Overview
The city of Liverpool, England, was like every other city energized by the Victorian boon in industry and trade. It is best known today as the home of the British Invasion and music that changed the world. But Liverpool’s history has a less harmonious side, and a dark past that reaches back centuries. True crime historian, Stephen Wade, goes there.
In Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Liverpool, Wade reveals the city’s most shocking crimes: a notoriously deadly duel in 1806; gang wars and the infamous nineteenth-century “Cholera Riots”; a killer butcher and a terrorist bombing; grandma killers and sinister sisters; swindlers and crimes of passion; poisonings, bodysnatchers, and serial killers; a murderer who claimed to be possessed by demons; and a terrifying hunt for the fiend behind the Ripper murders. Wade invites readers into the shadowy backstreets of a fabled city in this criminally fascinating chronicle of misdeeds, madmen, and real-life mysteries.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783037414 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pen & Sword Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2019 |
| Series: | Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 49 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Militia Major Killed in a Duel
1806
... their animosity increased daily ...
On a December day in 1806, just before Christmas, Colonel Bolton of the Loyal Liverpool Volunteers, stood firm on the ground where he was to fight a duel with Edward Brookes. He calmly said to his opponent, 'Agreeably to the custom of duelling, I believe that you, Sir, are to fire first.' Brookes, a major in the Lancashire Militia in former times, did indeed fire first, but missed his man. Bolton took aim, fired and in seconds, his opponent was down on the grass, the ball penetrating his skull, just above his right eye. The man's seconds and the medical attendant came quickly but the major was dead.
A good shot had killed a poor shot: a sad scene all too common in military history throughout the centuries. This rapid and merciless method of satisfying a debt of honour had given the Liverpool undertakers another customer in officer's garb.
Bolton wasted no time in removing himself from the scene. His friends had a carriage ready. As the Annual Register reported: 'Since then he has not been heard of.' This was wilful murder in the criminal law, but here is the problem at that time in history: it was a military matter, often related to regimental pride and honour. The law of the land was often at odds with army thinking.
Fighting a duel over a matter of honour had always been a principle element of British military life up to the Regency period, and such combats presented problems. This Liverpool case was no different. A war was being fought in Europe at the time against Napoleon of course; the military men were used to hard living, and their habits were carried over into civilian life. Army regulations stated that a man must defend his honour. Only three years before Bolton's killing of Brookes, a Captain Macnamara in the Royal Navy had killed a man in a duel and his defence was that 'he needed to sustain his character for courage.' He was acquitted. There had been a law passed in 1803, and known as Lord Ellenborough's Act, which made duelling a capital offence; if one participant was killed, then the charge was murder. But a law on the Statute Book is one thing: actual convention and army practice is another.
Yes, a killing like this was wilful murder, but someone would have to agree to take on the case, and he would be pitted against a massive groundswell of feeling that such an event was in some way 'just' and that honour was a personal matter, seen by many as entirely separate from any concepts in the criminal law. The two men involved were not only officers and therefore gentlemen, but businessmen in Liverpool society and known throughout Lancashire. Most likely, Brookes would have been seen as the least admirable, subject to the petulant and irrational behaviour that had him in its grasp for a long time before this fatal dawn appointment with death.
If Brookes' relatives wanted to press charges against Bolton, they would have had to do what a Mr Garrow applied to do to conduct a criminal proceeding against a man who had written a letter trying to provoke a duel, saying:
Sir, I have been informed of your unwarrantable conduct in forcing my gate, which you found locked. I suppose you thought it a public road; but that point shall be decided in a court of law. Now, Sir, I have only to add that I consider it a personal insult to myself and expect the satisfaction of a man of honour ...
This was in 1815. It was not uncommon; one person at the time counted 172 duels fought in England between 1760 and 1821, but the military historian Richard Holmes considers this an underestimate. But the habit persisted for much longer than the legal attempts to tackle the problem. The law was ambiguous on the matter because duelling could in no way be interpreted as manslaughter, but manslaughter had been used as a defence until 1822 when the laws on manslaughter were revised. For these reasons, Colonel Bolton, running away into anonymity from Liverpool after killing Brookes was playing it safe, just in case he ended up in court. The judgement there may well have been wilful murder. But the duels continued until the last one was fought in Englefield Green, near Egham in 1852, with a fatality.
