Biggleswade Haunted Pound Stretcher Part Two: The fire and a rabbit hole to Bethlem Hospital

The plaque commemorating the fire in Biggleswade: link here to original photo.

Whilst I wait for witnesses to the haunting of the old Pound Stretcher to get back to me, and they are, I decided to follow up some leads. Today’s post is not about ghosts but about the Great Fire of Biggleswade and its terrible impact on the people of the town. I’m following the fire because it was mentioned by at least one person on a Facebook group, as a link to the haunting. They claimed that Aggie the ghost was a victim of the fire. I wanted to know if that could be the case. Where and when was the fire? Who were the victims? All that I have found out is revealed below. There is some discussion about trauma and mental health conditions.

What do we know about the fire?

The fire started at 11AM on Thursday 16th June 1785. It seems most accounts, come from a few contemporary news paper reports from the time. Here’s what the Northampton Mercury had to say about it:

Thursday Morning last, about eleven o’clock, a most terrible fire broke out at Mr. Griggs’s, the Crown Inn, at Biggleswade, Bedfordshire; occasioned by a servant throwing some hot ashes into the yard, which communicating to a crate full of Straw, immediately set fire to the premises. The wind being very high, the flames with amazing rapidity spread to different parts of the town, and consumed near 200 dwellings, together with barns, stables, etc. a very considerable quantity of corn, hay, etc. with a number of hogs, and fat calves. The fire was not got under till near Six in the evening. Loss must be very great as many of the principal houses and inns were burnt down.

Northampton Mercury Monday 20th June 1785

Just a note on quotes from the news paper archives, I’ve changed the fs for s’s and tidied up some of the capitalisation and punctuation, but otherwise the story is as it appeared in the Mercury. I’ve found similar but less complete versions of the same story in newspapers from Herefordshire and Bath. Different spellings for Biggleswade make it hard to find related articles.

One thing all the articles and accounts have in common is that no loss of human life is mentioned. The animals who are lost are recorded in the Hereford article and so it seems strange not to mention any human casualties. I wondered if it being a fire started in the middle of the day, that it made it less likely for there to be casualties, as people were out in the fields, or awake at least, and able to get to safety. The newspapers of the time often have whole sections given over to reports of fires, including naming those who perished and who were left gravely ill. In fact the Hereford Journal on 23rd June 1785 finishes it’s report, based on a letter sent in from Baldock, on the Biggleswade fire by saying:

The recent fires about us strike the country with terror.

Letter from Baldock sent June 16th to the Hereford Journal

The reporting of fires was something that was clearly important and newsworthy and it seems strange to not mention deaths in Biggleswade when deaths in other fires are certainly mentioned.

So I had a look at the burial records for Biggleswade in 1785. I found 63 burials at St Andrew’s Church that year. Only one death occurred in June and that was almost a week before the fire. That number might seem low, but there were only two deaths recorded for July that year. The months of October – March saw the bulk of deaths apart from a spike in May when four members from the same family died in short succession. It seems there are no deaths recorded at St Andrew’s church that correspond to the fire. Of course there may have been deaths I haven’t found, there were dissenters in Biggleswade who attended other churches. I am not sure what was done at the time if remains could not be found after a fire. A gruesome thought but an important historical one. If there is no body to bury will the death still be recorded?

Thankfully it is looking unlikely that anyone died that day in the fire, though I can not say for sure. Of course some people may have died later that year if they sustained injuries during the fire. What we do know is that many people in Biggleswade were victims of the fire in other ways; I have seen reports that almost a half to a third of the town was destroyed. Estimates range from 50 to 200 dwellings being burnt down. I suspect the higher number includes the barns, stables and other out buildings mentioned in the news article quoted above. Many families must have been made homeless, and lost their livelihoods. We know there was a national appeal to raise funds for the town. I wonder if some of the deaths later that year were indirectly connected to the fire. Say from the stresses and diseases related to being made homeless? But the records I have access to online, don’t generally give cause of death, but it is something I could potentially look into.

I say the records generally don’t give cause of death and that’s true for the local burial records available online. But as I scrolled down the deaths linked to Biggleswade, one of the last deaths of the year leapt out at me. It had a cause of death attached to it and it made me sit up and pay attention. Not because it’s related to the haunting but because it’s possibly related to the impact of the fire on people’s lives.

