The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

by Summerscale, Kate

  263 The work was well-paid . . . to divorce her. From a report in The Times of 9 December 1858.

  263 In his new role Whicher took part . . . the Tichborne Claimant. Account of the case of the Tichborne Claimant from: Famous Trials of the Century (1899) by J.B. Atlay; The Tichborne Tragedy: Being the Secret and Authentic History of the Extraordinary Facts and Circumstances Connected with the Claims, Personality, Identification, Conviction and Last Days of the Tichborne Claimant (1913) by Maurice Edward Kenealy; The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Mystery (1957) by Douglas Woodruff; The Man Who Lost Himself (2003) by Robyn Annear; and reports in The Times.

  264 'It has weighed upon the public mind like an incubus.' From The Tichborne Romance (1872) by A Barrister At Large (A. Steinmedz), quoted in Victorian Sensation (2003) by Michael Diamond.

  266 'I daresay you hear me frequently abused . . . Your Old Friend, Jack Whicher.' Quoted in Scotland Yard: Its History and Organisation 1829–1929 (1929) by George Dilnot.

  267 Jack Whicher was still living . . . until death. From census returns of 1861, 1871, 1881, marriage certificate of Sarah Whicher and James Holliwell, and Holliwell's citation for the Victoria Cross.

  267 'It is a very curious story . . . the detective prime?' Dickens quote from a letter to W.H. Wills – see The Letters of Charles Dickens 1868–870 (2002), edited by Graham Storey, Margaret Brown and Kathleen Tillotson. Robert Louis Stevenson letter of 5 September 1868 quoted in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (1974), edited by Norman Page.

  269 In 1927 T.S. Eliot compared . . . fallible.' From an article in the Times Literary Supplement of 4 August 1927.

  270 Henry James characterised . . . works of science.' From 'Miss Braddon', unsigned review in The Nation, 9 November 1865.

  270 In May 1866 Samuel Kent renewed his plea . . . congestion of the lungs. Papers on Samuel Kent's application to retire on full pay in HO 45/6970. In March the annual report of the factory inspector Robert Baker had referred to the great wrong done to Samuel in the years since Saville's death. An extract from Baker's account of his colleague's trials, including the 'threatened blindness' and subsequent paralysis of Mrs Kent, was published in The Times on 24 March 1866. According to her death certificate, Mary Kent died at Llangollen on 17 August 1866 – Samuel was present at her death.

  270 That summer he was awarded . . . common and cruel. See The Times, 9 July 1866.

  271 Through the winter of 1867. Information about William Kent's life after 1865 from Savant of the Australian Seas (1997) by A.J. Harrison. An electronic second edition of this biography, completed in 2005, is available on the STORS website of the State Library of Tasmania – members.trump.net.au/ahvem/Fisheries/Identities/ Savant.html.

  271 He gave the name 'retrospective prophecy' . . . a word as "back-teller"!' said Huxley. From the essay 'On the Method of Zadig: Retrospective Prophecy as a Function of Science' (1880). In Lady Audley's Secret Mary Braddon described the detective's procedure as 'retrograde investigation'. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce developed his theory of 'abduction', or retrospective deduction, in about 1865. 'We must conquer the truth by guessing,' he wrote, 'or not at all.' For the idea of 'backward hypothesising', see: The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1983), edited by Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok; The Perfect Murder (1989) by Peter Lehman; and Forging the Missing Link: Interdisciplinary Stories (1992) by Gillian Beer.

  272 'Alone, perhaps, among detective-story writers . . . more essential and more strange.' From Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911) by G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton was adapting Job 19: 'For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth' (King James Version of the Bible).

  Others have found the endings to detective stories disappointing: 'The solution to a mystery is always less impressive than the mystery itself,' wrote Jorge Luis Borges in the short story 'Ibn Hakkan-al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth' (1951). 'Mystery has something of the supernatural about it, and even of the divine; its solution, however, is always tainted by sleight of hand.'

  273 He left his money . . . joint executors. From Samuel Kent's will, dated 19 January 1872 and proved by William on 21 February that year.

