Unsolved London Murders

by Jonathan Oates

  Low-level corruption was more common, at least judging from anecdotal evidence. Nightclub owners, bookmakers, prostitutes and publicans all gave bribes in order that police would turn a blind eye to their semi-legal status or assist if they were in trouble with criminals. Some of this might only have been low level, with one superintendent stating that the habit of publicans leaving beer for the beat constable was ‘simply a token of genuine friendship’. Another example of corruption was noted by ‘Boy’ Mulcaster in Brideshead Revisited, when he and his friends are stopped by the police in London: ‘There’s no need for you to notice anything. We’ve just come from Ma Mayfield’s. I reckon she pays you a nice retainer to keep your eyes shut. Well, you can keep ’em shut on us too, and you won’t be the losers by it.’ Later, when Rex Mottram comes to their aid after their arrest, ‘with the slightest nuance, he opened the way for bribery’ and gives the desk sergeant a havana cigar. However, in both these instances, the police do not accept bribes, though clearly it was envisaged that they would. Tipping was a recognized element in a policeman’s renumeration, even to the extent of helping the rich in and out of their cars. Yet corruption may have been at a lesser level after Trenchard became commissioner in 1931. Nor was it prevalent. When two constables found a middle-aged man with a younger woman in Hyde Park, they planned to have them charged with public indecency. The man tried to bribe them, but they withstood the temptation. He turned out to be Sir Basil Thompson, once Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard.

  The police in London had not only to deal with criminals in the inter-war period, but were also involved in political disputes. There were fears about Bolshevism among the working classes in the 1920s and, on one occasion, a procession of the unemployed was dispersed by a baton charge on the grounds that most of them were ‘low class’ Jews, and therefore suspected as being Bolsheviks. The principal crisis in the 1920s, though, was the General Strike of 1926, when the police had to ensure that food supplies got through and that the volunteers running the transport system were unmolested. This sometimes involved them in clashes with the strikers. Evelyn Waugh noted that the police had to disperse a crowd in Hammersmith by a baton charge and a similar method of crowd dispersal was used in Southall. The police were also on the receiving end of violence in Hanwell, where some men threw stones at them. In Brideshead Revisited, during the Strike, a policeman is knocked to the ground and is being kicked by half a dozen youths, and another has a head injury during a disturbance in the Commercial Road.

  In the 1930s, the threat to public order came from the far right. The formation of the British Union of Fascists by Sir Oswald Mosley led to violence between groups of political extremists. Although the police did not sympathize with Mosley’s socialist opponents, they did not approve of the Blackshirts trying to impose their own form of order on the streets. Matters came to a head in 1936 when Mosley planned a march through the Jewish districts of the East End. This led to the ‘Battle of Cable Street’, where the police clashed with crowds who opposed such a provocative gesture.

  In both instances, the police earned the enmity of sections of the London community. They were not seen as impartial upholders of the law but, certainly by some, as enemies of the working class. One observer noted ‘the curious fact that a crowd, particularly in working class districts, is almost invariably hostile to the police’. A priest remarked, ‘seldom does one hear a good word for them’. Notting Dale was a notoriously rough part of London. In 1929, following the arrest of a suspect, there were verbal and physical attacks on the police and the police had to barricade the police station on occasion. Neal’s Yard in Monmouth Street, Covent Garden, was a place, in the words of a veteran policeman, ‘where [thugs] break all you young coppers in’. There had been fighting between police and people on Peace Night in 1919 and one observer said ‘I have never seen in all my life such a hostile crowd’. In 1923, there were 1,429 cases of injuries to police officers. Part of this animosity was because there were instances of the police beating up suspects and planting evidence on them. Sometimes policemen misused their powers and in 1928 one Helen Adele was falsely accused because she would not have sex with two constables. Mr William Bignell recalled troublemakers at the Tottenham National Assistance offices in the 1950s and an ex-copper told him that in the ‘old days’, i.e. before 1939, the police would simply have taken the offender behind the premises and seen to it that he would not repeat his offence. Despite this, senior officers tried to create a more favourable image. Thomas Divall wrote ‘I can assure the public that the “bobby” is a real good fellow, and if they would only treat and trust him as such, there will be a much better feeling between the two.’

