Chapter Six
‘Even my own fireside’:
Trouble at Home
(1884)
On a cold, showery morning, a week before Christmas 1881, Jerome Caminada married Amelia Wainhouse in the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, Manchester. The church had been built on Oxford Road only a decade before, designed by Joseph Hansom, famous for the ‘Patent Safety Cabs’ that still bear his name. The detective, aged 37, made his vows to his bride, who was 10 years his junior, in a simple ceremony witnessed by Amelia’s older brother, Thomas, and her sister, Sarah Anne.
Amelia was the daughter of Joseph Wainhouse, an Irish ribbon weaver, and his wife, Mary. Like the Caminadas, the family came from humble beginnings in the mill-dominated suburb of Hulme, depicted by Engels as ‘one great working people’s district’. Due to the steep rise in the population following the Industrial Revolution, it was an area of tiny back-to-back houses, inadequate sanitation and dreadful conditions. Born in 1855, Amelia had three older siblings: Thomas, William and Sarah Anne, and a younger brother, Joseph. Unlike Caminada’s family, all the Wainhouse children survived childhood and they quickly left the slums behind. At the time of her wedding, Amelia was living with her brother Thomas and his wife, Annie. Aged 31, Thomas was a successful chemical salesman and Annie was an organist and music teacher. Amelia’s other brothers also shared the house, along with their mother Mary, 58, now a widow. William, 28, was a pattern maker for an engineer and Joseph, 22, a lithographic printer. Amelia was also working, as a saleswoman, probably with Thomas.
Further proof of the Wainhouse family’s success was the fact that they had moved to Moss Side. In the mid-nineteenth century Moss Side was still a quiet, picturesque village on the outskirts of Manchester. Between 1861 and 1901, the population of this sleepy suburban backwater increased tenfold to 27,000, as it was subsumed into the urban conglomeration. In the early 1880s, although they lived in a street of small terraced houses, the Wainhouses would have enjoyed a relatively pleasant lifestyle in a mixed area, which also included large, middle class houses, with notable residents such as Rupert Potter, father of children’s author Beatrix. Friedrich Engels took shelter in Moss Side after his travels around the unsanitary inner city. Close to Alexandra Park, with many fine buildings like the Denmark Hotel, it was a far cry from Amelia’s birthplace in the slums still home to most of the Caminadas.
Jerome and his new wife set up home in Old Trafford, another leafy suburb closer to the city centre. They bought a house named Fern Villa, at 26 Eastnor Street, near to Old Trafford Police Station and not far from the tramway into central Manchester. Their first son, Louis, was born at home on 24 April 1883 and later that year, they moved along the street to number 22. Known as ‘the playground of Manchester’, Old Trafford was enjoying the final years of its heyday and the wealthy lived in elegant villas, still overlooking green pastures and farmland. Local landowners like the de Trafford family had encouraged the development of cultural and leisure facilities, such as the Old Trafford Botanical Gardens, which opened to the public in 1831 and hosted the Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857. Its biggest event would be the Royal Jubilee Exhibition, attended by Queen Victoria in May 1887. Other attractions included the Pomona Gardens, with its impressive glasshouse, and the Manchester Cricket Club (now the Lancashire Cricket Club).
This salubrious district began to attract the professional middle classes who aspired to a superior quality of life, away from the grime and smoke of the city, especially as transport links improved access to the centre. As a well-paid police inspector, Detective Caminada was one of these new urban residents. He also became a landlord, purchasing a number of houses in neighbouring Lucy Street, which he let. However, despite Mr and Mrs Caminada’s cosy new life in the suburbs, crime was never far away and it would not be long before a shady character came knocking at their door.
