HE was an impoverished turnip-picker who died from horrific injuries at the hands of two men who beat him with a thick stick and repeatedly bashed him over the head with a stone.

One of the last people to see Edward Rendall alive was a police officer who saw him in the company of two drunken teenagers as the trio headed down a country lane that led from the White Horse Inn on the Isle of Wight.

The weather in that August of 1877 had been far from glorious, and with the ground too wet to work, the victim and his brother were making a tour of the local inns.

Rendall, who relied on his job at Budbridge Farm, which yielded 35s for a heavy week’s toil, could not scrape two pennies together that day and relied on his brother to buy the food and drink.

It was at the inn they encountered Alfred Jones, 16 – whose increasing boisterousness that evening was in proportion to the amount he drank – and 20-year-old Charles Brading.

Inexplicably, Rendall was persuaded to leave his brother and accompany the teenagers down a country lane that led from the pub to St John’s Brickfields.

The following morning, he was found insensible, lying against a stable, with more than 20 wounds to his bloodied head. He died shortly after admission to the local infirmary.

The incriminating evidence lay nearby.

An intricately carved wooden stick that Jones had fashioned before drink took command of his senses bore blood and hair. The stone was equally smeared with blood.

Following news of his demise, a postmaster reported how he had seen the trio near the stable, with Rendall evidently uncomfortable in their presence.

He heard Jones shout: “Come along, I know a good place where we can all turn in together.” Rendall protested: “I am honest enough. I have not robbed you. I have never robbed anyone.”

When arrested, the killers unsurprisingly fell out, each blaming the other for the murder.

“But they were in it together,” Mr Collins QC alleged at their trial that took place at Hampshire Assizes.

“The motive was pure and simple – robbery. It was the taking of life, in cold blood.”

Neither defendant gave evidence.

In his closing speech to the jury, Mr Matthew applied emotional pressure to acquit Jones of murder, alluding to his age and lack of parental care.

“I ask you with your mercy to give him that care he has wanted in a world he has had little to look back on with gratitude.”

For Brading, Mr Bullen submitted that there had been no “desire” for murder. He said: “If it had been premeditated, if they had meant murder, they would not have left him alive,” adding that Brading had earned a good reputation with the Army and militia.

Jurors returned a verdict of manslaughter, which the judge, Mr Justice Lopes, accepted with seeming reluctance.

“The jury has taken a most lenient view of this case,” he told the pair before jailing them for 20 years each.