The Invention of Murder (23 page)

Executions as theatre were immediately turned back into genuine theatrical representations. Unusually, neither the main melodrama houses nor the legitimate theatres had much time for Rush’s story: there was a mention in December 1849 of a theatre manager in Stockton-upon-Tees who was prosecuted for an unlicensed production of a play about the case, but that was one of the very few theatrical references to appear. But if Rush was not reproduced in the mainstream theatres, the fit-ups, the peepshows and the travelling showmen all loved him. These shows toured the country in caravans all summer, doing circuits around the local fairs and wakes, then came to London in October. ‘People is werry fond of the battles in the country, but a murder wot is well known is worth more than all the fights. There was more took with Rush’s murder than there has been even by the Battle of Waterloo itself,’ said one showman.

Whether the source was fiction or true crime, the main element in melodrama was the black-and-white nature of the characters: good was good, evil was evil. Anything, almost, could be melodrama. Old Wild’s booth theatre performed a ‘melo-dramatisation’ of
Macbeth
in the 1840s. But it was Dickens, with his exaggerated characters, who was most frequently the source of melodrama. By 1850 there had been nearly 250 productions based on his works; by 1860 the number had risen to more than four hundred. Dickens understood the link: ‘Every writer of fiction,’ he said, ‘though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage.’ His use of coincidence was similar in function to the providential workings of a melodrama: in
Oliver Twist,
the first pocket Oliver picks belongs to his lost father’s best friend. His vocabulary, too, has theatrical elements – Sikes snarling ‘Wolves tear your throats!’ could be taken from any minor theatre stage. And stage devices are woven, unspoken, into the novels. In
Martin Chuzzlewit
Nadgett, the private detective, appears suddenly at the side of the suspected murderer, ‘as if he had that moment come up a trap’, that is, a trapdoor on a stage. Yet at this point, crime onstage and in fiction was still not about detection, but about the control of villainous characters who were marked by their villainy as being outside society. It was more comfortable to think of Rush in this way: as a stage villain in topboots.

One report said that at least six, perhaps eight, ballad-sellers were at Rush’s execution. These ballads gave pleasure for more than the moment – families clubbed together to afford the penny price, and one patterer remembered seeing, long after the execution, ‘eleven persons, young and old, gathered around a scanty fire’ where an old man was reading aloud an account of Rush’s final moments. One writer proudly claimed, ‘I did the helegy. on Rush’s execution. It was supposed. to be written by the culprit himself, and was particular penitent.’ The ballad-sellers did well with a supposed confession of Rush’s, in which he admitted to murdering his grandmother fourteen years previously, burying her in the garden, and then killing his wife for good measure. Another assessed Rush in financial terms: ‘I lived on him for a month or more. When I commenced with Rush, I was 14s. in debt for rent, and in less than fourteen days I astonished [everyone] by paying my landlord all I owed him.’ Another agreed: ‘Rush turned up a regular trump for us. Irish Jem. never goes to bed but he blesses Rush the farmer; and many’s the time he’s told me we should never have such another windfall as that. But I told him not to despair; there’s a good time coming, boys, says I.’ And sure enough, he went on, ‘up comes the Bermondsey tragedy’. The Bermondsey tragedy, or the story of Maria and Frederick George Manning, was to bring ‘good times’ to murder-mongers everywhere.

What makes one murder catch the interest of the public, while another leaves it cold, is a mystery. Henry Mayhew’s patterer had various explanations: it might be that one murder occurs too close to another – ‘Two murderers together is no good to nobody’; or too many patterers piling in on the same story could mean that attention was diluted; sometimes, he said, the weather was too wet, or too hot, or too something. Yet if this were the case, logic would say that the murder of Patrick O’Connor by Maria and Frederick Manning would have been a matter of general indifference, for it took place in the middle of one of the worst cholera epidemics ever known in Britain. At the time of James Rush’s crime, between October and November 1848, a thousand people had died of cholera in England; by the time the Mannings came to the attention of the newspaper public, that was the merest trifle: between June and October 1849 14,000 people had died of cholera in London alone. In Bermondsey, a working-class district where poverty and overcrowding meant the disease was rampant, one out of every fifty-nine residents died that summer.

