A Very Gruesome Football

A startling and macabre discovery was made on Sunday 29 December 1907 on the farm of Mr Bassett, of Trentham, next to the Staffordshire estate of the Duke of Sutherland. Some children playing in a barn on the farm were seen to be kicking a curious object about. A farm hand went over to them to  investigate and on examining the ‘football’ found that it was a human skull. 

The police were called for and a search soon revealed some clothing hidden under the hay in the barn and a short while later a human skeleton was discovered. That particular batch of hay had been harvested in 1906 and as the police could not trace any disappearance from the locality in that year, they quickly came to the conclusion that the skeleton was that of a tramp. There was some evidence to support this as a piece of soap and several other articles often carried by tramps were found in the pockets of the clothing. 

It seemed very likely that the tramp had snuck into the barn, climbed into the hay and fallen asleep. If this had happened immediately after harvesting and the hay was what is known as ‘sweating’ (i.e. the freshly cut plants were still giving off moisture, carbon dioxide and heat) this it was said would be sufficient to cause his death. That the body had been reduced to a skeleton after being only eighteen months in the hay was probably due the barn being infested with rats. 

Uttoxeter Advertiser and Ashbourne Times, Wednesday 1 January 1908, p.8

News and a Narrowboat

On 1 September 1939, Tom Rolt and his wife Angela were travelling along the Trent and Mersey canal aboard their narrowboat, Cressy. Arriving at Trentham Bridge to take on some fuel they were hailed by a boatman at the tiller of a passing barge, who told them that Germany had invaded Poland. That day they passed through the Potteries, and the Harecastle Tunnel on into Cheshire, where two days later they heard the announcement that war had been declared.

Rolt, a future campaigner for preservation of Britain's neglected canal system and one of the founders of the Inland Waterways Association, later wrote a lyrical account of their journey entitled Narrow Boat, which sparked a post-war resurgence of interest in this by-then woefully neglected transport network. A traditionalist at heart, Rolt was dismissive of many of the towns and cities they passed through, but devoted two short chapters to their brief passage through the Potteries. His appreciation of the area and its people stemmed from the fact that he had some years earlier partially served his engineering apprenticeship at Messrs Kerr, Stuart and Co, locomotive engineers in Stoke.

Reference: L.T.C. Rolt, Narrow Boat pp. 115-129; Landscape With Canals, p.3.