CRIME IN PAST TIMES

Knife attack at the Red Lion

A sexual assault at the Red Lion in Bourne almost 200 years ago ended in an affray in which a man was stabbed but it also gives us an insight into the conditions of our public houses when providing accommodation at busy times.

Stow Green Fair was being held that week at the hamlet a mile to the east of Folkingham, an annual market, horse and pleasure fair that attracted every scoundrel in the district on the lookout for easy pickings while drunkenness, fighting and disorderly conduct were a regular occurrence.

As so many people attended he event, overnight accommodation was booked up at most of the inns and public houses in the neighbourhood and Bourne always took its fair share of visitors, sleeping them where they could, with half a dozen or more to a room and often with several sharing the same bed.

Such it was on the night on Monday 1st July 1833 when the Red Lion in South Street was packed with people on their way to the fair which was due to start the following day. The bars too were doing brisk business and among the customers was John Dawson, an engraver and copper-plate printer, from Stamford. During the evening, he fell in with a number of rowdy showmen and having drunk too much, was put to bed in one of the rooms upstairs in a state of intoxication.

There were four beds in the room and he was given one of them, the others being occupied by three married couples and what happened next was subsequently described by the Stamford Mercury in graphic detail. “The wife of one of the men”, said their report, “was alarmed by Dawson putting his hand into her bed and she awoke her husband who aroused the other parties in the room. A scuffle took place to turn Dawson out and in the course of the affray, the offender stabbed one of the men with a knife which fortunately striking on the ribs did no very serious injury, the point of the weapon being turned by the blow.”

In the confusion that followed, Dawson managed to escape but was apprehended the following morning and brought before the magistrates at the Town Hall where he was committed to the Folkingham jail to await a further hearing the next day when he was charged with wounding a showman with a knife with intent to do him bodily harm.

But after hearing the evidence, the magistrates decided that the case had not been proved and the prisoner was discharged on payment of £2 7s. costs, a fortuitous verdict because during the hearing Dawson had been revealed as a man with responsibilities, having a wife and five children back home in Stamford, and had he been found guilty the punishment would have been a lengthy jail sentence or even transportation to the colonies.

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