Killing of a Timekeeper

A man who was refused permission to take up his duties after returning to work drunk pushed his timekeeper into the River Mersey. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death but later reprieved.

At 6pm on Monday 9th October 1905 William Hitchen, began a nightshift at Toxteth Dock, where the 28 year old worked as a stoker on an engine. At 10pm he was given half an hours break and went with engine driver Thomas Moore to a nearby pub where they both drank one and a half pints of beer. 

Moore returned to his duties but Hitchen stayed away for another forty minutes. When he returned and the timekeeper Thomas Williams refused to book him back on. Williams then left the engine house and walked towards the river, followed by Hitchen. Some words were exchanged and Hitchen pushed Williams over the wall into the Mersey. 

Hitchen then went to rejoin Moore at the engine and casually told him that he had pushed Williams into the Mersey. The driver didnt believe this but a few moments later a labourer went up to him and said that the incident had really happened. Moore ran to the river wall and threw a rope down to Williams who was struggling, but before he could reach it he sank below the water. 

A boat was lowered but the body was not recovered until 2am, by which time Hitchen had fled across the Mersey to his Tranmere home. He was arrested an hour later saying to police 'I am very sorry' when being told that Williams was dead.

An inquest heard that Hitchen's actions had also been witnessed by a labourer named James Murray, who had been told by him 'I will do for that fellow tonight.' Another worker had seen Hitchen in the engine house was was told 'The timekeeper wouldn't book me on but he's alright now, where he ought to be in the river.'

Williams was a 24 year old widower whose wife had died thirteen months earlier. He lodged at 351 Park Road and his funeral was held at St Gabriel's Church followed by an internment at Toxteth Park Cemetery. 

At the Liverpool Assizes on 1st December Hitchen pleaded that he had been drunk at the time, but in summing up Mr Justice Ridley said that this could only be a factor if there had been provocation, which in this case there wasn't. 

The jury took 45 minutes to find Hitchen guilty of murder but with a recommendation for mercy on the grounds of the premeditation period being very short. He had held his head in his hands for much of the trial and fainted on hearing the sentence of death, leading to him being carried from the dock. 

More than 25,000 people signed a petition calling for a reprieve. This was then presented to the Home Secretary by his solicitor John Bateman of 115a Dale Street. Two weeks after the trial, it was confirmed that the sentence would be commuted to penal servitude for life.

Killed Over Coal

A dispute between two trimmers on board a Liverpool registered vessel led to one of them being gaoled for sixteen years.

At 4pm on On 8th January 1905 German Emil Baumann finished his four hour shift on board the Booth Line's Caereuse, which was sailing from Barbados to New York. He was challenged by his relief William Maguire, who felt he had not left sufficient coal to last the half hour it would take him to clean out the furnace.

About twenty minutes later Baumann appeared at the stoke hole and taunted Maguire, refusing to send any more coal down to him. He then challenged Maguire to a fight and the two men went onto the forecastle. Another seaman named James Mackay then saw Maguire fall down clutching his chest which had blood pouring out of it. The ship's doctor was called but Maguire was dead within minutes, with wounds in his chest and abdomen.

An inquiry in New York ruled that there was sufficient grounds to extradite Baumann to the United Kingdom and on 20th February he appeared before Mr Justice Wills at the Liverpool Assizes. Baumann claimed that Maguire had first come at him with a knife, but the witness Mackay said that only the German had a weapon. 

When the jury deliberated, Baumann was saved by the fact Maguire had willingly left his post to fight him. This led to him being found guilty only of manslaughter but the judge said it was very near to murder. He was then sentenced to sixteen years penal servitude.

Suicide Pact in a Hotel

When two lovers made a suicide pact at a Liverpool hotel, one survived leading to him being sentenced to death.

On Sunday 11th September 1904 a maid at the Waverley Hotel in Lord Nelson Street grew concerned about not being able to enter a room despite making several attempts during the day. At around 7pm the proprietor decided to force entry into the room, which had been booked in the name of Mr and Mrs Muir. On going in they found the female dead and the male alive but unconscious.

When the police arrived the male, 29 year old Allan Muir from Bootle came to but was in a delirious state. He was taken to the Royal Infirmary and then the Workhouse Hospital, where opium poisoning was diagnosed. A search of the hotel room found letters that appeared to indicate a suicide pact between the couple, who were not man and wife but instead two lovers. The female was Isabella Mackenzie, a mother of two from Glasgow who was separated from her husband.

