The judge in the case, Baron William Channell, agreed, and essentially repeated the prosecutor’s argument as his own summation. After half an hour the jury pronounced Flora Davy guilty. Flora Davy then launched with wild-eyed distress into a semi-coherent declaration of absolute innocence of the crime and absolute devotion to Frederick Moon. What little of this outburst Baron Channell could understand, he disregarded; he sternly told Davy, as she covered her face in shame, that she was most fortunate she had been tried for manslaughter and not for murder. And then he sentenced her to eight years’ penal servitude.
She collapsed and was dragged insensible to her Newgate cell.
There was no such melodramatic hysteria that day in the Old Bailey’s tiny Third Court, where Agnes Norman, with her usual emotional vacancy, stood trial for murder of one child and the attempted murder of four others. Harry Poland, who had spent the last few days rushing back and forth as junior counsel in both Pook’s and Davy’s trials, here led the prosecution. The sleuth-hound knew from the start that his success in convicting the girl of murder depended almost entirely upon a single ruling by the judge in this case, Thomas Chambers, Common Sergeant of London. While death had attended the girl in numbers simply too great to attribute to coincidence, there was little to no direct proof that she had committed any one of them. If Poland were allowed to introduce that pattern of death as evidence in itself, the jury might convict. Otherwise, it likely would not. Poland, then, forced a ruling on this issue as quickly as he could, announcing during his opening that he intended to bring up the deaths of other children and of many animals in order to support the charge that Agnes Norman had murdered the infant Jessie Jane Beer.
Norman’s lawyer, David Morgan Thomas, immediately barked his objection. And after Common Sergeant Chambers disputed the matter with both lawyers for some time, he declared he was simply not qualified to make the ruling on his own. He therefore suspended proceedings, left the courtroom, managed in time to steal both Chief Justice Bovill and Baron Channell away from their trials, and questioned them both on the issue. After this considerable recess, he returned with a decision—of sorts. Both Bovill and Channell, he announced, agreed about the evidence of the deaths of animals: that was strictly inadmissible. They were less clear about the evidence of the deaths of children. Therefore, while he would allow that evidence, if Poland pressed him to do so, he would “reserve the point.” By that technical term, Chambers meant that if Poland introduced this evidence, the common sergeant would likely appeal the case to the higher court which then existed to consider such knotty legal issues: the Court for Crown Cases Reserved. Quite possibly, then, Poland could win in this court and lose on appeal: a rare outcome indeed for an Old Bailey trial in 1871.
Nonetheless, Poland pressed the point. He began to call his witnesses. Jessie Beer’s father spoke of discovering his baby dead, on her back, in her bed. The child’s mother spoke of Agnes Norman’s oddly disconnected behavior in the wake of that discovery. The doctor that the Beers called in that night and the two doctors who conducted the infant’s post-mortem all testified to the toothmarks on her lip—marks consistent with the hard and sustained pressure of deliberate suffocation, and not with accidental suffocation from a soft mattress. One of these doctors went so far as to claim that her death could not have been accidental, if John Beer’s assertion that he found his child dead on her back was accurate. Besides this, however, the doctors refused to state with absolute certainty that the infant’s death had not been an accident.
And with that—before Poland actually had a chance to bring in evidence of any other child’s death—the common sergeant had had enough. Since they could not rule out an accidental cause for Jessie Jane Beer’s death, Chambers told the jury, they simply did not have enough evidence to convict Agnes Norman of her murder. Thus directed, the jury quickly pronounced Agnes Norman not guilty of the infant’s murder.
Seeing his most compelling case for murder fail, Harry Poland abandoned the other three murder charges and focused instead upon the one remaining charge: the attempted murder of ten-year-old Charles Parfitt. Poland’s evidence in support for that charge was far more direct and compelling. There was the boy’s own account of Agnes’s attempt: “I was woke up in the morning by somebody strangling me—like this, with her hand on my throat, and her finger upon my nose—I tried to make a noise....” There was also the corroborating testimony of the boy’s aunts and his uncle, to whom he had revealed the attack right after it happened, and who had seen the boy’s sore, swollen lips and throat. In response, Agnes Norman’s counsel could only question the accuracy of a ten-year-old’s recollection, and point out Agnes Norman’s repeated protestations that she had done nothing, and the family’s assertion that they would never have reported the case in the first place if they hadn’t learned of the other, more serious charges against the girl.
