported to Australia where he endured punishment after punishment and at one time escaping to become a bush ranger before being recaptured and sent to Norfolk Island – a living hell.
Drawing on previously unseen and unpublished documents the story of the Lingards is brought tragically back to life and for the first time their story is told in full – and was the little mill boys story really the basis for Dickens Oliver Twist ?
The story of the Lingard family and those around is one of murder, highway robbery and brutality. When Anthony Lingard the elder married Elizabeth Neal a train of events began that would help change the laws of England and influence the birth of a new nation.