by Bruce Wexler
London’s Old Bailey was the highest court in the land. The present building dates from 1902 and was built on the site of the infamous Newgate Prison. The statue on the top of the dome is of Lady Justice who holds a sword in her right hand as a symbol of the power to punish, and a set of scales in her left symbolizing the power of equity.
A mounted policeman’s baton used to control crowds and rioters.
Ex –policeman James Berry was the official hangman for eight years between 1884 and 1892. His position gained him a macabre celebrity.
Charles Dickens wrote about the severity of the legal system in his novels.
Magwich the convict attacks Pip in the graveyard on the Cooling Marshes in Dickens’s Great Expectations.
For criminals sentenced to custodial sentences, prison conditions were dreadful. As author Charles Dickens wrote, “At the time, jails were much neglected.” Most prisoners were obliged to pay for their food and lodging, and the sight of prisoners begging from visitors was commonplace. They were also obliged to pay a release tariff at the end of their sentence. If they had no means of raising the money, they were simply left in goal.
In fact, Charles Dickens had received an all-too-intimate glimpse of the prison system at the age of twelve, when his father spent three months in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. As was usual, the entire family was forced to join him there, although the unfortunate Charles was sent to work in a shoe-blacking factory during the day. His brush with the wrong side of the law gave him a lifelong obsession with prison and the British legal system, and they appear in all his major novels. But it is his sympathetic biography of the convict Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations that gives us perhaps his most extraordinary insight into the English criminal justice system in the mid-nineteenth century. Its insight into the criminal mind is extraordinarily sympathetic for the time in which it was written (between 1852 and 1853). Caught stealing turnips as a child, Magwitch spends his entire life “In jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail,” for increasingly vicious crimes. In effect, he becomes a victim of a brutal system designed to punish rather than rehabilitate: “I’ve been done everything to, pretty well – except hanged. I’ve been locked up … (and) carted here and carted there… stuck in stocks, and whipped and worried and drove.” Britain finally turns his back on Magwitch altogether, and he is transported to the penal colony in New South Wales, Australia. (This practice was reserved for only the most serious criminals in 1853.) Returning to England, he only misses being hung by dying of natural causes. Dickens shows how despite his dreadful life, Magwitch has a spark of true goodness, and suggests that more humane treatment could have fostered, rather than extinguished this. As his fame and influence grew, Dickens became heavily involved in the movement to reform British prisons, and travelled to America examine the various penitentiary systems prevalent at the time.
“I’ve been done everything to, pretty well — except hanged. I’ve been locked up . . . (and) carted here and carted there. . . stuck in stocks, and whipped and worried and drove.”
MAGWITCH, DICKEN’S Great Expectations
The infamous Newgate jail where public executions were popular spectacles until the 1860s.
A Victorian prison warder holds a cell door open.
The inside of a preserved police cell. An iron latch runs across the inspection hatch of its solid door.
Once inside, a wooden tray was the only concession to comfort.
The Victorian period saw extensive rioting and the mounted police were often deployed.
The birch was used as a means of punishment until the 1950s. Scenes like this flogging at Newgate Prison were commonplace.
As well as prison, convicts could be subjected to a fearful range of capital and corporal punishments. Flogging was commonplace, and boys as young as eight were hung right up until the 1850s. Public executions persisted until 1868, and even heavily pregnant women were not spared. A good view at London’s Newgate hanging ground was a highly desirable commodity, and could change hands for as much as ten pounds.
By the end of the century, the prison system had changed dramatically. In place of filth, starvation, and degradation, the prisons were models of a new kind of equally oppressive regime. In the “silent system,” prisoners spent most of their time alone in their cells, stripped of their personal identity, known only by a number, and dressed in prison uniform. Their punishment was manual labour, the “hard” labour of rock breaking and excavation for serious criminals, while shorter-term prisoners and men convicted of less serious offences learned various menial trades, such as shoe mending.
Flogging was commonplace, and boys as young as eight were hung right up until the 1850s.
Leg irons were used to restrain prisoners in Victorian times.
Two examples of handcuffs, or “Darbys”as they were known. These are from the collection of the Kent Police Museum. Every police constable would carry a pair.
City Road Police station in the late nineteenth century. It was one of several large, inner city police stations built to control crime. Four officers stand proudly in the front portal.
The Scales of Justice stone tablet, which appears on the wall of the building.
The imposing portal of Bow Street police station complete with its ornate metal lamps, which were white instead of the usual blue reportedly at the request of Queen Victoria, who used to visit the nearby Royal Opera House.
A famous name in crime detection in London, Bow Street was the home of the original Bow Street Runners. This body of men was eventually absorbed into the Metropolitan Police Force, but its name lived on in the magnificent police station and Magistrates court that now occupy the site.
In place of filth, starvation, and degradation, the prisons were models of a new kind of equally oppressive regime. In the “silent system,” prisoners spent most of their time alone in their cells, stripped of their personal identity, known only by a number, and dressed in prison uniform.
