June 25, 2025 • 14 mins
In the early hours of August 1933, Charles Fox was murdered during a violent break-in at his West Bromwich home. The crime triggered a large-scale police investigation that uncovered a trail of forensic evidence linking the attack to 21-year-old Stanley Eric Hobday. As the manhunt intensified, Hobday’s movements led officers across the country. This episode explores a shocking crime, its swift resolution, and the public reaction that followed.
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🎧 Listen to my new podcast Curious Britain
Explore the mysteries, folklore, and forgotten stories of Britain. Listen now: https://linktr.ee/curiousbritainpodcast
Sources:
Ancestry
National Archives
Birmingham Daily Gazette - Saturday 12 December 1931
Daily Herald - Tuesday 29 August 1933
Leeds Mercury - Friday 01 September 1933
Daily Herald - Friday 08 September 1933
Daily Herald - Wednesday 27 September 1933
Shields Daily Gazette - Thursday 28 December 1933
Black Country Bugle 1 April 1999
Music:
"Long Note Two" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Unusual Suspects
Subscribe to my YouTube channel for video versions of the podcast:
📺 youtube.com/@prashsmurdermap
💡 Support me on Patreon to get ad-free episodes
https://www.patreon.com/prashsmurdermap
💰 Make a one-off contribution
Every little bit helps! If you'd like to make a one-time donation, you can do so via PayPal here: https://www.paypal.me/prashsmurdermap
🎧 Listen to my new podcast Curious Britain
Explore the mysteries, folklore, and forgotten stories of Britain. Listen now: https://linktr.ee/curiousbritainpodcast
Sources:
Ancestry
National Archives
Birmingham Daily Gazette - Saturday 12 December 1931
Daily Herald - Tuesday 29 August 1933
Leeds Mercury - Friday 01 September 1933
Daily Herald - Friday 08 September 1933
Daily Herald - Wednesday 27 September 1933
Shields Daily Gazette - Thursday 28 December 1933
Black Country Bugle 1 April 1999
Music:
"Long Note Two" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Unusual Suspects
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It was Sunday, twenty seventh of August nineteen thirty three,
and Gladys Fox was struggling to sleep in the stifling
summer heat at her home on eight More Street, West, Bromage.
Just as she was finally drifting off, the sound of
shattering glass from downstairs jolted her awake. She looked at
(00:23):
the clock and saw it was one forty a m.
Her husband, a twenty four year old metal worker named
Charles William Fox known as Bill, was asleep next to her.
She nudged him awake and told him anxiously about the
noise she had heard. He lit a candle and crept downstairs,
(00:44):
dressed only in his vestern shirt, to see what was
going on. A sudden breeze blew out the candle, and
moments later Bill Fox staggered back up the stairs and
managed to gasp out to his wife, I had been stabbed.
He collapsed on the bedroom floor, a knife buried in
(01:05):
his back, and died in his wife's arms. Within minutes.
Her screams alerted a man who was passing the house
on the way home from a night shift, and he
called the police. When the police arrived, they found a
broken window and shards of glass at the back of
the house where the intruder had gained entry. A piece
(01:30):
of torn fabric which appeared to have come from a
coat lay near the window, and bloodstains dotted the window frame.
The detective Inspector Fred Cheryl, scotland Yard's leading fingerprint expert,
took prints from the window frame and the knife embedded
in Bill Fox's back, which had been used to stab
him seven times. The burglar had stolen fourteen shillings earned
(01:56):
by Bill Fox from his second job as a doorstep
collector for the National Clothing Company to supplement his metalwork's income.