Yet this exerted less hold on the public imagination than two murders. Soon after Rush’s execution, the
Bury Herald
noted some uncanny parallels between Rush and John Thurtell: the two, it reported breathlessly, had been at school together (unlikely – Rush was at least six years younger); they had both conducted their own defence; and both were executed for murder. This seemed so very remarkable that the
Preston Guardian
not only picked up the story, but printed it again on 18 August. In the same column it listed that in the previous three days, 3,015 people had succumbed to cholera; 1,253 had died. On the day the murder of Patrick O’Connor was discovered, the
Morning Chronicle
reported another 336 dead, and on the next page it mentioned, with no sense of incongruity, that ‘last night hundreds of persons were congregated in front of the house’ where O’Connor’s body had been found. Of course, there was then no known way of preventing cholera, while in theory murder could be prevented, or if not prevented, detected and ‘cured’ by execution. The
Morning Chronicle
listed some of the treatments for cholera – ‘chloroform, carbonic acid, ether, calomel and opium, camphor, ammonia, wine, brandy … applications of cayenne pepper, mustard, turpentine, and other species of artificial heat’. Science could solve a single crime, but not thousands of deaths. It was more comforting to think of the former than of the latter. As with Good, the hunt for the murderers of O’Connor was to be prolonged, but unlike Good, everything worked perfectly for the police – the detective force functioned exactly as its founders had planned, while new technology (trains, telegraphs) was as much use to the pursuers as to the pursued. In a world where people were healthy one morning, dead the next, this must have been reassuring.

Maria Manning was born Marie Roux (sometimes ‘de Roux’) in Vaud, Switzerland. By 1843 she was working in Britain as a lady’s maid for the wife of an MP in Devonshire. After her mistress’s death, Marie – now anglicized to Maria – was employed by Lady Evelyn Blantyre, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. (The Duchess was Mistress of the Robes, a position of some importance in Queen Victoria’s household, and this touch of high life was always included in later tellings of the story.) Maria probably met Frederick George Manning when she lived in Devonshire. He was originally from Taunton in Somerset, and had been a guard on the Great Western Railway. Soon after their wedding in 1847, Manning left the railway, possibly because of suspicion of involvement in a series of train robberies, and with his wife’s savings set up as landlord at the White Hart Inn in Taunton.

The marriage was not happy, nor was the pub successful. Mrs Manning now either became friendly, or continued a friendship from before her marriage, with Patrick O’Connor. O’Connor had arrived in London in the 1830s from his native Ireland, and had had a somewhat dubious, although financially lucrative, career. In his early days he told a barrister that his money came from smuggling (the barrister later claimed that O’Connor had attempted to defraud him, so how much of this is true, and how much aggrievement, is unknown). At some point he found legitimate work, first as a tide-waiter, a customs official who examined ships for contraband as they waited for the tide to turn; later as a gauger, an exciseman concerned with official measures. He was also said to have had a profitable sideline as a small-time usurer, and been involved in dockyard protection rackets.

By the early to mid-1840s, he and Mrs Manning were meeting frequently, and she may even have left Manning and lived with O’Connor at some point. In 1849 the attempt to earn a living from the inn in Taunton was abandoned, and the Mannings moved to London, eventually taking lodgings at 3 Minver Place, Bermondsey, south of the river. Mrs Manning worked as a dressmaker, a big step down from her grandeur as a lady’s maid in a titled family; Manning was unemployed. On 9 August, O’Connor, who was proud of his friendship with a woman who had worked for a duchess’s daughter, was seen crossing London Bridge, heading, he said, to his lady friend’s for dinner. That evening, Mrs Manning visited his lodgings alone. His landlady, having frequently seen them together, permitted her to wait for some time in his room. The next day, he failed to appear at work. Nothing happened for three days, and then the police appeared at Minver Place, looking for O’Connor. Later that day Mrs Manning left the house with luggage, and the following day the furniture, and Manning, went too. When the police returned that evening, abandoned possessions were found scattered across the rooms, but there was nothing that belonged identifiably to O’Connor. Another two days passed, and the police returned once more, this time with a plan to dig up the small yard. They found nothing there, but on entering the kitchen, one sharp-eyed constable noticed that there was a thin line of discoloration running between two flagstones in front of the hearth. The flagstones were lifted, and underneath was earth that had recently been disturbed. Under this was the naked body of a man, trussed up and embedded in quicklime. Patrick O’Connor had been found, but the Mannings were gone.