An unusual death for Biggleswade

On December 16th 1785, six months to the day of the fire, a young man in Bethlem hospital in London died. His cause of death was “Lunacy” and his home town was given as Biggleswade. He had been admitted into the hospital only two months before on 22nd October 1785, just over 4 months after the fire. He was most probably 22 years old and called Francis Rowney.

So I left behind any thoughts of hauntings, if Aggie the ghost haunts Pound Stretcher I don’t think she died in the Great Fire of Biggleswade. Instead I went down a fascinating rabbit hole involving Bethlem Hospital and thoughts about how a tragedy like the fire in Biggleswade affects a community then and now.

Bethlem Hospital

You might want to skip to the next section if you don’t want to read about the mistreatment of patients at Bethlem hospital. Scroll down past the photograph to the next section if that is the case.

You have probably heard of Bethlem hospital’s more notorious name Bedlam. You might remember or still hear people saying “It’s like bedlam in here!” to mean somewhere that is unruly, crowded and chaotic. Apparently that colloquial use of the word has been about since the early 1600s. The hospital had a notorious reputation as being historically everything bad about the treatment of people who were mentally unwell or distressed. So here’s a quick introduction to the hospital that Francis Rowney found himself in.

The Bethlem hospital was founded in 1247 and the first definitive evidence that it was being used to house patients with mental health conditions is from 1403. Of course back then no one used phrases like mental health conditions. Bethlem Hospital or its nick name Bedlam was a place to lock up those considered unruly, distressed, “insane” or suffering with “lunacy.” Very little is known about the treatment of patients back in medieval times, although it was reported that there were shackles and restraints for those regarded the most dangerous.

In 1676 the hospital moved the short distance from near modern day Liverpool Street station to modern day Finsbury Circus nearer to Moorgate station. This is the location of the hospital that Francis Rowney from Biggleswade was admitted into. By 1785 the hospital could accommodate 220 patients including 100 “incurables.”

One thing Bethlem was notorious for was allowing the public in to view the patients as “entertainment.” In 1753s it was estimated by a journalist that over 100 visitors paraded through the hospital to gawk at the patients during Eater weekend. By 1770 however, the extensive “visiting” of Bethlem hospital by the public had been stopped. Though the public could still visit in smaller numbers by applying to the governor. Although the reduction of the visiting public can be seen as a good thing, it has also been shown that instances of abuses at the hospital went up when they were no longer under the scrutiny of the general public. We know that patients were encouraged to bathe, and that they would have been treated with leeches and all kinds of remedies to “purge” the body.

In 1785 Bethlem was no longer the only mental hospital in the country but there were still very few. It wasn’t until the late 1790s that the Quakers founded the York Retreat – shout out to the Quakers for leading the way in a more humane treatment of people with mental health conditions! During the Victorian period county asylums began to be built and the number of patients in hospitals for “lunacy” grew exceptionally. But in 1785 it was a rare thing for a young man from Biggleswade to end up in any “mental hospital” because there just weren’t that many of them. So how did he end up in the Bethlem Hospital?

View across modern London, the Old Bailey, Farringdon and the edge of Moorgate

What do we know about Francis?

Historically all we know is the following:

• A Francis Rowney is baptised at St Andrew’s Church, Biggleswade on 7th August 1763, his mother is Elizabeth, his father Thomas
• His father may have died when Francis was 11 in 1774
• On Thursday 16th June 1785 there is a devastating fire in Biggleswade
• On 22nd October 1785 a Francis Rowney is admitted into Bethlem Hospital suffering with “lunacy” the two witnesses to his admission are a London based chemist (medical man) and one of his neighbours, a book seller.
• On 16th December 1785 Francis Rowney dies in Bethlem hospital of “Lunacy”
• On the 18th December 1785 he is buried in St Giles’ Cripple Gate church yard.

What might have happened to Francis?

There are so many possibilities. Maybe Francis was safely away from Biggleswade when the fire started. He might have been working as an apprentice or servant, in London on St John’s Street. This is where both of the witnesses to his admission to Bethlem hospital live. There are records for the apprentices of Mr Labrow the druggist and Rowney isn’t one of them. But he could have been a servant or worked for Mr Turpin the book seller or indeed any other business or family who lived near by. Maybe his illness had nothing to do with the fire at all.

