The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (24 page)

On 15 January 1869, Antonio Brady, the registrar of contracts at the Admiralty, Somerset House, had been told by a potential contractor, Nicholas Maxwell, of an attempt to extract a bribe from him. Maxwell had been informed that he would only secure the timber-supply contract if he paid a £30 fee to a member of the Admiralty staff. The member of staff concerned was William Rumble, the Admiralty’s ‘Inspector of Machinery Afloat’. Antonio Brady promptly contacted Scotland Yard and sought the assistance of the detective department and the case was allocated to Clarke. The first task was to find out more about Rumble and to determine whether he alone was in a position to guarantee a contract or whether other Admiralty staff members were involved. A meeting between Maxwell and Rumble was arranged at Maxwell’s office on 18 January, where Clarke listened from a side room. Rumble stated that he had an unnamed friend in the Admiralty who was in a position to influence the contractual arrangements. Clarke’s next step was to maintain surveillance of Rumble and to identify any acquaintances.
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Clarke and Detective Sergeant Sayer started to follow Rumble for part of each day. Fortunately, it did not take too long to make progress. On 20 January, at Waterloo Station, Clarke saw Rumble meet an unknown man at 10.30 a.m.: ‘Rumble went up to him and commenced a conversation – they walked down the back stairs into York Street, and over Waterloo Bridge into Lancaster Place, and there they parted, and [the unknown man] went into Somerset House by the entrance in Lancaster Place.’
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Rumble’s contact was quickly identified as James Gambier, a first-class clerk in the Admiralty storekeepers department, who was the first to know when a tender had been accepted and also had the responsibility of writing to the successful contractor. Thus, by delaying the issue of the formal contract letter Gambier could create a window of opportunity to extract a ‘fee’ from the successful contractors.

Clarke and Sayer maintained regular surveillance at Waterloo Station, and confirmed that Rumble and Gambier met there on at least eleven occasions. However, the police had no specific evidence linking Gambier to attempted bribery. A decision was therefore taken, with Maxwell’s agreement, for the £30 ‘fee’ that Rumble had asked for to be paid to him. Obtaining a £30 cheque from the Admiralty, Clarke cashed it into three traceable £10 Bank of England notes and, at a meeting at Maxwell’s office on 2 February (at which Clarke again listened from the side room), Rumble was handed the money. By 3 February, Maxwell received confirmation that he was the successful contractor. The police had to wait only a short time for the banknotes to filter through the system; one was paid in to the Church of England Insurance Office by Gambier to cover his life insurance premium, and the other two were paid in by Rumble, one to a warehouseman and the other to a wine merchant.
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Armed with the information that Gambier had paid in one of the banknotes, and a warrant, Clarke arrested the two men at Waterloo Station on Wednesday 17 February. Both were taken to Bow Street Police Station and charged with having conspired to obtain £30 from Nicholas Maxwell by false and fraudulent pretences.
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A search of the men revealed that both had pocket books, Gambier’s proving particularly interesting, in the form of abbreviations and ciphers that were suggestive of other financial transactions of a similar kind. By the second magistrate’s hearing, Clarke had found a means to translate at least part of the cipher in the pocket books, and it was said at the hearing that all the persons whose names were supposed to be identified by initials in Rumble’s notebook had denied being party to any transactions involving the payment of any ‘fee’ to gain a contract. The suspects were committed for trial at the Old Bailey.
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Rumble’s defence against the charges was that he had ‘merely acted as an agent, and that he had no intention to commit a criminal act’. Gambier’s defence counsel contended that ‘although [Gambier] had acted indiscreetly and improperly in taking the money from Rumble for giving information relative to this contract he had not contemplated or been guilty of a criminal act’. The jury did not take long to disagree, bringing in a ‘guilty’ verdict against both men, who were each sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour.
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Something that did not appear in any of the hearings or newspaper accounts of the case was that Rumble had an interesting track record. In an unconnected case he had been previously charged, in 1864, with an offence relating to the fitting out of a gun-boat for later use by the Confederate States during the American Civil War. Originally named the
Scylla
, it had been sold by the Admiralty in 1863, ostensibly for the China trade, but in reality it had been bought by an agent acting for the Confederate States Navy. Rumble had been put on trial at the Queens Bench, Westminster, between December 1864 and February 1865. Charged with offences under the Foreign Enlistment Act which included the accusation that he had been actively involved in repairing and fitting out the ship at Sheerness, engaging crew and being on the ship on its testing voyage to Calais, on which occasion the Confederate flag was raised and the ship re-named as the CSS
Rappahannock
. (Ultimately, the ship did not go into active service as it was detained in port by the French authorities.) Though found ‘not guilty’ at this earlier trial, Rumble had nonetheless been punished subsequently by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, who had reduced him to half-pay, giving him a motive for his subsequent crime.
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It seems likely that Clarke and others must have been aware of that situation, and yet the newspapers did not refer to it in their coverage of Rumble’s 1869 trial, perhaps because of the ‘not guilty’ verdict in 1864. Whether any reference to the CSS
Rappahannock
case was suppressed, to avoid further embarrassment to the British Government on the sensitive issue of breaches of neutrality during the American Civil War, might also have been a consideration. The ‘
Alabama
claims’ by the United States ultimately led to substantial financial reparations being paid by Britain in 1872.
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Betting

In November 1868 a general election had brought in a change of government, with William Gladstone becoming prime minister at the head of a Liberal administration, and the appointment of Henry Bruce as Home Secretary. It is no coincidence that this change of government coincided with a greater involvement of the police in enforcing legislation to deal with perceived failures in the moral rectitude of the working man and woman. One of Bruce’s main achievements in a historical context was the reform of the licensing laws, but in 1869 he also issued orders to the Metropolitan Police under their new commissioner to suppress betting houses.
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Clarke was given the lead responsibility for this task. The following description of Clarke’s involvement in the policing of betting houses covers the period from 1869 to 1877.

