At around 3pm on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 11, 1892, a group of men were seen walking along White Cross Street (now Ayres Street) supporting a finely dressed gentleman who appeared worse for wear, writes historian Neil Crossfield…
Witnesses heard the men singing ‘ta-ra-de boom-de day’ and urging their slightly stupefied colleague to join in. Scenes like this would not be unusual in Victorian Southwark, where a multitude of pubs catered to a clientele where excessive alcohol consumption was common.
The group were then seen to bundle the man into a darkened alley, at the rear entrance to the George IV pub in Southwark Bridge Road. While three men went in, only two walked out, and it was then that the body of Dr. William Peter Kirwain was discovered, slumped against the wall of the alley, and frothing at the mouth.
A police officer was called, he cut the man’s tight collar with his knife, and an ambulance was called. By the time the victim got to Guy’s hospital, the man was dead. When Dr. Carling of the Guy’s ‘dead room’ made his initial assessment of the victim, he ascertained that the cause of death had been strangulation.
Initial reports about the victim suggested that the victim, Dr Kirwain, was a model of Victorian respectability and virtue. He was born in Ireland in 1850 and had gained his medical qualification there. He had recently been working as a locum doctor in the East End. Dr. James MacLachlan, who lived at 200 Barking Road, had known Kirwain since 1875 and told a coroner that he believed that he was a sober and abstemious man.
As more details were discovered about the doctor, it appeared that underneath the veneer of respectability, there most likely were darker secrets. Although he was not known to have any financial worries, Kirwain had frequently used pawn shops in the local area, although his friends just attributed this to an ‘eccentricity.’
He had left his digs at around 11am, smartly dressed, wearing a deep brown morning coat, a high hat, carrying a silk umbrella in his right hand, and light tan gloves. He was also wearing a gold ring on his little finger and a gold watch on a chain. Kirwain had visited Dr. MacLachlan at around 6pm before going to dinner with his friend’s brother.
Kirwain was last seen in the Aberfeldy Public House at around 11:15 on Tuesday night, when he left a colleague to return home to 212 Brixton Road, Kennington. This was around six miles away, and several buses and trams ran along this route.
However, his landlady, Mrs. Eliza Hardley, reported that he did not return to his room that night. Had he decided to walk home and become waylaid in another pub?
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We will never know, but the next confirmed sighting was at 5:30 on the following morning when he was seen by Edwin Stirling, the Landlord of the King Alfred pub which stood on Newington Causeway, near to the Elephant and Castle.
Giving evidence, Stirling said the pub had opened as usual at 5am, and a slightly dishevelled-looking Dr. Kirwain had been in the pub. He was not alone and was in the company of a woman named Blanche Roberts.
Kirwain had ordered a glass of bitter for himself and two-penny-worth of Irish whiskey for the woman. By her own admission, his companion was an ‘unfortunate’ woman; one of thousands of poor Victorian women who had become sex workers to support themselves.
At around 10:15 that morning, the couple went into a florist on Great Dover Street, where a slightly unsteady Dr. Kirwain bought a flower for Ms Roberts. He had tried to give her a yellow chrysanthemum, but she had wanted a rose.
The florist recalled the doctor saying, ‘Give her what she wants’ before pulling out a handful of coins, including ‘some loose silver, half-crowns, two-shilling pieces and two or three gold coins, all mixed up with some coppers. The florist also said that the doctor looked like he could do with a ‘good wash to refresh him’ and that the lady smelled ‘strongly of drink’.
After, they headed to the One Distillery in Borough High Street, where Kirwain bought more whisky for his lady friend. The sight of this incongruous couple had created a stir, drawing attention to themselves as they trawled around the streets of the Borough.
Borough was a notoriously poor and crime-ridden area during this period, where prostitution was rife and several of the most verminous common lodging houses could be found, inhabited by those living on the very fringes of society but not yet desperate enough to go into the workhouse.
Groups of children began to follow the pair as they left the bar and went to sit in Red Cross Street Gardens. The children were calling Ms Roberts ‘Tottie-Fay,’ just one of the aliases used by an infamous inebriated woman who had been arrested and charged in court over one hundred times for drunkenness and general debauchery, becoming somewhat of a working-class anti-hero in the period. The caretaker of Redcross Gardens had seen the children pelting the couple with stones and noted that the woman looked ‘three parts drunk’.
Unfortunately, the couple had attracted the attention of some slightly more menacing characters – Charles Balch, Edward Waller, John Noble, and Henry Lee.
