by James Moore
Cream was charged with murdering Matilda Clover and went on trial in October that year. Convicted in just twelve minutes he was hanged on 15 November at Newgate Prison. According to James Billington, the man who conducted Cream’s execution, the vain villain had some shocking final words, saying ‘I am Jack the …’ as the noose tightened around his neck. No one else present recorded hearing him saying this. Is it possible that Cream was actually Jack the Ripper, responsible for the string of unsolved murders in Whitechapel four years earlier? Records suggest that Cream was in jail in the United States at this time. But he was certainly released early from that sentence in shady circumstances and almost certainly thanks to a bribe. Some have suggested that Cream was not actually in prison in 1888 and that he had gained his freedom earlier through corruption, perhaps even paying for a double to take his place behind bars.
But even if we accept that he was at large during the Ripper murders, Cream’s modus operandi appears to have been very different from Jack the Ripper, involving poisoning rather than strangling and mutilation. On balance it seems unlikely that he was the Ripper. Yet Cream was just as much a threat to young women, enjoying the idea of the pain he caused them. And, if correctly reported, his final words were no doubt another sign of his fetish for both mischief as well as murder.
LOCATIONS: The Wellington Hotel, Nos 81–83 Waterloo Road, Waterloo London, SE1 8UD, wellingtonhotelwaterloo.co.uk; Sherlock Holmes, Nos 10–11 Northumberland Street, London, WC2N 5DB, 020 7930 2644, www.sherlockholmespub.com
CIDER AND PATRICIDE IN THE COTSWOLDS, 1893
Butchers Arms, Oakridge Lynch and Stirrup Cup, Bisley, Gloucestershire
When the wife of septuagenarian farmer James Wyndham passed away in 1889 he decided to take a new partner by the name of Virtue Mills. It was a name James’ son, Frederick, thought highly inappropriate for a woman his own father once described as ‘the biggest whore he could find’. Frederick Wyndham believed that his irascible father had sold out on his family by taking up with 41-year-old Virtue and moving her in as a ‘housekeeper’ when she was still married to another man. He was also incensed that Wyndham senior had thrown his own sisters out of the family home in the process. In September 1893, James had even tried to run down one of them, Susan, in his horse and cart following a row about money she was owed.
Frederick, a fiery bailiff and butcher who himself had five children, had been mistreated by his father as a youngster. He was once tied by his thumbs to a beam and left standing in an attic on his own for twenty-four hours. It was, perhaps, unsurprising that there was not much love lost between them. After James got together with Virtue the incensed Frederick would often state publicly that if his father didn’t throw ‘the whore’ out of the house, he would shoot them both.
The Butchers Arms, Oakridge Lynch, Gloucestershire, where Frederick Wyndham drank cider before murdering his father. (© James Moore)
Despite the family tension, James did allow his son to go game shooting on Twissell’s Farm near Oakridge in Gloucestershire where he was the tenant. On 19 October 1893, James set off to do just this with his employer, a coal merchant called William Farrar. But as the day progressed, neither the country air nor the mellow Cotswold landscape would lighten Frederick’s mood. Before going hunting, Frederick called at the New Inn at Bisley, a pub now known as The Stirrup Cup and which has existed since 1774. Susan was lodging at the pub and confirmed to Frederick that their father had indeed tried to run her over in a road nearby. Frederick then borrowed a double-barrelled shotgun from the landlord, a Mr Skinner, and the party headed up to Oakridge, stopping for more refreshments at The Butchers Arms. Here Frederick sank another two pints of cider. By the time he and Farrar finally set off for the shoot the 45-year-old was well oiled. Once on his father’s farm, Frederick took out his frustrations on a man called Gilbert Rawle who had been shooting rabbits on the land. Rawle said he had permission to be there from Wyndham senior, but Frederick confiscated Rawle’s dead rabbit and told him that if he saw him on the farm again he would throw him into the brook.
At 4 p.m. that afternoon, Frederick spotted his father lifting potatoes with two labourers. Farrar went to speak to James, then Frederick stepped up and an argument soon erupted. Frederick brought up the issue of Virtue Mills and the incident involving Susan. James accused him of being drunk and told him off for bringing up such matters in front of employees. Frederick then told his father about throwing Rawle off his land. James was furious, saying he had indeed given Rawle permission to be there.
