Hard men of the Yard: Frederick Wensley third from the right at the Palace where he received the King’s medal.

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THE DAILY Express called him the ‘Greatest Detective in the World’. The Sunday Express called him the real Sherlock Holmes. His name was Frederick Wensley and he worked himself up from a copper on the beat in Whitechapel stalking ground of Jack the Ripper, to be head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigations Department.

 

‍ He was always a leader. One morning in 1888 other constables at the Yard wondered why their new mate had bought bicycle tyres into the locker rooms. He sliced them up and nailed the rubber to the soles of his boots … so that The Ripper wouldn’t hear him coming if he was lucky enough to come across him and save his victim.

 

‍ The Whitechapel streets were made of cobblestones and police regulation shoes had wooden soles. They made a loud clattering noise. Within a month, other coppers on the Whitechapel beat nailed rubber on their boots too

 

‍ Wensley became the most highly decorated detective in Scotland Yard’s history. He was an ‘old school’ copper. Not for him the clever theories of psychoanalysts when a clip around the ear would do or sheer hard policing and thinking.

 

‍ He was no pushover. In his early days on the beat in London’s East End, he tried to make the peace between a pub landlord and a drinker. Sitting in the gutter a minute later — by way of a plate-glass window — he had learned his lesson. A few months later he was walking his beat when a bartender called to him. An affable stranger had walked into his saloon and invited everyone to drink. But when the time came to pay, he said he had no money.

 

‍ Wensley, taking no chances this time, loosened his club; and when the stranger flashed a sword from his cane, he slipped under the blade and swiped him across the back of his neck with the club.

 

Back at the station, he was told he would be reported for improperly using his truncheon! But in court, the prisoner jumped out of the dock and tried to kill the magistrate. The black mark against Wensley was wiped out.

 

In 1896, he was responsible for capturing a burglar and murderer named William Seaman in a fight in Whitechapel in front of a crowd. Seaman had just murdered a pawnbroker named John Goodman Levy and his housekeeper, Mrs Sarah Gale. The trial made page leads in the Express and Seaman was hanged for murder.

 

‍ Not long after Wensley was promoted to Sergeant and posted to CID where he distinguished himself in a notorious gang case in which the only clue to the identity of bits of a woman’s torso found wrapped in a parcel, was the phrase ‘Bloodie Belgium’ scrawled on a slip of paper, and a laundry mark on the sheet in which she had been wrapped. He cracked it. His career rocketed and he became well known in the Press.

 

Wensley went on to become head of CID and finally Chief Constable of the Criminal Investigations Department. He was responsible for establishing the Flying Squad. Over 42 years, he never failed on a case, excluding Jack the Ripper. He is credited with solving more murders than any other man and was said to sit alone for hours puzzling out mysteries no one else could solve.

 

‍ He was at the centre of all the big crime stories of the day and was often consulted by Government ministers on new laws.

 

‍ On his retirement in 1919 Wensley used his two bound scrapbooks of press clippings and photographs to document his personal life for his book ‘Detective Days’. His life and work were serialised in both the Daily and Sunday Express.

 

‍ He had become well known by villains who feared him and the public who loved him.

***

Coffins for sale, with torpedoes inside



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Torpedo fitted to coffins to protect the bodies

DYING was so commonplace in the early 19th century that all newspapers made good money from ads for coffins, cures and crime stories of body snatching for sales.

 

‍ Everyone seemed a winner. The body snatchers, or resurrectionists as they were called, got up to 14 guineas a body — digging up corpses and selling them to medical schools was legal before 1832. Even when it wasn’t, it didn’t stop them.

 

‍ More medical schools were opening all over Britain and more bodies were needed. It was a supply and demand business. Bodies were not only taken from graveyards but funeral parlours, mortuaries, private homes and of course the poor houses were targets. A large harvest of corpses few cared about.

 

‍ The coffin makers got to work, new kinds of coffins were big business.

From the ‘torpedo coffin’ that exploded with iron balls when forced open to mortsafes — iron cages placed around the grave above and below ground for those who could afford it were on offer in the Press.

