The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811

Product Information

Sixty-three years after the murder of Thomas Briggs, a railway station again played a part in a sensational murder. It is no surprise, then, that with the sensation that the murders caused, that every vaguely suspicious person was regarded as the culprit of the terrible crimes. The hours passed without discernable benefit for the besieging force. Midway through the morning Home Secretary Winston Churchill gave permission for the army to be used and in a short time a detachment of the Scots Guards turned up. Their participation transformed the situation. Equipped with powerful Lee Enfield rifles the soldiers virtually shot the second floor to pieces, forcing the duo to move downstairs and fire from the first and ground floor windows. But here too they were subject to a galling fire. Yankee sailors with drawling utterance, smoking deliberately and spitting immoderately; some miserable-looking Greeks-a cowardly and dishonest race, who, of little John Turner, a lodger at the King’s Arms pub, was escaping from an upstairs window, crying and shouting and either partially or wholly naked depending on the source. It was clear that something dramatic had happened within.

Still, it was to take 23 years before Britain saw its first ‘railway murder’– and it all began on 9 July 1864 with the 21.50 from Fenchurch Street. But it was not just foreigners who found themselves accused. As the Star (London)reports, ‘A great number of suspicious characters have…been stopped.’ This included one Thomas Knight, as the Oxford Journal details, ‘who underwent another long and minute examination.’ I was born in Reading (not great, but it could have been Slough), studied Ancient and Modern History at New College, Oxford, and I've got a PhD in art history from the University of Sussex.

Gateways

It would transpire that the body was that of Italian immigrant Carlo Ferrari, enticed from his usual sales spot in Covent Garden, taken to a hovel in Nova Scotia Gardens, Bethnal Green, and murdered for profit. Who did it? And in an added extra for the student of East End crime, it stands next to an adjoining house which bears the famous year of 1888 above its door. 6. Thomas Briggs, Britain’s first railway murder I don’t read a lot of non-fiction but I was attracted to this because it came up as a book club choice just after I had enjoyed several Lucy Worsley documentaries. And there is the fact that the subject matter includes Agatha Christie. Contemporary newspaper illustration of the pen maul used in the first murders, showing the initials "IP" or "JP"

He remained in the shop with his wife Celia, their 3 month old son and his young apprentice called James Gowan. Jacob Peters and three other anarchists, Yourka Dubof, John Rosen and Nina Vassileve were subsequently tried for the Houndsditch murders but were all acquitted apart from Vassileve, who was found guilty of a minor offence which was subsequently quashed on appeal. Rightly or wrongly Gardstein, Svaars and Sokoloff were held to be the main culprits in the killing of the three officers. Rivett was the nanny to the three children of her mistress, Veronica Lucan -better known as Lady Lucan, the wife of Richard John Bingham, the seventh Earl Lucan. The Art of the English Murder by Lucy Worsley is written to accompany a BBC television series on which she is a presenter. Her research brought about a written version which provides a plethora of information regarding the British interest in the idea of murder. The fact that the British enjoyed and couldn’t get enough of murder is outlined and discussed by Worsley but not meant to be an encompassing book on crime itself. Several high interest and notorious crimes are highlighted throughout and the murderers lives described. Worsley pinpoints how crime was handled and the limitations of the investigators trying to solve the crimes.

TRENDING

Part Three, "The Golden Age," was equally well thought out, and Worsley's analysis gave me some welcome new insights about the "dead end" of the interwar detective novel before British genre authors followed their U.S. counterparts into the hard-boiled, noir style of storytelling. On a personal note, Worsley's balanced and insightful analysis helped me finally to articulate why I can read Wilkie Collins or Arthur Conan Doyle all day long, over and over again with relish, while the works of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers leave me cold. hope they will. Numerous shells adorn these shop-windows shells resting on a bed of moss; some large Timothy Marr, who was in his twenties, ran a silk mercer’s shop at 29 Ratcliffe Highway, where he lived with his wife Celia, their three-month-old son, also Timothy, his apprentice James Gowan and their servant Margaret Jewell. Fittingly, Frances Wilson’s new biography of De Quincey, Guilty Thing, begins not with his birth or his lineage, but with a murder: In the early hours of December 8, 1811, shopkeeper Thomas Marr, his wife and infant child, and his apprentice were all found dead, their throats slit and their heads bashed in. With no real suspects, the case fascinated everyone in England, but none more so than Thomas De Quincey himself. The Ratcliffe Highway murders, as they became known, inspired in De Quincey a “profound reverie,” according to his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and would occupy his mind and his writings for decades to come. The murders, De Quincey would later write, “had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale,” he concluded, by the “deep crimson” of the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Those who had seen the corpses testified and the surgeon who had examined them also gave his report. The jury returned a verdict of willful murder by a person or persons unknown.