  273 In January 1872 Samuel Kent . . . of a stillborn boy. Biography from Savant of the Australian Seas (1997, revised 2005) by A.J. Harrison; Guidebook to the Manchester Aquarium (1875) by William Kent; A Manual of the Infusoria (1880–82) by William Kent; death certificate and will of Samuel Kent; birth announcement in The Times; marriage certificates of William Kent; census of 1881.

  275 In 1875 William's wife . . . obstruction of the bowel. According to the death certificate, she died in Withington, Manchester, on 15 February.

  275 Jack and Charlotte Whicher . . . fields of lavender. Lavender Hill information from: Directory for Battersea Rise and the Neighbourhoods of Clapham and Wandsworth Commons (1878); Directory for the Postal District of Wandsworth (1880); The Buildings of Clapham, edited by Alyson Wilson (2000); and Battersea Past, edited by Patrick Loobey (2002).

  276 In the summer of 1881 . . . went to his wife. From Whicher's death certificate, will and probate in the Family Records Centre and the Court of Probate.

  276 After Jack's death . . . executor of her will. From Charlotte Whicher's will and probate at the Court of Probate.

  277 Williamson was . . . unofficial hours.' From Fifty Years of Public Service (1904) by Arthur Griffiths.

  277 The Chief Superintendent . . . a game of chess. From Scotland Yard: Its History and Organisation 1829–1929 (1929) by George Dilnot.

  277 'A Scot, from the crown of his head . . . valuable public servant.' From Scotland Yard Past and Present: Experiences of Thirty-Seven Years (1893) by Timothy Cavanagh.

  277 Field – who by the 1870s was reduced almost to poverty. In a letter written in January 1874 from 'Field Lodge', his home in Chelsea, he begged a client for £1 that he was owed – he had spent the past four months ill in bed, he said, and his doctor's bill was £30. From a letter in the British Library manuscripts collection: Add.42580 f.219. Field died later that year.

  277 In a notorious trial of 1877 . . . six detective inspectors. From Critical Years at the Yard: The Career of Frederick Williamson of the Detective Department and the CID (1956) by Belton Cobb, and the census of 1881. Wilkie Collins also died in London in 1889, aged sixty-five.

  278 According to a police commissioner . . . harassing work'. Unnamed police commissioner quoted in Scotland Yard: Its History and Organisation 1829–1929 (1929) by George Dilnot.

  278 the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral in London. Most of the mosaic floor in the St Paul's crypt was made by female inmates of Woking prison between 1875 and 1877, according to the St Paul's chapter minute books for 1874–89.

  278 Major Arthur Griffiths . . . intelligence was of a high order.' From Secrets of the Prison House (1894) by Arthur Griffiths.

  279 Griffiths returned in another memoir . . . her name was never mentioned.' From Fifty Years of Public Service (1904) by Arthur Griffiths.

  279 In 1877 Constance petitioned . . . marked her petition 'nil'. Petitions and letters of support in HO 144/20/49113.

  CHAPTER 19

  283 In 1884 William . . . and Florence (twenty-five). The information about William and his family in this chapter is drawn mainly from Savant of the Australian Seas (1997, revised 2005) by A.J. Harrison. Other sources include: 'Emigration of Women to Australia: Forced and Voluntary', a paper delivered to the Society of Genealogists in London by Noeline Kyle on 31 August 2005; the English census of 1881; and two of William's own books – The Great Barrier Reef (1893) and especially The Naturalist in Australia (1897).

  286 At Burlington House, London . . . and torso'. From The Times of 11 June 1896.

  287 Two Japanese scientists were credited . . . before them. The Australian pearl specialist C. Dennis George pointed out that the stepfather of the two Japanese pearl pioneers spent several months on Thursday Island in 1901, and had opportuni
ty to observe William Saville-Kent's methods. George also argued that Saville-Kent succeeded in cultivating whole pearls before he died, and claimed that a string of these were found in the possession of a female vet in Brisbane in 1984; another set is rumoured to be in the possession of a family in Ireland. See Savant of the Australian Seas (1997, revised 2005) by A.J. Harrison.

