Scotland Yard: The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police

by George Dilnot

Detective-Inspector Helden and his staff of the Criminal Investigation Department of the division are the most dreaded enemies of the river thieves. Time was, when the "light-horsemen" of the river were in their heyday, that £25,000 worth of property was stolen annually. That has been reduced to less than a couple of hundred pounds—a comparatively trivial, insignificant figure.

It is to both branches of the river police that those who use the river owe this complete immunity from theft. Every man of the C.I.D. in the division has a complete knowledge of thieves and receivers on whom it is necessary to maintain constant surveillance. Marine store dealers and old metal dealers are kept in close touch, for it is to them that the odds and ends of ship equipment might be taken by a dishonest sailor or watchman.

One of the most famous of river thieves was a man whom the public knew as "Slippery Jack." He made a rich harvest until he was laid by the heels. Almost naked, and his skin greased lavishly, he would slip aboard likely-looking craft in search of plunder. If he were disturbed, he would dodge away, his greased skin aiding him if anyone attempted to seize him. He was tracked down one evening to Blackfriars, where he backed his boat into midstream and turned at bay with a vicious sheath-knife. Only after a fierce struggle, in which the police did not escape scot free, was he arrested. His exploits cost him ten years' penal servitude.

It was the detective branch of the Thames Police that solved the complicated mystery of a supposed case of murder which attracted much public attention at the time. The full facts have never been made public, and may be interesting.

In August, 1897, the body of a naked man was found floating near the Tower Bridge. A line was woven tightly round the body, arms and neck, and a doctor stated that the body must have been in the water about three weeks, that death was due to strangulation, and that he thought it impossible for the man to have tied the rope round himself, though it must have been tied before death.

A woman identified the body as that of her husband, Von Veltheim—he who shot Woolf Joel in Johannesburg and was later sentenced at the Old Bailey for the blackmail of Mr. Solly Joel—and a jury brought in a verdict that "death was caused by strangulation whether amounting to murder the evidence fails to show."

Here were all the elements of the mystery that might have puzzled Sherlock Holmes. The detectives began to puzzle it out. They were all watermen, and knew, what the doctor had apparently overlooked, that a body will often swell after prolonged immersion in water. Although the rope was woven tightly about the body there was only one actual knot. They came to a directly opposite conclusion to the doctor—that the rope had somehow enwound itself round the man after he was in the water, and that the swelling of the body had tightened it. They began to make enquiries. Soon they discovered that a seamen named John Duncan had vanished from the ship Thames, moored at Carron Wharf, near Tower Bridge. Also a piece of "throw line" similar to that twisted round the body was missing. Also that Duncan, the last time he was seen alive, had declared his intention of taking a bathe. These facts made it easy for the sailor police to reconstruct the tragedy.

Duncan was unable to swim. He attached one end of the rope round his chest and fastened the other end to the ship. Then he had slipped overboard among the piles of the wharf. By some means the end of the rope in the ship became detached. Duncan struggled to save himself and the rope became entangled about him. That was the solution of what seemed a baffling problem.

The men of the division receive the same pay as men ashore, but they are a class entirely apart. On land, men are transferred from division to division as they are promoted, or as occasion demands. On the river this system does not apply in practice. Most of the men spend their whole police career on the water, for it takes so long to make the complete police officer of the Thames Division, and a man once trained is too valuable to be used for other work.