by Jan Bondeson
Lars Gustafsson represents a philosophical school of what we can call historiographical negativism: the thoughts and actions of past generations are naturally obfuscated by the passage of time, and the analysis of historical conundrums, like the example of Strindberg’s Inferno crisis, is in vain even with the most sophisticated technological tools. For an example of the diametrically opposite view, one needs look no further than the present-day amateur criminologists making use of various Internet resources to bring forward a novel ‘solution’ to the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Such an armchair detective of the computer age would not need any reference library, nor would there be any need for travel or other exertions, with Google Books and other online literary archives just a click away. As for original newspaper material, the British Newspaper Archive and other capacious online repositories are readily available to subscribers.10 There are several Internet bulletin boards where Ripper enthusiasts can debate their most recent discoveries. As shown by the present-day deluge of privately published books, often of an execrable quality, historical research is easier than it has ever been and is available to a much wider class of people than the traditional university scholars. It can be a double-edged sword that becoming a published author, through some Internet ‘vanity’ service, is today within the grasp of any person.
A question of key importance for this book is whether a historical mystery can be solved through deductive reasoning alone. In vain did the learned German scholar Hermann Pies dedicate his life’s work to investigating the life and mystery of Kaspar Hauser, only for his theories to be crushed by DNA analysis; in vain did a multitude of French theorists speculating about the fate of the unhappy ‘temple child’ Louis XVII propose their favourite ‘False Dauphins’ as the rightful heirs to the French throne; in vain did a variety of transatlantic enthusiasts support the cause of the impostor Anna Anderson, who managed to persuade many people that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia. As for Britain’s national mystery, the identity of the elusive Jack the Ripper, the lucubrations of myriad imaginative theorists have introduced novel and unexpected ‘suspects’ like Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale; Sir William Gull, the eminent physician; Sir John Williams, who founded the National Library of Wales; Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland; and even the murderess Mary Eleanor Pearcey. Instead of closing in on the elusive Jack, through painstaking analysis of the available evidence, the popular newspaper brand of modern Ripperology has managed to distance itself from the original Whitechapel Murderer, corrupted by greed for money, blatant falsifications and dismal publishing hoaxes.
As for some other celebrated Victorian murder mysteries, the murder of the barrister Charles Bravo in his Balham mansion in 1876 stands out as one of the most famous. The journalist James Ruddick strongly suspected that he was poisoned by his wife Florence, who was actively aided and abetted by her lady companion Mrs Jane Cox, and here I believe he was right, although other authors have held divergent views on the case, some even suspecting suicide.11 Guy Logan and Jack Smith-Hughes both strongly suspected that, although the shop assistant Augustus Payne stood trial for murdering Mrs Ann Reville in Slough in 1881, the true killer was in fact her husband Hezekiah. I myself am not entirely convinced by their reasoning.12 Guy Logan also found strong reason to believe that John Lee – also known as ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’, after his execution was badly botched – was guilty of murdering Miss Keyse at The Glen, Babbacombe, in 1885, and here I believe he was right.13
The distinguished crime historian Richard Whittington-Egan took much care to research the Riddle of Birdhurst Rise, the 1928 triple murder of three members of a prominent Croydon family, concluding that the mystery woman Grace Duff had murdered her husband, sister and mother; some later commentators have agreed with his deductions, and pointed his investigation out as a model of its kind; one modern writer has entirely disagreed, however.14 Mr Whittington-Egan also investigated the mysterious 1945 Lower Quinton ‘Murder by Witchcraft’ case, along with fellow criminologist Bernard Taylor, presenting solid-looking arguments that the old field labourer Charles Walton was murdered by his employer, the farmer Alfred Potter.15 In another book, I have taken care to reinvestigate thirteen unsolved late Victorian murder mysteries, making use of the original police files at the National Archives, if extant, as well as a variety of online newspaper databases, and sundry published secondary sources.16 In one case, the Eltham murder of Jane Maria Clouson in 1871, I was in a position to present novel arguments to the effect that the young man Edmund Pook, who originally stood trial for the murder at the Old Bailey but was acquitted, actually was the guilty man. In five other cases, I was able to identify a main suspect; in three others, it was possible to present arguments against the guilt of the person who had stood accused of the murder at the time; in four instances, mainly murders of prostitutes by elusive late-night ‘customers’, I had to confess to being wholly clueless.
Oft as I lay in my cell lamenting
My wretched situation I deplore
My murdered master appears before me
With his throat all streaming with his gore
That rather disreputable periodical, the Illustrated Police News, was fond of depicting the final dream of convicted murderers, with the lurid phantasms of the moribund prisoner in the condemned cell supplied from vivid images of the individual’s past crimes.17 Courvoisier went to bed a few minutes after eleven o’clock on Sunday night, but he woke with a start at midnight and asked the turnkeys what time it was. The condemned man was able to go to sleep again, but the turnkeys heard that he groaned and gnashed his teeth, as if his dreams were far from pleasant ones. Did the spectre of Eliza Grimwood appear to the wretched murderer, to seize hold of the trembling Swiss valet and thrust its bloodstained face into his? Did Lord William Russell come to haunt his former servant, as the writer of the execution poem quoted above speculated, ‘his throat all streaming with his gore’, presenting a dreadful appearance as he took his cowardly murderer to task? Or did ultimate nocturnal phantasms of the condemned man, for whom there was no hope in this world or the next, involve a foretaste of what horrors awaited him in the afterlife: fearful fiends of nethermost Hell, ever-burning fires, red-hot pokers inserted into various body orifices, and enormous demons farting both day and night, into the sulphuric fumes of the Netherworld?
