Author: Richard Jones

In 1888, the year of the Jack the Ripper murders, the possibilities of how cameras might be used in criminal and legal cases were being explored. The Sheffield Evening Telegraph, in its edition of Monday the 24th of […]

One of the suggestions made at the height of the Jack the Ripper scare, was that bloodhounds might be used to track the killer through the teeming streets of Whitechapel. Sir Charles Warren, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had […]

Although the Jack the Ripper murders, so far as we know, ended in November 1888, with the murder of Mary Kelly, for many years afterwards any murder in London was looked at as possibly being the work of […]

In 1894, the residents of the district of Kensington, in west London, were subjected to series of unprovoked attacks by a mysterious veiled woman who stabbed several women with a sharp object. The attacks for a time caused […]

Jack the Ripper aside, the 19th century East End was the epicentre for some pretty major and horrific discoveries, several of which involved the finding of human remains. In September, 1873, a ghastly discovery was made in the […]

I’ve recently been delving into old copies of The Pall Mall Gazette in search of stories that bring the late 19th and early 20th centuries to life. The other day my attention was caught by the following article […]

Some pretty horrible cases found their way into the courts of the Victorian metropolis, and quite of few of them make horrifying and uncomfortable reading even today, separated as we are from those long ago events by the […]

In the first half of the 19th century all manner of ghostly activity was being reported across the country, and was causing terror and panic in several remote communities. Perhaps the most famous of these was the case […]

19th century Whitechapel could be a dangerous place, even for those who were just going about their everyday business. Street robberies and attacks were commonplace, to the extent that, when you stepped out of doors you, quite literally […]

The following article, which told of the lives of some of the residents of the Women’s Shelter in Hanbury Street, appeared in The Social Gazette on Saturday the 20th of August, 1910:- ROSIE – A DAUGHTER OF ERIN […]