The Invention of Murder (5 page)

Hunt poured all of this out at the magistrates’ hearing. When more than one suspect was arrested for a crime, only one could be given immunity from prosecution by turning king’s evidence. This frequently produced an unseemly scramble to be the first person to ‘peach’. Hunt’s ‘natural pusillanimity’ encouraged his pragmatism, and he revealed all. After the three men met up at the cottage, he said, they ate the pork chops Hunt had brought with him for supper. (At the trial, Probert’s servant was asked, ‘Was the supper postponed?’ ‘No,’ she replied innocently, ‘it was pork.’)
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Telling Mrs Probert that they had to visit a neighbour after supper, they collected Weare’s body from where Thurtell had stashed it, took what valuables he had on him, and put the corpse in a sack. Back at the cottage, Thurtell presented Mrs Probert with a gold chain. Mrs Probert, greatly wondering, later watched from a window as Thurtell and Hunt, who said they would sleep in the sitting room, instead took a horse from the stable. When they returned, having dumped Weare’s body in a nearby pond, she overheard them dividing the money they had found on Weare’s body, which was a wretched £15, instead of the legendary £2,000. The next day Thurtell and Hunt took the gig back to London, together with some of Weare’s clothing. They returned the following day, Hunt bringing a newly purchased spade. Probert was anxious about the proximity of the body to his cottage, so soon Weare was on the move once more, this time to a pond near Elstree.

As soon as the authorities located the body, Thurtell was committed for trial, with the other two remanded as accessories. Things were not looking good for them – some of Weare’s belongings had been found in Hunt’s lodgings, and a shirt marked ‘W’ in the stable near Probert’s cottage. The gig and the unusual horse were identified at various pubs along the route between Gill’s Hill and London, as were its passengers. At the inquest Hunt claimed that he had no connection with Thurtell and Probert, that he had only been hired to sing (he was a modestly successful tavern performer; his more famous brother sang at Covent Garden). He agreed that he had bought a sack and rope before he left London, but said they were for the game that Probert and Weare planned to shoot. Probert too tried to claim that Thurtell acted alone, but the jury found that Weare had been murdered by Thurtell, while Probert ‘counselled, procured, incited, and abetted the said John Thurtell the said murder and felony to do and commit’. Thomas Thurtell meanwhile was arrested for conspiracy to defraud the County Fire Office.

In November, Probert’s wife, sister-in-law and brother were all arrested. Mrs Probert’s brother Thomas Noyes had played cards with the men after the murder, and she herself had received what was now identified as Weare’s watch-chain. Noyes and his sister were soon released, but Mrs Probert remained under arrest, while the authorities approached Probert to turn king’s evidence. Hunt had proved an unreliable witness, clearly terrified, happy to agree with anything anyone suggested. The main reason to use Probert, however, was that if he were indicted, Mrs Probert’s evidence of what had passed at the cottage could not be heard – a wife could not testify against her husband.

In the run-up to the trial the newspapers whipped themselves into a frenzy. At the end of the French wars, a 4d. tax had been added to the price of a newspaper, ensuring a hefty cover price – at the time of Thurtell’s trial, the
Morning Chronicle, The Times,
the
Morning Herald
and the
Observer
each cost 7d. Yet their prosperous, middle-class readers were avid for crime stories.On a random day in the month of Weare’s murder, the four pages of
The Times
consisted of two pages of advertisements, two columns of news, a few letters, some birth and death announcements; and the rest of the paper was entirely given over to police, trial and magistrates’ court reports. The
Morning Chronicle
similarly gave the majority of its editorial space to crime on a regular basis, continuing a long tradition of prurient upper-middle-class love of crime: the
Gentleman’s Magazine
had, between 1731 and 1818, reported on 1,172 murders – over one a month for nearly a century.

Pierce Egan, one of the most famous journalists of the day, claimed to have interviewed Thurtell as he awaited trial. Egan had started as a sporting journalist, writing
Boxiana, or, Sketches of ancient and modern pugilism
in 1812. In 1821 his
Life in London, or, The day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom,
illustrated by the Cruikshank brothers, a comic story of two young swells on the razzle, was wildly popular. Imitations and even outright plagiarisms quickly appeared, as well as several stage versions. As a member – albeit a more respectable one – of the fancy, Egan dealt with Thurtell’s story as sympathetically as possible, while still maintaining an appropriately shocked tone.
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His piece was very much for slightly raffish men about town, presenting Thurtell as a ‘foolish young [man] from the country’ whom the professional gamblers had ‘picked up as a
good flat
[an easy dupe]; and the rolls of country
flim-seys
[banknotes] which he brought with him to town, were soon reduced … The
Swell Yokel
as he was first termed … was hailed as a rare customer; and numbers were on the look out to have a
slice
of his
blunt
[piece of his money]…Mr. Weare was one of this number: (he was what is termed in the sporting world a dead nail [a crook]), a complete sharper [swindler].’

