There is a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle concerning Sherlock Holmes’s exposure of what were then known as “fraudulent mendicants.” In “The Man with the Twisted Lip” Neville St. Clair, a prosperous gentleman living in the suburbs of Kent, travelled to his business in the City every morning and returned on the five fourteen from Cannon Street each evening. It transpired, however, that he had secret lodgings in Upper Swandam Lane, a “vile alley” to the east of London Bridge, where he dressed up as a “sinister cripple” called Hugh Boone who was well known as a match-seller in Threadneedle Street with his “shock of orange hair, a pale face disfigured by a horrible scar.” This tale was published in 1892, as part of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Twelve years later there was a beggar who sold matches in Bishopsgate; he was well known in the vicinity, since he was “paralysed … He could be seen dragging himself painfully along the gutter, his head hanging to one side, all his limbs trembled violently, one foot dragged behind him and his right arm limp, withered and useless. To complete the terrible picture his face was most horribly distorted.” This account was written by a chief detective inspector of the City police force, Ernest Nicholls, in Crime within the Square Mile. In the autumn of 1904 a young detective constable from that force decided to “tail” the match-seller; the policeman discovered that the beggar would drag his paralysed body into Crosby Square and then “make his exit at another corner as a nimble young man.” He turned out to be a gentleman, by the name of Cecil Brown Smith, who lived in “the genteel suburbs of Norwood” and who earned a prosperous living from the charity of those who passed him in Bishopsgate. It is a curious coincidence, if no more, and may be accounted as one of the many strange coincidences which life in the city creates.
In the same book of police cases, there is the story of a bloodstained razor being discovered behind the seat of a bus; the young man who found the blade hesitated a few days before giving it to the police, because some years before he himself had slashed the throat of his “sweetheart” with just such a murder weapon. It is as if the city itself brought forth evidence from its own history. The stories of the mendicant beggars may imply that Cecil Brown Smith had read Conan Doyle’s story of London vagrancy, and had decided to bring it to life; or it may be that certain writers are able to divine a particular pattern of activity within the city.
In any case that connection of fact and fiction, in the realm of crime, was not wholly lost in the twentieth century. Tommy Steele played Jack Sheppard in Where’s Jack, Phil Collins was “Buster” Edwards in Buster, Roger Daltrey was John McVicar in McVicar and two performers from Spandau Ballet enacted the Kray brothers in The Krays. The tradition of The Beggar’s Bush and The Beggar’s Opera continues.
CHAPTER 30
Raw Lobsters and Others
If villains become heroes, it has been the fate of policemen to become figures of fun. Shakespeare satirised Dogberry, the constable in Much Ado About Nothing, in what was already a long tradition of city humour at the expense of its guardians.
At first “the watch,” as the police forces were called for many centuries, were literally watchers upon the walls of London. In a document of 1312 it is stipulated that “two men of the watch, well and fittingly armed, be at all hours of the day ready at the gate, within or without, down below, to make answer to such persons as shall come on great horses, or with arms, to enter the City.” But what of the enemy within? The “good men” of each ward were by custom responsible for maintaining order, but in 1285 an informal system of mutual protection was supplanted by the establishment of a public “watch” comprising the householders of each precinct under the jurisdiction of a constable. Each householder, when not assuming the offices of beadle, constable or scavenger, had to serve as part of the watch operating under the rules of “hue and cry.” So we hear of unruly apprentices being chased, and “nightwalkers” arrested. There are constant descriptions of roreres-roarers-who drink and gamble and beat people in the streets. These are taken up, locked up, and brought before the city magistrates the following morning.
