Sir Edward’s injury was found not to be serious, but he suffered severely from shock. His assailant was taken to Kensington police station and identified as Alfred George Bowes, from Acton in west London. It later transpired that, having failed to pass his driving test and having been refused a licence as a taxi driver, Bowes had developed distorted feelings of injustice and humiliation, which focused for some reason on the Commissioner. Bowes imagined that the Commissioner was personally responsible for his failure to get a licence.
He was tried at the Old Bailey. No fingerprint evidence or any other was required, as the accused pleaded guilty. The weapon used was a Remington Colt self-loading pistol. Sir Edward, supporting himself on a stick and still unwell, was the chief witness. He asked the judge to be merciful towards Bowes. ‘He was ambitious to become a taxi driver,’ explained Sir Edward. ‘All ambition is a good thing, and I would not wish him to suffer unduly because of that ambition.’
The judge sentenced Bowes to fifteen years’ penal servitude. This distressed Sir Edward, who as Commissioner was in a position to know much more about his assailant’s background and character than the usual victim of such an attack. He knew that Bowes, an only son, had been anxious to better himself and earn a good and regular income as a taxi driver so that he could improve his widowed mother’s lot: she kept herself from abject poverty by washing and sewing for others.
After Alfred Bowes was imprisoned, Sir Edward periodically drove to Acton, where he dismissed his chauffeur-driven car before calling on Mrs Bowes. He gave her enough money to satisfy her needs and keep herself comfortable and warm. After each visit – and they continued for several years – he returned to Kensington by public transport. For a long time no one, not even his wife, knew about these visits. When Alfred Bowes was released from prison in 1922, Sir Edward paid for his passage to Canada, giving him enough money for him to make a new start in life.
Sir Edward, meanwhile, remained as Commissioner throughout the First World War, although he could have retired in 1915 when he was sixty-five. When in 1918, after years of governmental procrastination, the police went on strike at midnight on 29 August, demanding various improvements in pay, pensions and conditions, Sir Edward, who had supported their cause and had been sadly disillusioned by the whole experience, resigned soon after the government capitulated. The strike lasted two days.
Laden with honours and distinctions bestowed on him for his invention, classification and promulgation of a fingerprint system that was now in successful worldwide use, Sir Edward lived out the rest of his life in a house called Cissbury at Ascot. He became a magistrate. He was chairman of the Athenaeum Club in London and on the central committee of the NSPCC. Then in 1930 his only son, John, who had just completed a three-year course at Trinity College, Cambridge, suddenly became ill and died, aged twenty-two.
Six months later, on 19 February 1931. Sir Edward Henry himself died at the age of eighty.
Meanwhile, further improvements had been made at Scotland Yard. In August 1914, when the First World War began, a PC was earning thirty shillings a week; in 1918 the basic pay was put up to forty-three shillings; and by 1931 it had risen to seventy shillings. By the time of the First World War, the first detective training school had been started and the Criminal Record Office set up. By then, the Metropolitan Police were equipped with a few official bicycles and cars, and in 1921 – twenty years after the first telephone was installed at the Yard – the first police telephone box was erected.
18
DAVID GREENWOOD
THE MURDER OF NELLIE TREW, 1918
Seldom have more trivial items helped to trap a murderer than the button and badge that were lost from an overcoat and left behind at the scene of this crime. Seldom has a murderer been so hopeless or pathetic, or he and his victim so young.
Nellie Grace Trew was sixteen. A junior clerk, she worked in the offices of Woolwich Arsenal and lived with her parents at Juno Terrace, Eltham Well Hall. She was known as Peg. On the evening of Saturday, 9 February 1918 she left her home to go to Plumstead Library to change a library book. When she failed to return home by midnight, her father went to the police.
Her body was found the following morning on Eltham Common, near the Eltham-Woolwich Road, and about a quarter of a mile from her home. She lay on her back, and although still wearing her knickers, she had been raped. Covered in mud, she had been struck on the head, dragged about 30 yards and strangled manually. Beside her lay her handbag and a library book called The Adventures of Herr Baby.
