Charles Hitchen
The embattled under-marshal would try hard to retain his power and after two months of being accused of the felonies, at last, on 16 December, he showed his poorly written "answer" spread on 9 pages of foolscap. The document is a record of the names of all those places mentioned above, where Hitchen met the thieves and organised crimes with them. It also gives the examples of social details, one of which explains how Lord Barnard's bills through a chain of accidents appeared in Hitchen's hands. If one did not tip the porter in the General Post Office, he would throw the letter out. Pickpockets, visiting the Office for their own purpose in the midnight, saw the other one at the door with the bills inside. Seeing the boys with the papers on the one side of the tavern and a sad victim on the other, set Hitchen to assist him. Certainly, this rather comic justification with others added to his main reason of being maliciously persecuted by the robbers was not to blindfold the Court of Aldermen, who were reluctant to take decision against him anyway for the clear reasons discussed above. On the other hand, they could not utterly ignore the Lord Mayor's reminder to the committee, that marshal's behaviour humiliated the City and reflected other officers' behaviour under the Mayor. All they did, though, was rather cynical. After waiting for Hitchen's written defence, presented itself as late as 16 December, they did not read it until 16 January 1713. As for their decision on marshal's suspension, it came over five months late, that was 24 June 1713 and "forbade him attendance on the Lord Mayor" while retaining his power as a constable to obtain warrant when needed and apprehend.
Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens was born the elder of two boys in Portsmouth, Hampshire. Even when they were children Christopher never got on well with his brother Peter Hitchens, a Christian and socially conservative journalist. His parents, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987) and Yvonne Jean Hitchens (née Hickman; 1921–1973), met in Scotland when both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II. Christopher often referred to Eric as simply the 'commander'. Eric was deployed on which took part in the sinking of the in the Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943. Christopher would pay tribute to his father's contribution to the war: "Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day's work than any I have ever done." He also stated that "the remark that most summed him [his father] up was the flat statement that the war of 1939 to 1945 had been 'the only time when I really felt I knew what I was doing'." Eric Hitchens would later work as a bookkeeper for boatbuilders, speedboat-manufacturers and at a prep school. Later in life, Hitchens identified as a secular Jew—since Judaism is matrilineal and he discovered his mother was Jewish. His mother was a 'Wren' (a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service). His father's naval career required the family to move a number of times from base to base throughout Britain and its dependencies, including to Malta, where Christopher's brother Peter was born in Sliema in 1951.