The Real Sherlock Holmes

by Angela Buckley

  More dangerous still were women with tears in their eyes and torn skirts, who would cry for help and beckon a gentleman away from the throng to assist them, or prostitutes tempting them into the shadows. Before he knew it, the unwary gentleman would be attacked and robbed by the ‘coshers’ (thugs) waiting in the dark.

  Official police returns confirmed the high levels of crime on the streets of Victorian Manchester. In 1866, there were some 13,000 arrests, with robbery and pickpocketing being the most common crimes. By 1870, the number of arrests had doubled. Indictable offences (i.e. those brought to trial) included assault, breach of the peace, drunkenness, stealing and prostitution. The crime rate in Manchester was almost two crimes per person – four times higher than in London during the same period. Only five per cent of these arrests resulted in conviction. PC Caminada had his work cut out.

  Late one evening in March 1868, Caminada stepped out with pride in his new uniform ready to tackle the crime-infested streets of his neighbourhood. It was a freezing cold night with snow on the ground and, as he picked his way along the slippery pavements of John Dalton Street in the pale, yellow light of the gas lamps, a man called out to him. When Caminada turned to face him, he was assailed by a tirade of insults: ‘Have I to pay rates and taxes to keep such lazy fellows as you walking about the streets?’ Before the young policeman had a chance to respond to this unprovoked attack the man, a beerhouse-keeper named Quinn, punched him in the face, and fled the scene.

  ‘I was certainly a little non-plussed’, Caminada recollected, ‘To get a violent blow on the nose… was not a very pleasant experience for a beginner’. Undeterred, he returned to his business of pacing the beat, but as he reached the corner of the street he suddenly received another thump from Quinn, this time to his ear, accompanied by the words, ‘Take that! How do you like it?’

  Still smarting from the blow, Caminada pursued the beerhouse-keeper as he took off into the night. Quinn flew up a flight of stairs leading into a nearby tavern, but Caminada grabbed his legs and dragged him back down to the pavement. A scuffle ensued, which resulted in Quinn biting the policeman’s hand ‘in right good fashion’. Luckily the injury was not as serious as it might have been: ‘Fortunately, he had no teeth, but he worked away so vigorously with his gums that I could feel the pain for weeks after’. Quinn was convicted of assault and Caminada never forgot his first incidence of violence as an officer: ‘Though the matter was no joke at the time, I often smile when I come across my friend, the beerhouse-keeper, Quinn’.

  After a challenging week, Caminada’s first Saturday night on duty was no better. Snow was ankle-deep on the pavements as PC Caminada prepared to face another freezing night on duty:

  as I stood in the steady downfall, with the cold about zero, eating my supper, the outlook on that bitter Saturday night was not particularly cheering. Anxious, however, to distinguish myself, I had no time to moralise, so “bolting” my supper in the best way possible under such circumstances, I again commenced to patrol my beat with all the importance of a newly-made policeman.

  Passing the ‘dirty narrow gullet’ of Thompson Street he heard a ‘row’ coming from a common lodging-house, the home of James Woodcock, alias Jimmy Good-lodgings, his wife and their three sons. The family had been ‘holding high carnival’ and as Caminada lifted the latch the noise grew louder. Jimmy and his wife were sitting by the fire singing, dancing and cursing, while the youngest son was drunkenly muttering to himself on a chair. The room was full of old-fashioned country furniture, including a large sofa draped in check calico, with a valance hanging down at the front to obscure the sight of the family’s shoes stored underneath. A scuffling noise ‘resembling that of a dog fight’ was coming from underneath the sofa drapes and on closer inspection, Caminada found the two older sons fighting underneath it, both drunk and ‘worrying each other like a pair of bulldogs’.