Nearby, trodden into the grass and mud was a replica of the badge of the Leicestershire Regiment, the Tigers, and an overcoat button. The latter had been threaded through two holes – not with cotton or wool but with a piece of wire, one end of which was sharp, the other end being broken. The police acted promptly, and by Monday morning photographs of the badge and button appeared in every popular newspaper.
Ted Farrell, who worked for the Hewson Manufacturing Company in Newman Street between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road – the firm made aeroplane parts – drew the attention of the pictured badge to a twenty-one-year-old workmate, a turner called David Greenwood. Farrell thought the badge was just like one that Greenwood wore in the lapel of his overcoat – and he had been wearing it, Farrell felt sure, the previous Saturday. Now it was missing. He pointed at the newspaper and remarked: ‘That looks uncommonly like the badge you were wearing.’ Greenwood had to agree, and when asked what had happened to his badge, replied that he had sold it on Saturday afternoon for two shillings to a man he had met on a tram between Well Hall and Eltham. His colleagues then suggested that for his own good that he should ‘clear the matter up’ with the police.
Accordingly, at lunchtime, Greenwood went to Tottenham Court Road police station and told his story about the badge and the man in the tram – ‘His accent appeared to me as though he came from Belfast,’ he stated. ‘I should say he was a man that had had an outdoor life.’
The police discovered that Greenwood had been a neighbour of Nellie Trew and lived at Jupiter Terrace, Well Hall. They visited the Hewson works the following day, showed Greenwood the badge, and asked him if it was in fact his. He said it was. He was then asked to accompany Inspector Carlin back to Scotland Yard. En route, the inspector casually enquired: ‘What buttons have you on your coat?’ adding as he saw for himself – ‘Why, I see they are all off.’ Indeed they were, and Greenwood said they had been ‘off for a long time’. The inspector, taking a close look at the coat worn by the young man beside him, now noticed that there was a little tear where one button had been. ‘That is where it was pulled out, I suppose,’ Greenwood explained. The button found by Nellie Trew’s body was later proved to have come from his overcoat and the wire attachment to have been part of a spring of a type used at Hewson’s. Greenwood was arrested and charged.
His trial began at the Old Bailey on 24 April 1918 before Mr Justice Atkin; Sir Travers Humphreys was the prosecutor and Mr Slesser defended. Greenwood, who pleaded not guilty, said he had never liked his overcoat, which had been issued to him on his discharge from the RAMC in 1917. The buttons were poorly sewn on and had come off easily. He was not, he claimed, wearing the coat on the day of the murder.
Mr Slesser revealed the record of Greenwood’s valiant war service and tried to get Bernard Spilsbury to admit that Greenwood would not have been able to overpower a healthy young girl. He had enlisted at the beginning of the war when he was seventeen and had fought at Ypres, where he had been buried alive by the earth thrown up by an exploding shell. He was now suffering from neurasthenia, shell-shock and a weak heart. Spilsbury refused to commit himself either way.
The jury took three hours to find Greenwood guilty, adding a recommendation for mercy because of his youth, his services to his country and his good character. Curiously, when asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed, Greenwood repeated that he was innocent but urged that the recommendation for mercy be disregarded. It was – he wa
s sentenced to death.
He appealed, and was reprieved on the eve of his execution, set for 31 May, being sentenced instead to penal servitude for life. For some years people continued to agitate for his release – petitions were organised and signed by thousands. But he spent fifteen years in jail, being released in 1933 at the age of thirty-six.
19
MAJOR ARMSTRONG
THE MURDER OF MRS ARMSTRONG, 1921
Very few murderers seem to have been of any great height or, for that matter, of any great weight, and they have had a correspondingly exaggerated idea of their own importance and an excess of personal vanity. Indeed, vanity is a trait to be found in most murderers, who lavish much care on their dress and appearance, especially when appearing in court. One such was Major Armstrong, believed to be the only solicitor in the UK ever to be hanged.
