Preface
Writing the evocative description of London circa 1850 which opens Bleak House, the aspect that Mr. Charles Dickens famously empathized was fog. In 1881, arriving in the capital as a young man of twenty-one who had been raised in a small town in the East Midlands, it is the filth of the metropolis that assails Lyle Thorne’s senses.
Filth is everywhere. On the banks the River Thames, the outgoing tide deposits the flotsam and jetsam of a thousand vessels, large and small, to be picked over by urchins searching in the debris for something, anything, of value. The lower reaches of the Fleet, flowing beneath Holborn Bridge and Fleet Bridge, past Bridewell Palace, deposit raw sewage into the river, the stench of which has been known on hot summer days to force a suspension of business in the Houses of Parliament.
Filth in the streets – the excrement of three hundred thousand horses, one thousand tons of dung each day. Single horses pulling hackney cabs, pairs pulling tramcars, three horses pulling each omnibus, to say nothing of the uncounted numbers of horses belonging to private carters and to the elegant gentlemen and ladies whose recreation is to ride in Richmond Park. On every corner, Mr. Dickens would have recognized the descendants of his little crossing sweepers, proud that they down’t know nofink
– except that they can make a few coppers every day by keeping a channel clear for the gentlemen and ladies to pass without soiling their shoes, their trousers and their dresses.
Filth on the very surface of the buildings. Not fog but smog, that noxious mixture of the natural mist of low-lying land in the river floodplain and the outpouring of a million coal-burning chimneys. The sand-colored Anston limestone of the Palace of Westminster does not merely appear blackened by the deposits of airborne coal particles but is actually being eaten away by the acids that form when soot dissolves in water. Ditto Christopher Wren’s fine Anglican cathedral, the magnificence of whose exterior is shrouded in a darkening cloak as though ashamed to show itself. Ditto Buckingham Palace shrouded in black like the grieving widow of Prince Albert who lives there in perpetual mourning for her lost love.
Filth in the slums of the East End. Grime on the hands of the costermongers in the markets of Brick Lane, Billingsgate, Spitalfields, Petticoat Lane, and Roman Road. Grime engrained in the faces of the ladies of the night in Whitechapel and Bethnal Green. Grime invading the homes of the even most house-proud of women who each morning wash their doorsteps with scrubbing brush and hot soapy water until the stone is like to be worn away in the futile attempt to make it clean.
Filth in the form of the policemen entrusted with keeping the peace and maintaining the rule of law in this burgeoning metropolis. Deeply ingrained suspicions persist amongst all classes that the Metropolitan Police is a covert military force intent upon dictatorship. This, despite the findings of a 1828 Select Committee under Sir Robert Peel, that concludes, upon statistical evidence, that the influence of the Metropolitan Police in repressing crime, and the security it has given to person and property [makes it] one of the most valuable modern institutions.
No matter. The filth
they are called by those who feel themselves to own nothing worth the stealing and who persist in having a grudging admiration for the audacious thieves who take from those who clearly had more than they have any right to. Such people have a whole set of names for the men who wear the dark blue uniform and carry truncheons they are only too ready to use. Tracing their origin to Sir Robert Peel, they are Bobbies and Peelers; from their uniforms, they are Coppers and Bluebottles; for reasons lost in antiquity, they are the Old Bill, Rozzers, and Scuffers; and from pure hatred, they are Pigs, Rashers and Scum.
At a rent of one guinea a week, Thorne secured a clean bedroom in a lodging house on Cecil Street, and spent the next three days simply walking around the city, map in hand, seeing the sights. He loved it. This, he felt instinctively, was the place he was destined to spend the rest of his life.
Having worked for four years as assistant to a printer in his home town of Arnhale, Thorne had accumulated enough money to move south to London, leaving his widowed mother with the promise that, if all went well, he would find a place for her to live in the suburbs. Indeed, Lyle Thorne would have made the journey earlier, but he had done his research: to join the Metropolitan Police one had to be twenty-one years of age or over. Every other criterion he met, being six inches taller than the minimum height, well educated by the standards of public education at that time, and free from any bodily handicap.
Though he did not know it, he had arrived in the capital at a time when the Metropolitan Police was expanding significantly and on the lookout for likely recruits. The range of police work had expanded from simply enforcing the common law to include the increasingly scientific investigation of crime. In 1878, the Criminal Investigation Division had been established under Charles Vincent and in the next five years arrests by metropolitan detectives would rise from 13,000 to 18,000 annually.
I first heard these stories from Thorne himself during my visits to the farmhouse in Upper Sanditon where he lived in retirement for the last two decades of his long life. Upon his death, I discovered that he had left to me an entire filing cabinet of case files, all in total disorder. I should also acknowledge the cooperation of members of the current Metropolitan Police who have always responded helpfully to my attempts to fill in missing details in my accounts of Thorne’s investigations.
