Moving into a historic West Dorset inn, I encountered the ghostly legend of Blue Jimmy, writes KIZZY HELGESEN
Having married into a family of renowned ceramicists, I had no idea that the new stage of my life would lead me to encounter this moral spectre. My new home was a 17th-century coaching inn, once known as the Crown and Anchor in Mosterton, West Dorset.
The large house boasted many of its original features, and I always had the sense of stepping back in time. Climbing the creaking stairs to bed meant crossing the old dance floor, still bowed unevenly by the vigorous feet that had jubilantly stamped there. Tobacco smells snatched at your nose as you walked by.
Within a fortnight, I was awoken by a sound. My new husband slept soundly, but there was something that prickled at my neck. I slid out of bed and over to the leaded window. The main A-road was in complete darkness. The streetlight was not casting its usual orangey glow. I could see nothing.
Then the sound that woke me came again. Horse hooves. They got closer until the creature must have been directly under the window. I held my breath as it continued, and then heard it turn. The sound of the horse’s hooves changed as it crossed the cobbles of our courtyard. And then, silence.
Looking back towards the bed, I saw that my husband was awake.
“Is that a bloody horse in the yard?” he asked.
Feeling relieved that, for a change, my sanity was not in question, I nodded. He groaned, hauling himself out of bed and trudging down the stairs. I heard the back door open, followed by a long pause before his footsteps came back up.
“Nothing,” he shrugged, getting back into bed. He was asleep and snoring in moments.
I, of course, did not sleep.
Being a fully-fledged spooky soul, I researched the history and found a fascinating connection to Dorset’s famous author, Thomas Hardy, who had recorded the Ballad of Blue Jimmy.
I absorbed myself in an account of this rebellious gentleman, who was said to be named James Clace. It was believed he had the nickname “Blue Jimmy” with allusions to his clothing, morals, or demeanour.
In the early 1820s, James Clace was said to have had a solid fortune, but for recreation, he stole fine horses and sold them on. Despite his choice of hobby, he did not excel in it. In fact, he had been brought before different judges 18 times but was dispatched without serious charge.
On a dark winter’s night in 1825, Blue Jimmy allegedly stole a bay mare and was riding it across the West Country to a market. He came to the Crown and Anchor in Mosterton – my new home! He asked to stable his horse in the yard of the pub and came inside. Jimmy wanted wine but accepted beer. He sat in the bar room (now our lounge), warming himself by the fire, and then took a room for the night—likely the very room I slept in.
The landlord of the pub grew suspicious, feeling that he knew the horse to belong to someone else. He went out to the yard, lifted the mane of the bay mare, and made a mark.
The next morning, Blue Jimmy bid farewell and made his way to market. At the market, the mark was revealed, and the theft exposed. Blue Jimmy was once again dragged in front of a judge at the assizes. Unfortunately for him, this time it was a judge he had seen once before, and on the testimony of the Crown and Anchor landlord, Jimmy was sentenced to hanging.
The County Chronicle states: “Execution, Wednesday, 25 April 1827: James Clace, better known by the name of Blue Jimmy, suffered the extreme sentence of the law upon the new drop at Ilchester… Clace appears to have been a very notorious character. In early life he lived as a postboy at Salisbury; afterwards, he joined himself to some gipsies for the humour of the thing, and at length began those practices which brought him to an untimely end; aged 52.”
Allegedly, upon the gallows, Blue Jimmy expressed that he had followed the strict rule of never stealing horses from people more honest than himself, but only from skinflints, taskmasters, lawyers, and parsons. Otherwise, he might have stolen a dozen where he had only stolen one.
Hardy’s ballad describes it well: “Blue Jimmy stole many a steed, Ere his last fling he flung.”
I never heard the hooves again.
KIZZY HELGESEN is by day a charity fundraiser and addictions counsellor from Lincolnshire. By night, when the laptop closes, Kizzy creaks open the Underwood typewriter and descends into her favourite genres of the macabre, historical true crime and the irrepressibly spine chilling. A past host of Fright Nights across the UK and a collector of cats, top hats and creator of two suitably creepy children.
