Murder most foul at Belmount Farm
Today the ruined farmhouse of Belmount is like many lonely spots out on the moor above Ramshaw, the wind sighing sadly through the rotting timbers of old window frames and roof joists. But Belmount has a fascinating, dark secret which it has kept to itself for almost 130 years; if those tumbledown walls could speak, they would tell us who murdered Robert Snowball in his workshop on New Year's Day, 1880.
Tales of Derwentdale, a collection of local folklore published in 1902, gives one account of what happened in the story "The Blanchland Murder". Young farmer Robert Snowball leaves the remote farmhouse - where he lives with only his father and the housekeeper - to do some joinery in the byre, with plans to go and visit a friend later on that evening. The next morning he is found dead by the housekeeper after being hit with extreme force in the back of the head with a sledgehammer. The following Monday - the 5th - an inquest is held at the house of PC Ferguson in Ramshaw and Robert Snowball is buried the next day in Blanchland churchyard. Later on the 6th, the Snowballs' housekeeper Jane Barron is arrested and put in the police cell at Ramshaw.
The case attracts national press attention; on January 12 The Guardian's correspondent writes that he had been up to Belmount... "It would be almost impossible for a stranger to find the house even in daylight, and it would be impossible for him to find it after dusk. He would lose himself in the attempt."
The Guardian report fills in the detail that the Derwentside Tale leaves out.
Robert Snowball had taken on the tenancy of Belmount in May 1878, and had lived there with his aged parents, John and Ann. Robert's mother had died just six or seven weeks before the 26-year-old's own life would come to its abrupt and grisly end. On November 18 1879 the father and son had taken on Jane Barron, aged 27, as housekeeper.
The Guardian report follows the Tale fairly closely, lingering perhaps a little longer than necessary on the forensics... "The whole of his teeth were forced out". The blow from the 3lb iron hammer with its 3ft long shaft ... "had been struck with such force that half of the hammer head entered the back of the skull..."
Because old John Snowball was considered "infirm and tottering", the finger of suspicion didn't even move vaguely in his direction. Jane Barron was a strapping woman of five foot six inches... "possessed of broad shoulders and a deep chest". There were holes in her story as big as the hole in Robert Snowball's head: she claimed she'd seen blood dripping from the barn ceiling, but the police said it couldn't have seeped through the flooring of the workshop, and if it had, not in the place she had indicated.
Her clothes had been stained with blood; no-one had been seen in the area for three days before the murder, and neither old Mr Snowball nor Jane Barron had made any mention of the farm dogs barking to alert them to a stranger approaching. It has to be either Jane Barron or old Snowball.
And yet the Guardian reporter says: "When charged at the Stanhope Police Office by Superintendent Henbron (the policeman's name was actually Thubron - but don't forget this is a Grauniad report), Barron answered, after an interval of over a minute, "I haven't murdered anyone, and I haven't seen anybody murdered."
The local police, the doctor and the coroner, unused to dealing with such a strange and serious crime, were way out of their depth. In the byre at Belmount the day after the murder, the doctor thinks at first that Robert has "...had a fit, burst a blood vessel and expired." Despite some misgivings, he sends a telegraph to Stanhope requesting a coroner to attend an accidental death - and as a result a full three days elapse before the police arrive.
"She said, "Waa's all yon blood coming down the byre?" I said it would be from the sheep that was cutten up in the loft." - John Snowball.
It gets worse; when they do get to Belmount on the Monday morning, Mr Snowball senior has mopped up the blood in the workshop... "The old man also said that he had thrown the water out upon the ashpit, and on searching there the police found some of the teeth of the murdered man." Potentially vital evidence has gone forever. Anyone who may have been around Belmount on the fateful day has had three days to make good their escape.
Another possible flaw in the process is highlighted by The Guardian: "The prisoner had been committed on the capital charge at a magisterial inquiry at which there was only one magistrate present. Mr Justice Stephen, in his charge to the Grand Jury, had urged them to throw out the bill and leave the case open to any further evidence that might come out. This course was not taken, and the prisoner was put upon her trial."
At the Durham Assizes the following April, the Guardian says the crowds mob the doors of the court, excited to hear what the verdict will be.
In court, old Mr Snowball says Robert had teased Jane Barron that day at the tea table about a suitor, called White, he thinks, and she had blushed and appeared unhappy about it. Claiming to be confused, the old man changes his evidence and says he remembers she had followed Robert out to the barn, and reappeared 10 minutes later, flushed and putting her head in her hands. Giving evidence herself, Jane Barron says that neither she nor the old man left the house until she went out to milk the cows.
Despite all the circumstantial evidence, Jane Barron is acquitted, no motive forthcoming, the jury's decision depending on whether they believe the old man or not, and the suggestion that some "person unknown" who had borne a grudge against Robert Snowball had lain in wait in the barn to smash him from behind while he worked away at his joinery. Who, though, would have a grudge against a 26-year-old who lived in a remote farmhouse with his old Dad?
It's not as if he has accumulated lots of enemies in his short life; the granite cross in Blanchland churchyard reads... "in affectionate remembrance" and Tales of Derwentdale says that at Robert's interment... "there was a very large attendance of persons from many miles round the district."
One name crops up two or three times in the columns and columns of feverish verbatim reporting - but somehow the details are never fully explored. Jane Barron's former employer, George White of Hedley, had sent Jane a letter saying he was coming to Belmount to see her, and Robert Snowball had heard on the local grapevine that White had actually made it as far as Blanchland two or three weeks earlier but had been unable to find Belmount up on the moors. Giving evidence, Thomas Green of Blanchland said Robert Snowball had been talking about his new housekeeper when he'd popped into The Angel for a New Year's Day lunchtime drink just hours before his murder. He'd said George White - 'her sweetheart' - was going to be visiting Jane later on that day.
A year after these terrible events, the Census records for 1881 show us that old Mr Snowball is still at Belmount, with younger son, John, in charge and another housekeeper looking after them. Jane Barron is still a housekeeper, but in Boldon, far away from the storytelling and sensationalism that must have enthralled late night fireside gatherings for many years afterwards.
But she finds - as have many people since then - that there's no escape once you've been thrust into the media spotlight. The murder becomes a topic for 'Pitman Poet' Tommy Armstrong in The Blanchland Murder, and more seriously Jane Barron's name crops up in the Newcastle Courant in January 1881; she is sueing both the Consett Guardian and the Durham Advertiser for libelling her by saying she'd been admitted to a lunatic asylum - and she's awarded more than £40 (equivalent to about three years' wages in her housekeeper role).
There are lots of questions even now: If he was on his way to Sandyford to visit the neighbours, how did Robert Snowball end up in the byre, seemingly dying without a struggle? If Jane Barron really had followed Robert Snowball, and come back face reddened after the sound of a fall in the byre as John Snowball said in his altered evidence, didn't he notice the blood splashes on her at that point? Was George White, Jane Barron's former employer from Hedley, ever questioned and did he go to Belmount that evening as Robert Snowball had been telling his friends? Strangely none of the newspaper reports of the time report these vital details.
The speculation went on for years - now and again a newspaper would report a rumoured 'deathbed confession', but these always proved unfounded. Whoever really murdered Robert Snowball all those years ago, and why it happened at all, the old walls of Belmount farmhouse aren't telling.
