The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (32 page)

I afterwards saw the prisoner Luie the same day in the House of Detention by his own request and he then said. – ‘If I thought they would not prosecute me I would tell all particulars’. I replied that I could make him no promise, but if he wished to make a statement I would rather he did it through the solicitors. Luie then said ‘Very well, let them come on Monday’. This was on the Saturday. I left him then. On Monday, the 15th, I went with Mr Pollard [assistant Treasury Solicitor] to the House of Detention, and there saw the prisoner. The warder then said to him ‘This is Mr Pollard and Mr Clarke, do you wish to see them?’ Luie then led me to a corner of the room and said, ‘I will not now. I have been advised to hold my tongue’ … On the way here he said ‘Since you last saw me I have had a visit from Captain Nicholson [nephew of George Whalley]. He brought me a letter from Mr. Whalley, saying that he could get me remanded from time to time, and that I should not go to the convict prison and that he had given £5 to Harding [Claimant’s servant] to keep me … I should not have got into trouble had it not been for the folly of Dr Kenealy, who forced Mr Hawkins to call the rebutting evidence. It is not all my fault. I begged of them scores of times not to put me in the witness-box. Mr Onslow is a very violent man, and would not listen to me. He gave me a book of evidence given at the last trial, and marked the different passages in it which I had to learn at night time and had frequently to sit up all night. He told me about the brown mark on the side, and frequently made a drawing with his finger to show me the shape and size of it, and placed his hand on my side to show the position.’ … The prisoner said ‘that he never intended originally to give evidence.’ He expected to have made some money without, but they forced him to do it, and he was never allowed out by himself. One or the other of them was always with him … He said ‘I should have been put in the box earlier, only I could not learn my story correctly’.
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The response to Clarke’s account of events, by supporters of the Claimant and Luie, was immediate. In a letter published in
The Times
on 12 January 1874, George Whalley, referred to the ‘extraordinary statement of Detective Officer Clarke as to what Luie has, he alleges, confessed to him, and which, so far as I am concerned and also in other respects within my own knowledge is an absolute fiction’. Whalley then, displaying arrogance, folly or an ignorance of legal procedure (or probably a combination of all three), attended the next Bow Street hearing of Luie’s case on 15 January and asked to address the court. This was refused and he was told to pass any relevant information to Luie’s solicitor. Two days later, when Clarke was cross-examined, ‘the small attorney’s box was literally besieged by friends of the Claimant including Mr Whalley’.
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Undeterred in his attempt to negate the effect of Clarke’s evidence, Whalley then wrote further letters to the press including one published in the
Daily News
on 21 January which stated:

As the statements of Detective Clarke of what Jean Luie has told him – though denied, as it seems by Luie himself – may materially prejudice the trial, I consider that I am called upon to state that nothing that has occurred in relation to this man [Luie] that affects my belief that his evidence as to the
Osprey
is substantially true.
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Hearing of these letters, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn demanded that Whalley should appear at the Court of Queens Bench to answer a charge of contempt of court. Whalley was fined £250, which he refused to pay and, as a consequence, he was arrested and removed to Holloway Prison.
³⁹

By now, the Claimant’s trial was proceeding to its conclusion. Henry Hawkins made reference to the detectives during his final statement for the prosecution:

But as to Whicher and Clarke; I quite agree that you may have detectives who grossly deceive you, and you may also have men of all ranks and classes who will invent a story to deceive you. But Whicher and Clarke belong to a highly respectable body of men, and I challenge any one to point to a single thing, from the time when this Defendant first set foot in England till now, that Whicher, or Clarke, or Mackenzie [the agent sent by the Tichborne family to Australia in 1867] has done that has not been done in the strict discharge of the duties they had to perform. They have simply been employed in the detection of crime, and because they have discharged their duty, are they to be branded as perjurers? I shall say no more about them. You have heard a great deal about them, but hard words do not injure anybody’s character, and I say there has been no foundation for the attacks upon them.
⁴⁰

The trial finally ended on 28 February 1874. The jury took only thirty minutes to reach a guilty verdict on the counts of perjury, and to conclude that the Claimant was not Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, that he did not seduce Miss Katherine Doughty (Lady Radcliffe), and that he was Arthur Orton. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms of seven years’ penal servitude.
⁴¹

