The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective
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The London Metropolitan Police had been set up in 1829, the necessary legislation being driven through Parliament by the Home Secretary and later prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. The orthodox history of the force is that an incompetent and corrupt system of parish policing in pre–1829 London made it essential to establish a more effective and centrally organised police force for London.11 More recent historical analyses have questioned this perception of the ‘before and after’, though the details need not concern us here.12 After the enabling legislation was passed in Parliament, Peel had appointed two commissioners, responsible to the Home Office, to establish and manage the force. These were Colonel Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne. Rowan was 47, with a distinguished military record in the Napoleonic wars. Mayne was a 33-year-old Dublin-born barrister who had not held any administrative post. The appointments proved to be shrewd and effective ones and the two men worked well together right up to the time of Rowan’s retirement in 1850.13 From 1855 Mayne became the sole commissioner and operated in an increasingly autocratic manner until his death in 1868.14 Between 1862 and 1868, after joining the detective department at Scotland Yard, George Clarke found himself working in close proximity to Commissioner Mayne and at times received his orders directly from him.
The original Metropolitan Police district was a 10-mile radius from Charing Cross, excluding the City where a previously established City Police was retained under the City of London Corporation. The Metropolitan Police headquarters was established in Whitehall Place, adjoining Old Scotland Yard. The district was managed within several divisional areas, each headed by a superintendent; seventeen divisions were operational by May 1831 and by 1834 the number of London policemen was just short of 3,400.15 It was the two commissioners, Mayne and Rowan, who drew up and implemented the operational strategy for the force. Embodied in the early police instructions was the philosophy that the principal role of the Metropolitan Police would be to contribute towards crime prevention.16 Creation of a small plain-clothes detective force (focusing on crime detection) was delayed until 1842, not least because of political and public concerns that this would lead to a civilian-spy system similar to those found in some European countries, and further fears that men in plain clothes were more susceptible to corruption.17 These concerns were real in the minds of many people, and remained so for many years. James Davis, who was appointed in the 1870s as the legal adviser to the Metropolitan Police commissioner and worked on a daily basis with the detective department, expressed the following views to a Home Office Commission in 1877:
… the principle of having police in plain clothes is, in my opinion, an evil, and I think that their being in uniform is one of the greatest guarantees for good conduct. I may say that all action in plain clothes, which is to a certain extent a disguise, and where there is no public control over the officer in question, is an evil. No doubt there are exceptional cases where the advantages outweigh the evil, but I still think that a detective force, that is to say, men going about who are police officers not in uniform, is of itself a great evil.18
However, Davis did not allow his personal principles to prevent him ‘supping with the devil’ when at work.
The accountability of the force to the Home Office, rather than to local administrative authorities in London, was justified on the grounds that the police would need to perform tasks of national importance, such as protecting the monarch, the royal palaces, Parliament and public buildings, and protecting society from terrorist threats.19 Centralised government control ensured that functions additional to the prevention and detection of crime were added to the Metropolitan Police remit, to aid the smooth running of a variety of aspects of society. These included traffic regulation, the licensing of cabs and street-sellers, supervising the prevention of disease amongst farm animals (which were still numerous in London in the mid-nineteenth century) and implementing government legislation established to protect individuals from their own ‘moral weaknesses’ (including drunkenness and gambling).20
