The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (48 page)

It was at this point that Clarke discovered that he had committed the most heinous of all ‘crimes’: he had become a political liability. The Home Secretary’s response made Clarke’s position abundantly clear: ‘I should never have allowed him to be reinstated save for the … purpose of pension. He has been acquitted by the jury. He has had long service. Let him have his pension but I cannot keep him in the force. He must … retire at once [the last two words being doubly underlined].’
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An escape route was obligingly found. Henderson reported that ‘Chief Inspector Clarke’s health is so seriously impaired that I apprehend he will probably be considered by the Chief Surgeon as unfit for further service’.
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That prediction was conveniently confirmed by the police surgeon on 18 December, and, on 4 January 1878, Clarke retired from the Metropolitan Police on an annual pension of £184.
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The Home Office letter confirming this could not resist rapping Henderson over the knuckles for reinstating Clarke in the first place.
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Despite his acquittal and the strong support that Clarke had received from his superiors in the police, he was not successful in gaining Home Office approval for the payment of his legal fees.

Froggatt, Druscovich, Palmer and Meiklejohn, having served their sentences, were released from Coldbath Fields Prison, Clerkenwell, in October 1879.
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Froggatt was immediately rearrested for the misappropriation of trust funds for which he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude.
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Druscovich returned to his wife Elvina at their home at 64 South Lambeth Road and established himself as a private inquiry agent; one of his jobs involved investigations into bribery in the Oxford parliamentary constituency in the May 1880 election. He did not survive long, dying on 29 December 1881 at the age of 39 from tuberculosis. Pensionless after his conviction, he left £448 7
s
.
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Palmer, also pensionless, returned to his family and became manager of the Cock public house at 340 Kennington Road, Lambeth, having been helped to obtain a licence by Edward Clarke. He died from pneumonia, aged 53, on 8 January 1888, leaving £283.
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John Meiklejohn proved to be the most resilient of those imprisoned. Soon after his release he purchased four houses in Battersea at a cost of £1,025, and lived in one of them with his wife and children.
¹¹¹
He set up a private inquiry agency and worked on several occasions for the solicitor George Lewis. When Lewis’ client William O’Brien, an Irish Nationalist MP and editor of
United Ireland
, was sued because of an article reporting a homosexual scandal at Dublin Castle, Meiklejohn was called in and discovered a network of homosexual activity which helped
United Ireland
win the libel case brought against them.
¹¹²
When the Tichborne Claimant was released in October 1884, Meiklejohn’s name was bandied around by the Claimant and his friends as having helped ‘pack the jury’ against the Claimant in 1873, under instructions from Scotland Yard. Counter reports indicated that Meiklejohn was preparing to respond to these claims by an action for libel, though ultimately no such action appears to have been taken.
¹¹³
During the furore surrounding the ‘Jack the Ripper’ inquiries in the autumn of 1888, he advertised in
Reynolds’s Newspaper
that ‘Mr Meiklejohn being instructed in the matter of the Whitechapel mystery, is prepared to liberally reward any person who can afford him information of a satisfactory nature’; like others he failed to solve the mystery of who committed the murders.
¹¹⁴
In 1890 he wrote a series of articles for the
Leeds Mercury
about his life as a Scotland Yard detective.
¹¹⁵
In 1903 the self-destructive side of his personality re-surfaced when he decided to pursue a libel action against the former prison governor and author Arthur Griffiths over his references to the Trial of the Detectives, in the book
Mysteries of Police and Crime
. The three-day hearing became effectively a re-run of the trial and, once again, Meiklejohn emerged the loser, probably facing considerable legal costs in the process.
¹¹⁶
In 1912 he published more accounts of his working life in his book
Real Life Detective Stories
. In this he referred, for the first time, to the events of 1877: ‘I left the police force, under circumstances to which I can and shall, if I am spared, give a very different colouring to than usually accepted.’
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He was not spared, and died from acute pleurisy on 12 February 1912 aged 71. He appears not to have left a will, and was buried in a pauper’s grave at Grove Park cemetery.

With regard to the men who had played some part in bringing the detectives into the dock, William Walters was sentenced at the Old Bailey on 23 March 1880 to twenty years’ penal servitude, after pleading guilty to forgery. While in Newgate Prison awaiting trial and anticipating a long sentence, he produced a statement accusing George Clarke and others, including von Tornow, of accepting bribes. Walters claimed that he had met Clarke on a number of occasions, but not since he had been bailed in 1875. The document was forwarded to Scotland Yard where the head of the new Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Howard Vincent, commented that ‘this statement of Walters contains nothing new’.
¹¹⁸

In September 1882 William Kurr, Frederick Kurr and Charles Bale were released on licence having served just over five years of their ten-year sentences.
¹¹⁹
Harry Benson was released on licence on 9 October 1885.
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Within two days, Benson had written to the Home Secretary complaining that he had been ‘followed in a most marked manner by detectives everywhere I have been’. Commissioner Henderson confirmed that Benson had been placed under observation, that Kurr was already out of prison ‘concocting some fraud’ and that Benson’s liberation ‘has been anxiously awaited by his former associates’.
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Benson eluded his ‘minders’ and travelled first to Paris to establish whether his father (who had died while Benson was in prison) had left him anything; he hadn’t, and it is believed that Benson then rejoined the Kurrs.

During the next two years they conducted frauds in Europe and America. In February 1886 Benson was convicted for fraud and false representations in Belgium and was sentenced to two years and sixteen days’ imprisonment, later reduced to six months. He then travelled to North America, meeting up with Kurr, and it is ‘tolerably certain that they made a great deal of money’.
¹²²
In September 1887 the two men were arrested in Bremen on a charge of defrauding an English gentleman in Geneva, through a fraudulent business – the ‘
Agence Financière de Génèvre
’. Benson had passed himself off as an American banker, and had become engaged to the daughter of a retired surgeon general from the Indian army. He had given his fiancée jewellery (later found to be fake) and advised his father-in-law-to-be to invest £7,000 in the fraudulent scheme. However, the two men escaped prosecution when they refunded £5,000 to the angry but embarrassed ex-surgeon general and his daughter. Travelling once more to the American continent, in Mexico, Benson impersonated the impresario of Madame Patti, the acclaimed opera diva who, in her prime, received $5,000 a night for each performance.
¹²³
After siphoning off some $25,000 from ticket sales, Benson was arrested in America and held in the Tombs Prison, New York. Expecting to be extradited to Mexico, he slipped back into the black depression that had caused him to set fire to his Newgate cell many years previously.
¹²⁴
The
Liverpool Mercury
was amongst the first to report his death in September 1888: ‘A telegram from New York announces the termination by suicide of the career of Henry [sic] Benson, perhaps the most accomplished swindler of the century. Whilst in jail he is said to have thrown himself from a staircase on to a stone floor below, and to have sustained injuries which caused his death.’
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Beyond the personalities involved, the events of 1877 also contributed towards changes in the organisation and management of the detective force. On 13 August 1877, the Home Secretary had appointed a departmental commission to inquire into the ‘State, Discipline and Organization of the Detective Force of the Metropolitan Police’.
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While there is no doubt that the establishment of the commission was linked to the investigations of corruption within the detective department at Scotland Yard, the report’s conclusions and the eventual outcome, in terms of reorganisation, are not as simplistically linked to the fallout from the Trial of the Detectives as most general histories of the Metropolitan Police suggest. Chaired by Undersecretary of State at the Home Office Sir Henry Selwin-Ibbetson, the commission members also included Colonel William Feilding, who had been head of the short-lived ‘secret service department’ during the Fenian conspiracy. The commission started to collect its evidence on 23 November 1877, three days after the end of the Old Bailey trial; Superintendent Williamson was amongst the first witnesses to be called. In the commission report it is remarkable how little reference is made to the personalities and events that had been involved in the corruption trial. To employ a modern metaphor, the events surrounding the trial seem to have represented ‘the elephant in the room’ that was acknowledged but rarely spoken about. Clarke was mentioned twice in the minutes of evidence, on both occasions in a positive light. Firstly by Williamson, who described Clarke as ‘a very unusual article’ and highlighted his abilities in tracking down criminals: ‘a man of about as much shrewd common sense as any man in London.’ Secondly, Commissioner Henderson commented on the use of informers and referred to the now notorious letter to William Walters: ‘Take the case of Inspector Clarke – he wrote to a publican to come and give him information. I believe that was perfectly legitimate.’
¹²⁷

Beyond such passing references, the principal issue addressed was the perceived failure of co-operation between the detectives based within divisions, and those in the department at Scotland Yard. This was an issue that Williamson had raised as far back as July 1870, suggesting then that the divisional detectives should be managed by the Scotland Yard Detective Department.
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It was considerations of this nature that led the commission to put forward its first two recommendations: ‘an amalgamation of all the detective bodies into one force’ and ‘that they be separated from uniform branch, and placed under officers of their own’.
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Some other recommendations could be more readily traced back to issues relevant to the Trial of the Detectives, including proposals for higher pay to attract better recruits; reconsideration of travelling expenses and other allowances; the banning of gratuities from members of the public ‘on pain of dismissal’; and the establishment of a reward fund administered centrally.
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On 6 March 1878 a young barrister, Howard Vincent, was appointed director of criminal investigations, having previously taken the initiative to produce a report on the police system and crime detection in Paris.
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Judging by comments made by the Police Commissioner James Monro in 1888, Vincent’s input was a greater influence in the establishment of CID than the 1877 departmental commission report:

In reply to your letter of 8th [November], conveying a report of the Departmental Commission appointed on the 18th [sic] August 1877 and requesting marginal notes thereon or otherwise a report on the subject, I have to state that this Report appears to be quite unknown in the Commissioner’s Office as a document and never appears to have been brought to the notice of the Commissioner for any action to take place upon it … Yet for all this the greater part of the recommendations have been more or less carried out. So far as this office is concerned a new Criminal Investigation Department sprang into being without any action on the part of the Commissioner … I am under the impression that most of the changes were arranged direct between Mr. Howard Vincent and the Secretary of State; Sir Edmund Henderson probably giving his concurrence verbally, saying that he had no objection.
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Superintendent Williamson remained at Scotland Yard, initially as Vincent’s right-hand man. In March 1883 a bomb explosion in London marked the start of another Fenian campaign, and a ‘Special Irish Branch’ was established under Williamson’s leadership later that month.
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The Branch later suffered the embarrassment of a Fenian bomb exploding in a urinal beneath their offices on 30 May 1884; no one was injured.
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Williamson died on 9 December 1889, still in post, though for some months prior to his death his health had failed. By then he had received personal promotion to the rank of district superintendent – equivalent to chief constable. The Home Secretary expressed his ‘… deep regret with which he hears of Mr. Williamson’s death, and of his sense of the great loss which the Police and Public have sustained in being deprived of an Officer distinguished for his skill, prudence and experience, and whose life has been unsparingly devoted to the Public Service’.
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The Prince of Wales expressed similar sentiments.
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Williamson’s well-attended funeral service was held at St John Evangelist church in Smith Square. He left £1,887 12
s
7
d
.