Murder Capital: Suspicious deaths in London, 1933–53

By Amy Bell

Murder Capital is a historical study of unexpected deaths whose circumstances required official investigation in mid-twentieth-century London. Suspicious deaths – murders in the family and by strangers, infanticides and deaths from illegal abortions – reveal moments of personal and communal crisis in the social fabric of the city. The intimate details of these crimes revealed in police investigation files, newspaper reports and crime scene photographs hint at the fears and desires of people in London before, during and after the profound changes brought by the dislocations of the Second World War. By setting the institutional ordering of the city against the hidden intimate spaces where crimes occurred and were discovered, the book presents a new popular history of the city, in which urban space circumscribed the investigation, classification and public perceptions of crime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781847799746

Amy Bell

Amy Helen Bell is an Associate Professor of History at Huron University College at Western University

Book preview

Introduction

London: murder capital

Since the seventeenth century, the city of London has evoked images of crime and disorder in the popular imagination.¹ Murder Capital will examine a twentieth-century London, one both real and imagined, as the site for the commission, investigation and popular perceptions of suspicious deaths, or unexpected deaths whose circumstances required further investigation. Suspicious deaths reveal moments of personal and communal crisis in which individual impulses and social pressures converged in a moment of irrevocable violence. This study will compare such deaths across the various boundaries of the city, and demonstrate how deadly violence changed in character during and after the Second World War. Police investigations, newspaper reporting and crime scene photographs will uncover intimate details of the daily lives of London’s inhabitants and the transformations wrought by war in the fabric of the city itself.² While many of the more notorious murders under discussion were widely represented in the press, Murder Capital will also examine categories of suspicious deaths left out of the imagined spaces of crime in London. Police files describe familial murders, women’s deaths from abortion and infanticides, which were never reported in newspapers and did not appear in the official Home Office statistics, pointing to the gaps in our understanding of criminal and everyday London and its people in this period.

In the first half of the twentieth century, murder rates in the capital reflected the national rate, which dropped steadily from 9.6 per million in 1900 to a low of 6.2 in 1965.³ For example, according to the 1930 Report of the Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis, London had twenty-one murders, forty-one manslaughters and eight infanticides, equivalent to 8 per million inhabitants, very close to the national rate of 7.5.⁴ Despite this equivalence, twentieth-century London remained a focal point of the national interest in crime, as suspicious death investigations took place within an established narrative of crime, criminal justice and punishment unique to the city. London was steeped in the historical, dramatic, literary and journalistic narration of murder. Its historical importance as the centre for criminal prosecution at the Central Criminal Court or the Old Bailey, as the hub of the legal profession and national jurisprudence, under the jurisdiction of the nation’s oldest and largest police force, and as the home of a powerful daily press gave suspicious deaths a visibility and a historical context not to be found elsewhere.⁵ London was also the scene of infamous unsolved murders in recent memory: the poisoning of barrister Charles Bravo in Balham in 1876, the Whitechapel murders of 1888, the Charing Cross trunk murder of 1927, and others which provided years of speculative fodder for the popular press. The criminal trials of murderers who were caught, such as Dr Thomas Neill Cream, convicted of poisoning prostitute Matilda Clover in 1892, and Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, convicted of killing his wife in 1910, highlighted the theatrical drama of Old Bailey trials: the gruesome details of poisoned and dismembered bodies, the dogged detectives who tracked down the killer, the emphatic and dispassionate medical experts testifying for the prosecution and the climactic final verdict and capital sentence. Added to this, London was the backdrop to early fictional detectives such as Charles Dickens’ Inspector Bucket of Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins’ Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone (1868) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared in 1887.⁶ Suspicious deaths took place in familiar criminal landscapes in which specific neighbourhoods and addresses became associated with the finding of bodies, the commission of crimes or the residence of killers. The printing of photographic images in newspapers, as printers’ blocks from the 1850s and as halftone images from the 1890s, also helped to create a visual language of crime associated with the capital city.