Three hours later, a butcher named Robert Newton, who lived
a few streets away in his shop, found that he
too had been the victim of a break in, although
(02:18):
given the fate of mister Fox, it was perhaps fortunate
that he had not been woken by the burglar and
gone downstairs to investigate. To Newton's astonishment, he found a
bowl of soapy water and his own razor, which the
intruder had apparently used to shave himself. A needle and
(02:38):
thread had been taken from his wife's sewing basket, and
the thief had also enjoyed a bottle of milk and
a joint of pork in the kitchen before making off
with a table knife and several pounds in cash. Police
soon deduced that Bill Fox's killer had gone to Robert
(02:58):
Newton's house after wid Wards and took the needle and
thread to repair the damage to his coat, which he
had torn while climbing through the Fox's window. D I.
Cheryl compared the fingerprints on the milk bottle at Newton's
home to the ones found of the knife and window
frame at the Fox's and found that they matched, confirming
(03:20):
that the same man was responsible. A Home office analyst
collected several dark hairs from Robert Newton's razor, while plaster
of Paris casts were taken from shoe prints in the
soil outside the Fox home, which were a size four,
noticeably small for a man. The fingerprints were checked against
(03:46):
police records and were found to match twenty one year
old Stanley Eric Hobday of Sam's Lane, West Brommage, who
already had a criminal record. Born in nineteen twelve, his
mother had left when he was a child, and he
had frequently played truant from school. In nineteen twenty six,
(04:07):
at the age of fourteen, he stole four pounds ten
shillings from his father and was sent to an industrial
school for three years, but while on leave, he broke
into an office and fired a pistol at the police
constable who arrested him. He was sentenced to time in Borstal,
a young offenders institution, but this failed to deter him
(04:29):
from his criminal behaviour. He briefly worked as a laborer
after being released on license, but often stole food and
money from homes, grocery shops and even from his grandmother.
He enjoyed collecting knives and spending time outdoors, sleeping outside
in fields in the park or on the grounds of
(04:50):
the derelict Churchville House in West Bromage, usually with a
gun and blank ammunition in his pocket. Twenty nine, aged seventeen,
Hobday broke into a chocolate factory and gorged himself on
the confectionery inside. By nineteen thirty three, aged twenty one,
(05:12):
he had worked as an electrician for a time, but
was now unemployed and living just half a mile from
More Street, the home of mister and Missus Fox. He
was of slim build at five foot three inches weighed
around one hundred and twenty pounds and was described as
having brown hair, brown eyes, and a sallow complexion. Given
(05:35):
his stature, the small size of the shoe prints now
made more sense. Shortly after the break ins and murder,
it was reported that a Jouat saloon car had been
stolen from a locked garage and the knife taken from
the butcher's house had been used to pick the lock.
(05:58):
More than one hundred uniforms and plane clothes police officers
conducted an extensive search across a twenty mile radius. They
monitored railway stations, checked lodging houses, stopped and questioned motorists,
and scoured the nearby woodlands. Stanley Hobday's picture was printed
in newspapers across the country, and for the first time
(06:21):
in its history, the BBC carried a description of the
wanted man on the radio. At around seven am, less
than six hours after the murder of Bill Fox, the
jout saloon was spotted in the village of High Lee, Cheshire,
around sixty miles north of West Brommage. The fugitive had
(06:43):
gone further than the police had guessed. A farm hand
working in a field heard the roar of the engine
and saw the car traveling at high speed before it
careened around a corner and lost control. The front off
site tire was punctured as it bounced over a steep
grass verge, then rolled over onto its side. The farmer
(07:08):
watched in amazement as a slim man climbed out of
the vehicle, calm and unharmed, then walked away from the scene.
The farmer called out to him, but the driver ignored
him and continued on his way. Five miles away, at
Nutsford railway station, Hobday inquired about the price of a
(07:29):
ticket for the next train to Birmingham and was then
seen walking south, or at least that is how it appeared.
The clerk recognized him from the newspaper photo and reported
the sighting to the police, but instead of traveling to Birmingham,
the escaped killer was on his way further north. Hobday
(07:53):
kept a low profile, making his way through smaller country
lanes to avoid the main roads, tracted unwanted attention when
he caused a commotion by blundering into a herd of cows.
