by James Moore
THE VIOLENT LIFE OF CHARLES PEACE, 1876
Banner Cross Hotel and Stag’s Head, Sheffield, South Yorkshire
Moments before the trapdoor was released and Charles Peace was hanged he begged his executioners for a beverage. ‘I should like a drink,’ he said, ‘Have you a drink to give me?’ They were his last words, and he never got the drink. It was a typically rumbustious statement from one of the most intriguing villains of the nineteenth century and one of the most unpleasant characters in the history of crime. Peace was a sly cat burglar, opportunistic thief and a calculating killer. Yet he was also possessed of a strange charm and some extraordinary gifts. He was a master of disguise, an ambitious escape artist as well as being an extremely accomplished musician. Peace, born in Sheffield in 1832, certainly had an unusual upbringing. He was the son of a collier, turned one-legged lion tamer … after an injury. And this circus heritage would define a breathtaking criminal career that saw him roam far and wide across Britain and successfully elude police who were pursuing him for murder.
At the age of 14, Peace was working at a steel mill in Sheffield when he was injured by a red-hot piece of metal that went into his leg, leaving him with a lifelong limp. He supported himself by playing the fiddle in pubs across the city but also took to theft and burglary, spending long stretches as a prisoner during the 1850s and 1860s. During this time he shot at and almost killed a police officer too. He had also found time to get married to a widow called Hannah Ward. In 1866 he was caught burgling another house near Salford and sentenced to another eight years behind bars. He said he had only been caught because he had been drunk on whisky. While in Wakefield Prison for the crime, he made a daring escape attempt, managing to smuggle a makeshift ladder into his cell, saw a hole in the prison ceiling and run along the roof of the building. He was tracked down to the governor’s house before he could make good his escape. But he had evaded warders for four hours and even had time to take a bath and change his clothes.
Returning to Sheffield in 1872, Peace set up home with his family again, working as a picture framer. In 1875 they moved to the suburb of Darnall where Peace became obsessed with his buxom neighbour, Katherine Dyson. She was an Irish American who had married her much older husband, Arthur, a civil engineer, in Ohio. Arthur was, by all accounts, a mild-mannered man, but he and Katherine often rowed. Katherine was fond of a drink, and she and Peace struck up what might be described as, at the very least, a romantic friendship. They would drink together, without Arthur, at pubs in the city, including the now demolished Marquis of Waterford on Russell Street. It’s likely that Peace also frequented the Kelham Island Tavern nearby, which dates back to 1836 and still stands today. Arthur Dyson soon put his foot down. In June 1876 he threw a visiting card into Peace’s yard which read, ‘Charles Peace is requested not to interfere with my family.’
Peace wasn’t one to back down without a fight. He once said, ‘If I make up my mind to a thing I am bound to have it.’ He set about on a campaign of harassment, and in July 1876 he tripped up Arthur Dyson in the street, threatening Katherine Dyson with a gun the same evening. A warrant was issued for his arrest but, as he did so often, Peace simply moved towns. This time he went to Hull where his wife ran an ‘eating house’ while he busied himself with burgling houses in upmarket districts in far-off Manchester. Meanwhile the Dysons had moved to start a new life in another district of Sheffield, Banner Cross. Yet on arrival at their new home on 26 October, a few doors down from the Banner Cross Hotel, one of the first people Katherine Dyson saw was her old drinking partner who cried out, ‘I am here to annoy you and I will annoy you wherever you go.’
Things came to a head on the night of 29 November 1876. Peace had spent that afternoon entertaining drinkers at pubs in Ecclesall by playing tunes using a poker, strong piece of string and a stick. At 7.50 p.m. a man matching Peace’s description was seen walking in front of the Banner Cross Hotel. Charles Brassington was standing outside the pub underneath a gas lamp when the man asked him if he knew of some strangers who had come to live nearby. He told them that he didn’t. The man asked him to look at some letters, but Brassington told him that he couldn’t read. At 8 p.m. the pair parted with Peace saying that he would make the night a ‘warm un’ for the ‘strangers’.
