William Mellish & the Would-Be-Killer Whaler

(originally posted 15 January 2018)

Not everyone’s lives are a rollercoaster of excitement or celebrity.  Such was that of William Mellish Esq., a respected ship and commercial property owner who made his fortune providing the British navy and other vessels with fresh meat, suet and other supplies. 

'Entrance to the London Docks' engraved by Charles Heath, drawn by Peter DeWint, (1829), image from https://www.bl.uk

On a freezing February afternoon in 1833, Mellish stopped in at Spread Eagle Court to do a spot of banking.  Unbeknownst to him, a shadowy figure lurked in the entrance of the court directly opposite.  As Mellish exited the bank and entered Spread Eagle Alley, the man walked up behind him and shot him twice in back of the neck, in full view of witnesses.  

The assailant then calmly cast the weapon aside as Mellish, bleeding profusely, cried out, “What does this mean?  I don’t understand it - what does this mean?!”

The man coolly replied, “Mr Mellish, you tried to kill me and I tried to kill you if I could”.

The approximate scene of the crime where Spread Eagle Alley once was (image courtesy of Google Maps)

What had Mellish done to deserve this?  Was the motive robbery?  Or a business deal gone sour?  Witnesses commented on the gunman's lucidity immediately after the shooting.  Making no attempt to escape, he sat on the pavement and waited for the police to turn up, confessing, "I have done it - I have followed him for a month, and I know I shall be hanged for it; I won't hurt any of you - take me where you like, I won't offer to go".  Mellish was rushed to Mr Miles, a surgeon on nearby Throgmorton Street.  The first musket ball exited an inch in front of Mellish’s ear and was discovered on the floor of a nearby tailor’s shop. A week later, the second was extracted from Mellish’s neck.

A rich heritage and 'madness'

Two years earlier Captain Noah Pease Folger was the master and commander of Mellish’s whaling ship, Partridge, but had been dismissed on charges of misconduct.  A dispute erupted: Folger claimed he was owed between £1200 - £1300 but was only awarded £848, which Mellish paid immediately.  Crucially, Capt. Folger was denied an all-important character testimonial by Mellish and it was this straw that broke the camel’s back.

Folger descended from a proud and distinguished line of whalers said to be related to Benjamin Franklin who were also name-checked in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851).  Soon Folger was convinced Mellish had intentionally besmirched his reputation and ruined future opportunities, depriving him of a living, and from that day forward Folger became a man obsessed.  A witness later recalled, “I have heard him speak very violently of Mr Mellish indeed!  As soon as Mr Mellish’s name was mentioned, he was like a madman”.

The Folger family as mentioned in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, 1922 edition and image from https://archive.org

What are fascinating are the varying degrees of Captain Folger’s alleged insanity: he erupted with fury at the mere mention of Mellish’s name before the attempted murder, yet his behaviour after the shooting was calm and resigned. Folger followed Mellish for weeks leading up to the shooting and had purchased a horse whip specially to beat him with, indicating premeditation, however testimony from Folger’s fellow mariners aboard the Partridge in 1826 painted him as a dangerously unstable man capable of harming himself and others without a thought.

While sailing the South Seas route, Folger reportedly hurled iron bars at passing whales and then attempted to jump from the ship onto their backs.  Half-naked, he waltzed with chairs in the cabin and smashed panes of glass with his bare fists, dancing on the broken shards. As soon as he’d been patched up, he repeated the bloody ritual all over again.  He was known to scramble out of bed in the dead of night, convinced that Satan himself had entered the cabin, and steadfastly refused to sleep below deck for fear of ghost of the ship’s cook who’d been dead for two months.  Convinced the crew planned to rob him, he locked up his possessions and slept with loaded horse pistols next to his head nightly.

Image from https://archive.org

The Verdict

Unsurprisingly, 37-year old Captain Folger entered a plea of insanity and the jury took just 20 minutes to acquit him of murder, although he was found guilty of breaking the peace and wounding with intent to kill.  He was sentenced to imprisonment by Sir Peter Laurie, the then Lord Mayor who, like Mellish, is buried in Highgate Cemetery West. Interestingly, despite the successful insanity plea, Folger was moved from Newgate to the County Lunatic Asylum but was then moved back to Newgate after the Superintendent of the Asylum noted the “establishment was not intended for the care of sane persons”.

