A Very British Murder (5 page)

This system began to break down all over Britain as the nation became urbanized. A network of neighbours, constables and nightwatchmen simply could not deal with more serious crimes such as significant thefts or murders. In the early eighteenth century, private individuals who’d been the victims of crime could seek redress by engaging the services of a ‘thief-taker’, an entrepreneurial individual who offered his services to track down criminals for a fee.

However, the problem with thief-takers was that they knew most of the criminals, and were far too friendly with some of them. Occasionally they would accept a higher counter-bribe
not
to turn a villain in. The most famous thief-taker of all was Jonathan Wild, who had started his London career as a racketeer and dealer in stolen goods. In 1713 he teamed up with an official parish constable in London, Charles Hitchen, and on their nightly ‘Rambles’ through the city, they extorted money from – rather than protecting – the general public.

Wild, however, managed to maintain an appearance of legitimacy. His house in the Little Old Bailey became, by 1714, ‘an Office of Intelligence for lost Goods’. He was careful not to keep stolen property on his premises, but everyone knew that he could help you get back something that had been stolen. And so ‘Mr. Jonathan Wild’ became ‘a considerable Figure in the World’, promoting himself as ‘Thief-catcher General of Great Britain’.

However, his double game was too tricky to last. His success roused the enmity of his former partner, and now rival, Hitchen. Using the very up-to-date Georgian medium of the published pamphlet, Hitchen accused Wild of high-handed, rough justice, turning in some criminals, protecting others, corrupting all. And so, in 1718, an Act was passed, thought to be aimed specifically at Wild, which explicitly made it a crime to bargain with criminals for the return of stolen goods.

Despite this, Wild remained in business for a good few more years. He was clearly performing a much-valued public service. He eventually fell from grace, though, after his treatment of Joseph ‘Blueskin’ Blake. This unsavoury character had been a criminal child
whom Jonathan Wild had adopted (in the manner of a Fagin) to commit crimes on his behalf. Once ‘Blueskin’ was caught, however, Wild washed his hands of him. The enraged ‘Blueskin’ cut Wild’s throat. Although Wild survived, people now turned against him. When charged with theft soon afterwards, he found he had lost his ability to talk his way out of trouble. He was hanged at Tyburn, the crowd pelting him with stones.

It was this unsatisfactory situation that caused the writer Henry Fielding to enter the fray. As well as a successful playwright and author of
Tom Jones
, Fielding had a strong social conscience and served as a magistrate. In 1751 he wrote his celebrated work of social science,
An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers
. He started keeping a ‘Register of Robberies’, containing intelligence about crimes committed along with suspicious persons and behaviour, and he encouraged members of the public to report in with information. It was the first time a magistrate had tried to pre-empt crime, rather than just reacting to its consequences after the event.

Fielding also recruited six parish constables to stay in service permanently, for a salary, rather than leaving their posts after the customary temporary term of office. These specially trained ‘Bow Street Runners’, as the public called them, are often hailed as marking the very beginning of a professional and paid police force. These six men, in blue coats, patrolling the area within six miles of Charing Cross, became a familiar sight on the streets of London.

But they were soon competing with numerous other proto-police forces run by individual parishes. Judith Flanders calculates that in 1790 there were no fewer than a thousand parish watchmen
and constables, employed by 70 different bodies. The Thames or Marine Police Force, founded in 1798, was therefore only one of very many. Henry Fielding’s work was continued after his death by his blind half-brother, Sir John Fielding, who put his finger on a new problem: competition or non-cooperation between them. ‘The Frontiers of each Parish,’ he said, were ‘in a confused State, for that where one side of a street lies in one Parish, the Watchmen of one Side cannot lend any Assistance to a person on the other side.’

