Spooks in the dock?
Could Nicky have been up against one of this lot?
Newington Gardens, which sits alongside the current Inner London Crown Court, was previously home to the Horsemonger Lane Gaol, later known as the Surrey County Gaol. This was Surrey’s main prison and 131 men and four women faced execution there between 1800 and 1877.
Marie Manning was a Swiss servant who, along with her husband Frederick, murdered her lover, Patrick O’Connor in what became known as the Bermondsey Horror.
Marie and Frederick shot O’Connor, a money lender, in the back of the head at close range before burying him under the flagstones in their kitchen, and stealing his money and shares.
Novelist Charles Dickens was among the large crowd of onlookers at their joint hanging in 1849, which took place on the roof of the prison gate. Afterwards Dickens wrote that the ‘wickedness and levity’ of the spectators was ‘inconceivably awful’. He later based one of his Bleak House characters, Mademoiselle Hortense, on Manning’s life.
Margaret Waters, also known as Willis, was a ‘baby farmer’, taking in other women’s babies for money.Waters drugged and starved the infants in her care and is believed to have killed at least 19 children. Charged with five counts of wilful murder as well as neglect and conspiracy, she was hanged by executioner William Calcraft on 11th October 1870.
Edward Marcus Despard was an Irish officer in the British Army who’d gained notoriety as a colonial administrator for refusing to recognise racial distinctions in law. Also a republican, he was executed in 1803 as the alleged ringleader of a plot to assassinate the King.
Newington Gardens is still thought to be the burial place of Lieutenant Thomas Beauclerk, who took his own life in the gaol and was buried in its grounds in November 1832. He’d been committed to the prison to await trial on a charge of sodomy.