Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (3 page)

At 9.50 p.m. the train pulled out of the station and began to pick up speed. As it headed east towards Stepney and then began its wide arc north to Bow, Thomas Briggs may have allowed his eyes to close.

CHAPTER 3

The Duckett’s Canal Bridge

About a third of the way between Bow Station and Hackney Wick Station – also known as Victoria Park – the North London Railway track passed briefly through an undeveloped area bordered by marshes before the line turned west again into the City. On the edge of the over-populated, working-class neighbourhoods of Bow and Bethnal Green, this stretch of track was lonely, with no houses to overlook it – just an iron railway bridge that crossed over a sluggish ribbon of water known as Duckett’s Canal.

At half-past ten on the night of Saturday 9 July, Guard Ames’s train with its bloodied, locked compartment was still clattering west towards its final stop at Chalk Farm.
Edward Dougan, Policeman 71
from the Bow Division of the Metropolitan Police, was on patrol in Wick Lane, a narrow, snaking roadway running north to south from Hackney Wick down to Old Ford. Hugging the eastern boundary of Victoria Park, the lane contained a few houses overlooking the park and an inn called the
Mitford Castle
.

It was dark and quiet, apart from the muted noises coming
from the tavern and the sound of a train running slowly along the embanked line behind it. Then PC Dougan heard someone call out. More shouts went up. Running towards the noise, the policeman reached a steep grassy slope behind the pub just in time to make out four or five men scrambling in the darkness down the incline. The group was cursing loudly that it had only just been missed by a passing down-train and several of the men were struggling to carry a heavy object between them.

Several minutes earlier, the driver of an empty train returning to Bow had noticed a dark shape between the ‘up’ and ‘down’ lines. Stopping the train just as it began to cross the canal bridge, he had reversed and waited while the stoker and the guard went to investigate.

The pale scythe of the moon was blurred by clouds as the two men climbed down from the engine and began to walk back along the tracks in the darkness. A warm breeze rustled the leaves of the trees and whispered through the briar and thorn bushes that spilled over the edges of the canal towpath. It rocked the surface of the streak of black water, feathering the scum that formed at its banks. The cooling air smelled of damp, green grass and of the remains of the smoke that funnelled during the day from the chimneys of the local factories. Small black shadows skittered before the men’s footsteps, disappearing into the undergrowth and the brickwork of the viaduct.

The ground sloped sharply down on either side of the tracks as the two men continued along the ridge. The gravel crunched underfoot and a dim murmur of voices swelled from the pub down to their left. Nearing the object seen by their driver, the guard – William Timms – and his companion thought it probable that a large dog had been injured while crossing the line. As they drew closer they began to realise that they were wrong. A human form was lying on its back on the six-foot way – the space between the tracks – its head pointing northwards and its feet towards London.
The dark-suited body was twisted
, its right
leg straight and the left drawn up, the right arm under the body and the left thrown across it. A dark thread of blood trickled freely from its head, soaking into the earth.

The Mitford Castle backed so closely onto the line where it met the canal that the glasses on the bar shivered with each passing locomotive. Inside, customers filled the large tap room with its bare board floors, wide windows, large empty fireplaces, smoky gaslights and an ill-assorted collection of tables and chairs. None of them had been aware of the discovery being made on the tracks behind until their conversations were interrupted by the urgency of William Timms’ bellows for assistance.

Alerted by the shouting, the tavern landlord James Hudson and several of his customers had rushed towards the back door, groping blindly in the dark as they crossed the yard and climbed up the embankment towards the noise. PC Dougan had arrived just as they were coming back down again, hefting between them the black-clad body.

Learning that the railwaymen had found a man – insensible and bleeding – between the tracks, young Edward Dougan quickly took control. As the group entered the noisy pub, he directed them to place the limp body on a table in a small, dark-panelled room behind the public bar. Looking down at the man’s ghastly-pale face, Dougan saw that blood from several head wounds was beginning to congeal over his forehead; the full, white beard was clotted with blood and wet with blood-flecked spume. The injured man’s moans were unintelligible. He was barely alive.