From the outset, efforts had been made to ensure that the all-male police was not regarded as a militaristic organisation. This started with the selection of the policeman’s uniform, which initially consisted of top hats and blue swallowtail coats with the minimum of decoration, in contrast to the colourful military uniforms of the time.21 A future police colleague of Clarke’s, Timothy Cavanagh, was not impressed by the uniform, describing it retrospectively as ‘a cross between that worn by the ex-Emperor Zoolooki of the Squeejee Islands, and the policeman in the pantomime’.22 Apart from the uniform, some other operational aspects of the force were closer to a military regime, including the hierarchical structure. In addition, many of the commanding officers were former soldiers, and constables were subjected to strict discipline and had to cope with ceremonial drill and its associated cleaning and polishing.23 One consequence of the strict discipline was a high turnover of policemen. Of the 2,800 constables serving in May 1830, only 562 remained in the force by 1834 – drunkenness being one major problem. As late as 1865 the annual staff turnover rate in the Metropolitan Police was still high at 13.5 per cent.24
The work was also uncomfortable and often dangerous, and recruitment mainly attracted unskilled or at best semi-skilled labourers who would be less discouraged by these features of the job and the low pay.25 Constables were paid 21s a week, of which 2s were deducted for section house accomodation. Sergeants received 22s and 6d a week. All ranks were required to give their whole time to the service, wearing their uniforms on and off duty and, even if they matched the qualification criteria for the electoral roll, policemen were not entitled to vote.26
It is always difficult to make meaningful comparisons between the comparative values of salaries, not least because of the differences in living standards and taxation regimes between eras but, using one comparator, the annual salaries of a constable and sergeant in 1830 would be worth approximately £2,700 and £2,900 in 2010.27 Little wonder that Peel’s new police were regarded as underpaid by modern standards. However, for Victorian labourers (including those from the agricultural sector who would only be drawing that scale of wage in the weeks when work was available) a job in the police gave them continuity of employment, and large numbers applied to join. Of 5,056 individuals recruited into the Metropolitan Police between 1840 and 1900, 48 per cent were labourers, of which 24 per cent were from the agricultural sector. From a regional perspective only 18 per cent of all recruits were from the London area, a further 24 per cent were from the Home Counties and 42 per cent from the other English counties, with the remaining 16 per cent from Scotland, Wales, Ireland or abroad.28
Applications from men like Clarke were welcomed:
From the first day of the Metropolitan Police, the policy pursued, in recruiting for the force, was to endeavour to get men from the agricultural community, not only because of the superior physique of the rural worker, but because countrymen without previous experience of town life, made more trustworthy policemen than those who were London bred and might be described as knowing too much about London. The countryman’s mind had the advantage, from the point of view of those who had to train him as a constable, of being fallow and not ‘infertile’; the Londoner’s might be more fertile, but it was usually far from fallow.29
The establishment of the new police in 1829 was not greeted with much enthusiasm by Londoners (and the same could be said for the press of the day). When Londoners joined they not infrequently found that their decision had distanced or even ex-communicated them from their families and friends.30 However, by 1840 perceptions of the force had started to improve somewhat, largely through the efforts of Rowan and Mayne in establishing clear operational procedures and high standards. Indeed, as early as 1834 a Parliamentary Select Committee report described the new police as one of the most valuable modern institutions.31 In addition, though policemen remained the butt of many a joke and still encountered some public anger, the increasing adoption by the press and public of the more affecti
onate nickname of ‘Bobbies’ for police constables (rather than the more dismissive ‘Peelers’) suggested that some of the initial hostility had eroded.
In 1839 a second Metropolitan Police bill extended the district of the Metropolitan Police to a radius of 15 miles from Charing Cross, and the force’s manpower was increased to 4,300 to accommodate this. In 1829 the infamous Bow Street Runners had originally been retained as a distinctive body, but they had functioned more as a private detective agency than a public service and there was confusion over the powers of the Metropolitan Police commissioners vis-à-vis the chief magistrate of Bow Street. Following the 1839 legislation the Runners were disbanded and were offered the opportunity to transfer into the Metropolitan Police, though it seems that few did.32 Other changes in the new legislation meant that the stipendiary (paid) magistrates of London lost their police role and their offices were transformed into the Metropolitan Police Courts, including Bow Street and twelve other such courts.33 By the time that George Clarke decided to apply to join the Metropolitan Police, the essential elements that he would encounter in his career, with the exception of the creation of a detective department, had been put in place.
