The Ripper of Waterloo Road

by Jan Bondeson

  New Waterloo Bridge.

  The site of Wellington Terrace today. On the left is the Waterloo Campus, King’s College London; on the right, Conway Hall, University of Notre Dame.

  St John’s Waterloo, where Eliza Grimwood was buried, as it stands today.

  Some remaining older houses in Waterloo Road, at the corner with Exton Street.

  The Cornwall House annexe of the HM Customs and Excise had been constructed where the remainder of the terrace had once been, with the Royal Waterloo Hospital for Women and Children occupying the corner with Stamford Street. In 1951, only No. 11 Waterloo Road still stood, but this ultimus of old Wellington Terrace was pulled down the following year. Although some older houses in Waterloo Road remain at the corner with Exton Street, nothing whatsoever remains of Wellington Terrace; the Cornwall House annexe is today the Waterloo Campus of King’s College London, and the Royal Waterloo Hospital has become the Conway Hall of the University of Notre Dame.

  If the ghost of Eliza Grimwood has not been exorcised by constant noise from motor vehicles in busy Waterloo Road, the clatter from the trains on their way to Waterloo station and the revel of the jolly young students, then it will gaze in horror at the Southbank Centre and the National Film Theatre, and that curious contraption, the London Eye.

  12

  WHO MURDERED ELIZA GRIMWOOD?

  So what are we to make of Inspector Field’s handling of the Grimwood murder inquiry? Quite a few of his decisions do not agree with the modern concept of how a police detective ought to conduct his business. It is surprising that more than once he ruled out potential suspects for the reason that they were, or perhaps rather seemed to be, respectable people of fixed address. Murderers come from all walks of life and the witnesses had, after all, testified that the Foreigner was smartly dressed. The inspector’s notes also make it clear that he was a misogynist even by the standards of the time: women, to him, were an inferior breed, and their reliability as witnesses accordingly diminished. It is ironic that the antics of some of the female witnesses from the Strand Theatre actually seemed to support this notion.

  Inspector Field deserves praise, however, for his ability to keep a cool head in what must have been a most trying situation. He was under pressure from the magistrates and coroner, from the newspaper journalists, and from the Londoners themselves, who demanded a speedy solution to the murder mystery. Another admirable quality was his considerable talents of organisation. It has been claimed by some historians that it was a major weakness of the New Police that its divisions had no tradition of co-operating, and that even major cases were handled by just a few officers. But the data on hand from the Grimwood investigation does not agree. Inspector Field was capable of raising considerable manpower when facing tasks that exceeded the capacity of his small core team of three, like the search of the vicinity of Waterloo Bridge, the hunt for the Foreigner, and the tracking down of the writer of the Cavendish letter. In the latter two operations, he successfully liaised with policemen from other divisions.

  Inspector Field’s notes also testify to how much influence the coroner had on the proceedings during the inquest, and to what degree the magistrates directed the subsequent murder inquiry. Out of the window goes the idea of the omniscient Victorian policeman running his own inquiry, like Inspector Bucket in Bleak House or Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone. In the Grimwood murder inquiry, the majority of the important decisions were made by the coroner and magistrates, sometimes without Inspector Field even being consulted. But although these magistrates may have been competent in administering summary judgement in the various petty offences that were brought before their bench, they lacked experience when it came to investigating a serious crime. In particular, Inspector Field rightly objected to their enthusiasm for easy ‘solutions’: the sensation witness John Owen, the unreliable Catherine Edwin, and the ubiquitous anonymous letters naming some novel suspects.

