WATKINS CORNER
Watkins Corner is a developing historical drama based on the life, crime and execution of Robert Watkins, an uncle of Rob Perrett’s four-times-great-grandmother. Drawing upon genealogical research, court records, contemporary reporting, local history and stories preserved through the family, the project explores the life of an ordinary working-class man whose violent actions and public death became part of Wiltshire folklore.
Robert Watkins was a labourer from Wootton Bassett, described in surviving accounts as a local ruffian and bare-knuckle fighter. By 1819, his wife had recently died, leaving him with three children during a period of severe poverty, unstable employment and limited social support. Records also describe his relationship with Sophia, the daughter of his landlady, and suggest that his desire for money and status contributed to the desperate choices that followed.
On 7 May 1819, Watkins ambushed and murdered Stephen Rodway, a respected salt and coal merchant, on the turnpike road near Purton Stoke. The location later became known as Watkins Corner. Watkins was connected to the crime through witness testimony, his possession of a pistol and, most significantly, banknotes stolen from Rodway that were traced through local transactions.
Watkins was convicted of wilful murder at Salisbury Assizes and publicly executed at Purton Stoke on 30 July 1819. Contemporary reports suggest that between 10,000 and 15,000 people attended, while traders turned the event into something resembling a public fair. Following the hanging, his body was passed to surgeons for dissection, an additional punishment imposed upon convicted murderers under the law of the period.
The project will not excuse Watkins’s crime or present him as a romanticised folk hero. Instead, it will examine personal responsibility alongside the poverty, class divisions, limited social mobility, rudimentary policing and brutal justice system of early nineteenth-century England. Combining historical true crime, social realism and period drama, Watkins Corner will distinguish between documented evidence, family tradition and carefully considered dramatic reconstruction.
The project has also been proposed as the practical element as part of a PhD research by Rob Perrett examining how historical fact is used within narrative drama. The proposed research would include audience studies comparing the responses of viewers who are told which elements are historically verified with those who are not, exploring how perceptions of truth, authenticity and dramatic interpretation affect their engagement with the story.
(All images on this page are AI-generated artistic impressions, created to communicate the historical setting, characters, atmosphere and intended visual direction of Watkins Corner. They are not archival images and should not be regarded as definitive representations of the real people, events or final production design.)