  Although the middle classes were generally supportive of the police – Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot refers to them as ‘a brave and intelligent force of men’ – they had reason to be in conflict with the police too. First, they were shocked by scandals such as the Goddard case and other police misdemeanours which were made public in this era, such as the wrongful arrest and failed prosecution of innocent people. Secondly, the increased use of motor cars meant that they came into conflict with the law enforcers. However, middle-class volunteers cooperated with the police during the General Strike, to their mutual benefit and appreciation.

  Relations with the press were often poor, too. Superintendent Percy Savage wrote of ‘the lack of efficient co-operation between the police and the public. It is indeed a strange and regrettable fact that there is – and always has been – a strong disinclination in certain police circles to take the public fully and frankly into their confidence.’

  The Metropolitan Police force undoubtedly had its defects in the inter-war period. How far these examples of misbehaviour were commonplace is difficult to discern, however. Their popularity and the trust they were held in, or not, were clearly important for solving crime. Yet as we shall see in the next chapter, they did have a fair amount of success.

  CHAPTER 2

  Crime in London between the World Wars

  All great cities are magnets for crooks, gamblers, dope pedlars, prostitutes, pimps and perverts and riff raff of all kinds.

  As has been said, the impression that most people have about crime in this period has been formed for us by the detective novels of Agatha Christie and other writers of detective fiction at that time. Murders are committed in country houses and among the upper middle classes. They are solved by private detectives. This, however, is fiction. We must now look at the facts.

  Criminality in London was always a diverse affair and this period was no exception. While the Chicago gangsters of this era are well known, there were also criminal gangs in London. The most famous were the Sicilian gangster clan, the Sabinis. They committed burglaries, thefts, extorted money from prostitutes and book keepers, and fought rival gangs. They mostly used knives and razors to settle disputes over protection rackets. There were also shoot outs, with Henry Sabini being shot dead in Great Bath Street in 1922. They also fought with other gangs both in London and outside. Charabancs would take the fighters from Saffron Hill, the famous Italian quarter just to the west of the City, and Stepney, to the race courses of Greenford and Epsom Downs. Or there could be violence and intimidation in London races, such as at Alexandra Palace in 1921. Common battle grounds were Holborn, Clerkenwell and Gray’s Inn Road.

  At first the police did little (some policemen even connived and protected these gangsters), though in part this was because few would testify against the gangsters. Yet in 1922, 60 policemen arrested 100 of the criminals. The Sabinis were not finally defeated until they were interned as enemy aliens in 1940, but their activities had been curtailed from about 1930, with Inspector Hambrooke remarking that Scotland Yard could ‘predict with confidence that the terrorist days of the gangsters as we have known them are gone, never to return’. Another foreign gang were the Messinas, also from Italy, who founded a vice empire in Soho of gambling dens and brothels, using both British and Italian girls in the latter. Soho in
the 1920s was the centre of the cocaine trade in London.

  Most crime, however, was the work of individuals. The 1927 London Guide warned visitors to the capital of the dangers of crime. ‘A favourite dodge of the light fingered fraternity is to join a crowd for one of the motor omnibuses. Standing on the steps as if about to enter, they work their will while the scrimmage for buses ensue, and then hastily alight.’ In public places, especially on vehicles, the poster ‘Beware of pickpockets’ was a common sight. Thieves often carried overcoats over their arms to use as a screen for their nefarious activities.

  Crime was not dominated by foreign gangs, despite their demonization in the press. As Chief Constable Frederick Wensley wrote, ‘The cleverest thieves … are undoubtedly born cockneys’. Crime was usually the province of the poor. Dockers, with their weekly pay packets, were a common target for pickpockets and in 1927 nine Shoreditch pickpockets were apprehended en route to Poplar and Canning Town. Groups of women from Hoxton often took part in shoplifting expeditions, reselling the goods at markets. Poor people valued their padlocks in order to safeguard their few possessions and in some districts it was unsafe to hang the washing outside if one was absent from home.

