eastlondonhistory.com

A frustratingly brief piece pops up on the radar courtesy of the Press Association, saying that seven paintings by the late East End gangster Ronnie Kray are set to be auctioned. However there’s very little in the way of what, where and by who, so if anybody knows anything, please post a comment to this story.

The works, which date from the early 1970s, in the early years of Ronnie’s life sentence, will be auctioned in Sudbury, Suffolk, on 26 July. Ronnie, who died aged 61 in 1995, and his identical twin Reggie (who died a few years later, as did older brother Charlie), was a terrifyingly violent man who used his years of incarceration to explore the other side of his character, through books, writing, art and a deal of spiritual self examination. I don’t know if the paintings are any good, but they should be interesting to see.

On 28 December 1911 a man stumbled into Leman Street Police Station and announced he had come to help the police with their enquiries into a particularly gruesome double murder … that of Hanbury Street restauranteurs Solomon and Annie Milstein.

Even the rudimentary policing standards of the day couldn’t miss the clues in this case. For as the officers searched Myer Abramovitch they found that beneath his top set of clothes was a second. Covered with blood the garments were identified as those of Solomon Milstein. Within three months, the hapless Abramovich would be dead, executed at Pentonville gaol.

The downfall of the Milsteins came about through a (relatively) honest attempt to boost their restaurant’s takings. The eaterie, at 62 Hanbury Street, never really got going, and just a few months after it opened, the takings were failing fast. So it was, in November 1911, that Solomon suggested setting up a gambling den in the basement. The game of choice was Faro.

Although it has died out now, Faro was one of England’s most popular card games during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The game was popular with the punters because it was easy to learn and offered good odds to the player. That was when it was played fairly at least. But Faro was notorious because it was so easy for the banker to rig, and games were invariably crooked. Similar to baccarat, it was banned in France but hugely popular in the Wild West; watch those Westerns and the guys in the saloon are probably playing Faro, with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday famed Faro dealers. Famous conman, card sharp and riverboat gambler Canada Bill Jones was once asked why he bothered playing at a notoriously crooked Faro game in Cairo, Illinois and replied ‘Yeah, but it’s the only game in town!’

The Milsteins’ was far from the only game in Spitalfields but it was proving mighty profitable. Every deal of the cards meant thrupence profit for the house and there was more. People started to lose of course, and then pledged their rings, watches and jewellery – which Milstein could then sell on. But Annie Milstein was unhappy. Cards she didn’t mind, but gambling was immoral. She put her foot down and Solomon and his partner Joe Goldstein reluctantly closed the school. On Boxing Day 1911, a Tuesday, they cleared out the gamblers and divvied up the last pot. Solomon, Annie and Joe took 4s 6d each (23p). A man called Hermann Leferron handed over a watch, for which he got £2 10s and he left, with the stragglers, at 12.45 on Wednesday morning, the 27^th of December.

But around 2.30am, one Marks Verbloot, who lived in the flat above the restaurant heard groans and began to smell burning. The place was on fire, with the Milsteins still inside. The police forced the door and found the pair, battered to death in their bed, with a strong smell of paraffin pervading the apartment.

Tracking down the card school wasn’t hard. Everyone came forward and every name was soon accounted for – except for 28–year-old Myer Abramovitch. But Abramovitch had barely covered his tracks. The police interviewed Lazarus Rickman, a gambler at the club, who identified a distinctive neckerchief found after the blaze as belonging to the errant Myer. And if Abramovitch had failed to come forward, he was hardly doing a good job of hiding himself. Another of the gamblers, Henry Seychur, was on the corner of Commercial Road and Leman Street on the 28^th when he spotted Myer enjoying a coffee at a stall across the road. Seychur strode over and demanded to know why Abramovitch hadn’t been to see the police, and promptly marched him to the nearby nick.

Abramovitch wasn’t happy, but made no attempt to escape. Yes the neckerchief was his, he confirmed to the detectives. They searched him and found pledged watches belonging to Leferron and Rickman. They then peeled off his suit to reveal Solomon’s blood-soaked garments beneath. It was a gruesome find – perhaps Myer had been hoping to pawn the clothes later.

