1887: Jubilee Year. The crowned heads of Europe were invited to a fortnight-long celebration starting with a royal thanksgiving ceremony at St Paul’s on 21 June. It would be a display of Imperial glory unprecedented in the fifty years since the coronation.
James Monro knew that if he could only bypass the Commissioner, he could bend Home Secretary Matthews to his will; and he managed it. He got Robert Anderson back into the Home Office and whisked day-to-day intelligence of international political crime out of Sir Charles Warren’s hands altogether.
The Criminal Investigation Department was reorganised. ‘Ordinary’ serious crime would be dealt with by Section A. Superintendent Williamson would head Section B, a department about twenty-five strong dealing with Irish affairs in London as the old SIB had done. Section C would be the Port Police. All section heads would report to Warren.
Section D, an entirely new, very small and secret section called the Special Branch, would be financed separately from the Metropolitan Police; its money would come from the Treasury via the Home Office. It would consist of just four policemen but could draw on the resources of other CID sections if required. Chief Inspector Littlechild at its head would report to Monro, who (to Warren’s annoyance) would report directly to Home Secretary Henry Matthews. Three inspectors would be answerable to Littlechild: Melville, Pope and Quinn. Their duties would take them outside London when necessary (Melville was still stationed in France), and would not be exclusively Irish. They would resurrect Von Tornow’s old job, keeping a watchful eye on political agitators in general, and potentially murderous ones in particular. Information that came from Le Caron in America to Anderson would go to Monro directly. Occasional duties would include royal protection.
Jenkinson had retired to Buckinghamshire, yet his presence still hovered over the Secret Service. His plots had taken on a momentum of their own. More than once Monro would discover, long after he needed to know, that some allegedly dangerous Irishman was on the Secret Service payroll (like Casey or Millen or John Patrick Hayes) or in the pay of the Foreign Office like Carroll-Tevis. He was doing his job blindfold and did not know that Jenkinson had inspired an entrapment operation which even now was being put into action. Jenkinson had one idea: that the British must be shown that, unless Home Rule were granted, there would be a dynamite campaign.
Arthur Balfour, Salisbury’s clever thirty-nine-year-old nephew, held the opposing view: the Irish required the smack of firm government. In March he became Secretary of State for Ireland and began to promote a Crimes Bill, which would outlaw organisations believed to be hostile to the Crown. There would be no collusion between the Tories and the Parnellites. The Times had come into possession of letters allegedly from Charles Stewart Parnell which revealed his sympathy with violent action. The newspaper ran a series of accusations against him while Anderson contributed concurrent articles about past, but quite recent, Fenian activities in America – anonymously.
By May the public was nervous. Scotland Yard was putting out press releases about a dangerous Clan-na-Gael man in Paris, Patrick Casey – Captain Stephens’ cousin, who like him was in British service.
In Le Havre Melville was a new father again. Kate had given birth to Cecilia in 1886. The promotion to Inspector, with its increased pay, was welcome.
Monro expressed concern that explosives were on their way by a passenger ship of the French line from America via Le Havre for delivery to someone called Miller, or Muller, in Paris. He communicated a request, via the Foreign Office, for vigilance: ‘I have a couple of officers at Le Havre and their services are very much at your disposal.’ HM Consul Bernal reported that no explosives had arrived but if they did, Monro would be the first to know.
All the same, Melville had noticed an interesting individual passing through. A thin, middle-aged American called Muller wearing an astrakhan-collared coat had left New York on SS Gascogne of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique on 18 April. He was on his way to the French capital. The explosives, if and when they arrived, might be destined for him.
Melville followed ‘Muller’ to Paris, to the Hotel du Palais in the Avenue cours la Reine, on the right bank overlooking the Seine near the Place de la Concorde, where the stranger signed in as General F.F. Millen. Melville installed himself nearby and kept a watchful eye on the slightly-built American, noticing that he wrote a lot of letters. No doubt enlisting the help of a concierge, he discovered that Millen’s correspondents in London included a Colonel Farrer at the Oriental Club – probably his link to Jenkinson. There was also a certain Tevis who lived at a good address in Paris.
Monro, in London, literally didn’t know the half of it, so if Melville ever got sight of the letters’ contents Monro must have been mystified. Before he left Room 56 Jenkinson had burned the paperwork. There was no one (except the Foreign Office, and they were silent) to tell his successor that General F.F. Millen was working for the British. Or that General Carroll-Tevis, a soldier of fortune long resident in Paris who had risen high in the Fenian movement, and of whom Monro had never heard either, was a Foreign Office spy.