  Caminada dragged them out: ‘I shall never forget the appearance they presented. Their hands and feet were so bruised and bitten, that there was scarcely a spot as large as a sixpence which did not bear marks of savage brutality’. He threatened the whole family with arrest if they didn’t stop their violent behaviour, but he did not quite get the reaction he had hoped for: ‘I very soon found that whatever opinion I had of my own importance, neither the uniform nor the “little brief authority” of the newly-made policeman had any terror for these fiends’. The two brothers quickly settled their differences and then joined forces to defy their ‘common enemy’, setting on the policeman and demanding to know who had sent for him and what he was doing there. Worried about ending up under the sofa himself, Caminada decided that ‘discretion was the better part of valour’ and backed into the street as the door was slammed firmly behind him. But the evening was not over yet.

  He had just resumed his beat in the falling snow, when he heard cries of ‘Murder!’ coming from Spinningfield, one of the ‘worst haunts of vice’ in the city. He hurried off in the direction of the shouts and found a woman lying across the footpath and the doorway of a small house. A crowd of people had gathered around her and a flickering candle cast a dim light over the scene, giving the half-dressed woman ‘a weird appearance’. The snow on the pavement was crimson with blood. The prone woman was a local character known as ‘Fat Martha’ and she had been stabbed.

  Caminada drew out his rattle to summon help, which ‘had the effect not only of summoning assistance but of bringing all the loose characters of the neighbourhood on the scene’. At the hideous noise, bedroom windows were flung open and heads leaned out of the upper windows of the neighbouring houses to find out what all the fuss was about. When the locals realised that it was only Martha they swore at the police officer for disturbing their sleep and slammed the windows shut again. There would be no help from that quarter.

  Finally three other officers came to Caminada’s assistance and he was dispatched to the police station for the accident litter, a handheld stretcher consisting of a piece of canvas stretched between two poles. As Martha weighed about 17 stone, the four men struggled to roll her onto the stretcher. Eventually they prised her from the cold pavement and headed towards the Royal Infirmary, followed by a procession of bedraggled onlookers. They made their unsteady way through the blizzard to the hospital, where they placed the victim on a couch in the accident ward for inspection by the surgeon on duty. When he discovered that Martha was a ‘loose character’, he refused to treat her and instructed the police officers to take her to the workhouse. Although ‘the prospect for the carriers was not a pleasant one’, they placed Martha back on the litter and set out again across the city for the workhouse hospital in New Bridge Street.

  After nearly two miles of trudging through the snow with a dead weight, the exhausted foursome arrived at the workhouse gates and rang the bell. As the porter opened the heavy door, Martha stirred on the stretcher. ‘Where am I?’ she cried. Caminada replied that she was at the workhouse, to which she responded, ‘What are you doing with me here? Put me down, you scoundrels. I am not going to the workhouse’. With these words she began to thrash, so the policemen were forced to put her back on the ground. Announcing that she was going home, she scrambled unsteadily to her feet and disappeared into the night. Caminada remarked:

  the feelings of the carriers… can be better imagined than described, and… she was the recipient of some rather warm language, all of which she took in good part, and returned with interest… The incident was a common Deansgate one.

  Despite his initial challenges on the beat, it did not take long for PC Caminada to get into his stride. By the end of his first year he had established himself as a resourceful and efficient police officer, who took the lead in operations. In December 1868, he was tasked with the investigation of the theft of a valuable collection of meerschaum pipes from a private house. The only information he had was a description of the suspect’s ‘striped, shining, cloth trousers’. After a week of searching Caminada finally found the suspect and his associates in a ce
llar dwelling in Peter Street. He organised an early morning raid on the lodgings, galvanising his colleagues into action: ‘I set to work to call together all the constables near the point, giving them directions on each beat to be ready for a surprise, and to render me assistance if required’.

  It was another bitterly cold night with hardened snow on the ground, and as they neared the dwelling Caminada removed his boots, overcoat and muffler, so that he would not be heard. He knew that one of the gang members, a prizefighter, would attack without hesitation if he spotted the police. Caminada watched the suspects through a shutter and noted that there was a deadly carving knife on the table. Placing two officers in a nearby street, he sent the rest into the alleyway: ‘I now arranged for the lightest of the men to creep down the steps after me, and to leave his helmet at the top, for fear of it accidentally falling off’.

