PC Israel May: The Snodland Murder That's Still Kent Police's Earliest Line-of-Duty Death

Day 11 of 15. Yesterday's story was a Kent village that armed itself and fought off England's most violent smuggling gang. Today's is quieter, and in its own way sadder: a single police constable, walking his beat on the edge of Snodland in the dead of night, who never made it home.

Israel May was 37, a second-class constable with 14 years' service in the Kent County Constabulary's Malling Division, based at Snodland. In the early hours of Sunday 24 August 1873, a local woman, Selina Upton, saw him on the road - the last confirmed sighting of him alive. Around 6am, his body was found in a turnip field beside the road running from Snodland towards Malling, roughly a mile from Ham Hill. A newspaper reporter at the inquest described his head injuries as "almost literally shattered to pieces." His own truncheon - standard issue to every Kent constable since 1860 - was never recovered. The inquest jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against person or persons unknown.

Suspicion settled on Thomas Atkins, a Snodland bargeman said to have quarrelled with and threatened May the week before his death. He was arrested at Kingsdown, around fourteen miles away, by a county constable on 30 August, six days after the killing. A contemporary report in the Illustrated Police News, published that 6 September, says he was taken into custody without resistance.

Atkins stood trial at Maidstone Assizes in December 1873 - and was convicted not of murder but of the lesser charge of manslaughter, for which he was sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. That outcome is confirmed independently in a 1997 Snodland Historical Society pamphlet, which records that Atkins "paid the penalty of manslaughter by twenty years penal servitude." Local crime-history research into the original trial reports adds that Atkins's own statement to police, read out in court, said "I took the constable's staff from him and hit him about the head," and that his defence argued he'd been drunk and that May struck him first - plausible detail, though it rests on a single source we couldn't independently corroborate, so treat it as less certain than the conviction and sentence themselves.

Kent's county police force was only 16 years old when May died - formed in January 1857, with its first headquarters in Maidstone. Kent Police's own roll of honour today still lists Israel May as its earliest recorded death - a live institutional fact, not just a historical one. The next name on that list isn't added until 1907, more than three decades later, which means every time Kent Police marks its own history, his is still the first one read out.

Roadside memorials like this have a name and a tradition: "murder stones", markers placed at or near the scene of a killing - part commemoration, part warning to the living, most common in the 1820s but still being erected decades later. The 1997 Snodland Historical Society pamphlet records that one stood "near the spot" where May died, about two hundred yards from the old turnpike gate on the road towards Malling - separate from, and in addition to, his grave in the churchyard. We couldn't confirm whether that roadside stone still survives today; many don't. His churchyard memorial certainly does.

May was given a public funeral on Thursday 28 August 1873, paid for by voluntary contributions from the local community. His memorial still stands in the churchyard of Christ Church, Snodland, on Malling Road - though not in the building he'd have known. In 1873 the Snodland congregation was worshipping in a temporary corrugated-iron "tin tabernacle" on Oxford Street; the permanent stone church on Malling Road wasn't built until 1893. The churchyard itself predates both buildings, and the parish still maintains it today. His inscription reads, in part: "Found cruelly murdered on Sunday morning, August 24th 1873 ... He received a Public Funeral on Thursday August 28th 1873. The Memory of the Just is Blessed."

Source: Kent Archaeology, Monumental Inscriptions of Christ Church, Snodland, Wikipedia, Kent Police, Snodland Historical Society, Pamphlet No. 3, "Historical Jottings of the Parish of Snodland" (Andrew Ashbee, 1997) and Kent, England Online Parish Clerks, newspaper abstracts (Illustrated Police News, 6 September 1873). One further narrative detail (Atkins's statement to police and his defence) comes from amateur local crime-history research rather than these primary sources, and is flagged as such above.