My maternal family come from the area where the Nene meets the sea. I grew up with tales of marsh lights, pulling men to their deaths, and with a healthy terror of the invisible creeping tide. But the actions of people can be far darker and more mysterious than the dangers of the landscape.
Maria Martin was born in Holbeach in 1833. She moved to the marshes around Sutton Bridge in childhood. Long Sutton was known as Sutton St Mary at the time, and her father Abraham was a sluice-keeper on Sutton Marsh. In 1855, she married William Burridge. William was the same age as Maria. He was born in Littleport, but had also moved to Sutton Marsh in childhood. After their marriage, they lived on the very edge of Sutton Bridge. William worked on the land. They had three children, although one died in infancy.
William was a drinker, and he was not very stable. In September 1862, he went to work, reaping. He was extremely drunk. In the evening, the other workers went home but William did not – they assumed he’d fallen asleep in drink. One told Maria that he was asleep in the field, so Maria went to rouse him. She found him dead. He’d strangled himself with his own belt.
Maria was twenty-nine when she was widowed, and had two young children – Abraham was nearly four and John was a baby. She lived in Long Sutton, and attended the Wesleyan chapel in Sutton Bridge. The chapel now appears to be a kebab shop. Maria played the harmonium in the chapel, and this is how she met Kirby Wilson Triffitt, one of the choir singers.
Kirby was a year younger than Maria, and born in Sutton Bridge. He lived with his parents on Bridge Street, and worked variously as a carter and brickmaker. He fell in love with Maria, and their relationship began in 1863. However, Maria refused to marry him. As a widow, Maria would have been reliant on out-relief from the workhouse at Holbeach to maintain herself and her children. Any impropriety could see that money taken away, and it doesn’t seem Kirby was either respectable enough or rich enough for Maria to marry.
In the summer of 1869, Susannah Richardson died in Sutton Bridge. Her husband, William Pearson Richardson, began to court Maria very soon after. They probably met in the chapel. William was not exactly rich, but he had a smallholding and sufficient money to have the vote. He was some eighteen years older than Maria, with three adult children. He seems to have been a far more attractive potential husband than Kirby, and Maria accepted his marriage proposal in March 1870.
Kirby was furious. On 15th March, he went to Maria’s house, banging on the door. She did not answer, and he assumed this was because William was on the premises, so he broke down the door. Maria was alone, and much aggrieved at this invasion of her home. She summoned the police, and Kirby was dragged up in front of the magistrates a week later.
The magistrates fined Kirby 23 shillings for breaking and entering, a substantial sum for a labourer. Kirby was incensed at the fine, and told the magistrates a dark story. He told them that he’d been in a relationship with Maria for seven years, and during that time, she’d borne three children. All three had subsequently vanished, and he’d killed one of them himself and buried it.
Absolute scenes!
The police investigated promptly. Kirby took them to his father’s house, pointed out the grave, and they exhumed the remains of a tiny child. They then arrested Maria and dug up her garden but found no evidence of any other babies. However, based on this bleak discovery, Kirby was also arrested. They were charged on 1st April, and subsequently bailed: William Pearson Richardson paid Maria’s bail.
According to Kirby, the first child was born in 1864. Maria had passed the baby to him over the fence, and asked him to dispose of it. She said that if Kirby did, she’d marry him. Lovestruck Kirby took the child to bury it, and as he laid it in the grave, it cried… so he stomped on it. Maria had been pregnant two more times since then, but he had no idea what had become of the babies.
The inquest on the remains showed a slightly premature infant, but there was not enough remaining to determine the sex of the child, or whether it was born alive. Kirby changed his story slightly at the inquest. He said he had not killed the baby, it was already dead. He also said Maria had been pregnant in 1865, but not a third time.
Maria denied everything throughout. She said Kirby was jealous that she was marrying another man, and had invented the story to ruin her.
Maria and Kirby were both charged with concealment of birth, an offence which could be punished by up to two years in prison. The case came to court on 29th July 1870, at the summer assizes at Lincoln. Before any case was tried at the assizes, it was shown to the Grand Jury, who decided which cases proceeded to full trial and which could be thrown out. They threw out the case against Maria.
The case against Kirby, however, proceeded and he pleaded guilty. He didn’t really have a choice: he’d told the police about the child, and taken them to the body. So, no evidence was heard, but the judge made extensive comments on the case.
The judge did not believe a word of Kirby’s story. He didn’t believe they’d been in a relationship, he didn’t believe Maria had any children with Kirby, he didn’t believe the child in Jeremiah’s Triffitt’s garden had anything to do with Maria at all. Maria was respectable, Kirby’s vengeful lies were not believable.
He sentenced Kirby to a year in prison, which he served in Spalding gaol. Kirby died in 1873, unmarried, aged thirty-nine.
Maria married William Pearson Richardson at the end of August 1870, barely a month after the trial. However, she died in 1878, when she was forty-five. She had no further children with William. William married a much younger (and heavily pregnant) woman in 1881, but died in 1882.
So, who to believe? Maria was a respectable woman, apparently entirely beyond suspicion. She was respectably engaged to a decent man. She never wavered from her denial.
Yet, Kirby’s story has a ring of truth. He loved her, wanted to marry her, disposed of a child for her, held out for her for years, and was rejected for a richer, older man. I expect more families had dead babies buried in their gardens than they ever would have liked to admit, but there were no other obvious maternal candidates in the Triffitt household.
Pregnancy was very difficult to avoid for sexually-active women in the nineteenth century, but abortion techniques were widely practised. Maria was no innocent girl: she was in her thirties, and had at least three children with her first husband. And there were plenty of local waterways to dump an unwanted baby in, especially if you’d grown up living on a sluice…
This type of story – that of the spurned lover – often ends violently, but Kirby was more subtle. He tried to ruin Maria’s reputation, but it backfired spectacularly.
SOURCES: Globe, 31st March 1870, p.4. Lincolnshire Chronicle, 8th April 1870, p.6. Stamford Mercury, 8th April 1870, p.6 and 5th August 1870, p.3.
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Sophie Michell 