The Real Sherlock Holmes

by Angela Buckley

  Furthermore, Caminada engaged in many charitable works and one particularly poignant campaign concerned a young man, who had lost his life while trying to save that of another. John Amos McAvoy, 24, was a window cleaner living in Richmond Street, possibly in one of the houses owned by Caminada. Living close to the Bridgewater Canal, the family kept a lifebuoy and grappling irons on hand for the regular occasions when people fell into the water. In July 1907 some young boys were bathing in the canal when one fell in, whilst filling a water pistol.

  The alarm was raised and John McAvoy jumped in to rescue him. After previously having saved many other people from drowning, tragically he died in the attempt. Three onlookers dived in and rescued the boy, who had panicked and pulled McAvoy under the water. The young lad survived and was ‘apparently little the worse for his immersion’ (Manchester Courier). Jerome Caminada formed a small committee to raise funds for a memorial stone to mark John’s grave in Southern Cemetery, as well as some money for his bereaved parents. He wrote several letters to the local press to solicit subscribers, so that ‘the heroic but unrecorded deeds which he accomplished should not pass unnoticed’.

  In 1910, at the end of his first term on the council, Jerome Caminada sought re-election, advocating lower rates and fair competition in the awarding of municipal contracts. His opponent was Labour candidate, G. F. Titt. The outcome of the election was a dead-heat between the two, each receiving exactly 1,482 votes. In an unprecedented move, the returning officer cast the deciding vote against Caminada and he lost his seat. He did not stand again.

  Jerome Caminada was recorded on the 1911 census as living with his wife in the large nine-roomed family house in Denmark Road, where he would remain for the rest of his life. His son, Charles aged 23, had taken on the family property business and was still living at home, along with his sister, Mary, 20. On the evening of the census, family friend Mary McCann was visiting the Caminadas. A 66-year-old unmarried woman also from Manchester, she was Mary’s godmother.

  At the age of 67, Caminada had retired from active work at last, but there would be one more major court case before he could enjoy a quieter life.

  Recovering from an attack of diabetes in September 1911, Jerome Caminada was enjoying a weekend alone in Rhyl, North Wales, when he paid three shillings for a day trip to Llanfair, about 30 miles further along the coast. The tour was by charabanc, a horse-drawn coach popular in the early twentieth century for outings and pleasure trips. Pulled by four horses the vehicle was at full capacity, with 22 passengers on four long seats.

  On the return journey the passengers complained about the speed of the coach, but the driver paid them no heed, egged on by a group of young lads, who were singing merrily and ringing a bell. After the rapid descent of a steep hill, one of the wheels slipped onto a grassy patch and the coach overturned, spilling its load of day-trippers into the road. Caminada was thrown out of the vehicle, losing consciousness as he hit the ground. His nose and some of his ribs were broken and he was bleeding profusely from a wound to the head.

  Two doctors attended to him at the scene of the accident, before transporting him to the Black Lion Public House in Llanfair, where he remained in bed for nine days. Once he had recovered, Caminada returned home to Manchester, but it was another three months before he was able to walk unaided. As soon as he was well enough, the ex-detective initiated a lawsuit for negligence against the proprietors of the coach company, Brookes Brothers, to recover damages for personal injuries and to pay for his nursing care.

  At the hearing in March 1912, Caminada’s representative maintained that the coach was top-heavy in structure and unsuitable for hilly country, with wide seats that hung up to 17 inches over the sides. An expert confirmed that the undercarriage was very light and the springs too weak for the weight. The driver, 23-year-old Daniel Brookes, stated that the accident had been caused by one of the leading horses shying at a pile of slates at the bottom of the hill. The coach had toppled over as he was trying to regain control of the animals. An experienced driver, Brookes had never had an accident before and he had acted appropriately in the circumstances. Daniel Roberts, the coachbuilder, testified that the charabanc was not top-heavy and that his firm had built 40 similar vehicles, none of which had ever overturned. The jury took just 15 minutes to return a verdict in favour of the defendants. Caminada had lost his final case and his health never fully recovered.

