Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (25 page)

*

A dense fog hung low over London on Monday morning as Müller was
removed from his cell
in Clerkenwell to a police van, accompanied by Detective Inspector Tanner and Inspector Kerressey. Extra police had been mustered to keep the approach roads to the Hackney town hall clear. Six separate mounted patrols diverted and managed the suburban traffic. Thirty constables guarded the entrance to the main building; twenty more were inside and fifty police patrolled the area around Hackney Station, within 150 yards of the hall. By half-past seven, all two hundred places in the inquest room were occupied and the corridors and staircases were crammed, while outside the police struggled to maintain an access route. At eight o’clock Müller arrived under police guard; the witnesses were ordered into an adjoining room, and the questions began. George Blyth was called first, and then his wife Ellen. Eliza Matthews spoke plainly about Müller’s visit to her on Monday 11 July and the circumstances surrounding their possession of the cardboard box from Death’s shop. John Hoffa, John Death and the Repschs identified the prisoner. Then a juryman asked Müller to put on the crushed hat found in carriage 69. Tanner stood to hand it to him and he pulled it onto his head.

There was a flurry in the court as it fitted.

After Humphreys reimposed silence on the room, Thomas Lee’s deposition was read to the jury and Müller’s solicitor Thomas Beard laboured over the evidence regarding the two men seen in Briggs’ compartment at Bow Station on the night of the murder.
Is the prisoner one of them? … Is he like the man or not? … Will you not swear the prisoner is the man?
he asked
repeatedly. Over and over again Thomas Lee simply answered,
I cannot so swear
.

Lee’s refusal to put Müller in the train with Briggs that night went some way to redressing the advantage lost as Müller stood before the court with the broken Walker hat sitting comfortably on his head. Rising swiftly, Hardinge Giffard wrested back the advantage: under fire from his interrogation, Lee let slip that he was not, after all, entirely sure that either of the men he saw had whiskers. A rippling
Oh!
swept through the court.

Reprising the post-mortem results and directing the jury that they must consider only the material facts presented before them, Humphreys advised them that Thomas Briggs had certainly been robbed and that his death was the result of malice. He reminded them that a hat presumed to be Müller’s had been left in the compartment while Mr Briggs’ hat had disappeared, later to be found on the prisoner. The jury’s duty was to consider, on the basis of the evidence, whether a crime had been committed. Further, if they concluded it likely that Müller had played any part in the murder of Mr Briggs then they must return the inquest’s verdict of wilful murder against him. The jury retired.

Twenty minutes passed before they returned, preceded by the coroner. They found that
the deceased died from the effects of foul violence administered in the railway carriage on the 9th July and we find that Franz Müller is the man by whom the violence was committed.
Before proceedings were brought to a close, however, the foreman of the jury asked to make a statement on behalf of them all. They wished to call the attention of the government to their dissatisfaction at the present state of security on the railways. No delay should be allowed – they said – in enforcing the railway companies to adopt more efficient methods of protection of life, character and property.

The room emptied. Police and witnesses were all running late for their next appointment at the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. Dispersing, they left the thirteen men of the inquest jury waiting
to discharge their final duty by adding their signatures to an indictment, stating on their oaths that
Franz Müller, late of Bow, did feloniously wilfully and of his malice aforethought kill and murder against the peace of Our Lady the Queen her Crown and dignity the said Thomas Briggs.

In the rush, did any of the jurymen notice that a mistake had been rapidly corrected in the official documentation? So closely did the names Franz Müller and Thomas Briggs elide in the public mind that in the space reserved for the name of the victim ‘
Thomas Müller
’ was recorded, before the clerk dashed it out and corrected it to Briggs.

*

Those fortunate enough to secure a seat on the public benches at the Bow Street court earlier that morning had endured a long and uncomfortable wait. At ten past eleven, more than an hour late, the witnesses arrived, grumbling that they had been given no pause to rest or take refreshment and that, summoned hither and thither across the capital, their lives no longer seemed their own.

