Crime News in Modern Britain

Press Reporting and Responsibility, 1820-2010

Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson, Samantha Pegg

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137317971
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

Drawing together examples from broadsheet and tabloid newspapers this account of English crime reportage takes readers from the late eighteenth century to the present day. In the post-Leveson world, it is a timely and engaging contextualisation of the history of printed crime news and investigative journalism.

1

The Beginnings of Crime Intelligence: 1800–1860

‘A Lawyer is an honest Employment, so is mine. Like me too he acts in a double Capacity, both against Rogues and for ‘em; for ‘tis but fitting that we should protect and encourage Cheats, since we live by them.’¹

Introduction

If modern crime intelligence is constituted by a public audience informed by the media about crime and (at least to an extent) about the legal processes contextualising it, its origins lie within the development, in the sixteenth century, of the printed broadside or broadsheet ballad. These early print productions emerged as powerful cultural factors shaping how crime (particularly murder) was popularly understood within and between communities. While not addressing the legal process directly, they helped establish its importance as the key tool for managing crime and protecting the community.² In broadsheet ballads, offenders, once caught, were tried, convicted and suitably punished, and increasingly that punishment was mediated through or at least sanctioned by a formal legal process.³ However, they made no attempt to portray the legal ‘truth’ of any criminal proceedings, concentrating only on their outcomes. Yet, for the first time, news of criminal events managed within a formal legal context could be spread with some uniformity to a mass, if not (strictly speaking) a contiguous, market. Broadsheets narrating crimes which caught the imagination could be copied and recopied; they helped to fuel the demand for more information about criminal activity, which resulted in productions such as the Newgate Calendar with its retrospective and moralistic framing of the more sensationalist narratives of crime.⁴

As Malcolm Gaskell has pointed out, it was that narrative (establishing the event and its outcome), rather than the precise details of the actual crime or the role of the law, which was initially important in the creation and reception of such productions. The ‘symbolic content’ rather than any ‘precision of reporting’ was what characterised the broadsheet approach to crime reportage.⁵ The law was there, but not in detail. This emphasis on the symbolism of a crime is unsurprising given the lingering tradition which conflated crime and sin even into the early nineteenth century.⁶ Moral dimensions to offending were managed increasingly by groups such as the Society for the Reformation of Manners, with links to religion but working in secular society by the end of the eighteenth century. The legacy of sin and consequent shame remained central to popular understandings of law-breaking well into the nineteenth century, thanks to the continuing production of these broadsheets.⁷

The quality of the crime intelligence gleaned from broadsheets was limited. Reports of crimes were formulaic to a high degree, repeating the same messages in the context of the different criminal narratives. Their emphasis was on events leading to the scaffold, and the allocation of the respective blame; since the purpose behind broadsheets was to package even moral warnings in an entertaining way, there was no need for precise, informative detail on any particular case. Thus, the legal process was depicted with a broad brush up to the eventual outcome, especially if that involved the scaffold.

The development of the newspaper press from the late eighteenth century into recognisably modern news deliverers took place against the background of this broadsheet ballad provision. Initially, titles were mainly local or provincial, though a few began to acquire a national importance amongst the emerging middle and established upper classes, notably The Times and the Morning Post. But, whether national or regional, the importance of the newspaper press was that it provided increasing scope for innovative ways of reporting crime at length, providing detail that was impossible in the broadsheet format and a different emphasis from the Newgate Calendar with its greater immediacy. Crime was a regular feature in most titles. Coming at a time when the adversarial criminal trial format was prioritising the role of the lawyer, the growing audiences for newspapers rapidly created a demand for crime intelligence, enabling a consequent growing popular interest in the trial process. For both editors and proprietors, a single trial involving a sensational crime offered much greater scope than the intrinsically shorter scaffold event. It might last more than a day at the Assizes (an execution, with all the preliminaries and aftermath, rarely occasioned more than a morning or afternoon), whereas even a sitting of the summary courts could provide several items likely to entertain and engage readers. Broadsheets remained a popular resource for mass reading up to the middle of the century, but the growing importance of newspapers as a source of crime news by the late 1820s is effectively illustrated by the coverage of the famed Red Barn murder: an event which caught the national imagination, resulting in substantial coverage in local and national titles from the first reports of the discovery of the body to the eventual execution of the perpetrator.

