A Very British Murder (6 page)

Verse from a broadside (1855)

TO MODERN EYES,
one of the more distasteful aspects of the Ratcliffe Highway Murder was the way that hundreds of people traipsed through the Marrs’ house in the days following the crime. They came in order to ogle at the dead bodies of the victims, laid out upon their beds, and they came in huge numbers.
The Times
reported: ‘The sensation excited by these most ferocious murders has become so general, and the curiosity to see the place where they were committed so intense, that Ratcliffe Highway was rendered almost impassable by the throng of spectators.’

There were two good reasons why this ghoulish practice was much more acceptable then than now. Firstly, both birth and death were much more part of normal domestic life. Today both processes
have been medicalized, and very often shuffled off into a hospital rather than a person’s home. Regency people were much more used to relatives dying at home in their own beds, and most women gave birth at home. The laying-out of a corpse in the front room, so that friends and neighbours could come to pay their respects, was normal practice. There was also a strong Irish presence in east London, and the idea of the ‘wake’ – visiting the home of a dead person in order to see them in their coffin, and contributing money so that the family could hold a gathering with drinking and partying – even now lingers on in Ireland after being forgotten on this side of the sea.

Secondly, justice itself, as we have seen, was still a matter for the community, not for professionals. It was important that any available data could be seen and shared by as many people as possible. This is why the inquest was held at the Jolly Sailor public house, close to the Marrs’ house, and why the 12 members of the jury appointed to determine the cause of death were invited to tour the house themselves before they heard anyone’s evidence. (They emerged visibly shaken.) The murder of the Marrs was significant precisely because it revealed the limits of this method of solving crimes. This time, hearsay, knowledge of the characters of one’s neighbours, and eyewitness reports of what had happened would prove to be inadequate.

That said, many of those visiting the Marrs’ house must have also been motivated by a third factor: morbid, salacious curiosity. This wasn’t an entirely novel development. After all, even Georgian ladies and gentlemen were used to drawing amusement from grotesque and horrific sights. These included London’s ‘Bedlam’, or Bethlem,
or Bethlehem Hospital, an institution constructed in Moor Fields in the 1670s for people suffering from mental illnesses. The governors of the hospital allowed – even encouraged – such visits, because the money paid for entry contributed to the hospital’s coffers. A French visitor described the experience, in 1725, of touring the cells, which were:

reserved for dangerous maniacs, most of them being chained and terrible to behold. On holidays numerous persons of both sexes, but belonging generally to the lower class, visit this hospital and amuse themselves watching these unfortunate wretches, who often give them cause for laughter. On leaving this melancholy abode, you are expected by the porter to give him a penny.

The governors really wanted to attract rich, well-born visitors, potential future patrons of the charity, but for everyone who came the appeal was a mix of entertainment and compassion. The two could be experienced at the same time. A later tourist, the poet William Cowper, wrote that, as well as feeling pity, he too had
enjoyed
visiting the mad:

I was not altogether insensible of the misery of the poor captives, nor destitute of feeling for them. But the Madness of some of them had such a humorous air, and displayed itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was impossible not to be entertained, at the same time I was angry with myself for being so.

These feelings – horror, awe, a sense of danger viewed from safety – would come to the fore in the art and literature of the Romantic movement, with its exultation of the sublime, the untamed and the dangerous. They would also become necessary parts of the experience of enjoying a murder.

By the nineteenth century, the upper and middle classes did not need to visit a madhouse to find a thrill: they could simply pick up novels like Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818) (‘If you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends’). But their non-literate, working-class contemporaries could experience something of the same from visiting the scene of a crime.

IN 1823, THE
year that the second edition of
Frankenstein
came out, the so-called ‘Elstree Murder’ was committed by boxing promoter, insurance fraudster, gambler and rather incompetent murderer, John Thurtell. His victim was a fellow member of ‘The Fancy’, the name given to the late Georgian underworld of prizefighters and those who followed them, placed bets upon them and commentated on them.

This was a shifty business, for magistrates were usually unenthusiastic about having potentially rowdy crowds gathering at boxing matches held in their towns. So ‘The Fancy’ had to rendezvous in open fields. Huge crowds would gather – rather like an illegal rave in the 1980s – to watch an engagement in a roped-off, 8-ft-square ring, and significant amounts of money would change hands as the gambling commenced.

Thurtell had invited one William Weare, who moved in similar circles, to visit a cottage near Elstree, Hertfordshire, for a session of drinking and gambling. His aim was to get his hands on the large sum of money Weare was known to carry. The murderer travelled to Hertfordshire in a hired horse-drawn gig, a vehicle that would later become an iconic image and a powerful visual shorthand for his crime.

During the course of an October evening, Weare was shot by Thurtell, and the murderer and two accomplices then slit Weare’s throat. One of these accomplices was William Probert, the owner of the cottage off Gins Hill Lane, an overgrown rural track that later became known as ‘Murder Lane’. The three inept criminals threw the body of William Weare into the pond outside Probert’s cottage. On second thoughts, though, they decided that this wasn’t a safe enough hiding place. So they fished the corpse out again, and a second pond a little way away was chosen instead. Then, in an alarming display of sang-froid, the three went back to Probert’s cottage and spent the rest of the night singing songs and eating pork chops.