When did you first hear of the huge reward?
solicitor Beard asked of both Godfrey and Elizabeth Repsch once each had given their evidence to the magistrate. Neither was able to say. How were they able to remember with such precision the trousers Müller had worn on any day prior to Saturday the 9th, or even after it? Could they describe in detail the lining or shape of any of their own hats, or the hats of their friends, or even of the new ‘guinea’ hat Müller was wearing when he visited them the week after the murder? Again, neither the husband nor the wife was able to do so.

Reporters came and went, taking copious notes for the several editions of the day’s newspapers. Beard pushed Toulmin – the Briggs’ family doctor – about finding grit in the wounds on the victim’s head, suggesting that death had been caused by the fall from the train. Toulmin countered that the great quantity of
blood found on the carriage seats and the nature of the forceful, blunt wounds demonstrated that a violent attack had occurred before the fall. Called next to testify, young Dr Brereton concurred that these were the blows that had fractured the skull and that they were more likely to have caused death than the fall from the train.

Müller appeared at last to have snapped into life. Gone was the unmoved and unmoving defendant: following the verdict of the inquest, he seemed finally to have woken up to the gravity of his situation. He listened to Dr Brereton’s descriptions of Thomas Briggs’ injuries with equanimity but when any other portion of the evidence told against him he became animated,
scribbling notes
for his solicitor and engaging him from time to time in earnest discussion. When Matthews took the stand, Müller’s face lit with anger and his eyes never left the witness throughout his testimony as Thomas Beard once again harried the cab driver to account for his whereabouts on 9 July. Again he could not.

You ought to know exactly. You have reason to remember it
, reproved Beard. It made no odds. Matthews remained obstinate and unyielding.

Yes, I know I have
, he barked.

Late into the afternoon a new witness was called by Hardinge Giffard. Daniel Digance was asked to take the stand. Rumours that the police had procured new evidence from Thomas Briggs’ hatters were confirmed as he swore that he had made hats for Briggs for the last thirty-five years, that Briggs preferred the best-quality, twenty-one-shilling hats and that his most recent purchase was in September 1863, almost exactly a year earlier. Referring to the hat found in Müller’s box, Giffard asked,
Does the measurement as to the fit of the hat correspond with the order given by Mr Briggs?

Yes, precisely
, replied Digance.

Further, Digance remembered that Thomas Briggs complained after a few days that his new hat was a little loose and asked that
a folded band of tissue paper be lodged under its brim to alter its fit. Taking up the hat in question, the hatter showed that
the paper has been removed, but there are some fragments of the tissue left, showing where the paper has been
. This unexpected development elicited another loud exclamation from the public seats.

The fact remained that this hat was much lower in the crown than the style favoured by Briggs, allowing uncertainty to remain as to its original owner. Digance’s hatmaker, Frederick William Thorne, was called next and his evidence was damning. He recognised the hat as one of his by his handwritten mark but he believed it had been cut down.
The work has not been done as a hatter would do it. A hatter would have stuck it together with a hot iron and gum. That would necessitate the use of a block. This has been sewn round.
He said that the lining, too, had been altered in a manner not used by professional hatters. He thought that the stitching used to alter the hat was uncommonly neat.
It was evidently done
, he said pointedly,
by some one accustomed to sewing.

After five gruelling hours, at a little after four o’clock, the lawyers were done. As the magistrate Mr Flowers asked the prisoner whether he had anything to say, Müller looked up sharply.
I have nothing to say now
, he demurred in a loud but respectful voice, laying particular emphasis on the final word.

There had been no surprises. Having read over and signed the depositions, the magistrate ruled that the prisoner should be committed to take his trial on the charge of wilful murder.

*

An hour later, Müller was being led under strong guard out of the court towards a waiting police van. With loud groans and yells, the crowd broke through the ranks of the police stationed at some distance above and below the court to keep them back. Pushing and shoving, sweeping through the barrier, they made a rush at the van, reaching it just as the doors were closed. As it drove away with Müller inside, half the multitude pursued it, rushing down the street and banging on its side before the horses pulled ahead and began to draw clear.

