A Nagging Toothache 
A new kind of detective had arrived on the scene in London 1888. His name was Sherlock Holmes. The fictional sleuth was described by his creator, the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle, as a ‘walking calendar of crime’ who ‘appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the country’. Holmes, appropriately for the period, was also a social investigator with a taste for ‘long walks, which appeared to take him into the lowest portions of the city’. His first case appeared in print in Beeton’s Christmas Annual of November 1887, and was then repackaged in book form in July 1888. Holmes went on to appear in three more novels and fifty-six short stories, one of which – A Scandal in Bohemia – was set on 20 March 1888. There was no murder to solve, but the episode was notable for the fact that Holmes was outwitted by a woman while endeavouring to save the King of Bohemia from blackmail. It was a rare defeat, but his powers were as sharp as ever despite his addiction to cocaine. Within seconds of Watson’s visit to No.221B Baker Street, Holmes deduced that the doctor had put on 7½lb, had returned to practice, had got very wet recently and had a clumsy servant girl. ‘You see but you do not observe,’ the detective declared.
Sherlock Holmes also tapped into another theme – the apparent incompetence of Scotland Yard. The former Chief Inspector Francis Carlin, writing in 1919, felt aggrieved that the public were left with the impression that the police were a ‘crowd of inept blunderers’, adding that Holmes was allowed 350 pages to catch his man whereas the Yard detective ‘has to get his man quickly or not at all’. In some of these real-life cases the investigation only uncovered more and more loose ends. What may at first have looked like clear-cut murder ended up as a genuine mystery or a collection of suspicious circumstances with no real evidence.88
A Nagging Toothache Fifteen-year-old Frederick Playle had an errand to run. His master William Barber, the manager of a chemist’s shop in Walthamstow, east London, had written a note and wanted it delivered to a customer a few hundred yards away. It was only to be delivered to a Mrs French, mind, nobody else. So, when Frank got to No.208 Boundary Road a few minutes later and Mrs French’s husband answered, he quickly made his excuses and left. Later that afternoon he went back again with the note and on this occasion he was able to hand the young woman the message. Mrs French replied with a simple, ‘Tell him yes.’ His errand complete, Frank returned with the reply to Mr Barber, ready for his next task, which was to fetch a shilling’s worth of brandy from the local public house. Shortly after his return at 4 p.m., Mrs French arrived and was shown into the back parlour where the chemist occasionally performed tooth extractions. Mr Barber, who seemed a little strange or ‘dull’ in demeanour, told Frank he could go home for a few hours. Being an obedient fellow, young Master Playle did as he was told.
When the boy returned to chemist’s at 6 p.m. he found it closed and the lights switched off. Rather than shrug his shoulders and wander off, he walked round the back along a footpath and scaled the wall into the garden. Once inside the premises he knocked at the parlour door. There was no answer. Frank opened the door and let his eyes adjust to the darkness of the room. There on a sofa near the window sat Mrs French; she looked unnaturally pale and motionless, almost like a showroom mannequin. Frank decided to get help from the butcher and the grocer next door, and they in turn fetched a doctor.
Having taken the woman’s pulse, Dr George Thorpe at first thought Mrs French had fainted. Her pulse was slow and he could barely detect her breathing. Her dress had been undone four or five buttons from the top, but her clothing was otherwise in order. While examining her closely he detected a sickly sweet smell coming from her mouth: the distinctive odour of chloroform. There was a bottle of it on the shelf nearby, as well as several other jars containing smelling salts, carbolic lotion, carbolic acid and soda water, some toothache tincture, brandy, cotton wool, a handkerchief and a hand bowl containing water. Mrs French’s gloves, brooch, umbrella and bonnet were on the table next to one of Barber’s hats.
The police were called, but it was past midnight when they discovered that the till had been plundered. Perhaps as much as £15 was missing. There was also no sign of Mr Barber. A description was issued:
William Barber, aged thirty-five, chemist’s assistant, height 5ft 8.5in, fair complexion, hair and moustache, near-sighted, dressed in grey jacket, dark trousers and a hard felt hat. He is splay footed.
Annie Mary French died at 11.45 p.m. the next day, Sunday 22 July 1888. She was twenty-two years old and had been married to Arthur George French, a grocer’s assistant, since the summer of 1886. By all accounts they had lived happily together. Mr French said that he had last seen her that Saturday at 2 p.m. when she told him her toothache was coming on again. Two weeks earlier she had bought a bottle of Chlorodyne – a mixture of morphine, cannabis and chloroform – from Hamilton’s for the same problem and he assumed she had gone out for some more. Annie was otherwise in good spirits and when she failed to return to the house at 7 p.m. he assumed she had gone to visit her mother. Questioned about William Barber, he said the chemist used to come round to his house every other day and dined there on Sundays by arrangement. The two men were friends and went on morning walks together.
