CovSoc founder member, Paul Maddocks, reviews a book written by one of Coventry’s best known tour guides, Jo Phillips. Paul writes……
A new book has been published called “In the company of the Coventry Coroner, the life and legacy of Charles Webb Iliffe”, by Josephine Phillips.
“Step into the smoke-filled streets of Victorian Coventry, a city bustling with industry and shaped by the daily struggle for survival. Here, boys became chimney sweeps, mothers sold their wedding rings for a loaf of bread, and illness, injury, and misfortune seemed to lurk around every corner. Meet the man called in when death knocks unexpectedly: Dr. Charles Webb Iliffe.
“In this world of changing machinery and quiet suffering, one man walked the delicate line between life and death. His name was Dr. Charles Webb Iliffe Coventry’s Chief Coroner.”
‘In the Company of the Coventry Coroner’ isn’t your typical biography. It’s part true crime, part social history, and part love letter to a forgotten figure who saw tragedy not as spectacle, but as something deeply human.
As Coventry’s coroner for over four decades. Charles Webb Iliffe listened to the silences others ignored, giving voice to the voiceless and dignity to the forgotten. Through gripping case histories, personal insights, and a peek into the bizarre and often brutal world of 19th Century medicine, this book invites readers into Coventry’s world of soot, sorrow, resilience, and quick justice. It’s a story not just of one man’s life, but of a community, and the lives he helped honour, even in death.
The author, Jo Phillips has spent the past fifteen years guiding curious minds through the winding street and layered history of Coventry. A seasoned local tour guide with a passion for the city’s forgotten corners and shadowed stories, she brings the past to life with warmth, grit and a touch of the theatrical. Much of the research for the book is drawn from primary materials access through various archives including the British Newspaper Archive and the Coventry Archives based at the Herbert Museum. These local records offered invaluable insight into Iliffe’s family, career, and the civic life of Victorian and Edwardian Coventry.
This is all in the time of Coventry being an industrial city with much poverty, overcrowding, stagnant water, raw sewage seeping through cellars, cholera outbreaks, smallpox, workhouses and Charles saw it all, especially when called in to sign death certificates.
Dr. C. W Iliffe was born in 1843 and died in 1921, aged 77. He is buried in the London Road Cemetery.
Dr. Iliffe lived at a well known house on the London Road, called The Chace. At the time it was a grand house standing back from the original London Road in its own grounds.
After Dr. Iliffe’s death the family moved away and the house became a posh hotel, known as the Chace Hotel. However, at present this Grade II listed building is boarded up and its future is uncertain.
The book is available to purchase through Amazon for £12.
Book number ISBN 9798296098887