The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder And The Undoing Of A Great Victorian Detective (7 page)

On Tuesday, 10 July, an editorial in the
Morning Post
, an influential national newspaper, ridiculed the efforts of the Wiltshire police to discover Saville's killer. It criticised the rushed, peremptory way the coroner had conducted the inquest, and demanded that the investigation into the child's death be taken over by 'the most experienced of detectives'. The article argued that the security of all the homes of England rested on uncovering the secrets of Road Hill House. It acknowledged that this would mean violating a sacred space:

Every Englishman is accustomed to pride himself with more than usual complacency upon what is called the sanctity of an English home. No soldier, no policeman, no spy of the Government dare enter it . . . Unlike the tenant of a foreign domicile, the occupier of an English house, whether it be mansion or cottage, possesses an indisputable title against every kind of aggression upon his threshold. He defies everybody below the Home Secretary; and even he can only violate the traditional security of a man's house under extreme circumstances, and with the prospect of a Parliamentary indemnity. It is with this thoroughly innate feeling of security that every Englishman feels a strong sense of the inviolability of his own house. It is this that converts the moorside cottage into a castle. The moral sanctions of an English home are, in the nineteenth century, what the moat, and the keep, and the drawbridge were in the fourteenth. In the strength of these we lie down to sleep at night, and leave our homes in the day, feeling that a whole neighbourhood would be raised, nay, the whole country, were any attempt made to violate what so many traditions, and such long custom, have rendered sacred.

These sentiments were felt deeply in Victorian England. On a visit to the country in the late 1840s Dr Carus, physician to the King of Saxony, noted that the English house embodied 'the long-cherished principle of separation and retirement' that lay 'at the very foundation of the national character . . . it is this that gives the Englishman that proud feeling of personal independence, which is stereotyped in the phrase, "Every man's house is his castle." ' The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that domesticity was the 'taproot' that enabled the British to 'branch wide and high. The motive and end of their trade and empire is to guard the independence and privacy of their homes.'

The
Morning Post
of 10 July 1860 held that 'in spite of all these proverbial sanctities, a crime has just been committed which for mystery, complication of probabilities, and hideous wickedness, is without parallel in our criminal records . . . the security of families, and the sacredness of English house-holds demand that this matter should never be allowed to rest till the last shadow in its dark mystery shall have been chased away by the light of unquestionable truth'. The horror of this case was that the corruption lay inside the 'domestic sanctum', that the bolts, locks and fastenings of the house were hopelessly redundant. 'The secret lies with someone who was within . . . the house-hold collectively must be responsible for this mysterious and dreadful event. Not one of them ought to be at large till the whole mystery is cleared up . . . one (or more) of the family is guilty.' The
Morning Post
article was reprinted in
The Times
the next day, and in newspapers throughout the country over the rest of the week. 'Let the best detective talent in the country be engaged,' demanded the
Somerset and Wilts Journal
.

On Thursday a Wiltshire magistrate renewed his plea to the Home Secretary to send a detective to Road, and this time the request was granted. On Saturday, 14 July, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Lord Palmerston's Home Secretary, instructed Sir Richard Mayne, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, to dispatch 'an intelligent officer' to Wiltshire as soon as possible. 'Inspector Whicher to go,' Mayne scribbled on the back of the Home Office directive.

The same day Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher received his orders to head for Road.

PART TWO
THE DETECTIVE

'I set forth to pave the way for discovery -
the dark and doubtful way'
From
The Woman in White
(1860), by Wilkie Collins

CHAPTER FOUR
A MAN OF MYSTERY

1 October 1814- 15 July 1860

It was still light as Whicher's train rolled towards west Wiltshire on that Sunday in 1860. Usually by July the pastures were broken up with blocks of yellow - tawny wheat or bright gold corn - but this year the summer had come so late that the crops were green as grass.