  288 Mary Ann and Elizabeth . . . corresponded to the end. Information about the Kent family from death certificates and wills, correspondence in Bernard Taylor's archive and research in Australia by A.J. Harrison and Noeline Kyle. St Peter's Hospital is described in Old and New London: Volume 6 (1878).

  288 It emerged in the 1950s . . . under the name Emilie King. From Saint – with Red Hands? (1954) by Yseult Bridges. Bridges said that she obtained the information first-hand, from a woman who was twenty-two when she met Constance in 1885. When Bridges wrote her book, the story of what subsequently became of Constance was unknown.

  288 In the 1970s . . . Miss Kaye died. Constance's Australian exile was disclosed in Cruelly Murdered (1979) by Bernard Taylor.

  290 In her will . . . the first Mrs Kent. In this will, written in 1926, Constance bequeathed the nurses' home she had established to a fellow nurse, Hilda Lord, and left her money to the Joseph Fels Fund. Fels (1853–1914) was a Jewish-American soap magnate, social reformer and philanthropist who established model communities for the unemployed and for craftsmen in England and the US. He believed that taxation should be based solely on land ownership. The account of the discovery of the family portraits left to Olive is from correspondence in Bernard Taylor's archive.

  CHAPTER 20

  291 In 1928. . .the origins of his death. Rhode quoted and discussed this letter in an essay in The Anatomy of Murder: Famous Crimes Critically Considered by Members of the Detection Club (1936). The original letter was destroyed by enemy action in the Second World War, but Rhode's typed version survived.

  294 At boarding school. . . gas leak is a convincing detail.) The gas leak was mentioned in the Somerset and Wilts Journal in 1865. Constance was boarding at a school in Bath, according to the newspaper, when 'being offended with her teacher, she deliberately turned on the gas throughout the house, making no secret of the fact that her intention was to cause an explosion'.

  294 The letter claimed that Constance read Darwin. This was plausible, since The Origin of Species received a huge amount of attention when it was published in 1859. There was an impossibility in the letter, though – the author claimed that the young Constance used to shock people by referring to 'La Divine Sara' Bernhardt, but the actress – who was born in the same year as Constance – did not become famous until the 1870s.

  295 Like the heroine . . . absorbed by the past. In an essay of 1949 the psychoanalyst Geraldine Pederson-Krag suggested that the murder in a detective novel is a version of the 'primal scene', in which a child witnesses or imagines his or her parents having sexual intercourse, and interprets the act as violent. The victim represents one of the parents, the clues represent the nocturnal sounds, stains and jokes that the child observed but only dimly understood. The reader of a detective novel, says Pederson-Krag, satisfies his or her infantile curiosity by identifying with the detective and thus 'redressing completely the helpless inadequacy and anxious guilt unconsciously remembered from childhood'. See 'Detective Stories and the Primal Scene' in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 18. In 1957 the psychologist Charles Rycroft argued that the reader was not only the detective but also the murderer, playing out hostile feelings towards the parent. See 'A Detective Story' in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 26. These approaches are discussed in Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel – a History (1972) by Julian Symons.

  296 The letter from Sydney threw out . . . corruptions of his own body. Information on syphilis from Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis (2004) by Deborah Hayden, and from Alastair Barkley, a consultant dermatologist in London.

  298 the book by John Rhode. The Case of Constance Kent (1928).

  299 The person best placed to solve a crime . . . its perpetrator. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, sometimes cited as the original detective story, Oedipus is both the murderer and the detective; he commits and he solves the crimes. 'In any investigation, the real detective is the suspect,' wrote John Burnside in The Dumb House (1997). 'He is the one who provides the clues, he is the one who gives himself away.'

  299 The holes in her story left the way open . . . the main players in the case had died. In Murder and its Motives (1924) Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse accepted Constance's guilt but lamented that the girl was born into an age unable to understand and accommodate her complex psychology. In The Rebel Earl and Other Studies (1926) William Roughead regretted that the alienists had not recognised that Constance had 'a mind diseased'. In Saint – with Red Hands? (1954) Yseult Bridges argued that the true killers were Samuel Kent and Elizabeth Gough, and that Constance confessed in order to protect them. In Victorian Murderesses (1977) Mary S. Hartman agreed that Constance probably made a false confession to conceal her father's guilt. In Cruelly Murdered (1979) Bernard Taylor proposed that Constance killed Saville, but that Samuel, who was having an affair with Gough, mutilated the body to conceal his daughter's crime and his own misdemeanour.

