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Overview
The detective is a familiar figure in British history. This work looks at famous cases such as the Ripper murders and the beginnings of the Special Branch and Detective Branch of Scotland Yard. This history covers various aspects of crime history, including the career of Jim 'the Penman' Saward, a notorious forger, and more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752496498 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 807 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Read an Excerpt
Plain Clothes & Sleuths
A History of Detectives in Britain
By Stephen Wade
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Stephen WadeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9649-8
CHAPTER 1
BEFORE SCOTLAND YARD: AMATEURS AND LEARNERS
For centuries, ever since the first justices of the peace were established in the medieval period, the notion of acting against criminals was focused on the magistrate himself (at first voluntary) and the 'Reeve', later called the shire reeve and eventually 'Sheriff'. The system of criminal law before the mid-eighteenth century was largely concerned with accusers gathering and placing a recognizance before a local magistrate. He would then take action, but there were no officers to investigate.
In the tiny village of Long Riston, near Beverley, in 1799, a group of local people took out a recognizance against three people who they alleged had brutalised and eventually killed a little boy, the son of two of the accused. It was a case of murder. The adults clearly had the intention of beating and whipping the child until they had taken away his life. No one went out to start a process of enquiry and detection; they merely came to the East Riding of Yorkshire assizes to stand trial. Whatever investigation and evidence was collated there would be placed before the jury.
In that case, the assize records show something intriguing and fascinating. It is an occurrence that explains much of the local power and social interaction in criminal cases before the regional police forces slowly emerged after the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. At the bottom of the assize record, written in pencil, are the words 'guilty' written next to all three accused. But then a line has been put through the name of the man. 'Not guilty' was written in its place. It would be a positive thought to assume that some kind of investigation had taken place, but more likely we are talking about a local power structure: he may have had debts and transportation would have meant that these debts would never have been recovered. He may simply have had powerful friends. Or there may have been evidence to exonerate him.
British criminal history before the 1829 act, with the exception of those parts of London around Bow Street, was subject to a dominance of the idea of prevention, not detection. Cases of investigation and police work are rare in the regions, while Henry Fielding and others, as we shall see, were beginning to establish detective work. There are rare examples, however, and one case study from West Yorkshire shows that at times magistrates of special ability did turn detective. Such a man was Samuel Lister, of Little Horton, Bradford. Lister was living and working in the heartland of coiner country. Clipping the King's coinage was a very lucrative business at that time (the mid- to late-eighteenth century). Lister was a Justice of the Peace between 1751 and 1769, and he achieved a remarkable feat of detection – he tracked down a forger to the source of his work and his base in Gloucestershire.
Coining then was a capital offence. The Calderdale coiners had made a remote fastness in the hills to where they could retreat into farms well away from the new towns. But Lister, along with his magistrate colleagues at the time, was expected to take on a large workload and there was a shortage of talented magistrates. By the last seven years of his period of office, a great deal of the legal business of the western half of the textile areas around Bradford came under his responsibility. One of his many duties, but one not at all well defined, was to bring felons to justice. Most magistrates had no time for this, but Lister went in pursuit of some, and his most outstanding case was that of his detection of man who called himself Wilkins, apprehended for not paying his inn bill. In January 1756 Wilkins was standing in the dock before Lister. The man had some highly unusual documentation on him, including a letter from Lord Chedworth, giving him immunity from arrest in a civil court. He also had a promissory note for the huge sum of £1,100. Lister was intrigued.
It seemed that Wilkins had forged notes and bills, not actually clipped coinage, but this was a capital offence. Lister did an amazing thing – he circulated details of the man, notably into the area of Painswick, Gloucester. He placed information in the London press also; the man was actually Edward Wilson, a clothier from Painswick. He had been forging bills in the West Country and was a wanted man. He was convicted and received a death sentence.
The kind of activity Lister engaged in was impossible for magistrates as a general rule; he was an outstanding man with a passion for detective work. What he did was almost a twentieth-century piece of police work, communicating across the counties to ascertain a true identity of a suspect. His suspect could have been released at any point on bail by a friend. There was therefore high drama: a chase for information before the system stopped both the arrest and the trial from taking place.
The general system of policing before Peel though, was one in which the key figures of magistrate, parish watch and other local dignitaries and landowners made up the general scene. In London, before Peel's act, we need to trace the beginnings of any smack of professionalism to the Fielding brothers: Henry the novelist, author of Tom Jones, and his blind brother John. Particularly after the beginnings of the gin craze, after its introduction into Britain in 1735, crime escalated in London and other towns. Assaults and robberies related to drunkenness, poverty, insanity and sheer desperation were subject to the brutal repression of the 'Bloody Code' – a long list of capital crimes on the statute books making such offences as stealing a sheep or even robbing a bit of cloth into a hanging matter.
