The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

CHAPTER FOUR

A MAN OF MYSTERY

1 October 1814– 15 July 1860

It was still light as Whicher's train rolled towards west Wiltshire on that Sunday in 1860. Usually by July the pastures were broken up with blocks of yellow – tawny wheat or bright gold corn – but this year the summer had come so late that the crops were green as grass.

At 6.20 p.m. the train pulled into Trowbridge – a forest of factory towers and chimneys – and Whicher stepped out onto the railway station's narrow platform. The first building he came to as he left the ticket hall was John Foley's police station on Stallard Street, a two-storey structure dating from 1854, when the local force was founded. This was where Elizabeth Gough was being detained, of her own volition, until her examination was resumed the next day.

Trowbridge had made money from cloth for centuries. The coming of the railway in 1848 had brought even more prosperity – now, with a population of eleven thousand, it was the biggest factory town in the south of England. Wool mills and dyeing houses spread out to the left and right of the station – about twenty of them, powered by more than thirty steam engines. These were the factories that Samuel Kent inspected. On a Sunday evening they lay idle, but in the morning the machines would start to pound and whirr, and the air would thicken with smoke, soot, the smells of urine (collected in tubs from public houses and used to scour wool) and of the vegetable dyes streaming into the river Biss.

Whicher hired a porter to carry his luggage to the Woolpack Inn, Market Place, half a mile from the station. The pair crossed the bridge over the Biss – a small, slow tributary of the Avon – and walked to the town centre. They passed the houses of the Parade, a terrace built by rich Georgian clothiers, and the side streets crammed with weavers' cottages. Trade had been poor that year. Many sheep had died over the harsh winter, so wool was scarcer than usual, and the competitive mill-owners of northern England were selling their muslin cheap.

When Whicher reached the Woolpack, on the corner of Red Hat Lane, he paid the porter sixpence and went in. The inn was a compact stone building, with an arch at its centre, which offered rooms at is.6d. a night. Wine, cider, spirits and home-brewed ale were sold at the bar. Whicher may have ordered a drink or two: when in a tight spot, he once told Dickens, 'I couldn't do better than have a drop of brandy-and-water to keep my courage up.'

Jonathan Whicher was born in Camberwell, three miles south of London, on 1 October 1814. His father was a gardener, probably one of the village's many market gardeners, who grew cherries, lettuces, roses and willow for sale in the city. He may have tended the lawns and flowerbeds of the richer residents of the district – Camberwell was studded with the stucco villas and ornamental cottages of merchants seeking an airy retreat from London.

On the day of Jonathan's baptism, 23 October, the curate of St Giles parish church also christened the child of another gardener, and the babies of a shoemaker, a cabinetmaker, two coachmen, a flutemaker and a labourer. In one of the many variants to which his surname was prey, Jonathan was recorded as the son of Richard and Rebecca Whitcher. He was known as Jack. He had an older sister, Eliza, and at least one older brother, James. Another sister, Sarah, was born in August 1819, when he was four. That summer was remembered for its abundance of Camberwell Beauties, the large, velvety, dark-claret butterflies first seen in the area in 1748.

In the mid-1830s Jack Whicher was still living in Camber-well, probably in Providence Row, a small terrace of cottages at the northern, poorer end of the village. The cottages lay on Wyndham Road, close to a mill and backing onto nursery gardens, but in a wretched neighbourhood – 'as proverbial for its depravity as for its ignorance', according to a report published by the local school. Wyndham Road was frequented by shifty types – hawkers, costermongers, chimney sweeps – and by outright villains.

When Jack Whicher applied to join the Metropolitan Police in the late summer of 1837 he was just old enough, at twenty-two, and just tall enough, at five feet eight inches, to meet the entrance requirements. He passed the tests for literacy and physical fitness, and two 'respectable house-holders' of his parish vouched for his good character. Like more than a third of the early recruits, he was working as a labourer when he submitted his application.

