Notable People

Myles Crofton was a boatman working the Grand Canal Company's boats on the Limerick Canal, a working man on a working river. On Saturday 28 November 1891, Boat No 17 left Limerick for Killaloe with Crofton on board alongside two other crewmen and a fourth man who was not a boatman. When the boat reached Killaloe, Crofton was found unconscious, with seven wounds about his head and over both eyes. The police and a dispensary doctor were called, but he died the following morning in great agony. He was forty-five years old. He left a wife, Catherine, and eight children.

At the inquest, held on 30 November, the jury returned an open verdict. They could not say with certainty who had inflicted the wounds, but they put on record their concern for the welfare of Crofton's wife and family, and asked the Grand Canal Company to treat them mercifully. Three men who had been on the boat were charged and remanded to Limerick Jail.

One of them, George Farrell, turned Queen's Evidence. He told the magistrates he had heard a row in the cabin between a crewman named Frank Egan and Crofton, had seen them fighting with their fists, and had then watched Egan strike Crofton with his boot. The doctor confirmed the wounds were caused by violence, not accident. The Belfast News-Letter reported that one of the men had confessed to Crofton being repeatedly assaulted while the party were drinking on their way down the Shannon.

Egan was committed for trial. Farrell and a third man were released. What became of the trial, or of Egan, has not been established.

William Tattersall grew up in Brooksbottoms, a model mill village near Bury owned by John Robinson Kay, a place with no public house, a pioneering school, and a strong Wesleyan character. He left school at fourteen to clerk in the mill office, earning six shillings a week, and from those modest beginnings built a remarkable career at the heart of the Lancashire cotton trade. He was the youngest of ten children.

He had been filing copy for the East Lancashire Echo since he was thirteen. By the turn of the century he was commercial editor of the Manchester Examiner, Secretary to the Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations, then the largest employers' organisation in the textile trade, and a regular contributor to The Economist and The Times. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic consulted him on cotton statistics. He was a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a member of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, and of the Cobden Club, the intellectual home of Victorian Free Trade. He appeared in Who Was Who 1897–1916 as a leading cotton trade expert and statistician, and was profiled in Lancashire Faces and Places in 1901. In January 1903 he resigned the secretaryship of the Federation, after ten years, to take up a newly created appointment from the Board of Trade as cotton trade expert correspondent for Great Britain and Ireland. In 1910 he was elected as a Liberal to Manchester City Council for Oxford Ward, serving on the Finance Committee where, as one colleague noted, his statistical knowledge made him exceptionally valuable.

His connection with Winston Churchill arose from their shared opposition to Chamberlain's tariff reform proposals. Between 1904 and 1908, as Churchill fought his way into the Liberal Party and won the seat for North-West Manchester, the two men corresponded regularly. Six of Churchill's letters to Tattersall survive, some marked Private, written on Colonial Office paper or from the Hotel Bristol in Paris, and were sold at Sotheby's in December 2002 for £11,352. Churchill wrote asking Tattersall to arm him with arguments against Chamberlain's Preston speech, to brief him for a Reform Club dinner, and to trust that he would not let his connection with Manchester drop. He never fully made good on that last promise. On the evening of 22 October 1914 he dined with the Manchester Watch Committee, returned home to Melbrook in good spirits shortly before eleven, and went to bed. At two in the morning he knocked on his wife's door: "I am poorly." By the time the doctor arrived he had died of heart failure. An inquest was held the following day. The Lord Mayor of Manchester attended his funeral. He had been writing his weekly column on trade and finance the Saturday before.

Robert Kitching was a market gardener at Leeming in the North Riding of Yorkshire, a small village two miles from Bedale. He had a wife, four young children, a hook where his left arm had been, lost in a gun accident years before, and a reputation throughout the village for a violent and ungovernable temper. He had been before the magistrates on more than one occasion. For reasons that were never fully explained, he had developed a deep and long-standing hatred of the local police sergeant, James Weedy, and had made no secret of what he intended to do about it.

On the evening of 19 September 1890 events came to a head. Weedy found Kitching drunk and causing a disturbance outside the Leeming Bar Hotel and told him to take his pony and cart and go home. In front of witnesses, Kitching stated plainly what he would do before the night was over. Weedy, knowing the man, followed him home. He did not make it back. Kitching went into his house, returned with a loaded gun, and shot him dead at point-blank range. Weedy was forty-three. He left a widow and twelve children.

The investigation was brief; the evidence overwhelming. What the inquest and subsequent trial revealed was not a crime of sudden passion but something more disturbing: a man who had announced his intention, carried it out, and then carried on. After the killing Kitching walked to his father-in-law's house to report what he had done, moved the body, threw the gun into a nearby beck, and then went to bed. He rose at five the following morning, loaded his cart with a pig and some fruit, and drove to Richmond market. He was arrested at his stall.

In December 1890 the jury at York Assizes took little time to find him guilty. He was hanged at York Castle on 30 December, one of the last public executions to take place there. Capital punishment for murder would not be abolished in England until 1965, but in 1890 the rope was still the only answer the law had for a man like Robert Kitching.