At the first inquest hearing on 25 July, Mr French was questioned about whether he suspected there was anything going on between his wife and Barber. ‘Never,’ he replied. ‘She told me she utterly disliked him and wished he would keep away from the house.’ Mr French had behaved more coolly towards the chemist as a result, and it was noticeable that the previous Sunday, Barber was very quiet during dinner and complained of feeling miserable. ‘He said it was very lonely being in the house alone. He was a man who drank freely. Lately he had taken to drinking spirits, but I never saw him the worse for drink.’ As far as he knew, Barber’s mood had nothing to do with his wife. So the evidence of Frederick Playle came as a shock. The teenager confirmed that Annie French had called at the chemist’s shop every morning for the last nine months at around 11 a.m. That was the cue for Barber to send him away on an errand, and when he returned he nearly always found Mrs French with Barber in the back parlour. Even so, he had never seen Barber acting improperly towards her or even seen him put his arm round the woman’s waist. The husband couldn’t believe that there had been so many visits – he had always got the impression that Barber disliked the company of women. Nevertheless, there was now a possible motive – had Barber poisoned Mrs French when she called off their affair?
The next day, Annie French was buried in Bow cemetery whilst the police continued to search for the missing chemist. Then, on Saturday 28 July, an unshaven and downtrodden Barber was arrested in Brentford. He had taken a room above a coffee shop in the high street, but he had attracted attention due to his ‘superior dress’ and the curious way he read the daily paper, scanning the news while pretending to be absorbed by the advertisements. After being apprehended by a local constable, he admitted that he was the wanted man, but insisted that Mrs French must have accidentally poisoned herself in an attempt to soothe her toothache. ‘We were great friends but there was nothing improper between us. I tried to restore her but failed and I ran away in the excitement of the moment. I did not know exactly what I was doing.’ He had taken the money from the shop but most of it had been stolen from him by a woman while he was drunk. Barber had pawned his waistcoat but had kept a bottle of prussic acid in his pocket with a note which insisted that he was not to blame for ‘The Walthamstow Mystery’. It appeared he had been planning to kill himself.
On his appearance before the magistrates he sobbed as the clerk read the charge of ‘causing the death of Annie French by administering to her a noxious drug’. The evidence included the statement he gave to police after his arrest:
Mrs French had complained of having suffered from toothache for some few weeks, and I had on several occasions rubbed on chloroform or camphorated chloroform. I had told her at any time when the toothache came to come down immediately and then I would give her a draught to take, and would rub her gums with chloroform and would afterwards apply some strong caustic such as carbolic or nitric acid to destroy or wither the nerve. Just as I was about to prepare the draught some customers came into the shop and Mrs French said to me in a rather pettish way ‘go and attend to your customers’. I left her in the room with the preparations and on my return I found she had taken the whole of the contents of the strong solution of morphia.
He said that he had tried to revive her with some brandy and the smelling salts, and undid her dress round the neck and bathed her forehead with cold water. ‘Immediately after doing this she fell from my arms on to the couch and said “I am dying”. I looked at her and saw she was changing fast and could not recover. In my fright I rushed away, not knowing what to do with myself.’ Barber vehemently denied that sexual assault was on his mind, or that he was planning to perform an operation. As for the note he had sent to Mrs French, he claimed that it only referred to some cigarettes that he had asked her to make.
His account was not entirely convincing but his reference to morphine, both in his statement and in the suspected suicide note, tallied with the latest medical opinion on the cause of death. Chloroform poisoning was thought to be unlikely due to the lack of any irritation in the throat. At the conclusion of the inquest in August, the coroner declared that the case was even ‘more mysterious than ever’ and left it to the jury to decide whether they needed to hear any more evidence. If Barber had given Mrs French the drugs then he was guilty of murder, but if Mrs French had taken them it was either an accident or suicide. ‘So far as he could see, there was no evidence to lead them to any conclusion,’ reported the Standard newspaper. ‘It was, however, in his opinion a very strange thing that she should have taken it herself.’ It was unfair to call Barber to give his account at the inquest as he had already been charged by the police, the coroner added. The inquest jury returned an open verdict, unable to be sure exactly how Mrs French had met her death.
The prosecution continued, however, and Barber was committed to the Old Bailey for trial. On 18 September, the case was considered by the Grand Jury and was thrown out. Barber was a free man.89
At the Pleasure Grounds On Wednesday 25 April 1888, a Mrs Ann Smith, aged fifty-one, of Hemsworth Street, Hoxton, stood before the magistrate at Worship Street Police Court to make a desperate plea for help. Her twenty-five-year-old daughter Elizabeth – known as Annie – had left the family home that Saturday to attend a dance. She had never come back. Mrs Smith checked with all the local police stations and asked questions in the neighbourhood. Annie had simply disappeared. She was ‘a good steady girl’ with a regular job as a machinist for a local firm in Kingsland Road. Her father, Albert, was a respectable carpenter and shop fitter. But the police were reluctant to investigate without evidence of foul play, and Mrs Smith could only hope that by appealing to the magistrate they would get some publicity. The following day, after a report was carried by The Times, the police swung into action.