On 18 September, Whicher became a police constable. His weekly wage – about £1 – was only a slight improvement on his previous earnings, but his future was now a little more secure.

The Metropolitan Police, the first such force in the country, was eight years old. London had got so big, so fluid, so mysterious to itself that in 1829 its inhabitants had, reluctantly, accepted the need for a disciplined body of men to patrol the streets. The 3,500 policemen were known as 'bobbies' and 'peelers' (after their founder, Sir Robert Peel), as 'coppers' (they caught, or copped, villains), as 'crushers' (they crushed liberty), as 'Jenny Darbies' (from gendarmes), and as pigs (a term of abuse since the sixteenth century).

Whicher was issued with dark-blue trousers and a dark-blue long-tailed coat, its bright metal buttons imprinted with a crown and the word POLICE. His division and number – E47, the 'E' for Holborn – was boldly marked on a stiff, buckled collar; beneath this, a leather stock four inches deep encircled his neck as protection against 'garotters'. His coat was fitted with deep pockets in which to stash a truncheon and a wooden rattle. He wore a chimney-pot hat with a glazed leather crown and leather supports down the sides. A fellow officer detailed the costume: 'I had to put on a swallow-tail coat, and a rabbit-skin high-top-hat, covered with leather, weighing eighteen ounces, a pair of Wellington boots, the leather of which must have been at least a sixteenth of an inch thick, and a belt about four inches broad, with a great brass buckle six inches deep . . . I never felt so uncomfortable in all my life.' An officer had to wear his uniform even when he was not at work, so that he could never be accused of concealing his identity. He put a band around his wrist to show when he was on duty. Beards and moustaches were banned. Many men grew sideburns instead.

At a time when all clothes were a uniform of sorts, the police kit had its merits: the journalist Harriet Martineau noted that an ambitious young working-class man could 'pass along the street somewhat more proudly, and under more notice' in this get-up 'than the artisan in his apron and paper cap, or the labourer in his fustian, or bearing the porter's knot' – fustian was the rough fabric from which labourers' jackets were cut, the porter's knot a pad to protect the shoulders when carrying a heavy load.

The perfect policeman was defined by restraint, anonymity, an absence of emotion. 'A hot temper would never do,' said Martineau, 'nor any vanity which would lay a man open to arts of flirtation; nor too innocent good-nature; nor a hesitating temper or manner; nor any weakness for drink; nor any degree of stupidity.' Andrew Wynter, a physician and writer, described the ideal constable as 'stiff, calm, and inexorable, an institution rather than a man. We seem to have no more hold of his personality than we could possibly get of his coat buttoned up to the throttling-point . . . a machine, moving, thinking and speaking only as his instruction-book directs . . . He seems . . . to have neither hopes nor fears.'

Whicher shared a dormitory with about sixteen other men in the Hunter Place station house, in Hunter Street, just south of King's Cross. This was a substantial brick building that had recently been acquired by the force. The entrance was through a long, dark passage; as well as the dormitories upstairs, the station contained four cells, a library, a scullery, a mess room and a recreation room. All single men were expected to lodge in the station house, and to be in their quarters by midnight. When working the early shift, Whicher rose before six. He might wash in the dormitory, if he had his own tub and screen, and then breakfast on a chop, a potato and a cup of coffee. At six the men lined up in the yard. One of the division's four inspectors took the roll, then read out a paper from headquarters at Whitehall Place listing any punishments, rewards, dismissals and suspensions of individual officers. The inspector also informed the men of the latest crime reports, giving descriptions of suspects, missing persons and property. Having checked his men's uniforms and equipment, he gave the order to 'Close up!' A few of the constables were sent to the station house as a reserve force, while the rest were marched off to their beats by the sergeants.

