Recent reads - Jack the Ripper (again), Britain in the early Seventies and a Biblical travelogue (of sorts)

I’ll start this post, about three factual works that I have recently read, by saying that I really should stop reading books about Jack the Ripper. It’s not exactly a healthy subject to obsess about. After the latest Ripper book, I think I’m done on that subject for now. It was Jack the Ripper: The 21^st Century Investigation by Trevor Marriott, an ex-copper who was bigged up by the blurb as a ‘top Murder Squad detective’ who ‘reveals the Ripper’s true identity at last’; that last bit is used, with slight variations, for the blurb on almost all books about the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 so I didn’t exactly have high hopes. There followed a re-hash of the murders (I really am not sure if there’s much new that can be said here, but every Ripper murder book must of course cover this very well-trod ground – although to his credit, Marriott does at least suggest that there were victims beyond the ‘canonical’ five) before an admittedly entertaining set of chapters about the more prominent suspects (Montague Druitt, James Maybrick, the Duke of Clarence, etc, etc) in which the cases against each of them were taken apart. Marriott was somewhat put out that he wasn’t able to use his police contacts to have a go on HOLMES, the modern crime-recording database – he must’ve hated the recent BBC documentary, Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened, in which Emilia Fox was allowed to do just that. Marriott’s eventual hypothesis was that the murderer might have been a sailor on one of the many ships in London’s docks which were not far from Whitechapel – not original, but it’s interesting how he’s able to research this (there’s not as much evidence as he’d hoped) and I like how he brought in the international angle – there were reports in the years immediately after 1888 of similar crimes in Germany and Nicaragua, although how much of that may or may not have been true is debatable (as with any Ripper study, Marriott is as quick to disregard any evidence that doesn’t support his theory as he is solid in his defence of the evidence that does). The ‘Ripper’ in this study turned out to be a German sailor who murdered his landlady in New York in 1894 and who, after being found guilty, met his end in the electric chair two years later. Apparently his lawyer thought he might have been Jack the Ripper. I’m not really convinced – we’ve had theories about Ripper suspects ending up getting done for different murders before. This, ultimately, was not the best of Ripper reads (Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed, which also tried to use modern investigatory techniques and came up with a very different but equally unprovable suspect, has the merit of being much better written), while I take my leave of Ripper speculation with a thought that maybe, given recent events involving Russia, the old one about the Ripper being a Russian agent acting to discredit the British police might be due a re-airing.

Moving to more recent history, I’ve encountered Dominic Sandbrook before. He’s the revisionist historian who wrote four books detailing British history – not just the politics, but a bit of everything including society, economics, popular culture, etc – between the Suez Crisis and the election of Mrs Thatcher. I read them out of order, of course, starting with the last one (Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979). I liked that one so much that I went back to the beginning and enjoyed the first one (Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles), then immersed myself in the second (White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties). And so to the third – State of Emergency: The Way We Were, 1970-1974. The early Seventies in Britain were strange times indeed and Sandbrook, true to form, immerses the reader in this period which saw strikes, moral panics over the country’s youth (a recurring theme in Sandbrook’s books, the only thing apparently new about the skinheads being that they dressed different from the Teddy boys from just over a decade beforehand), all hell breaking loose in Northern Ireland, more strikes, a Home Secretary seemingly permanently drunk (stagger forward, Reggie Maudling), several decent sitcoms and massive cultural change while there was a PM who had a grand piano installed in Downing Street (Ted Heath, of whose various faults the worst seems by this account to have been a run of appallingly bad luck). Everything, right down to children’s TV shows (and the accompanying concern that kids were watching too much TV), football hooliganism and popular fiction (in particular Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man which, although published in ’75, is used as a prism here to explore radical chic) gets a look-in here; even life in the suburbs, much maligned at the time, gets a more positive going-over. As with Sandbrook’s other works, things draw to a grand climax in which events and themes previously mentioned draw together as a government teeters on the brink; here, it’s the Heath government declaring a state of emergency for the fourth time (yes, really) as Britain, in economic trouble even before the oil crisis of ’73, lurches into the Three-Day Week in which electricity was limited to conserve energy supplies (and, guess what, people panic-bought toilet paper). Worth a read, even if you haven’t read any other books in the series!

And then there’s Apostle: Travels to the Tombs of the Twelve by an American travel writer called Tom Bissell. The clue’s in the title – Bissell has taken it upon himself to visit the tombs (or sites of the tombs) of Jesus’s disciples. As travelogues go it’s an interesting challenge and Bissell – who kicks off by saying that he comes to this as a lapsed Catholic – has really done his homework in the arcane subject of who the twelve Apostles were (the four Gospels are not exactly in universal agreement here), what happened to them and where they ended up. Obviously in some cases their remains ultimately found their way to more than one place and some of this is highly disputed, but Bissell picks one site for each one and goes there to see what he can find out (the sites in question may raise some eyebrows – the site of an obscure monastery in Kyrgyzstan as opposed to Salerno Cathedral for St Matthew, for example, though what with several of the disciples being buried in Rome I guess he chose a site outside Italy for a bit of variation). On the way, he displays some impressively in-depth theological learning, sometimes perhaps too in-depth while in places he does tend to lose patience with the people he meets (his travels occurred over the course of several years, and at one point he notes that it was four years until he met ‘a person visiting a Christian church who knew something about Christianity’). He’s at his best in the first chapter, to be honest – visiting Jerusalem in an attempt to find the place where Judas Iscariot hanged himself – and by the end it seems like he’s running out of steam, devoting a mere four-and-a-bit pages to his pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela. A promising premise and plenty of insights, overall it’s more solidly good than anything else.

The mysterious pyramid in Falmouth

Reading about the Killigrew family in The Grove of Eagles sparked my curiosity the next time I went to Falmouth. Their manor house, Arwenack, was mostly destroyed in the Civil War although later it was partly restored and now stands today on Avenue Road, opposite the Discovery Quay car park. Also in the immediate vicinity is the family’s memorial, which takes the form of an unmarked granite obselisk – or rather, given that its surfaces are triangular and they converge in a point at the top, an unmarked granite pyramid.

At least, it is generally assumed to be the family’s memorial.

Known locally as the Killigrew Monument, it was erected on the orders of one Martin Lister (d.1745), a soldier who had married into the Killigrew family – and who’d had to change his name to Lister-Killigrew in order to benefit from his wife’s inheritance, his wife Anne being the daughter of Sir Peter Killigrew (d. 1705) and, as they had no children, the last of the line. After his wife’s death in 1727, Lister-Killigrew left Falmouth but later sent instructions to his steward at Arwenack that the stone pyramid be built. These instructions were apparently quite detailed but its exact purpose is unclear as Lister-Killigrew was adamant that there should be no inscription. Apparently he never saw it completed as he never returned to Falmouth.

Standing some 44 feet high, the lack of inscription means that the Killigrew Monument is something of a mystery although it is generally assumed to have been intended as a memorial to the family who founded the town of Falmouth in the seventeenth century. It has been moved a couple of times since being erected, and has been at its current location since 1871. Local legend has it that during one of the previous relocations, two wax-sealed glass bottles were found underneath it. Accounts of this vary – some say the bottles were filled with parchment or coins, while others say they were empty (which sounds unlikely).

One of the more fanciful stories is that the pyramid is in some way a means in indicating the location of buried treasure, for there has been more than one story about the Killigrews of Arwenack being involved in nefarious activities, from smuggling and receiving stolen goods to piracy and murder. One of them, Mary Killigrew, who lived in the sixteenth century (the actual years of her birth and death are unknown), was actually convicted of piracy and sentenced to death although she was pardoned by Elizabeth I. She had sent her servants to raid a Spanish ship that had sought shelter in Carrick Roads (one of the largest natural harbours in the world and the reason for Falmouth’s existence), and she is reckoned to have buried some of her ill-gotten gains in the grounds of Arwenack House.