Local police stations were usually live-in affairs with police staff domiciled on site. They were an important element in the hierarchy of Victorian crime fighters.
Despite the gradual modernization that was instigated in the penal system, the courts, and the police force in the mid-nineteenth century, famous miscarriages of justice continued to occur. As we know, Conan Doyle himself was instrumental in having Oscar Slater and George Edalji released from prison, although his other cause celebre, Sir Roger David Casement was executed in Pentonville Prison in 1916.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Metropolitan Police Force had begun to use various kinds of equipment that would become universally recognizable. The first horse drawn van specifically for transporting prisoners was introduced in 1858. Dark in color, these became known as “Black Marias.”
A lithograph of a Black Mariah from the Illustrated Police News.
The celebrated Black Mariah discharges its prisoners. The V.R. stands for Victoria Regina, Queen Victoria.
A fragment of one of a number of letters sent to the police, and other authority figures, that claimed to be from Jack the Ripper. As a postscript, the sender adds a final taunt “Catch me if you can.” Some of these letters were judged to be authentic, because they contained details of the murders known only to the police and the perpetrator himself.
Police officers themselves were also drawn from a higher caliber of recruits as respect for the institution grew. They also became taller, as the standard height for officers was increased to 5 feet 8 inches in 1870 (except in the Thames Division, for some obscure reason). Men at the top of the profession, such as Commissioner Richard Mayne (appointed in 1855), were highly paid; he drew an annual salary of £1,883, a very considerable sum at this time. His two assistant commissioners were paid £800 each. At the same time, Superintendents received £200 per annum; Inspectors were paid £100, Sergeants £58, and Constables a mere 19 shillings each week. The entire organization of the “Met” cost £240,000 a year.
Challenges to the police force were also growing. This was a period of severe unrest and rioting, and 3,200 officers were needed in 1865 to control a serious riot in Hyde Park, central London. Twenty-eight officers were permanently disabled in the fray, and a stone struck even Commissioner Mayne. In the end, the army was called in to restore order. Rather less seriously, there was an epidemic of linen theft from washing lines, and Constables were asked to “call at the houses of all persons on their beats having wet linen in their gardens, and caution them of the risk they run in having them stolen.”
1872 saw the first strike by Metropolitan officers, and several men were disciplined (although they were allowed to return to the force). New police stations were continually opened during this period, including New Scotland Yard itself in 1875. Three years later, the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) was established under Charles Vincent, the newly appointed Director of Criminal Investigations.
Further “Divisions” were created in 1879, so that there were a total of 26.
The lurid front page of the Police News demands “Two more Whitechapel horrors, when will the murderer be captured?” Note the bull’s-eye lamp that the policeman is shining on the victim’s face—it is the same type as that illustrated on page 109.
The 1880s were a particularly difficult decade for the Metropolitan police force. As well as encountering extremely serious riots and civil unrest, Scotland Yard itself was bombed by the Fenians in 1884, in an attack targeted on the Special Irish Branch of the force. In 1885, more bombs exploded at both the Tower of London and the Houses of Parliament, and the Trafalgar Square riots of 1886 and 1887 led to the resignation of two police Commissioners (Sir Edmund Henderson and Sir Charles Warren).
True Crime
Perhaps the most serious crisis to face Scotland Yard during this period was case of Jack the Ripper. Between 1888 and 1891, a total of eleven women, mostly prostitutes, were butchered in frenzied and psychotic attacks in the East End district of London. Their bodies were grotesquely mutilated and body parts and organs removed. The Ripper case was the first serial killing ever investigated by the Met, and they had only limited success. Despite a team of officers of the highest rank and calibre being brought in from Scotland Yard to supervise the local division, and a raft of suspects being arrested, no conviction was secured for the murders. Despite over a century of investigation, they remain unsolved to this day. Even worse, “saucy Jack” taunted the police with their failure, submitting jaunty accounts of his “Whitechapel Murders” to the newspapers. The ultimate insult to the police came in October 1888, when the headless torso of one of the victims was discovered in the foundations of the new Whitechapel police headquarters, then under construction.
The police were so desperate to catch the Ripper, that they issued these posters soliciting help from the public. At this time London’s East End was full of people on the wrong side of the law, so the police were doubtful that they would receive much co-operation.
A surgical post-mortem knife of the type thought to have been used by the Ripper. The proximity of the crimes to the London Hospital, and the murderer’s skill in dissecting the corpses, suggested a surgical training. This brought various medical men under suspicion.
A cartoon at the time showed a blindfolded policeman, while various hideous effigies (signifying Jack the Ripper), dance around him. This was a popular view and one Holmes may have shared.
“When I have done another one you can try and catch me again. So goodbye dear Boss, till I return.
Yours, Jack the Ripper.”