In the daytime, a constable covered a seven-and-a-half-mile beat at two-and-a-half miles an hour for two four-hour stints: from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., say, and from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. He familiarised himself with every house on his beat, and strove to clear the roads of beggars, tramps, costermongers, drunks and prostitutes. He was subject to spot checks by a sergeant or an inspector, and the rules were strict: no leaning or sitting while on the beat, no swearing, no consorting with servant girls. The police were instructed to treat everyone with respect – the drivers of hansom cabs, for instance, were not to be referred to as 'cabbies' – and to avoid the use of force. These standards were to be observed off-duty, too. If found drunk at any time, a constable was issued with a warning, and if the offence was repeated he was dismissed from the force. In the early 1830s four out of five dismissals, of a total of three thousand, were for drunkenness.

At about eight in the evening Whicher ate supper in the station house – roast mutton, perhaps, with cabbage, potatoes and dumplings. When assigned the night shift, he took his place in the yard before nine, carrying a lantern, or 'bull's-eye', as well as a truncheon and a rattle. On this unbroken eight-hour stint he tested the locks on windows and doors, watched for fires, took the destitute into shelters, checked that public houses were closed on time. The circuit was much shorter at night – two miles – and Whicher was expected to pass each point on his beat every hour. If he needed help, he swung his rattle; a constable from a neighbouring beat should always be within earshot. Though this shift could be miserable in winter, it had its perks: tips for waking up market traders or labourers before dawn, and sometimes a 'toothful' of beer or brandy from each publican on the route.

Whicher patrolled Holborn in the years that the district was dominated by the great, eight-acre slum of St Giles. This dark complication of streets and alleys was laced with hidden passages through courtyards, attics, cellars. Hustlers and thieves spilled out to coax, hoax or steal cash from prosperous passers-by – around St Giles lay the law courts, the university, the British Museum, the fine squares of Bloomsbury and the posh shops of High Holborn. If spotted by the police, the criminals slipped back into their labyrinth.

Holborn teemed with tricksters, and the police of E division had to be expert in identifying them. A new vocabulary evolved to catalogue the various deceits. The police watched out for 'magsmen' (conmen, such as card sharps) who 'gammoned' (fooled) 'flats' (dupes) with the help of 'buttoners' or 'bonnets' (accomplices who drew people in by seeming to win money from the magsmen). A 'screever' (drafter of documents) might sell a 'fakement' to a vagrant 'on the blob' (telling hard-luck stories) – in 1837, fifty Londoners were arrested for producing such documents and eighty-six for bearing them. To 'work the kinchin lay' was to trick children out of their cash or clothing. To 'work the shallow' was to excite compassion by begging half-naked. To 'shake lurk' was to beg in the guise of a shipwrecked sailor. In November 1837 a magistrate noted that some thieves in the Holborn area were acting as decoys, feigning drunkenness in order to distract police constables while their friends burgled houses.

On occasion the officers of E division left their district. The entire police force was deployed to line the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey when Victoria was crowned in June 1838. Already the police were familiar with lunatics who were fixated by the new queen. An inmate of a workhouse in St Giles, for instance, was taken before the magistrates because he had become convinced that Victoria was in love with him. He said they had 'exchanged looks' in Kensington Gardens. The magistrates recommended that he be committed to an asylum.

Jack Whicher's first reported arrest was in December 1840. In a brothel on the Gray's Inn Road, near King's Cross, he noticed a seventeen-year-old girl giddy with drink and flaunting a set of improbably fine clothes. A feather boa hung from her neck. Whicher remembered that a boa was among the items stolen from a house in Bloomsbury a fortnight earlier, and that a maid had absconded on the night of the burglary. He approached the girl with the boa and charged her with theft. Louisa Weller was convicted later that month of robbing Sarah Taylor of Gloucester Street. The story of her capture outlined in miniature Whicher's detective qualities: an excellent memory, an eye for the incongruous, psychological acuity, and confidence.

Straight afterwards, his name vanished from the newspapers for two years. This was probably because he had been recruited by the Metropolitan Police Commissioners – Colonel Charles Rowan, an army man, and Sir Richard Mayne, a lawyer – to a small band of plainclothes 'active officers', proto-detectives whose existence was a secret. The English public had a horror of surveillance. There had been outrage in the early 1830s when it came to light that a plainclothes policeman had infiltrated a political gathering. In this climate, the detectives had to be introduced by stealth.