So could the Killigrew pyramid be a way of indicating where Mary Killigrew’s treasure might be buried? It sounds unlikely, but as Martin Lister-Killigrew didn’t say why he wanted the monument to be built, we’ve no way of knowing for sure.

Jamaica Inn

[Spoiler alert – don’t read on if you do not wish to have the major plot-twist of Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier revealed to you.]

“Bodmin is the greatest and wildest stretch of moorland in Cornwall … I came unprepared for its dark, diabolic beauty. People say that my fictional characters seem to emerge from the places where my stories are set, and certainly when I first set eyes on the old, granite-faced inn itself it made me think there was a story there, peopled with moorland folk in strange harmony with their background.”

So wrote Daphne du Maurier (in Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall) about the Jamaica Inn, a moorland pub/hotel located in a hamlet called Bolventor which is just off the A30 in the middle of Bodmin Moor, about mid-way between Launceston and Bodmin (both of which have at some point served as Cornwall’s county town). It’s about a mile away from Dozmary Pool, a small lake which some say was the lake where King Arthur received his sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake. But I digress; back to the Jamaica Inn. Although much altered over the years (it’s been renovated considerably since du Maurier’s time), the current building dates back to around 1750 although there’s been an inn on the site since at least the 1540s, serving as a staging-post for the changing of horses on stagecoaches travelling on the London-to-Penzance road which, as the A30, went straight through Bolventor until a by-pass was built in the 1970s. I cannot say what it is like as a pub, for I, like many a traveller in the West Country, have only ever used it as a brief stopping-point on the way home, as a last place to get a coffee and a few Cornish souvenirs before heading back across the Tamar.

It is, of course, famous today for being the main venue for Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel Jamaica Inn. Daphne du Maurier first visited the Jamaica Inn in the early 1930s at the suggestion of a friend of hers, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch – a prolific writer, known as ‘Q’, best remembered today for being the editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse. She ended up going there with Q’s daughter, and while staying there they decided to ride a few miles across the moor to visit someone. Unfortunately the weather turned, and in rain and fog they got lost – in the end, they resorted to leaving the reins loose and hoping that the horses would lead them back to the inn, which they eventually did.

It was her stay at the Jamaica Inn that inspired her to write the novel of the same name, her second, which was published in 1936. In early nineteenth-century Cornwall, Mary Yellan, a farm girl from Helford in the south-west of the county, goes to live with her aunt and uncle after the death of her mother. Her uncle, Joss Merlyn (who she has never met before) is the landlord of the Jamaica Inn, and even before Mary gets there on “a cold grey day in late November” we readers get the impression that all is not well at the isolated roadside inn. The coachman initially refuses to go beyond Bodmin, and it’s only after Mary tells him that she’s the landlord’s niece that he is reluctantly persuaded to take her there, and he’s very cagey as to why (“Jamaica’s got a bad name … Respectable folk don’t go to Jamaica any more”).

Strange things are indeed happening at Jamaica which, despite being on the main road, has no passing trade. Joss Merlyn is a violent drunkard (although, as he points out during one of his drinking-sessions, “I’m not drunk enough to tell you why I live in this God-forgotten spot”; that comes later), while his wife – the sister of Mary’s late mother – is a timid, almost ghost-like figure. The only activity is at night, when horse-drawn waggons occasionally arrive to unload vast amounts of goods at the inn (the passage in which Mary witnesses this from her bedroom window is particularly good). Then there’s the late-night drinking-session that occurs when strange men come from all over Cornwall, and which ends with Joss Merlyn ordering the murder of one of the men. Mary assumes that her uncle is heavily involved in smuggling – with the inn being used to store contraband that’s been landed all over the county – but it is actually worse than that. For Uncle Joss is not involved in smuggling but wrecking – the act of deliberately luring ships onto the rocks of the northern Cornish coast, and then murdering survivors and stealing whatever the ships are carrying.

Meanwhile, there’s Bodmin Moor itself, for this is a tale as much of a place as it is of people. All around Jamaica Inn and its nefarious goings-on is the brooding presence of the moor – “a silent, desolate country … vast and untouched by human hand; on the high tors the slabs of stone leant against one another in strange shapes and forms, massive sentinals who had stood there since God first fashioned them”. Like her creator, Mary Yellan goes for a walk out on the moor – she gets lost, and is saved (more or less) by the local vicar.

Ah, the vicar. The Reverend Francis Davey, who happens to be an albino, is the vicar of the nearby village of Altarnun (like the Jamaica Inn, a real place, located in the north-eastern edge of Bodmin Moor). He comes across as being a kindly man, but all is not what it seems. For it is the vicar who is the real villain of Jamaica Inn, the unlikely brains behind Joss Merlyn’s brawn. He’s only revealed as the leader of the wreckers towards the end, of course, after Mary finds a picture of his in which he depicts himself as a wolf preaching to his congregation who are shown as sheep.

I really enjoyed Jamaica Inn, even though reading it ‘blind’ – not knowing who the real villain of the piece is – is difficult, as the story is so well-known. Would I have seen that twist towards the end coming had I not already known that the vicar was the bad guy? It’s impossible to say. I’d’ve liked to have seen more characterisation of said villain, though, but that’s not really possible when his true identity is revealed so late in the novel (and, as we shall see, revealing him as the baddie-in-chief earlier would’ve ruined the whole thing). Part of me wonders if it might have worked better had du Maurier made Mary Yellan the narrator rather than telling the story in the third person. From my own perspective, though, the main thing I was wondering about was how the evil vicar compares to another fictional man of the cloth who turns out to be heavily involved in activities of a nocturnal and highly illegal nature.

I refer, of course, to Doctor Syn. How does the Vicar of Altarnun measure up against the Vicar of Dymchurch? It’s rather hard to say, for Doctor Syn (similarly not revealed as the smuggler leader until close to the end of the original novel in which he appeared) got to return in six adventures that fill out his considerable back-story – for which we readers must be thankful that Russell Thorndike’s acting career did not pan out as he’d hoped, forcing him back to writing novels. Daphne du Maurier, of course, was (unlike Thorndike) a novelist first and foremost, and she never saw any reason to return to the characters of Jamaica Inn (although it would be great to have had a sequel about how Mary’s relationship with Jem Merlyn pans out after they leave Cornwall at the end). Plus, of course, it is easier to make a smuggler leader into a sort-of hero (in a Robin Hood way) than it is a wrecker leader, given how the latter activity involves a lot of cold-blooded murder (or did it? This, I feel, is something that should be explored in greater depth in another ‘Historic English crime’ piece!). So, as far as the Reverend Davey is concerned, he’s a more out-and-out villain than the Reverend Doctor Syn for that reason, but we have just a few hints at how a man of God came to be the leader of a gang of wreckers: “I am a freak in nature and a freak in time. I do not belong here, and I was born with a grudge against this age, and a grudge against mankind. Peace is very hard to find … I thought to find it in the Christian Church, but the dogma sickened me”. There are also hints at an obsession with paganism which might, if dealt with in any more depth, tie in with the elemental nature of the moor (“I have stood in the church at midnight, Mary, and listened to the silence; there is a murmur in the air and a whisper of unrest that is bred deep in the soil and has no knowledge of the church and Altarnun”), but no more. At the end, the Reverend Davey remains a bit of an enigma, just like Rachel in My Cousin Rachel. And it’s the enigmatic bit that makes Daphne du Maurier’s characters linger in the memory long after you’ve finished reading her books.

Even the ones you already know about, for Jamaica Inn has been adapted several times. Unfortunately, a couple of the more high-profile adaptations haven’t been particularly good, with the film and TV people failing to do the novel justice. There was that BBC adaptation back in 2014, which didn’t go down too well thanks to the almost-inaudible dialogue; the 1983 ITV version, with Jane Seymour as Mary Yellan and Patrick McGoohan as Joss Merlyn, is much better. And then, back in 1939, there was the Alfred Hitchcock version.

