South 
The growth of transport both echoed and spurred on the growth of London itself. It was now expanding as fast as the suburban railway could lay down its tracks. More and more people were finding it convenient to commute to the City from what had once been open country. Areas like Leyton, Tottenham, West Ham, Southgate and Willesden doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in population between 1871 and 1891, as the middle class pursued respectability and the workers seized on the cheap fares to move out in search of a better quality of life. In 1888 young couples from the lower middle class were advised to choose houses ‘some little way out of London. Rents are less; smuts and blacks are conspicuous by their absence; a small garden, or even a tiny conservatory is not an impossibility’. Out in the suburbs there was fresh air, fewer shop windows to tempt the wife into extravagant spending, and less opportunity for the mother-in-law to interfere. The recommended areas were Sydenham, Forest Hill and Bromley in the south, and Finchley and Enfield in the north.28
Moving out of the city centre did not guarantee a peaceful existence, however. As the population expanded to the outer regions, so did the conflicts that decorate everyday life. While incidents were fewer, and less serious, murder still occasionally crept out to the suburbs.
South Surbiton was only fifty years old, and a true creation of the railways (the station’s original name was ‘Kingston-on-Railway’). Although it did not become an urban district until 1894, it was a typical commuter town consisting of Victorian townhouses and churches on the dividing line between Greater London and the Surrey countryside. And while it was well within the boundary of the Metropolitan Police District’s V Division, it was an unlikely setting for a murder.
Seventy-one-year-old Major Thomas Hare had been living in a four-storey semi-detached house at No.13 St James Road for fourteen years following his retirement from the army. It was set away from the road and visitors had to climb the steps to knock on the door and await the attendance of the housemaid. The major, who had served in the 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment of Foot and the Cape Mounted Rifles in South Africa, had relatively few problems to occupy his twilight years other than the disability of his wife of nearly forty years, Frances. They owned another property in Surbiton Hill and were supported by their two youngest sons, both employed responsibly by the local council and a bank respectively. The oldest was serving with the army in India.29
Their second eldest, Gordon, was most definitely a concern. If he had a role model it might have been Cecil Rhodes, who went to South Africa in 1871 and within twelve years was president and founder of the De Beers diamond mining company, earning £50,000 a year. Or perhaps it was Rimbaud, who in 1888 was involved in arms dealing and spying in Ethiopia, the only country to retain its independence during the Scramble for Africa between 1881 and 1914. Both were in their mid-thirties and making their mark on the world.30 Gordon was at a similar age but had achieved almost nothing. He had been to America to tend cattle, and Australia, but wherever he travelled in search of his fortune he would inevitably return every one or two years to ask his father for maintenance. By 1885, having paid out several thousand pounds, Major Hare told his son that he had to find his own way. Gordon’s requests for maintenance then turned to demands, threats and even violence. A warrant was issued. Two days before he was due to appear before the magistrates, Gordon went to the family home and threatened to blow out his father’s brains unless he was found employment. As a result he spent three months in prison, but the effect was only to deepen his resentment.
Gordon went abroad again, reportedly to join a travelling circus in Mexico. By the summer of 1888 he was back at his parents’ front door, but his father firmly told him he was trespassing and that he should leave. The following day, Saturday 25 August, his youngest brother Maynard, twenty-one, spotted him in the City. Gordon walked up to him and said, ‘You may as well speak to me. No one will speak to me, and it’s a matter of life and death.’ Over a lunch and lemonade, Gordon explained that he was taking medication because he was unable to sleep at night. He took out a handful of revolver cartridges, but Maynard thought he was only suggesting suicide. Maynard later recalled:
My brother has always been a source of great trouble. When I was quite a boy he was sent to America and there was employed tending cattle … It was always a grievance that they [his parents] would not keep him as he liked. He thought everyone should go out of their way to supply his wants. It did not matter how much my mother suffered, he thought he should be supplied with money … My brother had an allowance of one guinea a week and he took it with scorn. My father got him an office in the City, but his behaviour was such that he could not keep the situation.