Magistrates' court records indicate that Whicher was working undercover in April 1842, when he noticed a trio of crooks in Regent Street. He followed them until he saw one of them stand in the path of Sir Roger Palmer, an Anglo-Irish baronet who owned a house in Park Lane, while another gently lifted Sir Roger's coat tails and the last picked a purse from his pocket. Professional pickpockets such as these typically worked in teams of three or four, shielding and easing one another's work. Many were extraordinarily adroit, having been trained since childhood in the art of 'dipping' or 'diving'. Though one of the three escaped, Whicher spotted him in another part of town a fortnight later and hauled him into a police court, reporting that the fellow had compounded his offence by trying to buy him off with silver.

The Metropolitan Police files show that Whicher was again operating incognito later that month, when he took part in the hunt for Daniel Good, a Putney coachman who had killed and dismembered his lover. Whicher and his Holborn colleague Sergeant Stephen Thornton kept watch on the house of a female friend of Good's in Spitalfields, east London (Dickens later described Thornton, who was eleven years older than Whicher, as having 'a ruddy face and a high sunburnt forehead . . . He is famous for steadily pursuing the inductive process and, from small beginnings, working on from clue to clue until he bags his man'). Daniel Good was eventually caught in Kent, but by good luck rather than deft police work.

In June 1842 the commissioners asked the Home Office for permission to set up a small detective division: they argued that they needed a centralised, elite force to coordinate murder hunts – such as the search for Good – and other serious crimes that crossed different police districts. If these officers could wear plain clothes, they said, the force would be all the more efficient. The Home Office agreed. That August, Whicher, Thornton and the other six men picked as detectives formally abandoned their beats, shed their uniforms, became as anonymous and ubiquitous as the villains they sought. Jack Whicher and Charles Goff of L (Lambeth) division were the most junior, but both were made sergeants within weeks (Whicher was only a month short of having served five years as a constable, usually the minimum required for promotion). This brought the number of sergeants in the division to six, serving under two inspectors. Whicher was given a pay rise of almost 50 per cent, from about £50 to £73 a year – £10 more than a regular sergeant's salary. As before, his wages were supplemented with bonuses and rewards.

'Intelligent men have been recently selected to form a body called the "detective police",' reported Chambers's Edinburgh Journal in 1843. 'At times the detective policeman attires himself in the dress of ordinary individuals.' The public wariness persisted – a Times editorial of 1845 warned of the dangers of detective police, explaining that there 'always will be, something repugnant in the bare idea of espionage'.

The detectives' headquarters were a room alongside the commissioners' offices in Great Scotland Yard, by Trafalgar Square. The men technically became part of the A, or Whitehall, division. Whicher was designated A27. His job, now, was to disappear, to slip noiselessly between the classes – the detectives were to blend, eavesdrop, merge into 'flash-houses' (pubs frequented by criminals) and into crowds threaded with thieves. They were untethered. While an ordinary policeman circled his beat like the arm of a compass, passing each point every hour, the detectives crisscrossed the city and the country at will. In the London underworld they were known as 'Jacks', which captured their classless anonymity.

The first English detective story, by the journalist William Russell, writing as 'Waters', appeared in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal in July 1849. The next year Whicher and his colleagues were eulogised by Charles Dickens in several magazine articles: 'They are, one and all, respectable-looking men,' Dickens reported, 'of perfectly good deportment and unusual intelligence; with nothing lounging or slinking in their manners; with an air of keen observation and quick perception when addressed; and generally presenting in their faces, traces more or less marked of habitually leading lives of strong mental excitement. They have all good eyes; and they all can, and they all do, look full at whomsoever they speak to.' George Augustus Sala, a fellow journalist, found Dickens' enthusiasm cloying – he disliked the novelist's 'curious and almost morbid partiality for communing with and entertaining police officers . . . He seemed always at his ease with these personages, and never tired of questioning them.' The detectives, like Dickens, were working-class boys made good, thrilled to find themselves with the run of the city. In Tom Fox; Or, the Revelations of a Detective, a mock-memoir of 1860, John Bennett noted that the detective was socially superior to 'the common peeler', because he was better educated and 'of far higher intelligence'. He sought the secrets of the establishment and of the underworld alike, and since he had few precedents he made up his methods on the hoof.