The immediate objection from the critical reader of this book would of course be that a murder mystery from 1838, fifty years before the depredations of Jack the Ripper, cannot be particularly easy to solve: surely, the newspaper coverage would have become too dated, the secondary sources on the crime too muddled, and the motives driving people at the time too obscured, for the enigma ever to be made clear? On the contrary, it can be pointed out that the Grimwood case is more recent than the aforementioned Kaspar Hauser mystery, with a margin of less than a decade; the reign of terror of that figure of dread, the London Monster of 1790, and the much-debated scribblings of that pseudonymous man of mystery, ‘Junius’ of the Public Advertiser, long predate it.18
The obvious question given the secondary sources about the murder is of course, ‘Did Hubbard murder Eliza Grimwood?’ I would answer that question firmly in the negative, since the forensic evidence speaks strongly in favour of his innocence. The main argument in favour of his guilt, namely that he was a disreputable bully who was partly ‘kept’ through Eliza’s not inconsiderable earnings, is not in doubt, but Hubbard’s actions the days after the murder were not those of a guilty man, and his modest intellect was hardly capable of planning and executing what was in fact a perfect murder. Hubbard withstood two attempts to incriminate him for the murder, by the creature Owen and by the anonymous letter-writer who may well have been young M’Millan, and he remained unshaken by long and gruelling questionings at the inquest and at Union Hall. If we accept that the Foreigner committed the murder, then we have a number of peripheral contemporary suspects, namely young M’Millan himself, Mr Skinner the tobacconist, the French
singer Ernest Tondeur, and the unnamed Jew confronted by Inspector Field; all these men are obviously innocent, and have nothing to do with the murder.
The next question is ‘Did Courvoisier murder Eliza Grimwood?’ I honestly think that he did. Firstly, we have the matter of his (withdrawn) confession, and then the ‘Logan Memorandum’ suggesting that while in Newgate Courvoisier spoke of murdering two young women of the street: most probably Eliza Davies and Eliza Grimwood. He exactly fits the reliable witness descriptions of ‘the Foreigner’, with regard to height, hair colour and general appearance, and one of the witnesses thought his dress indicative of that of a respectable gentleman’s servant. Just like the Foreigner, Courvoisier could speak both French and Italian, but he also spoke good English, although with the French accent remaining. One witness thought his name similar to that of the French assassin Fieschi, and Eliza may well have spoken the name of her murderer when he came to fetch her at the Strand Theatre, although a witness misheard it as ‘He is here’. There were vague contemporary murmurations that Courvoisier had committed murder before he slew Lord William Russell at No. 14 Norfolk Street, and that he had once arrived home in a very dishevelled state, under suspicious circumstances. Then we have the matter of the mackintosh brought by the Foreigner to the murder house at Wellington Terrace, in order to avoid getting his clothes bloodstained; I rather suspect that this was the modus operandi in the murder of Lord William Russell, and perhaps in the murder of Eliza Davies as well.
Was Courvoisier an opportunistic serial killer, the Ripper of Waterloo Road, who occasionally murdered young women for perverted pleasure, and men for the sake of profit? He fits the description of the dapper-looking young ‘Frenchman’ who had befriended Eliza Davies, but the lack of reliable witness testimony in this obscure murder case, and the incompetent police investigation, renders it impossible to narrow down the search for the Frederick Street murderer. The main suspect in the murder of Mr Westwood was the Swiss Nicholas Carron, but two men were seen leaving the murder house; was the second culprit another Swiss, motivated both by bloodlust and the desire for plunder? There were contemporary rumours that the murders of Eliza Grimwood and Mr Westwood were linked. The situation is that from 1837 until 1839, three unsolved murders with the same modus operandi were committed in central London. During those years, a young man with a liking for London low life, who later showed that he was perfectly capable of planning and executing a near-perfect, premeditated murder, was at large in the metropolis. When analysing the murder of Eliza Grimwood, or for that matter the murder of Lord William Russell, the impression is that both victims were killed, for motives of both bloodlust and plunder, by a person of superior coolness and cunning, who had committed murder before. Gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case!
The church of St John in Waterloo Road took a direct hit from a German bomb in 1940, and the roof and much of the interior was destroyed. After standing open for ten years, it was eventually restored, and today it looks very much like it did when Eliza Grimwood was buried there in 1838. The churchyard has been much altered and no trace remains of Eliza’s gravestone. When I visited the churchyard in 2007, it was infested with drunks and vagabonds, who swigged thirstily from their cider bottles or lay comatose on the ground; when I returned in 2015, these undesirables had relocated to some other hangout, and it would appear that Eliza’s restless spirit finally had peace. With Thomas Hood, author of ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, we can exclaim:
One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion’d so slenderly
Young, and so fair!