Jamaica Inn was to be the last British film to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock before he moved to Hollywood (decades later, he would return to his native London to make Frenzy). It wasn’t one of his better efforts. Problems began when he had to comply with Hollywood’s Production Code, which frowned upon negative depictions of the clergy – meaning that the Reverend Davey was replaced as the villain of the piece by a local squire called Sir Humphrey Pengallan (the English gentry, of course, was fair game). Hitchcock then managed to do away with much of the novel’s tension and suspense. This, one suspects, was mainly because Charles Laughton, the actor who played Sir Humphrey, was also one of the film’s producers and demanded that his character have more lines (Laughton had a lot of pull in the British film industry back then, having won the Oscar for Best Actor a few years previously for playing the title role in The Private Life of Henry VIII). This forced Hitchcock to have him revealed as the baddie sooner than planned. Daphne du Maurier didn’t like it, to the point that she apparently considered withholding the film rights to Rebecca, which had been published a year earlier. Thankfully, she relented, and Rebecca was made into a film by Hitchcock in America a year later.

Historical English crime: Smuggling on Romney Marsh (part 2)

The smuggling of wool out of England declined in the early eighteenth century, as European weavers found cheaper sources of wool elsewhere and other clothing materials, such as cotton, started to appear in Europe. That did not mean that smuggling was at an end, though – in fact, smuggling as it is popularly perceived today was just getting started, for by that time there was more money to be made smuggling goods into Britain (and it was indeed Britain by this point, the UK having been created as a result of the Act of Union in 1707). Products like alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea all had high import duties imposed on them, which led to much smuggling of such goods. Tea in particular was an expensive drink, yet in the early eighteenth century the English were well on their way to becoming a nation of tea-drinkers.

The smuggler, therefore, came to be seen as a public benefactor who could supply tea – or brandy, or tobacco – at a reasonable price. Not everyone thought well of smuggling, though. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, often preached against it, although for the most part his words fell on deaf ears; more than a generation after him, attitudes towards smugglers were better summed up by the essayist Charles Lamb, who described the smuggler as an “honest thief” who robbed “nothing but the revenue – an abstraction I never greatly cared about”. Smugglers could also pay quite well, and many a farm labourer supplemented his meagre income by way of some nocturnal fetching and carrying (quite literally ‘moonlighting’).

Being located on the edge of Romney Marsh, the Sussex port of Rye was very much a smugglers’ town where the magistrates and the riding officers struggled and often failed to keep things under control. Two such magistrates were James Lamb and Allen Grebell, who we have previously encountered as (respectively) the intended victim and the actual victim in the ‘murder by mistake’ case. These gentlemen, who both served as Mayor of Rye in the early-to-mid eighteenth century, are on record as having acquitted those accused of smuggling due to insufficient evidence on more than one occasion, such decisions perhaps being taken more out of fear for their personal safety than any other consideration. Both knew what happened to Gabriel Tomkins, a bailiff who’d arrested one Thomas Moore for a smuggling-related offence at Rye in 1735. After being bailed, Moore went to the Mermaid Inn, nowadays a famous old pub-cum-hotel but then a notorious smuggler hang-out, where he met with several others. Unfortunately for Tomkins, he happened to be staying at the Mermaid Inn. Moore and his friends forced the bailiff out of his room, dragged him out into the street, relieved him of the bail-bonds and arrest warrants that he had on him, took him down to the harbour and put him on a ship to be taken overseas. He was only rescued from that last bit because the captain of the local revenue ship heard what had happened and ordered all of the ships in the harbour to be searched.

The smugglers were violent men, notorious for killing riding officers and anyone else who took too close an interest in their affairs – so much so that many ordinary people were only too happy to turn a blind eye to their activities, such was their fear of incurring the wrath of the smugglers. Lamb and Grebell, and others like them, would have found themselves and their families in danger had they taken a firmer approach to smuggling (Tomkins was lucky he wasn’t killed). At the time, the most notorious group of smugglers operating in the Romney Marsh area were the Hawkhurst Gang, named after the Kentish village of the same name, who during the 1730s and 1740s terrorised Kent and Sussex. They were regular customers at the Mermaid Inn – and when they drank there, they’d sit with their weapons on the tables, clearly with no fear of the authorities.

The seeds of their downfall were sown in October 1747 when they were expecting a large consignment of tea which was due to be landed in Sussex but which in the event was seized when the ship that was carrying it was intercepted at sea and taken to Poole in Dorset. The tea was taken to the custom house at Poole, and it says something for the audacity of the Hawkhurst Gang that they decided to go to Dorset, attack the customs house and steal ‘their’ tea. They duly managed to pull off this heist, but several months later one of their number was arrested in connection with the raid and imprisoned at Chichester. The rest of the gang decided that in order to protect themselves, anyone stepping forward with evidence against their incarcerated comrade should be killed.

Two men – the custom house keeper and a shoemaker – came forward as witnesses to the raid. They were on their way to have their evidence taken by a magistrate when they stopped at a pub called the White Hart in a village called Rowlands Castle (then in Sussex, now in Hampshire). Unfortunately for them, the pub landlady was an ally of the smugglers and she quickly sent a message to the Hawkhurst Gang. It wasn’t long before seven of them turned up; posing as locals, they plied the witnesses with booze until they passed out. When they came to, they found that they’d both been tied astride a horse. The smugglers whipped them and took them to a well where they threatened to throw them in. They then whipped one of them to death and attempted to hang the other; they botched that, so they threw him down the well, and then threw some big stones in after him to finish him off.

When the bodies were found, the sheer brutality of what the smugglers had done turned many against them, and one by one they were rounded up. All seven went on trial for murder at the Chichester Assizes; they were all found guilty and six of them were hanged (the seventh died in prison before he could be taken to the gallows). Of the remaining members of the Hawkhurst Gang still at large, one of them accused another of stealing some of the tea that had been taken in the raid; he beat him to death and hid his body in a pond. He was later arrested for that murder, and he too ended his life on the gallows almost two years after that fateful consignment of tea had been seized. That, more or less, was the end of the Hawkhurst Gang.

But their downfall did not deter others – indeed, it left a vacuum that other smuggling gangs were quick to fill. The situation on land was bad, for even if a smuggler was arrested it was notoriously difficult to secure a conviction, such was the intimidatory nature of the smuggling gangs. At sea, meanwhile, the revenue men were invariably outnumbered – in 1720, for example, the captain of the Rye revenue ship reported: “3 large Calais sloops loaded with brandy &c lye now off this Harbour, about 30 men in each sloop watching for my comeing out. If I have not more men or a Man of Warr ordered to cruise with me I am useless, & the rideing officers dare not appear on ye coast.” Throughout the eighteenth century, there were never enough revenue ships to deal with smugglers, with the various overseas wars in which Britain was involved meaning that for long periods of time the Royal Navy wasn’t able to help out in any great numbers.

As far as the government was concerned, smuggling was a clear public order problem, especially in Kent and Sussex where smuggling gangs were to all intents and purposes private armies; troops were posted to coastal towns but they could be withdrawn at times of war. On Romney Marsh, it was said, “the smugglers go around in such large gangs and are so daring that it is absolutely necessary to have military force”. There was an obvious solution, and that was to cut the import taxes so as to make smuggling economically unviable. Pitt the Younger understood this, and in the 1780s he cut the duty on tea and reduced the duty on French wine, but any hopes of putting a stop to smuggling by lowering import duties were dashed when Britain found herself at war with Revolutionary France in 1792 (a situation that would last, on and off, until 1815); in times of war, taxes had to go up.

Smuggling as a large-scale criminal activity therefore continued into the early nineteenth century, a time when the threat of a French invasion led to new coastal defences on and around Romney Marsh. A defensive ditch called the Royal Military Canal was dug, and a series of fortifications called Martello Towers were built (some of these can still be seen at various points along the Kent and Sussex coasts). The invasion never came, but after 1815 these defences were combined with an increased military presence in the area and the enforcement of a naval blockade at sea to serve as a significant deterrent to smuggling.