The trial was a brief affair, opening at the Old Bailey on 7 February 1912 and closing just two days later. The defence claimed Abramovitch was insane, but to no avail. Mr Justice Ridley sentenced him to hang. An appeal failed too, and on Wednesday, 6 March, Myer took the drop at Pentonville, hanged by John Ellis and Albert Lumb.

May Day has many symbolic meanings. For many it is the official day of organised labour throughout the industrialised world – and the origin of our own May Day holiday. For others it marks the true arrival of spring, with celebratory dances around the Maypole. But back in 1517, East Enders saw 1 May marked by riots against immigrant workers. The shameful scenes would forever be remembered as ‘Evil May Day’.

There has often been suspicion and fear of incomers in the East End of course. In our time it has surfaced in the Blackshirt marches and the Battle of Cable Street, and most recently in the Brick Lane bomb attack. In the 16th century, the targets of ignorance were not Jews or Bangladeshis, of course. Instead it was the incoming merchants and craftsmen from Flanders, Italy, the Baltic States and France who were on the receiving end.

A study of those immigrants throws up some interesting parallels with the more recent targets of racism. Many of them were fleeing religious persecution in their home countries. And there were common characteristics shared by the new Londoners. Sylvia L Thrupp, in her essay Studies in London History, identifies “a striving towards piety and economic advancement through honest work and mutual help within the group” – a description that could equally be applied to the incoming Jews and Bangladeshis of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately hardworking newcomers are often viewed as trying to steal a piece of the existing pie, rather than creating new wealth of their own. The incoming craftsmen who settled outside the City walls in Spitalfields brought new skills and techniques, which gave them the edge over the existing cockneys. These new skills were in trades as diverse as weaving, silver and gold-smithing, jewellery making, tailoring, clockmaking and brewing. There were celebrated printers, basket makers, joiners and caterers.

Thrupp’s paper paints a fascinating picture of London’s racial mix of the time, with the Italians forming “a commercial and financial aristocracy”. There were Frenchman and Jews. Greeks, Italians and Spaniards comprised London’s physicians, and the servant class was largely made up of Icelanders.

Things would probably have settled down, with the new workers becoming assimilated, with their burgeoning businesses offering employment to the existing Londoners … and of course the existing Londoners adopting and adapting the new skills and techniques for their own advancement, were it not for the medieval version of a recession, which hit in the early 1500s.

A preacher named Dr Beal gave regular rabble-rousing rants at St Paul’s [Cathedral] Cross, a kind of Speaker’s Corner of the day. And on 1 May 1517, his target was the incoming tradesmen (though there was also a ‘denunciation to the death’ of that pagan fertility symbol the Maypole). A mob of apprentices, clerics and ruffians were roused to action by Beal’s racist polemic, and they marched toward the East End, led by a disillusioned broker named John Lincoln.

As they reached the East End itself, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, Sir Richard Cholmley, had his men fire on the rabble in an attempt to turn them back, and the Earls of Surrey and Suffolk rode in with their troops, seizing 400 prisoners.

Justice was swift and brutal. Lincoln and his fellow leaders were hung, drawn and quartered, their remains gibbeted as a reminder to others. The surviving prisoners were charged with the treasonable offence of “breaking the peace of Christendom”, another capital crime. Henry VIII was all for hanging the lot of them, but intercessions by his queen, Catherine, and Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, secured their pardons. The prisoners “took the halters from their necks and danced and sang”.

And the incomers gradually assimilated themselves into the life of London – inter-marrying, bringing their children up as East Enders and, in time, becoming East Enders themselves.

A few weeks ago we looked at the career of Monty Norman – East End composer, creator of the James Bond theme, and chronicler of the seamy underworld of London life.

One of his sources of inspiration was the unlikely character of Dr Crippen. But far more likely was the subject of his 1972 show Stand and Deliver – because Jack Sheppard was probably the most notorious and slippery East End villain of them all.

But Sheppard’s fame lay not in the nature of his crimes – but in the inability of the authorities to keep him confined. Jack escaped from Newgate and other jails on no fewer than six occasions, making him one of the most celebrated anti-heroes of his day.

