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Last week we saw how the unlikely trio of master mariner John Harriott, magistrate Patrick Colquhoun and philosopher Jeremy Bentham were responsible for the formation of the Marine Police Force on the River Thames. Having swiftly proved to Parliament that his new river force was saving the docks a huge sum in pilfered goods, Colquhoun found himself in charge of a publicly funded police force.

The Marine Police took a lease on a riverside site at Wapping and set about appointing permanent officers, with a Superintendent of Ships Constables in charge of five Surveyors, men who would patrol the river by both day and night, rowed in open galleys by Thames Watermen. A further four Surveyors would visit ships being loaded and unloaded, while Ship Constables would watch over the dockers. There was also a Surveyor of Quays with two assistants and 30 Police Quay Guards.

It was an unwieldy setup, and it was hard and dangerous work, but by the 1830s, the Marine Police had grown to having three stations (Waterloo and Blackwall had been added) and 15 boats. In 1829, Robert Peel formed the Metropolitan Police and in 1839 the new force amalgamated with the river force, which was now renamed Thames Division.

A disaster in 1878 was to force change from the river police’s use of rowing boats … though it was a long time coming. On 3 September that year, iron ship the Bywell Castle ploughed into the pleasure steamer Princess Alice at Galleons Reach. The paddle boat, returning with 800 holidaymakers from a day trip to the Kent coast, was snapped in two and sank with the loss of more than 600 lives. It was the greatest ever loss of civilian lives in UK waters. The inquest found that Thames Division were woefully underpowered with their rowing galleys, and the first two steam launches came into service in the mid 1880s. By 1898 there were eight more, but it was 1905 before the 28 row boats were finally phased out. In 1910, motor launches joined the fleet.

The late 20th century had its own river tragedy, and again it forced a change in how the Thames was policed. At ten minutes to two on the morning of 20 Auguest 1989, the dredger Bowbelle collided with the pleasure boat Marchioness close to Cannon Street Railway Bridge. The river police were swiftly on the scene, getting to the collision inside six minutes. Four police boats, assisted by the passenger boat Hurlingham plucked 87 people from the waters of the Thames, but 51 people died, and the inquest that followed demanded change.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency ( MCA ), the Port of London Authority ( PLA ) and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution ( RNLI ) worked on setting up a dedicated Search and Rescue service for the tidal River Thames, taking over at least part of the role that the River Police had fulfilled for more than two centuries. And on 2 January 2002, the RNLI opened four new lifeboat stations at Gravesend, Tower Pier, Chiswick Pier and Teddington. And the river police (now called the Marine Support Unit or MSU) work in tandem on rescues with the RNLI, the Coastguards and a London Fire Brigade boat.

Today, the job of protecting the London Docks from pilfering is no more - because of course the London Docks are no more, having long since moved downriver to Tilbury. But to this day the river police operate out of the same Wapping High Street address that has been their home for more than two centuries, and now has 22 boats in its fleet. The beat of the MSU covers 14 miles of river, between Hampton Court and Dartford Creek. Above Hampton Court, the Surrey Police patrol the river along with the Environment Agency. Below Dartford, the Essex and Kent Police take over, with an Essex marine unit based at Burnham-on-Crouch police station.

Two of the founders of the river police have been remembered in the names of police launches. The John Harriott was in service from 1947 to 1963, while a Targa duty boat currently bears the name. Police launch Patrick Colquhoun patrolled the Thames from 1963 to 2003. Jeremy Bentham, strangely, has never been thus commemorated. Perhaps his ‘auto icon’ sat on display at University College London is memorial enough.

The Marine Policing Unit at Wapping is a sophisticated and unique branch of the Metropolitan Police. The men and women in boats have to liaise with the Port of London Authority, Special Branch, Customs and Excise, the Coastguard service, London Fire Brigade and Immigration. And their motor launches are a familiar sight, speeding from the Wapping River Station that has been its home for more than 200 years.

