centralised detective force in the country, consisting of two inspectors and six
sergeants, with a small number of constables.
The detective branch’s remit was serious crimes, particularly murders. The
freedom of movement that detectives enjoyed, as opposed to constables
following a prescribed ‘beat’, enabled them to investigate and pursue
criminals more effectively. They used informers and contacts in the criminal
underworld. They also undertook political inquiries, fraud cases, protection
duties for diplomatic and political figures, private investigations for
individuals, and surveillance of possible foreign terrorists. The detective force
provided a rich seam of material for novelists such as Charles Dickens and
Wilkie Collins, whose sympathetic portrayal of the officers did much to create
a very positive public impression.^10
Improvements to policing in the city took time to have an effect in more
rural districts. Highway robbery, petty theft, and assaults were common and
hard to deal with when miles of countryside and forest offered sanctuary to
criminals. For example, the majority of Surrey crimes that were successfully
prosecuted were those which occurred in the South London districts, rather
than those in more remote parishes. Two famous and much reported murder
cases in Surrey did result in convictions. The first is commemorated today by
a headstone set up in Thursley churchyard.
In 1786, a sailor, whose name was never discovered, stopped at the Red
Lion pub in Thursley. He fell to talking to, and buying drinks for, some men
he met there, and offered to help them on their way across the Devil’s
Punchbowl, a wellknown local valley, towards Hindhead and the road to
Portsmouth, where they claimed to have berths waiting them aboard ships.
The young sailor’s body was found naked, mutilated, and almost decapitated,
where the robbers and murderers had pushed him down the side of the
Punchbowl. Locals had seen the crime, and the felons were soon taken up.
They pleaded guilty at the assizes in Kingston upon Thames, executed, and
their bodies tarred and displayed on the gibbet for many years at Hindhead.
The second notorious Surrey case took place in 1817. A customer entering
the Godalming shoemaker’s shop of Mr George Chennel found the elderly
housekeeper lying with her throat cut on the floor, partially blocking the door.
Calling in some neighbours to help, the customer and several others climbed
the stairs and discovered Mr Chennel’s body in his bed, his throat almost
severed through, and with bruises suggesting that he had put up a fight in his
defence. From the temperature of the bodies, the witnesses believed that the
assaults must have been committed on the previous night. A hammer found
next to Mr Chennel’s body appeared to be one of the murder weapons.
CRIME IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY AND EMPIRE