He was born in White’s Row, Spitalfields in 1702 and was placed early in the Bishopsgate workhouse, before entering an apprenticeship with a carpenter. The indenture period was long – indeed Jack served six years of his apprenticeship before cutting loose just ten months before his time was served. He immediately turned to thieving, and in 1724 was imprisoned in St Giles Roundhouse.

Within three hours he was out, and the Sheppard legend began. He cut open the roof and lowered himself to the ground outside, using a rope he had fashioned from a sheet and blanket. He lost himself in the crowd and disappeared.

He surfaced again a few weeks later, lifted for pickpocketing in Leicester Fields – near the present day Leicester Square. Thrown into prison he was restrained with irons, but sawed through them, broke the chains and bored through an oak bar nine inches thick. Sheppard may have been a lousy thief, but his escapology was becoming almost supernatural, and the prison officers kept the broken pieces “to testifie and preserve the memory of this extraordinary event and villain”.

Jack was on the run for three months, before famed ‘thief taker’ Jonathan Wild ran him in. Sheppard went to Newgate, his sentence death. He was thrown into the condemned hold. It should have been tough to escape but Sheppard had smuggled in a spike, and with it began boring through the wall. Accomplices were doing the same job on the other side, and soon he was free, mingling with the Bartholomew Fair holiday crowds, and escaping into the Smithfield streets.

He popped up again just days later, robbing a watchmakers in Fleet Street. This time, back in Newgate, he was “fastened to the floor with double fetters”. He had become a celebrated prisoner, and the wealthy came to view him in his cell. Sheppard in turn jibed and abused them. The anxious warders frisked Jack regularly, and finding a file that had been smuggled in, moved him to an even more secure cell within the jail.

Of course, he escaped again. He slipped his wrists through his cuffs, and sprung his locks with a nail. He used his chains to prise out a chimney brick and escaped into the room upstairs. It was then a minute’s work to spring the door lock and, finding himself on the roof of the jail, he swung down to freedom, using his blanket as a rope.

He spent the next days lording it in London. Robbing a Drury Lane pawnbroker and hiring a coach and fine clothes with the spoils.

Two weeks later he was back in custody. The “most numerous croud of people that ever was seen in London” heard the judge sentence him to death for a second time. This time he was to be hanged within the week, the authorities panicking that any longer and he would escape again.

But though a penknife was confiscated from him on the way to the scaffold at Tyburn, his escapes were at an end. Sheppard met his maker at the end of a rope.

The legend continued however. A century later a report looked at the educational levels of East End children. Henry Mayhew’s 1840 document noted that poor children who had never heard of Moses or Queen Victoria had “general knowledge of the character and course of life of Dick Turpin, the highwayman, and more particularly of Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison breaker”.

Some villains drift into crime through circumstance or misfortune and some, like East End boy George Smith, seem born to it.
Smith was born at 92 Roman Road on January 11, 1872
and was just nine years old when he received his first custodial sentence – eight years in a Gravesend Reformatory. It was a criminal career that
was to conclude more than 30 years and at least three murders later, on the scaffold of Maidstone Gaol.
Smith received several
short sentences for theft between his eventual release and signing up for the Northampton Regiment in the early 1890s. But in 1896, his true modus operandi was emerging – exploiting women for financial gain.
In that year he received
12 months for persuading a woman to steal from her employers. He used the money to open a baker’s shop in Leicester. It was Smith’s final brush with genuine work, and the start of his tireless travels around England in search of more victims.
Bigamy
He married Caroline Thornhill in 1898, bigamously adding a second wife in 1899. She described his appeal:
“He had an extraordinary power; this power lay in his eyes. You had the feeling you were being magnetised, they were little eyes that seemed to rob you of your will.”
And robbing was Smith’s aim. He persuaded Caroline to steal a set of silver spoons from her employer, Smith acting as a receiver. The hapless pair were arrested, Smith getting two years on her evidence.
On his release in 1903, the vengeful husband went after Caroline, who fled to Canada to escape him.
The angry Smith returned to his bigamous bride, cleared out her bank account, and left.
It’s unknown how many more women Smith conned over the subsequent years. Certainly in 1908 he met and married Florence Wilson, a widow from Worthing, in the space of three weeks. He took her straight to the nearest Post Office, withdrew her £30
savings, went off to get a newspaper and walked out of her life, returning to clear out their Camden digs en route.