Their crime – sordid, greedy and unimaginative though it was – nevertheless caught the public’s imagination, and it rather brilliantly illustrates the ways in which the location, the setting and even the props of a murder could be enjoyed. The combination of the violence and the everyday domestic detail that emerged as the crime unfolded was gripping to the thousands of readers who followed the case in the press.
The Times
found that the ‘coldblooded villainy in the mode of bringing it about, and the ferocity which accompanied its perpetration, has seldom been equalled’,
and the publisher James Catnach printed no fewer than a quarter of a million copies of one particular printed broadside giving the latest details about Thurtell’s trial.

The transcript of the trial seems almost intended to provide maximum entertainment value. In order to establish the timing of events, Probert’s maid was asked:

‘Was the supper postponed?’

And her answer was:

‘No, it was pork.’

Due to the various bungles in the disposal of the body and the murder weapon, and the lack of sympathy between the three accomplices, Thurtell was easily found guilty and swung for his deeds within three months. He had become a figure of such notoriety that a crowd of 40,000 was said to have gathered to watch his death.

Of course this level of public interest was potentially hugely lucrative. Probert, the accomplice, escaped being hanged for his part in the crime, but he went bankrupt and his cottage and belongings were sold off by his creditors. They were snapped up and the property itself became a tourist attraction. Indeed, a little local circuit developed. The ‘curious’ began at ‘the grave of Mr Weare, in Elstree Church-yard … and the pond, about a quarter of a mile out of the village’. The second stop was the Artichoke Inn ‘in which the corpse was carried, and where the Coroner’s inquest was held’. Here the landlord, Mr Field, was on hand to answer questions. He was particularly well informed because he’d been a member of the jury at the inquest. Having had their chat with Mr Field, visitors could then examine the sack used to transport Weare’s remains (‘the marks of blood which it bears gave it particular interest’.) From the Artichoke
Inn tourists would travel on to the cottage itself, and could barely be restrained from pinching souvenirs to take home. One newspaper reported that ‘a twig from the hedge, through which the remains of a murdered man had been dragged, must furnish a treat’. And indeed the hedge had been pulled quite to pieces.

John Thurtell and the Elstree Murder became infamous enough to provide material for a seemingly endless stream of well-known authors. Thomas De Quincey, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and, later, Walter De La Mare all had reflections to make. And the Elstree Murder Tour became so well established that five years later even a remote and grand figure like Sir Walter Scott came a-visiting.

Scott extracted maximum romance from the circuit that he made in 1828 of all the notable sites. He started by describing the local ‘labyrinth of intricate lanes, which seemed made on purpose to afford strangers the full benefit of a dark night and a drunk driver’. By then, the cottage had been partially demolished, but he carefully inspected the first pond: ‘Now only a green swamp, but so near the house, that one cannot conceive how it was ever chosen as a place of temporary concealment for the murdered body.’

He visited the ruins of the cottage, for which privilege he was charged 2s. 6d. by the ‘truculent looking hag’ acting as custodian.

Scott was by no means the last of the Elstree Murder tourists. Nearly 60 years later, in 1885, a contributor to the publication
Notes & Queries
described another visit to Probert’s cottage during which he had found ‘an old man clipping the very hedge through which Weare’s body was dragged’, and been able to visit the very kitchen in which the pork chops had been cooked. And on 24 October
1923, a commemorative meeting was held at the murder scene to mark ‘exactly one hundred years to the very hour when the evil deed was done’. Gordon S. Maxwell, a topographer, reported that the weather was disappointingly inappropriate. Instead of ‘a clouded sky and a fierce east wind blowing chilly and blusteringly over a scene of desolation’, it had been rather a lovely evening.

Enthusiastic murder tourists may have flocked to the cottage for decades to come, but in 1823 it was not in fact necessary to make the journey to Hertfordshire to experience something of the same thrill.

The gig in which Thurtell and his victim had travelled to Elstree had been a choice prize in the sale of his goods. The idea of such a fine and pleasant means of transport being used for such nefarious purposes seems to have piqued people’s interest, and few of the broadsides printed about the crime were complete without a picture of the fatal vehicle. In Regency life, a gig was a symbol of respectability, and Thomas Carlyle was particularly struck by the importance attached to it by his contemporaries as the Thurtell case unfolded. In his mind, the gig became a symbol of hollow materialism and a thoughtless grasping after respectability, and he began to refer, in correspondence with his wife Jane, to regrettable conditions such as
gigmania, Gigmaness, Gigmanhood
and
county gigmanism
.

The original gig was acquired by the New Surrey Theatre in London, to be used onstage in a dramatic retelling of the story of the murder entitled
The Gamblers
. ‘Boiled Beef’ Williams, the theatre’s manager, placed an advert in
The Times
promising that audiences would see the ‘identical horse and gig alluded to in the
daily press in the accounts of the late murder, together with the table at which the party supped, the sofa as described to having been slept on, with other household furniture, as purchased at the late auction’.

The relish with which Thurtell’s story was lapped up seems almost ludicrous today, and yet this crime struck a powerful chord with everyone in Regency England.

William Cobbett, the radical writer, even claimed that his young son was spurred on to learn how to read in order to find out more about the case, at a time when ‘all the world was talking and reading about THURTELL’. Thomas Carlyle greatly regretted it once all was over: ‘Thurtell being hanged last week, we are duller here than ever.’

He had been rather an amusing murderer, whose blunders and pretensions were a rich source of comedy. Indeed, as Thomas Babington Macaulay noted, ‘There is a possibility that Thurtell killed Weare only in order to give the youth of England an impressive warning against gaming and bad company.’