Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Henry Pook thus found himself out of the spotlight and back in the legal grind. He had certainly hoped that the name he had made for himself defending Edmund would bring him a higher class of client and a higher income. But with the exception of a case or two, this was not to be. For the rest of his admittedly short career, he generally argued his cases as he had before: at Greenwich Police Court, defending (and very occasionally prosecuting) for theft, burglary, assault, and other breaches of Greenwich’s peace. In July 1873, Henry Pook sought to capitalize upon his minor fame in another way, with the death of David Salomons, one of two Liberal MPs from the borough of Greenwich. (Prime Minister William Gladstone was the other.) Henry Pook had long been one of Greenwich’s staunchest Conservatives, and when the local Conservatives selected another man, Thomas Boord, to run in the by-election, Henry Pook defied them and ran as well. And Henry Pook thus learned with some embarrassment the meager political value of his renown. With six candidates running, Boord won easily with 4,525 votes; Henry Pook tied for last place with 27. He would not have been able to serve very long, in any case; he died a little over a year later.

  Edmund Pook, sitting out the final refrains of Greenwich’s rough music in Herne Bay, returned home to 3 London Street soon after his March 1872 confirmation into the church. Not long after that, his brother, Thomas, came home as well. Thomas’s marriage had been on shaky foundations at the time of Jane’s murder; at that time, his wife, Emma, and his infant daughter (also Emma) had fled Greenwich for her parents’ home in the Kentish countryside. When it became clear that the estrangement was permanent, Thomas gave up his own house and returned to share again Edmund’s room and Edmund’s bed. And once he returned, Thomas never left. Mary Pook’s cousin Harriet Chaplin remained there as well, and so for several years the family configuration at the Pooks’ stayed the same as it had been before the murder: father, mother, two sons, cousin. (Also, maids-of-all-work continued to come and go, most of them, it seems, carefully picked from among Mary Pook’s poorer relations.)

  Ebenezer Pook was the first to break up this domestic arrangement, dying in 1877 of a lingering, painful illness. Mary Pook took over as the printing shop’s proprietor. Edmund himself was the next to leave, four years after this, when at the age of thirty he met and married twenty-year-old Alice Swabey, the daughter herself of a prosperous printer, and the two moved into their own house on South Street, around the corner from his mother’s. Alice had been ten at the time of Jane Clouson’s murder, and had then lived south of Lewisham, close to the cemetery in which Jane was buried. She knew, therefore, about Edmund’s legal odyssey and about his unpopularity. None of that mattered to her, apparently.

  Less than a year later, Edmund was stunned to read in the newspapers that he had died. According to this report, Edmund Pook had left Greenwich after the murders, changed his name, inexplicably, to John Pook, returned a few years before to London, to Marylebone. He had “lived a solitary and apparently friendless life in private lodgings for the last two years, and kept up no communication with any of his relatives.” Newspapers across the country carried this false report; far fewer carried the retraction two days later, when two brothers of the deceased John Pook protested that he and they were not related to Edmund, and that they had been “greatly pained” by the news that they were. With little effort, of course, a reporter could have tracked Edmund down; if he was hiding, he was hiding in plain sight. But no one bothered to discover how he felt about the mistake.

  In September 1882, Alice and Edmund Pook had a son, Edmund Thomas Pook. Three and a half years later, they lost him. They had no children after that. Cousin Harriet died in 1890. Brother Thomas died in 1897. And mother Mary, at age seventy-five, died in 1899. With no family in Greenwich remaining to keep them there, Edmund and Alice nonetheless stayed on for another ten or twelve years. By 1911, however, the two had taken up residence on the island of Guernsey, where sixty-year-old Edmund took a job as a letterpress printer. By 1915 they had moved to the neighboring island of Jersey; Alice Pook died there that year. With her death, Edmund’s closest living relative was his brother Thomas’s daughter, Emma, who had married a man by the name of Thomas Linforth Spiller and who now lived south of London, in Croydon. And for the last few years of his life, Edmund Pook moved back to south London to live close to his niece and her husband, perhaps even to live with them: they did take boarders.