What had Brookes and Bolton argued about? We know that they started the dispute late in 1805 and that it was 'a matter of business' as The Gentleman's Magazine reported. Bolton was the chairman of a business concern in which Brookes had invested his money, and Major Brookes was extremely critical of Bolton's behaviour in that position. The argument was so fierce that they agreed on fighting a duel but others stepped in to intervene, and they were bound over, under a heavy penalty, to keep the peace for a year. Major Brookes could not let things rest, and he simmered with aggression and hatred until the period elapsed, then presented the challenge again.
They met at five in the morning, 20 December, on the outskirts of Liverpool. The fatal encounter then took place. Clearly, Brookes was not much of a marksman and, as was the custom when a shot missed, he had to stand with amazing courage, and let Bolton take his time to aim at the forehead; at least it was a speedy death. The tale is one of sheer impassioned hatred; a reporter at the time said that their animosity 'increased daily' over the penalty period.
Why did this savage custom last for so long? Simply, because there was then no legal redress for 'debts of honour' and this happened when the members of the militia were accustomed to living according to rules openly at odds with statute law.
It took several decades more after these events in Liverpool for a change of general attitudes, notions of masculinity had to change, and that was far more difficult to achieve than legislation, as was the case with the abolition of slavery for instance; the letter of the law takes a long time to percolate through to deep mind-sets and entrenched definitions of such things as 'honour.'
CHAPTER 2The Hope Street Gang and the Cholera Riots
1826–1832
It was a panic generated by a genuinely horrific discovery
The names Burke and Hare have not only attained the status of infamy and notoriety in the history of crime: one of them gave the English language a terrible new word in the years after his death in 1829. A 'Burker' became a word signifying that lowest of all killers perhaps, a 'Resurrection Man', someone who was willing to kill in order to earn some money from the doctors who needed cadavers for their schools of surgery and anatomy. The two villains had started their horrendous trade in 1827 when an old pensioner who owed them £4 was killed and taken to Dr Knox's anatomy school in Edinburgh. For his corpse, they received over £7 – much more than the sum he owed them.
Clearly, this was a quick and easy way to earn some cash, so Burke and Hare developed their business into a murderous enterprise targeting tramps and prostitutes. But it led Burke to the gallows and Hare to a runaway life as a poor fugitive in London. Unfortunately for the poor and vulnerable of other cities in Britain, the trade in bodies had an appeal to other 'Burkers' and Liverpool had its own gang of these desperate individuals.
In 1826, some dockers at the St George's Dock began to complain about the intolerable smell coming from some containers labelled 'Bitter Salts' which were scheduled to be shipped to the port of Leith. Things came to a head and the stench was so bad that the boxes had to be opened. What met their eyes was totally repugnant and shocking: inside were eleven naked corpses, preserved in brine (following the long tradition of salting bodies as in ancient Egypt), and this led to further investigations at number eleven, Hope Street, where more than twenty other corpses were found, some preserved by hot wax injection. There had even been some bodies of dead infants preserved in brine. The consequences of this find were to lead to large-scale riots and social disorder, mostly based on the arrival of cholera in the town, and on the nefarious actions of a doctor, William Gill, who had been organising 'resurrection' business for the anatomy schools.
At the trial of the gang, and notably of James Donaldson who was the overall manager of the business, there was a furore when the subject of the children's bodies was discussed. As the Liverpool Mercury reported:
One of the witnesses stated, that in the cellar there was a tierce [a vessel holding two-thirds of a hogshead of liquid] containing a quantity of brine which they poured off, and found the bodies of some babies ... an audible shudder ran through the court on the mention of this last circumstance and the foreman of the jury was taken suddenly ill ...
Donaldson was put in prison for a year and had to pay a fine of £50. The whole business was sickening, and more was to come when another man was arrested in relation to containers with corpses in them, and this person had parish cemetery keys on his person – keys to the door of a vault. In 1827 there was more grave-robbing going on at Walton Church. At the home of local surgeon William Gill five bodies were found; someone had seen some grave-robbing actually happening and this led to the investigation and the arrest of the doctor. At Gill's trial, the issue of the medical problem of having to have access to bodies for dissection was prominent. He even read a long statement at his trial, defending his actions in terms of a professional reason for why he had been driven to do. He avoided a custodial sentence and was fined £30.
