been sentenced to death for the murder of Dyson, Mrs. Thompson appealed
to the Treasury for the reward of L100 offered for Peace's conviction.
She based her application on information which she said she had supplied
to the police officers in charge of the case on November 5 in the
previous year, the very day on which Peace had first written to her from
Newgate. In reply to her letter the Treasury referred "Mrs. S. Bailey,
alias Thompson," to the Home Office, but whether she received from that
office the price of blood history does not relate.
The police scouted the idea that any revelation of hers had assisted
them to identify "John Ward" with Charles Peace. They said that it
was information given them in Peckham, no doubt by Mr. Brion, who, on
learning the deplorable character of his coadjutor, had placed himself
unreservedly in their hands, which first set them on the track. From
Peckham they went to Nottingham, where they no doubt came across Sue
Thompson, and thence to Sheffield, where on November 6 they visited
the house in Hazel Road, occupied by Mrs. Peace and her daughter, Mrs.
Bolsover. There they found two of the boxes which Mrs. Peace had brought
with her from Peckham. Besides stolen property, these boxes contained
evidence of the identity of Ward with Peace. A constable who had known
Peace well in Sheffield was sent to Newgate, and taken into the yard
where the prisoners awaiting trial were exercising. As they passed
round, the constable pointed to the fifth man: "That's Peace," he said,
"I'd know him anywhere." The man left the ranks and, coming up to the
constable, asked earnestly, "What do you want me for?" but the Governor
ordered him to go on with his walk.
It was as John Ward, alias Charles Peace, that Peace, on November 19,
1878, was put on his trial for burglary and the attempted murder of
Police Constable Robinson, at the Old Bailey before Mr. Justice Hawkins.
His age was given in the calendar as sixty, though Peace was actually
forty-six. The evidence against the prisoner was clear enough. All Mr.
Montagu Williams could urge in his defence was that Peace had never
intended to kill the officer, merely to frighten him. The jury found
Peace guilty of attempted murder. Asked if he had anything to say why
judgment should not be passed upon him, he addressed the Judge. He
protested that he had not been fairly dealt with, that he never intended
to kill the prosecutor, that the pistol was one that went off very
easily, and that the last shot had been fired by accident. "I really did
not know," he said, "that the pistol was loaded, and I hope, my lord,
that you will have mercy on me. I feel that I have disgraced myself, I
am not fit either to live or die. I am not prepared to meet my God, but
still I feel that my career has been made to appear much worse than it
really is. Oh, my lord, do have mercy on me; do give me one chance of
repenting and of preparing to meet my God. Do, my lord, have mercy on
me; and I assure you that you shall never repent it. As you hope for
mercy yourself at the hands of the great God, do have mercy on me, and
give me a chance of redeeming my character and preparing myself to meet
my God. I pray, and beseech you to have mercy upon me."
Peace's assumption of pitiable senility, sustained throughout the trial,
though it imposed on Sir Henry Hawkins, failed to melt his heart. He
told Peace that he did not believe his statement that he had fired the
pistol merely to frighten the constable; had not Robinson guarded
his head with his arm he would have been wounded fatally, and Peace
condemned to death. He did not consider it necessary, he said, to make
an inquiry into Peace's antecedents; he was a desperate burglar, and
there was an end of the matter. Notwithstanding his age, Mr. Justice
Hawkins felt it his duty to sentence him to penal servitude for life.
The severity of the sentence was undoubtedly a painful surprise
to Peace; to a man of sixty years of age it would be no doubt less
terrible, but to a man of forty-six it was crushing.
Not that Peace was fated to serve any great part of his sentence.
With as little delay as possible he was to be called on to answer to
the murder of Arthur Dyson. The buxom widow of the murdered man had been
found in America, whither she had returned after her husband's death.
She was quite ready to come to England to give evidence against
her husband's murderer. On January 17, 1879, Peace was taken from
Pentonville prison, where he was serving his sentence, and conveyed by
an early morning train to Sheffield. There at the Town Hall he appeared
before the stipendiary magistrate, and was charged with the murder of
Arthur Dyson. When he saw Mrs. Dyson enter the witness box and tell her
story of the crime, he must have realised that his case was desperate.