These methods were sometimes criticised. In 1851 Whicher was accused of spying and entrapment when he caught two bank robbers in The Mall. While walking across Trafalgar Square in May that year, Whicher spotted 'an old acquaintance', an ex-convict who was back in town after a stint in the penal colonies of Australia. He saw him join another old lag on a bench in The Mall, opposite the London and Westminster Bank. Over the next few weeks Whicher and a colleague watched the pair size up the bank. The policemen lay in wait until, on 28 June, they caught the crooks red-handed, fleeing the bank with their loot. Correspondents to The Times censured the officers for letting the crime take place rather than nipping it in the bud. 'The credit for skill and ingenuity gained by the detectives is probably what greatly inclines them to detection rather than prevention,' complained one letter-writer, implying that they had become puffed up by the attentions of Dickens and the like.

Dickens recast his new heroes in the figure of Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1853), the supreme fictional detective of the era. Mr Bucket was a 'sparkling stranger' who 'walks in an atmosphere of mysterious greatness'. The first police detective in an English novel, Bucket was a mythological figure for his age. He glided and floated into new zones, like a ghost or a cloud: 'Time and place cannot bind Mr Bucket.' He had 'adaptability to all grades'. He borrowed some of the dazzle of Edgar Allan Poe's amateur detective and intellectual magician Auguste Dupin, who preceded him by twelve years.

Bucket was broadly based on Whicher's friend and boss Charley Field – they shared a fat forefinger, an earthy charm, a relish for the 'beauty' of their work, a blithe assurance. Bucket was reminiscent of Jack Whicher, too. Like Whicher at the grand Oxford hotel, there was 'nothing remarkable about [Bucket] at first sight but his ghostly manner of appearing'. He was 'a stoutly-built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black' who watched and listened with a face 'as unchanging as the great mourning ring on his little finger'.

Through the 1840s and 1850s Whicher worked on sleights of hand and of the mind. He dealt with criminals who slipped away into alternative identities, melted into the streets and alleys. He was set on the trail of men and women who counterfeited coin, signatures on cheques, money orders, who escaped from alias to alias, shuffling off names as snakes shuffle off skins. He was the specialist on the 'swell mob', conmen and pickpockets who dressed as gentlemen and could slit open a pocket with a concealed knife, whip out a tie pin under cover of a flourished handkerchief. They worked their dodges at theatres, shopping galleries, places of amusement such as Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum and the London Zoological Gardens. Their greatest harvests were reaped at big public occasions – race meetings, agricultural shows, political gatherings – to which they would travel by first-class train to insinuate themselves among the men and women they hoped to rob.

In 1850 Charley Field told Dickens of a trick that Whicher had pulled off at the Epsom Derby. Field, Whicher and a friend called Mr Tatt were drinking together at the bar – they were on their third or fourth sherry – when they were rushed by four swell mobsmen. The gangsters knocked them over, and a fierce scuffle broke out – 'There we are, all down together, heads and heels, knocking about on the floor of the bar – perhaps you never see such a scene of confusion!' When the villains tried to flee the bar, Whicher cut them off at the door. All four were taken to the local police station. Mr Tatt discovered that his diamond shirt-pin had been stolen during the fight, but there was no sign of it on any of the swell mobsmen. Field was feeling very 'blank' (dejected) about the thieves' victory, when Whicher opened his hand to reveal the pin in his palm. 'Why, in the name of wonder,' said Field, 'how did you come by that?' 'I'll tell you how I come by it,' said Whicher. 'I saw which of 'em took it; and when we were all down on the floor together, knocking about, I just gave him a little touch on the back of his hand, as I knew his pal would; and he thought it was his pal; and gave it me!'

