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  He would have learned the practical skills of rural life. Almost every family, even the tradespeople, kept a few chickens and grew vegetables, and James Melville as baker and liquor-seller kept a pony and cart for haulage and would have expected his sons to help out. As his parents ran a cash business the boy was probably acute enough about figures.

  With Father Walsh to offer pastoral care, and the town’s Roman Catholic chapel being left to crumble, religion is unlikely to have played a major part. Sneem’s Catholic community was not to be allowed to slide into non-observance, however. In 1855 the Earl of Dunraven took a holiday home locally, and converted to Catholicism. When he saw the leaky old earth-floored shack of a chapel in Sneem he determined to donate something better, and commissioned no less a man than Philip Hardwicke, the distinguished London architect, to design a new church. As is usual in such matters, construction hit a snag. The local builder, Mr Murphy, died. But the new church had found a practical saviour in his son, who, at nineteen, was just six years older than William Melville. Murphy managed to get the church completed on time and its consecration in 1863 was followed by a bonfire and festivities, which continued until dawn. So well did the young Murphy, another Sneem boy made good, profit from building Sneem’s church that he went on to found the multi-national construction company that still bears his name.

  William Melville would have been a familiar figure to everybody in that village of only three or four hundred people. We gather that he did not leave home until his later teens, because he was known locally as a great hurley player.8

  In the Melville family it is said that as he grew up, William used to take the pony and cart each Wednesday to Killarney Station to collect supplies. One Wednesday he did not return. A search was mounted and the pony was found, patiently waiting at the station. William had taken the train to Dublin.9

  Whether he stopped for days, or years, in Dublin, Liverpool or anywhere else, is impossible to say. He could have left Sneem at seventeen or at twenty-one; we do not know for sure. Reports he wrote later in life demonstrate a high degree of literacy, so he may have done as many ambitious young English men did and attended evening classes after a day’s work in a shop. Self-help – social and financial advancement through hard work, good books and respectable living – was in vogue in these mid Victorian years, and as he would have known from personal observation, money spent on drink – money that he may have wanted to send home – would be wasted. The first record so far discovered of Melville’s presence in England is his acceptance into London’s police in 1872; yet it doesn’t seem likely that what Dubliners are pleased to call a bog-trotter, however bright and adaptable, could have crossed from Sneem to London and within months acquired the basic worldly wisdom required of even the greenest police constable. William probably spent a few years in a big city after he left home.

  London was at this time the largest conurbation on earth, with a population approaching four million and growing fast.10 Lambeth, comprising the parts of London immediately south of the Thames, which is where Melville was working when he applied to join the police force, was decidedly mixed. Along the riverbank, Waterloo was the haunt of prostitutes, cheap music halls and the usual con men and hustlers who congregate around railway stations; Vauxhall was blighted by terrible poverty and the dirt and smell of dockside workshops, potteries and distilleries; and in both districts the roar and steam of the railways were ever present. Behind them lay Kennington, a central suburb where many of the stately Georgian houses were now in multiple occupation. In winter, a noxious cloud of river fog and coal dust would descend upon the entire area for days at a time.

  When Melville joined the Metropolitan Police at the age of twenty-two, he is said to have been a baker in the employ of James Macaulay at 99 Kennington Road, Lambeth.11 No.99 is gone now, but it was one of a row of houses backing onto the grounds of Bedlam, the Bethlehem Hospital for the insane. James Macaulay the baker is shown living there, with his wife and six children and a middle-aged lodger, in the 1871 census.12 Upstairs was the home of the secretary of a religious society and his family. Kennington was quite respectable.

  Maybe it was the sight of new police accommodation being built just along Kennington Road at No.47 that sparked Melville’s idea of becoming a London policeman. Irishmen quite often did; they comprised around six per cent of the force at a time when the Irish in Ireland had good reason to consider themselves oppressed by an imperial power. Indeed, Irish-American agitators, having failed in a half-hearted bid to promote an uprising in Dublin, had settled for terrorism in mainland Britain. There had been a devastating Fenian attack on the Middlesex House of Correction in Clerkenwell in 1868, with twelve people killed, though mercifully few signs of violent insurrection since.

