I’m delighted to share the exciting news that my new book, The Bermondsey Murder: Scotland Yard’s First Great Challenge and Dickens’ Inspiration, has now been published!
Fifty-year-old Patrick O’Connor was seen for the last time on 9 August. Originally from Ireland, he had been working first as a tide waiter (he inspected the cargo on ships when the tide turned) and then as a gauger at the London Docks since his arrival in the capital for over a decade earlier. He also had a side hustle as a moneylender and was well known for his rather shady financial dealings. At 7.30 am, Patrick left his lodgings in Greenwood Street, Mile End Road. After he had finished work, at about 5 pm, he bumped into a friend on London Bridge, to whom he mentioned that he was heading to the house of a Frederick Manning, in New Weston Street, Bermondsey. This was not surprising, as he was a frequent visitor to Frederick’s home, being especially friendly with his wife Maria. However, when Patrick didn’t turn up for work the following day, his colleagues became suspicious.
As, by the weekend, there was still no sign of him, his friends issued handbills for information, which were circulated to the police stations throughout the city. With still no word from O’Connor by the following Monday, his friends asked PC Henry Barnes, from Stepney Division, to look for him. Eight days after his disappearance, on 17 August, the officer set out with a colleague from Southwark Division, PC James Burton, to look for the missing man.
Frederick and Maria Manning lived at 3 Minver Place (also written as ‘Miniver Place’), New Weston Street, round the corner from Guy’s Hospital (and now near the Shard). The small row of four two-storey houses, each with a basement and a garden at the back, were opposite the original building of the Bermondsey Leather Market. (The houses are no longer there today.) After searching the garden, where they found no obvious signs of disturbance, the officers entered the building through the front door. Inside the house, there were two rooms on each of the three floors. As they entered from the street, Constables Barnes and Burton stepped into the front parlour, on the ground floor. They then passed through the front parlour to the back, and descended the stairs into the basement.
It was dark in the basement, but as they searched the back kitchen, ‘sharp-sighted’ PC Barnes noticed a damp patch between the edges of two flagstones on the floor. He tested the mortar with his penknife and found that it was soft. Suspecting that the floor might have been disturbed, he called his colleague who, after borrowing a crowbar from a neighbour, helped him lever up the flagstones. Underneath was a layer of wet mortar and then earth, which was composed of limestone, hardcore and clay. The officers began to dig.
Barnes and Burton removed the loose soil with a shovel, and after a foot of digging, PC Barnes uncovered a human toe ‘protruding through the mould’. Another few more inches revealed the rest of the body – the naked man was lying on his front, with his legs doubled up behind him and tied around his thighs with a rope. His head, which was buried slightly lower than his body, was embedded in slack lime, which ‘had commenced its work of destruction…the flesh in several places being eaten away’.
Whilst the police officers had been carrying out their horrible excavation, local surgeon Samuel Meggitt Lockwood arrived at the house. He entered the kitchen as the body was being pulled out of its ‘grave’. His initial examination was that the man had been bludgeoned with a blunt instrument and then shot in the head. The surgeon also removed a set of false teeth from the victim’s mouth, which later identified him as Patrick O’Connor. By this time however, the prime suspects had fled the scene and so the case was placed in the hands of the Scotland Yard detectives.
Maria Manning, (her birth name was de Roux) was 29 years old. Originating from Lausanne, near Geneva, she had arrived in England earlier in the decade and had found employment as a lady’s maid for high society families, including in the household of the Duchess of Sutherland. She met Patrick O’Connor on a tour of the Continent with the duchess’s daughter and apparently, he had been attracted by ‘her appearance and manners’. Despite her friendship with Patrick, in 1847, Maria married Frederick George Manning. Aged 37, he came from Taunton in Somerset. At the time of their wedding, he had been a guard on the Great Western Railway, but he lost his job after being implicated in a robbery even though he had been released without charge
Speculation was rife in the newspapers about the Mannings. General opinion concluded that they had killed O’Connor for his money, because of Maria’s taste for the finer things in life, and Frederick’s inability to provide them. All the police had to do now was to find them.
The Scotland Yard officers soon discovered that Maria had taken a cab, just after Patrick O’Connor had disappeared, to London Bridge station, where she’d left some luggage in a locker, before travelling on to Euston station. When the police opened the trunks, they learnt that Mrs Manning had taken a train to Edinburgh. They immediately telegraphed the Edinburgh Police who, after receiving a tip off from a broker’s where Maria had tried to cash in some stolen railway shares, went to her lodgings and arrested her. She was then accompanied back to London. Her husband was not with her and was still on the run but, several days later, Detective Edward Langley was deployed to travel to Jersey, after the police received intelligence that the fugitive might have fled to the island. Detective Langley struck lucky and apprehended Manning in his bed.
The trial of Maria and Frederick Manning opened at the Old Bailey on 25 October 1849. After two days of testimonies and just 45 minutes’ deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict for both defendants, and sentenced them to death. It is not known which one of the pair actually killed Patrick O’Connor, but it is likely that Maria shot him and then Frederick finished him off with a chisel. The killer couple were hanged together at Horsemonger Lane Gaol on 13 November.
One of the spectators at the Mannings’ trial and subsequent execution was the author Charles Dickens. He was haunted by the sight of the felons swinging from the top of the prison, which he wrote about in Household Words. Also, it is generally believed that Maria Manning was his inspiration for Lady Dedlock’s murderous French maid, Hortense, in Bleak House, which was published in 1852, just three years after Maria’s death.
If you’d like to read the full details of this iconic murder case, you can buy a copy of my book here.
