Courtroom Ghosts

The unidentified people who died in the 1878 sinking of SS Princess Alice were not the only people pulled from the Thames whose names and stories remained unknown. The river treats its victims brutally, carrying them miles away from where they entered the water, and knocking them against debris and passing water traffic so as to render them unrecognisable. Sometimes bodies remain in the water for weeks before they are found, by which point natural processes have similarly altered their appearance beyond recognition. Other times, they enter the water already rendered unidentifiable by the person or persons who killed them. An obvious way of doing this is dismemberment. Almost exactly five years before the sinking of SS Princess Alice, a grizzly discovery was made in the Thames at Battersea. I am not going to delve into that case here, but the Thames Torso Murders are one of the most shocking crimes relating to the river. Luckily for you, the excellent historians at Criminal Corpses have...

More than thirty years before the shocking disaster of RMS Titanic, another maritime horror filled the front pages of London's newspaper and it occurred far closer to home. SS Princess Alice was a paddle steamer owned by the London Steamboat Company, 219.4ft long and 20.2ft wide. The Board of Trade had surveyed the ship in 1878 and decided that it could carry a maximum of 936 passengers. On 3rd September that year, SS Princess Alice left Swan Pier, close to London Bridge, and headed to Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. The return journey would call at Blackwall, North Woolwich, and the pleasure gardens at Rosherville. Tickets could be used interchangeably on any steamship owned by the company, so that those who did not wish to go all the way to Sheerness, or indeed could not afford to, had the option to make an outward journey to Rosherville on another vessel and join the Princess Alice for the return journey to Swan Pier; this journey cost as little as 2 shillings. As such...

  Born in 1849 in Northumberland, W.T Stead became the editor of the Nothern Echo in 1872, while still in his very early twenties. He immediately set about turning the newspaper into an 'engine of social reform'. Stead had a variety of social concerns, but perhaps the most taboo of them was prostitution, which proliferated in the cities and towns of the newly industrialised kingdom. It is 'the ghastliest curse which haunts civilised society, which is steadily sapping the very foundations of our morality' Stead wrote.  In 1883, Stead became the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette , personally one of my favourite 19th century newspapers, but described as the 'Dunghill Gazette' by poet Algernon Swinburne. Stead's style of journalism, which could fairly be described as sensationalist, did lead to changes in legislation and policy, such as new housing law that came about through his 1883 attack on the slums, or the £3.5 million government investment that followed his...

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the RSPCA, was founded in 1824. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, meanwhile, would not be founded for another sixty years. When a Liverpool businessman by the name of Thomas Agnew visited New York City, he was impressed by the society that had been set up there with the mission of rescuing 'little children from the cruelty and demoralization which neglect, abandonment and improper treatment engender'. Inspired, Agnew returned home and founded the Liverpool Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (the LSPCC). Other cities and towns followed suit and, in the summer of 1884, the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Shaftsbury, was the first President and he was joined by others including Benjamin Waugh as co-secretary and Angela Burdett-Coutts. The latter also founded Columbia Market in the late 1860s and served as Preside...