But hark! I hear my death-bell tolling
And to meet my fate I must away
How shall I meet my offended Maker?
How stand before him on the judgement-day?
François Benjamin Courvoisier rose at four o’clock on the morning of the day he was to be executed. He dressed and occupied himself by writing letters in French to various old friends and relatives. He also signed some rather macabre autographs to the sheriffs and turnkeys:
François Benjamin Courvoisier
The 6th of July, 1840
The Day of My Execution.
The Rev. Mr Carver and M. Baup the Swiss clergyman prayed with him, and administered the holy sacrament. When prompted, Courvoisier whispered, in a barely audible voice, that he was fully penitent for the crime he had committed, and that he had confidence in the atonement of the Saviour; his pale, contorted countenance plainly showed the deep anguish of his soul, a journalist assures us. The executioner William Calcraft then pinioned the prisoner and he was led to the scaffold by two turnkeys, Calcraft and Sheriff Wheelton following him and the Rev. Mr Carver reading the burial service as he walked before the condemned man.
The sheriffs had been inundated with requests to see Courvoisier being executed and 600 seats had been taken by the nobility and gentry adjacent to the scaffold itself. In addition, a curious mob had already congregated in front of Newgate the evening before the execution. Boys were advertising seats at the windows of houses facing the scaffold, and good seats were snapped up for as much as five guineas. In one of the houses immediately opposite the drop, the windows were taken out, to offer the execution enthusiasts inside an unimpeded view of proceedings. Soon, every seat at a window facing the scaffold was sold to various middle-class customers, who did not like to mix with the rowdy mob in front of Newgate. Sir W.W. Wynn had hired a room to the south of the drop, at the George public house, with a party of friends, and Lord Alfred Paget and his friends occupied a window at the undertakers next door. Some execution enthusiasts in the mob went home for their night’s sleep, but more hardened elements who had secured good vantage points for the cataclysm to come remained there all night, smoking their pipes and telling stories of other criminals they had seen executed. At two o’clock in the morning, the apparatus of death was brought out of the prison yard, and two carpenters worked for more than two hours to fix it to the scaffold, the sound of their hammers ceasing as the bell of St Sepulchre’s chimed a quarter past four. The growing mob gave a long yell of triumph.19
The execution of Courvoisier, from the Sunday Times and People’s Police Gazette of 12 July 1840.
The end of Courvoisier, from the Curiosities of Street Literature (London 1871), sheet 193.
One of the men in the mob who had congregated to see Courvoisier hanged was Charles Dickens, who was quite disgusted by the ribaldry, drunkenness and debauchery demonstrated by the Newgate mob; another was William Makepeace Thackeray, who had risen at three o’clock in the morning to be able to join the mob in front of Newgate. At its largest, the audience numbered between 12,000 and 15,000 people – a considerable crowd indeed, but a good deal smaller than that which had congregated to see Greenacre done to death. The coarse and common conversation among the elements of the mob, and their loud and heartless laugh, was irksome to the two literary men, who felt that the crowd behaved as if it had congregated to view some passing pageant or travelling fair rather than to see a man hanged. As the bell begun to strike eight, there was a great murmur among the mob, and women and children assailed Thackeray’s ears by shrieking horridly. As he expressed it in his famous essay ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’, ‘I don’t know whether it was the bell I heard, but a dreadful quick, feverish kind of jangling noise mingled with the noise of the people, and lasted for about two minutes. The scaffold stood before us, tenantless and black; the black chain was hanging down ready from the beam. Nobody came. “He has been respited,” somebody said; another said, “He has hanged himself in prison.”’20
Drawings of a cast of Courvoisier’s head, made after the execution.
But in the end, Courvoisier emerged just as planned, and ‘a dreadful yell of execration’ arose as the condemned man entered the scaffold. As Thackeray expressed it:
He wa
s dressed in a new black suit, as it seemed, his shirt was open. His arms were tied in front of him. He opened his hands in a helpless kind of way, and clasped them once or twice together. He turned his head here and there, and looked about him for an instant, with a wild, imploring look. His mouth was contracted into a sort of pitiful smile. He went and placed himself at once under the beam, with his face towards St Sepulchre’s. The tall, grave man in black twisted him round swiftly in the other direction, and drawing from his pocket a nightcap, pulled it tight over the patient’s head and face. I am not ashamed to say that I could look no more, but shut my eyes as the last dreadful act was going on, which sent this wretched, guilty soul into the presence of God.
There was a great roar from the mob as Calcraft swiftly and expertly launched Courvoisier into eternity; the prisoner did not struggle much, and his wicked and profligate life was ended swiftly and effectively. The mystery man François Benjamin Courvoisier took his secrets, of which I suspect there were many, with him to an unmarked grave within the walls of Newgate, later marked with a ‘C’ in chalk, and pointed out to visitors as the murderous Swiss valet’s final resting place. May the London of present and future generations be free of murderers as cruel and cunning as him!
An autograph signed by Courvoisier in the death cell at Newgate.
