Tag: George Yard

A stowaway from Newcastle nearly becomes another murder victim in 1888

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When John Henry Marler was brought before Mr Lushington at Thames Police court on a charge of attempted murder it must have excited some interest in the district. Marler was a sailor, recently arrived in the capital from the north east of England on the Albert, a brig out of North Shields.

The brig was probably bringing coals from Newcastle but it had at least one passenger that the captain wasn’t aware of. Mary Jane Pascod had stowed away  on board, or at least had been pressured into doing so by Marler. Marler had proposed to the young woman before he’d left for London and had urged her to accompany him. The girl was reluctant to leave and quite likely even more reluctant to marry the sailor but somehow he smuggled her onto the ship.

Mary Jane was right to be worried about the 32 year-old seaman. He had a violent temperament, especially when he’d been drinking, and the couple argued. He was 12 years older than Mary and when she told him she didn’t want to have anything more to do with him he flew into a rage and threatened her. When they docked at the Isle of Dogs he went ashore and drank heavily.

He was seen later that night by a watchman on the wharf near the Albert. Marler spoke to the watchman, saying:

‘Stop me from going on board that ship to-night. If I do, I shall kill that woman’.

The watchman (John Stacey) didn’t stop him but did notice how drunk he was, and so he followed him onto the brig. Stacey saw Marler approach where Mary Jane was hiding and draw out a knife. He was about to bring it down on the young woman when Stacey pounced, grabbed his arm and wrestled the knife away.

He told his version of events to Thames court who must have listened all the more intently, knowing that just a few days earlier there had been a brutal stabbing in the East End that had left Martha Tabram dead in George Yard, near the Whitechapel Road. Martha was, arguably, the first of the official ‘Ripper’ victims that summer and later it was suggested that a sailor (albeit a foreign one) might have been responsible for the serial murders that so shocked the nation in 1888.

Mr Lushington decided to deal with Marlee there and then, sentencing him to six months imprisonment with hard labour. He instructed the police to send a telegraph to let Mary Jane’s family and friends know she was safe but would require help in getting back home.

[from The Morning Post (London, England), Monday, August 13, 1888]

Drew’s new book (co-authored by Andy Wise) is published by Amberley Books. It is a new study of the Whitechapel murders of 1888 which offers up a new suspect, links the ‘Jack the Ripper’ killings to the unsolved ‘Thames Torso’ crimes, and provides the reader with important contextual history of Victorian London. The book is available on Amazon here

‘A Mysterious tragedy in London’, as Martha Tabram’s murder sets off the hunt for ‘Jack the Ripper’.

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“Mysterious tragedy in London”.

This is how one regional English paper reported the death of a woman in East London in early August 1888.  At that point they didn’t know that this was about to become the story of 1888 and one of the most notorious crime stories of this or any other age.

The Sheffield paper described how John Reeves was on his way to work, descending the stairs from his room in George Yard Buildings in what is now Gunthorpe Street, Whitechapel, when he came across the body of a woman. She was lying in a pool of blood and Reeves rushed off in search of a policeman. PC Barrett (26H) quickly found a doctor who examined the woman in situe.

Dr Keeling ‘pronounced life extinct, and gave it as his opinion that she had been brutally murdered, there being knife wounds on her breast, stomach and abdomen’. It was hardly a contentious conclusion to draw, the poor woman had been stabbed 49 times and only one of those blows (to the area close to her heart would have been needed to kill her.

The paper reported that the victim was ‘unknown to any of the occupants of the tenements on the landing of which’ she was found, and no one had heard ‘any disturbance’ that night. A killer had apparently struck and killed with extreme violence without anyone seeing or hearing anything.

The murder had, the paper continued, been placed in the capable hands of Inspector Reid of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), who was now ‘conducting inquiries’.  So far these inquiries had not resulted in any clues being found but that didn’t stop the press from speculating. There were dark muttering about the type of wounds that the unknown woman had suffered, some of which were described as ‘frightful’, one described as being of ‘ almost revolting nature’.

While the identity of the victim was just as much as a mystery as her assailant the papers did agree that she was ‘undoubtedly an abandoned female’. By this they meant that she was a prostitute and so speculated that her client might have killed her. Moreover it was stated that her wounds were ‘probably inflicted by a bayonet’ and so the search was soon on for one of the several soldiers seen drinking near the scene of the crime earlier that night.

