by Jan Bondeson
11
RED HERRINGS
After Mr Skinner had been cleared at Union Hall, Inspector Field and Constable Goff were the only remaining members of the Grimwood task force. They kept an eye on Hubbard, who was again working as a bricklayer, and more than once followed him clandestinely back to his mother’s house in Mile End, which served as the wretched man’s only refuge. A busybody named Mr Golding wrote to the police that he was sure that some of Hubbard’s relatives lived next door to him, and suspected that the murder weapon had been thrown down the privy of these premises. But the inspector found that Hubbard the neighbour, a respectable customs officer, was not related to Hubbard the bricklayer. Another letter-writer pointed the finger at a former ‘customer’ of Eliza Grimwood, but the inspector ‘found that he was a reputable gentleman and had only seen her three times’.
On 12 July there was some drama after a foreign criminal had been taken in Clerkenwell. Since the local police thought he resembled the Foreigner, Inspector Field was ordered by Mr Jeremy the magistrate to bring the cabman Spicknell and the waitress Parker, the two people who had had the best look at Eliza Grimwood’s sinister companion the evening of the murder, to the Clerkenwell police station. The prisoner was a foreign Jew and a noted gambler, who had been in prison from March until early May 1838 under another charge. But neither cabman nor waitress could identify him as the Foreigner and so he was released.1
Inspector Field’s police diary about the Grimwood murder investigation ends on 14 July 1838, just seven weeks after the murder was committed. After that date, he was probably assigned to other duties, although he never entirely lost touch with the most mysterious murder case of his career and from time to time was called upon to continue his investigation. On 14 August 1838, a tobacconist named Goodlad, who kept a small shop in the Mile End Road, applied to the Lambeth magistrates to have a ditch in his neighbourhood searched for the murder weapon and other articles that might give a clue to the identity of the murderer of Eliza Grimwood. He carried with him a large bundle of correspondence, having already written to the Secretary of State as well as to the Union Hall magistrates. But since Inspector Field had already considered his proposal and turned it down, the magistrate would have nothing to do with this matter. Mr Goodlad, who was said to be ‘exceedingly fond of interfering with matters that do not at all concern him’, left the justice room very dissatisfied with their lack of interest.2
In March 1839 there was some further buffoonery. A man named James Howard, respectably dressed but in a very excited state of mind, had gathered a large mob in George Street, Grosvenor Square. When a police constable came to the scene, Howard told him that he was annoyed because he had been waiting for more than two hours opposite the residence of Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister, in order to ‘crack his Lordship’s head’, for which purpose he had armed himself with some large stones. When brought to the Marlborough Street police office, Howard introduced himself as the son of King George IV and Queen Caroline and went on to say he had undeniable evidence that Lord Melbourne had murdered Eliza Grimwood, in the Waterloo Road. Aware that his dark secret was known, the wicked nobleman was tormenting Howard by means of electricity, administered through a vast network of agents. When searched, his pockets contained several stones, a sharp dirk, and a letter to the Queen outlining how Lord Melbourne had committed the Grimwood murder. The magistrate said that after such threatening conduct, Howard could not be permitted to be at large. He was committed to prison, and the police were ordered to search out his friends, since the poor fellow was obviously quite insane.3
Just a few weeks later, there was further sensational news. The Union Hall police office received a letter that began with these highly charged words:
Gentlemen, - Before you receive this hurried note the body of the murderer of Eliza Grimwood will be in the Thames. Yes, I, and I alone, am the guilty villain who perpetrated this hellish deed and in a few hours will receive my desserts. Stricken in conscience, and shunning all mankind, I add to my character the name of a suicide rather than meet with an ignominious death on the scaffold …
Having already had enough of anonymous letters, the magistrates first decided to ignore this animated missive, but when Inspector Field attended at Union Hall on some other business, they showed it to him. The inspector immediately became interested, since he knew that a man’s body had been found in the Thames the morning after the letter had been sent, namely that of George Green, a former captain’s steward on board the East India trader Victory, who had for some time been in bad health from a liver complaint. When his body was fished out of the Thames, his pockets had contained a fine silver hunting watch, nine shillings and a halfpenny, and a half-pint bottle of sherry. Green had been drinking hard for many years, although the waiter at the Bengal Arms in Birchin Lane had observed that the evening of his suicide, Green had for once been reasonably sober. At his lodgings was found a large amount of Indian copper money and ‘a singularly extensive wardrobe of linen and general clothing’, but no letter or other document that allowed comparison with the handwriting on the letter the magistrates had received.
