Victorian super sleuth of the yard
Modern popular culture is bursting at the seams with such famous fictional detectives as Inspector Morse and DCI Gene Hunt. But we tend to know little about real policemen while the murder victims or killers become household names.
When Chris Payne, a retired professor of horticulture, learned that his great-great-grandfather George Clarke was a detective chief inspector in the Metropolitan Police in the second half of the 19th century he decided to find out more about him.
To his surprise he discovered that this leading figure – known to colleagues and criminals as “the Chieftain” – in the tiny detective department at the original Scotland Yard was something of a celebrity to the Victorian public, involved in all the greatest crime sensations of the 1860s and 1870s.
Here are some of his most famous cases.
The North London Railway Murder
Having joined the force as a constable 24 years earlier George Clarke’s first big case as a detective came in July 1864 when the body of 69-year-old chief bank clerk Thomas Briggs was discovered on the railway line between Fenchurch Street station in the City of London and Hackney Wick.
George Clarke was something of a celebrity to the Victorian public
It became clear that Briggs had been attacked on a train. A valuable watch and chain had been stolen and the murderer also seemed to have escaped with Briggs’s hat, leaving his own behind in the confusion.
A young German tailor called Franz Müller emerged as the main suspect after he was found to have sold the chain to a City silversmith. But by the time this came to light he had set sail for New York.
Showing amazing det- ermination Clarke and a colleague set out to get to the US first.
Taking the two main witnesses with them they raced across the Atlantic aboard a faster steamship and detained the unsuspecting Müller as soon as his tall ship docked. A watch matching the description of Briggs’s was found in his cabin as was Briggs’s hat, which Müller had tried to disguise.
The accused was greeted by huge crowds on his return to London. He was found guilty of the murder at the Old Bailey in late October and hanged at Newgate a fortnight later in front of a 50,000-strong crowd. The case led to the installation of emergency communication cords on trains and contributed to the decision to hold executions in private from 1868.
Bizarrely the murderer’s attempt to modify his victim’s bell-topped hat also led to a fashion for “Müller hats” which would later lead on to bowler hats.
The Plaistow Marshes Murder
In November the same year a headless body was found in a reed-bed beside the River Thames in the East End. The victim was identified as a young German clerk called Theodor Führhop. The following day his landlord, fellow German Karl “Charley” Köhl, was arrested for murder.
Crucial to proving the case were a large number of pawnbrokers’ receipts found at Köhl’s home. When the items were tracked down a former landlady thought she recognised them as having belonged to the victim but it was only when Clarke travelled to Germany – his second arduous foreign trip in six months – that they were identified beyond doubt by the dead man’s family.
Köhl went on trial in January 1865 and became the last person to be executed in public, at Springfield Gaol, Chelmsford.
The Tichborne Claimant
One of the most sensational trials of the 1870s involved a claim to an aristocratic inheritance in a cause célèbre that divided the nation. Again Clarke’s role was crucial.
Sir Roger Tichborne, the 25-year-old heir to a landed estate in Hampshire, had been lost at sea off South America in 1854. His mother refused to believe he was dead and after her husband’s death nearly a decade later she placed international newspaper advertisements appealing for news.
One of the adverts came to the attention of a butcher in Australia who then claimed that he was Sir Roger.
Lady Tichborne accepted him as her son but the rest of the family rejected the claimant. A civil action came to court in 1871 and nine months later the butcher’s claim was thrown out.
The claimant was then prose-cuted for perjury. A key defence witness calling himself Jean Luie said he had met a delirious shipwreck survivor en route to Melbourne who called himself Roger and whom he could identify as the claimant. But this approach fell apart when Clarke proved that “Luie” was an ex-convict who’d been in England at the time. The jury concluded the claimant was plain old Arthur Orton from Wapping. He was sentenced to 14 years’ hard labour.
The Great Turf Swindle
Chief Inspector Clarke’s last great case landed him in the dock himself. It began in 1876 with a bookmaking scam in which people were invited to make money by placing bets on behalf of a racing “expert” who was “so good” the bookies refused to take his custom.
The swindle was the work of a gang of fraudsters but as the net closed in it became clear they had protectors in high places. After the trial three Scotland Yard detectives and a solicitor were arrested for corruption.
Clarke, now second-in-command at the plain-clothed detective department, was one of the arresting officers but when the case came to court the leader of the fraudsters denounced him from the witness box as part of the conspiracy and he too was put on trial.
Clarke was the only one to be acquitted. One newspaper reported: “The words [not guilty] were scarcely uttered before a burst of cheering rang through the court.” Despite his long, successful service 59-year-old Clarke was now a political liability and the Home Secretary ordered that he be retired immediately from the Metropolitan Police.
Historians have argued since that he may have been guilty all along but his great-great-grandson insists that the only evidence against him came from fraudsters.
“He was not an inspirational detective in the sense that Sherlock Holmes would be regarded but there seems to have been little need for such at Scotland Yard as the Victorian criminal was rarely astute,” says Payne.
“What was needed was someone who could assemble evidence and build a convincing case for the prosecutor to secure a conviction. This seems to have been George Clarke’s great strength.”
To order Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes Of A Scotland Yard Detective by Chris Payne (The History Press, £14.99) with free UK delivery send a cheque or PO made payable to Express Bookshop to Chieftain Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or call 0871 988 8367 (10p/min from BT landlines) or visit www.expressbookshop.co.uk