The Real Sherlock Holmes

The Hidden Story of Jerome Caminada

Angela Buckley

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Social
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473834699
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The life and law enforcement career of the legendary Victorian police detective: "Caminada's story is a remarkable one... [a] fascinating book." — The Manc On December 6, 1886, Arthur Foster leaves the Queen's Theatre, Manchester, with a pocket full of gold and a lady bedecked with diamonds on his arm. He hails a hansom cab, unaware that a detective has been trailing him as he's crisscrossed the streets of the city. As the cab pulls away, the detective slips inside and arrests the infamous "Birmingham Forger." The detective is Jerome Caminada, legendary policeman and real-life Victorian super-sleuth. A master of disguise with a keen eye for detail and ingenious methods of detection, Caminada is at the top of his game, tracking notorious criminals through the seedy streets of Manchester's underworld. Relentless in his pursuit, he stalks pickpockets and poisoners, unscrupulous con artists and cold-blooded murderers. His groundbreaking detective work leads to the unraveling of classic crime cases such as the Hackney Carriage Murder in 1889, secret government missions, and a deadly confrontation with his arch-rival, a ruthless and violent thief. Caminada's compelling story bears all the hallmarks of Arthur Conan Doyle and establishes this indefatigable investigator as one of the most formidable detectives of the Victorian era—and a real-life Sherlock Holmes. "The real-life figure who inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's infamous detective, Sherlock Holmes, may have been uncovered." — Daily Mail

Chapter One

‘A very hot-bed of social iniquity and vice’

(1844–1868)

One Sunday the Bishop of Salford, Herbert Vaughan, was leaving St Augustine’s Church in Manchester after Mass, when a swell mobsman (a well-dressed, highly skilled pickpocket) made a daring attempt to snatch his magnificent pectoral cross, while his hands were raised in the act of blessing his flock. The thief would have succeeded – had Jerome Caminada not been in the congregation. In an instant, before the bishop had realised what was happening, the detective had retrieved the cross. Despite having chosen the police force over the priesthood, Caminada’s religious faith and childhood experiences had a significant impact on his future and would influence his remarkable crime-fighting career for more than three decades.

Caminada’s early life could not have been more different to the history of his literary peer, Sherlock Holmes. When Dr Watson questioned the provenance of the consulting detective’s faculties of observation and deduction in ‘The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter’, Holmes admitted that some of his skills may have come from his family history:

My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class. But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

By comparison, Jerome Caminada did not come from the landed gentry or have a university education, but his ability to solve complicated cases bore an uncanny similarity to the exceptional skills of the famous ‘sleuth-hound’, and was also rooted in his past.

Jerome Caminada was born to immigrant parents on 15 March 1844 in Deansgate, opposite the site of the infamous Peterloo Massacre. In the 1840s, Manchester was one of the poorest and most dangerous places in Britain. With some of the nation’s worst living conditions and staggering crime rates, life for manual workers was an uphill struggle. Since the opening of the first mill by Richard Arkwright in 1780, the city had seen unprecedented change. The cotton industry had burgeoned beyond expectation, accelerated by the development of an effective transport system – first the canals and later the railways – and, by the early nineteenth century, ‘Cottonopolis’ was established as the world’s first industrial city. But whilst industrialisation brought tremendous wealth to Manchester’s factory owners and businessmen, for thousands of others penned into the notorious slums of the city, life was tougher than ever.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the number of inhabitants of Manchester had tripled, reaching 242,000 in 1841, as migrant workers poured into the city to try their luck in the factories and mills. Inadequate housing stock forced them to live in cramped accommodation, without clean water and basic amenities. It was in these filthy streets, and with the odds stacked against him, that Caminada fought to survive a precarious childhood. In his memoirs he described the contrast that characterised Victorian Manchester: ‘In this great city, we have, side by side with enormous wealth and luxury, an inconceivable amount of squalor, misery, degradation, and filthiness of life’.

