George Merrett was, like so many young workers in Victorian London, an immigrant from the countryside, and so was his wife, Eliza. He came from a village in Wiltshire, she from Gloucestershire. They had both been farm labourers, and, with no protection from unions, no solidarity with their fellows, had been paid a pittance to perform pointless tasks for pitiless masters. They had met at a farm show in the Cotswolds, and vowed to leave together for the immeasurable possibilities that were offered by London, now only two hours away on the new express train from Swindon. They moved first to north London, where their oldest child, Clare, was born in 1860; then they shifted into the city centre; and finally in 1867, the family having become too large, costly and manual work too scarce, they found themselves near the brewery site in the bustling wen of Lambeth.
The young couple’s surroundings and lodgings were exactly as the illustrator Gustave Doré had drawn on one of his horrified expeditions from Paris: a dim world of bricks and soot and screeching iron, of huddled tenements, of tiny backyards with privy and clothes-boiler and washing-line, and everywhere an air of damp and gritty stench, and even a rough-hewn rollicking hugger-mugger devil-may-care and peculiarly London type of good cheer. Whether the Merretts missed the fields and the cider and the skylarks, or whether they imagined that ideal truly ever was the world they had left, we shall never know.
For by the winter of 1871 George and Eliza had, as was typical of the inhabitants of the dingier quarters of Victorian London, a very substantial family: six children, ranging from Clare at nearly twelve years old, to Freddy at twelve months. Mrs Merrett was about to be confined with her seventh pregnancy. They were a poor family, as were most in Lambeth: George Merrett brought home twenty-four shillings a week, a miserable sum even then. With rent payable to the Archbishop, and with food needed for the eight ever open mouths, theirs were straitened circumstances indeed.
On the Saturday morning, just before 2 a.m., Merrett was awakened by a neighbour tapping on his window, as prearranged. He rose from bed, and readied himself for the dawn shift. It was a bitter morning, and he dressed as warmly as he could afford: a threadbare greatcoat over the kind of smock-jacket that Victorians called a slop, a tattered grey shirt, corduroy trousers tied at the ankle with twine, heavy socks and black boots. The clothes were none too clean: but he was to heave coal for the next eight hours, and could not be bothered with appearance.
His wife recalled him striking a light before leaving home: her last sight of him was under one of the bright gas lamps with which Lambeth’s streets had recently been outfitted. His breath was visible in the cold night air – or maybe he was just puffing on his pipe – and he walked purposefully down to the end of Cornwall Road before turning left into Upper Ground, and then down to its continuation, Belvedere Road. The night was clear and starlit and, once his footsteps had faded, soundless except for the clanking and puffing of the ever present railway engines.
Mrs Merrett had no reason to be concerned: she assumed, as she had for each of the twenty previous nights on which her husband had worked the dawn shift, that all would be well. George was simply making his way as usual towards the high walls and ornate gates of the great brewery where he worked, shovelling coal beneath the shadow of the great red lion – the brewer’s symbol – that was one of London’s better-known landmarks. There may have been little money in the job; but working at so famous an institution as the Red Lion Brewery, well, that was some reason for pride.
But that night George Merrett never reached his destination. As he passed the entrance to Tenison Street, between where the south side of the Lambeth Lead Works abuts on to the north wall of the brewery, there came a sudden cry. A man shouted at him, appeared to be chasing him, was yelling furiously. Merrett was frightened: this was something more than a mere footpad, a silent and menacing figure who lurked in the dark with a cosh and a mask. Merrett began to run in terror, slipping and sliding on the frost-slick cobbles. He looked back: the man was still there, still chasing after him, still shouting angrily. Then, quite incredibly, he stopped and raised a gun at him, took aim and fired.
The shot missed, whistling past and striking the brewery wall. George Merrett tried to run faster. He cried out for help. There was another shot. Perhaps another. And then a final shot that struck the unfortunate Merrett in the neck. He fell heavily on to the cobbled pavement, his face down, a pool of blood spreading around him.
Moments later came the running footfalls of Constable Burton, who found the man, lifted him, attempted to comfort him. The other policeman, William Ward, summoned a passing hansom cab up from the still busy thoroughfare ofWaterloo Road. They picked up the wounded man gently from the ground and hoisted him into the vehicle and ordered the driver to take them as fast as possible to St Thomas’s Hospital, 500 yards further south on Belvedere Road, across from the Archbishop’s London palace. The horses did their best, their hoofs striking fire from the cobbles as they rushed the victim to the emergency entrance.
It was a fruitless journey. Doctors examined George Merrett, attempted to close the gaping wound in his neck. But his carotid artery had been severed, his spine snapped by two large-calibre bullets.
The man who had perpetrated this unprecedented crime was, within moments of committing it, in the firm custody of Constable Henry Tarrant. He was a tall, well-dressed man of what the policeman described as ‘military appearance’, with an erect bearing and a haughty air. He held a smoking revolver in his right hand. He made no attempt to run, but stood silently as the policeman approached.
‘Who is it that has fired?’ asked the constable.
‘I did,’ said the man, and held up the gun.
Tarrant snatched it from him. ‘Whom did you fire at?’ he asked.
The man pointed down Belvedere Road, and to the figure lying motionless beneath a street lamp, just outside the brewery store. He made the only droll remark that history records him as having made – but a remark that, as it happens, betrayed one of the driving weaknesses of his life.
‘It was a man,’ he said, with a tone of disdain. ‘You do not suppose I would be so cowardly as to shoot a woman!’
By now two other policemen had arrived on the scene, as had other inquisitive locals – among them the Hungerford Bridge toll-collector, who at first had not dared go out ‘for fear I would take a bullet’, and a woman undressing in her room in Tenison Street – a street in which it was apparently far from uncommon for women to be undressing at all hours. Constable Tarrant, pointing towards the victim and ordering his two fellow policemen to see what they could do for him, and prevent a crowd from gathering, escorted the supposed – and unprotesting – murderer to the Tower Street Police Station.
On the way his prisoner became rather more voluble, though Tarrant describes him as cool and collected, and clearly not affected by drink. It had all been a terrible accident, he said; he had shot the wrong man, he insisted. He was after someone else, someone quite different. Someone had broken into his room; he was simply chasing him away, defending himself as anyone surely had a perfect right to do.
‘Don’t handle me!’ he then said, when Tarrant put a hand on his shoulder. But he added, rather more gently, ‘You have not searched me, you know.’
‘I’ll do that at the station,’ replied the constable.
‘How do you know I haven’t got another gun, and might shoot you?’
The policeman, plodding and imperturbable, replied that if he did have another gun, perhaps he would be so kind as to keep it in his pocket, for the time being.
‘But I do have a knife,’ replied the prisoner.
‘Keep that in your pocket also,’ said the stolid peeler.