It’s all a far cry from the early days of the unit, when officers ventured into the docks in rowing boats, and often had standup fights with dockers … who resented the new coppers curtailing their ‘bonuses’. For the story behind the river police is of theft from the docks on a grand scale, and a curious genesis involving Spitalfields philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham was a fascinating and contradictory figure. A lover of freedom, he also famously he devised the panopticon - a prison where the inmates could be observed at all times (while never being aware that they were being watched. His philosophy of utilitarianism is brilliant but controversial. To put things simply, the theory says that the worth of an act is judged by its contribution to the sum total of human happiness: many have argued that, logically, utilitarianism could lead to great individual unhappiness for the individual. Yet he was startlingly liberal for his day - a proponent of animal rights, equal rights for women, gay rights and an end to both slavery and the death penalty.

But we’re not here to argue philosophical theory, we’re talking about ships and crime. Bentham also saw himself as an intensely practical philosopher - hence the panopticon. Hence too his interest in the problem of thievery at the docks, where merchants in the Pool of London were losing half a million pounds in filched cargo each year. The great thinker was persuaded to work on a solution by Magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, alongside Essex Justice of the Peace and Master Mariner John Harriot.

Within weeks, Colquhoun had a plan to put to the merchants. Armed with £4200 put up by the West India Merchants and the West India Planters Committees, the magistrate recruited 50 men to police the 33,000 dock and river workers - Colquhoun claimed 11,000 were on the make, a figure surely plucked from the air.

So was born England’s first professional police force, and they were hated. Just like the earlier Bow Street Runners (founded in 1749) and the later Metropolitan Police, they would be considered an infringement of Londoners’ liberties; the idea of a police force seems to have been viewed by many rather as identity cards are now. The Marine Police Force was pilloried as an idea suitable for France or Germany, but not for the free men and women of England.

Colquhoun’s ‘11,000′ may not have been far off mind. Soon after the force began its work on 2 July 1798 a mob of 2000 attempted to burn down the Wapping Police Station with the officers inside. The fight that ensued saw the first English policeman killed in the line of duty, with the death of the unfortunate Gabriel Franks. One of the forces’s current launches is named ‘Gabriel Franks’ in his memory.

The crux of Colquhooun’s plan was in giving his men a salary, unlike the Bow Street Runners, who relied on a (rather erratic stipend). By putting the river men on a regular wage he could make them full time, demand higher standards of professionalism and, arguably, reduce the likelihood of corruption. The brilliance in involving Bentham in this plan was that the founders used utilitarianism to sell the marine force to local businesses. They used a cost-benefit model, effectively saying ‘for every pound you cough up to fund our police force’ you’ll make more than a pound back’.

And it worked. A year in, Colquhoun reported back that his men had ‘established their worth by saving £122,000 worth of cargo and by the rescuing of several lives’. Possibly some made-up figures again there from Mr Colquhoun, but the authorities figured that such furious resistance must mean the police were hitting a nerve, and Government acted to transform the freelance agency into a public police force. Colquhoun had not only invented the idea of the publicly funded police force, he had also introduced the idea of crime prevention (rather than simply capture and punishment) for the first time. Again, this rankled with many, who argued that a free Englishman should be free to commit crimes and then be caught, rather than being snooped on by officers. But the authorities loved it of course, and the model was copied around the world.

Next week: Fights, rescues and tragedies … how the river police developed.

Modern-day policing owes as much to the forensics lab as good, old fashioned sleuthing. Many a murderer is captured by a DNA match, rather than Holmes-style deduction. But the case of Frances Coles and Tom Sadler, at the close of the 19th century, makes you wonder how traditional policing ever nailed anyone.

Sadler was a violent drunk, and Frances his occasional mistress. She was found brutally murdered and he turned himself in at Leman Street police station bruised and covered with blood. The police were sure they had their man - they just couldn’t prove it.

Friday the 13th of February, 1891 proved an unlucky night for young PC Ernest Thompson, as he patrolled the area around Leman Street, Mansell Street and Royal Mint Street. The Whitechapel beat was quiet around 2am, so the copper, who had only been on the force for two months, was a little surprised to hear a man’s footsteps retreating from the railway arches on Swallow Street, opposite Chamber Street. It was just unusual enough for PC Chambers to take a look at the clock on the Co-operative store in Leman Street - it read 2.15. But it wasn’t remarkable enough for the PC to pursue the man. How he later wished he had.

