The Blandford Express

Charles Edgar Brine (20) was, on the face of it, a quite respectable agent for the Prudential Insurance Company and had recently moved from Blandford to Wimborne. However, he also had a duplicitous sideline involving the sale of bicycles.       In June 1891, Charles Edgar Brine appeared before Wimborne magistrates charged with stealing two bicycles valued at nineteen pounds. The first bicycle he had ‘borrowed’ from Frank King, a Wimborne machinist, to go on a ride with a friend. He said his friend was so impressed with the machine that he had kept it for a period and would probably offer to buy it. Brine said he would send King a telegram when he heard from the friend. None was received but Brine insisted he had sent one. In fact he had already sold the bicycle for just three pounds. He told the buyer he had sold it for a friend who was short of money. The second bicycle he had bought himself on hire purchase having paid a deposit of two pounds, Eleven pounds & eleven...

  Three local men believed they had sound theories to identify Jack the Ripper. This was the name given to the murderer who savagely killed five women in London’s impoverished Whitechapel district in 1888. The three men with these views were Henry Richard Farquharson, Frederick George Abberline and Sydney Godolphin Osborne. Henry Richard Farquharson who has been unkindly nicknamed ‘ loose-lipped Farqie’ was the controversial and outspoken Member of Parliament for West Dorset from 1885 to 1895. He lived at Eastbury House in Tarrant Gunville. Apparently, Farquharson claimed that the murderer was the son of a surgeon who had committed suicide. Fearing libel, he did not identify him specifically but his description pointed to Wimborne-born, Montague Druitt. In February 1892, the Western Mail later confirmed that the West Dorset MP’s theory was that ‘ the author of the outrages killed himself. ’ Druitt had committed suicide in November 1888 and his body had been recovered from the Ri...