The Real Sherlock Holmes

by Angela Buckley

  Detective Caminada accompanied Mrs King to the police station where, after she had identified the deceased child’s clothing as that of Mrs Allen’s baby, the investigation began. Around the same time, enquiries were initiated on behalf of Mrs Frances Remington, a cook, whose step-daughter had been missing since the previous May. Elizabeth Ann Remington, 25, had been in service away from home as a domestic servant and, despite being engaged to be married to a young man called Albert Barnesley, she had mysteriously disappeared whilst visiting her cousin in Morecambe. Her fiancé had written to the cousin, only to discover that Elizabeth Ann had never arrived in Morecambe. Every effort was made to trace her but without success, until Mrs Remington decided it was time to call the police.

  As the investigation into the unknown child’s death gathered pace, Elizabeth Ann Remington suddenly turned up to see her stepmother in Rochdale. When Mrs Remington suggested that Elizabeth had been having an illicit relationship with her employer, her step-daughter was outraged and denied all accusations. However, on 28 September Caminada and his colleague took the landlady, Mrs King, to Burnley, where she identified Elizabeth Ann Remington as ‘Mrs Allen’, the mother of the deceased infant. The detective arrested Elizabeth Ann on suspicion of having murdered her illegitimate child. Throughout the investigation it had been presumed that the father of the infant was a ‘man of substance’, as this would explain his motive for concealing the birth in order to preserve his reputation. In her statement to the police Elizabeth Ann confirmed that this was the case.

  Ashworth Read, aged 47, was a cotton waste dealer, who owned Spruce Mill. Married with four children, the youngest of whom was four years old, he lived with his family in Burnley. According to the 1891 census they employed one domestic servant: Elizabeth Ann Remington. When Read discovered that Elizabeth was pregnant with his child, he moved her to Manchester, where they met every day at the station.

  On the day of the child’s death, Elizabeth Ann stated that they had taken the tram with the child to Cheetham Hill and entered the woods at Blackley. She recalled that Read had soaked a handkerchief in water and given it to her to place on the child’s mouth, which she did. After removing it, Read repeated the action and shortly after the child was dead. He wrapped the body in brown paper and left it unburied there in the woods, where the Shorrocks brothers found it. Perhaps Read had hoped that the body would be eaten by animals and become unidentifiable.

  Detective Caminada went to the Royal Exchange, where Read was well known as a regular trader and arrested him. He charged them both with murder, but apart from Elizabeth Ann’s testimony there was still no concrete evidence to link Read to the case, so Caminada began to piece together the events that had led to the gruesome discovery in the woods at Blackley.

  The detective quickly confirmed the connection between the suspects, before and after the child was born. The son of the hotelkeeper, nine-year-old James King, identified the prisoners and said that he had seen them together several times, whilst he was playing in the street. Other witnesses came forward to corroborate his statement. A publican had noticed them taking tea together in his tavern and William Gordon, caretaker of St Michael’s Flags, the site of a former paupers’ graveyard near Angel Meadow, had seen both the prisoners regularly throughout May and June. Read would bring food and the pair would sit there together for a while. He had not noticed whether Elizabeth Ann was pregnant, but he saw her crying on two occasions. James Bartholomew, the verger of nearby St Michael and All Angels’ Church, also spotted the couple on the Flags. He said that they usually stayed for about an hour and once, when she had dropped her mackintosh, he had thought that Elizabeth might be expecting a child.

  Caminada also acquired the evidence of a tobacconist, John Waters, who said that the prisoners had entered his newsagent’s on New Bridge Street, to take shelter from the rain. He remembered offering Elizabeth Ann a chair because she looked ill. The final witness statement was from John Stone, a detective at Victoria Railway Station. He had seen the couple in the station refreshment room and on platform six, from which the trains ran to Burnley. The case was building and, when Caminada discovered letters from Elizabeth’s fiancé at Read’s mill, he was certain that both suspects were guilty. In order to secure his conviction Caminada produced evidence from a tram guard who recognised the prisoners; they had travelled in his tramcar towards Cheetham Hill at 1pm on the day of the murder. The guard, Henry Spencer, confirmed that they had alighted at the tram office with the child. Another tram guard, Matthew Peam, saw the woman returning alone at about 2.30pm. He had noticed her because she kept bursting into tears.

