Sunday 29 January 2012

Body in Suitcase: New Shock (Brighton Trunk Murder)

Daily Mirror dated Tuesday June 19th 1934
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On 17th June 1934 a worker at the left-luggage office of Brighton Railway Station complained about the smell coming from a large suitcase or trunk that had been deposited there a while before.  The police were called and, when opened, the trunk was found to contain the dismembered torso of a woman. Two days later, further searches at other Railway termini turned up the trunk at King’s Cross Station in London. This contained a woman’s legs.  Sir Bernard Spilsbury, England’s most senior and most famous criminal anthropologist (and 1930's answer to Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan), established that the torso and legs were from the same person, but little else.  


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As can be seen from this clipping form the next day’s Mirror the story took a bizarre turn with the revelations of a Psychic, even so the rest of the victim was never found, her identity never established and the murderer never charged.

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During house-to-house investigations around Brighton Railway station the police found another trunk and another body.  It was soon decided that this had no connection to the previous discoveries and was treated as a separate case.  This time the victim was identified, as Violette Kaye, and her ex-boyfriend Tony Mancini stood trial for murder but he was acquitted due to lack of evidence.  38 years later Mancini apparently confessed to a ‘News of the World’ journalist (remember them?) that he had killed Violette.


Incidentally, for crime fiction fans I can thoroughly recommend Peter Guttridge's Brighton Trilogy - 'City of Dreadful Night', 'The Last King of Brighton' and 'The Thing Itself' - the latter out in April 2012.


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Piracy in the China Seas was quite common in the 1930’s. According to a statement in Hansard in 1936, 17 British adults and 70 British schoolchildren had been victims of Chinese pirates between 1933 and 1935. Of these only 3 were killed.  On the 17th June 1934 SS Shuntein, a passenger and cargo vessel on only its second voyage was taken over by Chinese pirates. 5 Brits, 1 Japanese and about 20 Chinese passengers were taken onto 8 or 9 Junks.  6 Royal Navy vessels led by the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle immediately set out to intercept the pirates and, having dropped warning notices demanding the release of the hostages, proceeded to bomb and machine gun the boats.  The British and Japanese hostages were released unharmed. 
“By Gad, Sir, that’ll show the yellow devils they can’t mess with the British Empire. Pass me another Singapore Sling.”

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George Fratson was subsequently released from prison.  Lucky really that he hadn’t been hung (or is it hanged?).  I hope Messrs Avory, Swift, Branson and Finlay read this and had a moment's pause for thought. 

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Enough of crime for now.  The play turned out to be J M (Peter Pan) Barrie’s last – ‘The Boy David’ and indeed Elizabeth Bergner did play the title role!  It was premiered in Edinburgh in 1936 and, despite scenery by Augustus John and music by William Walton, received a less than favourable review from the Glasgow Herald. (search Google News for “‘Elizabeth Bergner’ Barrie”)


Ironic and sad. And 78 years later it still happens, but fortunately only rarely.

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Latymer Court still stands today and if you want a 1 bedroom flat there you’ll need about £300,000, which, I note, is almost as much as it cost to build the whole place in 1934.

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Is there nothing new under the sun?  Miss-behaving footballer in road-rage attack.


Some things have changed, though.


















Sunday 22 January 2012

No Post Today (Again)

Sorry but still recovering from an eye operation and virtually blind in my left eye.  Will try again in 2 weeks - 5th February 2012.

Sunday 8 January 2012

No Post Today

Sorry, but no newspaper today because I have a detached retina.  Hopefully normal service will be resumed in a fortnight on Sunday 22nd January.

Sunday 1 January 2012

Let's Party like it's 2000

Millennium Daily Mail dated Saturday January 1st 2000
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There were many an hour wasted round the coffee machines of the nation discussing whether or not the new millennium started on 1st January 2000 or 2001. Who cares – there goes another £10000 worth of fireworks, oooh, aaah.

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The Y2K Bug or Year 2000 Bug was the big media-driven scare of 1999. They predicted that at the stroke of midnight when the century changed from 19 to 20 computers controlling everything from your trusty video recorder to in-flight jumbo jets would crash.  The problem went back to the early days of commercial programming when computer memory and storage space was at a premium.  To save space most date fields in records were given just 2 bytes instead of 4 – i.e. yy instead off ccyy – i.e just the year without the century – i.e. 99 instead of 1999.
The news media decided that this meant that at the vital moment the computers would think it was 1900, and because the Wright Brothers hadn’t flown yet, all the planes would just drop from the sky.

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Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin became the first President of the Russian Federation (which replaced the old communist USSR) in 1991 and tried to convert the Russian state into a ‘free-market’ economy. The result was widespread corruption and inflation, not to mention personal unpopularity.  He finally resigned and his Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took over.

Yeltsin was an eccentric figure who enjoyed a drink of five – a sort of political Oliver Reed.

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Born when Rutherford B. Hayes was US President, Queen Victoria was on the English throne and Gladstone was Prime Minister, she was already 23 years old when the Wright Brothers pioneered powered flight. She lived through two World Wars, the proliferation of the motor car, the Stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression, the start of both radio and TV broadcasting, the rise and fall of Communism, the Cold War, the assassination of John F Kennedy, the coming and/or going of 24 Presidents and saw the first man walk on the Moon. Now that's what you call a life.

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Ex-Beatle George Harrison was stabbed in the chest by and intruder in the early hours of Thursday 30th December.  The attacker, Mike Abram, was found to be insane and committed to a secure hospital but was released in 2002!

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As it says, predictions are pointless and a Happy New Year to one and all.