Courtroom Ghosts

Val as a young man 'One day on the way to work I came across a lot of German armed cars. When I came closer, I could see what was happening. Germans had surrounded the Jewish ghetto and were firing into the buildings and some flame throwing cars were inside setting fire to the buildings. Rage welled in me but none of us could do anything to such overpowering forces. The ghetto burned for some time. German patrols were constantly checking for survivors. If they found anybody inside the ghetto they would shoot them.' Val's boss entrusted him with some money to deliver but on the way he lost the envelope containing it. He was fired and then began work at a toy factory. This was followed quickly by time spent working at a hotel, then a barber's shop. Eventually, he left Warsaw and took up work on a farm. The following spring he made his way back to Warsaw and met up with a friend. Together, they embarked on a botched smuggling operation across the border in Germany. Val was...

This blog is a departure from the usual theme. My partner’s dad, Wladyslaw Ciechomski, known to friends and family as Val, passed away on 18th December 2021. He was quite possibly the most remarkable man that I have met and I want to use this space to pay tribute to him. I will do so in three parts, with the second and third parts telling the story of his time both in the Polish Underground and in Nazi prison camps. There was nothing Val could not turn his hand to, including planning and building an extension to his house, completely by himself. He rewired the house, did the plumbing, fixed his own car, and made beautiful costumes and toys for his children. At one point he even had ambition to build a boat. He carried the scars of his difficult early years but was always stable, capable, and very, very clever. My partner's nickname for him was 'Mr Fix-It'. Val was born just outside Warsaw in 1927 and never knew his mother. Instead, he was raised first by his father and late...

  Medford Mail Tribune , 29th March 1944 In 1912, politician Arthur Lee announced in Parliament that  "the United Kingdom, and particularly England, is increasingly becoming a clearing-house and depot and dispatch centre of the white slave traffic" His comment related to a Criminal Law Amendment Bill which was being debated, and which was born of widespread fears around issues of sex trafficking. For more on this, I recommend Julia Laite's book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey , her appearance on this episode of the History Extra  podcast and, if you want even more, this brilliant discussion of the book on the History Workshop  podcast.  While the Bill did not pass, Britain was not the only nation experiencing a similar moral panic, which centred around the notion that white women and girls were being kidnapped or coerced into sex work, usually by 'foreign' men. In the United States, Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act in 1910, better known as th...

Most people have heard of Burke and Hare, the two Scottish body-snatchers who turned to murder to increase their profits. I won't recount the entire history of body snatching here, especially as Suzie Lennox at Digging Up 1800 has such a rich amount of material. In essence, body snatching was a response to tight restrictions on anatomical dissection - very few bodies were available for medical students to practice on, and so some individuals made a handsome profit by raiding graves and selling the corpses to medical schools. The illicit trade prompted a number of ingenious methods and contraptions for preventing grave robbers from gaining access, including the 'mortsafes' pictured below, which feature on Digging Up 1800 , along with an explanation of their use. More examples can be found here .  In 1832, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act, which required the registration of anybody practicing anatomy and allowed the dissection of bodies which were unclaimed after death. ...

Britain’s most prolific serial killer of the modern age, whose photo I will not be sharing here, worked for a number of years at The Surgery at 21 Market Street, in the small Tameside town of Hyde. The town has the unfortunate distinction of being associated with two of the 20th century's most notorious cases of serial murder, for it was here that Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were living at the time of their arrest in October 1965. Just under thirty-three years later, Harold Shipman, a popular local GP, was arrested for the murder of one of his patients by means of the powerful opiate diamorphine; like the Moors Murderers, Shipman would be handed a whole life order. Shipman was caught because he forged the will of a patient, making changes to award himself a great deal of money. The patient, Kathleen Grundy, was a well-known figure in the local community who had once been the Mayoress of Hyde, and who had died in June 1998 at the age of 81. When her GP, Dr Shipman, told her family t...

Violent crime  committed by women is extremely rare (more than 90% of homicides are carried out by men), and sexually-motivated murders involving female perpetrators are even more unusual. So much so, in fact, that the names of the few women who have been convicted of such offences take on an almost mythical status in the collective consciousness.  One such killer is Myra Hindley. Even after her death, the public fascination with her continues.  There is a Trevor McDonald  documentary on ITV that claims that Myra Hindley and Rosemary West had a love affair while both imprisoned at Durham. It seems that there is always another angle, something new to say. But really it is just the same mugshot displayed over and over again on a outraged, horrified loop. I think most people know her story and have seen her photograph, so I'm choosing not to include either here. As much as I find crime in general interesting, I am growing increasingly uncomfortable with the way true cri...