Entering the alley, Thompson saw a grisly sight. A young woman lay, barely breathing, her throat slit across. A sergeant was summoned and then the doctor, George Bagster Philips, who pronounced Frances Coles dead. Police Inspector Donald Swanson, ordered that a sample of the blood be kept for analysis and the rest washed away. It was the same hastiness to clean up a crime scene that had been seen in some of the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders; though detective work and analysis was at such a crude level in the 1890s that it’s arguable that preserving the scene wouldn’t have made much difference. Analysis of blood was very basic, with scientists just about being able to tell the difference between animal and human gore.

And despite the police’s conviction that they had another Ripper murder on their hands, their attempts to track down the most likely accomplice were pretty feeble. They knew that Frances had last been seen with Tom Sadler, a fireman on the SS Fez, and that the two had been seen drunkenly stumbling from pub to pub in the day or two before the murder. They quickly discovered that Sadler took up with 26-year-old Frances, a working prostitute, when he was ashore. They just couldn’t track him down. When Sadler was eventually run to ground the next day at the Phoenix pub, in Upper East Smithfield, he was pretty scathing about the detective work of London’s finest. ‘I have not disguised myself in any way,’ Sadler said. ‘If you couldn’t find me the detectives in London are no damned good.’

Sadler told a desperate story of a couple of days descending ever deeper into drunkenness, with a couple of nasty beatings sustained along the way. No he didn’t kill Frances, he said, though he was infuriatingly vague about his movements, and how and where he had parted from Frances (another drunken row). The coroner identified three cuts across the throat, left to right,  back again, then back once more. Sadler’s sailor’s cap was drenched in what was probably human blood. The story changed from day to day, and the arresting officers were not only confident they had got their man, but that they would get a conviction.

But before any trial there had to be an inquest, and that was called before the East London coroner at the Working Lads’ Institute in Whitechapel. Mr Wynne E Baxter heard the evidence of Bagster Phillips who opined that Sadler’s bruised and bloody appearance was at least consistent with having murdered Frances Coles. The press had a field day, deciding that they had at last run Jack the Ripper to ground. It was just three years since the Whitechapel murders had shocked London, and there was enough in common with the murder of Frances for editors to decide this was the latest in that violent series. But when the jury returned on Friday 27 February 1891, they had not found enough to decide on anybody’s guilt. The foreman declared ‘We find that the deceased was wilfully murdered by some person or persons unknown, and we wish to say that we think the police did their duty in detaining Sadler’.

It was a frustrating verdict rather reminiscent of the ‘not proven’ of Scottish courtrooms. The finger had been firmly pointed at Sadler, but no more. The suspect went free, but the story doesn’t end there. Two years later the police logged reports of Salder having threatened to murder his wife Sarah. Neighbours described him as ‘violent and treacherous’. The murder of Frances Coles stayed as an open case meanwhile. The way it was treated speaks volumes at what the police really thought: it was filed as the last entry in the Home Office and police files on the Whitechapel Murders.

With thanks to East End Murders from Jack the Ripper to Ronnie Kray by Neil R Storey, published by The History Press, ISBN 9780750950695, £12.99.

A frustratingly brief piece pops up on the radar courtesy of the Press Association, saying that seven paintings by the late East End gangster Ronnie Kray are set to be auctioned. However there’s very little in the way of what, where and by who, so if anybody knows anything, please post a comment to this story.

The works, which date from the early 1970s, in the early years of Ronnie’s life sentence, will be auctioned in Sudbury, Suffolk, on 26 July. Ronnie, who died aged 61 in 1995, and his identical twin Reggie (who died a few years later, as did older brother Charlie), was a terrifyingly violent man who used his years of incarceration to explore the other side of his character, through books, writing, art and a deal of spiritual self examination. I don’t know if the paintings are any good, but they should be interesting to see.

On 28 December 1911 a man stumbled into Leman Street Police Station and announced he had come to help the police with their enquiries into a particularly gruesome double murder … that of Hanbury Street restauranteurs Solomon and Annie Milstein.

Even the rudimentary policing standards of the day couldn’t miss the clues in this case. For as the officers searched Myer Abramovitch they found that beneath his top set of clothes was a second. Covered with blood the garments were identified as those of Solomon Milstein. Within three months, the hapless Abramovich would be dead, executed at Pentonville gaol.

