The union was not condoned by Catherine’s family, who turned her out when they realised she was romantically attached to the guardsman who earned a living selling pamphlets and ballads.
But Catherine was enchanted by the charismatic, handsome Irishman and the pair began a life together travelling from town to town on foot and sleeping rough – by the time she left her family’s care, she was already pregnant.
Their speciality was writing and selling ‘gallows ballads’, on one occasion the couple hawked such a publication at the execution of Catherine’s cousin, Charles Christopher Robinson, 18, who was hanged in Stafford after being found guilty of cutting the throat of his sweetheart in 1866.