The Ability to Kill (17 page)

That is from
The Belman of London
by Thomas Dekker, published in 1608. The title page of the first edition announced, with a smack of the lips, that it was ‘Bringing to light the most notorious villanies that are now practised in the Kingdome,’ and recommended it as, ‘Profitable for Gentlemen, Lawyers, Merchants, Citizens, Farmers, Masters of Households, and all sorts of servants, to marke, and
delightful for all men to Reade.
’
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In the golden age of reason the massive voice of Doctor Samuel Johnson was raised to challenge a decision of the Sheriffs of Newgate to conduct their hangings at the prison. ‘Sir,’ he groused to Boswell, ‘executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public were gratified by a procession, the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?’

What the doctor was complaining about, be it noted, was not that the executions were to be private (over eighty years were to go by before hangings ceased to be a public entertainment in London), but that the old custom of parading the condemned person and the hangman in a cart through the streets
to Tyburn gallows, was to be abolished.
^†
And there is no doubt that he was voicing popular feeling on the subject. Twenty thousand people would turn out to see an important hanging; and, as, at the time, there were some two hundred offences that carried the death penalty, Londoners had plenty of hangings from which to choose. Since 1868 there have been no public executions in London (Michael Barrett, the Fenian, was the subject of the last) and today only four capital charges remain—high treason, murder, piracy with violence and (for some obscure reason) the ‘destruction of dockyards.’ Small wonder that the Londoner counts on his Sunday newspaper to make the most of what is left, and that when fact began to fail him, he should turn so readily to fiction. The detective story may have been born in the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, but it was London that fed it, clothed it and brought it to maturity.

Members might suppose, then, that, faced by the inquiring visitor anxious to savour Criminal London at its seamiest, the proud, eager Londoner would be ready with a list of all the liveliest sinks of iniquity, a warning against con-men, and directions for getting to the site of the latest razor-slashing incident before the blood is cleaned up. But no. What the unfortunate visitor is most likely to get is a smug, cliché-packed lecture about how law-abiding London is, how polite and gentlemanly the police are, how they don’t carry guns, how even the few petty crooks there are (and what big city doesn’t have at least a few?) always respect the copper on the beat, how Scotland Yard always gets its man, and how, if you leave your wallet in a London taxi, all you have to do to get it
back is go to the Lost Property Office, because Londoners are so honest. As Americans you may even have to endure a statistical bromide, too; Chicago had 326 murders in 1948, whereas London with over double the population had only 31 murders during the same period.

All this is not mere hypocrisy. There is a criminal and a policeman inside every human being; and in the breast of the law-abiding Londoner the war between the two is waged with particular ferocity. But it is waged in silence, and the official communiqués always tell of victories for the policemen. It is only in the turbulent back-streets of the London mind that the ghosts of priggers and whip-jackes, of draw-latches, fraters and Abraham men, are still allowed to roister with their doxies through the stews and trugging shops of Thomas Dekker’s city. There no policeman walks his beat. The bell of Newgate Prison has been silent now for over fifty years; but its echoes have not ceased, and, in the blood flowing so sedately through the modern Londoner’s veins, there is still something that quickens to that far-off sound. It is an old, cruel lust, and he prefers to refer to it deprecatingly as a taste for the macabre.

Newgate! For many a Londoner the very word is still a part of childhood. ‘Go and wash your face,’ his mother used to tell him. ‘You’re as black as Newgate’s knocker!’ Nothing, he knew, could ever be blacker.

Newgate was built on to the old city wall as an additional defence work in the twelfth century. In those days city gate fortifications were often used as prisons, and the New gate was exceptional only in that it remained a prison for over seven centuries, ‘the repository,’ says its historian, ‘of more human suffering and more human sorrow than any other building in the City of London.’ In the fifteenth century, a Lord Mayor of London named Whittington tried to ease the lot of the prisoners;
and when he died, his money, bequeathed to charity, was used to rebuild the prison. It was from Dick Whittington’s Newgate, with its stone figure of a cat at the feet of Liberty, that Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard and Claude Duval went to the gallows. In the eighteenth century it was again rebuilt. But it was already a legend and no amount of rebuilding could change its evil reputation. Newgate was Newgate, and Londoners were soon. reminded of the fact when ‘gaol fever’ (typhoid) from the new prison killed off several judges who held court in the adjacent Sessions House. In 1827, after a visit to London, Heine, the German poet, wrote that the very name of Newgate filled the mind with horror.

Yet for the Londoner there was pride and awe as well in his feelings about the place. When Wandsworth Prison was built, critics of its architecture complained that it lacked the ‘fine, gloomy solemnity of Newgate,’ and it was not until 1902 that Newgate itself was finally demolished. All that is left of it now is the water conduit which some charitable grocer installed in the fifteenth century so that the prisoners should not die of thirst. In the old building’s place stands the Central Criminal Court, commonly known by the name of the lane that runs between Newgate Street and Ludgate Hill—the Old Bailey.

The shade of Newgate was certainly hovering at the architect’s elbow when he designed it. The ‘fine, gloomy solemnity’ of the Old Bailey is in every sense worthy of the site it occupies. Its appearance produces immediate feelings of depression and guilt. Many remarkable murderers have been tried there. After a few minutes of the echoing gloom within, one wonders why they troubled to defend themselves. The Old Bailey is the place of which the criminals of London have always been most afraid.

