The Invention of Murder (22 page)

Despite the public outcry over police failures during the search for Good, many people remained conflicted over the role of the police. An earlier letter in
The Times
had suggested that there was a case to be made for some policemen not wearing a uniform, in order to go about their business more successfully; two years later this idea still seemed radical, even underhanded, to many: the newspaper fulminated against those policemen who, in tracking down a gang of counterfeiters, had ‘assume[d] various disguises, – such as the dresses of cobblers, itinerant greengrocers, and costermongers’, in a ‘practice … sanctioned and encouraged by the authorities’. This not only displayed ‘consummate subtlety’ (a negative, not a positive attribute), but also made the police ‘themselves parties to [the] commission [of crime]’. By using plainclothes decoys, ‘the two kings of Scotland-yard [Mayne and Rowan] have transgressed the law and violated the constitution’.

The law itself, however, was changing. Outside London the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 had permitted all boroughs that had an elected council to appoint their own watch committee, staffed with ‘sufficient’ men to preserve the peace. But with no central funding, by 1837 only ninety-three of the eligible 178 boroughs had troubled to do so. Two further acts, the Police Act and the Rural Constabulary Act, both in 1839, had permitted magistrates to set up police forces in their counties. Again, by 1841, only twenty-four out of fifty-six had bothered. It was, in particular, Birmingham, Manchester and Bolton – industrial areas with vastly increased populations – that set up new forces. Now the first police commissioner of Birmingham, a solicitor named Francis Burgess, was appointed, and with 293 men, more than double the number of the old watch, he focused on prevention, particularly of crimes against property (always more widespread than crimes of violence), even more specifically counterfeiting, a Birmingham speciality because of the predominance of metal workers in the city. Mayne and Rowan established their Detective Department on 14 June; by August, Burgess too had a divisional superintendent and four plainclothes men.

Not that they were always appreciated. Burgess’s men in ‘coloured’ clothes watching ‘the well known thieves’ at the local horse fair in 1841 might have been welcome, but to many of the city’s population, the police were not simply preventing crimes, but enforcing new middle-class norms of behaviour on every class, a pattern emerging across the country. In 1843 the Manchester council charged the police with enforcing laws against dog-fighting and bear-baiting; they were also expected to prevent Sunday drinking. In Leeds, the council wanted the police to give evidence against all who ‘prophane [sic] the Lord’s day’. Changing expectations were turning what had been merely unpleasant actions – or even merely working-class pastimes – into criminal ones. Hawking without a licence, musical performances in unlicensed premises, being drunk and disorderly, perpetrating low-level violence – all this was now not simply undesirable, but illegal. In the slang of the time, the police were now ‘blue drones’, ‘blue idlers’, ‘blue locusts’ – they were parasites, living off the working classes.

This was well represented in flash songs – street songs linked to the underworld of thieves and rogues:

Two murders in 1848–49, however, changed many people’s perceptions: the first because the victims were prosperous, civic-minded middle-class citizens, the second because the police, unlike in Good’s case, functioned as an efficient detective force.

In 1848, James Blomfield Rush, a tenant farmer in Norfolk, was in financial difficulties. Rush had always been of wavering respectability. He was born around 1800, the illegitimate son of a prosperous gentleman farmer and a mother who sued for breach of promise.
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By 1836 he held the leases on two farms, Felmingham Farm and Stanfield Hall Farm. His landlord, and the owner of the Stanfield Hall estate, was Isaac Jermy, the Recorder of Norwich (a Recorder was a barrister who served as a judge in some cities). Jermy had previously been known as Isaac Preston, but on inheriting Stanfield Hall in 1838 he had changed his name. There were, however, two other claimants to the estate: Thomas Jermy, a gardener, and his cousin, John Larner.