All that Monro, and by extension Melville, suspected was that somebody had engaged somebody else to ship the ‘Greek Fire’ as the explosive substance was said to be, to Millen who was supposed to organise ‘a celebration of Mrs Brown’s very good health’. The Queen was to be threatened with a Jubilee dynamite plot.
Melville reported from Paris that Millen was on his way back to the Channel coast, this time to Boulogne, and he followed. Nearly two weeks later, on 24 May, Millen’s wife came from Dublin to join her husband at his hotel.
Melville and Monro perhaps expected some Irish-American emissary to arrive, but none did. And Millen made no sortie across the Channel. But Melville raised his eyebrows when a Scotland Yard inspector called Thomson, who had just retired, turned up with his own wife at the same hotel and the two couples made friends.
Melville had not been warned that Thomson and his wife would turn up. It is possible that Anderson, at the Home Office, had hired him and omitted to tell Monro. The Foreign Office’s man in Paris, Carroll-Tevis, to whom Millen had only recently boasted that he had come to Europe to ‘operate’ during the Jubilee, had sent a female spy to Boulogne: later he told Michael Davitt so. After the event nobody wanted to say who had sent the Thomsons.
The Millens and the Thomsons moved together to a different hotel, the Hotel Poilly. Melville noticed with irritation that Millen was now posting his own letters. There was no longer any chance, as there had been in Paris, of getting a quick look at the addresses – unless the French police could be induced to let him have a look at whatever the postman took out of the box. They could not. He put the case before Monro: this would have to be done through official channels.
Monro passed on the request to the Foreign Office who got the heavy weight of Lord Salisbury’s sanction behind them and informed the Ambassador as well as the Consul of the matter’s importance.1 At Boulogne, HM Consul Surplice engaged the assistance of the French police at once. At last Melville could legitimately read Millen’s mail, which was shown to him by the French police when it was collected.
And now there arrived, to beard Millen in his lair, none other than Superintendent Williamson, who demanded that General Millen afford him ‘absolute disclosure and abandonment of his mission’. Williamson believed that Millen’s mission was to blow Queen Victoria to smithereens on behalf of Clan-na-Gael. ‘Absolute disclosure’ was a key request. Williamson, acting on Monro’s orders, wanted to know who Millen was working for. Millen would neither confirm nor deny anything.
Melville took hold of the letters for long enough to read them and summarise passages. That is in part the reason why not only the ordinary French police, but also the Railway Police, attended a meeting between Surplice and Williamson on 15 June where the matter of Millen was discussed. They had his description – it would be known if he left Boulogne – but also it may be inferred that if items of mail were taken away to be read, they might have to be delivered separately to the mail train before it left, and the Railway Police would need to know.
Monro must find out who Millen was writing to. He had a very strong suspicion that Millen was one of Jenkinson’s men even now. Lord Lyons, the Ambassador in Paris, confirmed that the French police would give every assistance in Paris as well as Boulogne; ‘I trust however that there will be no relaxation of independent means of watchfulness on the part of the English police’, he added pointedly.
Far from it. Whichever way you looked at it, the British Government had been keeping several so-called plotters, and an attendant cast of snoopers, in comfort at public expense. No entrapment could happen. It was a farce; there wasn’t a genuine revolutionary among the lot of them. The Jubilee plot, which had seemed such a wizard wheeze, must be closed down.
Without any help from Millen it was rolling relentlessly on. Carroll-Tevis had engaged one Cassidy to ship the explosives and, unexpectedly, he did. They arrived unknown to Monro, in the form of dynamite powder, on the City of Chester in Liverpool on the very day of the Jubilee, along with two ‘brothers’ called Scott and a Mr Joseph ‘Melville’, whose real name was Moroney. Moroney, as Monro discovered, had been instructed in New York to complete the task in which Millen seemed to be failing. The three men also brought a couple of Smith and Wesson revolvers.
On 21 June, when hundreds of titled Europeans processed in open carriages through the streets of London to celebrate with Her Majesty at St Paul’s, Millen at Boulogne ‘had all his luggage packed and ready for flight and was evidently in a state of intense excitement’.2 But nothing happened.
Monro now knew that General Millen was writing to Sullivan, the head of the Clan-na-Gael in America who knew perfectly well what Cassidy was up to, as well as to Tevis in Paris. Neither Millen nor Monro knew Tevis as anything but the agent of the Fenian Brotherhood.3 Monro did know that Millen had reported to both Sullivan and Tevis ‘attributing his failure to the close vigilance of the police’.4 He did not yet know that Sullivan had sent Moroney and the others.