Her cross-examination was adjourned to the next hearing, and Peace was
taken back to London. On the 22nd, the day of the second hearing in
Sheffield, an enormous crowd had assembled outside the Town Hall. Inside
the court an anxious and expectant audiience{sic}, among them Mrs.
Dyson, in the words of a contemporary reporter, "stylish and cheerful,"
awaited the appearance of the protagonist. Great was the disappointment
and eager the excitement when the stipendiary came into the court about
a quarter past ten and stated that Peace had attempted to escape that
morning on the journey from London to Sheffield, and that in consequence
of his injuries the case would be adjourned for eight days.
What had happened was this. Peace had left King's Cross by the 5.15
train that morning, due to arrive at Sheffield at 8.45. From the very
commencement of the journey he had been wilful and troublesome. He kept
making excuses for leaving the carriage whenever the train stopped.
To obviate this nuisance the two warders, in whose charge he was, had
provided themselves with little bags which Peace could use when he
wished and then throw out of the window. Just after the train passed
Worksop, Peace asked for one of the bags. When the window was lowered
to allow the bag to be thrown away, Peace with lightning agility took a
flying leap through it. One of the warders caught him by the left foot.
Peace, hanging from the carriage, grasped the footboard with his hands
and kept kicking the warder as hard as he could with his right foot.
The other warder, unable to get to the window to help his colleague, was
making vain efforts to stop the train by pulling the communication cord.
For two miles the train ran on, Peace struggling desperately to escape.
At last he succeeded in kicking off his left shoe, and dropped on to the
line. The train ran on another mile until, with the assistance of some
gentlemen in other carriages, the warders were able to get it pulled up.
They immediately hurried back along the line, and there, near a place
called Kineton Park, they found their prisoner lying in the footway,
apparently unconscious and bleeding from a severe wound in the scalp. A
slow train from Sheffield stopped to pick up the injured man. As he was
lifted into the guard's van, he asked them to cover him up as he was
cold. On arriving at Sheffield, Peace was taken to the Police Station
and there made as comfortable as possible in one of the cells. Even then
he had energy enough to be troublesome over taking the brandy ordered
for him by the surgeon, until one of the officers told "Charley" they
would have none of his hanky-panky, and he had got to take it. "All
right," said Peace, "give me a minute," after which he swallowed
contentedly a couple of gills of the genial spirit.
Peace's daring feat was not, according to his own account, a mere
attempt to escape from the clutches of the law; it was noble and Roman
in its purpose. This is what he told his stepson, Willie Ward: "I saw
from the way I was guarded all the way down from London and all the way
back, when I came for my first trial, that I could not get away from the
warders, and I knew I could not jump from an express train without being
killed. I took a look at Darnall as I went down and as I went back, and
after I was put in my cell, I thought it all over. I felt that I could
not get away, and then I made up my mind to kill myself. I got two bits
of paper and pricked on them the words, 'Bury me at Darnall. God bless
you all!' With a bit of black dirt that I found on the floor of my cell
I wrote the same words on another piece of paper, and then I hid them in
my clothes. My hope was that, when I jumped from the train I should be
cut to pieces under the wheels. Then I should have been taken to the
Duke of York (a public-house at Darnall) and there would have been an
inquest over me. As soon as the inquest was over you would have claimed
my body, found the pieces of paper, and then you would have buried me at
Darnall."
This statement of Peace is no doubt in the main correct. But it is
difficult to believe that there was not present to his mind the sporting
chance that he might not be killed in leaping from the train, in which
event he would no doubt have done his best to get away, trusting to his
considerable powers of ingenious disguise to elude pursuit. But such a
chance was remote. Peace had faced boldly the possibility of a dreadful
death.
With that strain of domestic sentiment, which would appear to have been
a marked characteristic of his family, Peace was the more ready to
cheat the gallows in the hope of being by that means buried decently at
Darnall. It was at Darnall that he had spent some months of comparative
calm in his tempestuous career, and it was at Darnall that he had first
met Mrs. Dyson. Another and more practical motive that may have urged
Peace to attempt to injure seriously, if not kill himself, was the
hope of thereby delaying his trial. If the magisterial investigation
in Sheffield were completed before the end of January, Peace could be
committed for trial to the ensuing Leeds Assizes which commenced in the
first week in February. If he were injured too seriously, this would not
be possible. Here again he was doomed to disappointment.