On discharge from hospital Muir was arrested and charged with murder, as the law of the time decreed that if two people attempted suicide and one survived, the other was to be charged with murder. Muir replied to the detective on being told of this charge;  'I did not kill her, we both agreed to die together. She went out and bought the stuff and we both took equal amounts.'

Investigations into the couple's background established that they had met and began a relationship when they were crew members on board the Pretorian, which sailed between Glasgow and Canada. Three days before they were found in the room, they had gone to Muir's home in Bootle where there was a disturbance that led to the police attending. Their last day together had been spent having breakfast in the hotel before buying drugs from chemists in the Lime Street area.

At St George's Hall on 5th December a letter was read out from Muir to his wife, which said 'You have ruined my life with your tongue, you have driven me to this, may god forgive me. I sincerely hope the dear little children will not take after you.' Muir's defence suggested that his lover was a regular taker of opium and that it would have killed her one day, whether or not he was in the vicinity.

The judge's summing up was not favourable to Muir, as he pointed out that Mackenzie had wrote a letter to her husband begging forgiveness, indicating that she was planning to die. The jury returned a guilty verdict but with a recommendation for mercy. The judge passed the death sentence was was the norm but a week later the Home Secretary commuted this to penal servitude for life.

Crockery in the Witness Box

When a Chinese crew member of a British vessel was killed in the 1920s, many of the witnesses at the subsequent trial took the oath by smashing crockery.

On 28th July 1925 an argument broke out amongst Chinese crew on the Sunderland registered steamer Palm Branch, which was sailing from St Thomas in Jamaica to Liverpool. The result of this was that one of them, Sing Looh ended up overboard. A boat was lowered but the search for him was abandoned after two hours.

On arrival in Liverpool on 11th August police boarded and after speaking to the Captain detained six of the crew. They then charged firemen Cheong Fook and Cheong Mo Fook, who were unrelated, with murder on the high seas. Cheong Mo Fook claimed that he had been hit over the head with a basin by Sing Looh and he had subsequently slipped into the water. Other witnesses though  said that the chief engineer had separated them and Cheong had then assaulted Sing Looh and threw him overboard with the help of his accomplice.

At the trial on 5th November two interpreters were required, one to interpret the evidence from Shanghainese to Cantonese, then another to translate into English. The Chinese witnesses took the oath by smashing crockery, the broken pieces of which littered the witness box. Cheong Mo Fook was found not guilty and discharged.

An Adopted Baby Killed

A respectable middle class woman in Mossley Hill who had lost  a baby of her own adopted another one, only to kill during a spell of insanity.

Early in 1903 Elizabeth Sturgeon, the 36 year old wife of a drapers buyer who lived at 7 Dudley Road, gave birth to a stillborn baby. Devastated by this loss, she sought to adopt one and in June of that year answered an advert in the Liverpool Echo from someone in Litherland looking to take a baby off their hands.


Sturgeon showed great affection for the four month old baby girl who she christened Mabel. In early July she visited her parents in Lincolnshire where she acquired the services of a girl called Alice Porter who returned to Liverpool with her to help as a housekeeper and nanny.

On Tuesday 28th July Sturgeon acted very strangely, taking the unusual step of sending Alice to buy gin for her. She had a lie down and told her husband that she was in a vile temper, then wrote a letter to her parents saying that she was going to have a 'last walk' due to the cruelty of her husband who had tried to strangle her so he could live with a flower girl.

Sturgeon took Alice and Mabel out with her at 4pm on a long walk that ended up with them sat under a hedge in a field near Mossley Hill church The baby was crying in a strange fashion and Alice expressed concern to Sturgeon that she may suffocate the child when she put a handkerchief in her mouth to try and stop this. Alice then fell asleep after Mabel had gone quiet, having been given a small drop of rum by Sturgeon. 

In the morning, Sturgeon offered Alice a shilling as an inducement to walk across the parapet of a railway bridge. She did so but when halfway across she fell thirty feet, but was lucky to suffer only a sprained ankle.  Sturgeon told Alice to remain where she was and she would return the baby home then get help, but she was gone some time. When she did return, she told Alice that a woman was looking after Mabel and when she could find no trace her, reported the baby to the police as missing.

Nobody local had seen anything untoward and after speaking with her husband Bill Sturgeon over the letters his wife had written police arrested her on suspicion of murder on the Wednesday evening. A search of the area where they had last been seen was launched and Mabel's body was found the following morning a few inches underground in a lime pit off Solomon's Lane (where Geoffrey Hughes playing fields now are), her neck covered in stab wounds. 

