by Jan Bondeson
Bishop and Williams at Bow Street, from Vol. 2 of Percy Fitzgerald’s Chronicles of the Bow Street Police Office.
In the 1820s and early 1830s, the medical faculties and anatomy schools of London had a considerable shortage of fresh bodies for detection. This opened the door for organised gangs of bodysnatchers, who would purchase the bodies of moribund people from the relatives, or rob newly dug graves in the churchyards. A good-quality cadaver could fetch £10 or even £20, meaning that, undeterred by the grisly fate of their Edinburgh colleagues Burke and Hare, these London ruffians could make a good living from their wholesale grave-robbing activities. On 5 November 1831, the two bodysnatchers John Bishop and James May delivered the corpse of a 14-year-old boy to the King’s College anatomy school. They wanted 12 guineas, but were offered 9 guineas by the King’s College porter. The cadaver seemed uncommonly fresh, however, and there were no signs that it had ever been buried; the face was strangely swollen and the eyes bloodshot. The ‘F’ or Covent Garden Division of the New Police were called in, and Bishop and May were arrested, along with two other members of the gang, Thomas Williams and Michael Shields. Bishop lived in a Bethnal Green cottage, No. 3 Nova Scotia Gardens, and when the police excavated the garden, they found items of clothing suggesting that the gang had committed multiple murders. The boy’s identity remained a mystery, but the police suspected that he was Carlo Ferrari, an Italian who had made a perilous living by exhibiting a tortoise and some white mice in the London streets. Shields, who successfully argued that he had only been the porter who had helped to carry the boy’s remains, was liberated, but the other three ruffians stood trial for murder.
The three London Burkers were found guilty and sentenced to death, but May was eventually reprieved and sentenced to transportation for life. Awaiting execution, Bishop and Williams confessed to their crimes. They had drugged two boys and a slum dweller with rum and laudanum, and then drowned them in a water butt in the rear garden, and sold their bodies for dissection. The police allowed the public access to the house of horrors at No. 3 Nova Scotia Gardens, for a fee of 5s, and many of the domestic fixtures were carried off by the curious, who wanted some souvenirs from the murderers’ lair. Bishop and Williams were hanged at Newgate on 5 December 1831, in front of a crowd 30,000 strong. Rather suitably, considering the nature of their crimes, their bodies were dissected at the Theatre of Anatomy in Windmill Street, and the remains exhibited in public. The New Police were praised for the speedy arrest and conviction of the London Burkers.9
In December 1832, the 63-year-old clerk Henry Camp Shepherd was found murdered in the counting house of his employers, Messrs Williams & Sons, soap manufacturers, of Great Compton Street. His skull had been brutally bashed in with a poker. The counting house contained an unopened safe, for which Mr Shepherd held the keys. Although nothing had been stolen from the safe, Mr Shepherd’s watch was missing, and the motive for the crime was supposed to have been robbery.
For undisclosed reasons, one of the remaining Bow Street Runners, Lloyd of Hatton Garden, took charge of the murder investigation. Mr Shepherd had complained that when out on company business in rural Hampstead and Highgate, he had been followed by some ruffianly fellows who had the appearance of glaziers. Two men in similar attire had been observed skulking about near the soap factory. A young man named Samuel Newland was taken into custody on suspicion of being involved in the murder, since he was employed at the soap factory and had murmured against Mr Shepherd in the past, but he could prove a solid alibi, and was discharged. Instead, another remaining Runner, Lea of Lambeth Street, got a tip from a convict that Mr Shepherd had been murdered by two previous associates of this convict, named Tom Ainsley and Jem Martin. These two were promptly arrested and brought before Mr Allen Laing, the Hatton Garden magistrate. It turned out that Ainsley had no previous convictions, and since he seemed like a respectable man, he was released. Jem Martin, who had several convictions for petty theft, and who looked most dejected at being accused of murder, was several times examined by the magistrate. Runner Lea had discovered that Martin’s clothes had been stained with blood, and he took note of the man’s alibi for the time of the murder, which he hoped to be able to prove false. But in the end, Jem Martin was also discharged by the magistrate, due to the lack of evidence against him, and in spite of a government reward of £100, matched by another £100 from Mr Williams the soap manufacturer, the murder of Henry Camp Shepherd was never solved.10
A handbill on Bishop and Williams, from Vol. 2 of Percy Fitzgerald’s Chronicles of the Bow Street Police Office.
The end of the London Burkers, from the Curiosities of Street Literature (London 1871), sheet 190.
Mr Shepherd is found murdered, from the Illustrated Police News, 23 April 1904.
Catherine Elms is found murdered, from the Illustrated Police News, 28 November 1903.
