Later, at university, when I became interested in Thomas Hardy after seeing John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd, I was at first shocked to find that Hardy was an aficionado of public executions, because I was very much against capital punishment. But when I read his erotic description of the hanging of a woman called Martha Browne, it was Grace Fox I pictured, a vague but beautiful dark-haired female shape hanging there on the blasted heath, the gallows creaking with the weight, her body twisting languorously in the wind. The features were blurred, of course – this was simply someone my brother had mentioned to me years ago – but my imagination had no problem in supplying the female form under the clinging wet shift. It could have come from any one of the magazines I was hiding under my mattress at the time. I won’t say that the image excited me – I have never been drawn to necrophilia or sado-masochism – but I had to admit that there was a certain grim sensual and erotic aesthetic in it all, which Hardy, bless his soul, had grasped at once.
Now here I was, forty years later, living in Grace Fox’s house. What of it? I asked myself. It was certainly a coincidence, though not a great one; in reality, it was more like one of those ‘small world’ stories. But after Ted Welland’s tale and my talk with Graham, I felt a certain frisson when darkness fell upon Kilnsgate House that night. When the wailing and creaking woke me from my sleep once again and sent me downstairs for whisky and forgetfulness, I found myself standing at the top of the landing for a few extra moments, looking down the corridor in the dark, looking for Grace.
4
Famous Trials: Grace Elizabeth Fox, April 1953, by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley
Grace Elizabeth Hartnell was the daughter of a successful Saltburn bank manager and Alderman. She was a clever girl who attended her local grammar school, where she excelled both in the arts and in the sciences, and was generally regarded as a quiet and reserved child. Grace was nonetheless possessed of an enquiring mind and a kindly disposition, and she demonstrated an inherent gentleness and compassion towards all living creatures. Perhaps the only blot in the copybook of her youth was a broken engagement to a most suitable young man from the nearby town of Redcar, an ambitious young solicitor called Edward Cunliffe, whom her father very much admired, in favour of a far less appropriate paramour. This rejection of her father’s choice of partner showed a certain early rebellious and headstrong element in young Grace’s behaviour, an unwillingness to bend to the will of her father, and a tendency to forsake the duty incumbent upon the daughter of a local dignitary for the fickle will- o’-the-wisp impulse of romantic love. Much of the business still remains shrouded in mystery, as neither Grace nor her parents cared to speak of it in later times. The young man she chose, contrary to her family’s wishes, was an aspiring poet by the name of Thomas Murray, who turned out to be a rake of the most unspeakable order. Thomas soon deserted Grace for another woman, leaving her so distraught that it was thought best she should retire to her Aunt Ethel’s house in Torquay to recover from her attack of nerves. She returned a contrite woman and soon regained her father’s affection, though not that of the broken-hearted young solicitor Edward Cunliffe, who had since taken flight to seek his fortune in Argentina. Thomas Murray later died fighting for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. All this took place in late 1930, when Grace was merely eighteen, and by which time her husband-to-be was already an established GP in Richmond. A short while later, Grace began her training as a nurse, a profession at which she excelled beyond all her father’s misgivings. Grace trained at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, in Newcastle, submitting to the almost nun-like existence of the nurses’ home, with its strict curfews and rules against male visitors, all under the eagle eye of Matron. She soon showed evidence of the three qualities essential to a good nurse – devotion to her patients, technical proficiency and that essential feminine quality of tenderness, or gentleness, that in no way interfered with the efficiency with which she discharged her rigorous duties. Grace qualified as a State Registered Nurse with flying colours in 1935, and only a year later, she met and married Dr. Ernest Fox. The couple soon moved into Kilnsgate House, where everything proceeded as normal for the following three years. When war was declared, Dr. Fox curtailed his duties at the Royal Victoria Infirmary and turned his attention towards the Friarage, in Northallerton, which had recently opened as an emergency medical services hospital to receive casualties in the event of the bombing of Teesside’s civilian population. Throughout late 1939, Grace and Ernest continued to live at Kilnsgate House, tended by loyal maidservant Hetty Larkin. At this time, they also accommodated for several weeks an