  Edmund Pook died, age seventy, at Croydon Union Hospital. If on his deathbed he had spoken any words about the events of a certain April evening forty-nine years before, no one cared to record them.

  *

  A more permanent record exists of Jane Clouson’s life, and of her death, thanks to Newton Crosland and to the Clouson memorial committee, dedicated to erecting a monument to honor Jane’s suffering, her virtue, and her human value. Their dedication, at first, earned them nothing but ridicule from editorialists who reasoned that monuments were reserved to those who had performed great acts—while Jane Clouson, a lowly maid-of-all-work, had done nothing, it seems, beyond managing to die violently. “It would be difficult,” growled a writer in the Daily News after the committee gathered funds at the Greenwich Lecture Hall in October 1871, “to imagine a more flagrant breach of good taste, or a greater outrage on the public opinion and sympathies of a civilized community.” An editorialist for the New York Times, after reading of the committee’s work in London papers, was equally annoyed. “Was there ever such a display of idiocy outside of Bedlam?” he complained. “It takes a British wiseacre to discover in the simple and common act of dying a merit worthy of sculptured immortality.” The committee, ignoring the derision, soldiered on, commissioning a Deptford stonemason, Samuel Hobbs, to sculpt a fine statue of Jane Clouson, set under a dome of stone and over a marble plinth. The pennies of the multitude, and the more substantial contributions of Crosland and others, simply could not bear the cost of such an elaborate production, and when Samuel Hobbs threatened to sue for nonpayment, the committee dropped him and engaged yet another Deptford stonemason, John Lord, for a more generic and affordable production: a suitably funereal depiction of a supplicating young child. That is the monument that now stands over Jane’s grave at Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery, adorned with the epitaph that Newton Crosland had composed for it. That epitaph had been edited to take into account public taste; the reference to Jane’s cleanliness, in particular, had been removed. It retained, however, Crosland’s plea for a resolution, a plea spoken in Jane’s voice:

  May God’s great pity touch his heart and lead

  My murderer to confess his dreadful deed,

  That when the secrets of all hearts are known,

  Guilt and repentance alike may be shown.

  As the years passed, it slowly became a certainty that God’s great pity would do no such thing.

  A second memorial to Jane Clouson—a memorial of sorts, anyway—had come earlier, and then had quickly and deservedly disappeared. Pretty Jane: or, the Viper of Kidbrook Lane, churned out in the spring and summer of 1871 to capitalize upon the murder, was a work that gave new meaning to the term “penny dreadful”: a farrago of sixteen parts containing irrelevant, throwaway woodcuts to frame execrable prose. Its writer begins with a few pitiful attempts at suspense and horror, but quickly abandons these for hideously inappropriate and mind-numbingly interminable passages of pseudo-comic dialog in the manner of a third-rate Dickens. The very first page of Pretty Jane is unquestionably its best: a primitive and yet vivid woodcut, “The First Meeting in the Lane,” that depicts what certainly appears to be Edmund Pook, with his wideawake hat and his dark suit, strolling with a doe-eyed Jane Clouson, dressed much as she was in her surviving photograph. But the promise that this illustration offers readers—the promise to get to the heart of the Eltham mystery—would never be fulfilled. The man in the wideawake hat, it quickly becomes clear, is not Edmund Pook at all, but a man named Duchesney, a ludicrous caricature of a vicious aristocrat. Jane is Jane Clouson, the reader finally learns
for sure on the very last page, but the entire tale, it turns out, allegedly concerns her life before she took up service with the Pooks—service in a morally bankrupt manor house of the sort that exists only in the lowest Victorian melodrama and the cheapest gothic fiction. The rest of the work documents Duchesney’s ridiculous and unsuccessful attempts at Jane’s seduction. Any reader attaining the incredible feat of reading the serial to the end would have discovered that once Jane kept her virtue and freed herself from Duchesney, “her footsteps unhappily led her to Greenwich, from whence a sad and shrouded fate attended her.” And that is the story’s only reference to the actual crime. Edmund Pook is never mentioned. The writer and the publisher of the penny dreadful might both have been fools, but they certainly were not so foolish as to court a lawsuit for libel at the hands of Henry Pook.

