They walked through the Pier Hill fairground. . . Description of rides and stalls from the Chelmsford Chronicle, 21 September 1894.
Little Elsie the Skirt Dancer. . . The Era of 13 July 1895 reported that a burlesque actress, a clown and a group of jugglers were also to appear in the Pavilion that night.
At low tide. . . Account of the pier adapted from Walter Besant’s description of a day trip to Southend in East London (1901).
the most notorious murderer. . . Account of James Canham Read’s crime and conviction from the London Standard of 27 June, 9 July and 8 December 1894, Morning Post of 10 July 1894, Chelmsford Chronicle of 13 July 1894, Essex Standard of 14 and 21 July 1894, Illustrated Police News of 7 July, 14 July and 24 November 1894, Evening News of 15 and 16 November 1894 and Reynolds’s Newspaper of 18 November 1894.
When Robert learned. . . In the Old Bailey, Robert’s father said that Robert ‘went to Southend to see Read’ without specifying a date. Read appeared in the Southend police court on 9 and 16 July. Robert was on the register of Stock Street school at the time, but according to his headmaster did not attend after 7 July, the day of Read’s arrest.
The killer in ‘The Bogus Broker’s Right Bower’. . . The preposterously titled The Bogus Broker’s Right Bower; or, Ralph Rolent’s (Felon 26) Tigress Shadower was one of the tuppenny magazines in Robert’s collection, a sixty-four-page Aldine O’er Land and Sea story originally published by Beadle’s Dime Library in New York on 14 March 1894.
the Balaam Street recreation ground. . . See McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough. The construction of the park cost £11,206, according to the Chelmsford Chronicle of 15 June 1894, and provided employment for some of the jobless labourers of West Ham.
games of knocking down ginger. . . In The Love of a Brother: From Plaistow to Passchendaele (2011), Percy Cearns recalls his childhood in the 1890s and 1900s: ‘What terrors of Plaistow Park Road we lads must have been. I wonder how many fruitless journeys to open front doors we have caused ladies in the neighbourhood through our propensity to play a game, colloquially known as “knocking down ginger”. “Kick can”, “buttons”, “egg cap”, “leap frog”, “robbers and thieves” were among other famous sports which we young ruffians were wont to pass our evenings.’ Percy and his brother Fred shared a bedroom, where at night they read the ‘forbidden fruit’ of penny literature by candlelight. When their father found the magazines, he confiscated them and lectured his sons about their reading habits: ‘Dad . . . always told us there were plenty of books in the bookcase to read “instead of such trash”. I am afraid we neither of us took much notice of this advice however, as we would always replace the lost copies and impatiently await the next numbers.’
From the front of the house. . . Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper of 21 July 1895 observed that Cave Road lay ‘in the open part of Plaistow, looking across the flats and the river to the Kentish hills’.
The German writer H. A. Volckers. . . In Part XII of ‘A Journey to Europe’, Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 31 July 1886.
As the eldest son. . . For boys’ chores, see Michael J. Childs, Labour’s Apprentices: Working-Class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (1992) and Edward John Urwick (ed.), Studies of Boy Life in Our Cities (1904).
There was no age restriction. . . In East London, Besant observed that East London boys smoked cheap cigarettes, known as ‘fags’, as a way of asserting their manhood. They also liked to read penny dreadfuls ‘featuring the likes of Jack Harkaway knocking down the ship’s captain on the quarter deck’, and to play cards, known locally as ‘darbs’. On boy smokers, also see Childs, Labour’s Apprentices.
When an overladen National Line vessel disappeared. . . In Cattle Ships: Being the Fifth Chapter of Mr. Plimsoll’s Second Appeal for Our Seamen (1890), the MP Samuel Plimsoll reported that the widows of the lost Erin sailors told him that only the cashier had shown them kindness. Plimsoll recorded his name as ‘Euston’, presumably a mishearing of ‘Hewson’, since John Hewson was chief cashier of the National Line at the time.
Dear Sir. . . A transcript of this letter is Exhibit A in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9.
The weather had cooled off. . . See London Daily News, 15 July 1895.