On Tuesday 18 March 1884, the Caminada family were enjoying a rare morning together at their home. A delicate child, baby Louis was sleeping after his lunch when the doorbell rang. Jerome opened the door to find a ‘stylishly dressed man, fluent in speech’ on his doorstep, whom he recognised as accomplished swindler, ‘Handsome Charlie’. Clearly failing to recall Caminada, Handsome Charlie brandished a letter about a loan, which he claimed had allegedly come from the astonished detective. After Caminada had invited him into the house to discuss the matter, Handsome Charlie explained that he wished to borrow £50, for which he would pay £10 interest for one month. He was at pains to add that the loan was for his friend, on whose behalf he was making enquiries. After reassuring Caminada that his friend had securities in the London and North Western Railway and the Bridgewater Canal, Caminada arranged for the friend to call the following afternoon.
At 2pm the next day, Caminada found an elderly, well-dressed gentleman squinting at the house number in the strong sunlight. Surprised that Handsome Charlie’s accomplice had actually turned up, Caminada invited him inside. The gentleman was John Mosley, 60, a tobacconist from Ardwick, one mile east of the city centre. Mosley said that he had £150 to draw at the end of the month, and would leave some valuables as security for the loan, including a gold watch and chain (a gift from his daughter), three rings and several pawn tickets. After Mosley emptied his pockets, Caminada revealed his true identity: ‘Now, my friend, you can leave the jewellery here and go and bring your friend “George the Greek”. If you do not I will have you locked up for attempting to defraud me out of fifty pounds by means of worthless jewellery’. George the Greek was another daring swindler and a known associate of Mosley and Handsome Charlie.
The elderly gentleman’s response was to jump up, stamp his feet and slap the table in indignation. Despite the fact that this was taking place in his home, with his wife and child nearby, Caminada remained calm. He called to Amelia, who was in the next room, to bring him the cash box, which quietened Mosley down. Caminada took out pen and paper to write a promissory note for £60, payable the following day. Furious that the detective had not handed over any cash, Mosley flew once again into a violent rage. Caminada, after first putting on his hat, seized the swindler by the collar and dragged him to Old Trafford Police Station.
Leaving Mosley in custody he then went to his address in Ardwick, only to discover that Mosley and Handsome Charlie were neighbours and used each other’s addresses to defraud potential victims and evade arrest. This time their game was up: Mosley was found guilty and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Handsome Charlie, but he managed to avoid the law for the time being. Later it was revealed that a neighbour had written the letter with the detective’s address, to lure the con man straight into a trap.
While criminals rarely came knocking on his door, Detective Caminada’s keen instinct for scams often saved him from being robbed. He once prevented a large-scale fraud that touched even the town hall and the local police constabulary.
Caminada and his wife regularly had coal delivered to their house and, keeping a strict eye on domestic expenditure, the detective was in the habit of checking the amount delivered. Examining his cellar one day he became suspicious; the two tons of coal usually delivered should fill his cellar, but this time, an additional two hundredweight had apparently been required to replenish the same space. Unwilling to let it pass without investigation, Caminada went directly to the wharf to order the next load from the proprietor, who was a neighbour and close friend. After questioning the weight of the previous supply, he arranged a delivery for a new consignment of their ‘best’ coal. The foreman made out the order in the presence of the detective and this time only one ton and 18 hundredweights filled the cellar.
His suspicions confirmed, Caminada now had to find proof of the coal agent’s double dealing: ‘I determined to be even with the coal merchant, even if I waited 20 years for an opportunity’. He did not have to wait long. Having emptied his cellar of every last lump of coal, he arranged the next delivery for 7am the foll
owing Thursday. When the appointed time arrived he watched out for the carter in the garden, but he did not turn up and Caminada had to leave for work. When he returned home later, the coal had already been delivered.
Despite this setback, the detective persisted and a week later he took one of the carters to a local alehouse for a drink. During their conversation he discovered that a disagreement had taken place between the proprietor and the carters over stoppage of pay during Whit Week and they had decided to take industrial action. This was Caminada’s opportunity to strike at the heart of this dubious business. After interviewing several more disgruntled carters, he found that there were two systems of issuing tickets, one set giving the correct weight and another, with two or three hundredweights added, the latter being in operation when the customer had no means of checking. In addition, the coal merchant often sold interier quality ‘seconds’ coal at the same price as ‘best’.