Now the machinery that Mayne had worked so hard to establish showed what it could do. Already the two police divisions whose districts included O’Connor’s and the Mannings’ lodgings had been working together. A notice was published asking for information on ‘Maria Manning, a native of Geneva, 30 years old, 5 feet 7 inches high, stout, fresh complexion, with long dark hair, good looking, scar on the right side of her chin, extending towards the neck, dresses very smartly and speaks broken English. Has been a lady’s maid and dressmaker.’ Everyone felt they were part of the hunt. A journalist found two cards at Minver Place, one listing sailing times to New York, the other with ‘Mr. Wright, passenger to New York’ written on it. These were handed to the constable on duty, who tore them up, announcing grandly that ‘it was not very likely that if they had intended to go to New York they would have left those cards behind’. The journalist went down to the docks to check the passengers on the
Victoria,
one of the listed ships. No Manning appeared on the passenger manifest, but a baggage clerk said that six boxes had been delivered in that name. This information was sent to Scotland Yard, which showed more interest than the local bobby. A steamer was sent after the ship, which had by this time passed Plymouth, with an inspector on board who knew Manning by sight. The suspected murderers were not, however, on the
Victoria.

O’Connor’s lodgings were searched, and his family supplied a list of missing valuables, including railway scrip. The police also found the cab driver who had taken Mrs Manning and her boxes away; he had driven her to London Bridge station, where the boxes had been left, marked ‘Mrs. Smith, passenger to Paris. To be left till called for.’ They were still there, and when opened they were found to contain clothes and other possessions identified as O’Connor’s, and some clothes or fabric with reddish-brown stains. Another cab driver came forward to say that he had driven a woman provisionally identified as Mrs Manning from London Bridge to Euston station. There, a Mrs Smith had taken a ticket for Edinburgh. The police now telegraphed their counterparts in that city.

The telegraph was a wonder of modernity. The first criminal had been caught by it only four years previously (see pp.329–32).
Punch
called it ‘God’s lightning’ – a swift and sure retribution: ‘Murder has hardly turned from its abomination. when the avenging lightning stays the homicide.’ The
Illustrated London News
highlighted two modernities, telegraph and railway: the ‘guilty wretch, flying on the wings of steam at thirty miles an hour, is tracked by a swifter messenger’. And that is what happened to Mrs Manning. She had fled north, to Edinburgh, where she had commissioned a stockbroker to sell some shares, and asked him to find out if payment could be made on some railway scrip she held. The following day she returned to collect the scrip, saying she had been unexpectedly called away. The day after that, a notice was circulated itemizing the stolen scrip. The broker immediately contacted the police with ‘Mrs Smith’s’ address. As the
Glasgow Herald
marvelled, the arrest was ‘almost miraculous’: a description had been sent from London ‘at ten minutes before one o’clock’, and ‘a few minutes after one’ the police were at her door. Then, ‘before the clock had struck two’ a telegraph was on its way back to London to report her arrest; ‘so magically had all this been effected’ that the police in London had barely returned to Scotland Yard from Euston station before the news of Maria Manning’s arrest was with them.

Locating her husband was less straightforward. Manning had agreed the sale of the furniture with a broker for £13, but after that his trail went cold. There were almost as many sightings of him as there had been of Good, but finally a credible report put him in the Channel Islands, and he was traced to Jersey. The police arrested him there at the end of the month, and escorted him back from St Helier to Southampton, and then by special train to Vauxhall, where hundreds of people stood waiting to see him. It was reported that on his arrest Manning had been urbane: ‘Ah, Sergeant, is that you? I am glad you are come. If you had not come I was coming to town to explain it all. I am innocent. Is that wretch taken?’ (There are typographical indications that the word ‘wretch’ was a polite newspaper substitution, one assumes for ‘bitch’.) Manning’s line from the moment of his arrest did not vary: ‘She is the guilty party. I am as innocent as a lamb.’ He claimed that his wife had shot O’Connor, and he had fainted in horror: by the time he came to, the body had vanished.