  At the end of October Ashworth Read and Elizabeth Ann Remington appeared at the Manchester Police Court and, after the initial hearing, the case was referred to the Assizes in Liverpool. Before the trial the infant’s body was exhumed to check whether the brown paper, which had a distinctive blue lining, was the same as some burned at the mill following Read’s arrest. The evidence was inconclusive.

  However, the case opened in Liverpool amid intense speculation, on 23 November 1893. Spectators watched as the two prisoners stepped forward to the dock. Read seemed slightly nervous but self-possessed. His hair and beard were neatly trimmed and he wore a tightly-buttoned dark blue overcoat. Elizabeth Ann, on the other hand, dressed in a jacket and hat, was highly distressed. She buried her tear-swollen face in a handkerchief, weeping loudly when the letter from her former fiancé was read out.

  Throughout the trial Read rose frequently from his seat and leaned on the rails of the dock. He appeared at ease and assured of his freedom as the witnesses presented their statements. The Burnley Express remarked on his apparently carefree demeanour:

  So self-possessed was he that once, at least, he actually joined in the smile and laugh which some trifling incident caused in Court. Throughout his case his bearing was in very marked contrast to that of the girl.

  A look of intense relief passed over Read’s face as the judge concluded that, despite a compelling cross-examination by Detective Caminada, the evidence was not sufficient to convict either of the defendants. Ashworth Read and Elizabeth Ann Remington were discharged and left the court together to the hearty congratulations of their friends and family, including Mrs Read, who welcomed her husband with open arms. The following day Ashworth Read resumed his work on the trading floor at the Royal Exchange. Once the rumour of his presence spread, a crowd of heckling businessmen chased him from the building. As recalled by Caminada: ‘This was, probably, one of the most remarkable scenes that ever took place on ‘Change’.

  Infant deaths from natural causes were commonplace in Victorian England, with particularly high mortality rates in the cities. Therefore, it was rare for the circumstances of a child’s death to be considered suspicious. The exact number of children killed deliberately is unknown, but as Adrian Gray quotes in Crime and Criminals of Victorian England, in 1864, 2,305 deaths of children under one year old were due to unspecified causes and between 1863 and 1887 63 per cent of murders were of infants.

  The situation was even more precarious for illegitimate children who, like the child of Ashworth Read and Elizabeth Ann Remington, were generally seen as a burden for their unmarried parents. Many single women who gave birth would be cast out from their family and left to fend for themselves. Shunned by society, their options were very limited: entering the workhouse; starvation on the streets; or giving their child over to the care of a dubious and often ruthless baby farmer. Employers would not hire domestic servants with babies and women who worked in mills and factories had to leave their infants at home. Farmed out, these poor mites were often subjected to neglect, abuse and, in the worst cases, murder. Some illegitimate children died and were disposed of without their births ever being registered; it was as though they had never existed.

  This disregard for infants was reinforced in law: infanticide did not exist as a separate offence and defendants could only be tried under a charge of wilful murder which, as a capital offence
carried the death penalty. Juries were very reluctant to convict, except on the strongest evidence. From the 1860s, executions for the murder of young children were very rare and female offenders were usually charged with concealment of birth, which carried a much more lenient punishment, with a maximum sentence of two years. It was not surprising therefore that Read and Remington were acquitted of the murder of their child in Blackley Woods. However, Detective Caminada would investigate another questionable infant death with a similar beginning but a very different outcome.

