The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (46 page)

Amongst the other defence witnesses, Sergeant Littlechild reported that there was no truth that William Walters had been at Edwin Murray’s house when he and Clarke had searched it. Inspector Cruse confirmed that when Walters had been granted a licence for the Grapes public house, Clarke had informed the magistrate of Walters’ previous betting convictions. Clarke’s youngest daughter, Catherine, said that she often opened the door to visitors, and that she had never seen William Kurr in her life before seeing him during the court proceedings. Mary Booker, a part-time servant of a lodger in Clarke’s house, gave similar evidence. Clarke’s daughter-in-law, Louisa Clarke, stressed the frugality of the Clarke household, and stated that, on 25 September 1876, Clarke and she had spent the late evening waiting at Kings Cross Station for Clarke’s wife Elizabeth to return from visiting her sick brother-in-law. The significance of this evidence was that Kurr claimed that he had met Clarke elsewhere that evening. In a similar manner, William Norfolk confirmed that he had been out with Clarke on other nights in late December 1876 at times when Kurr had stated that he held meetings with Clarke. Norfolk’s evidence was reinforced by the landlord of the Paxton’s Head, Knightsbridge, where Clarke and Norfolk had spent an evening together. Likewise, the landlord of Clarke’s local public house, Charles Jackson, also contradicted Kurr by stating that he had never seen Kurr and Clarke together in his pub, though Clarke himself was a regular customer. Frederick Andrews, the accountant who had introduced Clarke to Yonge (Benson) in 1875, confirmed the manner of the introduction and that ‘from his knowledge of Benson he would say that he was a man who was not to believed on his oath’. Finally, James Griffin swore that William Kurr had been present at Sandown Races on 31 August 1876, as he had previously done during the turf fraud trial in April.
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When given the opportunity to speak, before a final decision was made by the chief magistrate, Clarke said:

I wish to say that I am perfectly innocent of the charge made against me by the convicts. It is made to destroy me for having honestly and fearlessly performed my duties towards the public in protecting them against the frauds committed from time to time, and especially during the last six or seven years, and for having brought them and their friends and associates to justice.
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However, despite the efforts of George Lewis and the defence witnesses, Clarke was probably sufficiently experienced and sanguine not to be surprised when he and all the arrested men were committed for trial at the Old Bailey. Only Clarke and Froggatt were permitted bail.

The Trial of the Detectives

The Old Bailey trial covered the same ground as the proceedings at Bow Street, notwithstanding the appearance of some new personalities amongst the prosecution and defence teams, and some additional witnesses.
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For this reason, the following account will not repeat aspects previously covered and will focus on the case against Clarke and the events and personalities that only emerged during the Old Bailey trial.

After his committal for trial, Clarke needed to find a counsel who could represent him at the Old Bailey and to raise the funds to pay for legal costs. On 25 September, and again on 10 October, his solicitors wrote to the Home Secretary asking for payment of Clarke’s defence costs. The letters highlighted the service he had provided to the Home Office in shutting down betting offices and stressed that Clarke was a poor man ‘and is quite without means to defend himself against the charge which has been made against him’.
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The Home Office replied that he would only have a fair claim if acquitted; in the meantime his case could not be distinguished from that of the three other inspectors. However, Secretary Cross was sufficiently intrigued to ask Commissioner Henderson ‘whether this representation as to his poverty is correct and, if so, how the fact can be explained and when it first became known to the Commissioner’. Henderson duly provided Cross with a reality check:

… Chief Inspector Clarke joined the Detective Department in May 1862. He was previously a Serjeant in the S Division his pay being £1 4/- per week. He was a Detective Serjeant until November 1867 pay £2 2/- per week, promoted then to Inspector at a salary of £200 per annum. In May 1869 he was promoted to Chief Inspector. Salary £250 per annum and in 1872 his pay was increased to £276 per annum.

I am informed that he has brought up a family of five children, three boys and two girls. He has assisted two of his sons with money to start in business, and has still one son and a daughter dependent on him. His wife has had frequent attacks of illness, his daughter also requiring expensive medical treatment. He also has to contribute to the maintenance of his aged mother.

At present he receives no pay, being suspended. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that he has no funds to draw upon to meet the heavy expense of legal assistance … an expense which probably would fall little short of £100.
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Although he was unsuccessful in raising additional funds for legal costs, there was a moment of happiness for Clarke when his daughter Emily’s first child was christened on 30 September. His grandsons’s birth had prevented Emily from giving evidence on his behalf at Bow Street, but she would be well enough to appear at the Old Bailey.

Following discussions with George Lewis, Clarke followed his solicitor’s recommendation that an up-and-coming barrister, Edward Clarke (no relation), should be asked to represent him at the Old Bailey. Edward Clarke had recently added to his burgeoning reputation as an advocate during the Staunton murder trial (often referred to as the Penge murder case).
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In his autobiography, Edward Clarke described the first meeting of the two men:

Clarke came to me with an introduction from Mr. George Lewis, assured me that he was innocent, and begged me to defend him, and in consideration of his slender means to accept a small fee and very small refreshers. I believed him and sympathised with him, and agreed to a refresher of five guineas a day, half the amount which had been paid me in the Staunton case.
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At nineteen days the trial of the detectives was, in its time, the longest criminal trial that had been held at the Old Bailey. The prosecution for the Crown was in the hands of Attorney General Sir John Holker and Solicitor General Sir Hardinge Giffard. Edward Clarke later described his strategy as counsel for Clarke: ‘My cross-examination in the Detective case was careful but by no means long. It is a very useful general rule that you should not cross-examine when you cannot contradict. By provoking a repetition of the story you fix it on the minds of the jury, and you run the risk of the mention of some fresh detail.’
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For these reasons, he decided to keep short his cross-examination of Kurr and of Mrs Avis (Benson’s housekeeper who had produced copies of Benson’s correspondence with Clarke). As the committal hearings had shown, Clarke and Lewis had assembled a number of defence witnesses able to provide evidence that contradicted Kurr’s statements relating to his ‘meetings’ with Clarke. There was only one witness who provided partial corroboration of one aspect of Kurr’s story. This was a cabdriver who had taken Kurr to the end of Great College Street on two occasions during the autumn of 1876. However, the cabdriver had not seen whether Kurr had called at Clarke’s house, or could simply have been one of the men that Clarke had reported to Williamson, who ‘had been watching and making mysterious inquiries about him in the neighbourhood of his own residence’.
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Far more difficult to deal with was Clarke’s correspondence with Benson during 1875. Clarke had either not received or had not preserved some letters that Benson claimed to have sent him. However, copies of some of Benson’s letters and Clarke’s replies had been provided to the Treasury by Benson’s housekeeper, Mrs Avis, or had been recovered from a ‘dead letter office’ – having been sent originally to an incorrect forwarding address by an Isle of Wight resident who was clearing Rose Bank after Benson had vacated it during 1876. The recovered correspondence started with a letter from Clarke of 19 April 1875, sent shortly after his first meeting with Benson (as Yonge) in the Isle of Wight, followed by a second letter a few days later. Clarke’s initial tone had been robust:

Scotland Yard April 19th 1875

Dear Sir, In reply to yours of the 11th inst., I am utterly astonished that you, as a stranger, should have heard anything of my character, good, bad, or indifferent; but, thank God, I am not afraid of any man, and do not care one pin if all my actions through life were published to the world to-morrow. You have certainly excited my curiosity, and I appeal to you as a gentleman to let me know what you have heard about me, and you may depend that I will in no way compromise you. It is quite impossible for me to see you at the Isle of Wight. Yours respectfully, G. Clarke.
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Detective Office April 26th 1875

Dear Sir, Your letter of the 19th only reached me yesterday, having been absent from London. You must have misunderstood me when at Rose Bank, as I certainly said that my visit was purely official, and that I could not enter into any confidential correspondence respecting the two men Walters and Murray, but I did express my astonishment when you told me that the secrets of the office were betrayed by some one, whose name you may decline to give. I further said that I should be glad to hear from you on that subject. I am still prepared and anxious to hear on that matter. Yours respectfully, G. Clarke.
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By June 1875, Clarke’s tone had softened:

20, Great College Street, Westminster June 16th 1875

No doubt you have heard that the two men, Walters and Murray, did not appear to take their trial and have not been heard of since. I hear they have left the country. I should be glad to see you to talk over the matter, but I cannot spare the time this week. I feel that I want a run out somewhere for a blow. Kurr and Montague have also left the country. Yours truly, G. Clarke.
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That letter had been written in response to one from Benson:

15th June 1875

My Dear Sir and Brother, We exchanged promises at our last interview. Yours was that [you] would give me an early opportunity of proving my friendship; mine that I would show you how kindly I feel towards you, and how anxious I am to pay my debt to you. I have also news of great importance to communicate with you about the letter you know of [Clarke’s letter to Walters]. I will show you how thoroughly you can trust me. Will you, therefore, oblige me by coming down as soon as possible – Thursday or Friday? By leaving Waterloo at 3 p.m. you can return next morning in time to be in your office by 10. A line from you in return announcing your visit as requested will oblige yours sincerely, G.H.Y. If you do not like to write, merely let me know what time I may expect you, as it is urgent I should see you before Saturday.
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Subsequent letters from Benson also mentioned his ‘debt’ to Clarke, references that the prosecution interpreted as circumstantial evidence that Clarke had accepted money from him, though Clarke’s letters to Benson contained nothing specifically compromising in their content.
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Edward Clarke was also concerned that many aspects of Kurr and Benson’s ‘story’ were consistent, though the two men, in prison, were ‘without any opportunity of communication’.
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In this regard, Edward Clarke failed to recognise that Kurr and Benson had found ways of communicating while in prison, at least before their own trial. Nonetheless, Clarke’s counsel was undoubtedly right to adopt a strategy that would highlight Benson’s potential to fool not only the gullible, but also to compromise a hardened veteran of the detective department like Clarke:

My chief object was to show him [Benson] at his best; as the polished and educated man who was capable of deceiving and outwitting even a trained inspector of police. He looked little like that when my turn came to cross examine him. He was ill; it was the afternoon of his third day in the witness box; and all that morning he had been cross examined with just severity, but with some roughness by Montagu Williams. As he sat in the chair put for him in the witness box, in the ugly convict’s clothes, hair cropped, face worn with illness and fatigue, he was a pitiful object. My first words brought a change. ‘Now Mr. Benson, I have a few questions to ask you.’ It was the first time for months that he had been spoken to in any tone of courtesy. His face lit up, he rose to his feet, bowed in acknowledgment, and stood with an air of deference, waiting to reply … I felt that my object had been attained.
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During his cross-examination, Edward Clarke was successful in extracting confirmation from Benson that he had passed on information to Clarke about another fraudster, Victor Trevelli, who was later apprehended and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude for forgery in March 1877.
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This was proof that Clarke had gained information of value to the police during his dialogue with Benson.