If ever there was an instance of picking on the wrong person, it was at Fenton Toll Gate on a January morning in 1834. Mr Dawes, a surgeon from Stoke on Trent, was walking back home from Lane End, later to become known as Longton, when he passed three men. One of them raised their arm and struck him in the face, knocking him to the ground. As Mr Dawes lay stunned, the man began to rifle through his pockets whilst the two others assisted with this daylight robbery. As the surgeon regained his senses, he started to shout, ‘Murder!’ but one of the thieving trio place his hand across his mouth to silence him.

Dawes saw an opportunity to defend himself and managed to bite down on the man’s forefinger. The more he struggled, the harder Dawes held on. Eventually, the failed footpad managed to escape but left part of his finger in the jaws of Dawes.

When another Stokie surgeon called Mr Chadwick heard of the attempted robbery, he tipped off the police that he has just attended to a collier who was missing the end of his index finger and pointed them in the direction of the Evans brothers of Lane Delph. Apprehended at the their residence, the missing finger (carefully preserved by Dawes in a bottle of spirits) was found to be a match for Charles Evans’ manual wound and they were arrested. Out of shear desperation at the trial, he claimed he had cut it off when carving mutton in a public house but, despite their denial of any wrongdoing, the Evans brothers were nailed and sentenced to 14 years transportation. Who needs fingerprints when you have the actual finger?

What became of their accomplice and perhaps more interestingly, the incriminating index finger, remains a mystery. Is this body of evidence still preserved in a bottle of spirits somewhere on a shelf in Stoke?

Sources:

http://www.turnpikes.org.uk/Tollhouses%20of%20Staffordshire.htm

Bucks Gazette – Saturday 22 March 1834

Staffordshire Advertiser – Saturday 18 January 1834