Herbert Rowse Armstrong, a neat little man with ice-blue eyes, was fifty-one at the time of his wife’s death. He wore spectacles, spats, a flower in his button hole and a walrus moustache, spikily waxed at each end. Apart from being small (5 ft 3 in), he was also extraordinarily slight, weighing only about 7 stone. He lived with his wife and three young children in the charming Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye, in the then country of Brecknockshire, where he was clerk to the local JPs, the Worshipful Master of the Hay Lodge of freemasons, and had a reputable solicitor’s practice in Broad Street.
He was born in Devon, in Plymouth, on 13 May 1869; his father was a merchant. The family moved to Liverpool and young Armstrong, after studying at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and then in Liverpool for a law degree, became an articled clerk in that city in 1895. He was commissioned during the Boer War in 1900, serving with the First Lancashire Royal Fusiliers. In 1901, pursuing his profession as a solicitor, he went to Newton Abbott in Devon, lived there for six years, and eventually, after a three-year engagement, married a printer’s daughter, Miss Katherine Mary Friend, in Teignmouth in 1907, when she was thirty-four. They moved to Hay-on-Wye, where, at 9 Broad Street, Armstrong became the junior partner of Mr Cheese in a solicitor’s firm that was then renamed Cheese and Armstrong. The couple settled in a valley south-east of Hay called Cusop Dingle, where they acquired a large house, Mayfield, as well as three children in as many years: two girls and a boy. The house, situated on the English side of the border (which was marked by a wooded stream running down the valley), had a large garden, a tennis court, and a plethora of plantains and dandelions that required large quantities of weed-killer to keep them under control.
On 26 April 1914, Mr Cheese died (of cancer) and his wife collapsed and died the following day (of a heart attack). The solicitor’s practice now became Armstrong’s alone, the brass plate at the door changed to read: Mr H Rowse Armstrong, Solicitor and Notary Public, Clerk to the Justices. But he had little chance to enjoy his professional elevation-which some people would later see in a very sinister light – for in August war was declared. In November 1914, Armstrong enlisted in the Royal Engineers and served throughout the Great War (although never abroad), becoming a major in 1916, a rank he also held as a part-time soldier after the war in the local Territorial Army. In 1917, Mrs Armstrong, nervous about her children’s future, made a will leaving them everything she had, aside from bequests to friends and just £50 a year to her husband.
Major Armstrong was demobbed in May 1920. Two months later, he was entertaining a middle-aged widow in London: they had dinner together and went to a theatre. This was Mrs Marion Gale, who lived with her mother in Ford Cottage, Christchurch. She had first met Armstrong in August 1915 when he was stationed in the Bournemouth area.
It is worth noting here that in April 1920, the body of Mrs Mabel Greenwood was exhumed at Kidwelly in south Wales and found to contain about half a grain of arsenic. Her husband, Harold Greenwood, was a forty-five-year-old solicitor practising in Llanelly, and four months after his wife’s sudden death, in June 1919, he had taken a younger woman, Gladys Jones, as his second wife. In June 1920 the jury at the inquest on Mrs Greenwood concluded that she had been poisoned by Mr Greenwood. He was sent for trial. Weed-killer containing arsenic was alleged to have been given to her in a bottle of burgundy at lunch. The case excited much interest, not only in Britain but also in America. It must have caused much comment in that other somnolent town in south Wales, Hay-on-Wye.
A month before the major met Mrs Gale in London, and just about the time that Greenwood was sent for trial, Mrs Armstrong made a new will, leaving everything to her husband and making no special provisions for her three children. The will was in his handwriting and counter-signed by the housekeeper and a maid – although not at the same time, and in the case of the maid not in Mrs Armstrong’s presence. Her signature and the will were almost certainly forged.
About this time, her mental state began to deteriorate. She had never been in the best of health, suffering from chronic indigestion, rheumatism and neuritis, and was something of a hypochondriac. She believed in homoeopathic medicines, of which over fifty bottles were found in her bedroom after her death. A tall and gawky, intelligent, cultured woman, who wore spectacles and played the piano with skill, she was also a cranky, teetotal autocrat who allowed no wine, spirits or smoking in the house and who ruled her home, husband and children with some severity. The Armstrongs were nonetheless thought locally to be an affectionate couple – they were impolitely known as Mutt and Jeff – and her public rebukes were borne by the major with mild and good-humoured forbearance.
