by Trow, M. J.
The French, always anxious to believe the worst about the British, understood the Thames to be the country’s suicide capital. In the late eighteenth century the writer Pierre Grosley suggested that the clutter of wharves and boatyards along the banks was an attempt to deflect would-be suicides from throwing themselves in. In earlier times of course, when the country was still Catholic, suicide was a mortal sin – the soul of a suicide would not find heaven and the body could not be interred in holy ground. Alice de Waynewick nevertheless jumped into the river at Dowgate ‘being non compos mentis’.12 Some suicides no doubt imagined that drowning would be quick and painless, rather like falling asleep. The reality is different. ‘Lord, Lord,’ Shakespeare’s Duke of Clarence says in Richard III while awaiting his murder in the Tower, ‘methought what pain it was to drown; what dreadful noise of water in mine ears’. Samuel Pepys was told by a waterman in February 1666 of the inn-keeper of the Bear near London Bridge who had suicidal tendencies and eventually succeeded. Twenty years later, the son of Sir William Temple, Secretary for War, leapt into the crashing waters under London Bridge with his pockets full of stones. This was at the point called the maelstrom, where the river is particularly dark and the eddies whirl with a malevolence of their own.
Peter Ackroyd cites a number of nineteenth-century suicides. It was perhaps the speed of that century’s growth in London, and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, which made ‘jumpers’ more frequent than before. At Henley, a footman whose own brother had died in a drowning accident, drowned himself in a bathing costume. A working man, distraught at the death of his baby, tied his hands and feet so that he could not struggle against the current. Perhaps three or four bodies were recovered each week, although it is difficult to be sure of the cause of death. The ‘Bridge of Sighs’ of which Thomas Hood wrote was a swing bridge near St Peter’s church in the docks. Waterloo Bridge came to be known as Lover’s Leap or the Bridge of Sorrow because of the large numbers of such incidents there. Later in the century a boat was moored nearby, specially adapted to haul bodies into it. In 1882 544 bodies were recovered from the Thames. Of these 277 received open verdicts at the coroners’ inquests, sometimes because no one came forward to identify them. Saddest of all were the newly born infants found floating in a world that could not afford to keep them.
One of the saddest suicides was that of Montague John Druitt, who has been put forward since the 1960s as a possible suspect for the Whitechapel murders of the 1880s which are bound inextricably with the central theme of this book. The evidence against Druitt is almost non-existent; his name occurs in the infamous Macnaghten Memoranda, random jottings by the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard written in 1894 and naming three innocent men as possible suspects, Druitt among them. His suicide however is beyond doubt. At about one o’clock on the afternoon of Monday 31 December 1888, waterman Henry Winslade found his body floating in the river near Thorneycroft’s Wharf, Chiswick. Constable George Moulson, the first policeman on the scene, searched the body and found two cheques drawn on the London and Provincial Bank, two first-class railway tickets, a pair of gloves, a gold watch and £2 17s 2d in cash. Most telling of all were the four large stones in each of the overcoat pockets.
At the inquest held at the Lamb Tap pub in Chiswick three days later, a note was read out which had been found at Druitt’s chambers (he was a barrister): ‘Since Friday I felt I was going to be like mother and the best thing for me was to die.’ In the previous July his mother Ann had been admitted to the Brooke Asylum for Lunatics in Clapton. This pattern, with its inevitable conclusion of suicide ‘while the balance of the mind was disturbed’, was all too common along the river reaches.
Cashing in on this grisly situation were the dredgermen, whose work Charles Dickens describes in Our Mutual Friend. The social commentator Henry Mayhew wrote:
Dredgers are the men who foul almost all the bodies of persons drowned. If there be a reward offered for the recovery of a body, numbers of dredgers will at once endeavour to obtain it … no body recovered by a dredgerman ever happens to have any money about it, when brought ashore.13
Five shillings was paid to anyone collecting bodies from the Surrey side of the river. They were photographed by the 1890s and taken to a variety of mortuaries, like St George’s in the East or Whitechapel Infirmary Workhouse in Eagle Place. Members of the public could visit to identify corpses and collect clothing and belongings. After that anyone unclaimed was buried in a pauper’s grave.