But smuggling persisted – many ex-servicemen who now found themselves unemployed took to smuggling, and bloody encounters between smugglers and government forces were now the order of the day. By this time, the biggest smuggling gang on Romney Marsh was the Aldington Gang, named for the Kentish village of the same name but also known as the Blues on account of either their blue clothing or the blue flares they used for signalling. They were active from around 1817 and were invariably heavily armed and didn’t think twice about shooting a revenue man or a blockader. In February 1821, some 250 of them went to the beach at Camber to unload a smuggled cargo. This attracted the attention of the blockaders, a party of which attacked the smugglers and pursued them inland to Brookland, where the Aldington Gang turned and fought in a skirmish that came to be known as the Battle of Brookland. Five men were killed and around twenty wounded, but in the heat of the fighting the gang’s leader, one Cephas Quested, ordered someone to shoot one of the officers of the blockade force. Unfortunately for him, the man he’d given the order to was a blockader not a smuggler, and Quested found himself under arrest; he was subsequently tried and convicted at the Old Bailey and hanged at Newgate.

Subsequently, the gang was taken over by one George Ransley, the landlord of the Bourne Tap pub in Aldington. Under him, the Aldington Gang prospered for several years, landing contraband on the coast between Rye and Deal despite the blockade. Their success came to an end in July 1826 when a blockade officer was killed when he tried to stop the gang running a cargo ashore at the beach at Dover. The government moved fast, and Ransley and several others were arrested in the months that followed. Nineteen of them went on trial at the Maidstone Assizes the following year, and although all of them were found guilty of offences that carried the death penalty their sentences were commuted to transportation; Ransley ended up in Tasmania.

The Aldington Gang were the last of the big smuggler gangs. In 1831, blockade duties for Kent and Sussex became the responsibility of HM Coastguard which had been founded some nine years earlier; this force was well-armed and well-disciplined. There followed various skirmishes between the Coastguard and the smugglers, the last serious one taking place at Pevensey in 1833. By this time, events were turning against the smugglers. Police forces were being established to keep law and order on land, and attitudes such as those expressed by Charles Lamb (see above) were becoming out-dated, for by the dawn of the Victorian age the smuggler was seen not as an honest thief but as a threat to public order. Finally, in the 1840s the government showed its commitment to free trade by slashing import duties, after which smuggling became a somewhat unimportant activity.

But in a sense, it has lived on. The many tales of smuggling on and around Romney Marsh have long provided a source of literary inspiration. Rudyard Kipling, who lived in Sussex for over thirty years, wrote the poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’ (“brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk…”) which can be found on the back wall of the Mermaid Inn. 

At around the same time, the Rye-based author Russell Thorndike created the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn – the mild-mannered vicar of the Romney Marsh parish of Dymchurch who also happens to the ruthless leader of the local smuggler gang. This remarkable character first appeared in the novel Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh in 1915. A couple of decades later, Thorndike (an actor as well as an author, and the brother of the actress Sybil Thorndike) returned to the character with six other adventures (Doctor Syn Returns, The Courageous Exploits of Doctor Syn, etc) which are set prior to the first novel. There was a movie in 1937, starring George Arliss, and another one in 1963 with Patrick MacGoohan.

Thorndike, by the way, wasn’t the only author to be inspired by Rye and the surrounding area. Henry James and E.F. Benson both lived there, while the town is said to have provided Enid Blyton with the setting for her Famous Five adventure Five Go to Smuggler’s Top. John Ryan, the creator of the ineffectual cartoon pirate Captain Pugwash, also lived in Rye (contrary to urban myth, the characters in Captain Pugwash did not have sexually suggestive names).

Although the Doctor Syn novels have long been out of print, Dymchurch’s most famous resident, and probably Romney Marsh’s most famous smuggler (even though he’s fictional), is still celebrated in a biannual event called the ‘Day of Syn’ which takes place at Dymchurch over the August Bank Holiday weekend in even-numbered years. There’s also a steam locomotive named after him on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway.

Historical English crime: Smuggling on Romney Marsh (part 1)

My travels have recently taken me to Romney Marsh, a fascinating part of the world down on the south coast. Low-lying and sparsely populated, it covers around 100 square miles, mostly in Kent but stretching over into Sussex as well.

Romney Marsh – “where the roads wind like streams through pasture and the sky is always three-quarters of the landscape” (according to John Betjeman, and who am I to disagree with him?) – is a large, flat, low-lying and almost empty area with several isolated churches (indicating abandoned or ‘lost’ villages) which was long regarded as both a potential weak point in the event of an invasion from continental Europe – of which more in later posts – and a paradise for smugglers.

Smuggling began in the Middle Ages, and it began with wool, a commodity that formed the backbone of the medieval English economy; it was said that in Europe, the best quality wool came from England. English wool was therefore highly prized by weavers on the continent, and during the reign of Edward I exports of wool were therefore taxed – which is where the smugglers got started, for it was the customs system as introduced in the late thirteenth century that created smuggling. Wool was smuggled out of England via small harbours and beaches, especially on the south-eastern coast which is the closest part of England to mainland Europe. On Romney Marsh – prime sheep-grazing country to the extent that there is still a breed of sheep called the Romney – the smugglers flourished. They became known as ‘owlers’ due to the owl-like noises they used to communicate at night, which was when most of their activities took place, and so the smuggling of wool became known as ‘owling’.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, high export duties and a somewhat ineffective system of control meant that the owlers went more or less unchallenged. A century later, the smuggling of wool out of England was declared to be punishable by death – but did not deter the smugglers, who if anything acquired a more ruthless character, arming themselves to prevent arrest. The customs or revenue men, known as riding officers, were both too few and too poorly-equipped to stop them, though, and Romney Marsh and the various Cinque Ports, along with their accompanying ‘limbs’, got a reputation for lawlessness as a result. This can be seen in the events of 1669, when a man called William Carter, who had set himself up as a smuggler-catcher and managed to get a warrant from Charles II to that effect, arrested the captain of a ship for wool-smuggling and got the magistrate in Folkestone to commit him for trial. However, on arriving in Folkestone with his prisoner, Carter was pelted with stones by the women of the town, who’d been encouraged by the captain’s wife; in the face of such an onslaught, the smuggler-catcher had little option but to let his prisoner go.

Even corrupt officials got involved. This is illustrated by an event that took place in Hythe (one of the five original Cinque Ports) in 1692, when riding officers seized 16 bags of wool in a barn belonging to Julius Deeds, the Mayor of Hythe. Deeds sent his servant, Thomas Birch (who was also a parish constable), to retrieve the wool. He got arrested, and at the subsequent trial the defence tried to argue that the riding officers had acted illegally on the grounds that they had not been accompanied by a parish constable. The prosecution replied that the constable who should have been accompanying them was – you’ve guessed it – Birch himself! Despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, the jury accepted the defence’s argument that the wool had been due to be sent to another part of England rather than abroad, and acquitted him. Such instances were not uncommon.

By 1698, the government had resorted to forbidding anyone who lived within 15 miles of the sea in Kent or Sussex from buying wool. In addition to that, all sheep-farmers living within ten miles of the sea in said counties had to account for all of their fleeces for up to three days after shearing. Riding officers were appointed in greater numbers and could call on armed cavalry – dragoons – to help them against the smugglers. Owling persisted, but by the 1720s it was in decline.

But that did not mean an end to smuggling on Romney Marsh.

To be continued…

Historical English crime: 'Stand and deliver!'

Even today, the mention of the word ‘highwayman’ conjures up a certain image – that of a masked, well-dressed man astride a horse, brandishing a pistol and demanding that rich travellers in a stage-coach ‘stand and deliver’ (in other words, hand over whatever cash and assorted valuables they might have on them) somewhere on an open road at some point in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Having made off with the loot, he would of course outwit the authorities if they sent anyone after him. It can be a rather romantic image even though the reality was far from romantic – these were brutal, violent men operating in a brutal, violent era.

