As a landlord, Beron was more affluent than most and exhibited this status in his dress. He wore a large gold watch and chain, from which also hung a five-guinea piece. In a purse attached to his waistcoat by a safety pin were, it was said, about twenty golden sovereigns.
In December 1910, Steinie Morrison began to be seen in the Warsaw restaurant at Leon Beron’s side. Morrison, aged about thirty, was also a Russian Jew, although he claimed to have been born in Australia. His real name may have been Alexander Petropavloff, although at other times he called himself Moses Tagger and Morris Stein. He came to England about 1898. A fine figure of a man (6 ft 3 in tall) and darkly handsome, he was a charmer. His mien and good manners belied the fact that he was a professional burglar who had served five prison sentences, amounting to twelve years, and had in fact been released from jail about six weeks before he and Beron met.
At 8.10 am on Sunday, 1 January 1911, Leon Beron’s body was discovered by PC Mumford on Clapham Common. Concealed in some furze bushes near a footpath, it lay on its back with its legs neatly crossed. It had apparently been dragged a short distance, as there was mud on its front, on the backs of the hands and the toes of the boots. Beron, who was wearing a melton overcoat, muffler and patent leather boots, had been struck on the head by a blunt instrument and stabbed three times in the chest as he lay dead on the ground. He had been robbed. No coins or money were found in his possession. There were seven superficial cuts or scratches on his face. Two, one on each cheek, were thought by a police surgeon to be S-shaped and not made accidentally. The surgeon later described them in court ‘as being rather like the “f” holes of the violin, on each side of the strings’.
The police discovered that Morrison had worked from late September 1910 for seven weeks for a baker in Lavender Hill and accordingly knew the area, including Clapham Common. They also discovered that on the morning of 1 January, Morrison, calling himself Banman, had deposited a paper-wrapped package in the cloakroom at St Mary’s Station, Whitechapel. It contained a revolver and forty-four cartridges. The relevant cloakroom ticket was found in the lining of a billycock hat discovered in his lodging, in the rooms of a prostitute, Florrie Dellow, who resided south of the river at 116 York Road, Lambeth. Morrison had moved in with her on 1 January, after telling his East End landlady at 91 Newark Street – Mrs Zimmerman – that he was off to Paris. He met Florrie at midday – she lived in the house of a watchmaker acquaintance of his – and allegedly asked her if he could live with her. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘If you will look after me.’ He stayed with Florrie for a week, having, he later said, deposited the revolver in the cloakroom so as not to frighten her. (In fact, he did this before he met her.)
Morrison was apprehended at about 9.30 am on Sunday, 8 January, at Cohen’s restaurant, Fieldgate Street, just as he finished his breakfast. He was taken to Leman Street police station, ostensibly because, as a convict on parole (‘a ticket-of-leave man’), he had neglected to tell the police about his move to Lambeth. Two days later, he was charged with the murder of Leon Beron.
The nine-day trial of Steinie Morrison began at the Old Bailey on 6 March 1911. Mr Justice Darling was the judge. Mr Richard Muir led for the Crown and Mr Edward Abinger for the defence. The trial was characterised by several colourful East Enders, mainly aliens, who gave evidence. They tended to be disputative and unawed by the majesty of the court. On the eighth day, during Abinger’s final speech for the defence, Solomon Beron – the dead man’s bachelor brother, who lodged for seven pence a night in Rowton House – was so provoked by the suggestion that he might have killed his brother that he attacked Abinger and had to be removed, raving, from the court. He was taken to a lunatic asylum.
Throughout the trial, the accused stood – he refused to sit – observing the court with disdain and with one hand on his hip. According to Morrison, he had spent New Year’s Eve 1910 selling imitation jewellery. He had supped at the Warsaw restaurant, he said, at about 8 pm. Then he visited the Shoreditch Empire of Varieties, whose artistes that night included Gertie Gitana, Harry Champion and Harry Lauder. He was there from about 8.45 to 11.10 pm. After the show he returned to the restaurant to pick up a wrapped in a paper, which he had left with one of the waiters, Joe Mintz. Morrison had in truth bought a flute for four shillings in the Aldgate that morning. He observed that Beron was in the Warsaw, but did not sit with him, and, having downed a cup of tea, he proceeded, he said, about 11.45 pm to his old lodging in Newark Street, where he went straight to bed, sleeping on a sofa in the Zimmermans’ downstairs front room. On his way to Newark Street, he said, he saw Beron and a very tall man on the corner of Sidney Street, soon to be the scene of a famous siege a few days later. ‘Bonsoir, monsieur!’ Beron had called.