Redressing the balance

William Mellish passed away the following year, his ultimate demise no doubt sped up by his earlier brush with death.  It was then that Folger’s lawyers, the Sheriff and even the Governor of Newgate campaigned for his release on the basis that Folger posed no threat to the public as Mellish was now dead.  The appeal was successful and a full pardon was granted to Captain Folger but on one condition: he was to leave Britain permanently within 30 days, in addition to “entering into his own recognizances to keep the peace during the remainder of his life”.  After three years and nine months as a prisoner, Noah Pease Folger was a free man and returned to Nantucket where he died three years later on 7th December 1837.

William Mellish was survived by two daughters (both married into minor aristocracy) to whom he left properties estimated at the eye-watering sum of over £1 million (the inheritance later resulted in a particularly ugly court battle between the sisters and their husbands, but that's a different story!). Mellish and seven other family members were then moved from the original family plot in St John’s, Wapping, to the plot in Highgate Cemetery West by his daughter in 1859, some 25 years after his original interment.

 A massive thank you to the doyenne of all Highgate Cemetery-related knowledge, Mrs Sue Berdy - viva the Coven!

Who put the nookie in the cookie jar? Mick did…

(originally published 13 August 2018)

How on earth did two of Hampstead Cemetery’s most successful residents become embroiled in some deliciously subversive 20th century advertising?  Sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles…

In 1857 Samuel Palmer joined Huntley & Palmers as a partner and within a decade the family-run biscuit company dominated the market.  By 1878 they boasted being Royal Warrant holders for the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Italian and, at that time, Siamese royal families, while Henry “Dr Livingston, I presume?” Stanley ensured he was well-stocked with Huntley & Palmers as he trekked to Lake Tanganyika.  Captain Scott followed suit (with his own bespoke recipe no less) for his ill-fated Antarctic expedition.  The company supplied soldiers with their biscuits during both World Wars and even baked the future Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s wedding cake, while the Reading-based factory was visited by Oscar Wilde, King George V and Edward VII.  It also was used as a set location for the speakeasy scenes in 1975’s Bugsy Malone starring Jodie Foster and Scott Baio.  But something else set the company apart: its flair for advertising, both in print and on their highly collectible biscuit tins (trust me on this, they’re exquisite).  But by the 20th century, this Biscuit Behemoth had no idea about just how collectible its tins were about to get…

Samuel Palmer (image courtesy of Reading Borough Council via http://www.huntleyandpalmers.org.uk)

By the late 1880s Kate Greenaway was legendary in her own right, commanding adoration from a generation of Victorian children (and their mothers!) with her nostalgic illustrations of children frolicking in Regency-style outfits.  Her “Under the Window: Pictures & Rhymes for Children” saw her hit meteoric heights with the book selling out as quickly as it was printed, while Liberty of London commissioned an entire range of children’s clothing based on her artwork.  Kate counted John Ruskin as a professional admirer and personal friend, was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, exhibited at the Fine Art Society and even had an award established in her honour (The Kate Greenaway Medal) recognising outstanding achievements in illustration.  Her work epitomised a time when children were untainted by cynicism, negativity or hardship, instead encapsulating innocence and eliciting a longing for a bygone era.  Fast forward to the late 1970s when all that was about to change, courtesy of a subversive young freelance artist….

Kate Greenaway (Image courtesy of https://www.npg.org.uk)

During 1978/79 the UK saw the Winter of Discontent and Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister.  The Clash released London Calling, the streets were piled with rubbish and Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed crusader against moral decay, was still fighting the filth.  At the time Mick Hill was an illustrator from Whitstable commissioned to design three Huntley & Palmer biscuit tins and the opportunity to make a little mischief was simply too good to pass up.

Mucha do about puffing

Mick got to work on his first design for Huntley & Palmers Cocktail Biscuits by replicating the style of Alphonse Mucha.  He created an Edwardian party scene in full swing complete with dancing couples, a band, bottles and bottles of champagne, luscious fruits and flowers… the illustration smacked of free-spirited opulence.  But there was one small detail hiding in plain sight: a devilish-looking gent offering a buxom blonde an enormous spliff with one hand while pouring drink into his lap with the other.  Evidently Mick wished to ensure the contents of the tin and the characters depicted on it had something in common: they were all baked.

