At half-past 11 at night John Harris was attempting to sell copies of a local newspaper. There had been a murder in Notting Hill that had seized the attention of the reading public and, like any good salesman, Harris knew he had to capitalise while the news was ‘hot’. However, the area around Goldbourne Road was a quiet one and the vendor was disturbing the peace.

He was soon discovered by a policeman on his beat. He was shouting: ‘the dreadful murder at Notting Hill: verdict and sentence of the prisoner’ at the top of his voice. There were residents at their windows calling for the policeman to make him stop his racket. PC Gallagher approached him and when he refused to stop shouting (saying he ‘had to wake Notting Hill up to sell his papers’ ) he asked him for his name and address.

Harris replied: ‘Artful Bill, commonly known at the East End as the Scarlet Runner’.

This didn’t satisfy the constable who arrested him and took him back to the station. Having spent an uncomfortable night in the cells Harris was brought before Mr Paget at Hammersmith Police Court.

He was not a happy man. He ‘told the magistrate that he was traded worse than a felon, and locked up all night’. Mr Paget understood that he needed to sell his papers and accepted that some people might have liked to have read the breaking news, but…

it was ‘a great nuisance, particularly when the men [newspaper vendors I presume he meant] cried out all sorts of things that had not taken place’. Fake news in 1881?

Given that Harris had already been punished by being incarcerated in the local nick Mr Paget discharged him. Hopefully he found a different pitch to flog his news from in future.

The murder in question took place in May that year and in Goldbourne Road. Some of the occupants of number 48 were awaked by the smell of smoke and discovered the building was on fire. It seems to have been building of multiple occupation that opened on both Goldborne Road and Portobello Road. There was a shop on the Portobello side and the fire seems to have started there. Two people (William Nash and Annie Maria Weight) were charged with the murder of Elizabeth Clark who died in the fire, but it seems that several others were also consumed by the flames. The motive seems to have been insurance; Nash’s business (as a furniture dealer) was in trouble and he and his wife (the other accused – presumably not officially married so tried under her maiden name) may have set a fire to claim against their policy with the Yorkshire Fire Insurance Company (worth upwards of £120).

The jury acquitted Annie but found her husband guilty. They recommended him to mercy on the grounds that they didn’t believe he intended to cause death. That would have been small compensation to those that lost their lives, their loved ones or their homes. The judge sentenced Nash to death but he was later reprieved.

[from The Standard, Saturday, August 06, 1881]