by Jan Bondeson
As late as September 1853 came some last-minute drama. A Dane named Peter Lunischall was arrested as the murderer of Eliza Grimwood after being accused by the prostitute Ann Jennings. When the Dane first appeared before the Southwark magistrates, he said that he had been very intoxicated at the time. A police constable testified that the woman Jennings had been sober when she accused the Dane. With some trepidation, Ann Jennings testified that the prisoner had threatened ‘to serve her the same as he had served Eliza Grimwood’. Sergeant Goff next took the stand, to give the court a short summary of the Grimwood case, as he remembered it. Indeed, the murder had been a most mysterious one, and a man named Hubbard, who was since dead, had been the only man charged with the crime. The most likely culprit had been the man who had accompanied the murdered woman home that night. When asked whether the prisoner resembled that man, Goff responded in the negative, since the Foreigner had been a good deal taller. But when asked whether he could definitely exclude the prisoner as the murderer, the cautious Goff again said no, and the Dane was remanded for further questioning. An anonymous letter to The Times, signed ‘a Magistrate’, exulted that the Dane had been charged with the murder of Eliza Grimwood and that his accuser was a woman who supported him with the wages of prostitution, just like Eliza Grimwood did to the English wretch.
A few days later, Lunischall was again examined. By this time, Goff had examined the documents on the case held by the Commissioners of Police at Scotland Yard, and found the original descriptions of the Foreigner as a man much taller than the hapless Dane. Goff now declared himself certain that the drunken sailor was wholly innocent. The cabman Spicknell, the witness who had had the best look at the Foreigner at the time, had been transported seven years ago for stealing a watch and was now coachman to a judge at Hobart-town! When gruffly asked whether she still persisted in her story, Ann Jennings meekly answered ‘I do, your worship. He not only threatened to serve me as he had Eliza Grimwood, but said he would cut me up, put me in a pickle tub, and send me to Holland!’
Commenting that this was a ridiculous affair altogether, the magistrate said that these words were the idle threat of a lazy vagabond towards a prostitute. The words uttered by such a man were without meaning and there was not the slightest pretext for the charge.10
Throughout the Victorian era, the murder of Eliza Grimwood was vividly remembered in London folklore. Indeed, it became a byword for any unsolved murder mystery, as well as for the wild accusations that had been going round at the time. In 1848, a ludicrous list of accusations against Lord Palmerston in the satirical monthly The Man in the Moon included that of murdering Eliza Grimwood. The next year, the same periodical lampooned Charles Dickens for his short story ‘The Haunted Man’, the reviewer saying that he had not the slightest idea ‘what the crime committed by the Chemist might have been. For all that appears it may have been murdering Eliza Grimwood. Should not wonder if it was.’ George Augustus Sala wrote in a similar vein about people ‘who accuse you of having set the Thames on fire, and murdered Eliza Grimwood, if you do not accept their interminable romances …’ and the Radicals being accused of having ‘invented the Income Tax, caused the Irish potato famine, set the Thames on fire, and murdered Eliza Grimwood’. When the actor William Charles Macready played a character named Gabriel Grimwood in a boring religious melodrama, a voice from the audience interrupted his harangues with the question, ‘Look here, old bloke, who cut Eliza’s throat?’11
For many years to come, the ghost of Eliza Grimwood would be conjured up when London was shaken by some gruesome unsolved murder. It was something like the epitome of a murder mystery: the beautiful but flawed victim, the base and unworthy Hubbard, and the multitude of other suspects. In late 1857, when a large knapsack containing human remains was found on the abutment to Waterloo Bridge, there was debate whether this was a hoax by some medical students, or a murder with dismemberment by some student of James Greenacre, the Edgware Road murderer of 1836. For topographical reasons, a journalist thought the hideous relics on Waterloo Bridge more reminiscent of the great murder sensation back in 1838: ‘In some respects, it seems more to resemble the case of Eliza Grimwood, that castaway whose murder has probably haunted the memory of some brutal “gentleman” …’ Another writer on the Waterloo Bridge Mystery of 1857, which would never be satisfactorily solved, commented on this most recent addition to London’s unsolved murders: ‘will the assassins ever be discovered, or will this horrid tragedy remain for ever, like the murder of Eliza Grimwood, years ago, a mystery, utterly beyond solution …’12
