Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (28 page)

The same quality of respectability was essential for the ‘knife grinder’ scam. The thief waited until he saw the mistress leaving the house then reported to the servant that the lady of the house had sent him to grind the best carving set. A similar ruse involved a boy calling at the house on the pretext that the master had sent him to get a suit of clothes as he had been soaked rescuing a child from a canal. Unsuspecting servants invariably supplied clothes and shoes which were promptly sold. This scam required a great deal of brazen effrontery, whereas the snoozer needed above all a strong nerve and an easy manner.

Snoozers

As one of the country’s major commercial centres, Manchester boasted many splendid hotels, catering for a vast population of businessmen. It was an ideal environment for the snoozer. A snoozer was a well-dressed, inconspicuous gentleman who specialised in stealing from prestigious hotels. He was a criminal aristocrat, a man with a cool head and quick hands. Usually he carried a range of skeleton keys and a few select burglars’ tools – but his greatest asset was his plausibility. Highly respectable and unobtrusive he blended into his surroundings. He looked perfectly at home in the hotel lounge and dining room, a patron no member of staff would ever challenge.

Before the credit card era, when relatively few people carried chequebooks and hotel accommodation was quite expensive, most travellers relished the security of a wad of paper money or a purse of sovereigns. The snoozer invariably booked in and then dined in the hotel. Apparently self-absorbed he watched and listened intently to his fellow guests, deciding which were likely to provide the richest pickings. That evening he arranged to check out early the following morning. That night he entered as many rooms as possible, hoping ideally for cash but also prepared to risk taking watches and jewellery. The next morning he left before any of his victims realised their loss.

When the thefts came to light, most hotels were concerned to preserve their reputation by avoiding unfavourable publicity. Indignant guests found management anxious to placate them and unwilling to involve the police. The wiser hotel managers, however, referred the matter directly to a particular detective, a man whose renown spread far beyond Manchester and gave him a national reputation.

10

The Good, the Bad and the Dangerous

The Master Detective

‘He can’t be,’ said the cabbie. ‘Let me see,’ he said, shouldering the peeler out of the cab doorway. A string of spittle hung from the corner of the old man’s mouth. His head lolled on his chest.

‘Come on, sir,’ said the cabbie, shaking him by the top of his arm, ‘you have to wake up.’ The spittle formed a viscous pearl on his lapel.

I told you,’ said the peeler. ‘Nowt’ll wake him till the Last Judgement.’

The death of a wealthy businessman in a cab on a dank Tuesday night in February 1889 began a chain of events that made a Manchester detective a national figure and sparked a furious debate in legal and medical circles. In an age when immigrants – especially the Irish – were blamed for a great deal of the nation’s crime, Jerome Caminada was an unlikely master detective. The son of an Italian father and Irish mother, he was anathema to the Manchester underworld and gained a reputation that extended far beyond the city. He was the Manchester Sherlock Holmes.

But he also had a pronounced streak of the Clint Eastwood cop. Caminada employed Holmes-like logic to solve crimes, but he was not a detached intellectual happy to leave the unpleasantness to others. He relished a good scrap and delighted in thrashing any criminal who resorted to violence. Like most men who excel in their chosen profession, he had no sense of proportion. He was relentless in pursuit of his quarry, regarding crime, no matter how petty, as a personal affront. Pragmatic and dogged, he regularly rendezvoused with informers in the back pews of the Hidden Gem, the church of St. Mary’s, Mulberry Street, secreted between Manchester’s warehouses and mills. There, he bowed his head like a man in prayer while a fellow penitent whispered in his ear.

The most important of his assets, however, was his intimate knowledge of the city and its people. He knew its streets and courts, its rookeries and lodging houses, as only one who has grown up in the city can. The pulse of the city beat in his veins. If something was amiss in a crowded street or a thronging market, he spotted it. He had a nose for criminals and was as observant as the sharpest pickpocket looking for a likely victim. He was also a master of disguise.

