A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  But the information came too late to prevent John Williams – if indeed he was the criminal – from striking again. Twelve days after the first killing, at another public house on what is now Garnet Street, a further massacre took place. This quiet and respectable pub had closed at 11 p.m. Its landlord, John Williamson, his wife Elizabeth and their servant Bridget had all retired to bed. However, the street was disturbed when a near-naked man climbed out of an upstairs window via a knotted sheet.

  This was Williamson’s lodger, John Turner. He had been in bed when he’d heard the front door banging and the maid calling out. Next, he heard his landlord moaning, and emitting the chilling words: ‘I am a dead man’. The lodger heard the sinister sound of somebody walking about below. Creeping down the stairs, Turner saw a tall man bent over the prone body of Mrs Williamson. The horrific sight caused him to rush back upstairs and escape through the window. Amazingly, the Williamsons’ little granddaughter, Kitty, just 14 years old, slept through the whole attack and survived.

  This second slaughter, so soon after, and so near to the scene of the first, caused a tsunami of terror and panic. Londoners began to feel a new kind of fear. Barricaded behind locks and shutters in their homes, they felt the very modern anxiety that even these defences might not prove stout enough against an urban, predatory killer who struck out at random against law-abiding families, entering homes without warning or mercy. In the country communities that many of them had left behind, one knew one’s neighbours. Here in the docklands, with so many strangers about, and with dark, crowded, busy streets ill lit by night, a new kind of menace seemed to be abroad.

  GIVEN THE CIRCUMSTANCES, it seems natural that the authorities would want to wrap up the crime as quickly as they could. Indeed, in the opinion of the mistress of detective fiction, P. D. James, they wrapped it up with unseemly haste, simply to placate public feeling. John Williams was taken into custody: after all, he’d had the opportunity of getting hold of the murder weapon used in the first crime and he had acted suspiciously the day after. There were also rumours that he and the first victim, Timothy Marr, had been former shipmates who had quarrelled. But these were very sketchy grounds. Fortunately for the magistrates, Williams appeared to admit his guilt: after a week in prison, he hanged himself.

  The police were quick to announce that the killer had been caught. However, some people remained unsatisfied. There were rumours that Williams’s death had not been caused by his own hand. He’d seemed to be in good spirits immediately before it. The death was all too convenient for the authorities and their desire to reassure and restore order. It was to make a very clear statement that the panic was over that Williams’s body was publically paraded as the culprit, clearly and obviously dead.

  The body of John Williams is paraded through the streets of Wapping on a cart before vast crowds. The maul, his supposed weapon, lies by his left shoulder.

  Yet questions about Williams’s guilt, and the handling of the case, remained open and preyed upon the minds of the government. The capital’s system of policing had been shown by the Ratcliffe Highway killings to be inadequate. There would not be an immediate, overnight change to the way things were done, but this crime did contribute to the slow but inexorable build-up of the case for a single, coordinated police force.

  At the same time, Londoners and indeed the British as a whole lapped up the specifics of the case. It became so widely reported that it has claims to be called the first great modern mass-media sensation. The thirst for information about this particular crime created a new genre of journalism: murder reporting, with all its inaccuracies, gory details and outright condemnation of everyone and everything seeming to stand in the way of a speedy conclusion.

  In De Quincey’s hands, this very ordinary (and quite possibly unfairly accused) seaman was transformed into a suitably bizarre and charismatic figure. In a parody of the public’s image of the killer, he described Williams as having a ‘corpselike face’, a ‘sinister voice’ and an oily and snaky demeanour. He had a bloodless ghastly pallor, hair of ‘bright yellow, something between an orange and a lemon colour’, and ‘in his veins circulated not red life-blood, such as could kindle into the blush of shame, of wrath, of pity – but a green sap that welled from no human heart’.

  He wore a fine coat of blue, ‘richly lined with silk’, and he was naturally so courteous that had he accidentally jostled anyone on the crowded streets on his way to commit the crime, he would certainly ‘have stopped to offer the most gentlemanly apologies’. He bears little relationship to the person John Williams really was – a rough and ready tar of the docks. He sounds rather like Hannibal Lector.

  From the few known facts of the case, combined with terror, speculation and imagination, the fully formed fictional murderer was born.

  3

  The Watchmen

  ‘One of them would be writing novels, another studying politics, a third immersed in divinity, a fourth speculating on the girls that went by, a fifth gnawing his pen for an unfinished couplet and a sixth playing the fiddle.’

  The Examiner, 1811, reveals what London’s magistrates were really doing when they were meant to be catching criminals

  WHERE WERE THE police?

  While Margaret, the Marrs’ maid, was knocking on the door of No. 29, Ratcliffe Highway, the local nightwatchman passed by. His name was George Olney, and every night, at half-hour intervals, his beat took him past the Marrs’ house. He helped Margaret to bang on the door, and to rouse the neighbour who eventually entered the house.

