Something a little different for the first Sojourn of 2025, visiting sites of crimes that occurred in London during the time that Holmes was practising as a Consulting Detective. He may have been consulted on all or some of them.
Catching a train to Vauxhall, I then rode one stop on the Victoria Line to Pimlico. From here it was a ten minute walk to the first crime scene, 85 Claverton Street, SW1V.
Adelaide Bartlett
On 1st January 1886, Mr. Doggett, the landlord of this address (since demolished for a block of flats - Whitley House) was woken at 4.10am by his tenant Adelaide Bartlett, to be told that she thought that her husband was dead. Adelaide had married Bartlett, a wealthy owner of six grocery shops (and 11 years her senior) in 1875. Their relationship remained almost entirely platonic, with Edwin instead encouraging his wife’s relationship with George Dyson, a young Methodist minister, who he had retained to teach Adelaide Latin and Mathematics. He even told George that he should marry Adelaide if he died.
On arrival at the scene, the landlord and Edwin’s physician, Dr. Alfred Leach, found Edwin dead, and were both immediately suspicious. A postmortem revealed that Edwin’s stomach contained chloroform and concluded that this had killed him. Adelaide and George were immediately arrested, with Adelaide being accused of the murder, and George being accused of helping her when it was revealed that he had bought chloroform for Adelaide to treat her husband. Edwin had been a hypocondriac, convinced that he had syphilis (which he didn’t), and had been taking mercury poison as a treatment.
The charges against George were dropped due to lack of evidence, but Adelaide appeared at the Old Bailey, represented by the leading barrister of the day, Sir Edward Clarke, whose brilliant defence relied on common-sense expert testimony. Various medical men stated that liquid chloroform was not necessarily fatal, and that there was no chloroform in Edwin’s windpipe or lungs, as there would have been had it been poured into his mouth as he slept. The jury concluded that there was ‘not sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered’, and so Adelaide was acquitted. The mystery of Edwin’s death has never been solved, and after the trial both Adelaide and George vanished from public notice.
The novelist Julian Symons (who also wrote three Sherlockian pastiches, two which were set in the modern-day featuring a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character), wrote a novelisation of the story, ‘Sweet Adelaide’, in which he suggested that Adelaide emigrated to the USA, settling in Connecticut.
WHERE WAS HOLMES ?: Holmes was in Baker Street (with Watson), but not yet well-known due to fact that Watson’s first chronicle ‘A Study in Scarlet’ was not published until the end of the next year (January 1886)
A fifteen minute walk brought me to Vauxhall Bridge, and my second crime scene.
Finding bodies in the Thames in the 1880’s was not unusual, with 544 corpses being recovered from the river by ferrymen, passers-by and the marine police in 1882. Therefore, when in May 1887, a female torso washed up on the shores of Rainham in Essex, there was little press interest. In the following week, more body parts started to appear on other parts of the Thames shore, until the body was almost complete, although the head was never found. Police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond stated that whoever had dismembered the woman had a rough anatomical knowledge, but was not a medical man. Due to the level of decomposition, he was unable to conclude that a ‘violent act’ had occurred, so the inquest recorded her simply as being ‘Found Dead’.
A year later on 11th September 1888, as ‘Jack The Ripper’ fever gripped London, a woman’s arm was recovered here, on the shore of Pimlico, barely a mile from the Houses of Parliament. The Times newspaper initially suspected that the arm was placed in the water as a medical students' prank. Then on 28th September, another arm was found on the opposite bank in Lambeth. Dr. Charles Hibbert, who examined one of the arms, stated that although the killer ‘was not necessarily an anatomist, he certainly knew what he was doing’, given his cutting at joints.
WHERE WAS HOLMES ?: It was a busy month for Holmes – first he investigated the experiences of Mr. Melas, Greek Interpreter [GREE], then helped Watson’s future wife [SIGN], and finally found himself on Dartmoor for his most famous investigation [HOUN] (September 1888)
Crossing the bridge, another fifteen minute walk brought me to 103 Lambeth Palace Road, SE1.
Thomas Neill Cream
The victims of the Lambeth Poisoner in 1891 included 19-year-old Ellen ‘Nellie’ Donworth, 27-year-old prostitute Matilda Clover (although her death was originally put down to alcoholism), and prostitutes Alice Marsh (21) and Emma Shrivell (18) who both died in agony in the flat they shared. A further woman, Louise Harvey, also a prostitute, was given two pills, by a client who insisted that she swallow them right away. However, Harvey, suspicious of him, pretended to swallow the pills he had given her but secretly threw them from a bridge into the River Thames. Late in 1891, when police received an anonymous letter accusing two respectable and innocent doctors of the poisonings, they quickly realised that it must have been written the murderer, as the letter writer knew too much.