Clarke’s involvement had been highly significant in undermining aspects of the pro-Claimant evidence, particularly that of ‘Luie’, and he had also exposed the incompetence of some of the Claimant’s supporters and legal team. Henry Hawkins commented later that:

Luie’s story of picking him up in the boat must have amused him [the Claimant] greatly. If he was amused at the ease with which fools can be humbugged, he must also have been astounded at the awful villainy of those who, perfect strangers to him, had perjured themselves for the sake of notoriety.
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Ultimately, the Claimant had only himself to blame for the end result of the charade that he had persisted with (and continued to persist with throughout most of his life). Nonetheless:

Whatever crime the Claimant was guilty of, whatever view one may take of his moral obliquities, and of his mean, cruel and disgraceful lies told over a series of years to support a long-drawn-out fraud, we must not deny him some share of the virtue, which, according to Dr Johnson is the most important of all – courage.
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Clarke’s responsibilities did not end when Arthur Orton was transferred to prison. He was still employed on the Luie perjury case which came to trial at the Old Bailey on 9 April 1874. A month prior to that, Clarke had also arrested Captain James Brown on a similar charge.
⁴⁴
At his trial Luie was charged under his real name of Carl Peter Lundgren; it had now been established that he was a native of Gothenberg. He had been a ship’s master and, in 1853, at the time that Luie had stated that he was on board the
Osprey
, he had been employed in Hull. Though Luie was legally represented at the beginning of his trial, his counsel had withdrawn by the time the defence were required to put their case, and his supporters were noticeable by their absence. There was one exception, the ever-present George Whalley, who offered himself as a witness for Luie, but was prevented by the judge from presenting his hearsay evidence. When summing up, the judge blamed Luie’s so-called friends for his lack of representation, and criticised Whalley for ‘tendering himself as a useless and futile witness’. The jury returned a unanimous ‘guilty’ verdict on the grounds of perjury. A charge of bigamy was not proceeded with, but was left on the books. Captain Brown was tried immediately after Luie, with a new jury, and also found guilty of perjury – the jury not finding it necessary to retire to consider their verdict. Luie was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude and Brown to five years.
⁴⁵

After the Claimant had been imprisoned, his popularity continued as his supporters transferred their efforts to securing his release. Others jumped on the bandwagon that the Claimant’s cause provided for their own radical political purposes.
⁴⁶
From 1875 onwards, there was a regular meeting at Hyde Park on Easter Monday in support of the Claimant’s cause. For these events, large numbers of police were put on standby and detectives attended to observe proceedings.
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By 1877 John de Morgan, a notorious radical of the time, had become involved in the Claimant’s cause. De Morgan was an Irish nationalist who, after arriving in London, had achieved success in leading a movement against the enclosure of common lands and, in 1875 and 1876, had taken direct action against the attempted enclosure of part of Hackney Downs and Plumstead Common. De Morgan had given notice to the Home Office that he planned to organise a march on the Houses of Parliament on 17 April to present a petition in favour of the Claimant’s release.
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Clarke, as the Scotland Yard expert on Tichborne-related matters, was asked to assess the significance of the threat. On 1 February 1877 Clarke reported that de Morgan: ‘… appears to be so elated by the notoriety he gained in getting up meetings for the preservation of Commons and Open Spaces, and is so eager to keep up his name before the public that I believe there is nothing too rash or too ridiculous for him to attempt.’
⁴⁹
On the 17 April, there was a significant police presence, but no disorder.

