While the Pooks were willing to leave those three to the mercies of the Treasury Department, they were determined to prosecute their chief antagonists themselves. The transgressions of Superintendent Griffin and Inspector Mulvany were just too great, and too personal, to leave them to be dealt with—or possibly not be dealt with—by the Crown. Ebenezer and Henry resolved personally to seek summonses against the two for the willful and corrupt perjury they had committed at Edmund’s trial. They would seek those summonses at London’s Guildhall, in the City, as Griffin and Mulvany had testified, and allegedly committed their perjury, at the Old Bailey. If they succeeded in obtaining those summonses, the Pooks hoped to do to the officers what they had done to Edmund: have them hauled into police court, examined, committed for trial—and then, within a month, placed in the prisoners’ dock of the Old Bailey to fight for their reputations, their careers, their freedom.
Before the Pooks could pursue this vengeful pleasure, however, Henry Pook had his own reputation to think about, having to answer to the two summonses the police had taken out against him for violent and indecent behavior two months before: first for his outburst when Edmund Pook was denied a haircut and a shave, and second for abusing officers while demanding police protection on the evening after Jane Clouson’s funeral. On Wednesday, July 18, then, Henry Pook appeared at Greenwich Police Court not as an advocate but as a defendant. Flanking him was his barrister, Douglas Straight, who had been one of Edmund’s lawyers, as well as Ebenezer Pook, his chief witness to both incidents. (Edmund Pook, who had also witnessed one of them, was on the other hand nowhere to be seen.) Eight officers of R Division testified to Henry Pook’s fist-shaking and obscenity-laden conduct on both occasions. In response, Ebenezer as well as Henry (who, since he had counter-summoned two of the officers, was entitled to speak) presented a very different version of the events, with a patient and put-upon Henry Pook bullied by the police. And Douglas Straight, in cross-examining the officers, did his best to insinuate that Superintendent Griffin—who had not been present on either occasion—had concocted the entire business, trumping up the charges and coaching his officers on their testimony.
The presiding magistrate, William Partridge, remained largely unconvinced of the Pooks’ perspective upon the events, and rejected outright Straight’s vilification of Superintendent Griffin. He ruled to dismiss the first charge against Henry Pook—for his outburst over Edmund’s missed haircut—because then, he realized, Henry Pook was acting in the interests of his client. As for his outburst on the night after Jane’s funeral, however, when Edmund was not present, Partridge ruled, “with great regret,” that Henry Pook was guilty of interfering with police business. He fined the solicitor two pounds and court costs.
Ebenezer Pook immediately paid the fine and hurried home to shoot off a letter to the Standard both castigating the police and defending his solicitor: “I feel deeply the insult to which Mr. Pook has been subjected—he having only acted as a bold and fearless advocate.... If I know anything of the people of Greenwich—and I believe I do—I feel sure that he will not stand less in their estimation than formerly, but, on the contrary, some marked ebullition of feeling in his favour will be evinced.”
*
The next evening—Thursday, July 20—the Pook case became a parliamentary issue, when George Whalley, Liberal member from Peterborough, rose in the House of Commons to question Home Secretary Henry Bruce. Whalley reminded Bruce of Chief Justice Bovill’s bitter attack upon police misconduct in the Pook case. What steps then, Whalley asked the home secretary, would he take to protect the public against any recurrence of that sort of misconduct?
It was a question that the home secretary could have answered in two very different ways. He could have approached it generally, as a question about government policy, an opportunity to advocate steps to reform a deficient system; in particular, it offered Bruce a chance to promote the establishment of a public prosecutor’s office in England.*2 Or Bruce could approach it specifically and narrowly, as concerning only the objectionable conduct of James Griffin and John Mulvany: a specific question about discipline and not a general one about policy. Henry Bruce chose to approach the question that way. In doing so, he was able to dodge answering Whalley’s question completely. The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Bruce replied to Whalley, had just informed him that summonses had been applied for against the two officers referred to. While their cases were pending, therefore, Bruce thought it best to refrain from saying anything that might prejudice them. If, of course, the summonses were not granted, Bruce told Whalley he would be happy to answer his question.
