MANY Worcester people first really got to know the name Bob Blandford when he was sleuthing around the city’s ancient pub scene looking up the histories, anecdotes and goings-on in the ale houses.

He subsequently produced a series of books which have since been the go-to volumes for anyone wanting to know a fact, or even a fiction, relating to Worcester’s licensed or even unlicensed trade over the centuries.

Having drunk that glass dry, the former associate editor of Berrow’s Worcester Journal and RGS student turned his attention to the local police and in 2016 compiled an equally-fascinating historical volume called The Spike, so named after Worcester’s City Police’s distinctive helmet, which was billed as the definitive history of the force.

Now comes Spike II - the lives, the crimes and the violent times 1900-1936 which has been so anticipated that apparently advance orders already look set to put it in the Worcester and district best sellers list.

It is being launched on Saturday, appropriately in a pub The Virgin Tavern in Tolladine Road and Bob himself will be there from noon until 5pm and possibly a bit longer.

Amid the veritable encyclopaedia of words and stories, Spike II contains a remarkable theme which still casts a dark shadow over the city today.

As Bob explained: “It involves a horrific trio of gruesome murders in Worcester, 48 years apart, all involving three bodies, all involving children, all committed by comparatively-young ex-servicemen known to their victims, each squeaky-clean according to the authorities – and all linked by a series of bizarre coincidence.”

Date-wise, the first was back in November 1925 when Worcester City probationer PC No27 Herbert Burrows murdered Ernie and Doris Laight and their two-year-old son Robert at the Garibaldi pub in Wylds Lane on the night of November 26, 1925.

A daughter Joan, aged four, remained unharmed, having slept through the night’s awful events.

In the second case Frederick George Taylor hammered and mutilated his wife and their two children in their house in Green Lane, Rainbow Hill, in October 1929.

While the third was the most recent when in April 1973 David McGreavy murdered the three young children of Elsie and Clive Ralph, the couple he lodged with in Gillam Street.

Bob then lists a series of facts that link the cases - all were triple murders, all were committed by short-term ex-servicemen considered as loners even though none had a civilian blemish against his name, all were considered out of the murderer’s character and normal demeanour, all the children were murdered in their beds, all the children had been playing games with their murderer just hours before their deaths, all the cases excited huge outpourings of local grief while attracting national attention, all sparked outrage particularly by women clamouring to deal with the murderers in their own fashion and all three murderers were committed to Gloucester Gaol.

He adds: “But that’s not where the bizarre coincidences end. For all three involved children aged two and four, all the murders were committed at night or the early morning on a Thursday or a Friday, the three adults and three children murdered by Fred Taylor and Herbert Burrows are buried in triple graves at Astwood cemetery, both boys murdered in these two cases were aged two and both had been christened Robert but were better known as Bobby. While Herbert Burrows was also known to his city police colleagues as Bob.

“The two women murdered were Doris and Dorothy. Both were aged 32. Two of the murderers – Burrows and Taylor – had considered setting fire to the scenes of their crimes with Taylor confessing he wished he had and Burrows using paraffin to partially burn the body of Dolly Laight in a bid to destroy the evidence.

“All the men had had short service careers - Taylor in the Army, McGreavy and Burrows in the Navy, which they had joined as teenagers, McGreavy aged 15 and Burrows aged 17, and both were originally stationed at Portsmouth. The two had also demonstrated erratic behaviour and undergone psychiatric evaluation as a result. Both were cashiered, on each occasion the Navy keeping their findings secret. Had the files been released it is possible two adults and four children would not have met a dreadful end.

“Finally, and most bizarrely of all, Fred Taylor had been born and lived in 8 Gillam Street, his mother was still living there at the time he murdered her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Forty-four years on and with several changes of ownership, the same house was occupied by the Ralphs whose lodger David McGreavy murdered their three children inside the house.”

It was a very forensic trawl through masses of material by Bob who is almost certainly the city’s most prolific author with nine books published in 11 years totalling nearly three million words. His counting not mine.

Most of his earlier titles are available from Waterstones in The Shambles and the Tourist Information Centre at the Guildhall or signed and personalised direct from the author via Bob Backenforth’s Worcester Secrets Facebook page or by e-mail at bbbbbbob1@aol.com.