This was the last time that Clarke was involved in matters relating to the Claimant. The Claimant himself was released from Pentonville Prison on 11 October 1884 on ticket of leave, continuing to insist that he was Sir Roger Tichborne until 1895, by which time he was destitute and had accepted an offer from
The People
to publish his ‘confession’, later retracting it. He died on 1 April 1898, an appropriate date for a man who had managed to hoodwink thousands of people, including his ‘mother’. About 5,000 people attended his funeral.
⁵⁰

Theft at Gray’s Inn

While the Tichborne case and betting prosecutions were the dominant features in Clarke’s working life between 1872 and 1875, these were far from being the only responsibilities that he had. In 1873, for example, His Imperial Majesty the Shah of Persia Nasir-al-Din paid his first visit to Britain, and wherever the shah went, Clarke was on his heels guarding his precious gems. Preparing for this important visit, Commissioner Henderson had assembled the latest statistics on the Metropolitan Police force, which had expanded considerably over the past few years. The shah was informed that ‘the streets of London patrolled by the Police would reach, in a straight line from London to Teheran, and thence to Point de Galle in Ceylon, 6,612 miles’.
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In 1873 the estimated population of London was almost 4 million; the numbers of police in the City and the Metropolitan areas were 785 and 9,927 (449 and 14 per square mile), respectively. There were about 1,400 horse-drawn omnibuses, 8,108 hackney carriages and 25,000 horses on the streets.
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Indeed, since Clarke had joined the force in 1840 the population in London had doubled and the manpower levels in the Metropolitan Police had increased by a slightly greater factor (2.3 fold). Yet despite this overall increase and the 1869 enlargement of the detective department, Clarke was still expected to tackle a very diverse range of criminal investigations; including theft, murder in international waters, guarding visiting dignitaries and witness abductions. Clarke also provided cover for Superintendent Williamson when he was absent on business or leave.

On 7 May 1872 Clarke was brought in at a late stage to investigate a number of thefts from lawyers’ offices at Gray’s Inn Square. Three separate burglaries and thefts had occurred at night at the offices of Messrs Denton, Hall and Barker during the previous year and had remained unsolved. The earlier burglaries had involved the theft of money, but the most recent had involved several valuable parchment deeds. This theft had been followed by the receipt of a letter, signed ‘C.M.H.’, offering to return the stolen deeds if £7 was paid. The writer used the post office in Judd Street as a poste restante address for reply. In February 1872, the nearby legal firm of Messrs Stuart and Massey had discovered that a locked iron box containing important documents had also been stolen. Mr Massey had placed a £20 reward notice in the newspapers for the return of the box and its contents. He subsequently received a letter from ‘W.H.’ (replies to the Gray’s Inn Road post office) asking if a reward would be given for the documents alone. After a prolonged correspondence, a £20 reward was paid using numbered banknotes, and the documents had been returned by a woman to the hall porter’s office at Gray’s Inn Square. The head porter, John Andrews, had been expecting such a delivery and called uniformed colleagues William Comley and P.C. David Edwards (posted at Gray’s Inn) to follow the woman. Taking the lead, Edwards asked Comley to hold back and follow at a distance, while he went in front. However, Edwards soon reported that he had lost sight of the woman, and the two men returned empty handed. Meanwhile, a watch had been put on the two post offices and, on 3 May, an E Division detective saw a woman collect a letter addressed to ‘C.M.H.’ at Judd Street. She was arrested and taken to Bow Street Police Station where she was recognised as Sarah Edwards, the wife of P.C. Edwards.
⁵³

This apparent connection between the robberies and a serving officer drew a senior Scotland Yard officer on to the case. Clarke travelled to Bow Street Police Station on 9 May to collect P.C. Edwards and went from there to search the two rooms that Edwards and his wife rented. Finding examples of handwriting and stationery that corresponded with those in the letters sent to Gray’s Inn by ‘C.M.H.’ and ‘W.H.’, Clarke arrested Edwards and his wife. Later in the day Clarke also travelled to Walworth and arrested Sarah Edwards’ mother, Elizabeth Hopkins. In an identification parade, Hopkins was identified as the woman who had returned the stolen items by the Gray’s Inn Square hall porter, Andrews, and his colleague Comley.
⁵⁴
After several Bow Street Police Court hearings in front of the magistrate, Mr Flowers, the three prisoners were sent for trial at the Old Bailey. By then witnesses had been identified who could confirm that Sarah Edwards had collected mail for ‘C.M.H’ and ‘W.H.’ at the two post offices. The stationery used by ‘C.M.H.’ was also confirmed as the same as that found at Edwards’ lodgings, both items having the same watermark.
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