The Body in the Cylinder: How a Discovery During World War Two Revealed an Unsolved Victorian Era Mystery
Liverpool is second only to London in terms of damage suffered as a result of the Nazi blitz during the Battle of Britain in 1940-41. Large tracts of the city are in ruins with the area around the Liverpool dockyards especially hard hit. Debris is everywhere.
On this summer day a group of American soldiers is working to clear rubble from behind what remains of a Methodist Church located on Boundary Street East, a small street on the border between Liverpool’s densely populated Everton and Vauxhall neighborhoods only a few miles from the dockyards.
An American bulldozer pushes aside some rubble and reveals a sealed rusted metal cylinder about six feet in length and nineteen inches in diameter. One side of the cylinder is bolted shut with what appear to be rivets, while the other end is open several inches, but as the bulldozer pushes the cylinder aside it inadvertently crushes the open end almost completely sealing the rusted metal container closed.
Unable to move all the debris from the bomb site around the church the American engineers simply push the rusted steel cylinder aside and out of the way where it will reside for the next two years and become a semi-permanent fixture in the local neighborhood.
A contemporary lifelong Liverpool resident named Norman Garner would later recount in an interview once this inconspicuous steel cylinder gained notoriety that, “Passersby would often use the cylinder as a bench and I often saw children playing with it.”
People in the neighborhood routinely notice that local kids love to roll the old rusted cylinder through empty lots and spin it around to see how fast they can make it go.
On one end, the one that was crushed by the American bulldozer, a crack about three or four inches wide has formed over time and on July 13, 1945 as three school aged children are rolling the cylinder along the sidewalk, they decide to try and peek inside that crack after they hear a rattling sound coming from inside the container.
At first, the kids believe that they can see an old shoe through the crack in the cylinder, but as they peer inside more closely, they soon see what they think is a human bone.
Alarmed and terrified the kids rushed to inform the police.
When the police arrive they use an acetylene blow torch to open the crushed end of the rusted cylinder and a shocking sight meets their eyes. Inside that old steel drum the Liverpool police discovered a corpse dressed in what appeared to be late nineteenth century clothing. The corpse is almost entirely intact though a majority of the flesh has rotted away over the years.
This is the Liverpool “Body in the Cylinder”.
A small tuft of reddish brown hair still remains attached to the skeleton’s skull, but the lower left part of the skeleton’s jaw bone is somehow completely missing.
The corpse is about 6 feet tall and it appears as if the man had been curled up in a fetal S shaped posture at the time of his death inside the cylinder.
Initially, it was thought that perhaps the man had been homeless, crawled inside the cylinder to sleep and been killed as the result of a German air raid during the blitz. But given the state of decomposition that the body was in, and the fact that the skeletal remains were dressed in such an antiquated fashion, the coroner’s report at the time could only date the age of the man as being anywhere between twenty-five and fifty years old at the time of his death.
A number of interesting possessions are found sealed away with the Body in the Cylinder at the time of its discovery in July of 1945.
For one thing, the man’s skull though having become separated completely from his torso during its time in the metal drum probably as a result of having been rolled through the streets of Liverpool, is resting atop a brick wrapped in burlap sackcloth, a sort of improvised pillow, leading authorities to believe that the man in the cylinder may have been asleep at the time of his death.
He is carrying two diaries, both of which are almost entirely illegible at the time of their discovery, but investigators can see that all the pages in the diary which can be deciphered are dated sometime between the years 1884 and 1885.
The date of the diaries is in line with the type of clothes the body is wearing, a three piece wool suit of good quality, typical of Victorian Era men’s dress.
Upon examination of the body the coroner at the time, a Mr. G.C. Mort reveals to the public that along with the diaries the Body in the Cylinder also had in his possession a worn signet ring, a set of keys, a train ticket to London, several postcards and an undated receipt from T.C. Williams and Company.
T.C. Williams and Company had been a Liverpool based paint manufacturer owned by its namesake Thomas Creegan Williams between the years 1870 and 1884.
Despite over a decade as a successful businessman records indicated that Thomas Creegan Williams had been declared bankrupt on March 10, 1884.
Through failed investments and ill advised expansion T.C. Williams and Co. had fallen into exorbitant debt. It was theorized that Thomas Creegan Williams could have been the man behind the Body in the Cylinder.