It now looked as if the Wyndhams might come to blows and Farrar attempted to step in and separate them. Frederick and James both began to walk away, but then Frederick turned around, bringing up Mills again and shouting out that he would ‘shoot the whore’. Soon the pair were advancing on each other again and this time Frederick said, ‘I will shoot you.’
He then swiftly put his gun to his shoulder and fired off two rounds. The first tore into James’ neck and shoulder, the second into the lower part of his heart. Farrar looked on horrified as James fell to the floor, dying.
Farrar bundled Frederick into the trap which had brought them to the farm and which was parked in a nearby field, setting off for Bisley with the intention of going straight to the police station. He ignored the killer’s plea to be given some more cartridges so he could shoot himself. The murder had been witnessed by both a farm worker and a passing woman called Georgina Stephens. Before long, the trap arrived back in Bisley where Frederick went into the New Inn, found Susan and told her, ‘I have done it, I have shot my father, I will die for you. He’ll drive over you no more.’ The landlady, Mrs Skinner, heard what he said and gossip soon spread in the village. Frederick handed back his borrowed gun, then walked to the police station shouting to a growing crowd, ‘I have shot my father.’ At the station Frederick then told a shocked pair of constables, ‘I have been and shot my father and if he is not dead, I hope he is.’ Frederick was locked in a cell while his father’s body was recovered from the field and taken to the Butchers Arms. There it was washed and laid out. Two days later the inquest was carried out here too.
The Stirrup Cup, Bisley, which was once the New Inn, where Wyndham borrowed the murder weapon. (© James Moore)
Later, at Stroud police station, Fredrick made a signed statement which read, ‘I solemnly declare that I shot him. Put two barrels into him. I hope he is dead … and I can die happy in a minute.’ At Stroud Magistrates’, Virtue Mills gave evidence of the fierce arguments between her lover and his son, to which Frederick shouted, ‘Let me get at her for two minutes and I’ll tear her limb from limb. I could cut her to pieces. Nothing is too bad for her. She’d better jump in the canal and drown herself.’
At his trial at Gloucester Assizes, which began on 28 November 1893, Frederick continued to show no remorse for killing his father, and his ire continued to be directed towards Virtue Mills. Before sentence was passed – and having been found guilty in two minutes flat – he was asked if had anything to say. He replied simply, ‘I should like to kill the woman sir … she was the cause of it all.’ Frederick was said to have gone calmly to the gallows on 21 December. Ironically he had, himself, once applied for the job of hangman.
LOCATIONS: The Butchers Arms, Oakridge Lynch, Gloucestershire, 01285 760 371, www.butchersarmsoakridge.com; The Stirrup Cup, Cheltenham Road, Bisley, 01452 770007, www.stirrupcupbisley.co.uk
MURDER NIGHT AT THE CAFÉ ROYAL, 1894
The Café Royal Hotel, London
By the 1890s the swanky Café Royal in the heart of ‘that part of London which is never asleep’ was in its heyday, frequented by the artistic giants of the age such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Having been set up in 1865 by an ex-pat Parisian, Daniel Nicolas Thevenon, it was the haunt of an eclectic mix of painters, poets and writers who could regularly be found enjoying the heady atmosphere of The Domino Room, with its marble topped tables, plush velvet benches and gilded mirrors. Wilde once became so drunk on absinthe here
that he started to hallucinate, imagining that he was in a field of tulips.
Despite its reputation as a trendy place to drink, dine and socialise, the Café Royal’s location in lower Regent Street meant it was also cheek by jowl with the less salubrious Soho, an area infamous by the 1890s for harbouring a criminal fraternity that spanned everything from prostitutes to anarchists. It was an area dubbed the ‘cosmopolitan home of arson and murder’. And on 6 December 1894 a shocking murder occurred at the Café, violently at odds with its reputation for fun and frivolity. The Café’s management appears to have been keen to play down interest in the case lest the sorry saga dent its reputation. Meanwhile the police were left so puzzled by the killing that the investigation was soon put on ice. However, in the run up to that Christmas, the mystery of who killed Marius Martin, the Cafe’s burly night porter, became the talk of the town, before just as quickly fading into the pages of history.