The Ratcliffe Highway Murders definitively showed that this method of policing was inadequate. The reaction of those responsible for law and order in Wapping was confused and incoherent. The head of the Thames Police, John Harriott, had quickly issued handbills promising £20 for information on three men seen loitering outside the Marrs’ on the night of the murder. Yet he was castigated by the Home Office for this commendable initiative, and was accused of overreaching his powers. Meanwhile, the magistrates of Shadwell, who were appointed by the Home Secretary, and therefore more ‘official’ than the Thames Police, offered £50 of their own for the ‘discovery and apprehension’ of the perpetrator. And, yet again, the Coroner, John Unwin, began to investigate the case by holding an inquest at the Jolly Sailor public house.

Questions were soon raised in Parliament. Why had the Shadwell magistrates overlooked so many clues? Was there any reason beyond xenophobia why so many Irish people had been arrested on suspicion of the murders? Why had Williams been left alone and unsupervised in his cell? The answers were not easy to find. As Spencer Perceval himself said, ‘no state of nightly watch, however excellent, could have prevented such a crime. Indeed he hardly knew in what system
of police a prevention could have been found.’ (Perceval would not live long enough to see what the answer turned out to be. Only five months after the murders, in May 1812, he was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons, by a lone gunman with a grudge against the government.)

In the opinion of P. D. James and T. A. Critchley, co-authors of a book on the Ratcliffe Highway Murders published in 1971, a vigorous Home Secretary might have pushed through legislation to create a central police force in the months following the crime. But the Home Secretary was lethargic and unengaged, and faced the widespread attitude that an official police force was only suitable for foreign countries where the people didn’t trust each other. Authoritarian governments abroad used their police services to oppress their people. Freeborn Englishmen, people said, would not stand for such an infringement of their native liberty: ‘They have an admirable police in Paris, but they pay for it dear enough. I had rather half-a-dozen throats should be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years than be subject to domiciliary visits, spies and all the rest of [the French police’s] contrivances.’

Proposals for a single police force constantly ran up against this belief that the strong arm of the law was as much a curse as a blessing. The state, of course, played a much smaller role in British society than it does today: compulsory schooling only arrived in 1880, old-age pensions had to wait until 1909 and the National Health Service until 1948.

And yet, 18 years later, Parliament finally managed to agree on the solution to London’s policing problem: a single central coordinating body to deal with crime throughout the city, to be paid
for out of taxes. In 1829, Parliament passed ‘an Act for improving the Police in and near the Metropolis’, and the job of setting up the new police force was given to the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, who had already reformed the police in Ireland. When, in 1829, the new force was set up, it contained over one thousand men, who became known as ‘Peelers’.

The creation of this new force is often seen as a sharp turning point, and yet conscientious historians are at pains to point out that ‘before’ and ‘after’ weren’t so very different. Some of the same people and practices, and indeed terminology (‘constables’) continued, and the new force would never have jurisdiction over the powerful City of London, which was protective of its privileges. (Peel was wise in thinking this a battle not worth fighting, and, to this day, the City still has its own separate police force.) Indeed, as far as the statistics can tell us, crime was actually falling, and the perceived need for the police arose just as much from the increased
fear
of crime as its reality. The creation of a police force was part of a wider movement to make cities clean and tidy and orderly. People’s all-important
perception
that their streets were safe would be aided by the removal of beggars, the repair of the roads and the abolition of rowdy fairs, as much as the catching of murderers.

But however much historians stress continuity as well as change, the creation of the Metropolitan Police Force was a significant development, and went almost hand in hand with the emergence of the middle class. Terms such as ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’ are notoriously slippery, but the Great Reform Act of 1832 did create a new division between the group of people who had formerly all been lumped together as ‘the lower classes’.

In 1832, the pool of people allowed to vote in elections was extended from roughly 400,000 to 650,000. Some of the previous system’s well-known anomalies – like the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ where Members of Parliament were returned by only a handful of voters – were obliterated. Votes were now given to all male property-owners of a certain level of wealth: they had to own land worth £10. Now master craftsmen and successful shopkeepers were voters, with a stake in the status quo. Those just a little bit less wealthy, such as skilled tradesmen, remained outside the political class, and some instead turned to radicalism. There would now be new levels of confrontation between these two classes, with the police on the side of their new friends, the middle class.