In Fielding's London, the idea was that there would be a shift-work process, in which the good people of the city would take turns as constables. Of course, as they were unpaid and it was dangerous work, this did not happen. The small number of paid officers extended only to the 'Runners'. These existed in places other than Bow Street, but that location has claimed the name. At Bow Street the magistrates looked after the Runners and also the patrols. These were a small force of road patrol officers who policed the outskirts of the city. In central London the 'Charlies' were supposed to watch the streets in some areas, but they were subject to corruption and were not exactly fit men.
Dickens, writing in 1850, had another viewpoint on the Runners:
We are not by any means devout believers in the old Bow Street Police. To say the truth, we think there was a vast amount of humbug about these worthies. Apart from many of them being men of a very indifferent character, and far too much in the habit of consorting with thieves ... they never lost a public occasion of jobbing and trading in mystery and making the most of themselves ...
Henry Fielding has to take the credit for the 'thief takers' however; he added this small select group of men to the Bow Street staff after he became Chief Magistrate at Bow Street in 1748. John Fielding, following him in 1754, was really responsible for the larger force that became the Bow Street Runners. Like Lister, however, Henry Fielding saw the importance of communication. He started the Covent Garden Journal in 1752. This only lasted for a year, but it was far-sighted and was a beginning in this important branch of detective work. A report in the issue for 10 March 1752, for instance, is the first instance of the manoeuvre of 'putting a person up for identification'. With details such as 'Saturday night last one Sarah Matthews, a woman of near fourscore brought a woman of about twenty-four before Mr Fielding' and 'It appeared that her former marriage was a falsehood and that the old lady was the lawful wife ...'
Of course, when there were severe riots, this force could not cope. When there were major problems of social disorder, the army were called out; the militias were accustomed to a tough repression in these cases. A common solution to the problems of disorder was simply to intensify the military actions, treating rioters as an enemy army. By the end of the eighteenth century, when the country was quite used to large bodies of military and naval men around the land, the militia regiments were often keen to practise using swords and guns against the 'rabble'.
But something large scale and more humane was needed. The time was right for a person with outstanding qualities of organisation and problem solving to appear. A man who had been Lord Provost of Glasgow, Patrick Colquhoun, was that man. After moving south to London in 1789, he became a magistrate. He was only thirty-seven but eager to achieve something substantial in this context. His concept was that it was high time that something more than mere prevention of crime was needed. His book A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, published in 1796, went through seven editions in ten years. Colquhoun was many things, including the father of the soup kitchen, a result of his profound concern for the plight of the poor. He was one of those philanthropists who were also known at the time as commercial diplomats – a product of the Enlightenment who noticed the underclass and cared about them.
Colquhoun had the vision to see that what was needed was a number of police commissioners, men with salaries and defined responsibilities. He even suggested a place in the proposed new order for the watchmen, advocating them as a reserve force as the militia is to the regular army. The platform for opposition to his ideas would come from the rates, the ongoing problem of why the British ratepayers would want to finance men in a 'police state' in which the notion of law would be revolutionised and the ordinary man deprived of personal liberties. Colquhoun saw that some duties secondary to actual crime prevention could be included in the remit of the hypothetical police force. Obviously, Robert Peel was aware of these ideas and they were undoubtedly an influence on his thinking a few decades later.
He also conceived of a series of districts with departmental officers, something that would happen in 1829. But he was more than a crime theorist. Colquhoun was also a statistician and a typically enthusiastic social scientist of his age, gathering facts and figures, listing businesses and traders in various categories. All this would play a part in his thinking as he devised what we would now call the application of logistics to the municipal corporations' functioning. As he wrote, the cost of policing would, 'go very far towards easing the resources of the County of the expenses of what the Select Committee of the House of Commons denominate a very inefficient system of police.'
Pitt, in 1798, forwarded these ideas to Parliament but there was a massive and widespread protest. When a bill developed from these proposals was about to be discussed in the chamber, Pitt stood down. The consequences of this led to the bill being dropped. But there was one aspect that survived and was applied, and it was a very important one – the policing of the docks. As the new police were to discover in the 1830s, trying to tackle the problems of smuggling and theft along the Thames was a gargantuan problem and it was open to corruptive practises. At times, constables in Peel's force were to be subject to the temptation of co-operation with the villains, such were the financial rewards available. Colquhoun wrote about the 'plundering' of the docklands. He saw the weaknesses in the process of revenue investigation and excise, and he proposed a river police. By 26 June 1798, it was announced that a river police to be called the Marine Police Institution was to be formed immediately, with its base at Wapping. It was a force of considerable presence, having eighty officers in its original staff. This came about because of a Captain Harriott, who was a magistrate as well as a navy man. Then in 1800, a bill was passed (with the help of Jeremy Bentham) to provide the Thames Police Office with three stipendiary magistrates. Harriott himself took control of this for six years.
