House of Dogs: The Last Squires of Trecwn, Part 11 – The Pursuit of the Rev. Jenkyn Evans

We continue our series exploring the history of a Pembrokeshire estate and its colourful family.

Howell Harris

The “indecent haste” with which Francis’s body was rushed from Trecwn to Pontypridd and disposed of, the failure to consult or even inform his children, the shock of hearing that their father, whom they believed to be fit and healthy for his age, had died, and Ada Page’s misdirection of Henriette Miles which led her to miss the cremation too — all of these things provoked anger and suspicion that permeated the whole family (see Part 9).

The Cremation

Winifred had managed to make it to the cremation, but not because of anything Ada, Jenkyn Evans, or Cato Worsfold had done to help.

On the afternoon of Friday 10th December she arrived back at her hostel in Cardiff after a tiring day nursing in Brecon, more than 40 miles away. There was a letter awaiting her from one of her many North Pembrokeshire friends letting her know that her father had died on the 8th.

She went around to an old friend of the family who lived close by, a Dr Morris, and by chance another family friend, Walter Williams — Dr Morris’s cousin and Francis’s Fishguard solicitor — was visiting.

She asked if they had heard of her father’s death and Walter said he had, in the morning mail from his office, perhaps because he was also the local Coroner. He had tried to get in touch with her at her nurses’ home earlier that day, but without success.

Walter advised her to send a telegram to his Fishguard office for further details, and they were quickly informed that Francis would be cremated at Pontypridd the following day, with a funeral service at Llanfair church on the 18th.

Francis’s land agent Archibald Hodges had published a death notice in the local press so in Fishguard, at least, this was not a secret, and Walter’s clerk had checked with him directly about funeral arrangements.

Winifred immediately wired her sister Margaret, who lived in Liverpool where she worked as a teacher at a Catholic preparatory school, but it was too late for her to get down to South Wales, even if she had wanted to.

Margaret was indignant. “I firmly believe that I was intentionally kept in ignorance by the Executors of what had occurred, and particularly of the proposed cremation” — which was obviously true.

The Catholic Church did not begin to relax its prohibition of cremation until 1963, which may have been part of the reason why Ada and the executors had wished to rush it and to keep Margaret and the other children — Winifred at least Anglo-Catholic, Cyril married into a Catholic family — in the dark until it was safely over.

Early on Saturday morning Winifred rang up the crematorium and found that the ceremony would take place at 1 p.m., a detail Walter’s clerk had not been able to tell her.

She had to do this from a public telephone, and it was not easy to get an answer from the crematorium staff, who must have been surprised that the deceased’s next of kin appeared not to have been informed as the law required.

If this was the occasion on which, the crematorium superintendent alleged, she said that Francis “had been a perfect devil all his life, and she wanted to see his ashes,” presumably to be absolutely sure he was dead, that might explain the staff’s initial reluctance to help.

She took a bus the thirteen miles to Pontypridd, and asked the conductor to let her know when they reached the stop nearest to the crematorium. Another woman boarded and asked the same question.

It was Ada Page’s sister (probably Christine, who had lived at Trecwn in 1916 and broken Francis’s fall after David Bonvonni’s assault — see Part 7).

She asked Winifred if she was going to Francis’s cremation, and who she was.

Winifred replied, and “was very indignant that she should have been told of [his] death, and invited to the proposed cremation, whilst I, his own daughter in Cardiff, had received no intimation whatever, and had only found it out by the merest chance.”

Ada’s sister “seemed very surprised that I did know about the cremation, and she asked me not to interfere in any way to stop it.”

They had to wait quite a while for the party from Trecwn to arrive — one can only imagine the awkward, icy silence — but when they turned up Winifred did not keep quiet.

“I asked Sir Cato why I had not been told of the death and proposed cremation, and particularly why my brother had not been notified, and Sir Cato replied, in the presence of the Reverend Jenkyn Evans, that it was the deceased’s wish that the children should not be informed.”

Ada Page added “that ‘she knew you all [Cyril and his family] very well, only could not let you know because she never ‘interfered with Capt. Barham’s affairs’ .”

After the cremation Sir Cato tried to pour oil on what were obviously very troubled waters.

He invited Winifred to select an urn for the remains, but she replied “that I preferred to have nothing whatever to do with it under the circumstances in which I had been placed.”

The Aftermath

Winifred set the wheels of family suspicion in motion when she got back home. She wrote to Cyril to let him know everything that had happened.

She had already written to Canon Griffiths, Rector of Llanfair, who would conduct the funeral, asking him for further details about her father’s death — “and particularly what was the cause of it, and who had attended him.”

The most significant reaction came from their old governess, Henriette Miles, furious about having been misled by Ada and thus also excluded from being present.

His death had come as a “terrible shock” to her, “as only 2 days previously I had received a nice letter.”

On the 15th of December she wrote to Ada that it was “a hole and corner business, and that the body was smuggled out of sight.”

