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

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The court finally declared Williams guilty of the crimes, taking his suicide as a clear statement of his guilt. The cases against other suspects collapsed and, although Williams had not previously been connected with the murders of the Marr family, he was deemed the sole perpetrator of both. New Scotland Yard can still be found close to Westminster station, the best view of the Victorian buildings being from Derby Gate. The four victims were given a memorial service, then buried beneath a monument in the parish church of St. George in the East, where the infant had been baptised three months earlier. When the maul was cleaned on Thursday 19 December it appeared that some initials were carved into the handle, perhaps with a seaman's coppering punch: "I.P." or "J.P." Those who were working on the case now had a way to try to trace the owner. 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. The Ratcliffe Highway murders and subsequent political infighting, along with the build-up to Ablass turning pirate, are only slowly replaced by detection and a hunt for the killer. Meanwhile the reader must negotiate exposition along the lines of "Aaron Graham is the magistrate of Bow Street in the fashionable West End of town, and as such has some right to consider himself the lead magistrate in London and Westminster, though no such seniority exists in official point of fact and in any case Graham would never be graceless enough to dwell on it."

Returning about half an hour later, having been unable to buy the oysters, Margaret found ‘the shop shut up, and the door fastened.’ Ringing ‘violently at the bell,’ no one answered, and instead the attention of a nearby watchman was gained. 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. The Ratcliffe Highway murders brought to public attention the limited abilities of London's fragmented police forces, and were one of the factors that led toward the formation of the Met in the years to come. Two hundred years later and Ratcliffe itself has disappeared (although, in another of Google Maps' curious quirks, it's still listed as an area of East London). Yet in a city that often seems fixated on the macabre, the brutal nature of these crimes, and their unsolved nature, has propped the mystery up over the centuries. And in an added extra for the student of East End crime, it stands next to an adjoining house which bears the famous year of 1888 above its door. 6. Thomas Briggs, Britain’s first railway murder

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In the early hours of 3rd January a long file of police officers wound their way through the silent streets of the East End to Sidney Street, which runs from Commercial Road in the south to the junction of Whitechapel and Mile End Roads to the north. The officers had not been told what their mission was but they knew that it was dangerous because the married men had been excluded. Some were armed but their weapons, antique revolvers, tube rifles and shotguns, were more suited to a museum than a gun battle. Williams, via his final desperate act, had essentially condemned himself, leaving the coroner Unwin to ‘consign the body of this self-murderer to that infamy, and disgrace which the law has prescribed.’ A verdict of felo de se – felon of himself – was given. Tellingly, Mr. Atkins, ‘the keeper of the prison, was so indisposed,’ that he could not attend the inquest. The Kentish Gazette, 31 December 1811, detailed yet more suspects. Sylvester Dryscoll was arrested because some ‘bloody breeches [were] found in his possession.’ A groom named Anthony Aldmond was taken into custody because:

In a fashion, although the Ratcliffe Highway (now simply named The Highway) has changed a lot since 1811. This leaves space for the reader to worry about historical details, whereas in the second half of the book, with the narrative firmly under way, the pace is so efficiently ratcheted up as to preclude all mundane questions. Until then, characters anachronistically travel by carriage when they would be far more likely to have used the river; a man reads the inscription on a coin in the street at night, quite a feat before gas lighting. More troubling is a writing style that tips from the colourful into the bizarrely baroque with phrases that sound wonderful, but don't appear to have any meaning: "the Great Public Leviathan was up and out of its chair and scooping down the atmosphere with a gigantic spoon"; or my favourite, "But revolution, like sodomy, was just another form of desire". Worsley is Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces but is best known as a presenter of BBC Television series on historical topics, including Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency (2011), Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls (2012), The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain (2014), A Very British Romance (2015), Lucy Worsley: Mozart’s London Odyssey (2016), and Six Wives with Lucy Worsley (2016). And even a month later, Bell’s Weekly Messengeron 19 January 1812 reports how‘The public mind continues naturally alive to every farther search and discovery respecting the late horrible murders.’

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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. Their relationship soon overstepped the boundaries of churchman and parishioner, allegedly with Thomas’ agreement and even encouragement. John Williams became a main suspect in the case after the maul that had been used in the Marr family murder was linked to a sailor who lodged at the Pear Tree Inn, where Williams also stayed. He had the opportunity to take the maul, whilst his behaviour after the murders was seen as suspicious, and his clothing was reported to be torn and bloody.

I was born in Reading (not great, but it could have been Slough), studied Ancient and Modern History at New College, Oxford, and I've got a PhD in art history from the University of Sussex. Ablass was a seaman who had sailed with Williams aboard Roxburgh Castle. He had a history of aggressive behaviour and had been involved in the unsuccessful mutiny aboard the ship, and was placed in confinement afterwards, while Williams was thought to have simply been led astray by his shipmates. Ablass was drinking in company with Williams at The King's Arms on the night of the murders, and was a far better match for Turner's description of the killer. He was also lame, matching the earlier eyewitness description of one of the men running up the Highway after the first murders, and was unable to account for some of his time on the nights of both murders. He was detained as a suspect. When evidence emerged that Marr, Williams and Ablass had all served together as seamen before Marr went into business on his own, it was suggested that there were links, and possibly old scores to settle, between the three. Twelve days after the first murders, on 19th December, the fears of the neighbourhood were realised. Another three people were killed inthe King’s Arms public house at 81 New Gravel Lane, a little further along Ratcliffe Highway. The publican, John Williamson, his wife, Elizabeth, and a servant, Bridget Anna Harrington, were all murdered during the night in a similarly violent manner to the Marrs. There was no apparent link between the two households and the local people were terrified the murderer might strike again, perhaps killing a family at random. More rewards were offered and the murders made national news. This year is the 200th anniversary of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, when seven people were killed in a gratuitous frenzy in the space of 12 days. But while 19th century Londoners would have recoiled at the mention of John Williams and his crimes, they probably mean little to the city’s present day inhabitants.Inside were the bodies of the publican, John Williamson, his wife Elizabeth, and barmaid Bridget Harrington – once again all battered to death, and on this occasion each with their throat cut. Crowbar, chisel murder weapons 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.’

Ask any Londoner of a certain age to name a famous missing person, and you will receive the same answer – Lord Lucan.Timothy Marr, who was in his twenties, ran a silk mercer’s shop at 29 Ratcliffe Highway, where he lived with his wife Celia, their three-month-old son, also Timothy, his apprentice James Gowan and their servant Margaret Jewell. His relationship to the Romantics is sometimes neglected, mainly because the world he conjured was so completely at odds with Wordsworth’s natural reveries. If earlier biographers like Lindop helped rescue De Quincey from his exclusive affiliation with drug culture and set him once again alongside the Romantics, Wilson makes it clear just how close that connection was. Guilty Thing’s chapter titles are all based on the section titles of Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” the Romantic opus that also provides epigraphs for nearly every chapter. And in many ways De Quincey was the archetypal Romantic hero—a young man, ferociously intelligent and precociously studious, discovering himself through a life of letters. But whereas Wordsworth would rely on nature as his muse, De Quincey’s was the city, pulsating and filled with danger—if he wandered lonely, it was not as a cloud but as smog. When more light was brought in, the carpenter’s lost chisel was found upon the shop counter but it was perfectly clean.