by Payne, Chris
The court was now full to overflowing. There were more people present – many more – than when the Penge convicts were sentenced to death. At the entrance to the bench there was not standing room. Barristers struggled to their seats with difficulty. Every avenue was blocked, and there were almost as many visitors standing as sitting. The counsel connected with the case returned to their seats, and all was anxiety, crowd, confusion, intolerable heat and expectancy. The jury only asked, through their foreman, for some documents to verify the handwriting of Palmer, and then they retired. At this moment there was – naturally perhaps – some little hesitation on the part of Clarke and Froggatt in following the other prisoners down the stairs into the gaol. Hitherto they had been on bail and up to this moment they were free men. Going down those stairs accompanied by the warders, certainly looked like going to prison, and both Clarke and Froggatt hesitated. They did more: they looked appealingly to Mr. Sidney Smith [Governor of Newgate Prison], who was in his old painful corner in the wide dock, as if to ask protection from this first step to gaol. But it could not be, and it was far better as it was; for who would willingly expose himself to the cruel gaze of a crowded court during those dread moments, when the jury is deciding the fate of prisoners? For then, when the judge is absent, when formality is comparatively at an end, the long pent up silence gives way to a period of what looks like heartless animation. There is a buzz of conversation, the usher indignantly calls to some daring personage instantly to remove his hat, the ladies are escorted into inner apartments for consoling cups of tea, there is an in-coming and out-going of City magnates in purple robes and chains of office. Anything but solemnity prevails while the jury deliberate in their room, and the prisoners wait below with visions of the treadmill and oakum-picking before their eyes. The more crowded the court the greater the gossiping; and if in a murder case actual levity is not restrained, how much less can silence be expected when it is whispered about that ‘after all they can only get two years’. Painters have given to us scenes of intense dramatic effect as conveying the horror and despair of those who ‘are waiting for the verdict’. But they are ideal. They do not occur at the Old Bailey when the rope is dangling in mid-air, and they are not expected when the ultimate doom will only be the crank and cropped hair. The prophets were true who anticipated that the deliberation would not be long. There had been plenty of time to consider the case in all its bearings before this, and there is one consolation in a long trial. It means a short deliberation. So the five o’clock tea was curtailed and the fashionable gossip was cut short by the arrival of the usher, who, fighting his way through a desperate crowd, announced that the jury would be back in three minutes. Back came the ladies, off went the obstinate hats, silence was emphatically pronounced, and at seventeen minutes past four the jury had returned, preceded by the young foreman, who held in his hand an ominous paper. This was the verdict. He had not returned to ask any questions as some asserted. The fate of the prisoners was now in the foreman’s hands. But now there was a painful interval. The prisoners were arranged in front of the dock, all terribly distressed and nervous. But the judge had not returned. It seemed a long time this delay to all in court. It must have seemed hours to the accused. The longer the delay, the more the whispering, and once more, when the red curtains were parted and the judge appeared, it was necessary to command silence authoritatively. At last the names of the jurymen are called over, and the Clerk of the Arraigns asks the dread question in order and in deep silence. Meiklejohn? Guilty. Druscovich? Guilty. Palmer? There is an anxious hesitation, and the young foreman, who is terribly nervous, wishes to go back and recommend Druscovich to mercy. So Palmer’s fate hangs in the balance, and the presentment of the jury is made commending Druscovich to clemency. Once more the questioning begins again. Palmer? Guilty. Once more there is some hesitation. Clarke? No; the foreman wishes to do everything in order, and goes back instantly to Palmer. He, too, is recommended to mercy, because he was not bribed. And now comes Clarke’s turn, and apparently the most anxious moment of all, for the silence deepens. Clarke? Not guilty. The words were scarcely uttered before a burst of cheering rang through the court – not from one corner. Not from gallery alone, not merely the delighted relief of friends; but a sudden, strong, sympathetic cheer. The authorities of the court tried vainly to silence the noise, and it required the firm, indignant voice of the judge to restore silence. The court was to be instantly cleared if such indecent exhibitions of sentiment were heard again. Instantly Clarke appreciated his position and fell back from the rank with a smile on his face. He looked young again, and beamed, as he stood back with folded arms, almost a free man. Froggatt, terribly agitated with all this delay and excitement, closes up, and bows his head as the question is asked. Froggatt? Guilty.100
Druscovich, Palmer, Meiklejohn and Froggatt were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour, the maximum allowed for the offence committed, and inadequate punishment in the view of Judge Baron Sir Charles Pollock. As the jury had been charged with reaching a verdict on only part of the indictment, Clarke was released on his own recognisance of £100 to appear, if called upon, to answer other counts.
The Aftermath
By 13 December 1877, the decision had been made not to pursue any further charges against Clarke. His first task was to write to Edward Clarke:
I have much pleasure in informing you that all accusations against me have been withdrawn and I am now fully reinstated in my former position. I beg to thank you very much for the very able manner in which you conducted my defence. The Solicitor to the Treasury has been most grossly deceived by the woman, Mrs. Avis, as I most solemnly declare I never received a letter in her handwriting, the drafts of which she produced. I am informed by her own family that she was entirely a creature of the convict Benson, and would perjure herself to any extent to serve him. As to the evidence of the convicts, Kurr and Benson, I can only give it my solemn denial that ever I received even one penny at their hands, or ever gave them the slightest information.
Again thanking you most heartily.101
Clarke’s next task was to try to get his legal costs refunded, and he sent a memorandum to Commissioner Henderson, which was duly forwarded to the Home Office with Henderson’s support:
Having been acquitted of the serious charges preferred against me by the Solicitor to the Treasury, and being reinstated in my former position as Chief Inspector with full pay during my suspension: I beg in accordance with the recognised custom of the Service, to ask that Colonel Henderson will be kind enough to submit my application to the Home Office, that Mr. Secretary Cross may be pleased to authorize my legal expenses being paid out of the Police Funds.102
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].’103 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’.104 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 £184.105 The Home Office letter confirming this could not resist rapping Henderson over the knuckles for reinstating Clarke in the first place.106 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 1879.107 Froggatt was immediately rearrested
for the misappropriation of trust funds for which he was tried, found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude.108 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 7s.109 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 £283.110
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.’117 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 1885.120 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’.121 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.’125
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’.126 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