The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective

by Payne, Chris

  In addition to lotteries based on the outcome of horse races, which required no skill on the part of subscribers, Clarke also investigated those individuals who operated businesses in which cash bets were taken on individual horses selected by ‘punters’. In the first of these, Clarke tackled The Racing, Telegram and Commission Agency, run by William Wright from 19 York Street; this agency advertised that it would take bets on commission through the post. On 2 June 1869 Clarke forwarded a postal order for £1 to the agency to back ‘Cock of the Walk’, at 10:1 to win in the Royal Hunt Cup at Ascot. His colleague Detective Sergeant Lansdowne backed ‘See-Saw’ in the same race at 8:1 to win. If the choice of horses was based on the men’s undoubted experience of attending race meetings in the course of duty, they selected wisely. On the day of the race, in a large field of runners, See-Saw won, edging out Cock of the Walk by a neck, with both horses on closing odds of 100:30.63

  Overall, William Wright was the principal loser when his premises were raided and he was arrested for ‘keeping and using a betting house’. Despite arguing that no offence had been committed as ‘persons did not resort to the house in question’ (as all transactions were dealt with through the post), Wright was fined the maximum £100 at Bow Street Police Court.64 Loath to lose his business, he gave notice of appeal which, together with some other similar appeals, was heard on 22 January 1870 at the Court of Queens Bench. Clarke was cited as the Crown respondent in the appeal. In what was clearly a test of the robustness of the betting house legislation, and its interpretation by the police and the courts, the judgement was given to the Crown, with the appeal judges concluding that ‘all the cases belonged to that very class of cases which it was the object of the acts to suppress’.65

  As with the example of lotteries, the test case against Wright’s betting business and the failure of his appeal opened the door for further betting house prosecutions, whether they were based in houses, shops, pubs, clubs or conducted by post, and whether the operators were effectively bookmakers, tipsters or merely facilitated others to operate a bookmaking service on their premises. During the next six years, Clarke led prosecutions against at least ten further substantial betting operations.66 By 1876, and probably earlier, he had become so well known to the betting ‘trade’ that he was no longer able to be the front-man in the initial covert enquiries at betting premises as he was too easily recognised. Even when making postal applications to place a bet, he began to adopt a pseudonym and a different address (e.g. ‘Henry Lambert of 39 The Oval, Kennington’). As one of his detective colleagues, Sergeant (later Chief Inspector) George Greenham, was to say about him in 1877: ‘I should think he was pretty notorious, not only in the force, but among the betting people themselves – he was constantly appearing at the police courts in such cases.’67

  Some of the prosecutions opened the police and the courts to the criticism that there was ‘one law for the rich and one for the poor’. The classic example was the 1870 prosecution of the ‘Knightsbridge Exchange’, a betting club. Clarke first paid a covert visit to the premises at 4 Chapel Place, Brompton, on 18 August 1869, and learned that the organisation was essentially a working-man’s club in which members paid a 5s subscription to join; there were between 1,000 and 2,000 members. When he returned on 16 November with a membership card, he found that the yard at the premises contained a large assembly of people in which several bookmakers were accepting bets. There was then a gap of seven months before he returned overtly to the Exchange, on 20 June 1870, to inform the owners that they were breaking the law, and told them to close down their operations. When this request was ignored, the police raided the property in September and more than twenty men were arrested and brought before the courts.68 The delay and greater delicacy shown before taking action in this case is interesting, and the likely explanation is that the Treasury Solicitor, the police and Home Office were considering whether there could be difficulties in securing a conviction, and also whether they might be creating a rod for their own backs by proceeding. The latter was certainly the case as the upper-class racing club, Tattersalls, was run along similar lines, albeit in more salubrious premises, and yet appears to have received no police investigation. When the case was heard at Bow Street, the owners of the Knightsbridge Exchange were represented by William Ballantine. He pointed out that: ‘… a strong feeling existed why one class of people should with impunity be permitted to keep open a betting club while another of more humble extraction should be prosecuted for doing exactly the same thing.’69

  Notwithstanding these comments, eight of the defendants were fined for using the Brompton premises illegally as a betting house. The Times subsequently thundered in support of Ballantine’s view, in its leader column:

  … He is quite right. Unless the public are entirely deluded, betting transactions at Tattersalls are open to at least as much reprehension on the score of gambling as any that were carried on at ‘the Knightsbridge Exchange’ … We will not say that a substantial distinction between the two cases does not exist. But it certainly ought to be rendered more manifest. If people must bet, it is no doubt better they should do so lawfully than unlawfully. But it is impossible that the legality of a Betting Club can depend on the mere amount of the subscription, or on the exclusiveness of its members. That would simply be to say that poor men are to be heavily fined for practices which rich men may pursue with impunity.70

  However, no prosecution of Tattersalls followed and the subject continued to be a running sore in the sporting columns over the next few years, as in the Penny Illustrated Paper in 1876:

  Now, though it has grown trite enough to ask what moral difference there can be in betting under the roof of Messrs. Tattersall’s sacred establishment and in betting under any other roof, the injustice of dealing with this gambling evil cannot be too frequently protested against … either the patrician supporters of the turf ought to set an example of self-abnegation and at least give up betting in public, or … they surely ought to be made amenable to the same law which drags their poorer brethren … off to prison, or inflicts upon them severe fines.71

  Almost 120 years later, the historian Stefan Petrow concluded that ‘the state seemed determined to wallow in hypocrisy … It had no intention of making betting wholly illegal … yet it had no intention of making betting wholly legal’.72 In the meantime, the police, and Clarke in particular, were tasked with applying the law in this ambiguous situation. Clarke must have been acutely aware that those members of the lower classes who enjoyed a ‘flutter’ were not well served by the way in which the legislation was enforced, and it is probably this that prompted him in June 1874 to submit a report to Commissioner Henderson about betting stalls at Epsom racecourse. At this point, betting at racecourses was not suppressed, but Clarke had noticed that some landowners at Epsom had sub-let space to betting men ‘of the lowest kind and what are commonly termed “welshers”’.73 His concern was that these men could erect temporary stalls on sub-let land at the racecourse, take bets from working men and disappear with the takings before they had to pay out any winnings. He suggested that the landowners should be prosecuted and James Davis, the legal adviser to the Metropolitan Police, agreed. However, the legal opinion from Harry Poland demonstrates something of the philosophy underlying the hypocritical and moralistic stance of the Home Office to betting. The following sentences are particularly instructive:

  I am of opinion that they [the Epsom landowners] can be successfully prosecuted under the Betting Act 1853 but whether they should be prosecuted, appears to me to be a question that requires much consideration … If the public find that they can bet with safety they are encouraged to bet, whereas if they find that they are cheated out of their money they are less likely to bet again…74

  So, Clarke’s well-intentioned proposal did not get the support he hoped for and no further action was taken.

  From the newspaper reports of gambling cases between 1869 and 1876, where Clarke was the principal investigating officer, at leas
t thirty-eight people were found guilty of betting house and lottery offences, and the average fine received by these individuals was £49 (equivalent to about £2,200 today). However, from information published in 1877 it appears that this probably represents less than half of his overall achievement in suppressing betting crime. The Home Office-led campaign that Clarke had to implement was regarded at the time as successful; Superintendent Williamson in 1877 described Clarke’s performance as one of ‘great industry, energy and skill’.75 Many businesses were closed down. However, others were set up overseas or in Scotland (which had been omitted from the 1853 Act, a loophole that was closed by the Betting Houses Act 1874).76 In addition, some individuals also decided that they should devise more profitable, albeit fraudulent, betting schemes and it would be these men who would provide the criminal fraternity’s nemesis for Clarke. Ultimately, Clarke’s part in the effective suppression of betting houses and the public profile that came with it would prove to be his poisoned chalice; but he would not know that until 1877.

  Offences Against Children

  On 29 July 1869 the detective department at Scotland Yard received an anonymous letter, signed ‘One Who Knows’. The contents related to abortion (which was illegal at that time) and infanticide, and made the following claims: ‘A woman named Martin, residing at 33 Dean Street, Soho is in the habit of procuring abortion and boasts of having murdered 555 infants during the last 18 months … This woman is the greatest criminal in London; her house is a house where abortion and child murder is openly carried on!’77 Inspector Druscovich was given charge of subsequent enquiries, keeping strict observation of Mrs Martin’s movements, but failed to obtain sufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution. In September or thereabouts, press exposure caused Mrs Martin to move to Woking where she died suddenly on 29 November. In his concluding report, Druscovich commented: ‘There is no doubt that the accusations against Mrs. Martin were well founded but it was impossible to obtain the necessary evidence in consequence of her extreme caution and the fact of the law holding both parties to transactions equally amenable.’78 Here, Druscovich was referring to the fact that any abortionist, and any pregnant mother securing an abortion, would be held equally liable in law at that time. Any case taken to court would effectively require convincing evidence from a third party to secure a conviction.

  At a time when effective birth control methods were not available, and where prostitution was rife, unwanted pregnancies and unwanted children were commonplace. The problem in 1869 was not a new one but that year seems to have marked a point at which the police started to take some action. For a pregnant woman in the mid-Victorian era who did not want to give birth or to keep their child, the options were stark. She could obtain an illegal abortion; murder the child; abandon the child at a workhouse or other refuge; or place the child with other women who, for a fee, would look after it. The term ‘baby farming’ came into popular usage in the second half of the 1860s to describe situations where women accepted payment in exchange for the care of children who were not their own, a process that was unregulated at the time.79 Many women with unwanted pregnancies were often close to poverty themselves, and the majority were not able to provide sufficient funds for the adequate care of their child. However, despite the grim connotations that have become associated with the term ‘baby farming’, some unwanted and ‘foster’ children were successfully placed in environments where they appear to have been well treated. Clarke had an example of such a situation within his own extended family. His youngest sister-in-law, Louisa McGregor, had married an agricultural labourer, John Spicksley, but the couple do not appear to have been able to have children. Instead, in 1861, Louisa and her husband were looking after four ‘nurse children’; sisters aged 8–13 years from a family in Brighton. How long the children stayed with Louisa and John is uncertain, but at least one of the sisters, Caroline Best, went on to become a governess in later life.

