The Cleveland Street Scandal E-Book

Neil Root

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 384

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'A fascinating and meticulously researched look at the biggest gay scandal to hit the headlines until Oscar Wilde. Absolutely a must-read.' – Paul Donnelley, author of 501 Most Notorious Crimes It's the summer of 1889, and the royal family is in crisis. It is well known in polite society that the Prince of Wales's eldest son and his aristocratic acolytes are regulars at 19 Cleveland Street – a male brothel in London's West End. Bad behaviour by the gentry is accepted, but it must stay behind closed doors; they can do what they wish, but the rule that rules all is silence. The Establishment has always closed ranks – a word here and there from powerful people will put rumours swiftly to bed. But not this time. Onto this stage walks Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline of Scotland Yard, fresh from leading the disastrous Jack the Ripper investigation the previous year. Now the reputations of men who rule half the world are under threat from a scandal that stretches all the way to the corridors of Buckingham Palace.

Leseprobe

Cover Illustrations: A foggy Victorian street in the early evening (iStock/John Shepherd); An extract from Cruchley’s New Map of London, 1869 (Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland).

Quote from Henry Labouchère MP, Hansard HC vol 341, col 1541(28 February 1890)

First published 2025

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© Neil Root, 2025

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Contents

Prologue

Part I: No. 19 Cleveland Street

Part II: A Hush-up, Libel and Oaths on the Bible

Coda

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Prologue

At the turn of the twentieth century, as the Victorian era had just taken its final dying breaths, journalist John Philip Collins, originally from Birmingham, was a boarder in a house at No. 313 Clapham Road in Lambeth, south London. It was a well-appointed address for a professional man: leafy and suburban. After surveying that long road running from the Oval to Clapham High Street, the social researcher and reformer Charles Booth had judged it ‘Middle-class. Well-to-do’ in his 1898 Map of London Poverty.

As it still stands today, No. 313 was roomy, three storey and mid-Victorian, one of two sandwiching an identical terraced house. And Collins, aged 30 in March 1901, wasn’t the only lodger. There was also Laurence Allen Jones, a 27-year-old consulting engineer, along with a 9-year-old ‘visitor’ named Harold Charles Gibbons. To keep the house in order, Mary Isabella Yates, aged 18, was a general domestic servant supplied by the Hanover Square Workhouse. Mary was undoubtedly a great help to the lady of the house: 54-year-old Emma Abberline. Her husband, the head of the house, was 58-year-old Frederick George Abberline.

Fred Abberline, a former policeman, who had served with the Metropolitan Police over a lengthy career, had done very well for himself. He’d ended up with the senior rank of chief inspector and was stationed at Scotland Yard. However, his two most interesting cases, both internationally infamous in quite different ways, had occurred when he was one rung below his final rank and known as Inspector Abberline. He’d been retired from the police force for almost a decade as Britain moved into the Edwardian era.

Having a famous ex-detective as his landlord was a professional godsend for John Philip Collins. Abberline had tales that any up-and-coming journalist would have been desperate to tell. At the time he was Abberline’s tenant, Collins was employed by the Pall Mall Gazette, a London evening newspaper which had been a crusading social-reforming publication under its legendary editor, W.T. Stead, but was now under the much more conservative editorship of Sir Douglas Straight. Collins’ career would flourish, with him becoming the literary editor and the assistant editor on the Pall Mall Gazette and later moving to the Daily Telegraph.

Collins managed a real coup in persuading the professionally reticent Abberline to talk about the hunt for Jack the Ripper back in 1888, a massive, exhausting and ultimately fruitless investigation, which Abberline had led on the ground in London’s East End. The failure to find and capture the brutal killer of five women, the most notorious ‘serial killer’ in history almost nine decades before that term was coined, deeply rankled every policeman and detective who worked on that case, especially Abberline. It had happened on his patch, which he knew so well, having been stationed in the East End for much of his service. And Abberline was professionally proud, highly industrious and used to getting results.

Walter Dew, who worked under Abberline on the Jack the Ripper case in Whitechapel and later, as a chief inspector, captured the wife killer Dr Crippen in 1910, recalled Abberline as being ‘portly and gentle speaking … who might easily have been mistaken for the manager of a bank or a solicitor. He also was a man who had proved himself in many previous big cases … No question at all of Inspector Abberline’s abilities as a criminal hunter.’

In two issues of the Pall Mall Gazette, published on 24 and 31 March 1903, Abberline gave Collins his thoughts on Jack the Ripper, almost fifteen years after the horrific murders. The spur for Abberline to finally speak out was the imminent execution by hanging of Polish-born ‘George Chapman’ for the poisoning of three women in London. But Abberline knew him under his real name, Seweryn Klosowski, in 1888, when Klosowski was working as a barber in the East End.