The story teller in me wonders though if there could be a link to the fire.

Maybe Francis was in Biggleswade that day. Maybe he witnessed the fire. Witnessed his home being destroyed, tried desperately to save his house, his pig, his belongings but was helpless to stop the hot greedy flames. Maybe he trudged with bucket after bucket filled with water, from the river or from a well, his arms aching. As he did this he was choked with smoke and soot. Engulfed by the panicked cries of his neighbours. Maybe he was out working in the fields only to come rushing back to town to find everything destroyed. His family and neighbours devastated by the destruction of everything they owned. Most importantly there was nothing he could do or have done to have prevented it. He was helpless and the situation hopeless.

Maybe, Francis worked at the Crown Inn for Mr Griggs. Maybe he was distracted, careless that morning, and threw out the ashes before they were completely cooled and watched horrified as the crate of straw caught alight. Panic erupting inside him as the wind whipped the flames higher and further, until they tore through his home and his town destroying everything in it including his sanity.

Although my last bit of speculation there is a story tellers leap, it is something worth thinking about. Some articles elude to the fire being set deliberately whilst others state it was a foolish and costly mistake. I have found no records of anyone being prosecuted for the fire. I wonder if anyone was? I wonder how you live with yourself knowing that you have caused such devastation?

Whatever happened to Francis, the trauma could have been so severe that his family and local town felt unable to support him. We know there was an appeal for aid and money sent to Biggleswade. Maybe some of that paid for him to be sent to London seeking treatment, a cure, or somewhere where he didn’t distress his family and neighbours any more than they already were.

Trauma then and now

Guess work aside I do genuinely wonder if the fire could have played a part in poor Francis’ admittance into Bethlem and his untimely death. It’s a common misconception that people in the “olden days” just got on stoically with the tragedies they faced. Things were so grim back then they were desensitised to their plight. It’s a comforting thought in a way, it’s ok our ancestors weren’t like us they could cope with this stuff. As we consider high levels of infant mortality, disease and the precariousness of life back then, it makes it easier if you also think that the people of the time didn’t feel things the same way we do. But I think that’s quite a dangerous and misleading way to think. It implies that our modern feelings are either superior or some kind of luxury we’ve earned. That we’re some how weaker than our ancestors, softer, more prone to feeling distress, or that they are some how stronger, colder and more resilient.

I think reality is a lot more nuanced. In the 21st century we have a different way of speaking about and categorising our feelings thanks to the disciplines of psychology, medicine and sociology. We also live in a society where talking about our feelings has evolved and become something most people feel more able to do than in the past. But just because we can now categorise how we feel and recognise mental health conditions in a particular way, doesn’t mean those feelings and conditions are new. Though in the case of what we now call PTSD it is interesting to see how the symptoms of that condition appear to differ depending on the historical period, but I digress.

Also many of us today have more free time than our ancestors had and that time gives us the space to explore our feelings, to write about them, to talk about them, to express them in a different way. But I believe fundamentally that people through out the ages have experienced trauma and emotional upset in a similar way, when terrible things happen. In fact psychiatrists have studied Samuel Pepys’ diaries identifying how he dealt with post traumatic stress after the Great Fire of London. Also many in the past will have experienced mental health conditions that are organic and not wholly caused by external factors. Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, published in 1621, is a beautiful and moving example of the universality of many experiences of mental distress and what helps and hinders recovery. There was a radio 4 series on this wonderful book and an In Our Time programme dedicated to it.

I firmly believe that the people of Biggleswade whose homes and properties were destroyed will have experienced trauma. Some maybe temporarily in the direct aftermath. Some will have experienced symptoms that were more severe and or lasted for longer. I can just imagine, thirty or so years after the fire, people saying things like “she was never the same after the fire.” Why? Because its the kind of thing that is said about people who have experienced traumatic events through out history.

For me it seems perfectly natural, though terribly sad, that a young man was so traumatised by the fire in Biggleswade he was admitted to the countries leading hospital, for what they then called “lunatics.” Where 6 months to the day of the fire he died, possibly by his own hand. It certainly brings to life how terrible that fire must have been and what its potential impact was on the people caught up in it.

