Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (5 page)

If some from the middle classes felt a frisson of fear as they read their papers that day then it would not have been an entirely unfamiliar feeling. A new genre of extraordinarily popular literature had begun to appear during the early 1860s, swiftly
characterised as ‘sensational’. Among these novels were Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s infamous
Lady Audley’s Secret
(1862) and Wilkie Collins’
The Woman in White
(1860) and all of them were typically designed to unsettle readers with complex plots that revolved around stolen inheritances, poisonings, imprisonments, adulteries, illegitimacies and night-shrouded skulduggery. ‘Sensation novels’ took as their settings not the urban criminal underworld favoured by Dickens but the apparently safe domesticity of rural country houses, and they caught the public imagination, dominating the literary scene with their tales of mystery, suspense and danger.

Sometimes called ‘newspaper novels’, the plots of these books might have been taken straight from the Newgate Calendar – an annual compendium of violent crime – and they mirrored the emotive press coverage of extreme offences, feeding the Victorian appetite for reading about transgression and brutality. Designed to electrify the nerves, they proclaimed themselves to be (as Mrs Braddon put it)
morbid, hideous and delicious
.
In other words, fear was part of their appeal.

But while it was titillating to read about murder from the comfort of an over-stuffed armchair, sensation novels – because they located crime right at the heart of bourgeois homes – also hinted uncomfortably at
cracks within the Victorian ideal
, insinuating that even respectable society concealed a dark, criminal underside. Critics were alarmed both by their lack of restraint and by their tendency
to
drug our thought and reason
; they considered them to be an ‘inferior’ form of fiction and derided them as the
abominations of the age.
Despite the fact that they were dubbed
dangerous and foolish
, the books were vigorously promoted by the new bookstalls established by W. H. Smith on station concourses in the wake of the railway revolution, and they were phenomenally successful, selling in their tens of thousands.

The murder of Thomas Briggs in a first-class railway carriage so close to the centre of the metropolis, with its attendant air of
impenetrable mystery, was supra-sensational. It suggested an implicit threat to the day-to-day safety of society as a whole, as if the plot of a novel were spilling over into reality. The critic Richard Holt Hutton had written in 1861 that
every year
[sensation novels]
wander further afield
in search of novelty, and glance more and more wistfully at the unexhausted store of the horrible, exceptional or morbid incident
. This murder, committed in a public – but effectively locked – space, broke all known rules. It pricked at the horrible fear that, beyond the pages of a novel, one’s own ordinary existence could also be plunged into a chaotic hell. And, whereas sensation novels concluded with the discovery of wicked secrets and the restoration of order, the murderer (or murderers) of Thomas Briggs were unidentified and at large. It was a reality that unsettled every member of the public who travelled by train, shattering confidence in the security of their established routines.

The crime played, too, on an undefined but pervading sense of latent danger that had begun to develop during the 1860s. Second-generation Victorians were finding themselves increasingly anxious as they struggled to make sense of the rapidity of change in the world around them. It turned out that all that much-admired and ever-accelerating progress was also destabilising many of the orthodoxies that once sustained society. New and controversial theories propounded by men like Charles Darwin –
On the Origin of Species
had been published only five years earlier, in 1859 – confirmed that people could no longer rely on centuries-old geological, Biblical and scientific certainties. New wealth destabilised old hierarchies and class structures. Modernity changed everything and its benefits and drawbacks were vigorously debated. Lurking beneath it all was a growing uncertainty about where the individual fitted into this new moral and physical universe.

The railways more than anything else – both tyrannical industrial monsters and engines of progress – seemed to crystallise
these conflicting feelings of admiration and doubt. Just days before Thomas Briggs was attacked, the Board of Trade had sent a letter to all railway companies, calling on them to
make some attempt to allay
the sense of insecurity evidently felt
by the travelling public
. Now, feverish newspaper reports of the murder added tinder to the already-smouldering fire of public concern and outrage, engendering a loud clamour for police success. Inspector Richard Tanner steeled himself for the deluge.

CHAPTER 6

The Smiling Face of a Murderer

Letters from a public agitated by the news of the train murder were arriving at newspaper-editors’ desks and at police stations all over the capital.
One delivered to Scotland Yard
suggested that tickets collected on the night of 9 July should be inspected for obvious signs of blood in order to surmise at which station the murderer had left the train and therefore where he had embarked. Another wrote that two frustrated bank clerks
known to be guilty of the darkest deeds
were seen entering the City at about eight o’clock on Saturday evening. The anonymous correspondent contended that a third man had been seen hanging around suspiciously with
a wach and chane
[sic]
and … a ring which I have never seen before
.

One of these notes stood out. It was delivered to Kerressey at the Bow police station at ten-thirty on Monday morning, sent by John Death (pronounced
Deeth
), the owner of a prosperous jewellery business in a district close to Thomas Briggs’ bank. Death claimed that a gold Albert chain very like the one described in the morning papers, with its hook missing, had been exchanged at his shop earlier that very morning. Kerressey hailed a cab and
travelled south-west to No. 55 Cheapside, right in the centre of the busiest thoroughfare in the City.

Death had worked in the same business for more than thirty of his fifty-one years. In his early days as a shop-man, employed by a person with an equally memorable name – Mr Greedy Mott – the jeweller had been woken one night by the sound of shattering glass and had chased a young thief through the gloomy neighbouring churchyard of St Mary-le-Bow. Called to give evidence in court, he had watched from the witness benches as the arrested youth was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

John Death now owned and ran the shop with the assistance of his brother Robert. He explained to Kerressey that, at about ten o’clock that morning, a stranger came to exchange an old-fashioned gold chain for something more modern. Using a pair of scales, John had weighed the stranger’s chain and valued it at three pounds ten shillings – a shop-man’s monthly wage; then he had offered the customer an alternative chain worth five shillings more.

