Hallie Rubenhold’s new book, The Story of a Murder (published later this month), is a fresh look at the Dr Crippen case. It was, of course, famed because it was the first time the new-fangled device of wireless telegraphy was used in a murder hunt. Crippen had made a bid to escape by crossing the Atlantic but suspicious captain had sent a message back concerning his identity. A London detective, Chief Inspector Walter Dew, hopped aboard a faster ship and was able to arrest Crippen.
On hearing about the new investigation – which promises to be a superb read – my mind turned to a Glasgow case in which a dogged detective followed a suspect across the Atlantic.
And it occurred 34 years before…
In 1866, Superintendent Alexander McCall of the City of Glasgow Police was told by officials of the Union Bank of Scotland that someone was forging their banknotes and passing them in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Greenock, Dalkeith and Stirling. The process used was that of lithography and when the detective heard that a Glasgow photographer had recently sold such a printing press, three rollers and seven lithographic ‘stones’, or engravings, he began to believe he had his man. He had the equipment taken from their new owner to Central Police office where he had a lithographer examine it. The printer found impressions of a £1 Union Bank note in one of the stones while a subsequent search of the photographer’s Sauchiehall Street studio revealed engravings and banknote paper. Superintendant McCall put two and two together to come up with a very sizeable sum indeed. The problem was, his forger had left the city.
English-born John Henry Greatrex was a photographer, and lay preacher, who specialised in making the pictorial carte-de-visits which were in vogue in the late 19th century. He was a tall, striking man with a full beard and a way with women. Perhaps the 38-year-old took the lay part of his preaching too far.
But his business was failing and he decided that although there was a commandment against stealing, there was no stricture specifically about forgery.
He first tried taking pictures of bank notes but found the results singularly unconvincing. His mind then turned to lithographic printing and he recruited copper engraver Sewell Grimshaw to help perfect his scheme. If they were first to make money, they must first spend it and neither man had the capital required. Enter Sewell’s brother Tom, who had some disposable income and was not afraid to risk it on their venture. The equipment duly purchased and tests made, the men began to churn out the notes in Greatrex’s premises in Hope Street and, later on the corner of Sauchiehall Street and West Campbell Street. They produced around £1,300 (around £85,000 in today’s terms) in dodgy notes and set about passing them – or ‘uttering’ – around Central Scotland.
McCall’s investigations also revealed that family man Greatrex had been conducting an affair with Jane Weir, one of his employees. She had been working for him for around four years and it was during the counterfeiting scheme that they had become intimate. Her romance with the photographer had developed to such a point that he felt confident enough to confess to her how he was now making a living. He even showed her the result of his labours – bank notes, she said, ‘bundles of them in the room where they were wrought.’ She never at any time thought to ‘peach’ on him and soon found herself deeply involved in her lover’s criminal enterprise.
Deciding that Aberdeen would be a fine place to receive their product, Greatrex sent her to the Granite City while he and the brothers Grimshaw set out on their tour of the central towns and cities. He later joined her and, using the name Rivers, they shared a bed in Forsyth’s Hotel.
It was during this illicit sojourn in the north east that Greatrex learned that the jig was up. McCall and his men were on the trail but the real break came when the Grimshaws were arrested in Edinburgh while passing a note in exchange for an umbrella. When their luggage was searched it was found to contain a quantity of counterfeit cash.
Greatrex read about the arrests on 3 October and knew that sooner or later they would track him to Aberdeen so he hot-footed it to London, taking a room under the name of Gray in Brown’s Private Hotel in the Strand. Jane followed him a few days later and they stayed in Brown’s for around a week then moved to lodgings in Waterloo Road.
But Greatrex was growing increasingly nervous about the progress being made by McCall and his team and concluded that they should flee to New York. He decided it would be safer for them to travel separately, so he booked himself a First Class passage on the steamer Hermann out of Southampton. One week later, Jane followed – Second Class for her – on the SS Deutschland.
McCall tracked their movements to Aberdeen, then to London and finally to Southampton. He was not about to let something as insignificant as the Atlantic Ocean prevent him from nabbing his man so on 19 November 1866 he arrived in the USA in the company of a witness who knew Greatrex by sight.
The problem was that New York was teeming with people. Boats arrived every day from Europe with new immigrants and the Glasgow copper, a fish very much out of water, had a very daunting prospect ahead of him. How was he to find two Scots in a sea of nationalities in an alien city?
Then he hit on a daring notion – despite Greatrex’s money-making skills he would be short of cash in New York so he and Jane would be looking for work. The Glasgow detective ran an advertisement in a number of newspapers posing as a photographer looking for a female assistant to work in his studio. The clincher was the words ‘a Scotch girl preferred.’
