Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

by Paul Thomas Murphy

Exactly two weeks afterward, the wisdom of Henry Pook’s shift in litigation became apparent, as the grand jury met at the Old Bailey, considered the bills against Crosland, Farrah, and Page—and ignored them all. The Pooks’ criminal prosecution of their enemies collapsed in an instant. One week after this, the three celebrated their triumph—of sorts—with a meeting at the Greenwich Lecture Hall to discuss Edmund Pook’s trial and to solicit funds—funds no longer for legal defense, but for a monument to Jane Clouson herself. Supporters filled the thousand-seat theater to overflowing, and Newton Crosland, now the undisputed leader of the movement, took the chair. He spoke movingly about the appropriateness of a memorial to the girl; he read out the epitaph for it he had composed himself. (That epitaph, with some changes, was indeed the one chiseled upon the monument.) A collection was taken up and £7 collected—almost all in coppers. But Crosland and several other speakers pressed for more than a statue in Jane’s memory: they argued that R v. Pook had been a monstrous miscarriage of justice and proposed two legal reforms: the establishment of a public prosecutor and the adoption of the Scottish verdict of “not proven.”

  Three months of ceaseless litigation had only hurt rather than helped Edmund Pook’s and Henry Pook’s reputations. Public sentiment at Edmund’s acquittal had been, with the exception of Greenwich and Deptford malcontents, entirely on his side. That sentiment had by now evaporated; most would agree, with Greenwich magistrate James Patteson, who declared at John Page’s examination that he was “almost sick of the case.” At the end of October, George Stiff, editor of the Weekly Dispatch, snapped, “The acquitted Mr. Pook got the benefit of the doubt, and certainly silence in the unhappy transaction, rather than litigious vexatiousness, is the wiser procedure. In Scotland the verdict would have been that known as ‘not proven;’ and something resembling that is precisely what is felt by all in the present case. As people are neither perfectly satisfied, nor fully at ease in their judgment, it is certain that pertinacious persistency in wrangling can only provoke a general irritation.” Stiff held Henry Pook responsible for this travesty of justice, litigating simply to achieve “nauseating notoriety.” “Really,” Stiff concluded, “we recommend Pook to subside.”

  Henry Pook, however, was never one to subside. Instead, he sued both Stiff and the Weekly Dispatch.

  *

  As the civil cases wound their slow way along—with delays, they would not be argued for another three months—Henry Pook took an inspired legal step, one that surely greatly enhanced his clients’ chances of winning their case. He applied at the Court of Exchequer for, and was granted, special juries for his trials against Newton Crosland and the Kentish Mercury. Special juries, to put it simply, consisted of men of substantial property: traditionally bankers, merchants, and those who held the rank of esquire. Their higher social status almost guaranteed a more conservative jury, which is why the Crown routinely employed special juries in state and political trials. Such a jury, Henry Pook assumed, might be more amenable to the interests of a solid Greenwich burgher—or of his son.

  In the meantime, if tension in Greenwich and Deptford abated, it certainly did not disappear. Edmund Pook remained an exile in Herne Bay. In early December, fourteen-year-old Arthur Thomas paid a price for his mother’s inability to state, nine months before, who purchased a hammer from their shop, when a drunken lout with a long memory approached the boy outside the Thomases’ ironmongery, shouted incomprehensibly, and felled him with a blow to the side of the head. It was the latest of many attacks upon the Thomases; at the assailant’s examination, Arthur’s father, Samuel, noted that the family had for months been “subjected to the greatest annoyance.”

  One week after this came the news of a far greater fall. “Mr. James Griffin,” the newspapers reported in mid-December, “superintendent of the R division of metropolitan police, whose name was often mentioned during the trial for the Eltham murder and the subsequent proceedings, and who is now the defendant in an action brought by the young man Pook for £1,000 damages, has been retired from the force with a superannuation allowance of £200 a year in consequence of ill health.” Ill health might indeed have been a cause of Griffin’s resignation: managing a police force for months after having entirely lost the confidence of the people of the town could not but have been enormously stressful. But rumors quickly arose that this explanation was a fig leaf to conceal his dismissal for his conduct in the Pook investigation. The Kentish Mercury attempted to dispel these by publishing glowing testimonials to Griffin by Commissioner Henderson and other notables. Pressure by the Pooks almost certainly had something to do with Griffin’s leaving the force: their lawsuit, pending until the day Griffin retired, vanished completely after that. There would be no Pook v. Griffin. The end of Griffin’s promising career, it seems, the Pooks accepted as punishment enough.

