He need not have worried. Frederick Farrah had made an odd choice for his counsel: Douglas Straight, who had a month before been one of Edmund’s own lawyers (and more recently had been Henry Pook’s). Straight had advocated Edmund’s innocence at his trial; he had no intention of challenging that position now. “I shall ask Mr. Pook no questions,” he announced. Without any fear of challenge or contradiction, then, Henry Pook led Edmund through a catechism of denial:
“Had you any communication with that poor girl?”
“None whatever.”
“Did you write her a letter?”
“Never.”
“Did you ever make any appointment to meet her?”
“Never.”
“Was there the slightest act of familiarity between you?”
“None whatever.”
“Did you make her a present?”
“Never.”
“You have read that pamphlet, Edmund Walter Pook?”
“Yes.”
“Do you now, upon your solemn oath, declare that all the charges against you are true or untrue?”
“Untrue in every particular.”
“That you solemnly declare before your maker?”
“I do.”
Straight then offered the abject submission of his client. Farrah, he claimed, had not scrutinized Newton Crosland’s text carefully enough to realize that it was libelous. Now that he realized that it was, Farrah offered to apologize and to suspend publication.
Henry Pook instantly refused that offer; the Pooks, he said, had resolved to prosecute Farrah to the bitter end. The magistrate, Frederick Flowers, declared that in that case he had no choice: the pamphlet was, he was sure, libelous; he committed Farrah on bail for trial at the Old Bailey.
If judicial sentiment at Bow Street lay wholly with the Pooks, popular sentiment there did not. On the street outside the police court, a mass of “half-drunken, ragged loafers” according to one report, howled, hissed, and jostled Henry and Edmund. The two required the assistance of the police to be placed in a cab rather than thrown under it. Their appearance that day only served to whet the public appetite for The Eltham Tragedy Reviewed; while they were at court every copy of the pamphlet at Farrah’s nearby shop sold out.
One week later, at Caroline Horton’s examination in Greenwich for libel, Edmund and Henry Pook experienced a similar victory within the courtroom and a similar rout without. The widow Horton, despite her limited means, had managed to obtain good counsel. As a young woman she had been a servant in the home of Charles Carttar, a lawyer who now served as coroner for West Kent; he agreed to take on her case. And Carttar, like Douglas Straight, had no intention of challenging Edmund Pook’s declaration of innocence. Instead he rebuked the Pooks for aiming to punish Horton rather than Newton Crosland, and sought the sympathy of the magistrate, James Patteson. Horton, he pointed out, was a hardworking widow with a large family; she knew the Pooks and had been supportive of Edmund throughout his ordeal. Because neither the Kentish Mercury nor Newton Crosland had been prosecuted for his letters, she considered the pamphlet perfectly legal to sell.
Caroline Horton assisted Carttar by fainting in the middle of his speech. The magistrate was indeed sympathetic, but felt bound by the law. She had indeed sold a work that he was sure was libelous, and he would have to commit her—unless, he emphasized, the Pooks reconsidered. The Pooks—father, solicitor, and Edmund—then conferred, and agreed: they would drop their charge if Caroline Horton apologized. The proceedings ended with rousing cheers—but the cheers were exclusively for the widow. Outside the courtroom the Pooks again faced hissing and the hooting. They escaped by a ruse, the police decoying away the crowd by driving an empty cab around the block, as if they were planning to spirit the Pooks over the back wall.
The rough reception the Pooks got in Greenwich could hardly surprise them. But the rough reception in London almost certainly did. Until recently, the discontent, the rage and ridicule, had been entirely confined to the populace of Greenwich and Deptford. Thanks to The Eltham Tragedy Reviewed, but thanks even more to the Pooks’ crusade to stamp that pamphlet out, hostility toward the Pooks—all of them—was growing. “The Pook family are becoming a nuisance,” two newspapers from outside of London proclaimed several days after Caroline Horton’s examination. “It would be quite a mercy if the whole family would emigrate.”