  Among the fictional versions of the story is a scene in the British horror film Dead of Night (1945), in which a girl encounters the ghost of Saville Kent in a remote corner of a country house – he speaks of Constance's unkindness to him. Two years later Mary Hayley Bell's play Angel, directed for the London stage by her husband, Sir John Mills, so confused audiences with its sympathy for Constance that it closed within weeks and almost ended Bell's career as a playwright. Eleanor Hibbert, who as Jean Plaidy produced historical novels, fictionalised the case in Such Bitter Business (1953), under the pseudonym Elbur Ford. Two characters in William Trevor's Other People's Worlds (1980) become obsessed by the Road Hill murder, with horrible results. Francis King's Act of Darkness (1983) set the story in colonial 1930s India, and had the boy accidentally killed by his sister and his nursemaid when he surprises them in a lesbian embrace. James Friel's Taking the Veil (1989) placed the case in 1930s Manchester, and had the boy killed by his father and his aunt-cum-nursemaid after he witnesses them having sex; his teenage half-sister mutilates the body and makes a false confession of murder to protect the father, who has sexually violated her. In 2003 Wendy Walker compressed the story into a book-length poem, Blue Fire (as yet unpublished), which used one word from each line of Stapleton's The Great Crime of 1860.

  299 his confidential reports to Sir Richard Mayne. In MEPO 3/61.

  AFTERWORD

  303 Stapleton's explanation . . . cut into his neck. Joshua Parsons, who was in charge of the post-mortem, disagreed with this interpretation of the cuts to Saville's finger. The incisions had not bled, he told the magistrates' court on 4 October 1860, which meant that they must have been made after death, probably by accident. In any case, he said, he thought the cuts were on the right hand, not the left. His reading of the body supported the theory that the child was suffocated, a finding that Stapleton was determined to disprove. The doctors' dispute returns Saville to the realm of riddle and debate. The image of the live child dims.

  303 'The detective story . . . a happy ending.' In a letter of 2 June 1949 to James Sandoe. From The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Non-Fiction, 1909–1959 (2000), edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane. Chandler argued in the same letter that a detective story and a love story could never be combined, because the detective story was 'incapable of love'.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Page 42: Metropolitan Police officers discover a body under the kitchen floor of Frederick and Maria Manning in Bermondsey, south London, 1844 (from Mysteries of Police and Crime by Arthur Griffiths)

  Page 58: Floorplan of Road Hill House

  Page 76: Map of the village of Road

  Page 90: Map of area surrounding Road

  Page 98: Inaccurate
floor plan of Road Hill House, published in the Bath Chronicle, 12 July 1860 (courtesy Daniel Brown/ Bath in Time/ Bath Central Library)

  Page 160: Map of central London

  Page 206: Lady Audley and an alienist, from a serialisation of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret in the London Journal, 1863

  Page 226: Constance Kent's confession, April 1865

  Page 246: A postcard of Constance Kent, printed in 1865

  Page 260: Female inmates of Millbank prison in the 1860s (from Memorials of Millbank by Arthur Griffiths)

  Page 282: Map of Australia

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Further sources are detailed in the Notes

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  Metropolitan Police, Home Office and court files

  ASSI 25/46/8

  HO 45/6970

  HO 144/20/49113

  MEPO 2/23

  MEPO 3/61

  MEPO 3/53

  MEPO 3/54

  MEPO 4/2

  MEPO 4/333

  MEPO 7/7

  MEPO 21/7

  Newspapers

  The Bath Chronicle

  The Bristol Daily Post

  The Daily Telegraph

  The Frome Times

  The Morning Post

  The News of the World

  The Observer

  The Penny Illustrated Paper

  The Somerset and Wilts Journal

  The Times

  The Trowbridge & North Wilts Advertiser

  The Western Daily Press

  Journals