Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (7 page)

Tanner’s third line of investigation concerned Charles Judd – the criminal assumed responsible for shooting Judge Poinsot in France. Had Judd returned to England? Tanner asked the Préfecture de Police in Paris to send him a photograph, a description of the man and copies of the case papers. All efforts must be made to establish what had become of Judd. Playing a waiting game, the detective ordered police divisions nationwide to keep a watch over districts with foreign lodging-houses. Railway stations and the London docks were
put under surveillance
and police at
Folkestone, Dover, Southampton, Harwich, Hull and Liverpool were ordered to stop and search any dubious-looking Germans seeking passage on boats leaving England.

*

On the morning of Tuesday 12 July the directors of the North London Railway added a further hundred pounds to the reward fund. Tanner redrafted the police posters, including John Death’s description of their suspect. Each printed sheet would be some three feet long by two feet wide, printed with heavy black type.

The next morning
these huge new posters screamed horrid murder
across the capital and to the four corners of the country, broadcasting a reward
equivalent to several years’ pay
for a metropolitan craftsman. Tanner’s experience encouraged him to believe that, sooner or later, someone would come forward with evidence that would unlock the mystery.

£300 REWARD MURDER

WHEREAS MR THOMAS BRIGGS chief Clerk to Messrs Robarts, Curtis and Co., bankers, Lombard-street, was Violently Assaulted in a First Class Railway carriage, and found on the Line of the North London Railway between Old Ford Bridge and Hackney Wick Station, on Saturday, the 9th instant, about 10pm, and has since died from the effects of the injuries he received

£100 REWARD

paid by her Majesty’s Government
PARDON to any accomplice not being the actual
murderer who shall give such information as shall
lead to the same result.

A FURTHER REWARD OF £100

Will be paid by Messrs Robarts, Lubbock and Co.,
Bankers, 15 Lombard Street

A FURTHER REWARD OF £100

will be paid by the North London Railway Company to any person who will give information as above

A large old fashioned plain gold lever watch, open face, white dial, seconds hand, number 1487 and number inside 2974 maker ‘Samuel William Archer, Hackney’ and a best Paris nap hat, white lining, maker’s name ‘Digance Royal Exchange’ inside were stolen from the murdered man.

A gold Albert curb chain, large gold key and swivel seal, stolen from the murdered man, has been found exchanged at a Watchmaker’s shop yesterday for a square oval secret link gold Albert Chain, with knot-pattern twisted key, swivel seal, and a plain gold finger ring, white Cornelian stone, oblong shape, engraved head, by a man of the following description: Age 30, height 5 feet 6 or 7 inches, complexion sallow thin features, a foreigner – supposed German – speaks good English; dress black frock coat and vest, dark trousers, black hat.

A BLACK HAT Maker, T Walker, 49 Crawford Street, Marylebone, was left in the Railway Carriage by the Murderer.

Information to be given to Inspector Tanner, Detective Police, Great Scotland Yard: Superintendent Howie, K Division, Police Station, Arbour Square, Stepney, or at any Metropolitan Police Station.

CHAPTER 8

Improbable Hypotheses

On Wednesday 13 July, the fourth day of the investigation, Inspector Tanner and Superintendent Daniel Howie were in
Somer’s Town
, a dilapidated district running between Camden, King’s Cross and St Pancras that contained a largely impoverished and reputedly truculent foreign community. That morning a young German suspect had been apprehended there by the local police. John Death was summoned but, when Tanner showed him the prisoner, the silversmith was clear that
this was not the customer
he had served on Monday morning. Someone else fitting the description of the suspect had also been spotted behaving oddly on the 7.45 p.m. North Kent train at New Cross on the previous evening, but that trail had already gone cold.

The London detectives are … upon their trial
, contended the
Daily Telegraph
that morning.
It cannot be forgotten that they have to make up for arrears; that during 1863 … murder after murder was committed with impunity. Our police have a character to keep, but they also have a reputation to regain … they will be wrong to reject any hypothesis because it is improbable
. The press were also quick to focus on John Death’s story and, in
the absence of other clues, the transaction in Cheapside came under scrutiny. It seemed particularly noteworthy that the gold chain had been exchanged rather than sold, and by someone who behaved well enough in an upmarket establishment not to make the Death brothers overly suspicious at the time. As jumpy commuters discussed the case, what afforded the most relief was the fact that the suspect was supposed not to be an
Englishman
. One might, perhaps, be less concerned about the predatory motives of one’s fellow passengers so long as their accent was unbroken.

But London was full of foreigners, a crucible bigger and more complex than any other city in the world – a city
thrumming to
the eternal tread
of feet upon the pavement
, as Dickens wrote in
David Copperfield
. The immigration of poor workers had brought problems of overcrowding in the rotting courts and rookeries and the overpopulated neighbourhoods that made up much of the turbulent ‘East End’ – a term first coined by Dickens’ friend, the journalist Henry Mayhew, in the 1850s. An extreme away from the genteel squares, the vibrant shops and the glittering lights of the new West End, these sunless slums and blind alleys contained a grinding maelstrom of poverty.
There were the Irish
, broadly considered disruptive; the politically skittish French; the Jewish ghettos with their money lenders, importers and wholesale dealers; the Italian vendors of macaroni and ice creams; and, along the riverside by the Port of London, the ‘blacks’, ‘Johnny Chinamen’ and ‘lascars’ working as sailors or ships’ servants. Recent European revolutions lived in the memory and the middle classes feared the growing power of the brooding, multi-ethnic mob packed into the eastern reaches of the city.

Among the foreign communities, Germans did enjoy a better reputation than most. Not only did the widowed Queen’s origins suggest kinship, but the English also admired German philosophy, literature and music, and envied them their landscape and educational system.
Wealthy Germans
– bankers like the Rothschilds
and industrialists like Siemens – dominated both business and finance and glittered in society. Then there were refugees from the European revolutions – most famously Karl Marx, who arrived in 1849 – and a substantial colony of working-class Germans employed as clerks, watchmakers, sugar-bakers and tailors. Many had come to London either as part of a custom of
Wanderschaft
– broadening their horizons by seeking apprenticeship in the capitals of Europe – or as economic migrants fleeing the low wages, unemployment and agricultural failures of their own country. London could be brutally unyielding, but its booming economy also held the promise of freedom and opportunity and
half of all Germans in the country
lived in the capital, making their sixteen-thousand-strong community the largest of all the immigrant groups. Most had settled at London’s eastern edge, particularly in the Leman Street area of Whitechapel – through which the North London Railway line passed – spreading out through Shoreditch to St George’s-in-the-East and north-eastwards to Bow, Bethnal Green and Stepney.

On the whole, this working-class German community was considered productive despite their proclivity for heavy drinking, uncouth eating and the sort of loud street bands that drove the peace-loving crazy. Among the poorest were artisans employed in sugar refineries, confectioneries or tailors’ workshops, who lodged in bulging tenement houses or rented rooms from working-class Londoners, segregated by their class but embedded enough to have established their own places of worship, newspapers and clubs. In
the support system of ‘Little Germany’
there were numerous
Vereine
, including a German Gymnastic Society, a German Athenæum and clubs for theatricals, concerts, cards and songs. There was a German Mission, a German YMCA, a Society of Benevolence, a Legal Protection Society, German workhouses, orphanages, schools, restaurants and – at the edge of Hackney – a much-admired German Hospital.

The German husband of the Queen, Prince Albert, had exerted
a strong influence on his adopted country. Alive, public criticism had centred on his poverty and the burden he laid on the public purse; recently deceased, he had left the widowed Queen in a paralysis of grief. Feelings were further complicated by the Prussian invasion of Denmark in February 1864. Partly in consequence of the recent marriage of Edward, Prince of Wales to the Danish Princess Alexandra, English sympathy was focused on the Danes and only five days before Thomas Briggs was attacked Disraeli had tabled a vote of no confidence in the British government for its failure to defend Denmark against the growing belligerence of the Austro-Prussian forces as they fought for control of the duchies of Holstein and Lauenburg.