Next arriving in Bristol, he swiftly married Edith Pegler. Smith would disappear for months at a time, saying he
was off to Bedford, Southend, Croydon or Luton to sell antiques, and always returning with money.
Never returned
In October 1909, he married Sarah Freeman from South-ampton. He used the same scam as on Florence Wilson – clearing out her Post Office account before selling her war bonds and pocketing £400. He took Sarah to the National Gallery, nipped off to the toilet, and never returned.
But larceny turned to murder when he met Bessy Mundy in Bristol in 1912. The pair moved to Herne Bay, where Smith consulted a solicitor about how he could get his hands on Bessy’s £2,500 inheritance, despite the resistance of her family. A bequest seemed the only way, and the pair made their wills.
Smith’s plan seems transparent to us today. He repeatedly called the doctor about his wife’s ‘fits’ though she had no recollection of these, and he immediately bought a bath for their hotel room – a bath in which Bessie was found dead days later. No post mortem was held and the inquest decided it was misadventure.
Smith should have been rich, with his £2,500 inheritance, but he could never hold on to his spoils. In November 1913 he married Alice Burnham in Portsmouth. He swiftly had her life insured for £500, emptied her account, and took her
on holiday to Blackpool. He rejected a first hotel for not having a bath.
Drowned in bath
The next day, Alice was dead, drowned in the tub of their guest house. The landlady, Mrs Crossley, was appalled by Smith’s callousness – immediately selling his wife’s effects and refusing a deal coffin because “when they’re dead they’re done with”.
Along the way, Smith certainly conned many more women, but there was to be one final murder.
On December 15, 1915, Margaret Lofty went out for tea… and never returned. She had bumped into Smith, and within days they were married and moved to London. At 8pm on Friday 18, the couple’s Highgate landlady, Louise Blatch, heard a furious splashing from the bath upstairs,
followed by a gurgle, a sigh and then silence. Moments later she heard Smith playing the harmonium in the front room. The tune – ‘Nearer My God To Thee’.
Finally Smith had gone too far. The report of the inquest in the News of the World newspaper caught the eye of Mrs Crossley and Alice Burnham’s father. The similarities were too great and the pair called Scotland Yard.
Smith’s career of crime soon unravelled as the Yard travelled the country amassing evidence. He was convicted of the three murders – though there may have been more – and carried unrepentant, kicking and screaming to the scaffold on Friday, August 13, 1915.

When the battered body of Leon Beron was discovered on Clapham Common on New Year’s Day 1911, it was to set in motion the most notorious murder trial of the day.
And it was to provide a day in court for some of the
East End’s most colourful characters… and least reliable witnesses.
The case also dragged in the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, allegations of spying and sinister implications with the recent Sidney Street siege and the Houndsditch Murders.
Slum landlord
Beron wasn’t universally loved – as a slum landlord he was unlikely to be. He owned nine decaying houses in Russell Court, Stepney, which provided him with 10 shillings (50p) a week, enough to pay his own two shillings rent on 133 Jubilee Street, Stepney, and provide the one and sixpence a day for his meals
at the Warsaw Kosher Restaurant at 32 Osborn Street, Whitechapel.
It was at the Warsaw that Beron began to be seen in the company of Steinie Morrison, in December 1910. Morrison was another Russian Jew, who had arrived in England in 1898. Where he arrived from wasn’t certain – he claimed to be Australian and also used the pseudonyms Alexander Petro-pavloff, Morris Stein and Moses Tagger. What was certain was that he was a professional thief, who had already served five sentences for burglary.
Prompt arrest
Beron was found in gorse bushes on the Common, his head staved in by a blunt instrument, his legs neatly crossed, his wallet emptied, and a curious ‘S’ mark carved into each cheek. They were, observed the police surgeon, “like the f holes on a violin”.
It took the police just seven days to pick up Morrison, arresting him as he tucked into his breakfast at Cohen’s Restaurant, in Fieldgate Street.
They had quickly discovered that he had been working at Lavender Hill, so might know the Common well. They also discovered that on the morning of New Year’s Day, Morrison, using yet another pseudonym of Banman, had lodged a revolver and 45 bullets at the left luggage office of St Mary’s Railway Station, in Whitechapel.
They also discovered that he had moved in with a Lambeth prostitute, Florrie Dellow,
on January 1 – after telling his Newark Street landlady that he was off to Paris.
All very suspicious, but also all circumstantial evidence.

