Crime and Criminals of Victorian England E-Book

Adrian Gray

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 430

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Dark and foggy Victorian streets, the murderous madman, the arsenic-laced evening meal - we all think we know the realities of Victorian crime. Adrian Gray's thrilling book recounts the classic murders, by knife and poison, but it also covers much more, taking the reader into less familiar parts of Victorian life, uncovering the wicked, the vengeful, the foolish and the hopeless amongst the criminal world of the nineteenth century. Here you will encounter the women who sold their children, corrupt bankers, smugglers, highwaymen, the first terrorists, bloodthirsty mutineers and petty thieves; you will meet the 'mesmerists' who fooled a credulous public, and even the Salvation Army band that went to gaol. Gray journeys through the cities, villages, lanes, mills and sailing ships of the period, ranging from Carlisle to Cornwall, showing how our laws today have been shaped by what the Victorians considered acceptable - or made illegal.

Leseprobe

CRIMEAND

CRIMINALS

OF

VICTORIAN

ENGLAND

CRIMEAND

CRIMINALS

OF

VICTORIAN

ENGLAND

ADRIAN GRAY

For Andy White and Kevin Rumens – good neighbours

Cover illustration used with permission of the British Newspaper Library, Colindale.

First published 2011

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Adrian Gray, 2011, 2013

The right of Adrian Gray to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9676 4

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

1

The Criminal World of Victorian England

2

Murder

3

Manslaughter, Madness & Other Violent Assaults

4

Burglars & Other Robbers

5

Crimes of Poverty & Desperation

6

Crimes of the Countryside

7

Crimes on Rail & Road

8

The Cruelties of the Sea

9

Riot, Revolt & Disorder

10

The Rise of Terrorism

11

Passion, Love & Lust

12

Deceit & Deception

1

The Criminal World of Victorian England

CHANGING IDEAS OF CRIME

In some ways crime has changed little, though attitudes to criminals have changed much. This book attempts to consider what both were like in Victorian times, drawing upon particular examples to illustrate general themes. It covers crimes that have been forgotten for 150 years but also some examples of very well-known major Victorian cases – though it is not necessary to repeat the best known in any detail.1 The Victorians were especially worried about two particular crimes of theft: burglary and variations of highway robbery. Burglary was a fear because it involved people breaking into houses, and was severely punished. The forms of robbery on the street and highway varied according to the times: the highwayman faded away as trains destroyed his stock in trade, but the dark streets of the Victorian city bred instead the footpad and the garrotter.

Much thought went into crimes of a sexual nature, yet the law was slow to protect women and children from abuse. ‘Criminal conversation’ meant an adulterous affair, whilst a man (or a woman) could still be sued for breach of promise. Meanwhile, there was a debate as to whether a married woman could, in law, be raped by her husband and there was no criminal law of incest.

Some Victorians were interested in phrenology, the belief that the shape of a person’s head or features could indicate their criminal tendencies. As a result, court reports often described the accused’s features in detail and the belief was satirised in a famous picture of Charlie Peace. James Clark, an old man arrested in Dover for assisting in the murder of a constable, was described as having ‘a low forehead, sunken eyes, and a lower jaw unusually long, the loss of his upper teeth rendering it more particularly prominent’. Press accounts of trials often emphasised convicts’ physical characteristics, ugliness and criminality being seen as part of a spectrum.

Phrenology was the ‘science’ of predicting a person’s character by their appearance. Charlie Peace was notoriously ugly, but none of it explains this very strange depiction of him!

One of the key themes of the era is the way in which previously accepted behaviour became criminal. This also had an effect on crime statistics, as more crimes were added to the statute book. Areas affected included sexual behaviour, specifically issues surrounding prostitution, and public order offences. Some types of sport were banned because they were seen as cruel or disruptive, or both, although the general disapproval of betting contributed to this. Prize fighting and cockfighting are both examples of this; when thirty-four people were fined for attending a cockfight in 1865, The Times commented that by fining them, ‘for doing what their fathers did with perfect impunity, [the magistrate] satisfied the feelings of the community no less than the requirement of the law’.2 Portmanteau legislation, such as the 1892 Burgh Police Act, introduced powers to prosecute on a range of offences, including water, sewage, housing and dairy products. Relatively innocent acts, such as that committed by Giuseppe Baccarini in playing an organ in Clerkenwell, came within regulation and he was fined 2s 6d for being a nuisance in 1861.

Gambling and betting were types of ‘moral crime’ that attracted ire as the century developed, although as early as 1843 ‘lotteries in public houses’ were condemned by the Inspector of Prisons as ‘unmitigated evil, combining the excitement for drink and idle company with the thirst for sudden and inordinate gain’.3 The 1853 betting legislation4 closed betting shops and forced bookmakers on to the streets where municipal bye-laws limited them even further; the Metropolitan Traffic Act made it illegal to be ‘in a public thoroughfare for the purpose of betting’. From the 1890s, premises had to be licensed for gambling and there were prosecutions if not. When the landlord of the Northumberland Arms in Hackney was found to be collecting betting slips and money, he was fined £30 and the bookmaker he worked with £50.