  Comic policeman: few people saw the guardians of law in this light. Author’s collection

  Cars were increasingly used in crimes. Basil Thompson wrote ‘the motor car has served the criminal far more than it has the police’. Smash and grab motor bandits targeted jewellers and Ruby Sparks from Camberwell was particularly notorious in this field in the 1920s. Car theft and resale was another burgeoning industry. A Brixton gang specialized in stealing from garages in Camberwell and the Oval. New number plates were useful and a crooked clerk in the London County Council proved helpful here.

  Burglary was another offence, both of shops and houses, in this era. The first cat burglar on Park Lane was one Gussie Delaney in 1924. In the following decade, burglars used flexible plastic to overcome Yale locks. Houses in Golders Green and Hampstead were particularly targeted from the late 1920s.

  Despite all this, generally speaking, crime was at a low level, though contemporaries, unaware of the higher crime rates that would follow the Second World War, were concerned. After all, as a source noted, ‘a large proportion of the offences committed in the United Kingdom take place within the borders of London’. In the 1930s, recorded crime was on the increase, though only about a hundred every year included violence. We shall now examine some figures. In 1913, there had been 7,000 trials for assault and only 4,500 in 1939. Drunkenness cases fell from a pre-war level of 70,000 to 18,000. Whereas in 1903 there had been 553 recorded burglaries, in 1928 there were 473. Larcenies were almost halved to 1,135. Wensley wrote ‘Indiscriminate violence has, in fact, gone out of fashion with the criminal classes.’ Yet, although the London of the 1930s was safer than that before 1914, there was an overall increase in recorded crime in London from 1934 to 1939 of 13.4 per cent, from 83,700 offences to 94,900. However, by the standards of later years this was low, with 570,000 offences in 1978 (when the capital’s population was lower than in the 1930s). It was thus nonsense for a modern Home Secretary to state in 2008 that London has never been safer than at present.

  There were hotbeds of crime in the capital and Campbell Street in Islington was thought to be the worst street in London. Policemen, children and strangers avoided it if at all possible, though its inhabitants chiefly stole from one another. This was a very poor neighbourhood, it was criminal and overcrowded. Theft, violence and gambling were commonplace and in a typical year in the 1920s a dozen of its residents would be in prison. Yet by the 1930s, even this street became more law abiding, with increased policing and the exodus of some of its residents.

  Many Londoners had no first-hand experience of crime, nor much fear of it. Mr Bignell recalls that his parents, who lived in Hornsey in the 1930s, had no fears about crime, and his mother often went out late at night, and alone, in order to do her shopping, walking through darkened streets. How common this experience was is another question, however. Yet London diarists at this time also indicate that crime and the fear of crime was low, if not non-existent. Evelyn Waugh’s only brush with the law was in 1925 when he spent the night in a police cell for drunkenness; he was never the victim of crime. Nor was Henry St John, a civil servant who lived in west London in the 1920s and 1930s. Mr A K Goodlet did record being attacked in Ealing in 1934 by some roughs, but that was the only time he experienced crime and he seems to have quickly forgotten it.

  Murder, too, was at a relatively low level in these years. Wensley wrote ‘Murder investigations, so far as Scotland Yard is concerned, happen much more frequently in books than in real life.’ This is despite the fact that greater London’s population rose throughout these decades from 7.5 million in 1921 to about 8.6 million people in 1939, the largest number that had ever lived there, before or since. Between 1921 and 1939, there were 490 murders in London (and of these, more than 95 per cent were cleared up). This compares very favourably with the numbers of fatal crimes in the early twenty-first century, which numbered 475 in 2004–6. We should also remember that the number of murders in the inter-war years was inflated by cases of women dying as a result of abortions and the fact that some of victims would have survived in more recent years because of advances in medicine. Furthermore, there were a large number of weapons in private hands following the First World War and many young men who knew how to use them. Finally, people were poorer in this period compared to the later twentieth century: clearly the link between poverty and crime is a tenuous one. Londoners were far more likely to be killed in road accidents in London (these averaged 1,000 per annum in the 1920s and 1,400 per year in the 1930s) and violence against the person was very rare. Quite why these decades were so safe is another question, but that it was so is undoubted. One possible explanation was offered in 1932, ‘Observers at home and abroad, whatever their views on capital punishment, agree that the stringent deterrent is the certainty of being found out.’ It must be noted that many convicted killers were given jail sentences, rather than being hanged.