The downfall of the Milsteins came about through a (relatively) honest attempt to boost their restaurant’s takings. The eaterie, at 62 Hanbury Street, never really got going, and just a few months after it opened, the takings were failing fast. So it was, in November 1911, that Solomon suggested setting up a gambling den in the basement. The game of choice was Faro.

Although it has died out now, Faro was one of England’s most popular card games during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The game was popular with the punters because it was easy to learn and offered good odds to the player. That was when it was played fairly at least. But Faro was notorious because it was so easy for the banker to rig, and games were invariably crooked. Similar to baccarat, it was banned in France but hugely popular in the Wild West; watch those Westerns and the guys in the saloon are probably playing Faro, with Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday famed Faro dealers. Famous conman, card sharp and riverboat gambler Canada Bill Jones was once asked why he bothered playing at a notoriously crooked Faro game in Cairo, Illinois and replied ‘Yeah, but it’s the only game in town!’

The Milsteins’ was far from the only game in Spitalfields but it was proving mighty profitable. Every deal of the cards meant thrupence profit for the house and there was more. People started to lose of course, and then pledged their rings, watches and jewellery – which Milstein could then sell on. But Annie Milstein was unhappy. Cards she didn’t mind, but gambling was immoral. She put her foot down and Solomon and his partner Joe Goldstein reluctantly closed the school. On Boxing Day 1911, a Tuesday, they cleared out the gamblers and divvied up the last pot. Solomon, Annie and Joe took 4s 6d each (23p). A man called Hermann Leferron handed over a watch, for which he got £2 10s and he left, with the stragglers, at 12.45 on Wednesday morning, the 27^th of December.

But around 2.30am, one Marks Verbloot, who lived in the flat above the restaurant heard groans and began to smell burning. The place was on fire, with the Milsteins still inside. The police forced the door and found the pair, battered to death in their bed, with a strong smell of paraffin pervading the apartment.

Tracking down the card school wasn’t hard. Everyone came forward and every name was soon accounted for – except for 28–year-old Myer Abramovitch. But Abramovitch had barely covered his tracks. The police interviewed Lazarus Rickman, a gambler at the club, who identified a distinctive neckerchief found after the blaze as belonging to the errant Myer. And if Abramovitch had failed to come forward, he was hardly doing a good job of hiding himself. Another of the gamblers, Henry Seychur, was on the corner of Commercial Road and Leman Street on the 28^th when he spotted Myer enjoying a coffee at a stall across the road. Seychur strode over and demanded to know why Abramovitch hadn’t been to see the police, and promptly marched him to the nearby nick.

Abramovitch wasn’t happy, but made no attempt to escape. Yes the neckerchief was his, he confirmed to the detectives. They searched him and found pledged watches belonging to Leferron and Rickman. They then peeled off his suit to reveal Solomon’s blood-soaked garments beneath. It was a gruesome find – perhaps Myer had been hoping to pawn the clothes later.

The trial was a brief affair, opening at the Old Bailey on 7 February 1912 and closing just two days later. The defence claimed Abramovitch was insane, but to no avail. Mr Justice Ridley sentenced him to hang. An appeal failed too, and on Wednesday, 6 March, Myer took the drop at Pentonville, hanged by John Ellis and Albert Lumb.

May Day has many symbolic meanings. For many it is the official day of organised labour throughout the industrialised world – and the origin of our own May Day holiday. For others it marks the true arrival of spring, with celebratory dances around the Maypole. But back in 1517, East Enders saw 1 May marked by riots against immigrant workers. The shameful scenes would forever be remembered as ‘Evil May Day’.

There has often been suspicion and fear of incomers in the East End of course. In our time it has surfaced in the Blackshirt marches and the Battle of Cable Street, and most recently in the Brick Lane bomb attack. In the 16th century, the targets of ignorance were not Jews or Bangladeshis, of course. Instead it was the incoming merchants and craftsmen from Flanders, Italy, the Baltic States and France who were on the receiving end.