In support of Morrison’s account of his movements, Janie Brodski, aged sixteen, and her sister, Esther, told the court that he had indeed been at the Shoreditch Empire on New Year’s Eve – somewhat inconsequential evidence, as Beron was murdered at about 2.45 am – although she had neglected to tell the police so when they originally interviewed her. She and her sister, she said, had obtained seats in the orchestra stalls for one shilling each. Morrison was in the same row. Janie’s evidence – ‘I swear that I saw Morrison there on the night of 31 December. Nobody can deny my own eyes!’ – was largely discredited when the acting manager of the Shoreditch Empire said that no seats for the stalls could have been bought at the door as they were all sold, and anyway the price had been raised that night to 1s 6d. It seems that Janie was much enamoured of Steinie Morrison. She had only met him in the last week of December, and within days, she said, he had talked to her of marriage.
The Zimmermans – Maurice and Annie – assured the court that Morrison could not have left their house without rousing them, as the front door had such a noisy bolt that it regularly woke the household. The prosecution pointed out that he could have left by a window.
According to the prosecution Morrison spent most of the evening of 31 December with Beron in the Warsaw – from about 8.30 to 11.45 pm, as alleged by the proprietor, Alexander Snelwar, as well as the waiter, Joe Mintz. Somehow, alleged the prosecution, Morrison had inveigled Beron to go with him to Clapham Common. There, so the prosecution said, in the early hours of the New Year, Morrison murdered the other man by striking him with an iron bar or a jemmy (the skull was fractured) and by stabbing him three times.
The evidence was largely circumstantial, confused, and the prosecution witnesses easily impugned. Beron’s belligerent brother, Solomon, had sworn he had seen Leon in Fieldgate Street at 10.45 pm on New Year’s Eve. A gasfitter’s wife, Mrs Deitch, who also ran a brothel, said she had seen Morrison and Beron in Commercial Road, Stepney about 2.15 am on 1 January. Joe Mintz was not so sure that the package Morrison had left with him about 6 pm on 31 December was indeed a flute – it seemed too long (about 2 ft) and too heavy to be a flute.
Two hansom-cab drivers, Hayman and Stephens, and a taxi-cab driver, Castlin, said respectively (a) that Morrison and Beron had been picked up at about 2 am on 1 January at the corner of Sidney Street and Mile End Road, and had been driven a distance of 6 miles to Lavender Gardens, Clapham, where Morrison had paid the five shilling fare; (b) that Morrison, on his own, had been driven from Clapham Cross to the Hanover Arms near Kennington Church about 3.10 am; and (c) that Morrison and another man had been picked up at 3.30 am at Kennington and taken to Finsbury Gate in north London. Stephens described his ‘Morrison’ as being about 5 ft 10 in tall and looking like an actor or professional man.
It is odd how the cabmen’s accounts detailing Morrison’s journeys give him just enough time to dispose of Beron about 2.45 am and then walk across the Common. Moreover, that night there was no moon, and it was so dark that identification cannot have been easy. Two of the cabmen, Hayman and Stephens, had come forward some days after 6 January, when the police issued a notice asking cabmen for information about any man or men they had taken to and from Clapham Common between 2 am and 6 am on 1 January. A r
eward was offered. And by the 6th, Morrison’s picture had appeared several times in the newspapers.
In his summing-up, the judge asked the jury about the evidence of the cabmen: ‘With what certainty can you, do you think, swear to a man whom you saw on a night like that, by the kind of light there was at these places? Can you feel certain that a man would not be mistaken?’