  On 10 March 1914, just five days before his seventieth birthday, Jerome Caminada died at his home in Denmark Road. The cause of death was recorded as diabetes (from which he had suffered for six years), influenza and heart disease. Four days later, a Requiem Mass was held for him at the Church of the Holy Name, where he had celebrated his marriage and the baptisms of his children. The renowned detective’s funeral was attended by many of the city’s dignitaries, including the Lord Mayor, members of the city council, several magistrates and representatives of the various organisations to which he had belonged. His former colleagues also attended to bid their comrade farewell, including ex-Detective Inspector Peter Wilson, who had worked with Caminada on many cases. After the Mass, his funeral cortège of five carriages proceeded to Southern Cemetery, where Jerome was laid to rest in the family grave.

  Judge Edward Abbot Parry gave the eulogy at Caminada’s funeral. As Judge of Manchester County Court from 1894 to 1911, he had known the detective well, describing him as ‘a great character’ and ‘good citizen’. He also praised his sterling qualities and unorthodox methods, as well as his role as a leader: ‘He was a man of resource, energy, and initiative, and he never stultified himself by a petty adherence to office regulations. He was the Garibaldi of detectives’. Furthermore, the judge remembered Caminada’s kindness, commenting wryly:

  What I want to remind my fellow-citizens, now he is gone, is that in all the miserable work he had to do, and did so ably, he was always a human being with a kind heart. He never lost his faith in human nature, though he knew more about moral diseases than most bishops.

  On a more personal note he recalled a poignant moment in their shared history, which had brought them closer together and cemented their friendship: ‘One does not readily forget a man who has been near you and done you kindness in the hour of trouble’.

  On 26 July 1898 Judge Parry had been presiding over a case against court bailiff, William Taylor, to have his licence revoked for misconduct, which would have meant the loss of Taylor’s livelihood. The court was filled to capacity and it had been a busy morning for the judge. When Judge Parry announced that Taylor was unfit to hold a bailiff’s licence, the defendant sprang up the steps and jumped onto the bench. Pulling out a revolver, he held it to the judge’s head and shot him three times. Judge Parry reeled backwards, his hand covering a wound to his cheek, while his clerk grappled with Taylor and wrestled him to the ground.

  As the scene of horror unfolded, the spectators in the public gallery began to scream and there was a mad rush towards the doors. In the struggle at the bench another shot was discharged and a bullet whizzed over the heads of the fleeing crowds. Judge Parry sustained wounds to the neck and face, but fortunately a doctor from the Manchester Royal Infirmary was present in court and he staunched the bleeding with handkerchiefs. Taylor was overpowered and dragged into another room to wait for the police.

  Superintendent Caminada was in the detective office when he received news of the attempted assassination of Judge Parry. Grabbing his revolver, he ran out of the office and jumped into a cab, heading straight to the courtroom. On arrival he accompanied the injured judge to a private nursing home and helped him into bed, before returning to the scene of the crime. Taylor was later sentenced to 20 years’ penal servitude for attempted murder.

  After the shooting Caminada investigated other ‘half-mad folk’ who sent death threats to the judge and his legal colleagues. Judge Parry recalled one case that revealed the detective’s ‘slow sense of humour’. Caminada had been interviewing one such letter writer and when he met the judge a
fterwards, he reported with a sigh:

  It’s no good, judge. I’ve been with the fellow an hour or two and I can’t knock any reason into him. He’s got hold of the wrong end of the stick, and as I keep telling him: it’s not you he wants to shoot at all – it’s the registrar.

  At the end of the eulogy, Judge Parry gave a moving summary of his colleague and friend: ‘All of us in Manchester knew Jerome Caminada’s worth as a detective; not everyone knew his honesty, faith, and kindness. May he rest in peace’.