Six days after the Jubilee celebrations started Millen and his wife left Boulogne for Paris. Inspector Melville got there first, played a hunch and booked a room at the Hotel du Palais, where sure enough, the Millens turned up. They were joined by their two daughters, Kitty, who had been staying in London, and Florence from Dublin. Melville became friendly with the family and helped the girls with French lessons.5 Kitty Millen had been staying in Thurloe Square, near the Museums in South Kensington, for the last six months, and when she returned to London, her French tutor happened to leave Paris at the same time. He followed her to South Kensington where he quietly handed over responsibility to Patrick Quinn.
Kitty and Florence met an Irish MP at the House of Commons and Kitty passed to him, as instructed by her father, a package of letters recommending one Joseph Melville (Moroney) to three Irish MPs.
Between August and November Monro pursued Moroney and his co-conspirators just as Millen had been pursued in France. His aim was to harass these potential dynamiters into leaving without having done any harm, and in this he succeeded. It was old-school Scotland Yard practice, favouring ‘open and constant surveillance’: deterrence rather than entrapment.
Of the conspirators in England only Moroney had any money he had gone to Paris to get it – and he, like Millen, did little except travel around, in his case with a Miss Kennedy, a milliner from Boston. The Clan-na-Gael funds (or more accurately, the Land League funds) he received were spent on hotel rooms in Paris, London and Dublin and the frothiest of fancy lace Miss Kennedy could find in the capitals of Europe.
Littlechild’s men – specifically McIntyre, Quinn and Walsh pursued the two other men who had arrived with Moroney from NewYork on the day of the Jubilee. These fellows remained in London in impoverished circumstances. (When, later, Clan-na-Gael members insisted on proper accounting for the funds, the plight of the dynamitards and the families left behind emerged as an issue. Some were destitute and abandoned by the movement far from home.) An associate – an associate seen with Moroney and Millen in Paris – died of tuberculosis. Monro used the inquest to expose the Jubilee plot and its association with General Millen before a large number of invited journalists.
In the final months of 1887, dynamite powder was found dumped in a back yard in Islington. Moroney’s co-conspirators were arrested. The one who had dumped the dynamite was broke and sick; he had in his possession a Smith and Wesson revolver and a cutting from a newspaper about the future engagements of Arthur Balfour. He could not read, he said, but it was a highly suggestive find, considering the odium with which ‘Bloody’ Balfour was regarded in Irish nationalist circles. The prosecution’s case was that these men were pawns in the Jubilee dynamite plot, and for that they received long jail sentences. (One died in prison and another was released, after petitions to the Home Secretary, after six years.)
On 22 October 1887, General Millen left for America. After abortive attempts to carry on spying in Central America he would die of natural causes in New York in 1889. No doubt Lord Salisbury was relieved. So was Monro; and in justification of the way he had handled the Jubilee plot, he wrote in November of 1887:
To have permitted the plot to ripen, taking measures only to ensure the apprehension and punishment of the criminals, would have involved comparatively little cost of thought or effort or money while the result would doubtless have impressed the public with a belief in the zeal and efficiency of the police. But the policy I have adopted, and steadily pursued, though of course a thankless one so far as the public is concerned, will, I venture to hope, receive the approval of the Government.6
In March of 1888 the rewards were doled out. Inspector Melville came second to top of the list after Chief Inspector Littlechild and received the then generous sum of £25.
It seems that at this time Melville was officially posted to Paris.7 Since no one had yet told Monro that both Patrick Casey and Carroll-Tevis, its most notorious Irish-American residents, were in the pay of the British, the Special Branch could certainly have justified a permanent posting there. Every conspirator who crossed the Atlantic seemed to visit those two and they were worth watching. The Prince of Wales also made frequent trips to Paris and it is quite likely that Lord Salisbury wanted an eye kept on him for diplomatic reasons, quite apart from any threat of attack.8 Inspector Moser, who had worked for Monro in Paris before, had now left the force and was running an ‘Anglo-Continental Enquiry Agency’;9 Melville seems to have taken his place as Monro’s man in the capital.
On 17 May Monro told Matthews that a plot was afoot to assassinate ‘Bloody’ Balfour, the hated Secretary of State, and the would-be assassin was in Paris. Matthews informed the Foreign Office at once, and the following was telegraphed to HM Ambassador:
Private and Most Secret. Home Office have information that plot to assassinate Mr Balfour and others is being prepared by the notorious J.P. Walsh who is living under assumed name in Paris at the Hotel d’Industrie 31 Rue Dunkerque. He should be followed. Home Office have agent in Paris who will call at Embassy place himself at Your Excellency’s disposal. Further particulars by next messenger.