In May 1833, the New Police faced yet another challenge when the elderly spinster Catherine Elms was found murdered in her house at No. 17 Wellesley Street, Chelsea. She had been stabbed around the face and throat with some formidable instrument. In her younger days, Miss Elms had kept a school in Smith Lane, but now she was retired and let out rooms in her house to lodgers. A quiet, inoffensive old lady, she was not known to have any enemies. A young woman known as Mrs Mortimer, who lodged in the house, appeared very keen to get up to her own room and check her belongings; since this attracted suspicion, she was arrested by the police. Mrs Mortimer asserted her innocence, and went as far as to put her hand on the mangled body of Catherine Elms, exclaiming, ‘So help me God, I am innocent of any participation in this murder!’ This exhibition of the old superstition of ‘touching the body’ impressed the police greatly, and Mrs Mortimer was promptly released. At the coroner’s inquest on Catherine Elms, it was revealed that before the murder she had gone to the Wellesley Arms to purchase half a pint of stout for her dinner. Since the jug she had brought for her stout was found to be empty, and since no remains of food were found in her kitchen, it was presumed that she had finished her frugal repast, before being surprised and murdered by some intruder or intruders. Two ruffianly fellows had been spotted lurking outside the pub when Miss Elms came to have her jug filled, and they were presumed to have been the murderers. There was no clue whatsoever to their identity, however, and the coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown. On 15 May, a man named John Sharpe came up to a police constable and confessed that he was one of the men who had murdered Miss Elms. He was a man of low repute, and a suspected coiner; he had previously given himself up for murdering his two children, but they turned out to have died from the measles. After being examined by the magistrate Mr White, at the Queen Square police office, Sharpe withdrew his confession, and he was eventually released since there was no convincing evidence against him. It aroused suspicions among the police, however, that he had spoken of the pump in Miss Elms’ kitchen, since there was really such a pump – a fact that had not been made public. In spite of some late bruits that the nephew of Catherine Elms had returned to London from New York to murder her, due to some testamentary shenanigans from an uncle who had died in the West Indies and left £7,500, the murder was never solved.11 As for the murder house at No. 17 Wellesley Street, which was later to become Upper Manor Street and today is Chelsea Manor Street, it no longer stands.
James Greenacre dismembers Hannah Brown, from an old print.
In late December 1836, a sack containing a woman’s headless and limbless torso was found at a recently constructed terrace of houses in the Edgware Road, near the Pineapple Tollgate. A week later, a woman’s severed head, with long grey hair, was found jamming a lock in the Regent’s Canal. In early February, a Camberwell workman found a sack containing two legs, which fitted the torso perfectly. This was clearly a case of murder with dismemberment, and the first task for the New Police was to identify the Edgware Road murder victim.
The severed head was put in a jar of spirits and exhibited in a
workhouse, but no person could recognise its bloated and battered features. A washerwoman named Hannah Brown, the widow of a shoemaker, was reported missing by her relatives, and her brother Mr Gay recognised the severed head’s mutilated ear, the result of an earring being pulled out by a fellow servant. A naïve and trusting woman, Hannah Brown had answered a newspaper advertisement from a certain James Greenacre, and agreed to supply her savings of £300 to support the commercial exploitation of a novel washing machine he had invented. These two had become very friendly, and just before she had disappeared on Christmas Eve, Hannah Brown had told her relatives that they were planning to get married.
James Greenacre on the frontispiece of a small provincial Newgate Calendar, printed in Derby 1844.
Inspector Feltham and Constable Pegler, of the ‘T’ or Kensington division of the New Police, found out that the 51-year-old James Greenacre was a businessman who dabbled as a grocer and tea merchant, and owned a number of slum houses. He claimed to hold an estate in Hudson Bay, something that had impressed Hannah Brown very much. Three of Greenacre’s previous wives had died of disease, and he had left the fourth behind in America. After Christmas, Greenacre had told a friend that the marriage was off since Hannah Brown had unexpectedly got into debt and left London.
Instead, his mistress Sarah Gale had moved back into his house. The police suspected that Greenacre had murdered Hannah Brown on Christmas Eve 1836, dismembered the body and distributed its mutilated parts all over London, before getting on with his life as well as he could. Greenacre and Sarah Gale were both arrested by Inspector Feltham on 24 March, just as they were making preparations to sail for America, and they were committed to stand trial at the Old Bailey the following month. The sack containing Hannah Brown’s remains could be traced to Greenacre, and her earrings had been found in Sarah Gale’s possession. Greenacre asserted that Hannah Brown had died accidentally when her chair had tipped over backwards, but he was not believed, since she had clearly been hit hard with a stick or bludgeon, putting her eye out. Both James Greenacre and Sarah Gale were found guilty and sentenced to death, although Gale received a reprieve and was transported to Australia, where she lived on for another fifty years, not expiring until 1888. The public execution of Greenacre in front of Newgate was a fairground event, attracting 20,000 spectators. The New Police could exult that they had been able to bring a cunning and premeditating murderer to justice.12 Greenacre’s head was shaved after death, for phrenological examination, and his death mask was exhibited at the Black Museum for many years. In his poem ‘A Lay of St Gengulphus’, Richard Harris Barham included a topical reference to the sanguineous career of the Edgware Road murderer:
They contrived to pack up the trunk in a sack,
Which they hid in an osier-bed outside the town,
The clerk bearing arms, legs and all on his back,
As that vile Mr Greenacre served Mrs Brown.