'One of the most beautiful things that ever was done, perhaps,' said Field. 'Beautiful. Beau-ti-ful . . . It was a lovely idea!' The artistry of crime was a familiar conceit, most strikingly advanced in Thomas de Quincey's ironic essay 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts' (1827), but the artistry of the law enforcer was something new. In the early nineteenth century, the subject of a crime story was the daring, dashing crook; now he was more often the analytical detective.

Whicher, who was said to be Commissioner Mayne's favourite officer, was made an inspector in 1856, and his salary rose to more than £100. Charley Field had left the force to become a private investigator, and Whicher and Thornton were now in charge of the department. In 1858 Whicher caught the valet who had stolen Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin and Child from the Earl of Suffolk. In the same year he took part in the hunt for the Italian revolutionaries who had tried to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris – the terrorists had hatched their plot and built their bombs in London – and he led a reopened inquiry into the murder of a police constable in an Essex cornfield. In 1859 Whicher investigated whether the Reverend James Bonwell, rector of a church in east London, and his lover, a clergyman's daughter, had killed their illegitimate son. Bonwell had paid an undertaker eighteen shillings to bury the baby secretly by slipping him into someone else's coffin. The coroner's court cleared the couple of murder but censured them for their behaviour, and in July 1860 the Bishop of London sued Bonwell for misconduct.

A couple of months before he was dispatched to Road Hill, Whicher tracked down the perpetrators of a £12,000 jewellery heist near the Palais Royal, in Paris. The thieves, Emily Lawrence and James Pearce, used the trappings of gentility to work their cons in jewellers' shops, where Lawrence 'palmed' lockets and bracelets off the counters and into her handmuff (female thieves were well-equipped with places in which to stash their spoils – shawls, stoles, muffs, vast pockets in their crinolines). With his favourite sidekicks, Detective Sergeants 'Dolly' Williamson and 'Dick' Tanner, Whicher gained entry in April to the jewel thieves' house in Stoke Newington, just north of London. When he charged Emily Lawrence, he noticed her shuffle her hands, and asked to see what she was holding. A struggle ensued, during which her boyfriend threatened to smash Whicher's skull with a poker, and Lawrence let three diamond rings fall to the floor.

From his brief appearances in memoirs, newspapers and journals, Jack Whicher emerges as kind, laconic, alert to the comedy in his work. He was 'an excellent officer', said a fellow detective, 'quiet, shrewd and practical, never in a hurry, generally successful, and ready to take on any case'. He had a wry turn of phrase. If Whicher was certain of something, he was 'as sure as I'm alive'. 'That'll do!' he said when he found a clue. He was benevolent to his foes – he agreed to share a drink with one thief before taking him prisoner, and to spare him the handcuffs: 'I'm willing to behave as a man to you,' he said, 'if you are willing to behave as a man to me.' He was not above a practical joke: at Ascot in the late 1850s he and some fellow officers crept up on a sleeping inspector, who was known for the pride he took in his whiskers, and shaved the bushy black growth off his left cheek.

Yet Whicher was a reserved man, private about his past. At least one sadness attended him. On 15 April 1838 a woman who called herself Elizabeth Whicher, formerly Green, née Harding, had given birth in the borough of Lambeth to a boy named Jonathan Whicher. On the birth certificate she recorded the father's name as Jonathan Whicher, his occupation as police constable, their address as 4 Providence Row. She had been about four weeks pregnant when Jack Whicher applied to join the police force – it may have been the prospect of a child that prompted him to enlist.

Three years later, Whicher was living in the Hunter Place station house, Holborn, as a single man. Neither his son nor the child's mother seems to appear on a death register between 1838 and 1851, nor in any census taken that century. The certificate apart, there is no evidence that Jack Whicher ever had a child. Only the record of the boy's birth remains.