The juxtaposition between London’s reputation for violent interpersonal crime and its importance as the capital of Great Britain and the largest city in Western Europe also reinforced public fears that the city was in danger of being overwhelmed by the poverty, disease and crime which had threatened its prosperity since the nineteenth century.⁷ Mid-twentieth-century London was the capital of the British Empire, dominant in international finance, the centre of a national transport system and the bureaucratic and governmental centre of England and the United Kingdom. London was a political hub, hosting Parliament and, from 1888 to 1965, the London City Council, the most powerful local government institution in Britain.⁸ It was the centre for many professions, for the arts and for the law courts. Well-to-do patrons helped to fund the largest service and luxury market in England, fed in part by the imports from the Port of London.⁹ But from the late Victorian era there had been an uneasy sense that all of this power could be under threat. London suffered particularly acute social and economic problems due to its rapid growth, which brought problems of overcrowding, poor sanitation, social and economic dislocation and rising levels of crime.¹⁰ Many nineteenth-century middle-class men and women, including journalist Henry Mayhew, scientific explorers Charles Booth and his cousin Beatrice Webb, and missionary William Booth (unrelated to Charles) of the Salvation Army, sought to uncover an authentic vision of the poverty and crime in the capital’s slums.¹¹ As Heather Shore observed, ‘The Victorian underworld is vicariously lived through the lives of the middle class social investigators who recorded the lives of the criminal and dangerous classes, and through the gaslit lens of Whitechapel, circa 1888.’¹² These accounts used the metaphors of darkness, jungle, labyrinth and a descent into a mysterious and terrifying world, which they sought to quantify and make known.¹³ Suspicious deaths in mid-twentieth-century London, and the manner in which they were investigated and reported, were framed in these older narratives of the city’s vulnerability and potential savagery, conditions the bombing raids and threatened invasion of the Second World War only intensified.

London’s criminal geography

This book examines the investigation of suspicious deaths in the middle of the century to illuminate changes in the pattern of violent crime over a period of great social upheaval and physical destruction. The institutional divisions of neighbourhoods and police districts delineate a criminal geography of London as viewed from above, while the more intimate landscape of rented rooms, alleyways, hotels, lodging houses, pubs and public parks exposes the individual scenes and the circumstances where deadly violence took place. Crime scene photographs taken by police photographers also suggest how crimes were framed in relation to the landscape of the city and existing urban visual narratives, and how they brought to light the hidden urban spaces and textures of everyday life. The individual stories revealed by these unhappy endings tell us not only how people died, but how they lived, and the family tensions, unwanted pregnancies, sexual violence and chance encounters in emotionally heightened circumstances that led to their untimely ends. The suspicious death and its moment of crisis, as detailed in police files, trial depositions, newspapers reports and memoirs, reveal glimpses of the motives, relationships, conflicts and living arrangements of people in London.

Between 1933 and 1953 the social makeup and physical landscape of London underwent rapid and fundamental changes. As the Metropolitan Police evolved as an institution of social and spatial control, the way in which crimes were defined, discovered and investigated also changed. This period saw a transition from Victorian policing to more modern methods of collecting information at crime scenes and tracking criminals.¹⁴ In 1933, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Trenchard, instituted a new system of tracking crimes in the capital, including a careful ledger of all deaths by violence in London to be forward annually to the Home Office. ¹⁵ The suspicious deaths recorded in these ledgers reveal the changing patterns of violent crime in London. In the 1930s, suspicious deaths illustrate the strains of economic hardship on the family, the difficulties faced by European refugees and the dangers of prostitution. The Second World War brought a temporary lull in the numbers of suspicious deaths, as conscription, full employment and evacuation of children caused a change in the demographic and lightened some economic hardships. As the war dragged on, however, the tensions exacerbated by raids and shortages and the influx of soldiers and deserters congregating in the capital brought the numbers of suspicious deaths up again. In 1946, many former soldiers returned to their families carrying service revolvers, the fatal results leading to the highest murder rates in the period. The bomb sites and rubble left behind by the raids were used by killers to conceal their crimes well into the 1950s.

The shift from murders within the family to assaults by strangers led to extensive changes in how crimes were investigated by coroners and police. In family murders the guilty most often confessed, or killed themselves. Neighbours and acquaintances in the community were also an important source of information. But these tools could not be used when the perpetrator or victim was not known in a city with an increasingly itinerant population. Case files from the 1940s show that police were more willing to turn to the growing circle of forensic experts to find links between the killer and the victim. The one category which defied police investigative attempts, as it had done for many years, was the killing of newborn children, whose abandoned bodies left the fewest clues and whose deaths were almost always listed as unsolved. This book will examine the periods from 1933 to 1939, from 1939 to 1945 and from 1945 to 1953, ending with the discovery of John Christie’s victims at 10 Rillington Place and the challenges the crime presented to police investigation and British justice.