Legislation of 1853 struck at the advertising of betting and made it illegal to bet ‘in an office or place’. It was ruled that a stool or umbrella counted as a ‘place’, yet the police rarely prosecuted betting at Epsom or Goodwood. It was illegal for bookmakers to accept cash bets on the street, so it became common to use children as runners and further legislation was passed in the 1890s to outlaw this.

The criminalisation of betting affected only the lower class; in 1891 Mr Pickersgill told the House of Commons that ‘the existence of gambling hells in the West End of London is notorious … I want to know why the poorer classes are alone interfered with, while the so-called better classes are allowed to go scathless’.5 The law had produced some ridiculous inconsistencies: six barges on the Thames were sent to prison for playing a betting game with pennies; Christmas goose clubs were shut down as ‘lotteries’; and East End and Liverpool working men’s clubs were raided. In contrast, the Park Club was ruled to be a gentlemen’s club and therefore exempt from prosecution, and despite a ruling that baccarat was illegal in 1889, clubs such as the Brabant Club openly featured it nightly! Pickersgill was especially incensed about Tattersall’s, which he argued was just a front for huge amounts of gambling.

While betting was considered a ‘moral’ crime, poaching was seen as a crime of theft, but also in some ways as a ‘moral’ crime in that a traditional activity was increasingly regarded as crime. It was defined by a leading legal writer as one of a number of crimes ‘which derive their moral significance exclusively from the fact that they are forbidden by the law’.6

The criminalisation of previously acceptable behaviour caused a sense of confusion about the law. In Phineas Redux, Anthony Trollope mused about the arrest of a former MP, Browborough, for electoral corruption: ‘The idea of putting old Browborough into prison for conduct which habit had made second nature to a large proportion of the House was distressing to members of Parliament generally.’7

Another theme is the way in which the demands of a modern, industrialised society prompted the acceptance of greater regulation to benefit all. New rules covered social offences, such as the nuisances regulations, which were intended to control disease by declaring what could be burnt, cooked, processed and buried within urban areas. Later legislation added to this, for example by criminalising the disposal of some materials into rivers. There followed the Removal of Nuisances and Prevention of Epidemic Diseases Act 1846, the Smoke Nuisance Prevention Act of 1853 and the Rivers Pollution Act of 1876. Typically, magistrates would serve an abatement of nuisance order and impose fines with costs. The Smoke Nuisance Amendment Act also regulated river transport on the Thames and elsewhere, so six tugboat captains were all fined £5 each in 1861 as their tugs ‘did not consume their own smoke’. The Alkali Act was one of a number of efforts to extend the law to industrial pollution.

‘Sporting activities’ were increasingly suppressed by legal means, usually because they disturbed the peace – or trade. This also included other forms of celebratory disorder, with behaviour around 5 November a priority – the rolling of tar barrels, setting off of fireworks and even firing of guns being still common in the 1840s. The Explosives Act 1875, section 80, prohibited ‘throwing or setting off fireworks on any highway, street, thoroughfare or public place’.

Alcohol was increasingly regulated. Undoubtedly much crime was linked to alcohol, and the arrests made by some police forces involved a suspiciously high proportion of drunks. The Beer Act of 1830 had made beer available almost without limit or tax in order to wean people off gin, but by the 1860s attitudes had changed: new beer houses had to be licensed from 1869 and after 1872 the Licensing Act gave the justices control of the whole lot. It has been estimated that alcohol was a factor in 40 per cent of the ‘lesser crimes’ committed in 1876. The informal selling of alcohol was almost eradicated, though people in isolated places still tried to profit from it if they could: in April 1891 John Tyrell, a ‘hut keeper’ on the Manchester Ship Canal, was fined £50 for selling drink without a licence – presumably to the passing trade.

In health, legislation was intended to control threats to public health, and a series of Vaccination Acts made vaccination against smallpox compulsory for children under three months from 1853. Laws of 1867 and 1871 introduced fines of up to 25s or even prison for parents who refused to comply. It took at least four separate acts to clarify the position, but by linking the new requirements to the Poor Law it created a stigma for public health. Due to weaknesses in the 1861 Act, by 1863 only 14 per cent of Poor Law unions had acted8 and it was not until vaccination officers were brought in under the 1871 Act that prosecutions became common. Between 1870 and 1874 there were 5,490 prosecutions and 2,650 convictions, including two people convicted sixteen times and two nineteen times.9 One man had been summonsed forty-four times. By 1884–85, prosecutions were 2,806 a year. In 1876 the Poor Law guardians of Keighley were imprisoned in York Castle for contempt as they refused to implement the law. Leicester was notorious for its opposition: in 1884–85 there were 11,010 prosecutions and 922 convictions in the town,10 but of 6,300 births a year, only 80 were being vaccinated in 1898. This was despite men (usually) being sent to gaol, often for fourteen days, and others having their property seized to meet unpaid fines. Here was a whole new addition to the court statistics, to which can be added, from 1881, prosecution for non-attendance at school, which also affected parents.

Laws such as the Common Lodging Houses Act of 1851 (see Chapter 5) attempted to regulate areas deemed as health risks. Laws also regulated the sale of milk in order to reduce the risk of tuberculosis. The Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act of 1869 meant that a farmer’s animals now came within the compass of the law if they succumbed to such problems as Foot and Mouth disease.