Next Time: Another historical diversion

I’m not quite finished with the historical diversions. After scrutinising Francis Rowney’s admission entry to Bethlem Hospital, I did some digging into the men who witnessed his admittance. They don’t appear to help us with our understanding of how Francis ended up there, but they have some interesting social history stories to tell of their own!

Finally I am getting some bites on social media regarding the haunted Pound Stretcher and a witness has just sent me a message with what happened to her and what she knows. It appears Aggie may have been a maid working in that building…

Tunnel vision

Willow vision: Taken with my Nikon D7200 300mm f/6.3

I’ve had a really busy week at work recruiting and I’m beginning to feel a little frazzled. It’s also why I haven’t had as much time to post pictures. Because we’re recruiting online using video calls I’ve been spending all day staring at a screen in a way that I wouldn’t usually. I can’t suddenly switch my camera off for a break half way through an interview! This means the last thing I want to do in the evening is stare at the screen some more to choose photos.

But this morning I was feeling tired and a little hemmed in by my long to do list, so procrastination won out and here I am posting photos! I took the photo above at the weekend on my walk along the river. It’s taken through the leaf fronds of a willow tree that create a lovely tunnel to walk through. I like taking photos in that tunnel of leaves because it reminds me of how I see the world. Not a lot of sharp detail and lots of distraction and distortion. Obviously that isn’t exactly how I see the world but it feels like that sometimes. I also like the mood it creates like swimming through a tunnel of green ocean, its a calming colour but it’s also disconcerting because you are so limited in what you can see. So in many ways it also pictures my mental state when I’m feeling stressed.

So in juxtaposition to that, below is a photo I took on my mobile phone when I visited Lindisfarne in 2017. It was just before dawn and I think it captures that stillness you get just before the sun comes up, just before the whole island bursts into life with bird song and seal calls.

Holy Island morning: Taken on my iPhone

Street photography 1 – Kings Cross Tunnel and an accidental reader

Small acts of Pride – the tunnel at StPancras and Kings Cross – Nikon D7200 35mm lens f/1.8

I visited London on Friday for what the lady at the train station coffee shop called a “jolly” I was meeting a friend for lunch and another friend for coffee. I was also planning to try some street photography. It’s something I love looking at, other photographers street photography that is, but something I often feel nervous about doing myself. I find though, that having the camera lens to look down helps ease the anxiety I often feel in busy places like London. Though the first photo I’ve shared today, has no people in it.

When the new part of Kings Cross was opened a few years back a tunnel opened to take pedestrians from either St Pancras or Kings Cross up towards Coal Drop Yard. (Coal drop yard is where back in the olden days, coal was dropped. Now it is a “destination” for the young, the hipsters and the hungry. It has restaurants and street food vendors.) This underground corridor is striped on the ceiling and one wall and the other wall is a continuous screen which sometimes contains adverts, information or art but usually it’s just left blank but displaying different colours. Pale or pastel for most of the year but in the summer to celebrate gay pride it is the bright vibrant rainbow colours pictured above. Also I think the green lines added to the floor as an aid to social distancing shown in the picture above, actually help create that sense of curving movement or journey in the photo.

Below is a picture of the same tunnel taken two years ago, with a strategically placed silhouette of a person in it. My Dad particularly likes this photograph so I have a large pint out of it I need to get framed and take up to him in a couple of weeks time. It was meant to be a present in 2020 but Covid prevented me getting it to him.

The tunnel – taken on my iPhone 4mm f/1.8

I didn’t just photograph tunnels on Friday. I also took some pictures around Angel, Islington and the Kings Cross area. This photo, below is taken outside Google’s offices at StPancras. I was focussing on the tree and after taking the photo I noticed the little boy playing by the water. He’s out of focus and I wouldn’t share a photo of a child if they were identifiable with out permission, but his hat obscures his face so I think in this case it is ok. What I didn’t notice until even later when I was looking at the picture on my computer screen was the young person reading! If only I’d noticed them when I was framing the shot! But these are the trials of a visually impaired photographer and I’ve learnt not to feel upset or disappointed when I miss an opportunity. Instead I felt grateful that I could still crop the photograph in a way that brought attention to them as part of the whole scene.