Histories of crime

Murder Capital will be the first analysis of suspicious deaths in twentieth-century London. It examines an era of profound change in the types of murders committed and how they were investigated, and it bridges the gap between studies of Victorian crime and policing and histories of criminology and forensics in contemporary England.¹⁶ The book also reveals a hitherto unexplored facet of the war’s effect on London’s populace and criminal justice in Britain as a whole. The approach combines a social history of violent crime and its investigation with a consideration of the spatial geography of crimes in London and an analysis of the forensic investigation of the crime scene itself. Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton’s innovative research on twentieth-century British forensic cultures has made the modern crime scene the object of historical study, and has shown how scientific investigative practices were subject to social and institutional forces.¹⁷ Scholars working with Victorian texts, such as Judith Walkowitz, Simon Joyce, Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard, have outlined Victorian criminal geographies of crime and danger, and emphasized the importance of gender and class in understanding narratives of crime.¹⁸ Historians examining the social histories of crime, such as Mark Roodhouse, William Meier, Julia Laite and Matt Houlbrook, have examined patterns in other types of twentieth-century crime in London, including prostitution, theft, homosexuality and black marketeering.¹⁹ In all these studies, the space of the crime and its situation within the city is fundamental to its discovery, its investigation and its cultural associations.

Narratives of crime in London have relied since the early modern period on understandings of space, both literal and imagined. Recent work on early modern London has highlighted the metropolis’ importance as an area of shared cultural values: an imagined community in which landmarks and buildings had ‘multiple temporal and topographic meanings’.²⁰ One of the most enduring ways in which the city was understood was through the mapping of the physical locations of crimes and crime-ridden areas. In the sixteenth century, certain London neighbourhoods were identified in the popular imagination as ‘nurseries of vice’.²¹ Fed by broadsides describing London murders in great detail, popular interest in crime helped to create what Leigh Yetter has called an early modern ‘popular landscape of crime’.²² Similarly, Miles Ogborn and others have mapped eighteenth-century ‘spaces of modernity’ in London, exploring the complex and interconnected topography of transformations in institutions, experiences and identities.²³ More recently, historians have examined Victorian geographies of dirt and cleanliness in London, in particular nineteenth-century sanitary reform as an aspect of the expanding and industrializing metropolis.²⁴

My aim is to use these concepts of the city as a set of overlapping spaces of control, knowledge, resistance, disorder and difference in order to examine the criminal geography of London in the twentieth century. The book will examine the institutional ordering of the city according to the top-down maps of police divisions and boundaries and the investigations of individual crime scenes. Newspaper coverage will suggest some of the social and cultural meanings associated with crime in the capital, and how these tended to focus on particular neighbourhoods such as Soho. Crime scene photographs presented as evidence in criminal trials will also indicate how these deaths were framed and situated within existing visual narratives of the city.²⁵ The archival sources reflect the perspective of the institutions and individuals who defined, investigated and prosecuted crime. But the police files also offer hints of resistance, such as the abortionist Florence Taylor framing her abortion of a woman who later died as an act of compassion: ‘I didn’t know her name. I did it because I was sorry for the poor little thing,’ and Christopher Craig defying the police with his underage status from a Croydon rooftop in 1953, shouting, ‘Come on, you coppers! I’m only sixteen!’²⁶ London emerges in these criminal investigations as a complex mosaic in which cosmopolitan and commercial spaces abutted dingy flats, waste spaces, alleyways and parks, and after 1940, bomb sites, shelters and other physical legacies of the war.

Policing in London

Modern policing in London was from its inception based on the physical and investigative control of urban space. In 1829, the Metropolitan Police Force replaced the piecemeal system of parish constables and watchmen with seventeen police divisions in a seven-mile radius from Charing Cross, excluding the City.²⁷ In 1839 the second Metropolitan Police Act expanded the area to include the whole of Middlesex and those parishes in the counties of Surrey, Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent up to fifteen miles from Charing Cross. The main unit of administrative control was the division. By 1934 the Metropolitan Police district was divided into twenty-four divisions of widely varying sizes (see Table 1). For instance, A Division of Westminster had an area of 1.88 square miles, and a force of 694, while S Division Hampstead was the largest with an area of 86.81 square miles and a force of 954. Each division was headed by a superintendant who reported to the Commissioner.²⁸

Table 1: London Metropolitan Police divisions in 1934²⁹

These police divisions varied greatly in size and character. Divisions A, C and E, based in Cannon Row, Savile Row and Bow Street, were responsible for the West End, with its pleasure seekers, businessmen, monarchy and government. They had to oversee official events as well as monitor heavy traffic. By contrast, K Division in the East End covered thirty-two square miles, with a working-class population of 568,000 people in 1953, mainly employed in factories and the docks.³⁰ Each police division was further divided into subdivisions, which were governed by sub-stations or several sectional stations (see Table 1). The areas were further divided into beats for uniformed constables to patrol on foot, in order to familiarize the constables with local habits and to deter crime by their physical presence.³¹