The families of both Jerome’s parents were among the mass of immigrants who flocked to Manchester for work at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the early 1800s, skilled craftsmen migrated to England from northern Italy, settling in towns and cities throughout the country. Manchester was now home to a number of Italian businesses, which made precision instruments such as thermometers, telescopes and magnifying glasses. Jerome’s paternal grandfather, Lewis Caminada, was a barometer-maker. Originally from Lombardy in northern Italy, he arrived in Manchester in the late 1700s. His son, Francis, (Jerome’s father) was born in the city around 1811. Francis followed his father into a skilled trade and became a cabinetmaker.

Detective Caminada retained his mixed cultural heritage throughout his life: ‘He was in appearance a typical Italian with very strongly marked features, but he never lost his native Lancashire speech, and was in many ways very much a Lancashire man until the end of his days’ (Daily Mail). Caminada’s mother, Mary Boyle, although born in Glasgow, had Irish roots and her father, Cornelius Boyle, was a mechanic. Mary was also from an impoverished background and, like many others before the Education Act of 1870 introduced compulsory schooling, she had never learned to read or write.

Francis and Mary Caminada’s first child was born in 1837. By the early 1840s, the couple had settled in Deansgate, central Manchester. Luxurious shops, magnificent hotels and bustling streets dominated the city’s commercial district, but close by the grand façades were smoking factories, grimy warehouses and tenements. The journalist Angus Bethune Reach gave a description of the area in the Morning Chronicle: ‘between the dull stacks of warehouses and the snug and airy dwellings of the suburbs – lies the great mass of smoky, dingy, sweltering and toiling Manchester’.

The major thoroughfare of Deansgate, which ran through the heart of the city, was lined with mills and warehouses, but as the road left the business district, second-rate shops, alehouses and gin palaces soon replaced them. On both sides of Deansgate were the inner-city slums, where poverty was endemic and crime rife. Caminada later recalled the streets of his childhood: ‘The neighbourhood of Deansgate also was the rendezvous of thieves and was a very hot-bed of social iniquity and vice’.

The 1841 census records Francis and Mary Caminada, aged 30 and 25 respectively, living with their three young children: Francis, aged three; John Baptiste, two; and Hannah, one, in a house shared with four other families. There would have been no running water and the 13 inhabitants of the house shared an outside privy with the other residents of the street. The couple were unmarried, but later that year, they finally tied the knot at St Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church, in nearby Granby Row. By this time they had moved around the corner to 33 Peter Street, opposite the Free Trade Hall, which commemorates the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when the Manchester Yeomanry fired on innocent protestors, killing at least 11 and injuring more than 600.

Peter Street was a mixed area, with two-storey terrace houses sitting shoulder to shoulder with public buildings. There were warehouses, timber yards and smaller dwellings, as well as theatres, concert halls and the original Manchester Museum. It was also well known for brothels and illegal drinking dens. The Manchester Evening News stated that, ‘The Peter-street side of Deansgate once shared with the Wood-street neighbourhood the questionable notoriety of being the most dangerous district in the city’, with ‘beerhouses in which nightly assembled lawless characters of the worst type’. Despite this reputation, Francis and Mary stayed there for the births of their three younger children, Louis in 1842, followed by Jerome in 1844 and Teresa in 1846.

In the first of a series of tragic events for the Caminada family, baby Louis died aged nine months, of ‘hydrocephalus acutus’, a disease of the brain. Then four years later, three-year-old Jerome’s eldest brother, Francis, aged nine, died of enteritis. The health of children growing up in industrial Manchester at that time was notoriously poor. Overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and contaminated water contributed to the shockingly high infant mortality rate: in the 1840s, 48 per cent of all recorded deaths in Manchester were of children under five years old, with the majority dying before their first birthday. Many of these untimely deaths were attributed to childhood diseases like small pox and scarlet fever, as well as diarrhoea from infected water supplies.

Adults too were at risk of disease due to the appalling conditions and a lack of basic medical care. Just two months after the death of his eldest brother, Jerome Caminada’s fragile childhood was completely shattered when his father, Francis, died of heart disease at the age of 37. Some time after Francis’s death, the remaining members of the Caminada family moved to Quay Street, on the other side of Deansgate. Tucked away behind the main road, this area of atrocious slums was a warren of dirty tenements and disreputable lodging-houses. Friedrich Engels depicted the streets around Quay Street in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844:

Here are long, narrow lanes between which run contracted, crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps…the most demoralised class in all Manchester lived in these ruinous and filthy districts, people whose occupations are thieving and prostitution.