When, in January 1860, a young prostitute named Marie Tourtoulou was found murdered at No. 39 rue Sainte Anne, a newspaper headline exclaimed, ‘An “Eliza Grimwood” case in Paris!’13 In 1863, the young prostitute Emma Jackson was found murdered with her throat cut from ear to ear, inside a seedy brothel at No. 4 George Street, St Giles. Although twenty-five years had passed since the Waterloo Road Horror, there was immediate comparison with the case of Eliza Grimwood, and prediction that the murder would remain unsolved. ‘While England has a memory, it will ponder upon the ghastly mystery of Eliza Grimwood’s fate. … When will the murders of Eliza Grimwood, the child at Road Hill House, and the girl in George Street, St Giles, be “out”?’ exclaimed the London Reader.14 Later in 1863, the bricklayer Samuel Wright murdered his girlfriend Maria Green at No. 11 Waterloo Road, ‘adjacent to the spot where the unfortunate Eliza Grimwood was murdered upwards of 20 years ago’. An eloquent Morning Post journalist wrote:
It would almost seem that some localities in London are doomed to bear a fatal reputation, either from having been the scenes of crimes or accidents, or from possessing evil reputations gained in other ways. Waterloo-road is, unfortunately, particularly distinguished on account of the doubtful reputation attached to it in times not far gone by … The tragedy of which Eliza Grimwood was the victim, from the mystery attending the circumstances, and from the fact that the perpetrator has never been brought to justice, was enough to impress the name of the locality on the public mind for a long time, even had the road not borne a name which history will not let die.15
The ghost of Eliza Grimwood was again called to rise up after the mysterious murder of the young prostitute Harriet Buswell on Christmas Eve 1872, and after a woman’s dismembered remains had been found in the Thames near Battersea:
It is greatly feared that we are now in possession of all we shall ever know concerning the unfortunate woman, murdered and mutilated, whose remains have been found in the Thames. The reward of £200 has failed to bring to light any fresh particulars of the affair, which bids fair to be consigned to Lethe along with that of Eliza Grimwood and Harriet, of Coram-street …16
An indignant writer on the Buswell case was scathing about the skill possessed by the Scotland Yard detectives:
They possess none, and it is notorious that they make a mull of nearly every intricate case taken in hand. What about the Eltham murder, the Hoxton murder, or the murder of Eliza Grimwood (which in its features was counterpart with the present Coram-street Tragedy). Moreover, the circumstances connected with the George-street murder are somewhat identical with those of the present, and the criminal is at liberty.17
Due to the passage of time, the accounts of the Grimwood case became increasingly confounded. One journalist wrote that ‘in the famous case of Eliza Grimwood at least a dozen persons claimed the credit of being her assassin. They were all, of course, lunatics, or in delirium.’ A writer on Waterloo Bridge, which had become toll-free after being purchased by the Crown, said that in Waterloo Road, ‘Eliza Grimwood was murdered by some miscreant, of whom the only trace was a glove, bearing a ducal coronet’!18 In 1876, the murder of Eliza Grimwood was featured in the New Zealand Evening Star; in 1881, in the Memphis Daily Appeal; and, as late as 1929, in the New Zealand Herald.19
In a magazine article about unsolved murders, there was another long but dangerously inaccurate passage about the Grimwood case, showing how facts get distorted in
the popular imagination:
The murder of Eliza Grimwood excited a most painful interest in the public mind. She was singularly beautiful, of the class termed ‘unfortunate’, but loathing her way of life, which she was in a manner coerced into following by her cousin, originally a working carpenter, but at the time of the murder occupying a house in the Waterloo road, twelve doors from the bridge, where he offered a mercenary shelter to vice. Eliza Grimwood occupied and received her friends in the first floor of that house. One of the most frequent of her visitors was a foreign gentleman, called by the neighbours whose notice he came under, Don Whiskerandoes, from the luxuriance of his whiskers and beard. This person, it was observed, invariably wore lavender-coloured gloves. The same peculiarities – a hairy face and lavender gloves – distinguished a dethroned potentate then residing in exile in England, for which and no other tangible reason his Serene Highness fell under the ban of suspicion. A few days previous to the catastrophe