The jury found Norman guilty of attempted murder. But they recommended that the common sergeant show her mercy on account of her youth. The common sergeant assured them he would consider their recommendation and deferred sentencing until the next sessions, in August, to do so.*1 Until then, he ordered Agnes Norman back to Newgate, where she must have wondered, as she heard the muffled sounds of celebration of someone else’s freedom, how long it would be before she herself went free.
*
Just as the crowd outside the Old Bailey had gathered throughout the day on that Saturday, July 15, another crowd—this one more numerous and much more ominous—had gathered in Greenwich, in the street outside the Pooks’ home and shop: had gathered, then swelled, and by evening roiled with anxious anticipation. They were, according to the newspapers, a “mob of the lowest class,” the “roughs of Greenwich.” They, like their counterparts at the Old Bailey, had closely followed the trial; they, too, knew that a verdict was coming on this day. Unlike their Old Bailey counterparts, they anticipated that verdict with a sense of unease, and with the growing certainty that justice for Jane Clouson was about to be denied.
Within half an hour of the trial’s end their fears were realized. Newsboys ran among them hawking a hastily printed special edition of the Kentish Mercury and announcing Edmund Pook’s acquittal. A number of men and boys in the crowd had prepared for just this moment. They took up flags, all of them black, and several emblazoned with a single word: BLOOD. They formed up in a procession and, followed by a howling multitude, they paraded through the streets of Greenwich, proclaiming the deplorable verdict and attracting more to engorge the mass on London Street. Edmund Pook’s return was now imminent and thousands now began to watch for him, craning their heads west in the direction of Greenwich railway station.
Edmund and his family somehow managed to evade their detection altogether and slipped into their home through a side door. Their solicitor was not as fortunate: the crowd spotted Henry Pook, mobbed him, and heaped him with execration until he managed to break free and seek sanctuary in a nearby public house, where he remained trapped for hours. Once the multitude realized that the Pooks were in their house, they unleashed their pent-up fury and frustration in a deafening and unearthly din, screaming, whistling, hooting, and shouting obscenities toward the Pooks’ empty windows. They kept that up for hours, finally melting away in the early hours of the morning. The next evening, they returned—and the next. For five days they kept up their fervent and thunderous cacophony. “Greenwich is at present suffering from high fever,” noted one newspaper. “Partisanship is running wild, and the usually sedate burghers are arrayed in two hostile bands, whose sympathies and antipathies are as strongly marked as were those of the Montagues and the Capulets.” That description might capture the civic division that had begun with Edmund’s arrest, and that had with his acquittal widened dramatically. But it did not capture the social dimension of the split: on one side, the tradesmen, the burghers, the self-consciously respectable of the town, ceding with a temporary mortification their streets to the other side—the largely working-class supporters of justice f
or Jane, those who had for weeks flocked to the site of her murder and had on the rainy day of her funeral lined the streets of Deptford and Lewisham. It was that side that now sought with numbers and deafening noise to impose in some way the justice that they believed had been denied the girl at the Old Bailey.
Later in the week, in a letter to the newspapers, Jane Clouson’s father, James, of all people, would come closest to articulating the crowd’s inchoate frustration. “I have always considered trial by jury as one of the safeguards and boasts of our English nation,” Clouson wrote, “but, after this trial for the murder of my daughter, I fearlessly say—and I think it is the opinion of thousands of my fellow-countrymen—that justice has not been done. Where will they now go to look for the murderer, or what will be done? The case must not rest here; if so, murderers will carry out their designs with more impunity than ever upon our defenseless women and children, by hacking and chopping them into pieces to prevent their identification.” That Clouson attributed injustice not to the police arresting the wrong man but to the court’s failure to find guilty the right one was clear from his great praise for the witnesses for the prosecution “who fearlessly came forward in the cause; but who, I consider, were brow-beaten and intimidated while giving their evidence, and made appear [sic] to the world as liars and everything bad. Such disgraceful conduct to respectable witnesses has never been known in a court before.” Had true justice existed in that Old Bailey courtroom, James Clouson was certain, Edmund Pook would have been convicted.