In the early 1930s, the Metropolitan Police began to shift away from the policy of constant physical presence in London towards a technological and investigative control of urban space. In 1932, Commissioner Lord Trenchard abolished the timed beat system as part of his wide-ranging reforms of the force. By the late 1930s blue police telephone boxes and pillars and wireless cars were the conduit between policemen and civilians on the street and the local police station.³² By the 1950s there were 400 telephone boxes and 117 wireless cars patrolling the Metropolitan Police district, twenty-four hours a day.³³ From the information gathered on the street, a virtual London was recreated in the basement of the headquarters at Scotland Yard. From 1933, local stations called in details of the daily activities, which were collected in the Information Room.³⁴ Maps of London were spread onto four glass-topped tables, on which markers were set, representing all the vehicles and boats in commission. These central maps reconstituted the spaces of London in order to discover patterns and to distribute manpower. Each division also created its own district map of local crimes in order to identify the patterns of individual criminals.³⁵ Mapping became an integral part of crime investigation and control, reinforced by the increasingly detailed crime statistics kept by each division.

Crime statistics

The Metropolitan Police gathered statistical data on suspicious deaths in several formats: the Metropolitan Police Commissioner’s Report, the Judicial Statistics for England and Wales and the Criminal Statistics for England and Wales, presented annually to Parliament. Suspicious deaths differed from the statistics of other crimes that were known to the police or reported, since their investigation depended on the discovery of a physical body under suspicious circumstances. Debate surrounding criminal statistics’ reliability has formed an important part of the criminal historiography of England.³⁶ Historians looking at the long view of crime from medieval to modern times, such as Elias’ 1939 account of the ‘civilizing process’, have argued that the institution of police forces was an important step in reducing levels of violent crime, as it shifted the responsibility for prosecution and investigation of murder from the victim to the state. This in turn, according to Elias, made the murder statistics kept by the police much more reliable, as the number of homicides which were concealed, settled out of court by vendettas or compounded by money payments were reduced to insignificance.³⁷ By the 1960s the reliability of English homicide statistics began to be questioned, notably by J.D.J. Havard, an ambitious physician who also held a law degree, in The Detection of Secret Homicide.³⁸ He argued that many homicides were successfully disguised as natural deaths and bypassed the police altogether: ‘The high rate of detection for murder, as shown by the criminal statistics, relates only to those cases which have been identified as homicides, and may therefore have lulled us into a false sense of security.’³⁹ In 1998 statistician Howard Taylor claimed that the remarkable consistency of murder rates, which between 1880 and 1966 kept to a cumulative average of 150 a year with a band of 20% variation on either side of the average, suggested that police forces in England and Wales consciously underreported murders.⁴⁰ He posited that, while the quantity and quality of crime reported to the provincial and metropolitan police forces remained beyond the forces’ control, ‘how they were recorded and processed was a matter of policy and that policy was set by the Chief Constable … [Therefore a] reading of the statistics greatly assists in the reconstruction of supplysided quotas, policies, priorities and politics that underlay criminal justice.’⁴¹ Taylor’s argument has received strong criticism, notably from Robert Morris, who pointed out that the Treasury did not place a budgetary restriction on murder trials, and that to ration the number of reported crimes would have required a conspiracy of huge proportions.⁴²

The under-reporting of crime did not require a conspiracy, however, so much as shared mutual interest in keeping the number of unsolvable crimes down, which is reflected in other primary sources. Historians of crime examining nineteenth-century coroners’ courts have also uncovered a reluctance to classify suspicious deaths as murder. Until 1926, all sudden or suspicious deaths in England and Wales were investigated by a coroner working with a jury of twelve men in the presence of the corpse.⁴³ Mary Beth Emmerichs’ study of over 1,000 samples of nineteenth-century London coroners’ verdicts that did not result in criminal indictments found only five verdicts of ‘wilful murder by person unknown’, suggesting that coroners’ juries were hesitant to bring in a verdict of wilful murder.⁴⁴ John Archer’s study of reports from coroners’ courts in Victorian newspapers in North-West England suggested that the victim’s status in society partly determined whether a case remained unprosecuted, with infants, foreigners and female partners making up a substantial number of those whose deaths were downgraded or ignored by policing authorities and the judicial system.⁴⁵ This trend reflected the lower social value of these victims as well as the smaller chance of conviction for murder.

