How Essex was once known as ‘arsenic county’

One-and-a-half pounds of the poison was found bricked up in the walls of the vicarage- enough to kill thousands of people.

Was this hidden away by a potential poisoner until they were ready to carry out their dastardly deed? Had there been a murder at the vicarage and the arsenic hurriedly secreted away? We will never know. The stash was handed over to the police, along with a 200- year-old bottle of brandy found alongside it. And that was the end of the story.

However, it’s certainly yet another clue as to why Essex once had the unfortunate moniker of “arsenic county”.

For a brief time during the Victorian era the very name of Essex could cause outsiders to shudder.

The popular press gleefully created an image of a region where Lucrezia Borgia would be given a run for her money.

Tabloids painted a picture of a place where poisoners lurked on every street corner with phials of toxin at the ready.

If possible, anyone travelling to Essex was advised to pack their own food, since dining out was an open invitation to the owners to sprinkle arsenic over the meal.

A Times journalist wrote at the time: “Deeds, which the imagination connects with the Borgias, are seen naturalised in an uneducated English county.”

A Morning Post article read: “Essex, a district where cold-blooded murder meets with all the popular favour which is smuggling in Sussex.”

Another London journalist, travelling through an Essex village in a stagecoach, looked out at the villagers as they enjoyed the evening sunshine. He wrote: “They are marked for death. You must realise many are pre-doomed to a painful and lingering destruction.”

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In reality, of course, Essex was no more poisonous than any other county. Its reputation had arisen because of a statistical blip, a succession of celebrated cases with their origin here.

It began, in 1846, with the case of a woman dubbed ‘Sally Arsenic’.

The name was to become as famous in popular culture as that of Jack the Ripper, half a century later.

Her real name was Sarah Chesham, and she hailed from Clavering, Jamie Oliver’s childhood home. In her own way she, too, became a sort of celebrity chef.

Queen of crime - Agatha Christie used poison as the murder method in many of her novels (Image: File photos)

Sarah made sweets, liberally laced with arsenic. She would then wander the lanes, a real-life evil witch, offering the sweeties to any child she met. At a time when child mortality was rife, her murderous exploits escaped attention for a while.

She would be accused of killing her own children and her husband and would eventually be hung outside Chelmsford gaol in 1851 before a crowd of 8,000 ‘spectators’.

Sarah would have the ignominy of being the last woman to be executed in public outside the prison.

‘Sally Arsenic’ certainly acquired a reputation. “Mothers used to keep their infants indoors when she was seen prowling about the village,” it was reported.

But Sarah was more than a murderer; she was, it appears, a woman with a penchant for poison that could make the blood run cold.

The horrible truth began to emerge at the trial of Mary May, of Manningtree in 1848. Mary had been one of Sarah’s pupils, at an informal school, confined to women.

Here, Sarah passed on tips about how to poison husbands, neighbours and even your own children.

Mary was executed at Chelmsford Prison after being found guilty of poisoning her half-brother, William Constable, who was widely known in the village of Wix by his alias, Spratty Watts. The motive, as established by the prosecution, was a small sum of money reported to be between £9 and £10 that was payable to May from a Harwich mourners’ club on Watts’s death.

After Mary’s execution a coroner from Maldon named William Codd held a special investigation in Thorpe, Essex, to look into why so many poison cases were occurring in the county.

The meeting, and his subsequent comments, only served to fan the flames of Essex as ‘arsenic county’.

Mr Codd remarked: “The presence of epidemic crime in one particular locality, and not in another, is a matter difficult enough of explanation.

“Why should the practice of secret poisoning obtain rather in the marshes of Essex than elsewhere?

“Of the fact there can unfortunately be no doubt. In a certain district in the county of Essex, comprising the four villages of Bradfield, Ramsay, Dovercourt, and Tendring, the existence of a terrible system of secret poisoning has been discovered, and yet more crime is suspected.

“In every one of the recent instances the tragedy has been a domestic one. The husband has fallen a victim to the criminal practice of the wife.

“From the moment each unhappy sufferer swallowed the first draught, until the time when he expired in agony, every remedy prescribed by medical skill to alleviate the first symptoms was drugged by the same fatal hand.”

Popular ballads of the day told tales of ‘Essex death clubs’, where wives swapped tips on how to poison their husbands and collect the insurance money.

It was an exaggerated picture, but not a wholly inaccurate one.

The emerging science of forensics did establish an unusually high rate of poisoning in Essex.

