Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (6 page)

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Five doctors
were charged with conducting Thomas Briggs’ postmortem that morning, including Brereton and the family doctor Toulmin. First they catalogued the bruises and scratches on Briggs’ hands, knuckles and left forearm – wounds that appeared to have been made as he defended himself against blows from his assailant. Then the body itself was scrutinised. There were no extreme injuries: as each organ was removed, it was pronounced intact.

Focusing on his head, the doctors noted the
deep, jagged wound
that had severed the cartilage of the left ear. Anterior to that another wound extended to the bone and appeared to have been caused by something sharp. A further blow had fractured the whole of the upper portion of the temporal bone with such force that it was driven in, dividing and crushing the ear itself.

On the crown of the head were three incised wounds, each about three-quarters of an inch in length, and a fourth that measured three inches across. All of them appeared to have been made by blows directed from front to back and all extended through the scalp, cutting down into the pericranium (the skull membrane). Peeling back Briggs’ grazed scalp to expose the cranium, the doctors found
a great quantity of effused blood
and a skull so extensively fractured that fissures in the bone radiated much like the damage inflicted on a sheet of plate glass by a stone. A small triangular portion of the parietal bone fell away from the rest of the skull. Blood was found between the scalp and the calvarium (or skull-cap) and there was more between the dura mater (or brain’s membrane) and the brain itself. In other words, the fracture of Thomas Briggs’ skull had produced a substantial and fatal
sub-cranial haemorrhage
.

Fracture of the skull and compression of the brain
were recorded as the official causes of death. The doctors judged that some of these injuries, including the deep incision over the ear, could have been caused by the fall from the train as Briggs’ head struck the stones between the tracks. The wounds over the crown, though, were consistent with powerful blows from a dull instrument. These strikes were all from above and they looked as though they were aimed first at the victim’s left temple, consistent with the theory that Briggs had dozed off, resting his head against the side of the carriage as he journeyed home. It appeared that his assailant had then struck him repeatedly on the top of his head as he struggled to defend himself. Any one of the blows would have been sufficient to kill.

During the few violent seconds of the attack, Thomas Briggs had stood little chance. As his blood spattered over the windows, sides and cushions of carriage 69, he may not even have cried out. Yet it was difficult to credit the possibility that the train door had been opened and slammed again behind Briggs’ falling body without drawing the slightest attention. Why had no one yet come forward to help the police?

CHAPTER 7

Something to Astonish the Public

Across London in the Palace of Westminster, black-suited gentlemen were raising angry questions in Parliament. Just days after the Board of Trade’s letter to railway companies asking them to consider the introduction of an effective method of communication between passengers and their train guard, Thomas Briggs had become the victim of
one of the foulest murders
committed in our time
. Alexander Baillie Cochrane – the fiery MP for Honiton – now demanded to know when the Board would compel railway directors to take action, but Milner Gibson – the President of the Board of Trade – was impatient with such questions. He believed that governmental interference would diminish the responsibility of the companies to act and, further, that alteration to existing carriages would be so costly that it would render any innovation financially impractical. Gibson’s blunt refusal to consider the introduction of a new bill to force action from the railway companies garnered boos and groans from a substantial portion of the House.

It also galled newspaper editors.
The Times
accused the Board of Trade of having committed murder through neglect. It considered railway directors despotic and the government careless of
public safety, recalling examples of carriages on fire and desperate passengers unable to alert the driver or guard. It also highlighted the plight of an eighteen-year-old called
Mary Anne Moody
, indecently assaulted by a fellow second-class passenger only a fortnight earlier. So terrified was Moody that she had tried to escape through the door, tottering on the primitive footboard as the train steamed along at 40 mph. Had a gentleman in a neighbouring compartment not leaned through the bars of his window and gripped her round the waist until the train pulled to a halt more than five miles later, she would most certainly have perished.

The murder was focusing attention on the closed, separate compartments endured by railway travellers and calls for government intervention grew louder by the hour. Many remembered the murder of an eminent French magistrate in December 1860. Judge Poinsot had been shot and robbed as he travelled in a first-class railway carriage through France, and his audacious murder had set writers thinking. In 1862 William Makepeace Thackeray wondered:
have you ever entered a first-class railway carriage, where an old gentleman sat alone in sweet sleep,
daintily murdered him
, taken his pocket book, and got out at the next station?
The following year a story in the
Globe
magazine described
the loudest screams …
swallowed up by the roar
of the rapidly revolving wheels, and murder – or violence worse than murder –
[going]
on to the accompaniment of a train flying along at 60 mph
.

Within three decades railway carriages would irrevocably enter the public imagination as crime scenes in Zola’s novel
La Bête Humaine
(1890). Taking the murder of Poinsot as its inspiration, the novel’s plot would centre on the traumatic image of a deadly struggle in a gas-lit carriage witnessed by a passenger on a train passing in the opposite direction, impotent to assist. It would end with a runaway train plunging towards disaster, symbol of a society hell-bent on its own destruction.

The murderer of Judge Poinsot – supposedly a scarred, broken-toothed criminal called Charles Judd – had never been caught.
The Times
now believed that
it is plain that
no man is safe
from assassination, no woman from rape, as long as people are left, sometimes for more than an hour, with the impossibility of making known their situation
. Death, the paper suggested, was lurking in every traveller’s shadow. For the privileged few, first-class travel had hitherto appeared to promise the safety of segregation, keeping the rough and the smooth comfortably apart. Now the isolation that had been so pleasurable was becoming unnerving and a feverish idea was taking hold: that the closed compartment was a provocation to murder, and that the multiple colliding worlds of the railway traveller represented unmanageable danger.