French-born Martin was an impressive man, described as having ‘enormous muscles’. The 40-year-old stood 6ft 2in tall and weighed in at 18 stone. Sporting a huge handlebar moustache, he was a familiar figure at the Café where he had worked for ten years after arriving from his native land without a job. He lived in an apartment above the venue with his wife, Mathilde.
The Café Royal as it is today. It was the scene of a murder in 1894 which remains unsolved. (© James Moore)
On the night of his death the Café closed as usual at 12.30 a.m. Just after 1 p.m. the cashier, Richard Crossman, counted up that night’s takings – a tidy £450 – and placed them in the safe, taking the key with him. At 1.05 a.m. Crossman wished Martin goodnight and left the night porter to do his rounds. It was Martin’s usual habit to go down to the kitchen at about 2 a.m. for a supper of leftovers. But it was a meal he would never eat.
Shortly before 7 a.m. that morning, Café cellar man Alexandre Delagneau found Martin’s body near the building’s Glasshouse Street entrance when he went to answer a workman who was knocking at the door. Martin was lying on his back half under one of the tables, near the cashier’s office. Delagneau roused Martin’s wife before running to the house of a local surgeon, Mr F.W. Axham, who lived further down Glasshouse Street.
When the doctor arrived, he found Martin unconscious but still alive. There was blood across his face and hair which a distraught Mrs Martin had been trying to wash away. The initial reaction of the doctor, given Martin’s size, was that he had suffered a fit or stroke and hit his head when falling. It was only when Martin was taken to the nearby Charing Cross Hospital that it was discovered that he had in fact been shot, twice, with a small calibre revolver. The first bullet had struck Martin above the right ear and the second was fired into his left cheek. Sadly doctors could not save him and at 3.45 p.m. he was pronounced dead.
That morning police had made a thorough search of the building but found no weapon. There was a broken pane of glass in the cashier’s office but no conclusive evidence that the safe had been tampered with. As well as the Martins, several staff lived over the Café but no one had heard any commotion during the night.
Two days after the crime, The Times reported that ‘The utmost reticence is shown by the police and by those connected with the Café Royal.’ Perhaps this was partly because the police were increasingly baffled by the motive. At first it was assumed that Martin had simply been the unfortunate victim of burglars who wanted to get their hands on the money in the cashier’s office. But there didn’t seem to have been a break-in as such. While the glass in the cashier’s box had been smashed, the safe was untouched and Martin’s keys to the building were still in his pocket. Would armed robbers have made so little effort to have taken the money, especially since they would surely have made a detailed study of the arrangements of the building and its night porter’s habits prior to the crime. There also appeared to have been little sign of a struggle and nothing had been removed from the premises.
Within days the newspapers and the police were asking if Martin might have known his killer and if the motive had been due to some grudge against the man himself. There was some evidence that Martin had a bad temper and was unpopular for having reported staff for taking food. There was also a suggestion that one of the men’s toilets might still have been occupied when the restaurant had closed that night, prompting detectives to believe that the killer or killers could have lain in wait until everyone was gone before pouncing on the victim.
Another intriguing piece of evidence was that during the night the doctor who had attended to Martin had been awakened by the whining of a hansom cab’s horse in the street below, which he saw standing near the Glasshouse Street entrance.
Detective Inspector Greet, put in charge of the case, asked for a list of waiters who had been dismissed from their employment at the Café. It emerged that one foreign waiter who occasionally worked there had disappeared on the day of the murder. Greet appears to have been so convinced that this man was the culprit that he even put out a description:
Wanted, on suspicion of murder, a man aged 20; height five feet only, stout build; very dark hair, slight moustache; eyes dark. Dress – short jacket, soft felt brown hat indented on the crown, dark waistcoat, probably buttoned close up to the neck. Has the appearance of an Italian. Probably has a revolver.