That evening Gordon checked into the Kingston Hotel and the following morning a maid noticed that all the pictures in the smoking room had been turned to face the wall. At 5 p.m. that Sunday he left the hotel and set off for St James Road. His father was at a service in St Mark’s Church and the housemaid, Martha Hodsell, refused to let him in, having direct instructions from Mr and Mrs Hare. Gordon tried the back door before returning to the front to sit on the top step and wait. At 7.50 p.m. his father returned from church. ‘Major Hare!’ shouted Gordon angrily. Moments later a gunshot rang out, followed shortly afterwards by a second.
A friend of the family, Dr Matthew Coleman, ran to the gate to see Major Hare lying on the steps, gasping, with a bullet wound to his neck. In the porch Gordon fell to the floor, dead. Having shot his father he had placed the barrel of a revolver into his mouth and discharged a bullet into his brain. ‘The lips were blackened but his moustache was not singed,’ reported The Times. In his pocket were begging letters to friends for money and work.
The inquest was presided over by coroner Athelstan Braxton Hicks, the son of the obstetrician who gave his name to phantom pregnancy contractions. After allowing the jury to examine the body of father and son, he summed up the case by saying that, ‘the only gleam of satisfaction to be obtained from this awful tragedy was the fact that by committing suicide Gordon had spared his mother and other relatives the painful ordeal of appearing against him on a charge of murder, for which crime he would undoubtedly have hanged’. As it was, Gordon and his father were buried in the same grave in Kingston the following day, 29 August 1888.31
North Thirty miles or more north, on the edge of the Metropolitan Police District, lay the village of Shenley in Hertfordshire. It was beyond the reach of the Midland & Great Northern Railways and remained a parish of farms and countryside, the home of craftsmen, labourers and those who wished to live away from the smoke and fog of London.32 Even now, Green Street in Shenley remains bounded by ploughed earth, hedgerows and trees, with the occasional cottage set back from the road. In 1888 No.91 was part of a long brick building made up of four ‘cottages’ and the Green Willows pub. It was occupied by Edward Cullum, a gamekeeper turned agricultural labourer born and bred in Suffolk. Once married, and with two sons in tow, he moved first to Hemel Hempstead and then to Shenley. He was now in his sixties and his eldest had left home having trained as a blacksmith. The youngest, twenty-four-year-old Henry, had returned home the previous year after leaving his employment as a porter for the Midland Railway in Normanton, Yorkshire. Since his return he had done little but fall in love with a young woman living next door but one.
Emily Bignall was twenty-three and had two children from two different men. She was fond of Henry and her mother Sarah had never seen them quarrel. Although, there was one time around Christmas that Emily had come home with a revolver she had taken away from Henry for safekeeping. And at the end of February, Emily appeared to have been crying while Henry was visiting the cottage. But they seemed quite friendly when they started chatting over the palings in the backyard at around 11.30 a.m. on the morning of 7 March. One or two minutes later the neighbours heard a man cry out, ‘You Beast!’ Then two shots were fired and Emily fell to the ground. Emily’s mother, Sarah Bignall, recalled:
My child fell into my arms and said ‘Oh Mother!’ She was bleeding from the neck and holding her apron up to her neck on both sides. I dragged her towards my door and she fell to the ground. I put my fingers to try and stop the blood and then I saw it rush out the other side. I ran to the door and shouted ‘Murder’. I remember no more and believe I fainted.
George Atkins, a baker who had been having lunch at the Green Willows pub, rushed out at the sound of gunfire and saw Henry Cullum flinging the revolver into the garden. Atkins asked him, ‘What have you done it for?’
Henry replied, ‘I’d some strange impulse upon me. I love the girl more than I love my life.’ Atkins noticed that Cullum was bleeding from the hand, having somehow shot himself after shooting Emily.
‘You’ve killed her Harry!’ Atkins exclaimed.
‘I’ve killed another one besides her,’ replied Cullum, ‘my father. I expect he’ll die broken-hearted.’ Cullum then collapsed.
The murder fell to be investigated by Inspector Robert Butt from the S Division based at Barnet, although the case did not offer much of a puzzle. The press called it a ‘love tragedy’, an outrage caused by jealousy over her previous relationships. Below one report of the case, the Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper inserted an advertisement for an ‘Electropathic Belt’ to aid men and women suffering from ‘any form of nervous derangement, loss of power, debility, or functional disorder’. Henry Cullum would not rely on a defence of insanity at trial, although he had been examined by a doctor at the request of his father three months earlier. Dr Ross Smyth found there was no reason to put him in an asylum, albeit he was fond of an activity that many believed was a disease of the mind – masturbation.
