Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  *8 Ann Merritt was tried for murder in 1850 for poisoning her husband, James. Henry Letheby testified that Ann’s husband had indeed been poisoned. That conclusion was never in dispute. When the poison had been ingested, on the other hand, was deeply contested. The defense argued that James Merritt had accidentally ingested arsenic in the morning; the prosecution (and Letheby) contended that Ann Merritt had given him the poison later, in a bowl of gruel. Because of doubts in this respect raised after her trial, Ann Merritt gained not a pardon but a commutation to imprisonment for life.

  4

  Social Confusion and Moral Corruption

  When Edmund Pook, now twice committed for murdering Jane Clouson, passed through the forbidding walls of Newgate prison, he must have known there was a chance he would never see the world outside again. All his journeys to and from the courtroom in the Old Bailey, which adjoined Newgate, he would make by an underground passage. If at trial he was found guilty and condemned, and if that sentence was carried out, he would be executed upon a gallows within the prison, since outdoor—and crowd-pleasing—public executions had been proscribed just three years before. But even with the specter of death before him, Pook surely found Newgate an improvement over Maidstone. Because of reforms of the previous two decades, Newgate was no longer an emblem of hell on earth; its notorious wards—overcrowded, unsupervised, disease-ridden stews of criminality—were no more. Prisoners now were fewer, and each had an individual cell. Moreover, Edmund Pook had a friend and protector in the prison in the Reverend Frederick Lloyd-Jones, the prison ordinary, who resided in Greenwich and had before his appointment to the prison served as curate at St. Alfege, the Pooks’ church.

  Lloyd-Jones apparently made sure that Pook was transferred to the more comfortable quarters of the prison infirmary when, the day after he entered the prison, he suffered a most fortunate fall. He collapsed with a grand mal epileptic seizure,*1 and reportedly bit his tongue and his lips and bled over his clothes. In terms of its influence upon the public and upon prospective jurors at his trial, this seeming corroboration of Pook’s claim that the blood the police found on his clothes was his own could hardly have come at a better time, and the Pooks—most likely Henry Pook—lost no time in feeding the news to the press.

  The June sessions were to begin within a week,*2 and as far as Edmund’s defense was concerned, they could not begin soon enough; any delay would give the police time to strengthen their seemingly weak case. As a solicitor, Henry Pook could not act as Edmund Pook’s advocate at the Central Criminal Court; that privilege was reserved to barristers alone. And so Henry Pook engaged for Edmund a formidable—and expensive—phalanx of defenders. As supporting counsel he engaged Joseph Miller Harrington, Edward Besley, and Douglas Straight. The last two of these were mainstays at the Old Bailey, and known for their brilliance—Besley for his solidity and Straight for his polish and acuity. To lead, Henry Pook picked Queen’s Counsel John Walter Huddleston. This was an inspired choice. From the start Huddleston shared Henry Pook’s perspective on the case, adopting as his own the belief that Edmund Pook was not a criminal but a victim, persecuted rather than prosecuted by an overzealous police force. But while Huddleston’s passion came close to equaling the solicitor’s, his forensic abilities were greatly superior. Huddleston, according to the Times, was “admirable in the conduct of a cause, dangerous in cross-examination, and above all things skillful in presenting his points to the jury.” While Henry Pook blustered and antagonized, Huddleston won over judges and juries.

  And so on the seventh of June it was with Huddleston that Edmund Pook stood at the Old Bailey before Judge Colin Blackburn to set a date for trial. Two days before this the recorder for the court had summarized the evidence against Pook to the grand jury, which then met privately and heard testimony from the prosecution’s witnesses. They then returned a true bill against Pook—in effect, committing him to trial for a third time. (Had the grand jury on the other hand refused to return that bill—had they, in other words, ignored the bill—then Edmund Pook would have been a free man.) A trial was thus inevitable, and Huddleston declared himself eager to begin at once.

