MADAM BESWICK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 October 1940, Page 8

MADAM BESWICK

BURIED OVER HUNDRED YEARS AFTER SHE DIED. We know very little about the dear lady. She seems to have been quite harmless, and she was certainly a very grateful soul. But she was odd. She lived in the neighbourhood of Sale in Cheshire, and suffered a good deal before hei’ end in 1757. If there was one bright spot in her last dark days, it was Dr Thomas White who put it there. Madam Beswick appreciated what he did, as Dr Thomas White discovered soon after she died, for she left him £25,000. on one condition. Poor old'soul, she was sentimental to the end, and we cannot help thinking the doctor must have put her heart in a flutter more than once without knowing it, for her one condition was that he should look at her once a year. That was all. The doctor was a sensible fellow, and £25.000 was not to be lost for the sake of the least inconvenience, so he had Madam Beswick embalmed, and shut up in an old clock case. She lay there at the top of his house year after year; and once every year the doctor and a lawyer went up to see her, removing the curtain which covered her face, and looking down at the odd lady. They opened a bottle of wine after the touching little ceremony, and forgot all about it till twelve months went by. Well. Dr Thomas White died in 1770. and the old clock case with its strange possession was moved to Manchester’s Natural History Museum, and there it stayed till 1806 when the astonishing lady was buried 111 years after she died.