In a very real sense, there was nothing new about highway robbery, for thieves who operated on foot – footpads – had been robbing travellers for as long as there had been roads. However, the gun-toting thief on horseback was something new to the seventeenth century. This was a violent age (what with the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Civil War in this country), and the increased availability and effectiveness of firearms combined with the proliferation of men, often former soldiers, who either lacked or didn’t much care for gainful employment and knew how to use a gun while riding a horse (the latter being vital to ensure a quick getaway). They were helped by the ineptitude of the law enforcement system of the period; in the days before organised policing, the job invariably fell to the parish constable who was usually under-equipped to deal with anything other than minor crime, and who was often thought of as being lazy or incompetent (Shakespeare having set the standard for that particular stereotype with Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing).

The mounted thieves started to become known as ‘highwaymen’ in the mid-seventeenth century; they were also known as ‘gentlemen of the road’ on account that many of them dressed smartly enough to pass for gentry even if they were of more humble birth. The famous demand to ‘stand and deliver’ goes back to that time, while the earliest references to the follow-up ‘your money or your life’ are from trial reports dating back to the mid-eighteenth century. The growing print industry produced pamphlets detailing their crimes, which brought them to the attention of the public (this would continue in the eighteenth century with publications like the Newgate Calendar and plays like The Beggar’s Opera, followed by the ‘penny dreadfuls’ of the nineteenth century).

One of the earliest highwaymen to become well-known in England was James Hind, who had fought for the Royalists in the Civil War and took to highway robbery during the time of the Protectorate, preying in particular on those associated with the Parliamentarian cause (he once tried, and failed, to rob Oliver Cromwell himself). Others followed, some becoming famous in their time. Claude Duval was a Frenchman who operated just north of Restoration-era London; one of the first highwaymen to dress in fashionable clothes and put on gentlemanly airs, he’s said to have once agreed to only take some of his victim’s money, as opposed to all of it, if the his pretty wife agreed to dance with him by the side of the road (which she did). William Nevison was a former soldier who rode from Kent to York in less than a day (a previously unheard-of feat) in order to establish an alibi, a tale that greatly amused Charles II. Robert Congden was an Old Etonian gentleman-farmer by day and a highwayman by night who held up the Earl of Dorset for a thousand guineas.

Most famous of them all, though, was the Essex publican’s son Dick Turpin, who had started out as a butcher before turning to crime; in addition to being a highwayman he was also a poacher, a burglar and, like many of his fellow-highwaymen, a cold-blooded killer. Such was Turpin’s fame that acts performed by other highwaymen, such as Nevison’s ride to York, ended up being attributed to him. Despite their often-violent behaviour some highwaymen – Turpin in particular – were to a degree idolised in that way in which criminals are sometimes, and somehow, made out to be popular heroes (a point picked up in an episode of Blackadder, wherein Baldrick describes a highwayman as “halfway to being the new Robin Hood … he steals from the rich, but he hasn’t got round to giving it to the poor yet”).

From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the main roads of England became hunting-grounds for the highwaymen and as such very dangerous places – especially the bits that ran through what was then open country on the outskirts of London (although robberies in London itself were not unknown; it was partly concern about highwaymen in Hyde Park that led William III to ensure that Rotten Row, the road between Westminster and Kensington Palace, became the first road in the country to be artificially lit). Highwaymen often chose isolated areas that the main roads passed through; Bagshot Heath, crossed by the roads to both Portsmouth and the West Country, was popular. To the north, Finchley Common on the Great North Road acquired a certain reputation, while to the south on the Dover Road Shooter’s Hill was the venue of choice for hold-ups (it had already got its name from being a place where archery was practiced in the Middle Ages). Many such places had gibbets where the bodies of executed criminals were displayed in metal cages to deter others from a life of crime, and these were well-known to people who often travelled out of London; Samuel Pepys, for example, once mentioned riding past “the man that hangs on Shooter’s Hill”.

Quite a few highwaymen ended up on the gallows, having either been captured in the act or found out later (when people noticed that they’d suddenly started spending a lot more cash than they usually did, for example). Hind was done for treason rather than highway robbery because of his overt support for the Royalist cause, resulting in his being not just hanged but drawn and quartered as well. Congden had shot and killed his first victim when he had tried to resist, while Nevison had killed a constable who’d tried to arrest him; both were hanged for murder. Duval, somewhat unusually it would seem, was actually hanged for no more than highway robbery. Turpin, meanwhile, was arrested for horse theft which was also a capital offence at the time – and although some in the government wanted him to stand trial in London or his native Essex, his trial and subsequent hanging took place at York.

The ‘golden age’ of the highwayman is usually considered as having been the period between the Restoration (1660) and the death of Queen Anne (1714), although Turpin’s ‘career’ post-dates this (he is thought to have turned to crime in the early 1730s, and was hanged in 1739 at the age of 33). Yet there were still some fairly audacious highway robberies being carried out well into the eighteenth century; in 1774, no less a person than the Prime Minister, Lord North, wrote of being “robbed last night as I expected … at the end of Gunnersbury Lane”. For much of the eighteenth century, travellers along England’s roads took to preventative measures – Horace Walpole, the writer (and son of Britain’s first PM), wrote of being “forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going into battle”. When encountered by two highwaymen outside London, the Duke of Montrose shot and killed one of them (the other escaped, with the duke declining to give pursuit on the grounds that enough blood had already been spilled). The subject of whether or not one should shoot a highwayman, regardless of whether or not he’d shot first, is one that Samuel Johnson (who defined ‘highwayman’ in his Dictionary as simply “a robber that plunders on the publick roads”) had few doubts about. Boswell records that, when it came up in conversation, the great man of letters stated: “I would rather shoot him in the instant when he is attempting to rob me, than afterwards swear against him at the Old-Bailey … I am surer I am right in the one case than in the other. I may be mistaken as to the man, when I swear: I cannot be mistaken, if I shoot him in the act. Besides, we feel less reluctance to take away a man’s life, when we are heated by the injury”. Boswell retorted that Johnson “would rather act from the motive of private passion, than that of publick advantage”, to which Johnson replied: “Nay, Sir, when I shoot the highwayman I act from both.”

In such an atmosphere, it became a matter of routine for coachmen, post-boys and the like to travel either armed or accompanied by someone who was, the weapon of choice usually being a brace of pistols – as guns back then were of the muzzle-loading, single-shot variety it paid to have more than one loaded and ready to fire – or a blunderbuss (an early form of shotgun with a flared muzzle, easier to load while on the move but only effective at close range). Rich travellers, particularly those heading along the Great West Road to the fashionable spa town of Bath, took to travelling with as little money or jewellery in their coaches as possible – the wealth could go on ahead, stuffed in the pockets and saddle-bags of a single servant on horseback, preferably carrying a gun of some sort for his own protection.

Sometimes, a lone rider confronted by a highwayman could get the better of him; one story is of a servant carrying his master’s money who, when confronted by a highwayman, said he’d willingly hand over the cash but asked if the highwayman would be so kind as to put a bullet through his hat first, so that he later could show that he’d put up some sort of resistance before standing and delivering. After the highwayman had obligingly fired, the clever servant produced his own pistol who had been concealed in his coat! As the highwayman had only been armed with a single pistol, the servant now had the advantage and took his opponent to the nearest town to hand him over to the authorities (and, presumably, collect any reward that may have been on offer).

Some highwaymen responded by forming gangs, although many of these were short-lived as they invariably fell out over how to divide the spoils. One of the more notable gangs of highwaymen operated in and around Cherhill, a Wiltshire village on the Great West Road, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; being poor men who only owned one set of clothes each (clearly highway robbery was not always lucrative), they became (in)famous for doing their robberies naked so that no-one would be able to identify them by their clothes.

Highway robbery in England died out in the early nineteenth century. Some would assume that it was killed off by the railways, but it would appear there were a number of factors at play. Highway robbery had actually become quite rare by the time that century began, and the last recorded one took place in 1831 (two years after Stephenson built his Rocket). The increase in the turnpike system with its tolled and gated roads had combined in the mid-to-late eighteenth century with the increased enclosure of farmland to limit highwaymen’s activities (there was, quite simply, less open space), and in the early nineteenth century they were limited further by the expansion of cities (especially London) into what had been open countryside. As the cities grew, policing became more effective, and the increased use of banknotes helped too as they were easier to trace than gold coins. The ‘gentleman of the road’ had had his day.

