Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (23 page)

*

Camden Station was the last stop before Euston Square and railway officials, their friends and families and a gaggle of reporters swarmed the length of the platform. A telegraph sent from Liverpool had informed all stationmasters that Müller was sitting in the last compartment of the last second-class carriage, right at the rear of the train. As the express rounded the curve by the Chalk Farm bridge just after half-past two on Saturday afternoon and began to slow on its approach to Camden, a great surge was made towards the end of the platform. Faces pushed against the train windows but Müller, sitting between Inspectors Tanner and Kerressey, stared resolutely forward, refusing to turn his head. As several passengers departed from carriages further up the train, reporters struggled to get on board and claim empty seats. Tanner’s colleague Inspector ‘Dolly’ Williamson pushed through the mêlée to enter the prisoner’s carriage.

As the train pulled out of Camden a Black Maria – a windowless, horse-drawn police van with the royal crest emblazoned on its sides – drew up in Seymour Street alongside Euston Square Station, and backed into a narrow passage that opened onto the arrival platform. Railway directors and a knot of their officials waited on the platform, while a strong body of police struggled to contain the tremendous crowds pressing in from all directions.
Outside the station, vehicles were covered with human forms and inside the main shed men and children teemed over the roofs of standing train carriages. The whole station, reported
The Times
, was a veritable
scene of tumult
.

At 2.45 p.m the train appeared. A ripple passed through the crowd and
excitement overruled all propriety
, as
Lloyd’s
later reported. Elderly men were knocked aside and women were shoved as the spectators clawed at each other to get a better look. The noise that went up was deafening.

The long express train shuddered to a stop just short of the buffers so that Tanner’s carriage came to a halt at the furthest end of the platform immediately opposite the Seymour Street exit. The rear doors of the police van were open. As Tanner and Clarke emerged from their compartment, each holding one of Müller’s arms, there was a single shout and then a chorus of groans and hisses. The German’s
efforts to spruce himself up
had met with little success: his long black lounge coat looked seedy and his beribboned straw hat dirty.
The people seemed surprised at the slight, mean and shabby appearance
of the man who had been so long the theme of universal discussion
, reported the
Manchester Guardian
.
Far below the middle height, excessively plain looking and ill-featured … he really was not ‘equal to the occasion’ in the estimation of the crowd who freely commented on the disappointment which they experienced.

Excitement quickly gave way
to dismay. Was this really the man who had sparked such widespread alarm? Could a monster wear the appearance of such innocence? Dressed in tatty clothes, he looked far too slight to have thrown a large man from a train without assistance. Aware of violent pushing from every quarter, and of the edge of threat implicit in the crowds, the detectives almost ran across the exposed width of the platform, elbowing through departing passengers, lifting Müller up the steps into the van and stumbling in after him as it set off at speed.

At the magistrates’ court in Bow Street the ordinary business
of the day was taking place in packed courtrooms while the crowds outside thinned and regrouped. Heads and shoulders packed the windows of neighbouring houses. By three o’clock the air seemed almost frantic with expectation as a police van, guarded by constables on foot and followed by a breathless mob, drew up at the police station opposite, rocking violently under the press of people swarming around it. Several minutes elapsed while the police struggled to clear a route to the station door. There was a stir as the van door opened and then Müller emerged followed closely by Tanner, Williamson and Kerressey, with Sergeant Clarke in the rear. Among the black-caped officers and in the sea of black toppers, brown felt hats, caps or ladies’ bonnets worn by the multitude, Müller’s weather-beaten white straw hat emphasised his difference. Brimming with nervous energy, his step was jaunty and his manner seemed almost flippant as he was pushed towards the entrance to the police station, a boy among the burly officers who surrounded him.

Inside the police station, Thomas Beard, his clerk and Dr Ernest Juch, editor of the London-published German newspaper the
Hermann
, watched as Müller was charged
with having wilfully murdered Thomas Briggs on the night of the 9th July last
. A note was made that a hat and watch were found in his possession when arrested. Dropping his head, Müller gave as his address the Blyths’ home at 16 Park Terrace, Old Ford, Bow, then he was led out of the busy room and conducted across the yard outside towards a cell where Dr Juch and Thomas Beard were allowed to join him.
A German-speaking police officer
stood guard outside. Since his committal to the New York Tombs twenty-one days earlier, this was the first time Müller found himself in the company of people who might help him. Asked how he was, he burst into tears before replying quietly,
very bad.
To Juch’s reassurances that he would be protected, Müller simply repeated,
I am quite innocent of the crime and I shall be able to prove it
.

Far from the boiling, dust-filled city of New York in which he had never been free, back in the centre of London with its chilly mists and its skies heavy with clouds, he would sleep alone that night for the first time in weeks. As evening fell, he was given a blanket and a bolster and seemed cast down again by this small act of kindness.
You are very kind
, he said.
The police are very kind, particularly Mr Tanner all the way home from America. Of course, you must do your duty
. It seemed that this apparently sociable and naïve young man expected to be treated harshly.