The woman was Martha Tabram (or Turner) and although DI Reid followed up the soldier angle it was soon clear that no squaddie was responsible for Martha’s murder. While her death has previously been only loosely linked to the series of killings history has called the Whitechapel Murders I think we can now be fairly sure was among the first of ‘Jack the Ripper’s victims. Killers MOs develop over time and adapt to circumstance (the Zodiac killer in California in the 1960s is a good example of this) and so while Martha’s throat was not cut they are similarities in respect of the other murders in 1888-91.

I believe Martha Tabram was actually the third person that the serial killer known as ‘Jack the Ripper’ murdered, the first being over a year earlier in May 1887. Along with my co-research Andrew Wise we have set out our arguments for drawing link between the Whitechapel murders and another set of unsolved homicide (the Thames Torso mystery) which occurred at the same time. While London might have had two serial killers operating at exactly the same time we think it is unlikely and we believe we might have uncovered a possible suspect to hold responsible. Obviously proving someone is guilty after 130 plus years has passed is all but impossible and so we offer our suspect as a possible killer, not the killer.

The pursuit of Jack the Ripper has become a parlour game which anyone can play and we are not so arrogant as to believe that solving it is easy or straightforward. We’ve presented our case in our new book – Jack and the Thames Torso Murders: A New Ripper? (published by Amberley this summer) – give it a look if you are interested in finding out more about the case, our suspect, and late Victorian London. It is available in all good bookshops and online.

[from Evening Telegraph and Star and Sheffield Daily Times, Wednesday, August 8, 1888]

Cruelty to cat grabs the attention of the press while across London the ‘Ripper’ murders begin.

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The 8th August 1888 has considerable significance for anyone familiar with the so-called ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders of that year. Although the brutal killing of a woman in George Yard, near Whitechapel High Street did not make the headlines that the later murders that summer did, for many it represents the beginning of the series.

The victim, Martha Tabram, was poor and probably survived partly by prostituting herself in the back alleyways of the East End. She had supposedly been out early on the night she died with a woman named Pearly Poll although the real truth will probably never be known. Martha was stabbed 39 times, most of the wounds being made with what was described as a ‘pen knife’, the one killing blow (to her heart or sternum) was probably made with a large weapon such as a bayonet or a dagger.

Martha’s dead body was found by John Reeves on his way to work at 4.45 on the morning of the 7 August. Death was calculated to have occurred at around 2.30-2.45 in the morning. Despite an initial belief that an off duty soldier was the killer (provoking a number of inconclusive and frankly farcical identity parades) no one was identified as the murderer.

Meanwhile the everyday business of the Police Courts continued with less dramatic (but still interesting) cases coming before the magistracy. On 8 August 1888 The Standard reported an interesting case involving violence, not towards a human but towards a cat. James Moor Bowman was summoned to Bow Street Police Court (the senior magistrates court in the capital) to face a charge of cruelty. Bowman, a pub landlord,  was accused alongside his barman Richard Ellis, with setting fire to his cat.

The prosecution witnesses (‘a workman named Boothy and his wife’) claimed that they saw Bowman pour methylated spirits over the animal’s head and then ignited it. The poor creature jumped up and over Mrs Boothy’s head and ran out of the pub (The Sovereign in St Martin’s Lane).

When Mr and Mrs Boothy ‘remonstrated with the Defendants on their cruelty’ they were kicked out of the pub. The landlord even called a policeman (PC 279C) to have them taken away for causing a disturbance.

Bowman and Ellis claimed the Boothys were drunk and the policeman confirmed that they were ‘lively; in fact they were semi-intoxicated’. Bowman produced an uninjured  cat as proof the witnesses had been making it up all along. Mr Boothy declared that it was not the same cat that he had seen burned by the publican.

Bowman added that he could produce several witnesses who would testify that he wasn’t in the bar at the time the incident was supposed to have occurred. The magistrate wondered why he hadn’t brought them along immediately, to save time. Bowman told him that it was a ‘trumped up charge’ brought by two drinkers who were upset about being asked to leave when they were the worse for alcohol (as barmen were supposed to do). It was ridiculous to think that he or his barman would have set light to an animal in the middle of a busy public house.

Sir James Ingham, the Bow Street magistrate on duty agreed the whole thing was very ‘circumstantial’ but he’d like to see it disproved before he made his judgement. He adjourned the case for a week so that Bowman could produce the witnesses he promised who would show the Boothys to be liars.

To this day no one has been conclusively proved to have been the Whitechapel murderer but the ‘hunt’ goes on. This blog concentrates on the Police Courts of London across the whole of the Victorian period but when the date falls on our near to those when the ‘Ripper’ struck I shall try and find a case for that day.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, August 08, 1888]