The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811

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The Ratcliffe Highway murders brought to public attention the limited abilities of London's fragmented police forces, and were one of the factors that led toward the formation of the Met in the years to come. Two hundred years later and Ratcliffe itself has disappeared (although, in another of Google Maps' curious quirks, it's still listed as an area of East London). Yet in a city that often seems fixated on the macabre, the brutal nature of these crimes, and their unsolved nature, has propped the mystery up over the centuries.

Ablass was a seaman who had sailed with Williams aboard Roxburgh Castle. He had a history of aggressive behaviour and had been involved in the unsuccessful mutiny aboard the ship, and was placed in confinement afterwards, while Williams was thought to have simply been led astray by his shipmates. Ablass was drinking in company with Williams at The King's Arms on the night of the murders, and was a far better match for Turner's description of the killer. He was also lame, matching the earlier eyewitness description of one of the men running up the Highway after the first murders, and was unable to account for some of his time on the nights of both murders. He was detained as a suspect. When evidence emerged that Marr, Williams and Ablass had all served together as seamen before Marr went into business on his own, it was suggested that there were links, and possibly old scores to settle, between the three. On 27 August 1887, the eccentric illustrated publication Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday published an article entitled ‘ The Ratcliff Highway Murders,’ describing how: For twelve succeeding days, under some groundless notion that the unknown murderer had quitted London, the panic which had convulsed the nightly Metropolis diffused itself all over the island. I was myself at that time nearly three hundred miles from London, but there, and everywhere, the panic was indescribable. Contemporary newspaper illustration of the pen maul used in the first murders, showing the initials "IP" or "JP"According to the Thames Police Museum, all would be brutally murdered, and another apprentice, Margaret Jewell, who had been out purchasing oysters, was the one who discovered the dead bodies upon her return. She tried to ring the bell while home, but could not hear from anyone — she alerted a night watchman and Marr’s neighbor. The neighbor, John Murray, found the bodies of the Marrs and the apprentice in the house, and screamed: And yet, the main suspect was John Williams, alias Murphy, who would not live to defend himself. John Williams – Felon of Himself A principal suspect in the murders, John Williams (also known as John Murphy), was a 27-year-old Irish or Scottish seaman and a lodger at The Pear Tree, a public house on Cinnamon Street off the Highway in Old Wapping. Williams' roommate had noticed that he had returned after midnight on the night of the tavern murders. Thomas De Quincey claimed that Williams had been an acquaintance of Timothy Marr, and described him as: "a man of middle stature, slenderly built, rather thin but wiry, tolerably muscular, and clear of all superfluous flesh. His hair was of the most extraordinary and vivid colour, viz., a bright yellow, something between an orange and a yellow colour". The Times was more specific: he was five-foot-nine, slender, had a "pleasing countenance," and did not limp. Williams had nursed a grievance against Marr from when they were shipmates, but the subsequent murders at The King's Arms remain unexplained. [3] The Art of the English Murder by Lucy Worsley is written to accompany a BBC television series on which she is a presenter. Her research brought about a written version which provides a plethora of information regarding the British interest in the idea of murder. The fact that the British enjoyed and couldn’t get enough of murder is outlined and discussed by Worsley but not meant to be an encompassing book on crime itself. Several high interest and notorious crimes are highlighted throughout and the murderers lives described. Worsley pinpoints how crime was handled and the limitations of the investigators trying to solve the crimes.

In December 1811, a series of brutal murders took place in the Ratcliffe Highway area. Like everyone in the East End, William James and his family would have been caught up in the drama, which caused panic amongst the local population and made the news across the country. Weeks after Williams’s suicide, Bell’s Weekly Messenger reports how an ‘important discovery’ had been made, which removed ‘every shadow of doubt respecting’ Williams’s guilt. Williams had been seen in possession of a ‘long French knife with an ivory handle’ before the murder of the Williamsons and their maid, which had never been found in his belongings. The narrative explains how and why the readers’s original delight in the gory even sordid murders gradually developed into a preference for the more genteel country house murder mystery. value on land, are absolutely helpless at sea ; Swedes and Danes by time score-good mariners all of them; a few Russians, After maintaining his innocence throughout his trial, Muller reportedly confessed on the scaffold prior to his execution on 14 November. Can I visit the crime scene?Pear Tree Lane – formerly Fox's Lane, now named after The Pear Tree, the inn where the second Ratcliff Highway murders took place Worsley is Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces but is best known as a presenter of BBC Television series on historical topics, including Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency (2011), Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls (2012), The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain (2014), A Very British Romance (2015), Lucy Worsley: Mozart’s London Odyssey (2016), and Six Wives with Lucy Worsley (2016). Yankee sailors with drawling utterance, smoking deliberately and spitting immoderately; some miserable-looking Greeks-a cowardly and dishonest race, who, of little