Thurtell in this version is not only naíve, but even cowardly. Egan gives a history of incidents where Thurtell had issued challenges, or pretended to, but was not actually willing to fight. This is all done very delicately, by imputation rather than outright statement. After telling the history of the fire and the arson trial, Egan concludes, ‘It is decidedly the opinion of Thurtell’s most intimate friends, that his conduct for the last two years, had been more like that of a madman than of a rational being.’

This seems kind when compared to the newspapers. Long before the trial began,
The Times
printed a stream of vitriolic – and completely unsubstantiated – stories. On 6 November it told its readers that ‘Thurtell is reported to have been with Wellington’s troops at the siege of San Sebastián, where he lurked behind the lines to murder and rob a fallen officer,’ and he was reported as saying of this victim, ‘I thought by the look of him that he was a nob, and must have some blunt about him; so I just tucked my sword in his ribs, and settled him; and I found a hundred and forty doubloons in his pocket!’ This was one of the few stories that was denied in print, as commentators noted that 140 doubloons would be so heavy the possessor would not have been able to walk. Nothing daunted, that same day there was another story about Thurtell, saying that in his lodgings the police had found an air-gun in the shape of a walking stick, cunningly painted to look like wood, although nothing more was ever heard of it. Four days later, a story appeared about one James Wood, Thurtell’s supposed rival for the supposed charms of Miss Caroline Noyes, Mrs Probert’s sister. Wood was said to have been decoyed into an ambush in a tenement, where he was attacked by Thurtell with a pair of dumbbells.
The Times
added, as proof of this remarkable story, that a search of the building had produced a set of dumbbells. And on the same day the paper reported that Probert had testified that Thurtell had ‘picked out 17 persons of substance that he intended to rob and murder, and that [Weare] was one of them’. The journalist had no doubt that the remaining sixteen had had lucky ‘escapes from the late horrid conspiracy’, and added a story of a man named Sparks, who declined to go into business with Thurtell, thus escaping a ‘horrible doom, which otherwise, in all probability, awaited him’. A week later the daily update, otherwise relatively low-key, referred to Thurtell, Hunt and Probert – still awaiting trial – as ‘the guilty culprits’.

The
Morning Chronicle,
too, referred to the three as ‘the murderers’. The
Hampshire Telegraph
claimed that Probert had ‘debauched’ both the unnamed wife and daughter of his unnamed landlord, and ‘Indeed … no woman, whom he wished to possess, could escape him; for if he could not get her by fair means, he would not scruple to assail her by foul.’ The
Derby Mercury
reported that an unnamed ‘person who was known to be acquainted with the Thurtells. [had] suddenly disappeared, and has not since been heard of’. The
Caledonian Mercury
liked the death-by-dumbbells story, and threw in an additional report of ‘an offensive smell’ emanating from Probert’s cottage, similar to ‘that which proceeds from a corpse in a state of decomposition’. The
Examiner
reported that yet another unnamed man had been murdered, this time ‘cast into the Thames from Battersea Bridge’. For good measure it added that Thurtell and his gang had also attempted to murder Mr Barber Beaumont, the director of the County Fire Office, and had only been foiled because, contrary to habit, on the night of the attempt Mr Beaumont had failed to take his usual seat by a window. Many of the papers featured this story, apparently never pausing to ask themselves why such a dastardly gang had not summoned the energy to make a second attempt on Mr Beaumont’s life. The
Bristol Mercury
reported yet another ‘mysterious disappearance’, this time an unnamed pregnant woman, said to be a clergyman’s daughter, who had been ravished by one of the gang. ‘The worst is surmised,’ it added hopefully.

The hysteria infected everyone. A thirteen-year-old schoolboy wrote to his mother that Thurtell had ‘positively’ plotted to murder ‘a long catalogue of rich persons’: his schoolmaster had assured him that ‘the bodies of 6 persons have been found in the Thames, 2 of them are women. Two clergymen are engaged in this scandalous affair. Two clergymen of the Established Church!’