Peace recovered so well from the results of his adventure on the railway
that the doctor pronounced him fit to appear for his second examination
before the magistrate on January 30. To avoid excitement, both on
the part of the prisoner and the public, the court sat in one of the
corridors of the Town Hall. The scene is described as dismal, dark and
cheerless. The proceedings took place by candlelight, and Peace, who was
seated in an armchair, complained frequently of the cold. At other times
he moaned and groaned and protested against the injustice with which
he was being treated. But the absence of any audience rather dashed the
effect of his laments.
The most interesting part of the proceedings was the cross-examination
of Mrs. Dyson by Mr. Clegg, the prisoner's solicitor.
Its purpose was to show that Mrs. Dyson had been on more intimate terms
with Peace than she was ready to admit, and that Dyson had been shot
by Peace in the course of a struggle, in which the former had been the
aggressor.
In the first part of his task Mr. Clegg met with some success. Mrs.
Dyson, whose memory was certainly eccentric--she could not, she said,
remember the year in which she had been married--was obliged to admit
that she had been in the habit of going to Peace's house, that she had
been alone with him to public-houses and places of entertainment, and
that she and Peace had been photographed together during the summer fair
at Sheffield. She could not "to her knowledge" recollect having told the
landlord of a public-house to charge her drink to Peace.
A great deal of Mrs. Dyson's cross-examination turned on a bundle of
letters that had been found near the scene of Dyson's murder on the
morning following the crime. These letters consisted for the most part
of notes, written in pencil on scraps of paper, purporting to have been
sent from Mrs. Dyson to Peace. In many of them she asks for money to get
drink, others refer to opportunities for their meetings in the absence
of Dyson; there are kind messages to members of Peace's family, his wife
and daughter, and urgent directions to Peace to hold his tongue and not
give ground for suspicion as to their relations. This bundle of letters
contained also the card which Dyson had thrown into Peace's garden
requesting him not to interfere with his family. According to the theory
of the defence, these letters had been written by Mrs. Dyson to Peace,
and went to prove the intimacy of their relations. At the inquest after
her husband's murder, Mrs. Dyson had been questioned by the coroner
about these letters. She denied that she had ever written to Peace; in
fact, she said, she "never did write." It was stated that Dyson himself
had seen the letters, and declared them to be forgeries written by Peace
or members of his family for the purpose of annoyance. Nevertheless,
before the Sheffield magistrate Mr. Clegg thought it his duty to
cross-examine Mrs. Dyson closely as to their authorship. He asked her
to write out a passage from one of them: "You can give me something as a
keepsake if you like, but I don't like to be covetous, and to take them
from your wife and daughter. Love to all!" Mrs. Dyson refused to admit
any likeness between what she had written and the handwriting of the
letter in question. Another passage ran: "Will see you as soon as I
possibly can. I think it would be easier after you move; he won't watch
so. The r--g fits the little finger. Many thanks and love to--Jennie
(Peace's daughter Jane). I will tell you what I thought of when I see
you about arranging matters. Excuse this scribbling." In answer to Mr.
Clegg, Mrs. Dyson admitted that Peace had given her a ring, which she
had worn for a short time on her little finger.
Another letter ran: "If you have a note for me, send now whilst he is
out; but you must not venture, for he is watching, and you cannot be too
careful. Hope your foot is better. I went to Sheffield yesterday, but
I could not see you anywhere. Were you out? Love to Jane." Mrs. Dyson
denied that she had known of an accident which Peace had had to his foot
at this time. In spite of the ruling of the magistrate that Mr.
Clegg had put forward quite enough, if true, to damage Mrs. Dyson's
credibility, he continued to press her as to her authorship of these
notes and letters, but Mrs. Dyson was firm in her repudiation of
them. She was equally firm in denying that anything in the nature of a
struggle had taken place between Peace and her husband previous to his
murder.
At the conclusion of Mrs. Dyson's evidence the prisoner was committed to
take his trial at the Leeds Assizes, which commenced the week following.