Early on the morning of Wednesday the 8th of June in 1881, Lyle Thorne left the respectable lodgings in Lamberth Street that he had taken three days earlier and presented himself at Scotland Yard promptly at 9 am. And that is where our story begins.
Reginald Knowles
Southwold
June 1959
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The Case of the Murdered Wife
June 1881
Murder most foul, as in the best it is,
But this most foul, strange, and unnatural. (William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5)
Everything had gone pretty smoothly up to this point. Lyle Thorne had sailed through a physical examination, which, in truth, had consisted of little more than counting and measuring his major body parts and ensuring their basic functionality. He had been questioned perfunctorily on his knowledge of the law by a Justice of the Peace who appeared hardly to be listening to Thorne’s responses. The oath had been administered.
True, there had been a moment of concern when the Justice of the Peace, pen in hand in the very act of completing the Swearing-in Certificate had paused to ask:
Thorne? Now why does that name sound so familiar to me, young man?
It had been six years since Thorne’s father had been hanged for murder, but fortunately the J.P. showed no signs of recollecting it, and Thorne was certainly not going to remind him.
It’s a very common name up North, sir,
he replied vaguely.
The J.P. had already recommenced filling in the certificate, having apparently forgotten his own question. He handed the document over to Thorne. Under the impressive coat of arms of the Borough of London, expressed in rather archaic English, it read:
These are to certify that Lyle Peter Thorne is hereby appointed to the position of constable in the Metropolitan Police under the provisions of the County and Borough Police Act, 1856, having this day by me been sworn into said office.
Given under my hand at the Central Criminal Court this 7th day of June 1881 being one of Her Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the Metropolitan area.
Joseph P. Biggins Esq.
It was not until 8.30 a.m. on the following day that Thorne’s induction into the Metropolitan Police force encountered its first, apparently insuperable, hurdle. He was standing before a desk at Scotland Yard behind which a sergeant, resplendent in a blue uniform with a single row of gleaming silver buttons down the front of his jacket and three silver chevrons on the upper arms, was looking perplexed.
I’m sorry, lad,
he said, but it seems that we have no uniforms in your size. I’ve taken your measurements, and we’ll get one made as soon as possible.
At six foot three inches, Thorne was fully nine inches above the average height of males at that time, and though there were taller men than he in the force, they were few and far between. The trousers of the largest available uniform had reached only to his lower calf and had looked absurd.
May I ask how long that will take, sergeant?
Thorne inquired.
You may ask, my lad,
replied the sergeant, but I can’t give you an answer on account of its never having happened to me before. But, of course, until you have a uniform, I can’t send you out onto the streets, so you will be restricted to office duties – which can start with you making a fresh pot of tea.
The words were no sooner out of the sergeant’s mouth than a slightly-built, middle-aged man in plain clothes entered the room.
Sergeant Pounder,
he began in a clipped and authoritative manner, I need a constable to accompany me to investigate a reported murder in Devil’s Acre.
I’m sorry Detective Sergeant Price,
Pounder replied, but there is no one available. We are pretty stretched at the moment on account of this flu that’s going around.
Then who’s this long streak of bacon, Pounder?
the Detective Sergeant asked jerking his thumb in the general direction of Lyle Thorne.
"A new constable, sir. Name of Thorne. Just been sworn in yesterday. Never even been out on patrol. And, Pounder added with emphasis,
he doesn’t have a uniform."
He’ll do,
the Detective Sergeant stated in the sort of tone that ensured there would be no objection. I might need someone who can look over high walls,
he added with a smile to Pounder.
D.C. Price turned to Thorne and asked, Got your warrant card, lad?
Yes sir,
Thorne replied.
Then what are you waiting around for, constable? Pounder can make his own tea for a change,
Price said turning on his heel and disappearing out of the door.
Thorne looked to the sergeant for guidance. Pounder dismissed him with a small wafting of the left hand which seemed to indicate that he dissociated himself from the detective sergeant’s foolishness, and Thorne turned to follow Price. At that moment, his career in the Metropolitan Police began.
* * * * * *
There were many areas in Victorian London of which respectable citizens were either genuinely ignorant or about which they feigned ignorance. London’s slums had originated in the mid-eighteenth century as a result of the unprecedented growth in population consequent upon industrialization. By the 1880s, the entire East End was characterized by over-crowded, insanitary housing, poverty, disease, and crime, but though the East End was the most extensive such slum area, there were several other pockets of deprivation such as St. Giles and Clerkenwell in Central London, and Pottery Lane in Notting Hill.
To the middle classes who never experienced
