The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. Judith Flanders

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘new police’ on the streets: five divisions, with 144 Metropolitan Police constables apiece. Within eight months there were 3,200 men, all dressed in blue. The Bow Street Runners had worn red waistcoats, but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes. The new police’s uniforms had been carefully chosen to indicate their professionalism, while at the same time the colour had been selected to reassure the population that, unlike the red-coated army, this was a civil, not a military force. (Not that the new colour choice made much difference: the police were quickly dubbed ‘raw lobsters’ or ‘the unboiled’. An unboiled lobster is blue; when it is put in hot water it turns red. Thus a policeman was only ‘hot water’ away from being a soldier.) The uniform was also protective: the stock at the neck was leather, not linen, and the rabbit-skin top hat had a reinforced leather top and bracing; according to one policeman’s memoir, it weighed eighteen ounces. (In 1864 it was replaced by the ‘Roman’ helmet that is still worn.) The only weapon carried was a baton, with a rattle (replaced by a whistle in 1884) to summon aid.

      Peel’s instructions for the new police stressed that constables ‘will be civil and obliging to all people’, while being ‘particularly cautious not to interfere idly or unnecessarily in order to make a display of his authority’. ‘The object to be attained is the prevention of crime,’ yet the police also had what today would be called ‘caring’ roles in their communities: looking after ‘insane persons and children’, ensuring that street nuisances (rubbish, waste, building materials) were removed, enforcing Sunday trading laws and preserving public order. The middle classes quickly came to accept this ideal as the reality, while the working classes were less persuaded, frequently with good reason. The early recruits were not exactly the crème de la crème, and of the initial intake of 2,800 men, 2,238 were swiftly dismissed, 1,790 for drunkenness.

This distrust came to a head in three separate incidents in 1833. The first was what became known as the Cold Bath Field riot. In May a group of workers calling themselves the National Political Union organized a rally in London. Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, ruled it an unlawful assembly, and flyers were posted warning the population not to participate. On the morning of 13 May about seventy-five constables were stationed near Cold Bath Field, the planned rallying point, with reinforcements backing them up – altogether, about 450 men were on call. When the workers arrived, the police superintendent moved his men in. Bricks were thrown, baton charges were led, many were injured, three constables were stabbed and one died. The policeman in command, Superintendent Mays, claimed he and his men had marched slowly down the street towards the speakers’ platform, planning to arrest the leaders and give the crowds time to leave under their own steam. They only charged, he said, when bricks and stones were thrown; he also claimed that the rioters had guns (although everyone agreed that no shot had been fired). On the other side, eye-witnesses reported that the police had charged immediately, indiscriminately attacking men, women and children, many of whom had nothing to do with the rally, but were simply passers-by. The officers made no attempts to rein in their men, and the crowd response was purely self-defence. The jury at the inquest on PC Robert Culley reached a verdict of justifiable homicide, noting that the Riot Act had not been read, which made the police charge illegal.*This verdict was quashed on appeal, and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry found that the police had not used excessive force. This was decidedly not the public’s view. The caricaturist Robert Cruikshank wrote a savage attack on the authorities, inflating the number of police to eight hundred, and suggesting that Culley had probably been stabbed by another policeman. He ended by parodying Peel’s instructions with a set of his own ‘Necessary Qualifications’ for policemen: ‘He must be utterly destitute of all feelings of humanity … He must qualify himself for action, by knocking down, every half hour, all the poor fruit-women he can find and other peaceable hardworking people, who endeavor [sic] to get an honest livelihood to support their large families. If able to perjure himself with a clear conscience he may depend upon speedy promotion.’

      While the inquest and inquiry were continuing, public outrage was exacerbated by the ongoing case of Popay, known generally as ‘the police spy’. William Popay was a police sergeant sent to infiltrate the National Political Union. He pretended to be an artist and attended meetings in ‘coloured clothes’ (plainclothes), acting as an agent provocateur, inciting his supposed fellow workers to illegal actions. When he was unmasked, earlier fears about the true nature of the police force seemed to be justified. It was, said the Radicals, nothing but a government-sanctioned spy network, paid for, to add insult to injury, out of working men’s taxes. Another select committee was set up, but before it could deliver its report the death of John Peacock Wood suddenly assumed significance.

      Wood should have had no fame at all. He was a waterside character in Wapping, by the London docks, an amiable drunk, a man of no trade or settled way of life. But he was harmless. On the night before his death he was drinking at the White Hart tavern with a friend, his wife and the landlady. According to witnesses at the inquest, a squabble arose over who was to pay for a pint, and this attracted the attention of a policeman, who ‘laid hold of the deceased, and shoved him “right slap” into the street’, where he fell on the pavement. A succession of witnesses agreed that Wood had been knocked down by a policeman, while another constable was seen with ‘a stick in his hand’, and another ‘lift[ed] the man up, whose head fell again to the pavement; the blow was violent’. It was not the first blow, either: the policeman’s hands were ‘stained with blood’. Somehow it took four policemen an hour to carry Wood the 250 yards from the tavern to the police station. A man in the cells saw him dragged by his feet into a cell (‘A deep murmur and expression of horror here burst forth’), where he was left until ten o’clock the next morning, at which point a doctor was sent for. Wood was treated and taken home, but he died that afternoon of a fractured skull caused, said a doctor, not ‘by a lateral fall, but. by a large round stick’.

      It was not just the death, but the behaviour of the police and the coroner at the inquest that incensed the population. The police swore that the cells’ other occupant could not have witnessed Wood’s treatment, because he had been discharged at six (said the charge book), or maybe it was 2.30 (the inspector). The police were permitted to sit in the court before they testified, unlike the other witnesses, which meant that they would be able to tailor their evidence. (The coroner stoutly protested that no policeman would think of doing any such thing.) At an identification parade the constables arrived dressed in street clothes, rather than their uniforms – to evade recognition, thought many.

      The fractious bickering between jury and coroner continued for thirteen hours on the first day. On the second, four doctors testified that Wood’s fracture had been caused by a truncheon-shaped object. Another witness testified to seeing him being chased by the police, but the coroner refused to accept this evidence, dismissing it as ‘disgraceful’. A juror snapped back, ‘If an honest perseverance to elicit the truth was disgraceful, he would admit that their conduct throughout the whole proceedings was disgraceful indeed.’ The coroner backed down, mumbling that it was ‘the firing and cross-firing’ of questions that he had been referring to, before adjourning the sitting.

      On the third day, another twelve hours was spent on the case. A number of policemen testified to the very great care they had lavished on the unconscious Wood. One ‘burst into tears, and said he had an aged mother, whose feelings had been much hurt by his name being mixed up with the affair’. A juryman, unmoved, asked him if it were not true that he had previously ‘broken a man’s head with his truncheon’. The coroner refused to let him answer the question, and the court was adjourned in uproar once again.

      On day four, a witness agreed with the police account, testifying that she had seen Wood carried carefully. On cross-examination, however, it was found that her evidence matched nothing that anyone else had seen that night, that it followed a private interview with the police inspector before the hearing, and furthermore that she had been seen drinking with another policeman only that morning. The coroner said he had received a note suggesting that Wood’s head ‘might have been accidentally struck against a beam at the entrance of the station-house’, but even the police agreed that that was СКАЧАТЬ