Lady’s Newspaper and Pictorial Times – Saturday 25 November 1854
Morning Post – Tuesday 21 November 1854
Death From Lockjaw.
An inquest was held at the Eagle and Child Inn, in Conisborough, before W. Marratt, Esq., coroner, and a respectable jury, touching the death of Joseph Tyas, aged nine years, who died under the following circumstances :—
lt appears that, on the 2d of November, a youth, who had recently come to reside in the same yard with deceased, named William Smith, aged 14 years, inflicted a severe blow with a clothes-prop upon the upper part of Tyas’s nose. The wound was dressed at the time by his grandmother, Alice Rotherham, and to all appearance was not likely to be of any serious consequence.
On the Wednesday before his death, he had got so much better that he went to his work, but on Friday he complained of being unwell, and on Saturday morning ‘at four o’clock he was discovered to be jaw-locked. Mr. Foote, surgeon, was immediately sent for, and attended to him up to the time of his death which took place the same day.
The inquest was adjourned in order that a post mortem examination might be made. In the course of that examination a piece of wood was taken from the wound, which had doubtless been overlooked in the first dressing. The evidence produced tending to prove that death had resulted foam the injury received, a verdict of Manslaughter was returned, and Smith was committed on the coroner’s warrant to take his trial at the next York assizes.