The defence and prosecution witnesses were as unreliable as each other. Beron’s brother Solomon attempted to physically attack defence counsel Edward Abinger when he implied he might have had something to do with Leon’s death.
Unreliable evidence
Meanwhile, 16-year-old Janie Brodski backed Morrison’s alibi – that he had spent the night at the Shoreditch Empire watching Harry Champion and Harry Lauder. She claimed that she and her sister had paid on the door for seats in the stalls at a shilling each.
Unfortunately, the theatre manager confirmed that the seat prices had been raised to 1s 6d (71/2p) for the night, and had all been sold out days in advance.
Add in the unreliable and conflicting evidence of a number of cab drivers placing Morrison at the murder scene (by now his photo and offers of a reward had appeared in the newspapers) and it is difficult to see how any court could reasonably convict him.
Abinger attempted to cloud the waters further. He implied that Beron was a police informant who had been assassinated for grassing on the anarchists responsible for the Houndsditch Murders and the Sidney Street siege. The ‘S’ marks stood for the Polish word ‘spiccan’ or spy, he suggested.
The policeman in charge, DI Wensley, scoffed at the theory, and the jury took 35 minutes to find Morrison guilty of murder. The judge had no option but to pass the death sentence, saying: “May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
“I decline such mercy!” shouted Morrison. “I do not believe there is a God.”
The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction but the Home Secretary was not so sure. Churchill commuted Morrison’s sentence to life.
Ironically, it was a decision the prisoner himself would not accept. He repeatedly appealed to be put to death and, on January 24, 1921, weakened by a series of hunger strikes, he died in Parkhurst Prison.

Samuel Dougal was devoid of morals, a psychopath with no conscience and a murderer none to careful about covering his tracks.
That he got away with murder for years was down to his unquenchable self-confidence and magnetic charm.
Dougal was born in Bow in 1846, finished school and secured a job as an apprentice in a civil engineer’s office.
But the young man was in search of fun, not regular employment. When his debts, his drinking, his womanising and his father started to catch up with him, he ran off to join the Army, enlisting at Chatham in 1866.
For 21 years he toured the world with the Royal Engineers, serving in Wales, Ireland, Nova Scotia, and finishing his service at Aldershot in 1887, where he was quartermaster-sergeant and chief clerk.
His military career was spotless but his home life was not so good. He had married one Miss Griffiths in 1869. The couple had four children, but she had to endure his drunkenness and violence for 16 years.
Then, in June 1885, she suddenly fell violently ill. 12 hours later she died in agony.
Violent death
Dougal returned to England on leave just two months later, with a new wife. In October she was dead too, after a bout of violent vomiting.
Both women were buried within 24 hours of death. And, as both occurred on military property, neither body was subject to post mortem.
In 1887, the regiment returned to England, Dougal with another woman, though this time they didn’t marry. She had a baby, but was so beaten by Dougal that she fled back to Halifax, posing as a widow.
The decommissioned soldier moved through a quick succession of Civvy Street jobs – publican, steward of a Conserva-tive club, surveyor, clerk, salesman and storekeeper.
There were even more women than jobs. He fathered two more children with a young widow, but again the violence was so much that she fled.
He ran a pub in Ware, Hertfordshire, supported by an elderly woman and her cash. When the house ‘accidentally’ burned down in 1889, Dougal anticipated an insurance payday but instead wound up in St Albans Crown Court, charged with arson.
The lucky Dougal escaped due to lack of evidence and skipped off back to Ireland, where he met and married Sarah White in 1892. The
third Mrs Dougal bore him two children.