After the actual dissection and Burking scandals, the issue at the centre of all this became related to the arrival of Asiatic cholera in the city. In 1831 Liverpool's population was in a state of public health crisis but not much was being done; a massive Irish immigration had contributed to this. One estimate calculates that over half a million Irish people arrived in Liverpool on the first half of the nineteenth century. Of course, some of these would carry on and board ships for America but, nevertheless, the population expanded rapidly and many poor workers lived in overcrowded homes and cellars. There were to be almost 5,000 cases of cholera in the city during the crisis years of the 1830s, and around thirty-one per cent were fatal.
In 1832, there were several signs that Asiatic cholera had come to Liverpool, but the Board of Health and its advisers tried to deny this. One of the most shameful episodes here is that the Board was given a large sum of money when it cleared vessels to leave port with a clean bill of health, and had been doing so for some time before the truth was out in the streets that cholera had come and that the belief grew that medical men were using the bodies of people dying from the disease for anatomical study. One sensation that highlighted the attempt to ignore the problem was the outbreak of cholera on board the Brutus, a ship that set sail from Liverpool in May 1832. As the Annual Register reported at the time:
On the 27th, the ninth day out of Liverpool, a healthy man, about thirty years of age, was seized with malignant cholera. The usual remedies were used and he recovered. The next case was a sixty year old woman, who died in ten hours of the attack ... The ravages of the pestilence then increased ... The greatest number of deaths was twenty-four in one day ...
There was a string of violent riots in the city, starting in May 1832, when there was a frightening attack on the Toxteth Park Cholera Hospital. The Chronicle reported that a mob surrounded a patient and accompanying staff as he was bound for the hospital and began raising hell. When the patient was taken inside, the mob still raged outside, shouting 'Bring out the Burkers!' Things carried on in this way for a month. In Lime Street, a woman was attacked, accused of being a Burker and, luckily, found a place to hide; then there were several more disturbances in the city centre, and one in the dock area, at Barter Street. In all there were eight riots across most parts of Liverpool.
In this same year, the Anatomy Act had been passed; this was the first attempt to try to make cadavers available to medical research, and cut out the need for illicit trade. The idea was to make the bodies of paupers available for use: those people who would be unclaimed by their family. Even that was slow to find its way through parliament, as Henry Warburton had produced the bill in 1829, but it took three years to be made into law. In those three years the riots in the regions had continued. The disgusting sensation of 'The Italian Boy' in London, a case which ended in the hanging of two Burkers, with a crowd of 100,000 people watching them die, made body-snatching very big news indeed, reaching into the provinces. The two villains had killed sixteen people for profit.
The cholera riots in Liverpool finally stopped in June. The Mayor had received a letter from 'an Irishman' threatening that there would be awful consequences if he did not act. A meeting was called in which the Board of Health talked to the city's Catholic priests, and then shortly after an announcement was made in all the churches. The aim was to allay fears about the alleged Burking in the cellars and port. The important part of the statement was that bodies after death would be seen by family:
... orders have been issued that the relations of those who die in the hospital shall be allowed to see the bodies of the deceased before the coffins are closed, and that they may within a limited time take them away to the grave. Permission is also granted to relatives of the sick to see them in hospital daily, under certain regulations necessary for preventing infections.
Some historians have pinpointed the year 1831 as the time when Britain was coming very close to revolution; the agitation for what was to be the great Reform Act the next year was part of this, and so were the various kinds of labour unrest. But the cholera riots in Liverpool and other cities formed a major part of that feeling at the time that life was experienced 'on the edge' of disaster and ruin. The papers at the time tried to blame the trouble on 'the Irish' and on the destitute poor, but these were grossly unfair and wrong-headed. It was a panic instigated by a genuinely horrific discovery, and the fact that respected medical men had been involved, and that they had been fined in court, only added to the sense of outrage in the streets.
But the study of medicine and the necessity for doctors to be trained in Anatomy, meant that the dissections had to go on, as they always had; the old prints and illustrations show the importance of this advancing knowledge in the fight against disease.