  That such an abysmal production, and such a cheat on its assuredly meager audience, actually ran its entire course is in itself a minor miracle. Then Pretty Jane: or, the Viper of Kidbrook Lane quickly disappeared, almost without a trace. No advertisements for it, and no references to it in either courtroom or newspaper, survive to mark its existence. We know that it did exist only because a single copy, apparently, remains on earth today: an incomplete one at the British Library.

  A final and nearly as transient memorial to Jane Clouson lay in the clothes she was wearing and the things she carried the night she was murdered. These the metropolitan police kept at Scotland Yard, and, three years later, when Inspector Percy Neame began to assemble exhibits for what became known as Scotland Yard’s Black Museum (and is now known as the Crime Museum), he chose Jane’s effects for display. The Black Museum was then, as it is now, generally restricted to members of the Metropolitan Police, but in 1877 a reporter for the Spectator gained admission. He described seeing on a little wooden shelf “a dirty Prayer-book, a pocket dictionary, a pair of boots, a gaudy bag worked in beads, and the crushed remains of a woman’s bonnet, made of the commonest black lace, and flattened into shapelessness”; over the shelf, he saw “a gown and petticoat, of cheap, poor stuff, bearing dreadful, dim stains, and a battered crinoline.” Obviously, this collection of Jane’s effects had somehow been embellished in the months and years after the murder: she certainly had neither a prayer book nor a dictionary in her possession on the night of her attack. But it is equally clear that the evidence of her clothing was preserved: preserved for a time, anyway. The 1877 description offers the first, and the last, indication that they were in the Black Museum at all. At some point, they were removed to make way for another exhibit; at some point after that, Jane’s clothing—the last surviving physical evidence in the case—disappeared altogether.

  *

  And yet, memories lingered. John Mulvany, James Griffin, and the police of R Division never forgot Jane, and surely never let go of their certainty that they had discovered and arrested her true murderer. They were not the only ones who thought so. In 1924, fifty-three years after Edmund’s acquittal—and four years after his death—sleuth-hound Harry Bodkin Poland, then ninety-five years old, spoke out about the case in his memoirs. “Coleridge and I,” he remembered, “had no doubt about the guilt of the prisoner.” And as far as Poland was concerned, one man alone was responsible for Edmund’s escape from justice: that “weak vessel” Chief Justice Bovill, who in his summing-up “had attacked the police who he said, and incorrectly said, had assumed the prisoner’s guilt and had strained the evidence to obtain a conviction, and in the result Pook was triumphantly acquitted.” Certainly, Chief Justice Bovill’s summing-up had destroyed any possible chance of a guilty verdict in R v. Pook. But in truth, the case had been decided long before his summation. Harry Poland had failed to give due credit to the masterful work of Edmund’s lawyer, John Huddleston, who—well briefed by Henry Pook—thoroughly diffused the prosecution’s case by beating down every important prosecution witness, rendering Perren a liar, Lazell a fool, Sparshott muddleheaded, and Dr. Letheby inconsequential. More than this, Poland failed to apportion due blame to John Duke Coleridge for his inability or unwillingness to match Huddleston in energy, persistence, or wit. To be fair, Coleridge’s task was far more onerous than Huddleston’s; Coleridge was forced to proceed from beginning to end of the trial in the face of the chief justice’s carping, his belittling, even his ridicule, while Huddleston enjoyed Bovill’s full support. By the third day of the trial, when Huddleston began calling witnesses for the defense, the solicitor general essentially had given up.

  Of all these defense witnesses, four of them—the four alibi witnesses from Lewisham—seemed to prove Edmund Pook’s innocence beyond doubt. Joseph Eagles, his wife Mary Anne, their lodger William Douglas, and young Eliza Ann Merrett had all, under John Huddleston’s examination, given eyewitness accounts placing Edmund Pook miles away from Kidbrooke at the time the prosecution argued that Jane was attacked. And since John Duke Coleridge in cross-examination had done next to nothing to controvert their testimony, their testimony seemed incontrovertible; with their evidence, the jury could naturally conclude that Edmund Pook’s alibi was ironclad.