An illustration of the Banner Cross Hotel, Sheffield, where Charles Peace was seen before committing murder. (Courtesy of The Banner Cross Hotel)
At around the same time, Katherine Dyson had put her 5-year-old son to bed and went out to a privy which stood beside the terrace where they lived. Peace was watching from a passageway and suddenly sprang in on her, wielding his gun. Mrs Dyson screamed and her husband, who had been reading in the back parlour, rushed out to see what all the commotion was about. Arthur chased after Peace who fired off a shot from his revolver to frighten him. With Dyson still giving pursuit, Peace then shot a second time, this time hitting him in the temple. Katherine Dyson screamed, ‘Murder! You villain, you have shot my husband!’ Dyson died shortly afterwards. A man who was drinking in the Banner Cross ran out and tried to give pursuit, but he did not catch Peace who later took a train to Hull. The inquest into Dyson’s death was held at The Stag’s Head on Psalter Lane on 9 December 1876 where enough evidence was produced to name Peace as the likely killer.
Over the coming weeks, Peace managed to evade capture despite a £100 reward on his head. Peace made use of his abilities as showman and actor to alter his appearance, successfully thwarting those looking for him. He would dye his hair, use walnut juice to darken his skin tone and even made a fake arm to hide a missing finger. Wanted posters listed his age as anywhere between 40 and 60, for Peace was said to have an unnerving capacity to change the shape of his face at will.
Before long, Peace was living in Peckham, London, in a house which contained both his real wife and a new girlfriend. He established a new identity for himself as a Mr Thompson. Here he would spend the next two years becoming wealthy by stealing from posh properties in Blackheath. His run of good luck only came to an end in October 1878 when he was caught by a PC Edward Robinson during a burglary. Robinson managed to hold on to Peace despite being shot at five times and injured in the arm. Peace was sentenced to penal servitude for life for the attempted murder of the policeman. While Peace had not revealed his identity, his real name and his criminal past were eventually uncovered thanks to a tip-off. His mistress, ‘Mrs Thompson’, even tried to claim the reward for his capture.
Peace now faced the prospect of another trial, this time for Dyson’s murder. Yet on the train ride from London to Sheffield for a hearing, he contrived to produce more drama, by unsuccessfully trying to escape by jumping from the train.
Appearing before the Leeds Assizes on 4 February 1879, Peace’s defence was largely based on the idea that he had been having an affair with Katherine Dyson and that her jealous husband had been killed accidentally during a struggle. Mrs Dyson denied she’d had a relationship with Peace. However, he had dropped letters at the scene of Arthur’s shooting which were allegedly from Katherine and appeared to suggest she was very intimate with Peace. She had also been seen drinking with a man in the Stag’s Head the night before the shooting. To the amusement of the court, Mrs Dyson could only ‘almost’ swear that it wasn’t Peace. The man she had imbibed with seemed to be much younger.
The jury took just twelve minutes to find Peace guilty and he was sentenced to death. Before his execution Peace, who professed to be a religious man, did express remorse for his crimes. He also admitted to the Reverend Littlewood from his cell that he was responsible for another killing in 1876, that of a policeman in the Whalley Range area of Manchester. Peace said that on 1 August he had fatally shot PC Nicholas Cock when the officer and another constable surprised him during a burglary. He told the clergyman that ‘I got away, which was all I wanted.’ Another 18-year-old man, William Habron, was already serving a life sentence for that murder. Peace knew this as he had brazenly attended Habron’s trial, sitting in the publi
c gallery and saying nothing as the man was convicted for a crime he didn’t commit. Habron was thought to have killed Cock because he was always making trouble in a local pub called the Royal Oak and, it was said, had once threatened to kill the policeman. Upon Peace’s eventual confession, Habron, who had only avoided execution himself because of his youth, was given a full pardon with compensation.
Charles Peace was finally hanged by William Marwood on 25 February 1879 at Armley Gaol in Leeds – but not before he had complained about the quality of the bacon he had been given for breakfast.
LOCATIONS: Banner Cross Hotel, No. 971 Ecclesall Road, Sheffield, South Yorks, S11 8TN, 0114 2661479, www.thebanner.co.uk; The Stag’s Head, No. 15 Psalter Lane, Sheffield, S11 8YL, 0114 2550548, www.mystagshead.co.uk
MURDER AT GLENCOE? 1877
Kings House Hotel, Glencoe
Glencoe, in the Scottish Highlands, possesses a majestic, eerie beauty. It is an awe-inspiring valley surrounded by high mountains, yet it is also an unsettling place. For it’s difficult to forget that here, in 1692, the terrible slaughter of the Clan MacDonald took place. The massacre occurred after the MacDonalds were deemed to have failed to swear proper allegiance to the new king, William III.
