Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths Around Uxbridge

Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths

by Jonathan Oates

This west London town has its own character--and its own deadly criminal history--from the author of Unsolved Murders of Victorian and Edwardian London.

Foul Deeds & Suspicious Deaths Around Uxbridge takes the reader on a sinister and sad journey through centuries of local crime and conspiracy, meeting victims and villains of all sorts along the way. There is no shortage of harrowing--and revealing--incidents of evil and despair to recount from the earliest recorded history of the Uxbridge district up to the present day.

Jonathan Oates's fascinating research has uncovered some grisly events and unsavory individuals whose conduct throws a harsh light on the history of this suburban area west of London. His book records crime and punishment in all its dreadful variety. Among many acts of violence and wickedness are the burning to death of five Protestant martyrs and the execution of a turbulent priest in Tudor times, a family massacred at Denham in 1870, and several brutal murders that have never been solved or explained. Cases that stand out as particularly shocking or bizarre include a son who was killed by his mother, a woman who died after an illegal operation, the Uxbridge tea-shop murder of 1951, and a man tried for manslaughter and later murder in West Drayton, who committed suicide two decades later.

This chronicle of Uxbridge's hidden history will be compelling reading for anyone who is interested in the local history of the area and in the dark side of human nature.

160 pages, ebook

First published November 20, 2008

About the author

Jonathan D. Oates is a historian and prolific author on the subject of the Jacobite campaigns from 1689-1746. His focus is on military matters, the British Army and its commanders, and especially the English dimension of the period. This is his seventh book on the topic and he has also written about thirty articles on aspects of Jacobitism, anti-Jacobitism, and the military campaigns. He has also edited three volumes of relevant material; the memoir of a loyalist Scottish officer, the letters of the Duke of Cumberland, as well as a memoir of an eighteenth century Leeds schoolmaster. There are a number of other similar books in the pipeline, including one on sieges of the 'Forty Five. The author studied History at Reading University in 1988-1991, obtaining a First Class degree with a thesis about the 'Fifteen, and then a doctorate from the same place in 2001, covering responses in north eastern England to the two major eighteenth century rebellions. He has been employed as Borough Archivist for the London Borough of Ealing since 1999. He has also had books published about criminal, local, and family history, especially in and around London.

Reviews

[Paula Corregan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book!

This book detailed very interesting cases of murders which occurred in suburban London from the 1800s to the 1960s. If you enjoy reading true crime books, you will like this book. I highly recommend it to other true crime readers.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read