Eliza Grimwood had a clear prospect of escaping from the loathed life to which circumstances had condemned her. A commercial traveller had fallen deeply in love with the beautiful unfortunate, to whom he proposed marriage. His offer was accepted, greatly, it was said, to the cousin’s chagrin, rage, indeed, as also, there was reason to believe, in opposition to the jealous will of Don Whiskerandoes. A day was fixed for the ceremony, late in the evening previous to which Whiskerandoes was seen to enter the house. He was admitted by the cousin. A room on the second floor, directly over Eliza Grimwood’s sleeping apartment was occupied by another courtesan who, as well as her companion, heard at about the dead waste and middle of the night, a noise as of quarrelling below. The chamber door was presently opened, shut again, and the listeners heard the creaking of a man’s step as he descended the stairs and passed out at the street door. So common an incident in that house could excite no surprise. It was afterward remembered that Eliza Grimwood’s little dog, though a fierce animal, except in the presence of any one he knew well, did not bark! In the morning, Eliza Grimwood was found, fully dressed, lying on the floor (the bed had not been occupied) quite dead. A sharp instrument, a thin poniard it is believed, was driven into her heart, and life must have been instantly extinct. Instead of the escape, poor girl, so near as it seemed at hand, from pestilential, moral death to hearty, hopeful life, she had been hurled (because, there can be little doubt, of the seeming certainty of that near escape, and her fixed resolve to avail herself of the blessed chance) – hurled ruthlessly into a terrible eternity, with all her sins broad-blown, as flush as May – unhouseled, unanointed, unannealed. By the black-bearded foreigner nicknamed Whiskerandoes? Few doubted that he was the murderer. But where was Whiskerandoes, so-called? Where was he to be found? None knew.20
The final appearance of the ghost of Eliza Grimwood was in 1888, when it was conjured up by Jack the Ripper’s sanguineous handiwork in Whitechapel. A writer in the Daily Telegraph commented:
Those with retentive memories may be comparing notes regarding the strange similarity existing between the Whitechapel case and that of Eliza Grimwood, who about half a century ago was found in a house in the Waterloo-road under circumstances of closely analogous horror, her murderer never having been discovered.
The journalist speculated:
Foul deed has been wrought by a lunatic suffering from a recognised and hideous form of homicidal monomania – possible in the case of Eliza Grimwood, and incontrovertibly established in that of the ‘Monster’ Renwick Williams, whose intended victims, however, escaped with life – or whether the poor waif and stray of a woman in Whitechapel was done to death by a gang of fiendishly ferocious roughs.21
A letter writer to the Irish Times wished to point out that:
Undetected crime in London has assumed a very formidable and disappointing shape. Note the Great Coram Street murder, the Waterloo Road murder, the Euston Square murder, the Burton Crescent murder, the Stoke Newington murder, and various minor atrocities … Again is London startled with most appalling murders, committed with impunity in its most crowded thoroughfares.22
After Eliza Grimwood’s effects had been sold at auction by her covetous brothers, it must have been very difficult for Hubbard to find a tenant for the house in Wellington Terrace, since every Londoner knew that a particularly gruesome murder had been committed there. Rumours soon spread that the empty house was haunted by Eliza Grimwood’s restless spirit. Hubbard stayed at his mother’s house, and did not dare to move back to Wellington Terrace, although he still had the let for the house. In September 1838, a newspaper wrote:
Notwithstanding the length of time which has elapsed since the murder of Eliza Grimwood, the house which she occupied in the Waterloo-road has remained untenanted ever since Hubbard quitted it. In order to facilitate the letting of it, the landlord has reduced the rent considerably, but all to no purpose. Numerous have been the applications from individuals of both sexes to look over the house, upon the pretence of taking it, should it suit their convenience, but it has afterwards been apparent, with no other object than that of gratifying an idle curiosity. From present appearances no one is likely very soon to become the inmate of this dwelling, so notorious is it in the annals of crime, while the landlord has the mortification of knowing that he is not only pestered by inquisitive observers, but is sure to be a very great pecuniary sufferer by its inoccupancy.23
The gloomy prediction of this newspaper journalist would prove to be nothing but the truth.
