The London Daily Chronicle of 13 May 1927 (page 9) had the above wording as the heading for a short article. Some three years earlier, a Jamaican man had broken into a house in the village of Hollingbourne near Maidstone in Kent, and had been sent to prison. At the end of his sentence he refused to be sent to the West Indies and so was sent back to the scene of his offence. Hollingbourne (missing the final ‘e’ in the 1927 report) had fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, and the man – nameless, but known as Darkey – was a charge on the local guardians. He had so far cost £165. He refused to move away, and had been subject to a failed attempt to have him classified as of unsound mind. If he was sent to an asylum then his costs would fall upon the Kent county authorities, not the village.

The case reveals weaknesses in the centuries-old poor laws. He could not be expelled from Britain as he was a British national. It seems that he did not give his name – certainly it is not mentioned in newspaper reports in 1927. The local guardians were able to get rid of this unwelcome burden for the Hollingbourne poor law institution’s responsibilities were ended that autumn when the fellow was certified insane and sent to the Kent Mental Hospital at Barming (Daily Chronicle, 22 November 1927, p 7). This was reported elsewhere with the same text – Leicester Daily Mercury of 22 November page 16 and the Shepton Mallet Journal of 25 November, page 6 for example. ‘”Darkey” achieved considerable notoriety by his amazing feats of strength, his enormous appetite and his refusal to work’.

The mental hospital at Barming had opened in the 1830s, and was closed in 1994. It sometimes held as many as 2,000 psychiatric patients. Known as Oakwood Hospital, some of its finer buildings survive. There are some 7,000 bodies in the old cemetery, almost all unmarked. The nameless Jamaican may well be amongst them.