The home secretary’s intelligence was accurate—almost; earlier that evening, Henry and Ebenezer Pook had marched into Guildhall police court to apply for summonses against Griffin and Mulvany. Or, at least, they had attempted to apply for them. They arrived at Guildhall minutes after the magistrate, the highly respected Robert Carden, once Lord Mayor of London, had left for the day. Undaunted, Henry Pook expected Carden’s chief clerk to take down their complaint. But he refused, instead directing the Pooks to fill out the proper forms and return to court with all witnesses; only then would their complaints be heard. The Pooks snatched up the proper forms and retired, grumbling. Four days later, they returned, this time with Edmund, and this time arriving just in time to catch Carden as he was leaving court. They convinced him to return, and they submitted and swore to the charges. Both Edmund and his father accused James Griffin of lying at his trial three times, and James Mulvany lying four times, all when testifying about their confrontation and arrest of Edmund on the first of May.
To the enraged Pooks, convinced of both officers’ enmity toward them, the charges must have seemed solid. But they were not. Every one of them was less an absolute falsehood, and more a small difference in recollection between the Pooks and the police of words remembered in court two and a half months after they were spoken. The most serious claim against James Griffin, for example, was that he lied when he testified that Edmund had “made no reply” when Griffin told him Jane said she was to meet him on Crooms Hill. (Edmund and Ebenezer swore, rather, that Edmund had energetically and instantly denied meeting her there.) And the most serious charge against John Mulvany was that he denied in testimony that he had said to Edmund of Jane that “there is a letter to her in his handwriting.” Both Edmund and Ebenezer swore that he used exactly those words—therefore attempting to entrap Edmund with evidence the police did not have. (Transcripts of the trial show that Mulvany did not use those words, and instead told Edmund that “people said that he had written a letter to her.”)
Two days later, Carden refused to grant the summonses. He and his chief clerk, he told the Pooks, had read the transcripts of the trial. They discovered that while Bovill had criticized the conduct of the two officers, he did not ever claim—did not even insinuate—that either one had committed perjury. And if they had committed perjury during the trial, Carden was sure, so “just and conscientious a judge” would certainly have called for their prosecution. Here Henry Pook interrupted to protest—Carden had surely not read Bovill’s summation. (In fact, Bovill did not accuse either Griffin or Mulvany of perjury at any point during the trial.) Carden simply ignored the outraged solicitor, let his refusal of their application stand, and, while Henry Pook angrily blustered that he would take their prosecution elsewhere, turned to other business.
With that, the Pooks’ dreams of placing either Griffin or Mulvany in a criminal dock died. And indeed, their dream to prosecute Mulvany died entirely. As for Griffin, they quickly adopted another strategy to make him pay for his transgressions—and make him pay literally. Since Robert Carden blocked criminal prosecution, they would simply sue him in civil court. At some time within the next few weeks, they launched that suit, seeking twenty thousand pounds’ damages on two charges: that Griffin had maliciously prosecuted Edmund, and that he had made on the first of May an illegal entry into Ebenezer Pook’s home.
The re
sults of that lawsuit would not transpire for months. Meanwhile, five nights later the remote possibility that the Crown, rather than the Pooks, might prosecute either officer died as well when the Liberal member for Peterborough, Mr. Whalley, repeated his question to the home secretary. Henry Bruce gushed unqualified praise for both officers and announced that Police Commissioner Henderson had determined that neither officer had done a thing to justify dismissal from the force.
