Cambridgeshire Murders by Alison Bruce Read Free Book Online

Friday 6 August 1819; the date carved on Mary’s gravestone is incorrect.

5
FROM WATERHOUSE TO SLAUGHTERHOUSE
    L ittle Stukeley is situated approximately 3 miles from Huntingdon. According to the 1821 census there were just fifty-two houses, home to 385 inhabitants. Of the families, sixteen cited their employment as handicrafts and seventy-one worked in agriculture.
    The village dates back to at least the times of Richard II and was originally named Stivecle. As is typical of Cambridgeshire villages, the church is impressive, having been built and extended over many decades with several parts of the building dating to the 1600s.
    It was Tuesday 3 July 1827 when the residents heard the news that their rector, the Revd Joshua Waterhouse, was dead. At first it was rumoured that he had committed suicide by cutting his own throat. The incumbent vicar for about fourteen years, the 81-year-old Revd Waterhouse was well known for both his meanness and his eccentricities. It was this eccentricity that made the villagers believe that suicide would not be out of character.
    However, it soon became clear that there was a murderer at large.
    Born in Derbyshire in 1746, Joshua Waterhouse was the youngest of four children and the son of a respectable farmer. In 1771 he entered St Catherine’s Hall, Cambridge. He gained his first degree in 1774, his second in 1777 and became a Bachelor of Divinity in 1786. He was elected to a Fellowship and resided in Coton near Cambridge. Throughout his college career he was described as ‘one of the handsomest and best-dressed men of his college’. His popularity with the ladies meant that by the time of his death he had amassed enough love letters to fill an entire sack. One of the women he courted was the radical feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose work included Vindication of the Rights of Women.
    It will never be known exactly what turned Waterhouse from a popular man to the pious and eccentric 81-year-old murder victim, but J.A. Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses (1752–1900) casts some light on Waterhouse’s character. Venn noted that he was ‘Constantly engaged in quarrels with other fellows; in 1798 voted for himself as Senior Fellow when the election to the Mastership took place; the Lord Chancellor nominated Joseph Proctor. At Little Stukeley his costume is said to have consisted of a coarse great-coat, corduroy breeches and light grey stockings.’
    Although it appears that the original records no longer exist there are numerous mentions of several complaints of immoral conduct made against Waterhouse and brought before the Bishop of Ely; and that the move to Little Stukeley was an attempt by Waterhouse to put these incidents behind him.
    In 1806 Joshua Waterhouse bought a parcel of land called the Denhills in Little Stukeley and paid in the region of £2,000 for the next presentation to the rectory of Little Stukeley. In 1813 the Revd Dr Torkington died and Revd Waterhouse became the incumbent of Little Stukeley, and moved there from the rectory at Coton, Cambridge. Until his death he continued to be the rector for both churches.
    Once settled at Little Stukeley Waterhouse’s penny-pinching ways earned him a reputation as a miserly minister. He preferred to leave his land uncultivated rather than pay the labourers a decent rate for their time. With equally false economy he hoarded any produce that he could not sell at what he felt was its correct value. This meant that every room in the vicarage, apart from the kitchen and one bedroom, was filled with either wool or grain. Many of the windows were boarded to avoid the payment of window tax and the house became so rat-infested that according to one contemporary account the vermin caused destruction ‘from turret to foundation stone’.
    Waterhouse lived alone, employing several villagers to work in the rectory and on the surrounding estate. On the morning of his death he had been seen at various