Five months later Henry Cullum pleaded guilty at the Hertfordshire Assizes and was sentenced to death. ‘The prisoner appeared quite unconcerned,’ reported The Times. The execution was fixed for 21 August but five days beforehand he was reprieved and sent to Broadmoor Asylum in Berkshire. He was still a patient there three years later, his occupation being listed as ‘garden labourer’.
For some observers, the case wasn’t so much about mental illness, or jealousy, but the law on firearms. Anybody could buy a gun, and anybody could carry a gun around in public provided they had a licence. Licences could be purchased for 10s from the Post Office. The penalty for not having a licence was £10, or up to a month of hard labour. The jury at the inquest into the death of Emily Bignall clearly found this situation worrying, as they added to their verdict the statement that they: ‘desire to represent to the government authorities the necessity which exists for the adoption of some measures limiting the use of revolvers, whether by heavy tax or otherwise; especially that the sale or delivery of them to persons of immature age should be restricted.’33
It would be another fifteen years before restrictions were placed on the sale of firearms to under-eighteens, drunkards and the insane. And it was not until 1920 that firearms certificates would be universally required.
West Isleworth was a small town in Middlesex known for its aristocratic mansions and fruit gardens. In 1888 it was also home to a large soap factory run by Pears Soap, one of a new breed of businesses in late Victorian Britain. Pears were an international giant, selling to customers from New York to Australia, and they poured £100,000 a year into promoting their products. Their full-page adverts promised to leave users with: ‘fair white hands, bright clear complexion, and soft healthful skin’. Their flagship store in Oxford Street boasted a vision of ancient Pompeii, complete with floor mosaic, veined marble columns and a fountain.34
On 15 April two women arrived in Isleworth from the town of Netherton, near Dudley, in the Midlands, hoping to find seasonal work in the orchards. Charlotte Whale, a twenty-six-year-old chain maker, and Sarah Procter, a thirty-six-year-old nail maker, had lived together on and off over the last few years. It was a troubled relationship, for Charlotte had previously given birth to a child fathered by Sarah’s brother and Sarah was so upset that she threatened to kill her brother if they married. During the train journey to Brentford, Sarah seemed anxious and perhaps a little paranoid. She was heard to say, ‘I don’t think you will behave true to me.’
Charlotte replied, ‘I will – you shall go to the same place with me to live and we will sleep together, and if we can get work we will work, together.’ But if Sarah and Charlotte were lovers, it was not said openly and the newspapers remarked only that they were: ‘on the most friendly terms’.
The pair did find a place together, at Mitchell’s Cottages off Wharton Place, and it was arranged that they should sleep in the same bed. On Monday 16th, Sarah felt too ill to go out looking for work and complained of a pain in her lower back. Charlotte tended to her friend, took her meals and applied a mustard poultice. The following morning they were taken a cup of tea before they were due to start work at 8.45 a.m. A few minutes later the landlady, Mrs Callow, went upstairs and heard groaning. Through the open door she saw Charlotte lying on the bed in her nightdress; her face covered with blood. She had been repeatedly battered with a water jug until the side of her head caved in to expose the brain. She was dead by the time the doctor arrived.
Sarah Procter seemed proud of her accomplishment, and claimed that she had borne a grudge ever since Charlotte had pushed her over three or four years earlier. She also insisted that Charlotte had not spoken to her for eighteen months before they came to London, and had ripped up and burnt a letter that she was due to send to her brother and sister. ‘I done it, and I meant to do it, and I know I will have to swing for it,’ Sarah said, drinking calmly from a cup of tea.
The supposedly destroyed letter was later recovered intact. In it, Sarah Procter complained that she had been ill since she arrived in London, ‘for the air is too strong for me’. She asked for 8s 6d so she could come home again, as there was no work for her, and even if there was she would not be able to stand it. It was becoming plain that Sarah Procter was suffering from delusions. There was also a history of epilepsy in her family as her father, her brother and one of her sisters had all suffered fits.
