SUPPOSED MURDERS
“On Saturday night, a person named Price, residing in Bethnal Green, was digging in his garden when he turned up a human skull, and on making further search exhumed an entire skeleton, which, however, on being examined by a medical man, was found to have a rib too many. This occasioned a further search, and a second skeleton was discovered, to which the stray rib properly belonged.

“Both were obviously those of young persons; and, as the garden is in the neighbourhood in which lived the notorious Bishop and Williams, who were executed for the murder of the Italian boy, the gossips of that locality at once came to the conclusion that they were the remains of some unknown victims of those murderers.

“Bishop and Williams were, however, disciples of Hare and Burke [sic], and carried their victims to a better market; the popular supposition is therefore improbable. At the inquest, the researches of the police may perchance reveal somewhat more of this mysterious affair.”

Alas not: nothing more appears in the records about these Bethnal Green bones.

A few years ago, I was giving a talk in Stepney about the Italian Boy case, and afterwards a man came up to tell me that he had spent his working life on demolition and construction sites, mostly in the East End. He operated the machinery that drills down into the soil in preparation for pile-driving. As the earth came up to the surface, he said, it was not so very unusual for old human bones to be in among the soil. This was on sites where no cemetery or churchyard had ever been.

My own thoughts about this are that perhaps some non-Church of England Protestants may have been deciding to bury their dead within the precincts of their own homes, rather than consign them to the burial grounds of a church with which they had no allegiance, no doctrinal sympathy, and to whom they would not wish to pay burial fees. To whom, in fact, many Non-Conformists/Dissenters felt significant hostility.

The building-site man and I were interrupted in our conversation by another attendee, and when I turned back to continue, he had disappeared (like someone in a passage by Thomas De Quincey). I later established that he wasn’t a member of the history society who had asked me to talk, so I have never been able to find him to explore the subject further with him.

This picture, from the Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archive collection, shows the excavation of the garden of 3 Nova Scotia Gardens, Bethnal Green, as the Italian Boy murder investigation got under way. No bones were found, of course, but plenty of physical evidence of the killings that had taken place here. THLHL&A, 277 Bancroft Road, E1 4DQ, tel: 020 7364 1290. localhistory@towerhamlets.gov.uk