Fear radiated along the length of every train: anyone might be doubted, especially if he had
the look of a foreigner
.
Worst of all
, wrote the
London Review
,
is
the horrid consciousness
, not merely that you are uneasy, but that you are making the traveller in the opposite corner uneasy too
…
Both parties simultaneously feel that it is possible Mr Briggs’ murderer was affable in
his
manners. You know, as the train rolls on, that though he may pretend to be looking out of the window, your vis-à-vis is keeping half an eye upon your movements, and that you are keeping half an eye on his
. Some considered arming themselves. Others wondered if they should make out their wills before embarking on a train journey.

As the reaction of the public grew more febrile, the police worked under the pressure of constant scrutiny and were besieged with advice from the public in letters that told of shifty men in pawnbrokers’ shops, dodgy characters on trains in Nottingham, Italian refugees of
desperate character
and murderous forgers and fraudsters.
One correspondent hinted
that employees of lunatic asylums who were not on duty on that day should be questioned, because
the fact of the body being thrown
out in some short time proves it to have been someone in the daily practice of overcoming resistance and in ready knowledge of disposing of their victims
. Someone else suggested that drawings should be made of the wounds to Briggs’ head. Then, using men of different heights, he posited, the police should reconstruct the battering to determine the
height of the assassin
, because
experiments will show that a man 6 feet high and a man 5 foot cannot make the same line or cut
. It was a theory startlingly ahead of its time: almost a century would pass before the police began to adopt this kind of mathematical analysis and, perhaps for that very reason, the letter was ignored. Prefiguring the later novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a lady in Islington wondered whether anyone had thought of using a bloodhound? Fearing it was already too late, she counselled the police of the advisability of having one or two of these
remarkable creatures
always on hand.

Forensic science in Britain was in its infancy and – anyway –
the legal establishment was sceptical
of allowing the laboratory to play too great a part in the detection of crime. Consequently the country lagged behind its European neighbours and though dactyloscopy – or fingerprinting – was pioneered in Britain and might have given Tanner’s investigation proof beyond doubt, its acceptance as a standard police tool lay in the future. Similarly, the precipitin test to differentiate between human and animal blood would not be invented by the German scientist Paul Uhlenhuth until 1901. In 1864, all a chemist was able to do was examine spots under a microscope to divine first whether they were indeed blood, and then to make a guess as to their origin by comparing the shape of the cells to a rough chart of different animal types. It was not accepted police practice to collect hairs from crime scenes and nobody scrutinised either the bloodied stone lying close to where Briggs’ body was discovered or the battered hat found on the train for such details. Microscopic evidence would not be springing to Inspector Tanner’s aid. The
only clues he had so far were the crumpled hat, descriptions of the stolen watch and chain and a possible description of the murderer.

Forsaken or lost hats began to take on a whole new significance. The Bow police station was already inundated with hats of all shapes and sizes recovered from park benches and dustcarts across the city,
reports of suspicious hats
being cleaned and information on those who had returned home hatless or with black eyes on the night of Saturday 9 July. Elsewhere, divisional police stations across London were being kept busy by a steady stream of eager citizens queuing to have their say. As each potentially fruitful lead was pursued locally, copies of the reports were sent to the Commissioner and to Tanner who was, in effect, sitting at the narrow end of a mighty funnel into which the public were pouring their insinuations, suspicions and fears.

There were allegations about ruptures within the extended Briggs family and at Islington police station a neighbour of Thomas Briggs at Clapton Square stated that he had travelled in the same train as Briggs on Saturday night. He claimed that a man between forty and fifty, slightly taller than average with a thick red face, side whiskers and moustache, had rushed into his second-class carriage before the train set off and had stared closely at each of the passengers. The guard had closed the door but the stranger had reopened it, jumped down onto the platform and rushed towards the front of the train in the direction of the first-class compartments.

Facing a welter of proliferating reports, Inspector Tanner was keen to focus on solid leads and his own instinct. Superintendent Howie had already questioned the hatmaker Walker at his shop in Marylebone but had drawn an exasperating blank. Inspector Kerressey had asked Briggs’ son Thomas James to return to Clapton Square to remove the hook left dangling from the buttonhole of his father’s waistcoat. Along with the jump link found in the carriage and the chain recovered from Death’s shop, the
separate parts that held the chain to the stolen watch and attached it to his clothing were now reunited in police hands.

The banking district was awash with the rumour that Briggs had been assaulted by a clerk holding a grudge and Tanner had his suspicions about the two young clerks who had raised the alarm on the night of the murder. During that morning the Exchange had been feverish with reports that the police had arrested a City man and it had taken a public refutation to restore calm. In chop houses and taverns, on street corners and in dealing rooms, fingers were being pointed at the men who discovered the bloody carriage – Harry Vernez and Sydney Jones.

The detective was also collecting information about the assault and robbery on a train in the same spot back in October 1857. The thief had been caught as he fled to the marshes and had been tried and sentenced to four years’ hard labour. That man – five feet seven inches tall with a sallow complexion and thin features – had since been released, and those who remembered the circumstances of his trial recalled that he was said to have threatened to
do something to astonish the public when he came out.
Additionally, the description given by John Death matched that of a known associate of this offender. If the clerks were as innocent as they claimed, was it possible that this ex-convict was their man? The inspector deputed Superintendent Daniel Howie to track him down.