CHAPTER 3A Poacher Shooting
1846
The problem for Lynn was that the stock of his gun was cracked
Gamekeeper John Wainwright was enjoying a pint with his friend at the Eagle and Child tavern on 15 April 1846. This was near the Earl of Derby's estate at Knowsley, where Wainwright was assistant gamekeeper. This was about a mile from the village of Prescot, and it should have been a good place to relax, but at half past nine that night, shots were heard outside the pub and Wainwright sensibly went outside, via the back door, to investigate this with some caution. But the person out in the dark was ready, and when the gamekeeper reached the gate, a volley of shots was fired, some hitting him, wounding him in the leg and hand. When the landlord of the pub ran outside to see what was happening, the gunman was seen to run off into some of the woods belonging to Sir Thomas Birch. As Wainwright collapsed in pain, the landlord ran after the attacker, but he was soon away into the night.
But the shots were fired by a man who was soon traced, as a footprint was found in soft earth that night, where the gunman had run away, and these matched the show of the major suspect, Charles Lynn. He was soon in court, and witnesses who had been drinking in another pub close to where the attack took place, the Rose and Crown, said that they saw him take out a gun which was in two parts, and then assemble it. The problem for Lynn was that the stock of this gun was cracked, and that was noticed; when a gun with that feature was found in the Birch plantation, the match was obvious and the link to the villain was made sure. In the pub, he had been with a friend, and as they loaded the gun, his friend said, 'Put some of the others in, they'll tell a tale.' That meant that he loaded two kinds of shot, and he was heard to say that he would go out for game 'in spite of anybody.'
The man must have been amazingly reckless, because people reported that when he left the Rose and Crown he was heard to say, 'Let either Birch or Wainwright molest us on the road and we'll do their job for them.' Again, with crazy bravado, Lynn had been seen by a passer-by near the plantation and had been asked what he was doing. He replied, 'I am looking for a hare' and that he would have a hare 'and Birch afterwards.' No less than a pile of twenty-five shot was found in the doorway where Lynn had been standing that night.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths in Liverpool"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Stephen Wade.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Chapter 1 Militia Major Killed in a Duel, 1806,
Chapter 2 The Hope Street Gang and the Cholera Riots, 1826–32,
Chapter 3 A Poacher Shooting, 1846,
Chapter 4 A Brutal Robbery, 1852,
Chapter 5 The Cafferata Poisoning, 1860,
Chapter 6 The Killer Butcher, 1862,
Chapter 7 Murders in the Mean Streets, 1873–4,
Chapter 8 Brutality to Women, 1850-80,
Chapter 9 The High Rip Gang, 1874,
Chapter 10 Finger in the Till, 1875,
Chapter 11 A Bomb Outside the Police Station: Fenian Troubles, 1880s,
Chapter 12 He Killed Grandma, 1883,
Chapter 13 Murderous Sisters, 1884,
Chapter 14 Dangerous Deeming: Ripper Suspect, 1891,
Chapter 15 Margaret Walber: Husband Killer, 1894,
Chapter 16 The Seafarer and the Bookseller, 1895,
Chapter 17 The Maybrick Sensation, 1889,
Chapter 18 Mysterious Death of a Street Singer, 1899,
Chapter 19 Goudie, Victim and Swindler, 1901,
Chapter 20 A Shooting in Great Newton Street, 1904,
Chapter 21 Spring-Heeled Jack in Everton, 1904,
Chapter 22 The Madge Kirby Mystery, 1908,
Chapter 23 Women Campaigners in Walton Gaol, 1909,
Chapter 24 The Wife-Killer Docker, 1910,
Chapter 25 Death in the Church of Humanity, 1913,
Chapter 26 The Body in a Sack, 1913,
Chapter 27 Murder of a Nurse, 1919,
Chapter 28 Riots, Strikes and Violence, 1911–19,
Chapter 29 The McKenzie Murder, 1921,
Chapter 30 A Man Beset by Demons, Lock Ah Tam, 1925,
Chapter 31 The Wallace Mystery, 1931,
Chapter 32 Wartime Crime Tales, 1939–45,
Chapter 33 Suicide in the Adelphi, 1942,
Chapter 34 The Cameo Cinema Case, 1950,
Chapter 35 After the Stash, 1951,
Chapter 36 The Rugby Player Hero, 1963,
Afterword A Walton Gaol Tale, 1946–47,
Bibliography,