By 1898, Dougal was without a wife again and his youngest child was dead after suffering convulsions.
Spinster’s fortune
Camille Holland was a spinster of 55 when she had the misfortune to bump into Dougal at the Earl’s Court Exhibition that year. She had recently come into an inheritance of £6,000 – an enormous amount for the time.
Dougal persuaded Miss Holland to invest in Moat House Farm, outside Saffron Walden, in January 1899.
There was a succession of servant girls, most driven out by his drunken sexual advances. The last, Florrie Havies, was also the last person to see Camille Holland alive.
On 19 May, Miss Holland said she was off to do some shopping – her whereabouts would remain a mystery for another four years.
Unexpected exit
Dougal told Florrie that her mistress had unexpectedly boarded a train to London and had written saying she would soon return.
Remarkably, though rumours flourished and Dougal’s behaviour got no better, nobody chose to dig any deeper until April 1903.
In the intervening years, Dougal had forged cheques to siphon money from Camille’s bank accounts, transferred the deeds of Moat House to himself, moved Sarah White in as his daughter, and impregnated another servant, Kate Cranwell.
But the police were finally closing in. On Friday 13 March, 1903, Dougal moved out of the farm with Kate Cranwell’s sister, Georgina, also pregnant. The pair took the train to Liverpool Street and then on for a weekend of pleasure in Bournemouth.
Dougal was eventually apprehended not by the police, but by a sharp-eyed bank clerk, who called officers when the killer tried to change some £10 notes at the Bank of England.
The police moved in to Moat House, digging up the farmyard and, on 27 April, Miss Holland’s corpse was found in a drainage ditch.
Dougal’s defence in court was typically confident if implausible. He claimed he had been unloading his gun, when it accidentally went off. Panicking, he had hidden her body in the ditch.
The father of 11, husband of three and lover of many more was hanged at Chelmsford Gaol on July 8, 1903.

The London bobby on the beat is probably the most famous figure of the hundreds of police forces worldwide.
When home secretary Robert Peel finally forced through his Metropolitan Police Bill in 1828, after six years of Parliamentary and public resistance, he established a properly organised, city-wide law enforcement service for the first time.
Their distinctive blue uniform and top hats were chosen to emphasise to a hostile populace that this wasn’t an army set up to control the general public. Despite riots and attacks on the new force, the ‘Peelers’ were here to stay.
But it’s a common misconception that the Met – replacing the rag bag of detective agencies, watchmen and Bow Street Runners which patrolled the old London – was the first modern force. That honour goes to the Thames River Police, established some 30 years earlier. As so often before, the East End led the way, and certainly had a more pressing crime problem!

Silks, rum, tobacco

In the 1700s, London became the busiest and most important port in the entire world, sitting as it did at the hub of a huge new empire. The West Indies, the Americas, the Far East and India – all were stations in this huge global enterprise by British merchants. And as a result, tea, coffee, sugar, rum, spices, silks, furs, tobacco and many other valuable commodities flooded through the wharves of Wapping.
The East End had a valuable inshore trade, too, with coal from Newcastle and fishing fleets landing hauls from the North Sea. The merchants of Wapping flourished… but so did the thieves.
Some of the inbound ships never made it to the Pool of London. Pirates operating further down the Thames toward Tilbury would waylay the vessels as they came in.
Wapping locals would have all the time in the world to observe craft being laden with outgoing goods during the working day and would brief the pirates, who would intercept the unfortunate captains at night. Robbery with violence was the norm – any resistance would be dealt with at knifepoint.

Stolen goods

The processing of the stolen booty was a highly organised Wapping business in itself, with 12 factories in the town receiving the goods and selling them on throughout the City.

