“A trial took place at the Old Bailey in 1834, in which a man was wrongly charged with being a convict, and with having unlawfully returned from transportation. The chief clerk of Bow Street produced a certificate, dated in 1817, of the conviction of a person, alleged to be the prisoner, under the name of Stuart. The governor of the gaol in which Stuart was confined believed the prisoner to be the person who was then in his custody. The guard of the hulks to which Stuart was consigned from the gaol swore most positively that the prisoner was the man. On the cross-examination of this witness, he admitted that the prisoner Stuart, who was in his custody in 1817, had a wen on his left hand; and so well-marked was this that it formed part of his description in the books of the convict-hulk. The prisoner said his name was Stipler: he denied that he was the person named Stuart, but from the lapse of years he was unable to bring forward any evidence. The Recorder was proceeding to charge the jury, when the counsel for the defence requested to be permitted to put a question to an eminent surgeon, Carpue, who happened, accidentally, to be present in court. He deposed that it was impossible to remove such a wen as had been described, without leaving a mark or cicatrix. Both hands of the prisoner were examined, but no wen, nor any mark of a wen having been removed, was found. Upon this the jury acquitted the prisoner.”
Charles Dickens, aided by the pencil of “Phiz,” in The Pickwick Papers, gives us the power of seeing the process of “portrait taking,” which was simply done by a group of runners and warders staring hard at the prisoner and noting his points.
In a Blue Book, Identification of Habitual Criminals, published in 1892, which contains the report of a Committee appointed by Mr. Asquith, who was then Home Secretary, we read that:—
“The practice of the English police, though the details differ widely in different forces, is always dependent on personal recognition by police or prison officers. This is the means by which identity is proved in criminal courts; and, though its scope is extended by photography, and it is in some cases aided by such devices as the registers of distinctive marks, it also remains universally the basis of the methods by which identity is discovered.”
The Register of Distinctive Marks, such as the wen in the case just mentioned, contained under nine divisions of the body those permanent scars from wounds, operations or burns, tattoo marks, moles, wens, warts, mother marks, etc., which might be expected to prove helpful in identification. Those registers were published annually, and distributed to all the different forces throughout the country. The system does not seem to have been very successful. For example, out of sixty-one enquiries, in twenty cases no information was obtained. As to the remaining forty-one cases, eight were incorrect, while of ten cases no ultimate intelligence reached the Registrar. The conclusion of the Committee is thus stated (p. 8):—
“It appears to us, therefore, that the comparative failure of these registers is due, not to any want of care in the way in which the work has been done, nor to the mode of classification, but rather to the inherent difficulty of devising any exhaustive classification of criminals on the basis of bodily marks alone, and also to the difficulty of using a register of criminals that is published at intervals and in a printed form.”
Four years before this, as I have stated, I submitted to Inspector Tunbridge, deputed from Scotland Yard to meet me, an “exhaustive classification of criminals on the basis of bodily marks alone,” but the chairman of that Committee, now Sir Charles E. Troup, told me himself, at the Home Office, that he had never heard anything of it. It is now, however, in use pretty well throughout the civilized world.
Some progress, nevertheless, was made. A card index was recommended, and greater definiteness in the description of the bodily marks was to be observed. A very notable change was also foreshadowed in the whole conception of the subject.
It is interesting now to read that “it was strongly represented to us by Chief-Inspector Neame and his officers, that there should be greater precision in the taking of descriptive marks, and that their distance from fixed points in the body should be measured and recorded.” Science is measurement, and it is highly creditable to the English police that this demand was now to come from them.
Here is a specimen of the Register Form as applying to the Right Arm—one of the nine divisions of the body for this purpose.