Abberline relayed to Collins that Klosowski had been a strong suspect for the Jack the Ripper killings. This was despite the detached and sadistic modus operandi of the poisoner, which was so vastly different from the up-close, but also sadistic, barbaric mutilations carried out in the 1888 serial murders. Abberline explained this fundamental discrepancy by saying, ‘There is much to be said for Chapman’s consistency. You see, incentive changes; but the fiendishness is not eradicated.’

Abberline was still frustrated, and pointing the finger at Klosowski was merely professional speculation on his part, with no firm evidence attached. In the second article, Abberline starkly said to Collins, who relayed his words directly to readers, ‘You can state most emphatically that Scotland Yard is really no wiser on the subject than it was fifteen years ago.’

Conversely, no speculation would have been needed as to the perpetrators in the other major case of Abberline’s career, which he took charge of in the year following his Jack the Ripper investigative defeat. The culprits were known, and some of them had been publicly named, but Collins never managed to get Abberline to divulge anything about that case, which, like the Jack the Ripper inquiry, had triggered headlines all over the world.

It was an inside story that Collins, like any self-respecting journalist, would have loved to publish, but he would have been aware of the very real and dangerous sensitivities of that affair, which implicated the highest echelons of the aristocracy, government and even the royal family itself – and led to a shameless Establishment cover-up.

It’s unknown whether Collins ever questioned Abberline about that case, which had swiftly become known in the UK as the Cleveland Street Scandal and abroad as the London Scandal. Collins was most probably resigned to that affair being off-limits, especially as a prime mover in that cover-up, the Prince of Wales, was now King Edward VII. Consequently, it’s also little wonder that Abberline never spoke about it, even though it was a case that frustrated him deeply and made him feel very disillusioned about his policing career; it was a key factor in his retirement soon afterwards.

It all began in the summer of 1889, with a routine investigation by a policeman several ranks below Abberline. But the gravity of what was uncovered and the seismic implications for the fabric of Victorian society would mean that Abberline, still considered one of Scotland Yard’s finest, even after the Jack the Ripper debacle, was soon brought in to oversee it.

PART I

NO. 19 CLEVELAND STREET

One

4 July 1889

Fifteen-year-old Charles Swinscow knew that he was in very real trouble. Dark-haired, with a full mouth and jug ears, he habitually wore a serious expression, ready-made for his circumstances that morning.

Smartly dressed in his messenger uniform for the London Central Telegraph Office, his place of work, Charles felt a deep sense of foreboding when Police Constable Luke Hanks singled him out for attention and took him into a vacant room alone. There was no formal caution given to suspects at that time by the Metropolitan Police, so PC Hanks simply told Charles that he was being questioned in relation to the theft of some money. ‘I believe that you have been in possession of a large sum of money – 18/-. What can you tell me about that?’

Charles, now red-faced and afraid, denied having had so much money, but did admit to having had 14/- ‘on his person’ a few days earlier.

‘From where did you obtain that money?’ asked PC Hanks.

‘I got it for doing some private work away from the office.’

‘For whom?’

‘For a gentleman named Hammond,’ said Charles, quietly.

‘Where does he live?’

‘At 19 Cleveland Street, near the Middlesex Hospital.’

‘What kind of work did you do for him?’

‘Will I get into trouble if I tell you?’ asked Charles.

‘I cannot say,’ said PC Hanks, solemnly.

‘Must I tell you?’

‘Certainly.’1

Charles looked down at the ground in front of him and then slowly raised his head to face PC Hanks. Shaking with trepidation, he knew that what he was about to say would be deeply shameful for him and his family – and would almost certainly lose him his coveted position at the General Post Office (GPO). Finally, Charles stilled himself enough to speak in a wavering voice.

‘I will tell you the truth. I got the money from Mr Hammond for going to bed with gentlemen at his house.’

Inwardly shocked at Charles’ statement and its implications, PC Hanks ended the interview and went to report to his superior, Chief Constable John Phillips. Phillips was, in fact, a police constable like Hanks, but as the highest-ranking officer attached to the GPO at that time, he had the title ‘Chief’. This was unique to the police unit attached to the Victorian and Edwardian GPO and is not to be confused with the modern role of chief constable, which now heads the forty-three police constabularies of England and Wales and oversees hundreds or thousands of police officers.

On being appraised of the disturbing revelation made by Charles, Phillips ordered Hanks to resume Swinscow’s questioning and to gain as much further information about this serious matter as possible. Seated, Swinscow was cowed when PC Hanks re-entered the room, but stood up at once.

‘Please sit down and tell me everything you know,’ said PC Hanks, with the natural authority earned by an experienced policeman. That was enough. It took no more for Swinscow to begin to open up and offer the sordid details of what he’d done, the implications for him and his family being more than sufficient to make the boy come clean.

