Dr. Neville Spriggs, grandfather of Daphne
Spurling, the Society’s Project Co-ordinator,
was a Leicester police surgeon for 25 years. He
was visited in 1924 by a young Australian cousin,
Percy Spriggs. Recently Percy’s son,
Christopher, sent Daphne an account written by
his father. Although it reads as if written at
the time, it was part of a diary written in the
mid1970s. Percy often talked about the
incident, so perhaps one of his children or
grandchildren suggested he wrote it down. This is
the story as told by Percy.
‘A horse! a horse! my Kingdom for a horse!.
The words that Shakespeare put into the mouth of
a mortally wounded King Richard came rushing to
my mind as I stood at the top of an old Roman
wall in the City of Leicester in England. The
year was 1924 and I was just a young man from
Australia touring the world, stopping over for a
few days with a relative.
Dr Neville Spriggs, a keen historian and
President of the Archaeological Society, was
telling me something of the fascinating history
of the city. He had shown me the ‘supposed’
burial place of Richard III and on my enquiry, I
was told that on the death of the King, the story
was, that his body was thrown into the river from
the old stone bridge. I could see below me that
bridge spanning the river and way beyond lay
Bosworth Field. History was unfolding before my
eyes and I dropped off to sleep that night with a
picture in my mind, of the Lancastrian about to
overwhelm the king’s forces through the
sudden treachery of the two Stanleys and their
followers deserting to the forces of Richmond (later
Henry VII) and of Richard’s crown being
picked up on the battlefield and at once placed
on the head of Richmond who was saluted king by
the whole army.
I thought of the dreadful dilemma of those
loyal soldiers retreating with the now dead king
— of the urgency of preventing the royal
body being captured by the enemy. I thought too,
of the two young princes murdered in the Tower by
Richard.
It is now breakfast time the following morning.
My cousin was called to the ‘phone and in
his capacity as doctor and police surgeon, was
informed that a human skeleton had been recovered
from the thick black mud at the site of
excavations for the foundations of a steel bridge
under construction just a little down stream from
the old stone one and it was suggested that the
bones could be those of Richard III. All thoughts
of bacon and eggs were dropped when Neville asked
if I would care to go with him to inspect the
bones. Would I go? Indeed I was already ahead of
him, visualising the newspaper headlines and
maybe hearing the news on a crystal set. In fact,
the occasion was so momentous that I was thinking
of the fantastic tales that I would have to tell
my, as yet unborn, children — perhaps even
my children’s children. Yes, I MUST have
grandchildren to be worthy of such a story as
this.
A short run in the old Morris and we were
walking towards a group of people looking down at
something on the pebbly edge of the river. A
constable cleared a passage for the doctor and me
and then — moment of moments — we too
were looking at an almost complete skeleton
neatly arranged on the ground.
I remember thinking that this occasion was
more exciting than the Pyramids; the Coliseum; an
audience with Pope Pius XI (for which I had
become an American Catholic for a couple of hours);
the terrible fire at sea on the ‘Hobsons Bay’;
and crash of an old Imperial Airways plane which
somehow carried me from Le Bourget to Croydon
— all these episodes, if rolled into one
would not equal this fantastic moment.
My cousin now examined the bones —
particularly the almost complete vertebrae and
with what seemed to me a cursory inspection
lasting perhaps one minute, rose up and
pronounced in no uncertain manner, that the bones
could be those of a man of that period, but were
larger than one of King Richard’s stature.
He then added that this skeleton was not that of
the king.
The doctor instructed the constable to take
charge of the remains and then strode off to the
car with the remark ‘Come Perce, and we’ll
see if they’ve kept our bacon and eggs warm.
This was terrible! I was indignant that my cousin
had seemingly dismissed the matter with such
little concern. ‘How the devil could you say
so positively and without a very thorough
examination, that these bones were definitely not
those of King Richard?’ Fortunately for me,
I was only thinking that remark, as the doctor
was rapidly striding his way towards the car, so
I saved the question until we were seated and
about to move off. Neville now fixed me with a
wicked twinkle in his eyes.. . ‘Don’t
they teach you anything of English History in
your Australian schools?’ Then came the
moment of truth. Richard was a hunchback, which
explained my cousin’s close examination of
each vertebra.