In religion, the law controlled how you could worship, most notably through the Church Discipline Act of 1840 and the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874, intended to stamp out ritualistic worship in the Church of England. More than a dozen clergymen were prosecuted under the latter and several sent to prison, often for contempt: Father Enraght of Bordesley was arrested at his vicarage and put in Warwick gaol for forty-nine days;11 Arthur Tooth spent a few weeks in Horsemonger Lane. Though a minor addition to the judicial statistics, these offences occupied vast areas of newsprint.

The law also reached out into commercial areas with, for example, the Master and Servant Act. This governed relations between the two protagonists of its title, and indeed could work either way. As an example, a Lambeth boilermaker was summonsed under this act in 1867 for non-payment of wages; the ‘Master’ claimed his ‘Servant’ had done poor work, but the court took this as merely an excuse and he was ordered to pay £1 1s 9d.

HOW MUCH CRIME WAS THERE?

It is impossible to trace the extent of crime with any certainty throughout the Victorian era because other factors changed so much. In 1837 there was no national approach to policing, but by 1901 the police were everywhere, so even if the law had stayed the same, the chances of falling foul of the legal system were considerably increased. But the law did not stay the same; new offences were introduced with great regularity. One might argue that an offence that barely changed – such as wilful murder – might offer a secure guide, but the chances of detection for crimes such as poisoning were enhanced by scientific discovery and more efficient legal enforcement, compared to the days of the Norfolk poisoners when wholesale poisoning took place with impunity for many years. When the Parliamentary Committee on the Game Laws questioned Colonel Robertson about the apparent high level of poaching in Hertfordshire in 1874, they received an answer that might have appeared opaque:

Reverend Shore was arrested for preaching without a licence and also prosecuted for officiating at a service in unlicensed premises in 1846.

Q: Is there a great deal of poaching in Hertfordshire?

A: There is a great deal of detection of poaching in Hertfordshire.

Robertson’s point was that the seemingly high level of crime in the county was due to their success in catching the poachers.

Perception was as influential as reality. In March 1847 Mr Justice Coleridge told the grand jury gathered at Salisbury that ‘the increase of crime in late years is fearful and appalling’12 – clearly hoping the jury would do its bit in convicting as many miscreants as possible. Yet the Parliamentary Blue Books covering 1841–50 showed that the population had increased by 12.5 per cent whilst crime had only increased by 11.3 per cent; convictions showed an actual decline in most respects.13 In 1863 Sir Richard Mayne, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, reported that 10,000 fewer people had been taken into custody in 1862 compared to 1857 – which did him little good at a time of ‘moral panic’ over street robbery.14

Some Victorians were optimistic. The release of the annual crime figures by Manchester police in September 1875 were celebrated for their emphasis on a five-year decline: burglary and housebreaking were down 40 per cent and robberies from the person with violence down 74 per cent. Some offences showed small increases, such as embezzlement by servants, and offences against the person such as manslaughter showed little change, but overall crime was down 30 per cent. One opinion expressed was that the introduction of flogging for robbery with violence had led to a decrease.15

Some very young people became habitual criminals and made frequent court appearances. There were a number of extreme cases, such as that of a girl from Truro named Bennett. Aged 19, she was sentenced at Bodmin to nine months in prison in 1867 for stealing 4s 6d from her own mother, but her list of previous offences was impressive: wilful damage (twenty-one days), stealing apples (fourteen days), stealing money (twenty-one days), disobedience in the workhouse (fourteen days), wilful damage (one month), lodging in an outhouse (twenty-one days), lodging in a wagon (twenty-one days), lodging in a stable (three months), prostitution (three months), lodging in a hayloft (twenty-one days), stealing jewellery (six months). All these offences were committed in a six-year period since she was 13, her life literally measured out in prison sentences.

PRISON & PUNISHMENT

The reform of criminal law had begun before the Victorian era, with the number of capital offences being reduced to only eleven by 1841. The last death sentence for a crime of property – burglary – was abolished in 1837, although burglary with attempted murder or wounding remained capital until 1861. A few other capital offences remained on the statute book after the Criminal Law Consolidation Act of 1861, including arson in royal dockyards, high treason and piracy, but were not used.

Public executions were a celebrated form of entertainment at the start of the era, but their popularity dwindled. The execution of Samuel Seager at Maidstone, in March 1839, was made worse by the presence of the murdered woman’s jeering husband in the front row and a large number of women, many of whom had brought their children to watch. Thackeray wrote an essay on Going to see a man hanged after the execution of Courvoisier in 1840 and argued for the abolition of capital punishment. The execution of the Mannings in 1849 was witnessed by about 30,000, following which Dickens wrote to The Times that ‘the conduct of the people was so indescribably frightful that I felt for some time afterwards almost as if I were living in a city of devils’. He was appalled by the crowd:

I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at the execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun … When the sun rose brightly … it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness that man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself as fashioned in the image of the Devil.