  The first police officer to be summoned from the scene after the discovery of the bodies was Charles Horton, who worked for the Thames or Marine Police, the small, independent body responsible for catching criminals in the docks and on the river. The force’s personnel records can still be seen at the Thames Police Museum in the police station at Wapping. They reveal that Horton joined up in 1806, and that he lodged with one Mrs Robinson, a baker. The register also shows that he was issued with a great coat – not really a uniform, but a useful garment for wearing on duty on the river – and he would also have been equipped with a cutlass for personal defence, and a set of handcuffs. (The early Thames Police were obviously not used to arresting many women, because my smallish hands could easily slip out of all the nineteenth-century cuffs I tried on in their museum.)

  Horton’s actions included taking the bloodied maul away, back to his office (but not examining it closely, otherwise he would have discovered the initials). The Thames Police then offered a reward for information regarding the crime. This was half successful: it did lead to John Williams being identified, but of course it’s quite possible that the money itself motivated his impecunious landlady to shop him.

  But this was the best that could be hoped for with the current state of policing. Smaller, earlier and simpler communities than Regency Wapping pretty much policed themselves. When a person was accused of a crime, his or her neighbours would appear before a magistrate to save or condemn, on the basis of his or her previous good (or bad) behaviour. An individual’s reputation and standing in the community was therefore more important than evidence.

  Each parish appointed a single unarmed ‘constable’ – literally a comes stabuli, a ‘master of the horse’ – who served for one year. His job was to make sure that order was observed on the streets. The office was an ancient one – the word first appears in 1252 – and he was one of four important parish officers, the others being the overseer of the poor, the surveyor of the highways and the warden of the church. His symbol of authority was his truncheon, often provided in a decorative form to act as a badge of office.

  The constable usually worked with a group of specialists who looked after the streets after dark. Groups of citizens clubbed together to employ these ‘nightwatchmen’ to make regular patrols. Their regular calling out of the hour of the clock and a description of the weather punctuated the dreams of Georgian householders. These watchmen, carrying their dark lanterns, were often extremel
y old and not infrequently took money from criminals to turn a blind eye to their activities. In Covent Garden, central London, we hear that the appointment of aged watchmen was a deliberate practice: the employment of younger men had had to be abandoned ‘on account of the connection which subsisted between them and the Prostitutes, who withdrew them from their Duty while Depredations were committing’. (At the same time, though, we should note that the tradition of laughing at the uselessness of nightwatchmen dates from Shakespeare’s time – they provide interludes of light entertainment, for example, in Macbeth.)

  This system began to break down all over Britain as the nation became urbanized. A network of neighbours, constables and nightwatchmen simply could not deal with more serious crimes such as significant thefts or murders. In the early eighteenth century, private individuals who’d been the victims of crime could seek redress by engaging the services of a ‘thief-taker’, an entrepreneurial individual who offered his services to track down criminals for a fee.

  However, the problem with thief-takers was that they knew most of the criminals, and were far too friendly with some of them. Occasionally they would accept a higher counter-bribe not to turn a villain in. The most famous thief-taker of all was Jonathan Wild, who had started his London career as a racketeer and dealer in stolen goods. In 1713 he teamed up with an official parish constable in London, Charles Hitchen, and on their nightly ‘Rambles’ through the city, they extorted money from – rather than protecting – the general public.

  Wild, however, managed to maintain an appearance of legitimacy. His house in the Little Old Bailey became, by 1714, ‘an Office of Intelligence for lost Goods’. He was careful not to keep stolen property on his premises, but everyone knew that he could help you get back something that had been stolen. And so ‘Mr. Jonathan Wild’ became ‘a considerable Figure in the World’, promoting himself as ‘Thief-catcher General of Great Britain’.

  However, his double game was too tricky to last. His success roused the enmity of his former partner, and now rival, Hitchen. Using the very up-to-date Georgian medium of the published pamphlet, Hitchen accused Wild of high-handed, rough justice, turning in some criminals, protecting others, corrupting all. And so, in 1718, an Act was passed, thought to be aimed specifically at Wild, which explicitly made it a crime to bargain with criminals for the return of stolen goods.

  Despite this, Wild remained in business for a good few more years. He was clearly performing a much-valued public service. He eventually fell from grace, though, after his treatment of Joseph ‘Blueskin’ Blake. This unsavoury character had been a criminal child whom Jonathan Wild had adopted (in the manner of a Fagin) to commit crimes on his behalf. Once ‘Blueskin’ was caught, however, Wild washed his hands of him. The enraged ‘Blueskin’ cut Wild’s throat. Although Wild survived, people now turned against him. When charged with theft soon afterwards, he found he had lost his ability to talk his way out of trouble. He was hanged at Tyburn, the crowd pelting him with stones.

  It was this unsatisfactory situation that caused the writer Henry Fielding to enter the fray. As well as a successful playwright and author of Tom Jones, Fielding had a strong social conscience and served as a magistrate. In 1751 he wrote his celebrated work of social science, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers. He started keeping a ‘Register of Robberies’, containing intelligence about crimes committed along with suspicious persons and behaviour, and he encouraged members of the public to report in with information. It was the first time a magistrate had tried to pre-empt crime, rather than just reacting to its consequences after the event.