Recently, a crime reporter made a list of the types of criminal currently working in London and graded them in the order of their professional standing. Dekker listed ‘roagues and vagabonds’ in a similar way, using the old London thieves’ cant. On the blackboard here, you may see the two lists side by side.

The first thing to be noted is the remarkable way in which the burglars have maintained their status in the face of three centuries of competition. Equally remarkable is the fall taken by the gamblers. Did they become careless? Or did the
cleverer ones emigrate and go West? In 1862, the only crooked ‘gamblers’ listed by Mayhew in his great survey of the London underworld were three-card tricksters and pea-and-thimble men.

With the advent of the railway, horse thieves and highwaymen would obviously go out of business. A more interesting change is in the position of the con-man. In Dekker’s time he seems scarcely to have existed. There are allusions in
The Belman
to ‘fooletaking,’ mock auctions and other ‘knaverie,’ but that is about all. He was certainly very low in the underworld social scale. Receivers of stolen property were not in it at all. Dekker referred to them casually as ‘certaine Brokers, who traffick onely in this kind of (stolen) Merchandize and by bils of sale … get the goods of honest Citizens.’ He did add, however, that they always made more money than the crooks who did the actual stealing. They still do, of course.

Blackmail, though again an unclassified crime, he discussed at some length. He called it ‘sacking’ and seems to have had a sneaking regard for its practitioners. One type of shake-down which he describes has a familiar modern ring. A gentleman finds himself in a lady’s bedroom, when ‘in comes a Ruffian with a drawne rapier, calles the Punck (as she is) damned whore, asks what Rogue that is, and what he does with his wife. The conclusion of all this counterfeit swaggering being a plot betwixt this panderly ruffian and the whore to geld the silly foole of all the money hee hath in his purse, and sometimes to make him (rather than his credit should be called into question) to seale a bill or bond for other sums of money at such and such daies, and so send him packing, when he hath paide too deare for a bad dish of meate which he never tasted.’

It seems odd that in today’s scale of values the blackmailer rates so low. In London, he (or she) is the only criminal that other criminals get high-minded and stuffy about.
Drug-peddling carries no stigma, and, indeed, is more acceptable socially than burgling in the suburbs; but blackmail, no. Even dog-stealing (and the British are a nation of dog lovers) is preferable!

The outstanding omission from the seventeenth-century list is certainly the pimp. The reason for this seems to be Dekker’s assumption that all crooks were panders anyway. True, he did single out those who lived on the immoral earnings of their innocent wives; but only to make a moral judgment. ‘Infamous earthy minded
Creatures
in the Shapes of
Snailes
,’ he called them. On the bawds, doxies, dells, morts and bawdy-baskets who ministered so generously to their applesquires and fancy men, he wasted no tears. ‘The companion of a theefe,’ he wrote, ‘is commonly a
Whore.
It is not amisse, therefore, to pinion them together.’

For the sake of convenience, we had better do the same thing; not only because in London, as in most other cities, prostitution and crime are generally close relatives, but because the visitor can so easily find this gateway to the underworld for himself. He will, however, soon recognise sharp regional differences.

In Mayfair, the crooks are, on the whole, of the genteel, non-violent variety and the girls endeavour to look and behave as much like actresses as possible. Some of them even succeed. It is only when the competition tries to move in that the façade collapses and nature, red in lip and claw, re-asserts herself. Almost invariably the competition comes from the shoddy square mile of London commonly known as Soho.

The northern part of it was a nineteenth-century development. There, the streets are wider, quieter and straighter than those south of Oxford Street. In and around Warren Street cluster dozens of second-hand car dealers. It was one of these, Stanley Setty, whose dismembered body was dumped into the
marshes of the Thames estuary from an aeroplane in 1949.
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It is said that in this small quarter of London there is a known criminal population of well over a thousand; but that may well be too modest an estimate. The quarter has some of the characteristics of a small town. Everyone knows everyone else. Strangers are instantly recognised as such. News travels fast. The police, however, unlike those of most small towns, go about in pairs. Crime here is not a petty affair of pilfering from parked cars or slot machines, but of safe-blowing and armed bank hold-ups, of smash-and-grab raids and big jewel robberies. It is a place where a girl can easily get to know too much, and end up needing plastic surgery; or even on a police mortuary table.

It is understandable that she should want to move to Mayfair where the money is better anyway and life is more light-hearted. Besides, the humourless attentions of the ‘pushup mob’ are not the only occasional occupational hazard she has to face, especially if she works in the older Franco-Italian section. Many of the stocking murders are committed there. Old Compton Street, just behind Shaftesbury Avenue, has a quite remarkable record in this respect. Perhaps it has something to do with the proximity of the theatres; the psychotic comes to town, has dinner, sees a good show (or perhaps a bad one) and then, feeling like strangling someone with a silk stocking, moves off into near-by Soho to find a suitable subject.

There are signs, though, of a change. The Notting Hill Gate district, well west of Mayfair, is getting some of this trade nowadays. On the whole, murderers are a conservative lot; but, where sex-crimes are concerned, there has always been a westward trend. Seventy years ago practically all murders of this kind took place in the East End; more specifically in the boroughs of Stepney and Poplar and adjacent to their main traffic arteries, the Whitechapel and Commercial Roads.