And while the rest of the family stayed put, sometime in the last months of 1871 Edmund finally bowed to the pressure, quit his father’s employ, and decamped to the East Kent seaside town of Herne Bay; fewer than sixty miles from Greenwich, the place was far enough away from the hurly-burly, but close enough so that Edmund could commute by train for his several court appearances. His rustication was effected so quietly that whom he stayed with, and how he spent most of his time, remains unknown. Only the fact that he sought strength and solace in the church during his stay provides any evidence that he was there at all. In April 1872, the local newspaper reported that the bishop of Dover had laid his hands in the Anglican rite of confirmation upon seventeen youths, “including Mr. Pook, who has been for some time residing in Herne Bay.”
In the meantime, contention and commotion continued in Greenwich as if Edmund had never left. Members of the Pook Defence Fund, realizing that the home secretary would not see them and would do nothing to support them, took matters into their own hands: in mid-August they inundated Greenwich and Deptford with placards offering £200 for the detection and conviction of Jane Clouson’s actual killer. Their opponents derided the offer as a shameful attempt to divert attention from Edmund Pook. And rival committees sprung up to fund legal costs on the other side: an ephemeral Horton Defence Fund and a more successful Farrah Defence Fund. In mid-September, two thousand men, women, and children gathered at a monster meeting on Blackheath in support of the publisher. A number of local radical politicians spoke, extolling the virtues of free speech and castigating the abuses of the Pook trial. Boxes were passed around and a substantial fund raised—a fund, however, offset at the very end of the meeting, when Frederick Farrah’s fine gold watch was ripped from its fob and stolen. Superintendent Griffin, on hand to keep order, quickly stepped in to arrest the pickpocket, but not before the thief handed the watch to a confederate, who escaped.
And all this time, The Eltham Tragedy Reviewed continued to sell and continued to be read; Frederick Farrah, on bond and awaiting trial, saw no reason why he should not continue publishing the pamphlet until a judge and jury determined it libelous. The Pooks, then, decided they had no choice but to prosecute the one who had invented the gunpowder as well as the one who had fired the shot. And so on September 12, Henry Pook finally sought and obtained a summons for criminal libel against Newton Crosland. Three days later, when Crosland appeared at Bow Street to answer the charge, it became clear that the Pooks finally had a legal battle on their hands. For by Crosland’s side was the formidable solicitor George Lewis, junior partner in the firm of Lewis and Lewis.
It would be another five years before George Lewis—with his instantly recognizable furred frock coat, his monocle, and his long Dundreary whiskers—would become the most famous solicitor in England, the solicitor of choice to London’s high society. But he was already well on his way. Two years earlier, Lewis had been introduced to the Prince of Wales, and just a year before had advised the prince when he became embroiled in the scandalous divorce case Mordaunt v. Mordaunt. And he had already developed the abilities that would make him famous: utter discretion, indefatigable service, and a ferocious tenacity at cross-examination. The Pooks would find no submission, no offers to apologize or desist, from George Lewis. And neither Crosland nor Lewis had any intention of shying away from the golden opportunity of subjecting Edmund Pook to a thorough cross-examination.
The confrontation between the two highly passionate and egotistical solicitors was predictably explosive. “Personalities were freely indulged in,” remarked the reporter from the Times. Henry Pook opened with hype
rbole even greater than usual, positing himself as a modern hero of myth—a forensic Jason—taking on his many libelous enemies: he “should meet them as they came, and if there were a thousand dragon’s teeth, he would bury them in the earth, and though dug up again, he would face them still, showing that they should not frighten them. Once for all, this matter should be settled.” Lewis, for his part, delighted in puncturing the bulging solicitor’s bulging ego. When, for example, Lewis complained about Henry Pook’s relentlessly ornate speechifying, Pook responded righteously that he did not make speeches for the sake of popularity: he was there in the cause of truth and justice.
He had never imputed to Pook “that he had obtained popularity by his speeches,” Lewis responded—“but rather the reverse.”
After Edmund Pook, with a remarkable and discernible composure, took the witness chair and Henry Pook guided him through his usual denial that he had murdered Jane Clouson, Lewis rose to cross-examine. He began by establishing that the police did have some grounds for at least considering him a suspect: Jane had lived in his home for twenty-three months, he acknowledged, had become pregnant at that time, and had left only eleven days before her murder. From this line of questioning Lewis quickly turned to Edmund’s bloody clothing.
