The Maul and the Pear Tree

by P. D. James

  The parish vestry was next in action after Harriott, and it acted in the only way open to it. Good detection depended on reliable information, and information had to be paid for. It was an old, well-proven formula; the only question was, how much to offer? Not a penny more than was needed, for the parish of St George’s-in-the-East was as poor as any in London. Yet the enormity of the crime and the danger that would still hang over the parish so long as it remained unsolved both pointed to a considerable sum. Having viewed the bodies, the Churchwardens, Overseers and Trustees held an urgent, anxious meeting in the vestry of St George’s. The clerk, John Clement, drafted a hand-bill and rushed it round to Skirven, the printer of Ratcliffe Highway. Skirven put it in the press at once, and the same afternoon it was pinned up on the church door and on the doors of all the churches and public houses in the neighbourhood.

  Poor James Gowen was the least regarded of the victims. His short life must have held more toil than pleasure, and he died brutally in an agony of terror. Now, when it came to issuing the reward bill, no one seems to have known his real name. But there was someone who remembered him. A week later an anonymous letter arrived at the Home Office from ‘a distant Relation of the poor apprentice who was so barbarously murdered in Ratcliffe Highway’, observing that ‘the lad’s name was not James Biggs but James Gowen’. ‘Query?’ a disbelieving Home Office clerk wrote on the letter; but the point was perhaps not without interest, and might be followed up sometime – ‘Mr Capper, speak,’ he added.

  2 Hand-bill issued by the parish of St George’s-in-the-East

  The Shadwell magistrates, meanwhile, assembled in their Public Office in Shadwell High Street. But what to do? Little but wait: the vestry’s offer of a fifty-pound reward for information was bound to bring rapid results. Moreover they learned that Harriott’s man Horton had found a bloodstained maul; so they sent a message to the River Thames Police Office inviting Harriott to join them in examining Margaret Jewell, John Murray and George Olney.

  Already on Sunday morning, therefore, three separate authorities were active in the case: the Churchwardens, Overseers and Trustees of the parish, with their offer of a reward; Capper and his fellow magistrates at the Shadwell Public Office, waiting for any information the offer might throw up; and Harriott at the River Thames Police Office. During the succeeding days, as news of the crime spread, this confused situation grew worse. Suspicious characters were rounded up all over London and brought before the magistrates at the other six Public Offices and at Bow Street itself. Each bench worked largely in isolation from the others, sending messages to Shadwell only when they felt inclined to do so. Nevertheless, there existed one central point at which, in theory at all events, the various threads could, exceptionally, be pulled together.

  The magistrates in the Public Offices were appointed by the Home Secretary and they acted under his direct authority. In the case of Bow Street the relationship was intimate: the Chief Magistrate, Sir Richard Ford, was constantly in and out of the Home Office with plans for capturing enemy agents; and William Day, a Home Office clerk, played a leading part in operating the Bow Street Runners. The Thames Police, too, were strictly controlled, as Harriott was soon to be reminded. The other seven Public Offices, by contrast, were relatively independent (except for their staff and annual budgets) but they were encouraged to draw the Home Secretary’s attention to anything of importance. This explains why, from the beginning, detailed reports flowed into Whitehall describing every new suspicion, almost every prisoner examined, and every fresh turn, until eventually the Home Secretary was obliged to take a very close personal interest in the case himself.

  But that came later. At first the Home Office treated the Ratcliffe Highway murders as it would have treated any other – with bland indifference. The Right Hon Richard Ryder, a pompous man of forty-five, lacking in humour (Harrow and St John’s, Cambridge, Lincoln’s Inn, Judge Advocate General before being appointed to the Home Office) had been Home Secretary for two years, but he seems to have taken little interest in the Department’s affairs. In his office in Dorset House – a building on the site of Henry VIII’s old tennis court on the north corner of Whitehall and Downing Street – he employed two undersecretaries, a law clerk, a précis writer and a private secretary, supported by eighteen clerks; and at the end of 1811 public business was pressing. The Peninsular War was at a critical stage, and Napoleon’s Continental System was beginning to take effect; much of the Department’s time was occupied with subversive activities at home. In November 1811, too, the Luddites’ frame-breaking in Nottinghamshire had risen to a peak, and it was the Home Secretary’s duty to supervise a full-scale military campaign against the saboteurs. So when the first letters from the magistrates came in little notice was taken of them.

