KEEN FOR ANY DISTRACTION FROM THE DAY’S DAILY GRIND
THE LOGISTICS FOR THE COMPLETE FINGERPRINTING of every male over the age of sixteen in West Garside and a fifteen-mile radius thereabout were staggering.
Although there had been no official national census undertaken since 1931, the 1939 National Registration Act requiring everyone to register and carry an Identity Card was, in effect, a census.
However, this information was now fifteen years out of date and so of little value in assessing the size of the population for West Garside.
But making use of the Electoral Register, Shuggie McDermott and his team calculated that the population of West Garside and environs to be 37,483, of which 16,117 were assessed to be male.
Extrapolating further, eliminating under 16’s and over 65’s reduced the figure of males to 13,381. To assist in this process, Professor Alan Turret, Professor of Mathematics with a speciality in statistical models from the University of Sheffield, was enjoined to assist in the calculations, which he did with enthusiasm. Council records, postal records, and other information were fed into the maw of raw data, from which Shuggie and Professor Turret produced their totals. They then calculated that 9,634 households would require to be visited and male residents fingerprinted.
Large-scale maps of the area were pinned to the walls of a room adjacent to the incident room, and Shuggie’s team of twenty-seven officers began the implementation of the search for the owner of the fingerprints—the thumb and four fingers of the right hand—found on the glass beneath Emily Black’s bed.
The twenty-eight fingerprint officers assigned to the campaign—for that is what it had become, a campaign planned along military lines—were divided into fourteen squads of two officers: one a fingerprint technician, the other a uniformed assistant.
Each squad was assigned a district, the district marked up on the large-scale maps by means of thick pen lines. Within each district, the team had to visit every house, cottage, farm, lodging, hotel, every dwelling in their district where there was thought to be a male resident who fell into the age category of 16 - 65. Every house visited was checked against a master list. Return visits were to be undertaken if there was no answer or the person concerned was at work or otherwise not available.
Each squad was issued with dozens of specially printed cards of convenient size to carry. On one side of the card, there was space for the name and address of the fingerprintee (if there is such a word), the other side had space for the thumb and forefinger, and the other fingers were printed on the reverse side. The bottom of the card had a space for the name and initials of the squad officer taking the print. At the end of each shift, the cards were taken in boxes back to the ‘fingerprint’ section at the station, where Shuggie McDermott’s trained fingerprint technicians carefully examined each set of prints, comparing them with a blown-up photograph of the suspect’s prints that each technician had at his desk. With a magnifying glass, he searched for the unique pattern of arches, deltas, whorls, pockets, loops, and twinned loops which make up a human print.
In several cases, the prints taken were smudged, and the squad had to be sent back again to retake the print. Secretaries and clerks logged each print card against the list of extrapolated names assembled by Shuggie.
You have to admire the sheer efficiency of this campaign. In the days before computers, each entry had to be logged in by hand, a laborious and mind-numbing task, but such a vital one. If even one card managed to escape from the system, that one card could be that of the killer.
In addition to the squads calling at each dwelling, mobile vans, like the one in which Councillor Earnest Heatherton, Mayor of Garside, had given his prints, were set up in the Market Square and Town Hall Square, whilst travelling vans called at the main employers in the town—Alexander and Matthew, Duckworth and Dawes, Headleys, Garside Forgemaster’s, and Monkhouse Precision Tools amongst them. Male workers of the specified age were ‘invited’ to have their prints taken, and most, keen for any distraction from the day’s daily grind, readily lined up, joking and laughing, cajoling any of their workmates who were reluctant to be printed, loudly voicing the opinion that they must be the guilty one.