May my end a warning be...

[Gary Barnett]

HR tells us that the spectators to Robinson’s hanging gathered in the the yard of Stafford Gaol.

Seems not. Almost all the press reports say the execution took place outside the gaol. This contraption was apparently in use there between 1817 and 1868:

[Gary Barnett]

This looks like the spot.

[Chris G.]

Great photographs!

Cheers

Chris

[Gary Barnett]

Great photographs!

Cheers

Chris

Thanks, Chris.

Tom’s point below about the impetus coming from bad research is spot on. I read HR saying the (3/4,000) spectators congregated inside the prison gates and I have doubts:

a) because it sounds implausible and it contradicts the press reports I’ve read,

and

b) because I don’t trust HR’s research.

So I look it up and learn something about how executions actually worked at Stafford. Or so I imagine...

But we have been told that we do not have the skills or knowledge to challenge the research of an historian of HR’s calibre, so maybe she has a secret source, available only to pukkah historians, which proves that Robinson’s execution was the exception to the rule.

[Michael Banks]

Thanks, Tom.

My copy of The...Bugle arrived today.

The Kidney Kate article had a follow-up: a ‘Ripperologist ’ named Dave Froggatt of Yardley, Birmingham sent in a copy of Kate’s birth certificate (which they reproduced).

Dave subsequently wrote the following article for the June, 1996 Ripperologist in which he claimed, ‘Catherine and Thomas Conway made their living by selling books written by Conway about famous people and hangings‘.

https://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rip-wolver.html

As far as I can tell, the origin of the gallows ballads idea was the Bugle article, which isn’t attributed to anyone and has far too much detail to be entirely credible.

Hello Gary,

An irrelevant piece of info but Dave Froggatt is a very good friend of mine.

[Gary Barnett]

Hello Gary,

An irrelevant piece of info but Dave Froggatt is a very good friend of mine.

Thanks, Michael. Next time you see him, could you ask him what he thinks of the Bugle piece?

[Michael Banks]

Hello Gary, I spoke to Dave Froggatt the other day and he told me that he was impressed with The Bugle piece for its detail. I get The Bugle every week and it’s great for local history.

Dave also mentioned a piece in The Midland Evening News dated Thursday October 4th 1888. It was from an interview with a married cousin of Catherine’s (her name has variously been written as Crate, Crute, Croot and Croote) who lived in Oxford Street, Wolverhampton and her an aunt, Mrs J Eddowes who lived with her husband at 119 Bilston Street, Wolverhampton.

The story is of a pensioner (Thomas Conway) travelling around the country selling pamphlets on history assisted by Catherine Eddowes.

[Gary Barnett]

Hello Gary, I spoke to Dave Froggatt the other day and he told me that he was impressed with The Bugle piece for its detail. I get The Bugle every week and it’s great for local history.

Dave also mentioned a piece in The Midland Evening News dated Thursday October 4th 1888. It was from an interview with a married cousin of Catherine’s (her name has variously been written as Crate, Crute, Croot and Croote) who lived in Oxford Street, Wolverhampton and her an aunt, Mrs J Eddowes who lived with her husband at 119 Bilston Street, Wolverhampton.

The story is of a pensioner (Thomas Conway) travelling around the country selling pamphlets on history assisted by Catherine Eddowes.

Thanks, Mike. I think I’ve seen piece you mention, or one very similar. As far as I can tell there’s no mention of ballads prior to the Bugle piece.

I did some research into Jesse Croote. I’m not sure he actually married Kate’s cousin. He was a rather dodgy horse dealer/greengrocer and had connections to Islington. His brother was in the manure business there, as had been the Tomkins lot.

[Michael Banks]

Thanks, Mike. I think I’ve seen piece you mention, or one very similar. As far as I can tell there’s no mention of ballads prior to the Bugle piece.

I did some research into Jesse Croote. I’m not sure he actually married Kate’s cousin. He was a rather dodgy horse dealer/greengrocer and had connections to Islington. His brother was in the manure business there, as had been the Tomkins lot.

Dave and I did talk about visiting a few Eddowes related areas. I’ll mention it to him although I haven’t a clue if there is anything significant remaining.

[Gary Barnett]

Dave and I did talk about visiting a few Eddowes related areas. I’ll mention it to him although I haven’t a clue if there is anything significant remaining.

I have a family connection to the Black Country. My horse-slaughtering ancestors moved from Whitechapel, first to Wolverhampton and then to Bilston before eventually returning to London (Islington). They were in Islington while the Tomkins family were there and when the Tomkins’s moved to Manchester they hooked up with a character named Nicholas Shippy, another Whitechapel knacker, whom my family knew.

[Gary Barnett]

I’ve posted this elsewhere, but I think it should be lodged here as a record of the quality of the source material used to construct the Kate Eddowes, Balladeer myth.


Two sources in combination (if both are correct) would seem to suggest that "Aristotle Tump" is the pen name of Harry Taylor.
In a blog named "Black Country Gob" I found this comment:
"Aristotle Tump, was the alter-ego of the first Editor of the Black Country Bugle. Now while I love reading the paper, and do contribute to it's page's, some of his early research, shall we say, relied entirely on folk stories."
The story of the founding of the Black Country Bugle is summarised on Wikipedia as follows:
"The paper was established in 1972 in Halesowen, by the Founding Editor Harry Taylor, and his co-partners Derek Beasley and David James. The trio had previously worked together on a free local paper, with Taylor editing the paper and writing the majority of the editorial, and Beasley and James selling adverts, as was the case in the early years of the Black Country Bugle."
This local newspaper still exists and their website is at

http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/Home/

Chris Scott, 24th March, 2012.

https://www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=14554

[Gary Barnett]

Does anyone know the origin of the belief that this image of Kate Eddowes was based on a miniature portrait given to her by an aunt?

[Gary Barnett]

Does anyone know the origin of the belief that this image of Kate Eddowes was based on a miniature portrait given to her by an aunt?

The reason I’m asking is that I suspect the answer is ‘Aristotle Tump’. It’s another product of his fertile imagination that is regularly trotted out as a fact.

[Gary Barnett]

I wonder why it never occurred to me before to question the plausibility of Kate’s working class Wolverhampton family commissioning a portrait of their wayward niece and the PIP gaining access to it within days of her murder.

Where would they have got it from?

[Gary Barnett]

According to the Bugle, in January, 1866 Thomas Conway placed an order for 400 extra copies of the successful Robinson ballad with Sam Sellman, the Church Street printer.

The 1851 census shows there was indeed a ‘stationer’ of that name operating in Church Street, Bilston. However, by 1861 he had moved to Penn/Upper Penn and was operating as a timber merchant. He remained in Penn for the rest of his life and by 1881, aged 78, he was being described as a retired timber merchant.

I think we can narrow down Sellman’s abandonment of his Church Street stationer’s business to 1857: