Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (9 page)

The driver had been out on the roads for twelve hours and
was aiming to call it a day
within the half hour. As he climbed down
from the box at the front of the cab, his eyes fell on a police notice and he read – he would later say that it was for the first time – the descriptions of a hat bought from Walker’s in Marylebone, of the chain exchanged at Death’s in Cheapside and of the suspect with his German accent.
Turning to the police waterman
– whose job it was to limit twenty cabs to a stand – he asked what height the waterman thought him to be. Fixing his attention again on the handbill stuck on the wall and rechecking the description of the suspect, he turned over in his mind a recent conversation with his wife. Spurred by the offer of the three hundred pounds’ reward, the cabman then hauled the horse’s head out of its bucket and whipped the animal into action, heading for Earl Street East on the district’s shady border. Rushing inside number 68, he asked his wife if she knew what had become of the small cardboard box he had seen his young daughter playing with. Pulling it from the corner of a table-drawer, he then marched back out to his cab.

By quarter past eleven, Jonathan Matthews was pushing through the door of the Hermitage police station, part of the Marylebone division of the force. Telling the duty sergeant that he had something to tell about the murder of the man on the North London train, he waited. In common with the police across London, Inspector Thomas Steer had been bothered constantly by people who thought they were on to something, bringing all kinds of reports and surmises about the murder of Thomas Briggs. Wearily, he picked up his notebook and prepared to take down one more extraordinary account.

The first thing that struck Steer as unusual was that Matthews, whose job took him all over town, swore that he had known nothing of the highly publicised murder until an hour or so earlier. It seemed very unlikely. The rough-spoken, Wellington-booted cabman sat with his hat on his knees, leaning across the table with excitement. Steer watched the weather-coarsened face and the flushed cheeks, waiting for the cabman’s tale to unfold.

Jonathan Matthews spoke of
a young German tailor from Chemnitz
in Saxony who was called Francis – or Franz – Müller who had, for a short while, been engaged to Matthews’ sister-in-law. Then he drew from his coat pocket something that made Steer begin to pay closer attention: a cardboard box with the name and address of John Death printed on the top. The cab driver contended that the box had been given to his daughter to play with on Monday 11 July by Müller, who had come to tell his wife that he was leaving the country. The jeweller’s box and its link to a young German marked Jonathan Matthews’ story as different from the vague sightings and suspicions that had made up the greater part of the public’s response to the Briggs murder. Urged to continue, Matthews related that Müller worked for a City tailoring business called Hodgkinson’s in Threadneedle Street and that he had been lodging in the Old Ford area of Bow. There was also a peculiar story about a hat. Several months ago, said Matthews, Müller had admired one of his own new black beaver hats and tried it on. It was too tight, but he liked it, and Matthews had agreed to get him one a little bigger in return for a waistcoat Müller promised to make. Matthews had ordered the hat from the same shop – Walker, of Crawford Street, Marylebone – and collected it ready for Müller when he visited the following weekend.

Now Steer was alert. Matthews’ statement linked the information gathered from the Death brothers not simply to a specific German tailor but to one who apparently owned a hat manufactured by the same hatters as the one found in the bloody carriage. Believing that Matthews had brought them something precise, Steer pulled on his overcoat and told the cabman to drive them both to the man’s home. Clattering through darkened streets, they made for the rundown neighbourhood of Lisson Grove on the borders of Paddington where Jonathan, his wife Eliza, and their four young children lived in
cramped rented rooms
in a small house shared with two other working-class families.

Steer wanted to go back over Matthews’ story. Speaking in turns, Jonathan and Eliza complied, telling him that they had known Müller for about two years. The German had once worked for a relation and, as they became more friendly, he began to eat with them most weekends and was soon courting Matthews’ sister-in-law. The two had become engaged until the girl broke it off, alarmed by what she called her fiancé’s petty jealousies. On the whole, Eliza said, Müller was an inoffensive, trustworthy sort of fellow and good company. He was a little prone to boasting, but she liked him.

Steer pressed them about the hat. Out in all weathers, Matthews grumbled that he got through nine or ten new hats a year. He said that during the previous November Müller had admired his latest purchase and asked for a duplicate for himself. The hat Matthews ordered for him cost ten shillings sixpence and, like his own, had a merino strip on the underside of the brim –
because
, said the cabman,
of its
not wearing so greasy as the nap
. He asked for the brim to be turned up a little extra on each side since that was what Müller had most liked about his own. The new hat was kept in its box until Müller collected it, leaving a new black waistcoat in exchange as promised. Matthews mentioned to Steer that the last time he had seen Müller – a couple of weeks before the murder – he had remarked how well the hat suited the German and had noticed that there was
a mark on the inside brim
where the young man pressed his thumb to remove it. A slight additional curl had also developed along its edge. Matthews had made a point of asking if Müller had done it on purpose.

Unfortunately, Jonathan Matthews was unable to show Inspector Steer his own original Walker-made hat.
He had replaced it
in June, he told the inspector, with a cheaper hat from Down’s shop in Long Acre.

Eliza filled in the background about the box. A week earlier, on Monday 11 July – two days after the attack – she told Steer
that Müller had called between two and four in the afternoon to tell her he was leaving for New York. He stayed about three hours, boasting that the City tailors for whom he worked were sending him abroad to work on the impressive salary of £150 a year. Knowing that jobbing tailors of Müller’s type generally received about
twenty-five shillings a week
and that £150 represented three times his current annual wage – knowing, too, that Müller was prone to spinning yarns – Eliza had been inclined to take what he told her with a pinch of salt.

He was limping
, she told the inspector, and he had explained this by telling her that a letter cart ran over his foot on London Bridge the previous Thursday. She recalled, too, that the German had shown her a gold chain, detaching it from his waistcoat button hole and dropping it into her hand – a light gold chain that she thought rather inferior to the one she was used to seeing him with. He also showed her a ring on his little finger with a cornelian face that he said was a present from his father in Germany. Before he left, the tailor had given her ten-year-old daughter the small cardboard box to play with.

As she drew to the end of her tale Eliza added that, as he was leaving, Müller had collected his hat from her dresser and that she had complimented him on how well it had worn.
Oh, this is a different hat
, he replied. Then he left. Neither she nor her husband had much idea how to find Müller now but they did have a photograph he had once given Matthews’ sister-in-law, and a piece of paper with the address of his lodgings in Bow. Casting about in the same drawer in which she had stored the small cardboard jewellery box, Eliza handed them both over to Inspector Steer.

The policeman had heard enough. Summoning a fast, two-wheeled hansom and bundling Matthews quickly into it, he
set out for the home
of his superintendent in nearby Marylebone. So far as Steer was concerned, they had made a breakthrough.

CHAPTER 10

The Wind Blows Fair

The hansom carrying Inspector Steer, Superintendent William Tiddey and Matthews rattled over the cobbles into Scotland Yard, pulling up smartly at the rear entrance of the Chief Office. Inspector Tanner was not far behind and, after listening to Matthews’ story, he knew that there was an obvious way to test it out. Rising to unlock a cupboard, the investigation’s lead detective reached for the crumpled hat retrieved from the North London Railway carriage on the night of 9 July and passed it to the cabman. Matthews did not pause. This was, he was certain, the same hat he had bought for Müller: it had the same easily identifiable striped lining, the same merino underband, a curled brim and a distinguishing mark which he had already described to Inspector Steer – the imprint of a right-hand thumbmark.

Once Jonathan Matthews had convinced Inspector Tanner that the broken hat belonged to Franz Müller, the inspector split his men into two groups. Steer was ordered to Bow to trace the tailor while Tanner and Tiddey set off for the City. It was already past eleven. A hansom on ‘special arrangement’ was engaged to convey the two men through the night and across the metropolis.
Whipped through darkened streets brightened by flaring gaslights, it travelled eastwards along the Strand and into Aldwych, passing grand houses, vibrant theatres and the coloured lights and impromptu performances of the
‘penny-gaffs’
. Along Fleet Street and up deserted Ludgate Hill it continued, veering north and turning its back on the thick, snaking Thames. Passing the Old Bailey Sessions House and the grim, dark walls of Newgate gaol, the ancient tower of St Sepulchre’s church appeared in front of them as they swung hard right into Newgate Street.