In 1868 he began three years walking the beat in parts of the city where all peelers were fair game. His very presence in some areas was dangerous. On several occasions locals jumped and beat him for no reason. Caminada had no intention of becoming a punch-bag. It wasn’t long before he was thrashing assailants and had a reputation as a tough and effective peeler.

But it was as a detective that he achieved acclaim. He frequently won gifts and rewards – not only from the victims of robberies, grateful for the return of their valuables, but even from the Watch Committee, which on his retirement in 1899, granted him a special pension of £210 a year. At a time when his salary was about £250 a year, he frequently won rewards of £100, the grateful gift of a bank or business saved from forgery or fraud. Famously, he cracked a case in which a fraud obtained £2,200 by forgery. A group of local businessmen were so grateful to him for the deterrent effect this had on others that they presented him with a cheque for £300.

But the highlight of his career was undoubtedly the Manchester cab murder of February 1889 when Caminada secured a conviction and a death sentence within three weeks of the murder. It began with what could have been a scene from Fergus Hume’s
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
, a popular thriller of the day. On a dank winter evening, at about 7pm, as mist snaked around the gargoyles of the cathedral, a stocky young man hailed a growler – a four-wheel horse-drawn cab.

‘The Three Arrows, Deansgate,’ he said, leaping in, while his older companion, steadying himself against the doorframe, levered himself into the cab. It struck the cabbie that the Three Arrows was not the older man’s sort of place. He looked prosperous, not the sort to drink in such a dive. Told to wait, the cabbie drew a horsehair rug around his legs, hunched his shoulders against the dampness and pummelled his gloves. Then he heard the roar of a lion.

Pivoting in his seat, he saw first the man on stilts, like a jerky compass, and then the ringmaster in front of him. The clowns, tumblers and acrobats followed, waving with mechanical jollity. When the odd pair emerged and ordered the cab to Stretford Road, the older man was swaying. The circus procession snarled the traffic and the cab moved at a walking pace towards Cambridge Street. Just as the growler reached the railway bridge on Whitworth Street, a labourer shouted from the pavement, ‘Your door’s open, pal.’

The cabbie sighed and peeled the rug from his stiff legs. Inside the cab, the old man sat wedged in the corner of the seat furthest from the open door. The young man was gone. Without the disappearing passenger, the death might have attracted no attention. The body bore no signs of violence and the doctor’s initial diagnosis was that the man had died of heart failure after drinking too much. However, someone had interfered with the victim’s clothes and he had neither watch nor money. The autopsy detected a lethal dose of chloral hydrate.

The dead man was fifty-five-year-old John Fletcher, senior partner in a long-established Lancashire paper-manufacturing company, a member of the county council and a Justice of the Peace. His nephew revealed that when he left his Cannon Street office at 1pm on February 26, the day he died, he was wearing a watch worth £120, gold-rimmed spectacles and had at least £5 in cash. In fact he was carrying a much greater sum. Watch, glasses and money were missing.

Caminada soon discovered that Fletcher liked a tipple and that drink made him careless of his welfare. He had business premises in the city, though he lived in Birkdale near Southport, and was in Manchester that day to attend the sale of a mill at the Mitre Hotel. In his account of the case, Caminada says cryptically that he ‘avoided contact with the dead man’s family’. At no stage does Caminada discuss the obvious question: what was Fletcher doing in a dive like the Three Arrows with a much younger man of an entirely different social class?

No doubt Caminada asked himself this question. Presumably that is why he kept clear of Fletcher’s family. Instead, he relied entirely on his greatest strength – meticulous police work. His first task confirmed what he already suspected: the address on Stretford Road was a ruse, intended only to get the young man away from the city centre. It turned out to be the home of an entirely respectable tailor who had no link with either Fletcher or any dubious characters. Fletcher, it seemed, left the Mitre in the late afternoon, saying he was going to Sinclair’s Oyster Room. Caminada hoped that by trawling the city’s bars and the prostitutes’ stalking grounds he would uncover details of his movements up to the time of his death.

