This book had its genesis in 1969 when I first read T. A. Critchley’s A History of Police in England and Wales, 900–1966, in which he gives a brief account of the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders on the borders of Wapping. The brutal murder of two families provoked an unprecedented nationwide panic and Tom Critchley deals in his book with the demand for the reform of the police to which this gave rise, as inexperienced magistrates with their pathetically inadequate and ill-equipped forces grappled with the mystery against a background of mounting hysteria and public criticism. By chance I had myself recently read a contemporary account of the murders which left me very doubtful about the guilt of the seaman, John Williams, who was eventually arrested. We decided to undertake our own investigation from such records as we could find, with a view to writing an account in collaboration. The Maul and the Pear Tree, originally published by Constable in 1971, was the result. It was for me an enthralling, exciting and deeply satisfying collaboration. Unhappily my co-author has since died, but this new edition, which he would have been delighted to see, is dedicated to him.
There is surely no part of London which has seen greater changes since the book was first published than has riverside Wapping. If the ghosts of those pathetic victims and of Mrs Vermilloe’s seafaring lodgers could revisit their old haunts, little more than an occasional public house and the elegant octagonal lantern of Hawksmoor’s St George’s-in-the-East would remain to make them feel at home. It would surely seem to them that the Highway, with its gleaming tarmac and unending traffic, had replaced the Thames as London’s main thoroughfare, as busy and perhaps as dangerous as the river they knew. What, I wonder, would they make of St Katherine’s Dock yachting marina and the concrete bastions of riverside hotels, or the converted warehouses, once citadels of the trade which supported their precarious livelihoods, but which are now the coveted apartments of the rich? The hovels and the narrow streets with their teeming life have vanished and only the strong-flowing Thames remains the same.
T. E. Critchley and I, drawing largely on contemporary records, have given our solution to the mystery, but a mystery it still remains. The Ratcliffe Highway murders, previously thought of as simple acts of extreme barbarism, are among the most interesting and extraordinary in the English criminal calendar.