The Police News coverage of the 1888 murder of Annie Chapman. The newspaper claims that she was the Ripper’s fourth victim, but most authorities maintain that she was actually the second. A number of other murders that occurred before and after the five “core” killings were also attributed to the Ripper.
But although the Ripper murders were the undoubtedly the most notorious crime of this period, the era was marked by a wave of the most violent killings. The poor condition of the economic underclass undoubtedly contributed to the circumstances of many infamous murders. In 1873, an unemployed man named Parker cut the throats of his disabled son and daughter, rather than see them go to the dreaded workhouse. Infanticide amongst London’s poorest residents was shockingly commonplace, and it was estimated that one in every 15,000 babies born was murdered soon afterwards. Terrible living conditions were also a factor in several killings. Living with his wife and seven children in a one-room coal cellar, led one Greenwich resident to become so unhinged that he murdered his wife by throwing a knife at her. Depraved by hunger, and “Almost before the breath was out of his mother… (the couple’s twelve year old son) was searching about the bed to see if he could find any ha’pence.” Then as now, women and children were often the victims of domestic violence, and in the absence of divorce, “deplorable wife murder” was particularly common. Prostitutes were particularly vulnerable, as were the elderly. Several widows and widowers were murdered in the 1880s, mostly during bungled burglaries.
The front of 29 Hanbury Street, where Annie Chapman was murdered in 1888. Little had changed by the 1950s, when this photograph was taken. At the time of the murder, a Mr. Richardson, a packing crate maker, occupied the shop.
Greenwood takes a more serious view of London’s criminality, and ascribes it to ‘‘seven curses’’: neglected children, professional thieves, professional beggars, fallen women, drunkenness, gamblers, and the waste of charity.
JAMES GREENWOOD IN THE SEVEN CURSES OF LONDON (1869)
The backyard of Number 29 where this dismembered body was found. Drunks and prostitutes frequented the yard, so suspicious comings and goings went unnoticed. The yard is clearly identifiable in this photograph from the Police News (opposite).
Overcrowding, the lack of adequate streetlight, and the “street life” to which many women and children were abandoned, ensured that the poorer parts of nineteenth-century London became hotbeds of vice and crime. Outrages like the Ripper killings were all too easy to perpetrate, and he successfully evaded capture.
A contemporary print of the Ripper murders shows a pair of gentlemen, remarkably like Holmes and Watson, in pursuit of a Ripper suspect. If only Holmes could have turned his attention to this real life horror.
Murder was by no means the only crime in the wave of offences the police had to deal with. Two contemporary social commentators, Charles Dickens Jr. in his 1879 title, Dickens’s Dictionary of London and James Greenwood in The Seven Curses of London (1869) cover a good array of mid- to late-nineteenth century crime. Dickens concentrates on the so-called “nuisances… to which metropolitan flesh is heir.” These included a large variety of offences, including animal baiting, the careless driving of cattle, cock-fighting, furious driving, indecent exposure, obscene singing, and mat beating after 8 a.m.. By contrast, Greenwood takes a more serious view of London’s criminality, and ascribes it to “seven curses:” neglected children, professional thieves, professional beggars, fallen women, drunkenness, gamblers, and the waste of charity. As well as the diverse vices discussed by Dickens and Greenwood, blackmail, terrorism, and attempted suicide were all the province of the over-stretched constabulary.
A selection of poison bottles from the Police Museum collection. Poisoning was a popular means of dispatch in Victorian times, partly because many deadly poisons were easy to obtain and there were few forensic tests to establish their presence in victims’ bodies. This gradually changed as the century progressed.
Every home had a cutthroat razor, and they became popular weapons in more “spontaneous” murders.
One of a collection of bizarre knives, used as murder or assault weapons, on show at the Police Museum. Sailors arriving at the London docks would often bring knives like these from overseas, and carry them for self-defense.
A pair of Victorian brass knuckles. These could be carried in a pocket, and gave the bearer an instant advantage in a street brawl.
A Kukri, originally from
India, was one of a number of lethal weapons carried by criminals. The razor sharp blade and curved cutting edge could sever a person’s head with a single blow.
A murder weapon concealed in a hollowed-out book, from the Police Museum collection. In “The Solitary Cyclist,” the Reverend Williamson hides his revolver in a hollowed out prayer book—see page 178.
Two knives in The Sherlock Holmes Museum collection. The small ivory handled knife is of the type used to murder Mr. Willoughby Smith in “The Golden Pince-Nez.” The horn-handled clasp knife is like that used to assassinate Pietro Venucci in “The Six Napoleons.”
Sherlock Holmes’s cases also reflect the crime-ridden nature of the times, and the fascination that the general public had with criminal activity and detection. Although Holmesian crimes are almost always committed in more ingenious and subtle ways than the common or garden variety, they are often fall into the categories of those committed by more ordinary criminals: murder, attempted murder, bank robbery, burglary, kidnap, treason, and espionage.