“Do you know how that blood came upon your garments?” Lewis asked him.
“From the fit that I had had,” he replied conclusively, eliminating from consideration the possibilities that he had cut his finger in the shop or had bound up a shopboy’s cut finger.
When Lewis then asked him where his fit had occurred, Edmund was certain: “at my own house.” He was equally certain that he had not had an epileptic fit outdoors for some time—for six or seven months. As to when the fit in his home had occurred, he was far less certain. “What is the good of asking me; I know nothing more about it,” he protested, when Lewis badgered him on the point. Lewis persisted until Edmund admitted that the fit had occurred no more than two weeks before the murder. With that, Lewis pounced upon a curious anomaly: Edmund claimed to have suffered his fit indoors—while fully dressed for the outdoors.
“How do you account for the blood on your hat?”
“By its being knocked off.”
“You do not wear your hat in the house?”
“But you can go in with it, I suppose.”
“Then how do you account for it?”
“By its being knocked off, and blood spurting from my mouth on the hat.”
“But you said your fit was in the sitting room. You do not wear your hat there?”
“Do you take yours off directly when you go in? I lay on the floor beside it in the fit.”
Henry Pook, distinctly discomforted by this line of questioning, here interjected “one would think you were trying the young man over again.” Exactly so. Lewis pressed on.
“Was the coat you had on when you were arrested the coat you had on the night of the fit?”
Edmund—whose recollection about the fit to this point was at best vague, was certain on this point: “No.”
“Have you looked to see if there is blood on it?”
“No.”
“Where is it?”
“At home.”
“Has it been examined?”
“The police had all my clothes.”
If that coat had been bloody, it seems, the police would have noticed that blood. But they had not. And so, according to his account, he suffered an epileptic fit while dressed in coat and hat, and had bled: bled on his hat, bled on the lower legs of his trousers, but had not bled at all on his coat.
Lewis then turned to Edmund’s movements on the night of the murder and elicited from Edmund the claim that he had run from Lewisham to Greenwich “because I felt the fit coming on”—a claim Lewis later dismissed as a physiological absurdity. With that, Edmund left the witness box and Crosland’s examination adjourned for a week. Edmund thus braved one of the best cross-examiners in the country, and if he hadn’t emerged entirely unscathed, he certainly had not been defeated—he had hardly been exposed as Jane Clouson’s murderer. It soon became clear, however, that Lewis would have another chance—and another after that—to shake his story.
On September 19, five days after Lewis examined Edmund, the grand jury convened at the Old Bailey, considered the charge of libel against Frederick Farrah—and ignored the bill. The charge against the pamphlet’s publisher thus dropped, Farrah celebrated by issuing a second edition of The Eltham Tragedy Reviewed, one in which some of the most striking connections between Edmund Pook and Crosland’s imagined perfect murderer were removed. The grand jury offered no reason for ignoring the bill. But its message that the charge did not merit trial at the Old Bailey was perfectly clear. Perfectly clear, that is, to everyone but the Pooks, who refused to admit defeat. Not only did they resolve to press on in their criminal prosecution of Newton Crosland; they also initiated two more prosecutions for criminal libel, hoping that the grand jury at the next Old Bailey sessions would consider the matter differently. On the afternoon of September 27, then, Henry Pook hurried from Bow Street to Greenwich Police Court and obtained a second summons against Frederick Farrah on the same basis as before, and then obtained one against yet another Greenwich shopkeeper who had dared sell The Eltham Tragedy Reviewed. John Page, tobacconist on Greenwich Road, accepted his summons with ironic honor, displaying it in his shop window next to a particularly ugly likeness of Henry Pook,*3 and printing up new labels with which to wrap his tobacco. “Happy Jane Maria Clousen. Taken away from the evil to come,” they proclaimed, somewhat cryptically, but certainly suggesting that that evil had blasted John Page instead.