After amassing enough evidence, Caminada arrested the proprietor, his manager, the foreman and the clerk. The manager, who was also the son-in-law of the owner, declared that the responsibility was entirely his and, after a protracted trial, they were all convicted of conspiracy to defraud, except the proprietor, who was acquitted but had to pay the legal expenses. In his summing up, the judge complimented Caminada on his ‘detective qualities’. The coal merchant had gained contracts to supply fuel, not only to the Caminada household, but also to the Corporation of Manchester at the Town Hall, to the Police Court and to police stations throughout the city. Caminada’s suspicions were justified:
Thus the Corporation, amongst others, received the benefit of the exposure and prosecution, whilst I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had broken down a conspiracy which had not spared even my own fireside.
Detective Caminada and his wife were now settled in their comfortable house in Old Trafford and life had improved for the rest of his family too, although not quite to the same extent. By the mid-1870s, Caminada’s mother, Mary, had left the rookeries of central Manchester and moved to Barton upon Irwell, about five miles from Jerome. Barton was a suburb of Salford and, although the area was predominantly populated by textile workers, Mary no longer had to share her home with several other families. In 1881, aged 66, she was living with her daughter Teresa, 28, who still worked as a silk winder in a local factory. Five years earlier, Teresa had given birth to an illegitimate daughter, Annie, who also lived with them. There was no father named on her birth certificate.
Although life was better, Mary still had major challenges to face. The census revealed that she had lost her sight and her blindness was likely to have been a tertiary stage symptom of syphilis, which seems to have blighted her adult life and the lives of her children.
Mary’s other surviving child, John Baptiste, had spent most of his adult life away from home, but things had not been any easier for him. In the early 1860s, he had moved to Newcastle-upon-Lyme, where he worked as a letter carrier for the British Postal Service. In 1868 he married Kezia Skey, a farmer’s daughter originally from Gloucestershire, and later that year she gave birth to twins, Louis and Teresa. Aged just five weeks, Teresa had died of marasmus, a wasting disease, usually due to severe malnutrition and often an indication of inherited syphilis. Teresa’s twin brother survived and the couple had another child, Florence Mary, who would later become inextricably linked with one of her Uncle Jerome’s most famous cases.
By the early 1880s, John Baptiste and his family had returned to Manchester and settled in Cheetham, another densely populated area of mill workers near the centre of the city and the location of the forbidding Strangeways Prison. John worked as a druggist, making and supplying pills and other chemicals from his home.
In Victorian England, many impoverished families like the Caminadas left British shores for a new life abroad. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, 11.4 million people made the momentous decision to emigrate to countries such as America, Canada and Australia, which were then British colonies. Many took advantage of government-assisted passage schemes, which encouraged workers from impoverished rural communities and insalubrious urban conditions to take their chances elsewhere, in the hope of a better quality of life.
During the summer of 1884, Detective Caminada exposed a treacherous scam which exploited the aspirations of the poor in Manchester. Advertisements appeared on placards throughout the city publicising The British Employment, Emigration and Aid Society, which claimed to provide opportunities for work overseas by setting people up in the colonies as farmers. The proprietor, Walter Hamilton, ran his operation from impressively furnished offices in the city centre, where he held lectures on the benefits of emigration, collected subscriptions and received endorsements from prominent citizens, including the Bishop of Manchester. Attractive prospectuses and penny pamphlets filled with stories of enterprise and success, drew flocks of people, many of whom then bought tickets for a passage abroad. Before long, however, the naïve victims discovered that this promise was a sham.