  *

  Newton Crosland entered the Court of Exchequer at Westminster on the first of February, 1872, with an unshakeable sense of foreboding. His astrologer friend, the one who had told him of the great evil to him portended on the date of Jane’s death, had again examined his chart and had determined that Crosland was to lose at this trial. And the fact that Chief Baron of the Exchequer Fitzroy Kelly judged the case was additionally inauspicious: Kelly was a good friend of Chief Justice Bovill, whom Crosland had savaged in The Eltham Tragedy Reviewed.

  Crosland’s advocate in the trial was the capable John Humffreys Parry, known for his melodramatic style, his participation in several notable criminal trials, and his reputation for winning. If winning this case entailed establishing that Crosland’s assertions about Edmund Pook and his trial were reasonable ones, no one could have done a better job than Parry besides, perhaps, George Lewis—who had briefed him and had briefed him well. In a thorough and lengthy cross-examination of Edmund Pook, Parry forced admission after admission to establish doubt about Edmund’s innocence. Edmund acknowledged that the coroner’s jury had returned a verdict of willful murder against him, that a magistrate had committed him for trial, that a true jury had returned a true bill against him for murder. He repeated his certainty that many strangers had committed perjury against him, for no clear reason: “with the exception of Inspector Griffin,” he testified, “I did not know one of those I charged with perjury.” He repeated his callous dismissal of Jane as a “very dirty girl.” And he articulated all of the compelling hearsay evidence not admitted at his trial: Fanny Hamilton’s claim that Jane was to meet him on the night of the murder, as well as Jane’s statement that she was pregnant, and that Edmund was the father. It was the charwoman Jane Prosser who actually had sworn Jane had said this, but Edmund inadvertently rendered the claim more compelling by attributing it to Jane’s cousin Charlotte Trott as well as to Prosser.

  That hearsay evidence formed the centerpiece of Parry’s closing address of the jury on the second day of the trial—an address tailored to be as much a prosecution of Edmund Pook as a defense of Newton Crosland. Crosland had every right to question the exclusion of Jane’s words at trial, Parry argued. “There were many circumstances pointing to this young man as the murderer of this girl which he could never get over. If that girl’s lips had not been sealed in death, and if she had repeated upon her oath the statements alleged to have been made by her, where would the plaintiff have been now? Why, undergoing penal servitude for life.”

  That certainly might have been so. But the fact is that Jane’s lips had been sealed in death, and, for all Parry’s sensational marshalling of the evidence, for all his heaping doubt upon Edmund’s version of events, he, like George Lewis before him, failed in forcing from Edmund the utterly damning admission that would in an instant have exposed him as guilty, exposed his acquittal as a sham, and vindicated Crosland’s attack upon it. Parry failed, in other words, to prove Edmund Pook a murderer. But he certainly did enough to prove to many that Edmund Pook could have been a murderer, and that alone should have been enough to win this case. For as both Pook’s lawyer—John Huddleston, again—an
d the judge, Chief Baron Kelly, stated to the jury, the one question at issue was whether Crosland’s letters constituted a fair, honest, impartial criticism of the trial, or whether they amounted to an unfair and unwarranted attack upon Edmund Pook. Given the doubts about the case and the trial that Parry had forced from Edmund Pook’s own lips, there had clearly been nothing unwarranted about Crosland’s criticisms.

  But Chief Baron Kelly, and not John Humffreys Parry, had the final words in the trial, and it was with the chief baron’s summation, according to Newton Crosland, that everything fell apart. Kelly, Crosland later wrote, “summed up dead against me and said not a word in my favour: he made several mistakes in matters of fact, two of these my counsel corrected, but there was a third which he allowed me to pass. I asked him why he did not correct that also. He replied ‘I corrected him twice; if I had done it a third time, I should have put the Judge’s back up, and then perhaps it would have been worse for us!’”

  Indeed it could have been. The jury retired, consulted for half an hour, and returned to declare Crosland guilty of libel. Edmund, Ebenezer, and Henry had finally won. The damages resulting from the libel, the foreman announced, amounted to £50—not an inconsequential amount in 1871, but certainly not enough to cover Henry Pook’s expenses, and a far cry from the £10,000 the Pooks had asked for.

