D1.8.14: Coroner's Inquest wanted

D1.8.14: Coroner's Inquest wanted

Newspaper Clippings

Bleek criticises the investigative rigour of Police Surgeon Dr Ross's report on the mysterious death of Miss Oosterbeek, a young Rotterdammer holidaying in Cape Town. He uses this case to query the general inadequacy of the colony's police services as an institution when investigating the proper causes behind increasingly frequent and suspicious unsolved local deaths. Bleek speculates that the rise in unsolved cases stems from procedural laxity or the incompetence of officials, taking particular exception to the inane details drawn upon in Ross's report that do little to uncover the truth or reduce the mystery. Bleek argues that a British-style coroner's inquest (an institution pursuing fact-finding rather than fault-finding) is needed, as perpetrators escape justice through a lack of thorough investigation. He encourages William Porter and parliamentarians to devise such a bill. Finally, he suggests hybridising the preferred Dutch Law of Inheritance (which better protects married women) with the superior constitutional rights and liberties captured in English Common Law for women more generally.

Printed newsprint glued on paper

22 December 1864

Two cut-out columns of printed newsprint mounted on foolscap folio (warped). 'Coroner's Inquest wanted' is the title Bleek wrote on the mount.

Coroner's Inquest (wanted), deaths (unexpected), murder (investigation of Miss Oosterbeek's), Mr Kropholler (was intoxicated), Miss Oosterbeek (her suspicious death), Rondebosch Road (a man with a fractured skull found on the), Dr Ross (Police Doctor), report (Dr Ross'), Inspector Thorndyke, Colonel Hill

Pressed clippings of Victorian current affairs opinion pieces by Wilhelm Bleek. Published in Het Volksblad on Thursday, December 22nd, 1864. The 'British institution of a Coroner's Inquest' holds inquests (which are not trials) at coroners' courts to determine who has died and how, when, and where the death occurred. These cuttings include Dr Ross's letter to Het Volksblad's editor. Jan F. Celliers, who edited Het Volksblad from 1863 to 1872, was likely the 'editor' to whom Dr Ross (possibly William Henry Ross, MD [b. 1835 - d. 1912]) wrote (Nash, 2009: 40; Pama, 1979: 56, 61; Picton, 1969: 39, 86). JWG van Oordt, the celebrated classicist, was likely Celliers' successor.

Van de Sandt de Villiers & Co.