But the greatest criminal element was within the docks themselves. There were around 33,000 lumpers, as the 18th century dockers were known, and 11,500 of them were known thieves. With no organised force to patrol the river, the assorted band of mudlarks, long apron men, scuffle hunters, light horsemen and heavy horsemen (as the various types of thief were colourfully known) were free to steal without fear of capture.
The Rum Boat Act of 1761 was intended to prevent theft but was never enforced. Fortunately, in 1797, a man came along with a vision and a plan to establish law and order on the river.
John Harriot, a mariner and a ‘man of many parts’, constructed a plan for a force and took it to the Lord Mayor of London. The Mayor, also Conservator of the River, amazingly declared it to be of ‘no concern to London’.
Undeterred, Harriot teamed up with Patrick Colquhoun, an energetic Scot from Dumbarton who had founded the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, the first in the UK. Colquhoun was now a London magistrate and worked with Harriot to set up the Marine Police Establishment. On July 26, 1798, the office was set up at 259 Wapping New Stairs – as near as possible to the vulnerable incoming craft.
Businessmen such as the West India Planters, which alone reckoned to be losing an astonishing £250,000 a year from theft, breathed a sigh of relief. The first modern police force had been born.
Patrols in rowing galleys commenced from Wapping, and the present headquarters of Thames Division still occupies this site.
The force cut cargo losses and led to the arrest of so many criminals that on October 16, 1798, a riot took place and an attempt was made to destroy the court building. During the riot two police officers were shot – one in the hand and the other subsequently died from his wounds.
The police officers were ordered by Harriot to fire into the crowd. The crowd dispersed and Dr Colquhoun set a legal precedent by allowing one hour to elapse before pursuing the ring leaders of the riot who were by this time known to the authorities. One was hanged and a further six were transported.
The Marine Police became an officially recognised body in 1800 when parliament passed a Bill to run for seven years. This was extended for a further seven years in 1806.

In 1907 a petrol/paraffin engine was developed at Wapping and was first installed into the rowing galleys. This unfortunately affected the balance of the craft and several capsized – leading to the death of one officer.
In 1914, purpose-built craft were in use, and a civilian engineering and carpenters workshop was opened, releasing the police officers to do what they do to this day: patrolling the river, keeping users safe and catching crooks.

Visit the Thames River Police Museum, 98 Wapping High Street, E1 (tel: 020 7481
1212). The archives contain
a comprehensive collection
of photos, documents
and artefacts.

In the days when murder meant the death penalty, some killers went to the scaffold in hysterics, some in calm acceptance of meeting their maker, and some making angry assertions of their innocence.
But William Seaman went to the rope with a wry joke – observing that it was the first time in his life he’d ever managed to act as a peacemaker.
One day in 1896, the stabbed and beaten bodies of John Goodman Levy and his housekeeper Sarah Gale were discovered at Goodman’s home at 31 Turner Street, which runs between Commercial Road and Whitechapel Road.
Take a walk down Turner Street today and you’ll see that number 31, on the corner with Varden Street, has been converted into a clothing factory – one of a handful of garment works in a street that mixes
the rag trade, modern housing and derelict Victorian homes, all nestling behind the London Hospital.
But look across the road at 33 Turner Street and you will get a picture of what the
murder site looked like, before bombs and redevelopment redrew the geography of this East End thoroughfare.
The crime was discovered when a neighbour saw what she thought was a prowler nipping over the backyard wall in Varden Street as darkness fell one night.
Hideous
She called the police, but before the constables had arrived, an excited crowd had already gathered round the front step, alerted by the gruesome sight of blood seeping out from under the door.
The arriving policemen broke down the door to encounter a hideous sight. Levy lay stabbed just inside the hallway. They then ran upstairs to find Sarah Gale, also knifed, in one of the
bedrooms.
The motive for the crime seemed obvious. The 77-year-old Levy was notorious in the district as a fence, and rumour had it he had a huge stash of ill-gotten money secreted in number 31.
The rooms showed signs of being ransacked – the unfortunate Mrs Gale, 35,
had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The puzzled constables could not see the protagonist anywhere. It was left to Detective Sergeant Wensley – later to rise to be the first Assistant Commissioner of
the Met – to spot the villain.
It was a piece
of detection that brought him widespread fame in the tabloids of the day. But Wensley drily remarked that it hadn’t taken a very astute piece of sleuthing. There was a huge hole in the ceiling, and when the young policeman climbed on a chair to see what was occurring he spotted a figure disappearing through another hole onto the roof of the house.
Wensley and his constables pursued the intruder onto the roof. There, Seaman – for it was he – realised he could not escape, and risked a 40-foot jump to the pavement, reckoning that the gathered crowd of ghouls would soften his fall. Cursing the watchers as Jews, he flung himself down, slightly injuring a number and breaking both his legs in the process.
Amateurish
Meanwhile, in Bath, Albert Millsom and Henry Fowler had been arrested after their amateurish attempts to cover up the murder of Henry Smith, in Muswell Hill. They were sentenced to hang for the crime, but Millsom, believing that his accomplice intended
to turn Queen’s Evidence, repeatedly tried to attack him in court.
Such was Millsom’s venom, that the authorities feared – rather ironically – for Fowler’s wellbeing. And so, when the pair were hanged, the pro-
tagonist of the Turner Street Murders was executed between them. It was the
first time in his life, Seaman jokingly noted, that he’d ever been a peacemaker.