Her state of mind would feature largely in her defence to the charge of murder. At the inquest it was on plain view as she accused Mrs Callow of sleeping with her and Charlotte on the night before the murder instead of her husband. A month later at the Old Bailey, the jury were told that Sarah had started to show odd behaviour after being knocked down by her brother, Charles, for insulting their mother in October 1883. Ever since she had complained about a pain in her head, occasionally treating it with an herbal brew made from plants. ‘My head is very bad,’ she would say. ‘My head will kill me.’
Surgeon Thomas Standish theorised that a burst eardrum might have caused inflammation of the internal ear and then the brain, leading to delusions and ultimately insanity. ‘A person seized suddenly in that manner might act almost automatically, and I think would not be able to reflect on the nature of what they were doing, in such a manner as [to] withhold an ordinary person from committing a crime,’ he told the court. Another doctor who examined her in custody also believed she had suffered chronic inflammation of the membranes of the brain, and possibly a ‘modified epileptic fit’ at the time of the murder.
‘She professed not to know or recollect what had occurred after she had taken the cup of tea, but she volunteered that she had no reason for doing it, she did not know why she could have done it,’ said Dr Henry Bastian. Apart from her strange behaviour, she had been a hard-working woman, having spent twenty-five years at Lewis & Co. nail manufacturers up until her journey to London. The judge remarked that the jury could not treat Procter as a rational being and accordingly that she be found insane at the time of the killing. Sarah Procter was sent to Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum.35
East Beyond the East End, on the other side of the River Lea, lay the parish of West Ham and the industrial suburb of Stratford. Here were mills, porcelain factories and chemical works. Perhaps most importantly for the area it was home to the works of the Great Eastern Railway (GER). For forty years its assembly line had turned metal plates into fully functional locomotives that would carry passengers from London to Cambridge, Great Yarmouth, Ipswich and Southend. In 1891, they set a new world record time of nine hours forty-seven minutes to build a six-wheeled steam engine. Many of the workers lived in the Stratford New Town houses built by the ‘Railway King’ George Hudson to the north-east of the station. For them, the life of hard labour at the workshops from Monday to Friday was relieved only by the pub at the weekend.
On Saturday 28 April, three colleagues at the GER boilermaker’s yard – Robert Marjoram, a forty-two-year-old blacksmith; Edward Lock, a boilermaker; and Charles Coote, a thirty-three-year-old hammer man – were enjoying a drink at the Boar’s Head public house in Queen Street. At around 2 p.m. there was a dispute about half a sovereign, although who exactly was owed it was not clear. Either way, it ended with Marjoram and Lock going outside to settle it. A fair number of other drinkers followed to watch the entertainment. Marjoram was a heavily built man and appeared intoxicated; he did not even put up his fists. Lock took advantage by knocking Marjoram to the ground with his first blow. When Marjoram got back up Coote left his position by the door of the pub and knocked him down again. This time Marjoram’s head smashed into the kerb with a sickening thud, knocking him out cold.
‘His mouth was open and full of blood, he was insensible,’ said James Regan, a local man who helped carry Marjoram home to nearby Henniker Road. Marjoram remained unconscious the rest of the day but the doctor was only called in the next morning. He died at 8.30 p.m. that Sunday evening from a brain haemorrhage. There was a 5in fracture to the rear of his skull where his head had hit the pavement.
Who was responsible for Robert Marjoram’s death? In common with other killings in or outside pubs, the alcohol consumed by many of those present may have had something to do with the conflicting witness accounts. Henry Buck, who had tried to pick Marjoram up after the first blow, was punched in the eye for his trouble and did not see the end of the fight. Mary Lancaster, Walter Bland and Thomas Serle saw Coote floor Marjoram with a punch to the mouth, while William Lye believed it was more of a hit to the chest. The doctor saw no sign of any injury to the lips or the teeth.
When arrested by the detectives of the K Division, Lock denied striking Marjoram down while Coote appeared to show some remorse. ‘I did not strike him, I only pushed him,’ he said. ‘I am very sorry I went away, but I was so upset I did not know what I was doing.’ Both were charged with manslaughter and both were acquitted by the jury at the Old Bailey after a trial.36