Crime in The Giggs Hill Area
Horace Walpole wrote of the dangers of the Portsmouth Road in 1784:
- 'But here is a worse calamity; one is never safe by day or night: Mrs Walsingham, who has bought your brother's late house at Ditton, was robbed a few days ago in the high road, within a mile of home, at seven in the evening.'
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- (Letter 275 to Hon HS Conway. By 'Mrs Walsingham', Walpole was referring to the mother of Charlotte Boyle Walsingham).
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Portsmouth Road and the surrounding commons were notoriously dangerous. There was the serious risk of both footpads (i.e. unmounted robbers) and highwaymen. Tom Waters, Jerry Abershawe, Evan Evans, William Hawke and Thomas Banks were all hanged in the 17th/18th centuries for banditry on the Portsmouth Road.
Read more about this topic: Giggs Hill Green
Famous quotes containing the words crime, hill and/or area:
“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)