The Ripper of Waterloo Road

by Jan Bondeson

  7. The Examiner 14 March 1841.

  8. The Observer 17 June 1838.

  Chapter 13

  1. There are two ‘murder broadsides’ about the Frederick Street murder. ‘Horrid Murder of the Bar-Maid, Hannah Davies’ is at the Museum of London (No. A2200), whereas the better-informed ‘Another Horrible Murder’ is reproduced in the Curiosities of Street Literature (London 1871). Much useful original material about the Frederick Street murder is held by the National Archives (MEPO 3/41 and HO 44/30). See also J. Lock, Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders (Taunton 1990), 31–3, J. Oates, Unsolved Murders in Victorian & Edwardian London (Barnsley 2007), 8–12, and M. Spicer (True Detective December 2011, 54–8). Newspaper sources include The Times 11, 13, 15, 16, 19 and 22 May 1837, Morning Chronicle 10 and 12 May 1837, and Weekly Chronicle 21 May 1837.

  2. This public house was at the corner of Frederick Street and Brooke Street off the Hampstead Road, roughly where today Longford Street joins Osnaburgh Place in this vastly changed part of London.

  3. The Times 15 May 1837.

  4. The Times 19 May 1837.

  5. Morning Chronicle 15 May 1837.

  6. The tale of the gypsy fortune teller is in the Morning Post 27 July 1837 and London Dispatch 30 July 1837.

  7. The Times 27 December 1837, The Standard 27 December 1837.

  8. MEPO 3/41.

  9. The Times 28 April 1845, The Standard 28 April 1845.

  10. MEPO 3/41. The story never reached the newspaper press.

  11. J. Lock, Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders (Taunton 1990), 31–3.

  12. The police file on the murder of Robert Westwood is MEPO 3/42 at the National Archives. See also J. Lock, Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders (Taunton 1990), 40–50, and J. Oates, Unsolved Murders in Victorian & Edwardian London (Barnsley 2007), 20–5. Newspaper sources include The Times 5, 6, 8 and 10 June 1839, Weekly Chronicle 9 June 1839, Morning Post 5, 6 and 8 June 1839, Morning Chronicle 8 June 1839, The Operative 9 and 16 June 1839.

  13. NA MEPO 3/42.

  14. NA HO 44/35, ff 384, 385, 392, 393, 396, The Times 5 January 1841.

  15. J. Lock, Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders (Taunton 1990), 48.

  16. On Marchant, see The Times 21 May, 22 June and 9 July 1839, Morning Post 21 May 1839, Era 26 May 1839, and Morning Chronicle 20 and 21 May and 2 and 8 July 1839. Later sources include C. Pelham, Chronicles of Crime Vol. 2 (London 1887), 478–9, Complete Newgate Calendar Vol. 5 (London 1926), 295–6, J. Eddleston, Foul Deeds in Kensington and Chelsea (Barnsley 2010), 17–19, and J. Bondeson, Murder Houses of London (Stroud 2014), 13–15.

  17. On Daniel Good, see F. Tyler, Gallows Parade (London 1933), 122–30, M. Fido, Murder Guide to London (London 1986), 180–2, and J. Lock, Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders (Taunton 1990), 64–8. The gatehouse of Granard Lodge still stands in Putney Park Lane, but the main house and the stables have been pulled down since they were seen by Guy Logan in 1904, see G. Logan & J. Bondeson, The True History of Jack the Ripper (Stroud 2013), 22.

  18. The Times 25 April 1842.

  19. On Dalmas, see The Times 1, 2, 3 and 11 May 1844, 24 February 1845, Morning Post 1, 2, 6, 7 and 11 May 1844, Morning Chronicle 1, 2, 4 and 13 May 1844, and Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 5 May 1844.

