William White Headstone
IN MEMORY OF / WILLIAM WHITE OF THIS PARISH, YEOMAN / WHO WAS ON SUNDAY EVENING THE 11TH OF DECR. / 1808 MOST INHUMANLY MURDERED / IN THE BOSOM OF HIS FAMILY / BY A GUN DISCHARGED AT HIM THRO A WINDOW / WHILST SITTING BY HIS OWN FIRESIDE / THE PERPETRATOR OF THIS HORRID DEED IS / NOT YET DISCOVERED BUT THERE IS ONE, 'WHO / IS ABOVE OUR PATH AND ABOUT OUR BED / AND WHO SPIETH OUT ALL OUR WAYS' / WHO WILL SOMETIME BRING IT TO LIGHT / HE LIVED ESTEEMED BY ALL WHO KNEW HIM / AND HIS SAD END IS UNIVERSALLY REGRETTED HE / LEFT ISSUE 6 SONS AND 5 DAUGHTERS TO BEWAIL / HIS LOSS AND DIED AT THE AGE OF 58 YEARS / STONE WAS ERECTED JUNE THE 24TH 1809 / 'By whose Assassinating Hand I fell / Drop Reader o'er my Grave one Silent Tear / Live Well remembering that your God is Near / If Rich or Poor or Relative you be / Strike your own breast and say - It was not Me!' (Some words bracketed/reconstructed in the source transcription where weathering has made the stone illegible.)Context & sources
Found via a Find a Grave search. On Sunday evening, 11 December 1808, William White, a well-off yeoman farmer of Hoo St Werburgh on the Hoo Peninsula, Kent, was shot dead through his own pantry window while sitting by the fire with his family - the gun, an old crudely-adapted musket, had been propped on a hurdle outside the window for aim, and was found discarded in a ditch near the River Medway afterwards. News of the murder reached London and the Bow Street Runners were called in, but no one was ever charged. William's wife Jane had died suddenly, with no warning illness, less than a year earlier (24 March 1808), leaving their 11 children orphaned by the murder. The local vicar, Rev Jordan, became an amateur investigator ('the parson detective') and focused suspicion on William's eldest son George, whose alibi (that he'd gone home for a handkerchief and so was briefly separated from a witness at the critical time) fell apart under questioning at a public parish meeting in 1809 - George could not produce the handkerchief afterwards, was seen behaving suspiciously near the scene, and had reportedly already told a farm employee, before the murder, a false story about an earlier gun going missing from the property. No charges were ever brought; George later emigrated to Australia, and the case remains formally unsolved.
- shadowsflyaway.blog, 'A 200th birthday and an unsolved murder Part 2 - a visit to St Werbergh's, Hoo' (full inscription transcription)
- shadowsflyaway.blog, 'Part 3 - the parson detective comes on the scene' (the George White suspicion detail)
- Find a Grave, 'William Walter White (1751-1808)'
- North Wales Gazette, 22 December 1808 (contemporary press report, cited by the blog but not read directly here)
Needs an in-person visit
- St Werburgh's Church, Hoo St Werburgh, Kent - the headstone is already photographed and transcribed by the blog cited above, but the transcription itself notes several words are bracketed/uncertain due to weathering; worth a second in-person check against the stone.
- Town
- Hoo St Werburgh
- County
- Kent
- Country
- England
- Coordinates
- 51.4177, 0.5648
- Year
- 1808
- Condition
- Fragment only
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