DAYS OF MY YEARS SIR MELVILLE MACNAGHTEN Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/daysofmyyearsOOmacnrich DAYS OF MY YEARS 1 LONDON: EDWARD ARNOLD. DAYS OF MY YEARS BY Sir MELVILLE L. MACNAGHTEN, C.B, I.ATE CHIEF OF THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT SCOTLAND YARD WITH PORTRAIT LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 1914 [A /I rights reserved'] ,«;"<* K^^'' TO MY DEAR FRIEND AND OLD COLLEAGUE Sir EDWARD RICHARD HENRY G.C.V.O.. K.C.B., C.S.I. THE BEST ALL ROUND POLICEMAN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY A MAN TO WHOM LONDON OWES MORE THAN IT KNOWS 324476 PREFACE " " O mihi prateritos referat si Jupiter annos ! The days of my years are not yet threescore and ten, but they are within an easy decade of the allotted span of man's life. Taken all round, those sixty years have been so happy that I would, an I could, live almost every day of every year over again. Sam Weller's knowledge of London life was said to have been extensive and peculiar. My experiences have also been of a varied nature, and certain days in many years have been not without incidents which may be found of some interest to a patient reader, and specially so if his, or her, tastes he in the direction of police work in general and Metropolitan murders in particular. Autobiographies are, for the most part, dull viii PREFACE stuff : I would attempt nothing of the kind, but only to set out certain episodes in a disjointed and fragmentary manner. I shall write principally for my own amusement, and until quite recently I resisted all baits thrown to me as to publishing anything in any shape or form. There is much to be said in favour of the old Scotch lady who remarked, with reference to history, that *' she didn't hold with it, and would have none of it, it being, in her opinion, far better to let by- '' gones be bygones ! But I trust that in these pages I may not be found to trespass in any way against the rules of good taste or good feeling. It shall be my endeavour to tread on no corned toes, and to set down naught in malice. I have had my likes and dislikes, but, so far as I know, no enemies in the world, and I hope this state of things may continue to the end of the chapter. A contented mind is a continual feast, and one should always be prepared to accept the bitters of life along with the sweets. It was said once by an enterprising journalist that I only owned up to two disappointments, the first being that, although I played in several trial matches, I was turned out of the Eton Eleven before the PREFACE ix Harrow match, and the second that I became a detective officer six months after the so-called '' Jack the Ripper '' committed suicide, and " never had a go at that fascinating individual/' But the readers—if any take the trouble to peruse the following pages—will be able to judge for themselves as to my ^'days/' and how they have been spent. I never kept a diary, nor even pos- sessed a notebook, so that, in what I write, I must trust to my memory, and to my memory alone. Therefore, I crave indulgence if any inaccuracies shall be found to have crept into some minutes of my '' days." MELVILLE L. MACNAGHTEN. CONTENTS PAGE Preface ..... vii CHAP. I. Births and Boyhood . I II. Eton Memories 6 III. A Start in Life—Bengal Forty Years Ago 42 IV. Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper 54 V. Early Days at the Yard 63 VI. The Hampstead Murder 71 VII. Bombs and their Makers 77 VIII. Sun Yat Sen . S8 n4 IX. The Strange Story of Adolph Beck 92 . X. Motiveless Murders . 100 H XL Missing Children—and Worse 121 XII. Blackmailers and Blackmailees 127 XIII. The Muswell Hill and Stepney Murders 137 XIV. Finger-Prints in General, and the Deptford Murder in Particular 144 XV. ^Assassinations . 159 XVI. A Lion Twice Bearded in his Den 164 XVII. Railway Tragedies 173 XVIII. Sidelights on the Crippen Case 189 XIX. Half a Day with Bloodhounds—Whitechapel AND SeVENOAKS—CONSTABLES COURAGEOUS 202 " " XX. Days (and Nights) in London and Paris . 210 1 xii CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE XXI. The Murder of the Strolling Player off Battersea Park Road . 229 XXII. Diurnal Oddments .... 238 'V XXIII. Foreign Desperadoes—Sidney Street and Tottenham ..... 248 XXIV. Two Dinners to end the "Days" . 270 XXV. Two Farewells and Three Loving Cups . 