The Uniformed Policeman
George Clarke, warrant number 16834, formally joined the force on 6 April 1840 at Scotland Yard. Of the eight new recruits listed alongside his name that day, only George Clarke was still in the police fifteen years later, the others having variously resigned or been dismissed.34 For Clarke to have been accepted, he had satisfied several recruitment criteria. His testimonials must have proved satisfactory, and a brief medical examination had ensured that he was physically fit and ‘intelligent’ and met the minimum height requirement of 5ft 7in.35 He had also needed to demonstrate that he could read and write and was able to understand what he had read. Aged 21, he was comfortably below the maximum recruitment age of 30.36 During the early recruitment of constables for the force, only one in three applicants met these basic criteria.37 Successful applicants such as Clarke were then sent for basic training, during which wages were 10s a week. Each preparatory class numbered about thirty men who were required to parade at the Wellington Barracks drill ground for several hours each day, six days a week, for a fortnight. Close-order drill and sabre practice constituted the bulk of this training, which was supplemented by two afternoon lectures by a superintendent and a considerable amount of legal material to be learnt by rote. Following this, the new constable patrolled with an experienced man for about a week; he was then moved to his division and sent out on his own.38
Clarke was allocated to S Division (Hampstead), one of the larger divisions in terms of area and at the time relatively rural. S Division had four police stations located at Hampstead, Albany Street, Portland Town and Barnet; Clarke may have initially been located at Barnet or Hampstead, but was probably later transferred to Albany Street. Initially, as a single man, it is likely that he lived in lodgings or in a section house together with other constables.
The principal means by which the new Metropolitan Police delivered its crime-prevention strategy was to give police constables the responsibility for a ‘beat’, which they patrolled in a regulated fashion.39 The day’s duties started with a short parade followed by daily orders being read out by a sergeant. Constables like Clarke had to write up their reports in their own time and until 1854 they were also drilled twice a week, all year long. After that year their drill was reduced to an hour a week in good weather during the summer only.40 Individual beats would vary in length from about 2 miles to 7.5 miles, being longer in rural areas and shorter during the night, with approximately two-thirds of the men placed on night duty at any one time. Beats had to be walked at a steady 2.5mph (to assist timed checks by supervising sergeants). During the day the constable would patrol on the kerb side of the pavement, but at night they would switch to the inner side of the pavement to enable them to check more easily the security of bolts and fastenings on properties. Despite their training in the use of sabres these would have been issued only when dealing with serious disorder; Clarke, on his beat, would only have been armed with a truncheon and a rattle to summon help.41
The workload of a constable and its physical and mental demands were considerable and unremitting, and the frequent solace of drink as an alleviator of pain and boredom was to some extent understandable. They were on duty seven days a week, only had one (unpaid) week’s holiday a year and no absolute entitlement to a pension.42 The records of those retired policemen fortunate enough to be pensioned-off frequently includes the phrase ‘worn out’ as the sole medical reason for their retirement. However, in reality the force had little charity for malingerers and as a deterrent police absent through sickness or injury had their pay deducted by 1s a day, increasing to 2s a day after three months’ absence.43 In 1868 a Home Office departmental committee report on the Metropolitan Police acknowledged that:
The duty of a constable is very severe; if on night duty he goes on duty at 10 p.m. and remains on his legs till 6 a.m.; he then goes back to rest, but has in the course of the day frequently to attend at the police court as a witness, and also occasionally to be at drill, walking sometimes a considerable distance to and from the drill ground. Dr Farr calculates that on average a constable on night duty walks 16 miles … A constable is 10 hours on a day beat, viz., from 6 to 9 a.m. and again from 3 to 10 p.m. and during this period he walks according to Dr Farr’s calculations, 20 miles.44
George Clarke survived the work regime of a constable in S Division for a relatively long period (thirteen years) before he was promoted to sergeant on 27 May 1853, at which time his weekly wage was increased to £1 4s. His brother Henry, who joined in March 1845, remained a constable for fourteen years in N Division (Islington) before receiving promotion. Both brothers were put in the shade, however, by youngest brother John, who joined N Division in April 1856 and became a sergeant only five years later.45 Yet long before George Clarke became a sergeant, he had also acquired a wife.
