The Ratcliffe Highway Murders

Ratcliffe Highway ran east from the Tower of London through Wapping and Shadwell, a few streets back from the Thames and the new London Docks. It was the main street of London’s sailortown. Sailors coming ashore with months of wages in their pockets found it lined with pubs, lodging houses and shops, and with crimps and landlords waiting to strip them of their pay.

Around midnight on Saturday, December 7, 1811, Timothy Marr, a young draper at 29 Ratcliffe Highway, sent his servant Margaret Jewell out to buy oysters for a late supper. When she came back, the door was locked. Inside, Marr, his wife Celia, their baby son and their apprentice had all been beaten to death. A reward poster printed the next day described “a Ship Carpenter’s Pæn Maul, broken at the point” found on the premises. On December 19, the publican John Williamson, his wife and their servant were killed the same way at the King’s Arms in nearby New Gravel Lane, though a lodger escaped down a rope of knotted sheets. The maul belonged to a sailor who lodged at the Pear Tree, a Wapping public house, and had left his tools there while he was away at sea. Suspicion fell on another lodger, John Williams, a 27-year-old seaman lately paid off from the East Indiaman Roxburgh Castle. He hanged himself in prison on December 28 before he could be tried, and his body was carted through the streets and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart. Whether he was guilty is still argued.

The murders made the Highway notorious, but sailors kept going there for the rest of the century. In As I Went A-Walking Down Ratcliffe Highway, a sailor home from Hong Kong spies “a flash-lookin’ packet,” a woman who takes him in tow and helps him spend his pay. The same verses turn up in Blow the Man Down and Paddy West, and Kipling’s The Ballad of Bolivar opens with seven sailors “Rolling down the Ratcliffe Road, drunk and raising Cain.”