Our repertoire includes several Legal London walks and those who have read previous blogs about the Inns of Court will be aware of just how intriguing and special that particular part of London is.
However, the tentacles of the law extend all over London and creep in to other of our London walks with incredible regularity.
Take, for example, the London Walking Tour that we have that sets out from Marble Arch. It has an incredible amount of variety on it. To begin with there is a 20th Century murder, featured on it.
At the junction of Bryanston Street and Portman Street there is a building which in 1922 was the Spencer Hotel.
It was in her room at this hotel on 14th March 1922 that 65 year old Lady White, was found dying from head wounds. There were no signs of forced entry and this led the police to the belief that her attacker must have been somebody who was connected with the hotel. They therefore began interviewing the hotel’s employees and, as a result,became suspicious of 18-year-old pantry boy Henry Jacoby.
He was searched and two bloodstained handkerchiefs were found in his pockets, Confronted with the evidence Jacoby confessed that he had intended to rob a guest’s room and had taken a hammer with him to ‘use if necessary’. He found Lady White’s door unlocked and entered. But she had woken and, to keep her quiet, he had hit her with the hammer. Found guilty of the crime he was hanged.
As our London walk progresses around this area we arrive at number 21 Shouldham Street. It was here on April 1st 1898 that Arthur Orton died. Twenty five years earlier Orton, a sheep slaughterer from Australia, had attempted to pull off a gigantic hoax by claiming to be Roger Tichborne, wealthy landowner and heir to a baronetcy, whose ship had disappeared on a voyage between Brazil and Jamaica. Lady Tichborne refused to believe her son was dead and offered a reward in Australian newspapers for any word of her son. Orton responded with a letter in which he addressed her as “My dear Mother,” and the hoax was underway. She met him in Paris in 1866, accepted him as her son, paid off his debts and afforded him an annual allowance of £1,000. But his claims were disputed by other members of the family, and after what was, at the time, the longest running case in the history of Britain’s criminal and civil courts, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. His last years at this house were spent in dire poverty. Yet such was the legend of the ‘Tichborne Claimant’ that 5,000 people lined the Edgware Road to watch his body being taken to a pauper’s grave in Paddington Cemetery.
These are just two of the stories that we cover on our London walk around Tyburn and Edgware Road. It makes such a difference to hear these stories at the locations at which the events you are hearing about occurred.
And that, in essence, is the hallmark of our exciting and informative London walks. We not only pack them with facts that will keep you entertained, but we also populate our London walking tours with real people.
Tags: Arthur Orton, London walks, Murder in London., Tichborne Claimant
