Recollections of a Policeman

by William Russell

When I was a child I was sometimes permitted to accompany a relation to drink tea with a very clever old lady, of one hundred and twenty—or, so I thought then; I now think she, perhaps, was only about seventy. She was lively and intelligent, and had seen and known much that was worth narrating. She was a cousin of the Sneyds, the family whence Mr. Edgeworth took two of his wives; had known Major Andre; had mixed in the old Whig Society that the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire and “Buff and Blue Mrs. Crewe” gathered round them; her father had been one of the early patrons of the lovely Miss Linley. I name these facts to show that she was too intelligent and cultivated by association, as well as by natural powers, to lend an over easy credence to the marvellous; and yet I have heard her relate stories of disappearances which haunted my imagination longer than any tale of wonder. One of her stories was this:—Her father’s estate lay in Shropshire, and his park gates opened right on to a scattered village, of which he was landlord. The houses formed a straggling, irregular street—here a garden, next a gable end of a farm, there a row of cottages, and so on. Now, at the end of the house or cottage lived a very respectable man and his wife. They were well known in the village, and were esteemed for the patient attention which they paid to the husband’s father, a paralytic old man. In winter his chair was near the fire; in summer they carried him out into the open space in front of the house to bask in the sunshine, and to receive what placid amusement he could from watching the little passings to and fro of the villagers. He could not move from his bed to his chair without help. One hot and sultry June day all the village turned out to the hay fields. Only the very old and the very young remained.

The old father of whom I have spoken was carried out to bask in the sunshine that afternoon, as usual, and his son and daughter-in-law went to the hay making. But when they came home, in the early evening, their paralyzed father had disappeared—was gone! and from that day forwards nothing more was ever heard of him. The old lady, who told this story, said, with the quietness that always marked the simplicity of her narrations, that every inquiry which her father could make was made, and that it could never be accounted for. No one had observed any stranger in the village; no small household robbery, to which the old man might have been supposed an obstacle, had been committed in his son’s dwelling that afternoon. The son and daughter-in-law (noted, too, for their attention to the helpless father) had been afield among all the neighbors the whole of the time. In short, it never was accounted for, and left a painful impression on many minds.

I will answer for it, the detective police would have ascertained every fact relating to it in a week.

This story from its mystery was painful, but had no consequences to make it tragical. The next which I shall tell, (and although traditionary, these anecdotes of disappearances which I relate in this paper are correctly repeated, and were believed by my informants to be strictly true,) had consequences, and melancholy ones, too. The scene of it is in a little country town, surrounded by the estates of several gentlemen of large property. About a hundred years ago there lived in this small town an attorney, with his mother and sisters. He was agent for one of the ‘squires near, and received rents for him on stated days, which, of course, were well known. He went at these times to a small public house, perhaps five miles from ——, where the tenants met him, paid their rents, and were entertained at dinner afterwards. One night he did not return from this festivity. He never returned. The gentleman whose agent he was employed the Dogberrys of the time to find him and the missing cash; the mother, whose support and comfort he was, sought him with all the perseverance of faithful love. But he never returned, and by and by the rumor spread that he must have gone abroad with the money; his mother heard the whispers all around her, and could not disprove it; and so her heart broke, and she died. Years after, I think as many as fifty, the well-to-do butcher and grazier of —— died; but, before his death, he confessed that he had waylaid Mr. —— on the heath close to the town, almost within call of his own house, intending only to rob him; but meeting with more resistance than he anticipated, had been provoked to stab him, and had buried him that very night deep under the loose sand of the heath. There his skeleton was found; but too late for his poor mother to know that his fame was cleared. His sister, too, was dead, unmarried, for no one liked the possibilities which might arise from being connected with the family. None cared if he was guilty or innocent now.

If our detective police had only been in existence!

