The Ripper of Waterloo Road

by Jan Bondeson

  THE RIPPER OF

  WATERLOO ROAD

  First published in 2017

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2017

  All rights reserved

  © Jan Bondeson, 2017

  The right of Jan Bondeson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB 978 0 7509 8186 6

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  1 The Stage is Set: London in 1838

  2 The Waterloo Road Horror

  3 The Lambeth Murder

  4 An Inspector Calls

  5 The Inquest Begins

  6 The Strange Welshman

  7 The Prostitute Who Knew Too Much

  8 Wilful Murder Against Some Person or Persons Unknown

  9 The Cavendish Letter

  10 The Clue of the Lavender-coloured Gloves

  11 Red Herrings

  12 Who Murdered Eliza Grimwood?

  13 The Frederick Street Murder, the Westwood Mystery, and Some Suspects

  14 The Main Suspect

  15 The Beautiful Corpse

  16 Going to See a Man Hanged

  Notes

  FOREWORD

  Back in 2006, I purchased, through the medium of eBay, a handsomely leather-bound set of the New Newgate Calendar, a scarce ‘penny dreadful’ issued in weekly parts from October 1863 until March 1865.1 Its two volumes are full of lurid accounts of celebrated criminals, like the mariticidal Catherine Hayes who ended her days being burnt at the stake, William Corder who murdered Maria Marten in the Red Barn, the gamblers Thurtell and Hunt who murdered William Weare at Gill’s Hill Cottage, and Mother Brownrigg who tortured and killed her young apprentice girls. Each penny issue has a gory frontispiece depicting some unfortunate individual being stabbed, shot or disembowelled; women are ravished, flogged or thrown out of carriages, and the sadistic Mother Brownrigg advances on her helpless, half-naked victim, whip in hand.

  Issues 53 to 61 of the New Newgate Calendar contain another thrilling tale: ‘Eliza Grimwood, or the Mysteries of Crime’, beginning with the highly charged words:

  Murder!

  How the horrible sound rings in the night air.

  Murder!

  What a thrill of horror darts through the frame of the cry. What atrocity – what crime is conveyed in the sentence. The poor, ghastly, bleeding victim, with glazed eyes and livid features, launched into eternity with frightful suddenness … What horror, what agony must be endured by the victim of the assassin’s knife.

  Murder! Murder!

  The horrible cry wakes up the stillness of the night with dreadful effect. Such a cry was taken up from mouth to mouth one bright summer night in July 1838, in the locality of the Waterloo Road … On the night in question an awful and atrocious murder was committed on a weak, frail woman – a wretched creature of the town was cruelly and barbarously murdered with more than usual atrocity.

  Although the account in the New Newgate Calendar is full of exaggerations and inaccuracies, it rightly states that the Ripper of Waterloo Road ‘with fiendly [sic], devilish and horrible atrocity, had inflicted the most hideous and diabolical injuries to the body of the wretched girl, abusing it in a manner that dare not be described’.

  I decided to investigate the unsolved 1838 murder of Eliza Grimwood further, spending ten years gathering material for this book.2 For the researcher or genealogist, it will be a welcome reminder that even what may be perceived as a relatively insignificant historical episode has generated considerable amounts of contemporary and secondary documentation, making it possible to tell the dramatic and exciting murder story as if Eliza Grimwood had been done to death just a few years ago. Well-nigh uniquely for a crime of that period, the diary of the police officer leading the investigation has been preserved for posterity. This means that the murder of Eliza Grimwood can be viewed from a triple perspective: that of the police, that of the contemporary newspapers, and that of its impact on popular culture and tradition. Why did the murder of Eliza Grimwood arouse such intense feelings of revulsion and outrage at the time? What was it about the sexually sadistic murder of a beautiful young prostitute that fascinated people at the time? What was the ultimate fate of Eliza Grimwood’s restless spirit, said to have haunted the Waterloo Road murder house for many decades? And what can be deduced about the identity of the perpetrator, and how many victims did this proto-Ripperine Victorian man of blood really claim?