  Charles Frederick Field continued his police career with considerable distinction. Far from receiving any criticism from his superiors for his running of the Grimwood investigation, he seems to have improved his position within the police hierarchy. In 1842, when the New Police finally formed its Detective Division, he became one of its inspectors. In 1846, he was promoted to Chief of Detectives, serving with considerable distinction until his early retirement in 1852, at the age of just 47. He then became a private inquiry agent in London. The Waterloo Road Horror remained the greatest unsolved murder mystery of Inspector Field’s career and he never ceased pondering it. In 1850, Field and six other detectives were invited by Charles Dickens to the office of his new magazine Household Words. Described as a portly, middle-aged man ‘with a large, moist, knowing eye, a husky voice, and a habit of emphasising his conversation with the aid of a corpulent finger, which is constantly in juxtaposition with his eyes or nose’, the inspector told the story of the murder of the beautiful Eliza Grimwood, and his own pursuit of the owner of the lavender-coloured gloves. Dickens published Field’s account as the second of his Three Detective Anecdotes in his magazine.1 The 1871 census lists Charles Frederick Field as a retired Inspector of Police, living at No. 5 Stanley Villas, Chelsea, with his wife Jane and their two servants; he died in 1874, aged 69.

  Criminologists recognise that murder can either be spontaneous or planned. The former variety is by far the most common, in the 1830s as well as today. Alcohol plays a major part in fuelling mindless violence, being cheap and readily available; it was even cheaper back in 1838, and frequently enjoyed to excess. Drunken sailors bashed each other’s heads in with heavy instruments, drunken husbands cut their wives’ throats with their razors, and drunken wives returned the compliment with their kitchen knives. These spontaneous, chaotic murders were usually easily solved by the Victorian police. They were often committed in front of witnesses, the victim was quickly missed and the body found, and the befuddled killer usually screamed out ,‘Yes, I did it!’ as soon as he or she was confronted by the authorities. In contrast, the early London detectives often struggled in cases of planned murder. The mysterious murders of Mrs Donatty in 1822 and Elizabeth Jeffs in 1827 both remain unsolved to this day. The arrest and conviction of James Greenacre for the murder and dismemberment of Hannah Brown in 1837 owed more to luck than to the detective work of the officers involved.

  In a logical analysis of the murder of Eliza Grimwood, Inspector Field’s original three alternatives are a useful way to start: either the Foreigner did it, Hubbard did it, or Someone Else did it. The third of these alternatives is of course the least likely, and seems to have been excluded by the police at an early stage. It would either concern an intruder entering the house after the departure of the Foreigner, or that one of the other three people living in the house (the commercial traveller William Best, the prostitute Mary Glover, or the servant Mary Fisher) committed the murder. To begin with the intruder scenario, this would imply that this individual was in possession of a key to the house, since there were no sign of either the front or rear doors being tampered with. Hubbard and Best had keys to the house, whereas its two female inhabitants had to rely on the servant Mary Fisher, who was in charge of a third set of keys, to let them in. It is highly unlikely that any of these people would have surrendered their keys to any person with violent or burglarious intent. Nor is there any record of Eliza herself giving keys to any of her admirers, even her favourite, the Birmingham sword cutler. As we know, there was some gossip at the time that a jilted admirer, an envious fellow prostitute, or even Hubbard’s estranged wife, would have committed the murder. Neither of these individuals would have been able to enter the house without inside assistance, however, nor would they have been in a position to commit the murder without an uproar or a struggle. Alternatively, the scenario in which the murder was committed by one of the other residents would really amount to a murder conspiracy in which Mary Glover and Mary Fisher aided and abetted William Best. But neither of them held any grudge against Eliza Grimwood; in fact, Mary Glover was
an old friend of hers, and the young servant Mary Fisher very fond of her mistress. And if the murder was done for profit, why leave eight prominently displayed large silver coins, as well as Eliza’s gold watch and jewellery, when they knew where she kept her valuables? Inspector Field got the impression that Best was an honest man and that Mary Fisher was a timid young girl. It seems extremely unlikely that either of these people had anything to do with the murder.

  The murder of Eliza Grimwood, from the novel Eliza Grimwood, A Domestic Legend of the Waterloo Road.

  It is clear from Inspector Field’s notes that immediately after the murder he viewed William Hubbard with the greatest suspicion. The bricklayer was a rough diamond who led a dissolute life. His motive would be either jealousy (of Eliza’s customers, particularly the sword cutler who was going to take her to Epsom) or gain (the missing purse full of gold sovereigns). Since Eliza knew and trusted him, he would have had the option of entering her bedroom after the Foreigner had departed, ready to noiselessly cut her throat with a formidable knife or bayonet he had purposely procured beforehand.

