Edmund Reid

Newspaper photographs of Margery Wren, and the murder shop at No. 2 Church Street
the result of a fall, but to multiple lacerations of the head by some blunt instrument. A pair of blood-stained fire tongs,
which were laying on the floor, were a prime candidate for being the blunt instrument in question. Miss Wren told Dr
Archibald that she had been assaulted inside the shop: “He caught me by the throat, and then he set about me with the
tongs.” When the doctor asked her to name her assailant, she just said “You will never get him, doctor. He has escaped.”
Dr Archibald found it strange that for some reason or other, Miss Wren did not want the name of her attacker to become
known.
Margery Wren was taken to the Ramsgate Hospital, where she lingered for five days. She spoke confusedly about
what had happened to her, telling Dr Archibald, a policewoman and various other people that “They were two of them
set about me. If I had not had my cap on they would have smashed in my brain-box.” She then said that there had
been three, or even four, assailants. She accused an elderly man named Albert Williams of having been the man who
attacked her, but then pointed the finger at “Hamlyn of No. 19”. Several times, she said “Hope did it!”, once adding
“Hope of Dene Road!” Mr S F Butler, the Chief Constable of Ramsgate, communicated with Scotland Yard, and Chief
Inspector Walter Hambrook was dispatched to Ramsgate to take charge of the murder investigation. When he arrived on
24 September, Miss Wren had become comatose, so it was impossible for him to question her in person. Hambrook was
quite baffled by the contradictory statements from the dying woman, accusing a number of respectable, elderly people
of having attacked her. When the magistrate had come to take her dying depositions, she had merely said “I do not wish
him to suffer. He must bear his sins. I do not wish to make a statement.” The local vicar had been equally unsuccessful
in getting Miss Wren to denounce the identity of her attacker; after he had left frustrated, Miss Wren said, with a note
of satisfaction, “I did not tell him anything, see”. The badly injured old woman died on Thursday, 25 September, and the
case was now one of murder.
Walter Hambrook went to see the murder shop, which was quite a dismal sight, the premises being in a very dirty
and verminous condition. There was not much stock in the gloomy old shop, and he got the impression that very little
business was done in there. The shelves contained a variety of archaic merchandise: a variety of fly-papers, Sunlight
soap, Zebo for cleaning the grate, and Bird’s custard powder, along with a selection of rather unappetizing sweets
kept in old-fashioned glass jars. Miss Wren had told some people that she was the owner of valuable house property in
London, but she had told others that she was very poor, and had even had her meals at a soup kitchen for the destitute.
Hambrook thought it likely that Margery Wren knew the man who had assaulted her, but that for some strange reason,
she had wanted to keep his identity a secret. The beneficiaries in her will were two elderly cousins: Mrs Hannah Cook,
72, and Mrs Ann Wilson, 84 and an invalid. Neither of these two were physically capable of committing a violent assault,
but the police were interested in Hannah Cook’s son, Police Constable Arthur Cook, but he had an unblemished record,
and his clothes were free from blood stains. There was brief optimism when a prisoner named John Lambert confessed
to committing the murder, but when questioned by Walter Hambrook, he told many untruths, and was incapable of
describing the topography of Ramsgate. On her deathbed, Miss Wren had mentioned the name of Albert Williams, a
69-year-old man from Dover, who had visited her at 1 pm the day of the murder, to complain that his nephew was
leaving him and his wife, to find lodgings elsewhere, but nothing transpired to link him with the murder. Miss Wren had
Ripperologist 147 December 2015 41