Hoping that the famous prisoner would be taken across the road to the courthouse for committal that afternoon, people were still kicking their heels in the streets around Bow Street, braving the intermittent rain. They called for Matthews, but he had made his own way home from Euston to Paddington. When Tanner left the police station at about five o’clock, accompanied by Inspector Williamson, he was cheered lustily. At Scotland Yard more people had gathered to applaud the now-famous, clever plain-clothed policeman who had tracked the villain and brought him home. As the crowds along the routes from Euston Square to Bow Street and Westminster began slowly to dissipate, he and Williamson went over the investigation together, preparing for the reopening of the coroner’s inquest and the magisterial hearing that would set the law in motion. It would be several hours before Tanner would at last be free to head home to his wife and two small children.

*

In his cell at Bow Street police station, Müller spent Sunday quietly. He wondered aloud why he was not being held at the Stepney station in the neighbourhood of his old lodgings with the Blyths, adding quietly to his guard
it’s of no consequence
.
I shall get justice wherever it is.

At Scotland Yard
the police were busy
. It fell once more to
Superintendent Tiddey to ensure that all the case witnesses were available on Monday morning, while
Daniel Howie
was put in charge of double-checking all the facts for the Treasury solicitors. The measurements of the railway line were repeated, reports on tests for blood were filed, lists of all twenty-one witnesses with their addresses and summaries of their statements were collated. The model of carriage 69 was collected from the railway workshops at Bow and the watch found in Müller’s trunk on the
Victoria
was taken to Samuel Tidmarsh – who had regularly cleaned and repaired Briggs’ watch – for identification. Then the watch, the three chains, the jewellers’ pasteboard box, the hats and the pawn tickets – all crucial evidence – were packed up and secured, ready for the opening of proceedings.

The
sensation –
as it was repeatedly called – was unfolding before the eyes of the nation and the excitement of the public was said to be
unprecedented
. The speed of the attack, the viciousness of the injuries, the status of the victim, the mystery surrounding the hat left in the train, the disappearance of the attacker and the coincidental involvement of two clerks in Mr Briggs’ bank had all provoked amazement. Matthews’ startling revelations, the hurried pursuit of the fugitive and the long-awaited arrival of Müller in New York had each pumped new blood into the story.
The complete novelty of the outrage in this country
, wrote the
Daily News
, was
a fact which in itself suggested the probability … that a foreigner had been concerned in the murder.

For two months the name of an obscure, impoverished German tailor had been uppermost in the nation’s thoughts. This
waif and stray of a foreign land
, floating in the scum of the London Maelstrom
, as the
Telegraph
put it, might have entered the New World with as little attention as he had left it, one drop more in the tide of immigrants seeking elusive fortune. Instead, millions of people across the world had waited intensely for the outcome of his pursuit across the Atlantic and questions of international importance were raised on his behalf. His name had
echoed in the corridors of the White House in Washington and the Tombs prison in New York.

Müller’s unimpressive exterior, his cool behaviour and details of how he ate, slept and talked were widely discussed. A new chapter had opened in his very public ordeal.

BOOK THREE

JUDGEMENTS

CHAPTER 23

I’ve Come to Tell the Truth

Müller was to appear before the magistrate at the Bow Street court at eleven o’clock on Monday morning. By seven there were already five hundred onlookers, and Superintendent Durkin feared that the numbers could become unmanageable. Deciding not to wait any longer, he ordered lines of his constables to stand shoulder to shoulder, forming a passage across the width of the street. Müller ignored the jeers as he walked the short distance.

By ten o’clock, smart carriages lining the routes to the court indicated that the upper classes were in attendance, anticipating something more dramatic than anything provided by the theatres of nearby Drury Lane. The spectator benches were packed with English and foreign press, artists from the illustrated papers and dignitaries with empty diaries, including young Prince Humbert, heir to the Italian crown, with his aide-de-camp and the Italian minister.

An hour later a sudden and impressive silence fell over the commotion as Müller, looking white and sad, was accompanied to the dock by his gaoler. The point of this hearing was to decide whether to proceed to trial after hearing outline evidence from
both sides. Representing Müller’s interests, Thomas Beard would pit himself against Mr Hardinge Giffard for the Crown. Giffard was not a senior lawyer but his competence was beyond doubt. The forty-one-year-old son of the editor of the
Standard
newspaper, he was destined for a glittering career as Solicitor General in Disraeli’s government of 1874 and, later, to be Lord Chancellor.

Beard first ensured that all the witnesses, apart from Inspector Tanner, were removed from the room pending their own depositions: a proper precaution already rendered useless by the repetitive and detailed news reporting of the evidence in the case. Over the next three hours the crammed court would
hear the testimonies
of Briggs’ nephew-in-law David Buchan, his son Thomas James, John Death the jeweller, Ellen Blyth, Elizabeth Repsch, Sergeant George Clarke and William Timms, the railwayman who had discovered the body. Step by careful step the old ground was slowly re-walked.
The watch, chains, black bag
and walking stick were each identified by the various witnesses, attracting considerable interest from the crowds as they were each handed up to the witness box for careful scrutiny.

Apart from Müller, the man everyone most wanted to see was Jonathan Matthews. His evidence had been given only once before in London, at the first depositions taken in the same court at Bow Street two months earlier on 19 July. Hundreds of words had been written about his testimony and the curiosity surrounding him was intense. Stepping out from the witness room, he took his place in the box.