evacuee from Newcastle, affectionately known as ‘Billy’, until the air raids that had been predicted never materialised, and his parents brought him back home. It was around this time that Grace joined the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Services and went to pursue her training at Netley, in Hampshire. There she learned of the many duties of a military nurse, including running the dispensary, a skill that was to be declared of great significance during the course of her trial. After brief stints in military hospitals around Dover, where she helped nurse survivors of the British Expeditionary Force after Dunkirk, Grace bade farewell to her husband in July, 1940, and spent much of the rest of the war in service overseas. Ernest continued his work at the Friarage, in both a teaching and a practising capacity, throughout the war, even after it became a Royal Air Force Hospital in 1943, and he was also often absent from the practice as he travelled around the country to supervise training programmes and present research papers at various institutions of learning. Hetty Larkin found useful employment in a munitions factory near Darlington. During the war years, Kilnsgate House provided the occasional brief billet for a transferred officer or two, but much of the time it was empty except for Dr. Fox and, once or twice a week, Hetty Larkin. The isolation was partly what made Kilnsgate less attractive to the armed forces, though during one period this played in the house’s favour, when it was used in a top-secret capacity between August, 1940 and July, 1942. Dr. Fox’s own practice continued as best it could. Dr. Nelson’s wife Mary, as usual, handled most of the administrative duties. These were quiet times for the most part in North Yorkshire, and one wonders what thoughts passed through Ernest Fox’s mind as he sat puffing his pipe in front of a crackling fire during the darkest and loneliest days and nights of the war. Grace finally returned to her husband and her family home on the 4th November, 1945. Once back at Kilnsgate House, she left the nursing profession for ever and took up her duties as a housewife. Ernest settled into life as a country GP again, while continuing his various research projects, and almost a year later their only child was born, a son named Randolph, after Grace’s own father, who had died of pneumonia during the war. Grace then appeared to devote herself to motherhood and housekeeping, with the faithful Hetty’s help. As mistress of Kilnsgate House, Grace remained outwardly gracious and courteous, the kind of woman who would do anything to help a friend in need, but close friends also marked a change in her since the war: dark moods, unpredictable outbursts, and grim silences during which she seemed to retreat into some secret place within herself. What ailed her we will never know, as she never spoke of it to anyone. Was it in that dark, lonely place where she first hatched the plot for her husband’s murder? Because according to the Crown, this was far from a crime of passion executed in the heat of the moment, but a coolly thought-out, near-foolproof way of ridding herself of a husband she had ceased to love. Grace merely seized the opportunity of the snowstorm and the witnesses present in Kilnsgate House to put into action a plan she had been long devising. Whether Samuel Porter himself was involved in the plot must also remain within the realm of speculation, for no accusation or proof was ever brought to bear on the matter, and no charges were ever laid against him. So we move now to the 1st January, 1953, as cruel a winter’s night as there had been in Swaledale for many a year.
October 2010
The following morning I took my first walk around Kilnsgarthdale. I turned right outside the gate and carried on by the side of the beck for about a couple of hundred yards, where the dale seemed to end at a drystone wall. I saw when I got closer that it was actually two walls enclosing a track, with a stile for access on my side. The track ran over the hill south, towards Richmond, and in the other direction it seemed to come to an end by the two overgrown lime kilns on the slope. After this, the track was obscured by shrubbery and grass, the remains of the wall just a pile of stones. Beyond the second wall lay the woods.
I retraced my steps and crossed the little packhorse bridge outside Kilnsgate House, then walked up the opposite daleside to the lime kiln I could see from my bedroom window. I hadn’t had a really good look at it close up, and now I knew what it was I paused to do just that. It was certainly a creepy place, like a half-buried drystone dome or egg, its eye half obscured by weeds. I bent and peered in as deep as I could, but could see no trace of the grates over which the layers of limestone and coal were laid, or the ashes of the fire below. I scrambled around the back, higher up the hillside, and saw that the top was covered with sod. To think it had squatted there unused, useless, for over a hundred and fifty years. What comings and goings had that fixed eye seen during that time?
