On the evening of Thursday, 21 October 1886, Thomas Pine Laver left a meeting of the Melplash Agricultural Society at Beaminster to ride the six miles home to his farm at Mappercombe. At 38 years old, he was a widower with three young children, having lost his wife, Betsy, just six months earlier. A witness later recalled seeing Thomas cantering home comfortably.

Thomas had instructed his groom to stay up to care for the horse. When the groom saw the riderless horse enter the stables, he assumed that his master had dismounted, entered the farmhouse and allowed the horse to make its own way to its stall. Meanwhile, Thomas’s mother-in-law stayed up all night waiting for his return.

At five o’clock the following morning, a shepherd found Thomas dead in the road, 500 yards from the farm, his head lying in a pool of blood. The position of his legs suggested that he had tried to get up but lost consciousness.

After Thomas’s death, his mother-in-law took care of his three children. She decided to leave the farm and moved to Earle Street in Yeovil. When she passed away in 1894, she entrusted the care of the children to her daughter, Elizabeth Genge, who was married to George Genge of the Manor Farm in Ilchester, previously of Hardington and Pendomer.