According to a key informer, J.P. Walsh had been among the instigators of the ‘Irish Invincibles’ who had claimed responsibility for the Phoenix Park murders of 1882. He had been living in America. The murders – and it is worth remembering this as a footnote to what follows – had been committed by stabbing with surgical knives bought in Bond Street by an American ‘Dr Hamilton Williams’. In Monro’s view of events in 1888,
[The dynamitards]… resolved on a new line of tactics. They professed to think that Irish Americans were not good agents for outrage, as their accent called attention to them. This sounds prudent; the real reason was that the Irish American had had enough of the danger and judiciously wished to throw the burden on the shoulders of other persons. With this object in view they resolved to inaugurate a system of assassination… to be carried out by Irishmen, not Irish Americans.10
Walsh was understandably averse to landing on English soil and allegedly intended to direct the plot from France. A Scotland Yard detective, probably Melville, followed Walsh and one day saw him deep in conversation with another Dubliner called McKenna under the Arc de Triomphe. Monro wanted Walsh interviewed, and had to wade through channels, in the usual way, via the Foreign Office and the Ambassador, to get the French police to order him to attend the Préfecture to be questioned.
Walsh, informed that he must pay a visit to police HQ, was sublimely unconcerned. Six years earlier the French Department of Justice had declined to extradite him from Le Havre, when he was caught fleeing Dublin after the murders. He had been minding his own business in Brooklyn ever since, so they couldn’t hurt him now. In he swaggered to the Préfecture, little knowing that among his French interrogators, speaking to him through an interpreter, would be one William Melville, whose account continues:
Walsh arrived at 9.30 a.m. at the Préfecture and was questioned through one of his officers by M. Goron, Chef de la Sûreté. In answer to questions he said his name was John Stephen Walsh, and he was born at Milford, County Cork, and was single and by profession a labourer. He took the name of Walters because he had come to France to receive some money which a man in England owed him. If this man corresponded with him (Walsh) he would bring himself under suspicion there, as he (Walsh) was outlawed in connection with the Phoenix Park murders. He was now staying in Paris for pleasure.
He said he would prefer to be hanged to revealing the name of above man, but said that he met him at Boulogne on 14th inst. when he received £20 from him. That was at the Hotel de l’Union, but neither of them stayed there, each returning home.
Melville, as a Frenchman, put a question. What job did this man do?
In reply to me, he said the man that gave him the money was a publican. Knowing that Walsh had received two letters yesterday, one from Omaha, United States, the other from Manchester, I questioned him as to his correspondence, when he said he had received a letter also from Preston, but declined to say from whom, but it was clear it was from the publican. On my briefing him re American acquaintances, he said that for the months up to November last, he worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and was well known to a Mr McGee a foreman there. During this time he lodged with John Ross 96 Adam Street, Brooklyn. Last January he went to Omaha to look for work and admitted meeting Thomas Brennan there. Pressed as to his letter of yesterday from Omaha, he said it was from John Groves of that city, but would not give his address. He said latter was a clerk or kept an office.
Thomas Brennan was also wanted for the Phoenix Park murders. Melville was well informed; he knew the names, and where certain Irishmen were hiding out, and he knew who he was looking for. He relentlessly asked questions in French, heard them interpreted, and heard the answers back in English – and made scribbled notes as they were interpreted to him in French. This Groves had sent Walsh some money: £60 in three notes. Melville said he did not believe this story – how could it be in three notes? Walsh asked if he had to produce the notes and –
M. Goron said it was voluntary, but I said quickly that he should show them. On this he drew from a belt worn inside his trousers three £20 Bank of England notes. M. Goron said this was a delicate matter, there being no charge against Walsh. I however snatched the notes hurriedly and found that they were:
| 1st | Serial No. 59/W No.66929. of 17th February 1887. This one was stamped at some office apparently with the figures 5989 and also 8668. |
| 2nd | 4/V No.64906 of 20th March 1886. |
| 3rd | 4/V No.85348 – ditto |
Walsh refused to give any answer as to why Groves sent him the money beyond that he was a friend, and thought, he (Walsh) might want it. He had no acquaintances at Paris but knew a Mr Casey, whom he saw when in custody at Havre in 1883, but did not see him since.11
Melville asked him about a ‘carroty’ fellow in whose company he had been seen (probably McKenna, living in Paris as Sylvester). Walsh told him the carroty man was an American he’d met by accident. And yes, he had met him again yesterday, but said it was by chance.