  The judge’s sentiments were echoed in the many obituaries that appeared in the local and national press. The Daily Mail described how Detective Caminada was ‘widely known throughout the country for his clever and daring detective work’. Other newspapers reflected on how Caminada’s reputation had travelled ‘beyond the precincts of the city, and was of great service in the unravelling of many crimes’ (Manchester Courier). A more personal obituary in the Daily Despatch emphasised Caminada’s deep sense of charity, faith and loyalty:

  In his public life he was absolutely fearless, and never hesitated to back up his opinions and his principles… He was a man of strong likes and dislikes. A kindness done to him would never be forgot (sic) and the few people who were really intimate with him found him a very firm friend. On the other hand he could be a stern enemy, in his home and family life he presented an irreproachable example.

  Jerome Caminada had provided well for his family throughout his married life and after his death the gross value of his estate was £16,527 (worth almost three quarters of a million pounds today). He left all his furniture and personal possessions to his wife, Amelia, together with an indefinite income of £10 a week. The remainder of his estate was to be held in trust for his children and any future dependents. His will also included instructions for special payments: £1,000 to his nephew, Louis Caminada, the son of John Baptiste; the same to Stonyhurst College, where his own son had studied; and smaller amounts to various Catholic and civic charities.

  The year after his death, on 9 December 1915, the Caminada family celebrated the wedding of his daughter, Mary, aged 24, to Herbert Sharp, an accountant. Six weeks later her brother, Charles Bernard, married Constance Isabella Cowley. Both weddings were held in the family church of the Holy Name. The next generation soon followed, with the birth of Jerome Charles Caminada in 1916, Bernard Sharp in 1918, and Nevil Francis Caminada in 1925. Jerome’s widow, Amelia moved to Southport with her daughter’s family, where she died in 1928.

  Throughout Detective Caminada’s exceptional career he was often measured against his imaginary equivalent, and the result was not always in his favour. After his death the Manchester Courier wrote, ‘Mr Caminada was not exactly a Sherlock Holmes, but as a detective he did good service to Manchester’. The Manchester Guardian attempted to counteract this rather unfair opinion, summing up the differences between the two detectives:

  In real life the successful detective is not a man endowed with extraordinary powers of impersonation and disguise, an expert knowledge of chemistry, and a brain which has to be kept cool with wet towels, when it is at work, but rather one who has acquired by slow degrees and after many years of obscure routine a personal acquaintance at once minute and wide with habitual criminals.

  In The Sign of the Four, Sherlock Holmes listed the essential qualities for the ideal detective as the powers of observation and deduction, and knowledge. There is no doubt that Detective Jerome Caminada had all three in abundance and that he exploited his skills to fight crime on the streets of his city for more than three decades. He tackled cunning criminals and solved intriguing crimes, employing methods often as ingenious as Holmes’s, but more importantly, his adventures were completely authentic.

  His widely publicised cases could easily have provided inspiration for the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is not surprising, therefore, that Detective Caminada should have been compared, both during his lifetime and after his death, to the great Sherlock Holmes, and as Caminada was a man of strong opinions, it is only right that he should have the final word.

  Fully conscious of the fact that the stories which I have laid before the reader are perhaps crude, and without literary finish, I still venture to submit them as depicting the career of one who for more than a quarter of a century has had much to do with successful detection and punishment of crime as any police-officer in the world.

  (Jerome Caminada, Twenty-Five Years of Detective Life,

  Volume II, 1901)

  Bibliography

  General

  Caminada, Jerome, Twenty-Five Years of Detective Life, Volume I (John Heywood, 1895)

  Caminada, Jerome, Twenty-Five Years of Detective Life, Volume II (John Heywood, 1901)

  Curtis, Liz, The Cause of Ireland: From the United Irishmen to Partition (Beyond the Pale Publications, 1994)

  Pritchard, R. E., Dickens’s England: Life in Victorian Times (The History Press, 2002)

  Quinlivan, Patrick and Rose, Paul, The Fenians in England 1865–1872 (John Calder, 1982)

  Rea, Anthony, Manchester’s Little Italy: Memories of the Italian Colony of Ancoats (Neil Richardson, 1988)

  Wade, Stephen, Spies in the Empire: Victorian Military Intelligence (Anthem Press, 2007)

