Crime Immemorial

Born in 1850 in the village of Broadstairs, Kent, England, Margery Wren was the younger daughter of house-painter William Wren and his wife Elizabeth. Alongside her sister Mary Jane, who was five years her senior, Margery fled the drudgery of rural life for the bustle of London, where she worked as a maidservant. Census records paint a picture of a dutiful domestic: in 1871, she toiled in Islington; by 1881, she was back with her parents in Clerkenwell; and in 1891, she served a wealthy merchant.

Fate turned kinder in the 1890s when a distant relative passed away, leaving the Wren sisters a modest inheritance and an aging confectioner’s shop at No. 2 Church Road in Ramsgate. The sisters escaped their servitude, transforming the premises into “Cottage Sweets and General Store”—a humble affair with fly-specked jars of boiled sweets, Sunlight soap, and Bird’s custard powder. They lived above the shop in cramped quarters: a small parlor downstairs, two bedrooms up, no bathroom, and an outdoor privy. The 1901 census listed Mary Jane as the head confectioner, with Margery as cook; by 1911, at ages sixty-five and sixty, they were still at it, their lives a monotonous rhythm of service to schoolchildren and locals.

Mary Jane’s death on January 31st, 1927, left Margery alone, inheriting the shop and £921 12s. 7d.—a sum equivalent to about £65,000 today. Yet Margery clung to her eccentricities. Dressed in outdated long skirts and a woolen cap over her balding head, she neglected the vermin-infested shop, claiming poverty while dining at soup kitchens. Rumors swirled: she owned valuable London properties, hoarded cash in a “little black bag,” or even harbored secrets from her maid days, like raising an illegitimate child for a wealthy family. Her will named two elderly cousins—Mrs. Hannah Cook, seventy-two, and the invalid Mrs. Ann Wilson, eighty-four—as beneficiaries.

No enemies were known, but Margery’s cantankerous nature earned her few friends. As her cousin Hannah later testified, she was a hermit, shunning company and letting dust gather in her “insalubrious” home.

September 20th, 1930, dawned ordinarily in Ramsgate’s Church Road, a stone’s throw from the seafront. Margery tended her shop as usual, serving children from St. George’s School. At one p.m., sixty-nine-year-old Albert Williams from Dover popped in to gripe about his nephew’s lodgings. A coal delivery followed around four forty-five p.m., with Margery paying the driver a shilling and twopence. At five p.m., a well-dressed woman in a red hat was seen pushing a perambulator outside the shop—the last known visitor.

Around five fifteen p.m., neighbors spotted Margery sweeping leaves in the yard, looking frail but content. She may have dozed off in her armchair shortly after, as was her habit. What happened next unfolded in the dim parlor: an intruder—or intruders—entered the shop and seized her by the throat, throttling her to silence any cries. Then came the frenzy: repeated blows to the head with the fireplace tongs, leaving eight gashes on her face, seven more on her scalp, and gray hairs matted in the bloodied iron. The shop door was locked from the inside; the attacker likely fled through the back alley, unnoticed in the twilight.

At six p.m., eleven-year-old Ellen Marvell arrived for blancmange powder. The door was bolted—a rarity. Peering through the glass, Ellen saw Margery in the back room, bedraggled and bloodied. The old woman shuffled to the front of the shop and unlatched the door, sold the powder with trembling hands, and collapsed as Ellen fled home. Her father rushed over, found Margery sprawled amid the chaos, and summoned Dr. Richard Archibald and the police. Chief Constable S.F. Butler arrived swiftly, calling in Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Walter Hambrook, who took charge the next day.

Margery was rushed to Ramsgate Hospital, her cap having blunted some blows to her “brain-box,” as she later quipped.

For five agonizing days, Margery lingered, drifting in and out of consciousness. Her statements, pieced together from doctors, a policewoman, and visitors, were a labyrinth of confusion and evasion—perhaps fueled by concussion, age, or unspoken loyalty.

To Ellen’s father, she first claimed a simple fall: “I had a tumble while asleep and hit my head.” Pressed by Dr. Archibald, who noted the wounds screamed assault, she relented: “He caught me by the throat, and then he set about me with the tongs.” But the name? “You will never get him, doctor. He has escaped.”

A magistrate arrived for dying depositions, but Margery demurred: “I do not wish him to suffer. He must bear his sins. I do not wish to make a statement.” The vicar tried next; she confided later, “I did not tell him anything, see.” In delirious mutterings, she fretted, “Is the little black bag safe?”—hinting at hidden valuables, though police found only £8 10s.

Her accusations veered wildly: Albert Williams, the morning visitor; Arthur Hamlyn, a young butcher’s boy at No. 19 who’d once nearly run her over; an eighty-four-year-old “Hope of Dene Road.” Then, pointedly: “Hope did it! Hope was the one that did it!” She spoke of two, even three or four assailants knocking at the door before fleeing. Or was it one man with a white bag and a red face, who “tried to borrow ten pounds”? In her final hours: “He has escaped, and you will never get him… Let him live in his sins.”

On September 25th, Margery slipped into coma and died. The autopsy by Sir Bernard Spilsbury confirmed a strangulation attempt, then blunt-force trauma. The inquest, opening September 26th and concluding October 24th, ruled murder by person or persons unknown.

Hambrook’s team swarmed Church Road. The shop was a squalid time capsule—little stock, fingerprints galore but no matches. Drawers were rifled, suggesting a frantic search, yet cash went untouched. Appeals yielded the red-hatted woman but no culprit. Every “Hope” in Ramsgate was grilled; beneficiaries like Hannah Cook’s son, PC Arthur Cook, checked out clean.

Other named suspects were questioned. Both Albert Williams and Arthur Hamlyn had solid alibis for the time of the murder and were ruled out. More promising was twenty-year-old Charles Ernest Hope, a petty crook fresh from Borstal and a train jewelry heist. He had arrived in Ramsgate by rail at four p.m. on the day of the crime with blood on his clothes, though he claimed he had injured himself during an earlier robbery. He also lied about the train station where he had disembarked, telling police he had gotten off at Dumpton Park, which was later found to be untrue. Despite his dubious movements, he was never charged or named as a suspect, and later went straight, working as a carpenter in Langley, Berkshire.

A prisoner named John Lambert actually confessed to the crime at one point, but when pressed for further details, he made several contradictory statements and could not describe the streets or landscape of Ramsgate, where the murder had occurred.

Nearly a century later, the former sweet shop is now a private residence, and the identity of the person who killed Margery Wren—as well as the reasons why she refused to name him—remain a mystery.