As for the supposed perjury of James Conway, Walter Perren, and Thomas Lazell, it became clear as time passed that neither police, nor Treasury Department, nor attorney general, nor home secretary had any intention whatsoever to bring any one of them to trial. The Pook Defence Committee and their secretary, Leopold de Breanski, did their best to force the matter, repeatedly writing to the home secretary to demand a meeting with him to discuss bringing Conway and Perren to justice for their lies in the witness box. (Lazell, whom Bovill never accused of perjury, had quietly slipped from the list.) Henry Bruce, however, refused to see them, and simply ignored their subsequent letters of protest.
The dying cause, then, of prosecuting the trial’s supposedly false witnesses the Pooks left to the less than capable hands of their defense committee. In the meantime, a new enemy arose to torment them—torment them into mounting what would become, in the end, a frenzy of litigation.
*
The first letter, signed only with the letter C, appeared in the Kentish Mercury exactly a week after Edmund’s acquittal. “As there is a general opinion abroad that there has been some miscarriage of justice in reference to this dreadful crime,” it began, “I have decided to analyse some of the evidence which was produced, and the general conduct of the trial.” What followed amounted to a caustic attack upon the many commentaries about the trial that had flooded the press over the previous week. While those commentaries had unanimously praised Chief Justice Bovill as a man of good sense, C castigated him as a cranky bumbler whose biases rendered him unfit to judge. While they had as one pilloried the police as inept both in detection and in testimony, C defended them. The police did not suppress evidence, he argued; rather, they set aside the locket, the “bloody” rag, the whistle, waiting until the relevance of that evidence might became clear, which is exactly what happened with the whistle. The police in their testimony were invariably clear and sensible; any confusion about their words lay entirely in the dunderheaded mind of the judge. And while the other commentaries uniformly condemned the evidence for the prosecution and commended the evidence for the defense, C did exactly the opposite. He saw nothing to exonerate Pook in the relative lack of blood on his clothing. “If the arteries were thoroughly divided” in the attack, he claimed, “they would contract, and the blood would not spurt.” Minor discrepancies in the testimony of prosecution witnesses, he claimed, actually suggested their honesty, “as the testimony then appears less like a taught lesson that has been learned by rote.” But testimony learned by rote was exactly what the defense witnesses seemed to speak. There was the uniform testimony of Edmund’s family, for example, that because of his epilepsy he was never out of a family member’s sight, a claim that was wholly belied by the proven fact that Edmund often rambled from home, alone, for hours at a time—as he did on the very night of the murder.
In short, C condemned the trial as a “burlesque of justice” in which judge and jury got it wrong. And C implicitly, but never quite explicitly, argued that Edmund Pook had murdered Jane Clouson. To the hotheaded Pooks—certainly to Ebenezer and Henry—the letter reeked of libel. And yet, with uncharacteristic reticence, the two refrained from action. They refrained, that is, until C continued his assault in the next week’s issue.
After further developing his analysis in this letter, C shifted to reverie, musing about how he would go about committing the perfect murder:
I shall prepare myself for my diabolical task, and cultivate my natural callousness and villainy by a devoted study of the popular sensation novels of the day. The girl I once loved, and who is desperately in my way, shall be my victim. I shall have studied my sensational novel to very little profit if I cannot contrive a simple plot, the simpler the better, for perpetrating my fell purpose. An evening walk down a dark unfrequented lane, and a small axe, will supply me with all the conditions I shall require for accomplishing my design. Fifteen blows in fifteen seconds will be enough. When the deed is done I shall not be miserable. I shall feel the same relief that a surgeon would feel after lopping off a mortified limb. But if my nerves should be a little agitated, a quick run home though the fresh evening air will restore my equanimity, and after supper I shall be quite ready for a good night’s rest.
From start to finish, C carefully connected Jane’s actual murder, and Edmund’s movements, with his imaginary “perfect” one. C therefore made his point even more fully than he had the week before: Edmund Pook had committed the perfect murder.