  Harry Poland, however, immediately requested a postponement until July and the next sessions. Not only were the police tracking down a witness who could give “very material” evidence, he claimed, but they had already found another: one who had been to Newgate and had positively identified Edmund Pook—although identified in what context, Poland did not say. Huddleston opposed Poland’s motion with a passion. Not only had Poland and the police had more than enough time to investigate the case, but five weeks’ delay would prove a crushing financial burden to Pook’s parents. Poland scoffed at that last argument; Ebenezer Pook, after all, was a respectable tradesman and thus a man of means. Nonetheless, Blackburn agreed to consider a delay if Poland could set out reasonable grounds in formal affidavits. Huddleston asked that these be produced quickly, and Poland submitted two of them in the courtroom that afternoon. The first referred vaguely to an unnamed witness for whom the police were still searching. The second, written by Superintendent Griffin, was much more specific, and concerned the newly discovered eyewitness, a man by the name of Walter Richard Perren.

  By day, twenty-six-year-old Perren managed his mother’s livery stables, drove a cab, and occasionally oversaw children’s donkey rides on Blackheath. (The Times would later disparage him as a “donkey-driver.”) By night, he pursued dreams of celebrity: he sang comic songs and was master of ceremonies at the Golden Lion, a little music hall in Sydenham. Walter Perren claimed to know Edmund Pook as a fellow entertainer—and, in Perren’s mind, a lesser one. Perren said that for three or four years he had known Pook slightly, only by sight and by his stage name, “Walter”; he had even seen him perform in public once. On the evening of April 24, one day before Jane Clouson was murdered, Walter Perren claimed to be in Deptford killing time before catching his train to Sydenham, when he had ducked into an ironmonger’s to buy two pennies’ worth of nails. That shop, he claimed, was Samuel Thomas’s; Jane Thomas served him. As he left, he saw “Walter” approach him, from the south, the direction of Sparshott’s shop. The two passed, recognized and nodded to each other, and for the first time, they conversed. Pook spoke first, asking Perren how he was getting along.

  “Middling,” Perren told him.

  “Are you still at Sydenham?” Pook asked, and Perren said he was.

  “I should think you will live and die there.” Pook then gestured toward the Thomases’ shop. I am just going in here; if you wait we’ll have a liquor-up.”

  But Perren, late for his music hall, declined, and Edmund entered the shop. Then, Perren claimed, delayed from rushing to the station by a slow-moving van, he watched the shop window, and saw Mrs. Thomas reach into it and withdraw a hammer. Then he rushed away. He did not realize for weeks, Perren told the police, that he had apparently witnessed Pook purchasing the murder weapon. He had of course seen the ubiquitous bills posted by the police, but the purchase they described had occurred on the Saturday before the attack, not the Monday. And the torrent of newspaper reports about Edmund Pook meant nothing to Perren either, since he only knew the person he had seen as “Walter.” Just a day before this hearing Perren somehow realized that he might be a crucial eyewitness and went to the police. Detective Mulvany hustled him to the Old Bailey to look at witnesses appearing before the grand jury, where Perren pointed out Jane Thomas as the woman he had seen in the ironmonger’s shop. He then went to the exercise yard at Newgate, where, from the crowd of prisoners somberly trudging in circles, he picked out Edmund Pook as his acquaintance “Walter.”

  Edmund Pook, perusing this affidavit with his solicitor, was baffled: Perren’s claims, he realized immediately, were a tissue of lies. Edmund did have ambitions as a performer, though modest ones. Once or twice, and only for charity, he had sung onstage. And he and his brother, Thomas, had put on several “penny readings” at the Greenwich Lecture Hall, for the purpose of which h
e had adopted the name “Edmund Walters.” Possibly Walter Perren had seen him there. But Edmund had had nothing to do with the sort of music-hall life that Perren suggested he had. And Perren was an utter stranger to him. He certainly didn’t invite the man to “liquor-up” with him the evening before Jane had been attacked.

  He had, in other words, a “perfect answer” to Perren—and Huddleston told Judge Blackburn so. As for the other affidavit, it was vague to the point of meaninglessness. The judge sympathized; he understood that Edmund Pook might be entirely innocent; he felt, and he regretted, the hardship a delay would cause Edmund Pook and his father. Nonetheless, the affidavits clearly suggested at least the possibility that a further inquiry could yield further evidence. He granted Poland’s motion for a postponement and sent Edmund back to Newgate for another six weeks.