According to him, he first noticed signs in her of a mental breakdown on 9 August 1920 when (five days after he had bought three tins of powdered weed-killer) he returned home from his office and learned that Mrs Armstrong had told the children they would never see their father again: she believed he had been arrested for something she had done. Her melancholia and delusions arose, it seems, from a deep sense of failure. Acutely introspective, she felt she was unworthy, that she was not looking after the children properly, was defrauding tradesmen and underpaying the servants. She heard voices and footsteps, and was anxious about imaginary intruders. ‘She imagined things were happening in the house,’ said the elderly housekeeper, Miss Pearce.
These delusions rapidly worsened, and then Mrs Armstrong became really ill. Doctors and family friends were consulted and on 22 August after Sunday lunch, which was attended by Major and Mrs Armstrong, by her sister, her niece and by the major’s lifelong friend, a solicitor named Arthur Chevalier, the necessary forms were signed and Mrs Armstrong was driven to Gloucester, to Barnwood House Hospital for Mental Disorders, a private asylum. She was there for five months.
Free of her strictures, the major indulged in his little vices, such as drinking and smoking and going up to London at the weekend, when he pursued the pleasures of a middle-aged philanderer. Before long, he was paying for these pleasures. In November he contracted syphilis, and was not fully cured until the following spring. And in November he must, like everyone else, have read with extraordinary interest that the jury at the Harold Greenwood trial in Carmarthen had brought in a verdict of ‘Not guilty’. Indeed, it was not long after this that he began to agitate for Mrs Armstrong’s return home, writing letters on the subject to the asylum’s superintendent.
On 11 January 1921, he bought a quarter of a pound of arsenic from Mr John Davies, the principal chemist in Hay – in very early anticipation of using it as a weed-killer in his garden. Three days later, he again wrote to the superintendent of Barnwood about his wife’s illness, saying: ‘The original delusions have absolutely ceased, and I feel sure that a return to her home and light household duties will be beneficial.’ Although her general health had improved, the superintendent, Dr Townsend, knew that her delusions had persisted – she believed she was being poisoned by the asylum. But as she herself was eager to go home, to redeem herself as a dutiful wife and mother, and as her husband’s request could not reasonably be denied, Mrs Armstrong returned to Mayfield on 22 January.
She was still quite feeble and
a nurse, Muriel Kinsey, was hired from the 23rd to assist Mrs Armstrong when she washed and dressed. But Nurse Kinsey felt unable to cope with her charge’s mental condition after Mrs Armstrong ‘asked if it would be sufficient to kill anyone if they threw themselves through the attic window’. A full-time nurse, Eva Allen, took over on the 27th. Meanwhile, the Armstrongs’ family doctor, Dr Tom Hincks, a large man with a dark moustache and a fondness for hunting and riding, was puzzled by his patient’s reference in an examination to the fact that she felt she was walking on springs. Although an invalid she left her sick-bed every day, anxiously venturing downstairs to check on the running of house and home. On 8 February she was forty-eight.
On Sunday, 13 February Mrs Armstrong was stricken with vomiting, pains and muscular spasms. It was thought she had caught a chill from sitting out on the porch, although she had been wrapped in an eiderdown and had had hot-water bottles at her feet and in her lap. She recovered, but after lunch (boiled leg of mutton, junket and preserved gooseberries), on the 16th she was dreadfully sick again. Dr Hincks noted that her sallow skin had darkened, becoming almost coppery; there were sores about her mouth. That evening she retired to her bed and never left it, being fed on soft foods such as tapioca, sago and Benger’s foods, intermittently vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea, with a pulse rate of 120 and terrible pains in her stomach.
Murder of the Black Museum 1875-1975: The Dark Secrets Behind a Hundred Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England Page 22