The life of a middle-class businessman in Victorian times had to be whiter than white. In those pre-permissive days, any hint of scandal could prove fatal to the reputation of the bourgeoisie.
Of course, that didn’t mean that all Victorians behaved with propriety. Behind many respectable front doors lurked violence, sexual licence and – in the case of Henry Wain-wright – murder.
Wainwright seemed to be the epitome of hard-working Victorian respectability. He lived in style at 40 Tredegar Square, with his wife and four children, and ran a brushmaking business at 84 Whitechapel Road, with a warehouse opposite at number 215.
Henry loved the theatre. The Pavilion was sited right next door to the brushworks and he often invited performers to Tredegar Square for dinner. Often, they would perform and recite in the Wainwrights’ drawing room.
However, his interest in the actresses went beyond the purely artistic, and he would entertain the younger, prettier ones at a succession of addresses around the East End. When he met pretty hatmaker Harriet Lane he decided to set up a lovenest for the two of them, well away from the grand Georgian facades of Tredegar Square.
First he took an apartment at 70 St Peter’s Street – the street is demolished today,
but ran along the same course as the modern Warner Place. He then moved Harriet to
the West End, before bringing her back to Stepney’s Sidney Square.
But Wainwright soon tired of his lover. Hoping to avoid fuss and scandal, he devised an elaborate plot to be rid of her, asking his brother Thomas to court her. To add to the confusion, Thomas adopted the
curious pseudonym of Teddy Frieake – much to the anger of the real owner of the name, an auctioneer who was a friend of the Wainwrights.

What went wrong with the plan is uncertain. What is known is that Henry killed Harriet, battering her with a hammer and shooting her three times in the head. She was then interred in Henry’s Whitechapel Road warehouse.
Wainwright’s life was rapidly falling apart. His business collapsed and he decided to leave Whitechapel Road for cheaper premises in Borough High Street. The only problem was Harriet. The stench of her decaying body was beginning to drift from the warehouse and into nearby Vine Court.
Henry decided to take the evidence with him. He dug up the corpse, dismembered it and packed it neatly into paper parcels, even enlisting his employee, Alf Stokes, to help him lug the packages into the Whitechapel Road. The smell was unmistakable, but despite Alf’s protests, Wainwright left him guarding the parcels while he went to find a taxi. The suspicious Stokes sneaked a look in the top parcel and was appalled to uncover a human hand.
Wainwright took his cab. Flushed with the success of his plan, he even invited Alice Dash, a chorus girl at the nearby Pavilion Theatre, to share the ride to his new premises. Henry lit a cigar and the two set off for Borough, while the distraught Stokes ran behind, desperately trying to find
a policeman to arrest the
murderer.
It wasn’t until the procession reached Leadenhall Street that Stokes managed to find a PC. Two coppers dismissed Alf’s tale as the ravings of a madman, and it wasn’t until the cab and Stokes crossed London Bridge and entered Borough High Street that the hapless warehouseman managed to persuade a pair of constables to stop the taxi.
The audacious Wainwright refused to open his parcels. “Why do you interfere with me,” he demanded. “I’m only going to see an old friend.” As the pair persisted, the desperate Wainwright said: “Say nothing about this, ask no questions and here’s £50 for each of you.”
The officers nevertheless opened the parcel to find the year-old dismembered parts of Harriet’s body.
Henry didn’t stand a chance. His brother admitted writing a letter in the name of Teddy Frieake to provide Henry with an alibi, as well as buying the chopping block and spade used in the disposal of the body.
Henry still protested his innocence, only recanting immediately before his hanging, even agreeing that death was a fair sentence.
Stokes received a £30 reward and set himself up in business, while Alice became lead dancer at the Pavilion.