A study of those immigrants throws up some interesting parallels with the more recent targets of racism. Many of them were fleeing religious persecution in their home countries. And there were common characteristics shared by the new Londoners. Sylvia L Thrupp, in her essay Studies in London History, identifies “a striving towards piety and economic advancement through honest work and mutual help within the group” – a description that could equally be applied to the incoming Jews and Bangladeshis of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately hardworking newcomers are often viewed as trying to steal a piece of the existing pie, rather than creating new wealth of their own. The incoming craftsmen who settled outside the City walls in Spitalfields brought new skills and techniques, which gave them the edge over the existing cockneys. These new skills were in trades as diverse as weaving, silver and gold-smithing, jewellery making, tailoring, clockmaking and brewing. There were celebrated printers, basket makers, joiners and caterers.

Thrupp’s paper paints a fascinating picture of London’s racial mix of the time, with the Italians forming “a commercial and financial aristocracy”. There were Frenchman and Jews. Greeks, Italians and Spaniards comprised London’s physicians, and the servant class was largely made up of Icelanders.

Things would probably have settled down, with the new workers becoming assimilated, with their burgeoning businesses offering employment to the existing Londoners … and of course the existing Londoners adopting and adapting the new skills and techniques for their own advancement, were it not for the medieval version of a recession, which hit in the early 1500s.

A preacher named Dr Beal gave regular rabble-rousing rants at St Paul’s [Cathedral] Cross, a kind of Speaker’s Corner of the day. And on 1 May 1517, his target was the incoming tradesmen (though there was also a ‘denunciation to the death’ of that pagan fertility symbol the Maypole). A mob of apprentices, clerics and ruffians were roused to action by Beal’s racist polemic, and they marched toward the East End, led by a disillusioned broker named John Lincoln.

As they reached the East End itself, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, Sir Richard Cholmley, had his men fire on the rabble in an attempt to turn them back, and the Earls of Surrey and Suffolk rode in with their troops, seizing 400 prisoners.

Justice was swift and brutal. Lincoln and his fellow leaders were hung, drawn and quartered, their remains gibbeted as a reminder to others. The surviving prisoners were charged with the treasonable offence of “breaking the peace of Christendom”, another capital crime. Henry VIII was all for hanging the lot of them, but intercessions by his queen, Catherine, and Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, secured their pardons. The prisoners “took the halters from their necks and danced and sang”.

And the incomers gradually assimilated themselves into the life of London – inter-marrying, bringing their children up as East Enders and, in time, becoming East Enders themselves.

A few weeks ago we looked at the career of Monty Norman – East End composer, creator of the James Bond theme, and chronicler of the seamy underworld of London life.

One of his sources of inspiration was the unlikely character of Dr Crippen. But far more likely was the subject of his 1972 show Stand and Deliver – because Jack Sheppard was probably the most notorious and slippery East End villain of them all.

But Sheppard’s fame lay not in the nature of his crimes – but in the inability of the authorities to keep him confined. Jack escaped from Newgate and other jails on no fewer than six occasions, making him one of the most celebrated anti-heroes of his day.

He was born in White’s Row, Spitalfields in 1702 and was placed early in the Bishopsgate workhouse, before entering an apprenticeship with a carpenter. The indenture period was long – indeed Jack served six years of his apprenticeship before cutting loose just ten months before his time was served. He immediately turned to thieving, and in 1724 was imprisoned in St Giles Roundhouse.

Within three hours he was out, and the Sheppard legend began. He cut open the roof and lowered himself to the ground outside, using a rope he had fashioned from a sheet and blanket. He lost himself in the crowd and disappeared.

He surfaced again a few weeks later, lifted for pickpocketing in Leicester Fields – near the present day Leicester Square. Thrown into prison he was restrained with irons, but sawed through them, broke the chains and bored through an oak bar nine inches thick. Sheppard may have been a lousy thief, but his escapology was becoming almost supernatural, and the prison officers kept the broken pieces “to testifie and preserve the memory of this extraordinary event and villain”.

Jack was on the run for three months, before famed ‘thief taker’ Jonathan Wild ran him in. Sheppard went to Newgate, his sentence death. He was thrown into the condemned hold. It should have been tough to escape but Sheppard had smuggled in a spike, and with it began boring through the wall. Accomplices were doing the same job on the other side, and soon he was free, mingling with the Bartholomew Fair holiday crowds, and escaping into the Smithfield streets.