A man was duly arrested in Soho but was soon released without charge. After that the trail appears to have gone cold. And despite the police’s theory, there was actually nothing concrete to suggest that any of his colleagues was so incensed by Martin that they had a carefully planned murder in mind. At Martin’s inquest, on 18 December, a verdict of murder was recorded by ‘persons or persons unknown’. Interestingly, the coroner ruled that the reason Martin had left France back in 1884 need not be brought up in court as it was not relevant. But it does beg the question as to just why he had left and whether, in some way, his past could have caught up with him on the morning of 6 December.
For seventeen years the murder at the Café Royal remained unsolved and largely forgotten. Then in February 1911 there was an intriguing sequel to the story when a shabby man went into a police station in Liverpool and shocked officers by saying he wanted to confess to the crime. Frederick Charles Bedford, 53, an unemployed labourer from Exeter, said he had shot Martin and subsequently given the gun to Henry Fowler, a man famously hanged for a murder in London’s Muswell Hill in 1896. Although Bedford was charged, the case against him was soon dismissed when police found that his story did not accord with the facts.
Who shot Martin remains a mystery to this day. Perhaps this is why his tortured spectre is said to have been seen lurking in the kitchens in the decades since. Unlike its ill-fated night porter, the Café Royal survived closure in 2008 and has recently opened as a luxury hotel.
LOCATIONS: The Café Royal, No. 68 Regent Street, London, W1B 4DY, 020 7406 3333, www.hotelcaferoyal.com.
WHERE OSCAR WILDE WAS ARRESTED, 1895
The Cadogan Hotel, Knightsbridge, London
In the 1890s the newly opened Cadogan Hotel was home to Lillie Langtry, the famous actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales, a serial philanderer who would later become King Edward VII. Langtry lived at the Cadogan between 1892 and 1897. Of course the scandalous behaviour of this resident remained largely unknown to the wider public. But, at the same time as Langtry inhabited the Cadogan, it also entertained another member of the arts whose personal life would become the subject of national debate. It was in room 53 (now room 118) of the Cadogan, on 5 April 1895, that the writer Oscar Wilde was arrested in dramatic circumstances.
Wilde was world famous for works that included The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde was also married with two sons. But in 1891, aged 38, he began an affair with the 22-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, nicknamed Bosie. When Douglas’ father, the Marquis of Queensbury, found out about the relationship, he was furious.
On 18 February 1895, Queensbury left his card at Wilde’s London club, the Albemarle, which read, ‘T
o Oscar Wilde, posing as a sodomite.’ Not only was sodomy illegal but, thanks to an 1885 act, ‘gross indecency’ between two men was effectively illegal too. Wilde seemed intent on suing for libel but his friend Robert Ross warned against it. When Wilde went for a lunch with the journalist Frank Harris and the playwright George Bernard Shaw at the Café Royal, they too counselled that he should drop the case. But, when Douglas arrived to join them, he urged Wilde to have his day in court. Wilde was persuaded that Douglas was right.
A portrait of the playwright Oscar Wilde from the Illustrated London News. He was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel in 1895. (Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London)
The case began at the Old Bailey on 3 April. As his friends had predicted it turned out to be a horrible mistake, opening up Wilde’s private life to scrutiny, with all the lurid details splashed across the newspapers. Queensbury’s lawyers dug up witnesses that linked Wilde to homosexual activities and under intense cross-examination Wilde’s case soon collapsed. Queensbury was acquitted. The same afternoon a warrant was immediately issued for Wilde’s arrest on charges of gross indecency.
Wilde had already been urged to leave the country with haste. Instead he retired to the Cadogan where he vacillated. At 1.45 p.m. Robert Ross brought Wilde the £200 he had asked him to draw on his bank and implored his friend to make for Dover and the continent. Another friend, Reginald Turner, who stayed with him, did the same. But Wilde, still apparently indecisive, eventually said simply, ‘The train has gone, it’s too late.’ Ross left to tell Wilde’s wife, Constance, of the situation before returning to the Cadogan where Ross told Wilde that she had hoped he was going abroad.
Wilde simply sat in a chair for several hours drinking hock and seltzer, a kind of white wine spritzer. At 5 p.m. a reporter called Thomas Marlowe, from the Star, came to see Wilde but was turned away. However, he did pass on the information that the warrant for Wilde’s arrest had now been issued. When Ross told Wilde of this the writer was said to have gone ‘very grey in the face’.