It has to be asked what detective work was being done, if any, in the early decades of the nineteenth century before Peel's act. Historians have traditionally studied this by means of looking at the massive and sensational crimes of those years, from the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 to the case of the body snatchers and 'The Italian Boy' horrors of 1831. There is no doubt that such cases highlighted the nature of detective work and also hinted at what kind of expertise was needed to improve. Add to these the murder cases involving Daniel Good and the butler Courvoisier in 1840–1 and we have several good reasons why the call for a detective force was made.
The Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 concerned the household of a draper called Timothy Marr on this road going east from London, running through some of the worst areas of the city for crime. A maid discovered Marr, together with his wife and baby, murdered. But they were killed in such messy, brutal and bloody ways that it was a sensational affair. The baby in its cot had had its throat cut and its skull battered. The investigation pinpointed the shortcomings of the available police forces, because the Thames Police, the Shadwell magistrates and the local churchwardens had all failed to achieve anything in spite of arresting several people. At that time a man could be arrested simply because someone saw him near the scene of crime. There were sightings and details of the actual killer, or killers, including a man called Turner who gave a description of a tall man wearing a specific style of coat. But, as with every high-profile murder that is not seemingly for profit or plunder, the doors were open for hysteria and myth-making. Even the famous writer Thomas de Quincey took hold of the case as a way of writing about meaningless killing, linked to a very modern notion of the sociopath.
It was the magistrates who were having to play detective and they had two suspects, Williams and Peterson, each with bloodied clothing and with visits to a public house under observation. But Williams hanged himself in a cell and from that point it was assumed that he was the killer. This case made it clear to the people of London that there was a case for the establishment of a police force. The estimated cost of such a force was put at £74,000 and the notion was forgotten. In terms of attempts at detection though, it had been an abject failure, pinpointing the abysmal lack of procedure, common sense and most of all co-ordination in the forces of law.
Taking a wider picture, this was a bad time for England – we were almost certainly about to go to war with America and the war in France was going badly. There were Luddite troubles in the North and various dignitaries were causing a stir about the inhumane criminal justice system and the disgusting state of the prisons and local gaols. With hindsight, it is a simple matter to see that another reason for a police force, particularly at that period, was to take some of the strain on men and resources put on the armed forces. There had been a standing army in the North and Midlands for many decades, ready to deal with radicals and riots. Soldiers were based in most main Yorkshire towns, for instance, ready to assemble in trouble hot-spots at any time. As late as the mid-1830s, under Feargus O'Connor, the 'Physical Force' Chartists were drilling with weapons on Woodhouse Moor, in Leeds. Nothing provides a sharper contrast between the French and British ideologies of criminal law and the morality of policing than the gap between the French detective in the system and the British. Before the reforms of Fouché in France, there had always been the 'King's Police' and these had contained agents provocateurs. The Ancien Regime in France had established the idea of police as an integral element of the espionage functions of legal controls on the populace.
Joseph Fouché took over the French Ministry of Police in 1799 when the old tradition of detective work being espionage was carried on. Fouche recruited three hundred officers to use as spies; when Vidocq took over the Brigade de Sureté he was a part of Fouche's organisation, something that worked organically, with excellent communications between different arondissements in Paris. As James Morton has pointed out, Britain did not monitor this: 'It is both curious and alarming that, more than seventy years later, the Metropolitan Police had still not learned from Vidocq and the French.' Early on in the British new police, there were several instances of the consequences of this lack of united work across the London areas. Frederick Wensley, who wrote a memoir, Detective Days (1931) and who joined the police as late as 1888 still noted that there were weaknesses in this respect: 'When I joined, an officer, except by definite instructions, was scarcely ever permitted to go outside his own division. The result was that criminals living in one district could, almost with impunity, commit crimes in another.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Plain Clothes & Sleuths by Stephen Wade. Copyright © 2013 Stephen Wade. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Acknowledgements,
1 Before Scotland Yard: Amateurs and Learners,
2 Peel, Mayne and Rowan,
3 The First Decades: The Social History of the New Detectives,
4 The First Decades: The Men and Their Cases,
5 The Trial of the Detectives: 1877,
6 Hunting Jack the Ripper and Charlie Peace,
7 Special Branch: Section D – 1888,
8 The New Sleuths: Professionals and Amateurs,
9 Major Cases c.1900-40,
10 The Making of Yard Men,
11 In and Out of the Smoke,
12 Case Studies in Charisma,
Conclusions,
Bibliography,