The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (6 page)

BOOK: The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective
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Like Tanner and Meiklejohn, Clarke must have learnt how to handle the more physical elements of his job. However, physical hazards were not the only concern, and Coathupe was later to comment that the employment of detectives at racecourses exposed them ‘to such temptations that they were liable to become mixed up with transactions which were not creditable’.
105

As a further illustration of the nature of Scotland Yard detectives’ work, their services could be purchased by private individuals with the commissioner’s permission. One such occasion arose in June 1864 when Tanner and Clarke were sent in plain clothes to attend and provide security at the fête and fancy bazaar at Orléans House, Twickenham, arranged by the Duc d’Aumale. The Duc’s father was the last King of France, whose abdication in 1848 had led to the French Second Republic when Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected president and later became Emperor Napoleon III.
106
The Duc and his family had sought sanctuary in England, and required a detective presence to help dissuade and to deal with any discontent French republicans who might appear at the fête. Fortunately, it seems that the fête passed off peacefully.

By June 1864, Clarke’s ‘apprenticeship’ as a detective had come to an end, and he was shortly to be moved on to bigger and better things.

2

A MURDEROUS YEAR

1864

Another base and dreadful murder

Now again, alas has been,

One of the most atrocious murders

It is, as ever yet was seen;

Poor Thomas Briggs, how sad to mention

Was in a first-class carriage slain,

Between Old Ford and Hackney Wick,

Which caused excitement, care and pain

Anonymous
1

The North London Railway Murder

On the evening of Saturday 9 July 1864 in the gathering dark at Hackney Wick station, two bank clerks, Henry Vernez and Sydney Jones, entered an unoccupied first-class compartment of the slightly delayed 9.45 p.m. train from Fenchurch Street to Chalk Farm. Noticing a bag on the seat near the door, Jones moved it before sitting down, only to discover that there was fresh blood on his hand. Alerted to this, his colleague immediately called the train guard Benjamin Ames who, with the aid of his hand lamp, found in the compartment a hat and walking stick in addition to the bag. There was blood on all these items, on the seats and trickling down the glass of the window.
2
In the words of a subsequent newspaper report, the compartment ‘was saturated with blood’.
3
Not unreasonably suspecting foul play, Ames locked the compartment doors, telegraphed Chalk Farm station and stayed with the train to its final destination before providing a full report to the stationmaster.

That same night, on the London-bound track, a train of empty carriages left Hackney Wick station at 10.20 p.m. Before reaching Bow station the engine driver, Alfred Ekin, noticed a large dark object lying between the tracks. Alerting his guard, William Timms, who was in the brake van, the train was stopped and reversed. Between the tracks the two men found the unconscious body of a man lying on his back, with his head towards Hackney. With the help of others who had arrived at the scene, including P.C. Edward Dougan, the body was carried to the Mitford Castle public house nearby. P.C. Dougan searched the man’s pockets:

and found four sovereigns and some keys in the left-hand side trousers pocket, and in the vest pocket a florin and half of a first-class ticket of the North London Railway. In the right-hand side trousers pocket there were 10s. 6d. in silver and copper, some more keys, a silver snuffbox, and a number of letters and papers, and a silk handkerchief, and a diamond ring on the little finger which I took away. There was a gold fastening attached to his waistcoat, but I could not undo it.
4

By 11 p.m. a local surgeon, Alfred Brereton, had arrived. He found that the man had many serious head wounds but was still alive. The surgeon’s attempts to revive the patient failed and he remained unconscious. The head wounds had arisen as a result of two main traumas; those on the top of the head had been caused by a blunt instrument while those on the left side of the head were consistent with a fall from a moving railway carriage. Clearly the man had been the victim of a violent assault, and it took little time for the connection to be made between the blood-soaked train compartment and the body on the railway track.

During the early morning of Sunday 10 July the man was identified as Thomas Briggs, 69 years old, a highly respected chief clerk in the bank of Messrs Robarts, Curtis & Co. of Lombard Street, coincidentally the same bank as that which employed the two clerks who had first entered the blood-splattered train compartment at Hackney. Briggs was well known as a frequent traveller on the North London Railway between Fenchurch Street and Hackney Wick. His son, Thomas James Briggs, was quickly contacted and arrived at the Mitford Castle at 2 a.m. Arrangements were made to transfer Briggs to his home at Clapton Square, Victoria Park, where he died at a quarter to midnight on the Sunday night. The police now had a murderer to find, and also had to cope with the considerable public reaction to the fact that this was the first murder that had taken place on a British train.

George Clarke would soon have heard the news of the murder at the office in Scotland Yard. However, he would not have immediately appreciated the ultimate extent of his involvement in the case. Indeed, Clarke was not involved in the initial inquiries. As the murder had occurred in East London, the first responsibility for the case fell on K Division (based at West Ham), under Superintendent Howie. Howie had been a policeman for twenty-eight years, and superintendent for twelve of them, and was only nine months away from his retirement, but his last few months were to prove eventful.
5

