File:Low railway bridge where the former Market Drayton to Stoke-on-Trent railway crosses the road to Bellaport Old Hall - geograph.org.uk - 814649.jpg

English: Low railway bridge where the former Market Drayton to Stoke-on-Trent railway crosses the road to Bellaport Old Hall. As you can see this is a very low bridge. Ruth Donaldson-Hudson related this story about her grandfather, this bridge being the one where the accident occurred.

In 1883 or 1884 my Grandfather was hunting one day round Norton-in-Hales. A mile or two beyond Norton village a lane lead up across fields to Bellaport Old Hall and on its way passes under a low railway bridge. As my grandfather rode under the bridge, his horse suddenly took fright and reared up, giving his rider a terrible blow on the back of his head. When he came home from hunting, he said that his head ached but beyond that made light of his accident. Had anyone but known it he had been very severely concussed and he should have been kept in bed, in a semi-darkened room, for a week or more. As it was, within a few days of the accident he went up to London on his Parliamentary duties; and as one of Gladstone's Irish Home Rule Bills was then hotly under discussion, the House had several all-night, or late –night sittings – than which nothing could have been worse for a man with concussion of the brain.

The effects of the accident were not immediately felt or seen. But after a year or so he began to have terrible headaches, and he became extremely depressed to the point of melancholia. His doctor advised him to travel, and he made several trips abroad, to Norway and India among other places. Far from improving under this treatment, he gradually became iller and iller. From what I have been able to gather from various sources, he would have awful brain-storms and fits of wild screaming. A slow paralysis set in, too, and he had a special pony-drawn bath chair built, in which he could go out and take the air. There was always a resident doctor in the house and latterly he had a male nurse as well. Tragic as it was for him, it was no less for his wife and children. By the time the latter had reached their teens, an age at which they most needed a father to guide and counsel them, they were almost entirely cut off from him by his illness. It dragged on for several years, the paralysis increasing all the time, and towards the end his brain became seriously affected. He died in 1893, in his fifty-third year, an age at which most men are hardly past their prime.