Peace, who had groaned and moaned and constantly interrupted the
proceedings, protested his innocence, and complained that his witnesses
had not been called. The apprehension with which this daring malefactor
was regarded by the authorities is shown by this clandestine hearing
of his case in a cold corridor of the Town Hall, and the rapidity with
which his trial followed on his committal. There is an appearance almost
of precipitation in the haste with which Peace was bustled to his doom.
After his committal he was taken to Wakefield Prison, and a few days
later to Armley Jail, there to await his trial.
This began on February 4, and lasted one day. Mr. Justice Lopes, who had
tried vainly to persuade the Manchester Grand Jury to throw out the
bill in the case of the brothers Habron, was the presiding judge. Mr.
Campbell Foster, Q.C., led for the prosecution. Peace was defended by
Mr. Frank Lockwood, then rising into that popular success at the bar
which some fifteen years later made him Solicitor-General, and but for
his premature death would have raised him to even higher honours in his
profession.
In addressing the jury, both Mr. Campbell Foster and Mr. Lockwood took
occasion to protest against the recklessness with which the press of
the day, both high and low, had circulated stories and rumours about
the interesting convict. As early as November in 1878 one leading London
daily newspaper had said that "it was now established beyond doubt that
the burglar captured by Police Constable Robinson was one and the same
as the Banner Cross murderer." Since then, as the public excitement grew
and the facts of Peace's extraordinary career came to light, the press
had responded loyally to the demands of the greedy lovers of sensation,
and piled fiction on fact with generous profusion. "Never," said Mr.
Lockwood, "in the whole course of his experience--and he defied any
of his learned friends to quote an experience--had there been such an
attempt made on the part of those who should be most careful of all
others to preserve the liberties of their fellowmen and to preserve the
dignity of the tribunals of justice to determine the guilt of a man."
Peace exclaimed "Hear, hear!" as Mr. Lockwood went on to say that "for
the sake of snatching paltry pence from the public, these persons had
wickedly sought to prejudice the prisoner's life." Allowing for Mr.
Lockwood's zeal as an advocate, there can be no question that, had
Peace chosen or been in a position to take proceedings, more than one
newspaper had at this time laid itself open to prosecution for contempt
of Court. The Times was not far wrong in saying that, since Muller
murdered Mr. Briggs on the North London Railway and the poisonings of
William Palmer, no criminal case had created such excitement as that of
Charles Peace. The fact that property seemed to be no more sacred to him
than life aggravated in a singular degree the resentment of a commercial
people.
The first witness called by the prosecution was Mrs. Dyson. She
described how on the night of November 29, 1876, she had come out of
the outhouse in the yard at the back of her house, and found herself
confronted by Peace holding a revolver; how he said: "Speak, or I'll
fire!" and the sequence of events already related up to the moment when
Dyson fell, shot in the temple.
Mr. Lockwood commenced his cross-examination of Mrs. Dyson by
endeavouring to get from her an admission; the most important to the
defence, that Dyson had caught hold of Peace after the first shot had
been fired, and that in the struggle which ensued, the revolver had gone
off by accident. But he was not very successful. He put it to Mrs. Dyson
that before the magistrate at Sheffield she had said: "I can't say
my husband did not get hold of the prisoner." "Put in the little
word 'try,' please," answered Mrs. Dyson. In spite of Mr. Lockwood's
questions, she maintained that, though her husband may have attempted to
get hold of Peace, he did not succeed in doing so. As she was the only
witness to the shooting there was no one to contradict her statement.