  It was an inconvenience that Edmund Pook, by all accounts, bore with perfect equanimity. “He is perfectly calm,” one newspaper reported, “and spends his time chiefly in reading.” The true burden of the delay fell, as Huddleston had predicted, upon Ebenezer Pook. The cost to retain counsel, and to ensure the appearance of the fifty or so witnesses the Pooks had amassed, increased the already substantial costs of a trial sure to last for several days—a thousand pounds in all, by one estimate. This, despite Harry Poland’s optimistic assessment of a printer’s fortune, was beyond the old man’s means. He would need help, and he sought it among his friends, his neighbors—his fellow burghers: those who saw themselves as constituting the respectable population of Greenwich. A fund was quickly got up—it would come to be called the Pook Defence Fund—and £250 was gathered within days. Those participating in the fund formed the nucleus of a growing body of Pook supporters, a counterbalance to the much noisier supporters of justice for Jane Clouson. Even before Edmund’s trial, the two sides in Greenwich’s incipient civil war were clear.

  If the police of R Division, if Detective Inspector Mulvany and Superintendent Griffin worked hard on the investigation during that June and July, they had little to show for it. Before the trial commenced, the Treasury submitted to Henry Pook a list of the witnesses they had found since Edmund’s indictment. It was scant. Walter Richard Perren, of course, was on it. So were William Sparshott’s wife, son, and shopboy; they could—partially—corroborate Sparshott’s account of Edmund’s visit to his shop. Besides these, there were two young women, Mary Ann Love and Alice Langley, whose evidence was at once deeply suggestive and utterly inconclusive. They clearly numbered among Edmund Pook’s female admirers, and thus countered the image of an overprotected homebody that Edmund’s family promoted. And both could testify to a curious evening out they had spent with Pook and with a cousin of his on the Sunday before the attack. The four had met next to Greenwich Park, and had strolled across Blackheath, past Morden College, through the market fields, and into Kidbrooke Lane. The police clearly considered this a dress rehearsal for Edmund’s walk two days later. The two young women also claimed to have caught Edmund in a lie, one that might be construed as an impromptu and weak alibi: he told them, as they walked, that he would be unable to meet on Monday or Tuesday, as he was engaged to sing in London. (He was, of course, not engaged to sing anywhere on the night of the attack.)

  Ironically, it was Edmund Pook’s defense—that is, Henry Pook—who made the best use of the trial’s postponement. The solicitor conducted his own investigation in support of Edmund’s alibi that he was in Lewisham at the time of the murder, on a bridge in Lewisham, gazing lovingly at the home of his true love, Alice Durnford. Although Edmund himself claimed that no one had seen him while he was there, Henry Pook found three neighbors to the Durnfords willing to testify that they had. To make sure that it was indeed Edmund Pook they had seen, Henry Pook came up with an apparently unprecedented means of identification: rather than marching them to Newgate, he invited them separately to the more comfortable confines of his home, Tudor House. There he had each one scrutinize two albums holding thirty photographs—one of Edmund Pook among them. Each one picked out that one as the image of the man they were sure they had seen on the bridge on the evening of April 25, more than ten weeks before.

  Henry Pook was a busy man between his client’s commitment to Newgate and his trial. He not only continued to investigate Edmund’s case, but also argued a number of cases for other clients in Greenwich Police Court. And on one glorious day in the middle of that June, he experienced what surely was one of the great days of his life, when he managed to engage in a spell of international diplomacy—of a sort. Pook happened to be both an elected member of the Greenwich Board of Works and solicitor to the board’s contractor for Greenwich’s sewer works. In both capacities, he joined a large party of workmen on June 17 for their annual outing to Sidcup, a village southeast of Eltham. The group diverted their walk a bit to take in what had recently matched Sydenham’s Crystal Palace as south London’s principal tourist attraction: Camden Place in Chiselhurst, then home of the recently-deposed ex-emperor of France, Napoleon III. After the disastrous collapse of the French army at Sedan eight months before, Napoleon’s wife and son had fled to England and soon took up residence there. And in mid-March, after his release from Prussian captivity, Napoleon—bowed, ailing, superfluous—joined them. And on June 17, Henry Pook and 108 workmen gathered outside the gates of Camden house to cheer Napoleon with their presence. Their brass band did their best to serenade Napoleon with “God Save the Queen” and “Auld Lang Syne.” They succeeded in drawing out the ex-emperor and his family to meet them. Henry Pook was instantly delegated speaker for the group, and his outspoken conservatism was equal to the occasion. He nostalgically recalled the Empire as the high-point of Anglo-French amity; he expressed the hope that the dark clouds over France might soon be dispelled—that the Empire might rise again. Napoleon was visibly moved by Pook’s extempore speech, and said so; he had, he said, always been a good friend to England. The workmen burst into cheers—three for the emperor, three for the empress, three for the prince imperial. And after handshakes all around and before the party and the triumphant solicitor left the Napoleons for Sidcup, the band struck up the then-popular tune “We May Be Happy Yet.”