He gleaned information here and there and eventually felt sure he was onto something. Edward Lait ran a dried fish and game stall near Sinclair’s. He knew Fletcher and remembered seeing him that day with a young man. Fletcher looked as if he had been drinking. The landlady of the Three Arrows confirmed that two men answering the description of Fletcher and his young companion were drinking there at 7pm on the evening of the twenty-sixth. In several other pubs he discovered that in the days after the twenty-sixth a young man matching the cabbie’s description had been spending money freely. What’s more, he was wearing a very distinctive watch, its chain adorned with dangling seals – exactly like that taken from Fletcher’s body.

Caminada questioned every cabbie operating in the centre of the city and eventually struck gold. One recognised the description of the young man with the distinctive watch chain and remembered taking him to The Locomotive. Caminada knew all about the infamous pub. The Locomotive Inn, New Cross, Oldham Road, known as Jack Rooks, was a notorious haunt of fighters, a meeting place for boxers, trainers and the touts who clustered around the sport. The chloral hydrate that killed Fletcher now fell into place. Fight fixers used it to dope boxers. In particular, Pig Jack Parton used it for this purpose by putting it in opponents’ mouthwash. In his youth Parton had been a good light heavyweight bare-knuckle fighter before becoming a promoter. He always bet heavily on the matches he arranged and liked to give himself a little edge.

Later as a landlord he used chloral hydrate to rob customers he then dumped in alleys. However, Pig did not fit the cabbie’s description – but his son Charlie, though taller than the five foot three the cabbie estimated, did. Charlie too was no stranger to the police. Though only twenty, he had crammed many things into his short life. Work, however, wasn’t one of them – his only experience of honest labour was the few months he’d run messages for a Manchester hotel. He was, however, a promising fighter and spent some time in America advancing his career. No sooner was he home than he embarked on his criminal career – stealing from a hotel in Market Harborough and defrauding a railway company.

Caminada’s suspicions were further confirmed when press reports brought forward two men claiming that Charlie had drugged and robbed them. It was time to arrest him. Charlie anticipated this and fled. A few days later the police caught up with him and the cabbie made a positive identification. Nevertheless, Charlie was cool and defiant. The cabbie was wrong, he said, and he could prove it. He had an alibi. He was at a coursing meeting in Liverpool that day and he even detailed the streets he had visited.

Once more Caminada used meticulous police work to breach a tricky impasse. He discovered that a few days before Fletcher’s death someone had robbed a chemist’s shop in one of the Liverpool streets Charlie had mentioned. The description of the thief matched Charlie and the substance stolen was chloral hydrate. The Liverpool chemist identified him. Even worse for Charlie, many of the Partons’ enemies saw in the family’s troubles their opportunity for revenge. They started to talk about a number of people drinking with Charlie who had suddenly become ill and later woke up in an alley penniless.

So many spectators wanted to see the trial at Liverpool Assizes that crowd control outside the court required relays of peelers. Charlie’s only possible defence was mistaken identity. His counsel worked hard trying to widen into a reasonable doubt the discrepancies between the cabbie’s description and his identification of Charlie. But the Liverpool chemist who confidently identified him as the man who stole the chloral hydrate undid all he achieved in this area. What confirmed Charlie’s fate, however, was Caminada’s meticulous research. He uncovered a witness, a respectable bookkeeper, who swore he saw Parton slipping something into Fletcher’s glass in the Three Arrows. After a two-day trial the jury retired. Parton, who made a great show of his cool indifference, swaggered to his cell to enjoy a meal of turtle soup, game and French pastries, courtesy of his friends. He had just dug his teeth into the dark partridge leg when the usher summoned him. The jury had taken less than twenty minutes to reach a unanimous decision. They pronounced him guilty, though with a recommendation for mercy. The judge, however, in sentencing Charlie, warned him to prepare for death.

The case stirred up intense controversy. What had happened, many asked, to the missing witness, about whom there was so much talk in Manchester? Apparently, this man visited Charlie in prison where the boxer made a full confession. Rumour had it that this was John Whittaker, a friend of Parton’s, and that Charlie told him he knew Fletcher from his days as a hotel messenger. They had met again on 26 February, fallen into conversation and agreed to share a drink. It was at this stage that Parton decided to drug and rob him.