Murder at the Post Office (Brecknock Road, Kentish Town)

Victorian London in 1886

1886 was a year of political instability in England, with growing numbers of rallies and protests over the widening gap between rich and poor, unemployment and low wages. Life was hard for the working classes, yet London continued to expand, with railways, industrialisation, and an underground railway system that had already been developing for over two decades. Literature flourished, and that year Robert Louis Stevenson published Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, reflecting the Victorian fascination with crime and psychology. The Metropolitan Police, established 57 years earlier, were becoming increasingly professional, and crime was widely perceived to be on the rise, sparking public anxiety, though much of it consisted of petty offences driven by poverty and desperation in certain areas of the city. Even so, serious violent crime, particularly murder, was generally rare, and in a respectable suburban neighbourhood like Brecknock Road, few would have anticipated a shooting in broad daylight.

The Murder

165 Brecknock Road, Kentish Town, is in northwest London and is just half a mile from Hilldrop Crescent, where the notorious wife-killer Dr Crippen would live a couple of decades later. The ground floor of 165 Brecknock Road housed a chemist’s shop and a post office, run by a Mr Hardy. On Thursday 17 June 1886, Mr Hardy was out, and his daughter Frances was acting as the postal clerk, while 25-year-old shop assistant John William Bowes looked after the chemist’s counter. That afternoon, Frances and John noticed a shabbily dressed young man loitering outside. They had seen him before and recognised him as 19-year-old George Finch, an occasional customer, but thought little of it at the time.

At around 4:30 p.m., Finch suddenly burst into the shop and grabbed the cash box which Frances had left on the counter. John Bowes shouted, ‘Stop thief!’ but the intruder drew a revolver from his pocket and, without hesitation, fired at point-blank range. Frances Hardy, who was at the post office counter in the other section of the building, was startled by what she first thought was an explosion. She ran across the passageway and entered the chemist through the connecting door, emerging behind the cashier’s counter, where she saw Bowes lying on the floor. Glancing up in horror, she saw George Finch still standing there, holding the gun. He fired two shots at Frances, one of them grazing her face, but she escaped through a side door into Lady Margaret Road and shouted for help.

George Finch then fled the shop, taking £7 10 shillings and a handful of postage stamps. A local man named Alfred Partnell, who had been walking nearby, heard the gun shot. When he saw Finch running from the post office, he chased him around the corner into Ospringe Road and watched the 19-year-old enter number 15, where he lived with his mother.

By now, several policemen had arrived at the crime scene. Alfred Partnell managed to attract the attention of Chief Inspector Millward of Y Division to let him know the gunman’s whereabouts, and several officers burst into 15 Ospringe  Road. While police guarded the front and back doors to prevent him escaping, Inspector Millward searched the house. At first, he found nothing. But when he opened the door to the water closet that housed the lavatory, he heard a noise above him and looked up, noticing a trapdoor. Millward clambered onto the toilet seat and, in the cobwebby darkness, could just make out the crouching form of a man tucked into a tiny alcove above, next to the cistern, a gun in his hands.

Chief Inspector Millward was reported to have said, ‘Give me the revolver, Finch.’

Finch’s muffled reply came back: ‘It was entirely an accident.’

‘I can’t say what it is,’ Millward remarked, ‘but if it is an accident, it would be better for you if you give up the revolver at once.’

‘If I do, you will take me in,’ Finch protested.

‘You will be taken in under any circumstances,’ Millward warned him.

George Finch refused to surrender, so a policeman was sent upstairs to the room directly above, where he began lifting the carpet and dismantling the wooden floorboards, to try and reach the cubbyhole from above. Realising they would get him sooner or later, Finch finally called out, ‘I will give it up,’ and handed the revolver to a police officer. A constable then seized him and pulled him down from his hiding place. On his person was £7 10 shillings and the postage stamps he had stolen, along with cartridges for the revolver. His mother, Charlotte Finch, became hysterical as her son was arrested and taken to the police station. At the station, he gave his name as George Vincent Heneage Finch and described himself as an artist, but insisted he was innocent, saying, ‘I didn’t do it. It was quite an accident.’