Frederick Farrah, at his examination, had clearly had a change of heart about the prosecution. Thanks to the efforts of the Farrah Defence Fund, and to the moral and financial support of Newton Crosland—who had vowed to fight each and every libel action mounted against his pamphlet—Farrah had dropped the conciliatory Douglas Straight as his counsel. Now, George Lewis represented him. And at his examination, John Page, as well, entered police court with both Newton Crosland and George Lewis at his side.
When Lewis cross-examined Edmund Pook at Farrah’s Bow Street examination, he took a new tack, questioning Edmund about his trial, and about the testimony of the prosecution witnesses. A pattern quickly emerged. Of William Sparshott, who swore Edmund came to his shop looking to buy an axe, Edmund claimed, “He was an utter stranger to me, and committed perjury in making that assertion.” Of the officers who testified to the finding of a whistle near the site of the murder, he said, “Two or three of them committed this perjury, I cannot tell you their names.” More than this, “Superintendent Griffin committed perjury... Mulvany also committed perjury. Several witnesses, utter strangers to me, committed perjury.” Edmund, in short, understood himself to be the victim of a widespread conspiracy of strangers who had no discernible motive to wish him harm. It seemed incredible. And it raised serious doubts, as Crosland had in his pamphlet, about the entire conduct of Edmund Pook’s trial.
Two days later, at John Page’s examination, Lewis conducted his final cross of Edmund Pook. This time he took Edmund over the same ground as he had before, quizzing him about his bloody clothing and about the improbable roster of supposedly perjuring witnesses. He was here, it seems, acting less the advocate and more the solicitor, preparing a brief for trial: less attempting to convince the magistrate to throw the charge out, but rather seeking out all possible weak points in Edmund’s story, weaknesses that a barrister could employ in higher court. And in his probing on this day, Lewis did manage to extract a new and remarkable claim from Edmund. At the end of his testimony, Edmund repeated his assertion that he had seen Jane Clouson walking in public with another man, three days before her murder. And then he added something new: his brother, Thomas, he stated, had seen Jane and a young man walking in public as well—one night before Edmund had seen the two. Edmund then stepped down, and no one in the courtroom seemed to understand how truly astonishin
g his words were. Had Edmund’s brother, Thomas, actually seen Jane and a “swell” together, as Edmund had, he would have had no reason to withhold that information on the day of Edmund’s arrest, and every reason to tell it. And yet he had said nothing. More than this, the odds against Edmund and Thomas Pook, and absolutely no one else, seeing Jane walking openly in Greenwich with a young man, on two successive nights, were unbelievably, staggeringly high. Thomas Pook had never claimed to have seen Jane Clouson four days before the murder—almost certainly because he had not done so. George Lewis, it seems, ended his cross by prompting Edmund Pook to lie in order to bolster his case. But it was a lie that even George Lewis did not detect.
If George Lewis, in the course of his three widely reported cross-examinations, succeeded in raising doubts about Edmund Pook’s innocence, he did nothing to prevent the magistrates at each examination from committing Crosland, Farrah, and Page for trial. Two of the magistrates were certain, the grand jury’s decision on Farrah notwithstanding, that Crosland’s pamphlet was libelous; the third thought, at least, that this was a matter for a trial jury to decide. This triumph of sorts was no longer enough for Henry Pook, no longer sure of his chances of winning at the Old Bailey after Farrah’s first case collapsed. Libel, he knew, could be fought in civil as well as criminal court. True, the Pooks could never have the vindictive pleasure of seeing their enemies suffer penal servitude if they were convicted in a civil court. But the Pooks could obtain high damages there; they could thus, in particular, inflict a devastating punishment upon wealthy Newton Crosland. And so on October 9, as Newton Crosland walked into Greenwich Police Court to attend John Page’s examination, Henry Pook stunned him with a writ from the Court of Exchequer seeking £10,000 damages: not for his pamphlet, but for his two Kentish Mercury articles. Henry Pook served similar writs on Sidney Boate, the newspaper’s craven editor, and on the proprietor of the newspaper, Boate’s great aunt, Christina Hartnoll.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 20