The haunted murder house at No. 12 Wellington Terrace stood empty throughout 1839, 1840, 1841 and 1842, but the Post Office directory for 1843 shows that it had finally got a tenant, the German wine merchant Adolphus Feistel, who may well have been a foreign immigrant who could not understand what all the fuss was about this notorious murder house. In 1844, the various ‘Terraces’ in Waterloo Road were incorporated in the main road, and the houses renumbered: Mr Clayton’s shop at No. 11 Wellington Terrace became No. 191 Waterloo Road, the murder house at No. 12 Wellington Terrace No. 192, and the Feathers tavern at No. 25 Wellington Terrace No. 205 Waterloo Road. The old numbering also remained, however, and the phrase ‘Wellington Terrace, Waterloo Road’ remained in use well into the 1860s.
Adolphus Feistel lived in the murder house until 1851, along with his wife who was a foreign toy dealer; the next tenant was the violin maker William Ebsworth Hill, who would remain in the house until 1868. In 1864, a journalist wrote, in an article on cheap dinners and where to find them, ‘If the gastronomic student will cross Waterloo-bridge, will walk down that combination of dubious tenancy and faded respectability known as the Waterloo-road, will pass the half-forgotten site of Eliza Grimwood’s murder, will proceed under the railway bridge, and continue his pilgrimage almost due south …’24
In 1865, the houses in Waterloo Road were again renumbered, from the centre of London towards the periphery, those on the eastern side of the road receiving uneven numbers: the Feathers tavern became No. 1 Waterloo Road, and the murder house No. 27 Waterloo Road.
In the years to come, a number of respectable tradesmen would live in the rehabilitated murder house at what had become No. 27 Waterloo Road: the portmanteau-maker Wollrath Zwanziger, the cork manufacturer Henry Clemence, and the watchmaker Abraham Kaufmann. When that intrepid ghost-hunter, Mr Elliott O’Donnell, made some enquiries about local ghosts in the 1890s, he found a street hawker named Jonathan who had been a boy at the time when Eliza Grimwood was murdered. Jonathan’s mother, who had known both Hubbard and Eliza, used to say that the latter was ‘as tidy a looking girl as was to be found in the ’ole neighbourhood’. A Mrs Glover, who used to visit someone lodging in Hubbard’s house (her daughter Mary Glover?), had twice seen Eliza Grimwood’s ghost, dressed just as she had been in her lifetime, making the bed in the murder room. People in what had used to be Wellington Terrace saw the ghost looking out through the ground-floor window so often that they got used to it, and were not alarmed by its presence.25
In contemporary articles on ‘murder houses�
�, the sinister dwelling in what had used to be Wellington Terrace was compared with the Curse on Mitre Square, the site of one of the ‘Ripper’ crimes, and with the house and shop at No. 22 Wyndham Road, Camberwell, where an entire family had been exterminated. Similar in notoriety was the strange ‘murder neighbourhood’ that had been the site of the unsolved Euston Square, Burton Crescent and Great Coram Street mysteries. In the early 1900s, the murder house was still standing. The area remained a seedy and rundown part of London, although traffic across the bridge gathered apace. In 1905, the journalist Guy Logan wrote:
A house in Wellington Terrace, showing the deep chasm below, from the Penny Illustrated Paper of 27 February 1872.
No. 12, Wellington Terrace, is daily passed by thousands who have no idea that it was once the scene of a most mysterious murder. There Eliza Grimwood, fair and frail, was cruelly done to death by a male ‘fiend’ whom she had permitted to accompany her home from the Strand Theatre …26
Old Waterloo Bridge was closed to traffic in 1924 after becoming increasingly unstable. After a heated debate over whether it should be repaired or destroyed, it was demolished in 1936, and a new bridge constructed next to it.
The murder house at what had become No. 27 Waterloo Road still stood in 1937, but its days were numbered: in 1938, it was recorded to have been empty, and in 1939, it was no longer listed in the Post Office directory. In 1940, only the Feathers tavern at No. 1 Waterloo Road, and a shortened terrace consisting of the remaining Wellington Terrace houses at Nos 3–11 Waterloo Road, remained standing.