By comparison to the still-busy West End, the City roads were deserted. The inns, taverns and chop houses were closed; the costermongers’ barrows had been covered and abandoned until the next day’s business.
Occasionally they passed dustmen
, crossing-sweepers, lamplighters or men with watering-carts dampening the dust on the widest streets. Scavengers and cloth-pickers idled through rubbish discarded during the day, sending odd bits of paper flapping across the pavements in the breeze. Bill-stickers and boardmen fixed advertisements to the walls of busy street corners. Except for these night-workers it was quiet and the air was still thick from the warm day. Where Newgate Street became Cheapside, the dome of Sir Christopher Wren’s enormous cathedral filled the night sky. Hard by the church of St Mary-le-Bow, whose bells declared anyone born within their hearing a cockney, the cab pulled up with a lurch.

Tanner descended,
hammered on the door of number 55
and entered the night-gloomy jeweller’s shop. Since his interview with Inspector Kerressey a week earlier, John Death’s days had been endlessly interrupted as he was summoned from his business to station houses across London, but none of the suspects he was shown was ever identifiable as the man with whom he had exchanged chains. Tanner now showed him the box handed to the police by Jonathan Matthews and Death confirmed that it was similar to the one in which he had packed the chain for the
suspicious foreigner. But he was equally clear that he and his brother used dozens of similar boxes each week.

Then the detective passed the photograph of Müller to John Death.
Yes
, he said, this was the man he had previously described – the customer who had offered Thomas Briggs’ watch chain for exchange on Monday 11 July. After all the false leads and diversions, Detective Inspector Tanner’s investigation was making headway.

*

By the time the hansom drew up outside the house at 16 Park Terrace, Old Ford, on the margin of Bow and Bethnal Green, it was one o’clock in the morning on Tuesday 19 July. According to Matthews and his wife, this was the address of the German, Müller. The windows of the house were dark and there was no sign of movement from within. Tanner decided to wait until first light.

For centuries, these eastern margins of the capital had housed
large groups of French Huguenot, Irish, Jewish, European and African immigrants
in tradesmen’s terraces thrown up since the 1840s by speculative builders. The growth of the London docks, the development of the North London Railway and increasing industrial sprawl along the River Lea had all combined to turn
Old Ford
from a quiet hamlet with small silk mills in the 1820s into a congested neighbourhood of water, gas and chemical works, breweries and brick-fields. Old Ford also gave its name to a road running east–west on the southern side of the three hundred green acres of Victoria Park. At its western extremity stood Park Terrace – a line of two-storey working-class houses made of yellowish brick already begrimed by smoke and smog. Number 16 was just minutes’ walk from one of the park entrances and no more than ten from the Duckett’s Canal bridge to the east and the railway tracks on which Thomas Briggs was found insensible. Tanner weighed it up. On the one hand, this was a likely
neighbourhood for the murderer. On the other, he knew that each of the railway stations at Bow and Hackney Wick were a mile distant, whereas an
omnibus passing the end of Park Terrace
ran directly to the City. Was it plausible that the German tailor used the North London Railway line to and from his work, rather than catching the more convenient ’bus?

The Square Mile and the districts to its east were the centre of the London garment industry, a nexus for thousands of labourers stitching shirts, ties, collars, suits and waistcoats. Some were salaried journeymen in upmarket tailors like Hodgkinson’s of Threadneedle Street, crafting hand-stitched clothing for the well-to-do; others did piecework for Jewish and German contractors, turning out cheaper, machined coats and trousers by the score. Many of these tailors barely scratched a living. Since the introduction of the Singer sewing machine from America at the Great Exhibition of 1851 the number of workers – mostly women – toiling for a pittance in squalid back rooms on rented machines had grown quickly, reacting to a growing demand for stylish clothing at low prices. From the English tailoring industry of the 1860s came the first coinage of the term
‘sweated labour’
.