‍SCHOOLGIRL Myra Brown sat swinging her legs on the edge of the double bed in her hotel room as reporters crowded round. Her husband had given her a Cadillac as a wedding present, she said. “But all I really wanted was a ring.”

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‍The 13-year-old girl who had recently married rock superstar Jerry Lee Lewis was watching children’s television and wondered what all the fuss was about outside in the street as police struggled to maintain order holding back the angry crowd.

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‍This was the scene at Mayfair’s Westbury Hotel in May 1958 when Jerry and his child bride arrived in London for a 37-date UK tour. Not only was his third wife so young but the British Press had announced that she was his cousin as well. The public turned against him, and it took years for him to recover from the bad Press.

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‍Some tour dates had already been cancelled in the backlash that followed. Things got worse when the Press went on to break the story that Lewis hadn’t yet got divorced from his first wife Jane Mitcham when he married Myra in Hernando, Mississippi five months earlier – and he had lied in church that she was 15.

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‍Most of the outrage happened in America. But when Lewis and Myra arrived in London, a storm of outrage erupted in the UK and they never expected it. As she stepped out of a black Maria outside her hotel, Myra asked reporters from the Express and Mail: “Why are people so angry?”

‍Lewis believed the best thing to do was get on with the tour. He did but turned to God for help. The next day he and his whole entourage fell to their knees and prayed for a full hour before he took the stage at the Gaumont State, Kilburn, North London.

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‍But God didn’t seem to be listening – protestors in the half-full theatre seemed to believe that rock and roll was the Devil’s music. When he appeared on stage in his custard-coloured jacket, he was repeatedly interrupted by whistles and boos and cries of "cradle snatcher".

‍The Press reported: “He performed in a state close to frenzy. A savage, raw energy burning within him, he hammered the keyboard like a man possessed.”

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‍When he returned home, he went from went for a time from charging $10,000 a concert to scraping a living in small bars and clubs and finally had to marry Myra again when his divorce from his second wife came through.

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‍This was the star whose life was to become a toxic cocktail of scandal, addiction and violence. Two of his seven wives were to die in suspicious circumstances; and he once drove to Elvis Presley’s home Graceland, high on alcohol and pills, with a gun on the dashboard. "Come out," he shouted to Elvis, “and we'll soon find out who's King!"

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‍Myra filed for divorce in 1970, after 10 years of marriage, citing adultery and abuse. She told a court how Lewis often beat her up in view of their little daughter. They had two children, a boy and a girl, but their son died.

‍Lewis disgraced himself many times. But his early tracks, A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On and Great Balls Of Fire, were so deeply part of the of the 20th Century music culture, that he never faded from the scene.

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‍When John Lennon walked into London’s Roxy Nightclub one evening, Lewis stopped playing and berated him from the stage, yelling out that the Beatles were shit and the Stones were shit and “there ain’t nobody who can play real rock’n’roll the way I can!”

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‍For his part, Lennon was entirely unbothered. After the show, he walked into Lewis’s dressing room, dropped to his knees and kissed his feet, before asking for an autograph from the man he called “the real king of rock’n’roll”.

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‍Sixty years after he hit the charts, he was playing to packed houses again. And somehow, despite the drink and drugs, he outlived many fellow rock'n'roll pioneers and left $15 million in his will when he died, aged 87 of natural causes.

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‍AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

‍A MIDNIGHT RAID ON A HAUNTED HACKNEY CHURCH YARD IS A RIOT

‍ON THE night of Wednesday, August 21, 1845, reporters from the Illustrated Police News arrived at the graveyard of St John’s Parish Church, Hackney, east London, to report on an extraordinary haunting.

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‍More than 1,000 people had already turned out from their houses in the neighbourhood to hunt for the ghost of a young boy who had been seen many times playing cards at midnight on a gravestone at the back of the church.

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‍Women had reported fainting with fright, and local newspapers had published accounts of the strange affair. The stone featured three boys playing cards on a table for money several years before.

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‍One of them, who was losing heavily, exclaimed: "May God strike me down if I do not win this game!" Ten minutes later he rose to leave the table and dropped dead, and now his ghost had haunted the graveyard.

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‍The night of the hunt, a mixed crowd began to assemble outside the cemetery where the ghost was supposed to materialise and where, people were afraid to go after midnight. More than 40 police arrived to keep order as the crowd, armed with lanterns and candles, and carrying sticks and stones, climbed the railings from the pathways and took possession of the burial ground.

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‍Graves and tombstones were clambered over, and recently restored mounds were kicked down. Flowers were trampled and many in the crowd looked upon the whole affair ‘as a joke’, reporters wrote.