The public hanging at Bury St Edmunds in 1847 of Catherine Foster, a young woman of barely 18 who had poisoned her husband after only three weeks of marriage, was said to have been especially ‘heart-rending’ and led to questions in the House of Lords.16

The case for hanging was not helped by bungled executions, such as that in 1856 of William Bousfield for killing his wife and three children in Soho, London. Bousfield displayed eccentric behaviour after his trial, refusing to speak for long periods or insisting that everything was a dream. He threw himself face first into the fire in his cell and was horribly burnt. After that he spoke not a word and his hideously marked face was covered with a linen cloth. He appeared to be dying, and a surgeon was brought in to check he was still alive. He was carried up to the scaffold on a chair: ‘It is almost impossible to imagine a more hideous and revolting spectacle than the death like and swollen appearance of the face, and the utter helplessness of the limbs as they hung downwards, and nothing can be compared to it than a bloated and swollen mummy.’17

Hangman Calcraft fixed the motionless man to a short rope while positioned on the chair; then the drop fell, at which point the apparently almost dead man burst into life and fought to get his legs back on to the platform. Three times he got a footing on the edge, and three times the turnkeys pushed him off again, the hangman having slipped from the scene, terrified after threats that he would be shot.

After the execution of Franz Muller in 1864, a bill for reform of the capital punishment system in 1866 attempted to introduce ‘degrees of murder’. This failed and little further progress was made on reform in this area during the Victorian era, although public execution ceased.

Transportation had already become established as an alternative to execution, but by 1860 only about 60 per cent of those sentenced to transportation actually were transported. Transportation to New South Wales stopped in 1840 and it ceased to Van Diemen’s Land in 1853, though some continued to Western Australia until 1867 and also to Bermuda and Gibraltar. By 1860 the government was spending £640,000 a year on ‘penal discipline’, of which £200,000 was being spent abroad (however, there were only 3,200 prisoners in the colonies and only 269 had been sent there during 1860). The total number in prison in England and Wales fell from 25,000 to 18,000 between 1858 and 1860.18

Dartmoor was one of the prisons that took over from transportation; in this scene a convict makes an ill-fated bid for freedom, 1884.

Transportation was then only used for sentences of fourteen years or more, and was replaced by Penal Servitude from 1853. Other criminals were sent to new ‘public works’ prisons such as Portland (1847–49) and Chatham (1856), which replaced the ‘hulks’. The ‘silent’ and ‘separate’ systems were introduced: in 1869 Sir Edward du Cane emphasised ‘hard bed, hard board and hard labour’, though the demeaning crank was stopped in 1898.

In the 1889 House of Commons debate on the penal system and punishment, Mr Pickersgill highlighted a number of relatively minor offences that had received severe punishments:

At the Liverpool Summer Assizes last year, four lads, aged about 17, were found guilty of robbery from a poor woman of the sum of 3s., the robbery being accompanied by personal violence. It was a most dastardly offence and richly deserved a severe punishment. But what was the punishment actually inflicted? Penal servitude for 14 years, on lads of 17! I am not surprised that the Report of the proceedings says the severity of the sentence caused great surprise. With the permission of the House I will quote a few words from the language used by the learned Judge in pronouncing sentence. He said:– It is truly intolerable that a set of rascals like you, just between boyhood and manhood, should be allowed to become the terror of all decent people.

Pickersgill compared punishments for similar offences:

I mean the well-known case of the boy Osborne, 17 years old, convicted at the Central Criminal Court,19 of an attempt to blackmail a gentleman by threatening to accuse him of an odious crime. Of course the crime committed by Osborne was a crime of the most serious character, a crime which requires to be treated with heavy punishment. But what was the sentence pronounced by the learned Judge on this lad of 17? No less a sentence than penal servitude for life! A few months afterwards, at the same Court, but before another Judge, a man was convicted of a similar crime, a crime which the Judge who pronounced sentence said was one of the worst possible description of its class, and he concluded by passing a sentence of ten years’ penal servitude.

There was growing realisation that sending people to prison for minor offences was ineffective – and expensive. A perceptive clergyman questioned the approach in Dorset in the early 1840s by identifying particular cases: he referred to a man who stole 4d worth of lime, was held in custody for forty-two days before trial and then given a week in gaol, costing the ratepayers £12 8s 4d. A person who stole seven eggs spent eighty-eight days in custody, costing twice as much. A girl of 11 who stole a bucket cost the ratepayers £10 11s 8d. Cheaper solutions had to be found.

THE New POLICE

All parishes were meant to have their own constables, a system that was already discredited in 1837, although it was not until 1872 that the law was changed so that parishes were not obliged to have one. Permissive legislation, such as the County Police Acts of 1839 and 1840, allowed local authorities to set up their own forces similar to that already created in London. Some did, but others disliked the cost. Often it took a shocking event to galvanise the ratepayers into sacrificing their personal funds: in one area, ‘Mr Hollest’s murder obtained the county police for Surrey’.20 The County and Borough Police Act of 1856 made a force compulsory in every area.