He popped up again just days later, robbing a watchmakers in Fleet Street. This time, back in Newgate, he was “fastened to the floor with double fetters”. He had become a celebrated prisoner, and the wealthy came to view him in his cell. Sheppard in turn jibed and abused them. The anxious warders frisked Jack regularly, and finding a file that had been smuggled in, moved him to an even more secure cell within the jail.

Of course, he escaped again. He slipped his wrists through his cuffs, and sprung his locks with a nail. He used his chains to prise out a chimney brick and escaped into the room upstairs. It was then a minute’s work to spring the door lock and, finding himself on the roof of the jail, he swung down to freedom, using his blanket as a rope.

He spent the next days lording it in London. Robbing a Drury Lane pawnbroker and hiring a coach and fine clothes with the spoils.

Two weeks later he was back in custody. The “most numerous croud of people that ever was seen in London” heard the judge sentence him to death for a second time. This time he was to be hanged within the week, the authorities panicking that any longer and he would escape again.

But though a penknife was confiscated from him on the way to the scaffold at Tyburn, his escapes were at an end. Sheppard met his maker at the end of a rope.

The legend continued however. A century later a report looked at the educational levels of East End children. Henry Mayhew’s 1840 document noted that poor children who had never heard of Moses or Queen Victoria had “general knowledge of the character and course of life of Dick Turpin, the highwayman, and more particularly of Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison breaker”.

Some villains drift into crime through circumstance or misfortune and some, like East End boy George Smith, seem born to it.
Smith was born at 92 Roman Road on January 11, 1872
and was just nine years old when he received his first custodial sentence – eight years in a Gravesend Reformatory. It was a criminal career that
was to conclude more than 30 years and at least three murders later, on the scaffold of Maidstone Gaol.
Smith received several
short sentences for theft between his eventual release and signing up for the Northampton Regiment in the early 1890s. But in 1896, his true modus operandi was emerging – exploiting women for financial gain.
In that year he received
12 months for persuading a woman to steal from her employers. He used the money to open a baker’s shop in Leicester. It was Smith’s final brush with genuine work, and the start of his tireless travels around England in search of more victims.
Bigamy
He married Caroline Thornhill in 1898, bigamously adding a second wife in 1899. She described his appeal:
“He had an extraordinary power; this power lay in his eyes. You had the feeling you were being magnetised, they were little eyes that seemed to rob you of your will.”
And robbing was Smith’s aim. He persuaded Caroline to steal a set of silver spoons from her employer, Smith acting as a receiver. The hapless pair were arrested, Smith getting two years on her evidence.
On his release in 1903, the vengeful husband went after Caroline, who fled to Canada to escape him.
The angry Smith returned to his bigamous bride, cleared out her bank account, and left.
It’s unknown how many more women Smith conned over the subsequent years. Certainly in 1908 he met and married Florence Wilson, a widow from Worthing, in the space of three weeks. He took her straight to the nearest Post Office, withdrew her £30
savings, went off to get a newspaper and walked out of her life, returning to clear out their Camden digs en route.

Next arriving in Bristol, he swiftly married Edith Pegler. Smith would disappear for months at a time, saying he
was off to Bedford, Southend, Croydon or Luton to sell antiques, and always returning with money.
Never returned
In October 1909, he married Sarah Freeman from South-ampton. He used the same scam as on Florence Wilson – clearing out her Post Office account before selling her war bonds and pocketing £400. He took Sarah to the National Gallery, nipped off to the toilet, and never returned.
But larceny turned to murder when he met Bessy Mundy in Bristol in 1912. The pair moved to Herne Bay, where Smith consulted a solicitor about how he could get his hands on Bessy’s £2,500 inheritance, despite the resistance of her family. A bequest seemed the only way, and the pair made their wills.
Smith’s plan seems transparent to us today. He repeatedly called the doctor about his wife’s ‘fits’ though she had no recollection of these, and he immediately bought a bath for their hotel room – a bath in which Bessie was found dead days later. No post mortem was held and the inquest decided it was misadventure.
Smith should have been rich, with his £2,500 inheritance, but he could never hold on to his spoils. In November 1913 he married Alice Burnham in Portsmouth. He swiftly had her life insured for £500, emptied her account, and took her
on holiday to Blackpool. He rejected a first hotel for not having a bath.
Drowned in bath
The next day, Alice was dead, drowned in the tub of their guest house. The landlady, Mrs Crossley, was appalled by Smith’s callousness – immediately selling his wife’s effects and refusing a deal coffin because “when they’re dead they’re done with”.
Along the way, Smith certainly conned many more women, but there was to be one final murder.
On December 15, 1915, Margaret Lofty went out for tea… and never returned. She had bumped into Smith, and within days they were married and moved to London. At 8pm on Friday 18, the couple’s Highgate landlady, Louise Blatch, heard a furious splashing from the bath upstairs,
followed by a gurgle, a sigh and then silence. Moments later she heard Smith playing the harmonium in the front room. The tune – ‘Nearer My God To Thee’.
Finally Smith had gone too far. The report of the inquest in the News of the World newspaper caught the eye of Mrs Crossley and Alice Burnham’s father. The similarities were too great and the pair called Scotland Yard.
Smith’s career of crime soon unravelled as the Yard travelled the country amassing evidence. He was convicted of the three murders – though there may have been more – and carried unrepentant, kicking and screaming to the scaffold on Friday, August 13, 1915.

