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    The Victorian Detective
    The Victorian Detective
    The Victorian Detective
    Ebook101 pages46 minutes

    The Victorian Detective

    By Alan Moss and Keith Skinner

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    About this ebook

    At the dawn of the Victorian age there was effectively no police detective force in Britain and detecting methods were rudimentary; by the end of Victoria's reign the Criminal Investigation Department had been established and basic forensic tests were in use. This book explores the development of the professional detective during the nineteenth century, giving examples of the methods he used to track down criminals and to convict them of offences ranging from petty theft to brutal murder. It also explains the development of forensics, from fingerprinting to tests that could identify whether or not blood was human. Mysteries such as the Jack the Ripper murders are examined, as well as the work of famous sleuths like the 'Prince of Detectives' Jonathan Whicher – the real-life counterpart of the legendary Sherlock Holmes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateSep 20, 2013
    ISBN9780747814207
    The Victorian Detective
    Author

    Alan Moss

    Alan Moss is a retired Chief Superintendent, who also contributed to The Official Encyclopedia of Scotland Yard.

    Read more from Alan Moss

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    • 5/5
      Nice overview of the apparition of a true detective force in England. The book does not pretend to give a comprehensive study of the subject. It’s an interesting read with a nice bibliography at the end, if the reader wants to pursue the subject.

    Book preview

    The Victorian Detective - Alan Moss

    INTRODUCTION

    WHEN Victoria became queen in 1837, she was the first monarch whose coronation took place with an organised police force in existence to keep the crowds in order. The Metropolitan Police had been established eight years earlier, in 1829, by the Home Secretary of the time, Sir Robert Peel, with its headquarters at Great Scotland Yard. It consisted entirely of uniformed officers: there were no detectives. The concept of a distinct squad of plain-clothes officers, dedicated to solving crime, had simply not been considered in Sir Robert Peel’s plan for the new police. By the time of Victoria’s death in 1901, the Fingerprint Bureau had been introduced to Scotland Yard, there was a test to detect whether blood found at a crime scene was human or not, and a Criminal Investigation Department was on the cusp of entering the most famous period in its history. So Victoria’s reign saw many fascinating developments in the way the police service was organised and how detectives investigated crime.

    In the first decade of the new police a small group of eight officers at Bow Street continued their role of investigating various complaints of crime that were made to magistrates, usually by well-to-do householders. The officers also traced fugitives and executed the arrest warrants issued by the court. In many cases their enquiries involved mixing with the associates of the criminals and negotiating the return of the property in return for a reward, paid for by the victim, rather than conducting a formal prosecution. Meanwhile, in the City of London, two brothers, John and Daniel Forrester, were employed from Mansion House Justice Rooms (from 1817 and 1821 respectively) and became famous detectives, particularly for their work in detecting crimes against banks.

    Bow Street Court and Police Station, 1880. The new building at numbers 27–8 replaced a police station at numbers 33–4 and the old court house opposite, at number 4.

    John Francis shoots at Queen Victoria in 1842, after having been seen with a gun in the same place the day before. This case provided part of the argument for specialist detectives to be introduced by Scotland Yard.

    When Victoria had been queen for five years, she was shot at by a man named John Francis. This incident, together with press criticism of the lack of specialist investigators, led to the formation of the Detective Branch in 1842. Soon, detectives from Scotland Yard were being called in to investigate difficult cases that forces outside London were unable to solve.

    Political crimes and terrorism caused problems in the late Victorian period, with substantial threats to the celebration of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee from Irish nationalists who had started to use dynamite.

    Some of the most demanding crime investigations for police in any period are those following attacks on prostitutes by strangers, where the twilight world of anonymous sexual transactions makes the murder victims peculiarly vulnerable. In the terrible social conditions of East London in 1888–9 the grisly Whitechapel Murders, accompanied by taunting letters from ‘Jack the Ripper’, put enormous strain on the police and caused both fear and morbid fascination that still resonate in books and television programmes today.

    BOW STREET

    THE FIRST POLICE OFFICE at Bow Street was at number four, the house of Colonel Thomas De Veil, who made his name from 1739 as the first notably honest magistrate in London. His successors included the novelist Henry Fielding and his blind half-brother, Sir John. Bow Street persuaded the government to fund various initiatives to reduce London’s crime problems, including a small group of permanent officers (also known as Bow Street Runners) to enforce the court’s warrants. Later, uniformed foot and horse patrols were introduced, the mounted officers having bases around the outskirts of London to combat highwaymen. Information about crimes and criminals is the lifeblood of detective work, and it was from Bow Street that the Weekly or Extraordinary Pursuit (later the Police Gazette ) was first published. It was not until 1883 that Scotland Yard undertook responsibility for it.

    The Police Gazette was originally

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