  Melville, although he was Irish and proud of it, had no truck with that sort of thing. He was sober and intelligent with a strong constitution and the social skills necessary to deal with the public. Metropolitan Police officers must be at least five feet eight inches tall. This was above the average. At five feet eight and a half, Melville got in.

  And promptly got out again. Having been admitted as PC 310 to the register of E Division (Bow Street and Holborn) on 16 September 1872, he was one of over a hundred officers dismissed for insubordination on 20 November.

  In a way the problem went back to the Clerkenwell bombing. It had been after this that the Government, threatened with further terrorism, realised that effective defence required a better-informed, more astute body of police. At the time there were 8,000 men in the Metropolitan Police and according to the Home Secretary just three of them were ‘educated’.13 On ‘Irish duty’ (that is, watching known Fenians), they were already routinely armed. Beat officers were not respected by their superiors, yet a job as demanding and responsible as this must attract men of high calibre. This meant better pay and a less militaristic approach. But the Government took a long time to draw up new pay scales, and some senior policemen took even longer to change their authoritarian attitudes towards the rank and file.

  When Melville joined in 1872 nothing had been done. The proposed pay increases were almost insultingly stingy, and at a meeting at the Cannon Street Hotel, all those present elected PC Henry Goodchild to be secretary of a Pay and Conditions Negotiating Committee to represent them. They specifically ruled out strike action; they had simply set up the machinery for collective bargaining.

  This alone was enough to alarm the Home Office. It immediately made a better offer, to the great satisfaction of Sir Edward Henderson, the Commissioner. Unfortunately, Assistant Commissioner Labalmondière and the Superintendents, many of whom had a military background, saw things differently. The Superintendents demanded that Goodchild give them details, in writing, of all the men who had been at the meeting, or meetings, where the Pay and Conditions Committee had been voted into existence. He refused. They told him he was going to be transferred; he saw this for the punishment it was, and asked to have the charges against him read out. The Assistant Commissioner sacked him on the spot for insubordination.

  Goodchild quickly canvassed his supporters. The Commissioner’s enquiry stated that on Saturday evening, 16 November:

  At Kensington, 43 men of T Division, when paraded by their Inspector for night duty at 9.45 p.m., refused to move off to their beats. Of these, four men, on the appeal of the Superintendent, at once went on duty. The remaining 39 men persisted in their refusal until 12.45 p.m.

  At Bow Street a similar course was pursued by 71 men of E Division, who refused to go on duty until 11.30 p.m.

  At Molyneux Street, 65 men of D Division, when ordered to move off, at first refused, but on the Superintendent’s appeal at once went on duty.14

  All the offenders in E Division, and 39 from T division, were dismissed. Nearly all were reinstated a week later, dropping a ‘class’. Melville had not far to fall, and after this hiccup his upward progress in the force recommenced on 29 November. The future trajectory of Goodchild, a brave man, is not recorded
.

  Melville was based during his first six months at Bow Street; this was Metropolitan HQ, Scotland Yard not yet having been built. As a constable, Melville would carry a truncheon and a whistle and, accompanied by a more experienced officer, patrol E Division from Covent Garden to Holborn.

  The ideology of the 1870s was proudly bourgeois, with a social conscience. There was a sense that government brought responsibilities, as well as rights. So, although Gustave Doré had illustrated the smoke-laden, overcrowded nightmare of central London as recently as 1869, the squalor in which the poorest people lived was slowly lessening. In the last decade or so investment in a new sewage system had made the Thames cleaner and connected private houses to efficient main drains. The London Underground railway was expanding, allowing better-paid workers access to the suburbs. As business grew there were more clerical jobs and, with universal education, more people capable of doing them. Public hangings had stopped (one of the Clerkenwell culprits was the last man hanged in public). The filth and cruelty of Smithfield’s livestock market had been replaced by a properly organised meat market. Cock-fighting and prize-fighting were not the socially acceptable pastimes they used to be. And Shaftesbury Avenue would soon be driven through the notorious rookeries of St Giles where policemen dared not go.