  Masquerading as an associate of the gang, Caminada called through the door to the inhabitants. When they opened the door he rushed in, armed only with a staff and a bull’s eye lantern, grabbing the knife from the table as he entered the dim room. Backed up by the other officers and with the knife in his hand, he handcuffed the gang. The prisoners were retained on remand while he tracked the movements of all the culprits, including ‘shiny trousers Jack’, who received nine months’ penal servitude. The slick operation was a complete success.

  During the early years of his police career, Caminada was credited with a number of high profile arrests, including a well-known group of ‘base coiners’ (forgers), the attempted robbery of a linen shop by convicted burglar, ‘Oldham Johnny’, and three seasoned criminals for burglary and arson, for which he was awarded £3 from the Salford Watch Committee. His success had enabled him to move out of the slums and he was now lodging at Albert Street Police Station, with 27 other constables, 20 prisoners and a homeless cotton-spinner. His mother and sister were living nearby in a shared house. Mary, 58, was working as a seamstress and Teresa, 23, as a silk binder in a local textile mill. Caminada’s brother, John Baptiste, now aged 32, had moved to Nottingham, where he was working as a bookkeeper.

  However, despite the improvement in Caminada’s personal circumstances, life was about to become even tougher on the streets when he encountered ruthless career criminal, Bob Horridge. In 1869 complaints were coming into the Manchester Detective Office from errand boys whose parcels were being stolen. A man would approach the messengers and offer to deliver their consignments to spare them the journey. Unsurprisingly, the packages never reached their destination. One day, two errand boys caught the conman, and he turned out to be a close acquaintance of an ex-convict called Robert Horridge, who had been receiving the stolen parcels. PC Caminada called on Horridge at his home, accompanied by an inspector.

  During the interview, Horridge became sullen and menacing. When he raised his scarred fists to threaten the policemen, Caminada took action: ‘This led me to seize him and force him into a corner of the room, where I kept him until the search was completed’. Unable to find any evidence of the scam the officers left but, from that moment on, Caminada and Horridge became deadly rivals: ‘We always knew each other afterwards, and whenever we met “Bob” would clench his teeth at me; but I always kept up a bold front to him, and never allowed him to think I was afraid of him’.

  It was not long before Caminada had his chance to arrest Horridge, for the theft of a watch. On account of his previous ‘bad character’, Horridge was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. Outraged by the severe sentence, he swore that on his release he would kill the policeman he considered responsible. During the next 20 years, Caminada and Horridge would come face-to-face many times, as the infamous thief continued to terrorise the streets of the city, with the detective always close on his tail. Horridge committed bold robberies, daring escapes and repeated assaults on police officers, including attempted murder.

  Almost two decades later, the rivals would meet for the final time in a life-threatening confrontation, but in the meantime PC Caminada’s career was on the rise.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Detective Jerome’:

  Racecourse Duty and Street Brawls

  (1871–1876)

  On 2 March 1871, Police Constable Caminada was promoted to the rank of sergeant and, because ‘he showed much aptitude for Detective work’, he was transferred to the detective department. His professional ambition fulfilled, the newly appointed detective could now tackle crime in earnest.

  The detective department of the Manchester City Police Force was in E Division and operated from the town hall, then located in King Street in the heart of the commercial district. However, plans were already under way for a new town hall that would dominate Manchester’s developing cityscape. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the new Gothic-style building was opened in 1877, situated not far from where Caminada had lived as a boy. The police department occupied a suite of rooms in the back courtyard including an inquiry room, a rest room for officers on duty and six 13ft by 8ft cells, each one equipped with a water closet. The cobbled courtyard in the centre provided lighting and ventilation. It had a dipped pavement for the Black Marias to enter laden with prisoners. Detective Caminada would spend the rest of his career working in this building, eventually rising through the ranks to the position of detective superintendent.