  Nothing could be further from the truth. There was a great deal that was suspicious about their claims, and had Coleridge one-tenth of the energy of his opponent at that point of the trial, he could easily have probed those claims, exposed their weaknesses, and left Edmund’s alibi in serious doubt. Newton Crosland, for one, professed his deep suspicions in particular of the testimony of Joseph and Mary Anne Eagles and of William Douglas, all of whom claimed that they had seen Edmund Pook lounging outside Alice Durnford’s house on the evening of April 25. Each of the three was certain about the time, about the date, and about the man whom they saw. “No one seems,” Crosland wrote, “to have called attention to the difficulty or absurdity of attempting to identify a very common-place, conventional-looking young man, said to have been seen lounging on Lewisham bridge—a very frequented spot—on a gloomy April night, at eight o’clock, after eight days had elapsed before there was any special occasion for noticing the incident!” That absurdity increases when one considers that not one of these witnesses came forward when those eight days elapsed and Edmund was arrested for Jane’s murder. Nor did they come forward during the next two months, as accounts of the inquest and the police court examinations flooded the newspapers, as portraits of Edmund Pook became public, and as every one of the prosecution witnesses came forward. It was only on Sunday, July 9, three days before Edmund’s trial commenced and ten weeks after the night Jane was attacked, that the indefatigable Henry Pook, apparently going door to door in Alice Durnford’s neighborhood and hoping against hope to find alibi witnesses, found the Eagleses and heard their accounts of seeing long before a man to whom they still attached no importance—until Henry Pook told them why they should. Having found Joseph and Mary Anne Eagles, Henry Pook had no intention of letting them go. He brought them back to Tudor House, his home in Greenwich, where, with the greatest interest in their identifying Edmund, he set up his own identification parade, setting before them two photograph albums and some loose photographs of men and women, from which, both Joseph and Mary Anne claimed, they picked Edmund Pook. Later, the Eagleses sent their lodger William Douglas to Tudor House, where he made a similarly successful identification.

  Throughout May, Henry Pook had with some justification lambasted the police for the shadiness of their identification parades. Of the shadiness of his own photographic identifications, however, he said nothing. Nor did John Huddleston or Chief Justice Bovill say anything at trial. More surprisingly, John Duke Coleridge himself said little to challenge this identification, thus forsaking a crucial opportunity for the prosecution.

  Unlike the Eagleses and Douglas, the fourth Lewisham alibi witness, Eliza Ann Merrett, had come forward early: she had attended both inquest and examination, had made herself known both to Henry Pook and to the police, and had yearned to claim in Edmund’s defense that he and she had passed each other as he walked home from Lewisham on the night Jane w
as attacked. She and Edmund, she professed, were long-standing friends: “I was born in Greenwich,” she testified at trial, “and I have always known him.” According to her, she and Edmund passed on the street that night; Edmund was walking very slowly, and although the two did not speak, Eliza claimed that she recognized him immediately. One would expect Edmund Pook, similarly, to recognize her, and would expect further that, when the police asked whether he had seen anyone in Lewisham that night, he would eagerly have named her. But Edmund did not; rather, he stated that he had seen no one in Lewisham that he knew or who could prove that he was there. (Later, he remembered that he had seen someone: his family’s errand boy, not Eliza Merrett.) More than this, her account of Edmund’s slow progress through Lewisham contradicts the several accounts—including Edmund’s own—that he was hurrying home to Greenwich that night.

  Thomas Pook was the one other important alibi witness at Edmund’s trial. But while Thomas and—suspiciously—Thomas alone offered testimony suggesting that Edmund could not have bought the murder weapon on the night before the attack, even he did not offer any evidence of Edmund’s specific whereabouts for more than an hour and a half on the night of the attack: that, he left to the Lewisham witnesses. Without the testimony of those witnesses, in other words, Edmund had no verifiable alibi for that night.