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Mortsafe: Iron bars protected corpses

Among these ‘patent coffins’ were designs with peep holes connected to tubes above ground, so that relatives could check their loved ones inside were still there.

 

The most popular device was the coffin collar that strapped the corpse’s neck to the base of your box. Ankle collars were used too. Some coffins had no external hinges or screws if you paid a bit extra. Dead cheap, so to speak, was a sealed bag of quick lime to hasten your decay. Those above the grave would pull the string to open it once you were in your resting place.

 

‍ Devices were not always the answer though. In 1817, the church of St Mary’s, in Lambeth hired men to watch over the graves. But the men were already seasoned body snatchers, known as resurrectionists and not a night went by without a body being snatched from the plots. The church vicar was mystified.

 

‍ But at this time, you could earn money if you even tipped off where a body was. A lot of people were at it.

 

‍ But things didn’t always go right. One body snatcher, known as Simon Spade (apparently true) was working at an Edinburgh graveyard in 1823. When he’d finished lifting the body from its coffin, he was about to fold it in half to pop it into a sack, he brushed the hair away from its face — and screamed! He had exhumed the body of his recently deceased wife for the dissecting table.

 

‍ It was one thing to dig up a cadaver in the local churchyard for delivery to a nearby anatomy school; but something else entirely if you were trying to transport a body, perhaps across the full length of the country, while trying to avoid detection.

 

‍ Bodies were folded, squashed, and stuffed into old barrels and boxes, corpses were bent roughly in half and their ankles tied up against their ears. They were subsequently labelled up as ‘Pickled Herrings’ or ‘Bitter Salts’ or even ‘Glass: Fragile: Even: This Side Up’ to put people off the scent. Sometimes scents of perfume or fish were poured over the boxes. But it was always the smell that gave the truth away in the end.

 

Cheers Kate, we’ll have just one more for the road

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kate Meyrick (front) with her High Society friends at the 43 club

 

ONE of the most astonishing women in the Roaring Twenties was a newspaper editor’s dream. The jazzy nightclub owner was always in and out of the headlines and lived by her own motto: “Men will pay anything to be amused.”

 

‍ Kate Meyrick owned the notorious 43 Club in London’s West End and always answered the knock at the door ‘after hours’ to let in police chiefs, villains, reporters, prostitutes, politicians and even refugees to drown their sorrows. Our old friend Micky Barnet of the Albion would have approved of her.

 

‍ She was the Queen of Soho, and it didn’t take her long to build a nightclub empire across London and even Paris that flouted licensing laws … and paid top cops to tip them off if dawn raids were planned.

 

‍ Kate, a neat and charming little woman, who entered her occupation as ‘confectioner’ in the 1921 Census, was jailed five times and lost count of the number of nights the 43 was shut down. At the time the licensing laws were Draconian. Drinks were not allowed to be served after 10pm but her parties, dances and drinking sessions went on until breakfast. Police largely turned a blind eye until her reputation grew and the government got involved.

 

Newspapers were holier than thou of course, journalists, editors and even proprietors were drinking in the club long after hours and then reporting on court cases of fights and shady characters who frequented the club.

 

‍ The 43 was one of the top venues in London, and attracted stars such as Joseph Conrad, J. B. Priestley, Tallulah Bankhead and playwright Frederick Lonsdale. Evelyn Waugh based his character of Ma Mayfield in Brideshead Revisited on Kate, and she was often referred to as Ma Meyrick by the public.

 

‍ Lord Mountbatten was a regular; so was Norman Hartnell. Rudoph Valentino was once summoned to a table to serve as he was carrying a tray of empty glasses back to the bar. Another millionaire arrived in six Daimlers, carrying 25 chorus girls and bought the club’s guests champagne all evening.

 

‍ Kate became so well known that in 2022, the National Archive had a 1920s exhibition featuring her. And to think, her road to fame began when she decided to buy a tearoom one day.