  Chapter 14

  1. The main sources about the murder of Lord William Russell and the trial of Courvoisier are H. Poland, The Trial of François Benjamin Courvoisier (London 1917) and Y. Bridges, Two Studies in Crime (London 1959), 11–128. There are shorter accounts in the Legal Review 11 [1849–50], 376–436, Law Magazine NS 26 [1850], 26–36, and Littell’s Living Age 25 [1850], 289–311. See also A. Griffiths, The Chronicles of Newgate (London 1884), 487–91, C. Pelham, Chronicles of Crime Vol. 2 (London 1887), 563–83, J.B. Atlay (Cornhill Magazine NS 2 [1897], 604–16), R. Storry Deans, Notable Trials (London 1906), 260–74, N.W. Sibley, Criminal Appeal and Evidence (London 1908), 191–204, C. Kingston, A Gallery of Rogues (London 1924), 9–15, and G.B.H. Logan, Wilful Murder (London 1935), 58–79. Modern accounts include those by J. Flanders, The Invention of Murder (London 2011), 200–8, and M. Knox Beran, Murder by Candlelight (New York 2015), 139–81. There is also a good deal of primary material in the National Archives: MEPO 3/44, CRIM 1/1/12 and HO 44/35-37. The Poland book is exceedingly rare, the Bridges book wholly unreliable, and the recent Knox Beran book of an execrable quality, with abundant invented dialogue. The Courvoisier case still awaits its historian.

  2. Y. Bridges, Two Studies in Crime (London 1959), 13.

  3. G. Blakiston, Lord William Russell and His Wife (London 1972), 28, 65.

  4. There is a biographical sketch of Courvoisier in Morning Chronicle 20 May 1840. The story of his dancing at the Scottish wedding was in the Dumfries Courier, reproduced in the Manchester Times 18 July 1840. An inventory of his clothes in NA MEPO 3/44 shows that this vain and foppish young man possessed six coats, thirteen waistcoats and nine pairs of trousers.

  5. The Standard 6 May 1840, Morning Post 6 May 1840.

  6. The Standard 7 and 8 May 1840, Morning Chronicle 7 and 8 May 1840, Morning Post 7 and 8 May 1840.

  7. Morning Post 8 May 1840.

  8. The Times 8 May 1840.

  9. The murder house at No. 14 Norfolk Street was purchased by the barrister John Ramsden, who lived there until 1851. A number of other householders followed, until the Rev. James Fletcher bought No. 14 in 1868 and lived there well into the 1890s. In 1897, the terrace of houses from No. 12 until No. 19 Norfolk Street was pulled down, and a block of mansion flats erected. Since there was another Norfolk Street in Westminster, from the Strand to the Victorian Embankment, the name was changed to Dunraven Street on 1 July 1939. Dunraven Street still exists, but none of the original houses stand today.

  10. Era 10 May 1840.

  11. The Standard 13 May 1840.

  12. Morning Post 7 July 1840, Y. Bridges, Two Studies in Crime (London 1959), 60.

  13. E. Henderson, Recollections of the Public Career and Private Life of the Late John Adolphus (London 1871), 203–6.

  14. On the trial, see Y. Bridges, Two Studies in Crime (London 1959), 69–104. Charles Phillips was later criticised over a story that Courvoisier had secretly confessed his guilt to him, although he still demanded to be defended with vigour in court.

  15. Morning Chronicle 20 June 1840, Morning Post 20 June 1840, Y. Bridges, Two Studies in Crime (London 1959), 85–8.

  16. Morning Chronicle 23 June 1840, Y. Bridges, Two Studies in Crime (London 1959), 106–10. There was speculation that the naughty book Courvoisier had been inspired by was Harrison Ainsworth’s novel Jack Sheppard, but the murderer himself claimed it was A History of the Successful Progress of Criminals. Here he was taken in a lie, since, according to the Copac and Worldcat databases, no such book exists.

  17. The Times 24 June 1840.

  18. The Standard 24 June 1840, Morning Post 25 June 1840, Morning Chronicle 25 June 1840, Freeman’s Journal 26 June 1840.

  19. The Times 25 June 1840.

  20. Morning Post 25 June 1840, Morning Chronicle 25 June 1840, The Examiner 28 June 1840, Blackburn Standard 1 July 1840.