Now that a potentially German murderer was at large, German immigrants – especially those that hovered on the edge of poverty – found themselves increasingly unpopular. Any who had taken temporary lodgings, who carried heavy walking sticks topped with ivory knobs, or who had hurriedly left town with their portmanteaus, fell under suspicion.

*

By Friday 15 July, almost a week since Briggs had left home for the last time, Tanner had nothing new to feed to the pressmen crowding around the entrances to Scotland Yard. He was still waiting for a description of Judd to arrive from the Paris authorities, still searching for the man found guilty of the attack on the line some years ago, and still wondering about the whiskered man who had attracted attention to himself by entering and leaving carriages on Briggs’ Saturday-night train. Several other witnesses had seen the big, agitated fellow as he dashed along the platform. No one could remember seeing him leave any of the stations on the line. Who was he, what was he up to and why could he not be traced?

Enquiries had been made in districts along the route of the North London Railway, particularly at Bow, in the warrens of
East End neighbourhoods, across Hackney and throughout the City. Small mountains of reports covered Tanner’s desk, the post brought new information each day and the heap of suspicious black hats at Bow station continued to rise while the squashed black hat found on the night of the murder – locked in a cupboard in Tanner’s office – mocked the lack of results and yielded no further clues. The newspapers were making things harder, questioning police efficiency, demanding rapid results yet confusing things by repeating rumours that raised hopes that an arrest was only days away. For a while it was believed that Inspector Kerressey, in a post and chaise, was pursuing a suspect across the highlands of Scotland.

In Hackney, Thomas Briggs’ cortège was leaving 5 Clapton Square. The blinds of the house had been drawn since his death on the previous Sunday evening and the family had exchanged their usual clothes for deepest black mourning. It is not clear whether Thomas’ widow Mary or either of his daughters attended the funeral: Queen Victoria was not at Prince Albert’s in 1861 and
etiquette manuals were divided
on the issue of whether women were sufficiently able to contain their emotions. It is possible that they watched from the upstairs windows of the house as the procession left the square, heading towards the New Gravel Pit Unitarian Chapel.

The shops on Hackney’s main street were closed for the hour as a mark of respect, the pavements lined with mourners. The coffin’s solemn route led past the Town Hall, leaving the station to the left as it passed under the railway viaduct towards ‘Paradise Fields’ burial ground – land that was once part of Loddiges’ famous plant nursery. Briggs’ body was interred in a small green meadow, among the graves of his wife’s extended family. Nearby, trains running to and from the City clattered intermittently over their tracks.

His will instructed as little fuss and as little expense as possible. The family pictures and Bible were bequeathed to his son
Edwin; some silver went to Thomas James; George was given his diamond pin, gold ring and portrait in oils; his daughter Mary was left some remaining pictures. The stuffed birds and the gold watch (if it was ever retrieved) were allotted to his youngest son, Netterville, and each child, as well as his niece Caroline Buchan, received nineteen guineas. His widow Mary would keep the house and what was left of his furniture and investments.

The funeral was barely over when the police station at Bow received a telegraph from Camden train station claiming that a man wearing Briggs’ hat had been arrested up the line in Hackney. Inspector Kerressey dashed over to Clapton Square, collected Thomas James Briggs and proceeded to visit each of the two Hackney police stations, but no one at either of them knew anything about the message. Telegraphs were sent back and forth and the two men travelled up and down the line several times, but to no avail. The affair turned out to be
a hoax
. Several men in different parts of town were also detained and questioned that day but all were eventually released. Long after sunset, officers from the Borough Division south of the river sent word that they had arrested a foreigner answering the description given by Death. The man was brought to Scotland Yard and Tanner sent an officer to rouse the jeweller. Hopes were running high as he arrived shortly before midnight, but the silversmith took one look at the stranger before shaking his head. As Friday came to an end, Tanner’s investigation was struggling.