The New Newgate Calendar
Post Archives
Archives for June 2018
On this date in 1797, a president of the floating republic was put to death by an empire of the lash. The occasion brings us to the era of Great Britain’s...
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I often wonder what the Victorians would make of our society if they could visit it. I imagine they’d be both awed and shocked if they were able...
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Anti-Communist resistance fighters Gerhard Benkowitz and Hans-Dietrich Kogel were executed by East Germany on this date in 1955. Benkowitz The two Weimar...
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Recently, there have been several exhibitions in London that I’ve wanted to see, relating to some of my main interests – photography, history...
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One of the classic ‘screen’ images we have of the late Victorian/Edwardian period is that of Eliza Doolittle selling flowers in Covent Garden...
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A gentleman with the interesting name of Sedley Alley was executed by lethal injection in Tennessee on this date in 2006, for the positively horrific rape-murder...
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William Pomroy, a police constable in A Division was stationed opposite Westminster Hall in the early evening of Tuesday 27 June 1866. As the...
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A letter from Aranjuez, dated June 30, says, Don Francis de Sallesar y Corvetto, a native of Murcia, where his father was regidor, was on Friday publicly...
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In 1689 the merchant John Farmer complained to the Earl of Nottingham that he and a companion had been imprisoned at Beaumoris without accusation or warrant....
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This case is quite unusual and barely qualifies as a case the London magistracy could hear at all. Indeed Mr Hardwick, the incumbent justice at Marlborough...
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On this date in 1685, Roundhead militant Richard Rumbold — known affectionately to his comrades from the English Civil War as “Hannibal”,...
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Elizabeth Avery had committed a very common crime in early Victorian London and received a very usual sentence for it. When she was brought before the...
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It was a black hood for the Blackout Ripper on this date in 1942. Charming Royal Air Force serviceman Gordon Frederick Cummins gave rein that February...
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The reports of the Police Courts of Victorian London provide a useful reminder that there is very little that is properly ‘new’ in our supposedly...
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On this date in 1931, Chiang Kai-shek had the former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party executed. Xiang Zhongfa was a dock worker unionist...
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One of the ‘big ideas’ of the late twentieth century was privatization. The principle was that all things are made better by competition. The...
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From the public domain History of Siskiyou County, California Illustrated with Views of Residences, Business Buildings and Natural Scenery, and Containing...
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This will be a post in two parts about data relating to the series of Westminster Coroner’s Inquests on London Lives, which cover the period 1760-1799....
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Pasquelio Cascarino ran an ice cream shop at 1 Neate Street, Camberwell with other members of his family. Italians in London were closely associated with...
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This ghastly description of a botched hanging comes courtesy of the out-of-print The palace of death, or, the Ohio Penitentiary Annex: A human-interest...
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We’ve met Henry Cooper before on this site. No, not the boxing legend who once floored Mohammed Ali, but a serial fraudster who got himself locked...
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On this date in 1779, American Revolution patriots hanged Henry Hare as a spy at Canajoharie in upstate New York. In the first years of the revolution,...
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Most of the drugs that are prohibited by law today were legal in the nineteenth century but contemporaries recognized that there was a problem with drug...
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The main objective of the ‘Carceral Archipelago’ project has been to write the history of convicts and penal colonies into global history,...
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On this date in 1890, an affectionate married couple hanged together in Elko, Nevada, for a murder they insisted they had not authored. We obtain this...
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The Metropolitan Meat Market at Smithfield The City of London actively policed the market at Smithfield so as to protect the citizens of the capital...
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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.) On this date in 1944, nineteen-year-old serial killer Seisaku Nakamura was hanged...
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The Royal Exchange and Bank of England (you can see the railings and the gas lamps on the left hand side) PC Batchelor was on his beat in Threadneedle...
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Indonesian migrant worker Ruyati binti Sapubi was beheaded in Mecca on this date in 2011 for the meat cleaver murder of her mistress. She numbered among...
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By the time Ann Poulter was brought before the magistrate at Marlborough Street she had recovered sufficiently from her pregnancy to face a rigourous legal...
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June 17 of 1581 was the alleged condemnation date — the best specific calendar date we have — for the German robber/murderer Christman Genipperteinga...
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Street fight in Seven Dials, by George Cruikshank c.1839 Seven Dials was notorious in the 1800s as a place of desperate poverty and criminality. It was...
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Dying graciously is a — in that blessed space of unfeigned equanimity, in between fright and bluster — is a difficult art. On this date in...
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William Thomas’ son – Thomas Thomas – had been a difficult child. He had grown up in a large family with eight siblings, another one...
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Anti-fascist teacher Raymond Burgard was beheaded on the fallbeil on this date in 1944, in Cologne. A literature instructor at Paris’s lycée...
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In mid June 1882 a well-dressed man was stood in the dock at Southwark Police court and charged with conspiracy to steal (or rather defraud) from two German...
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“Sermon preached at Haddam [Connecticut], June 14, 1797. On the day of the Execution of Thomas Starr, condemned for the murder of his kinsman Samuel...
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Mr Selfe was the presiding magistrate at the Westminster Police court in June 1863 and he was not a man to be trifled with. So when James Cowen appeared...
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Women dying of arsenic poisoning were a popular subject for the press – this later example is from the Illustrated Police News It was January 1888....
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This honourable man, a good knight and a gentle; of living somewhat dissolute; plain and open to his enemy, secret to his friend, easy to beguile, as he...
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When Sergeant Gillett (31N) found Amelia Cooke and her children sleeping under the stars he decided to act. It wasn’t the first time the woman and...
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On this date in 1941, Brooklyn gangster Pittsburgh Phil went to the Sing Sing electric chair. The smart-dressed Pittsburgh Phil* — “Harry...
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Spitalfields Market, c.1842 This is a very curious case and one which may require some deeper digger over the next few weeks. In May 1848 a murder was...
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Cry, after my death, against military justice! -Henri Herduin, in his last letter to his wife On this date in 1916, which happened to be Pentecost, two...
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James Hall was working as a builder in a yard on Manresa Road in Westminster. He was climbing the scaffolding to readjust it when a piece of wood sailed...
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On this date in 1697, the Paisley, Renfrewshire Gallow Green played stage for the strangling and burning of six “witches.” They’re known...
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Here is something slightly different today, not a case from the Police courts but the consequence of the savage penal system that existed in the late 1800s....
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On June 9, 1944, the 2nd SS Panzer Division hanged 99 habitants of the French town Tulle as revenge upon the French Resistance. On June 7, the Communist...
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London was an extremely busy port city in the Victoria period. Goods came in and out of the docks and the river teamed with shipping, bringing travellers...
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On this date in 1639, the Duke of Valette was beheaded in Paris as a traitor. Having anticipated this cruel stroke, however, he was happily away in England...
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