  1

  THE STAGE IS SET: LONDON IN 1838

  In the year 1838, London was the greatest city in the greatest empire on the globe, and its inhabitants were ruled by the benign presence of the youthful, virginal Queen Victoria.1 Neither George IV nor William IV had been particularly popular monarchs, and there had been jubilation when the reactionary Duke of Cumberland had succeeded to the throne of Hanover and left Britain for good. To Londoners of all classes of society, Victoria’s accession to the throne in June 1837, when she was just 18 years old, seemed to herald a new and more prosperous era in the country’s history, free of the corruption, waste and excesses for which her wicked uncles had made themselves notorious. There was widespread sympathy for the queen, since she was young, not unattractive and politically innocent. Many books, pamphlets and poems heralded the beginning of her spring-like reign; they dwelt at length on Victoria’s great wisdom, goodness and sense of philanthropy. Although her looks owed more to youth than to regularity of features or shapeliness of figure, the early prints of her all depicted her as a beauty.2

  The youthful Queen Victoria was fond of her old governess, Baroness Lehzen, who maintained a benign influence over her young charge. Although this formidable German lady had no formal position at court, she enjoyed a good deal of influence in royal circles. Queen Victoria’s relations with her mother, the intriguing and unpopular Duchess of Kent, had always been problematic. Although the duchess was allowed to keep her apartments at Buckingham Palace, Victoria dismissed her mother’s private secretary (and probable lover), the Irish adventurer Sir John Conroy. Lord Melbourne, the Whig prime minister, was a father figure to the orphaned young queen. A clever, educated gentleman, he dazzled her with his sparkling conversation and delighted her with his flattery. This experienced statesman was instrumental in helping her break free from the unwholesome influence of her mother and Conroy, and he did his best to guide her steps in matters of state after her accession to the throne. Queen Victoria was fond of simple pursuits, like counting the Canalettos in the Buckingham Palace picture galleries together with Baroness Lehzen (there were forty-three of them), amusing herself with puzzles and jigsaws, putting dissected pictures back together with the assistance of Lord Melbourne and Lord Conyngham, or watching her beloved spaniel Dash frolic in the palace grounds.

  The young Queen Victoria, from Vol. 2 of the Gallery of Engravings.

  Another engraving of the young Queen Victoria, from a portrait by Dalton after F. Winterhalter.
>
  Queen Victoria’s household at Buckingham Palace was run to medieval standards by a number of inert functionaries, who jealously protected their ancient privileges, and resented trespass into the customary preserves of their departments. The office of the Lord Chamberlain provided lamps, that of the Lord Steward cleaned and trimmed them, and that of the Master of the Horse made sure they were lit. The insides of the Buckingham Palace windows were cleaned by the Lord Chamberlain’s department, the outsides by the Office of Woods and Forests; the cleaning was never performed simultaneously, meaning that Victoria had to gaze through windows that were translucent only. The average age of the royal servants was high; they had been employed through a corrupt ‘grace and favour’ system, and stayed in service until well past normal retirement age. No person took responsibility for royal security, since it was considered well-nigh unthinkable that any person would have intent to harm or injure the queen. It would take the depredations of Queen Victoria’s persistent young stalker, Edward ‘the Boy’ Jones, who stole her underwear and spied on her in the dressing room, lying underneath a sofa, and the pistol-toting would-be royal assassin Edward Oxford, who fired at the queen in her carriage, for royal security to be upgraded at long last.3

  The same police force that guarded Queen Victoria was also responsible for maintaining law and order among her humble citizens in London’s slums and rookeries. For centuries, London’s policing had been based on a voluntary system, with unpaid petty constables being selected for an annual term, elected by their fellow parishioners. Since acting as the local policeman was far from popular already in the mid 1700s, many people paid to hire a replacement; this would have been beneficial if these substitutes had been vigorous young men, but often they were just feeble old workhouse inmates. In addition to this system of voluntary petty constables, each parish employed a force of nightwatchmen. Led by their Night Beadle, these watchmen each had a beat to patrol, and were armed with a staff, a lantern, and a rattle with which to sound the alarm if they saw anything untoward. The nightwatchman’s lot was a hard one: their status in society was low, their salary a meagre one, and their working hours singularly unappealing. Many of them were elderly and infirm, and there were unkind jokes about the cracking sound of their rattles, their cracking arthritic joints, and their weather-cracked old voices calling out the time.

