The Tales of John Dixon

In July 1912 an 80 year old John Dixon of 19 Spain Lane in Boston  was interviewed about his life – the following are some of the excerpts printed from this interview that give insight into his work for the engineering firm Tuxford’s and then the Waterworks Company. In the interview he gave insight into the bones buried around Boston giving an insight into superstition, spirituality and local history:

Mr Dixon was born at Holbeach in 1832. “……..I have been in Boston since I was a little child and I only had two ‘shops’. I was at Tuxford’s foundry nearly 20 years and with the Waterworks Company 40 years. When at Tuxford’s I used to go out with and look after their engines. Probably I should have been at Tuxford’s yet if they had only moved with the times, but they would never do that. They were old-fashioned and made everything good, but didn’t sell it. It no use making things if you haven’t plenty of agents out looking after the sales.

I went to many places for them and attended all the exhibitions and agricultural shows, but in the latter part of my time they never could do anything, and their stopping was a misfortune for a large number of men, and for the town. They would give no man a shilling commission for obtaining orders. In the fore part of my time with them people used to come to the Foundry to buy and bring their horses and take the things away, but that was not the case later. Alderman William Twell was appreciated there, and I think he is the only one of the staff left. If they had let him do as he wished the firm would have been in existence now. At one time they employed over 400 men and when I was at home in the busy season, many of us put in ten days a week, working night and day. We made some overtime then!”

Mr. Dixon was led on to chat about some of his adventures as the Waterworks Turn-cock. In the laying of the water mains and pipes in various parts of the town he and his companions occasionally disturbed human remains. He was present when the skull, rashly ascribed to George Ripley[1], the alchemist, was turned up in Fydell Crescent, and took it to a newspaper office in Boston. That relic and some bones were put into a glass case, and eventually found their way down to Hastings, where they were again disinterred, this time, from the shop of a curio dealer by a credulous spiritualist, who cremated them and scattered the ashes at sea and recently published a startling account of the business, and of conversations with George Ripley on the subject, obtained by spiritualistic agency which enabled the mundane operator to “call up” the shade of the long departed, somewhere in the vast regions of the unknown world!

These findings in Boston of human bones has before had some sensational developments, but they have sometimes been curious. Here is something that turns up a musty page of local history:

“When they built the Bedehouses by Hospital Bridge some years ago it was part of the old burial ground belonging to St. John’s Hospital. So they said. Anyhow we were putting in the water mains when we came across several skeletons. They were laid side by side, in proper order. One of them was the skeleton of a big fine man, more than six feet long, with large bones and teeth. I had an idea. I would like to get it out, so we carefully took away the mould and when the bones were fully exposed I took hold of the skeleton to lift it by the shoulders,  but it broke in two and the head came off! I think it was the late Mr. Sherwin, the builder, who showed it to Dr. James Tuxford, who was across the drain and shouted back that we were to take care of it. So we took it to Mr. Sherwin’s office, and I believe it passed into the possession of Dr Tuxford.”

The St. John’s Hospital spoken of by Mr. Dixon was that dedicated to St. Leonard, and maintained by the Knights Hospitalers of St. John of Jerusalem. From this retreat Hospital Bridge took its name. Jerusalem House, built of materials  removed from the hospital, was standing in the vicinity fifty years ago (1862). The inhabitants of the Bedehouses still receive an allowance out of a charge on certain lands that were once the property of the Order of the Hospital. No doubt the remains disinterred were those of Knights of St John buried in the cemetery of the hospital.[2]

Water Tower near Horncastle Road, Boston

“Down in a field at the back of my house”, resumed our ready informant, who was evidently enjoying himself, “we found two or three skeletons or parts of them. One was turned up in the old farm yard, with a full skull. The Grammar School boys got scent of it, and took it away and used the skull as a football! That was in Richardson’s field as it is now. We went after it, and gathered together the bones, and buried them decently under one of the big trees that are now in Mr. Kitwood’s garden.”

“Several human bones have been dug up in my garden. We once found a jawbone there when digging a post hole. All about the place was once a monastery. Through my garden the ground runs a great wall twenty inches thick. I come across it many years ago, and traced it along till I came to a corner, and then dug down in the hope of getting into a cellar, but found only old rubbish, and so gave it up.”