On 18 November 1843 at the parish church, Islington, Clarke married Elizabeth McGregor, the 19-year-old daughter of John and Elizabeth McGregor from Chipping Barnet. How George Clarke and Elizabeth met is unknown, but if Clarke was indeed located at Barnet Police Station they may have met on his beat (though constables were told to avoid conversation with women while on duty). There could be another explanation, as Elizabeth’s eldest brother, John, was ‘known to the police’ having been sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment in April 1842 for housebreaking.46
A constable had to get permission to marry and, presumably, the authorities that vetted Clarke’s future wife dismissed any concerns about her errant brother, or were perhaps kept unaware of his criminal tendencies. The marriage was unlikely to have improved their financial situation as a police officer’s wife was not supposed to take paid work, further testing the ability for two to live on a constable’s meagre wage, only supplemented by the regular income and a uniform. In addition, Elizabeth did not have any significant financial resources of her own. Her father was an agricultural labourer and, when he died of pneumonia in April 1855, her mother died only a few months later at the Union Workhouse at Chipping Barnet. Despite the difficulties that the young newlyweds must have had in managing on a tight budget they remained together until death intervened. Between 1845 and 1859 they had five children, three boys and two girls, during which time they rented rooms in Highgate and later St John’s Wood, before moving to Great College Street, Westminster, during the 1860s.47
Clarke’s main duties as a constable would have been in crime prevention, but there were occasions when he had to deal with individuals who had committed a criminal offence. The British legal system entitles the victims of a crime to initiate prosecutions but, increasingly during the nineteenth century, the police replaced the victim as the prosecutor in many cases.48 Offenders were brought before one of three principal courts: petty sessions, quarter sessions or assizes. The least serious offences could be dealt with summarily by m
agistrates sitting alone or in pairs; in metropolitan London such offences would have been handled in the thirteen police courts established by the 1839 legislation. These courts also decided whether there was sufficient evidence in other, more serious cases to refer them to a higher court. Quarter sessions dealt with these, with verdicts being decided by juries and sentences by magistrates. The most serious cases were entrusted to judges and juries at the assizes. The London equivalent of the assizes was the Old Bailey, which had been re-housed in 1834 in the new Central Criminal Court.49 This was a court which George Clarke would get to know well.
So, what type of criminal cases did Police Constable George Clarke get involved with? This is not as easy a question to answer as it sounds, not least because no relevant divisional records appear to have survived and, until the wider proliferation of newspapers from about 1855 onwards, press coverage was patchy. Additionally, George Clark(e) was a reasonably common name in the population so, even when case records refer to policemen with this name as investigating officers or witnesses, it cannot be certain that the reference is to ‘our’ man. Indeed, there were at least four other serving policemen in the Metropolitan Police with the name George Clark(e) during the 1840s and 1850s. Two of these suffered abrupt conclusions to their career. On 29 June 1846 a Police Constable George Clark was found murdered, his body shockingly mutilated and lying in a field in Dagenham. The murderer was never found.50 In 1854 another Police Constable George Clarke (G Division, Finsbury) also had an unfortunate encounter with the potential hazards of the job, and was retired from the force after ‘an injury to the spine and testicles’ following a fall on to iron railings at Dalby Terrace, City Road. By comparison, the more fortunate third George Clarke (M Division, Southwark) was pensioned off on 14 May 1853 merely for being ‘worn out and unfit for further service’. The fourth only joined the force on 3 August 1858 and was located in R Division, Greenwich.51 None of these officers served in S Division, and this improves the odds that any references involving Police Constable/Sergeant George Clark(e) within the S Division area between 1841 and 1862 are attributable to the Chieftain.