  Manchester

  Bethune Reach, Angus; Aspin Chris, ed. A Cotton-Fibre Halo: Manchester and the Textile Districts in 1849 (Royd Press, 2007)

  Briggs, Asa, Victorian Cities (Penguin Books, 1963)

  Cooper, Glynis, The Illustrated History of Manchester’s Suburbs (Breedon Books, 2007)

  Davies, Andrew, The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, Britain’s First Youth Cult (Milo Books, 2009)

  Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1892)

  Heaton, Frank, The Manchester Village: Deansgate Remembered (Neil Richardson, 1995)

  Jones, Steve, Manchester… The Sinister Side (Wicked Publications, 1997)

  Kidd, Alan, Manchester: A History (Carnegie Publishing, 2006)

  Makepeace, Chris, Looking Back at Hulme, Moss Side, Chorlton on Medlock & Ardwick (Willow Publishing, 1995)

  O’Neill, Joseph, Crime City: Manchester’s Victorian Underworld (Milo Books, 2008)

  Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (James Ridgeway, 1832)

  Thomson, W.H., History of Manchester to 1852 (John Sherratt and Son, 1966)

  Crime and punishment

  Chesney, Kellow, The Victorian Underworld (Penguin Books, 1991, 3rd edition)

  Dell, Simon, The Victorian Policeman (Shire Publications, 2004)

  Gray, Adrian, Crime and Criminals in Victorian England (The History Press, 2011)

  Hewitt, Eric J., A History of Policing in Manchester (E. J. Morten, 1979)

  Higgs, Michelle, Prison Life in Victorian England (Tempus, 2007)

  Schpayer-Makov, Haia, The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford University Press, 2011)

  Wade, Stephen, Tracing Your Police Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians (Pen & Sword, 2009)

  Research sources

  Newspapers:

  Aberdeen Evening Express – 1894

  Aberdeen Journal – 1890

  Birmingham Daily Post – 1886, 1890, 1895

  Blackburn Standard – 1875, 1889

  Burnley Express – 1893

  Cheshire Observer – 1884

  Daily Despatch – 1914

  Daily Mail – 1897, 1899, 1914

  Daily Telegraph – 1889

  Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette – 1890

  Gloucester Citizen – 1884

  London Standard – 1862

  Lancaster Gazette – 1889, 1893

  Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser – 1876, 1884, 1885, 1888, 1889, 1890, 1892, 1893, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1901, 1902, 1903, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1912, 1913, 1914

  Manchester Evening
Chronicle – 1899, 1901, 1914

  Manchester Evening News – 1874, 1882, 1884, 1886, 1887, 1893, 1894, 1899, 1902, 1903

  Manchester Guardian – 1890, 1895, 1896, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1901, 1903, 1907, 1910, 1912, 1914

  Manchester Times – 1888, 1890, 1892, 1893

  Nottingham Evening Post – 1880, 1882, 1887, 1895

  Nottinghamshire Guardian – 1876, 1886

  Police Review and Parade Gossip – 1898

  Preston Chronicle – 1889

  Reynolds’s Newspaper – 1881, 1884

  Sheffield Daily Telegraph – 1896

  Sporting Chronicle – 1885

  The Times – 1882, 1889, 1892, 1894, 1897

  Western Daily Press – 1926

  Worcestershire Chronicle – 1887

  Researchers interested in any specific article references are welcome to contact me through my publisher for more details.

  Museums and archives:

  Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives

  The museum holds an archive about Jerome Caminada, including press cuttings, artefacts, and original copies of his memoirs.

  Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archives

  57a Newton Street,

  Northern Quarter,

  Manchester M1 1ET

  0161 856 3287/4500

  Website: www.gmpmuseum.com

  Greater Manchester County Record Office and The Manchester Room @ City Library

  The archive holds a wide range of material relating to the history of Manchester and family history, including court records, prison records, Poor Law and workhouse records, Watch Committee minute books, as well as parish records and municipal cemetery burial registers.

  For further information:

  0161 234 1979

  Email: archiveslocalstudies@manchester.gov.uk

  Website: www.manchester.gov.uk/info/448

  The British Newspaper Archive