When the battered body of Leon Beron was discovered on Clapham Common on New Year’s Day 1911, it was to set in motion the most notorious murder trial of the day.
And it was to provide a day in court for some of the
East End’s most colourful characters… and least reliable witnesses.
The case also dragged in the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, allegations of spying and sinister implications with the recent Sidney Street siege and the Houndsditch Murders.
Slum landlord
Beron wasn’t universally loved – as a slum landlord he was unlikely to be. He owned nine decaying houses in Russell Court, Stepney, which provided him with 10 shillings (50p) a week, enough to pay his own two shillings rent on 133 Jubilee Street, Stepney, and provide the one and sixpence a day for his meals
at the Warsaw Kosher Restaurant at 32 Osborn Street, Whitechapel.
It was at the Warsaw that Beron began to be seen in the company of Steinie Morrison, in December 1910. Morrison was another Russian Jew, who had arrived in England in 1898. Where he arrived from wasn’t certain – he claimed to be Australian and also used the pseudonyms Alexander Petro-pavloff, Morris Stein and Moses Tagger. What was certain was that he was a professional thief, who had already served five sentences for burglary.
Prompt arrest
Beron was found in gorse bushes on the Common, his head staved in by a blunt instrument, his legs neatly crossed, his wallet emptied, and a curious ‘S’ mark carved into each cheek. They were, observed the police surgeon, “like the f holes on a violin”.
It took the police just seven days to pick up Morrison, arresting him as he tucked into his breakfast at Cohen’s Restaurant, in Fieldgate Street.
They had quickly discovered that he had been working at Lavender Hill, so might know the Common well. They also discovered that on the morning of New Year’s Day, Morrison, using yet another pseudonym of Banman, had lodged a revolver and 45 bullets at the left luggage office of St Mary’s Railway Station, in Whitechapel.
They also discovered that he had moved in with a Lambeth prostitute, Florrie Dellow,
on January 1 – after telling his Newark Street landlady that he was off to Paris.
All very suspicious, but also all circumstantial evidence.

The defence and prosecution witnesses were as unreliable as each other. Beron’s brother Solomon attempted to physically attack defence counsel Edward Abinger when he implied he might have had something to do with Leon’s death.
Unreliable evidence
Meanwhile, 16-year-old Janie Brodski backed Morrison’s alibi – that he had spent the night at the Shoreditch Empire watching Harry Champion and Harry Lauder. She claimed that she and her sister had paid on the door for seats in the stalls at a shilling each.
Unfortunately, the theatre manager confirmed that the seat prices had been raised to 1s 6d (71/2p) for the night, and had all been sold out days in advance.
Add in the unreliable and conflicting evidence of a number of cab drivers placing Morrison at the murder scene (by now his photo and offers of a reward had appeared in the newspapers) and it is difficult to see how any court could reasonably convict him.
Abinger attempted to cloud the waters further. He implied that Beron was a police informant who had been assassinated for grassing on the anarchists responsible for the Houndsditch Murders and the Sidney Street siege. The ‘S’ marks stood for the Polish word ‘spiccan’ or spy, he suggested.
The policeman in charge, DI Wensley, scoffed at the theory, and the jury took 35 minutes to find Morrison guilty of murder. The judge had no option but to pass the death sentence, saying: “May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
“I decline such mercy!” shouted Morrison. “I do not believe there is a God.”
The Court of Appeal upheld the conviction but the Home Secretary was not so sure. Churchill commuted Morrison’s sentence to life.
Ironically, it was a decision the prisoner himself would not accept. He repeatedly appealed to be put to death and, on January 24, 1921, weakened by a series of hunger strikes, he died in Parkhurst Prison.