The men who policed the river, whose job it was to cope with its crime and violence, were traditionally two inches shorter than their counterparts in the Met and their institution, later called Thames Division, was thirty years older. Their motto was Primus Omnium (First of All) and they are probably the world’s oldest police force.
By the 1790s the Port of London, even before the building of the sprawling docks, was the busiest and richest in the world. Three-quarters of the country’s trade goods, estimated to be worth about £75 million a year, passed up the river and the whole area was lawless. Gangs known as ‘light horsemen’ robbed unarmed vessels of their goods before they could be unloaded. Others connived with corrupt revenue officers to cream off a portion of the cargo, aided by unscrupulous watermen and ‘lumpers’ (dockers). An estimated £500,000 was lost in revenue to the government each year. By day, ‘heavy horsemen’, with special pockets sewn inside their trouser legs, wobbled precariously on the decks of their barges and wherries, weighed down with sugar, tea and coffee which were still luxury commodities with a huge tax on them.
The goods were usually passed to receivers in the pubs and brothels along the shore and the savagery of the ‘bloody code’ by which men and women could be hanged for even minor offences meant that, in the rare event of a court case, juries would usually fail to convict.
Into this chaos stepped two men whose unlikely partnership drew a line in the sand as far as river crime was concerned. Patrick Colquhoun had had a full and varied career as a businessman trading with the American colonies before settling first in Glasgow as one of the city’s leading commercial lights and then in London as a stipendiary magistrate. John Harriott had been both a naval and an army officer before a musket ball smashed his thigh on service with the East India Company. He then settled in Essex as Surveyor of Roads. Both men became caught up in various defence roles during the war against Revolutionary France, but in 1795 Colquhoun published A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis recommending the creation of a river police. Living at Wapping, he had ample opportunity to see at first hand the ‘depredations which have been heretofore experienced’ but ‘improving the morals of the maritime labourers’14 was probably a pious hope.
Three years later Colquhoun and Harriott were effectively given the task of cleaning up the Port of London. Their headquarters was 259 Wapping High Street, the back of which overlooked the river. Funding for their work was provided partly by the government and partly by the shipping companies who had been losing so much profit by the vast scale of theft.
The original River Police was made up of surveyors, land officers, constables and quay guards, together with the more reliable watermen and lumpers. They were armed with cudgels, cutlasses and firearms which must only be used in self-defence. At the top of the institutional tree the six surveyors received between £75 and £100 a year each, considerably better pay relatively than the detectives of other divisions who would work on the torso cases seventy years later. At the bottom, the watermen received £1 3s a week plus 10 percent of the contraband recovered. The great pressures on police forces – succumbing to drunkenness and bribe taking – would be met with dismissal. Ship’s captains could request the presence of constables on board their vessels while moored anywhere along the river, working alongside customs officers to reduce smuggling and outright theft. Lanterns in the ship’s rigging showed the presence of a constable at night to deter would-be thieves.
The River Police were still essentially a private security force.
Attempts at creating a fully organized, government-funded body of men to replace the wholly inadequate system of parish constables (‘charlies’)15 had always foundered, not only on the cost but on the average Englishman’s belief that such a force would be used as a private army by the government of the day. Despite this opposition, however, an Act of Parliament created the Thames Marine Police in July 1800. By the time Robert Peel at the Home Office created the Met (1829) the still separate River Police had three stations along the Thames. The original Middle Station was at Wapping; the Upper Station was on board the Port Mahon, moored off Somerset House; and the Lower Station was in a small building at Blackwall. Fifteen rowing galleys, each carrying a four-man unit, plied the river day and night between London Bridge and Deptford.