Closing the door against the pub’s rough crowd, Dougan sent immediately for a local surgeon and then, with train guard
William Timms at his side
, he began gently and patiently to search the body. First, he noted that the state of the man’s clothes suggested a struggle rather than an accident. A single black stud was all that held his rumpled shirt together; the shirt collar was loose and the disarrayed clothes were spattered here and there
with blood. Dougan removed some loose change from the injured man’s pockets along with a bunch of keys and
half a first-class return train ticket
for that day. There was
a diamond ring
on his little finger, a silver snuffbox and a bundle of letters and papers in his coat pocket. Attached to the third buttonhole of his waistcoat was a single gold fastener for a watch chain, but the chain and its watch were missing.

Carefully, Constable Dougan removed all these belongings, though the watch fastener still attached to the waistcoat proved too complicated for him to undo. Turning his attention to the letters, the policeman found the address of a City bank and gave the order for a runner to go in search of someone who might identify the wounded man and alert his family.

At about eleven o’clock, Alfred Brereton, a recently qualified doctor from the crowded Old Ford area of the Bow neighbourhood, pushed his way into the back room of the tavern. On his orders, the injured man was moved to a more private room upstairs and laid on a mattress on top of a table. Then the doctor tried, but failed, to rouse him.

Taking stock, Dr Brereton’s attention was caught by grazes on the skin of the man’s forearm and bruises on his hands. Next he examined a jagged wound above and in front of his left ear, so deep that the cartilage was nearly severed from the head. Livid, bruised swellings stretched across the forehead and there were several more wounds to the crown of the head. Conjecturing that some of the lesions on the left side might have been caused by the fall from a moving train, Brereton advised PC Dougan that the more brutal lacerations on the vertex seemed to have been inflicted by a blunt instrument. The weapon had been used with such force that the skull had been crushed.

By midnight two more neighbourhood doctors had arrived at the pub. Both expressed surprise that a man with such extensive wounds was still alive but, like Brereton, they failed to revive him. As the three medics, the train guard and the young constable
waited in the first-floor room they heard, without realising its significance, the rattling wheels of an empty train making its way back down the railway line to Bow Station.
Passing behind the pub
, past the spot on which the injured man had been discovered, carriage 69 –
uncoupled from the rest of the train
at Chalk Farm – was being returned up the line to Bow, where it would be locked in a shed for months.

*

To the north-west of the Mitford Castle, in Hackney, the elderly wife of Thomas Briggs and her spinster daughter had expected his return by half-past ten that evening. As each quarterly chime from the bells of the nearby church of St John marked Briggs’ failure to arrive home, their anxiety had grown. Then, in the small hours of Sunday 10 July, a knock was heard. Drawing back its heavy bolts, the housekeeper opened the front door to a stranger.

Mrs Briggs soon learnt that a dreadfully injured man believed to be her husband had been discovered and she dispatched the housekeeper to wake Thomas James, the second-eldest of her sons, at his home nearby. At two o’clock, three and a half hours after William Timms’ discovery, this servant and Thomas James (a marine insurance accountant) arrived at the Mitford Castle and dashed upstairs. Apparently reacting to the sound of their familiar voices and the clasp of the housekeeper’s hand in his, Thomas Briggs groaned pitiably. He seemed to be trying to speak.

As news of the outrage spread, the inn had begun to fill with locals eager for the latest intelligence,
staying well past the time
that regulations forced the bar to close in the hope of hearing the latest news. Slower to arrive was the Briggs’ family doctor, Francis Toulmin, who elbowed his way through the crowd to join the huddle of doctors upstairs. Briggs was close to death. All Toulmin could do was to make him as comfortable as possible
and make arrangements for his patient to be taken back home to Hackney in a litter.

