M J Trow - Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Isle of Wight

TRUE CRIME FROM WHARNCLIFFE

Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths Series

Barking, Dagenham & Chadwell Heath

Barnet, Finchley and Hendon

Barnsley

Bath

Bedford

Birmingham

Black Country

Blackburn and Hyndburn

Bolton

Bradford

Brighton

Bristol

Cambridge

Carlisle

Chesterfield

Colchester

Cotswolds, The

Coventry

Croydon

Derby

Dublin

Durham

Ealing

Fens, In and Around

Folkstone and Dover

Grimsby

Guernsey

Guildford

Halifax

Hampstead, Holborn and St Pancras

Huddersfield

Hull

Jersey

Leeds

Leicester

Lewisham and Deptford

Liverpool

London's East End

London's West End

Manchester

Mansfield

More Foul Deeds Birmingham

More Foul Deeds Chesterfield

More Foul Deeds Wakefield

Newcastle

Newport

Norfolk

Northampton

Nottingham

Oxfordshire

Pontefract and Castleford

Portsmouth

Rotherham

Scunthorpe

Shrewsbury and Around Shropshire

Southampton

Southend-on-Sea

Staffordshire and The Potteries

Stratford and South Warwickshire

Tees

Uxbridge

Warwickshire

Wigan

York

OTHER TRUE CRIME BOOKS FROM WHARNCLIFFE

A-Z of London Murders, The

A-Z of Yorkshire Murders, The

Black Barnsley

Brighton Crime and Vice 1800-2000

Crafty Crooks and Conmen

Durham Executions

Essex Murders

Executions & Hangings in Newcastle

and Morpeth

Great Hoaxers, Artful Fakers and

Cheating Charlatans

Norfolk Mayhem and Murder

Norwich Murders

Plot to Kill Lloyd George

Romford Outrage

Strangeways Hanged

Unsolved Murders in Victorian &

Edwardian London

Unsolved London Murders

Unsolved Norfolk Murders

Unsolved Yorkshire Murders

Warwickshire's Murderous Women

Yorkshire Hangmen

Yorkshire's Murderous Women

Please contact us via any of the methods below for more information or a catalogue

WHARNCLIFFE BOOKS

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS

Tel: 01226 734555 734222 Fax: 01226 734438

email: enquiries@pen-and-sword.co.uk

website: www.wharncliffebooks.co.uk

First Published in Great Britain in 2009 by

Wharncliffe Books

an imprint of

Pen and Sword Books Limited ,

47 Church Street, Barnsley ,

South Yorkshire. S70 2AS

Copyright M.J. Trow, 2009

ISBN: 978 184563 088 1

eISBN: 978 178303 747 6

The right of M J Trow to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the publishers.

Typeset in Plantin and Benguiat by

S L Menzies-Earl

Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of

Pen & Sword Aviation, Pen & Sword Maritime,

Pen & Sword Military, Wharncliffe Local History, Pen & Sword Select,

Pen & Sword Military Classics, Leo Cooper, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing

and Frontline Publishing

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact:

PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England.

Email: enquiries@pen-and-sword.co.uk

Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

Contents

Acknowledgements

M y thanks go to the following for their co-operation and spirit of friendliness in the production of this book: the editor and staff of the Isle of Wight County Press , the licensees and staff of the Hare and Hounds public house, Downend, the licensees and staff of the Buddle Inn , Niton, the churchwarden and PCC, Newport Minster, Andrew Ross, Hairdressing, Newport, Just You beauticians, Newport.

I would also like to thank Mrs Debbie Galvin for her help, and above all my good lady wife, Carol Trow, for many hours trekking over the Isle of Wight in all weathers to take the photographs in this book. And finally to my son, Tali, who knows where the bodies are buried!

Chapter 1

Alarums and Incursions

T here is only one line that tells us anything about the Roman invasion of the Isle of Wight. The biographer Suetonius wrote that Vespasian, sweeping along the south coast with the II Legio Augusta, took Vectis (the Island), defeated two warlike tribes ( validissime gentes ) and captured over twenty fortresses ( oppida ). The tribes were probably the Durotriges of what is today Dorset and the Dobunni further east in what would become Hampshire and Sussex. The fortresses are more likely to be hill-top forts on the mainland, but there is at least the possibility of one standing on a hill in the centre of the Island which is now the site of Carisbrooke Castle.

What was Vespasian doing in the Island in the first place? He was part of the Claudian invasion of AD 43, but that is in itself a misnomer. The Emperor Claudius was hardly the stuff of which soldiers are made and if he was not exactly the limping, stammering idiot of Robert Graves famous novel, he was certainly no general. He turned up, as Emperors often did, at the very end of the campaign, to claim laurels and wave to crowds - and came nowhere near Vectis.

The hard work was done by Aulus Plautius, who began a systematic attack on the disunited tribes of Britain, using the formidable tactics of the Roman legions. Worthy opponents like Caratacus were driven back into the forested mountains of Wales and Vespasian, with just a single legion, was taking a huge gamble in his march westward along the south coast.

Location map 1 . The author

The general who conquered the Isle of Wight the future emperor Vespasian, from a marble bust . The author

With his cavalry, his auxiliary units, his legion, siege engines and ballistae, he may have had 10,000 men at his back but that was probably more than the total number of fighting men in the Isle of Wight.

The fact that Suetonius makes so little of the Roman invasion of the Island and that other writers do not refer to it at all, probably implies that there was little or perhaps no resistance. The rapidly growing imperium that was Rome meant that southern regions of Britannia, including the island, had been trading with the eternal city for at least a generation by the time Vespasian arrived. Pre-Claudian coins have been found here and amphorae discovered in marine silt are evidence of a thriving wine import. We know that Celtic leaders in southern Britain like Togodumnos based at Chichester, were only too happy to accept a latinized version of his name and all the panoply of Roman client kingship that went with it.

What has survived from the Roman period of Vectis is a string of villas, eight of which have so far been discovered, implying an ordered, settled, peaceful way of life. Military camps, of the type found at legionary bases from Exeter to the later Hadrians Wall, do not feature and probably never did. Only at Carisbrooke, at the base of the Norman earthworks thrown up in the 1070s, do we have a section of a stone wall which is probably Roman.