The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (25 page)

By 19 April, Clarke’s investigations had provided sufficient evidence for a case to be made, and various Deptford Spec ticket outlets were raided by Clarke with Detective Sergeants Sunerway and Palmer and uniformed police from R Division (Greenwich); six men were arrested and charged with ‘establishing and maintaining offices for the purpose of conducting lotteries in contravention of the Lotteries Act and the Betting Act’. As this was the first case to be tackled since the Home Office crack-down, Poland sought to persuade the Bow Street magistrate Sir Thomas Henry that a trial at the Central Criminal Court would be appropriate. Poland also stressed that: ‘The Government were determined to put down, not only lotteries but all those offices now carried on with a certain degree of secrecy, in contravention of the Betting Act.’
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After two magistrate’s hearings at which Clarke was the principal witness for the prosecution, the six men were committed for trial at the Old Bailey. The men’s defence lawyer had recognised that the Crown was determined to take the case to a higher court but stated:

… in point of honour he was anxious to show that his clients, who had for years been engaged in transactions of very great magnitude, had acted with the most scrupulous good faith towards all the persons with whom they had dealt (Loud cheers.). Sir Thomas Henry observed that he could not allow any expression of feeling on the part of any persons in court. Order was at once restored…
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At the Old Bailey trial, the six accused had decided to plead ‘guilty’ and were released by the recorder after each had entered into their own recognisance of £100 to appear if subsequently called upon.
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The closing down of the Deptford Spec was effectively a ‘show case’ to send a message to the betting fraternity that the government was determined to close those schemes that fell outside the law, even though they had escaped legal sanction in the past because police investigations and prosecutions had not previously been implemented. The ‘loud cheers’ from the crowded court at Bow Street in support of the six Deptford Spec accused signalled that the actions that Clarke and his colleagues were now having to pursue for their Home Office masters were unpopular with the working man. However, this case was just the beginning for Clarke and his colleagues in the detective department. Newspaper accounts of betting prosecutions in London between 1869 and 1876 suggest that Clarke led at least two substantial betting investigations every year, each of which took up considerable time and resources and had to be fitted in around his many other responsibilities. After the Deptford Spec case he succeeded in shutting down at least three other lottery operations, including the ‘East End Spec’, the ‘South London Art Union’, and the ‘Carshalton Circular Spec’.
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In addition to lotteries based on the outcome of horse races, which required no skill on the part of subscribers, Clarke also investigated those individuals who operated businesses in which cash bets were taken on individual horses selected by ‘punters’. In the first of these, Clarke tackled The Racing, Telegram and Commission Agency, run by William Wright from 19 York Street; this agency advertised that it would take bets on commission through the post. On 2 June 1869 Clarke forwarded a postal order for £1 to the agency to back ‘Cock of the Walk’, at 10:1 to win in the Royal Hunt Cup at Ascot. His colleague Detective Sergeant Lansdowne backed ‘See-Saw’ in the same race at 8:1 to win. If the choice of horses was based on the men’s undoubted experience of attending race meetings in the course of duty, they selected wisely. On the day of the race, in a large field of runners, See-Saw won, edging out Cock of the Walk by a neck, with both horses on closing odds of 100:30.
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Overall, William Wright was the principal loser when his premises were raided and he was arrested for ‘keeping and using a betting house’. Despite arguing that no offence had been committed as ‘persons did not resort to the house in question’ (as all transactions were dealt with through the post), Wright was fined the maximum £100 at Bow Street Police Court.
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Loath to lose his business, he gave notice of appeal which, together with some other similar appeals, was heard on 22 January 1870 at the Court of Queens Bench. Clarke was cited as the Crown respondent in the appeal. In what was clearly a test of the robustness of the betting house legislation, and its interpretation by the police and the courts, the judgement was given to the Crown, with the appeal judges concluding that ‘all the cases belonged to that very class of cases which it was the object of the acts to suppress’.
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As with the example of lotteries, the test case against Wright’s betting business and the failure of his appeal opened the door for further betting house prosecutions, whether they were based in houses, shops, pubs, clubs or conducted by post, and whether the operators were effectively bookmakers, tipsters or merely facilitated others to operate a bookmaking service on their premises. During the next six years, Clarke led prosecutions against at least ten further substantial betting operations.
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By 1876, and probably earlier, he had become so well known to the betting ‘trade’ that he was no longer able to be the front-man in the initial covert enquiries at betting premises as he was too easily recognised. Even when making postal applications to place a bet, he began to adopt a pseudonym and a different address (e.g. ‘Henry Lambert of 39 The Oval, Kennington’). As one of his detective colleagues, Sergeant (later Chief Inspector) George Greenham, was to say about him in 1877: ‘I should think he was pretty notorious, not only in the force, but among the betting people themselves – he was constantly appearing at the police courts in such cases.’
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Some of the prosecutions opened the police and the courts to the criticism that there was ‘one law for the rich and one for the poor’. The classic example was the 1870 prosecution of the ‘Knightsbridge Exchange’, a betting club. Clarke first paid a covert visit to the premises at 4 Chapel Place, Brompton, on 18 August 1869, and learned that the organisation was essentially a working-man’s club in which members paid a 5
s
subscription to join; there were between 1,000 and 2,000 members. When he returned on 16 November with a membership card, he found that the yard at the premises contained a large assembly of people in which several bookmakers were accepting bets. There was then a gap of seven months before he returned overtly to the Exchange, on 20 June 1870, to inform the owners that they were breaking the law, and told them to close down their operations. When this request was ignored, the police raided the property in September and more than twenty men were arrested and brought before the courts.
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The delay and greater delicacy shown before taking action in this case is interesting, and the likely explanation is that the Treasury Solicitor, the police and Home Office were considering whether there could be difficulties in securing a conviction, and also whether they might be creating a rod for their own backs by proceeding. The latter was certainly the case as the upper-class racing club, Tattersalls, was run along similar lines, albeit in more salubrious premises, and yet appears to have received no police investigation. When the case was heard at Bow Street, the owners of the Knightsbridge Exchange were represented by William Ballantine. He pointed out that: ‘… a strong feeling existed why one class of people should with impunity be permitted to keep open a betting club while another of more humble extraction should be prosecuted for doing exactly the same thing.’
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Notwithstanding these comments, eight of the defendants were fined for using the Brompton premises illegally as a betting house.
The Times
subsequently thundered in support of Ballantine’s view, in its leader column:

… He is quite right. Unless the public are entirely deluded, betting transactions at Tattersalls are open to at least as much reprehension on the score of gambling as any that were carried on at ‘the Knightsbridge Exchange’ … We will not say that a substantial distinction between the two cases does not exist. But it certainly ought to be rendered more manifest. If people must bet, it is no doubt better they should do so lawfully than unlawfully. But it is impossible that the legality of a Betting Club can depend on the mere amount of the subscription, or on the exclusiveness of its members. That would simply be to say that poor men are to be heavily fined for practices which rich men may pursue with impunity.
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However, no prosecution of Tattersalls followed and the subject continued to be a running sore in the sporting columns over the next few years, as in the
Penny Illustrated Paper
in 1876:

Now, though it has grown trite enough to ask what moral difference there can be in betting under the roof of Messrs. Tattersall’s sacred establishment and in betting under any other roof, the injustice of dealing with this gambling evil cannot be too frequently protested against … either the patrician supporters of the turf ought to set an example of self-abnegation and at least give up betting in public, or … they surely ought to be made amenable to the same law which drags their poorer brethren … off to prison, or inflicts upon them severe fines.
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Almost 120 years later, the historian Stefan Petrow concluded that ‘the state seemed determined to wallow in hypocrisy … It had no intention of making betting wholly illegal … yet it had no intention of making betting wholly legal’.
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In the meantime, the police, and Clarke in particular, were tasked with applying the law in this ambiguous situation. Clarke must have been acutely aware that those members of the lower classes who enjoyed a ‘flutter’ were not well served by the way in which the legislation was enforced, and it is probably this that prompted him in June 1874 to submit a report to Commissioner Henderson about betting stalls at Epsom racecourse. At this point, betting at racecourses was not suppressed, but Clarke had noticed that some landowners at Epsom had sub-let space to betting men ‘of the lowest kind and what are commonly termed “welshers”’.
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His concern was that these men could erect temporary stalls on sub-let land at the racecourse, take bets from working men and disappear with the takings before they had to pay out any winnings. He suggested that the landowners should be prosecuted and James Davis, the legal adviser to the Metropolitan Police, agreed. However, the legal opinion from Harry Poland demonstrates something of the philosophy underlying the hypocritical and moralistic stance of the Home Office to betting. The following sentences are particularly instructive:

I am of opinion that they [the Epsom landowners] can be successfully prosecuted under the Betting Act 1853 but whether they should be prosecuted, appears to me to be a question that requires much consideration … If the public find that they can bet with safety they are encouraged to bet, whereas if they find that they are cheated out of their money they are less likely to bet again…
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So, Clarke’s well-intentioned proposal did not get the support he hoped for and no further action was taken.

From the newspaper reports of gambling cases between 1869 and 1876, where Clarke was the principal investigating officer, at least thirty-eight people were found guilty of betting house and lottery offences, and the average fine received by these individuals was £49 (equivalent to about £2,200 today). However, from information published in 1877 it appears that this probably represents less than half of his overall achievement in suppressing betting crime. The Home Office-led campaign that Clarke had to implement was regarded at the time as successful; Superintendent Williamson in 1877 described Clarke’s performance as one of ‘great industry, energy and skill’.
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Many businesses were closed down. However, others were set up overseas or in Scotland (which had been omitted from the 1853 Act, a loophole that was closed by the Betting Houses Act 1874).
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In addition, some individuals also decided that they should devise more profitable, albeit fraudulent, betting schemes and it would be these men who would provide the criminal fraternity’s nemesis for Clarke. Ultimately, Clarke’s part in the effective suppression of betting houses and the public profile that came with it would prove to be his poisoned chalice; but he would not know that until 1877.

Offences Against Children

On 29 July 1869 the detective department at Scotland Yard received an anonymous letter, signed ‘One Who Knows’. The contents related to abortion (which was illegal at that time) and infanticide, and made the following claims: ‘A woman named Martin, residing at 33 Dean Street, Soho is in the habit of procuring abortion and boasts of having murdered 555 infants during the last 18 months … This woman is the greatest criminal in London; her house is a house where abortion and child murder is openly carried on!’
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Inspector Druscovich was given charge of subsequent enquiries, keeping strict observation of Mrs Martin’s movements, but failed to obtain sufficient evidence to warrant a prosecution. In September or thereabouts, press exposure caused Mrs Martin to move to Woking where she died suddenly on 29 November. In his concluding report, Druscovich commented: ‘There is no doubt that the accusations against Mrs. Martin were well founded but it was impossible to obtain the necessary evidence in consequence of her extreme caution and the fact of the law holding both parties to transactions equally amenable.’
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Here, Druscovich was referring to the fact that any abortionist, and any pregnant mother securing an abortion, would be held equally liable in law at that time. Any case taken to court would effectively require convincing evidence from a third party to secure a conviction.