This pushy French policeman was making him uneasy. He hadn’t walked in expecting a grilling. He would answer no more questions. He demanded reassurance from the Préfet, who had been quietly observing, that none of this information about himself, or the banknotes, would reach the English police.
The silence was broken by Melville: ‘Walsh, man, I am an inspector from Scotland Yard.’
Walsh’s exact response is not recorded but we have it on Monro’s authority that it was ‘more emphatic than reverent’.12 He was allowed to go and McKenna was shadowed – so obviously shadowed that he dared not meet Walsh, but had to go back to his hotel. The two detectives sat down at a restaurant across the street and ordered un verre. After some time McKenna came out. The detectives got up to follow him. McKenna turned around crossly and came back. This he did several times. He was not a happy man. When finally he came out again they waved him over for a drink. He had been worn down; he could not resist. The glasses were on the table and the rounds were being thoughtfully consumed when around the corner who should come but – Walsh. When he saw McKenna sitting with two detectives he sprang to a certain conclusion about the cause of his own predicament. And he said so to McKenna, roundly abusing him. In the stand-up shouting match that followed, the two detectives crept away.
A couple of days later both men were gently escorted to Le Havre by train, Walsh travelling with Melville and McKenna with Sergeant Flood.
The two conspirators were so irate still with one another that they declined to travel in the same carriage. On the way to Havre Walsh attempted to pump Inspector Melville as to the ports which were watched by the Police. Inspector Melville naturally was not lavish in the information given, but he rather implied that there was not a port in the world where Scotland Yard was not strongly represented. On arrival at Havre, many of the employees at the wharves and shipping who knew Melville well owing to his having been formerly stationed at Havre, came forward effusively and greeted him. To Walsh this sight suggested that all these men must be allies of Melville in the police, and his comment, with an oath was ‘There are scores of them.’13
Monro gleefully informed the press that Walsh and McKenna were on their way home from France with their tails between their legs. Someone in America issued a denial that Walsh was in Europe at all; he was in Omaha. At this Monro sent a wire to Pinkertons, suggesting that if any American newsmen cared to see Walsh and his former friend Roger McKenna for themselves they could meet SS Gascogne when she arrived from Le Havre.
Walsh and McKenna were greeted on the NewYork waterfront by about forty news hounds. Walsh was in an abusive mood, and no one was left in much doubt that he had been made to look foolish. ‘Thus the Walsh assassinations scheme was extinguished by the slaughter and ridicule of both England and America’, concluded James Monro, recalling the event with great satisfaction fifteen years later.
Perhaps Sir Charles Warren felt, in the summer of 1888, that his Assistant Commissioner was stealing the limelight. His own standing with the public had never been lower. In November of 1887 he had called out thousands of troops to assist in policing a demonstration in Trafalgar Square; shots were fired and two people killed. The Pall Mall Gazette called it Bloody Sunday. Notwithstanding the roar of protest that greeted his rigid and heavy-handed methods, he threw his weight about more than ever. Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, could not keep him in check; ‘indeed he took the attitude that the Commissioner once appointed by the Crown had certain powers by statute in the exercise of which he was responsible to no higher official.’14
He was particularly incensed by Monro’s direct line of communication to the Home Office. The long working hours and endless ramifications of the Dynamite Plot had pretty much worn Williamson out, and he had to take sick leave. Monro put forward the name of MacNaghten, an old friend of his from Bengal, to the Home Office, suggesting that he should assist with Williamson’s work under the title of Assistant Chief Constable. The Home Office agreed but Warren ‘blocked the appointment with a mean little whispering campaign.’15 As for Monro, he was summarily removed from the room that the Assistant Commissioner had always occupied at Scotland Yard (‘one of the best in the collection of dog-holes in which the Metropolitan Police have their headquarters’)16 and sent to work alongside Section D at Whitehall Place. This inevitably marginalised the work of the section, besides causing offence to the man on whom rank had so obviously been pulled. ‘The department itself, established in another street, was looked upon somewhat as… a rival rather than a branch of the same business.’17
There were mutinous rumblings throughout the Metropolitan Police generally. Since taking over from Henderson, Warren had expected a militaristic style. Not only did he fail to understand that policemen needed to use their own initiative, but he could not grasp that detectives, to an even greater extent, must be relied upon to take decisions without referring upwards. As the Pall Mall Gazette pointed out, ‘the effect of this was felt throughout the entire force’.
