Here’s a sad and curious tale from a Weird Calderdale chapter on local quacks that was left out due to space constraints…
John Holmes was a ‘dispenser of herbs, barks, draughts’ and other unconventional treatments, though his critics, and there were many, would call him a quack.[i] Details are sketchy, but he came to the attention of the local media when he courted and won the affections of a lonely widow who resided in the Calderdale countryside. He persuaded her to marry him and they settled down in King Street, a respectable part of Brighouse, in the autumn of 1874.
However, it wasn’t long before this quiet neighbourhood had ‘its sense of propriety shocked’ by Mr Holmes.[ii] He had returned home steaming drunk one evening and created a rumpus that ‘disgusted the whole neighbourhood.’ His drunken and threatening behaviour were such that his poor wife fled their home with barely more than the clothes she was wearing. Holmes proceeded to lock her out and would not let her in even to pick up a change of clothes or any of her other property.
The authorities and all her neighbours were on her side, though, and she was given a warrant to enter the property and take back what was hers. She did this by breaking into the house when nobody was home while her neighbours kept a look out for her disreputable husband. She retrieved her property successfully and her husband, when he eventually returned, was furious, though there was little he could do about it.
Holmes soon left Brighouse and moved to Wyke where he met another widow. He told her he was a widower and again persuaded her to marry him. This union did not last, however, and when his new wife witnessed his behaviour she abandoned him in disgust.
All the while Holmes was treating his patients with his various quack remedies. Unfortunately for him, while treating someone with an infected finger, some of the pus from the digit found its way into a bruise on Holmes’s hand and he contracted blood poisoning.[iii] This is how the Brighouse News reported it, though it seems unlikely that an infection would enter though bruised skin which would probably be unbroken. In any case, he suffered greatly with the infection and was confined to his bed. Shortly after he suffered a stroke and lost the power of speech. His reputation was so bad in the neighbourhood that we are told that no woman would go near him to nurse him, including either of his wives. He died 16 May 1875 in Wyke.
After his death it was discovered that he had left a total of five wives, four of whom were still living. He had, it seems, in each occasion identified a lonely widow, courted her and then wed her without bothering to divorce his previous spouse.
His funeral card read:
Farewell, my wife and children dear,
My sorrows now are o’er;
But oh prepare to meet me there,
Where we shall part no more.
The Brighouse News could not resist adding sarcastically: ‘The question is naturally suggested, which of his wives is meant?’[iv]
[i] Brighouse News 31 October 1874
[ii] Ibid
[iii] Brighouse News 9 May 1875
[iv] Ibid
IMAGE: A Quack Doctor Selling Remedies from his Caravan (Wellcome Collection)
Paul Weatherhead 