Inspector Walter Kerressey, of Bow Police Station, was the first senior officer on the scene having been called at an early stage to the Mitford Castle by P.C. Dougan on the night of 9 July. Kerressey, a 43-year-old Irishman from Cappoquin, had joined the Metropolitan Police ten years after Clarke but had already been an inspector for five years.
6
On the morning of Sunday 10 July, Kerressey examined the train compartment at Bow station before visiting Briggs at his home, where ‘he was then alive but insensible’.
7
The items recovered from the train compartment were shown to ‘young Mr Briggs’ who identified the stick and bag but, to everyone’s surprise, told the police that the hat, a black beaver, was not his father’s.
8
It also became clear that a valuable gold watch and chain that had been regularly worn by the elder Thomas Briggs had not been found on the body. This suggested that theft was one possible motive for the murderous assault, albeit that more than £4 in cash had been found apparently untouched in Briggs’ pockets. From these early observations the search was set in motion to locate Briggs’ missing watch and chain, to identify the person who had left an unknown hat at the scene of the crime and to locate a bell-crowned hat, made by the hatter Daniel Digance of 18 Royal Exchange, which Thomas Briggs was known to have been wearing on the day he was assaulted. As later events proved, it was the hats and the watch that provided the key evidence, ultimately linking the murderer and the railway compartment. While K Division led the initial enquiries, they did not hold this responsibility for long. On Monday 11 July Commissioner Mayne appointed Inspector Tanner to take over the investigation.
9
He was to be assisted in this task by Clarke and the K Division team.

The extent of public concern about the Briggs murder was soon evident from the reaction of the press, highlighting the public fear of being attacked in railway compartments which, in those days, were cut off from one another and had no emergency communication system.
The Times
was amongst the first to comment on this aspect:

… all of us are liable to find ourselves in positions where we might easily be murdered for the sake of a purse or a gold watch. A railway carriage is a place where we are cut off for a time from all chance of assistance, and this feeling of helplessness in case of emergency has been a bugbear to many nervous travellers, male as well as female. Without the means of communicating with the guard we are almost at the mercy of fire, collisions, and fellow-passengers. This last danger is to most minds by far the most intolerable of the three. The idea of … being shut up with a murderer is still more intolerable. Highwaymen were bad enough, but they rushed out at you from behind a hedge, instead of quietly taking their tickets and seating themselves beside you in the same carriage … For some months to come travellers by night trains will probably scan their companions narrowly before entering a railway carriage. The best antidote to any such panic would be the speedy apprehension of the criminals, and this we trust we may very shortly have to report.
10

Fortunately, an important witness came forward on 12 July after a combination of intense newspaper coverage and the posting of bills describing the missing watch and chain and offering a reward totalling £300. A silversmith and jeweller of 55 Cheapside, with the somewhat unfortunate name of John Death (which he apparently preferred to pronounce as ‘Deeth’
11
), contacted the police to report that on 11 July a man had been served by his brother Robert who had exchanged a 15-carat-gold watch chain resembling the one stolen from Thomas Briggs. Death’s description of the man was ‘about 30 years old, 5 feet 6 or 7 inches high, with a sallow complexion and thin features. He is a foreigner, and is supposed to be a German, but speaks good English. He wore a black frock coat and waistcoat, dark trousers, and a black hat.’
12
In exchange for the £3 10
s
value of the watch chain, the man had purchased another chain and a ring which had been taken away by the foreigner in a small box.

There then followed some frustrating days for the police investigation with plenty of false leads being received from the press and public, or as the papers of the day expressed it: ‘the police have of course received the usual number of communications from madmen and practical jokers.’
13
It does not take much imagination to paint a mental picture of the workload of Clarke and other members of the small police team, spending long hours ploughing through piles of correspondence, looking for new leads, locating and interviewing potential new witnesses and following up information on suspects from as far afield as Scotland. At least one individual was arrested and Death was called in to identify him, but it proved not to be the prime suspect that they were seeking. However, things took a turn for the better on 18 July when a London cabman, Jonathan Matthews, emerged with evidence that was to transform the course and location of the investigation.

Matthews’ evidence identified a young German, Franz Müller, as the prime suspect. Müller was a tailor and a regular visitor to Matthews’ home. Indeed, only the previous Tuesday (12 July), Müller had visited and had given Matthews’ youngest daughter a small cardboard box, ‘such as jewellers put their various wares in’, bearing the name and address of John Death.
14
Matthews was also able to provide a photograph of Müller, and informed the police that he had bought Müller a hat a few months ago, similar to one of his own, which Müller had paid for in kind by making Matthews a waistcoat. Without delay the police took the cardboard box and photograph to John Death’s silversmith premises in Cheapside. Death identified the box as being of the type that he would have used to pack a watch chain and ring, and, on seeing the photograph of Müller, recognised him as the foreigner who had exchanged the gold watch chain for those items. Meanwhile, Matthews was taken to Scotland Yard and shown the hat found in the railway compartment, which he duly identified as the hat that he had bought for Müller.

Why it took Matthews so long to come forward with his information remains a question even today. His explanation was that he simply hadn’t heard about the Briggs murder despite the extensive newspaper coverage, street gossip and widespread bill-posting.
15
This issue and other aspects of Matthews’ evidence were later to be challenged by defence lawyers at the Old Bailey. However, for Inspector Tanner and his team it provided the best information received so far on the identity of the possible murderer. Tanner promptly proceeded to Bow Street Police Court to obtain a warrant for the arrest of Müller. Matthews had also provided the police with details of the address where Müller lodged, at 16 Park Terrace, Victoria Park. Here, the landlady Mrs Ellen Blyth confirmed that Müller had stayed there for some seven weeks, but had informed her about fourteen days previously of his intention to leave England for America. Having somehow raised sufficient money for a steerage passage, he had boarded the sailing ship
Victoria
on Thursday 14 July, which had left London the next day, headed for New York. Mrs Blyth had already received a letter from Müller dated 16 July and postmarked ‘Worthing’:

BOOK: The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective
10.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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