The ghostly coachman who saved my great-grandmother from harm

Kit Hewitt, probably in the Rock Gardens, Southsea, c1933Kit Hewitt, probably in the Rock Gardens, Southsea, c1933
Kit Hewitt, probably in the Rock Gardens, Southsea, c1933
There is something rather chilling about hearing your grandmother’s voice 40 years after her death. Even more chilling when she is telling you a remarkable ghost story – a tale of supernatural intervention close by Portsmouth Cathedral in the final years of Queen Victoria’s reign, intervention which quite possibly saved her mother’s life.

It was a story that my grandmother often used to tell – often at our prompting and especially at Christmas. But over Christmas 1972, my cousins recorded her telling it for posterity, and I am so pleased that they did. It feels infinitely precious all these years later.

And the funniest thing is that my grandmother clearly didn’t notice the very obvious set-up. My cousins feigned complete ignorance of the story. “Haven’t you heard that ghost story?” my grandmother asked them incredulously. They insisted that they really, really hadn’t – when of course they had, dozens of times. But the key point was that the tape recorder was now running. And so off she goes, telling the tale – and telling it beautifully, the tale of the otherworldly apparition which saved her mother from serious harm in Old Portsmouth in the closing years of the 19th century.

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My grandmother was Kathleen Hewitt, known to everyone as Kit. She was born and brought up in Portsmouth but moved to Sydney Road in Gosport in the mid-1930s not long after getting married. My father Graham was born there in 1939. Kit died in November 1984 at the age of 74.

Kit, then Evans, later Hewitt - "alone along the seashore, July 11 1930"Kit, then Evans, later Hewitt - "alone along the seashore, July 11 1930"
Kit, then Evans, later Hewitt - "alone along the seashore, July 11 1930"

This is a transcript of the story she told:

“Listen, well you know Christmas night you invariably, invariably start talking about ghosts. And old Grandpa Cook tells us the story that we've heard hundreds of times about his uncle going home from the pub one night drunk in Norfolk along the country roads and he got home in a terrible state and said he saw a ghost. Well, it turns out that it wasn’t a ghost at all. The ghost was an old farmer’s white cow (looking at him over the hedge)!

“Well, I always have to tell (my brother) Johnny about your grandmother Evans about how she saw the coach which I do really believe (she did) because she was like us. She was down to earth. She didn’t imagine things, you know. And it’s a very strange story.

“Grandmother Evans was born in 1879 so she was about 20 – 19 or 20. Well, that would bring it to about 1898 or 1899. Aunty Nell’s mum and dad lived right at the top of St Thomas’s Street in a very old house that went up in four storeys (…) Well, Aunty Nell’s dad when she was a baby used to go out at night in the old boats and perhaps he wouldn’t come back until three or four o’clock in the morning so my mother would go down and sit with her sister. She was like me – or like I was. She had no respect for time or anything. So it was about midnight and she was running down St Thomas’s Street (to get back home). And you get down St Thomas’s Street and it is High Street (?) and the cathedral is there.

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Kit with her brother and sister Arthur and Eve, newly-orphaned, c1928Kit with her brother and sister Arthur and Eve, newly-orphaned, c1928
Kit with her brother and sister Arthur and Eve, newly-orphaned, c1928

“Well, there was a garrison in Portsea then, and they had a very bad name, the soldiers, and there was a crowd of soldiers (in the road) and they got hold of my mother and, well, she was frightened. She didn’t know what they might do to her. She was only a young girl then. And they were all drunk.

“And she said suddenly out of nowhere came a coach. An old-fashioned coach, but she says she remembers the old-fashioned driver with a three-corner hat on. He got down and he brandished his whip at these soldiers. And he said ‘Go on, my girl. You run off.’ And she went scuttling on down to her mother’s, not thinking much. And she said when she got to her mother’s, she thought to herself ‘Now, I never heard that coach.’ It was a coach and four, and you imagine the clop-clop of horses on the cobbled stones and the wheels. And she thought ‘Well, I never heard it come and I never heard it go.’ Now as I say, she was the most matter of fact woman ever and all her life she puzzled about that. And she came to the conclusion that it was something out of unknown that had been sent to help her.

“She died in 1928. And (about) 20, 25 years after she died, I was reading (….) stories of Old Portsmouth and it described exactly the old coach that haunted the cathedral grounds (…) So she did she see it. I always believed she saw it because she said when she got home she thought ‘I never heard it come’; because she said ‘I wouldn’t have been so upset if I had heard a coach coming.’

“She made us like what we are really, I mean, because I wouldn’t have lived in that house with the air raids (during the Second World War) and all that on my own if I hadn’t had my mother as she was, so down to earth. (She always thought) the dark didn’t hurt you. Nothing hurt you.”

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