The Liverpool Evening Standard reported in the days following the discovery of the Body in the Cylinder that, “there does not seem to be any suggestion of murder. The man may have been of the queer type and crawled inside the cylinder to sleep.” In this context the word queer was most likely used to denote someone whose behavior was unusual due to mental instability.
Between the middle of July and the end of August 1945 authorities in Liverpool launched an inquest to determine whether the Body in the Cylinder could be definitively confirmed to be that of Thomas Creegan Williams, owner of T.C. Williams & Co. paint manufacturer.
The inquest theorized that at some point after being declared bankrupt on March 10, 1884, Thomas Creegan Williams had left his home and family in a suburb of Liverpool, and chosen to hide out from his debt collectors by sleeping inside a metal cylinder on the premises of his now bankrupt business.
Investigators believed that on the night he fell asleep inside the metal cylinder, Thomas Creegan Williams may either have been contemplating fleeing to London, or perhaps, even contemplating suicide. As it was though, there was no forensic or concrete evidence, such as a note, that the man had chosen to willfully seal himself inside the metal drum as a means of committing suicide.
As it was, whether he was suicidal or not, the inquest arrived at the conclusion that at some point during his slumber, Thomas Creegan Williams had in fact become sealed inside the cylinder and died of asphyxiation.
Though foul play had been almost entirely ruled out with regards to the Body in the Cylinder, the hypothesis arrived at by the court was simply mere conjecture based on circumstantial evidence.
Another theory surrounding T.C. Williams is that he willfully placed a corpse inside the sealed metal drum on the premises of his own, now defunct business, as a means of faking his own death so that he could flee his creditors and leave his family free of any future financial obligations as a result of the business and investment mistakes that he had made.
This theory asserts that Williams would have been unlikely to return to the site of the business he once owned if he was, in fact, seeking to flee from his debt collectors, and proponents of this hypothesis also point to the fact that the body discovered inside the metal cylinder already had a train ticket to London in its possession. Why would Williams possibly have chosen to sleep inside a metal drum, at the very site of his financial ruin, if he could already have been miles from Liverpool safe among the relative anonymity of London in an era before mass telephone communication or rapid transport?
All the court could ever determine was that the wife of a man named Thomas Creegan Williams had been buried in Liverpool at the turn of the twentieth century and that a T.C. Williams who lived in Seaforth and listed his occupation as a paint and brush manufacturer at 5 Leeds Street in Liverpool was a possible identity for the Body in the Cylinder. Neither a death certificate nor a gravesite for Thomas Creegan Williams has ever been found.
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| Victorian Era Image (possibly) of Leeds Street Liverpool |
Fleeing via ship to another country to escape debt was a common practice during the 19th century at a time when being in debt could still land someone in a workhouse where they would have been subjected to hard labor, inhumane conditions and near starvation rations.
If Thomas Creegan Williams had chosen to hide from his creditors, commit suicide, or fake his own death, he definitely wouldn’t have been the first Victorian Era man or woman to do so given the situation.
So that it is probable that Thomas Creegan Williams may have been attempting to hide until he was able to escape from his creditors, but it should also be noted that the Liverpool inquest sought to find relatives or descendants of Thomas Creegan Williams who might have been alive in 1945 in both Great Britain and the United States (as most Victorian Era debtors seeking to escape the workhouse traveled to New York City) but the investigation was unable to locate a single descendant of T.C. Williams. This is extremely odd since birth records indicated that Thomas Creegan Williams and his wife had given birth to a son in 1859.
As it was G.C. Mort, coroner on the case, was forced to rule an Open Verdict regarding the investigation into the Body in the Cylinder, stating that it was, “impossible to rule on a cause of death, or give an identity to the body, because of insufficient information.”
The court did state that it believed the time of death to have been sometime in the year 1885.
Perhaps, the German blitz on England during the Second World War did reveal the final resting place of distraught, possibly suicidal Thomas Creegan Williams who lived the last hours of his life sealed inside a steel drum seeking desperately to escape his creditors. But as it stands, to this day nearly one hundred and forty years after someone first crawled inside and fell asleep, or was placed there on purpose, the case of the Body in the Cylinder still remains open.
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