Blood on the Cobblestones: The Night a King’s Lynn Shopkeeper Became a Killer
The moonlight filtering through the broken fanlight cast eerie shadows across the bolts of fabric in Henry Pond’s shop. It was approaching five o’clock on a December morning in 1821, and the linen draper stood in his own darkened storefront, clutching a fowling gun with trembling hands. Outside, the night watchmen had just completed their rounds and departed – precisely as they had on the two previous occasions when thieves had robbed him blind. This time, Henry Pond was ready. Or so he thought.
At the time, 39 High Street (modern day Vision Express), housed a reputable linen and woollen drapery store, run by Henry Pond and his wife Sarah. Their lives, like those of many townsfolk, were punctuated by parish register entries: baptisms, marriages, burials. Their daughter Maria’s arrival in 1824, for example, is quietly noted in the surviving St. Margaret’s parish registers. Yet before Maria had even drawn her first breath, her father became the reluctant central figure in a drama every shopkeeper most dreads and few would easily forget.
What happened next would transform the respectable merchant at 39 High Street into the central figure of one of King’s Lynn’s most sensational cases – a story of escalating theft, desperate vigilance, and a split-second decision that left a young man (Robert Roberson, a young but notorious thief), bleeding out on the pavement.
A Perfect Crime in King’s Lynn – Almost
The audacity of the thefts was remarkable. Someone had discovered that Henry Pond’s shop had a vulnerability: a fanlight above the door, positioned just high enough to require assistance but accessible enough to reach through. The first break-in, roughly a fortnight before the fatal shooting, had been almost surgical in its precision. The thieves shattered the glass, reached through, and made off with valuable silk handkerchiefs – luxury goods that could be easily concealed and quickly fenced.
Pond’s response was ingenious if ultimately ineffective. Rather than repair the fanlight immediately, he left it broken, transforming his shop into a trap. He rigged a handkerchief to the bell-wire, creating a makeshift alarm system. It was the kind of clever improvisation that spoke to both his resourcefulness and his growing desperation.
But the thieves were clever too. A week later, they struck again, stealing more handkerchiefs and vanishing into the pre-dawn darkness before Pond could respond. The bell hadn’t rung. The trap hadn’t worked.
That’s when the draper made a fateful decision: he would keep watch himself, armed, and ready.
The Mathematics of Death
Pond had noticed something crucial about the timing. Both robberies occurred at approximately quarter to five in the morning – that liminal moment when the night watch had finished their rounds but the town hadn’t yet awakened. It was a calculated vulnerability in King’s Lynn’s security, and someone was systematically exploiting it.
On that Tuesday morning, Pond’s plan nearly fell apart before it began. He’d overslept, rising at almost five o’clock – too late, he thought. He was already heading back to bed when he heard them: footsteps passing and repassing outside his shop, the sound of someone circling, assessing, preparing to strike.
The double-barrelled gun he grabbed wasn’t purchased for this purpose – it was his fowling piece, loaded for bird hunting with shot No. 1 in the left barrel and finer No. 5 in the right. The pellets were designed to bring down game, not to kill a man. But in that moment, descending the stairs into his darkened shop, Henry Pond wasn’t thinking about the caliber of his ammunition.
He was thinking about the reflection he saw in the moonlight: a man’s arm, reaching through the broken fanlight, fingers groping for merchandise.
A Decision Measured in Seconds
The coroner’s inquest would later parse the sequence of events with judicial precision, but in that moment, Henry Pond had perhaps three seconds to make a choice that would define the rest of his life.
Opening the door would take too long – the thief would flee, and Pond would lose his only chance to end the harassment that had been plaguing his livelihood. The man’s body was hidden; only his arm was visible, and that “but indistinctly” in the uncertain moonlight.Pond raised the gun and fired at the arm.
What happened next was a matter of terrible timing and worse luck. At the instant Pond pulled the trigger, Robert Roberson shifted his position. The shot intended to wound his arm instead caught him under the shoulder. All of the pellets (meant to spray across feathers and flesh of a bird) entered his body in a concentrated mass, tearing through tissue and severing his aorta.
The sound of the gunshot must have been deafening in the enclosed street. When Pond threw open the door, he found Roberson collapsed on the pavement, “bleeding most profusely.” The young man, not yet twenty years old, was dying.
Pond, to his credit, didn’t flee or hide. With the help of several Scottish drovers who happened to be passing (itself a curious detail – what were they doing on High Street at five in the morning?), he carried the wounded man into his shop and ran for a surgeon.
It was too late. Robert Roberson was already dead.
The Dead Thief’s Résumé
The inquest held at the Queen’s Head revealed that Roberson was no casual opportunist. He was, according to the Norfolk Chronicle’s report, “well-known at our Quarter Sessions, where he had been repeatedly tried and convicted of various crimes.” Despite his youth, he was considered “the reputed head of a gang of pilferers who have long annoyed this town.”
Most damningly, Roberson had recently turned King’s Evidence – betraying a former accomplice to transportation in exchange for his own freedom. In the harsh moral calculus of Georgian England, this made him not just a criminal but a traitor to his own kind.
The authorities suspected he hadn’t been working alone that morning. Two people were arrested as suspected accomplices, though the historical record doesn’t tell us what became of them. Someone, after all, must have been supporting Roberson at the height necessary to reach through the fanlight.
Justifiable Homicide in King’s Lynn
The jury didn’t deliberate long. After what the Chronicle described as “a very minute investigation,” they returned a verdict of justifiable homicide.
It’s worth considering what that verdict meant. The jury wasn’t saying Pond had intended to kill Roberson – the draper had clearly aimed at the arm, hoping to wound and capture the thief. They were saying that under the circumstances – repeated thefts, a calculated watch, a moment when escape seemed certain if Pond didn’t act – his decision to fire was justified under the law.
But justifiable isn’t the same as comfortable. Henry Pond had taken a human life, however legally defensible his actions might have been. Did he lie awake nights afterward, replaying that moment? Did he wonder if he could have called out instead, warning Roberson away? Did he think about the young man’s family? Did Roberson even have one?
The historical record is silent on Pond’s inner life. We know only the external facts: he continued his business, possibly in partnership with Robert Wall (though Wall never appears in the directories). His daughter Maria was baptized in 1824. In 1840, the partnership with Wall dissolved, noted tersely in Perry’s Bankrupt Gazette. By 1841, Pond had relocated to numbers 76 and 77 on High Street.
Life went on, as it always does.
The Ghost in the Fanlight
What haunts this story isn’t the shooting itself (tragic as it was), but the cascading series of choices that made it inevitable. If Pond had repaired the fanlight immediately, would the thieves have simply moved on to easier targets? If the night watch had extended their rounds by fifteen minutes, would Roberson have chosen a different time? If Pond had shouted a warning before firing, would the young man have lived?
These are the kinds of questions that have no answers, only echoes. Standing outside 39 High Street today (Vision Express) you’d never guess that a young man died there, that his blood pooled on the cobblestones in the pre-dawn darkness, that a respectable merchant became a killer in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
Sometimes it takes very little for ordinary lives to intersect with tragedy, for the mundane business of running a shop to become the stuff of legend – and for one pull of a trigger to echo across two centuries.
The account of this incident is drawn from contemporary reports in the Norfolk Chronicle (December 15, 1821), coroner’s inquest records, and St. Margaret’s parish registers. While the basic facts are well-documented, the inner lives and motivations of the participants remain, as always, a matter of historical speculation.
© James Rye 2025