In this febrile atmosphere, a fortnight before the trial was scheduled to begin, plays were advertised at two London theatres, the Surrey and the Coburg.
*
Since 1737, a Licensing Act had severely restricted the number of theatres that were permitted to stage spoken drama or comedy; these were referred to as ‘legitimate’ theatres. The Act had not, however, included musical theatre, which could legally be performed in theatres licensed by local magistrates and known in London as ‘the minors’.
*

Throughout the century working-class theatre audiences were an increasingly powerful economic force, particularly in industrial areas. In the East End of London the rapid development of the docks along the Thames created a vast, and almost entirely working-class, community: from 125,000 people in 1780, the population grew to just under a million in 1888, and nearly two million by the end of the century, when it became perhaps the largest working-class community in the world. To serve its needs, theatres, taverns, saloons and other places of entertainment sprang up: ten new theatres in the quarter-century after 1825. These were not small places, either: at mid-century the Standard held 3,400 people, the Pavilion 3,500, the Royal Victoria gallery alone nearly 2,000. (The Vic was not in the East End but south of the river, but the audiences for the ‘transpontine theatres’, as they were known, came mainly from the river-workers and other East End residents.) Other new industrial cities had equally large spaces: in Birmingham in 1840, a single theatre gallery held 1,200 people. Working-class audiences far outnumbered middle-class ones: in 1866 there were 51,363 nightly seats in twenty-five London theatres; of these, 32,395 were located in the East End or south of the river in the transpontine theatres – the Coburg, the Surrey and Astley’s Amphitheatre being the most famous. When the cheap seats in the West End, and the sort of places that were too rough or too small even to be considered theatres, are added in, it is clear why working-class tastes predominated.

In 1840, a writer on theatre noted that at the Pavilion Theatre in Stepney, ‘the Newgate calendar [a multi-volume true-crime compendium] and tales of terror stand in the same place as Homer did to the ancient dramatists’.
Punch
parodied this taste, describing a leading man at the minor theatres as one ‘who is murdered at least twice a week, commits parricide several times in the course of the year, and is torn by remorse every night at about nine o’clock’.

Playwrights were thus always on the lookout for new murderous material, and with two plays called
The Gamblers,
a stimulated public immediately made the connection to the story that had been monopolizing the newspapers.
The Gamblers
opened at the Surrey on 17 November 1823,
The Gamblers, or, The Murderers at the Desolate Cottage
at the Coburg the following day.
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The Surrey and the Coburg were two of the homes of melodrama, the century’s predominant dramatic form. Melodrama simplified an increasingly complex world. It depicted brutal crime and violent death, which were familiar enough in the world its audiences inhabited; but unlike real life, in the world of melodrama justice always triumphed in the last act. What realism rejects as ludicrous coincidence is, to a melodrama audience, the workings of providence: the greater the coincidence, the greater the sense of meaning. The subjects tended to be those audiences could identify with: the rustic adrift in the big city, or working men oppressed by evil masters; the ‘pride of the village’ seduced by a villain. The villains were authority figures (squires, landlords, judges) or those who served them (stewards, lawyers, beadles). Melodrama characters have preordained parts: a villain is a villain, and will not become a hero. Costume was as much an indicator of character as occupation. The heroine wore white; heroes, even those with no connection to the sea, were frequently dressed as sailors (the dockyards were the major employers around many minor theatres); while villains wore the guise of men about town, usually with the addition of a dashing pair of boots.

This typing permitted stock companies to function: the rustic, the ‘heavy’, the heroine, the comic servant, were all a standard type, with standard make-up and a standard costume. Each week, therefore, a new drama could draw in the same audiences to watch similar characters in different situations, which were also standard: the last-minute reprieve from the gallows, the overheard conversation, the long-lost foundling child, the secret marriage. Melodrama also relied on highly stylized speech, in which thoughts were articulated – in
Tom Bowling,
a well-loved 1830 melodrama, Dare-Devil Bill, the smuggler, shouts that his enemy: ‘shall hang! hang! hang! and on the same gibbet as myself! And how I will exult, and how my eyeballs, starting from their sockets, will glare upon him in their convulsive brilliancy! And I will laugh, too … ha, ha, ha!’ – regularly interspersed with comedy, mime, spectacle, song and dance, all no more realistic than the dialogue. Nor were they intended to be. In an 1829 adaptation of Walter Scott’s
Guy Mannering,
a character is lost on a storm-racked Scottish heath, when suddenly: ‘Ha! What do I see on this lonely heath? A Piano? Who could be lonely with that? The moon will shortly rise and light me from this unhallowed place; so, to console myself, I will sing one of Julia’s favourite melodies.’ And he does.