Murder always commanded interest. Like many other titles in April 1828, the Morning Post announced to its readers the discovery of a ‘Horrid Murder’.⁸ The body of Maria Marten was found buried in the Red Barn (a local landmark), reportedly after she had appeared in a series of dreams to her stepmother indicating that she had been murdered instead of running away with her lover, and obvious suspect, William Corder. After his arrest, following the opening of the inquest in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, newspapers continued to speculate on his character and liability well into May, highlighting in lengthy news items the numbers making journeys, from as far afield as London, to view the Red Barn.⁹ Corder’s trial at the Summer Assize in August (though the result was generally advised in the press as being a forgone conclusion) was also covered in detail by national as well as provincial titles throughout the United Kingdom (including Ireland).¹⁰ In addition, an execution broadsheet, which according to sources such as Mayhew was highly popular, sold 1.65 million copies. All of this indicates that, for a variety of reasons, this was a crime narrative which caught the imagination of all classes, high and low, regardless of location. But a comparison with the information in the single-side newssheets is telling; it was the newspapers that provided the most titillating detail, which was subsequently absorbed into popular melodrama, performed well into the twentieth century. It was the newspaper coverage before the execution that attracted around 10,000 spectators to travel to witness Corder’s execution. Equally, after the trial, it was only in the newspapers that the extensive details of Corder’s eventual confession were to be found, courtesy of the eccentric but respected Old Bailey reporter James Curtis, reporting for The Times on this occasion.¹¹

The demise of the old broadsheets

The principle that dissemination of crime intelligence in the form of print productions was fundamentally a matter of public interest was already firmly embedded in the popular and the political psyche by the 1830s, thanks to the increasing literacy of the British reading public.¹² The newspaper coverage of this high-profile event demonstrated the potential of the press to take over from broadsheets as the favoured form of communicating detailed crime intelligence. Corder himself described the press as a ‘powerful engine for fixing the opinions of large classes of the community’.¹³ Fatefully, another ‘Horrible Murder’, perpetrated in November 1828 just seven miles away from Polstead, where a 10-year-old boy was found in a field with his throat cut, led the Coroner to observe: ‘if doubts ever arise as to the policy of publishing the proceedings of coroners’ inquests, the impolicy of doing so was clearly manifest’.¹⁴ However, this reality, particularly for political and social elites, was also a matter of concern. The expanding ability to read enabled the masses to engage not only with texts which were considered desirable for them, promoting social conformity and cohesion, but also ones which challenged the status quo. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the emerging Evangelical revival was seeking to make the masses ‘respectable’ by boosting their moral consciousness, figures like Mrs Hannah More feared the impact of traditional popular literature, such as broadsheets and chapbooks, often with their bluntly worded and sensationally described crimes and bad behaviour. Of even more concern to such figures, though, were the politically radical productions of that period, from writers and journalists such as Thomas Paine and his populariser, Daniel Eaton, and William Cobbett.

Mrs Hannah More’s enterprise in publishing the Cheap Repository Tracts was intended to counter the effects on the masses of such unfortunate reading matter.¹⁵ While she achieved considerable success in supplanting chapbooks, broadsheets and radical journalism were little touched by this and similar exercises, as the publishing enterprises associated with Chartism underline.¹⁶ It was the greater detail of sensational crime that newspapers contained that brought about the eventual demise of broadsheets, as the affection of figures like Sam Weller for the papers, and the police reports in them, in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers indicates.¹⁷ But, as the satirical comment in Pickwick Papers suggests, this was by no means an improvement from the point of view of the concerned respectable classes of the 1830s and 1840s; especially given the challenge to both the established provincial press and the mainstream nationals provided in the shape of the growth of Chartist newspapers during that period. The Northern Star, for example, was a commercial enterprise comparable to mainstream newspapers such as The Times. While, as the title suggests, it had the profile of a provincial paper, it had a much wider circulation than most such papers. It was, of course, primarily concerned with providing a diet of political news with a radical edge, but, ominously, it was a title which also devoted real space to crime reportage and comment on the law, presenting the same challenge to the established system.

For instance, the Northern Star announced: ‘Dewsbury riot created by the Government, through the medium of their tools “Justice” Ingham and Police Magistrate Greenwood’. Under this headline were powerfully inflammatory statements against the recently amended Poor L...