In his battles against these claimants, Isaac had used Rush as his right-hand man. Now, however, Jermy discovered something ‘irregularly drawn up’ in Rush’s leases, and they were replaced with new ones, at higher rents. Rush’s wife died in 1842 or 1843, leaving him with nine children. Then in 1844 his stepfather died. (Killed, so later report had it, by a gunshot wound when only he and Rush were present. It is hard to know how true this was, given the type of newspaper rumour that was then so common. The inquest found accidental death.) Most of Mr Rush senior’s money was left to his widow, but Rush borrowed £1,500 from her soon after the death, and then another £200. Mrs Rush did not survive long, and in her will the money was left to Rush’s children, with a codicil granting him the power to administer the property. He hired Emily Sandford as governess for the younger children, although before long he set her up in lodgings in Pentonville, in London, where he visited regularly in the guise of her ‘uncle’.

Rush became further indebted to Jermy when he bought the lease of Potash Farm, borrowing money from Jermy against the mortgage, with an agreement that the loan would be repaid on 30 November 1848. By 1847, the rent on Stanfield Hall Farm was in arrears, despite the cash infusion from Rush’s mother, and Jermy ‘put in a distress’ (a legal action to recover the rent). Rush was evicted and moved to Potash Farm. Jermy brought a further action, for bad cultivation of the farm, which he also won. In May 1848 Rush was declared bankrupt. Now he had become Isaac Jermy’s implacable enemy, and was plotting with the aggrieved Stanfield Hall heirs, Larner and Thomas Jermy. He introduced them to Emily Sandford, whom he described as a ‘lady of some means’, saying she would offer financial backing to help them recover their property. They agreed that, in return for the help of Rush and Mrs Sandford, when they inherited they would reassign Rush’s lease at a much-reduced rent. Five months after this meeting, Rush gave Mrs Sandford a memorandum of an agreement signed by Isaac Jermy, extending the lease of Potash Farm for twelve years; she signed it as a witness, despite not having been present when Jermy had signed. A month later, Rush produced more memoranda signed by Isaac Jermy, one postponing by three years the repayment of the loan of the money for Potash Farm, another promising, on receipt of all the documentation Rush possessed concerning Stanfield Hall, to cancel the loan altogether, and renew the Felmingham Farm lease. Again, Mrs Sandford witnessed these documents despite never having met Jermy, nor seen the papers signed.

The situation for Rush in November 1848 was not promising: he was bankrupt; he had twice been successfully prosecuted by Jermy; the debt for the loan he had taken on Potash Farm was due imminently; he had documents from both sides of the inheritance dispute, both agreeing that if he helped them they would ensure his financial future; and he had documents of dubious legality signed by Isaac Jermy.

On 27 November, Rush’s son, daughter-in-law and servants, all of whom normally lived at Potash Farm, were sent away, and only Rush and Mrs Sandford remained. That day, Rush instructed his servant to cover the entire path between Potash Farm and Stanfield Hall with straw. Mrs Sandford later claimed that Rush was agitated; before seven o’clock in the evening he went out for two hours. At Stanfield Hall, Jermy left his son and daughter-in-law drinking tea and playing cards, and went out onto the porch for his regular after-dinner cigar. A man ‘with something black round his head’ appeared, took out a gun and shot him dead. Jermy’s son, the unfortunately named Isaac Jermy Jermy, rushed out on hearing the shots and was also killed. Mrs Jermy then appeared, followed by her maid, Eliza Chestney; the two women were shot at in turn, and then the gunman fled. A paper was found by the bodies: ‘There are seven of us here, three of us outside, and four inside the hall, all armed. If any of your servants offer to leave the premises or to follow, you will be shot dead. we are. come to take of the Stanfield Hall property. – Thomas Jermy, the owner.’ Despite this threat, the butler, unmolested, ran for help to the neighbours.

The two women, who were wounded but not dead, were carried upstairs, and by 2 a.m. the police had arrived from Norwich. No one was in much doubt as to the identity of the perpetrator: the next morning Rush and Mrs Sandford were taken for questioning. Initially Mrs Sandford said that Rush had been at home all evening. Then she said that that was what he had told her to say. Her position in this case is difficult to assess in retrospect. There is no question that at the trial she was a hostile witness against her former lover. But her father had been a solicitor’s clerk, and it is worth considering whether she herself was the fabricator of the many documents that she had witnessed. The magistrate described her as untrustworthy, although this may merely have been because of her position as a woman living in sin.