  Harriott, characteristically, was the first to get in touch with the Home Office. He wrote at once, on Sunday. The startling account he had heard from Margaret Jewell and Murray deepened his interest. Directly the preliminary examination at Shadwell was over he elbowed his way through a vast crowd outside 29 Ratcliffe Highway and inspected the house himself. Then he returned to the River Thames Police in Wapping to write to John Beckett, the senior of the under-secretaries.

  ‘For the information of Mr Secretary Ryder,’ he began, ‘I deem it necessary to lose no time in acquainting you with the following account of the extraordinary inhuman Murder of four persons.’ The letter went on to summarise what Margaret Jewell and Murray had told the magistrates that morning, and already Harriott had his ideas. ‘It is pretty evident,’ he wrote, ‘that at least two persons were concerned, and most probably had planned their operations for a Saturday night as the shops are then kept open so late, when watching the master’s putting up the shutters, and leaving the door open when he went in to fasten the Bolts. They rushed in and perpetrated the horrid Murders; but being disturbed by the girl’s returning and ringing for admittance, they made their escape at the back door.’

  What of the prospect of detection? Harriott was optimistic. There were two points to follow up. First, he would discover whether any of the dozen or so young women Marr employed part-time would know that he had money in the house, and had been concerned in planning the murders; the offer of a reward and a free pardon might induce someone to come forward. Second, a ‘singular mark’ on the maul should enable it to be traced. The reference to Marr’s ‘dozen or so young women’ is curious. Marr was in a small way of business in modest premises, and was a man’s mercer not a tailor. It seems unlikely that he employed any labour other than James Gowen and one female servant. It may be that Harriott, in his zeal and enthusiasm, too readily accepted rumours as truth or misunderstood an informant. Certainly no servant other than Margaret Jewell and her predecessor gave evidence, and we hear no more of the dozen or so young women.

  Harriott was restless, eager to strike fast while clues were fresh. Having dispatched his letter he made further inquiries, and soon additional information came to light. It could be vital. Three men had been seen outside Marr’s shop for half an hour, one of whom kept looking through the shop window. Their descriptions had been obtained. One was dressed in ‘a light coloured sort of Flushing Coat, and was a tall, lusty Man’. Another was wearing ‘a Blue Jacket, the sleeves of which were much torn, and under which he appeared to have also Flannel Sleeves, and had a small-rimmed Hat on his Head’. No description of the third man had been given. Such promising clues had to be followed up without delay; and on Monday, 9 December, Harriott had his own hand-bill printed, setting out the men’s descriptions and offering twenty pounds for their arrest.

  This was the day on which the murders ceased to be local news and became a national event. ‘Horrid and Unparalleled Murders’, announced Monday’s Morning Chronicle; and The Times reported: ‘We almost doubt whether, in the annals of murders, there is an instance on record to equal in atrocity those which the following particulars will disclose.’ The account was gruesome enough, but ‘the magistrates are making every exerti
on to find out the murderers’. Certainly this was true of Harriott.

  But the Shadwell bench, having carried out their preliminary examinations the day before, seem to have lapsed into a sort of baffled resignation. Throughout Monday they waited for suspects to be brought in, but none came. Markland sat down to write his own account of the case for the Home Secretary, declaring bleakly, ‘We have no clue which promises to lead to a discovery.’ The broken and bloody maul, the footprints, the ripping chisel, it seems, were scarcely relevant. When they spoke of ‘clues’, the magistrates meant first-hand information that would lead directly to a conviction; and information had to be bought. ‘The parish of St George have issued hand Bills offering a Reward of £50 on Conviction of the Offenders,’ Markland concluded, adding delicately: ‘Permit me to suggest the propriety of His Majesty’s Government taking notice of it in the Gazette in such manner as to them may seem most proper.’