“I remember an adventure  I had as a lad,” continued the time-worn turncock looking back over the years. “ At the back of the houses by the Basin in Skirbeck Quarter, which belonged to Dr. Small, were some gravestones laid down flat. An old building was there once, the Baptist Chapel. A son of Captain Rose, who occupied one of the houses, and myself, were audacious boys. We came across a big slab, which looked very promising, and having an idea a lead coffin must be concealed there, we set to work to try and get it out. But that slab beat us. We tried all ways, but could not shift it from the brickwork. Some years later what was my surprise to see the self-same slab in the house now used as the Fever Hospital! There was no mistaking it. The house was the property of Dr. Small, and this heavy slab had been made its hearth-stone. I saw it in the large kitchen of the house, when I went there, and likely enough it is there yet.”

“Human remains have in later years been unearthed in the Skirbeck quarter in the vicinity of the Basin. Two skeletons were dug up in a yard opposite Mr. Harrison’s, those of a male and a female, and the teeth and skulls were in perfect state. But they were older than anything in the Baptist Burial-ground over the way.”

Some shuddery stories about the Parish Churchyard were told by the reminiscent Mr. Dixon. “When the church was restored in the fifties, there were walls of coffins in the middle of the church-yard three feet high. Members of a family were buried together, and some of the coffins were not two feet from the surface of the ground. The churchyard was to be levelled, and the mounds were taken down, the coffins, what was left of them, were destroyed and the remains in them turned out. In some cases the flesh was still adhering to the bones, and one saw the long hair of a corpse. All the remains which could be got together, as the work went on, we re-buried,

In a big hole in the ground, at the chapel end, and near the church tower. Two waggon loads of these poor fragments were deposited there. The earth was taken to the churchyard and emptied into a lighter. There were lots of small bones amongst it. Then it was taken up the Witham to a farm belonging to Mr. Hartley, and put on the land. They had to carry it somewhere.”

The interviewer, hardened journalist though he was, gasped with astonishment at this narration. “Was such a thing allowed?” he asked Mr. Dixon. “It was,” said Mr. Dixon. “True, there was an outcry, but the gruesome work did not stop. They merely ceased to load the soil during the day – and did it in the night-time!” Our friend tried to be consoling. “They raked the soil over before sending it up the river. They didn’t take away more than they could help.” The consoling was a failure, and Mr. Dixon followed it up by referring to the contract at Skirbeck[3] a year or two ago when remains which had to be disturbed from the church extension at St. Nicholas were reverently placed in boxes by Mr. Sherwin’s men, covered over, and promptly re-interred under the churchyard wall. “I well remember one who was moved there, Mr. Robert Meers. He kept the London Tavern here, and was a very nice man. There was the hands sculptured on his grave-stone – he was a Freemason and an Oddfellow.”

It would be irreverent to laugh at anything connected with a churchyard, but in view of a funny story here told about that of Boston, one may be permitted to smile. Once the place had the reputation of being haunted. There were strange sounds heard there at night.  People passing over the headstones at the east end of the church, in the silent hours, were alarmed by the knocking and bumpings. Then to the surprise of all and sundry, one of the graves began to yawn as though wanting to give up its dead! This lead to investigation. “Some of us were fetched to the spot. The slab of the vault had worked loose, and when we raised it we found the vault, a deep one, was nearly full of water, and a lead coffin was floating at its side. There was no woodwork to be seen. The coffin had been floating about a long time, and had bumped up against the slab and lifted it. I told a man to strike it with his pick-axe, which was done.” That laid the churchyard ghost. And remembering how they did it Mr. Dixon smiled, stroked his chin with a satisfied air that plainly said, “Nothing could have been better.”

This old and respected townsman has reared seven children, four of whom, all girls, are living, three in Boston and one in Canada, whose husband is an ex Q.M.S.[4] of the Royal Artillery. Mrs Dixon also is living still, though an invalid now.[5]

[1] George Ripley was one of England’s most famous alchemists and an Augustinian canon of Bridlington Priory in Yorkshire

[2] This is a fanciful leap as they are just as likely to be former inhabitants of the hospital or victims of plague.

[3] This was a contract to extend the church building

[4] Quarter Master Seargent

[5] Article from Boston Guardian 20^th July 1912