  The murder is discovered, from the novel Eliza Grimwood, A Domestic Legend of the Waterloo Road.

  Hubbard was strong enough to have committed the murder and mutilation of the corpse in the manner described. As we know, it had attracted some curiosity that although Eliza’s little dog had yapped briefly during the night, it had not barked loudly nor lengthily; was this because the murderer was someone it knew well? Inspector Field also found it strange that Mary Fisher, who had actually been sleeping only one thin wall away from the murder room, had not woken up, and he suspected that she might be in league with Hubbard. But although he questioned her several times, she was not caught in any prevarication or contradiction, and he formed the impression she was an honest girl who had been genuinely attached to her mistress. A combination of youth and hard toil may well have rendered her semi-comatose and entirely oblivious to the murderer’s swift and silent strike.

  As the murder investigation went on, the case against Hubbard weakened day by day. If he had been the murderer, his acting talents would have been considerable, since he seemed entirely distraught, drank and smoked excessively, and gave way to violent outbursts. Several witnesses attested that although their relationship had sometimes been tempestuous, Hubbard and Eliza had been genuinely fond of each other. With the exception of the unreliable prostitute Harriet Chaplin, no person testified upon oath that Hubbard was in the habit of beating or ill-treating Eliza. The three people who knew them best, namely Mary Glover, William Best and the servant Mary Fisher, all said that Hubbard and Eliza did get along quite well, and that they seldom quarrelled. Nor did any person, apart from Harriet Chaplin, testify that Hubbard had disapproved of Eliza’s friendship with some of her clients, or that he had ever threatened her. As for the veracity of the witness Chaplin, it must be remembered that at the inquest and at the proceedings against Mr Skinner, she told two wholly contradictory stories sprinkled with several demonstrable untruths.

  Another singular circumstance is that two deliberate attempts were made to incriminate Hubbard for the murder. The first of them seems to have been initiated by that miserable creature John Owen, with the aim of gaining pity and recognition for himself.2 It was very fortunate for Hubbard, considering the amount of prejudice that existed against him, that Owen picked out another man at the inquest! The second attempt, that of the Cavendish letter, was more stealthy and its instigator a more obscure figure. It may be that young M’Millan wrote the letter, but then it may not. Since there is no doubt that the brothers Grimwood bribed Hubbard to leave the murder house, and at the same time tried to make Inspector Field arrest him for attempting to escape from London, the timely appearance of the letter seems a little too convenient. Could it be that the Cavendish letter was written by or on behalf of the Grimwood brothers, to put Hubbard securely behind bars while they disposed of Eliza’s property? As judged by their various altercations in court, the brothers Grimwood hated Hubbard intensely and blamed him for their sister’s murder. If the letter had succeeded in its purpose, and led to Hubbard being convicted for the murder, the Grimwoods are unlikely to have shed any tears for the man they blamed for Eliza’s downfall.

  Hubbard and Eliza had a very strange relationship. Being first cousins, they must have known each other since an early age and there may well be some truth in the story that they had been childhood sweethearts. According to Hubbard, they had been living together in London for as long as ten years. During most, if not all this time, Eliza worked as a part-time prostitute. She had considerable success, as judged by her savings of at least £200, elegant clothes and expensive gold watch and jewellery. Although Hubbard worked as a jobbing bricklayer, his earnings were inconsequential compared to hers, and there is no question that she supported him financially. There was much sympathy for prostitutes among the Londoners at this time: they were considered as ‘unfortunates’ that had to be ‘saved’ from the evil men who preyed on them. As Hubbard found out the hard way, a prostitute’s bully was generally detested among honest people. It is ironic that the truth was that Eliza had in many ways been the one ‘wearing the trousers’ in the household: she possessed money and independence, choosing to prostitute herself with clients she usually knew well, if and when she liked it. Hubbard was a hard-working and badly paid manual labourer, who spent most of his earnings on strong drink, and had no ability to save money or improve his situation in life.