Historical English crime: A fatal case of mistaken identity

I was recently down in Rye, a lovely old town on the Sussex coast that has a long history as part of the medieval confederation known as the Cinque Ports, as well as many an old tale concerning smugglers and threats of invasion by the French. It’s full of history – the Mermaid pub has a sign saying that it was re-built in 1420 – which simply cannot be avoided as you walk up those cobbled streets to the churchyard at the top of the hill. 

The church, St Mary’s, has wonderful views of the surrounding area should you climb the tower (I, of course, cannot resist the chance to climb a good tower); you can see across Romney Marsh, down to Camber Castle, even to the power station at Dungeness on a clear day, and across to the cliffs by Pett Level – one of my favourite stretches of beach.

  

For any visitor to Rye, the Ypres Tower (pronounced ‘wipers’, just like the way the British soldiers pronounced the name of said Belgian town during the First World War) is well worth a visit for those wishing to find out more about the history of this fascinating place. One of the exhibits is somewhat macabre – it’s a full-size replica human skeleton encased in a gibbet, which was the metal cage in which the body of a condemned criminal was placed after said criminal had died by hanging, to be displayed at a suitable point such as a crossroads in order to warn people of the consequences of breaking the law.

This refers to one of Rye’s most (in)famous stories, that of a local butcher who murdered an ex-mayor of Rye in 1742. The twist is that he killed the wrong man. Not for nothing is it known as the ‘murder by mistake’.

The butcher in question was John Breads, who seems to have been the type to bear a grudge. In particular, he bore a grudge against the mayor of Rye, James Lamb, who’d fined him for selling meat at short weight. This angered Breads to the point at which he came to the conclusion that the best way of settling this grudge was by killing the mayor. Not being particularly subtle, he sometimes spoke about what butchers do to lambs (in an age before refrigeration, they did the slaughtering as well as the butchering) after he’d had a few drinks in the pub.

He got his opportunity on the night of 17^th March 1742. A ship docked at Rye was hosting a banquet and Lamb was invited as the guest of honour. Rye being a small town, it didn’t take long before everyone knew about this. To get from his house to the harbour and back, Lamb would have to walk through the churchyard, and it was here that Breads reckoned he would have his chance to kill him – preferably on the return journey when it would be darker and Lamb might have had a bit too much to drink (local gossip had it that French brandy – smuggled, presumably – would be served at the banquet). In the moonlight, it should be fairly easy to identify the mayor in his red cloak.

Unbeknown to Breads, though, it wasn’t James Lamb who went to the banquet. He’d not been looking forward to it as he wasn’t feeling well but had felt obliged to go because, well, he’d been invited and he was the mayor so it might cause offence if he didn’t go. However, his brother-in-law, a former mayor of Rye called Allen Grebell, popped by to see him in the afternoon and, on being informed that Lamb wasn’t up to it, offered to go in his place – for surely an ex-mayor would add just as much dignity to the occasion as the actual mayor? Lamb readily agreed, and decided that as Grebell would be going to the banquet on his behalf, it was only fitting that he should wear the red mayoral cloak.

Grebell had a lot to drink at the banquet, and was staggering on his way home which took him up the hill and through the churchyard. Seeing a figure in a red cloak and assuming it was Lamb, Breads (who’d been hiding behind a tombstone) attacked, stabbing his victim before fleeing. Grebell did not appear to realise he’d been stabbed – when he got home, he calmly informed his servant that someone had tried to attack him in the churchyard on his way home, and that he would sit down in front of the fire for a while before going to bed. No need for the servant to wait up any longer. What with Grebell wearing Lamb’s red cloak and the only available sources of light being the fire and maybe a lamp or two, the servant didn’t notice that his master was bleeding.

Lamb, meanwhile, was having a troubled night – he had a dream in which his late wife (Grebell’s sister) had appeared to him and warned him about her brother’s safety. Early in the morning, therefore, he decided to see if Grebell was all right. The servant answered the door, and on finding that Grebell’s bed hadn’t been slept in he remembered that Grebell had said he’d sit down by the fire in the front room. The checked the front room, and found Grebell. The ex-mayor had bled to death after falling asleep.

It soon transpired that Breads, who was nothing if not unsubtle, hadn’t fled far from the scene of the crime. He was wandering around the town, drunk, shouting about having killed the mayor. The parish constable found a blood-spattered knife in the churchyard. It had Breads’s name on the handle. The butcher of Rye was quickly arrested and imprisoned in the Ypres Tower.

The subsequent trial took place in May 1743 (actually a couple of months after the murder, as this was when Lady Day, 25^th March, marked the start of the new year in England). It was, apparently, unique in English legal history in that it was the only time when a murder trial was presided over by a judge (Lamb) who had been the defendant’s intended victim. The verdict was never in any doubt – the evidence of the knife and Breads’s behaviour on the morning after were damning, although it still took the jury ten hours before they reached a verdict. Before Lamb passed sentence, Breads left no-one in any doubt with an extraordinary outburst at Lamb: “I did not mean to kill Mr Grebell. It was you I meant it for, and I would murder you now if I could!”

Breads was sentenced to be hanged and, just over a month after the trial, that is what happened. The hanging took place out on the marsh, and afterwards the body was enclosed in a gibbet and left there – at a place known today as Gibbet Marsh.

Gradually, over the next fifty or so years, the bones disappeared as some of the townspeople apparently stole them – local legend has it that, back in the 18^th century, ground-up human bones were regarded as a remedy for rheumatism. When only the skull was left, it was taken to Rye Town Hall where it remains to this day; there are apparently plenty of requests to see it, although the occasional suggestion that it be put on public display is invariably rejected by the council on the grounds that displaying actual human remains wouldn’t be appropriate; tourists can make do with the fake skeleton in the Ypres Tower.

The main source for this story is a booklet called Murder by Mistake, which used to be available for sale at the Ypres Tower but which has now been out of print for many years (I got hold of a copy via eBay), although it was retold in a book called Murders of Old Sussex (of which I happen to own a copy, which stands on my bookshelves next to Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Barnet, Finchley and Hendon; make of that what you will).

It certainly raises a few questions, the big one being the question of why Lamb was able to officiate at Breads’s trial. Judges are supposed to be impartial, and in this case Lamb – as both the intended victim and a relative of the actual victim – most certainly was not (there’s a reason why the trial is unique in English legal history). Personal connections aside, why would the mayor – the local magistrate – take charge of a murder trial? Serious crimes were meant to be dealt with at the Assizes, those quarterly court sessions that were held in most county towns until well into the 20^th century. Rye being in Sussex, surely Breads should have been sent to Lewes to stand trial at the next Assize session? The reason given for why this was not done is Rye’s status as an ‘Antient Town’ within the Confederation of Cinque Ports, which appears to have exempted Rye from having to send its serious criminals to the Assizes; in the Cinque Ports, everything short of high treason was dealt with locally, with the mayor acting as a judge. The delay between Breads’s arrest and trial (over two months) could have been due to Lamb checking with the powers-that-be with regards to whether he should preside over such a high-profile trial in which he had a personal interest. 

If you ask around in Rye, you’ll find a different take on the town’s most notorious case of mistaken identity. Being an old and somewhat isolated port located on the edge of Romney Marsh, Rye has a long association with smuggling (of which more in a future post) and a local theory is that Lamb was in the pay of a group of smugglers known as the Hawkhurst Gang (who we will return to in said future post). Grebell, so this ‘unofficial’ version goes, found out about the mayor’s corruption and was planning to expose him; Lamb found out about what Grebell knew and planned to have him killed in order to keep him quiet. Breads, a violent man with a known grudge against Lamb, thus became Lamb’s unknowing tool in the elimination of Allen Grebell. Quite how Lamb was able to guarantee that Breads would be waiting with his knife in the churchyard, or even that Grebell would willingly take his place at the banquet, is not clear. But as conspiracy theories go, it’s an interesting one.