Ada passed the message on to Jenkyn Evans, who replied to Henriette on the 8th January that “such statements are grossly untrue and libellous, and if there is any repetition of them, such proceedings will be taken as may be necessary, and you will only have yourself to thank for the result.”

Even if Henriette had not planted the seed of suspicion that Francis had been disposed of rather than dying naturally, and then Ada, Jenkyn Evans, and Sir Cato had got rid of the evidence, his children would probably have reached the same conclusion by themselves, in their anger and shock.

They would make an issue of it, and of their own disinheritance too. On the 16th of December Winifred wrote to Walter Williams in Fishguard “Would you be willing to act for us in the matter? … I am anxious to take immediate steps to avoid any undue delay, as you know our position and what it means to us.”

That same day she went down to Pembrokeshire for the funeral. Cyril could not join her, but she was under instructions to use the occasion “to see people and get all the information I can!” What happened there made her even more determined to get justice.

Her father’s Will was read after the funeral, in the Managers’ Room of the Barham School, with the intended heirs, her young first cousins, once removed, the Squires, in attendance.

But she could go no further into the estate.

Jenkyn Evans, writing from Trecwn where he was staying (Ada Page remained there for months), told her “I regret to say that it would be impossible for you to come into this house owing to the express wishes of your late Father against any member of his family to do so; and I am in honour bound to carry out his wishes.”

The Prosecution

The wheels of Justice were soon set in motion. Those wheels ground away, slowly but remorselessly, over the next seven months, with documents being sought out and checked, statements taken, subpoenas issued, barristers consulted, the Glamorgan Constabulary (its Chief Constable, no less) pursuing enquiries, and the Home Office (responsible for regulating cremation) involved too.

The case was eventually referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions with a Home Office recommendation to prosecute as a matter of public interest. This was not a trivial, private matter, or the mere pursuit of a grudge.

Cyril’s barrister was clear: there was “reasonable and probable cause” for a prosecution, no matter how the jury resolved it.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of all the paperwork surviving from this process is what it shows about Cyril’s state of mind. He convinced himself that his father had been the victim of a crime and then a cover-up, as Henriette Miles had first suggested.

Even in business letters to Walter Williams about the case he referred to Ada Page, Jenkyn Evans, Cato Worsfold, and sometimes poor Canon Griffiths too as “the conspirators.”

The lack of cooperation from the Pontypridd Crematorium director to requests for information (until he was served with a subpoena by a superintendent of the Glamorgan Constabulary on the floor of the County Court, where he was Registrar, in front of the judge and before an audience of amused lawyers) also made Cyril “naturally suspicious as to how the whole thing was carried out.”

His suspicions went beyond “the conspirators,” and perhaps the Pontypridd Crematorium authorities too, to include the Welsh justice system itself. Would the local magistrates be sympathetic to “a non-Welsh person! or four penniless children!”?

Their Clerk’s pre-trial guidance (which has not survived, but presumably set limits on the scope of admissible evidence and questioning) was “a perfect travesty of justice, and seems to me to go to the very root of its administration.”

Cyril’s London solicitors appear to have shared some of his suspicions, or at least been prepared to reflect them in their brief for their barrister.

“The attendant circumstances are, to say the least of it, suspicious, but it is recognised that it is quite impossible to produce any evidence justifying such suspicions.”

This highlighted a fundamental problem with the prosecution. The supposed “conspirators” were a grieving middle-aged lady and two elderly worthies with no plausible criminal motives for either bumping their old friend Francis off (the old men were not even present) or rushing his body into the Pontypridd flames to destroy the evidence of — what?

The investment Cyril and his sisters made in the case seemed out of all proportion to the technical and procedural errors (or white lies) that Ada Page, Jenkyn Evans, and Cato Worsfold had committed on the 10th of December.

Cyril’s barrister saw the difficulty: “he did not desire to call anybody who on cross-examination would give the Revd.

Jenkyn Evans a certificate of too good a character” or say No to an obvious Defence question such as “if he considered that the Respondent wd be capable of committing such an offence as that with which he is charged.”

His conclusion at the end of the pre-trial conference was that he was “quite unable to accept a Brief,” after months of giving advice, and to recommend a junior chambers colleague in his stead. It is hard to resist the suspicion that he knew he was onto an embarrassing loser.

The Director of Public Prosecutions seems to have reached a similar conclusion, though for different reasons.

In his case the concern was that Cyril was pursuing a parallel civil suit against the Executors (or, as he called them, “alleged Executors”) to overthrow his father’s Will, and that the Crown should not act in a cause which might be thought of as intended to provide an advantage to one side in pending litigation.

Cyril was instead given permission to pursue the matter as a private prosecution, albeit one that enjoyed continuing Home Office assistance.

The Trial

The case finally came before the Fishguard magistrates on the 13th of July 1927. Cyril Barham made a revealing witness in his own case, but not an attractive or persuasive one.