The trail went cold for a couple of days, but
on Wednesday, thirtieth of August, Hobday was spotted in the
village of Rockcliffe, near Carlyle, one hundred and twenty miles
(08:16):
from where he had crashed the stolen car. He tried
to cover his face with a handkerchief to avoid detection,
but he had already been recognized and the local constabulary
rapidly arrived. When they asked him if it was Stanley
Eric Hobday, he admitted that he was. When an officer
(08:36):
grabbed his arm, he flinched, saying be careful. I hurt
my arm last week falling off a bicycle. He was
taken into custody, where he was examined by a doctor
and questioned. The doctor found a wound on his left elbow,
which had likely been inflicted by a sharp piece of glass,
(08:57):
perhaps from climbing through the smashed window at the Fox's home.
Three officers from West Bromage drove up to Carlyle to
collect him by car. When they read out the charge,
Hobday replied, murder. I've not done any murder. But detectives
(09:17):
had all the physical evidence they needed, as well as
multiple witnesses willing to testify that they had seen Hobday
in the vicinity of the murder and during his attempt
to escape justice in a stolen car. The trial began
on fourteenth of November nineteen thirty three at Staffordshire Sizars
(09:39):
and Stanley. Eric Hobday listened calmly as the court heard
the evidence. Along with the fingerprints and shoe Prince, police
had also found Hobday's suitcase in the back of the
jou At motor car, which bore his initials s E. H.
The strands of hair found on the razor at Robert
(10:00):
Newton's house also match Hobday's hair color, and a thread
recovered from his jacket was confirmed to be identical to
the torn coat fabric found near the broken window at
the home of mister and Missus Fox. Even Hobday's movements
prior to the murder had been suspicious, as he had
been spotted camping in worston Field, near West Brommage, wearing
(10:23):
a belt with a sheath knife attached to it. The
weapon's handle was distinctive. It was a version of a
bowie knife manufactured by Sheffield Company, which had only made
about twenty with this particular design. A group of girls
camping nearby also saw him packing up his tent when
(10:44):
the landowner told him to move on, and at that
time he had his shirt sleeves rolled up with no
wound visible on his left elbow, proving that he had
not injured it falling off a bicycle a week ago,
as he claimed. Hobday's appointed barrister, Sir Reginald Coventry Casey,
(11:04):
tried to cast doubt on Detective Inspector Cheryl's fingerprint evidence,
but there was little else he could do for his client.
There were no witnesses to call in his defense, and
all Coventry could do was ask the jury to consider
how likely it was that a cold blooded killer could
break into two houses in one night and stab a
(11:25):
man to death in a frenzied attack, then sit down
calmly as if nothing had happened, to eat, drink, repair
his torn coat sleeve, and have a shave. As strange
as Sir Reginald said this behavior was, the evidence was strong.
After forty five minutes of deliberations, the jury found Hobday
(11:47):
guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to death. Coventry
lodged an appeal on behalf of his client, and Hobday's
father organized a petition signed by three thousand people, but
the death sentence was upheld and the Home Secretary refused
to grant a reprieve. Those who supported Hobday didn't necessarily
(12:11):
believe he was innocent, but argued that he was intellectually disabled,
describing him as empty in the top story, and pointed
out that at twenty one, he was only three years
older than the legal hanging age. In fact, it was
only that year that the minimum age for hanging had
been raised from sixteen to eighteen. As an interesting side note,
(12:37):
Winniford Randalls, the daughter of the man who owned the
jouat Car, began receiving threatening letters after giving evidence during
the trial. They turned out to be from fifty seven
year old laborer Enoch Knowles, whose hobby for thirty years
had been sending hundreds of poison pen letters to judges
and witnesses. After reading about cases in the newspaper, he
(13:01):
was jailed for three years. Charles William Fox was buried
at West bromwige Borough Cemetery and four thousand mourners attended
his funeral, including members of the public and colleagues from
his workplace. Gladys Fox stood at her husband's graveside, their
lives together abruptly ended by the senseless murder after just
(13:24):
two years of marriage. Stanley Hobday spent Christmas of nineteen
thirty three at Winston Green Prison in Birmingham, knowing that
he would not live to see the new year, having
taken the life of a hard working man, and left
Gladys Fox a widow, all for the sum of fourteen shillings.
