The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811

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The crime has been tentatively linked to a series of similar murders known as ‘The Thames Torso Murders’ lasting from 1887 to 1889 and which saw body parts discovered from Battersea in the west to Essex in the east. Can I visit the crime scene? has all this to do with the sailors? Nothing, certainly, nothing. We beseech our readers to pardon our digression, All were found guilty and sentenced to death, although in the event May’s punishment was converted to transportation to modern-day Tasmania.

The facts in evidence against Williams were that he had had an opportunity to take the maul, that he had money after the murders but not before, that he had returned to his room just after the killer had fled the second crime scene, and that he had had bloody and torn shirts. Although an attempt was made to identify the maul and ascertain whether any of Williams's shirts had blood stains on them, the courts could not assess forensic evidence and gave great weight to eyewitnesses' statements. On December 7, 1811, on 29 Ratcliffe Highway, Timothy Marr, a linen draper, his wife, their baby, and an apprentice were killed in their shop. The adults and the apprentice all had their heads smashed, while their baby had his throat cut by the culprits. John Williams’ body was exhumed a hundred years later when a water main was installed in Cable St and his skull was kept for many years as a curiosity behind the bar in the public house at the crossroads. In recent years, The Crown & Dolphin has been converted to flats but I have not been able to discover what became of the skull. Does anyone know? The Ratcliffe (sometimes Ratcliff) Highway dates from at least Saxon Britain, running east from the City of London, London's historic core, along the top of a plateau near the edge of the eponymous "red cliff" which descended onto the low-lying tidal marshes of Wapping to the south. [2] Jamrach, the famous dealer in wild animals. According to one source the animals (including lions) were kept in cages in the basement. [3] There are few bus stops on The Highway, but London Buses routes 100 and D3 pass along short lengths of it. Route 100 connects to Shadwell, Liverpool Street, St. Paul's and Elephant and Castle, while D3 connects to the Isle of Dogs, Limehouse, Shadwell and Bethnal Green.Although this may seem bizarre, not to mention macabre, today it was at the time a common practice and one to which the authorities often turned a blind eye. On 27 August 1887, the eccentric illustrated publication Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday published an article entitled ‘ The Ratcliff Highway Murders,’ describing how:

and never says nothing to us. S'elp me Cot, vot vith railvays an' Sailors' Homes, there'll soon be no living in John Turner, a lodger at the King’s Arms pub, was escaping from an upstairs window, crying and shouting and either partially or wholly naked depending on the source. It was clear that something dramatic had happened within. 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. An inquest was held two days later at the Jolly Sailors’ public house, also on Ratcliff Highway, where the jury returned a verdict of ‘Wilful Murder, against some person or persons unknown, on each of the bodies.’ The story finally came to an end two and a half weeks later when the police located remaining members of the gang hiding out in a house in Sidney Street, but not before a firefight lasting seven hours which has also become notorious –‘the siege of Sidney Street’. Can I visit the crime scene?Mrs Celia Marr was the next victim to be discovered, ‘lying on the floor dreadfully wounded and lifeless.’ Her husband Timothy was found behind the counter in the shop, ‘bleeding, profusely about the head, with no signs of life.’ And tragically, the couple’s young son was found dead in his cradle in the kitchen. The whole sorry tale had begun on December 7th, when draper Timothy Marr set about shutting up his business on Ratcliff Highway around midnight. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1886, 41-year-old grocer Thomas Bartlett was found dead in his home in Pimlico.

This book has been written to accompany a television series of the same name and does, as a consequence jump around a little in subject matter. The book begins and ends with discussion of an essay - the first being, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" by Thomas De Quincey and finishes with an appraisal of "The Decline of the English Murder" by George Orwell. This is not really about crime, as such, although many crimes are discussed - it is about how, especially since the nineteenth century, the British began to "enjoy and consume the idea of a murder." This is the second of this author's works I have read. She has an easy to read style with a slight quirkiness, reminiscent of her presentation style on TV. I haven't seen the TV programme/series on which this book was based, but can envisage it from the structure of this book and the general style in which it comes across. For twelve succeeding days, under some groundless notion that the unknown murderer had quitted London, the panic which had convulsed the nightly Metropolis diffused itself all over the island. I was myself at that time nearly three hundred miles from London, but there, and everywhere, the panic was indescribable. This fascinating tale – of which we shall never know the truth – speaks of a Britain not so long ago when the metropolis grew rapidly and the first national media had come into existence but there was no police force yet. Nowadays, Mr Marr’s financial dealings and phone records could be scrutinised, and the maul analysed for fingerprints and DNA, and the Ratcliffe Highway (now known simply the Highway) has CCTV cameras installed.how much augmented is the suspicion of guilt against a man, who to escape justice, has recourse to self-destruction! All homicide is murder till the contrary shall be shewn. The law ranks the suicide in the worst class of murderers, and this is a case of unqualified self-murder.

It turns out that what the lower middle and working classes most wanted to do, in their leisure time, was to come face-to-face with murderers. And if that wasn’t possible, they wanted to read about them.” The rise of medical schools had created a demand for specimens, and the legal supply of executed criminals (the only bodies permitted to be used for the purpose) could not keep pace. He first discovered James Gowan, the young apprentice, who was lying on the floor about five or six feet from the stairs, just inside the shop door. The young boy’s skull was completely smashed, his blood was dripping through the floorboards, and his brains had appeared to have been pulverised and thrown about the walls and across the counters of the shop.It is our melancholy duty to record another most woeful calamity, in which a whole family has been again most savagely butchered! better housed, better fed, and higher-priced, utters no note to speak of, to redeem his keep. "They're the Matching these were two related cases which occurred in December 1910 and January 1911; the Houndsditch murders and the Siege of Sidney Street which left three police officers dead and three more seriously injured. 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.