The scene of the crime
Rupert Road ran between Canterbury Road and Carlton Vale in south Kilburn. It’s still on the map but no original properties have survived. Number 2 was a terraced house, its rooms occupied by several families. In all, an amazing total of 23 persons were shown living there on census night in 1881, a similar number to other properties in the road.
On 22 March 1881, Ann Moulford and her husband Charles were woken at 2.30am by loud screams of ‘Murder’ from the next room. Reluctantly Charles got up and knocked on his neighbours’ door, the home of John and Eliza Wegener and their two children.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked. John’s reply was ‘Nothing much.’
Charles asked for the door to be opened and when he was told to go away, he broke it open, and saw John and his two children. Ann Moulford followed her husband into the room, and while Charles watched John, she helped Eliza Wegener who was standing near the window into a chair. She was bleeding from her left ear, which had been cut. Charles thought Eliza had been stabbed which John denied. He made a fire and heated some water so Ann could wash the blood off Eliza. The injury didn’t appear serious and after Eliza got into bed, Ann and Charles returned to their room.
The Moulfords heard no more from next door, but when Ann checked on Eliza about 6.30am, she found her still in bed and unresponsive. Ann noticed Eliza had sustained a blow to the left side of her skull. She went for Dr John Ring who lived in Cambridge Gardens. He found a knuckle duster covered in blood on the Wegener’s windowsill and spoke to John, who seemed confused, but denied using the knuckle duster. John left the house and walked into the local police station where he told the desk sergeant that he had assaulted his wife. The police took John back to Rupert Road and after talking to Dr Ring, he was arrested. He admitted the blood on his shirt sleeves was Eliza’s, and said, ‘I have done it and I wish to be hung for it.’
Who was John Wegener?
John William Wegener was born in 1842 and baptized in Bermondsey, in the parish church of St John Horselydown ten years later. At the time his parents were living in Charles Street, off Blackfriars Road. In 1861 John was with his uncle William Smithers, who was running an iron foundry at Nos.1&2 Stingo Lane, a narrow street off Marylebone Road. John was working as an iron moulder with his uncle. .jpg)
Casting at an Iron Foundry, 1885 (Kroyer, Wiki)
In September 1870 John married Eliza Lammiman in St Marylebone parish church. The marriage certificate describes John’s father as a mariner while her father was a fishmonger. They were then living in Marylebone but the couple had moved to Kilburn, perhaps to Rupert Road, by the time two of their children were born: John in 1874 and Eliza in 1878. Ann Moulford said the Wegeners had been living at No.2 for around seven years and they’d been a happy couple until recently.
Dr Ring treated Eliza, but she was so badly injured that she was repeatedly unable to appear at Marylebone Police Court when John was brought to face charges. On 26 April the court was told he had been remanded on five previous occasions, but this time Eliza was present, still very weak but able to give an account of what happened. She said they had not quarreled, (John said they had), she remembered being hit twice and being treated by Dr Ring. But Eliza also told the court that John was a hard worker, a kind and affectionate husband. John’s lawyer asked that he be sent to Clerkenwell Sessions to face a charge of aggravated assault, but the Magistrate sent John for trial at the Old Bailey on a charge of wounding Eliza with intent to murder her.
The Old Bailey
At the Old Bailey trial in May 1881, Dr Ring described Eliza’s injuries. She had sustained, ‘a fracture of the parietal, temporal, and frontal bones of the head. There was an incised jagged wound of about 2 or 2 ½ inches: it went through the skin and muscle. I should say the injuries must have been caused by a series of blows. I took away five or six fragments of bone from the wound, and there was excessive depression of those bones on to the membranes of the brain. I performed the operation of trephining.’
His skillful intervention meant she survived: ‘She recovered consciousness about two days later. I thought she would have died, but she gradually recovered.’
What had happened?
The knuckle duster clearly inflicted the second injury; however, John claimed he used it for the first assault and his fist for the second, which Dr Ring said was impossible. He went on to say John had been drinking, that he was ‘in a very morose, abusive, condition.’ The police constable who had accompanied John back to Rupert Road said he believed John had been drinking hard, that he was in a ‘semi-state of drunkenness.’
John told the constable that after he had hit Eliza, he had tried to hang himself and when the rope broke (a very weak rope said the cynical PC), he intended drowning himself in a cistern in the back yard, but the water was too cold. John said he’d hit Eliza because ‘she had been out whoring’ which Eliza strongly denied.
Eliza elaborated on her magistrate’s court evidence. She said they’d been a happy couple until recently. John had taken to drink before but this episode had begun a few weeks after Christmas. A downturn in orders, said Eliza, led to John being discharged from his work as an iron founder at Saxby & Farmer, the large signal engineering works on Canterbury Road. One magistrate court appearance had been cancelled when the surgeon at Newgate Gaol said John was suffering from delirium tremens.
John apologised for the attack and said he was very fond of his wife and family. He agreed he had been drinking hard since Christmas, ‘I have not known what I was about. If I have any trouble, or drink, I hardly know what I am doing, and I can’t work. I send in my iron patterns all wrong.’ This was probably the real reason he was made redundant. John said his head ‘had been very bad’ and ascribed this to his parents, to the fact both died insane, his father at Guy’s Hospital and his mother in Caterham Asylum.
So far as the knuckle duster was concerned John told the court, ‘I have never used it before; I don’t know that I used it then, but as the doctor says there was blood and hair on it, I can’t deny it.’ Eliza told the court John had found the knuckleduster in a pile of rubbish years ago when he was working in Stingo Lane, and the children used it as a plaything.
The jury found Wegener guilty of a lesser charge, that of unlawful wounding, and he was sentenced to twelve months with hard labour in the Coldbath Fields House of Correction, Clerkenwell.
.jpg)
.jpg)
The aftermath
Their relationship survived the violent attack. John and Eliza were reunited after he had served his sentence and moved to several addresses in Hammersmith, north of present-day Olympia. In 1891 they were living in Blythe Road and he was working as a home and window cleaner. Their next home was at 52 Porten Road where the 1901 census describes him as a painter’s labourer. The couple were at 51 Masbro Road when John died in 1907 in the Hammersmith Infirmary, suffering from cancer of the mediastinum, the space containing the vital organs, including the heart, in the chest. The death certificate gives his original profession, that of an iron moulder. Eliza moved in with her married daughter and her husband, and in 1911 they were at 6 Vernon Street Fulham, then 5 Argyle Road Hammersmith. This was Eliza’s address in 1921, when she died aged 78, in Tooting Bec Mental Hospital, from what was described as senile decay and was likely to have been Alzheimer’s.
Comments
Post a Comment