  The criminal options to dispose of unwanted foetuses and children were abortion and murder. There were suspicions at the time that the individuals involved in both methods were the same, and the activities of midwives in particular came under considerable, and often undue, suspicion.80 However, it is clear that there was a high level of infanticide (probably under-reported) amongst the murder victims of that period, and not only in London.81 There is a chilling report of a visit paid by a Mrs Meredith to women in Brixton Prison:

  Many of them [the women prisoners] killed more than one child. I discovered that there was a kind of sisterhood amongst them … I found a girl who had become a mother at sixteen, and who was taught to kill her child. She fully understands the art, and would, in my opinion, practise it again if she had an opportunity. In fact there are some women in the prison … who have quite a contempt for infant life, and who speak of their crime with a kind of triumph, being the subject of no shame whatever.82

  Even allowing for an element of Victorian sensationalism in this report, other evidence suggests that unwanted children were murdered with the help of women with experience in such matters.83

  By the time Clarke became involved in cases relevant to infanticide, baby farming and abortion, the Metropolitan Police had already made some progress. In the Brixton area a number of dead infants had been found in the streets in 1870, and Sergeant Richard Relf of W Division (Brixton) had been put on to the case. He had the good fortune to be able to connect the birth of a child in a ‘lying-in establishment’ (where some single mothers arranged to give birth) with the disposal of the infant from a baby farm run by Margaret Waters and her sister Sarah Ellis. When visiting the Waters and Ellis establishment, Relf found eleven emaciated and listless children (one of whom became known in the press as ‘Little Emily’). Pilloried by the press, the two women were originally charged with manslaughter, later changed to murder. On 24 September at the Old Bailey, Waters was found guilty of murder and was subsequently hanged on 11 October 1870; her sister was acquitted of murder but found guilty of obtaining money by false pretences and sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment.84 Sergeant Relf received a gratuity of £20 for his ‘exemplary conduct’ and a testimony from the Reverend Oscar Thorpe (vicar of Christ Church, Camberwell, and Secretary of the Infant Life Protection Society), as well as a request by Thorpe to Commissioner Henderson that Relf should be solely employed in investigating such cases as he had done such a good job.85

  Meanwhile, Druscovich had been making enquiries into Mary Hall of 6 Coldharbour Lane, Camberwell, who ‘accommodates young ladies during their confinement and it is believed that occasionally, by a certain process, succeeds in bringing the children into the world still born’; this case was transferred to Relf, at Druscovich’s suggestion. Although the Treasury abandoned a planned prosecution of Hall for murder because witnesses ‘would have to confess to being guilty of the same dreadful crime’, she was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and a £100 fine in December 1870.86

  By 7 October 1870, Clarke was investigating other allegations relating to baby farming and infanticide, producing reports on that day on two different cases. The first of these related to his investigation of alleged baby farming by a Mrs Clarke, 44 Palmerston Street, Battersea Fields:

  I beg to report that after making enquiries in the neighbourhood mentioned, I on Saturday last, went to Mrs. Clarke and asked her to let me see the children she had under her care. She replied, ‘I have now in my charge five children and you are perfectly welcome to see them’. I was then shewn into a back room where I found them, and the particulars relating to whom are as follows:

  Rosa Kettelty, age 10, Mercer Kettelty, age 7, Frank Kettelty, age 3½. These children were received by Mrs Clarke about the 5th Sept. 1869, from their Father, who is employed at Lloyds Newspaper Office, Fleet Street, and who pays 10/- per week for their support, such payments however not including the costs of their clothing and education.

  Frederick K. Giles, 14 months old, received 16th Nov. 1869, from a woman giving the
same name, but whose address she does not know, a weekly payment of 8/- is made by a gentleman signing himself K.L.M., Army and Navy Club.

  Bertie Church, age 6 years, received from her Mother a Miss Church, of 127 High St., Chatham, when about a month old. This child was supported by its Grandfather, who resided at the above address, and was an artisan in Chatham Dockyard; about 12 months since, in consequence of his being thrown out of employment, the payments ceased; he informed Mrs. Clarke he was no longer in a position to pay for the maintenance, and suggested it should be taken to the Workhouse. Mrs. Clarke having become attached to the Child, did not assent to this, and has kept it under her care.

  Mrs Clarke could have no intimation of my visit, for which she was entirely unprepared but I found the children decently clad, and to all appearances properly and sufficiently nourished.

  The elder child Rosa Kettelty whom I questioned is a well-grown intelligent girl, and in reply to my questions said she had sufficient food and was kindly treated … Mrs Clarke told me she had taken six children to nurse, as a means of support for the last eight years, and during that time had only lost one by death, which occurred two years since…87