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CON 57/58

The Death of an Improvident Policeman

By Mike Buckingham and Richard Frame
First published 1988

© Mike Buckingham and Richard Frame 2012

When colleagues dragged the body of Constable Rodaway from the river Usk at Blaina Wharf the first thing they noticed was that his watch had stopped at four o’clock. Only one hour before the time indicated on the beslimed instrument the constable had rescued a drunken seaman from certain death in the chill January waters of the Usk.

Rodaway had taken the inebriated sailor to the docks police station to sleep it off and had returned to his beat. Now it was he who lay dead while the man he saved lay in a drunken slumber.

There had been no lights to guide Pc Rodaway as he walked back to his beat that fateful night having carried out his merciful task. The nightmarish thought that shortly after saving one life, his own would be forfeit to the cold, swirling, muddy waters of the unforgiving river could not have occurred.

The story is succintly told in the January 9 edition of the Monmouthshire Merlin, the forerunner of the South Wales Argus. The Merlin story reads thus: “On Thursday morning the body of Alfred Rodaway, one of the harbour constables, was found lying on the mud in the river near the old Blaina Wharf. He was visited on the beat shortly before three o’clock by Sergeant Pratten and reported that all was well.

“He was not seen again until his body was discovered in the ebbing of the tide between eight and nine o’clock. The place where the deceased fell was one of the safest parts along the whole of the dangerous riverside, and by what means the deceased was precipitated over the wall is a matter of conjecture and therefore various reports are in circulation, none, however, disparaging to the character of the deceased, who was always a steady well-conducted officer and who it was stated was never once reported during the ten years he had been in the police service.

“Shortly before Rodaway was seen by Sergeant Pratten he had rescued a drunken seaman from a watery grave and had conveyed him to the station. Soon after this he must have fallen in himself since his watch stopped at four o’clock.

“However distressing the circumstances we have detailed we have still to add the deceased has left behind him a wife and ten children, the youngest being but a fortnight old.

“The deceased had made no provision against the contingency of sickness or death and therefore their grief may be embittered unless the benevolent will extend their assistance to a case so lamentable in its results.”

Why should such a sober public servant meet his death in such an untimely manner, leaving a wife and ten children grieving? Did the benefactors of Newport stump up the money for his widow’s support, or did she and her children end up in the workhouse at Woollaston House, now the administrative wing of St Woolos Hospital?

There is nothing to suggest the officer might not have been entirely sober, but policemen in dock areas then notoriously hotbeds of crime and vice had enemies: could it have been one of these who pushed him to his death?

The mournful sequel to this story is that within days of Constable Rodaway’s death his youngest son was taken by sickness and thus followed him into the hereafter.

They rest together in eternal peace at St Woolos cemetery but what became of the rest of the family? For them perhaps a paupers’ grave or final resting place in some far-flung colony. What, after all, is a widow with ten children to do? It is a question the gravestone does not answer.

The unfortunate and untimely death of Pc Rodaway is just one of the human dramas marked in stone at St Woolos Cemetery. Some are tragic and some smack of the eccentric but more of that later.

Let us tell you about the cemetery’s very earliest days.

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