Charles Swinscow started by saying how he had met Henry Newlove, an 18-year-old messenger in the Secretary’s Office at the London Central Telegraph Office, around the previous Christmas of 1888, although Newlove had since been promoted to the role of ‘tracer’ in the Receiver and Accounts Department, giving him the higher ranking of third-class clerk. Henry Newlove had asked Charles to ‘go into the lavatory in the basement of the Post Office building’. And as Charles’ recollection continued, with PC Hanks maintaining his professional demeanour and outwardly showing no outrage, it seemed that he had followed Newlove into that basement.

‘We went into the water closet and shut the door, and we behaved indecently together. We did this on other occasions afterwards.’

It took only gentle prompting from PC Hanks for Charles to continue:

In about a week’s time, Newlove said – as near as I can recollect – ‘Will you come to a house where I will go to bed with a gentleman, you’ll get four shillings each time?’ I said at first, I wouldn’t do, but he persuaded me at last and I went with him to 19 Cleveland Street, a road near Tottenham Court Road, near the Middlesex Hospital. Newlove rang the bell, and the door was opened by a boy about my own age. We went into a parlour on the ground floor, and I saw a gentleman there who I learnt since is the proprietor. His name is Hamlin.2

In fact, it would soon be shown that the man Swinscow was referring to was Charles Hammond, the proprietor of No. 19 Cleveland Street.

Strangely, at the beginning of Hanks’ questioning, Charles had named him as Hammond, but the official statement then had him referring to him as Hamlin. Whether this was an attempt by Swinscow to not name the man who had paid him to carry out illegal acts out of fear or whether it was a simple police transcription error is unknown. Although, due to the gravity of what Charles said, the former is most likely, as Charles Hammond would immediately have been the focus of the investigation. And as Charles Swinscow told PC Hanks, Mr Hamlin/Hammond soon introduced himself on that first visit to No. 19 Cleveland Street:

He said, ‘Good evening, I’m very glad you’ve come.’ I waited a little while, and another gentleman came in. Mr. Hamlin introduced me, saying ‘that was the gentleman I was to go with that evening.’ I went into the back parlour, a room on the same floor with the gentleman. There was a bed there. We both undressed and being quite naked, got into bed. He put his person between my legs and an invasion took place.

I was with him about half-an-hour and then we got up. He gave me a Sovereign [20s or £1], which I gave to Mr. Hamlin [Hammond], who gave me four shillings. I have never seen this gentleman again. I went once more to the same house, and only once. It was about a month ago. Newlove showed me a letter which I understood was from Mr. Hamlin [Hammond], asking him to ask me to go up. It was signed Charley. I went and saw another gentleman with whom I also went to bed. I think that Newlove went with me to the house, but I’m not sure. This gentleman gave me half a Sovereign, which I gave to Mr. Hamlin [Hammond] who gave me twelve shillings.

Interestingly, the 12s Hammond paid Swinscow on this second occasion was 2s more than the man had paid Swinscow – half a sovereign being worth 10s – and three times more than he received on his first visit, even though, on that occasion, the man parted with a whole sovereign. This certainly would not have escaped PC Hanks, but at that stage he just wanted the full story to unfold.

Hammond may have wanted to entice Swinscow into returning to No. 19 Cleveland Street regularly by offering more payment as a calculated incentive. But it seemed that the man whom Swinscow went to bed with on his second visit warned him off going back there:

This gentleman after we got out of bed told me I ought not to return to the house again. He did nothing more to me than the other gentleman had done. I have never been to the house again, though Newlove on one occasion only has asked me to go. I was not in uniform on either occasion when I went to the house. I did not give Newlove any portion of the money which I received.

The fact that Swinscow made a point of emphasising that he wasn’t wearing his messenger boy uniform when he visited No. 19 Cleveland Street reveals just how ashamed he was at having to divulge what he had been doing and how fearful he was of losing his position with the GPO. But that was just the start of his troubles – penetrative homosexual intercourse (then known as ‘buggery’ or ‘sodomy’) – was highly illegal, socially taboo and potentially ruinous for his family as well as himself. Charles was a tough working-class boy, but he was crying inside, his panic mounting within him as PC Hanks sat opposite him, listening and making notes, yet betraying no emotion or the shock he felt at the revelations he was hearing.

Now that it was a police matter, Charles knew that he had no choice but to tell everything, as the creaking door to the unpalatable truth had been opened. At PC Hanks’ pressing, in addition to his recruiter Henry Newlove, Charles named two other telegraph messenger boys who had also visited No. 19 Cleveland Street – Charles Ernest Thickbroom and George Alma Wright, both aged 17. It had now become a network of debauchery, uncovered as part of a routine investigation of a case of theft.