Nonetheless, authorities still tried to keep costs to a minimum. After riots in 1855, the Home Secretary wrote to the Mayor of Wolverhampton about the inadequacy of his force, which was then increased from thirty-nine to fifty-four.21

One factor behind the eventual acceptance of the police was public disorder. Reluctant authorities avoided the cost of the police until unrest persuaded them that it was a price worth paying – in the case of Staffordshire, it was miners’ riots in 1842 that convinced them.22 Authorities preferred to maintain a slender police force and use the powers of the Riot Act to call in the military when there was risk of serious disorder. At least the Chartist troubles provided a marvellous incentive to make better use of the railways and the new electric telegraph, both of which began to be used from as early as 1839, and General Napier made efficient use of railway lines to control the northern districts as described in Chapter 9. As one historian has written: ‘The British railway network raised markedly the efficiency of the military force which was maintained on home service, by making the troops stationed in the southern part of England more readily available for the restoration of order in the manufacturing districts of the North.’23

Metropolitan officers were often sent to help in areas where there was no similar force, getting cheap fares. However, by the 1850s most areas had reasonable police forces of their own and the use of railways and the military was much reduced.

The cost of the police was estimated at £3 million a year in January 1869, whereas the loss from crime was put at £7 million a year.24

The electric telegraph was soon put to use to capture fugitives, one early and famous example being after a murder at Salt Hill near Slough in 1845. John Tawell put some cyanide into a woman’s drink before escaping by train to Paddington, but a telegraph message was sent ahead of him: ‘A murder has just been committed at Salt Hill and the suspect has been seen to take a 1st class ticket to Paddington on the 7.42pm. He is dressed as a Quaker with a long overcoat down to his ankles. He is sitting in the second 1st class carriage.’ Tawell was tracked to a coffee house and arrested.

The telegraph was also used to summon extra support during rioting, such as in 1851 when the fishermen and trawler owners at Great Yarmouth were at loggerheads. A huge crowd gathered outside the police station to demand the freeing of some incarcerated fishermen, but the 11th Hussars were summoned from Norwich by telegraph; attempts to stop their arrival by pulling up the tracks at the railway station were thwarted when the soldiers got out of the train before it reached the platforms.

The spread of the police reduced the frequency of ‘freedom riots’, where crowds attempted to release people from custody – or the opposite problem where mobs exacted retribution on witnesses. An example of the latter was at Windsor in 1844, when a mob of over 200 stripped three men and ducked them in the Thames for giving evidence against a beer shop keeper who had permitted gambling on his premises. In 1875 a man was arrested at a Birmingham public house for burglary, but the two constables taking him into custody were themselves attacked by a mob intent on freeing him. Extra police arrived, but the mob also increased in number, with stones flying and weapons being brandished. Sergeant Fletcher was stabbed and PC Lines stabbed in the head, from which he died. Jeremiah Corkery was executed for this murder and four others sent to prison for riot and assault.

A ‘CLASSIC’ VICTORIAN CRIMINAL: CHARLIE PEACE

Charlie Peace came from the backstreets of Victorian Yorkshire but became so famous – or infamous – that a comic book hero of the 1960s was based around him. After enjoying the veneer of bourgeois respectability in London, he was hanged at Leeds on 25 February 1879 for the squalid murder of a lover’s husband. His trial and execution attracted great publicity.

Perhaps one of the reasons for his cult success was that the legend was more glamorous than the reality. Supposedly an artist, poet and musician, he wrote only doggerel, played music on a violin with one string and his artistic endeavours at Millbank Prison consisted of ‘cutting out of a rough kind of cardboard a variety of objects – birds, beasts, fishes, horses and the like’. Neither was he handsome; one journalist described him as ‘short and meagre but wiry, and his face one of the ugliest ever set on human shoulders … and his mind was a sort of sewer’.

Peace was born in Sheffield in 1832. As a boy he suffered a leg injury and struggled with walking thereafter. He was first arrested for burglary in 1851, getting a one-month sentence. He served two prison sentences for burglary in Yorkshire and Lancashire, on the latter occasion showing a violent side that eventually led him to the gallows. Peace was back in prison at the end of 1866, again for burglary near Sheffield, and this time received a six-year sentence.

At Whalley Range in 1876, prowling around at night, he was challenged by PC Nicholas Cock who he shot in the chest and left to die. Two brothers were arrested and tried for the murder in Manchester; Peace attended the trial in November 1876 and watched as William Habron was sentenced to death, although the youth’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Later, Peace confessed to this crime and the young man was freed. ‘Some people will say,’ Peace mused afterwards, ‘that I was a hardened wretch for allowing an innocent man to suffer for my crime, but what man would have done otherwise?’

Meanwhile, in Sheffield, Peace had developed an obsession with a neighbour’s wife, Mrs Dyson. Eventually Mr Dyson moved his family away from Darnall, where Peace lived, to Banner Cross. Almost as soon as they had arrived, Peace turned up and made a show of his revolver to Dyson. Only a couple of days after the Manchester trial, he waylaid Mrs Dyson at the back of her house and when Dyson came out to intercede he fired at him twice. The second shot struck Dyson in the head and he died soon afterwards.

When this picture of a desperate burglar being captured was published, it was not known that the villain was Charlie Peace, wanted for murder in Yorkshire.

Peace escaped to a house in Hull where his wife lived. Chased by detectives, he escaped arrest by climbing out and hiding behind a chimney. In Nottingham he took a mistress called Susan Gray and on one occasion police arrived to find him in bed with her, but even then he managed to slip away from their clutches.