Ten years later in the increased centralization that was a marked characteristic of nineteenth-century government, the Marine Police disappeared into the expanding Met, to be called simply Thames Division. In some respects however, the River Police retained an air of individuality. They wore straw hats in the summer and reefer jackets with white shirts. Photographs taken as late as the 1890s appear to show men in police galleys in fancy dress, but it is actually official uniform.
A new Wapping police station was opened in 1872, with a yard alongside for the maintenance of the galleys. The Investigator replaced the Mahon in 1836 and after 1864 the Royalist (referred to in press reports on the torso murders) was moored off Blackwall. In the decade in which the torso murders began, Thames Division was divided into four watches, each six hours long, so that in effect the river was constantly patrolled. Plainclothesmen arrived in the form of one detective sergeant and three detective constables three years before the creation of Howard Vincent’s Criminal Investigation Department in 1878.
Like his more famous father, Dickens had definite views on the detective police on the Thames. He noted that arrests fell from 107 in 1875 to 88 the next year and 73 in 1877. At the beginning of the Ripper’s year (1888) Superintendent Skeats of Thames Division believed that this was the result of declining crime of all types because of the deterrent effect of his men. What is interesting is that Scotland Yard itself began to doubt the need for specialist river detectives. In fact when it was suggested in April 1884 that Thames Division’s jurisdiction be extended upriver to include patrols between Battersea Bridge and Teddington, the Commissioner asked for volunteers from T and V Divisions to row there on their rest days! The arrival of the torso killer should have made them all reconsider.
In May 1888, the force numbered 200 men led by a chief inspector. Under him were seven inspectors, forty sub-inspectors, 147 constables and five detectives. Two steam launches had been added to the fleet of twenty oar-driven galleys, one for use by a visiting superintendent (Skeats in 1888) and the other, called The Alert, to watch the bridges. An article in the Illustrated London News for that month noted grimly that the Waterloo police station had the largest share of suicides. The boat permanently moored there, as we have seen, had a special roller fitted to the stern to make hauling bodies out of the water easier. According to this account, there were twenty-five suicides in 1887 and Thames Division was able to prevent a further fifteen.
These people were charged – attempted or actual suicide was a crime until 1961 – and received what today we would call counselling from a prison chaplain. ‘If once they are rescued,’ said the police spokesman, ‘they seldom try the river again’ – although of course there is no way of tracing what other means they tried.
The Waterloo police station is described as ‘very cosy’. An inspector and his wife had private rooms there and there was a charge room and office. The reserve room was where the constables hung their oil skins and a special room, fitted with a bed and a bath with hot and cold water, was available for attempted suicides.
At Wapping, the Division’s headquarters, a collection of photographs was kept permanently of the bodies of those found drowned to aid identification.
Half a century later, Molly Lefebure was secretary to Dr Keith Simpson, the Home Office pathologist during the Second World War and found herself attending more crime scenes than any woman had done before. One routine day went:
Three cases at Hackney, one a suspected food poisoning, two at Walthamstow, one an old woman fell out of bed, the other an infanticide. A suicide at Wandsworth cut throat. Two straight cases and a drowner at Southwark.16
One unusual, river-related suicide she reported took place at Battersea in 1942. Among the gruesome souvenirs that ‘CKS’ collected was a heavy metal weight and a note which read ‘I expect you will find me over Battersea bridge – if you are interested.’ The note’s writer had fastened one end of the rope to the weight and the other around his neck. Police found his hanged body the next day.
But we are not concerned with suicides or accidental drowning or ancient votive offerings. We are concerned with murder and one series of murders in particular. In 1568 George Napier, a Jesuit priest operating clandestinely in what was now essentially a Protestant country, was hanged, drawn and quartered at Oxford. His severed body was thrown without ceremony into the Thames but by the time it reached Sandford, three miles to the south, it had, according to certain eyewitnesses, become whole again.
This would not happen to the torso killer’s victims – their bodies remained separate for ever.
