Dickens’ plan never became reality. It is not known what happened to Richard Gould after his arrival in Australia on the ship Eden. There was however a twist in the tale as regards to the Templeman family. In 1873, John Templeman’s great grandson, Herbert Templeman, a forty-two-year-old clerk at his father’s firm of solicitors, was charged with forgery in relation to a £1,242 fraud on a Major General Morris of Tiverton. He was convicted at the Old Bailey the following year and sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude. See Proceedings of the Old Bailey, reference t18740202-179. The account of the Templeman murder is taken from reports in The Times, Standard, Morning Post, Morning Chronicle and the Examiner between March and June 1840. Both trials can be found on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey website. See also the file on the Templeman murder at the National Archives under reference MEPO 3/43.
No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent: Details of the Crippen case are taken from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey online; Supper with the Crippens by David James Smith; Crippen the Mild Murderer by Tom Cullen; and Dr Crippen by Katherine Watson. See also reports in the Mirror, 16 July 1910; Islington Daily Gazette, 15 July, 20 September and 12 October 1910. References to Belle Elmore in The Stage newspaper between 1907 and 1910. Details on the exploits of Sandy McNab in the Western Times, 21 September 1910, and 2 April 1912; The Stage newspaper between 1907 and 1914; and the Mirror, 25 June 1914.
No. 63 Tollington Park: Details of the Seddon case are taken from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey online; Trial of the Seddons, ed. Filson Young (1925); and The Trial of the Seddons by Edgar Wallace (1966).
No. 14 Bismarck Road: Reports on the changing of Bismarck Road to Waterlow Road in the Derby Daily Telegraph, 16 June 1916, and The Times, 26 January and 27 November 1916. A transcript of the trial can be found in Notable British Trials: The Case of George Joseph Smith, ed. Eric R. Watson. See also George Sims, The Bluebeard of the Bath (1915); Arthur La Bern, The Life and Death of a Ladykiller (1967); and Jane Robins, The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath (2010).
The Godfather: Sabini appears to have given his date of birth as both 9 July 1888 and 9 July 1889. The only registered birth that comes close to a match is that of Otavio Handley, born to Charles Handley and Elizabeth Eliza Handley, née Fryer, at No. 4 Little Bath Street on 11 July 1888. Eliza Handley, who had a brother called Charles Handley, appears to have adopted the Sabini surname by 1891, when she is shown as living at No. 52 Warner Street with Joseph Sabini, aged thirty-six, and three sons: Frederick, aged ten, Charles, aged eight, and Thomas, aged three, and a five-month-old daughter called Mary. Eliza Handley, daughter of William Handley, married Ottavio Sabini, the son of farmer Regenti Sabini, at St Paul’s Church, Clerkenwell, in 1898. There was another Otavio Sabini born on 7 August 1889, at No. 4 Back Hill, Clerkenwell, to Guiseppe and Domenica Sabini, but he died a year and sixteen days later of bronchitis. See also Brian McDonald, Gangs of London (2010); Edward T. Hart, Britain’s Godfather (1993); and James Morton, East End Gangland (2009). Reports of cases involving the elder Sabini can be found in the online Proceedings of the Old Bailey, references t18941119-32 and t18900908-669. An Ottavio Sabini was also acquitted of wounding at a trial at the Clerkenwell Sessions on 3 September 1888. Darby Sabini’s own brief version of his early years is recorded in a Home Office memo found in the National Archives, in the file HO 45/23691. These papers also contain details of his criminal record and his detention during the Second World War as a potential enemy of the state. Details of the fight at the Fratellanza are also taken from reports in The Times, the Mirror and the Daily Express from 21 November 1922, and 16–19 January 1923. Report of bankruptcy proceeding in Daily Express, 30 June 1926.
Coronation Roses: Description of Coronation crowds in Mirror and The Times, 14 May 1937. Rosina Field and Katherine Peck case details from witness statements and documents kept at National Archives CRIM 1/940; MEPO 3/874; HO 144/20658; CRIM 1/465. Murphy’s confession in the News of the World, 22 August 1937.
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