  21. Era 28 June 1840.

  22. The seller of the book knew nothing of its history, since it had been bought at auction with a parcel of other books.

  23. On Logan, see J. Bondeson, Introduction to G. Logan, The True History of Jack the Ripper (Stroud 2013), 7–21 and 187–98.

  24. Famous Crimes Past & Present 3 (37) [1903], 263. He got the number of the house wrong this time.

  25. Famous Crimes Past and Present 5 (61) [1904], 207–9.

  26. Famous Crimes Past & Present 10 (125) [1905], 174.

  27. G.B.H. Logan, Guilty or Not Guilty (London 1929), 261.

  28. On Sims, see G.R. Sims, My Life (London 1917) and A. Calder-Marshall (ed.), Prepare to Shed Them Now (London 1968).

  29. G.B.H. Logan, Wilful Murder (London 1935), 58–79.

  30. G.B.H. Logan, Verdict and Sentence (London 1935), 180.

  31. G.
B.H. Logan, Masters of Crime (London 1928), 29.

  32. NA MEPO 3/44.

  33. Blackburn Standard 1 July 1840, Preston Chronicle 4 July 1840.

  34. Back in 1838, a man’s clothing was much more strongly linked to his position in society than it is today, when dukes can dress like dustmen.

  35. Yseult Bridges was an old crime writer who liked to think up suitable ‘solutions’ to historical crimes, and she sometimes made use of her imagination to ‘improve on’ the facts she possessed. In his William Roughead’s Chronicles of Murder (Moffat 1991), 204, Richard Whittington-Egan referred to her as ‘not the most reliable of authors’. She did not just give Courvoisier straw-coloured hair, but claimed that he was born near Geneva (it was in the Canton du Vaud, and closer to Lausanne). His parents were not ‘eminently respectable’ but common country people, and he had never received ‘an excellent education’ but merely attended the village school. He did not run away from home, but was sent to London by his parents in late 1835 to join his uncle. His father Abraham was alive in 1840, so it was also wrong to refer to his mother as being ‘widowed’. See Y. Bridges, Two Studies in Crime (London 1959), 15–16, 60.

  36. H. Malet (Notes & Queries 10s. 8 [1907], 408).

  37. On Brinkley, see R. Whittington-Egan, Murder Files (London 2006), 200–3, and J. Bondeson, Murder Houses of South London (Leicester 2015), 264–73.

  38. E. Henderson, Recollections of the Public Career and Private Life of the Late John Adolphus (London 1871).

  39. John O’London’s Weekly 10 May 1924, Y. Bridges, Two Studies in Crime (London 1959), 120–8.

  40. NA MEPO 3/44.

  Chapter 15

  1. On Turpin, see The Complete Newgate Calendar, Vol. 3, (London 1926) 88–97, P. Newark, The Crimson Book of Highwaymen (London 1979), P. Haining, The English Highwayman (London 1991), and J. Sharpe, Dick Turpin (London 2004).

  2. The Barnwell story is serialised in New Newgate Calendar (London 1863).

  3. G.T. Wilkinson, The Newgate Calendar Improved, Vol. 2 (London 1792), 370–85, E.R. Watson (ed.), The Trial of Eugene Aram (Edinburgh 1913), N.J. Tyson, Eugene Aram (Hamden CT 1983).

  4. New Newgate Calendar (London 1863), 1–16.

  5. P.D. James & T.A. Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree (London 1987). Curiously, the early fictional treatment of this case by ‘Waters’, Undiscovered Crimes (London 1862), 255–72, is not mentioned by Baroness James and her cohort. It may be argued that the depredations of the London Monster of 1790 caused a moral panic that equalled the outrage felt at the Ratcliffe Highway murders, but then the Monster never murdered any person.

  6. For a discussion of these ‘media murders’, see the recent works by J. Flanders, The Invention of Murder (London 2011) and L. Worsley, A Very British Murder (London 2013).