The two storeyed, whitewashed Kings House Hotel, with its distinctive dormer windows, is located in the middle of this remote, wild landscape. It is thought to have been an inn since around 1765 and was built following the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. The idea was to give troops and travellers a staging post through the inhospitable terrain on their way to and from Fort William, further north.
For at least the first 100 years of its existence, conditions were extremely hard for innkeepers and their families. In 1802, James Donaldson, a surveyor of the military road, recorded that the King’s House had been for some years in a ‘very bad state and has been kept in such a miserable style that the weary traveller, when he arrives there, finds himself destitute of every accommodation either for himself or his horse’. He reported that the roof was leaking and that not one of the inn’s windows had a pane of glass in it.
Things had improved somewhat by the 1870s, and the likes of the writer Charles Dickens had even stayed at the inn. But the King’s House was still a difficult and lonely place in which to make a living. It was located miles from any other significant habitation and the winters were cruel. Unsurprisingly there were dark tales associated with the place. One former innkeeper was said to have drunk himself to death. And a hawker had once been executed after throwing his wife off the bridge over the River Etive that runs beside the inn.
As the Edinburgh Evening Telegraph noted on 30 March 1877, ‘News travels slowly from a region where there is no communication by telegraph, railway, post office or coach’ from a place it described as ‘the most desolate in Scotland’. The newspaper then went on to relate the horrible recent death of the landlady at the hands, it was alleged, of her own husband.
Alexander MacDougall, 43, was described as a man ‘of superior education and intelligence’ who hailed from Kenmore in Perthshire. He had been a much admired teacher before taking on the £60 annual lease of the King’s House from the Earl of Breadalbane in 1870 on a year-to-year basis. He was then recently married to Sophia Jarrett, the daughter of a former keeper of an inn at Dalmally. While Sophia was said to be an amiable young woman, MacDougall, who was thirteen years her senior, soon became ‘sullen and of a jealous disposition’. The couple quarrelled continually and MacDougall was known to hit his wife. ‘It was evident,’ reported the Evening Telegraph, to ‘even those whose stays at the hotel were brief that the domestic arrangements were very inharmonious’. It was said that the atmosphere at Kings House was so bad the couple’s young daughter had to be sent away to stay with relatives in Edinburgh. On one occasion Sophia was said to have left the inn and taken refuge in the houses of local shepherds, while in the New Year of 1877 she fled to stay with her brother who had a farm near Killin. Each time, however, Sophia decided to return and give the marriage another chance.
The remote Kings House Hotel in Glencoe, Scotland, where a landlord beat his wife to the point of death. (Courtesy of Kings House Hotel)
On Monday 12 March there was another scene at the inn between the couple. That morning, along with the MacDougalls, a servant called Mrs Margaret MacDonald and two boys, Donald MacLeish and Alexander MacGregor, were also at the inn. MacDougall had been drinking heavily since the Saturday night and when Mrs MacDonald came in at about 9 a.m. from her duties she saw MacDougall dragging Sophia through the bar. This is where the couple normally slept on a ‘bar bed’. Sophia was wearing a ‘polka and petticoat’ while he was clad only in a shirt. MacDougall angrily ordered Mrs MacDonald out and she went to a local shepherd’s house about a mile away.
Meanwhile the two boys went about their work outside the house, returning at 11 a.m. to find the doors to the inn unusually bolted. When they returned at about 4 p.m. and found the place still locked up, they managed to force their way in and were shocked to see Sophia lying on the floor of the lobby. Her face was covered in blood and she was completely naked, a bloodied chemise lying next to her. They immediately ran to fetch Mrs MacDonald, who returned with the shepherd’s wife, a Mrs Cameron. They now found Sophia lying naked in the kitchen where her body had evidently been dragged in the preceding hour. She appeared to have been beaten insensible. The party picked her up and got her into a bed. MacDougall was nowhere to be seen, though he appeared later to ask Mrs MacDonald to clear up some of the blood in the bar.