Buffalo Bill. . . The story found in Cave Road was probably Buffalo Bill; or, Life and Adventures in the Wild West, a reprint of a Beadle’s Dime Library number, published in London in 1890 by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library. The young Billy’s exploits are described in Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood, published in New York by Beadle and Adams in about 1882. Bill Cody staged his ‘Wild West’ show at Earl’s Court from June to October 1892.
Over the weekend, the election campaigning. . . See Stratford Express, 17 July, and West Ham Herald, 20 July 1895.
‘to lift the weary load. . .’ From a speech at an open-air meeting by the docks in Silvertown on Monday 8 July 1895, reported in West Ham Herald, 13 July.
‘feel that there is sunshine. . .’ From an article by the socialist MP Robert Bontine Cuninghame Graham in The Workers’ Cry, July 1891.
In 1895 some 10,000 men. . . See Stephen Inwood, City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London (2005).
Edward Leggatt had been prosecuted. . . See Essex Newsman, 6 July 1895, and Barking, East Ham & Ilford Advertiser, 13 July 1895.
an activist had accidentally blown himself up. . . This incident inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907).
A donkey. . . See Stratford Express, 17 July 1895.
‘West Ham Workers – Attention!. . .’ See Evening News, 15 July 1895.
Robert’s novelette ‘Joe Phoenix’s Unknown’. . . Joe Phoenix’s Unknown; or, Crushing the Crooks Combination was an American detective story featuring East London criminals first published by Beadle’s Dime Library in New York in 1892 and reprinted in London in 1894 by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library.
‘I certify that Mrs Emily Coombes. . .’ A transcript of Griffin’s note is Exhibit B in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9; the torn-off date is Exhibit C.
Dear Pa. . . A transcript of this letter and of the bill from Greenaway are Exhibits E and F in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9.
‘Sir,’ wrote Robert. . . A transcript of Robert’s letter to the Evening News is Exhibit D in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9.
‘£2 wanted privately. . .’ Evening News, 4 July 1895.
There was no running water. . . See London Standard, 17 July 1895.
As the polling deadline of 8 p.m. approached. . . Account of election night from West Ham Herald, Forest Gate Gazette and Leytonstone Express and Independent of 20 July and Stratford Express of 17 July 1895.
along roads lit by gas lamps. . . According to McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough, there were 1,831 gas lamps in West Ham in 1886, lighting sixty miles of streets. Charles Masterman in The Heart of Empire (1902) describes other lights in the neighbourhood: ‘At night long lines of barrows brilliant with flaring kerosene lamps contribute an element of weirdness. Past these drifts a continuous stream of tired women haggling for whelks and cauliflowers and other necessities of existence. Every corner sports the brilliantly lighted gin palace with its perpetual stream of pilgrims.’ In From the Abyss (1903), he notices ‘the wildly flaring naphtha lamps from strings of stalls in the gutters’.
CHAPTER 3: I WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH
The police discovered. . . A list of the evidence gathered by the police is in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9.
PART II: THE CITY OF THE DAMNED
CHAPTER 4: THE MACHINE AND THE ABYSS
The courthouse in West Ham Lane . . . See Clare Graham, Ordering Law: The Architectural and Social History of The English Law Court to 1914 (2003).
The ‘Sun’. . . the ‘Star’. . . On 18 July 1895.
Ernest Baggallay. . . See ‘Spy’ caricature of Baggallay, captioned ‘A Popular Magistrate’, in Vanity Fair of 13 July 1905 and obituary of Baggallay in The Times, 11 September 1931.
In Canning Town police court. . . See West Ham Herald, 20 July 1895.
> Despite the passage of the Children’s Act. . . See Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood: Child Oppression in Britain, 1860–1918 (1991) and George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England 1870–1908 (1982).
The ‘Stratford Express’ approved. . . 20 July 1895.
a street vendor in Northern Road. . . See West Ham Herald, 27 July 1895, which reported that on 23 July the vendor was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment with hard labour.
Holloway gaol. . . See Arthur Griffiths, Secrets of the Prison House: Gaol Studies and Sketches (1894); Philip Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography 1830–1914 (1985); ‘In Holloway “on Remand”’, Pall Mall Gazette, 27 October 1892; and evidence given in 1894 by George Walker (the Holloway doctor), Lt-Col Everard Stepney Milman (the governor) and Rev. George Purnell Merrick (the chaplain) in the Departmental Committee on Prisons’ Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895).