The imposing, Grecian-influenced London Central Telegraph Office, on the corner of Newgate Street and St Martin’s le Grand in the financial City district, was a hive of activity that day. For over twenty years, it had become the hub of communications for Britain and the Empire, constantly receiving and dispatching telegrams all over the United Kingdom and the world.

Business was booming. Ever since the first telegraphic despatches had been sent in the early 1840s, public demand for them had increased. The GPO’s London Central Telegraph Office was at the centre of the telegram phenomenon, which continued to gain momentum through the 1870s–90s. By the end of the century, the London Central Telegraph Office employed 4,500 clerks and 150,000 telegrams were going through there every day. By 1907, the GPO would be Britain’s biggest civilian employer.

At the bottom of the hierarchy of employees, but looking upwards, were the young messenger boys. They wore smart small-checked woollen suits with a dark display handkerchief protruding from the jacket pocket, white starched-down-collar shirt and checked folded-down cravat, matching waistcoat and a hard flat cap with a band with ‘Telegram’ emblazoned on it in capital letters between horizontal white stripes. The boys would deliver telegrams by bicycle to businesses and private clients all over the city. Speed was all important, as they weaved in and out of streets filled with hansom cabs and horses and carriages.

Charles Swinscow was just one of hundreds of boys and young men between the ages of 14 and 18 who were employed in the late 1880s delivering telegrams. It was a regimented job, disciplined and rigorous, and they were expected to exhibit the highest standards of personal conduct. It was regarded as a prestigious start to a career in the civil service and an exceptionally good opportunity for working-class boys, offering job security with scope for promotion in time, if they were taken on full time as ‘established’ employees. They were considered lucky to have the job by their parents, who undoubtedly felt pride in their sons as they bicycled off to work, representing the GPO, a pillar of Victorian life.

By 1860, the prestige that the GPO and its headquarters at St Martin’s le Grand held had already become ingrained in society. In that year, the Victorian painter George Elgar Hicks, well known for his studies of everyday London scenes depicting groups of people, painted The General Post Office, One Minute to Six, which immortalised a crowd of socially diverse characters queuing to make the last post of the day. The art historian Mark Bills has described how the painting makes ‘a striking statement about the pace of activity in the city, about the behaviour of the crowd, and the role of the centralised post and press system at the heart of a vast empire’.3 The fact that it was featured by a popular painter such as Hicks, who also painted other national landmarks including the Bank of England, shows what an important institution the GPO was in Victorian Britain.

As part of their duties, the messenger boys had to collect payment from those who had telegrams delivered and hand it over to their supervisor immediately on their return to the office from ‘a run’. The boys weren’t allowed to carry any personal money while on duty to avoid the danger of getting it mixed up with the collected revenue. They were expected to be punctual, polite, applied, always well turned out, and to have integrity. Honesty was intrinsic to the role’s requirements, due to the sums of cash being transported.

The morning of Thursday, 4 July 1889 started no different from any other day when PC Luke Hanks of the Metropolitan Police, specially attached to the GPO, arrived at the London Central Telegraph Office. Hanks was 35, having been born in Southsea, near Portsmouth, Hampshire, in June 1854. His father, Isaac, was from Malmesbury in Wiltshire, and his mother, Catherine Agnes (née Daley) hailed from County Cork in Ireland. Isaac was a gunner in the Royal Marine Artillery and then became a policeman in the Metropolitan Police, which, although its jurisdiction was London, also oversaw the Royal Dockyards. By 1861, when Luke was 7, Isaac was a police sergeant at the Royal Naval Hospital in Haslar, near Gosport.

In 1871, aged 16, Luke was finding his own way and living in lodgings in Portland, Dorset, working as a ship’s steward boy on HMS Achilles. It was an armoured frigate, and at that time was in use as a guard ship to the Royal Navy’s Fleet Reserve around Portland, having been launched at the end of 1863.

By 1879, aged 24, Hanks had emulated his father, who had died three years previously, and become a police constable in the Metropolitan Police, which then had more than 10,000 officers. Luke was assigned to the policing of Her Majesty’s Dockyard in Portsmouth. In 1881, Hanks was in the capital, a police constable attached to Commercial Street Police Station in East London and lodging with other bachelor officers at No. 230 Fleur de Lis Street in Spitalfields, which would later be at the centre of Jack the Ripper’s hunting ground in 1888. But PC Hanks always dealt with theft, not murder, and by March 1885, he was attached to the GPO.

In the December of that year, Hanks married Ellen Shaw, known as Helen, and they lived at No. 405 Bethnal Green Road, Bethnal Green, in east London. On 11 January 1886, Luke and Helen had a son, Luke Cornelius, and on 2 September 1887, a daughter, Mary. By the following year, the Hanks family were living at No. 164 Finnis Street, Bethnal Green.

