Thomas Fogarty

[Gary Barnett]

My trip to the NA produced this:



RA Driver (no. 40869) Thomas Fogarty enlisted at Woolwich on 24/7/1874. He was 19 yrs 1 mth old at the time, and 5ft 5 5/8 ins tall; his POB was St. George’s, Middlesex and he was a baker.

[Edward Stow]

If he was a master baker, that might explain why he went blind.

[Gary Barnett]

I’m not sure these are all soldier 40869 or that 40869 is our Foggy, though I think both are likely.


Thomas Fogarty Courts Martial


12/11/1874

Woolwich
Desertion/MA kit
168 days hard labour


27/5/1875

Devonport
Insulting language
42 days hard labour


9/3/1878

Sheffield
Breaking from barracks/resisting escort/MA kit/drunk
336 days hard labour


21/2/1879

Sheffield
Desertion/MA kit/Re-enlisting
Fined £1

4/7/1879

Sheffield
Absence/theft and receiving/drunk
168 days hard labour


4/1/1882

Poona (GCM)
Escaping from confinement/desertion
5 years
Transferred from India to Portsmouth (4/5/82), then Millbank (17/5/82) and finally Chatham (27/5/82).

Fogarty was discharged from the RA on the grounds of ‘ignominy’ on 22/5/1882. His 5-year prison sentence was remitted on 10/3/1885.

I can’t seem to access the Chatham and Millbank prison registers that I found a while back. Going via Digital Panopticon, I can only get to transcriptions in FMP.

[Robert Linford]

Gary, try England & Wales, Crime, Prisons & Punishment, 1770-1935


(FMP)

[Gary Barnett]

Gary, try England & Wales, Crime, Prisons & Punishment, 1770-1935


(FMP)

Thanks, Rob.

I don’t remember having to go through that palaver before. I’m sure that once I was directed to FMP from the DP, the associated image was immediately on offer.

Having tried your suggestions above and using the series, piece and page refs given, I land up 30 years adrift from what I wanted.

[Gary Barnett]

40869 appears in various Police Gazettes in 1875 as having deserted from Woolwich on 31/5/1875. Not sure how that fits in the gap between his Devonport and 1st Sheffield CMs.

[Gary Barnett]

Thanks Rob, this entry in the Millbank register shows the Portsmouth/Millbank/Chatham trajectory of Fogarty - and his mucker(?) Linehan.

I can’t help thinking of Dravot and Carnehan.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7V566m8Bz0

[Anna Morris]

Gary: I am sure you are watching for any cause of Foggy's blindness. Your new avi indicates a man whose eyeballs have been severely damaged, are missing or non-existent. I am wondering if he had a couple bad fights and got his eyeballs split one at a time. Or another kind of accident. Then there was a press clipping about a fight--not about Foggy--where a brute intentionally destroyed the only eye a man had left. Some of the drunken fights were really nasty, speaking of Mayhem meaning maiming.

[Gary Barnett]

Gary: I am sure you are watching for any cause of Foggy's blindness. Your new avi indicates a man whose eyeballs have been severely damaged, are missing or non-existent. I am wondering if he had a couple bad fights and got his eyeballs split one at a time. Or another kind of accident. Then there was a press clipping about a fight--not about Foggy--where a brute intentionally destroyed the only eye a man had left. Some of the drunken fights were really nasty, speaking of Mayhem meaning maiming.

Yes, Anna, I’d love to know when, how, Foggy lost his sight. I think it was probably as a result of an injury. That said, the lady I have pegged as his mum was recorded as blind towards the end of her life.

I think the brute you mention was Jeremiah McCarthy, the boyfriend of Margaret Sullivan before she met and married William Crossingham. You may remember that on one occasion he kicked several of Margaret’s teeth out. Brute doesn’t really cover it.

[Roy Corduroy]

Good afternoon Gary,

What if Foggy had carved the fob on James Bousfield’s key chain and was expecting a share in the proceeds when Martha had sold it. She hadn’t, because she’d left it behind, but would Foggy have believed such a story?

In that scenario it wouldn’t have taken much for a vicious blind beggar with an ungovernable temper to have lost it, bashed Martha on the head with his stick, ripped open her clothing to look for the fob or some money to cover it and, finding nothing, to have commenced stabbing her, first with a small whittling knife and finally with a dagger-shaped carving tool.

The next day, fearing someone might have seen him with Martha, he coerces Poll into going to the police with a made up soldier story. Poll reluctantly agrees, but later gets cold feet and does a runner to her cousin’s, telling her doss-house friends that she intends to kill herself.

That is an interesting scenario you have.

Strange but I seem to remember Tom Wescott forwarding a very similar theory about Pearly Poll being a shill to lie for the real killer of Tabram, coming forward with the soldiers story which was a red herring. Tom wrote this in his book The Bank Holiday Murders. It was a new original idea he had.

And on the message boards when I tried to discuss Tom's theory you said something about Tom's work being all wrong and not to discuss Tom's theory ever. So I shut up about that. It was almost like being a newbie again in 2008 when everything I brought up people said "oh we already covered that."