  The West End may have been tidied up, but the Bow Street force must have smirked at Sir Edward Henderson’s diktat of the previous year. Alarmed by a spate of thefts from washing lines, the Commissioner had earnestly instructed all constables ‘to call at the houses of all persons on their beats having wet linen in their gardens, and caution them of the risk they run in having them stolen’.

  E Division was rough, and policing it a twenty-four-hour job. It contained not only St Giles, but a major railway station at Charing Cross, the sinister black arches of the Adelphi along the river – full of rough sleepers, and the Strand, with its theatres and restaurants attracting gullible provincials and sophisticated Londoners alike. Opposite Bow Street, a gas-lit Covent Garden market began trading in fruit, vegetables and flowers long before dawn; the pubs were always open, fights commonplace, and prostitutes never off the streets. Behind the great thoroughfares, above the warren of lanes strewn with horse dung and rotten vegetables, in cold and threadbare rooms there slept, and worked, a motley band of fly-by-night purveyors of abortifacients and dubious publications by mail order. E Division was a good place to start if you wanted an overview of human life at its most desperate.

  In April of 1873 PC Melville was transferred to L Division, Lambeth and Walworth, where he occupied police accommodation at 47 Kennington Road just off the Westminster Bridge Road. Some of the faces would have been familiar, for many of the prostitutes who lodged around Waterloo crossed the bridges in the evenings to pick up customers along the Strand and bring them back to York Road or other streets within walking distance of the river.

  That there was a huge gulf between the behaviour of the indigent and streetwise of London and the new ‘respectable’ classes is demonstrated by the first case of Constable Melville’s that we know about, from The Times in 1876.15 The complainant was one Kate Beadle, a young woman who had for several years been housekeeper to a Mr Crisp and his family at Islington. She said that her gold watch, diamond rings and earrings, to a total value of about £30, had been stolen from her by Henry Levy, aged thirty-nine, ‘a betting man’. Hers was a sad tale of a maid gone wrong. In August of 1876 she went to Brighton Races with Miss Crisp. Upon leaving they became separated. Two well-dressed men reassured her that they had seen Miss Crisp and she wasn’t far away; she would soon turn up. Miss Beadle went with them to a nearby public house. They bought her a glass of what she thought was ‘lemonade and claret’. She must have ‘got stupid’. The next thing she knew she woke up next morning sitting on a doorstep and noticed to her dismay that her diamond ring, valued at £24, was gone.

  She tottered off towards Brighton, and along the way a working man told her she could find a bed for the day – presumably to sleep off the effects of that single, devastating lemonade and claret – at a house near the town. She found the place and was relating her woes to the landlady when a young man who overheard said she could come to his house instead.

  So – the court did not enquire too deeply here – she stayed with him for three or four days. Then they went to London together and took lodgings in Hercules Buildings, Westminster Bridge Road. He was a gentlemanly fellow, and single, but unfortunately in the habit of taking everything she put down. Jewels and earrings just vanished into thin air. Distraught, Miss Beadle made discreet enquiries and was told that if she were truly contrite she could return to her work at Mr Crisp’s. This she decided to do; but when she announced her intention Henry, who had a persuasive way with him, swore that if she did he would send daily letters and wait outside the house. So – with unprecedented cunning – she pretended she would stay, but went to visit the Crisps at Islington anyway. When she came back he had taken all her clothes.

  At this point we may assume that she approached the kind policeman of Kennington Road and Mr Henry Levy’s fate was sealed. Detective Melville followed him all the way to Muswell Hill and took him into custody at the Alexandra Races. The accused allegedly said ‘I know all about it. I wish I’d never seen her. I’ve lost more than I’ve gained by her.’ Pawn tickets were found. He claimed that all the goods had been taken with Miss Beadle’s consent. He had a wife and children, and according to another detective who gave evidence in court, was ‘a rogue and a vagabond, well known at racecourses’.

  In this stratified society, women of all but the very highest and lowest class were treated like children, and in consequence they were as naïve as children.