  Fielding also recruited six parish constables to stay in service permanently, for a salary, rather than leaving their posts after the customary temporary term of office. These specially trained ‘Bow Street Runners’, as the public called them, are often hailed as marking the very beginning of a professional and paid police force. These six men, in blue coats, patrolling the area within six miles of Charing Cross, became a familiar sight on the streets of London.

  But they were soon competing with numerous other proto-police forces run by individual parishes. Judith Flanders calculates that in 1790 there were no fewer than a thousand parish watchmen and constables, employed by 70 different bodies. The Thames or Marine Police Force, founded in 1798, was therefore only one of very many. Henry Fielding’s work was continued after his death by his blind half-brother, Sir John Fielding, who put his finger on a new problem: competition or non-cooperation between them. ‘The Frontiers of each Parish,’ he said, were ‘in a confused State, for that where one side of a street lies in one Parish, the Watchmen of one Side cannot lend any Assistance to a person on the other side.’

  The Ratcliffe Highway Murders definitively showed that this method of policing was inadequate. The reaction of those responsible for law and order in Wapping was confused and incoherent. The head of the Thames Police, John Harriott, had quickly issued handbills promising £20 for information on three men seen loitering outside the Marrs’ on the night of the murder. Yet he was castigated by the Home Office for this commendable initiative, and was accused of overreaching his powers. Meanwhile, the magistrates of Shadwell, who were appointed by the Home Secretary, and therefore more ‘official’ than the Thames Police, offered £50 of their own for the ‘discovery and apprehension’ of the perpetrator. And, yet again, the Coroner, John Unwin, began to investigate the case by holding an inquest at the Jolly Sailor public house.

  Questions were soon raised in Parliament. Why had the Shadwell magistrates overlooked so many clues? Was there any reason beyond xenophobia why so many Irish people had been arrested on suspicion of the murders? Why had Williams been left alone and unsupervised in his cell? The answers were not easy to find. As Spencer Perceval 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.’ (Perceval would not live long enough to see what the answer turned out to be. Only five months after the murders, in May 1812, he was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons, by a lone gunman with a grudge against the government.)

  In the opinion of P. D. James and T. A. Critchley, co-authors of a book on the Ratcliffe Highway Murders published in 1971, a vigorous Home Secretary might have pushed through legislation to create a central police force in the months following the crime. But the Home Secretary was lethargic and unengaged, and faced the widespread attitude that an official police force was only suitable for foreign countries where the people didn’t trust each other. Authoritarian governments abroad used their police services to oppress their people. Freeborn Englishmen, people said, would not stand for such an infringement of their native liberty: ‘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 [the French police’s] contrivances.’

  Proposals for a single police force constantly ran up against this belief that the strong arm of the law was as much a curse as a blessing. The state, of course, played a much smaller role in British society than it does today: compulsory schooling only arrived in 1880, old-age pensions had to wait until 1909 and the National Health Service until 1948.

  And yet, 18 years later, Parliament finally managed to agree on the solution to London’s policing problem: a single central coordinating body to deal with crime throughout the city, to be paid for out of taxes. In 1829, Parliament passed ‘an Act for improving the Police in and near the Metropolis’, and the job of setting up the new police force was given to the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, who had already reformed the police in Ireland. When, in 1829, the new force was set up, it contained over one thousand men, who became known as ‘Peelers’.

  The creation of this new force is often seen as a sharp turning point, and yet conscientious historians are at pains to point out that ‘before’ and ‘aft
er’ weren’t so very different. Some of the same people and practices, and indeed terminology (‘constables’) continued, and the new force would never have jurisdiction over the powerful City of London, which was protective of its privileges. (Peel was wise in thinking this a battle not worth fighting, and, to this day, the City still has its own separate police force.) Indeed, as far as the statistics can tell us, crime was actually falling, and the perceived need for the police arose just as much from the increased fear of crime as its reality. The creation of a police force was part of a wider movement to make cities clean and tidy and orderly. People’s all-important perception that their streets were safe would be aided by the removal of beggars, the repair of the roads and the abolition of rowdy fairs, as much as the catching of murderers.

  But however much historians stress continuity as well as change, the creation of the Metropolitan Police Force was a significant development, and went almost hand in hand with the emergence of the middle class. Terms such as ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’ are notoriously slippery, but the Great Reform Act of 1832 did create a new division between the group of people who had formerly all been lumped together as ‘the lower classes’.

  In 1832, the pool of people allowed to vote in elections was extended from roughly 400,000 to 650,000. Some of the previous system’s well-known anomalies – like the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ where Members of Parliament were returned by only a handful of voters – were obliterated. Votes were now given to all male property-owners of a certain level of wealth: they had to own land worth £10. Now master craftsmen and successful shopkeepers were voters, with a stake in the status quo. Those just a little bit less wealthy, such as skilled tradesmen, remained outside the political class, and some instead turned to radicalism. There would now be new levels of confrontation between these two classes, with the police on the side of their new friends, the middle class.