  A young lad was playing football with his brother on waste ground near Ashton Canal, just outside Manchester city centre. When he went to wash his boots the boy spotted the legs of a child sticking up from the water. He pulled out the body to discover that it was a female infant, fully dressed, and with a piece of cord tied tightly around her neck. Heavy stones had been attached to the child’s waist to weigh her down: this was a clear case of infanticide. The inquest confirmed that the baby was around three months old and she had been in the water for between one and four days.

  All attempts by the police to identify the baby proved fruitless, until the widespread publicity of the case yielded some positive leads. Detective Caminada headed the enquiry and before long a lodging-house keeper came forward to identify the child’s clothing. The infant’s parents had been staying with Mrs French in central Manchester under the name of ‘Mr and Mrs Hirst’. About a month after their arrival Mrs Hirst was confined in the maternity hospital and then returned with a child, whom she called Maud. Baby Maud was baptised in St Luke’s Church, Chorlton-on-Medlock. Her parents were Joseph Hirst, 26, a bricklayer and his wife Martha, aged 20, a laundress. Despite their respectable veneer, it did not take long for Caminada to uncover the truth: Joseph Hirst was a violent man who mistreated his wife.

  One day the landlady, Mrs French, heard a scream from their room, after which the Hirsts went out. They returned without the baby, explaining that they had left her with her grandmother in Stockport. Three days later Maud’s body was found in the canal. Detective Caminada located the grandmother in Stockport and discovered that the couple were not married and that the child’s mother was actually called Martha Goddard. Keeping the grandmother’s house under surveillance in case Martha returned, he tracked the putative father to another property nearby. When he sent a colleague disguised as a vagrant to the house, he found that the suspect was in fact Hirst’s brother, John, who confided to the undercover officer that Joseph was wanted for child murder.

  Joseph Hirst was finally arrested in Leicester, after Caminada entered his house in the early hours of the morning and handcuffed him, while he was still sleeping. The detective then located Martha Goddard and took the pair back to Manchester to be charged with the wilful murder of their daughter. In her statement Martha confirmed that she had been the victim of abuse by her partner, which was corroborated by a medical examination. She had left the child alone with Hirst and when she returned Maud was dead. When Caminada confronted him with the allegations, Hirst admitted his guilt: ‘I own to it all. I don’t expect any pity; the thing is too bad’.

  Martha Ann Goddard was acquitted of murder, but Joseph Hirst was found guilty and received the death sentence. He was executed on 3 August 1896 within the precincts of Strangeways Prison. At a quarter to eight in the morning, a crowd of 500 people had gathered outside the gaol in front of the flagstaff, where the black flag would be raised after the execution. Soon after the prison clock struck eight, the sound of the falling of the trap door could be heard, which signalled that the hanging had taken place. The black flag was hoisted up the pole, where it fluttered in the breeze as the crowd carried on their journey to work. It was the first time in Caminada’s career of almost 30 years that an investigation had ended on the scaffold.

  Detective Caminada was involved in a number of murder cases, but most of them did not result in convictions. In 1889 he had apprehended the prime suspect in the murder of a pawnbroker’s assistant in Atherton, near Wigan, but it was a case of mistaken identity and another man was later hanged for the crime. Two years later Scotland Yard enlisted Caminada’s help to investigate the Kentish Town and Marylebone murders, which involved the deaths of two women. Although Caminada arrested the suspect, he was later discharged due to insufficient evidence. The real killer was never found. Other cases included the murder of a man in Angel Meadow during a domestic argument, who died of shock when an oil lamp was thrown at him, and the mysterious death of a woman who was hurled down a warehouse lift. Both investigations ended inconclusively.

  During Detective Caminada’s long police career, he investigated relatively few suspicious deaths. Murder was much less common than other crimes and in 1892 the annual report of the Registrar General recorded that, out of 32,524 inquests into sudden death in England and Wales, only 76 were committed to trial for wilful murder. The only murder cases that Caminada included in his memoirs were the two incidents of infanticide described above.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘A Chronicle of Crime’

  (1895–1899)

  We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.