Behind the lurid headlines lay a tragic reality. Some mothers poisoned their own families and themselves to escape from a life of unending misery. Food was expensive but arsenic was cheap.

The industrial revolution produced large quantities of the poison as a by-product. It was stocked alongside the groceries in village stores, and could be used as rat poison and a pesticide. It was also widely used in medications, in soap and beauty treatments and in ailments for skin and even libido problems.

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But it was arsenic’s use in the kitchen that attracted most attention.

Decades later the ‘queen of the crime thriller’, Agatha Christie, would use poisonings at the murder method in more than half of her books.

Colourless and tasteless, arsenic could easily be passed off as icing sugar or flour to an inquisitive husband. Mary Wittenback, a 41-year-old laundress and housewife who had been born in Southend, discovered this when she decided to sort out her annoying husband with a dose of arsenic.

In the summer of 1827 when she and her husband Frederick were boarding as lodgers in Islington, London, Mary decided to make her husband a dinner of suet pudding dumplings- with a hefty dose of arsenic mixed in.

Mary had planned the culinary killing for sometime. She and Frederick had not had the best of marriages.

After Fred’s death by suet pudding, a trial was held at the Old Bailey where Mary sat in the dock a lone and frail figure.

This 18th century sketch shows notorious English murderer Mary Blandy confessing to have poisoned her father.,Francis Blandy, with arsenic. She claimed that she thought the arsenic was a love potion that would make her father approve of her relationship. Blandy would be hung in Oxford in 1752 for the crime of parricide. (Image: File photos)

She was prone to sobbing and hysterical outbursts during the hearing.

After a jury declared her guilty she was taken from the courtroom in a wretched state, screaming hysterically.

A few minutes later she was brought back in to see the judge only to be told that after her hanging had been carried out her body would be handed over to the state for dissection- a common punishment in cases of murder. at the time.

Unfortunately, because the ‘short drop’ method of hanging sometimes didn’t work, death would often occur for the condemned on the dissection table rather than the scaffold.

This news seemed to tip Mary over the edge and she had to be carried out of the courtroom, unable to stand on her own two feet.

Her execution did turn out, indeed, to be a brutal, agonising affair. She went to the scaffold exclaiming: “Oh, my God! Oh, Christ! Receive me, a poor sinner,” She struggled on the noose for two minutes before she was dead.

Essex arsenic activities diminished for a time but in 1921 the poison was back in the headlines when sweets infused with poison began being circulated around north Essex.

Essex police were called in after three people from East Bergholt became ill after eating packets of raspberry Jujubes. Upon investigating police found that slits had been put in each sweet and arsenic injected inside.

Of course for as many housewives bumping off their other half with arsenic, there were an equal number of accidents involving the toxic mineral across Essex.

Sneaking a cake caused hungry John Chaney to lose his life shortly before Christmas in 1891.

Chaney, 61, was employed as a night-watchman for the steamer ‘Alexander Elder’ which was anchored at Tilbury Docks.

The ship had cakes laced with arsenic locked away onboard to deal with rats but Chaney one day unlocked the drawer and took out a cake. He died within a few hours in terrible agony.

In 1879 little Annie Hart - the child of a rat-catcher - died after drinking arsenic given to her by her sister.

The 18-month-old tot was at home in the village of Messing when her sister gave her some arsenic to drink, thinking it was ginger beer.

The father, a vermin catcher had bottles of arsenic stacked around the home and had placed a saucepan full of the poison on the stove to boil it for his duties he following day.

The young sisters had been left alone while their parents sat in the other room and sadly Annie paid the price. She became immediately sick and ill, dying that same night.

At the inquest into Annie’s death the coroner recording a verdict of accidental poisoning but chastised the father for leaving poison out.

In 1902 Clara Banks, aged 66, from Writtle, died after drinking home made plum wine which contained arsenic.

The wine had been a wedding present given to Clara’s son but the copper jar it had been made in had been used previously to store arsenic and was not cleaned out properly. Her death was also ruled an accident.

Arsenic poisoning from wallpaper was another terror of the Victorian age.

The fashionable vivid colours of the era, especially green, contained arsenic.

Thomas Charles Butler, from Leyton died from toxic poisoning as a result of ‘death by decoration’ in 1903.

Upon examining his wallpaper the coroner found it contained arsenic. The jury returned a verdict of “death from misadventure.”

One of the worse cases occurred in 1862 when four children from the same home in Limehouse died as a result of their arsenic infused wallpaper. An inquest heard the children had licked the green colour of the paper which contained ‘immense quantities of arsenic’.