  That hope was a forlorn one. Napoleon III of course never returned to France or to imperial glory; his chronic illness killed him in his Chislehurst exile a year and a half later.

  *

  “The interest felt in this case,” the Times reported of Edmund Pook on June 12, “has increased rather than abated since the postponement of the trial of the accused until the next session of the Central Criminal Court.” Certainly, the constant flow of visitors to Kidbrooke Lane attested to the enduring hold the crime had upon the popular imagination. The pilgrimage there reached its peak on Whit-Monday, May 29, when fully twenty thousand satisfied their curiosity, paid their respects, and tore up the landscape, transforming that generally quiet bit of London countryside into the metropolis’s third-largest tourist attraction: only the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and the newly opened International Exhibition at South Kensington attracted more that day.*3 But while popular interest in Jane Clouson and Edmund Pook might not have abated, newspaper reports on the case, which had since the beginning of May flowed in a steady stream, dried up altogether, not to begin again until the commencement of the July sessions. The public, hungry for sensation, would temporarily have to look elsewhere for their daily serving.

  The 1860s and 1870s were indeed an age of sensation, an age when the hunger for the sensational and the extraordinary was seemingly omnipresent and seemingly insatiable. And the market to feed that hunger was well developed. Sensation sold—sold books and sold newspapers. The most popular novels in 1871, and for the decade before, were sensation novels: dark revelations of the extraordinary offered up by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, and a host of others, which with their tales of murder and mayhem, duplicity and mistaken identity, forgery, theft, adultery, and bigamy, all suggested the inescapable presence of social confusion and moral
entropy of everyday existence. (On a less respectable literary level, but with a similar appeal, were the ephemeral but occasionally wildly popular serials for the masses, the penny dreadfuls.*4) The sensation novelists shunned exotic or gothic settings, preferring the quotidian, and they looked for inspiration in everyday true crime. Newspaper publishers of the day, too, recognized the seemingly insatiable public hunger for the extraordinary. From the august Times to less reputable weeklies such as Lloyd’s or Reynolds’s Weekly, blood and skullduggery sold copy, and reports of crime—in police courts, at inquests and at trials—filled the pages of every newspaper. And in the spring and summer of 1871 there was no lack of fully reported sensational stories to compete for public attention with stories about Jane Clouson and Edmund Pook, and to sustain the public hunger during the hiatus of that case.

  Coming from across the channel, for one thing, were sensational revelations on an epic scale: the vicissitudes of France, which had by that June endured a terrible year—known then and remembered in France still as “l’année terrible,” a time of social chaos, political uncertainty, bloodshed, and desolation. Technological innovation and the extraordinary events in France combined to change British newspapers forever. For the first time, foreign correspondents began to submit their dispatches not by post but by telegraph, and more than ever before, a paper’s circulation depended upon the freshness of its news and upon its correspondents’ ability to scoop the competition. And for the first time, British readers could read at breakfast about the astonishing events of the day before. In installments, then, British readers were able to follow France’s yearlong descent into utter chaos, a descent that commenced with the emperor Napoleon’s reckless declaration of war upon Prussia, which led to invasion, the collapse of the French army, the slaughter at Sedan; to Napoleon’s capture and to his eventual exile in Chislehurst. After Sedan came the Prussian march on the capital, and the Siege of Paris: dire starvation and bombardment, and then surrender to the newly unified German nation. And with the formation of the French Third Republic, worse was to come, as Paris formed its Commune in opposition to the Republic, leading to a second siege of Paris, this time a bloody conflict of French against the French. And finally—as Edmund Pook was indicted and at Newgate calmly awaited trial—came absolute chaos: the “semaine sanglante,” the blood-saturated days that followed the collapse of the Commune, when the victorious and vindictive Army of the Republic rounded up and butchered tens of thousands of Parisians, often upon the flimsiest of pretexts.*5 It was the worst civil bloodletting in all of Europe and during all of the nineteenth century.