The trial was, for its time, a drawn-out affair, lasting nearly a week. Most of the delay was caused by Rush representing himself; the judge permitted him a great deal of leeway in his questioning. With legal counsel, Rush might have been acquitted, for the evidence was not strong: two servants identified him as the murderer, but both had only had glimpses of the gunman; Mrs Sandford’s enmity towards Rush might have been turned in his favour; the remaining witnesses – the stationer who identified the paper the threatening note was written on, locals who had seen Rush that day, witnesses to Jermy’s handwriting – might all have had a harder time of it under a lawyer’s questioning. As it was, Rush was by turns aggressive and foolish. His bullying questioning of Mrs Sandford made her an object of sympathy. He claimed that all the witnesses were dishonest, that ‘nothing could exceed’ one for ‘lying’, that another had ‘grossly perjured himself’, but he produced nothing to back any of this up. Instead he quibbled over witnesses’ statements, highlighting tiny inconsistencies, as if this nullified their main purport: for example, he bickered with a policeman over whether it had been his left arm or his right that the man had held when he was arrested. He refused to hear one witness, claiming that he was prejudiced, but then called on another to contradict the statement the first one had not been permitted to make. The jury took five minutes to agree that he was guilty as charged: the only surprise was that they bothered to leave the room to make their decision.

People of all classes followed the story. One published transcript carried advertisements for other titles available from the publisher, including Eugène Sue’s
The Mysteries of Paris,
a version of Dick Turpin, some pirate and shipwreck stories, a
Cricketer’s Hand-Book, Wrestling and Pedestrianism, Modern Boxing,
ranging in price from 1s. to 2s.6d.: thus for a moderately prosperous audience. For those who wanted something a little more worthy, the local vicar, who had made prison visits to Rush, announced that ‘If spared’, he would ‘give a little sketch of my interviews in the cell’ in his next sermon. On Sunday, a large congregation waited for him. ‘You are mistaken,’ he said. ‘I intend to speak of Rush in the afternoon.’ ‘We are come to secure seats for the afternoon,’ was the response. Another vicar published a sermon on covetousness, and its effects on Rush, as a 2d. pamphlet. Dickens visited Potash Farm even before the trial, and reported back to his friend John Forster on the police search for the pistol (he thought they were not up to London standards). For those who couldn’t make a tourist visit themselves, Staffordshire potteries produced the highlights, and people could collect the protagonists: not only Rush and Mrs Sandford (there may also have been a figurine of Eliza Chestney, the maid, although none seems to have survived), but also the venues – Potash Farm, Stanfield Hall and Norwich Castle. The city of Norwich took a certain pride in its home-grown villain: the local museum purchased a portrait ‘medalet’ of Rush, struck to commemorate the execution.

Punch
magazine ran a vociferous campaign against Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors: here it equated the perfectly respectable middle-class pastime of looking at murderers’ likenesses with giving children murderer dolls to play with.

Nothing was too insignificant to report. The
Ipswich Journal
reprinted a note from the imprisoned Rush to the landlord of the local inn about his meals: ‘any thing you like except beef … the tea in a pint mug. if you could get a small sucking pig. send plenty of plum sauce with it’. After the trial began, the
Examiner
reminded its readers that the previous week it had reported ‘nearly the whole’ of the proceedings right up until press time, and now, ‘In order that our country subscribers may have the narrative of the case perfect we repeat the same in this week’s first edition’ – over five entire pages.

Up to 13,000 people attended Rush’s execution, with special excursion trains bringing eager viewers from Yarmouth and further afield. The newspapers frequently referred to the gallows as a theatre, and an execution as a theatrical spectacle. Rush seemed to provoke this metaphor more than most. ‘The drop,’ noted the
Examiner,
‘is literally the stage of crime for its last theatrical performance,’ while the
Ipswich Journal
reported that the spectators were ‘passing the interval [before Rush was brought out] very much in the same manner as the galleries of the great theatres do between the acts’. And in their view at least, Rush himself joined in. When he appeared, ‘On catching sight of the scaffold he lifted his eyes to Heaven, raised. his pinioned hands, and shook his head mournfully from side to side. The pantomime was perfect, conveying. a protest of innocence, combined with resignation.’