A daring and cleverly-planned robbery of diamonds was that of the Tarpeys, man and wife, from an assistant of Loudon and Ryder’s, the jewellers in Bond Street. The trick was an old one. The assistant called with the jewels on approbation at a house specially hired for the purpose in the West End, and was rendered insensible by chloroform, after which he was bound and the precious stones stolen. Mrs. Tarpey was almost immediately captured and put on her trial, but she was acquitted on the plea that she had acted under the coercion of her husband. Tarpey was caught through his wife, who was followed, disguised, and with her hair dyed black, to a house in the Marylebone Road, where she met her husband. On Tarpey’s defence it was stated that the idea of the theft had been suggested to him by a novel, at a time he had lost largely on the turf. The first plot was against Mr. Harry Emmanuel, but he escaped, and the attempt was made upon Loudon and Ryder.

The last great case of fraud upon the Bank of England will fitly close this branch of the criminal records of Newgate. This was the well and astutely devised plot of the brothers Bidwell, assisted by Macdonell and Noyes, all of them citizens of the United States, by which the bank lost upwards of £100,000. The commercial experience of these clever rogues was cosmopolitan. Their operations were no less world-wide. In 1871 they crossed the Atlantic, and by means of forged letters of credit and introduction from London, obtained large sums from continental banks, in Berlin, Dresden, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Lyons. With this as capital they came back to England viâ Buenos Ayres, and Austin Bidwell opened a bonâ fide credit in the Burlington or West End branch of the Bank of England, to which he was introduced by a well-known tailor in Saville Row. After this the other conspirators travelled to obtain genuine bills and master the system of the leading houses at home and abroad. When all was ready, Bidwell first “refreshed his credit” at the Bank of England, as well as disarmed suspicion, by paying in a genuine bill of Messrs. Rothschilds’ for £4500, which was duly discounted. Then he explained to the bank manager that his transactions at Birmingham would shortly be very large, owing to the development of his business there in the alleged manufacture of Pullman cars. The ground thus cleared, the forgers poured in from Birmingham numbers of forged acceptances, all of which were discounted to the value of £102,217. The fraud was rendered possible by the absence of a check usual in the United States. There such bills would be sent to the drawer to be initialled, and the forgery would have been at once detected. It was the discovery of this flaw in the banking system which had encouraged the Americans to attempt this crime.

Time was clearly an important factor in the fraud, hence the bills were sent forward in quick succession. Long before they came to maturity the forgers hoped to be well beyond arrest. They had, moreover, sought to destroy all clue. The sums obtained by Bidwell in the name of “Warren” at the Bank of England were lodged at once by drafts to “Horton,” another alias, in the Continental Bank. For these cash was obtained in notes; the notes were exchanged by one of the conspirators for gold at the Bank of England, and again the same day a second conspirator exchanged the gold for notes. But just as all promised well, the frauds were detected through the carelessness of the forgers. They had omitted to insert the dates in certain bills. The bills were sent as a matter of form to the drawer to have the date added, and the forgery was at once detected. Noyes was seized without difficulty, as it was a part of the scheme that he should act as the dupe, and remain on the spot in London till all the money was obtained. Through Noyes the rest of the conspirators were eventually apprehended. Very little if any of the ill-gotten proceeds, however, was ever recovered. Large sums, as they were realized, were transmitted to the United States, and invested in various American securities, where probably the money still remains.

The prisoners, who were committed to Newgate for trial, had undoubtedly the command of large funds while there, and would have readily disbursed it to effect their enlargement. A plot was soon discovered, deep laid, and with many ramifications, by which some of the Newgate warders were to be bribed to allow the prisoners to escape from their cells at night. Certain friends of the prisoners were watched, and found to be in communication with these warders, to whom it was said £100 apiece had been given down as the price of their infidelity. Further sums were to have been paid after the escape; and one warder admitted that he was to have £1000 more paid to him, and to be provided with a passage to Australia. The vigilance of the Newgate officials, assisted by the city police, completely frustrated this plot. A second was nevertheless set on foot, in which the plan of action was changed, and the freedom of the prisoners was to be obtained by means of a rescue from the dock during the trial. An increase of policemen on duty sufficed to prevent any attempt of this kind. Nor were these two abortive efforts all that were planned. A year or two after, when the prisoners were undergoing their life sentences of penal servitude, much uneasiness was caused at one of the convict prisons by information that bribery on a large scale was again at work amongst the officials. But extra precautions and close supervision have so far proved effectual, and the prisoners are still in custody after a lapse of ten years.

