Charles Everard CANHAM

  Noted events in his life were:

• Occupation: 2nd class staff sergeant age 30. MORE
Visitors to swindonlink have been asked to help piece together information about the descendants of Swindon Mayor Edwin Jones and murderer Charles Everard Canham.

Dan and Kathy e-mailed us Virginia, to ask if anyone could help with their family history quest. They told a tragic and tangled tale of events dating back to the beginning of the century.

Kathy's great grandparents were Charles Everard Canham and Hepzibah (Effie) Clara Davie Canham (nee Davie). They had eleven children, including John Howard Canham, Kathy's grandfather. From photos they appear respectable, even distinguished. Kathy believes that they lived intermittently in Swindon from the mid-1800's. Effie's eldest sister Mary was married to the Mayor of Swindon, Edwin Jones.

At the turn of the Century, the family was living in Nottingham, where Charles was district manager to the Gresham Assurance Company. He was described as 'a most devoted father and affectionate husband'.

On 29 November 1900, the veneer of respectability was torn away when Charles Everard Canham battered his wife to death with a coal hammer and slit the throat of three year old son, Donald [Davie age 2]. He also tried to gas the rest of his family whilst they slept. Charles was sent for trial at Nottingham Assizes. His defence was that the crime was committed under the influence of epileptic mania.

He was found guilty but criminally insane and sent to Broadmoor. By 1900, the two eldest children had left home. But the remaining eight were taken into the care. It was in a National Children's Homes orphanage that John Canham met Kate Lily Dickson or Dixon, Kathy's grandmother. Strangely, Kate had experienced similar tragedy in her family.

Her mother, Margaret Freda had set about her husband, Thomas, with a poker after he attacked one of the children. Kate and sister Florence were taken into care in 1908, their father by this time dead and their mother dying. Kathy and Dan are trying to locate any descendants of the Canham, Dickson/Dixon or the Jones families.

Charles married Hephzibah Clara ‘Effie’ DAVIE, daughter of Benjamin DAVIE and Elizabeth Ann PIKE, in 1878 in Farnham RD. (Hephzibah Clara ‘Effie’ DAVIE was born in 1855 in York and died in 1900 in Portsmouth.)