Complaints started to come into the detective office and armed with several witness statements, Caminada arrested Hamilton while he was holding forth in the middle of one of his lectures in Burnley Marketplace. He later found Hamilton’s phony pamphlets and other incriminating evidence at his premises. The sophisticated swindler was convicted and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. Caminada commented wryly that, had the transportation of criminals to the colonies still been in vogue at that time, Hamilton would have been able to ‘realise his dream of emigration free of cost to himself’. Following his conviction, Caminada discovered, among Hamilton’s papers, a letter from three sisters who had travelled from Ireland to participate in the fake emigration scheme. They were just 10, 16 and 19 years old and had sold everything they owned in their bid for a new life overseas. Moved by their plight, Caminada started a subscription for them, raising £12 (around £1,000 today). He also obtained clothing from some local ladies and secured the young women a passage to Canada.
As the emigration scam was reaching its conclusion, Caminada was promoted to Detective Chief Inspector in June 1884. But at home, he and his wife were about to experience dark times reminiscent of his own early years. Just three weeks after his promotion, baby Louis died. Aged 14 months, his death was attributed to congenital heart disease, an inherited condition which had killed Jerome’s father almost 40 years before.
After Louis’s death, Amelia quickly fell pregnant again and their daughter was born the following spring on 9 April 1885. Another sickly child, she died at just six weeks old of ‘general debility’: a catch-all phrase that indicated the absence of a clear diagnosis. Just over a year later, their third child, Charles, was born in September 1886, yet in a cruel twist of fate, on Christmas Day, the anniversary of the deaths of two of Caminada’s siblings, Charles died, aged four months. He too had suffered from a congenital heart condition. Losing three children in as many years must have been devastating for Jerome and Amelia. They buried their babies in the family grave in Southern Cemetery, a large municipal graveyard in southern Manchester. The poignant inscription reads: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’ (Mark 10:14).
Despite these terrible losses during their early family life, the Caminadas went on to have two more children and were eventually able to enjoy their secure and prosperous home. But for many in Manchester, home was not a place of refuge. Every week, after toiling long hours in the mills and factories, people flocked to the beerhouses and gin palaces to drink away their sorrows, causing endless trouble for Detective Caminada and his colleagues, as they sought to keep the peace on the turbulent streets of the city.
Chapter Seven
Gin Palaces, Gambling Dens and a Cross-Dressing Ball
(1885)
The gin-shops are in full feather – their swinging doors never hang a moment still. Itinerant bands blow and bang their loudest; organ boys grind m
onotonously; ballad singers or flying stationers make roaring proclamations of their wares. The street is one swarming, buzzing mass of people.
(Angus Bethune Reach, Morning Chronicle, 1849)
During the nineteenth century, Manchester city centre was a magnet for revellers, and Saturday night was the high point of the week. Ready to spend their weekly wages, workers flocked into the beerhouses, music saloons, theatres and taverns for a night out to forget their daily grind. Everyone was out to have a good time and nocturnal entertainment knew no bounds.
Detective Caminada was no stranger to the hectic nightlife in his home city, especially as he had spent his early years in Peter Street, the heart of Manchester’s theatreland. Near to his birthplace was St Peter’s Square with a concert hall and casino. On his former street there was the Folly Theatre (later re-named the Tivoli), an early music hall, converted from a Methodist chapel in 1865, and the Theatre Royal, one of the first theatres in the city, which opened in 1815. Next door is the Free Trade Hall, the former home of the Hallé Orchestra, founded in 1857, and a place where Caminada solved a rather unusual case.
A complaint was made about sheets of music being stolen from the Free Trade Hall. Every night during the concerts, music would disappear with the thief leaving no clues behind as to their identity. Caminada arranged to have a large, fake piano box made with discreet holes cut in it, so he could hide inside it and observe what was going on. On the evening of the next concert, he was in position when the musicians went out onto the stage, leaving the conductor and the librarian, who was in charge of the music, in the anteroom. Both men were above the slightest suspicion. At 7.30pm, the conductor joined his orchestra and the concert began. Under the vigilant eye of Caminada nothing untoward took place until the second half of the performance, when the librarian started rifling through the music. His eyes widened as he spotted a piece that grabbed his attention. Scanning the room to make sure that he was alone, the librarian slipped two sheets from the pile into his pocket.
The Real Sherlock Holmes Page 7