Although badly knocked about, Sophia was still alive and the next morning, from her bed, she had recovered consciousness enough to ask Mrs MacDonald for a clean chemise. Mrs MacDonald noticed that Sophia had bad wounds on her forehead and legs and that there was dried blood everywhere. Sophia continued to be ill for the next ten days while MacDougall went about his work at the inn as usual. During this time, Mrs Cameron asked Sophia several times about her injuries. She replied, ‘If I get better I will leave him altogether.’
Strangely, a doctor was not called until the night of 20 December. The nearest physician lived 13 miles away. By the time he arrived Sophia was slipping in and out of consciousness, her stomach and breast now very swollen. There did not appear to be much he could do for her, but he was able to ask Sophia who had caused her wounds and she named her husband. That night, said Mrs Cameron, MacDougall went to Sophia’s bedside, took her hand and asked for her forgiveness, which she gave. By the early hours of Wednesday morning she was dead.
Suspicions now having been raised, a constable then made his way from Dalmally to arrest MacDougall. Meanwhile Sophia’s body was taken in a coffin on a cart from King’s House and to the churchyard in Dalmally where she was buried. MacDougall was arrested and imprisoned at Inverary while further investigations took place. He was finally brought to Edinburgh for trial at the High Court in July 1877 and accused of mortally wounding Sophia by inflicting wounds with kicks and his fists. He pleaded not guilty, swearing that Sophia had got her injuries through falls.
Margaret MacDonald deposed (in Gaelic) that she had often seen the deceased with injuries about her face and had recently seen a cut on her forehead and a large bruise on her back. Sophia had told her that MacDougall has caused them. However, she did admit that both MacDougalls were keen on a drink. And one of the boys admitted that Sophia had once fallen out of a window in one of the bedrooms after she had been drinking.
There was disagreement among the doctors that were called to give evidence as to what had actually caused Sophia’s death. Two doctors who carried out a post-mortem believed she had died from infections caused by her wounds. But doubt was raised about whether the injuries she had sustained were, in themselves, enough to kill her. Indeed a police surgeon who was called to give his view told the court that he believed Sophia had died from chronic alcoholism, although there was little evidence to suggest that she had a habitual drink problem. Indeed the post-mortem had shown that her internal organs were in good worki
ng order. On 16 July MacDougall was found guilty, but not of murder. After fifteen minutes deliberation the jury delivered a verdict of culpable homicide, akin to manslaughter, and sentenced him to ten years’ penal servitude.
LOCATIONS: King’s House Hotel, Glencoe, Argyll, PH49 4HY, 01855 851259, www.kingshousehotel.co.uk
LAST ORDERS FOR JACK THE RIPPER’S VICTIMS, 1888
The Ten Bells, The Brick Lane Hotel, The White Hart & The Bell, Whitechapel, London
London’s East End pubs provided a boozy backdrop to the brutal Jack the Ripper murders, crimes perpetrated in a world where drink flowed as freely as the blood of the killer’s victims. Life in the late nineteenth-century district of Whitechapel was hard and often short. Riven with poverty and slums, it seethed with gangs of thieves and prostitutes and it still mirrored the image of London’s darker side conjured up in the works of Charles Dickens a generation earlier. Alcohol was a crutch that kept life tolerable for many. The fact that one of the Ripper’s victims, Mary Kelly, was last heard singing, ‘Only A Violet I plucked from my mother’s grave,’ in a tipsy manner was somehow tragically fitting. Indeed, the tragic stories of each of the women who were murdered and then mutilated by the infamous serial killer are peppered with references to local drinking dens, places that were often like second homes. Here the prostitutes, who would become the Ripper’s prey, would sometimes tout for trade and often spend what little money they accrued as they mixed with multifarious locals who thronged the bars at all times of day and night.
The shocking string of gruesome murders that gripped the smog-shrouded capital between 1888–1891 remain the most notable unsolved murders of all time. But the environment in which they occurred was one in which violence was commonplace. Fights in the public houses of the East End could break out at any time and there were any number of violent characters. There are even stories of a man in the district at the time with wooden legs who would suddenly smash up pubs when in drink. Murders too were a regular occurrence, with prostitutes often the victims, a fact that has contributed to the enduring puzzle over just which crimes could be linked to a single serial killer.