Fouls Deeds - Reviewed by Adrian Morris
What do we have here?
We have one of the latest in a long line of books in the Foul Deeds
& Suspicious Deaths range by various authors of which Geoffrey
Howse is but one. Despite the fairly hefty price tag for a paperback
book such as this, the book is nevertheless packed full of stories of
London’s ‘East End’. That is another point too. Howse ponders in his
introduction as to where the East End begins and ends. So it is not
surprising that Howse widens his net, and thus his historical remit,
to cover parts of East London as well. So we end up getting stories
about Hackney and Leyton that are not strictly in the East End as we
know it, but they are often considered so by the less historically
topographically minded public. So this is no bad thing as there have
been some juicy and salacious stories in these outlying areas.
The book itself is not an historical inquest into such affairs
bringing new insights or evidence to bear, but a piece of light
literature for the casual reader. Maybe someone who doesn’t really
know too much about the place and wants to begin to find out more.
This will be the book for you. It is not, and I must stress this, a
book such as the murderers’ Who’s Who as it doesn’t seek to
introduce the reader to a ‘find your way around the deeds and place’.
Howse places his work within the light history genre.
The contents really do
go through the whole history up to the beginning of the 20th century.
So we start with the Peasant’s Revolt against the young Richard
II in 1381 - that took place, in part, in Mile End, right up to a
catfight in a Dorset Street lodging house in 1903. The first group of
chapters deal with the purely grand historical stories such as the
Tower of London and the dreadful escapades and executions that took
place there. Howse indulges himself in a pretty good telling of the
political saga that surrounded the execution of Thomas Wentworth in
1641 and how he was impeached and sentenced by parliament. Fascinating
stuff. We hear about the pirates at Wapping and how their bloated and
decaying bodies were washed by the tide - hence the expression; “what
a wapper (sic)”. We hear about the plight of the tragic Coal
Heavers of 1691.
The middle chapters
deal with classic dark tales, mainly murder. We hear about the Henry
Wainwright murder of Harriet Lane in Vine Court and how Sir W. S.
Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan fame came to be involved. The
Whitechapel murders are dealt with and it is a fairly sound telling of
the murders, though Howse does get Martha Tabram’s age wrong. He
describes Druitt as a failed barrister - he wasn’t. He also claims
Druitt to be 31 years instead of 41 at the time of his suicide. Still,
one would need to dig deep to get the facts 100% and that was simply
not the objective for the writer.
We hear about later
murders by awful fiends like Edger Edwards. Forgotten by history for
the most part, but so bad that we learn that even George Chapman
called him a “hot ’un”! The rest of the book is made up of urban
dramas both extreme and common place culled from the Illustrated
Police News - which is where a large part of the illustrations do
come from.
It might have been a
nicer idea to have made the book’s scope carry over a wider historical
timeframe and cut out a lot of the more every day stories. Then again,
these stories did give the book a bit of a social historical backbone
which was nice. A book that will not change already entrench
knowledge, but one to introduce readers to an area they might not
otherwise know anything about. It is a book for the novice or casual
reader looking for a light read on a dark subject.
Wharncliffe Books
2005. ISBN: Paperback 1-903425-71-9. 192 pages A5 format. (£10.99) |