So I'm taking a wild guess that after Tom's book came out, that somewhere in the midst of hundreds if not thousands of posts interspersed with the usual asides, YouTube videos, Scrapple jokes, and what have you, someone had found some kind of mistake in Tom's stuff. His details. The research, the nomenclature. Something was found to cause an Aha moment, which made Tom persona non grata. Mr. Nobody. That's the impression I got from you. So I was left to ponder such.

Now here you are proposing a carbon copy of Tom's theory with your suspect, the blind man, Fogarty, cohort of Mary Ann Connelly, (Pearlie) being the protagonist.

HUH? Have i entered the Twilight Zone? Do not attempt to adjust your internet dial.

Roy

[Gary Barnett]

Good afternoon Gary,



That is an interesting scenario you have.

Strange but I seem to remember Tom Wescott forwarding a very similar theory about Pearly Poll being a shill to lie for the real killer of Tabram, coming forward with the soldiers story which was a red herring. Tom wrote this in his book The Bank Holiday Murders. It was a new original idea he had.

And on the message boards when I tried to discuss Tom's theory you said something about Tom's work being all wrong and not to discuss Tom's theory ever. So I shut up about that. It was almost like being a newbie again in 2008 when everything I brought up people said "oh we already covered that."

So I'm taking a wild guess that after Tom's book came out, that somewhere in the midst of hundreds if not thousands of posts somewhere interspersed with the usual asides, YouTube videos, Scrapple jokes, and what have you, someone had found some kind of mistake in Tom's stuff. His details. The research, the nomenclature. Something was found to cause an Aha moment, which made Tom persona non grata. Mr. Nobody. That's the impression I got from you. So I was left to ponder such.

Now here you are proposing a carbon copy of Tom's theory with your suspect, the blind man, Fogarty, cohort of Mary Ann Connelly, (Pearlie) being the protagonist.

HUH? Have i entered the Twilight Zone? Do not attempt to adjust your internet dial.

Roy

I think your memory is at fault, Roy.

For a start, you raised this point a short while ago and I thought I’d answered it. I’m happy to do so again, though.

My problem with Tom’s theory was the implausible Lords of Spitalfields/William Thick/Times-reading ‘shadow man’ (Le Grand?) conspiracy theory which, although not explicitly stated, was there in the background of his book. And that such a ‘proto-mafia’ would entrust a sick, chaotic drunk like Pearly Poll with such a crucial mission seemed to me to be beyond implausible. You’ll remember that part of the theory was that Poll attempted to fit up Pizer in Church Street, until Debra proved she was in an infirmary at the time.

That Poll might have been coerced into lying to the police by a violent partner seems far more plausible.

Having made the claim that I told you not to discuss Tom’s theory ever, I must ask you to provide evidence of my having done so.

Over to you.

Gary

[Gary Barnett]

Pearly Poll’s husband was a vicious, drunken blind man with mental health issues who as a wood carver presumably carried an assortment of sharp tools around with him. At one point he sold laces on the streets of Spitalfields.

On the morning of Annie Chapman’s murder an unnamed blind laces seller, a man said to be of ‘ungovernable temper’, reportedly committed a vicious attack on a woman near Spitalfields market. Having felled her with a blow he stabbed her repeatedly, and such was his rage that even after he was overpowered by the crowd he struggled to regain his knife and continue the attack.

If the attack had taken place at night and away from onlookers, the chances are there would have been a second corpse with contused wounds and multiple stabs lying in the Whitechapel mortuary. An almost carbon copy of the Tabram murder, with possibly more than one weapon being employed.

Was the Spitalfields attacker Thomas Fogarty? We don’t (yet) know. Were Poll and Fogarty an item in 1888? We don’t know that either, but we do know they both habituated tiny NE Passage that year.

[Anna Morris]

Here are some pathophysiological causes of collapsed eyeballs. (I'll work on the link till it works.......well, there isn't any way I can make that thing work. I suppose the basic search terms in the link would get someone there. There are several causes for collapse of the eyeballs including diseases.)

https://www.healthline.com/health/phthisis_bulb#causes[/url]

[Gary Barnett]

The first time we know of that Poll was treated for syphilis was shortly after she married Foggy, though given her occupation she may have contracted the disease before she met him. Debra once wondered whether that might have been the cause of his blindness.

40869 enlisted as a driver, but some of the later military records have him as a gunner. Could he have been already been losing his sight while serving in the RA? Lots of potentially sight-destroying diseases might have been picked up in the tropics, I would have thought.

[Gary Barnett]

Here are some pathophysiological causes of collapsed eyeballs. (I'll work on the link till it works.......well, there isn't any way I can make that thing work. I suppose the basic search terms in the link would get someone there. There are several causes for collapse of the eyeballs including diseases.)

https://www.healthline.com/health/phthisis_bulb#causes[/url]

It’s not working for me, Anna.