The Metropolitan Police unit attached to the GPO where PC Hanks served had originally been called the Missing Letter Branch but was retitled the Confidential Enquiry Branch in 1883. This unit grew quickly, largely due to the Fenian bombings of the 1880s, orchestrated by a group of Irish Americans wanting independence for Ireland from the UK, which was contemporarily known as the ‘Dynamite War’ and resulted in a series of explosions on the young London Underground. By 1889, the Confidential Enquiry Branch was a substantial force, with fifteen plainclothes detectives and many police constables, PC Luke Hanks being one of them.

In June 1885, Hanks had served as a witness at the Old Bailey in the trial of the thief and embezzler Henry Gamble; in October 1887, he had to testify in a case of simple larceny brought against the thieves Henry Sumner and Frank Beckett; and in January 1889, he’d appeared there again as a witness in the trial of the postal order thief, Charles Osborn Dunn. At all three trials, the defendants, whom Hanks had arrested, were convicted and imprisoned.

By early July 1889 Hanks had been a policeman for a decade and was seasoned in dealing with myriad types of thievery and gathering evidence. Now he was investigating reported thefts from the London Central Telegraph Office, and the messenger boy, Swinscow, had been, as Hanks later reported in his police report, ‘seen to leave a room from which money had been stolen, and he had also been seen with a sum of money, 18/- [18s] in his possession’. It was an exceptionally large sum of cash for a boy of Swinscow’s age and station to be carrying.

Swinscow was just over two months short of his sixteenth birthday when PC Luke Hanks interrogated him, having turned 15 on 14 September 1888. He had been appointed to the position of telegraph messenger on 2 January 1888, so he’d been in the role for eighteen months by early July 1889. His official job title was ‘Boy Messenger in the Receiver and Accountant General’s Office, General Post Office’. 4

Charles Thomas Swinscow was born on 14 September 1873, in Islington, north-east London, to Thomas, a 35-year-old newsagent, and Emily Ann (née Wright), aged 22. In 1881, they lived in Stoke Newington, at No. 3 Little Cross Street (now Angle Street). They had four lodgers, in their fifties, sixties and seventies. Charles was 7 then and at school, and his sisters Emily and Hannah were aged 5 and 3 respectively. Charles almost certainly wouldn’t have known then that a career at the GPO awaited him, although a family connection would undoubtedly gain him his place there. Charles Swinscow and his family had everything to lose.

5 July 1889

The following morning, PC Hanks went back to Chief Constable Phillips and briefed him on the further details he had gleaned. Phillips saw the gravity of the situation and reported what he had learned to the top, the Postmaster General, Henry Cecil Raikes, who, in turn, informed James Monro, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Some of the highest levers of late-Victorian British domestic power were now turning swiftly, and Swinscow, the other boys and their families would soon be caught up in the grinding machinations of the state.

And this wasn’t the first homosexual sex scandal that had rocked the GPO, a fact of which Phillips, Raikes, Monro and probably PC Hanks were well aware. Twelve years earlier, in 1877, during Disraeli’s second Conservative government, an internal GPO investigation had uncovered the fact that three telegraph messenger boys had prostituted themselves to a man of much higher social standing for 5s a go. He was a 37-year-old, well-connected secretary in the City of London named James Smith. According to the Morning Post newspaper, Smith would meet the boys in the street and then take them to his home in Park Street, Islington, north-east London.

After his conviction, Smith petitioned the Home Secretary Richard Assheton Cross directly, claiming that he was being made a scapegoat and writing, ‘The crime for which I am sentenced has been very prevalent amongst the Telegraph lads’, and the state wanted to prosecute him ‘as a warning to others’. But Smith’s appeal failed and he was sentenced to penal servitude for life at London’s Central Criminal Court.

Just one of the telegraph messenger boys, 17-year-old George Wright, faced prosecution in the end, and he was given a ten-year sentence, although the judge said that Wright should receive a much lighter sentence on appeal as he had ‘unhappily fallen in’ with Smith. They were serious punishments, but publicly, it had been a small affair, not one that was allowed too much press publicity.

But a dozen years later, in July 1889, the situation would soon reveal itself to be quite different. Neither PC Hanks, Chief Constable Phillips, Postmaster-General Raikes nor Commissioner Monro had any idea of the true wider implications of what they had learned, that there was far more to come or quite how high up the strata of society the snowballing scandal would eventually reach.

Yet, the case was already of such import that Commissioner Monro would turn to one of his leading detectives to oversee the investigation into the murky goings-on at No. 19 Cleveland Street. Enter Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline of Scotland Yard.