(13:46):
On Thursday twenty eight December, Hobday was executed by Thomas Pierpoint,
assisted by his nephew Albert. The crowds waiting outside were
undeterred by the crisp wintry weather, but quickly dispersed after
reading the formal notices of the execution posted on the
gates of the prison, and returned home to their lives
(14:10):
quickly forgetting the tragedy. You've been listening to Precious Murder Map.
If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a thumbs up,
comment or review, as it really helps to support the
show and help more people to find it. You can
also join me on Patreon for audio only ad free episodes.
(14:31):
Thanks for your support, Anne, I'll see you again soon.
It was Sunday, twenty seventh of August nineteen thirty three,
and Gladys Fox was struggling to sleep in the stifling
summer heat at her home on eight More Street, West, Bromage.
Just as she was finally drifting off, the sound of
shattering glass from downstairs jolted her awake. She looked at
(00:23):
the clock and saw it was one forty a m.
Her husband, a twenty four year old metal worker named
Charles William Fox known as Bill, was asleep next to her.
She nudged him awake and told him anxiously about the
noise she had heard. He lit a candle and crept downstairs,
(00:44):
dressed only in his vestern shirt, to see what was
going on. A sudden breeze blew out the candle, and
moments later Bill Fox staggered back up the stairs and
managed to gasp out to his wife, I had been stabbed.
He collapsed on the bedroom floor, a knife buried in
(01:05):
his back, and died in his wife's arms. Within minutes.
Her screams alerted a man who was passing the house
on the way home from a night shift, and he
called the police. When the police arrived, they found a
broken window and shards of glass at the back of
the house where the intruder had gained entry. A piece
(01:30):
of torn fabric which appeared to have come from a
coat lay near the window, and bloodstains dotted the window frame.
The detective Inspector Fred Cheryl, scotland Yard's leading fingerprint expert,
took prints from the window frame and the knife embedded
in Bill Fox's back, which had been used to stab
him seven times. The burglar had stolen fourteen shillings earned
(01:56):
by Bill Fox from his second job as a doorstep
collector for the National Clothing Company to supplement his metalwork's income.
Three hours later, a butcher named Robert Newton, who lived
a few streets away in his shop, found that he
too had been the victim of a break in, although
(02:18):
given the fate of mister Fox, it was perhaps fortunate
that he had not been woken by the burglar and
gone downstairs to investigate. To Newton's astonishment, he found a
bowl of soapy water and his own razor, which the
intruder had apparently used to shave himself. A needle and
(02:38):
thread had been taken from his wife's sewing basket, and
the thief had also enjoyed a bottle of milk and
a joint of pork in the kitchen before making off
with a table knife and several pounds in cash. Police
soon deduced that Bill Fox's killer had gone to Robert
(02:58):
Newton's house after wid Wards and took the needle and
thread to repair the damage to his coat, which he
had torn while climbing through the Fox's window. D I.
Cheryl compared the fingerprints on the milk bottle at Newton's
home to the ones found of the knife and window
frame at the Fox's and found that they matched, confirming
(03:20):
that the same man was responsible. A Home office analyst
collected several dark hairs from Robert Newton's razor, while plaster
of Paris casts were taken from shoe prints in the
soil outside the Fox home, which were a size four,
noticeably small for a man. The fingerprints were checked against
(03:46):
police records and were found to match twenty one year
old Stanley Eric Hobday of Sam's Lane, West Brommage, who
already had a criminal record. Born in nineteen twelve, his
mother had left when he was a child, and he
had frequently played truant from school. In nineteen twenty six,
(04:07):
at the age of fourteen, he stole four pounds ten
shillings from his father and was sent to an industrial
school for three years, but while on leave, he broke
into an office and fired a pistol at the police
constable who arrested him. He was sentenced to time in Borstal,
a young offenders institution, but this failed to deter him
(04:29):
from his criminal behaviour. He briefly worked as a laborer
after being released on license, but often stole food and
money from homes, grocery shops and even from his grandmother.