George Cornish was born on a farm in Westbury, Wiltshire, and might easily have spent his life there. He was working the land at Birchanger Farm in 1891 when a conversation with a detective visiting his father changed the course of his life. In March 1895, aged twenty-one, he presented himself at Whitechapel police station, in his own later words at a time when it was unsafe to walk the streets of the East End at night, and joined the Metropolitan Police.

What followed was nearly four decades of methodical ascent through Scotland Yard: constable to CID sergeant at Whitechapel, detective inspector at Kentish Town, and finally Detective Superintendent at C1 Department, the Yard's most senior criminal investigation branch. He became one of the original "Big Five", the small group of senior CID officers whose names were synonymous with Scotland Yard in its heyday. He retired on 31 October 1933 after thirty-eight years of service.

His cases spanned four decades and several of the most notorious crimes of the era. He traced the chemist's shop where Dr Crippen obtained the poison used to murder his wife. He arrested Henry Jacoby, the pantry boy who killed Lady White in a Marylebone hotel. He led the investigation into the murder of ten-year-old Vera Page at Notting Hill in 1931. He once took the fingerprints of a king: when King Manoel of Portugal had jewels worth £30,000 stolen from his Twickenham mansion, Cornish took the prints of everyone in the house, including the king and his consort.

His most celebrated case came in May 1927. A large black trunk deposited at Charing Cross left-luggage began to smell after five days. Inside was a woman's dismembered body, each limb wrapped in brown paper. The office at 86 Rochester Row where the killing had taken place was traced, but found scrupulously clean, as if the murderer had already won. It was Cornish who found a bloodstained duster in the trunk. Washed and re-washed, it yielded a single word: Greyhound. He and his men visited 120 Greyhound hotels in London before finding that an ex-employee named Robinson had an office in Rochester Row, the very office from which a taxi had taken the trunk to Charing Cross. Cornish later said simply: "It was a duster that really hanged Robinson." Robinson was tried at the Old Bailey, convicted on the evidence of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and hanged at Pentonville that August. In 1935 Cornish published his memoirs, Cornish of the Yard.

His last years were difficult. His daughter Margaret died in 1939 at just thirty-two. In December 1958, at the age of eighty-five, he was admitted to Friern Hospital in Barnet, admitted, the record states, with one penknife and three keys. He died there in February 1959 and was cremated at Enfield.

Wilfrid Norman Sadler was born in Eccles in 1897 into a prosperous and outwardly respectable Lancashire family. His father, Wilfrid Ernest, ran a successful plumber's merchant business from Ardwick Green in Manchester. The Sadlers lived in the large house at Danesbury on Chatsworth Road and, by any measure of the time, had done well.

But the family was no stranger to tragedy. Wilfrid's younger brother Ewart, a private in the Manchester Regiment just eighteen years old, cut his own throat with a razor on New Year's Day 1917, whilst billeted in a house in Southport. He was buried at Monton Unitarian Church, where the family had long worshipped.

By the early 1920s Wilfrid's own life had begun to come apart. His first marriage, to Dorothy Longbottom, had broken down, leaving behind two daughters, Dorothy and Bette, then toddlers. His motor mechanics business at Duke Street, Southport had failed. His father took him on casually at the Ardwick warehouse to give him something to occupy his mind, but colleagues noticed he seemed a different man, moody, depressed, and convinced he could do nothing right. He moved in with his aunt, Elizabeth Martha Sadler, who had lived alone at 39 Chadwick Road for over a decade. She was seventy-one. His father later testified that the two were passionately attached.

On the afternoon of 10 January 1924 he left the warehouse early, telling his brother Eric he felt unwell. At 6.15 that evening he approached two constables in Liverpool Road and said: "I have murdered my aunt. It was her or me. I was up against everything. I did it to get hanged." The officers broke into the locked house at 39 Chadwick Road and found Elizabeth Martha Sadler on the kitchen floor, dead, a razor beside her. The following morning, in his cell, Wilfrid made a further statement: "I carried the razor in my pocket for a week with the intention of cutting my own throat. I could not pluck up the courage to do it. I thought I could not make a proper job of it. I then thought I would do it on someone else and this is what I have done." He was taken to Strangeways four days later, committed for wilful murder, and brought before Manchester Assizes on 22 February, where three medical men agreed he was insane and unfit to be tried. The examining doctor testified that Wilfrid believed he had killed no one, that some power inside him had killed someone in his presence, and that since the crime he had been hearing his aunt's voice. He was ordered to be detained during the King's pleasure.

His father did not abandon him. By 1939 Wilfrid was living quietly at Hawarden, 59 West Drive, Thornton Cleveleys, working again as a motor and electrical engineer. When Wilfrid Ernest died in 1944 he left his son property on Rossall Road and a share of building land at Cleveleys. It was a practical act of faith in a man whom the world might easily have written off. Wilfrid made his will in 1951 and died at 17 Park Road, Cleveleys, in October 1959. He left effects of £2,982. He outlived all three of his brothers, Ewart (1917), Eric (1953), and Harry (1958). He was sixty-two.