Shady afternoon – Nikon D7200 35mm lens f/1.8

A bigger picture

Drifting – image of grasses and leaves

I know I promised insects. You will get insects but not today. Today I want to focus on my mental health. Partly because yesterday my mind was restless like the leaves and stems in the photo above. Yesterday my mind was full of movement but also anchored to the ground making me feel both stuck and motion sick at the same time.

Reflecting on my mental health

I’ve already written a little bit about how my sight affects my photography and also what I gain from digital photography as a way of seeing the world. I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years. I haven’t spent as much time thinking about how my photography affects and reflects my mental health, though until recently. I always knew that taking photographs was a way for me to distract myself for a little while from distressing feelings and also that if I stop taking photos, or no longer want to, its a sure sign that my mood is low. It then becomes a vicious circle: I don’t want to take photographs but taking photographs helps me, but if I don’t take any I feel more depressed, the more depressed I feel the less likely I am to want to take any photographs.

It doesn’t always mean I’m depressed if I’m not taking photos but its a sure sign when I don’t want to if I’m given the opportunity. So it’s an important way for me to gauge my mood but is it something more and do I get more out of it than just a mere distraction from mental distress?

Here’s a little bit about my mental health condition. I have been living with PTSD for nearly 25 years and because it wasn’t treated appropriately for much of that time and multiple traumatic things happened to me over the years it became what is known as complex PTSD. The main trigger happened in 1997 and was work related. I will write about this in the future but for now for those of you who don’t know me the experience was extreme, made the international news and left me feeling helpless and hopeless. Those two emotions contribute a lot to who will develop PTSD in any traumatic situation. If you have agency or are able to do something at the time to make a difference, it helps you deal with the trauma. It doesn’t mean you won’t experience PTSD but helps you cope. I felt as if I couldn’t do anything useful for myself or the others around me who were suffering and that feeling of helplessness meant it was harder for me to process at the time. Another contributing factor to developing PTSD is if you have experienced trauma as a child. Although I have always had a supportive and loving family there were some things which happened in my childhood that they nor I, had any control over and one of the biggest was the fact that I was born blind and how that was dealt with in the 1970s.

I spent frequent periods of time as a baby away from my parents in hospital and had numerous operations on my eyes which were always followed by eye drop treatment which I absolutely hated even as a baby. Later I would have more surgery as a 4 year old. Then there was the battle my parents went through for me to be allowed to attend the local school rather than a specialist boarding school. Even then the local school excluded me from certain activities like learning the recorder because of my eye sight. Meanwhile to stop me form having to go to a boarding school and avoiding the whole family moving to Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles, my Dad who was in the RAF, was posted there for 2 years with out us. We got to see him maybe every 6 weeks for a weekend. What I hadn’t appreciated for nearly 45 years was just how big an impact all this had on me and this all happened to me before the age of 6.

Nowadays thankfully parents can stay overnight with infants and children in hospital (well when there isn’t a covid pandemic.) There is a greater understanding of how hospitalisation and medical treatment impacts on youngsters including their behaviour. My confidence and independence as a very small child most probably was somewhat down to personality but also the situation I found myself in. Little did any of us know back then that it might be a warning sign of emotional trauma. Later in life it would lead to my habit of not opening up about how I really felt, a belief I had to be self reliant at all costs fuelled by a constant fear of abandonment. I have to stress that just this alone isn’t the cause of my cPTSD. But it is the shaky foundation that other traumas and upset through my life was built on and eventually it had to give.

But I can come back to all this later. In the future I want to explore further how my experiences as a disabled child, teenager and adult impacted on my mental health but I’ll have to break it down into manageable chunks or I’ll never get through it all.

Back to photography

Sea spray – Brighton beach May 2021

The picture above is one I took whilst in Brighton in May. I picked it because it is that stereo typical rough sea image for feeling emotional. But stereo types usually have a grain of something if not always truth in them and in this case the sea can be a wonderful metaphor for emotion. For me this photo reflects my state of mind when, like last night, I feel restless and frustrated. The sea spray and mist, the unnatural looking yellow of the light make an atmospheric photo but can represent a confusing state of mind. One where, what I want, which is rest and clarity, is obscured from me.