The essential difference between a soldier and a constable is that the former is seldom or never used out of formation, while the latter is seldom or never in formation. That is to say, the soldier is an integral part of a machine, the efficiency of which presupposes the absolute and mechanical obedience of all its parts. The constable, on the contrary, is called upon at all hours to exercise his own judgment, to solve knotty practical questions of law and of fact, to compose disputes, to dispense rough-and-ready justice, and in short to act as an independent unit. For every policeman is the bishop of his beat, with jurisdiction almost like that of a magistrate. If he winks he can suspend the operation of the law. If he pleases he can convert the law into a weapon of oppression. The soldier is never left alone. He never acts on his own initiative. He is always under the eye of his officer, and his supreme quality is unhesitating and unqualified obedience. The constable is always left alone. He is constantly acting on his own initiative, and his supreme duty is the habitual exercise of self-reliance and common sense. Hence militarism is fatal to the force. But with Sir Charles Warren militarism is supreme.18
By mid-August of 1888 Monro had had enough. He resigned, with dignity, in a brief note to Mr Matthews. Sir Charles Warren said nothing to Monro’s men and ‘sinister rumours’, according to Anderson, were circulating about who would take over on 31 August. Robert Anderson was made Assistant Commissioner but ‘for some occult reason’, as Anderson put it in his memoir, ‘the matter was kept secret, and I was enjoined not to make my appointment known. I had been in the habit of frequenting Mr Monro’s room as we were working together on political crime matters; but when I did so now, and Sir Charles Warren took advantage of my visit to come over to see me, it was at once inferred that he was spying on me because I was Mr Monro’s friend.’19
Anderson, laden with added responsibility for the ‘ordinary’ CID work on the very day in August when the Jack the Ripper murders began in Whitechapel, was floundering. He was not the sort of man who could withstand Warren at the best of times and with Monro gone, no one else was, either.
The Commissioner had introduced a crowd of yes-men, all of them former soldiers, who saw it as their job to issue orders to the Metropolitan Police. These proved both unpopular and ultimately counter-productive. The height requirement for CID entry was arbitrarily raised to five feet nine inches, as though there were some correlation between height and cunning. Uniformed constables could be fined a stupendous £50 (approaching a year’s pay) for being caught with a glass of beer when on duty. If they exerted their authority and made a mistake they risked being hauled before superior officers and dropping a ‘class’. As it could take eight years to get from one ‘class’ to another and gain a pay increase of twenty per cent, this did not seem a punishment proportionate to the offence.
Melville, in France, was fortunately spared most of this. He could still work autonomously, reporting directly to Littlechild.
In London police morale was low; police officers were entirely demotivated and assertive action by the force, from murder investigation to crowd control, was disastrously affected. So disastrously, in fact, that with the Jack the Ripper killings of September and October the public began to grow restive and the Queen feared ‘that the detective department is not so efficient as it might be’. In October the Pall Mall Gazette printed an article that could only have been inspired by Monro, banished to some Home Office backwater but fighting hard. It demonstrated intimate knowledge of Scotland Yard and was entirely unsympathetic to Warren.
Warren at last resigned on 10 November, the day after the final Ripper murder. There had, according to historical consensus, been five Whitechapel murders between 31 August (the date of Monro’s official departure) and 9 November. During this time Anderson had been occupied with the Parnell Commission as it looked into the truth of the allegations in The Times linking Parnell to the dynamitards. Matthews privately dismissed him as ‘a tout for The Times’.
Monro emerged from his exile at the Home Office. On 24 November, the Cabinet having discussed his candidacy at length, his name was submitted to Queen Victoria who was graciously pleased to appoint him Commissioner.
Anderson was officially, and openly, Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID. With Monro’s guidance in navigating the waters of ‘ordinary’ crime as well as political crime, he got on top of the job.
The Metropolitan Police breathed a collective sigh of relief and the line of communication between the four-man Special Branch, the Assistant Commissioner and the Home Office once again included the Commissioner.
Had it been generally known that the man strongly suspected of being Jack the Ripper had been in police custody in November, but had been allowed, probably by men working for the CID, to escape, there would have been an outcry. Francis Tumblety’s position as chief suspect had been common knowledge in the United States in his lifetime. In England it did not emerge in public for over a hundred years. Even then it came into the light of day only after years of dogged research sparked off by the discovery of a letter from Littlechild.