  Already, in 1785, there was a debate whether this voluntary system of policing was adequate in a London full of vice and crime. It was suggested that the metropolis should be subdivided into nine police divisions, each with its own police office, magistrates, and a force of twenty-five fit and able policemen, properly armed and with far wider powers than the parish constables. This suggestion was turned down, however, and the only major difference in the policing of London between 1690 and 1790 was the addition of a small force of Bow Street Runners, tough and resilient thief-takers in plain clothes based at the Bow Street police office. The capital’s indifferent policing was shown up by the London Monster’s reign of terror in 1790. This serial stabber of women on the streets of the metropolis sparked an unprecedented mass hysteria, with the people of London seeing Monsters everywhere. Eventually, after the Monster had claimed at least fifty victims, a Welsh artificial flower maker named Rhynwick Williams was arrested and charged with the crimes; he was sentenced to six years in Newgate, although there have been doubts over his guilt. A ‘Foot Patrol’ and a ‘Horse Patrol’, both mainly intended to hunt down footpads and highwaymen around London, were added to the Bow Street force in the early 1790s, and 1798 saw the foundation of the Thames River Police. In December 1811, two families were wiped out in the East End of London by an unknown intruder. The Ratcliffe Highway murders caused widespread alarm, since seven respectable people had been slaughtered by the elusive murderer. After much uproar in the East End, a sailor named John Williams was arrested and charged with the murders, but he rather conveniently was found hanged in his cell before he faced trial. Doubts concerning his guilt and speculation regarding the possible existence of an accomplice have persisted, however.4

  There was widespread criticism of the police after their failure to swiftly apprehend the Ratcliffe Highway murderer, and suggestions that a detective police should be set up according to the system in Paris, but in the debate that ensued, the traditionalists preferring the old voluntary system of policing once more prevailed. The young Tory politician Robert Peel, who became MP for an Irish rotten borough in 1809 at the age of just 21, was a firm proponent of police reform, however. This was not because he had concerns about unsolved murders or dangerous criminals on the loose in London, but because he was fearful of riot and civil unrest. In the Gordon Riots of 1780, a mob 60,000 strong had been at large, marching on Parliament, sacking prisons and burning down houses, wholly unimpeded by the feeble parish constables patrolling the streets. In the 1815 London Corn Law Riots, houses were looted and burned down by the mob, the police once more standing by uselessly. Calling in the army could be dangerous indeed when the rioters were at large. At the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, things got out of hand when cavalry charged a mob of 70,000 in Manchester, resulting in eighteen fatalities and many hundreds of wounded. At the London riots after Queen Caroline’s funeral in 1821, the mob blocked the road in front of the funeral cortege. After cobblestones and bricks had been thrown, the troops opened fire, and cavalrymen forming the guard of honour charged the mob with their sabres drawn. This time there were two fatalities among the civilians, and many wounded. The Duke of Wellington was more worried about the risk of mutiny in the Guards after Queen Caroline’s return. He wrote a strongly worded memorandum to the Cabinet that to prevent chaos and mob rule, London needed a professional police force.5

  In 1822, Robert Peel became Home Secretary in Lord Liverpool’s Tory government. He took the chair of a select committee on police in the metropolis, and worked tirelessly for police reform. Peel was no conventional and reactionary Tory squire; he identified himself with the prosperous industrial middle class. Not at all unreasonably, he felt that London society needed higher standards of social discipline, through the employment of a professional police force. Later in 1822, there was odium when a well-to-do London lady, Mrs Donatty, was found murdered by an intruder in her house. The police bungled the investigation badly, and the murder was never solved. In 1827, the elderly housekeeper Mrs Elizabeth Jeffs was found murdered in her house at No. 11 Montague Place, Bloomsbury. In spite of a multitude of leads – and a young ne’er-do-well named Bill Jones was arrested and tried for the crime but was found not guilty – the murder was never solved.6 Although by 1828 the seven London police offices employed constables of their own, and although many parishes had watchmen acting as extra constables, the total number of daytime policemen was just 450, a small force indeed for 1.5 million Londoners. In July 1829, Peel finally had success: his Police Bill received royal assent, and work started to build up the embryonic Metropolitan Police. London was subdivided into seventeen alphabetically named divisions, each of which would be led by a superintendent, and employ four inspectors, sixteen sergeants and 144 constables. The New Police was led by two commissioners, the Waterloo veteran Colonel Charles Rowan and the up-and-coming young Irish barrister Richard Mayne, from headquarters at No. 4 Whitehall Place, Westminster, in the front half of the ‘A’ Division station house, which opened into Great Scotland Yard.

