“Hull was a dangerous place to live in these years,” says a compendium of Yorkshire crime. “These years” were the time of the Great War, and the murder of David Ombler, a market trader and brother of a local councillor, was “another case in which Hull Police failed to achieve any significant progress involving old and vulnerable citizens.”

Ombler, though, was both very fit and only middle-aged. He was found beaten to death on his kitchen floor of his home in West Parade, Hull, at breakfast time on Saturday, May 30th, 1914.