 

‍ Kate, real name Kate Nason, was born in Ireland in 1875 and moved to England in the early years of her marriage to Dr Ferdinand Meyrick. The couple had five children, but they didn’t get along. They filed for divorce in 1910 but changed their minds and filed again twice after that, finally separating for good without divorcing.

 

‍ In 1919 Kate was in London nursing her eldest daughter, who had caught  flu whilst studying at college. Kate, looking for work with five children, replied to a newspaper advert for a financial partner to run tea dances. With her new partner they opened Dalton’s Club in Leicester Square, and just two months later a second club in Bedford Street.

 

‍ But London’s toes were tapping to the new sound of American jazz. Everybody wanted to dance to it, nobody wanted to sleep, they wanted to party, and nightclubs were mushrooming around the city’s West End.

 

‍ As the Charleston days took over and Britain began to party to the new music, the tea dances became more like clubs with booze and the days grew longer. Soon Kate took total control and was running eight nightclubs in London and one in Paris.

 

‍ The 43, in Gerard Street, became her base from 1921-23 and arguably was the most notorious nightclub of the decade. It didn’t need many bouncers at the door, there were enough villains inside to keep the peace.

 

‍ As Kate became a habitual offender breaking licensing laws, the Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks, decided to crack down on all nightclubs. And so began her prison trail. She spent three years on and off behind bars for breaking drink laws. A judge declared her clubs a ‘hell of iniquity’.

‍ The longest prison sentence she received was 15 months hard labour in Holloway Prison for paying a police officer, George Goddard, to warn her when raids on her premises were planned.

 

‍ When she was released, she simply started again.

 

‍ Her notoriety did no harm to her social standing. With profits from her clubs, she sent her daughters to Roedean and her sons to Harrow. Her second daughter, Dorothy, married the 26th Baron de Clifford in 1926 and a year later, her eldest, May, wed the 14th Earl of Kinnoull.

 

‍ But Kate was never a strong woman, and prison finally finished her off. She lost weight and looked visibly frail during her last years. She died in January 33, aged 57. On the day of her funeral, the West End dimmed its lights in her honour.

 

Look, it’s Beachcomber rummaging on the beach

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BEACHCOMBER is alive and well and can be found squelching his way along the banks of the Thames, you will be glad to read.

 

‍ He is searching for treasures from the past with metal detectors, sieves and trowels. Back in Victorian times and in the early days of Arthur Pearson’s Daily Express, young boys nicknamed Mudlarks did it with their bare hands, scooping up the mud and sewage and bits of bodies in their search for coins and jewellery.

 

‍ Today the new Mudlarks scoop up old clay pipes; coins, pottery and rare artefacts sometimes dating back to the Romans.

 

The Beachcombers need a valid permit from the Port of London Authority. But it does not issue permits to children under 12. And people must report any finds that are 300 years old or more to the London Museum’s Finds Liaison Officer. The museum records around 5,000 finds each year, but only takes in a small number for its collection.

 

‍ If you fancy being a Mudlark, er sorry, Beachcomber, the area in front of Tate Modern is a good place to start. Ernie’s Beach is a sandy area where you might see sand sculptures.

 

‍ It’s a good way for people to learn about London’s history. The wet and clay environment of the river helps preserve objects that would otherwise deteriorate. Finds range from the everyday rubbish of Tudor nobles to the precious possessions of Georgian merchants.

 

‍ But don’t forget your waders and gloves. Beachcombers (Mudlarks) are allowed to retrieve material from the north shore between Westminster and Wapping but it’s a messy job. The south shore is less tightly regulated, but even then, can only be explored up to a depth of three inches by those with a permit.

 

‍ The slate-coloured Thames mud with its distinct sulphurous smell is what makes it possible for the modern mudlarks to go about their work. The sludge is devoid of oxygen and is a good preserving agent, which allows a Roman child’s leather shoe lost on the foreshore in 800 AD to emerge from its resting place as if it was discarded yesterday.

 

 

 

TERRY MANNERS

 

4 November 2o24