Although once a fashionable quarter, the area had deteriorated and the two-storey houses, now sheltering the city’s poorest residents, were dilapidated and shabby. Behind Quay Street were rows of poorly ventilated and tightly packed back-to-back houses, which shared water pumps and privies between at least 20 households. The dense black smoke of the factory chimneys and the stench of rotting refuse permeated the unpaved streets, full of stagnant cesspools and open pigsties.

The soot-blackened terrace houses were made of crumbling brick, their broken windows stuffed with rags and paper in a vain attempt to keep out the driving rain and cold wind. The worst type of housing was the ‘one-up-one-down’. Each room housed at least one family but, more often than not, several families were living cramped together in the confined space. The most unfortunate were forced to live underground in the cellars.

Inside these ramshackle dwellings were minimal amenities: a fireplace for cooking and maybe a few sticks of cheap furniture. Some slept on thin mattresses, but others had to make do with rags or straw. The walls were damp and often bare. No stranger to these surroundings, Caminada gave a detailed description of the conditions in his memoirs: ‘the atmosphere being nothing but a fetid composition of pestilential vapour emitted from filthy beds, dirty clothing, foul breath, and, worse than all, the presence of offensive matter in the room’.

Many workers in Manchester’s mills and factories lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Average weekly wages in the early 1840s were around 10 shillings, half of which would be needed for the rent. Some operatives, such as spinners, earned higher wages and enjoyed better living conditions, but most families relied on the income of several members. The situation was particularly precarious for those affected by illness or the loss of the male provider and the poorest workers wore threadbare clothing and rarely had enough food to eat. Engels recounted how those who did not even possess a hat, would fold a piece of paper into a makeshift cap. Starvation and cold were constant threats to survival.

Despite such gruelling circumstances, the Caminadas fared relatively well, at first. In 1851, just four years after the death of her husband, Mary was letting out rooms in the lodging-house where she also lived with her four surviving children. The going rate for a bed for the night in 1849 was four pence and she had three lodgers. The young family was quite settled, with Jerome, aged six, and his siblings all attending St Mary’s Roman Catholic School, just a few streets away from their home. It was a small school run by nuns and most of the children were of Irish descent. In a rare reference to his childhood, Caminada later reminisced: ‘I remember, when a youth, writing in my copy book “Evil companions corrupt morals,” and there is no doubt about the truth of it’.

The family worshipped at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, Mulberry Street, where Jerome had been baptised. Still known today as the Hidden Gem, the city centre church, with its beautiful white marble altar, is concealed by office blocks and commercial buildings. As a police detective, Caminada allegedly used to meet his informers on the back pew, giving the impression that he was praying, whilst discussing his business quietly in the silence of the church.

However, by 1853 the family had lost their battle to escape the worst of the slums and were living in Little Quay Street. A reporter for the Manchester Evening News described the quarter some 20 years later:

In Little Quay-street the class of persons also appeared to be of the lowest of the hard-working population, and in some of the courts the scanty furniture and the squalid appearance of the kitchens showed how hard was the struggle for existence. Being Saturday night many of the women were washing linen for the Sabbath, and across the rooms were stretched clothes-lines, on which ragged shirts and well-worn underclothing were slowly drying.

That winter Mary gave birth to a boy named Lewis and this event may have accounted for the family’s move. His father’s name was not recorded. On Christmas Day the infant died of unknown causes, aged just five weeks.

Five years on the family had fallen even further into chaos. In 1858 Mary had another son, also called Lewis. This time the father was registered as John Boyd, a stonemason. When the baby died three months later, his death certificate revealed a shocking truth: the cause of death was ‘congenital syphilis’. Syphilis was rife in Victorian England and, as it was difficult to diagnose, it is not known how many victims this devastating disease claimed. Entering into the bloodstream through sexual contact, the infection was also passed from a mother to her unborn child, resulting in stillbirth, birth defects and early death. Infants with congenital syphilis suffered damage to their bones, teeth, ears, eyes and worst of all, to the developing brain. Even if syphilitic children survived early infancy, symptoms could appear at any time, affecting their neurological and cardiovascular systems and often resulting in blindness, deafness or mental illness. Before the advent of antibiotics, the situation was hopeless.