  There is strong technical evidence in favour of Hubbard’s innocence. Firstly, it is obvious from the nature of the wounds, and the extent of blood spatter in the murder room, that the garments worn by the murderer would be extensively stained with blood. Hubbard was the owner of seven shirts, all of which were found to be free of blood, including the collar and cuffs. Nor were there any bloodstains on his other clothes, except what could be expected from a person stepping into a large pool of blood. According to the washerwoman and other people who knew about Hubbard’s rather limited wardrobe, all his garments were present and correct. One could of course suggest that he committed the murder naked or dressed only in his underpants, but there was no way for him to have a bath afterwards unless he dived into the Thames from Waterloo Bridge. It would of course also have been possible for him to have clandestinely purchased another complete suit of clothes in which to commit the murder, but this would have demanded a degree of cunning that is not consistent with the other observations of Hubbard. And then there is the point of how to dispose of these extra clothes, and for that matter also the murder weapon. No person saw Hubbard sneak out of the house, through the front or rear entrances, and making such an attempt would have been hazardous indeed, since there were still people in the streets this warm and balmy late May evening, and since he was quite well known locally. The environs of the house were thoroughly searched by the police, but neither bloodstained clothes nor murder weapon were found. Hubbard’s own account of how he found Eliza’s body makes good sense and contains no contradictions or inconsistencies. The conclusion must be that not only were the magistrates quite right when they acquitted Hubbard, he was almost certainly innocent of committing the murder.

  Although acquitted for the murder, Hubbard remained a marked man among Londoners. Since many people knew him by sight, he was frequently booed and jeered, particularly attempting to return to his old haunts in the vicinity of Waterloo Road. He was desperately poor, and it must have been hard for him to obtain employment. In November 1838, there was a newspaper story that Hubbard had absconded to New York and that the police officer Keys had been dispatched to bring him back to London, since new evidence had been discovered linking him to the murder of Eliza Grimwood. But Hubbard himself wrote a letter to the Morning Advertiser, saying that he had never been out of England since liberated from Union Hall.3 As we know from the George Green story, he was still in London in April 1839.

  There are several versions of what finally happened to poor Hubbard. New Newgate Cale
ndar states that he did indeed go to America, but returned a few years after. He finally ‘died a miserable death of starvation, uncared for, unpitied, and believed by all to be the murderer of the unfortunate girl, Eliza Grimwood, who had been so cruelly assassinated years before’.4 According to the proceedings when George Hill was arrested in 1845, Hubbard had died in Hampton in 1843.5 The curious ‘murder broadside’ issued to announce the Hill confession adds that, on his deathbed, Hubbard sent for the minister and swore that he had had nothing to do with the murder of Eliza Grimwood.

  The truth would seem to be that, although Hubbard had announced his intention to stay in London until the murderer of Eliza Grimwood had been caught and convicted, he was soon driven out of the neighbourhood around Waterloo Road by the universal hostility he encountered. According to a newspaper article, he was living with his brother in Castle Street in March 1841. He often spoke of the murder, claiming that he had nothing to hide, although he knew that the police had been tracking his movements ever since. One day he collapsed and the doctor diagnosed inflammation of the lungs. Since his condition gradually deteriorated, ‘He was aware that his end was approaching, and shortly before he expired he exclaimed “Eliza, I see you. You have been waiting for me a long while. Wait a minute. I am coming.” He then placed his right hand upon his heart, and, in a few minutes after ejaculated, “Release me now.” He was supported by his sister, and soon after died in her arms, without alluding further to the dreadful deed!’6 This perhaps rather fanciful story was criticised by The Examiner, which suspected that it had been ‘manufactured for the express gratification of a certain class of newspaper readers’, but the fact remains that William Hubbard, aged 33 years and a bricklayer, expired from ‘inflammation of the lungs’ at No. 24 Castle Street on 22 February 1841, as proven by his death certificate.7