The man had demurred, making it clear that he preferred to make a straight swap. Consequently, Death showed him several slightly cheaper chains from which the man selected a square-oval, secret-link Albert chain with a knot-pattern twisted key and a swivel seal. This one was worth five shillings less than the chain he had brought with him and, to make up the difference, the stranger chose a second-hand signet ring set with a white cornelian stone engraved with the figure of a head. He put the ring on his finger and took away the replacement chain packed in a small cardboard box bearing the name and address of the shop. The transaction had taken no longer than ten minutes.

At the time, nothing about the deal had struck Death as out of the ordinary; it was only later, as he caught up with the newspaper reports and read the description of Thomas Briggs’ stolen chain with its missing jump link, that his suspicions had been aroused. In retrospect, John Death thought that this customer
had been at pains to stand away from the showcases, as if nervous that he might be suspected of something underhand. He seemed shifty,
avoiding the light from the windows
and turning his face so that it was always partly concealed. Both brothers were adamant that they had never seen him before but they were
able to give a detailed description
of a fellow around thirty years old with a pale, almost sallow face, clean-shaven and without beard or side-whiskers. He wore a black frock coat and waistcoat, dark trousers and a black hat and he spoke good English with a foreign accent – possibly German or Swiss.

Examining the chain with a magnifying glass, Inspector Kerressey could find on it no traces of blood. Dirt, though, was visible on the inside of the links, suggesting that it had not been cleaned before it was brought to the shop. If this
was
Briggs’ chain – and it matched the description – then it must have been wrenched from his waistcoat before the murderous blows had sent blood flying. Pocketing the chain, Kerressey left Cheapside and travelled north to 5 Clapton Square. It took only seconds for Briggs’ daughter to identify it as her late father’s property.

*

Together with Superintendent Daniel Howie from Bow Division, Richard Tanner was also bound for Hackney, heading for the Prince of Wales tavern in Dalston Lane where Mr John Humphreys, the coroner for East Middlesex, was due to open the inquest into Thomas Briggs’ death. The inquest’s function, un -altered for centuries, was to establish both the fact of any suspicious death and, if possible, its cause. The coroner and his jury would consider whether enough evidence existed to prove that a crime had been committed – the
corpus delicti
; if there was a clear suspect, they would also have the power of formal accusation, effectively recommending legal action. In the crowded tavern that was just minutes away from his home at Clapton Square, the banker’s body was laid out for inspection. Despite the
horrific injuries to the side and top of his head, his face was calm.
It appeared even to be smiling.

Things got underway as
thirteen local men
, all of them petty tradesmen, shop workers or junior clerks, were sworn to the jury. Then, Thomas James Briggs confirmed that the dead man was his father and identified the diamond ring and the walking stick as well as a pair of spectacles and a pocket book found in the pockets of his coat. The black bag, he said, had been borrowed from his younger brother, Netterville. Edward Dougan (the policeman in Wick Lane when the shout went up on the line) and Lewis Lambert (sent to retrieve the hat, stick and bag from Chalk Farm Station) also gave their version of events. Since it was impossible to continue without a known cause of death, these testimonies simply marked the formal commencement of the coroner’s task. Little more than an hour after taking his seat, Mr Humphreys adjourned the proceedings for a week pending results of the postmortem scheduled to take place the following day. There had been no mention of Inspector Kerressey’s interview with John Death but Inspector Tanner knew it and was pleased: the swift recovery of Briggs’ chain would give his investigation an early boost, suggesting that whoever was behind the attack on Thomas Briggs was making mistakes. The police had the hat left behind in carriage 69; now they could focus their attention on Death’s young foreigner.

The following day – Tuesday 12 July – the story of
The London Murder
circulated through British households, giving voice to a burgeoning middle-class nervousness.
The Times
observed that
great surprise has been expressed
that so fearful a murder should have been committed merely for the sake of an old fashioned watch and chain … and many persons are of the opinion that the object of the murder was not merely robbery
. Had the perpetrator been mistaken in supposing that
Briggs’ black bag
–
of the type generally used by bankers’ clerks in removing bullion
– contained a heavy quantity of coin? Had the victim been
observed for some time; in which case, had the violent attack been planned? Did this explain the unaccountable ease of the murderer’s escape?

Reports fussed over the peculiar coincidence that two of Briggs’ colleagues, Harry Vernez and Sydney Jones, had been the first to discover the bloody carriage. Curiously, even before the news of John Death’s revelation had been announced, there were those who believed that the shape of the buckled hat supposedly belonging to the murderer was
something like those worn by foreigners
.

Shock and anger began to give way to fear. What disturbed the public mind above all was the notion that, since the murderer had so successfully managed both to enter a first-class carriage and to remain unremarked in his flight from the bloody compartment, he – or they – did not
look
like killers. They might have recalled the words of Robert Audley, hero of one of those recent sensational novels, who believed
that
we may walk unconsciously
in an atmosphere of crime, and breathe none the less freely. I believe that we may look into the smiling face of a murderer and admire its tranquil beauty
. Playing on that fear,
the
Daily Telegraph
thought it
impossible to imagine circumstances of greater apparent security than those which seemed to surround Mr Briggs … travelling first-class for a mere step of a journey, on a line where stations occur every mile or so …
If we can be murdered thus
– it wrote –
we may be slain in our pew at church or assassinated at our dinner table
.