He enjoyed collecting knives and spending time outdoors, sleeping outside
in fields in the park or on the grounds of
(04:50):
the derelict Churchville House in West Bromage, usually with a
gun and blank ammunition in his pocket. Twenty nine, aged seventeen,
Hobday broke into a chocolate factory and gorged himself on
the confectionery inside. By nineteen thirty three, aged twenty one,
(05:12):
he had worked as an electrician for a time, but
was now unemployed and living just half a mile from
More Street, the home of mister and Missus Fox. He
was of slim build at five foot three inches weighed
around one hundred and twenty pounds and was described as
having brown hair, brown eyes, and a sallow complexion. Given
(05:35):
his stature, the small size of the shoe prints now
made more sense. Shortly after the break ins and murder,
it was reported that a Jouat saloon car had been
stolen from a locked garage and the knife taken from
the butcher's house had been used to pick the lock.
(05:58):
More than one hundred uniforms and plane clothes police officers
conducted an extensive search across a twenty mile radius. They
monitored railway stations, checked lodging houses, stopped and questioned motorists,
and scoured the nearby woodlands. Stanley Hobday's picture was printed
in newspapers across the country, and for the first time
(06:21):
in its history, the BBC carried a description of the
wanted man on the radio. At around seven am, less
than six hours after the murder of Bill Fox, the
jout saloon was spotted in the village of High Lee, Cheshire,
around sixty miles north of West Brommage. The fugitive had
(06:43):
gone further than the police had guessed. A farm hand
working in a field heard the roar of the engine
and saw the car traveling at high speed before it
careened around a corner and lost control. The front off
site tire was punctured as it bounced over a steep
grass verge, then rolled over onto its side. The farmer
(07:08):
watched in amazement as a slim man climbed out of
the vehicle, calm and unharmed, then walked away from the scene.
The farmer called out to him, but the driver ignored
him and continued on his way. Five miles away, at
Nutsford railway station, Hobday inquired about the price of a
(07:29):
ticket for the next train to Birmingham and was then
seen walking south, or at least that is how it appeared.
The clerk recognized him from the newspaper photo and reported
the sighting to the police, but instead of traveling to Birmingham,
the escaped killer was on his way further north. Hobday
(07:53):
kept a low profile, making his way through smaller country
lanes to avoid the main roads, tracted unwanted attention when
he caused a commotion by blundering into a herd of cows.
The trail went cold for a couple of days, but
on Wednesday, thirtieth of August, Hobday was spotted in the
village of Rockcliffe, near Carlyle, one hundred and twenty miles
(08:16):
from where he had crashed the stolen car. He tried
to cover his face with a handkerchief to avoid detection,
but he had already been recognized and the local constabulary
rapidly arrived. When they asked him if it was Stanley
Eric Hobday, he admitted that he was. When an officer
(08:36):
grabbed his arm, he flinched, saying be careful. I hurt
my arm last week falling off a bicycle. He was
taken into custody, where he was examined by a doctor
and questioned. The doctor found a wound on his left elbow,
which had likely been inflicted by a sharp piece of glass,
(08:57):
perhaps from climbing through the smashed window at the Fox's home.