By then, the police surgeon, Dr Downes, had examined the body of shop assistant John Bowes, confirming that he was dead and that the bullet had passed through the lower part of his temple. On Friday, George Finch was charged at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court with the wilful murder of John William Bowes, the attempted murder of Frances Hardy, and the theft of £7 10s belonging to the Postmaster General. Throughout the proceedings, Finch was observed grinning and winking at the witnesses, which they found deeply unsettling, and he carried an air of enjoyment when hearing them recounting the incident. When the magistrate asked if he had any questions for the witnesses, Finch replied theatrically, ‘I simply know nothing of it, your worship. I don’t know the gentlemen who come here. I don’t remember the chemist’s shop. That’s all I wish to say. Thank you.’ He was committed for trial.

The Trial and Imprisonment

While awaiting trial, George’s mother, Charlotte Finch, gave interviews to the press, shedding light on her son’s background. George Vincent Heneage Finch had been born in Cork, Ireland, in 1866, and she claimed that his father had been an army officer and was related to the Earl of Aylesford but had died just a week before George’s birth. By the time George was five, Charlotte had taken him and his elder sister Sarah to live in London, where she married a German man named Philip Lach, who left them soon afterwards. Now, Mrs Finch lived on a small income and supported herself by letting rooms to lodgers. She also revealed that George had once pushed a small boy off his bicycle and beaten him with a walking stick for no reason other than that the child had annoyed him. She added that one of George’s uncles had died in an asylum and that a cousin had gone insane from too much study.

Despite George’s shabby clothes, he had received a good education and dreamed of becoming an artist. Recently, he had got involved in the theatre and had planned to stage a play. He sold tickets to the event but couldn’t afford to pay the actors, who went on strike, leaving the audience disappointed.  In spite of the family’s financial circumstances, Mrs Finch insisted they were also related to Heneage Finch, the first Earl of Nottingham and Lord Chancellor under Charles II. The name Heneage was traditionally bestowed upon the eldest sons of the Earls of Aylesford, so whether or not the story was true, it seems that Charlotte Finch firmly believed there was a connection when she named her son.

George Finch appeared at the Old Bailey on Wednesday 4 August, before Mr Justice Field. His defence counsel, Mr Cooke, entered a plea of insanity, supported by evidence from two doctors who had examined Finch while he was awaiting trial. The Crown prosecutor Henry Poland and the jury agreed, and Finch was committed to Broadmoor, the infamous criminal lunatic asylum in the Berkshire countryside. 36 years later, in 1922, he was released into the care of the Salvation Army, then lived with his sister Sarah at 1 Vine Cottages, Borwick Lane in Billericay, Essex. He died in 1951 at the age of 85, having lived through immense social change and two world wars.

Aftermath

The house at 15 Ospringe Road and the post office on Brecknock Road still exist today. Victorian journalist George Sims, a murder house enthusiast, visited the building shortly after the crime and wrote colourfully, ‘The chemist’s shop, a bright, handsome, suburban house, was the last place in the world one would connect with a tragedy, whose neighbourhood seemed to rise superior to a bloody deed. The surrounding houses were elegant, bay windowed, aesthetically curtained, flower boxed abodes of gentility that would have blushed in every brick at the mention of the ‘Newgate Calendar’.’

By the Newgate Calendar, Sims was referring to a popular collection of sensationalised accounts of crimes, trials, and executions, originally linked to Newgate Prison and intended both to entertain readers and warn them against criminal behaviour.

George Sims, like many others before and after him, must have wondered how it is that so many crimes occur in places that appear perfectly ordinary, giving no hint that a murder could take place there; acts that have little to do with the pleasant layout of a street or the flowers in a garden, but with the decisions made by individuals we can never fully understand.

Researched and written by Prash Ganendran. Published on 28 May 2026.
© Prash Ganendran. All Rights Reserved.

Also available on Prash’s Murder Map

Sources

Popular Science Monthly (1875)
The People — Sunday 13 June 1886
Banbury Beacon — Saturday 19 June 1886
St James’s Gazette — Wednesday 04 August 1886
Exeter and Plymouth Gazette — Thursday 05 August 1886
Jersey Express and Channel Islands Advertiser — Tuesday 10 August 1886
Kenilworth Advertiser — Saturday 25 November 1905
Old Bailey Online
Ancestry.co.uk