PAST CRIMESguilty of crimes such as stealing rabbits, failing to attend school, keeping bad
company and being either outside of, or not under parental control.
Fingerprint evidence began to appear in courts–the first conviction on this
form of evidence took place in 1902 when Harry Jackson left his fingerprint
on the newly painted windowsill of a house that he robbed. Dr Henry Faulds
had tried to get the Metropolitan Police interested in the use of fingerprint
evidence in 1886, but they were at that stage dismissive of the idea. In 1892
Francis Galton had published a study of fingerprints, proving their uniqueness
to each individual, and finally in 1901 the first fingerprint bureau was set up in
Britain.
Recording of crime was necessarily done with pencil and paper in the days
before computers. Recently a detective’s notebook came up for sale at a well
known auction house. The author was a detective inspector based in
Manchester, and in the early 1900s he compiled a list of offenders with details
of their appearances, aliases, photographs and convictions. His ‘rogues
gallery’included burglars, safe breakers, petty thieves,‘brothel thieves’and
habitual offenders such as Ernest Bell, aged twenty in 1912, whose criminal
career escalated from stealing pigeons (fined £5), stealing a bicycle (twelve
lashes), and stealing jellies (five years in a reformatory) to shopbreaking, for
which he was sent to prison.
The Edwardian period saw one of the most famous cases of archaeological
fraud–the Piltdown affair. In 1912 Charles Dawson, a solicitor and amateur
geologist, presented a jawbone and skull fragments to the Geological Society
of London. He claimed to have found them in a gravel pit near Piltdown in
Sussex, where he had been digging for fossils. He claimed the bones to be
those of an early hominid, 500,000 to 1,000,000 years old. The find was
attested to by Dawson’s friend, Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of the
geological section of the British Museum. Few early hominid remains had
ever been found, and it was only in 1907 that the remains of Homo
heidelbergensishad been found in Germany. None had so far been discovered
in Britain, so Dawson’s evidence was greeted with much excitement. Later
discoveries of a canine tooth and a piece of carved fossil elephant bone were
made in 1914 and 1915 at Piltdown. Dawson himself died in 1916 and for
forty years, the Piltdown fossils were regarded as genuine.
However, doubts began to grow. New discoveries of fossil human bones
from round the world failed to match the Piltdown material and, in the late
1940s, a scientist from the Natural History Museum ran some tests. The
fluorine in the teeth could now be dated using newly developed techniques,
and the Piltdown specimens were found to be less than 50,000 years old and