The Maul and the Pear Tree

by P. D. James

  This letter is one of the most curious documents in the case, and suggests that the patient and intelligent Graham had finally been reduced to a state of indecision and illogicality more appropriate to the Shadwell Bench than to a magistrate of Bow Street. It may be that his powers were failing him, that the first symptoms of his last illness were already taking their toll. Certainly he was under pressure from all sides, and must have been conscious that his reputation was at stake. But Ryder can hardly have felt that the letter advanced the case, nor have failed to be struck by its inconsistencies and omissions, and by the irrelevance of much of the information it contained.

  For more than a fortnight Graham had kept Ablass in chains, and securely guarded. Now he had been released, but the magistrate does not specify the evidence on which he judged it proper to discharge one of his prime suspects. He states himself to be satisfied that two persons were concerned in Williamson’s murder, one shorter man than Ablass, and again he provides none of the evidence on which this important deduction was based. One of the murderers, a tall man, was seen by Turner. He could not have been Williams. If Graham was correct in believing that two men were concerned in Williamson’s murder, and that one of them who accompanied Williams was shorter than Ablass then Williams was innocent. The logic is inescapable and it is difficult to see how it escaped the intelligent Graham. He could hardly have believed that Turner, who knew Williams, was mistaken in failing to recognise him under such momentous circumstances.

  Graham was obviously convinced of Hart’s guilt but his letter does not deal with the strongest evidence against the carpenter – the presence of Pugh’s chisel in Marr’s shop. The magistrate had obviously been intrigued by the problem of how the murderer got the other weapon, the maul, into the shop. But it is not clear from the letter whether Graham is suggesting that Hart left his bag of tools at 29 Ratcliffe Highway after his earlier visit of nine o’clock, or whether he accompanied the killer, bearing the bag on his shoulder, and then handed over the maul to the murderer or attacked the victims himself. It is hardly feasible that the tools should have been left ready earlier in the evening. Marr would almost certainly have removed them from the actual shop during the busiest night of the week; and the murderer could have had no assurance that they would be to hand when he wanted them. Both killings were done with extraordinary speed. The door on each occasion was fortuitously open, Marr’s because he was awaiting the return of Margaret Jewell, and Williamson’s because he had not yet locked up for the night and was probably expecting Anderson to return for a final pot of beer. The murderer must have had the weapon in his hand, probably concealed under his coat as he entered, and must have struck with immediate and ferocious strength. It seems unlikely that Hart would have encumbered himself with a bag or basket of tools over his shoulder, or that if he did, he would have taken them away with him while leaving the maul and the chisel behind. Certainly Graham produced a formidable weight of evidence to prove Hart a liar, but Hart’s lies about his movements on the Sunday and Monday are not directly relevant to what was happening late on Saturday night. Graham’s oddly defensive letter is more a justification for his continuing to hold Hart in custody than a convincing case against the carpenter.

  And with this confused communication the investigation came to an end. Graham, baffled and frustrated, made no further efforts to find the second murderer. On 7 February Beckett returned the depositions to Shadwell. Hart, like Ablass, was released; and with so little public notice that the date is nowhere recorded. Sylvester Driscoll, too, was finally discharged and probably thought himself lucky to go free with nothing worse than a severe admonition from Markland for his imprudent conduct. Driscoll was an egregious and diverting rogue to the last. During the latter part of his confinement the cells in Coldbath Fields Prison were so full that the clerk of the prison told him that he must be moved to the cell next to that in which the dead body of Williams lay. The Times reports: ‘The poor fellow exclaimed in a paroxysm of alarm. “Don’t put me there, for I’m sure I’ll die in half an hour!” As his terrors were invincible he was humanely removed to another apartment.’

  Every day Harrison and Cuthperson had been calling at the Shadwell Public Office demanding the reward money, so that they could return to sea. Beckett called Capper and Markland to the Home Office to assist in drawing a plan for distributing the rewards, and towards the end of February the money was paid out. The schedule survives:

  10 Accounts of rewards paid

  TEN

  A Case for Parliament

  The macabre exhibition of Williams’s corpse and its interment beneath the New Cannon Street paving stones may have gone some way towards appeasing the sense of outrage in East London, but it did nothing to restore public confidence in the system of police. Thirty years earlier the Gordon Riots had caused a public outcry in London against the impotence of constables and watchmen to protect the capital against the fury of drunken mobs, but nothing had been done. Now the demand was renewed, and this time it was nation-wide. The horrors of Ratcliffe Highway, intensified in people’s imaginations by their unique combination of circumstances – the dark December nights, the mean streets, the sickening brutality of the crimes, the suddenness with which the murderer struck and as silently vanished, the final ghastly parade of an eighth carcase – afflicted the whole population with a sense of insecurity out of all proportion to the events themselves.