  Newton Crosland left the court thoroughly unchastened. And The Eltham Tragedy Revisited continued to sell.

  *

  Fifty-two years after the special jury reached their verdict in Pook v. Crosland, an elderly judge, who as a young barrister had attended the trial, shared his recollections of it in a letter to the Times. That judge, Edward Ridley, had forgotten much in the intervening years. “I forget who were counsel for the plaintiff; I forget even which of the Barons was Judge.” He forgot, as well, that Newton Crosland was the defendant in the case—not the Kentish Mercury, as he thought. (When Crosland lost his case, the editor of the Kentish Mercury quickly settled, and the proprietor’s case never came to trial.) While Ridley’s grasp of the facts slipped over time, his impression of the true loser in that trial remained clear. “What I do not forget,” he wrote, “was that Serjeant Parry was for the defendants. A verdict for them was not possible after the acquittal at the Old Bailey; but Parry, in a deliberate speech of reasoned and stately eloquence, which met with universal admiration, worked through the story piece by piece, and proved the guilt of Pook. The jury gave their verdict for one farthing damages, and Pook’s name went down to posterity.”

  Ridley was of course wrong about the farthing, as well.*4 But he did capture the shift in public consensus about the Pook case after seven months’ litigation, and after first Lewis’s and then Parry’s cross-examinations. In the eyes of the law, Edmund Pook was an innocent man. But to the public, the law had shown itself in a thousand ways to be an ass. And to the public, Edmund Walter Pook had very likely gotten away with murder.

  *1 After a month’s consideration, the common sergeant showed Agnes Norman very little mercy. Although he himself had caused the charges of murder against her to be thrown out, he had no doubt that she bore “moral guilt” for the deaths of four infants, and sentenced Norman to ten years’ penal servitude. [TE 15 Aug. 1871, 3.]

  *2 A bill creating a public prosecutor had actually been introduced in Parliament during the 1871 session. But it had failed. The creation of a Director of Public Prosecutions for England and Wales would not come about for another eight years.

  *3 Quite possibly this was the image of Henry Pook published in the Illustrated Police News: a hideous likeness indeed.

  *4 Six years after this, John Parry was able to obtain damages in exactly that amount—one farthing—for his client the artist James Whistler in the celebrated libel trial Whistler v. Ruskin.

  7

  Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

  On the afternoon of August 7, 1872, an apocalyptic thunderstorm—“the most severe within living memory,” reported the Morning Post—surged through southeast London. At Woolwich, court suspended so that magistrate and officers could battle rising flood waters. Before the gates of nearby Woolwich Arsenal a three-foot-deep lagoon arose; a foot and a half of water gushed into the shell foundry and destroyed the ordnance stored there. Lowlands became shallow lakes through which trains plodded. Unremitting lightning struck a number of buildings, felled walls, and goaded steamboat passengers on the Thames to jump up “as if electrified or shot.” In a market garden in Charlton, just north of Kidbrooke, two girls were struck, one apparently fatally. And in Eltham a thunderbolt battered the police station, exploding its windows.

  That deluge was the last and the greatest of a succession of storms that had beset the area that spring and summer, storms that brought with them—at least according to locals—freakish fireballs along with the thunder, the lightning, the flooding. And when some remembered that the very first of these storms had occurred on the first anniversary of Jane’s murder, a local superstition grew: the cosmic upheaval would continue until Jane Clouson’s murderer was brought to justice.

  But Jane Clouson’s murderer was never brought to justice.

  The £200 reward offered by the Pook Defence Committee, not surprisingly, led to no major breakthrough in the case. And the police of R Division, since Superintendent Griffin’s forced departure, and indeed, since Edmund Pook’s acquittal, had shown little inclination to continue their investigation. To them the case was closed: they behaved as if they knew exactly who had killed Jane Clouson—and behaved as if that killer was now beyond their grasp.

  Still, the case continued to force itself upon them, and continued in particular to haunt Detective Inspector John Mulvany. On November 26, 1871, a homeless laborer named Robert Sessions walked into Bagnigge Wells police station and confessed to Jane Clouson’s murder. Mulvany was called in to investigate and quickly discovered that Sessions had recently been discharged from the army for attempting suicide while insane, that his father, in a similar fit, had succeeded in killing himself, and that his aunt was presently confined to a lunatic asylum. The charge of murder was dropped and Sessions committed to the insane ward of Clerkenwell Workhouse. Just over a year after this, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, another itinerant, George King, told the police that he had “kept company” with Jane and had killed her in a jealous rage after he learned that she was carrying Edmund Pook’s child. Though King’s knowledge of the details of the crime was shaky—he confessed, for one thing, to killing Jane in August 1870 and not in April 1871—he was held for a week so that Scotland Yard could investigate; he was then discharged as a lunatic.

