The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (29 page)

I beg to add that about 350 men said to form an Ambulance Corps arrived at Havre from Dublin on Wednesday 12th Inst., and were still there at the time of my leaving. A great number of these were about the streets in a drunken riotous state and on Saturday night broke out in open mutiny, refusing to obey those in command, and a guard of Soldiers was called out to quell the disturbance, and I was informed by some of the parties that only about 40 of their number were required as an Ambulance Corps, and that the others must either join the French Army or return home, and I am of opinion from the riotous demeanour of these men, should they remain at Havre serious consequences will follow.

I respectfully beg to state that I received every possible assistance and attention from F. Bernal Esq. at Havre, and C.G. Percival at Caen.
¹³⁶

The reference made in Clarke’s report to an Ambulance Corps arriving from Dublin on 12 October was the ship
La Fontaine
. Several of the men from this ship did go on to serve in a medical assistance role. However:

Contrary to the original intentions of those who sent the Ambulance Corps to France, a number of the volunteers, including some Dundalk men, adopted a more active military role soon after their arrival … [including] those who joined the Foreign Legion: they enlisted in the 1st Compagne Irlandaise, Légion d’Étrangère. The Legion had its headquarters at Bourges, numbered 30,000 men, and was attached to the Army of the Loire.
¹³⁷

The men received rifle and machine-gun training and learnt how to operate as snipers and guerrilla fighters behind enemy lines. Whether any of the men from Dublin or London later participated in Irish Republican activities is not known.
¹³⁸

So Clarke returned home, having done what he could to return those men who had been potentially duped into fighting for France. He had obtained statements (including a full description of events from one of the volunteers, William Costello) implicating McDonald and others involved in the recruitment process.
¹³⁹
On 21 October, the newly promoted Chief Inspector Druscovich arrested ‘John McDonald’, believed to be the principal recruiter for the Bolt Street recruits to the Irish Ambulance Corps, whose real name was Joseph Patrick McDonnell. He was brought up before Sir Thomas Henry at Bow Street on 21 and 28 October on charges under the Foreign Enlistment Act. At the second hearing Clarke’s witness, William Costello, gave his evidence of events.
¹⁴⁰
However, after the hearings, no trial appears to have taken place; the case against Joseph Patrick McDonnell was ‘removed by
Certiorari
’ (a writ from a superior court directing that a record of proceedings in a lower court be sent up for review) and it is possible that some legal or political mechanism was used to sweep the case under the carpet to avoid political embarrassment.
¹⁴¹
McDonnell had been involved with organisations associated with Irish nationalism since 1862, including the National Brotherhood of St Patrick and the Fenians; he had been detained under the suspension of
habeas corpus
but was probably freed in 1869. McDonnell had also been appointed by Karl Marx as the representative for Ireland on the General Council of the International Working Man’s Association. In January 1872, at the latest, McDonnell was a free man, as newspaper reports for that month indicate that he attended the Association Council meeting.
¹⁴²

The Irish Ambulance Corps investigation, the monitoring of James Stephens in Paris and surveillance operations on foreign refugees seem to have been the closest that the Metropolitan Police got to covert operations during the time that Clarke was a detective.
¹⁴³
Although Clarke had been sent to France on an ‘undercover’ mission, the object was for him to obtain evidence of criminal activity in the context of the Foreign Enlistment Act, rather than to play a political-espionage role. For Clarke, this appears to have been the last time that he was involved with Fenian investigations that reached court. There were subsequent occasions when his expertise on Irish matters was sought, but his involvement in these did not emerge as headline issues.
¹⁴⁴
There was a resurgence of Irish terrorism in the 1880s, driven by a combination of Clan na Gael and the maverick, O’Donovan Rossa. By then, however, Clarke had long retired, though his friend and colleague ‘Dolly’ Williamson was still at Scotland Yard and in the front line of the policing of this next phase of Irish republicanism.
¹⁴⁵

Arson – London’s Burning

At 12.55 a.m. on 20 September 1871, a fire was reported to Richard Gatehouse, the keeper of the fire escape opposite Shadwell church. The informant, a young man, said that a fire had just broken out at Sufferance Wharf on Wapping Wall and he assisted the fireman, William Padbury and Gatehouse, with the fire engine. When reaching the fire they found a wagon-load of straw ablaze on the ground floor, which had spread to the upper floor of the warehouse above. The fire took about an hour to put out, at which point the young man helped the firemen to return the equipment to Shadwell church, where he was given the standard reward of ‘half a crown’ (2
s
and 6
d
) for the call and his trouble, and he signed the receipt as ‘W. Anthony’.
¹⁴⁶

After lobbying by insurance companies, a publicly funded fire service in London had been established after the passing of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade Act in 1865. Alongside the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the London Salvage Corps had started its operations in 1866; their responsibilities included salvage work after a fire had taken place.
¹⁴⁷
One of the Salvage Corps employees, Thomas Meechan, had been investigating a number of fires of unknown cause, including one in July where the Holborn Fire Station had been called out by a man living at 2 Parker Street, Drury Lane. On the night of 26 September 1871, Meechan took the Shadwell fireman, Padbury, to Parker Street to see if the Holborn fire alert and the Wapping Wall alert might have been given by the same man. Using the ruse that they had lost the receipt that had been signed by the informant at Wapping, they knocked at the door and found the man that Padbury recognised as W. Anthony. However, Anthony said, ‘You must be mistaken, I don’t know where Wapping is, I was never up there’.
¹⁴⁸

Armed with this denial that Padbury knew to be false, Meechan and his superiors decided to call in the police. Clarke picks up the story:

On 29th September, I received information about this fire at Wapping Wall, and next evening, Saturday, about 10 o’clock, I went with Meechan to the corner of Parker Street, near No. 2 – Meechan pointed out the prisoner to me as one of two men, and I went up to him and said ‘Anthony, I want to speak to you about some money you received for calling fires’ – He said ‘What is it’ – I said ‘I will tell you directly,’ and I took him to the corner of Long Acre – I then told him I was an Inspector of police, and should arrest him on a charge of wilfully setting fire to a wharf in Wapping Wall on the night of 19th September – He said ‘I know nothing about it; I never was there’ – He repeated that several times, and I took him to King David Lane Station [Shadwell], and charged him with the offence – After the charge was entered, the inspector asked him if he could read or write – he said ‘No’; and then, after some hesitation said ‘Only my name, I can write my name’ – He did not write at the Station, he was not asked to do so. – He gave his name, William Anthony, Parker Street, Drury Lane, and said he was a blacksmith.
¹⁴⁹

Anthony appeared at the Thames Police Court on 2 October. In addition to Clarke’s preliminary evidence, P.C. William Waller confirmed that he had seen Anthony opposite Shadwell church early in the morning of 20 September. Clarke also stated that there was evidence (from other signed reward receipts) that Anthony had called out the fire brigade at thirty-six fires, where the destruction of property amounted to £100,000 (equivalent to
c
. £4.5 million today).
¹⁵⁰
Anthony was remanded in custody and by 17 October was suspected of having set fire to at least 109 buildings, houses, factories and other premises in London in the last two years: ‘There was a large attendance of people whose premises had been destroyed and of others who were anxious to see a person accused of incendiarism on so very extensive a scale, merely for the purpose of the fee of half-a-crown…’
¹⁵¹

No doubt because of the seriousness of the case, Harry Poland had now taken over from Clarke the formal prosecution of Anthony, on behalf of the Treasury. At the 17 October hearing, witnesses had also been located who recalled seeing Anthony near the scene of the Wapping Wall fire before he had called out the fire brigade. Anthony, who represented himself, continued to deny the charges.
¹⁵²

On 7 November, additional detailed evidence emerged that Anthony had called out the fire engine and helped in the pumping at a fire at some workshops in Hampstead, and at a corn-chandlers workshop at Chalk Farm. By 29 November, Clarke’s enquiries had unearthed a total of 150 probable fire setting offences, and he was engaged in the investigation of eighty-five others, or as Harry Poland said: ‘Every day they obtained fresh information about the prisoner, who had in two years set fire to 150 places and caused immense losses. Inspector Clarke, the detective officer, had been engaged in the investigation of those cases for six weeks daily, and had not done with them yet.’
¹⁵³
Anthony again claimed that all the witnesses were mistaken.

At his Old Bailey trial on 13 December 1871, Anthony defended himself against the indictment of setting fire to the warehouse at Wapping Wall. After some legal discussion the judge, Mr Justice Grove, also allowed witness evidence on the association of Anthony with other fires. Apart from the battery of witnesses from the police and fire services, Charles Chabot confirmed that the handwriting on thirteen different receipts signed ‘W.Anthony’ was the same. The jury recorded a ‘guilty’ verdict, and Anthony was sentenced to twelve years’ penal servitude.
¹⁵⁴
The
Pall Mall Gazette
was not happy: ‘In the good old times arson was punishable with death, and now it is often visited with the punishment next in severity to hanging … Where the crime has unquestionably been systematically carried on, it is surprising to find only twelve years’ penal servitude awarded…’
¹⁵⁵

The
Liverpool Mercury
focused on a more positive aspect, noting that whereas the fires from unknown causes in the metropolis had for some time numbered twenty-five or thirty per month they had, since the apprehension of the prisoner, dropped to three.
¹⁵⁶
Police orders reported: ‘Commendation and reward granted to a Detective Inspector – The Solicitor to the Treasury having highly eulogized the services of Chief Inspector Clarke, in connexion with the case of a man named Anthony … the Secretary of State, on the recommendation of the Commissioner, has authorized a reward of £5 being paid to him for the skill displayed.’
¹⁵⁷

The huge variety of cases that Clarke tackled between 1868 and 1871 are vividly illustrative of the criminal and social environment of the time. The mental and physical pressures of the job must have been considerable, yet he seems to have thrived on the challenges as well as the increased responsibility that promotion to chief inspector brought. During these four years he had further demonstrated his ability to work with prosecution teams to assemble cases that would usually lead to convictions. He had also shown that he could be trusted to deal effectively with situations that were politically sensitive, such as the Irish Ambulance Corps, where a step in the wrong direction might have compromised Britain’s position of neutrality between the combatants in the Franco-Prussian War. His investigations of gambling premises also delivered what his political masters wanted, though they would not have made him the most popular man in Britain. His relationship with the public, and with certain politicians, would also be tested in his next major case.

5

THE TICHBORNE CLAIMANT, THEFT AND FRAUD

1872–75

Poor old Roger Tichborne now,

Is on his trial again,

They will not rest contented,

They never will refrain;

From doing everything they can,

To strike the fatal blow.

If money can only do it now,

To prison he must go.

Anonymous
¹

Between March 1872 and April 1874, Clarke’s life was dominated by the longest-running sensation of the Victorian age, the case of the Tichborne Claimant. This divided the British nation between those who enthusiastically supported a man who had returned from Australia to claim his inheritance, and those who considered his claims implausible and fraudulent. Matters were only resolved at great length, and at great cost, in the courts. To set Clarke’s involvement into context, it is first necessary to provide some background information.
²