Balch and Waller were habitual criminals. Balch had been born in Lambeth around 1854 and was first before a judge at the age of fourteen for stealing boots, he was sentenced to 21 days imprisonment. In 1868, he was convicted of stealing a pig’s head and sentenced to three months in prison. Other offenses were recorded, and he is eventually sentenced to seven years for stealing gooseberries in 1871. He does not stay out of trouble for long, as in 1882, he was sent to prison for ten years for stealing beans.
Balch was a particularly violent character; on the night detectives went to arrest him, they found him in the process of conducting a vicious assault on his wife. It is not surprising that he turned out like this, as his father was also a shady character who had been kicked to death in a fight at the Borough in 1887. Waller had been convicted of theft on three occasions and had also spent time in prison.
A witness named Alfred Kelly thought there was something suspicious about the way in which this group of men were following the doctor and Ms Roberts around and took it upon himself to follow them around the streets of the Borough for at least 2.5 hours.
At one point, he had seen the woman talking to the men and witnessed them trying to get Kirwain into a common lodging house. At around 1:30pm, the doctor was seen in the Lord Clyde pub in Peter Street (this pub is still serving today) in the company of three of the men, Balch, Waller, and Noble.
The landlady, Elizabeth Knight, thought that the doctor appeared drunk, and the men were buying him more drinks. At one point, he threw down and smashed a glass that they were trying to make him drink. The insinuation was that he was being drugged.
Another witness was a 13-year-old boy named John Wentworth, who made a living by selling bundles of firewood around the area. If any further evidence is needed that the accused were a vicious gang, it was later reported in the press that threats had been made to persuade Wentworth not to testify against them in court.
Wentworth’s donkey was attacked in its stable and sustained serious head injuries, losing an eye in the process. This barbaric attack deprived the lad of his means of making money, as the donkey was used to carry the wood. Luckily, people began to send donations into an appeal fund for Wentworth, and eventually, the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals donated a new animal to Wentworth, along with a promise that they would track down the people who so grievously attacked his animal.
When the four men left the Lord Clyde, the doctor was being held up by Balch and Waller. This was when several people heard the men singing. As they neared the passageway leading to the George IV pub, Balch and Waller pushed the doctor into the alleyway while Noble stood blocking the entrance.
We get some idea about what happened here from the testimony of another criminal called Featherstone, who was temporarily put into a holding cell with Waller whilst being transported to Holloway Prison after the men had been apprehended. Asking what he had been arrested for, Waller said for ‘doing in an old toff.’
Waller then described what had happened and said that he had put one hand inside the doctor’s shirt collar and the other over his mouth to prevent him from shouting. Balch, who was armed with a knife, accidentally stabbed Waller in the chin and then hit the doctor on the head, while Noble went through his pockets.
The prisoner asked Waller: ‘How much did you get?’. Waller replied, ‘One pound and six shillings.’ ‘That’s not much to kill a man for,’ said Featherstone, to which Waller replied: ‘We didn’t intend killing him, and if we had known he had only a little bit like that, we shouldn’t have touched him’.
But kill him they had, and after initial hearings at Lambeth Police Court, the full trial took place at the Old Bailey on November 14, 1892. Masses of people had gathered outside, and the courtroom was crowded. Balch, Waller, and Noble were all tried for murder, but Henry Lee was due to be tried for the lesser crime of robbery with violence later.
A wide range of witnesses were called upon, including poor Ms Roberts. In the witness box she appeared a pitiable character, totally bewildered by the whole experience. She confirmed that she was an ‘unfortunate’ woman and seemed to have little recollection of the events on the day of the murder due to her having consumed a lot of alcohol.
She revealed that she often inhabited the common lodging houses and sometimes took men into them. There is a suggestion that she may have known the accused as they lived in the same neighbourhood, but we will never know this.
However, while she may have had alcohol problems, it is possible that she had been advised to use this defence by the accused, who may have threatened her with retribution. There was also the potential that she would be implicated in the murder if she were found to have colluded with the men to rob him. It should be remembered that murder was a capital offence at this time.
Accepting that this was not a premeditated murder, all three men were found guilty of manslaughter while Lee was acquitted. Balch and Waller received a 20-year sentence each, and Noble 14 years. Waller would die in prison in 1907. This case had another unfortunate victim, for when the doctor’s mother in Dublin was told about his murder, she collapsed and died just three days before the trial had started, so overcome was she with grief.
Little is known of what happened to the unfortunate woman who was caught up in this tragic affair, but the 1911 census shows a Blanche Roberts working as a domestic servant at Guy’s hospital, so we can only hope that her later years were more peaceful and stable.