For the five days that they claimed London Street as theirs alone, however, the crowd needed no such articulation of the grievance they felt; they sought results not in reasoned reproach but in sheer, unrelenting noise. And on Monday evening, three days into their insurgence, they added street theater to that noise. At six o’clock that evening, a cart was wheeled up to the Pooks’ shop windows. It bore two effigies: one of Edmund Pook raising a plasterer’s hammer over his head; the other of Jane Clouson quailing under the blow. Having given the Pooks plenty of time to absorb the lessons of this tableau, the raucous multitude set off with the cart on a journey to Blackheath and back, their route lined with placards proclaiming “Pook the Butcher.” As the cart was returning to London Street a group of Pook supporters, in a courageous or foolhardy sortie, rushed the cart and destroyed the effigies. (These were later resurrected and, Guy-like, employed to solicit donations: pennies for the Pook.) This challenge to their power only inflamed the crowd, now swollen to its greatest size ever. At least three thousand strong, they returned to halt all traffic and business on London Street and unleashed a “perfect Babel” against the Pooks that lasted until midnight, when, according to one report, a mock funeral for Edmund Pook was planned.
All this time, the police—led, of course, by Superintendent Griffin, who had raced back from the Old Bailey on Saturday to take charge—stood by, observed the crowd, and did nothing more. For two days the Pooks, family and solicitor, chafed helplessly at Griffin’s passivity. They were certainly not surprised by it: James Griffin had become their inveterate enemy, and his passivity now struck them as yet one more manifestation of that enmity. When on Monday morning, however, the Pooks learned that the cart, the effigies, and the procession were to appear that evening, they could stand no more and took action, appealing over Griffin’s head directly to Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Edmund Henderson. “As I have been unable to get redress from the police here,” Henry Pook wrote the commissioner, “I call on you to do your duty and disperse any mob which may assemble or attempt to assemble.” Henderson replied immediately through an assistant that he would give “the necessary directions to the police on the street” and sent twenty-five officers to Greenwich as a reserve force.
That reserve force remained in reserve; Griffin and the police did nothing to stop the procession. “Last night,” wrote one outraged neighbor to the Daily News the next day, “a few policemen might be seen hovering near the spot, and from time to time vindicating the majesty of the law by calling upon a child to move on; but the mob is permitted to manifest its beery indignation unchecked, and is regarded by the paid maintainers of order with a sort of dignified imbecility.”
Griffin and his officers, however, were not dignified imbeciles, and their restraint was not a product of Griffin’s passive aggression toward the Pooks. The police stood in readiness to intervene when the crowd crossed the line to violence, when its verbal assault turned physical. The very few times that this happened—when, for instance, one man began to incite children to attack the Pooks’ house—the police did intervene. For the most part, however, Superintendent Griffin and his police refused to treat the crowd as rioters, for the simple reason that they were not rioters. Underlying their chaotic outcry was self-restraint; underlying their seeming madness, method.