At a second inquest on Green, in early April, it was concluded that apart from the timing of his suicide, there was nothing to connect the sottish ex-steward with either the letter or the murder of Eliza Grimwood. Some letters of his had been discovered and there was no resemblance between his handwriting and that on the letter to the magistrates. It also appeared as if he had been confined to some kind of hospital or asylum at the time of the murder. The jury returned a verdict of ‘Found drowned’. Hubbard was present at the inquest and paid great interest to the proceedings.4
In August 1839, the anonymous letter writers were up to their old tricks again. The Union Hall magistrates received a letter signed ‘M. Duke, 99, Chancery-lane, Fleet-street’, claiming knowledge that would unravel the Grimwood mystery and disclose the identity of the Foreigner, who was in fact a distant relation of the writer. It ended with the words, ‘I shall not be easy until I have betrayed the villain!’ It was discovered that there was a law stationer named Mr Duke at the address stated, but he turned out to be a respectable man. The letter did not at all match his handwriting, and must have been written by some mischievous fool, like so many others in the Grimwood drama.5
In December 1840, a man named Edward Hughes wrote to the Under Secretary of State, the Rt. Hon. Fox Maule, that he knew who had murdered Eliza Grimwood. In a further letter, he dropped the bombshell that the perpetrator was a woman, Mary Leary, ‘now residing at Hull – and to be easily found’. This jealous virago had suspected that the man cohabiting with her was in the habit of visiting Eliza Grimwood, and set in motion a diabolical plan to make sure their liaison was ended. Wearing an elaborate disguise, she had sneaked after her boyfriend to the Strand Theatre, where sure enough, he met up with Eliza. She had then followed them all the way to Wellington Terrace, where she lurked outside waiting for her boyfriend to exit the house. She then dashed into the house, seized a large knife lying on a table, killed Eliza and rushed out again, throwing the knife into the Thames from Waterloo Bridge on her way home.
This story had been told to Hughes’ sons by a man named Roberts. It does not seem to have evoked any police response, probably due to its innate implausibility. Firstly, a woman could hardly have cut Eliza’s throat with such force. Secondly, would the other inhabitants of the house not have heard this madwoman barging into the premises? Thirdly, the toll-keepers on Waterloo Bridge had not observed any bloodstained woman, or indeed any likely suspect, crossing the bridge shortly after the murder. Nor did it inspire confidence that Hughes wanted to involve the government in a quarrel he had with a magistrate in Hull, who had imprisoned his sons on a charge of obtaining money by false pretences.6
In late August 1845, more than seven years after the murder of Eliza Grimwood, there was some sensational news that actually seemed to solve the mystery. A private soldier in the 67th Regiment stationed at Portobello Bar
racks in Dublin, 30-year-old George Hill, had been arrested for being absent without leave. When the drunken private was taken into the College Street police office, he seemed quite jolly, saying that he knew something that would surprise everybody. He was the son of a London silversmith, and seven years earlier, he had murdered Eliza Grimwood, whose death had caused such a sensation in London back in 1838. Hill was given pen and paper and wrote down his confession in a very shaky hand, getting it almost right in his second attempt.
The news of the arrest of George Hill was speedily transmitted to London, where it caused considerable stir. Would the murder of Eliza Grimwood be solved after all? Without delay, Inspector Field and Sergeant Goff set out for Dublin to question the prisoner. It turned out that Hill had joined the regiment in 1843 and that his conduct had been extremely bad. He was a heavy drinker who had deserted several times, once being absent for more than a month. During one of these drunken expeditions, he had stolen a watch in Dublin and been sentenced to six months in prison. Inspector Field listened with interest when Hill’s commanding officer told him that the drunken private came from a respectable family in London, his father Mr E. Hill being a jeweller and watch-maker by trade, and that he had enjoyed a good education, learning to speak both French and Italian. George Hill had quarrelled with his father, however, and after being turned out of doors by his irate parent, he became a street hawker of sandwiches, newspapers and books, residing in the City of London. He then became a collector of fares in a steamboat company, but was discharged after embezzling £5. He then fell low for a while, living in the streets as a seller of sandwiches, before marrying, fathering a child, and moving to lodgings in Bishopsgate. Hill had joined the army in 1842, and due to his superior education, it had originally been proposed that he should be promoted to corporal, but his perpetual drunkenness and misconduct had upset this plan. When Inspector Field confronted Hill with his confession that he was the murderer of Eliza Grimwood, the private said that since he had been very drunk at the time, he had not known what he was doing. He greatly abhorred military life, and would prefer being executed as a murderer to remaining with this miserable regiment.
A handbill announcing Private Hill’s confession. The main image, wrongly showing Hill shooting Eliza Grimwood, had probably been ‘lifted’ from some other broadsheet.
Supplied with certificates from the Colonel of the 67th Regiment concerning Hill’s disastrous military career, and from the Dublin police about his confession as the murderer of Eliza Grimwood, Inspector Field and Sergeant Goff set out for North Quay with their prisoner, planning to travel to Liverpool on a steamship. On their way, the axle of the ‘jaunting car’ they travelled in broke and all three were thrown into the ditch. Hill tried to escape, but the athletic Inspector Field pursued and recaptured him. During the journey to Liverpool, and then by coach to London, the truculent prisoner hardly spoke a word. Inspector Field knew that habitual deserters sometimes made spurious confessions to notorious crimes, in order to escape from the military. Still, even the most drunken deserter must surely realise that this was a very dangerous practice indeed, particularly when the confession had been put down in writing before several police witnesses. It was also considered damning that Hill had said he had killed Eliza Grimwood by cutting her throat. Just like the Foreigner, Hill was nearly 5ft 8in tall and had dark hair and whiskers. He did not look particularly foreign, however, being a rather thin, pale, timorous-looking fellow, already marked by his addiction to the bottle. Inspector Field rather doubted that such a miserable specimen of humanity could carry out an accomplished murder and then escape without a trace. And what could have been the motive? The London newspapers were openly jubilant that the murderer of Eliza Grimwood had finally been brought to justice, however. There was even a ‘murder broadside’ about the ‘Confession of the Murderer of Eliza Grimwood’, wrongly depicting Hill as shooting Eliza with a pistol.