Samuel Dougal was devoid of morals, a psychopath with no conscience and a murderer none to careful about covering his tracks.
That he got away with murder for years was down to his unquenchable self-confidence and magnetic charm.
Dougal was born in Bow in 1846, finished school and secured a job as an apprentice in a civil engineer’s office.
But the young man was in search of fun, not regular employment. When his debts, his drinking, his womanising and his father started to catch up with him, he ran off to join the Army, enlisting at Chatham in 1866.
For 21 years he toured the world with the Royal Engineers, serving in Wales, Ireland, Nova Scotia, and finishing his service at Aldershot in 1887, where he was quartermaster-sergeant and chief clerk.
His military career was spotless but his home life was not so good. He had married one Miss Griffiths in 1869. The couple had four children, but she had to endure his drunkenness and violence for 16 years.
Then, in June 1885, she suddenly fell violently ill. 12 hours later she died in agony.
Violent death
Dougal returned to England on leave just two months later, with a new wife. In October she was dead too, after a bout of violent vomiting.
Both women were buried within 24 hours of death. And, as both occurred on military property, neither body was subject to post mortem.
In 1887, the regiment returned to England, Dougal with another woman, though this time they didn’t marry. She had a baby, but was so beaten by Dougal that she fled back to Halifax, posing as a widow.
The decommissioned soldier moved through a quick succession of Civvy Street jobs – publican, steward of a Conserva-tive club, surveyor, clerk, salesman and storekeeper.
There were even more women than jobs. He fathered two more children with a young widow, but again the violence was so much that she fled.
He ran a pub in Ware, Hertfordshire, supported by an elderly woman and her cash. When the house ‘accidentally’ burned down in 1889, Dougal anticipated an insurance payday but instead wound up in St Albans Crown Court, charged with arson.
The lucky Dougal escaped due to lack of evidence and skipped off back to Ireland, where he met and married Sarah White in 1892. The
third Mrs Dougal bore him two children.

By 1898, Dougal was without a wife again and his youngest child was dead after suffering convulsions.
Spinster’s fortune
Camille Holland was a spinster of 55 when she had the misfortune to bump into Dougal at the Earl’s Court Exhibition that year. She had recently come into an inheritance of £6,000 – an enormous amount for the time.
Dougal persuaded Miss Holland to invest in Moat House Farm, outside Saffron Walden, in January 1899.
There was a succession of servant girls, most driven out by his drunken sexual advances. The last, Florrie Havies, was also the last person to see Camille Holland alive.
On 19 May, Miss Holland said she was off to do some shopping – her whereabouts would remain a mystery for another four years.
Unexpected exit
Dougal told Florrie that her mistress had unexpectedly boarded a train to London and had written saying she would soon return.
Remarkably, though rumours flourished and Dougal’s behaviour got no better, nobody chose to dig any deeper until April 1903.
In the intervening years, Dougal had forged cheques to siphon money from Camille’s bank accounts, transferred the deeds of Moat House to himself, moved Sarah White in as his daughter, and impregnated another servant, Kate Cranwell.
But the police were finally closing in. On Friday 13 March, 1903, Dougal moved out of the farm with Kate Cranwell’s sister, Georgina, also pregnant. The pair took the train to Liverpool Street and then on for a weekend of pleasure in Bournemouth.
Dougal was eventually apprehended not by the police, but by a sharp-eyed bank clerk, who called officers when the killer tried to change some £10 notes at the Bank of England.
The police moved in to Moat House, digging up the farmyard and, on 27 April, Miss Holland’s corpse was found in a drainage ditch.
Dougal’s defence in court was typically confident if implausible. He claimed he had been unloading his gun, when it accidentally went off. Panicking, he had hidden her body in the ditch.
The father of 11, husband of three and lover of many more was hanged at Chelmsford Gaol on July 8, 1903.