To the Pooks, this was surely a vicious libel and surely actionable. And Henry Pook did take action, firing off a letter to the editor of the Kentish Mercury, a young man by the name of Sydney Boate, demanding he reveal C’s identity. Boate replied with a letter in which his righteousness fails to disguise his cravenness. “You will pardon me for doubting the wisdom of the course you adopt; but as any man who avows strong sentiments like ‘C’ should not be afraid of his name being known, Mr. Newton Crosland... is the writer whose name you want.”
Having thus learned the name of the man who had supposedly written this poison, the Pooks again desisted from legal action. They might have heard of Newton Crosland before: he was a near neighbor living in Blackheath; he was a successful wine merchant; he was a well-known spiritualist. But he was not a writer, and there was an unquestionable literary quality to these letters. The Pooks certainly did know Mrs. Newton Crosland, the writer—and Henry Pook, for one, suspected that she was the author of the letters. Chivalrous sentiment might therefore have led them to hesitate. Most likely, however, they simply demonstrated, surprisingly, a bit of common sense. The two letters had so far appeared in a Greenwich local newspaper; no other newspaper had reprinted them, and relatively few people had read them. If the Pooks prosecuted Crosland or the editor Sydney Boate for libel, on the other hand, the most malicious passages from the letters would be read in the courtroom, and newspapers across the country would eagerly—and legally—republish those passages, for millions to read.
For whatever reason, then, the Pooks did not prosecute—until, three weeks later, Newton Crosland left them no choice. On Friday, August 18, a twopenny pamphlet appeared in booksellers and newsagents in Greenwich, throughout the metropolis, and beyond: The Eltham Tragedy Reviewed, an expanded version of the Kentish Mercury letters, published by Frederick Farrah, a radical publisher on the Strand. Newton Crosland now aimed to spread his attack widely. And the Pooks had to act.
Still they refrained from going after Newton Crosland. “It was not the man who invented the gunpowder, but the man who fired the shot that did the mischief,” Henry Pook would later declare in court. They therefore sought to prosecute the publisher of the work—or, rather, the publishers. For they considered that anyone who disseminated this libel, anyone who sold it as well as anyone who produced it, was a publisher. On the day after the pamphlet first appeared, then, Henry Pook not only obtained a summons at Bow Street Police Court against Frederick Farrah; he also stormed into a little newsagent’s shop on Royal Hill, around the corner from the Pooks’ home, to order the shop’s proprietress, a timid widow by the name of Caroline Horton, to stop selling the pamphlet. “If you sell any after Monday, madam,” he snarled, “I shall summons you, and give you three months.” “Well, he’s anything but a gentleman,” Mrs. Horton uttered to a customer. She continued to sell the pamphlet. Two days later Henry Pook attended Greenwich Police Court to obtain a summons against her.
In obtaining those summonses, Henry Pook had placed Edmund Pook, at least potentially, into a difficult situation. Until this point, Edmund Pook had not bee
n obligated to testify under oath concerning Jane Clouson’s murder; indeed, as a defendant he was prohibited by the law of that day from doing so. But now that the Pooks were prosecuting Farrah and Horton for publishing the libel that Edmund Pook had killed Jane Clouson, Henry Pook would have to place Edmund in the witness chair to deny that fact. And if he was examined in court, he could be cross-examined: a good lawyer for the defense could trip him up by forcing from him self-incriminating discrepancies or contradictions. Because of the rule against double jeopardy, of course, Edmund could never now face justice as a murderer. But a ruthless and skillful cross-examiner might convincingly demonstrate to the world that he had killed Jane Clouson.
Henry Pook certainly was aware of that danger when on August 22 he appeared with Edmund at Frederick Farrah’s examination at Bow Street. He faced the prospect with a show of confidence. “I shall call Edmund Walter Pook, who is ready to be examined,” he announced, “and I shall defy the learned counsel to ask him any questions. The time for which the young man has so longed for has at length come, and he will now for the first time have the opportunity of opening his mouth and giving denial to all the charges brought against him.” Edmund Pook, however, approached the witness chair with discernible uneasiness.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 19