So now I tell this story to my grandchildren
and they invariably say Oh Grandpa, how very
disappointed you must have been’ —this
perhaps is the understatement of the year.’
As you can tell, Percy enjoyed telling the
story and Chris adds details from hearing the
account several times. Percy travelled to England
in a cargo boat with a handful of passengers. The
cargo was apples, wool and an animal fat in
barrels. The smell of the burning apples was not
so bad but it really stank when the wool and fat
burnt. Percy showed Chris a photo of the deck
buckled from the heat. Then Percy met an American
priest on the train to Rome who convinced Percy
that it was OK to pretend to be a catholic on
that occasion in order not to miss the chance of
a Papal Blessing. Luckily Percy kept the rosary
beads that he had presented to be blessed as he
needed them for the next close shave. The index
to The Times of 1924 lists a surprising number of
aeroplane accidents. Two could fit the story,
given a little poetic licence. A cargo plane
belonging to Air Union caught fire on landing at
Croydon on 22 January. The two passengers escaped
and helped save their personal belongings. The
fire was described as more spectacular than
serious. Another possibility is on 27 July when
the Chief Engineer was inspecting an Imperial
Airways plane as it was about to leave for Paris.
He noticed a tire (sic) was deflated, stepped
forward for a better view and walked into one of
the propellers. The propeller split and he died
in hospital.
But what about the bones? There is no
reference to this story at the Leicester Library,
the Record Office or on the Richard III websites
I visited. The Leicester Mercury is not indexed
and without knowing the date or month it would be
a long job to read all through 1924 to seek the
story of the bones beneath Bow Bridge. It was
possibly not reported as my grandfather had
immediately dismissed the possibility of the
bones being Richard’s. A 1986 summary of the
evidence suggests the following scenario. Henry
proved Richard’s death by having his body
exposed to the populace and the body was then
buried by the Grey Friars in their abbey. The
popular legend, that Richard’s body was
rudely removed from its coffin, carried jeeringly
through the streets of the city, and finally cast
into the river or roughly buried under the end of
Bow Bridge, is not contemporary but first
recorded 70 years after his death. So it is
probably not true. There is evidence that Henry
had a tomb constructed and erected over Richard’s
grave about 1495, but it was lost in the
dissolution. Christopher Wren’s father
reported having been shown in the priory grounds,
then a private house, a handsome three-foot high
stone pillar on which was inscribed ‘Here
lies the Body of Richard III, some Time King of
England’. After that there are no references
to the body or grave. It is widely believed that
the coffin survived as a drinking trough for
cattle and horses at various inns and in an
increasing state of disrepair. Those stories
finished around 1750. But this still begs the
question of what happened to the body. The
original site of Greyfriars has been lost under
redevelopment. Various skeletons have been found
in the right area, including one in 1935 during
the excavation of a carpark, but nothing as yet
been proved.
It seems that my grandfather was right in
dismissing the bones as Richard’s, but
possibly for the wrong reason. Recent research
seems to discount the hunchback theory, so I
wonder what became of those bones. Wouldn’t
it be just too terrible if they were those of the
unfortunate king? Poor Richard: he was only 33
years of age when killed at Bosworth Field in
1485. He is one of the very few English monarchs
without a known grave and the last to die on a
battlefield.
Neville and Percy in 1924 may not have known
about one final twist to the story. A family tree
possibly researched in the 193 0s takes us back
to an ancestor Samuel Sprydge or Sprigge who was
made ‘an esquire of the Body’ on
Bosworth Field on 21 August 1485. As this was the
day before the battle, which side he was on?
Percy’s grand daughter recently tried to
verify this story but was advised that as the
references to Household Awards were not ‘calendared’,
a search would be long and painstaking with no
guarantee of success.
References:
1 The Times 23 January, page 9 cal. 5
2 The Times 28 July page 9 col. 1
3 King Richard’s Grave in Leicester by David
Baldwin in Transactions of the Leicestershire
Archaological and Historical Society, Vol
LX, 1986
4. The Times 6 September 1935. As there
was no follow-up story presumably the idea of the
body being that of Richard III was soon dismissed.
with any queries
