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Baby

Age: 0

Sex: female

Date: 14 Oct 1910

Place: Weston-sub-Edge

The body of a newly-born female child was found on the side of the road near Weston-sub-Edge by a labourer.

The labourer had been walking along the Evesham-Stratford main road from Weston at 6.45am when he noticed a hole in the hedge to his left and when he went to have a closer look saw a brown paper parcel. He said that there was a hole in the parcel and when he looked inside he found the body of the child. He said that he then continued on to work and when he saw two men working in an adjoining field at 9.30am he told them about what he had seen and they then went back off to the hedge where they met a policeman.

Between the man finding the body at 6.45am and him returning with the other men, another labourer had been out with his dog which had noticed the parcel in the hedge and attracted his attention to it. After inspecting the parcel, which he said was rotting and falling away, he found that it contained the body of the child and went off to telegraph the police.

The policeman said that the child's body was in a very advanced stage of decomposition. He said that as well as the brown paper, the child had been wrapped up in a newspaper which was dated 11 September 1910. He said that on the brown paper there was part of a label for a firm of drapers in Evesham and that enquiries were made into it but without any result.

A doctor said that the body was so far decomposed that all he could say was that it was a female child and that it had had a very short life and must have been dead for three or four weeks.

An open verdict of found dead was returned.

see www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

see Gloucestershire Echo - Friday 14 October 1910