Those Edwardians, eh?  (image courtesy of https://picclick.co.uk)

The party in full swing (image courtesy of https://picclick.co.uk)

Huntley & Palmers: (going at it) since 1979

This little act of dissent slipped under the radar and in 1979 Mick turned his attention to the next piece, basing it on Kate Greenaway’s famous Regency revival style (it resembles the accompanying illustration from her poem “The Tea Party”, published in 1892’s “Marigold Garden”).  But this time Mick added an extra measure of spice to the tin, which featured children and young women dressed in that famous Greenaway style enjoying tea, cakes, tennis and kite-flying in front of a large country house.  Sounds wholesome, doesn’t it?  Again, things weren’t quite as they appeared: hidden in the background, underneath the feet of the innocent kiddies perched on the branch of a tree, are a couple enjoying some al fresco fun in the bushes while a pair of dogs are going at it in the garden’s right-hand border.

Kate’s original The Tea Party illustration (image courtesy of https://olddesignshop.com)

Mick Hill’s Greenaway-style tin (image courtesy of https://www.metro.co.uk)

The naughty bits (image courtesy of https://www.bathchronicle.co.uk)

More naughty bits (images courtesy of https://www.bathchronicle.co.uk)

Sex and drugs and profiteroles

For the final instalment in his hat-trick of naughtiness, Mick chose a Japanese theme that imitated woodblock printing, depicting a lively nocturnal scene in which traditional bare-chested female pearl divers brought their treasures to the surface.  The scene is completed with an attractive cherry blossom tree, underneath which stands an artist painting a landscape scene.  Now this one was a little more subtle, unless you are Japanese: the logographic characters running down the left of the artist’s picture spell out “Sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll” which Mick had a friend translate for him.

The Pearl Divers by Mick Hill (image courtesy of http://www.editiononline.co.uk)

All good things must come to an end and it wasn’t long before someone spotted the impish images and brought them to the attention of Huntley & Palmers.  The company didn’t take it well, issuing a press statement that read, in part, “… we can only decide to have a joke in rather poor taste” and describing the incident as “a very stupid and costly prank”.  Predictably the papers had a field day and thousands of lofts the country over were raided in the hope of finding contraband tins.  Mick was portrayed as being a vindictive ex-staff member but that was never the case: he was a freelancer and described his actions as being “just done for a bit of fun, for devilment really”.  You can watch the wonderful BBC interview with him here.  One of each of the infamous tins resides in the Reading Museum’s collection while the rest go for a pretty penny on online auction sites.

Samuel Palmer’s family grave is on a small tarmacked path to the left of the main path leading down from the cemetery gates on Fortune Green Road.  Samuel retired in 1898 and passed away on 9th April 1903 suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.  His wife, Mary Jane, joined him in 1910, followed by their daughter Nora in 1932.  The monument in Hampstead Cemetery isn’t listed but the memorial drinking fountain erected in his memory on nearby College Crescent (where the family lived at No. 40) is.  Constructed in the Arts & Crafts / Gothic-style with pink granite and oak, the inscription reads:

“This fountain, together with the open space on which it is erected, was presented to the Borough of Hampstead for the public benefit, in memory of the late Samuel Palmer, of Northcourt, Hampstead, by his widow and family, 1904”

Palmer family plot, Hampstead Cemetery

Samuel Palmer Memorial Drinking Fountain, College Crescent, Swiss Cottage

Kate Greenaway died on 6th November 1901 after suffering from breast cancer, which eventually spread to her lungs, for three years.  Her Arts & Crafts-style Hampstead home (39 Frognal) boasts a blue plaque commemorating her achievements and she was cremated in a private service, joining her parents in the family grave on 13th November, aged 55.  Her only brother, Alfred, joined them in 1938.  The plot is almost completely covered by an impenetrable blanket of blackberries and brambles, with only part of her father’s name visible on the top of the headstone (stand directly in front of Joseph Lister’s grave and look slightly to the right under a large tree – thank you, helpful sunbeam, for shining directly onto the grave in the photo below).  Her epitaph reads:

Heaven’s blue skies may shine above my head,

While you stand there – and say that I am dead!

So what would Samuel and Kate have made of these little acts of rebellion?  I’d like to imagine them taking it in the humour in which it was intended, perhaps over a pot of tea and some ginger snaps in that biscuit factory / artist studio in the sky, but something tells me they wouldn’t have (fig) rolled with it.