The victim was scarified from ankle to thigh, with some deeper cuts marking his mottled flesh.  One witness described his buttocks as resembling nothing so much as raw beef with blood streaming from it.  The damage had been caused by a punishment beating of between thirteen to twenty strokes with a two-foot-long gutta percha rule. Before he collapsed on the …

There is rather a good story about a missionary and his dog.  We feel it fully qualifies for inclusion here, as it is a nineteenth-century story with a London connection.  Aside from the two protagonists—the human and the canine—there is a ship and a ship’s captain and a hospital.  The joy of the story lies in part in the connections …

Walk along the north pavement of Fleet Street between Chancery Lane and Bell Yard, and you will pass a heavily rusticated building of imposing proportions, home of an executive recruitment firm and a magazine publishing company.  But in the late eighteenth century there stood here a row of brick-fronted premises, one of which was owned by a Benjamin Rackstrow.  He …

Can a building qualify as an overlooked Londoner?  On this website it can.  Take for example no.40 Leicester Square, which is currently festooned with hoardings and scaffolding.  Next year, if all goes to plan, it will open as a luxury hotel.  Formerly it was a cinema, which opened in 1930 as the Leicester Square Theatre, and was renamed the Odeon …

Theophilus Dunkley was described by those who knew him as convivial, clubbable, charitable and very fond of the music hall, not qualities one immediately associates—perhaps unfairly—with the Victorian undertaker.  Theo lived on and around Westminster Bridge Road all his life, and now rests in Lambeth Cemetery in Tooting among the many variety performers who were both his friends and clients. …

The year is 1836, the last year of the reign of William IV, and the sunset of the Georgian era.  The month is March, and the day is the 3rd—a cold and cloudy Thursday.  The setting is the workhouse in Lambeth in Surrey, where one of the inmates has just died. Ordinarily the death of a workhouse pauper would pass without …

The desperate cry of “Save my darling, save my darling!” echoed around Clapham Common at around eleven o’clock on the night of the 4th of May 1871.  Edward Hanniford, native of Devon and local fishmonger, rushed from his shop on the Polygon towards the cry.  Police Constable Reasy, who was on his beat, also hurried towards the commotion.  Both men …

On an August Friday in 1888, with the temperature at 80o in the shade, two seemingly mismatched friends met up in London.  The older of the two, William Richard Hughes, was in his late fifties, while the younger, Frederic George Kitton, was in his early thirties.  Hughes was an important financial official, the Treasurer of the City of Birmingham.  Kitton …

The prestigious chocolatiers Charbonnel et Walker have been in business since 1875; now their flagship shop can be found at One, The Royal Arcade — the end that opens on to Old Bond Street end.  But who were Charbonnel and Walker?  A quick look on the company’s website will tell you that the founders — Mademoiselle Charbonnel and Mrs Walker …

Those present at the Clerkenwell Police Court on Saturday the 13th of May 1871 probably sighed inwardly when the case against Leonard Albert Cambray was called.  Yet again a member of the working classes had drunk too much and attacked his wife.  For the forward thinking the only way of ending this vicious cycle was to encourage temperance, educate the …