Charles Carne Lewis. . . For his appointment as coroner, see Chelmsford Chronicle, 18 August 1882. For Florence Dennis inquest, see Chelmsford Chronicle, 6 July 1894. For sewage works inquest, see Morning Post, 19 July 1895.
The room was furnished. . . See Evening News, 29 July 1895.
a double coffin. . . See Cassells Household Guide, Volume I (1880).
burial insurance. . . See Maud Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (1913) and Cassells Household Guide, Vol. I (1880).
Many of the headstones had fallen down. . . See Mrs Basil Holmes, The London Burial Grounds (1896) and the page on Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in www.londongardensonline.org.uk.
At 1 p.m. Emily’s body was lowered. . . Burial details from Daybook of Burials in Consecrated Ground, City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery, LMA: CTHC 01/056.
a fourteen-year-old boy had climbed a tree. . . See Illustrated Police News, 8 and 15 July 1895.
The penny paper ‘Lloyd’s Weekly’. . . The article was published on 21 July 1895, as was the News of the World piece. The Forest Gate Gazette, West Ham Herald and Stratford Express ran their first pieces about the crime on 20 July 1895.
the British author Hugh E. M. Stutfield. . . In an article entitled ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1895. See Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880–1900 (2000).
An ‘Illustrated London News’ reporter. . . See ‘Picturesque Aspects of the East End III’, 9 April 1892.
The French novelist Emile Zola. . . See Manchester Guardian, 3 October 1893.
The English writer Ford Madox Hueffer. . . In The Soul of London (1905).
Walter Besant. . . In East London.
‘As there is a darkest Africa. . .’ From William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890).
The American novelist Jack London. . . ‘Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting-place, than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss,’ writes London in The People of the Abyss (1903).
CHAPTER 5: A KISS GOODBYE
an interview with Mary Jane Burrage. . . See Star, 18 July 1895.
certain rumours. . . The Illustrated Police News of 27 July 1895 reported that Robert resented his mother for not giving him enough spending money, but the suggestion that Emily Coombes was a heavy drinker seems not to have appeared elsewhere in the press.
he was declared bankrupt. . . The petition against him was heard on June 1873 and his creditors received their first dividends (of 1/6d for every pound they were owed) in July 1874. See London Gazette, 27 June 1873 and 8 July 1874.
Emily was born. . . The Register for Births and Baptisms in India shows that she was born in India on 1 March 1858, the daughter of George and Tryphena Allen, both natives of Poole in Dorset. The story about the rescue on the river Indus was reported in the Illustrated Police News, 3 August 1895. Her father’s naval service is detailed in United Kingdom Merchant Navy Seamen Records 1835–1941, TNA: BT113.
Robert, their first son. . . According to his birth certificate, Robert was born in 23 Edwards Street, ten minutes’ walk north of his grandparents’ house in Three Colt Street. At the age of seven, he was enrolled at Farrance Road board school, Limehouse, where Nattie joined him a year later. See Grange Road School Admissions Register 1888–1906, Newham Archives, Stratford Library. Upon the death of the boys’ grandfather in 1882, their father temporarily moved the family into the house in Three Colt Street.
The people of East London. . . From Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Vol. 1 (1889). A docker’s wife in Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets explains why she and her family are leaving Limehouse: ‘My ’usband finds it too far to get to an’ from Albert Docks mornin’ and night. So we’re goin’ to West ’Am.’
the National Line vessels ‘England’ and ‘France’. . . See N. R. P. Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway: An Illustrated History of the Passenger Services Linking the Old World with the New (1955); Arthur J. Maginnis, The Atlantic Ferry: Its Ships, Men and Working (3rd edition, 1900); F. E. Chadwick, John H. Gould, J. D. J. Kelley, William H. Rideing, Ridgely Hunt and A. E. Seaton, Ocean Steamships: A Popular Account of their Construction, Development, Management and Appliances (1891); and John Kennedy, The History of Steam Navigation (1903).
