A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Things began to change as the industrial revolution at least provided jobs for anyone who wanted to
work. As Luke Owen Pike has said in his History of Crime in England (Vol. 2,p. 406):’... there
began to be drawn a broader line than had ever existed before between the criminal classes and the
rest of the community.’ Roads were improved, and better communications meant that highwaymen
had less chance of remaining uncaught; in 1805, the horse patrols were revived in the London area,
with uniformed officers guarding the roads for ten miles around London from five in the evening
until midnight. There was still no regular police force, because the English remained convinced that
policemen were people who spied on you, searched your home and dragged you off to jail. So
methods of detecting a crime after it had been committed were still hit-and-miss.
But then, the crimes themselves continued to be of a curiously commonplace nature, as we can see
by studying the Newgate Calendar, a compilation of criminal cases from 1700 onward published in
1774 by J. Cooke. We read: ‘executed for sheep stealing’, ‘executed for forgery’, ‘executed for an
unnatural crime’ (sodomy), ‘executed for housebreaking’, ‘executed for robbing a poor woman’,
‘executed for highway robbery’, and so on. There are, of course, dozens of cases of murder, most of
them family murders - husbands murdering wives - and murders in the course of robbery, many
involving smuggling. The language seems absurdly inappropriate to the crimes: ‘this atrocious
monster’, ‘this abandoned wretch’, ‘this brutal villain’. Rape is relatively rare, and most of these
cases concern upper-class males, such as Colonel Francis Charteris, ‘a terror to female innocence’,
who made a habit of seducing his servant girls, and who ‘used violence’ against a girl called Anne
Bond who declined his offer of a purse of gold to sleep with him. Charteris was hanged. We
observe the incredible cruelty involved in many of the murders: a gang of smugglers who beat two
customs men to death in 1749, crushing the testicles of one of them, and a smuggler called Mills
who flogged a customs man to death in the same year. Elizabeth Brownrigg used to obtain servant
girls from the parish workhouse, then strip them naked and flog them to death - often hanging from
a hook in the ceiling. She was hanged in 1767, but her husband and son, who had been equally
responsible for a number of deaths, were given six months each on the technicality that they were
not the girls’ employers. But all this brutality was merely a reflection of the Age of Gin, when
London’s gutters were full of drunks, and life was cheap. The Newgate Calendar gives the
impression that ten times as many murderers escaped as found their way into Newgate prison.
In 1811, there was a case that made a sensation through the length and breadth of the country, and
caused householders everywhere to bolt and bar their shutters. It took place in a house in the
Ratcliffe Highway, in the East End of London. On the night of Saturday 7 December 1811,
someone broke into the house of a hosier named Timothy Marr, and murdered Marr, his wife, their
baby and an apprentice boy of thirteen. A servant girl who had been sent out to buy oysters
discovered the bodies. The incredible violence of the murders shocked everyone; the family had
been slaughtered with blows of a mallet that had shattered their skulls, then their throats had been
cut. The killer was obviously a homicidal maniac, but the motive had probably been robbery -
which had been interrupted by the girl’s return. In an upstairs room, a constable of the river police
found the murder weapon - a ‘maul’, a kind of iron mallet with a point on one end of the head; they
were used by ships’ carpenters. The head had the initials ‘I.P.’ punched into it. Two sets of
footprints were found leading away from the house.
Twelve days later, there was a second mass murder at a public house called the King’s Arms, in
Gravel Lane, close to the Ratcliffe Highway. The pub was run by a Mr Williamson and his wife,
with help from their fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Kitty Stilwell, and a servant, Bridget
Harrington. There was also a lodger, twenty-six-year-old John Turner. After the bar had closed at