*

By this time, Dr Alfred Brereton had been hanging around in the tavern for several hours and, leaving Toulmin in charge, he asked guard Timms to point out the exact spot where he had found the body. It was three o’clock in the morning as they left the busy upstairs room. Arming themselves with lanterns, they scrambled back up the embankment to the place where the tracks met the canal bridge. Crouching down at the spot pointed out to him by Timms, Brereton took a paper envelope from his pocket and rubbed it over a darkened patch of earth about a foot wide. The paper soaked up still-damp blood. Looking around, Brereton noticed a large, smooth stone close by. Stuck to the thickening smudges of blood on its surface were several grey and white hairs.

By the time Brereton returned to the tavern, the news that a blood-smeared railway carriage had been taken to the Bow sheds was exciting the crowd lingering there to discuss the night’s events. The doctor determined to inspect it immediately. At the train depot he found the carriage, its cushions soiled with blood – some still liquid – and its windows streaked and spattered with gobbets of flesh and brain matter.

Brereton was systematic in his scrutiny. Turning his attention to the offside of the carriage – the side furthest from the platform and closest to the centre of the tracks as the train had travelled northwards – he discovered blood on the inside of the door. Climbing down from the compartment to examine its outside, he found more blood on the footboard, the iron step, the rear wheel and on the lower panels of the carriage. It seemed clear to him that Thomas Briggs had fallen
head-first
, his skull hitting the footboard and glancing off the wheel closest to the door before his body slumped onto the space between the tracks.

Re-entering the compartment, the doctor was struck by a glint in the fibres of the near-side mat and, bending down, he discovered a gold ‘jump’ link – designed to attach a clasp to a chain and to be its weak point in case of damage – trodden into the flooring. Pocketing it, he left Bow Works, walked directly to the police station in nearby Bromley and delivered the link to the duty sergeant.

*

As it dawned on the police that something unprecedented had occurred,
Bow Division’s
senior officer, Inspector Walter Kerressey, took charge. A burly Irish ex-soldier, Kerressey had been in the force for twenty-five of his forty-five years and he supervised eleven first-class sergeants and
over three hundred police constables
in his division. By ten o’clock that Sunday morning he was following on the heels of Brereton, minutely examining carriage 69. He had already sent PC Dougan, weary from lack of sleep, to measure the exact distances between the spot at which the body was discovered and the stations on either side of it at Hackney Wick and at Bow. Other constables were walking over the tracks and scouring the banks by the Duckett’s Canal bridge for a weapon, a footprint or anything else that might have been overlooked. The normally deserted spot was now swarming with local police.

Taking in the details of the blood-smeared compartment, Inspector Kerressey conjectured that the dark patches visible on the right-hand armrest had been made as a bleeding body was dragged over it, towards the opposite door. Then he travelled on from the Bow sheds to 5 Clapton Square in Hackney, arriving at eleven o’clock. Taken to see the unconscious man, he noted that there was
no blood on Briggs’ bruised hands
, suggesting that the old man had not been the one to open the compartment door. Closely questioning the family, Kerressey then took detailed descriptions of the missing gold chain (a short heavy chain in the
Albert style, attached to a swivel seal and large gold key with the figure of an animal on top) and the clothes Briggs had been wearing when he left for work.

Kerressey then visited Thomas Briggs’ Hackney watchmaker, who provided a precise description of the timepiece from his records: a heavy, old-fashioned chronometer with an open face, the workings numbered 1487 and the gold case separately identified by the number 2974. The inspector was beginning to marshal the basic facts of the case. From statements given the previous evening by the stationmaster at Chalk Farm, he knew that three items had been removed from the carriage and another member of his team – Police Constable Lewis Lambert – was sent to retrieve them. Lambert was to take the bag, the walking stick and the crumpled hat to Clapton Square to be identified by the family, before bringing them on to Kerressey at the Bow police station.