Chapter 3
‘Found Dead’: Rainham, May 1887
It was a little after dawn on Wednesday 11 May 1887 that lighterman Edward Hughes saw something floating in the water. In common with thousands of men along the Thames, his job was to transfer goods aboard the flat-bottomed barges called lighters, from ship to shore. In the May of 1887, Hughes was working in the Victoria Dock that ran from Bugsby’s Reach where the Greenwich Marshes jutted north and made the river bend to Albert Docks lying alongside.
That morning, Hughes was on his barge lying alongside the jetty at Hempleman’s Factory. The ebb tide was flowing fast by then and he hauled the floating bundle up on deck. Any experienced lighterman would not have found this odd. As we have seen, half London used the Thames as a dumping ground and it was not that unusual to find ‘floaters’ in the water. Writing a few years later, R Austin Freeman travelled through dockland in a steamer and noticed a rowing boat with three uniformed men in it.
Suddenly, the man in the stern stands up and all three stare fixedly at what appears to be a submerged basket floating down in mid-stream … As they reach it the coxswain takes a length of thin rope and seizes the floating object and for an instant a human head appears above the surface. Then the boat starts off again and we see that the line has been made fast to the derelict, now towed astern and rolling over and over at the end of the cord with a horrid semblance to life. We realize that the mysterious boat belongs to the Thames police and that presently another poster bearing the words ‘Found Dead’ will appear among the collection of bills which decorate the door of the riverside mortuary.1
Rainham appears as a small village in Domesday in 1087 and by the time of its ‘mystery’ in 1887 had a population of 1,669. The church of St Helen and St Giles was the only building standing from its medieval past. The wharf had been developed since the 1720s to carry farm produce upriver to London and a new one, with a retaining flood wall, had been built in 1872. The marshes here are only 5 feet above sea level, a situation made even wetter by the existence of the Ingrebourne Tributary at the western end of the parish. Frederick Hempleman & Co was one of several manufacturers clustered around the ferry area that produced artificial manure.
Hughes took the bundle ashore. It was a coarse canvas sack and in it was the pallid, waterlogged torso of a female. The arms, legs and head had gone and a section of both breasts had been hacked away. Horrified, Hughes sent a colleague for a policeman. He found Constable Stock of the Essex constabulary and they carried the remains to the ferry building. Unusually thorough for a provincial ‘copper’, Stock noted that the cord around the sack had been wound round several times and he g
ot a message through to his superior, Inspector Allen. A number of officers were detailed to search the area, knocking on doors, wading about in the shallow water, checking anywhere where other body parts could have lodged.
It was fairly obvious to the authorities that Rainham itself was a red herring. For all the press dubbed the finding of the woman’s remains the ‘Rainham Mystery’, the true source of that mystery probably lay much further upstream. But the law said that all corpses found in an area were that area’s responsibility and, as Rainham had no mortuary or coroner’s court, the torso was placed in a shed next to the Phoenix Hotel in readiness for the inquest which would open in the hotel on Saturday 14 May.
The coroner was C C Lewis, covering the South Essex district and once the jury were sworn, he explained the circumstances surrounding the finding of the torso. His first witness was Dr Edward Galloway, the police surgeon from nearby Barking (the Met’s R Division), who had carried out a post-mortem on the remains. In accordance with the medical practice of the time, he reported on what he saw and made various extrapolations later. The legs and thighs had been removed with a perfectly straight cut made with a very sharp saw, leaving the last two bones of the lumbar vertebrae, the tendons and muscle tissue around this having been cut by a keen-edged knife. The same blade had passed through and separated the abdominal wall. The upper portion of the breasts, the head, arms and legs had all been removed, the lower limbs taken cleanly out of their pelvic sockets by means of cutting obliquely from the inside to the out. All cuts were clean, with no signs of jadedness and the work, in Galloway’s opinion, was that of an expert. The fact that there was no sign of external violence – no extraneous cuts or bruising – meant that it was impossible to say exactly how the victim died.