By 1895 the company had abandoned the passenger trade. . . See Leeds Mercury, 29 December 1894.
As a chief steward. . . For details of rations, see NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France and NMM: RSS/CL/1895/29996 SS England. For a steward’s status and duties, see Frank Thomas Bullen, The Men of the Merchant Service (1900).
Coombes was paid. . . For pay of Coombes and his shipmates, see NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France and NMM: RSS/CL/1895/29996 SS England.
There was talk. . . At the annual meeting, reported the Sheffield Evening Telegraph of 28 February 1895, some shareholders suggested that the company be wound up.
a friend of Coombes. . . This was probably his wife’s brother-in-law John William Macy, an American master mariner who had married Emily’s older sister Mary in 1866. Macy was said to be a good friend of Robert Coombes senior and he was in the United States at the time.
he gave interviews to several newspapermen. . . The reports appeared in the New York Times, Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette and New York Tribune on 22 July 1895. A fanciful article also appeared in the New York Sun that day, claiming that ‘Mr Coombs stood on the porch of his little vine-covered cottage in Plaistow. . . and bade good-by to his wife and two sons’, with the words, ‘Boys, take care of your mother’.
‘I found him to be my apprentice. . .’ Letter published in West Ham Herald on 27 July 1895.
CHAPTER 6: THIS IS THE KNIFE
At six o’clock. . . For the routine at Holloway, see note to p.52.
In the prison register. . . Walker described his form of mental debility as ‘recurrent mania’ and the ‘probable cause’ as ‘?injury to head at birth’. See Report of the Commissioners of Prisons and the Directors of Convict Prisons 1895–96, for the Year Ended 31 March 1896, PP, 1896, XLIV, 235.
‘London Standard’. . . 22 July 1895.
‘Evening News’. . . 22 July 1895.
Charlie Sharman. . . Sharman was born in Great Baddow, Essex, in 1850; his father was a schoolteacher and his mother, who was blind, played organ in the village church. As a young clerk, Sharman worked in Chelmsford, Essex, but was driven out of town in 1887 after being accused of indecent assaults – see Chelmsford Chronicle, 8 May 1891. For his law suits against his former clerk, see Essex Newsman of 2 May 1891, Chelmsford Chronicle of 15 May 1891 and Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald of 16 May 1891. For his defence of the Walthamstow verger, see Chelmsford Chronicle of 23 March 1894. For his success in the general election see Chelmsford Chronicle of 20 November 1896.
‘Star’. . . 25 July 1895.
‘Evening News’. . . 26 July 1895.
To wear a shirt with a collar. . . In The Nether World (1889), George Gissing notes that navvies, scaffolders, costermongers and cab to
uts usually went collarless, while shopmen and mechanics were likely to sport collars.
On the ground floor, Orpwood explained. . . According to the criteria laid out in Joseph Rowntree’s survey of working-class housing in York in 1900, the Cave Road terrace was of the type designed for relatively well-off working-class families. The best workmen’s dwellings were slightly larger, with five rather than four rooms, but like the Coombes residence they had a bay window, cornicing, a small railed garden to the front, frontages of fifteen to seventeen foot and a scullery behind the back parlour. The front parlour in such houses was used on Sundays as a room in which to receive guests, and otherwise only occasionally – for letter-writing or music practice, for instance. See John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815–1985 (1986).
‘Sun’. . . 29 July 1895.
‘News of the World’. . . 28 July 1895.
‘Illustrated Police Budget’. . . 27 July 1895.
‘Daily Chronicle’. . . Quoted in Evening News, 27 July 1895.
Cesare Lombroso. . . For instance, in The Criminal Man – the third edition, published in 1884, drew heavily on theories of degeneration.
‘Evening News’. . . 26 July 1895.
the wicked Mr Hyde. . . In Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson describes Hyde as like ‘a schoolboy’ who casts off his burden of respectability to ‘spring headlong into the sea of liberty’. He has ‘the light step, leaping pulses and secret pleasures’ of youth, as well as being an atavistic, ‘ape-like’ creature. See Claudia Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (2012).
A group of doctors. . . Quoted in Evening News, 27 July 1895.
‘the profoundest impression. . .’ See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964).