Road Hill House 

By Richard Banks

The following review of a recent Zoom course was written by myself for the WEA’s Newsletter. The WEA (Workers Educational Association) provides an extensive programme of courses on a wide variety of subjects. While it is too late to enrol for the Association’s Spring term courses (Jan - March), Adhoc courses will be held throughout the Spring and Summer. All courses during the pandemic have been taking place on Zoom but it is hoped to also hold face-to-face courses in Rayleigh, and elsewhere, later this year.

Anyone wishing to find out more about the WEA and its courses can do so on wea.org.uk or by phoning 0300 303 3464.

Richard

 

The Rise of Detective Fever

Tutor: Margaret Mills

10 week course

         This course, which under normal circumstances would have been held in the WI Hall, Rayleigh, was the first on-line learning experience for many of those taking part. Memorable for that reason it will also be remembered as an absorbing course in which the participants were able to exercise their deductive powers in trying to solve one of the most controversial murder cases of the Victorian era.        

         Fortunately, the official investigation was not undertaken by the amateur sleuths of Margaret’s course but by a new breed of policeman established by the Metropolitan Police in 1842. First based in Scotland Yard they were an elite, plain-clothed force, hand-picked from the best of the uniformed service. Although public reaction was initially wary – many perceiving them to be informants or Government spies – it was not long before they were receiving the enthusiastic endorsement of the national press and from there finding their way into the popular fiction of Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Since then they have never been out of fashion and are ever-present in the books and TV series of our own time.

         Prominent among the early detectives were Charley Field (the master of disguise) Adolphus ‘Dolly’ Williamson and Jack Whicher, known as the ‘Prince of Detectives’. In an age before fingerprints, DNA and other forensic aids the new detectives adopted a systematic, wide-ranging approach to criminal investigations that also made use of physiognomy, the art of judging character from a person’s appearance. The reactions of suspects, their facial expressions and mannerisms were therefore closely observed by these early exponents of the scientific approach to solving crime.

         In 1849 the reputation of the new detectives was secured when they were called in to investigate the ‘The Bermondsey Horror’, the brutal murder of Patrick O’Connor, a Customs official and moneylender. The crime sensation of the decade (eventually filling seventy-two pages of The Times) was solved by Field and Whicher who not only conclusively established the guilt of the culprits but apprehended them in distant parts of the UK wherein earlier times they might well have avoided capture.

         Eleven years later the London detectives were to face their greatest challenge yet when Wiltshire Magistrates requested their assistance in investigating the murder of Francis Saville Kent, the three-year-old son of well to do factory inspector, Samuel Kent. The initial investigation by the local constabulary had, to use a modern expression proved unfit for purpose and by the time the detective assigned to the case, Jack Whicher, arrived at Samuel Kent’s large house the much picked-over crime scene was of little help to his enquiries.

         Another complication was the large number of suspects. Road Hill House where Kent lived with his second wife, Mary was also home to four children from his first marriage and three from his marriage to Mary. In addition to three live-in servants, six more worked in or about the house during the day. While firm evidence was in short supply it soon became apparent to Whicher that the older children, now in their teens and twenties, resented their half-siblings, and that their father was much disliked by local residents and former servants. Rumours that he had, and was having, improper relationships with female servants was another discordant undercurrent that seemed somehow connected to the murder.

         Who did it?  I’m not saying. If you want to know you will have to do the course. But if you do, be prepared to be surprised!

         Our thanks to Margaret for an intriguing course, and to the WEA for their stewardship of Zoom.

 

Richard Banks,

Secretary, Rayleigh Branch