Two

6 July 1889

Inspector Abberline wasted no time, and just after dawn he applied for arrest warrants for Charles Hammond and Henry Horace Newlove, which were quickly granted at Marlborough Street Police Court. The charge against Hammond and Newlove was ‘that they did unlawfully, wickedly and corruptly conspire, combine, confederate and agree to incite and procure George Alma Wright and divers other persons to commit the abominable crime of buggery against the peace of Her Majesty the Queen’.1

Abberline’s next destination was the alleged house of ill repute at No. 19 Cleveland Street, where he aimed to enforce the warrants. With six storeys, including an attic and basement, No. 19 was a tall and narrow townhouse with two windows on each floor, including on the ground floor, with windows to the right of the heavy wooden front door. Running parallel to the major thoroughfare of Tottenham Court Road in the West End, Abberline’s destination was indeed, as Swinscow had said, almost directly opposite the Middlesex Hospital.

The hospital had previously been a workhouse before becoming a workhouse infirmary, and this large, imposing building had, over fifty years earlier, almost certainly been a key inspiration for the workhouse in Oliver Twist, as Charles Dickens had lived at No. 22 on two separate occasions as a child and in his late teenage years, when that stretch of Cleveland Street was called Norfolk Street.

In his bowler hat and suit, which, by late morning, would be too heavy for the summer’s day, and hobbling slightly on his left leg – the result of a varicose vein that he’d had at the beginning of his police service but had worsened because of years of incessant walking and standing – Abberline made his way onto Cleveland Street with two constables beside him. It was six o’clock in the morning.

All was quiet as Abberline rapped on the door loudly. There was no response. So Abberline knocked again, and then again. There was still no sign of life from within, which was ominous to Abberline.

The telegraph messenger boys who had frequented the house had described it as a hive of activity in their statements to PC Hanks, and a large house would surely have had occupants, even at that hour. At the very least, the proprietor Hammond should have been there in bed, just as Abberline had planned, to take him by surprise.

But Abberline wasn’t leaving without gaining entry. He used his rank and policing experience to instruct the constables to storm the door, even though he didn’t have official permission to do so by warrant. If there was any evidence inside, it had to be found before it could be disposed of after a tip-off, and Abberline was already suspicious that somebody may have already warned the guilty parties.

After a few burly shoulder shoves, Abberline and the constables were inside No. 19, and Abberline’s suspicion was soon confirmed. Not only was nobody there but the house, which had obviously once been expensively furbished, was stripped of any sign of personal effects, with just the furniture remaining. Hammond and his associates had absconded from the scene of the crimes.

Abberline ordered two constables, changing in shifts, to be put on duty to keep a watch on No. 19 Cleveland Street around the clock. One of them, PC Richard Sladden, will feature later in this story. Nobody entered the premises, but several well-heeled men walked up to the front door over the coming days and knocked, seeming disappointed when there was no answer.

In his police report dated 18 July, Abberline relayed that ‘a number of men of superior bearing and apparently of good position have been seen to call … accompanied by boys in some instances, and on two occasions by a soldier, but after waiting in a suspicious manner left without gaining admission’. Discreet tails were put on the callers.

The high status of individuals in social and military circles would soon begin to be revealed. One of them especially, a man from within the royal family’s inner circle, would become the focus of the ensuing scandal.

Later that same day, ‘the sworn informations’ of the telegraph messenger boys, Charles Thomas Swinscow, Charles Ernest Thickbroom and George Alma Wright, were heard at Marlborough Street Police Court. Adding to Swinscow’s revelations, Wright and Thickbroom, both aged 17, said that Henry Newlove had recruited them for Hammond. And while Thickbroom hadn’t gone to the basement lavatory at the London Central Telegraph Office with Newlove like Swinscow, Wright had done so, confessing that on one or two occasions Newlove had ‘put his person into me, that is to say behind, only a little way, and something came from him. I never did this to him.’ It was also revealed that Thickbroom, who said that he was motivated into attending No. 19 Cleveland Street for money, had worn his GPO telegraph messenger uniform when going there, unlike the others.

But in the meantime, Abberline knew that he would have to chase his prey and run down Hammond and Newlove, and arresting one of them could lead to the apprehension of the other. That’s just how things worked. And after making inquiries, the detective discovered where he might find Newlove.

7 July 1889

It was a Sunday, but that made no difference to progressing the investigation. North of Cleveland Street and just over half a mile north of Euston Station was where Inspector Abberline headed with two constables, one of them being PC Luke Hanks.

Down-at-heel Bayham Place, which runs through the much larger Bayham Street in Camden Town, where Charles Dickens had lived at No. 16 in 1823 as a boy, was their destination. Henry Newlove was known to live at No. 18 Bayham Place, with his mother, Margaret, and two of his three older brothers, his eldest brother and two elder sisters having left and made their own way. Henry had never known his father, John, a stonemason, who had died shortly before he was born.