Soon after the body was found, Sturgeon was remanded for a week at the police court. The inquest on 7th August heard evidence that she had been suffering hallucinations and was mentally deranged at the time of the tragedy. The coroner's court being unable to make a ruling on her state of mind, a verdict of wilful murder was returned and she was committed for trial at the assizes, 

Sturgeon was well dressed when she appeared at the assizes on 4th December, where the prosecution did not contest the medical evidence that she was insane. Justice Ridley then ordered that she be detained at His Majesty's Pleasure. Remarkably, instructed by her husband, Sturgeon's solicitor made an immediate application for her discharge, stating that the murder took place in about of temporary insanity that was now cured. However this was refused by the Home Secretary and she was removed to Broadmoor. She was released a few years later however and in the 1911 census is shown as living with Bill in Britannia Road, Wallasey.

Woman Cuts Her Husband Instead of the Bread

A woman whose abusive husband berated her for not mending his trousers properly stabbed him to death after he then told her to cut more bread for their children's supper.

On 2nd June 1903 at around 10pm, twelve year old Mary Lyon returned to her home in Salisbury Street, Everton after playing out. She was then asked to make sure her mother's friend Margaret Constantine got back to her home in Birchfield Street safely as she was drunk.

Mary saw Margaret back home, leaving her mother Catherine in Salisbury Street with her father Charlie and eight year old brother Charles. Both her parents had been drinking and Charlie said to Catherine 'You have not mended my trousers right.' She ignored him, leading to Charlie slapping her in the face and saying 'Cut more bread for the children.' With their son Charles watching in horror, Catherine pushed her husband away whilst holding the bread knife, which stabbed him in the chest causing him to fall onto the sofa.

Catherine ran into  the street screaming and a passer by named Henry Dowling came to see what was going on. She took him inside and Charlie was lying on the sofa. Young Charles said 'My mama done it' and Catherine responded 'I did not mean to do it.' Mary then returned from Birchfield Street and encountered the tragic scene.

Charles was pronounced dead on arrival at the Royal Infirmary, where the post mortem established that the wound to the heart was five inches deep. Catherine was arrested and admitted she was responsible for the killing, but insisted she had not meant to cause any harm. 

The inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder and Catherine was committed to the assizes for trial. However the Grand Jury, which carried out a preliminary review of the facts, decided that she should only stand trial for manslaughter. She was found guilty and sentenced by Mr Justice Bigham to three years penal servitude.

The Blundellsands Tragedy

A Crosby woman who killed two of her children and then attempted suicide herself was detained at His Majesty's Pleasure

Shortly before 9am on the morning of Sunday 31st May 1903 Joseph Cannell, a journeyman plasterer living at Brighton Vale in Blundellsands, went out for a walk with his three elder children leaving his wife Eleanor in charge of the youngest two. Joseph did not speak to Eleanor before going out which wasn't unusual, but there was nothing normal about the scene which greeted him when they returned at 2pm. 

Eleanor was in an excited state and told her husband that she had drowned their two youngest children. When Joseph saw that they weren't in their cots, he ran into the kitchen where he found eighteen month old Alfred and six month old Eleanor lying face down in a tub that was usually used to wash clothes. They were both dead and when Joseph went back to his wife's bedroom, she was trying to strangle herself with a rope that she had tied to a bedpost.

Joseph managed to cut the rope from his wife's neck but she ran off with the knife threatening to cut her throat. When Joseph managed to get the knife from her, Eleanor pleaded to be allowed to go to the beach to drown herself then tried to drink boiling water, causing her to vomit profusely. 

A doctor arrived and managed to sedate 38 year old Eleanor who was then taken to hospital. A letter was found in her clothing which read addressed to her father which read 'I cannot live in such trouble, forgive me and don't blame me too much.'

At the inquest on 12th June Joseph told the Coroner Mr Samuel Brighouse how his wife had been acting oddly in recent weeks and he had turned down work on occasions to stay at home and look after her. The day before the killing, he had been in a pub when she threw a glass of beer over him. Eleanor stated that she did what she did as she was upset and a neighbour said she had been erratic recently when the weather was hot. During the proceedings she often wept and cried out for her daughter Jane, who was in the horrible situation of giving evidence against her mother.

A verdict of wilful murder was returned by the coroner's jury and Eleanor then appeared at the County sessions House in William Brown Street, where she was committed to the assizes for trial. On 8th September Dr Price from Walton gaol said that she was unfit to plead and was suffering from melancholia at the time of the tragedy. This was not challenged by the Crown, leading to Justice Bigham ordering that she be detained at His Majesty's Pleasure.