  The Times already referred to Melville as a detective. He was not a member of the central Detective Branch, which was quite small and had been in existence since 1842. He was probably relieved not to be, because neither its effectiveness nor its probity were held in great esteem. Each division used officers as detectives, but they were occasional, plain-clothes ‘winter patrols’ of two working on a monthly shift system in the divisions.16 So Melville would have been a detective for part of the time and pounding the beat in uniform for the rest.

  The next case of his to be reported in The Times17 showed him in contact with a much rougher type, and off duty. As he was in plain clothes, he was probably rather useful. Two couples living at Tennison Street, York Road, were followed late one dark afternoon in November 1877 by Detective Sergeant Ranger and Sergeant Walsh. Off-duty Constable Melville was also following. At Brixton, the two couples were joined by a man named Smith. The police suspected all three men of a series of burglaries in South London, and when Detective Sergeant Ranger and the others approached, one of the women was found to be concealing a jemmy and skeleton keys. At the station they were all charged with loitering with intent in possession of house-breaking implements, and the men were accused of burglary. The police bungled here, as possession of jemmies and skeleton keys was evidently less serious at 6.00 p.m., when they were taken in, than it would have been had the police waited until 9.00 p.m. The chairman of the Surrey Sessions, regretting this anomaly in the English law, awarded Melville £1 for his trouble anyway. This kind of gratuity by results was at the discretion of the magistrates and was common. The result in this case was crime prevention.

  The burglars probably came to the knowledge of the police through an informer. This was perfectly obvious and yet it was not mentioned. Unless an informer (a criminal associate) or informant (an uninvolved observer) is known to bear a grudge against a person who is innocent, or otherwise stands to gain from a conviction in court, there is no point in the defence raising the matter. To this day informers are usually invisible: detectives ‘act on information received’ and no questions are asked. In the 1870s the use of informers was particularly problematic. The most senior policemen had not risen through the ranks, and did not approve of their officers consorting with criminals and spending time in pubs. Quite a
part from the risks of collusion and alcohol dependency, they believed (rightly) that this gave detectives a bad name. Further, because detectives had to advance money out of their own pockets for information, and could not claim the money back unless a crime was attempted and someone convicted, their evidence was always suspect.18 This was never acknowledged in court either.

  In February 187919 Melville appeared in the witness box at Southwark court with his right hand in a sling. The week before he and ‘another detective’ called Beale had followed a couple of ticket-of-leave convicts (men released on parole). They saw them enter 1 Windmill Street, and emerge having changed their clothes. They followed the men to a window of Sarah Bennett’s shop at 30 Blackfriars Road where one fellow surreptitiously cut a pane out of the window, seized two boxes of cigars, and passed his booty to the other. Constable Melville raced across the road but the pair had begun to run; he grabbed the one with the cigars and in the ensuing struggle his hand was severely cut with glass before he overcame the offender. Added to the charge of theft was that of cutting and wounding Constable Melville of L Division.

  Melville was plainly well suited to this kind of work. He gave evidence confidently and stated no assumptions that could provide an opening for an astute cross-examiner. He liked to see without being seen and, with the policeman’s towering helmet off, he had the detective’s required ability to melt into a crowd: he was an open-faced young man, ordinary in every way.

  It so happened that the central Detective Branch was being reformed after a scandal that emerged in 1877. A Madame de Goncourt had been swindled out of £30,000 and two men associated with horse-racing fraud, Benson and Kerr, were wanted to answer charges. Benson was in custody in Amsterdam and the Superintendent of the Detective Branch, Adolphus ‘Dolly’ Williamson, sent a smart, multi-lingual Chief Inspector Druscovitch to Holland to collect him. Bringing him back to London seemed unusually difficult. At home, Sergeant Littlechild and a couple of other officers were on the track of Kerr, but he too kept slipping through their fingers. No sooner did they find out where he was staying than he had moved on. Littlechild was getting suspicious by now, and he was not the only one. Finally they caught up with him in Edinburgh. Kerr tried to make a run for it; Littlechild raced after him and the man pulled a gun. ‘For Heaven’s sake, don’t make a fool of yourself, it means murder!’ cried Littlechild.20 Kerr submitted, and the story began to unravel.