Three officers from West Bromage drove up to Carlyle to
collect him by car. When they read out the charge,
Hobday replied, murder. I've not done any murder. But detectives
(09:17):
had all the physical evidence they needed, as well as
multiple witnesses willing to testify that they had seen Hobday
in the vicinity of the murder and during his attempt
to escape justice in a stolen car. The trial began
on fourteenth of November nineteen thirty three at Staffordshire Sizars
(09:39):
and Stanley. Eric Hobday listened calmly as the court heard
the evidence. Along with the fingerprints and shoe Prince, police
had also found Hobday's suitcase in the back of the
jou At motor car, which bore his initials s E. H.
The strands of hair found on the razor at Robert
(10:00):
Newton's house also match Hobday's hair color, and a thread
recovered from his jacket was confirmed to be identical to
the torn coat fabric found near the broken window at
the home of mister and Missus Fox. Even Hobday's movements
prior to the murder had been suspicious, as he had
been spotted camping in worston Field, near West Brommage, wearing
(10:23):
a belt with a sheath knife attached to it. The
weapon's handle was distinctive. It was a version of a
bowie knife manufactured by Sheffield Company, which had only made
about twenty with this particular design. A group of girls
camping nearby also saw him packing up his tent when
(10:44):
the landowner told him to move on, and at that
time he had his shirt sleeves rolled up with no
wound visible on his left elbow, proving that he had
not injured it falling off a bicycle a week ago,
as he claimed. Hobday's appointed barrister, Sir Reginald Coventry Casey,
(11:04):
tried to cast doubt on Detective Inspector Cheryl's fingerprint evidence,
but there was little else he could do for his client.
There were no witnesses to call in his defense, and
all Coventry could do was ask the jury to consider
how likely it was that a cold blooded killer could
break into two houses in one night and stab a
(11:25):
man to death in a frenzied attack, then sit down
calmly as if nothing had happened, to eat, drink, repair
his torn coat sleeve, and have a shave. As strange
as Sir Reginald said this behavior was, the evidence was strong.
After forty five minutes of deliberations, the jury found Hobday
(11:47):
guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to death. Coventry
lodged an appeal on behalf of his client, and Hobday's
father organized a petition signed by three thousand people, but
the death sentence was upheld and the Home Secretary refused
to grant a reprieve. Those who supported Hobday didn't necessarily
(12:11):
believe he was innocent, but argued that he was intellectually disabled,
describing him as empty in the top story, and pointed
out that at twenty one, he was only three years
older than the legal hanging age. In fact, it was
only that year that the minimum age for hanging had
been raised from sixteen to eighteen. As an interesting side note,
(12:37):
Winniford Randalls, the daughter of the man who owned the
jouat Car, began receiving threatening letters after giving evidence during
the trial. They turned out to be from fifty seven
year old laborer Enoch Knowles, whose hobby for thirty years
had been sending hundreds of poison pen letters to judges
and witnesses. After reading about cases in the newspaper, he
(13:01):
was jailed for three years. Charles William Fox was buried
at West bromwige Borough Cemetery and four thousand mourners attended
his funeral, including members of the public and colleagues from
his workplace. Gladys Fox stood at her husband's graveside, their
lives together abruptly ended by the senseless murder after just
(13:24):
two years of marriage. Stanley Hobday spent Christmas of nineteen
thirty three at Winston Green Prison in Birmingham, knowing that
he would not live to see the new year, having
taken the life of a hard working man, and left
Gladys Fox a widow, all for the sum of fourteen shillings.
(13:46):
On Thursday twenty eight December, Hobday was executed by Thomas Pierpoint,
assisted by his nephew Albert. The crowds waiting outside were
undeterred by the crisp wintry weather, but quickly dispersed after
reading the formal notices of the execution posted on the
gates of the prison, and returned home to their lives
(14:10):
quickly forgetting the tragedy. You've been listening to Precious Murder Map.
If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a thumbs up,
comment or review, as it really helps to support the
show and help more people to find it. You can
also join me on Patreon for audio only ad free episodes.
(14:31):
Thanks for your support, Anne, I'll see you again soon.
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