When an Electric Telegraph Tattled on a Murderer
Category: Murder & Misadventure 30th June 2026
In January 1845 a quiet little corner of Buckinghamshire became the theatre for a most absurdly modern crime. A man called John Tawell slipped a dose of prussic acid into the drink of a woman he had lived with. The woman died. The crime was, in every grim respect, atrocious. The tools he used were simple. His hubris was extraordinary.
Tawell had spent years abroad and then returned to the neighbourhood where the lady, Sarah Hart, trusted him. After the poisoning he tried to make a clean getaway by hopping into a cab and taking a train. His plan was tidy and ridiculous at once. It failed because somebody in the coaching office used a contraption of wires and pulses that the drawing room had only recently heard about. The electric telegraph transmitted a description to the constables in town and the police, brisk and oddly spiffing that day, intercepted him at the station. Bravo for technology. Oh bugger for the murderer.
The trial followed with all the grim ceremony of a court that needs to explain itself to an audience that thinks Victorian law is a sort of genteel puzzle. Witnesses gave accounts that were precise and occasionally delicious in their nastiness. The jury took less time than some afternoon teas. The verdict was guilty. The sentence was carried out. The machinery of justice, creaky and pompous as it often is, produced a result that satisfied a public with an appetite for retribution and gossip.
There are funny angles in this which I admit make me smirk in an indecent way. A telegraph, designed for commerce, was repurposed to snitch on a man who believed himself cunning. The local constable became a sort of dashing conductor of modernity. The whole episode feels like a small, vulgar triumph for progress over skulduggery.
People then, as now, were in a bind between trust and suspicion. For yonks the telegraph was praised and feared in equal measure. The Tawell affair remains a neat, appalling example of how a domestic quarrel, a cup of poison and a postal wire could tangle and finish a life. It left families bereaved and gossip very pleased indeed.