Brannigan and Murphy: Wrongly Convicted on Fabricated Police Evidence

Fiancée inadvertently exposed evidence tampering

Rev Buckle accosts the burglars (Project Gutenberg)

Let me take you on a journey back in time. To 1879, when Victoria was on the throne, Disraeli sat in Number Ten, and Joseph Swan of Newcastle had recently announced his invention of the incandescent light bulb.

Inside a vicarage in the remote Northumberland village of Edlingham, six miles south-west of Alnwick, an incident occurred that saw two innocent men imprisoned, and the methods of the local constabulary heavily criticised after it emerged that police skulduggery was afoot. The case was also instrumental in bringing about the formation of the Court of Appeal.

In the early hours of a February morning, in 1879, at Edlingham Vicarage in Northumberland, the elderly Rev. M H Buckle was woken by his daughter, Georgina, who was in a state of some alarm. When asked what was wrong, she whispered to her father that she had heard noises downstairs. Reverend Buckle immediately rose and pulled on his dressing gown, and, in a display of determination that belied his seventy-seven years, the courageous cleric descended the stairs to investigate with a candle in one hand and a sword in the other. In the drawing room, he came across two burglars who were busy ransacking the vicarage. A struggle ensued, in…