After moving to London he passed himself off as a musical instrument dealer, but continued with burglary. He took two houses in Billingsgate Street – one for his wife and one for his mistress. In May 1877 he moved to Peckham and continued his interest in scientific gadgets, developing a design for raising sunken vessels.

In October 1878 Constable Robinson saw a light appear mysteriously in a window of a house at St John’s Park, Blackheath, at two o’clock in the morning. Joined by two other officers, Robinson had not reckoned on the thief having a gun. Despite firing five shots, Peace was eventually brought to the ground, although Robinson was severely wounded. At this time the police had no idea that they had captured an infamous murderer from Sheffield.

Peace’s wife and mistress both fled, but they were eventually traced by the police and stolen property with them was identified. Peace was tried for robbery and attempted murder at the Old Bailey in November 1878; despite putting up the appearance of being senile, he was found guilty and sentenced to penal servitude for life. He was then put on a train to Sheffield, but Peace made a daring attempt to escape by leaping through the window. One warder caught hold of his leg and Peace dangled out of the speeding train for 2 miles, before eventually falling to the ground at Kiveton Park. He was too insensible to run off and was soon picked up again.

The execution of Charlie Peace for the Banner Cross murder at Leeds, 1879.

Peace was tried for murder in Leeds in February 1879, by which time the tales of his crimes and burglaries had been repeatedly told – and somewhat exaggerated – in the popular press. It took the jury only ten minutes to agree on a verdict of guilty. Once convicted, Peace confessed to the murder at Whalley Range, giving evidence about the scene that convinced the prison governor. He was hung at Armley on 25 February 1879.

Notes

1 Jack the Ripper features only in passing; there is already a whole library of books about this one series of crimes and little point in adding further to it.

2The Times, 24 April 1865.

3Report of the Inspector of Prisons, Parliamentary Papers, 1843, p. vi.

4 There was a Betting Act, Betting Houses Act and a Lottery Act in that year.

5Hansard, House of Commons, 17 March 1891.

6 J. Fitzjames Stephen, Criminal Law, London, 1863, p. 100.

7 Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux, first published 1869.

8 S. Williamson, The Vaccination Controversy, Liverpool, 2007, p. 202.

9Hansard, 3 July 1877.

10 Judicial statistics, 1884–85.

11 Enraght also spent time at St George’s in the east, where there were notable riots, described in a later chapter.

12The Times, 7 March 1847.

13The Times, 4 January 1856.

14 James Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, London, 1993, p. 62.

15Manchester Guardian, 28 September 1875.

16Hansard, 23 April 1847.

17The Observer, 6 May 1856.

18 Evidence from Parliamentary Debate of 1 March 1981, recorded in Hansard and The Times.

19 In 1886.

20The Times, 30 October 1851; Hollest, a curate, is considered in Chapter 4.

21 D. Philips, Crime & Authority in Victorian England, p. 58.

22 Ibid.

23 F.C. Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists, Manchester, 1959, p. 161.

24The Times, 15 January 1869.

2

Murder

Wilful murder was the worst capital offence in Victorian England, but juries hesitated to convict a man or woman if there was the slightest doubt. Towns such as Maidstone were notorious for not convicting for a capital offence: ‘now, so strong is the feeling against punishment by death, that it is extremely difficult to get a jury to convict … at one time at Maidstone it was difficult to get a jury to find a man guilty, even upon the clearest evidence, if they knew that an execution would follow.’1

Juries were reluctant to hang on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Perhaps the most famous man to be hung for murder on circumstantial evidence was Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner. In Phineas Finn one of the characters observed: ‘We were delighted to hang Palmer, – but we don’t know that he killed Cook’ – the latter his most noted supposed victim.2 Later in the same novel, Madame Goesler tries to convince herself that her hero, Phineas Finn, is safe: ‘Juries are always unwilling to hang … and are apt to think that simply circumstantial evidence cannot be suffered to demand so disagreeable a duty. They are peculiarly averse to hanging a gentleman, and will hardly be induced to hang a member of Parliament.’3

An example of this is the murder of 14-year-old Sarah Watts at West Woodlands near Frome in 1851. Watts was alone at a dairy farm which was invaded by burglars who raped and then killed her. Three men, including William Maggs and William Sparrow, were reported as having been seen in the area before and after the murder, and Sparrow was supposed to have described what happened to a woman he met. Saying little about the rape, he described how the girl had been beaten about the head, drowned by being placed head down in the whey tub, and then her body dumped on the floor. A handkerchief found on the kitchen table was linked to Sparrow.

Despite forty-three witnesses for the prosecution, others came forward to say the men had been in Frome at the time and all three were acquitted of the murder. Witnesses for the prosecution reported having been terrorised, with windows broken at night and threatening behaviour in court. In the minds of the jury, nothing could prove what had happened and all evidence was circumstantial. However, all three were tried and convicted of other felonies and Maggs was later transported for fifteen years.

Were people hung by mistake? One suspects Trollope of being ironic when he has the elderly Duke of St Bungay say: ‘I do not think that in my time any innocent man has ever lost his life upon the scaffold.’4 But there is clear evidence that Priscilla Biggadyke5 went to the gallows in error, and a number of others died protesting their innocence to the last.