  Little can be discovered about this Shadwell bench of magistrates except that, in contrast to that of the impetuous Harriott, their behaviour throughout was that of well-meaning dilettantes. Story, the senior, had been one of the original stipendiaries appointed in 1792. He would have been an old man now, and took no part in the correspondence with the Home Secretary or, so far as can be discovered, any interest in the case. His colleagues were much junior, and both were new to stipendiary office. Markland, formerly an unpaid magistrate in Leeds, had only been on the Shadwell bench since February 1811; and Capper, a Hertfordshire magistrate, since March. They would both know a great deal about rural crime – poaching, sheep stealing, vagrancy – and Markland might well have punished some of the men the Industrial Revolution had soured, and who were now enrolling in the armies of King Ludd. But neither would know anything of the life of East London slums or understand the ways of sailors. Nor is it likely that either man had the slightest experience of a major criminal investigation. They merely waited for the information that never came, and it is scarcely surprising that on Tuesday The Times was obliged to report, ‘Every effort of the police, and of every respectable inhabitant of the parish of St George’s-in-the-East has hitherto proved unavailing.’

  Harriott’s initiative, meanwhile, in offering twenty pounds for information about the three men who had been seen outside Marr’s shop on the night of the murder, had produced nothing – except a reprimand for his zeal. The Home Office could tolerate inefficiency, but not a breach of regulations. The Home Secretary tartly reminded the old man that he had no discretion to offer such a reward. His job was to get on with policing the river, and Ryder demanded an explanation. Harriott’s reply was a nice compromise between dutiful submission and pained reproach. ‘Feeling vexed with myself that I should suffer my zeal for discovering the atrocious Murderers to run me into an error,’ he began, and not knowing that the discretionary powers of police magistrates ‘on such an extraordinary occasion’ were limited, he had thought it best to issue the hand-bill without delay. But for the future, ‘I will take special care to keep my zeal within proper bounds’. Unfortunately for the progress of the investigation Harriott seems subsequently to have done so.

  Meanwhile the bodies of Marr and his wife with the child beside her were laid out on their bed. James Gowen’s body was placed in another room, probably the one normally occupied by Margaret Jewell. There they were left until it was time to coffin them for the funeral. They were no doubt guarded – at least in the sense that there was a Shadwell police officer in the house – but there was no restriction on sightseers and little control of the stream of neighbours, acquaintances and the curious and morbid from all over London, who passed endlessly up the narrow staircase into what was virtually a morgue. Fine ladies drew their skirts to one side as they brushed against the artisans of Ratcliffe Highway and the seamen and their women who had surged up Old Gravel Lane from the lodging houses near the river. The narrow landing was a crush of bodies as the visitors pushed their way from the mean room which held James Gowen’s pitiably mangled corpse, to view the even more poignant scene in the Marrs’ bedroom. There was a constant buzz of conversation broken by exclamations of horror, while the stench of the mob, the strong and ever-present smell of nineteenth-century Wapping, overlaid the first sickly-sweet intimation of decay. There lay the bodies, drained of all blood, their unsutured wounds gaping like those of butchered animals, yet wearing on their waxen faces the secret and committed look of human dead.

  Such visits to the houses of the bereaved to view the bodies of the dead were nothing new or strange to early nineteenth-century Wapping, particularly among the Irish immigrants who flocked into East London to escape the greater poverty and misery of their homeland, and who supplied a considerable part of the casual and unskilled labour of the metropolis – as well as of its army of professional beggars. Few of their domestic habits were acceptable to their more respectable and prosperous neighbours, and the custom of the Irish Wake was particularly disturbing. The corpse, no matter what was the cause of death, was laid out on the only bed, and burial was delayed until sufficient money had been collected from visiting neighbours to provide drink and food for the Wake. Wakes always led to drunkenness and often to violence, illness and death; although the worst case did not arise until 1817, when a Mrs Sullivan, whose prostitute daughter had died in the workhouse, persuaded the parish authorities to release the girl’s body for what she described as ‘decent burial’. This they unfortunately did. Mrs Sullivan raised three separate subscriptions for the Wake, all of which were spent in drink and feasting, and delayed the decent burial so long that twenty-six people who had viewed the decaying corpse were stricken with fever. Six of them died, and the parish was obliged to bury the girl in the end. We are not told whether Marr’s brother took the opportunity of raising some cash for the funeral expenses, although it may be significant that burial was deferred for a week. It is not unlikely that one or two visitors, particularly if they were Irish, moved by pity as well the high level of horror and interest of the spectacle provided, dropped a coin or two in a cup on their way out. They would not have been unacceptable. The bill for the recent alteration to the shop had still to be met, and it transpired that Marr had left only sufficient capital to pay his creditors nineteen shillings in the pound.