I propose to end at this point the detailed account of the more prominent criminal cases which lodged their perpetrators in Newgate. The most recent affairs are still too fresh in the public mind to need more than a passing reference. Few of the Newgate notorieties of late years show any marked peculiarities; their crimes follow in the lines of others already found, and often more than once, in the calendars. Violent passions too easily aroused prompted the Frenchwoman Marguerite Dixblanc to murder her mistress, Madame Riel, in Park Lane, as Courvoisier, the Swiss, had been tempted to murder Lord William Russell. Greed in the latter case was a secondary motive; it was the principal incentive with Kate Webster, that fierce and brutal female savage who took the life of her mistress at Richmond. Webster, it may be mentioned here, was one of the worst prisoners ever remembered in Newgate—most violent in temper, and addicted to the most frightful language. Webster’s devices for disposing of the body of her victim will call to mind those of Theodore Gardelle, of Good, and Greenacre, and Catherine Hayes. Greed in another form led the Stauntons to make away with Mrs. Patrick Staunton, murdering her with devilish cruelty by slow degrees. The judge, Sir Henry Hawkins, in passing sentence characterized this as a crime more black and hideous than any in the criminal annals of the country. But it was scarcely worse than that of Mrs. Brownrigg, or that of the Meteyards, both of whom did their helpless apprentices to death. It was to effect the rupture of an irksome tie that led Henry Wainwright to murder Harriet Lane deliberately and in cold blood. In this case the tie was unsanctified, but it was not more inconvenient than that which urged Greenacre to a similar crime. In cold-blooded premeditation it rivalled that of the Mannings. As in that case, the grave had been dug long in anticipation, and the chloride of lime purchased to destroy the corpse. Henry Wainwright’s attempt to get rid of the body was ingenious, but not original, and the circumstances which led to detection were scarcely novel proofs of the old adage that murder will out. Henry Wainwright’s impassioned denial of his crime, even after it had been brought fully home to him, has many parallels in the criminal records. His disclaimer, distinct and detailed on every point, was intended simply for effect. He might swear he was not the murderer, that he never fired a pistol in his life, and that, in spite of the verdict of the jury, “he left the dock with a calm and quiet conscience;” but there was no doubt of his guilt, as the Lord Chief Justice told him, while expressing great regret at his rash assertion. Wainwright’s demeanour after sentence has been described in the last chapter. Doubts were long entertained whether Thomas Wainwright, who was convicted as an accessory after the fact, had not really taken an active part in the murder. But a conversation overheard between the two brothers in Newgate satisfactorily exonerated Thomas Wainwright.

Poisoning has still its victims. Christina Edmunds had resort to strychnia, the same lethal drug that Palmer used; her object being first to dispose of the wife of a man for whom she had conceived a guilty passion, then to divert suspicion from herself by throwing it on a confectioner, whose sweetmeats she bought, tampered with, and returned to the shop. The trial of Miss Edmunds was transferred to the Central Criminal Court under Lord Campbell’s Act, already referred to. She was found guilty. It will be remembered that she made a statement which led to the empanelling of a jury of matrons, who decided that there was no cause for an arrest of judgment. Kate Webster followed the same course; but these pleas of pregnancy are not common now-a-days. Although sentence of death was passed on Edmunds, it was commuted to penal servitude for life; but she eventually passed into Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum, where she busies herself with water-colour drawing. The still more recent cases of poisoning which have occurred were not connected with Newgate. The mysterious Bravo case, that of Dr. Lamson, and that of Kate Dover unhappily show that society is more than ever at the mercy of the insidious and unscrupulous administration of poisonous drugs.

A case reproducing many of the features of the ‘Flowery Land’ occurred twelve years later, when the crew of the ‘Lennie’ mutinied, murdered the captain and mates, sparing the steward only on condition that he would navigate the ship to the Mediterranean. The mutineers were of the same stamp as the crew of the ‘Flowery Land’—foreigners, vindictive, reckless, and truculent ruffians, easily moved to murderous rage. The ‘Lennie’s’ men were all Greeks, except one known as French Peter, who was the ringleader, and who had long been an habitual criminal, a reputed murderer, and certainly an inmate more than once of a French bagne. Conviction was obtained through the evidence of the steward and two of the least culpable of the crew. In Newgate the ‘Lennie’ mutineers were extremely well behaved. Resolute, determined-looking men, their courage broke down in confinement. They paid close attention to the counsels of the archimandrite, and died quite penitent. A story is told of one of them, “Big Harry,” the wildest and most cut-throat looking of the lot, which proves that he could be grateful for kindness, and was not all bad. He had steadfastly refused to eat meat on some religions scruples, and for the same reason would not touch soup. He was glad, therefore, to get an extra allowance of bread, and to show his gratitude to the warder who procured this privilege for him, he made him a present. It was his own handiwork—a bird pecking at a flower; the whole manufactured while in the condemned cell of the crumb of bread made into paste. The flower had berries also of bread fixed on stems made from the fibre drawn from the stuffing of his mattrass, and the bird’s legs were a couple of teeth broken off the prisoner’s comb.

Of the lesser criminals, forgers, thieves, swindlers, Newgate continued to receive its full share up to the last. But there were few cases so remarkable as the great ones already recorded. Mr. Bamell Oakley made a rich harvest for a time, and was said at the time of his trial to have obtained as much as £40,000 by false and fraudulent pretences. Messrs. Swindlehurst, Saffery, and Langley cleared a large profit by swindling the Artisans’ Dwellings Company; and Madame Rachel passed through Newgate on her way to Millbank convicted of obtaining jewellery under the false pretence of making silly women “beautiful for ever.” The greatest causes célèbre, however, of recent times were the turf frauds by which the Comtesse de Goncourt was swindled out of large sums in sham sporting speculations. The conviction of the principals in this nefarious transaction, Benson, the two Kurrs, Bale, and Murray, led to strange revelations of dishonest practices amongst the detective police, and was followed by the arraignment and conviction in their turn of Meiklejohn, Druscovich, Palmer, and Froggatt.

CHAPTER XI
NEWGATE REFORMED.

Movement towards prison reform—Pentonville ‘model’ prison built—Extension of the movement—Opposing views as to silence and separation—Widely different treatment of criminals in various prisons—Mr. Pearson’s committee—His proposed system explained—Attention again attracted to Newgate—Most of the old evils still rampant, and scarcely any enforcement of discipline—Some attempt to exercise supervision, and minor improvements introduced—Scheme of reconstruction by Lord John Russell found impracticable, and Holloway selected for a new city prison—Subsequent reconstruction of Newgate on cellular principle—Committee of House of Lords inquire into whole subject of criminal treatment, and recommend extensive changes, with uniformity of system—Prison Act 1865 embodies most of these recommendations—Finally, an Act passed in 1877 transferring prisons to the Government, and Newgate closed.