Tracy Williams came along to a talk I gave and afterwards told me that she had ancestors who had lived in Nova Scotia Gardens, the site of the Italian Boy killings. She wrote out the following for me – the results of her labours in the census, births, marriages and deaths indexes. (For more on The Gardens, see also previous stories below.)

“John and Euphan Gullen probably moved to London from Edinburgh some time in the 1760s. He was a paper-maker and she was the daughter of a shipmaster, so they may have had a little money. By 1841 their grandson (my great-great-grandfather), John Hart Gullen, was a humble willow-cutter living in the slums of Bethnal Green. His daughter, Emma, was born at 5 Nova Scotia Gardens in 1843 [the killers had lived at Nos 2 and 3, twelve years earlier]. The family must have left the cottages by 1849 because Emma’s mother, Elizabeth, died of cholera in that year at 1 Virginia Row, nearby.

“In 1882 John Hart Gullen died of tuberculosis at the age of 64 in Bethnal Green workhouse. A number of his children lived to adulthood, and one of them was my great grandfather, James Gullen. He found a good trade as a marble mason and moved to Hoxton, then Edmonton, where a few of his descendants are still living.

“At the first chance I had to talk to my mum and her sisters about the Gullens and the notoriety of Nova Scotia Gardens, my Aunt Jean said something that has stayed with me: ‘I’m proud of them because they survived.’ ”