This last is hardly a story of unaccounted for disappearance. It is only unaccounted for in one generation. But disappearances never to be accounted for on any supposition are not uncommon, among the traditions of the last century. I have heard (and I think I have heard it in one of the earlier numbers of “Chambers’s Journal”) of a marriage which took place in Lincolnshire about the year 1750. It was not then de riguer that the happy couple should set out on a wedding journey; but instead, they and their friends had a merry, jovial dinner at the house of either bride or groom; and in this instance the whole party adjourned to the bridegroom’s residence, and dispersed; some to ramble in the garden, some to rest in the house until the dinner hour. The bridegroom, it is to be supposed, was with his bride, when he was suddenly summoned away by a domestic, who said that a stranger wished to speak to him; and henceforward he was never seen more. The same tradition hangs about an old deserted Welsh hall, standing in a wood near Festiniog; there, too, the bridegroom was sent for to give audience to a stranger on his wedding day, and disappeared from the face of the earth from that time; but there they tell in addition, that the bride lived long,—that she passed her threescore years and ten, but that daily, during all those years, while there was light of sun or moon, to lighten the earth, she sat watching,—watching at one particular window, which commanded a view of the approach to the house. Her whole faculties, her whole mental powers, became absorbed in that weary watching; long before she died she was childish, and only conscious of one wish—to sit in that long, high window, and watch the road along which he might come. She was as faithful as Evangeline, if pensive and inglorious.

That these two similar stories of disappearance on a wedding-day “obtained,” as the French say, shows us that any thing which adds to our facility of communication, and organization of means, adds to our security of life. Only let a bridegroom try to disappear from an untamed Katherine of a bride, and he will soon be brought home like a recreant coward, overtaken by the electric telegraph, and clutched back to his fate by a detective policeman.

Two more stories of disappearance, and I have done. I will give you the last in date first, because it is the most melancholy; and we will wind up cheerfully (after a fashion.)

Some time between 1820 and 1830, there lived in North Shields a respectable old woman and her son, who was trying to struggle into sufficient knowledge of medicine to go out as ship surgeon in a Baltic vessel, and perhaps in this manner to earn money enough to spend a session in Edinburgh. He was furthered in all his plans by the late benevolent Dr. G——, of that town. I believe the usual premium was not required in his case; the young man did many useful errands and offices which a finer young gentleman would have considered beneath him; and he resided with his mother in one of the alleys (or “chares,”) which lead down from the main street of North Shields to the river. Dr. G—— had been with a patient all night, and left her very early on a winter’s morning to return home to bed; but first he stepped down to his apprentice’s home, and bade him get up, and follow him to his own house, where some medicine was to be mixed, and then taken to the lady. Accordingly the poor lad came, prepared the dose, and set off with it some time between five and six on a winter’s morning. He was never seen again. Dr. G—— waited, thinking he was at his mother’s house; she waited, considering that he had gone to his day’s work. And meanwhile, as people remembered afterwards, the small vessel bound to Edinburgh sailed out of port. The mother expected him back her whole life long; but some years afterwards occurred the discoveries of the Hare and Burke horrors, and people seemed to gain a dark glimpse at his fate; but I never heard that it was fully ascertained, or indeed, more than surmised. I ought to add, that all who knew him spoke emphatically as to his steadiness of purpose and conduct, so as to render it improbable in the highest degree that he had run off to sea, or suddenly changed his plan of life in any way.

My last story is one of a disappearance which was accounted for after many years. There is a considerable street in Manchester, leading from the centre of the town to some of the suburbs. This street is called at one part Garratt, and afterwards, where it emerges into gentility and comparatively country, Brook Street. It derives its former name from an old black-and-white hall of the time of Richard the Third, or thereabouts, to judge from the style of building; they have closed in what is left of the old hall now; but a few years since this old house was visible from the main road; it stood low, on some vacant ground, and appeared to be half in ruins. I believe it was occupied by several poor families, who rented tenements in the tumble-down dwelling. But formerly it was Gerard Hall, (what a difference between Gerard and Garratt!) and was surrounded by a park, with a clear brook running through it, with pleasant fish ponds, (the name of these was preserved, until very lately, on a street near), orchards, dove-cotes, and similar appurtenances to the manor-houses of former days. I am almost sure that the family to whom it belonged were Mosleys; probably a branch of the tree of the lord of the Manor of Manchester. Any topographical work of the last century relating to their district would give the name of the last proprietor of the old stock, and it is to him that my story refers.