  Here was a spontaneous, country-wide reaction to which it is hard to find a parallel in all our history – for the nearest, perhaps, we have to look abroad to the shock experienced in the United States after the assassinations of the Kennedys and Luther King. The nature of the crimes and the importance of the victims were very different, but the national psychological reaction in each case was remarkably similar. In England then, as in America many years later, men felt that a society which failed to prevent the commission of crimes so heinous must itself be rotten at the core. ‘The late acts of atrocity stamp our character nationally as a most barbarous set of savages,’ W. Wynyard wrote to his friend John Beckett, the Under-Secretary at the Home Office, in forwarding his own ideas for improving the police. Many were saying the same thing. In Keswick, 300 miles distant from London, Robert Southey expressed to a correspondent (Neville White) the very pith of this wave of anguish and self-criticism:

  We in the country here are thinking and talking of nothing but the dreadful murders, which seem to bring a stigma, not merely on the police, but on the land we live in, and even our human nature. No circumstances which did not concern myself ever disturbed me so much. I have been more affected, more agitated, but never had so mingled a feeling of horror, and indignation, and astonishment, with a sense of insecurity too, which no man in this state of society ever felt before, and a feeling that the national character is disgraced. I have very long felt the necessity of an improved police, and these dreadful events, I hope and trust, will lead to the establishment of one as vigilant as that of Paris used to be. The police laws cannot be too rigorous; and the usual objection that a rigorous police is inconsistent with English liberty might easily be shown to be absurd.

  Southey stated the nub of the argument precisely, and the issue had not changed for fifty years. How was an efficient system of police to be reconciled with traditional English liberties? The only police force familiar to Englishmen, the French, was notorious as an instrument of armed terror; and few were prepared to press for reform at the risk of introducing tyranny. On 27 December, when the terror in Ratcliffe Highway was at its height, John William Ward could write to a friend: ‘They have an admirable police in Paris, but they pay for it dear enough. I had rather half-a-dozen throats should be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years than be subject to domiciliary visits, spies, and all the rest of Fouche’s contrivances.’

  But could the old system survive the shock of the Ratcliffe Highway murders? The London Chronicle, in its Christmas Day leader, had called emphatically for a proper system of police. To the Mor
ning Post the alternatives were stark: ‘Either respectable householders must determine to be their own guardians or we must have a regularly enlisted armed police under the orders of proper officers.’ Not all, however, saw the matter so simply. The Morning Chronicle reminded its readers how the police of Paris was ‘most dexterously contrived for the purpose of tyranny’, yet, nevertheless, believed that the ‘stain on the character of our country’ required a revision of the old system: ‘We never think of taking down an old, shattered ruin of incumbrance, till we find it tumbling on our heads. This is the English beaten road of improvement. We always appear to improve less from choice than from necessity.’ Public opinion was confused as well as shocked.

  This prevailing ignorance explains why even now, in the weeks following the murders, while panic was still only slowly abating and householders everywhere were fixing chains to their doors and bolts to their windows, the idea of a regular police force gained little support. The great majority of those who cared enough to write to the Home Office preferred simpler solutions. Reform should start with the watchmen. They should be younger, and someone – perhaps a police officer from the Public Office? – should have a duty to inspect them during the night. The seats should be removed from the watch-boxes to prevent their occupants from falling asleep. They should be armed with pistols and cutlasses and relieved of their rattles. Better men might be persuaded to serve if it were decided to change the ‘degraded name of watchman for Warden of the Night’. The links between watchmen and prostitutes should be broken by arranging that any woman who showed the ‘least sign of inducement should be sent to sift cinders, or if diseased, to a hospital – if this plan was adopted throughout the Kingdom it would do more for the preservation of the Army and Navy than 2,000 Doctors, besides being the means of increasing the population’. One ardent reformer even recommended that a watchman should be liable to imprisonment if, through negligence, he allowed a house on his beat to be broken into.

  Other, more imaginative, ideas flowed in. One correspondent suggested that convicted thieves should be branded with the letter ‘T’, and if the crime were atrocious, with the letter ‘V’ also; suspects should be branded with the letter ‘S’. Many people favoured the offer of bigger rewards. Someone suggested that criminals should be sent off to the army to fight wherever ‘the battle raged fiercest’. George Greene, of Chelsea, was not afraid of tyranny. He recommended the police system that operated in St Petersburgh, where ‘every householder is obliged upon pain of imprisonment to give notice to the police officer of his quarter of every new inmate of his house, and the latter is obliged within the week to attend to have his name and residence registered’. A lighting contractor thought the remedy lay in better street lamps, and another recommended the erection of huge gas-lit beacons at 200-yard intervals, the outlines of which – reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower – he obligingly sketched. Garnet Terry, of Finsbury, applied the lessons of the murders in practical terms: ‘Every house in which there is a male capable of bearing arms shall provide itself with a Hanger, Javelin or Pike, likewise a small Wicker Basket shield about twelve or more inches in Diameter with a strong wicker handle rising in a perpendicular direction from the centre of the concave side, this properly managed will be security against the blow of a maul or iron bar, and afford time for the thrust of the Cutlass, javelin or pike’.