  Three months later, in March 1873, a soldier named George Bingham presented the magistrate in the military town of Aldershot with a written confession to Jane’s killing. Bingham was a soldier, and perhaps because of rumors early in the case that Jane’s murderer was a soldier, his confession attracted a great deal of attention. The Pooks themselves engaged a solicitor—a solicitor from Aldershot, not Henry Pook—to watch the proceedings and to press for a “searching investigation” into the case. Several Pook supporters actually traveled down to observe Bingham’s examination. Mulvany traveled down as well and testified that the police could not connect Bingham to Jane Clouson in any way. As with every other confessor to the murder, evidence for Bingham’s insanity quickly grew. Jane Thomas was brought from Deptford to swear she could not identify Bingham as the purchaser of the hammer. Two witnesses who had been on Kidbrooke Lane the night of the attack swore as well that they could not recognize Bingham. The charge was dropped, and Bingham then admitted he had concocted the story to get out of the army.

  That was the last John Mulvany had anything to do with the case. Later that year he quit Scotland Yard—or, more likely, he was forced out: though a relatively young man of forty-four when he left, and with eight years to live, he described himself in the subsequent census as “Police Inspector Superannuated,” that is, dismissed on account of his age. After his failure with the Clouson investigation, Mulvany
was never again given charge of a high-profile case. If his star did not fall with Edmund Pook’s acquittal, it had certainly stopped rising.

  The next confession came seven years after Bingham’s, when a mason named Walter Thomas Prince regaled a magistrate in Stratford, in the East End, with an elaborate tale of assisting Edmund Pook in murdering Jane. (Prince carried the hammer and disposed of it; Pook actually struck the blows.) Prince then sobered up and confessed instead to being a delusional drunk with a nasty head injury. The magistrate sentenced him to two weeks of hard labor anyway. Two months later Prince made the same confession, and the same retraction, in Wandsworth; he was transferred to Greenwich, where he was let off with a warning.

  Finally, in April 1888, four months before the Ripper murders put a stranglehold on public attention, a man who called himself Michael Carroll caused a stir throughout the antipodes by confessing to a police officer in Sydney that he had killed Jane seventeen years before. Wide dissemination of his confession in both Australia and New Zealand prompted a number of letters to local papers by emigrants from southeast London, all very imperfectly recollecting the murder. One British newspaper speculated that Carroll was simply George Bingham, confessing for a second time. Although Carroll’s subsequent claim that he had invented and confessed his story while in a drunken stupor did not serve to free him, Scotland Yard did, with a cable declaring his story an utter fiction.

  *

  For the Pooks, both solicitor and family, the legal and social storm following Edmund’s acquittal eventually passed as well. After their victory against Newton Crosland, Henry Pook still had one lawsuit to mount for Edmund and the family: the libel action against George Stiff, editor of the Weekly Dispatch, for daring to claim that Edmund had been lucky in his acquittal—and, incidentally, for pillorying Henry Pook’s “litigious vexatiousness.” The civil trial, Pook v. Stiff, was argued on June 15, 1872, again at the Court of Exchequer, again before a special jury, again with Huddleston leading for the plaintiff and Parry leading for the defense. Again Edmund Pook appeared, to deny killing Jane Clouson. And again the jury found for the plaintiff—this time for £25 damages. With that, the close legal bond that Henry Pook had forged with the Pook family came to an end. The bond of friendship, however, born of desperate need and solidified with heartfelt gratitude, remained. Three months after his trial, Edmund had presented Henry Pook with a token and an emblem of that friendship: a finely chased silver snuffbox, bearing on its outside Henry Pook’s most appropriate motto, “ausis nil impossibile” (“to the audacious nothing is impossible”) and on its inside the inscription “To Henry Pook, Esq., from Edmund Walter Pook, in commemoration of the 15th of July, 1871, and as a mark of sincere gratitude.” July 15, 1871, of course, was the day of Edmund’s acquittal.