Date of Conviction: 06/03/1830

Age at Conviction: 27

Crime Convicted of: Highway Robbery

Court Convicted at: Lancaster Assizes (held at Lancaster Castle)

Sentence Length: Life

Ship Transported on: Remained in England

Where Arrived: N/A

Departure Date: N/A

Arrival Date: N/A

Biography: Mary’s case is a fascinating one; she was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death, commuted to transportation for life and finally freed after a mysterious letter and the local newspapers helped clear her and her father and friend of assault and highway robbery.

27-year old Mary, her father John and his friend Paul Rigby, all pedlars, from Bury but possibly originally from Ireland, had been on the road heading north towards Lancaster on Shrove Tuesday, February 1830. They had come from Garstang through Galgate and been drinking at the Boot & Shoe and Mary had begged a passing traveller for a ha’penny without luck at Scotforth. Several hours later at a Lancaster lodging house, they were suddenly arrested, charged with a brutal assault and highway robbery on the passing traveller, a Robert Stanley of Oswestry. Stanley had been beaten and had been tied with wire by the neck and hands to a gate at Bellevue, just outside of town, he was almost suffocated when he was found and aided by locals that evening. A large public collection was made for the man.

Mary and the two men were held until the next assizes at the castle. Evidence given by Stanley led to a death sentence for John and Paul and transportation for life for Mary despite their protests of innocence. Robert Stanley hurriedly left Lancaster (oddly for Liverpool). In the following days, doubt crept in, thanks in part to the local network of newspapers. Local residents of Oswestry, reading about the case, quickly wrote to say ‘there was no such person as Robert Stanley in their town’, nor was there a Rev. Thomas Venables who had written a character reference for Stanley. A respite was ordered on the executions while enquiries were made and many letters of testimony and affidavits to the Grimes’ good characters were sent from the people in Bury who knew them. They stated that they usually travelled around Bolton, Manchester and Cheshire and infrequently into Lancaster.

In the following week, Wolverhampton police came to Lancaster. They had had an almost identical ‘highway robbery’ the previous year; a man calling himself Robert Fisher had been found beaten, robbed and tied with wire to a toll gate on the edge of town. On the 19th March an anonymous, badly written letter was received at Lancaster Castle. In it the writer confessed it was them and a partner that had beaten and attacked the man and the other three were innocent. The writer said they needed money and had committed a number of these attacks so they could move to find work and were now in Ireland. Robert Fisher and Robert Stanley were clearly one and the same and a skilled actor to play the injured party too. A spate of copy-cat ‘attacks’ took off around the country for several years following.

With enough evidence, and having served over two months in jail, Mary, John and Paul were freed, receiving a full pardon in May, the victims of a huge miscarriage of justice.