  Caminada was initially one of 23 detective sergeants. Every Friday at noon, they would all attend a parade at the town hall, where they would confer with the chief officer about ongoing inquiries. They were required to work 52 hours a week and had to submit regular reports of arrests, visits and cases. When he was promoted from police constable to detective sergeant, Caminada’s salary would have almost doubled to around £2 per week. In addition, although the detectives’ activities were mostly confined to crimes in their own division, their services could be hired out privately for special duty elsewhere in Manchester, (for 10s 6d a day) and outside the city (at a daily rate of £1 1s, plus expenses and third class travel). Detective Caminada enthusiastically embraced this new opportunity and one of his first assignments away from home was at the Grand National in Aintree during 1871.

  Horse-racing became increasingly popular throughout the nineteenth century and the racing season attracted huge numbers of people. As captured in William Powell Frith’s famous painting, Derby Day (1856–58), all walks of life assembled at the racecourses to enjoy a day out. Well-heeled gentlemen rubbed shoulders with rural labourers wearing traditional smocks. Ladies in fine dresses indulged in picnics under lace parasols, while their children watched acrobats and tumblers perform tricks and gypsy women read fortunes nearby. All humanity was jostled together in the throng – politicians, aristocrats, factory workers and, of course, the criminal fraternity.

  The most serious crime associated with racing was horse-stealing and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes investigate a missing racehorse in ‘Star Blaze’ (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1892). However, the most common offences were swindling and pickpocketing as racecourses, in Caminada’s experience, were the ideal places to ‘pluck greenhorns’ (naïve newcomers): ‘A racecourse is the centre of demoralisation to a neighbourhood for miles around and draws to it, as if by magnetic force, the scampdom of the country’.

  The pickings were so rich that sharps, mobsmen and fake bookmakers flocked to the races to line their pockets. One of the most common tricksters was the ‘thimble-rigger’ who, with three small cups and a dried pea, outwitted day-trippers who laid bets that they could keep their eyes on the ball. Other gambling games included the three-card trick, loaded dice and weighted balls. Experienced magsmen were highly skilled and usually worked with an accomplice in the crowd to raise the stakes of the game. If spectators managed to keep hold of their money and resist the temptation of the side stalls, they could still lose it to a pickpocket.

  The most agile thieves had no trouble slipping through the crowds at the races, lifting purses and watches, before disappearing again. These were no ordinary criminals,
but were well-practised experts, who worked in teams. The gangs would select an appropriate victim and one of the mobsmen would come alongside him or her, as if squeezed by the crowd. While the victim’s attention was focused on the race, the dipper would slip his fingers into a waistcoat or pocket and relieve the innocent spectator of his watch. Sometimes one pickpocket would distract the ‘mark’ by pushing into him, while an accomplice ‘dipped’ his pockets. As soon as the victim was successfully fleeced, the gang would simply melt away into the masses, their ‘fences’ waiting nearby to receive the stolen goods. These opportunistic crimes were so prevalent at race meetings that detectives would be sent from all over the country to watch over the unsuspecting public.

  Before Detective Sergeant Caminada had even arrived at the racecourse at Aintree, he spotted two men whose appearance suggested that ‘they followed no legitimate calling’. He decided to tail them and before long observed the tricksters in action. The pair entered a booth on the race-ground, where they stayed until the bell rang to clear the course. Caminada spotted them again, lurking near the grandstand, opposite the brick bars of the lower-class enclosure. This narrow space between the bars and the stand was one of the busiest of the ground and a great crowd had gathered there. One of the men positioned himself next to a punter, who was studying a race card that he was holding in both hands. The thief moved closer, clutching his own race card, until his elbows were touching those of the race-goer. His companion stood behind and slid his hands beneath the mark’s elbows, lifting his gold watch from his breast pocket. Unfortunately, when the bell rang announcing the entrance of the horses, the detective lost his quarry in the ensuing rush. He was devastated: ‘Here, on the first occasion when I was sent away from home on special duty, I had just been on the point of making an excellent capture and of earning the approval of my superiors, when all in a moment the opportunity was swept away’.