At 6.20 p.m. the train pulled into Trowbridge - a forest of factory towers and chimneys - and Whicher stepped out onto the railway station's narrow platform. The first building he came to as he left the ticket hall was John Foley's police station on Stallard Street, a two-storey structure dating from 1854, when the local force was founded. This was where Elizabeth Gough was being detained, of her own volition, until her examination was resumed the next day.

Trowbridge had made money from cloth for centuries. The coming of the railway in 1848 had brought even more prosperity - now, with a population of eleven thousand, it was the biggest factory town in the south of England. Wool mills and dyeing houses spread out to the left and right of the station - about twenty of them, powered by more than thirty steam engines. These were the factories that Samuel Kent inspected. On a Sunday evening they lay idle, but in the morning the machines would start to pound and whirr, and the air would thicken with smoke, soot, the smells of urine (collected in tubs from public houses and used to scour wool) and of the vegetable dyes streaming into the river Biss.

Whicher hired a porter to carry his luggage to the Woolpack Inn, Market Place, half a mile from the station. The pair crossed the bridge over the Biss - a small, slow tributary of the Avon - and walked to the town centre. They passed the houses of the Parade, a terrace built by rich Georgian clothiers, and the side streets crammed with weavers' cottages. Trade had been poor that year. Many sheep had died over the harsh winter, so wool was scarcer than usual, and the competitive mill-owners of northern England were selling their muslin cheap.

When Whicher reached the Woolpack, on the corner of Red Hat Lane, he paid the porter sixpence and went in. The inn was a compact stone building, with an arch at its centre, which offered rooms at
is.6d
. a night. Wine, cider, spirits and home-brewed ale were sold at the bar. Whicher may have ordered a drink or two: when in a tight spot, he once told Dickens, 'I couldn't do better than have a drop of brandy-and-water to keep my courage up.'

Jonathan Whicher was born in Camberwell, three miles south of London, on 1 October 1814. His father was a gardener, probably one of the village's many market gardeners, who grew cherries, lettuces, roses and willow for sale in the city. He may have tended the lawns and flowerbeds of the richer residents of the district - Camberwell was studded with the stucco villas and ornamental cottages of merchants seeking an airy retreat from London.

On the day of Jonathan's baptism, 23 October, the curate of St Giles parish church also christened the child of another gardener, and the babies of a shoemaker, a cabinetmaker, two coachmen, a flutemaker and a labourer. In one of the many variants to which his surname was prey, Jonathan was recorded as the son of Richard and Rebecca Whitcher. He was known as Jack. He had an older sister, Eliza, and at least one older brother, James. Another sister, Sarah, was born in August 1819, when he was four. That summer was remembered for its abundance of Camberwell Beauties, the large, velvety, dark-claret butterflies first seen in the area in 1748.

In the mid-1830s Jack Whicher was still living in Camber-well, probably in Providence Row, a small terrace of cottages at the northern, poorer end of the village. The cottages lay on Wyndham Road, close to a mill and backing onto nursery gardens, but in a wretched neighbourhood - 'as proverbial for its depravity as for its ignorance', according to a report published by the local school. Wyndham Road was frequented by shifty types - hawkers, costermongers, chimney sweeps - and by outright villains.

When Jack Whicher applied to join the Metropolitan Police in the late summer of 1837 he was just old enough, at twenty-two, and just tall enough, at five feet eight inches, to meet the entrance requirements. He passed the tests for literacy and physical fitness, and two 'respectable house-holders' of his parish vouched for his good character. Like more than a third of the early recruits, he was working as a labourer when he submitted his application.

On 18 September, Whicher became a police constable. His weekly wage - about PS1 - was only a slight improvement on his previous earnings, but his future was now a little more secure.

The Metropolitan Police, the first such force in the country, was eight years old. London had got so big, so fluid, so mysterious to itself that in 1829 its inhabitants had, reluctantly, accepted the need for a disciplined body of men to patrol the streets. The 3,500 policemen were known as 'bobbies' and 'peelers' (after their founder, Sir Robert Peel), as 'coppers' (they caught, or copped, villains), as 'crushers' (they crushed liberty), as 'Jenny Darbies' (from
gendarmes
), and as pigs (a term of abuse since the sixteenth century).