In 1912, in retirement, the ex-Chief Inspector explained in a private letter to a journalist that Tumblety, a fifty-five-year-old American ‘quack’ doctor who was in London at the time, was very likely the culprit.20 He was a homosexual abortionist and a violent misogynist. He practised what he called ‘Indian medicine’, using herbs and potions and carrying out abortions, all over America. He never stayed in one place for long and always had plenty of money. His appearance was flamboyant and his conversation full of hatred and violence towards women. He used aliases – and decades before at the time of President Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth had used the name Booth, which, allied with his general eccentricity, had been enough to get him arrested, briefly. While living in Washington DC during the 1860s he owned an anatomical collection which included wombs he kept in specimen jars.
He had spent time in London before, notably in 1882 when he may have been that ‘Dr Hamilton Williams’ who bought the surgical knives used to kill Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke in Phoenix Park. According to a Ripperologist called Nick Warren, ‘Dr Williams’ was a Fenian who had a practice in Demerara, British Guyana, and ‘hung around the capital for several weeks attempting to gain employment with the Irish revolutionaries, only to be refused by them because of his ‘violent language’.21 There are indications that Williams and Tumblety were one and the same.
The pathology departments of two London teaching hospitals had been asked in the months before the Ripper murders for the wombs of women for which the buyer, ‘an American doctor’ would pay a high price. They declined to discuss this with the press, which may indicate that the police had told them to keep quiet because they were already on the trail of the very same American doctor. Tumblety was of Irish extraction and had relations in Liverpool, where he would have disembarked from America. There were almost certainly members of the transatlantic crew who spied for the British – John Patrick Hayes, for instance, one of Jenkinson’s Irish-American informants, was a ship’s engineer.22 There could in other words have been enough of a link to ‘Doctor Williams’ to make Tumblety of more than passing interest to the Sections B and C – the Special Irish Branch and the Port Police – who by 1888 (though not in 1882) were watching the ports for characters just like him. This seems to be confirmed by the Home Secretary’s memo to himself of 22 September: ‘Stimulate the police about Whitechapel murders. Monro might be willing to give a hint to the CID people if necessary.’23
In October Scotland Yard asked the San Francisco police for a sample of Tumblety’s handwriting. In November he was arrested for offences under the 1885 Amendment to the Criminal Law Act, that is, what were then called ‘unnatural’ offences involving men or boys. The New York Times of 19 November wrongly alleged that Tumblety (a well-known character there) had been held on suspicion of complicity in the Whitechapel murders but ‘when proved innocent of that charge was held for trial in the Central Criminal Court’ on these other, less serious charges.
Tumblety hadn’t been found innocent at all and nor had he been held for trial. There was insufficient evidence to charge him with murder and he was granted bail on the Criminal Law Act offences. He promptly skipped the country. As ‘Frank Townsend’ he boarded La Bretagne at Le Havre on 24 November – the very day that Matthews wrote to Her Majesty submitting Monro’s name as Commissioner.
On the evidence, it was cock-up rather than conspiracy. There seem few possible reasons other than incompetence why bail was not more strongly opposed. It later emerged that the two men who stood bail in the sum of £1,500 had known Tumblety for only a couple of days. Tumblety seems to have lived in London in shabby rooms in the East End and to have had only casual acquaintances,24 and if this was the case then the police had no particular reason to think he would be able to put up a large bail or find anyone who could. £1,500 was an enormous sum. Even so, once bail was offered and granted, Tumblety should have been shadowed constantly.
The senior policemen working on the case were CID detectives, not Williamson’s Special Irish Branch men. They were Chief Inspector Swanson at Scotland Yard, who reported to Anderson and, later, Monro; Inspector Moore, the senior man, and Inspectors Abberline and Andrews, in H (Whitechapel) Division; and as many men as could be mustered on the ground. After the trial Tumblety is said to have ‘immediately fled south’. Had he fled north, he would probably have left by railway to Liverpool for the transatlantic boat. What is certain, though odd, is that around 20 November, twelve extra constables were deployed at Euston and St Pancras Stations in order to examine the belongings of passengers arriving from America.25
He had money and at that date needed no passport, so his fastest escape route was to the South Coast and across the Channel. The Port Police in France could have been telegraphed by way of warning but there are no surviving papers to say that they were. Tumblety got out of England. He took a ferry to Boulogne, travelled to Le Havre apparently unregarded, and embarked for America.
