The Crime New Year’s Day 1847 was to be the last day that Amina and Robert Henry Blake would ever see. They were brother and sister, aged eight and five respectively, and were suffocated in their father’s bed by his jealous partner, thirty-eight-year-old Harriet Parker. Robert Blake Sr. had begun a relationship with Harriet two … Read more
Life in the Workhouse Ann was a twenty-eight-year-old mother of two illegitimate children who, in December 1837, was living with them in the workhouse at Drayton (now Market Drayton) in Shropshire, just over the Staffordshire border. She would have been described at the time as a dissolute young woman. The older of her two children … Read more
Background. The French’s had been married some seven years and lived in a cottage at Chiddingly in East Sussex with their one young son. William worked as a farm labourer with his brother, John, on a farm at Chiddingly and was seen in good health by John on Christmas Eve 1851. The next time John saw his brother was on January … Read more
Background.Sarah Chesham (nee Parker) was born at Clavering near Saffron Walden in Essex on the 9th of July 1809 and married Richard Chesham at the age of 19 in July 1828. She was pregnant when they married and gave birth to a daughter whom they christened Harriet on the 8th of February 1829. A further five boys were … Read more
Mary Wright (later Ball) was born in Nuneaton to Isaac Wright and Alice Ward in 1818 and christened there in June of that year. She married Thomas Ball in 1837 at the age of 20 and bore him six children over the next 12 years, of whom only one, Mary Ann Ball, survived. The marriage was mired in poverty … Read more
