You have to wonder what was the eventual fate of this unfortunate baby girl — though perhaps being given up was the best that could have happened to her, given the alternative that parents often chose. Infanticide followed by disposing of dead babies around churchyards and other less salubrious out of the way places… Continue reading “CHILD FOUND”
Tag: death
Just a graze…
Once upon a time the uncertainty and certainty of death hung over everybody, everywhere, all the time, as this brief report from the London Evening Standard in 1840 shows…
Giving it all away
On this day in 1852 there died a man who these days would have been given therapy for his condition. He was, in those unreconstructed times, called a miser. There is probably a pressure group somewhere railing as you read this that the terminally stingy and absurdly mean should never be referred to in such… Continue reading Giving it all away
Who killed Harry Larkyns?
Nowadays the average twentysomething works their way through temporary though deep relationships before permanence happens in the shape of marriage (or something like it). For 19th century women it wasn’t so easy. So we can forgive, if that is the appropriate word, San Francisco shop worker Flora Shallcross Stone. To not appear ‘flighty’ it… Continue reading Who killed Harry Larkyns?
Murder in Acton; the final act
My search for more information — truth if you will — about a local murder from nearly 200 years ago is ended. I wanted to find out about why a girl who once lived just yards from where I am writing should take it into her head to marry and then to kill her husband… Continue reading Murder in Acton; the final act
Catherine Foster; the trial
The morning the Lent Assizes opened in Bury St Edmunds on Saturday March 27th 1847, 17-year-old Catherine Foster, dressed in deep mourning and ‘evincing little alarm at the awful position she stood in’, replied in a firm voice “not guilty” to the charge of poisoning her husband. By ten past seven that evening, the prosecution… Continue reading Catherine Foster; the trial
5000 Spirits of a village, or the Layers of The Onion
Not a 100 yards from where I write this, in this sleepiest of sleepy Suffolk villages, a murder has been committed. The local paper, the East Anglian Daily Times, to which I am ever grateful for being a newspaper of the old school, wrote it up over Christmas. It would be churlish not to point… Continue reading 5000 Spirits of a village, or the Layers of The Onion
How to get attention; name your war after body parts
It’s an anniversary of sorts. It’s 200 years since the end of a war with a dull name and seven more years since the death that may have started it. The death was that of British Royal Navy sailor Jenkin Ratford. He was hanged from the yard arm. The circumstances of Ratford’s capture precipitated popular… Continue reading How to get attention; name your war after body parts