Of course, the most famous Victorian murderer, Jack the Ripper, was never caught. All the authorities received much criticism for this and Sir William Harcourt, the Home Secretary, was blamed in 1888 for his failure to offer a reward; he replied that large rewards often produced inaccurate information.6 Sometimes referred to as the first serial killer, Jack’s crimes were unusual in their method and subject, but he was far from being the leading killer of the era. The killings continued sporadically until 1891, after which they appear to have stopped.

What types of murder attracted the most press attention? The press betrayed a definite class bias: when the victim was middle or upper class, or especially if the perpetrator was, then the story would run and run. The murder of Lord Russell, described below, is a good example, as is the murder of Rev. Hollest, Vicar of Frimley, by a burglar (see Chapter 4). James Bloomfield Rush, a tenant farmer in Norfolk, shot his landlord Isaac Jermy and his son in 1848 at Stanfield Hall; a mixture of well-to-do rural life, mad vengeance and an illicit affair or two added to Rush’s mystique, and his decision to represent himself at the trial added still more.

It is difficult to identify what made Charlie Peace such a celebrated criminal. One author has suggested that the act of confession robbed a murder of its greatest interest – hence Palmer lives on but William Dove faded away.7 Dove murdered his wife with strychnine in Leeds in 1856 and was hung at York, attracting a crowd of over 10,000, but a full and detailed confession was circulated before his demise.

POISONINGS

If there was a classic early Victorian murder weapon, it was arsenic. It was the method of choice for many of the murderesses of the era, though its ‘golden age’ was essentially the 1840s. From 1859–80, fewer than 5 per cent of executed murderers had used poison.8

On 11 March 1838, in the Norfolk village of Hempnell, neighbours of the Daynes family found Mrs Daynes, two of her children and a neighbour, Mrs Mills, ‘lying on the floor in a state of the greatest sickness and agony, complaining of burning heat in the stomach and throat, and the severest pain in the body’. Mrs Mills and one of the children died of poisoning, arsenic and nux vomica or ‘fig powder’ being found in the kettle.

Charles Daynes, a labourer, was charged with two murders and the attempted murder of his wife. He was tried in Norwich in April 1839, firstly on the count of murdering the child; he was acquitted, largely because a wife could not legally give evidence against her own husband as a ‘competent witness’ and there was no clear motive. However, she could give evidence where she was the victim of the crime and so Daynes was tried again the next day for attempting to murder his wife. On this occasion there was an additional witness – a widow named Ann Lloyd – who told the court that Daynes had wanted to marry her and had told her his wife would soon die. He was hung at Norwich, perhaps more for the crimes he was not convicted of than the one he was brought to justice over.

Jonathan Balls died at Happisburgh on 20 April 1845, aged 77, of suicide by arsenic poisoning. His death came only five days after that of his granddaughter Elizabeth Pestle, who also showed arsenic symptoms; she was buried on the same day as Balls’ wife. The trigger for Balls’ suicide appeared to be the determination of his daughter, Mrs Ann Pestle, to go to the coroner with material from the poisoned infant.

On 18 May 1845 there was an inquest at the Balls family home, Hill House, on the bodies of Balls, his wife, aged 83, and four grandchildren. The bodies of the old lady and the young girl were ‘remarkably preserved’ – a sign of arsenic poisoning. The Norwich surgeon, Frith, said the bodies contained enough arsenic to have killed the whole parish. Phoebe Neave told the jury that both Balls and Mrs Pestle had asked her to get arsenic for them in previous years. Balls’ suicide led to the unravelling of a history of indiscriminate murder stretching over twenty years that shocked the nation. The Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, was so concerned that he sent an officer to investigate.

In early June 1846 the bodies of Balls’ grandchildren, Martha, William and Maria Green, were exhumed at East Ruston. Maria had died in 1836, taken ill while staying with her grandparents at Happisburgh; no post-mortem had been conducted, the doctor assuming her death to be from ‘spotted fever’. In succession, William and then Martha also died while staying with their grandparents. In 1845 Mrs Green, their mother, and the servant girl Sarah Kerrison were both taken seriously ill after eating herrings given to them at Balls’ house, but they recovered.

The exhumations found arsenic in the body of Maria. The coroner went to Ingham to exhume the child of another of Balls’ daughters, Mrs Peggs. Neighbours recalled that Balls had had yet another daughter, Mrs Lacey, who had died suddenly in 1833, which Balls had said was due to being kicked by her husband.

The number of people killed by Balls is difficult to prove. Sir James Graham told the House of Commons on 12 June 1846 that it could have been twenty or more. In a period of ten years Mrs Green had lost eight children, Mrs Pestle four and a husband, and Mrs Peggs one, Hannah. But, going back further, Balls’ own parents had died in 1822 soon after coming to live with him, and several ‘labouring friends’ who had been visitors to his house had also died suddenly. Two of his sons had died in the 1830s, and there was the daughter Maria Lacey. He had also been twice charged with arson and what was referred to as a ‘disgusting offence’. It was supposed that Balls planned it mostly so that he could be well supported by his daughters – getting rid of their children as a risk to the family finances.