  Robert Peel, the great Metropolitan law enforcement pioneer, from Vol. 4 of the New Portrait Gallery.

  There was a good deal of unemployment in 1829, and recruitment of all these police constables proved surprisingly easy: discharged soldiers and sailors, labouring men of every description, and former Bow Street foot patrols joined the New Police with enthusiasm, although the hours were long and the pay low. To be eligible, the recruits had to be able-bodied and at least 5ft 7in tall, under 35 years old, literate and of good character. Former army warrant officers and NCOs secured many of the appointments as inspectors and sergeants. The New Policemen, or ‘Peelers’ as th
ey were commonly known, were dressed in a distinctive uniform that was selected to be civilian-looking and uncontroversial: a swallow-tailed blue coat with a single row of shiny buttons, a stiff collar and leather neck-stock, and a reinforced tall hat; their trousers were white in the summer and blue in the winter. In contrast to the Bow Street Runners and Horse Patrols, who were armed to the teeth since they were dealing with dangerous ruffians and highwaymen, each constable carried only a rattle and a short truncheon. In order to appease the opponents of the New Police, Peel and the two commissioners emphasised that their police force was there to prevent crime, not to harass the good people of London. Neither of these three worthies considered that London needed a force of specially trained and selected detectives, however, and thus the uniformed officers of the New Police were in charge of investigating crimes of every severity, from capital murder down to petty theft.7

  Sir Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, the two first commissioners of the New Police.

  Old Scotland Yard, from Vol. 3 of Hargrave L. Adam’s Police Encyclopaedia.

  It would not be long before the detection skills of the New Police were tested. In August 1830, the middle-aged widow Mrs Jane Whillett was murdered in her house at No. 30 Upper Prince’s Street, Lambeth. She had been running a small marine store on the premises, selling second-hand clothes, empty bottles, and other humble articles to various needy locals. She had several sons, one of whom was still living at home, as was her daughter who had married a man named Norris; there was also a lodger named John Witham, who worked as a journeyman barge builder. It was Witham who had found Mrs Whillett beaten to death in her kitchen, with marks of repeated heavy blows to her face and head. Since she had been as poor as the proverbial church mouse, robbery seemed an unlikely motive; the ‘L’ or Lambeth division of the New Police, who were ‘using the greatest exertions to discover the actual murderer’, rather suspected a ‘family drama’. They knew, through the local gossip mill, that the lodger Witham had been more than friendly with Mrs Whillett. Since the remaining Bow Street Runners were unkind enough to make some snide remarks about the failure of the New Police to catch the murderer, the Union Hall magistrate Mr Chambers ‘hoped that no jealousy would exist between the old and new police upon this occasion, and that they would co-operate, and by their united exertions be the means of bringing the perpetrator of the murder to justice’. The New Police maintained that John Witham was the main suspect, since they thought Mrs Whillett had taken tea with her killer before he struck her down. But although Witham was examined by the Union Hall magistrates, there was no conclusive evidence against him, and his employer thought him a very respectable and hard-working man. When Witham was eventually discharged, and the murder of Jane Whillett remained a mystery, an article in the Morning Post took the part of the New Police. Unlike the old-fashioned and ineffective watchmen, and the corrupt Bow Street thief-takers, Peel’s system of policing aimed for crime prevention rather than punishment. Although the New Police had been ‘condemned for their over-anxiety to discover the perpetrator of the late murder in Lambeth’, the new system was honest, fair and free of corruption, the journalist asserted; his readers were reminded that under the old system of policing, the murderers of Mrs Donatty and Mrs Jeffs had escaped with impunity.8