Month: August 2015

The big story that many of the newspapers were reporting in the first editions on 31st August 1888 was the “retirement” that very day of the Assistant Commissioner, James Monro, to be replaced by Dr Robert Anderson. The […]

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton  (1803 to 1873), was a politician, a novelist, a poet and a playwright. Indeed, his books were hugely popular with the Victorian reading public and there sales were such that […]

Throughout this month we’ve been presenting regular updates of the murder of Martha Turner, which are drawn from the 1888 press reports that appeared in the wake of her death. If you wish to get started with the […]

On Saturday 25th August 1888, The East London Advertiser felt compelled to justify to its readership the coverage it had been giving to crime in the East End of London. “It has been our unpleasant duty, these last […]

By its very nature our Jack the Ripper tour is East End based since this was the district in which the infamous Whitechapel Murders occurred. But, to be honest, East London had so much ore than the Jack […]

By the 19th August 1888 it was becoming more than evident that the police had not got the foggiest idea as to who had carried our the murder of Martha Turner in George-yard. Based on the fact that […]

By the 17th August 1888 the police, so it appears, had given up any hope that Mary Connolly (“Pearly Poll”) would provide them with any useful information that might lead them to the perpetrator of the George-yard murder. […]

By the 15th August 1888, the victim of the George-yard murder had been positively identified as Martha Turner and the newspapers were discussing her last night  – which had, so the papers were reporting, been spent in the […]

The murder of Martha Turner – also known as Martha Tabram – took place in the early hours of 7th August 1888 on a dark, first-floor, landing of George Yard Buildings, in George Yard, a narrow arched turning […]

By the 11th August 1888 the victim of the murder in George-yard had still not been formally identified, albeit some people had come forward to suggest that they did know who she was. On Saturday 11th August 1888, […]