A Forgotten Court Case That Could Rewrite the History of Charlestown

For more than two centuries, Joseph Dingle has occupied a rather uncomfortable place in the history of Charlestown. The story most often repeated is that Charles Rashleigh created the harbour, placed Dingle in a position of trust and was eventually ruined when Dingle misappropriated, or even embezzled, an enormous amount of money. The figure usually given is £32,000 and, having been repeated for so long, the story has gradually come to be regarded as fact.

However, newspaper reports which I have recently uncovered from 1819 suggest that what actually happened between the two men was considerably more complicated. They show that Rashleigh’s claims against Dingle were being strongly disputed, that the Commissioners dealing with Dingle’s bankruptcy refused to accept Rashleigh’s claim for £30,000 and that, depending upon the final valuation of the accounts and property, Dingle’s representatives believed Rashleigh himself could have owed them a substantial sum.

The reports seem to point in three directions: the disputed debt, the failed arbitration and Dingle’s wider part in Charlestown.

One of the most revealing reports concerns a case heard in the Court of King’s Bench in London in July 1819, Kebell and Others v. Rashleigh. The plaintiffs were the men appointed to deal with Joseph Dingle’s affairs after his bankruptcy and were effectively responsible for protecting the interests of his estate and creditors.

The report explains that Charles Rashleigh had previously obtained a verdict against Dingle for £30,000, which at first appears to support the traditional account. However, when Rashleigh later attempted to prove this debt against Dingle’s bankrupt estate, the Commissioners refused to allow it. The newspaper recorded that Rashleigh came forward to claim the £30,000, “but the Commissioners refused to allow his proofs”.

This is where the story begins to look rather different. Rashleigh may have obtained a verdict for £30,000, but when he tried to recover that money through Dingle’s bankruptcy, the amount was not simply accepted as an undisputed debt. The accounts between the two men still had to be examined, and there were substantial claims being made on both sides.

According to the report, something in the region of £50,000 depended upon the eventual outcome. If Rashleigh’s account was accepted, Dingle’s estate might have owed him about £30,000, but if Dingle’s representatives were correct, Rashleigh could instead have owed the estate around £20,000. This was therefore not simply a case of deciding how much money Dingle had taken from Rashleigh. It was a much wider dispute involving years of accounts, property and business dealings between the two men.

In an attempt to settle matters, both sides agreed that the accounts should be examined by an arbitrator named Mr Macmahon. During this process Rashleigh produced a new account amounting to £55,000. He allowed Dingle credit for £19,000, which still left more than £30,000 that he said was owing to him.

There was, however, a considerable problem with part of this account. The newspaper stated that, “Part of the account, amounting to about £17,000, Mr Rashleigh himself offered no evidence of.”

This does not mean that the £17,000 was necessarily fraudulent or that Rashleigh had invented it, but it does show that the accounts were not as clear-cut as later versions of the story might suggest. Dingle’s representatives quite naturally wanted time to examine the figures and to establish the value of property which they believed formed part of his estate.

A surveyor named Mr Chapple told the court that he had twice travelled to Charlestown to measure buildings connected with Dingle’s property, but on both occasions he was prevented from doing so. There were also complaints that certain documents required to investigate the accounts had not been produced. By this point the dispute was clearly about much more than a single outstanding sum of money, involving property, buildings, rents, income and commercial transactions which had accumulated over many years.

Eventually Dingle’s representatives became dissatisfied with the arbitration and decided to bring it to an end. A formal document was prepared withdrawing Mr Macmahon’s authority to make an award and a clerk was sent to deliver it personally to him.

What followed sounds almost like something from a novel. The clerk went to Macmahon’s chambers several times in an attempt to hand over the notice, knocking and returning again later when he could not see him. He tried once more the following morning, but the document was still not received. In the meantime Macmahon continued with the arbitration and made his decision, ordering Dingle’s representatives to pay Rashleigh £30,000.

The matter then went before the Court of King’s Bench, where the question became whether Macmahon had deliberately avoided receiving the notice until after his award had been made. The Chief Justice appears to have taken the view that if a person knew somebody was repeatedly attempting to deliver a letter to him and deliberately avoided that person, he was also deliberately avoiding discovering what the letter contained.