Principal sources:
Kenneth M. Clarke, Murder by Mistake (Rye Museum Association, 1975)
Rupert Taylor, Murders of Old Sussex (Countryside Books, 1991)

The ongoing story of the missing Earl

Over four decades after his disappearance, the seventh Earl of Lucan is still capable of generating newspaper headlines. This week it was announced that, as he is not known to have been alive for at least seven years, a death certificate has been issued under the terms of a recent law called the Presumption of Death Act; he had previously been declared dead for inheritance purposes in 1999. This has duly prompted The Times to (finally) publish his obituary, and it means that his son can now be referred to as Lucan’s eighth Earl. The story, though, does not end here.

The saga surrounding the Lucan case has many classic ingredients – a brutal murder in a domestic setting (of the sort that Orwell identified as being so fascinating to the English), a dramatic disappearance and, of course, that old British obsession that is the class system. Also involved in the saga are high-stakes gambling, a messy legal case, some tigers, various exotic locations, a fugitive MP and the whiff of an upper-class cover-up. Unsurprisingly, it’s been a subject of ongoing fascination and speculation for the press and public over the course of many years.

Lucan was as upper-class as they come – his ancestors included the man who issued the order for the Charge of the Light Brigade and a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. A tall, distinctive-looking man with slicked-back hair and a luxuriant moustache, he worked for a merchant bank and had a taste for gambling – initially for fun, but he left his job and became a professional gambler after a big win (which led to his nickname ‘Lucky’ – although in the long run he lost more than he won). Leading an extravagant lifestyle at the higher end of Sixties London society (he was a member of the Clermont Club, a potent mixture of aristocracy and new money), he was once rated as one of the best backgammon players in the world and is said to have been considered as a possible James Bond (the story goes that he was offered a screen test but turned it down).

He married Veronica Duncan in 1963 and although they had three children the marriage was not a happy one. By the early Seventies the couple had separated, and Lucan lost custody of the children in an acrimonious and costly legal battle which came at a time when his gambling debts were spiralling out of control. He took to spying on his estranged wife in an attempt to find something with which to discredit her, and on the night of Thursday 7^th November 1974 the family’s nanny, 29 year-old Sandra Rivett, was murdered at the Countess’s home in Belgravia.

The unfortunate Mrs Rivett really had been in the wrong place at the wrong time; she had been working for the Countess for several months and usually took Thursdays off, but that week she changed her hours and had taken the Wednesday off instead. Shortly before 9pm, she asked the Countess if she would like a cup of tea and headed to the basement kitchen to make one; there, she was bludgeoned to death with a piece of lead piping and her body hurriedly placed into a canvas mailbag.

When the Countess went to find out what was taking Mrs Rivett so long, she was herself attacked by the killer but she was able to escape and run, covered in blood and presumably in shock, to a nearby pub for help; she identified her estranged husband as her attacker. The general consensus was that Lucan had mistaken Mrs Rivett for his wife, and the evidence against him was so compelling that later, at the inquest, the jury would take the unusual step of naming him as the killer. By then, though, he had vanished. The last confirmed sighting of Lord Lucan was when he drove to the house of two of his friends in Sussex in the early hours of 8^th November; he told them that he happened to have been walking past the Countess’s house when he heard a fight taking place inside; he had gone to her aid, but been accused of hiring a hitman to kill her (he also stated this in a letter that he wrote to his brother-in-law). His car was found abandoned in the Channel port of Newhaven.

Many believe that Lucan took his own life there and then – probably by drowning, either by jumping from a cross-Channel ferry or by borrowing a boat, taking it out to sea and deliberately sinking it. There’s also a more outlandish suicide theory – that after speaking with his friends and deciding that there was no way out, he was left alone in a room with a gun. After he shot himself, his body was fed to the tigers at the zoo owned by his high-rolling friend John Aspinall (who’d founded the Clermont Club). This story has featured in the papers recently – an old member of the Clermont Club who had been told this story years ago finally broke his silence – but it was suggested at the time of Lucan’s disappearance by Aspinall’s mother (who, in one of those familial coincidences that so abound among the upper classes, also happened to be the current Chancellor’s grandmother). This was denied by Aspinall himself, though, who said that his animals were only fed on the best cuts of meat and wouldn’t have wanted to eat “stringy old Lucky”.

Then there’s the theory that he used his powerful connections to disappear abroad – and this is where the story has ran and ran, “increasingly slipping the bonds of fact for the realms of fantasy” (to quote the obit in yesterday’s Times). Sightings of the missing Earl have abounded over the years, although one of the earliest took a turn for the bizarre when an Englishman was arrested in Australia on suspicion of being Lord Lucan in December 1974. He turned out to be John Stonehouse, the Labour MP and Czech spy, who had faked his own death the previous month; interesting times, the Seventies (Stonehouse, by the way, was returned to Britain and eventually sent to prison for fraud, with his spying activities being covered up at the time and not publicly revealed until many years after he had actually died).

The continuing sightings over the years that followed made Lord Lucan the most famous British fugitive from justice. He was ‘seen’ in Colombia (that one turned out to be an American businessman) and Paraguay (hanging out with ex-Nazis!), hiking on Mount Etna and working as a waiter in both San Francisco and Greece. For years, a homeless British expat in New Zealand had to deny claims that he was the Earl (despite being several inches shorter). It has been alleged that he was flown out of England in an aircraft piloted by the racing driver Graham Hill. It was claimed that people working for his friends took him to Switzerland, where they deemed him to be a liability and killed him. In 1982 a self-styled bounty hunter claimed that he’d tracked Lucan down to Cuba, although a tabloid newspaper subsequently found out that he was a hoaxer. A Rolex watch believed to have been the Earl’s surfaced in South Africa, lending credence to apparent sightings in a hotel bar in Bostwana and in a clinic in Johannesburg.

It was also claimed that he lived out his days on a beach in India. This was the pet theory of an ex-Scotland Yard detective who in 2003 published a book, Dead Lucky, which claimed that a British hippy known as ‘Jungle Barry’ who had died in Goa in 1996 was the missing Earl. It was, however, quickly established that said hippy was in fact a distinctly un-aristocratic pub musician from St Helens.

In 2004, thirty years after Mrs Rivett’s murder, the police released a computer-generated image of how Lord Lucan might have looked had he still been alive (by which time he would have been 69); this featured in a Channel Four documentary, The Hunt for Lord Lucan, which suggested that the 1974 murder enquiry had been flawed – the crime-scene had been contaminated, and the investigation had proceeded from the start on the assumption of Lucan’s guilt despite concerns over the Countess’s reliability as a witness – and featured an interview with the Earl’s son who claimed that his mother had been mistaken in identifying his father as the man who attacked her. The Countess, who refused to be interviewed for the programme and was by that time estranged from her children, stuck by her original story and has always believed that her husband drowned himself; in a rare newspaper interview, she claimed that her husband was “not the sort of Englishman to cope abroad”.

Claims of some sort of cover-up have continued. In 2012 a former personal assistant to Aspinall claimed in an interview with the BBC that she was involved in helping Lucan to set up a new life in the West African state of Gabon, and that Aspinall and the businessman James Goldsmith (another Clermont member) later arranged to have two of Lucan’s children sent out there on false passports so that the fugitive Earl could see them, albeit from a distance (the children denied this, and it is worth noting that this claim was only made in public after both Aspinall and Goldsmith had been dead for several years; the latter was notoriously litigious and won a libel case against Private Eye in 1976 after the magazine had alleged that he and Aspinall had met after Lucan’s disappearance to discuss how they could hamper the police enquiries). At the same time, one of the detectives who worked on the Lucan case during the Eighties claimed that there had been two very credible sightings of Lucan in that decade (one of them in Africa) but he was denied the funding to follow them up.

