Leitmotifs

Harold Eldridge -
son of Charles Albert Eldridge in the 1920s 

As this family history has proceeded, another bleak theme has emerged in ethereal fashion from the haze. Records of crimes committed and punishments imposed started to rear their heads through the murk. In some instances, members of the extended family were directly involved in the cases. In others, the crimes took place in their localities, and were crimes that they would have known about, discussed and evaluated. Then there were crimes, if crimes indeed they were, of a broader more political nature that had far more wide-ranging impacts on society more generally.

I could not help recalling, as this leitmotif began to develop that the son of Charles Albert Eldridge, Harold Eldridge in his capacity as Chief Medical Officer of Wandsworth Prison, occasionally enjoyed lunchtime pints with the famous forensic pathologist, Keith Simpson. These meetings would have given both men plentiful opportunity to share experiences and insights into the science of both crime and punishment. Harold was the supervising medical officer at the last hangings to take place at Wandsworth prison in the early nineteen-sixties, and Keith Simpson obtained minor celebrity after the publication of his autobiography, aptly titled Forty Years of Murder.

What really brought them careering back to mind though was a murder that took place way before the time of either man, back in Kent in 1863, a case in which the primary evidence used came not from witnesses, or hearsay, as was then the norm, but from an early use of forensics. The conclusions drawn from the samples taken were quite sufficient to secure a conviction, and concluded with the very last public hanging ever to take place in the County of Kent, that of one Alfred Eldridge of Canterbury. As can be imagined, it was quite a surprise to find an explicit connection between our own family line and that of the executed Alfred. More of him later.

Alfred was not the first or last member of the extended Eldridge clan to appear in a criminal context, and so as this work began to take shape, a more distinct emphasis was given to crimes committed and crimes chastised, which in itself gives some colour to the surrounding context, and some insight into the values and thinking of the many generations that this work touches base with.