Anecdotal evidence from police memoirs corroborates the street-level under-reporting of suspicious deaths, described by Howard Taylor as an ‘open secret’ among police forces.⁴⁶ Frederick Wensley, who worked as a beat constable in Whitechapel in the 1890s, recalled in his memoir how bodies in the streets were explained away:

It was not in those days a very extraordinary thing for a dead body to be found in the street during the night or in the early morning hours, and it was significant that this usually occurred not far from houses to which all sorts of bad characters were known to resort. Few of these cases were classed officially as murder. Injuries might, in some instances, have been self-inflicted or have been brought about by some drunken accident. No one could say that it was not so, but that there had been foul play was often likely … Who was to say in which of a dozen houses of ill repute it had taken place, or who of scores of roughs were responsible?⁴⁷

Alec Hatch, a Metropolitan Police constable in the 1970s, recounted that on his beat deaths which were unlikely to result in a criminal conviction were disguised as falls down the stairs.⁴⁸ The Metropolitan Police files from the 1940s also suggest ways in which the number of suspicious deaths could be kept low, such as the exponential increase of abortions ruled as self-inflicted in 1943 and 1944 (see Table 5).

While these examples suggest that official records be used with caution, they also demonstrate the importance of context in the classification of crime. Without full details, it remains impossible for the historian to reclassify potentially suspicious deaths. As Stefan Slater, Dick Hobbs, Louise Jackson, Julia Laite and others have argued, mid-twentieth-century crime was defined by policing predicated upon local knowledge gained on ‘the beat’.⁴⁹ Crime was therefore understood, and to a large degree accepted, in the context of a geography shaped by race, ethnicity, class and gender, as well as preconceptions about the neighbourhood in which a crime took place. It is therefore vital to consider the immediate situation where the body was discovered in the context of the wider area of which the crime scene was a part. The legal framework governing murders and manslaughter was also shifting in this era. The Infanticide Acts of 1922 and 1938 lessened the penalties for a mother who killed her infant, while the 1938 Criminal Justice Bill unsuccessfully called for an experimental five-year suspension of the death penalty. The mid-twentieth-century criteria for classifying, investigating and punishing death by violence reflected broad and long-lasting changes in social attitudes to crime, punishment and criminal justice.

The Metropolitan Police Register of Deaths by Violence

In 1933, the year in which this study begins, Commissioner Trenchard introduced a new system of keeping crime figures, which required every reported crime to be recorded unless the report was erroneous or malicious. Before this, reports for which no corroboration could be obtained could be struck out at the discretion of the local superintendant.⁵⁰ The Metropolitan Police also began to keep a ledger of deaths by violence to be forwarded to the Home Office in regular instalments. The Register of Deaths by Violence records each case chronologically, beginning with the date and place of the discovery of the body in a column on the left, and ending in the final verdict and the sentence in a column on the far right.⁵¹ In the twenty-one years between 1933 and 1953 the Registry details 953 suspicious deaths, excluding those categorized as vehicular manslaughter. Of these cases, police files are archived for 360 cases, approximately 150 of which were open for public viewing in 2013.⁵² The National Archives also holds police files on crimes which are not included the Register. These ‘extra’ files are indicative of the types of crimes which are left out of the official statistics and why. In some cases the charge was thrown out or the crime ruled to be in self-defence, suggesting that the judicial verdict of the story altered the categorization of the crime. The police case records contain a summary of the crime and depositions from witnesses, and some also include post-mortem reports, photographs, editorial comments by other police detectives or superintendants, newspaper clippings, anonymous letters and occasionally forgotten pieces of material evidence. The City of London Police also investigated suspicious deaths during this time, but no files on these investigations or on crime statistics are currently archived. As Clive Emsley recounted, most English police forces had dismal archival practices, and documents were invariably thrown away after a few years, unless they were taken home by senior officers and later donated.⁵³

Crime scene photography

Depositions from some of the criminal trials at the Central Criminal Court are also available at The National Archives, including photographs submitted in evidence.⁵⁴ Crime scene photographs presented as evidence suggest how suspicious deaths were framed and situated within the social and physical landscape of the city. The photographs also reflect the two competing influences on crime scene photography: photography as an objective institutional tool for capturing a momentary reality and preserving the scene of the crime, and photography as a subjective art form reflecting the shifting aesthetics and genres of urban photography. Photography had been used by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Scotland Yard and the Prison Commission as a method of recording evidence and identifying criminals