Detectives who’ve been involved in the case have published books on the subject over the years, with titles like Looking for Lucan and Lucan Lives. In the case of the latter, the author had once been convinced that Lucan had drowned himself (and had publicly said so in 1975) but later, in the course of his working on the book, he visited Mozambique, Botswana and South Africa in a bid to track the missing Earl down. It is perhaps with studies like this in mind that the eighth Earl once commented that: “I get a little tired when former Scotland Yard detectives at the end of their careers get commissions to write books which happen to send them to sunny locations around the world.”

Despite his having been declared to be the killer of Mrs Rivett by the coroner (a highly unusual occurrence which later led to a change in the law preventing killers from being named at inquests, for fear of prejudicing any future trial), the fact remains that Lucan never stood trial. The murder of Mrs Rivett has, therefore, never been solved. Most studies of the case, though, have worked on the assumption of Lucan’s guilt (although there has been a book with the intriguing title of Lucan: Not Guilty which makes the case for the defence).

One aspect of the story that always seems to have taken a back seat is the victim herself; for all the talk of the upper-class fugitive Earl not much is said of the working-class murdered nanny. The publicity surrounding the issuing of the death certificate has been unusual in that for once, a relative of hers has featured prominently. Neil Berriman, Mrs Rivett’s son (he was given up for adoption some time before the murder, and only learned who his mother was when he was an adult), has stated that he believes that Lucan planned to kill the Countess but hired a hitman to do it; the hitman, not Lucan, killed the wrong woman. He also claims to have seen a police document stating that Lucan was alive as recently as 2002 (the eighth Earl, by contrast, believes that his father died soon after the murder).

The story doesn’t end here. Mr Berriman, who has declined to produce the police document to which he referred, has stated that there are unnamed individuals “withholding evidence and not telling the truth … I do feel and hope that the Lucan mystery will be at a possible end in 12 to 14 months time through new evidence and lines on enquiry.” It seems that, even though Lucan’s family has now got legal closure with the death certificate, the saga surrounding Lord Lucan and the murder of Sandra Rivett has not finished yet.

On the trail of Jack the Ripper

On the day after Boxing Day, I found myself at Tower Hill tube station at 7:30 in the evening, by a surviving section of the old City Wall that dates back to Roman times. The reason? It is the starting point of the ‘Jack the Ripper’ walk organised by London Walks. Our guide was Shaughan, described by the company leaflet as ‘a distinguished and stylish actor’ as well as being a Blue Badge holder.

Our walking tour took us from the Tower to Spitalfields Market, via a series of sites on the boundary of the City and the East End which are indelibly linked with a string of brutal murders of prostitutes that took place between August and November in 1888, shocking Victorian Britain with their brutality and gruesomeness. The murders were described at the time as being “unique in the history of our country” by no less a person than Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This was the first instance of a serial killer at work, and coming at a time of a burgeoning sensationalist press it gripped the nation, and indeed the wider world, like nothing before or since.

The fact that the murderer, known to history as Jack the Ripper, was never caught means that the Whitechapel murders still fascinate over a century later, to the extent of being taught in some schools; when I did my teacher training it was a special project for one of the GCSE History classes that I taught. We were meant to go on a walking tour then but never did. Since then, I’d always intended to go on the walk and with some friends visiting from Canada this seemed like the ideal opportunity. We were not disappointed.

The venues may have changed in appearance – much of this part of London was destroyed in the Blitz – but Shaughan’s vivid descriptions and recitals of the letters apparently sent by the killer helped to bring the events of 1888 to life. He himself admitted that he’s had over a dozen people faint on his tours over the years, and his gory descriptions of the state of the victims’ bodies are not for the faint-hearted.

Shaughan told us a lot not just about the Ripper murders but also about the history of that particular part of London; the Whitechapel and Spitalfields areas are today a centre of the Bangladeshi immigrant population (which is why Brick Lane is the best place to go for a curry in London), but their proximity to the docks means that they have always been areas of immigrant settlement, from the Huguenots in the seventeenth century to the Eastern European Jews in the nineteenth. This was the poorest part of London, a place where prostitution was rife; according to Shaughan, in 1888 the going rate for sex was the same as the price of a place to sleep in one of the area’s many doss-houses (fourpence), one could purchase enough gin to get drunk on for a penny and there were streets where policemen only ventured in groups of four.

What I found fascinating was that the walk took us past the modern-day office block where I work on Middlesex Street (formerly known as Petticoat Lane). London is of course teeming with history but I had not realised just how close some of the murder locations were to my place of work!

As well as describing the murders in great detail (although not all of the sites were visited – there’s no pattern in the way they are spread out over the eastern edge of the City and the East End), Shaughan also touched on the identities of some of the suspects, such as Montague Druitt and Aaron Kosminski.The former’s suicide shortly after the last murder provides an explanation as to why the killings ended when they did, while the latter was actually identified by a witness, although it is possible that this was a case of mistaken identity.

I found that one man who was conspicuous by his absence from Shaughan’s narrative was Frederick Abberline, the detective inspector who investigated the murders with the limited means available to the police of the late nineteenth century. Also missing from the narrative was the man Abberline himself suspected of being the Ripper – a man later arrested, tried and hanged for a series of murders that bore very little resemblance to the Ripper murders (poison being this particular serial killer’s weapon of choice).

What he did mention, though, was an unusual take on Commissioner Warren’s order to remove the graffiti which was found on Goulston Street on the night of the ‘double event’ (30^th September 1888, when two of the victims were killed) – which it turns out can be seen not as a well-meaning attempt to prevent an anti-Semitic backlash (tensions were already running high in the area) but as part of a Masonic plot, although this hinges on whose version of the spelling one chooses to believe (what was controversial about Warren’s decision was that he ordered it to be cleaned before the police photographer arrived, and the police officers’ accounts of what the graffiti said are contradictory) or indeed whether the proximity of the graffiti to a blood-stained piece of apron linked to one of the victims is coincidental.

The Masonic theory was popularised in the 1970s by a book – one of many books on the subject of Jack the Ripper – which proposed that the murders were a means of covering up a secret marriage between HRH the Duke of Clarence (‘Prince Eddie’) and a working-class Catholic woman. This is the theory that has the Royal physician, Sir William Gull, killing the victims in a horse-drawn carriage and then depositing the bodies at the locations where they were subsequently found. Although widely discredited now, this theory brings the Royal family and Freemasonry into the Ripper story and as such remains a popular one, and has influenced film adaptations such as Murder by Decree (in which Sherlock Holmes, played by Christopher Plummer, goes on the trail of the Ripper), the 1988 TV series Jack the Ripper (with Michael Caine as Inspector Abberline) and the 2001 movie From Hell (Johnny Depp as a highly fictionalised version of Abberline).

Perhaps overplaying the Royal/Masonic theory, Shaughan explained to us that it was propagated on the evidence of one Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of the artist Walter Sickert (who was acquainted with the Royal family through his work and had a fascination with the murders). He (Gorman) later confessed that he’d made it up, but for supporters of this theory this can be explained as part of an ongoing cover-up. What Shaughan didn’t say, surprisingly, was that Sickert himself was named as a suspect by the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. Well, there are so many theories about who the Ripper was that it would be impossible to list them all over the course of a two-hour walk.

Incidentally, one of Shaughan’s fellow-guides is Donald Rumbelow, widely considered to be the leading Ripper expert. His book was certainly invaluable to me when I needed to read up on the case prior to teaching it!

At one point, a police car sped by, lights flashing and siren wailing. “They’re still trying to catch him,” quipped Shaughan.

Our tour ended with a few more theories – the notion that the Ripper also killed abroad, that ‘Jack’ was in fact ‘Jill’ on the grounds that the victims would have been more trusting of a woman than a man and so been off their guard (this was a pet theory of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), and that he was actually a doctor who apparently confessed to being the Ripper just before he was hanged for another series of murders.

Of course, we’ll never know for sure – and that is the main reason why Jack the Ripper still fascinates us 124 years later.