In the Caminada family, it is impossible to say conclusively how many of Jerome’s siblings may have contracted syphilis through their mother. Eight months after the death of baby Lewis, and once again on Christmas Day, 15-year-old Hannah Caminada died in Crumpsall Workhouse. The recorded causes of death were ‘idiocy’, tuberculosis and diarrhoea. The reference to her mental deterioration makes it likely that the disease had affected her too. The informant on Hannah’s death certificate was her younger brother, Jerome, aged just 14.

By his early teens Jerome Caminada had witnessed the deaths of five close relatives. Although unimaginable today, such a high death rate in one family was almost to be expected in the Victorian era, especially with the recurrent epidemics of contagious diseases, such as cholera and typhoid, which swept through communities. Nevertheless, the strain on Mary Caminada and her three surviving children must have been considerable. Despite these tragic setbacks, they managed to salvage what they could from their meagre existence and in 1861 they were still living in a shared household, but now with only one other family. Their circumstances had improved because the children were all working. Mary was now 48 and Jerome 17. Teresa, aged 14, was employed as a silk weaver, probably in a local factory and Mary’s eldest living son, John Baptiste, 20, was lodging in Newcastle upon Lyme, where he was working as a letter carrier.

After leaving school, Jerome spent six years in the Royal Lancashire Militia, before finding work as a brass-fitter. In the 1860s he was employed by two manufacturing companies. The first was Messrs Sharp and Stewart, a steam locomotive manufacturer responsible for building one of the first locomotives to travel on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. He then worked for Messrs Mather and Platt, a large engineering firm which owned the Salford Ironworks. Work in a foundry was dirty, hot and noisy. Beating hammers, roaring furnaces and dense smoke would have made the conditions almost unbearable for the workers, who were engaged in backbreaking physical labour. Endless days of toiling in the sweltering heat of the ironworks may have been one of the factors that influenced Caminada in his momentous decision to become a police officer. On 20 February 1868, at the age of 23, Jerome Caminada joined the Manchester City Police Force as a police constable.

Detective Caminada’s first-hand knowledge of the city’s back streets and the people who lived there, would be an effective weapon in his daily battle against crime. ‘The rookeries of the city had no terrors for him’, declared the Manchester Courier years later, ‘although, on many occasions, he deliberately ran grave risks in order to accomplish his object – the arrest of criminals’. His training in the militia and the physical nature of his work in the foundry had given him stamina, strength and a sense of discipline. Furthermore, his early experiences of poverty and hardship had instilled in him a deep sense of justice and a heartfelt compassion for others.

Jerome Caminada had served his ‘apprenticeship’ in the seedy and violent slums of his childhood. In 1868, as his life of fighting crime began, young PC Caminada would need all his faith, courage and determination to face the challenges that awaited him on the streets of Manchester’s dark underworld.

Chapter Two

‘A “Lively” Beat’

(1868–1871)

A policeman seldom forgets his first nights on duty. If he be an intelligent officer he feels that he is a person of some importance, that a large responsibility is placed upon his shoulders in looking after the safety of the lives and property of the Queen’s subjects on his beat, and in vindicating the laws of his country. He has visions of future promotion, and being anxious to distinguish himself, his eyes and ears are on the alert to everything that passes around, for he is in search of his first case. Thus his novitiate is full of excitement, especially if he be on a “lively” beat.

(Jerome Caminada, Twenty-Five Years of Detective Life, 1901)

These were Police Constable Caminada’s noble sentiments as he prepared to patrol the streets of his neighbourhood for the very first time. By the end of the week, he had been ridiculed, insulted and assaulted. With dented pride, but unabated enthusiasm, he later conceded that ‘a policeman’s life is not altogether a bed of roses’.

Prior to the formation of the Ma...