It was just before 1.30 p.m. when Abberline knocked and Newlove’s mother came to the front door. After some disingenuous denials from Margaret that her son was there, Abberline and the constables made entry and soon found 18-year-old Henry Newlove cowering in one of the two upstairs rooms. When Abberline read out the arrest warrant, which also named Hammond, Newlove’s reply went halfway to explaining why No. 19 Cleveland Street had been vacated: ‘Mr Hammond, after I told him about the affair Friday morning, told me to deny everything.’ Newlove had tipped off Hammond, who had fled.

But it was what Newlove said to PC Luke Hanks, who was assigned to take him in, that was truly enlightening. Unprovoked by Hanks, and obviously feeling very aggrieved by his treatment, the handcuffed Newlove started talking as they made their way to Scotland Yard in a hansom cab.

‘I think it very hard that I should get into trouble while men in high position are allowed to walk free,’ said Newlove.

‘What do you mean?’ asked PC Hanks.

‘Why, Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house at Cleveland Street. So does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois,’ said Newlove.

‘Who is Colonel Jervois?’

‘He lives at Winchester Barracks, Winchester,’ said Newlove.

His name was, in fact, Colonel Robert Jervoise, of the Hampshire Regiment’s 3rd Battalion.

There was no need for Hanks to ask who Lord Arthur Somerset and the Earl of Euston were. They were very well-known men, members of the aristocracy, and Somerset was a close confidant of the heir to the throne.

The gravity of the case and its profound implications, with such highly placed men mixed up in a homosexual prostitution scandal, was not lost on Hanks, and back at Scotland Yard, he at once told Abberline what he had learned. Abberline was stunned but he knew that he immediately had to discreetly inform Commissioner Monro about the troubling and potentially explosive development.

9 July 1889

Once in custody at Scotland Yard, Newlove was questioned at length by Abberline and confirmed all the details given by his fellow arrestees – Swinscow, Wright and Thickbroom – in their statements.

Abberline now focused on Hammond, the proprietor of what was really a male brothel at No. 19 Cleveland Street. But as Hammond had been warned off by Newlove on 5 July, and with the seriousness of the charges against him, Abberline knew that Hammond could be anywhere.

Meanwhile, PC Hanks made a courtesy call back to Newlove’s mother’s house in Bayham Place, where Henry had been arrested just the previous day. One of Henry’s elder brothers had asked Hanks to return to talk to their mother, Margaret, to explain the truth of Henry’s situation. It was while Hanks was doing this that he was to get another break in the case.

There was a knock on the door, and Hanks heard Margaret say to her son that it was ‘George Veck’, a name Hanks recognised professionally. Going outside the house, Newlove’s mother and brother made sure to leave Hanks inside the house while they spoke to Veck, who was wearing a dog collar and appeared to be a vicar. But Hanks had long learned to use his ears in such situations and soon realised that Veck was connected to the Cleveland Street case, and what he was saying was much more criminal than godly.

‘I saw Hammond at Gravesend yesterday, and I have been down there today, but he has flown. I cannot say where he is,’ said Veck. ‘I will see Henry is right and I will see you all right as well. Do you want any money? If so, let me know. I will instruct a solicitor to defend Henry in the morning.’

It was obvious that Veck was heavily involved in the affair, and he was trying to keep the Newloves, especially Henry, onside: as a procurer of boys for Charles Hammond, Henry Newlove knew a great deal. It would later be discovered that Veck, aged 48, had been living with Hammond at No. 19 Cleveland Street until very recently and they were close associates, perhaps even business partners. Veck by then lived in Gravesend, Kent, south-east of London, and Hammond had undoubtedly gone there when he left No. 19 Cleveland Street, with Veck harbouring him before he escaped somewhere else – quite possibly abroad, if Hammond had any sense.

And George Veck was not a priest at all. He had studied theology years earlier but had never been ordained. It was a good, respectable cover for criminality, especially in an era when the Church of England reigned supreme. Veck himself had been a telegraph clerk almost twenty years earlier, in Gosport, Hampshire. In 1877, he was fired by the Midland Railway Company for improper conduct with boys.

George Daniel Veck was born in a pub, The Battle of Trafalgar, on 5 October 1840 in Forton, Hampshire. His father, George, was then a labourer, but later became the ‘licensed victualler’ or publican, of that same establishment. Both Veck’s father and mother Elizabeth had died in the late 1870s, and his two younger brothers had passed away two decades before that.

Veck was still living in the same pub in 1871, when he was a telegraph clerk, but ten years later, after being fired from that position, he was living in Brixton, then in Surrey, and working as a beer retailer. Eight years later, he was firmly embroiled in the coming Cleveland Street Scandal.

PC Hanks didn’t arrest George Veck – or the Reverend G.D. Veck, as he styled himself – that day, but he would be put under surveillance in the hope that he might lead the police to Hammond or others involved in the case, which was now looking much more complicated.

Abberline was aware of the growing complexity of his new case, which was fast becoming a major inquiry, if not on the huge scale of the Jack the Ripper investigation the previous year. He wanted Hammond, who was at the centre of it all and the guiltiest party, in his eyes.