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‍“Every few minutes the cry was raised of ‘there it goes!’ and immediately the whole crowd rushed in the direction indicated. Others amused themselves by making the night hideous with imitations of unearthly cries.”

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‍Arrests were made and pick pockets arrested but it wasn’t until daylight that the graveyard was cleared.

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‍After that day, the ghost was never seen again but had made front page news.

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‍•The Illustrated Police News was a weekly pioneering tabloid from 1864 to 1938, that combined illustrations with sensational crime and scandal reports that were true. It became a major source of news for a penny and by 1888, its circulation reached 300,000, exceeding other similar publications like the News of the World. It became the ‘Go To’ publication for the Jack the Ripper case.

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‍BABIES FOR SALE ON THE STREET

‍CORNERS OF BARNARDO’S WORLD

‍A WONDERFUL story of Dr Barnardo’s love for children is told in the pages of Strand Magazine.

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‍“I can never recollect the time when the face and voice of a child has not had the power to draw me side from everything else,” he told writer Harry How. “I have aways had a passionate love for children — their helplessness, their innocence and in the case of waifs, their misery.”

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‍He told how one day in the 1856, when he was coming home from school in Ireland, he saw a poor and miserable-looking woman standing on the pavement with a wretched-looking baby in her arms.

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‍“I was a schoolboy aged 11 and the sight made me very unhappy,” he said. “I looked around to make sure no one was watching and emptied the contents of my pockets into her outstretched hand.”

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‍Sauntering on he couldn’t forget the face of the baby – it fascinated him.

‍“So, I had to go back,” he said, “and in a low voice suggested to the woman that if she would follow me home, I would try to get her something more.

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‍“Fortunately, I was able to let her into the hall without attracting much attention and then went down to the cook on my errand. I forget what was done, except that I know a good meal was given to the mother and some milk for the baby.

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‍“Just then my elder sister came into the hall and was attracted, as I had been, to the infant; but looking at the woman, she observed: Aren’t you the girl I have spoken to twice before and this is a different baby? This is the third you have had!’”

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‍It was the doctor’s first experience of a beggar’s shifts. The child was not hers, he said. She had borrowed it or hired it to beg for money.

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‍“I discovered that I could hire a baby from several lodging houses for fourpence to one shilling a day,” he said. “I could even buy one.

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‍“The prettier the better. Should it happen to be a cripple or possessing particularly thin arms and face it is always worth a shilling. Little girls always demand a higher price than boys.

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‍“I knew of one woman who has carried a baby exactly the same size for the last nine or 10 years. I have often bought children to rescue them. For one girl I paid 10s 6d. My first purchase cost me 7s 6d, it was for a baby boy and girl, sister and brother.”

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‍But the doctor only took in the genuinely needy. He added that not long before the interview, a lady arrived at his children’s home in Stepney in her carriage. A child was in it, and she laid five £100 notes in front of him saying that the child was his if he took it and asked no questions. He refused.

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‍On another occasion, a well-known peer of the realm sent a footman with £100 asking me to take the footman’s son. He refused again.

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‍“Gold and silver will never open my doors,” he said. “They only open for real destitution. I am for the homeless and destitute.

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‍“It is a dark night outside, but if you look up on this building, the words: No destitute boy or girl ever refused admission are large enough to be read on the darkest night and with the weakest eyesight and that has been true for these past seven and twenty years of my life so far.”

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍

‍23 June 2025

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‍I Remember, I Remember

‍By Thomas Hood

‍I remember, I remember,

‍The house where I was born,

‍The little window where the sun

‍Came peeping in at morn;

‍He never came a wink too soon,

‍Nor brought too long a day,

‍But now, I often wish the night

‍Had borne my breath away!

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‍I remember, I remember,

‍The roses, red and white,

‍The vi'lets, and the lily-cups,

‍Those flowers made of light!

‍The lilacs where the robin built,

‍And where my brother set

‍The laburnum on his birthday,—

‍The tree is living yet!

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‍I remember, I remember,

‍Where I was used to swing,

‍And thought the air must rush as fresh

‍To swallows on the wing;

‍My spirit flew in feathers then,

‍That is so heavy now,

‍And summer pools could hardly cool

‍The fever on my brow!

‍

‍I remember, I remember,

‍The fir trees dark and high;

‍I used to think their slender tops

‍Were close against the sky:

‍It was a childish ignorance,

‍But now 'tis little joy

‍To know I'm farther off from heav'n

‍Than when I was a boy.