Mr Abinger sought to imply that Beron was a police spy who had betrayed the anarchists responsible for the Houndsditch Murders (on 10 December 1910), as well as those who died in the Siege of Sidney Street (on 3 January 1911). Accordingly, he had to be killed. The alleged ‘S’ cuts on the cheeks of Leon Beron signified, he suggested, the Russian or Polish words for ‘spy’ – ‘spic’ or ‘spiccan’. But DI Wensley, in charge of the case, refuted this last idea, denying that Beron had ever been an informer or was involved with Peter the Painter (allegedly a prominent member of the Latvian criminal gang who were targeted in the Siege of Sidney Street) or any other anarchist. No one put forward the idea that ‘S’ might signify the English word ‘spy’ – or even ‘sodomite’. The prosecution suggested, however, that the supposed double ‘S’ had been cut by Morrison to confuse the police.
The judge remarked that anyone who could see the letter ‘S’ in the scratches must have better eyes or a more vivid imagination than he himself possessed. Indeed, police photographs of Beron’s corpse show little more than some scratches on his face. Dr Freyberger, who carried out the post mortem, accounted for this by explaining: ‘They do not come out well in photographs.’ They had also, he said, been distorted by rigor mortis.
It is conceivable, although the point was never raised, that the slight cuts were caused by the furze bushes into which Beron’s body was flung. The so-called ‘S’ cuts, magnified by Morrison’s defending counsel and by the press, have since become part of the myths and legends that accumulate around famous trials.
The jury were out for thirty-five minutes. They found Steinie Morrison guilty of murder. As the judge passed sentence of death on him, saying, ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul,’ Morrison shouted: ‘I decline such mercy! I do not believe there is a God in heaven either!’
Although the verdict was upheld by the Court of Criminal Appeal, the Home Secretary, Mr Winston Churchill, intervened. Morrison was reprieved on 12 April and his sentence commuted to penal servitude for life. He was sent to Dartmoor, and on his way there created a disturbance at Waterloo Station.
He found prison conditions and his existence in jail intolerable, and continually protested his innocence. It is said that he petitioned four times for the death sentence to be carried out. In despair, he staged a series of hunger strikes, and ultimately became so feeble that he died in Parkhurst Prison on 24 January 1921.
Several authorities have thought that Morrison was wrongly convicted, and that although he may have known more about the circumstances of Beron’s death than he admitted he was not the murderer. Some have suggested that a third man, looking not unlike Morrison, was involved, that this man drove with Beron to Clapham, and having murdered him joined up with Morrison at Kennington. It certainly seems odd that Morrison should take Beron 6 miles to Clapham Common to rob him and let himself be seen by three cabmen, on the way there and back. Moreover, although Morrison moved to Lambeth, he kept in touch with his friends and did not run away. However, it may be worth noting that the cabman, Alfred Stephens, who said he had driven Morrison from Clapham to Kennington about 3.10 am, was assaulted by four men on 20 January – allegedly because he had kissed the wife of one of his assailants. Stephens said at the time that five days earlier he had been threatened because he was assisting police enquiries.
There seems little doubt that at the Morrison trial more witnesses than usual lied in court about events and people, and that Steinie Morrison, although loved by some, was more loathed than liked – and was a great liar himself. Although the police working on the case were convinced before and after the trial that Steinie Morrison was the guilty man, it is possible that Morrison only acted as a decoy, taking Beron to Clapham Common on some pretext – perhaps to do with some sexual activity or the introduction of Beron to a receiver of stolen goods or ‘fence’. Morrison may then have left, whereupon Beron was murdered by some representative of the Houndsditch gang, using a hammer or chisel. The dent on Beron’s head doesn’t look like a blow from a jemmy – or a flute.
15
MR AND MRS SEDDON
THE MURDER OF ELIZA BARROW, 1911
Money is the mainspring of not a few murders – sheer greed, the acquisition without too much trouble or work of what others have acquired or earned. Some murderers are also very mean about money themselves, never eager to spend but ever eager to get a bargain or something for nothing.