  Probably a vigorous Home Secretary could have pushed a radical Metropolitan Police Bill through the House of Commons in 1812. The mood of public opinion was receptive, and on 18 January, Ryder moved for a committee ‘to enquire into the state of the nightly watch of the Metropolis’. If he needed any additional reminder of the state of public concern, he received it on the eve of the debate from a still terrified correspondent. The public should be excluded from the Chamber, Pro bono publico urged, and newspaper reporters admitted only on the understanding that the names of Members who spoke were not to be disclosed, for they would not afterwards ‘be forgot by the miscreants who now put all law and religion to defiance; they would not hesitate a moment in disposing of the lives of those Gentlemen’. Happily Pro bono publico’s fears proved to be exaggerated, and the distinction of those who took part in the debate testifies to the excitement and alarm that had now spread even to Parliament.

  Introducing the motion, the Home Secretary said that although he did not consider it necessary to enter at any great length into the reasons for it, ‘At the same time he felt himself justified in stating, that if the expediency of the measure rested upon the late horrible murders alone, by which two whole families had been completely exterminated, the atrocity of those crimes would in themselves have afforded sufficient ground.’ It was true that no system of police could prevent the commission of such murders while there were persons vile and abandoned enough to commit them, but an improved nightly watch would be likely to diminish the chances. Those who had been abroad would know that even where there was a despotic, armed police, ‘atrocities such as these were committed almost nightly, without exciting any of those deep impressions under which the mind of this country at present suffered’. The furore underlined the fact that few acts of this kind were committed here. Nevertheless, it was true that the law for appointing parish watchmen was being widely disregarded, partly because of the enormous growth of London. The Act required that the parish trustees should appoint none but ‘able-bodied men’ to guard the streets at night, but he knew of many instances in which those who were too old to earn their bread were appointed to be watchmen so that they would not be a burden on the parish. These were not the men to secure the lives and property of Londoners. It would be for the Committee to decide whether the system should be altered entirely, or whether it would be sufficient merely to enforce the present Act. But as far as he had thought about the matter at all, Ryder was rather inclined to the idea of enforcing the present system than of having recourse to anything new.

  For the Opposition, the Home Secretary was followed by Sir Samuel Romilly, the penal reformer, who condemned the restricted terms of the motion. Anyone familiar with what had recently passed, and with the ‘alarm and terror’ which had spread throughout the Metropolis, must have expected much wider measures. The Committee ought to inquire not only into the state of the nightly watch, but also into the causes of the alarming increase of crime: for the past five or six years there had been a steady growth, and this, too, during wartime. It was a proved maxim that fewer offences were committed in a period of war than in peace, since many criminals enlisted in the armed services. But in this country of late, ‘so far from being able to calculate on this solitary advantage, we were presented with a melancholy phenomenon of a protracted war and the continually increasing measure of offences against the peace and good order of society’. Moreover, the police had the strongest possible interest in multiplying crime since – unless they were ‘men of the most refined principles of humanity and morality’ – they would delay the detection of an offender until his crimes increased his value by increasing the reward for his arrest. ‘Could it be endured with patience that such abuses should exist in the face of decency and commonsense? … His Right Hon. Friend had talked of other countries as affording greater and more frequent instances of atrocities than this: good God! where did those countries exist? He knew them not. He had never heard of them. He never remembered to have read of whole families destroyed by the hand of the murderer in any country but this.’ The motion ought, Romilly urged, to be withdrawn, and sub mitted in a more comprehensive form.

  So far in the debate little had been said about the details of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, but with the next two speakers came pointers to what was being said in high places in London more than a fortnight after Williams had been put underground.

  William Smith, another Whig, supporting Romilly’s proposal to widen the inquiry, went on: If the House ‘attended to the nature of those horrible and barbarous outrages which for two months had kept the Metropolis in a state of perpetual alarm, and more particularly the
atrocious murder of Mr Marr’s family (the authors of which had never yet been discovered), it would be evident that had the nightly watch of the Metropolis been in the best possible state those outrages and that murder could not have been prevented.’ What could the watch have done? At best it could merely have driven the villains out of London into the surrounding villages, where people would have no protection.

  So the authors of the Marrs’ murders had never been discovered? The Prime Minister himself spoke next, and Perceval carried scepticism still further. ‘The particular outrage that had excited such feelings of horror and detestation in the Metropolis, and the perpetrators of which, the Hon. Gentleman said, had escaped detection, was still wrapped up in mystery. It undoubtedly seemed strange that a single individual could commit such accumulated violence. The probability was that he was incapable of doing so; but on this subject no certain opinion could yet be formed. If this outrage was actually committed by the individual to whom he had before alluded (Williams), it was untrue to say that the culprit had not been found; but certainly he must repeat that it seemed strange to him that such devastation could be occasioned by a single individual. At the same time, as far as he had been able to trace the circumstances of the case, it appeared to be yet uncertain whether or not others were concerned in this horrible atrocity. But as the Hon. Gentleman had himself said, no state of nightly watch, however excellent, could have prevented such a crime. Indeed he hardly knew in what system of police a prevention could have been found. If such enormous guilt lurked in the human breast, no system of government could hinder it from endeavouring to effect its object. It might be close to us; it might be in our houses. The only security against such crimes was the manner in which the general sentiment of mankind hunted down the individuals by whom they were perpetrated.’