Edmund Reid

From the Casebooks of
a Murder House Detective
Murder Houses of Ramsgate
By JAN BONDESON
The Ramsgate Society has published
a short pamphlet about ‘Blue Plaques
in Ramsgate’: houses in that town
where famous people had once been
staying. Viscount Wellesley lived at
No. 1 Chatham Place, Charles Darwin
at No. 8 Paragon, and Wilkie Collins
at No. 14 Nelson Crescent and No. 27
Wellington Crescent. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge lodged with a certain
Dr Gillman, who was treating him
for his addiction to opium, at No.
3 Wellington Crescent. It is not
generally known that Vincent van
Gogh taught school at No. 6 Royal
Road for a while in 1876, and lodged
A general view of Ramsgate, a postcard stamped and posted in 1905
at No. 11 Spencer Square. Karl Marx
stayed at No. 62 Plains of Waterloo for a while in 1879, to be near his eldest daughter Jenny, who
lived at No. 6 Artillery Road and gave birth to a baby there. Ripperologists will appreciate that
Major General Sir Charles Warren was a Ramsgate resident between 1901 and 1914, living at No.
10 Wellington Crescent.
Historically, Ramsgate has never been known as a hotbed of crime, but over the years, the Thanet fishing metropolis
has been the site of a number of celebrated murders, several of them unsolved. This article will tell the story of the
‘Black Plaques in Ramsgate’: the still remaining houses where the most famous Ramsgate murders took place.
In the Footsteps of Stephen Forwood, 1866
Stephen Forwood was born in St Lawrence, Kent, in 1829. He was apprenticed to a Ramsgate baker, and spent his
youth in hard graft and honest toil. The 1851 Census lists him as a journeyman baker, apprenticed to the master baker
Richard Woodbury. In the early 1850s, he took a baker’s shop in King Street, and in 1854, he married Mary Ann Edwards.
They had a daughter named Emily. Stephen Forwood went bankrupt in the mid-1850s, however, and all his property was
sold for the benefit of his creditors. Undeterred by this calamity, he left his wife and child and went to London to start
a new life. He called himself Ernest Walter Southey, and worked as a commission agent, or a writer in a law office. He
had an affair with a certain Mrs Maria White, who gave birth to three children fathered by him, at a time when she was
still living with her husband William White, a Holborn schoolmaster.
In the 1860s, Stephen Forwood mixed in London society, making use of the name Southey to prevent his Ramsgate wife
from tracking him down and demanding maintenance money for her daughter. He was living in sin with Mrs White, who had
Ripperologist 147 December 2015 29