Below is an image of a beautiful cottage garden in Surrey. We stayed there in May 2019 just before I Started the EMDR treatment, which has had such an impact on treating my cPTSD. At the time I was in a bad way, and this brief holiday was where I made the decision to take some time away from work and to really give the EMDR treatment a shot. The garden was wonderfully healing but this picture also bothers me. It’s full of chromatic aberration (the purple and green fringing on tree branches and bright white things in the photograph.) It’s caused by my cheap 35mm lens and the light conditions. If I try to remove it, Light Room also removes the bright pink of the flowers on the right. I’m sure if I opened up photo shop I could remove it with a bit of time and patience. But because of the chromatic aberration it works as an image representing my mind, or my mental health.

At the time, early May 2019 I would not have selected this photograph to represent my mind or my emotional state. I’d have probably picked something bleak and featureless. I had lost all sense of who I was. I couldn’t remember a time when I had felt like me. Let alone a time when I felt happy or content, other than the odd fleeting moment where I’d feel like I’d glimpsed myself in the mirror only to lose sight of myself again. There was a void where I should have been. That’s how I felt,

What really was happening was this photograph. I was there still – this vibrant messy garden but I was scattered like the light and the various parts of this image. There was so much going on I couldn’t take any of it in. Instead I focussed on one patch of grey white sky in the top left corner. A void, avoiding all the rest of the garden bursting with life. And if I did glimpse the bigger picture all I saw was the chromatic aberration that I wanted to airbrush away but there was so much of it, it would be impossible to do and I was terrified if I succeeded in cleaning up the picture I’d lose those vibrant pink flowers in the foreground. So best not to try just go back to that patch of grey white void and disappear there.

Spring – Surrey Cottage Garden

I’m pleased to say that through my EMDR treatment I have been able to see the bigger picture and not lose any bright and important parts of me. It’s helped me zoom out from that void and not only see myself but accept and embrace all the parts of me that were hurt.

Now I have to take the time to really let myself thrive.

I do love to be beside the seaside – Golden Hour Part 2

Brighton beach at sunset – taken on my iPhone

Earlier in the week I posted about golden hour and how the light just after dawn and just before sunset is the best for photography. Above is an example of a golden hour photograph. I took it in Brighton earlier this year. I’d gone there for a couple of days holiday, staying for the first time in an airbnb.

I was signed off work sick whilst I completed my treatment for complex PTSD. I’ve been having treatment called EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) it’s been in the news recently because Prince Harry has had the treatment to deal with the trauma around the death of his mum, Princess Diana. Although I’ve been having sessions for some time, the pandemic has made the process take longer than usual, as there have been months when I couldn’t visit my therapist due to social distancing. In May we were drawing to the end of my treatment and I was finding it increasingly difficult to work and give myself the time I needed to get well and process the treatment. I was processing trauma going back to my childhood and relating to being visually impaired. Something I hope I’ll be able to post about in the future.

But for now let’s just focus on Brighton. I was there for a couple of days because I needed some time away by myself. I took my camera and I had nothing planned but to take photographs, walk, listen to podcasts and eat some nice food.

I did all these things and on the first night I went out for a walk with my camera at golden hour. It was really cold and blustery. I’ve never seen Brighton seafront quite like it. The sea was really rough. but the sun came out and transformed a stormy evening into something magical. The light in the photo above was enhanced by the sea mist that formed a haze towards Hove. The gull was stroke of luck.

I hope the photo below gives an idea of the rough sea and lovely light. The ruined pier is always a great subject and I was lucky to capture the person on the beach being buffeted by the wind.

Squally sea spray – image taken with my Nikon D7200 camera 35mm f/1.8

So a lucky gull and person helped both photographs be something more than just a landscape shot. Although luck played a part in creating these images, obviously I still needed to be in the right place at the right time, taking photos. It comes back to that, take as many photos as you can tip. Keep snapping and something will turn up.

I remember getting back to the flat where I was staying feeling thoroughly energised from the wind and sea air and by the glorious yolky light of the sun. The next day was warm in the morning and I walked along the sea front for quite a way and then had Japanese food for lunch. Staying in Brighton was like a moment of calm in over a year of turmoil both in the world in general and with my own emotions. When I am out with my camera, that turmoil just ebbs away. The only thing that matters is being in the zone, creating images and seeing things in a different light.