It was unclear whether the mob had intended to lynch the prisoner. What was obvious was that it was wound to a fury so intense that it would take time to abate. In the meantime, those who had not given chase remained outside the court, howling, stamping their excitement, and stubbornly refusing to be moved on.

CHAPTER 25

A Pint of Meat and Vegetable Soup

Making its way east through the ashen light of the late afternoon the police van clattered to a halt outside Newgate, the most fearsome prison in Victorian imagination.
For more than a thousand years
a gaol had stood on the site of the City’s westernmost gate, a mere ten minutes’ walk from the Bank of England and St Paul’s Cathedral. It was a monstrous building designed to call forth horror, its scowling bulk, pitted granite flanks and chilling, iron-spiked walls emphasising the inevitability of punishment for crime.

The schoolboy Charles Dickens had gazed at this exterior with
mingled feelings of awe
and respect
, noting
how dreadful its rough, heavy walls and low massive doors appeared … looking as if they were made for the express purpose of letting people in and never letting them out again
. This building had been one of the landmarks in the narrow radius of Müller’s former London life but the familiar was made strange by his arrest. He could hear the resounding boom of St Paul’s bells. His friends still toiled in nearby Threadneedle Street amid the human din and harsh rattle of hooves and wheels. They moved, anonymous in the
feverish crowd of clerks, lawyers, vagrants, day-workers and prostitutes, passing from grand buildings to mean dwellings in squalid courts, while he followed only the orders of his captors.

Rain had turned the cold streets pewter. Omnibuses passed on their journeys between the Bank and the West End. Bewigged lawyers with bundles of papers tied in red tape, clerks in their black gowns, and employees of the neighbouring Central Criminal Court hurried past in the shadows of the austere building, as Müller entered the gaol through the iron-bound, nail-studded oak wicket gate. Directed by warders, he passed through two more barred doors and along sombre stone passages lit with dull lamps, arriving at the whitewashed Bread Room. He stood as his details were entered solemnly in the vast,
vellum-bound register
, a florid copperplate hand noting his name, height, age, birthplace and occupation. It was recorded that he was committed by Mr Flowers from Bow Street and by Mr Humphreys the coroner, pending trial on the charge of wilful murder against Thomas Briggs. Spaces for the trial date, the judge’s name, the verdict and the sentence remained blank.

Newgate housed
several hundred prisoners
in recently ‘improved’ single cells, each of them awaiting their trials at the opening of the next court sessions. If they were found guilty, they would be removed to other prisons; if convicted of murder they stayed to await their execution. Conducted along
flagged corridors
, Müller traversed narrow stone stairways and winding passages, through a succession of locked iron doors, each opened by an identically uniformed turnkey. Small windows gave onto open courts but admitted little light or air to diffuse a broth of smells that thickened throughout the place. He passed a room with glass panelling used by solicitors to meet with their clients, crossed a court and entered a glass-roofed gallery ranging up over four floors with cells branching off on either side.

Müller’s cell was about seven feet wide, thirteen feet long and ten feet high. It contained a table that folded up against the wall,
a small three-legged stool, a copper washbasin under a tap in the wall and a water closet or lavatory. Three triangular shelves in the corner held a Bible, prayer book, plate, mug and bedding. The floor was asphalt with a grating to admit heated air. A gaslight with tin shade was fixed to the wall. At one end was a high window with fixed panes and crossed iron bars.

The prisoner was given a pint of meat and vegetable soup and eight ounces of bread. His breakfast would be a pint of gruel alternately seasoned with salt and molasses, and on four evenings each week his dinner would consist of a pound of potatoes and three ounces of meat. While he waited for his trial in the adjoining
Central Criminal Court
, he would exercise daily in an open yard under forty-foot walls surmounted by iron pickets, walking three yards apart from his fellow prisoners. He would also attend services and sermons in the small chapel, sitting every morning (and twice on Sundays) on a low form behind railings. He would only be allowed visits from the prison authorities or members of his defence team. Because his case was considered ‘remarkable’ an officer was put on guard outside his cell around the clock. Sometimes, Müller would talk to him.