Robert Peel’s coordinated force was also strikingly different from its ragtag predecessors. It was headed by two ‘commissioners’, beneath whom – according to a letter of Peel’s dated 20 July 1829 – were a Chief Clerk, a Second Clerk and a Third Clerk. The Receiver’s office (the head financial post) also had a couple of clerks. Then there were to be 8 superintendents, 88 serjeants and 895 constables.

Most importantly, the efforts of all the policemen in London were now to be coordinated. Runners would travel regularly from station to station, sharing information, and the old
Hue and Cry
, a newsletter about crime, was replaced by the much fuller
Police Gazette
with up-to-date news about suspects. Daily orders for all constables were issued right from the top of the whole organization.

Half of the new ‘Peelers’ patrolled at night, the other half during the day, and they walked the streets at a steady two and a half miles an hour. Forbidden to sit down anywhere while on duty,
they wore a long blue coat with eight buttons and tails. The colour of the coats was important: blue was chosen, not red, in order to distinguish them from soldiers. Nobody in Britain wanted the army on the streets. This was especially true after the horrific Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which soldiers and hussars reacted in a heavy-handed manner to a peaceful crowd of protestors, slaughtering 11 people and wounding many more.

Around their necks the ‘Peelers’ wore leather collars to protect them against garrotters. The collars of their coats bore their official number, and, even today, when a police officer’s number appears on the shoulder epaulettes of his or her uniform, it’s still called a ‘collar number’. They wore white trousers of their own purchase – these were not officially part of the uniform – and on their heads they wore six-inch-tall, wide-brimmed top hats: again, to make them look more like civilians, less like soldiers. Their noisy rattles, rather like those once waved by football fans, were intended to make a racket and summon aid when necessary, but were later replaced by the more effective whistle.

Economic security seems to have been the major motivator for constables to sign up. But, even so, the 3rd Class Constables considered themselves to be poorly paid on 16s. 8d. a week. In 1848, a group of ten of them signed a letter complaining about this to their superiors. ‘Most of the married men on joining,’ they said, ‘are somewhat in debt, and are unable to extricate themselves on account of rent to pay and articles to buy which are necessary for support of wife and children.’ Over time, though, the police became seen as a stable and increasingly attractive career for people who had been labourers or workers in other trades. Police recruiters could
afford to become more selective, and the original requirement that a candidate be at least 5 ft 7 in. tall was raised to 5 ft 9 in.

Of course change and novelty were not always welcomed by the general public, who resented the cost of the new police force and missed their familiar and friendly – if often corrupt – old nightwatchmen. The new ‘Peelers’ were ordered to be ‘civil and obliging’ to the public, yet found themselves being insulted in return: popular names for them included ‘Raw Lobsters’, ‘Blue Devils’ and ‘Peel’s Bloody Gang’. This was partly because policemen were obliged to wear their uniforms even when off duty – such was the fear of the infiltration of civil society by ‘spies’.

But six years after the founding of the ‘Peelers’, it was clear that the idea of a single force to serve an entire city was here to stay. The rest of the country followed London’s example. The Metropolitan Police Force, the name by which the ‘Peelers’ were now officially known, was replicated in towns throughout Britain.

However, there was still one piece of the puzzle missing. The original ‘Peelers’ were concerned only with the prevention of crimes, not their resolution. Not until 1842 was a department of the Metropolitan Police created with the express purpose of
solving
crimes. The Detective Branch, as it was called, originally consisted of just two inspectors, six sergeants and a few constables. Dressed in plain clothes, their existence only became possible once society had got used to, and had started to trust, their uniformed colleagues.

It would take even longer for people to get used to the detectives.