  Among the sightseers who came up from the slums close to the river to view the bodies was a German sailor called John Richter, who lodged with a Mr and Mrs Vermilloe at the Pear Tree public house. He pushed his way up the narrow staircase, saw what he had come to see and went unobserved away, telling no one at the Pear Tree where he had been.

  The inquest on the four victims was arranged for Tuesday, 10 December, at the Jolly Sailor public house in Ratcliffe Highway, nearly opposite to Marr’s shop. While his wife bustled from taproom to kitchen preparing for an unusual influx of customers, the landlord suitably arranged his largest room. An imposing table was set ready for the Coroner, bearing candles to lighten the gloom of a December afternoon; two longer tables were placed together for the jury; a chair was set in place for witnesses. The fire was banked high. Outside could be heard the muttering and movements of a vast crowd.

  Early in the afternoon the jury began to assemble, and soon after two o’clock the Coroner, John Unwin, made his appearance. He and the jury first crossed the road and inspected Marr’s premises and the four corpses. Then they returned, visibly shaken and stern faced, to the Jolly Sailor, and the inquest was opened.

  The first witness called was Walter Salter, the surgeon who at the request of the coroner had examined the bodies. There was something of self-importance in his manner as, with no concessions to the education or vocabularies of the locals of Shadwell and Wapping, he translated into Latinate obscurity the brutal realities of battered skulls and slit throats which many of his hearers had seen for themselves. The Times reported:

  Timothy Marr the younger had the left external artery of the neck entirely divided; from the left side of the mouth, across the artery the wound was at least three inches long, and t
here were several marks of violence on the left side of the face. Celia Marr, the wife, had the left side of the cranium fractured, the templebone totally destroyed and a wound about the articulation of the jaw extending two inches to her left ear, and another at the back of the same ear. Timothy Marr the elder had his nose broken, the occipital bone was fractured and the mark of a violent blow was over the right eye. James Gowen, the apprentice boy, had several contusions of the forehead and nose. The occipital bones were shattered dreadfully and the brains were partly protruding and partly scattered about. Mr Salter swore that these violences were all in themselves a sufficient cause of death.

  Margaret Jewell was examined next. She described how her master had sent her out with a pound note to buy oysters, her fruitless search along Ratcliffe Highway and in the surrounding streets, her return after about twenty minutes to find the house locked against her, the arrival of the watchman and the subsequent appearance of Murray. She described how Murray had got into the house at the back and opened the street door. At this point in her evidence the girl was so much overcome by shock that she fainted away, and every effort to restore her was used for a considerable time without effect. She was not examined further.

  John Murray next took the stand. He testified that he was a pawnbroker and resided in the next house to that in which the murders were committed. About ten minutes past twelve on Sunday morning he was sitting at supper when he heard a noise in the shop floor of the next house which resembled the falling of a shutter or the pushing of a chair; he also heard the sounds of a human voice as if arising from fear or correction. The voice he thought to be that of a boy or a woman. All this happened in one minute. A little before one o’clock he heard the continued ringing of Mr Marr’s bell; this ringing continued until nearly half past one and at last he went to the door to know what was the matter. The watchman said that the pin was not fastened and that the girl was shut out. Murray then described how he had succeeded in making his entry from the back, his brief visit upstairs and his subsequent discoveries of the bodies. He testified that after the child had been found dead he had seen a mallet or maul in the hands of a police officer which was covered in blood and hair. Mr Marr had been living in Ratcliffe Highway only since last April. He was twenty-four years of age, his wife about the same. The child was only fourteen weeks old.