279 — DAYS OF MY YEARS C H A P T E RJ^L BIRTHS AND BOYHOOD. -- 1 remember The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky. It was a childish ignorance, But now, 'tis little joy To know I'm further off from heaven " Than when I was a boy ! Tom Hood. I WAS born at Monkhams House, Woodford, on i6th June 1853, the youngest of fifteen children C' a tremendous family to provide for,'* as Mr. Scrooge remarked when the ghost of Christmas stated that he had eighteen hundred brothers). '' The grand old gardener and his wife smile at the claims of long descent,'' and, in these demo- cratic days, the worthy couple would probably laugh aloud at any dissertation as to whether the Macnaghtens originally came from the north of I 2^]:/:^\ryDAYfyOF MY YEARS Ireland or the west of Scotland — but, as a curious record of longevity, I may mention that my great-grandfather was born in 1679, and (as the late Mr. Samuel Carter Hall bears testimony) served at the battle of the Boyne, having in the previous year ** commanded a regiment at the " siege of 'Derry/' It is true that the *' Colonel was a boy of eight or nine years old, but his father was absent fighting with King William in England. The clansmen placed the lad at their head, and, under his " command, *' marched to the defence of glorious and immortal Londonderry. This young warrior had no family of his first marriage, but in 1759 (at the age of eighty) was again wedded. By his second marriage he had two sons. The old gentleman lived to be one hundred and two, and therefore saw his elder son come of age. The said elder son died without issue in 1832, while the second son, my grand- father, became a Judge in Madras, and subse- quently Chief Justice of Bengal. He died in 1842, and left a family of seventeen children, of whom my father was one of the youngest. At my father's death on Christmas Eve 1888, no fewer than two hundred and nine years had passed from the date of his grandfather's birth, making a period of seventy years for each generation ! BIRTHS AND BOYHOOD 8 I believe it was the poet Cowper who looked back upon his schooldays as '' a dreadful dream." Now Mr. Cowper we know to have been a man of moods, and it is probable that he was a hyper- sensitive child ; but, making allowance for all that, I don't think that private schools, even some fifty-five years ago, were palaces of pleasure, or that memory dwells on them with delight. I went to school when I was just turned eight, and certain it is that (to make use of an Irishism) my first night away from home was the first day of my years into which misery entered. The novelty and the excitement of the afternoon acted as counter- irritants to the first parting with those one loved, and it was not till the sun went down on that August evening, and one went to bed, that the full realisation of sickening solitude, in the midst of some eight other tormenting little boys sleeping in the same room, was borne in on one. Most of us have gone through some such sorrowful experi- ences, and nothing in after life quite equals them. The second school I went to was worse than the first, and such seminaries do not, I am thank- ful to think, nowadays exist. A school of one hundred and twenty boys, whose ages ranged between eight and sixteen, badly looked after, in- differently taught, no proper supervision of games, — 4 DAYS OF MY YEARS and insufficient food—over these days let a veil be drawn. The exeats were oases in the desert, and I remember full well that, arriving at home about two o'clock on the Saturday, I used to hurry over lunch, and almost invariably make my way to Madame Tussaud's (then situate at the Baker Street Bazaar) and revel in the Room of Horrors till hunger and tea-time called me home. The boy, seemingly, was to be father to the man Crime and Criminals had a weird fascination for me at a very early age. I used always to take away the sixpenny catalogues and study them deeply, with the result that I really remember the details of the murders committed by J. Blomfield Rush, the Mannings, Courvoisier, Palmer, the Rugeley poisoner, and their contemporaries, better than those of many of the cases which came before me at the Yard in quite recent years. And what a gruesome Room of Horrors that old Madame Tussaud's exhibition boasted ! Ill-lit by gas, one found oneself in an underground chamber, hemmed in between Jim MuUins on one side and Fieschi on the other, and had to squeeze between these beauties in order to properly study a half- length figure of bathing Marat, upon whose chest and throat red sealing-wax was profusely sprinkled.