  (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity, 1891)

  Sherlock Holmes’s scathing attack on the quality of the writing within police accounts encapsulates the rivalry between the authors of detective fiction and real-life detectives who wrote their memoirs, towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s, stories about imaginary super-sleuths from the pens of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe and the legendary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, increased in popularity. The appearance of Sherlock Holmes in 1887 established a genre that remains fashionable to the present day. Like modern readers, the Victorians were hooked on the unravelling of mysteries, the solving of crimes and the literary heroes who outwitted dangerous criminals.

  Following on from the spate of mid-century detective novels written in the form of memoirs, detective fiction presented the private inquiry agent as a ‘sleuth-hound’: powerful, brilliant and infallible. With Sherlock Holmes as the epitome of the hero-detective they tracked deadly criminals, exposing their nefarious crimes and dastardly wrongdoings. By comparison the police were presented as mediocre, often inept and nearly always limited in vision and ingenuity: ‘Inspector Gregory, to whom the case has been committed, is an extremely competent officer. Were he but gifted with imagination he might rise to great heights in his profession’, quipped Sherlock Holmes in Silver Blaze (1892).

  The unflattering portrayal of police detectives in detective fiction inspired a new trend in real-life law enforcers publishing their memoirs to give a realistic insight into their work. Most early memoirs were written by detectives from the Metropolitan Police, notably from Scotland Yard. In Manchester Superintendent James Bent published his memoirs in 1891, after 42 years in the Lancashire Constabulary. Detective Chief Inspector Jerome Caminada soon followed suit.

  In February 1895, Caminada announced the imminent publication of his memoirs in the press. The Birmingham Daily Post anticipated that the book ‘should make racy and instructive reading’. Purchase was by subscription only and potential readers were required to sign up for a copy in advance at Sherratt & Hughes Bookshop in St Ann’s Square. The price was 10s 6d (about £30 today). By comparison, the first edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes had been published three years earlier for six shillings. In spite of the high cost, Caminada’s publisher, John Heywood, was so overwhelmed with orders that printing had to be delayed.

  Twenty-Five Years of Detective Life by Jerome Caminada was typical of the emerging genre. Based on 50 cases, ‘dealing with all manner of crime and criminals’, the main focus was the modus operandi of the villains that he had encountered in his daily work and the daring exploits he undertook to put them behind bars. A self-made man from a working class background, Caminada was the quintessential author-detective of the time, benefiting
from the trend within the publishing industry that sought to engage the interest of a wider market of newly literate potential readers. Furthermore, it was an opportunity to counteract the negative image of police officers portrayed in detective fiction. In the preface to the first volume, he challenged the preconceptions reinforced by Sherlock Holmes:

  the stories related in the following pages – unlike so many of the so-called stories of detectives – are founded on facts, and are, from first to last, and in all their details, truthful histories of the crimes they purport to describe, and of the detection and punishment of the criminals.

  There is very little information within the memoirs about Caminada’s personal life, which was characteristic of their type. These were histories of work, rather than stories about domestic arrangements. The main purpose was to prove the efficiency, skills, intelligence and dogged determination of real operatives in their daily battle with criminals. In addition, Caminada sought to give his readers a vivid insight into the nature of his city, dating from when he first started out on the beat.

  During his three decades in the police force, Manchester had begun to change: the slums had been cleared by the construction of the railways, standards of living had improved due to social legislation and crime was decreasing, thanks to a more efficient and extensive police force. Caminada’s valuable contribution was recognised by the Manchester Courier: ‘It is not too much to say that his name is now a “household word,” although in certain haunts it is not received with welcome’. Despite these improvements, poverty was still a harsh reality for many and Caminada gave a voice to the dispossessed, by describing their unbearable living conditions in evocative detail. Unashamed of his poverty-stricken childhood, he used his knowledge to instruct the more comfortable inhabitants of Manchester about how the other half lived, exhorting them to be sympathetic to their less fortunate neighbours: ‘let us tone down our horror into pity, and in every observation that we make let mercy temper justice’.