  7. D.A. Cohen (Journal of Social History 31 (2) [1997], 277–306). See also the papers by S. Chibnall (Sociological Review Monograph 29 [1980], 179–217), E.L. O’Brien (Victorian Literature and Culture 38 [2000], 15–37), D.A. Cohen (Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 109 [2001], 51–97) and M.J. Wiener (Journal of British Studies 40 [2001], 184–212).

  8. On the Red Barn case, see J. & N. Mackenzie, The Murder of Maria Marten (New York 1948), D. Gibbs & H. Maltby, The True Story of Maria Marten (Ipswich 1949), P. Haining, Maria Marten (Plymouth 1992), L. Nessworthy, Murdering Maria (Great Yarmouth 2001), S. McCorristine, William Corder (London 2014), and P. Maggs, Murder in the Red Barn (Chelmsford 2015), articles by E.M. Burrell (English Illustrated Magazine 171 [1897], 269–74) and C. Pedley (Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 31 [2004], 26–38), also All the Year Round 19 October 1867, 397–403, Sunday Times Magazine 28 May 1967, Sunday Review 26 November 2006, and Murder Most Foul 82 [2011], 15–21.

  9. The skeleton was later handed over to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of London, where it was exhibited next to that of the thief-taker Jonathan Wild, but in 2004 it was cremated at the request of Corder’s descendants. See The Times 18 August 2004, and Eastern Daily Press 21 August 2004.

  10. Jackson’s Oxford Journal 2 June 1838.

  11. Penny Satirist, 16 October 1841.

  12. Anon., Eliza Grimwood, a Domestic Legend of the Waterloo Road (London 1841). At least three copies of this rare book exist: one is at the British Library, another at the University of Delaware Library, a third was sold by Jarndyce Booksellers in 2002. Louis James misdated this book to 1839, whereas Arthur Edward Waite and Montague Summers misdated it to 1844.

  13. L. James, Fiction for the Working Man 1830–1850 (London 1963), 159–62.

  14. I. McCalman, Radical Underworld (Cambridge 1988), 227–31. There is a much better informed discussion by J. Adcock on the ‘Yesterdays Papers’ internet site (http://john-adcock.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/who-murdered-eliza-grimwood.html), where he makes a good case that the novel was written by the journalist Alexander Somerville.

  15. New Newgate Calendar, Vol. 2, Nos 53–61, October–December 1864.

  16. The standard work on this case is P. Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett (New York 1998). See also the articles by J.L. Crouthamel (New York History 54 [1973], 294–309), P. Cline Cohen (Legal Studies Forum 17 (2) [1993], 133–43) and K. Ramsland, ‘The Sensational Murder of Helen Jewett’ on www.crimelibrary.com.

  17. New York Times 14 August 1855 and 6 August 1899.

  18. Two good recent books on this case, both with bibliographies, are A. Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers (New York 1995), and D. Stashover, Edgar Allan Poe and the Murder of Mary Rogers (Oxford 2006). See also the articles by W.K. Wimsatt (PMLA 56 [1941], 230–48), S.C. Worthen (American Literature 20 [1948], 305–12), R.P. Benton (Studies in Short Fiction 6 [1969], 144–51), and A. Gilman Srebnick (Legal Studies Forum 17(2) [1993], 147–65).

  19. On the Bickford case, see the papers by B. Hobson (Boston Bar Journal 22 [1978], 9–21) and D.A. Cohen (American Studies 31(2) [1990], 5–30).

  20. These three unsolved murder cases are discussed in J. Bondeson, Rivals of the Ripper (Stroud 2016).

  21. P.C. Squires (Criminal Law and Criminology 29 [1938], 170–201), H.P. Sucksmith (Dickensian 71 [1975], 76–83), A. Borowitz, Blood and Ink (Kent, OH 2002), 154–7, J. John, Dickens’s Villains (Oxford 2003), 75–6.