He received a variety of applications and one, amazingly from a Jenny Weir, took him to a lodging house in Renwick Street, on the lower west side of Manhattan in what is now known as SoHo (South of Houston). Weir and her ‘husband’ were out when he called so he chatted to the landlady, asking her about her lodgers, who were using the name Mr and Mrs Parker. He described the people he was searching for and the woman said it sounded like Mrs Parker but her husband did not have a beard. He was, however, in the habit of quoting from the Bible. McCall knew he had tracked them down so he and his companion waited in the street for them to return.
They were soon rewarded by the sight of a man of similar build to Greatrex but clean shaven. When the man approached the steps to the boarding house, McCall took a chance and intercepted him. Up close, he knew he had his man and Greatrex was escorted to a nearby police office, where the extradition process was begun. Jane Weir was found later in their rented room. McCall did not arrest her but strongly advise her to return to Scotland and give evidence against her lover. It was 27 November – McCall had only been in the land of the free eight days.
Greatrex and the brothers Grimshaw stood trial in May 1867. The 72-page indictment ran to a total of 21 charges with 164 witnesses listed against them. Greatrex, a newspaper noted, was ‘more than usually pallid’ perhaps due to the long flowing beard and moustache for which he was known being missing. Among the witnesses was Jane Weir, who took the stand hesitantly which did not endear her to the judge – keeping the court waiting which was not a wise thing to do then or now. She was now a figure of scandal in the highly moralistic Victorian society. She had not only conducted an affair with a married man, a man she knew to be a felon, she had fled the country with him and posed as man and wife.
In court, she tried to hide her face from onlookers and her voice rarely rose above a whisper. When asked, as is courtroom tradition, to identify the accused she had to be forced to look around the room.
Jane Weir was verbally attacked by Greatrex’s counsel, who said that she had testified against a man ‘on whose bosom she had lain’ and had feigned illness to elicit sympathy from the jury. He felt nauseated by her while his client had been painted as the destroyer and she the victim. ‘As if they were not equally guilty,’ he railed, ‘both wilfully and knowingly plunging themselves into guilt.’
The charges could have brought transportation or even death but in the end Greatrex and his accomplices were lucky. The jury took 40 minutes to find them guilty and the photographer was sentenced to 20 years in jail while the brothers were each given 15 years. Greatrex had shown tremendous interest throughout the three day hearing, using his copy of the indictment as a notebook, but on hearing the sentence he slumped in the dock and covered his face with his hands.
The case was a triumph for McCall and he became one of the best known detectives on the force. Three years later he rose further, being appointed Chief Constable on the death of James Smart. Speaking of his predecessor, McCall said that ‘at his death, he left the police force of the city in a state of organisation and efficiency inferior to none in the Kingdom.’
However, the boys in blue were still viewed with a mixture of distaste and suspicion by many layers of society and McCall, it is said, did more than any other to improve relations between the force and the public. A article in the Wednesday February 26, 1873 edition of The Bailie, a publication dubbed by Glasgow writer Maurice Lindsay as ‘the Private Eye of the 1870s and 80s’, was particularly damning in its assessment of the Force prior to McCall’s tenure. It noted that until McCall took charge the city was ‘police-ridden to a disgraceful extent. Ignorant Highlanders, scarcely capable of uttering or understanding the Queen’s English, and as boorish and insolent as they were ignorant moved us on and off at their will. The slightest remonstrance at unjust treatment either of ourselves of others produced…..a whistle for the neighbouring Celt, ending in a walk to the nearest station and a charge for disorderly conduct.’ McCall, it seems, changed all that and police became more professional, courteous and effective. Under his leadership there were a number of advances in the Glasgow force. The rattles and clappers used by officers for decades to alert colleagues (the latter device giving birth to the term ‘run like the clappers’) were abolished in 1880 and the whistle brought in. In 1881, the city bought its first river patrol vessel – a rowing boat that remained in service for many years. More dramatically, the new-fangled telephone apparatus was introduced in a limited fashion in 1880 but political indecision prevented it from being fully used until 1886 when every police station was linked with the general exchange.
McCall remained in his office until 1887 when illness struck. In the winter of that year he was pensioned off and he moved to the south of France in a bid to regain his strength. On 29 March, 1888 he died. He was buried in the Necropolis, the great city of the dead erected on the site known as Firhill near the Cathedral. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose father had been a police officer who had served with McCall, received what may have been his first commission to design the headstone, which he did so in the shape of a Celtic cross.
(Adapted from a section of ‘Glasgow’s Black Heart’ by Douglas Skelton. Now out of print)