The crowd had no intention of inflicting physical harm upon Edmund or his home. They broke no windows, and—the tussle with Henry Pook aside—assaulted no one. Rather, they aimed to shame and stigmatize Edmund Pook—to ostracize him from their community. The court and the Crown had failed utterly to punish Edmund for his egregious violation of their social codes, and so the crowd in unconscious accord sought to do that itself, putting to use the techniques and the trappings employed for centuries by English communities driven to self-policing outrages upon its social values. The mass gathering of an aggrieved community, the flags and processions, the cart and the effigies, the mock funeral, and, above all, the raucous, ceaseless caterwaul: all were the paraphernalia of traditional charivari—better known, there and then, as rough music. Although today rough music, when it is remembered at all, tends to be associated with rural and not urban communities, the spirit of community among the working class of Greenwich and Deptford was strong, as was the urge to act when necessary in its own interests. So was the folk memory that provided them with the tools to do so. Historian E. P. Thompson notes that of in all of London in the last part of the nineteenth century, the tradition of rough music was strongest in the southeast. And on these five days in July 1871, that tradition had its most striking manifestation. One reporter, at least, predicted that the howling mob would succeed in shaming Edmund Pook away, stating of the Pooks that “none of its members can stir abroad without encountering reproach and remark,” and that “the only remedy will be their removal from the neighborhood.”
Ebenezer Pook, however, had no intention whatsoever of succumbing to the crowd’s pressure. His son, he was certain, was not a criminal, but a victim himself of the false evidence, the false witnesses, and the malevolent and manipulative police, all of which had for months stirred up the passions of the ignorant multitude, and had made life miserable not only for Edmund but for his entire family. On the morning after the first night of rough music, Ebenezer Pook described that misery in a letter he wrote to several newspapers. “My name has been brought into most unenviable notoriety. My solicitor, my son Edmund Walter Pook, my family, my friends, and I have been hooted and yelled at in the public streets in a most frightful and disgraceful manner; and for the past 12 weeks an agony and suspense have been endured by me and my family which rarely fall to the lot of mortals.” He made clear that the yowling mob had only strengthened his resolve not to fly but to fight. And on that morning, Ebenezer Pook sat down with his solicitor to plan retribution.
While Edmund Pook surely took part in this war council, he did so with far less urgency and intensity than did the two elder Pooks. Certainly, in the months to come, Edmund never demonstrated the vengeful zeal that his father did in lashing out in the press at his enemies, or that his solicitor did in the repeated courtroom tirades he directed against them. Ebenezer and Henry Pook, over the next months, would together initiate legal action and then descend upon the courtrooms of Greenwich and London with obvious vindictive relish; Edmund initiated nothing, appeared in court only when his presence was required, and, when he testified, generally did so with a stiffness that suggested he wished the entire matter over and done
with. He re-entered the legal fray more the dutiful son than the ardent avenger.
The Pooks had many enemies to pursue. There was of course the mob itself. Though there was little they could do without the help of the police, they resolved to do what little they could. As it happened, the night before, one of the Pooks’ neighbors, and one of their staunchest supporters, Leopold de Breanski, himself returning from the Old Bailey, had plunged into the mob on London Street, plucked out one of its better-dressed members, dragged him to the nearest constable, and demanded that the constable arrest the man for inciting the crowd to riot. The constable refused, instead advising Breanski to appear at police court and apply for a summons against the man. Remarkably, Breanski did just that, and Henry Pook, learning of the summons, agreed to prosecute. A week later, he did. The man was let go once he paid court costs. It was a paltry victory for the Pooks, and it came too late in any case to have any effect upon the howling multitude. But it did signal to all of Greenwich and Deptford that the Pooks would never dance to the crowd’s discordant tune.
And then there were the witnesses that the Pooks were sure had lied at Edmund’s trial. The chief justice had actually recommended the prosecution of two of them, James Conway and Walter Perren, for perjury. James Conway, who had not even testified at Edmund’s trial, was so mortified by Bovill’s accusation that upon hearing it he immediately wrote to the Evening Standard a letter protesting his innocence—a letter written in such amazingly fractured English that several newspapers republished it in full for its entertainment value alone. (“Sir I would be very much thankful if you let the publice a large know that I have been wrongfully acused of swering to the man pook has the man I see in Thomas shop....”) And in his letter to the press Ebenezer Pook added another name to this list of accused perjurers: “as for Perrin [sic], Conway, and Lazell, I suppose, after the remarks of the Lord Chief Justice, they will be dealt with by the Crown.”
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 18