Whicher was issued with dark-blue trousers and a dark-blue long-tailed coat, its bright metal buttons imprinted with a crown and the word
POLICE
. His division and number - E47, the 'E' for Holborn - was boldly marked on a stiff, buckled collar; beneath this, a leather stock four inches deep encircled his neck as protection against 'garotters'. His coat was fitted with deep pockets in which to stash a truncheon and a wooden rattle. He wore a chimney-pot hat with a glazed leather crown and leather supports down the sides. A fellow officer detailed the costume: 'I had to put on a swallow-tail coat, and a rabbit-skin high-top-hat, covered with leather, weighing eighteen ounces, a pair of Wellington boots, the leather of which must have been at least a sixteenth of an inch thick, and a belt about four inches broad, with a great brass buckle six inches deep . . . I never felt so uncomfortable in all my life.' An officer had to wear his uniform even when he was not at work, so that he could never be accused of concealing his identity. He put a band around his wrist to show when he was on duty. Beards and moustaches were banned. Many men grew sideburns instead.

At a time when all clothes were a uniform of sorts, the police kit had its merits: the journalist Harriet Martineau noted that an ambitious young working-class man could 'pass along the street somewhat more proudly, and under more notice' in this get-up 'than the artisan in his apron and paper cap, or the labourer in his fustian, or bearing the porter's knot' - fustian was the rough fabric from which labourers' jackets were cut, the porter's knot a pad to protect the shoulders when carrying a heavy load.

The perfect policeman was defined by restraint, anonymity, an absence of emotion. 'A hot temper would never do,' said Martineau, 'nor any vanity which would lay a man open to arts of flirtation; nor too innocent good-nature; nor a hesitating temper or manner; nor any weakness for drink; nor any degree of stupidity.' Andrew Wynter, a physician and writer, described the ideal constable as 'stiff, calm, and inexorable, an
institution
rather than a man. We seem to have no more hold of his personality than we could possibly get of his coat buttoned up to the throttling-point . . . a machine, moving, thinking and speaking only as his instruction-book directs . . . He seems . . . to have neither hopes nor fears.'

Whicher shared a dormitory with about sixteen other men in the Hunter Place station house, in Hunter Street, just south of King's Cross. This was a substantial brick building that had recently been acquired by the force. The entrance was through a long, dark passage; as well as the dormitories upstairs, the station contained four cells, a library, a scullery, a mess room and a recreation room. All single men were expected to lodge in the station house, and to be in their quarters by midnight. When working the early shift, Whicher rose before six. He might wash in the dormitory, if he had his own tub and screen, and then breakfast on a chop, a potato and a cup of coffee. At six the men lined up in the yard. One of the division's four inspectors took the roll, then read out a paper from headquarters at Whitehall Place listing any punishments, rewards, dismissals and suspensions of individual officers. The inspector also informed the men of the latest crime reports, giving descriptions of suspects, missing persons and property. Having checked his men's uniforms and equipment, he gave the order to 'Close up!' A few of the constables were sent to the station house as a reserve force, while the rest were marched off to their beats by the sergeants.

In the daytime, a constable covered a seven-and-a-half-mile beat at two-and-a-half miles an hour for two four-hour stints: from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., say, and from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. He familiarised himself with every house on his beat, and strove to clear the roads of beggars, tramps, costermongers, drunks and prostitutes. He was subject to spot checks by a sergeant or an inspector, and the rules were strict: no leaning or sitting while on the beat, no swearing, no consorting with servant girls. The police were instructed to treat everyone with respect - the drivers of hansom cabs, for instance, were not to be referred to as 'cabbies' - and to avoid the use of force. These standards were to be observed off-duty, too. If found drunk at any time, a constable was issued with a warning, and if the offence was repeated he was dismissed from the force. In the early 1830s four out of five dismissals, of a total of three thousand, were for drunkenness.