Twenty-four hours later Mrs Smith learned the dreadful truth. Their daughter was dead. Annie’s body had been found by police officers dragging the backwaters of the River Lea near Millfields. Two local men had been arrested and it was suggested that there was evidence of a sexual assault. ‘There seems little reason to doubt that a shocking outrage and murder have been committed at the East End of London,’ began the report in The Times. Further details emerged bit by bit over the coming days. Annie Smith, a ‘passionate’ girl fond of a drink, had gone to the ‘Pleasure Gardens’ at the back of the Greyhound pub on Lea Bridge Road on 21 April 1888. She was a regular visitor to the Saturday open-air dances, at which couples paraded on a covered platform to the accompaniment of a quadrille band. She had met with her fiancé, William Henry Stead, a well-dressed man described by locals as a ‘toff’, but as the evening wore on she had become increasingly drunk and upset. At around 9 p.m. she collapsed on the doorstep of the Carman’s Rest coffee shop and began vomiting. It seemed she had been at the brandy. ‘I am sick of it,’ she groaned, ‘I wish I was settled [married].’ When told she would give herself a headache with all the alcohol, she replied, ‘My heart aches, not my head.’ Annie then returned to the pleasure grounds and rejoined her fiancé, but he was clearly unhappy that she had been off by herself. After a quarrel, Stead slapped her face and left. Annie wandered off and asked a group of costermongers to carry her to the Ship Aground pub in their barrow because she felt faint. After a drink she accused one of them of stealing her purse, although he insisted that he was just pinning up her dress. Annie was next spotted walking across the Millfields in the company of a small group of men.
The two suspects arrested by police were George Anthony, a twenty-three-year-old bargeman, and Charles Cantor, a thirty-year-old labourer. Anthony claimed that on the night of the dance he, Cantor and a few of their friends had heard about the suspected theft and had chased two men towards Clapton. He had fought with one of them in a ditch, but the purse was never recovered. ‘I asked the woman if I should go up the road with her,’ he said. ‘She and me then went up Lea Bridge together as far as Chatsworth Road. I left her there and I don’t know where she went.’ He later added that they had gone across the marshes, across Strong’s Bridge and along the towpath to the waterworks gate. ‘I then saw Charlie Cantor coming along the path and I went away. I left her standing against the wall and I went along the path over Pond Lane Bridge across the fields and down home. Charlie Cantor was talking to her when I left.’
As for Cantor, he told the police, ‘I can’t tell you anything about her, sir, except that I saw her standing against a post.’ He refused to answer questions at the inquest, on the advice of his solicitor.
Further investigation revealed that the wall referred to by Anthony was a third of a mile from where Annie had been found dead at 5.20 a.m. on Friday 27 April. Although rats had gnawed away her left cheek and part of her right arm, there was no evidence of any violence or struggle. Her dress was muddy and wet but intact. The broken umbrella found on a nearby path was unconnected to the case. The surgeon, Dr Charles Aveling, concluded that the relatively small amount of water in the stomach of Annie Smith showed that she had not struggled when she entered the river, either because of weakness or some other reason. The evidence was slim, to say the least, but the case was intriguing enough to be given the tag ‘The Lea Mystery’, and an illustration of the Greyhound ‘Pleasure Gardens’ featured on the front page of the Penny Illustrated Paper for 5 May. Three days later the jury returned an open verdict, unable to say what had caused the young woman to drown.
At Dalston Police Court, the two suspects returned to hear that the prosecutor had effectively given up the case. The only evidence against Cantor was the statement of Anthony and that would be inadmissible. Anthony had scratches on his face, but they could have come from the fight with the costermonger. As to his being the last person seen with Annie Smith, there was the statement of one witness that she was alone at 1.30 a.m., by which time Anthony was at home. There was no evidence that the girl had been robbed or sexually assaulted. The magistrate had heard enough, and allowed the charges to be dropped.90
Six months later there was an even bigger sensation at the Greyhound ‘Pleasure Gardens’. Before an estimated crowd of 60,000 people in the grounds and the surrounding Hackney marshes, an aeronaut styling himself as ‘Professor Higgins’ ascended in a balloon. At 2,000ft, he set himself free and plunged to the earth. Above his head a homemade parachute fluttered and then finally caught in the flow of air, allowing the professor to descend slowly to the ground about a mile away from where he had begun. ‘The people seemed almost mad with excitement and seizing the Englishman who had successfully accomplished the feat, carried him shoulder high in triumph to the hotel where a fresh ovation was accorded him,’ reported the Birmingham Daily Post. By day, Higgins was a Clapton omnibus driver and amateur gymnast, but he had turned to ballooning after the American aeronaut and self-proclaimed ‘inventor of the parachute’, Professor Baldwin, made a descent at Alexandra Palace in July. In fact, the modern parachute had been invented in the late eighteenth century, but the public did not seem to care. It was in the grip of a new balloon craze that would continue into the mid-1890s. Professor Higgins survived a series of accidents while touring the country before eventually dying in a performance at Leeds in August 1891.91