  22. C. Dickens, Oliver Twist (London 1966), 418–32, 447–53, P. Collins, Dickens and Crime (London 1965), 96, H.P. Sucksmith (Dickensian 71 [1975], 76–83), W. Long (Dickensian 83 [1987], 149–62), see also L. Wolff (New Literary History 27 [1996], 227–49), D.C. Archibald in K. Harrison & R. Fantina (Eds), Victorian Sensations (Columbus OH 2006), 53–63, and S. Zemka (Representations 110 [2010], 29–57).

  23. Daily Mail 18 April 2009.

  Chapter 16

  1. From the broadsheet ‘Execution of Courvoisier’ (British Library shelfmark 1875 D4 (30)).

  2. Morning Post 23 June 1840, The Standard 24 June 1840, Freeman’s Journal 25 June 1840, Preston Chronicle 27 June and 4 July 1840.

  3. Popular books on historical mysteries include those by Sir J. Hall, Four Famous Mysteries (London 1922) and The Bravo Mystery (London 1923), J.G. Lockhart, Here Are Mysteries (London 1927), H.T. Wilkins, Mysteries Solved and Unsolved (London 1961), and R. Furneaux, The World’s Strangest Mysteries (London 1961) and The World’s Most Intriguing Mysteries (London 1965).

  4. J. Bondeson, The Great Pretenders (New York 2003), 72–126, see also the papers by G.M. Weichhold et al. (International Journal of Legal Medicine 111 [1998], 287–91) and M. Risse et al. (Archiv für Kriminologie 216 [2005], 43–53). It is curious that it has later turned out that DNA from the bloodstain on Kaspar’s trousers does not match that from hair samples and clothes belonging to him, see B. Brinkmann, Preface to A. von Feuerbach, Kaspar Hauser (Leipzig 2006).

  5. P. Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper: Case Closed (New York 2002), R. Edwards, Naming Jack the Ripper (London 2014).

  6. Freeman’s Journal 25 June 1840.

  7. L. Gustafsson, Ur Bild i Bild (Stockholm 1
988), 156–7 (translated from the Swedish by the present author).

  8. L. Gustafsson, Tennisspelarna (Stockholm 1980).

  9. Morning Chronicle 6 July 1840.

  10. It is curious and noteworthy that much valuable material in this book comes from newspapers not available online, like The Globe, Weekly Chronicle, Cleave’s Penny Gazette and Penny Sunday Times, indicating that the databases for early Victorian newspaper studies are far from comprehensive, and that good old-fashioned research and access to a first-rate newspaper library still play an important part for students of that period.

  11. J. Ruddick, Death at the Priory (London 2001), J. Bondeson, Murder Houses of South London (Leicester 2015), 50–62.

  12. G.B.H. Logan, Guilty or Not Guilty (London 1929), 163–80, J. Smith-Hughes, Nine Verdicts on Violence (London 1956), 1–22.

  13. G.B.H. Logan, Rope, Knife and Chair (London 1930), 121–37.

  14. R. Whittington-Egan, The Riddle of Birdhurst Rise (London 1975), see also J.G. Hall & G.D. Smith, The Croydon Arsenic Mystery (Chichester 1999), Master Detective June 2002, 40–4, and the wholly unconvincing account by D. Janes, Poisonous Lies (Stroud 2010).

  15. B. Taylor & S. Knight, Perfect Murder (London 1987), 241–51.

  16. J. Bondeson, Rivals of the Ripper (Stroud 2016).

  17. For an example, see J. Bondeson, Murder Houses of South London (Leicester 2015), 192, on the history of the Illustrated Police News, see J. Bondeson, Strange Victoriana (Stroud 2016) and Murderous Victoriana (forthcoming 2017).

  18. J. Bondeson, The Great Pretenders (New York 2003), 72–126, J. Bondeson, The London Monster (Stroud 2003), A. Frearson (Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 7 [1984], 211–27). For that matter, the Grimwood case is also predated by the mystery of the location of Major Weir’s haunted house in Edinburgh, successfully solved by the present author (Fortean Times 311 [2014], 30–6).

  19. The Globe 7 July 1840.

  20. Originally published in Fraser’s Magazine, July 1840.