Frederick Henry Seddon was an insurance agent, the district superintendent for Islington of the London and Manchester Industrial Assurance Company, for whom he had worked for over twenty years. In 1911, he was forty, a short, bald-headed, narrow-eyed, wax-moustached, Lancashire businessman, conceited, unfeeling, exact and exacting, who was so obsessed with thrift, money-making and the possession of property that these things had become his religion, with gold as God. He was forever counting his gold sovereigns and notes, totting up sums, zealously plotting and calculating how to save a bit here, make a bit there, and he was never loath to deal in anything that might show a profit, however small. He was not a pleasant man. He exacted 6s a week from his two teenage sons as payment for living at home. He studied the details of wills published in the papers and would say, seeing someone who had died intestate: ‘All that money thrown into the gutter. It’s criminal!’ At a music hall, he once created a scene when he was given change for a florin (2s) instead of half-a-crown (2s 6d). A freemason and formerly a chapel-goer and preacher, his pleasures appear to have included smoking, drinking, music halls and married women.
His wife was three years his junior. A sharp-nosed, weak but capable woman, Margaret Ann Seddon was ruled by her tyrannical husband, whose servants (maid and charwoman) and children (there were five), seemed nervous of him, if not frightened. On the other hand, she ruled their home. As she said: ‘I did not tell my husband everything I done, and he never told me everything.’ She also commented: ‘He never used to take any notice when I said anything to him – he always had other things to think of.’ Despite ‘a little difference on family matters’ (as he put it) at the end of 1909, when there was a brief separation, the marriage seemed quite equable.
The story begins in January 1910, when they moved into 63 Tollington Park, London N4. Seddon, having persuaded the owners to reduce the asking price to £320, bought the house on a mortgage of £220 with a down payment of £100. He intended to turn it into flats, but instead decided to use it himself, sub-letting the top floor. The other two floors and the basement were occupied by the Seddon household, consisting of husband and wife, his old father, William (aged seventy-three), his four children – a fifth child was conceived soon after the separation – and an eccentric servant, Mary Chater, whose brother and cousin were in lunatic asylums. She herself was a former mental nurse and was something of a case herself, shouting and breaking crockery and telling all manner of lying tales.
‘This house I live in,’ said Seddon in 1912, ‘fourteen rooms, is my own, and I have seventeen other properties.’ Four of these rooms formed the top-floor flat. Of the other ten, one was his bow-windowed front basement office, another a conservatory, and only three were bedrooms. Mr and Mrs Seddon had a double room on the first floor above the ground-floor drawing room. The first-floor rear room was divided by a partition: the two Seddon daughters and Mary Chater slept on one side, Grandfather William and the two Seddon sons on the other. Apart from the six shillings each of his sons paid for their weekly board, Seddon got five shillings a week from the insurance company as rent for the room used as his office, and twelve shillings and sixpence from the tenant of the four unfurnished top floor rooms. They were occupied for six months, and
then were vacated in June.
In July 1910, Miss Eliza Mary Barrow took over the top-floor tenancy. At the time of her death, Miss Barrow was forty-nine; a plump, unprepossessing woman, about 5 ft 4 in tall, who dressed poorly, she was parsimonious, squalid, ignorant, asthmatic, self-indulgent, deaf and drank gin. Her failings were more acceptable to Seddon because she had money, apparently inherited from her mother. According to an engine driver, Robert Hook, she had £420 4s 3d, nearly all in gold coin, kept in fifteen bags in a cashbox, in which were also some banknotes. Mr Hook said he helped her count it out in 1906, when Miss Barrow was living in his sister’s house, It was later established that the cash box could hold as much as £1,500 in gold.
She had known Hook since 1896, when she lodged with his mother in Edmonton. When old Mrs Hook died in 1902, Miss Barrow moved in with Robert’s sister, Mrs Grant. The Grants were heavy drinkers, it seems, and always feuding, throwing bottles and fire irons about. Mr Grant died in 1906. When Mrs Grant died in 1908, Eliza Barrow took charge of the youngest Grant, six-year-old Ernie, leaving his sister Hilda in an orphanage.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 17