On 8 September, George Hill was brought before Mr Traill, the Southwark magistrate. Inspector Field detailed the evidence against him: his bad character and conviction for stealing a watch, his escape attempt when they had left Dublin, his resemblance to the murderer with regard to age and height, and most important of all his written confession. Hill’s father told Inspector Field how he had ‘discarded’ his worthless son, as he described it, and how he had thrown away all his begging letters. George Hill had once written to his mother asking for money to purchase his discharge from the army, but she had ignored him. But when asked to explain himself, Hill made a much better impression than before, probably because the alcoholic fumes had cleared from his brain. He admitted that everything the inspector had said was correct, but he had made the confession only because of the tyranny and oppression he had suffered in the regiment. In his desperation, he had thought transportation or even execution preferable to staying in the army. Since he had lived in London in 1838, he could well remember the notorious unsolved murder of that year, and in his drunken state, he had decided to falsely confess to it. The magistrate remarked that although Hill’s wife and parents knew that he had been arrested for murder, none of them were present in court. Although he could understand how a desperate man might be driven to making a false confession, there was a need for Inspector Field to investigate what the prisoner had been doing back in 1838, and to confront him with the witnesses who had seen the Foreigner with Eliza Grimwood on the night of the murder.
When George Hill was back before the magistrate on 15 September, his wife, described as a genteel-looking woman, and her daughter, were present. Mr Thomas, the superintendent of the London & Westminster Steam Packet Company, testified that in May 1838, Hill had been in his employ as a ticket collector. He produced an account book showing that Hill had not absented himself from work at the time. Nor had he ‘exhibited any conduct to induce a belief that he had committed a murder’. A friend of Hill’s testified that they had often met in May 1838 and that Hill had behaved perfectly rationally and ‘manifested the same degree of sympathy’ when reading the newspaper reports of the murder of Eliza Grimwood. The cabman Spicknell, who had seen the face of the Foreigner, was certain that Hill looked nothing like him. Inspector Field concluded that in his mind, Hill was certainly innocent. The magistrate discharged him, but he was advised to report to the Horse Guards barracks at once, or he would be charged with desertion. Poor George Hill, who had not uttered a word during these proceedings, left the court by one door, his wife and child by another.7
The next drama in the Grimwood mystery was provided by the Duke of Brunswick. In 1843, the duke took legal action against Barnard Gregory, editor of the Satirist weekly paper, for calling him, among other things, the murderer of Eliza Grimwood. There was prolonged legal wrangling and the case went on for almost a decade; one of the points argued was how it could be known that the libel was directed against the exiled Duke of Brunswick and not his brother, the reigning duke.8 In 1845, Mr Carter and Inspector Field testified that the only person who had been charged with the crime was William Hubbard. In the end, the duke won and Gregory was sentenced to eight months in prison. The scribbler knew every legal loophole, however, and appealed the verdict claiming to have new evidence. But the crazy duke had prepared some unpleasant surprises for him. Gregory was an amateur actor and when he played Hamlet at the Covent Garden Theatre, the duke led a mob pelting him with rotten fruit. When Gregory brought a lawsuit against him for this outrage, the duke argued that the journalist’s libels against himself and others made him a person unfit to appear on the stage, and won his case. In 1846, Gregory again appeared as Hamlet, with the same disagreeable consequences.
After this second pelting, Gregory decided to fight back. When acting the part of Shylock at the Strand Theatre, he uttered a lengthy monologue that was not in the play, reminding the audience that it was at this very theatre that Eliza Grimwood had met the Foreigner – and had there not been plentiful rumours at the time that the murderer was none other than the Duke of Brunswick? Further court acti
on ensued, in which Gregory was strictly forbidden to repeat the offending statement in public. In 1848, the duke brought a second lawsuit against the Satirist, complaining that being libelled as the murderer of Eliza Grimwood had made him a marked man in society. He was awarded £1,500 in damages and the next year, the Satirist went out of business; Gregory was later sentenced to six months in prison.
But still it would be Gregory who had the last laugh. The duke, whose passion for litigation had got the better of him, proceeded to sue the Weekly Dispatch for calling him a lunatic. There was a debate whether a wealthy foreigner should really be able to sue for libel in British courts, but it was allowed, thus creating a legal precedent that has worried some of the Internet calumniators of the present day. The Duke of Brunswick won £500 damages this time, but after it had turned out that he had actually bribed two men to perjure themselves in court, the verdict was overturned. When the duke was charged with perjury, he escaped to France in a balloon and never set foot in England again.9