  London at night. Paul Lang’s collection

  Unsolved murders were rare, despite Sir Charles Cayzer, MP for Chester, referring in 1932, to ‘the large number of unsolved murder cases in the last two years’. More accurately, in the Agatha Christie book, The Thirteen Problems, published in the same year, the following discussion occurs:

  ‘Are there a lot of crimes that go unpunished, or are they not?’

  ‘You’re thinking of newspaper headlines, Mrs Bantry. SCOTLAND YARD AT FAULT AGAIN. And a list of unsolved mysteries to follow’.

  ‘Which really, I suppose, form a very small percentage of the whole?’ ‘

  ‘Yes, that is so’.

  Even in the case of unsolved murders (about 5 per cent of the total),

  it does not necessarily follow, that, because a murder is classed as undiscovered, the police do not know who committed the crime. In many cases the explanation is that some vital link in the chain of evidence is missing, and from circumstances beyond the control of the police it cannot be obtained.

  On the other hand, as Wensley wrote, some may have gone unreported:

  It was not in those days a very extraordinary thing for a dead body to be found in the street during the night or in the early hours, and it was significant that this usually occurred not far from houses to which all sorts of bad characters were known to resort. Few of these cases were classed officially as murder … but that there had been foul play was often very likely.

  He added that murder investigations were ‘either very simple or very difficult to handle’. If victim and criminal knew each other, as many did, or if the criminal confessed at once, which was not uncommon, matters were fairly straightforward. If it was a case of murder by a stranger, whether for money or due to lust, then enquiries were far more difficult. Chief Inspector Arthur Neil absolved the force from failure, and wrote that ‘I am certain the fault do not lie with the po
lice.’

  London was the largest city in the world and contained about a fifth of England’s population. As Chief Superintendent Thorp wrote, ‘All great cities are magnets for crooks, gamblers, dope pedlars, prostitutes, pimps and perverts and general riff raff’ and London was no exception. We shall now investigate some of their deeds.

  CHAPTER 3

  Death in Chelsea, 1920

  he read Buxton’s hand and told her that she would meet a violent end – and now she is murdered

  Mrs Frances Buxton, aged 53, was the landlady of the Cross Keys pub on Lawrence Street, Chelsea. She had been married to one Frank Charles Buxton in Toronto, Canada, in 1888, and they had had at least one married daughter by 1920. This was Mrs Gwendolin Wehrle of Phene Street, also in Chelsea. In about 1908, Frances had separated from her husband. This was due to his dislike of her political views (she favoured the suffragettes and, worse still, socialism) and also because he had had an affair in America and passed a venereal disease onto her. She did not see him again until August 1919 and at this time, he was the landlord of the Sussex Hall, Sidley, at Bexhill on Sea. He never saw her again. Mrs Buxton had been the licensee of at least three pubs; the old George at Kensington, the Star at Isleworth and, since 1914, the Cross Keys. When she was at the Star, she took on a partner, a younger man called Arthur Cutting, and he was her partner at the Cross Keys, too. This was not an unmixed blessing. One Henry John Penn, of Stern Street, Shepherd’s Bush, a ball finisher’s assistant and an old friend of Mrs Buxton (since at least 1910), recalled, ‘I remember on one occasion Mrs Buxton came to my place at Shepherd’s Bush and asked me to come over and stay the night at her house to protect her, as this Mr Cutting had attacked her and held her down.’ We shall hear more of Cutting later.