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. The Highway is a major arterial route into and out of the City of London and can become heavily congested during rush hour. There are two lanes in each direction throughout its length. It lies outside of the London congestion charge zone (CCZ). 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.’ Their relationship soon overstepped the boundaries of churchman and parishioner, allegedly with Thomas’ agreement and even encouragement.

In excavating a trench last year in St. George’s-in-the-East, for the purpose of laying a main for the Commercial Gas Company, the workmen, at a depth of six feet from the surface, found the skeleton of a man with a stake driven through it. These remains were undoubtedly those of John Williams, in life greeted with a universal yell of loathing and execration. better housed, better fed, and higher-priced, utters no note to speak of, to redeem his keep. "They're the Seemingly beaten with a blunt instrument before being thrown from the carriage, he died the next day. Who did it? 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. and behold, so has the temper of' Moses. Snarling, like a hyena, he shows his yellow fangs, rebuketh his hand-maiden

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In August 1886, a gas company began to excavate a trench in the area where Williams had been buried. They accidentally unearthed a skeleton, reportedly buried upside down and with the remains of the wooden stake through its torso. "It was six feet below the surface of the road where Cannon Street Road and Cable Street cross at St George's in the East." The landlord of The Crown and Dolphin, a public house at the corner of Cannon Street Road, is said to have retained the skull as a souvenir. The pub has since been renovated and the whereabouts of the skull are currently unknown. A nearby shopkeeper, Max Weil had alerted him to suspicious noises – but the heavily armed gang within did not have designs of Weil’s property. Grace's Alley – formerly Gracie's Alley, a path between Wellclose Square and the north end of Ensign Street, and home to Wilton's Music Hall

Turner was a lodger in the house, and other accounts have him escaping without any clothes at all. Meanwhile, the ‘alarm was instantly given,’ with a constable named Anderson and two other ‘resolute men,’ Ludgate and Hawse, arming themselves and entering the house. ‘Horrid to relate, they found the master and the mistress of the house, and the servant-maid, Biddy…lying quite dead, their throats cut from ear to ear.’ Sitting down after a hard day’s work, slippers on, guard lowered… for the last 200 years murder has been the topic to which readers turn for comfort and relaxation.” has all this to do with the sailors? Nothing, certainly, nothing. We beseech our readers to pardon our digression, This leaves space for the reader to worry about historical details, whereas in the second half of the book, with the narrative firmly under way, the pace is so efficiently ratcheted up as to preclude all mundane questions. Until then, characters anachronistically travel by carriage when they would be far more likely to have used the river; a man reads the inscription on a coin in the street at night, quite a feat before gas lighting. More troubling is a writing style that tips from the colourful into the bizarrely baroque with phrases that sound wonderful, but don't appear to have any meaning: "the Great Public Leviathan was up and out of its chair and scooping down the atmosphere with a gigantic spoon"; or my favourite, "But revolution, like sodomy, was just another form of desire".Arthur Morrison (1863–1945), author, wrote about Ratcliff Highway in his novel The Hole in the Wall (1902) Bishop and Williams also confessed to a string of additional crimes, whilst a Covent Garden porter, Michael Shields, was allowed to remain at liberty, based on the testimony of his co-conspirators that he had only been involved in deliveries, not murder. 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.

Intimidation alone cannot account for the extremity of the violence, but it could if the negotiation had turned bad and led to the killing of Mr Marr and his shop assistant, and then Mrs Marr too as witness. If there happened to be an unhinged individual with a violent murderous tendency among the group – someone like William Ablass – that alone can explain the murder of the baby. In this context, the Williamsons’ subsequent murder may be comprehended as damage limitation, if somehow they had learnt the truth of the earlier killings. A principal suspect in the murders, John Williams (also known as John Murphy), was a 27-year-old Irish or Scottish seaman and a lodger at The Pear Tree, a public house on Cinnamon Street off the Highway in Old Wapping. Williams' roommate had noticed that he had returned after midnight on the night of the tavern murders. Thomas De Quincey claimed that Williams had been an acquaintance of Timothy Marr, and described him as: "a man of middle stature, slenderly built, rather thin but wiry, tolerably muscular, and clear of all superfluous flesh. His hair was of the most extraordinary and vivid colour, viz., a bright yellow, something between an orange and a yellow colour". The Times was more specific: he was five-foot-nine, slender, had a "pleasing countenance," and did not limp. Williams had nursed a grievance against Marr from when they were shipmates, but the subsequent murders at The King's Arms remain unexplained. [3] The Kentish Gazette, 31 December 1811, detailed yet more suspects. Sylvester Dryscoll was arrested because some ‘bloody breeches [were] found in his possession.’ A groom named Anthony Aldmond was taken into custody because: The same night the initials were discovered on the maul, and twelve days after the first killings, the second set of murders occurred at The King's Arms, a tavern at 81 New Gravel Lane (now Garnet Street). The victims were John Williamson, the 56-year-old publican, who had run the tavern for fifteen years; Elizabeth, his 60-year-old wife; and their servant, Bridget Anna Harrington, who was in her late 50s. The King's Arms was a tall two-storey building, but despite its proximity to the Highway it was not a rowdy establishment, as the Williamsons liked to retire early.

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TREVOR BOND was born in South London to an East End family. He has a long-held fascination with the social and criminal history of London, with a particular interest in the Victorian period.