Legislation to reduce gambling had been strengthened by the Betting House Act of 1853 which ‘outlawed betting houses, the exhibiting of lists and the promulgation of advertisements and circulars offering tips and advice’.
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However, betting was still rife by 1869 not least because, despite the legislation, it had enjoyed virtual immunity from Home Office and police interference and prosecution.
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Warnings about the moral dangers of betting were sounded regularly; one example coming from the Victorian philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer, who expressed the view that gambling was: ‘… essentially anti-social. A successful gambler receives financial and material benefit without “effort”, and happiness at the expense of the “misery of the loser”, combining to produce a “general deterioration of character and conduct”.’
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Gambling, particularly linked to horse racing, occurred in various forms and at various locations; the types that Clarke encountered included lotteries and cash betting on horses in individual races, with unregulated businesses operating in private houses, pubs, shops, clubs and through the post. The maximum penalty for someone convicted of running an illegal betting enterprise, within the meaning of the 1853 Betting Act, was a £100 fine or six months’ imprisonment. These sentences certainly did not reflect the considerable effort and resources that were needed by the police to secure the evidence for a conviction.

Once an individual or group of individuals were suspected of running an illegal gambling operation, Clarke adopted the following general approach. Firstly, the property would be put under surveillance to observe whether the comings and goings were consistent with a betting operation taking place. Secondly, one or more detectives would enter the premises incognito and would place one or more cash bets or would buy a lottery ticket, as appropriate, and would also observe closely what was happening in the premises. If the betting business was operated by post, then bets would be submitted in the form of postal orders by at least one of the detectives, usually using their home address for replies. Thirdly, if the detectives were fortunate enough to have a winning bet or lottery ticket, then these would be cashed in to check whether the betting house was paying out on winning tickets or operating a scam in which they ‘welshed’ (defaulted) on the bets. Fourthly, if there was sufficient evidence that activities were illegal, then warrants were obtained from the appropriate police court magistrate (often Bow Street) and the betting premises were raided by the police, with the arrest of all individuals there who might be breaking the law, and the seizure of documents, betting slips, lottery tickets, tipsters circulars etc., all of which would need to be examined as a basis for assembling a case against the suspected offenders. When all the information suggested that a prosecution was justified, the case would be assembled in conjunction with the Treasury Solicitor, who always called on Harry Poland to lead the prosecution. In 1865 Poland had been appointed counsel to the Treasury and adviser to the Home Office in criminal matters and he held these offices for twenty-three years, earning the nickname ‘the Sleuth Hound of the Treasury’. He was regarded as a lucid and forceful prosecutor, and scrupulously fair.
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Poland’s friend and colleague at the Bar, Montagu Williams (known to be a natty dresser), said of him:

I don’t suppose that there ever were two men so unlike one another – he, plodding, slow, unimpulsive, and most industrious … I was the reverse of Poland … He was very careless in his dress. He had a mind above that sort of thing, but his family hadn’t, and times out of number his sister took him to task about his badly fitting clothes, and begged him to go to a proper tailor.
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The first gambling prosecution where Clarke and Poland worked together was the ‘Deptford Spec’. On the night of Saturday 27 February 1869, Clarke and Detective Sergeant Palmer went to the Bedford Arms beerhouse, where numbered lottery tickets (printed with the name ‘Deptford Spec’) were being sold at 1
s
each for the Liverpool Grand National Steeplechase, which would be run later in March. The two men each bought one ticket; up to 60,000 tickets were available for sale, amounting to total takings of £3,000 for the organisers if all tickets were sold (worth
c
. £137,000 today).
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After buying their tickets, Clarke and Palmer went up to the club room on the first floor to join the sixty to seventy people already there, awaiting the evening’s entertainment. It is not hard to picture a scene of a dimly lit room, packed with working men, clutching their week’s pay and determined to forget the labours of the previous week with the assistance of a few drinks and the chance to win a few pounds if they were lucky.

The ‘entertainment’ lasted at least three hours and consisted of the process of conducting a lottery. It started with the reading out of the numbers of the unsold tickets. The counterfoils of all the sold tickets were then placed in a ‘wheel of fortune’, together with a quantity of sand to stop the tickets sticking to each other, and tickets were drawn out individually until the numbers of selected tickets had been allocated against all the names of the individual horses expected to run at the Grand National. The cash prizes ranged from £500 for the first horse past the post, to much smaller sums for lower placings and non-runners. Having seen enough of the procedure by 9 p.m., Clarke left. Neither Clarke nor Palmer had a prize-winning ticket for the Grand National draw. However, on two other occasions in March Clarke bought tickets for a lottery based on the outcome of another major horse race, the City and Suburban Handicap, which he purchased at other outlets where Deptford Spec tickets were sold. After the results sheet for that race had been printed, Clarke found he had a winning ticket but, when he called to collect his £1 prize, he was refused payment as the ticket had ink on it.
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It seems from later information (presented by a defence lawyer at the magistrate’s hearing) that this unfortunate action on the part of the lottery organisers was taken in good faith: ‘The ticket presented by Inspector Clarke was blotted with ink, and the private mark had thus been obliterated. Of course the defendants were not aware that they were dealing with as respectable an officer as Inspector Clarke, of the detective force, or they would not for a moment have suspected him!’
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