sent to the station house as a reserve force, while the rest were marched off to their beats by the sergeants.
In the daytime, a constable covered a seven-and-a-half-mile beat at two-and-a-half miles an hour for two four-hour stints: from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., say, and from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. He familiarised himself with every house on his beat, and strove to clear the roads of beggars, tramps, costermongers, drunks and prostitutes. He was subject to spot checks by a sergeant or an inspector, and the rules were strict: no leaning or sitting while on the beat, no swearing, no consorting with servant girls. The police were instructed to treat everyone with respect – the drivers of hansom cabs, for instance, were not to be referred to as 'cabbies' – and to avoid the use of force. These standards were to be observed off-duty, too. If found drunk at any time, a constable was issued with a warning, and if the offence was repeated he was dismissed from the force. In the early 1830s four out of five dismissals, of a total of three thousand, were for drunkenness.
At about eight in the evening Whicher ate supper in the station house – roast mutton, perhaps, with cabbage, potatoes and dumplings. When assigned the night shift, he took his place in the yard before nine, carrying a lantern, or 'bull's-eye', as well as a truncheon and a rattle. On this unbroken eight-hour stint he tested the locks on windows and doors, watched for fires, took the destitute into shelters, checked that public houses were closed on time. The circuit was much shorter at night – two miles – and Whicher was expected to pass each point on his beat every hour. If he needed help, he swung his rattle; a constable from a neighbouring beat should always be within earshot. Though this shift could be miserable in winter, it had its perks: tips for waking up market traders or labourers before dawn, and sometimes a 'toothful' of beer or brandy from each publican on the route.
Whicher patrolled Holborn in the years that the district was dominated by the great, eight-acre slum of St Giles. This dark complication of streets and alleys was laced with hidden passages through courtyards, attics, cellars. Hustlers and thieves spilled out to coax, hoax or steal cash from prosperous passers-by – around St Giles lay the law courts, the university, the British Museum, the fine squares of Bloomsbury and the posh shops of High Holborn. If spotted by the police, the criminals slipped back into their labyrinth.
Holborn teemed with tricksters, and the police of E division had to be expert in identifying them. A new vocabulary evolved to catalogue the various deceits. The police watched out for 'magsmen' (conmen, such as card sharps) who 'gammoned' (fooled) 'flats' (dupes) with the help of 'buttoners' or 'bonnets' (accomplices who drew people in by seeming to win money from the magsmen). A 'screever' (drafter of documents) might sell a 'fakement' to a vagrant 'on the blob' (telling hard-luck stories) – in 1837, fifty Londoners were arrested for producing such documents and eighty-six for bearing them. To 'work the kinchin lay' was to trick children out of their cash or clothing. To 'work the shallow' was to excite compassion by begging half-naked. To 'shake lurk' was to beg in the guise of a shipwrecked sailor. In November 1837 a magistrate noted that some thieves in the Holborn area were acting as decoys, feigning drunkenness in order to distract police constables while their friends burgled houses.
On occasion the officers of E division left their district. The entire police force was deployed to line the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey when Victoria was crowned in June 1838. Already the police were familiar with lunatics who were fixated by the new queen. An inmate of a workhouse in St Giles, for instance, was taken before the magistrates because he had become convinced that Victoria was in love with him. He said they had 'exchanged looks' in Kensington Gardens. The magistrates recommended that he be committed to an asylum.
Jack Whicher's first reported arrest was in December 1840. In a brothel on the Gray's Inn Road, near King's Cross, he noticed a seventeen-year-old girl giddy with drink and flaunting a set of improbably fine clothes. A feather boa hung from her neck. Whicher remembered that a boa was among the items stolen from a house in Bloomsbury a fortnight earlier, and that a maid had absconded on the night of the burglary. He approached the girl with the boa and charged her with theft. Louisa Weller was convicted later that month of robbing Sarah Taylor of Gloucester Street. The story of her capture outlined in miniature Whicher's detective qualities: an excellent memory, an eye for the incongruous, psychological acuity, and confidence.
Straight afterwards, his name vanished from the newspapers for two years. This was probably because he had been recruited by the Metropolitan Police Commissioners – Colonel Charles Rowan, an army man, and Sir Richard Mayne, a lawyer – to a small band of plainclothes 'active officers', proto-detectives whose existence was a secret. The English public had a horror of surveillance. There had been outrage in the early 1830s when it came to light that a plainclothes policeman had infiltrated a political gathering. In this climate, the detectives had to be introduced by stealth.
Magistrates' court records indicate that Whicher was working undercover in April 1842, when he noticed a trio of crooks in Regent Street. He followed them until he saw one of them stand in the path of Sir Roger Palmer, an Anglo-Irish baronet who owned a house in Park Lane, while another gently lifted Sir Roger's coat tails and the last picked a purse from his pocket. Professional pickpockets such as these typically worked in teams of three or four, shielding and easing one another's work. Many were extraordinarily adroit, having been trained since childhood in the art of 'dipping' or 'diving'. Though one of the three escaped, Whicher spotted him in another part of town a fortnight later and hauled him into a police court, reporting that the fellow had compounded his offence by trying to buy him off with silver.
The Metropolitan Police files show that Whicher was again operating incognito later that month, when he took part in the hunt for Daniel Good, a Putney coachman who had killed and dismembered his lover. Whicher and his Holborn colleague Sergeant Stephen Thornton kept watch on the house of a female friend of Good's in Spitalfields, east London (Dickens later described Thornton, who was eleven years older than Whicher, as having 'a ruddy face and a high sunburnt forehead . . . He is famous for steadily pursuing the inductive process and, from small beginnings, working on from clue to clue until he bags his man'). Daniel Good was eventually caught in Kent, but by good luck rather than deft police work.
In June 1842 the commissioners asked the Home Office for permission to set up a small detective division: they argued that they needed a centralised, elite force to coordinate murder hunts – such as the search for Good – and other serious crimes that crossed different police districts. If these officers could wear plain clothes, they said, the force would be all the more efficient. The Home Office agreed. That August, Whicher, Thornton and the other six men picked as detectives formally abandoned their beats, shed their uniforms, became as anonymous and ubiquitous as the villains they sought. Jack Whicher and Charles Goff of L (Lambeth) division were the most junior, but both were made sergeants within weeks (Whicher was only a month short of having served five years as a constable, usually the minimum required for promotion). This brought the number of sergeants in the division to six, serving under two inspectors. Whicher was given a pay rise of almost 50 per cent, from about ?50 to ?73 a year – ?10 more than a regular sergeant's salary. As before, his wages were supplemented with bonuses and rewards.
'Intelligent men have been recently selected to form a body called the 'detective police',' reported
The detectives' headquarters were a room alongside the commissioners' offices in Great Scotland Yard, by Trafalgar Square. The men technically became part of the A, or Whitehall, division. Whicher was designated A27. His job, now, was to disappear, to slip noiselessly between the classes – the detectives were to blend, eavesdrop, merge into 'flash-houses' (pubs frequented by criminals) and into crowds threaded with thieves. They were