The procedure – as in the case of Walsh above – for getting cooperation from the French police was tortuous and by no means immediate. The Commissioner must send a formal note to the Home Secretary. The Home Secretary must request that the Foreign Office contact the Ambassador in Paris. The Ambassador in Paris would be informed of the gravity of the case in writing from the FO. (In the case of Walsh, the Ambassador had been warned to expect Melville to call; he did not warn his staff, who would not at first allow Melville to see him, and Melville had to get in touch with London again, et cetera, et cetera. So human error could draw out red tape even further.) The Ambassador would contact somebody in the Ministry of Grace and Justice – and in this case, would have to convince him that the man was a Jack L’Eventreur suspect, not just a hounded homosexual. The Minister would speak to the Prefect of Police, the Ambassador would send a wire to Consul Bernal in Le Havre who would speak to M. le Préfet locally, and so it went on. In short, ‘Frank Townsend’ could cross the channel and be on a boat to America while telegrams flew between London and Paris and a Special Branch man gritted his teeth on the dock at Le Havre.
Melville was the Special Branch man at Le Havre and anecdotal accounts from within the family relate that he was indeed involved in the pursuit of the Ripper.26 It was not, however, until the discovery of the Littlechild letter in February 1993 that these accounts took on a new perspective and meaning. It seems clear from the actions of the London police in alerting the NYPD and in the immediate despatch of detectives for America, that there was a prompt awareness of Tumblety’s exit via Le Havre. It is equally difficult to believe that Melville would have stood by and done nothing to try and prevent ‘Townsend’s’ departure, and yet his past experience of the French authorities demonstrates the extent to which he was bound by cumbersome procedures that could have made action inadvisable or impossible. Crucial police files on the Tumblety case have disappeared; whether the fact that the police had allowed him to slip through their fingers was the reason behind the cover-up and indeed the missing files must therefore remain open to speculation.
And all this happened in the two key weeks of November when the police force was without a Commissioner. Anderson, as the next senior man in charge, could have set the whole arrest-and-extradition case in motion but did not. He was distracted by concerns about the Parnell Commission. Or maybe he was not asked. But that he seems to have failed in his duty is implied by Monro’s reticence in later life, broken only by his response whenever the Ripper case came up that it was ‘a very hot potato’.27
Tumblety was chased back to New York. He passed the week-long voyage in his cabin, arrived on Sunday 2 December, bundled his bags into a cab and set off for lodgings on East 10th Street, closely followed by two American detectives.
Inspector Andrews and two other policemen pursued him to America, apparently via Toronto, but they did not arrive until 23 December.28 Before they arrived, in fact within a day of Tumblety’s landing, an English detective whose identity and purpose were perfectly obvious was seen parading jauntily about outside his lodgings. A New York newspaper, most likely getting its slant on the case from the New York police whose chief had been publicly dismissive of the efforts of British detectives, ridiculed this deterrent approach. The New York police, many of whom were of Irish extraction, were strong supporters of the Fenian cause and would never help English detectives on principle; and certainly there was no reason to arrest Tumblety on American soil. However, it seems that in this case Chief Inspector Byrne of the NYPD was doing his best to get the Ripper watched while evidence-gathering continued in London; he told a reporter from The World:
I simply wanted to put a tag on him so that we can tell where he is. Of course he cannot be arrested for there is no proof of his complicity in the Whitechapel murders, and the crime for which he was under bond in London is not extraditable… If they think in London that they need him and he turns out to be guilty our men will probably have an idea where he can be found.29
‘Complicity’ is interesting; it could imply that the Yard thought more than one murderer was involved.
In London, the papers – with the sole exception of an article in February in the Pall Mall Gazette – said not a word about the hunt having moved to America. By now Tumblety had been lost. It seems he may have gone to Central America, there to commit a remarkably similar run of murders in January 1889.30 The papers of Inspector Andrews, who was involved with the Ripper hunt from the start and pursued him to America, have been lost or destroyed. Abberline and Moore were H-Division men who by 1888 were based at Scotland Yard. In the summer of 1889 Abberline was taken off the Ripper case to investigate the Cleveland Street homosexual brothel scandal. Moore stayed until the investigation fizzled out in 1892, and then investigated other murders in London, with notable successes in solving serious crime in the French and Italian communities in Soho; he probably knew Melville well as they had been near contemporaries in Peckham in the 1870s.
The third man, Andrews, who pursued Tumblety to America, retired in August of 1889, at the age of forty-two, with thrombosis in his leg. Nothing further is known of him.
Writing in 1912, Littlechild stated his belief that Tumblety had committed suicide after leaving Boulogne. MacNaghten, in a report produced in 1894, believed that the murderer had fled to America and there died in a lunatic asylum; but MacNaghten did not officially join the Metropolitan force until nineteen months after the last murder. In fact Francis Tumblety died of a heart attack in St Louis in 1903, having booked into a hospital run by an order of nuns founded in Dublin. He died under the name Frank Townsend and he left almost $140,000.31 One can only speculate about the extent to which his wealth played a part in his escape.