Around this time, a London doctor, Thomas Neill Cream, who lived here met a police officer from New York City, who was visiting London. The officer mentioned that he had heard of the Lambeth Poisoner, and so Cream showed him the victims’ homes. The American then reported this to a British policeman, as he found Cream’s detailed knowledge of the case suspicious. Cream was put under surveillance, and it was soon found that he liked to consort with the prostitutes of Lambeth. The investigation took officers to America where they found that Cream, who had lived in Quebec, Edinburgh and Chicago, had poisoned at least one person to death in each city before being convicted by murder by poison in 1881, receiving life imprisonment, but being released in July 1891 after his brother pleaded for leniency (and bribed the authorities).
Cream was convicted of these new crimes and sentenced to death. Less than a month later, he was hanged on the gallows at Newgate Prison by James Billington, who claimed that Cream’s last words on the scaffold were ‘I am Jack the –‘. However, it was established that Cream was in a US prison at the time of the Whitechapel Murders.
Cream was the main antagonist of the 1990 Radio 4 play, ‘Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Pimlico Poisoner’, which represented the second time that Crawford Logan had played Watson for them (the first being opposite Roger Rees in the 1988 ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ which led to the complete dramatisation of the Canon, starring the recast Clive Merrison and Michael Williams), this time alongside William Chubb (with 1980’s Davros, Terry Molloy, as Lestrade). Also, in the first episode of ‘Murder Rooms: Mysteries of the Real Sherlock Holmes’, the young Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell pursue a murder case that involves a Thomas Neill, played by Alec Newman. At the end, a postscript further identifies him as Thomas Neill Cream, who attended medical school alongside Conan Doyle.
WHERE WAS HOLMES ?: Holmes was believed lost at the Reichenbach Falls in May 1891, but was in fact in Tibet visiting Lhassa and spending some days with the head Lama (October 1891)
Fifteen minutes later, I reached the Victoria Embankment, and Norman Shaw North, SW1A.
The Illustrated Police News, October 1888
This Grade I listed building was the headquarters of Scotland Yard from 1890 to 1967, and was built to the designs of architect Norman Shaw (whose name this building and the one next to it still feature). It took about twenty years to build. New Scotland Yard is now based in a building a short distance down the Embankment.
On 2nd October 1888, a female torso was discovered in a three-month-old vault that made up part of the cellar of the construction site for the building. It was placed there at some point after 29th September when Richard Lawrence, a workman, had last been inside the unlocked vault. The body had been wrapped in cloth, possibly a black petticoat and tied with string. The torso was matched by police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond to the arms previously found in Pimlico. The press called the discovery ‘The Whitehall Mystery’. The head and remaining limbs were never found, and the identity of the victim was never established.
In June 1889, parts of another woman were fished out
of the Thames, with one of her arms being later found thrown into the riverside
grounds of a house that had belonged to Mary Shelley, whose ‘Frankenstein’
involved building a monster out of various body parts. Again the head was never
found, but she was identified from other clues as Elizabeth Jackson, a
suspected Chelsea prostitute. On 10th September 1889, a constable on his beat
found a female torso under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel. The
murder was eventually attributed to the Thames Torso Killer, but like the
Ripper, the case was never solved.
WHERE WAS HOLMES ?: Newly back from laying Sir Henry Baskerville’s family ghost [HOUN], Holmes would have been available to be consulted on ‘The Whitehall Mystery’. However, when the second woman was found, he was in Herefordshire [BOSC] and Birmingham [STOC]. (October 1888 / June 1889)
Catching a tube from nearby Westminster Station, I made my way to Warren Street Station, where five minutes away was 33 Fitzroy Square W1T.
‘Tottenham Court Road Mystery’
Then a parcel containing a female arm (which due to being tattooed was believed to belong to a prostitute) was found in the gardens of Bedford Square, which I walked to next.
An inquest was held at St. Giles Coroner’s Court on 11th November 1884, where doctors stated that the body parts came from the same woman, being ‘divided by someone skilled, but certainly not for the purpose of anatomy’. The proceedings were adjourned, and by the time that they reconvened on 9th December 1884, a parcel containing bones of the right arm, right and left feet and right forearm of a different woman had been found in Mornington Crescent, a fifteen minute walk away. The remains were stored at St. Pancras Mortuary before being buried without the women ever being identified or the mystery solved.
WHERE WAS HOLMES ?: Holmes was in Baker Street (with Watson), yet to investigate the majority of his celebrated cases. (October 1884)
Having completed my tour of Victorian crime scenes, it was time to make way to the nearest tube station to start another Sojourn.
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