His new barrister’s opening statement was cautious and deliberate — the haste and the fact that the cremation form had been sworn incorrectly before Sir Cato Worsfold, who was himself involved in the decision, made it more than a mere technical offence, and suggested that the case required investigation.

Cyril’s testimony abandoned all such restraint. There had been a conspiracy against himself and his sisters, and not just to keep the news of the death from them.

“The parties who were present at the death were all interested in hushing up — I use that word — in hushing up the matter.”

Counsel: Are you suggesting that your father was murdered? — Witness: I am not suggesting anything. I cannot prove it.

Are you suggesting that poor Mr Jenkyn Evans murdered him? — No, I don’t suggest that.

Do you suggest that Sir Cato Worsfold murdered him? — No.

Are you suggesting that Miss Page murdered him? — Now you are getting nearer to it. She was the only woman in the house.

Counsel: Let’s have it out! What do you suggest?

Witness: My father had been ill for some time and none of his children were informed.

Counsel: Because he would not have you near the house? — Witness: No; that is not right. Miss Page objected to the children coming in.

Counsel: Would you have interfered with your father’s wishes when he was dead and could not speak for himself? — Yes. [Emphasis added.]

The defence barrister was remorseless. Did Cyril know that he was prosecuting a retired clergyman of 75 with an unblemished record?

Had he inquired as to the Reverend’s character? No. And yet he charged him with “knowingly and wittingly committing perjury? — I do.”

He did not think it could be a simple mistake? No. Not a matter of “relying on the advice of a solicitor [Sir Cato] — rightly or wrongly given?” No. “He was not sorry that he had prosecuted Mr. Evans for perjury, and he was not ashamed of himself.”

But the defence barrister made it pretty clear that he thought he should be, and then went for the jugular: the case was being brought for selfish purposes, in support of his High Court action to overthrow his father’s will.

The weaknesses in Cyril’s case that his own original barrister and the Director of Public Prosecutions had identified — the reliance on suspicion in the absence of any evidence; the good character of the supposed conspirators; and the ease with which his and his sisters’ genuine hurt and anger at having been shut out and kept in the dark could be misrepresented as cover for simple greed and a desire to discredit the senior executor of a will that disinherited them — proved fatal.

The Rev. Jenkyn Evans made a much more persuasive witness, because all he needed to do was to say what had happened, with a simple explanation why.

He had no personal interest in Francis’s death — just £200 for his work as executor. Francis’s children had only not been informed because, though he knew they existed, he had no idea of their addresses. If he had known, he would certainly have informed them.

He claimed to have informed some of Francis’s relatives — probably his great-nephews and niece, the Squires children, who had been his principal heirs since 1912; they attended the interment of the ashes and reading of the will on the Sunday a week after the cremation — but he was not pressed about this.

Ada Page was also effective, though not entirely honest. Francis had told her that his children knew of his wish to be cremated, and “did not want his family spoken of again.”

His children had not been anywhere near Trecwn in the fifteen years she had lived there, explaining why she claimed not to know their addresses, though in fact she had written to Cyril earlier that year.

“Asked if there was any truth in the suggestion that she had brought about his end, Miss Page replied that she did not think so. The world knew better than that. She was devoted to him.”

She, too, was not pressed in questioning, either by Cyril’s barrister or her own, but she did clear up one inconsistency in her earlier accounts of Francis’s death — if he took ill at midnight and was in agony for nine hours, why did she not phone for a doctor?

She meant, she said, that she had been going to and fro to attend him since midnight, but he only took really ill at 4-30 in the morning.

Sir Cato Worsfold supported them both — “There was considerable friction in the family, and Capt. Barham had told him never to mention it to him.”

Other witnesses also knocked down the props beneath Cyril’s suggestion that there had been some kind of conspiracy.

Francis’s land agent Archibald Hodges, for example, knew all about his intention to be cremated, and put a notice in the local paper announcing it, which was how Winifred came to hear about it via the letter from her friend at Dinas Cross.

There was no hushing-up, and, Francis’s doctors made clear, nothing at all suspicious about the death.

Dr Gwilym Lewis, who had told him and Henriette Miles in October that he was good for another twenty years, now clarified that Francis had suffered from “cardiac weakness” for some time; and his other GP, Dr Howard Owen, was now said to have signed the death certificate too, as the Cremation Act required in cases where a doctor had not attended, though his name did not appear on the document.

Jenkyn Evans’s barrister summed matters up: “the magistrates had never had presented to them a more wicked prosecution… — wicked in its institution, wicked in the way it had been persisted in. Charges had been flung about the court when there was no foundation for them whatever.

He strongly urged that the prosecutor should be punished for it.” “I challenge him to repeat those suggestions and remarks in places where he can be properly punished.” Cyril was using the court “for his own greedy purposes” and the defence barrister “asked the bench to throw the case out contemptuously.”

They did, after a brief consultation, but not as contemptuously as he had wished: both sides were left to pay their own costs.

You can find the rest of the episodes here.