Intelligence would soon come in that Hammond had escaped to Paris, and Abberline wrote in his report of 18 July that Hammond was staying, care of a Madame de Foissard, at 8 Passage des Abbesses in the Montmartre area of the French capital. After consulting his police superiors and getting approval, Abberline asked the British government’s Home Office, which then, as now, had overall responsibility for policing, to request that the French government ‘assist in surrendering’ Hammond.2

When the Foreign Office replied to the Home Office’s request on 24 July, it can hardly have been the response that Abberline was expecting. Addressed to the Undersecretary of State at the Home Office, it revealed that the matter had gone to the very highest level – to the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, head of the incumbent Conservative government, who was also the Foreign Secretary and in charge of the Foreign Office:

The Marquis of Salisbury has given his careful consideration to your letter of the 22nd instant, relative to the case of Charles Hammond, charged with conspiracy to incite certain persons to commit unnatural offences, who is believed to have escaped to Paris. I am now directed to request you to inform Mr Secretary Matthews [Sir Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary] that His Lordship does not consider this to be a case in which any official application could justifiably be made to the French Government for assistance in surrendering the fugitive to this country.3

This decision would have been passed from the Home Secretary to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner James Monro and then down to Inspector Abberline on the ground. It was an inexplicable decision. There was so much evidence against Hammond, and from multiple witnesses. Both Monro and Abberline would feel very frustrated but very aware that hidden and far more powerful forces than them were in play. Hammond knew many unsavoury and shocking facts about some very prominent people and it was obvious that special treatment was being applied to prevent him divulging what he knew.

But Abberline just wanted to uphold the law. He didn’t give up and by the beginning of August would find himself on a steamship to France to try to bring Hammond back.

Three

No verified photograph of Fred Abberline has ever been found, there are only newspaper sketches illustrating reports of his investigations. He wasn’t a Londoner. Although he spent much of his life policing and roaming the dark back alleys of the East End, as well as the upmarket thoroughfares of the West End, Abberline was born on 8 January 1843 in Blandford Forum in the county of Dorset, in the south-west of England, just over 100 miles (163km) from the capital.

Blandford Forum had been known for lacemaking, brewing and malting (turning grain into malt) in the Georgian period. Most of the town’s buildings that Fred knew in the mid-nineteenth century were built in this era, after a major fire flamed through the town in 1731, destroying the earlier premises. The Abberline family lived at No. 116 East Street in the town – a very long road.

Fred’s father Edward was a saddler by trade, and was latterly a local government official, while his mother Hannah (née Chin) was kept busy looking after Fred and his two older siblings, Harriett and Edward. His eldest sibling Eliza died in 1846, aged 12, when Fred was 3 years old. Edward senior died in 1850, aged 49, three days after Fred’s seventh birthday, and from then on, Hannah also ran a shop to support her family.

Fred’s entry into the world of work saw him apprenticed to a clocksmith, learning how to make and mend clocks, but this was very poorly paid and rendered him so impecunious it afforded him no life after he had contributed to the family upkeep. Having peaked in the late eighteenth century, the clockmaking industry was on the wane in Britain by the time Fred began his apprenticeship, and by the late 1850s Switzerland had become the hub of the artisan trade. For immediately financial and aspirational reasons, feeling the need to break away and build a career, penny dreadful fan Fred didn’t see his future in timepieces. His future was going to be in London.

In 1860, Blandford Forum took the first small step in leaving the coaching era behind when it connected to the burgeoning rail network, becoming part of the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway, two years later. The following year, Fred may well have made the first leg of his journey to the capital, when he left his family home. His sister Harriett had already left, so he said goodbye to his mother and brother Edward, aged 23 and a cabinetmaker, and moved there, three days short of his twentieth birthday. He joined the Metropolitan Police (‘the Met’), then just over three decades old, as a police constable, warrant number 43519, attached to ‘N’ Division in Islington, north-east London.

It was a stable career, with real opportunities for advancement, but it must have been a very adventurous step for Fred and a challenging change of environment, from a small provincial town (even almost a decade later in 1871, the population of Blandford Forum was just 3,900) to the sprawling, crime-ridden metropolis, where around 3.2 million resided when he began his policing career on 5 January 1863.

In 1866, three years after Fred Abberline joined, the Met had 6,839 police officers, and it was a force that was growing fast, more than doubling to 14,191 officers by 1887. He would soon prove to be temperamentally suited to policing and would develop a rare rapport in the areas he patrolled, forging links with locals and cultivating useful informants (known as ‘auxiliaries’ then), a Victorian ‘community’ policeman, identifying ‘hooks’ (pickpockets) and ensuring that all kinds of miscreants were ‘piped off’ (put under surveillance).

In the Islington Gazette