Mr. Lockwood fared better when he came to deal with the relations of
Mrs. Dyson with Peace previous to the crime. Mrs. Dyson admitted that
in the spring of 1876 her husband had objected to her friendship with
Peace, and that nevertheless, in the following summer, she and Peace
had been photographed together at the Sheffield fair. She made a vain
attempt to escape from such an admission by trying to shift the occasion
of the summer fair to the previous year, 1875, but Mr. Lockwood put
it to her that she had not come to Darnall, where she first met Peace,
until the end of that year. Finally he drove her to say that she could
not remember when she came to Darnall, whether in 1873, 1874, 1875, or
1876. She admitted that she had accepted a ring from Peace, but could
not remember whether she had shown it to her husband. She had been
perhaps twice with Peace to the Marquis of Waterford public-house, and
once to the Star Music Hall. She could not swear one way or the other
whether she had charged to Peace's account drink consumed by her at an
inn in Darnall called the Half-way House. Confronted with a little girl
and a man, whom Mr. Lockwood suggested she had employed to carry notes
to Peace, Mrs. Dyson said that these were merely receipts for pictures
which he had framed for her. On the day before her husband's murder,
Mrs. Dyson was at the Stag Hotel at Sharrow with a little boy belonging
to a neighbour. A man followed her in and sat beside her, and afterwards
followed her out. In answer to Mr. Lockwood, Mrs. Dyson would "almost
swear" the man was not Peace; he had spoken to her, but she could not
remember whether she had spoken to him or not. She denied that this man
had said to her that he would come and see her the next night. As
the result of a parting shot Mr. Lockwood obtained from Mrs. Dyson a
reluctant admission that she had been "slightly inebriated" at the
Half-way House in Darnall, but had not to her knowledge been turned
out of the house on that account. "You may not have known you were
inebriated?" suggested Mr. Lockwood. "I always know what I am doing,"
was Mrs. Dyson's reply, to which an unfriendly critic might have replied
that she did not apparently know with anything like certainty what she
had been doing during the last three or four years. In commenting on
the trial the following day, the Times stigmatised as "feeble" the
prevarications by which Mrs. Dyson tried to explain away her intimacy
with Peace. In this part of his cross-examination Mr. Lockwood had made
it appear at least highly probable that there had been a much closer
relationship between Mrs. Dyson and Peace than the former was willing to
acknowledge.
The evidence of Mrs. Dyson was followed by that of five persons who had
either seen Peace in the neighbourhood of Banner Cross Terrace on the
night of the murder, or heard the screams and shots that accompanied it.
A woman, Mrs. Gregory, whose house was between that of the Dysons and
the passage in which Dyson was shot, said that she had heard the noise
of the clogs Mrs. Dyson was wearing as she went across the yard. A
minute later she heard a scream. She opened her back door and saw Dyson
standing by his own. She told him to go to his wife. She then went back
into her house, and almost directly after heard two shots, followed by
another scream, but no sound as of any scuffling.
Another witness was a labourer named Brassington. He was a stranger to
Peace, but stated that about eight o'clock on the night of the murder
a man came up to him outside the Banner Cross Hotel, a few yards from
Dyson's house. He was standing under a gas lamp, and it was a bright
moonlight night. The man asked him if he knew of any strange people who
had come to live in the neighbourhood. Brassington answered that he
did not. The man then produced a bundle of letters which he asked
Brassington to read. But Brassington declined, as reading was not one of
his accomplishments. The man then said that "he would make it a warm 'un
for those strange folks before morning--he would shoot both of them,"
and went off in the direction of Dyson's house. Brassington swore
positively that Peace was the stranger who had accosted him that night,
and Mr. Lockwood failed to shake him in his evidence. Nor could Mr.
Lockwood persuade the surgeon who was called to Dyson at the time of his
death to admit that the marks on the nose and chin of the dead man
could have been caused by a blow; they were merely abrasions of the skin
caused by the wounded man falling to the ground.
Evidence was then given as to threats uttered by Peace against the
Dysons in the July of 1876, and as to his arrest at Blackheath in the
October of 1878. The revolver taken from Peace that night was produced,
and it was shown that the rifling of the bullet extracted from Dyson's
head was the same as that of the bullet fired from the revolver carried
by Peace at the time of his capture.
Mr. Campbell Foster wanted to put in as evidence the card that Dyson
had flung into Peace's garden at Darnall requesting him not to interfere
with his family. This card had been found among the bundle of letters
dropped by Peace near the scene of the murder. Mr. Lockwood objected to
the admission of the card unless all the letters were admitted at the
same time. The Judge ruled that both the card and the letters were
inadmissible, as irrelevant to the issue; Mr. Lockwood had, he said,
very properly cross-examined Mrs. Dyson on these letters to test her
credibility, but he was bound by her answers and could not contradict
her by introducing them as evidence in the case.