Finally, a curiosity about the case was how Balls was found in his coffin – with a walking stick on each side, a poker, handkerchiefs and a piece of plum cake in each hand; one of his daughters said this was in accordance with his wishes.

In April 1845 Sarah Freeman was hung at Wilton gaol, Taunton, for the murder of her brother by arsenic, but she was accused of more: ‘infanticide, fratricide and matricide’.9 Freeman, from Shapwick near Bridgewater, was described as ‘an abandoned woman’ and ‘a loose character before her marriage’ who had several illegitimate children. Her first illegitimate child was by a Church of England clergyman, who later more or less bribed a man to marry her.10 Two of her victims – her daughter and her husband, who died in December 1843 – were probably poisoned so she could claim £20 from the burial club. Her daughter died with violent stomach cramps and vomiting in March 1844, after which she went off to London, probably with a lover. Then she poisoned her mother and brother in December 1844. In January 1845 the body of her son James, aged 7, was exhumed; he had died in 1843 and the coroner’s inquest had recorded a verdict of natural causes on the advice of a surgeon. However, when the corpse was examined it was found to contain arsenic. Sarah was accused of four murder counts and found guilty of the murder of her brother; her death was watched by thousands.

These cases caused a furore about two things in particular: firstly, the way in which the parish authorities tried to save money by not having a proper inquest;11 and secondly, about the dangers of arsenic being so easily available. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, was scathing about penny-pinching local authorities. The Times campaigned on the question of easy access to arsenic, complaining in September 1847 about the ‘alarming increase of deaths through the criminal or accidental administering of arsenic’. One of the things it drew attention to was the impossibility of knowing how many had died; in the case of Mary May it was thought there was ‘scarcely any limit to the crimes’.

Mary May, ‘a repulsive looking woman’ in the view of at least one journalist, was arrested for the murder of her half-brother and lodger at Wix, Essex, in June 1848, whose life she had insured in a burial club. May was quickly found guilty of murder at Chelmsford and hung amidst rumours that her first husband and some of her fourteen children might also have been poisoned. The rumours entrapped her sister, Hannah Southgate, who had only recently buried one husband and married another. So in August 1848 the body of Thomas Haw was exhumed from Tendring churchyard, where it had rested since April 1847, and was found to contain arsenic. Hannah, who was clearly a younger and much more attractive proposition than her sister, was reported by her maid to have had a troubled marriage to Haw; the maid knew this since Hannah preferred to sleep with her rather than the husband she ‘couldn’t bear’. In fact, she often slept at farmer Southgate’s house. The maid saw her scraping arsenic on to a piece of bread and butter ‘to feed the rats’ but it was her husband who died. Two months later, she married Southgate. Despite the clear evidence, the jury were not convinced by the maid, Phoebe Reid, and Hannah Southgate was acquitted. This family tragedy claimed a final victim when Mary May’s last husband hung himself in their cottage at Wix in June 1851; she had told him that if he ever married again, she would come back to haunt him.

Sarah Chesham turned the pretty Essex village of Clavering into a scene of destruction. She was arrested for poisoning a baby, Solomon Taylor, and then, in September 1846, on suspicion of murdering two of her children about eighteen months earlier. It was suspected that both had been killed by two pence worth of arsenic, which Mrs Chesham had tried to acquire through the local post woman and also a rat catcher. The Cheshams lived upstairs in a cottage, much to the distress of Thomas Deards who lived downstairs; when the boys were poisoned in January 1845 he complained that ‘the vomit came through the cracks of the boards on to my table and floor’. Joseph and James died three days apart and other sons, Philip and John, were also ill for a while. The union surgeon certified them as having died of cholera, for which he later received a sound rebuke from the Lord Chief Justice.

The coroner’s inquest implicated farmer Thomas Newport, who had employed one of the boys but was alleged by Sarah Chesham to have beaten them; he also owned a box containing arsenic. It was claimed that John Chesham, a surviving son who was called as a witness, and Wisbey, one of the jurors, had been ‘tampered with’ by Newport’s men – most of the jurors were from the local community. There was a furious row among the jurors, most of whom condemned Wisbey. There was a suspicion that the relationship between Newport and Chesham had been close but she consistently tried to blame him.

The coroner recorded a verdict of wilful murder against Sarah on her two sons and then arranged an inquest into Solomon Taylor, who was the illegitimate son of Newport. Sarah Chesham had visited the Taylors at Manuden several times and John Clare gave evidence that he had heard Chesham say to the Taylor child: ‘Damn you, you want putting to sleep for half an hour, like the other two.’ The coroner was annoyed because the two witnesses he needed to prove a relationship between Chesham and Newport ‘kept out of the way’. Nevertheless, a verdict of wilful murder was recorded.

In March 1847 Chesham, ‘a good looking woman’ (who four years later was instead described as ‘a masculine-looking woman’), was tried at Chelmsford for the murders of Joseph and James Chesham. Though both had clearly died from arsenic, there was no proof of Sarah having possessed any and she was found not guilty. The Times was unimpressed, and noted later that ‘the evidence was most cogent, and left very little doubt of her guilt’.12 Chesham was also charged with the murder of Solomon Taylor, and Newport with aiding and abetting the murder. However, Professor Taylor said there was no evidence of poisoning so both were acquitted.