MUSEUM OF CRIME

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 August 1938, Page 9

MUSEUM OF CRIME

SCOTLAND YARD EXHIBITS GRISLY RELICS. MANY INGENIOUS CONTRIVANCES Packed into three small rooms in the basement of New Scotland Yard, and inaccessible to the general public, is one of the most grisly collections in London, court “exhibits” and relics of almost every crime of importance that has taken place in the last three-quar-ters of a century (says the “Observer”). Our attention was first drawn to a number of plaster death-masks ranged overhead round the walls —those of criminals executed by hanging, and all taken for anthropometric reasons, in the days when executions were still carried out in public. Two bunches of labelled ropes with nooses in their ends hang from the ceiling in two corners —ropes by means of which some 20 or 30 malefactors ended their lives.

A light rope ladder used by a modern cat burglar is displayed beside the collapsible wooden ladder used by the notorious Charles Peace, executed at Leeds in 1879 for the murder of Alfred Dyson. Peace, as your guide explained, was “a very little man.” His ladder, carried in a concertina case, is an ingenious contrivance of connected wooden slats which can be open vertically and hooked over a projecting cornice. The top edge of each slat provided Peace with the necessary foothold as he pulled himself up. Nearby, in a glass case, are his revolver, tools, and dark lantern, the latter with an improvised wick of a tartan material of which his wife was making a dress at the time of his arrest. RELICS OF CRIPPEN. Bludgeons and pistols of various ages with which people have been done to death line the walls of one room. In the showcases are two “coshes,” or socalled life-preservers, which figured in a very recent crime, together with a number of knives and saws used for a variety of ghoulish purposes—nearby two trunks in which human remains were deposited in railway cloakrooms. Another case contains relics of Crippen, including portions of the pyjama suit in which Mrs Crippen’s remains were buried beneath the flagstones of a cellar of a house in the north of London. Crippen was the first criminal whose arrest was brought about by wireless. The maker’s name tab on the jacket of those pyjamas helped to bring about his conviction for murder. There are bottles of arsenic distilled from flypapers and administered to victims in brandy, wine, and meat extract, portions of a tin of weedkiller, and a lengthy statement written in prison by Armstrong, the poisoner. The service pistol with which P.C. Gutteridge was murdered in Essex, together with the stockinette masks used by his slayers, and some of the contents of the doctor’s attache case in the stolen car from which the deed was committed, lie in a case near' the running board of the car, which still bears bloodstains. The distinctive scratches made by the base plate of every revolver on a brass cartridge case .helped to bring home this crime to its perpetrators. A list of all the relics in those three small rooms would fill a considerable catalogue and their history many books. But not all the exhibits have to do with murder and sudden death. Sir Roger Casement’s cocked hat, sword, and Foreign Office uniform were found among his effects in London. There is a pincushion embroidered like an old-fashioned sampler with texts and mottoes for which human hair has been used instead of silk or thread. It was the work of a woman with over 300 convictions for drunkenness. The pincushion was always handed over to the chaplain on her release from gaol and given back to her on her inevitable return a few weeks or months later. "FLANNEL FOOT’S” SHOES. There are the relics, including the indiarubber shoes, of a burglar known as “Flannel Foot,”' who gave Scotland Yard a very long hunt before his final capture a few years ago; safe-crack-ing implements and cutters; some of them laboriously hand-made; a huge pair of shears used for nipping the nuts off the steel grilles protecting shop doors; a bar of gilded brass filled with mercury and inlet with two or three small nuggets of genuine gold and sold to some gullible,citizen for £2,000. There is the roulette wheel so contrived that any number can be made to turn up at will; a crown and anchor board, and a “put and take” top by

using which the management cannot lose; and a home-made attache case with a spring bottom used for removing small articles off a shop counter. Three large sheets of forged health insurance stamps shown in a glass case on one wall are samples of a consignment to the value of over £7,000 manufactured abroad and brought to England in the bottom of a portmanteau with a dummy tin lining for sale to employers. Ingeniously forged notes and cheques ->f all demominations have a showcase to themselves, and here the most surprising exhibit is a postal order for 3s 6d which one forger must have spent many hours in altering to 8s 6d. It was not a mere matter of

changing the large black figures, but of redrawing the minutely-printed inner frame composed of "three and sixpence three and sixpence,” repeated ox er and over again and substituting "eight and sixpence.” It is superb example of minute and accurate penmanship; but for the sake of the five shillings gain a surprising waste of time unless it was done for sheer love of the art of forgery.

“It's surprising the length to which seme criminals will go in making their preparations,” our guide told us. “But it’s the obvious things they so often forget that generally leads to their downfall.” There is consolation in that.