The New Newgate Calendar
Post Archives
Archives for August 2018
On the last of August in 1816, the Colombian statesman Joaquin Camacho was executed as a traitor to Spain. Blind and paralyzed, he had to be carried to...
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The 31stAugust 1888 is etched on the memory of anyone familiar with the biggest crime news story of that year. It was at about 3.45 that morning that PC...
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French priest Albert Bruneau was guillotined on this date in 1894 for murder. (Most of the available information about this case is in French, as are most...
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‘Merry’ female students at Oxford, in The Sphere, 28 October 1922 (from British Newspaper Archive) Today, I should be making the 40-minute...
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When William Canham returned to the livery stable in Moorgate where he worked he was irritated to find that the two horses he had asked to be prepared...
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Henri Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, the “first martyr of Free France”, fell to German guns at the Fort du Mont Valerien on...
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London can be a perilous place for visitors, especially if they don’t keep a close eye on their valuables. Thieves operate in crowded streets and...
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On this date in 476, the father of the very last Roman emperor was put to death by a Germanic chief … a week before that last emperor was forced...
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John Roots had come to London in the late summer of 1848 to get treatment at Guy’s Hospital. The elderly labourer traveled first to Rochester (four...
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Peter Williams and Abraham (or Abram) Cox were hanged on this date in 1858* in Auburn, Maine, for the maritime murder of the crew of the Albion Cooper....
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Guest post by Jane M. Card; 27 August 2018. Images from the past are never to be taken at face value since, made according to contemporary visual conventions...
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There’s something about the violent deaths of police officers that grabs our attention. These are men and women who dedicate their working lives...
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Richard Wright had lost both his legs. How, is not made clear but he may have lost them in an accident, war or through disease. Wright was also elderly...
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Saint Alexander, patron of the Lombardy city of Bergamo, has his feast date on August 26 which is also the anniversary of his execution. A character for...
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George Jackson had a strange way of helping the late Victorian economy. On Sunday 19 August 1883 he picked up a handful of stones in the Strand and put...
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Today’s hanging comes courtesy of a public domain History of Greene County, Missouri, whose account we reproduce in full below: HANGING OF WILLIS...
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Mrs Sarah Ann Mott had just come out of a shop in Fenchurch Street and was heading home with her partner to their home in Ratcliffe, east London when she...
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(Thanks to Henry Charles Lea for the guest post on the last person done to death by the Spanish Inquisition, “Beata Dolores”, who on August...
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In these days of contactless payments and Oyster cards it’s easy to forget that not so long ago one used to need a ticket to travel on London transport....
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From the London Times, Aug. 25, 1927. (See also reports from public newspaper archives such as California’s.) I could not find any source that directly...
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There are moments of genuine comedy in the newspaper reporting of the police courts that offer a clear and (I expect) deliberate palliative to all the...
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On this date in 1936, the Spanish politician Melquíades Álvarez was shot by the Republicans. A waffling centrist who disdained “two...
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Yesterday’s post concerned the disorderly and violent behaviour of youth gangs in late nineteenth-century London. Given that it is still something...
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From the Journals of the House of Commons Die Mercurii, 21 Augusti, 1650 PRAYERS. A LETTER from Henry Roll, Lord Chief Justice, and Robert Nicholas, one...
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Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century the subject of gang crime periodically troubled the newspapers. Concern about ‘roughs’...
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On this date in 984, the deposed Pope John XIV* was killed in prison. Pietro Canepanova was his name by birth, and Bishop of Pavia was his rank when elected....
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Miss Elizabeth Cox was disturbed by sounds outside her front door in late August 1831. She opened the door which was next to Mr Ryder’s Yard, Queen...
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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.) On this date in 1786, five young men were hanged together before a large crowd...
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Mr Tahrir-ud-din Ahmed was an Indian student studying in England. He had taken up residence at 1 Colville Gardens in fashionable Kensington and so must...
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On this date in 1648, the once-debauched and now-deposed Ottoman sultan Ibrahim I “the Mad” was strangled to make way for his seven-year-old...
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While the Victorians didn’t have fingerprint technology or the data gathering capacities of modern police forces this didn’t mean that it was...
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North Korean regulars on this date in 1950 committed a notorious mass execution upon 41 U.S. prisoners during the Korean War. The Hill 303 massacre took...
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Posted by Sara M. Butler; 17 August, 2018. Setting the Scene The period leading up to the expulsion of the Jews from England in July of 1290 was a time...
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In August 1849 Mrs Isabella Blaby was summoned before the magistrate at Thames Police court to answer a charge that she was exposing her neighbours to...
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On this date in 1703, the great Camisard commander Pierre Laporte was broken on the wheel. He was already two days dead, but his punishment was shared...
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When the housekeeper turned up to work at 5 Queen Street on Wednesday 13 August 1873 she didn’t expect to be surprised. The house was unoccupied...
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On this date in 1293, the heretic and alchemist Capocchio was burned at the stake in Siena. Little is known about about this man’s life, but thanks...
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As Daniel Vincer was pushing his way up the crowded stairs of the Victoria Theatre (the ‘Old Vic’ as we know it) he thought he felt his watch...
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On this date in 1765, Boston patriots lynched the merchant designated as the imperial taxman. They only did so in effigy, but the “execution”...
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Mary Adams was at home with her young son when she heard a knock at the door. ‘Go and answer it’, she instructed her lad, ‘it will be...
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Taxi driver Ali Reza Khoshruy Kuran Kordiyeh was publicly hanged on this date for a killing spree that earned him the nickname “the Tehran Vampire.”...
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Queen Victoria’s Skye terriers, by Otto Weber (1874) In recent years there have been a spate of dog thefts in London and elsewhere. Like many crimes...
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Joseph Le Brun starred in the U.K.’s last public execution in the U.K. on this date in 1875. Although capital punishment had been moved behind prison...
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Mrs Georgina Weldon In August 1883 a woman appeared at the Bow Street Police court to ask for a summons against a psychiatrist whose name is perhaps family...
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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.) On this day in 1853, Hans M(a)cFarlane and Helen Blackwood were hanged before...
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Beggars and vagrants were an endemic problem for the police and magistrates of nineteenth-century London. The Vagrancy Act (1824) empowered the New Police...
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One hundred years ago today, the Germans hanged Russian revolutionary Boris Donskoy. Donskoy was not a Bolshevik but a Left Social Revolutionary —...
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When Augustus Peake asked to speak to his employer it wasn’t to ask for time off or for a rise, it was to make a deeply embarrassing confession....
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On this date in 1870, William Dickson’s hanging in the Leavenworth jail yard accidentally put the kibosh on Kansas executions for the next 74 years....
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