Although the Chief Justice accepted that Macmahon may have believed he was acting properly, he concluded that he had intentionally avoided receiving the notice and therefore avoided knowing its contents. The jury found in favour of Dingle’s representatives. The damages awarded were only one shilling, but the case shows how bitterly Rashleigh’s financial claims were still being contested.

This also raises an obvious question about the £32,000 which appears so frequently in later accounts of Joseph Dingle. The contemporary reports I have found so far contain several different figures. There are references to balances of around £24,000 or £25,000, claims of more than £30,000, a verdict for £30,000 and Rashleigh’s later account for £55,000, from which he allowed Dingle £19,000 credit.

What I have not yet found is a contemporary criminal court report stating that Joseph Dingle was convicted of embezzling £32,000.

That distinction is important, because a disputed civil debt is not the same thing as embezzlement, and a verdict requiring one man to pay money to another is not necessarily evidence of a criminal conviction. There may of course be further documents waiting to be discovered, and I would not claim that the matter has been settled, but the evidence found so far suggests that we should be much more cautious about repeating the familiar version without qualification.

But the court case does more than challenge the money story. It also raises a bigger question about Dingle’s part in Charlestown itself.

Another newspaper report, published in August 1819, makes the story even more interesting. It concerned thirty-seven cases brought by Dingle’s representatives against Rashleigh and other people occupying property at Charlestown. In describing Dingle, the report said that although he had little formal education, he possessed considerable powers of perception and had “foresaw the immense benefit” of turning the site into a harbour.

Even more interesting was the statement that he had done so “with the assistance of Mr Rashleigh”.

If this contemporary description is taken at face value, it gives a rather different impression of Dingle’s place in the early history of Charlestown. Rather than simply being Rashleigh’s servant or manager, he appears to have played an important part in recognising the commercial potential of the harbour itself.

Dingle also held a life interest in Charlestown property, received income there and was involved in substantial commercial dealings. The more evidence that emerges, the more the relationship between the two men appears to have been a complicated mixture of property, business and financial interests rather than the simple master-and-servant arrangement that is so often described.

It is also worth considering how the later version of events came about. A Rashleigh family account reproduced in Richard and Bridget Larn’s history describes Dingle as having “swindled” Charles Rashleigh and gives a strongly hostile version of what followed. It is an important account, but it was also written from one side of an extremely bitter dispute.

Over the years it would have been very easy for a word such as “swindled” to become “embezzled”, for a disputed balance to become a fixed figure and for a complicated civil dispute to be remembered as though it had ended in a straightforward criminal conviction. Once such a version had been repeated by later writers, each new account could easily have relied upon the one before it until the original uncertainty disappeared altogether.

This is why these newspaper reports are so useful. They were written while the dispute was still taking place and describe legal proceedings involving the people, accounts and property concerned. They allow us to look behind the later retellings and see something of what was actually being argued at the time.

They do not prove that Joseph Dingle was entirely innocent, and there may still be evidence to be found which supports some of the accusations made against him. What they do show is that the financial relationship between Rashleigh and Dingle was still being fiercely contested years after the supposed debt had arisen. Rashleigh’s £30,000 claim was refused by the Commissioners, his accounts were challenged, Dingle’s property rights were being investigated, and Dingle’s representatives believed that a proper accounting might even leave Rashleigh owing them about £20,000.

At the same time, another contemporary account was crediting Dingle with seeing the potential of Charlestown as a harbour and describing Rashleigh as assisting him in its development.

Taken together, these reports leave us with a very different picture from the one which has traditionally been handed down. Instead of a simple story of a wealthy landowner betrayed by a dishonest servant, we appear to have two men who were deeply involved in the creation and commercial life of Charlestown and whose financial affairs became so closely intertwined that, when their relationship finally collapsed, years of legal argument followed.

We still do not know exactly what happened between Charles Rashleigh and Joseph Dingle. But we can say this: the old story should not be repeated as if it were settled fact.

Charles Rashleigh, for two centuries, the truth has been hidden until now. Photo credit: Richard Larn OBE.

Written by Lyndon Allen, 2026