Brutal murder in Mead Hedges that was never solved

From then on, the track that was once a road fell into obscurity; the winds blew, the leaves gathered, the wild grasses sprang up and nature claimed again what was once hers.

People still occasionally walked along there, for it remained a footpath but no longer were they on the main route to Salisbury or Weyhill; in consequence, Mead Hedges itself became a curious anomaly, a track that leads from, and to, nowhere in particular.

Mead Hedges Cottages, c.1904. From a postcard by Francis Frith & Co. (Image: Francis Frith & Co)

In the modern era, the first time Mead Hedges became known to the outside world was in November 1858 when William Parsons was brutally murdered in a field that lay between Salisbury Road and Mead Hedges to the south.

Parsons was a prominent High Street draper, living with his family in extensive accommodation above the shop, who told his wife he was going out to post a letter in the late evening of 22 November.

He went along Bridge Street, up Western Road and into Salisbury Road, going past the lane that is now Mead Road, past one field and then into the next where there was a barn near the side of the road.

Popularly supposed to have arranged an illicit assignation, he was met by a man wielding a wooden club that was subsequently identified as being recently cut from a tree-lined hedge in Millway Road – or Drove as it was then known.

Parsons was chased out of the barn and around the field, all the time begging for his life while he was hit time and again about the head until he was dead.

Unusually, the prevailing wind was from the east and his screams of panic were heard as far away as Anna Valley but not in Andover itself.

The body was found the next morning by one of Parsons’ young employees who was taking a walk before starting work.

The police arrived, investigated, made a few enquiries and soon arrested the proprietor of the Rose and Chequers hotel.

Suggestions were made that the victim was having an affair with the hotelier’s wife.

The moment of the attack was precisely fixed by the testimonies of various people who happened to be walking home at the time and heard the fearful shouting of the victim.

The accused man, Thomas Alexander Banks, went before the magistrates and was committed for trial at Winchester.

He was seen with his wife in the area at the time of the attack and so his wife was assumed to be complicit in the alleged crime as well – and indeed the object of Parsons’ attentions.

Both were to spend some three months in Winchester prison, awaiting trial, during which Mrs Banks gave birth to her first son.

On the day of the trial, the judge read through the notes of the case and declared it ‘No Bill’, meaning there was not enough evidence for there to be any chance of a conviction and the couple were released without any further court proceedings.

All the charges were based on circumstantial assumptions that would never stand up in a fair-minded court.

Nobody else was ever arrested for the murder and no more evidence came to light.

In a bizarre twist, over 30 years later, former Andover man Rowland Lush walked into a police station in Liverpool and confessed to the crime.

It was referred to the chief constable of Hampshire police but no evidence could be found to connect Lush with the affair and he was released from custody (for the whole story, read my book, Andover’s Mystery Murder; out of print but available in the library).

The drapery business went first to his widow and then to his eldest son, also William, and continued to expand.

In 1866, 16-year-old Tom Hart joined what was then William Parsons & Son, and he gradually made his way up the ranks, marrying Kate Parsons, the former ‘boss’s daughter’ in 1877.

Eventually, in the 1890s, Tom Hart was made a partner, and the shop, by now four adjoining sets of premises, was renamed Parsons & Hart.

The second William Parsons retired in 1910 to Torquay while Tom Hart retired about the same time and the shop passed to a third generation.

And then in November 1915, Mead Hedges again came back into the story when the body of Tom Hart was found by cowman George Merritt, in what is now the playing field, just 100 yards from where his father-in-law had been murdered almost on the same night, nearly 60 years before.

It was clearly suicide: a razor was found by the body and the wounds were self-inflicted.

He was said at the inquest to have been depressed.

The cottages in the picture are at the western end of Mead Hedges path, just past the complex of flats in Clarendon Avenue.

What are probably 18th-century dwellings could have been built to provide workers’ accommodation for the nearby mill but may equally have been farm workers’ houses for Bagsbury farm which was a short walk up the hill and across fields.

Virtually condemned in the 1960s, local builder Jack Bowsher rescued and restored them from an inevitable fate and moved into the left-hand cottage with his family.

Today, these two cottages are the only thatched dwellings left in Andover.

Recently, decades of paint and rendering have been removed from the right-hand cottage, revealing a gloriously mellowed, bright orange brick.

Those of us of a certain vintage will recall that a little farther on from here was Rooksbury field, a large, uncultivated open space of undergrowth and sting-a-nettles.

The old Mead Hedges path ran westwards between the field and the railway line.

Then, in about 1968, a large house was built on Rooksbury field and what was once an area free to explore was completely fenced in with new six-foot panels and a new path laid out alongside the new fence.

That path too has since been absorbed by subsequent new houses and the pedestrian route is now along the Test Way footpath that was once the railway line.

At the entrance to Rooksbury Mill there was once a level crossing operated by a resident gatekeeper who lived in an adjacent bungalow.

Two more houses of 1900 vintage also lay on the higher ground which is now The Ramparts, part of the Kemmit Way estate.

Officially, these were the last two houses in Mead Hedges, though far removed from it, and demolished when the new estate was built, removing another vast open space.

And thus, in so many ways, does what we call progress, trample on the wild playgrounds of our youth, and forever stop us from roaming there.

If you are interested in local history, why not join Andover History and Archaeology Society? Details can be found at andoverlocalhistoryarchaeology.uk.