The end of James Greenacre, from the Curiosities of Street Literature (London 1871), sheet 192.
Prostitution was a subject that both repelled and fascinated the Londoners of the 1820s and 1830s.13 According to the conventional morals of the time, prostitution was the Great Social Evil, a cancer in the midst of society that could not be cut out. Moralist authors emphasised the harm done by the prostitute, corrupting the minds of young men and infecting them with venereal disease, and described the brothels as hellholes full of every vice and debauchery. Respectable men should pass the harlot flaunting herself in the street with downcast eyes, and decent women should not even have knowledge of what she was doing. A woman falling into prostitution was supposed to be an accursed creature who could not live long in her sin and shame. Debauched, drunken and disease-ridden, the prostitute was wont to destroy herself in a fit of anguish and remorse, and leap headlong into the Thames.
The slums of London were more symmetrically distributed in 1838 than they are today. Whereas Kensington, Chelsea and Bloomsbury were respectable middle-class suburbs, parts of Westminster and most of St Giles were notorious slum rookeries. The East End was quite a black spot already in the 1830s. The 1837 Return of the number of Brothels and Prostitutes within the Metropolitan Police District lists 3,325 brothels and an estimated 9,409 prostitutes throughout the metropolis; of these, 209 brothels and 1,803 prostitutes were based in the ‘H’ police division, incorporating Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Ratcliffe, some of the most deprived slums of London.14 Similarly, an academic study of the first point of contact between prostitute and client, estimated from the Old Bailey proceedings from 1820 until 1829, shows a sinister cluster in the East End, where brothels were plentiful and streetwalking prostitutes a common sight. There is a second cluster in the Covent Garden area, the traditional headquarters of London vice in Georgian times, with many theatres, coffee houses, taverns and brothels. Quite a few prostitutes were active in various parts of the City of London, fewer in Westminster, and very few in Kensington and Chelsea.15
Several early authors on prostitution made attempts to estimate the number of prostitutes in the metropolis. As early as 1791, the police magistrate Patrick Colquhoun claimed that the capital was home to 50,000 prostitutes, half of them ‘kept women’, the other half common street prostitutes. In 1839, Dr Michael Ryan, another anti-prostitution campaigner, claimed that London had between 80,000 and 100,000 prostitutes. This vast army of fallen women, a veritable scourge on decent society, each had a ‘bully’ or protector: vicious men capable of murder, or any other crime. Although he was a respectable medical lecturer and editor, Dr Ryan seems to have had a bee in his bonnet about prostitution and its vices, and his figure is not based on practical experience but on extrapolation alone.16 The 1837 estimate of about 9,000 London prostitutes is likely to be closer to the truth.
An impediment for any attempt to estimate the number of prostitutes in London is how to define a ‘prostitute’, since the profession was heterogeneous enough. At the bottom of the social scale, there were the East End wretches inhabiting the slum brothels: poor, drunken, prematurely aged and riddled with venereal disease, and resembling the victims of Jack the Ripper although living fifty years earlier. Some of the more ambitious streetwalking prostitutes wanted to escape the brothels, rather understandably so, since the brothel-keepers took much of their earnings, and employed ‘bullies’ who beat them up if they complained. These independent prostitutes often had boyfriends of their own, who doubled as pimps who protected them from perverts and violent drunks, and made sure the customers paid their fee. The better class of prostitutes had houses or lodgings of their own, and mostly saw ‘regulars’ – either jolly young rakes or respectable gentlemen who wanted some extramarital ‘fun’. They could choose their customers rather than accept all takers, and prostitute themselves if and when they wanted to, leading a normal life most of the time; they did not walk the streets, but might occasionally pick up customers in the West End theatres. It sometimes happened that one of these ‘regulars’ wanted to ‘keep’ their favourite to have her for himself; all over London, there were ‘kept women’ supported by wealthy Lotharios, who might have a wife at home and a different mistress for every day in the week. Nor was it unknown for the better class of prostitute to retire at the age of 30, and buy a nice coffee house or lodgings for the earnings she had accumulated, to lead a humdrum and respectable life for the remainder of her days. At the very top of the social scale of London prostitutes were the courtesans of high society, ‘kept’ by noblemen and wealthy magnates.
In Georgian times, there was little sympathy for the London streetwalking prostitutes. Immoral, sinful and disease-ridden, they were viewed as common street pests. The police made the occasional raid, arresting a number of prostitutes, but they were not kept in custody for very long, returning to work the streets after just a few days in prison. But in the 1820s and 1830s, there was finally some compassion for London’s downtrodden fallen women. They were known as ‘unfortunates’, seduced and let down by some village rake, and forced into prosti
tution as a result. Efforts were made to close down the brothels, and to reform their inhabitants by various stratagems.17 As for the brothel-keepers and ‘bullies’ who lived on the earnings of the unfortunates, they were viewed as the scum of the earth, scoundrels capable of any atrocity.