From then on Charlie Peace was on the run, wanted for murder, with a reward on his head of £100. Burgling as he went from town to town and narrowly evading capture, he came in time to London, where he eventually settled in 5 East Terrace, Evelina Road, Peckham. His wife, Hannah, was installed in the basement with her son, Willie. Peace occupied the other rooms with a widowed girlfriend, Susan Grey (or Bailey), aged about thirty – ‘A dreadful woman for drink and snuff,’ said Peace. They passed themselves off as Mr and Mrs Thompson and before long she bore him a son. The house was richly furnished, adorned with a quick turnover of other people’s possessions, and alive with dogs, cats and rabbits, canaries, parrots and cockatoos. As the women were always quarrelling it must have been a very clamorous household. In the evenings, Peace sometimes entertained friends and neighbours with musical soirées, at which he played a fiddle he had made himself, recited monologues and sang.
Meanwhile, he continued his trade, driving around south London by day in his pony and trap to look for likely ‘cribs’ to crack, returning to them at night with his tools concealed in a violin case. He dressed well – ‘The police never think of suspecting anyone who wears good clothes’ – and looked quite different from his Sheffield self, having shaved off his beard, dyed his hair black and stained his face; he also wore spectacles. He became more successful, more daring than ever, and although his burglaries attracted much attention in the papers, no one knew who the culprit could be. Every Sunday he went to church with Susan Thompson.
It seems in the end that someone grassed on him, perhaps one or other of his women. Certainly the police were out in unusually large numbers in the early hours of Thursday, 10 October 1878 in the south-eastern London suburb of Blackheath.
About 2 am PC Edward Robinson noticed a flickering light in the rear rooms of 2 St John’s Park. He summoned the assistance of PC William Girling and Sergeant Charles Brown, and the latter went round to the front and rang the doorbell, while the other two hovered by the garden wall at the rear. They saw the roving light inside the house go out and a figure make a quick exit from the dining-room window on to the lawn. PC Robinson chased him across the moonlit garden, and was 6 yards away when Peace turned and shouted: ‘Keep back, keep off, or by God, I’ll shoot you!’ PC Robinson said: ‘You had better not!’
Peace fired three times, according to Robinson, narrowly missing the constable’s head. He rushed at Peace. A fourth shot missed, but as they struggled – ‘You bugger, I’ll settle you this time!’ cried Peace – a fifth shot entered Robinson’s right arm above the elbow. Undaunted, but no doubt now enraged, Robinson flung Peace on the ground, seized the revolver and hit Peace with it several times. ‘You bugger!’ said Peace, ‘I’ll give you something else!’ And he allegedly reached for some weapon in one of his pockets. But by then Girling, followed by Brown, had come to Robinson’s assistance and Peace was overpowered.
While he was being searched, Peace made another attempt to escape and was incapacitated by a blow from Girling’s truncheon. A spirit flask, a cheque book and a letter-case, stolen from the house, were found on the captive burglar, as well as a small crowbar, an auger, a jemmy, a gimlet, a centre-bit, a hand-vice and two chisels.
As Robinson was now feeling faint from loss of blood, the other two policemen took charge of Peace. He was escorted to Park Row police station near the Royal Naval College at Greenwich and not far from the River Thames. There he was charged with burglary and with the wounding of PC Robinson with intent to murder. He gave his name as ‘John Ward’, and when asked where he lived he replied: ‘Find out!’ Inspector John Bonney of Blackheath Road police station was put in charge of the case, and later that morning Peace was brought before Detective Inspector Henry Phillips, local head of the newly formed Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, the CID.
DI Phillips later wrote a full, vivid and as yet unpublished memoir of his involvement with Peace. Writing in 1899, he said that Peace’s ‘repulsive’ appearance could be verified by the wax image of him in Madame Tussauds – where it is to this day.
On the morning of 10 October 1878, Phillips and Bonney tried to elicit information from the bloody-minded burglar, who exclaimed: ‘If you want to know where I live, find out! It’s your business!’ Bonney threatened to thrash him – ‘All to no purpose,’ Phillips wrote.
Peace was then lodged in Newgate Prison, where he was visited by DI Phillips more than once. Phillips wrote later: ‘He was very talkative and boasted of his misdeeds as if they were something to be proud of.’ Phillips concluded that although Peace could seem ‘religious-minded’ and a ‘nice quiet old man’, he was really ‘a canting hypocrite’.
The following month, on 19 November 18978, Peace was tried under the name of John Ward at the Central Criminal Court in the Old Bailey, charged with the attempted murder of PC Edward Robinson. The judge was Mr Justice Hawkins; Mr Pollard was the prosecutor and Mr Montague Williams spoke on the prisoner’s behalf.
After a four-minute consultation, the jury found Peace guilty. Asked by Mr Reed, the clerk of the court, if he had anything to say before judgement was pronounced, the prisoner made a lengthy, whining, almost grovelling speech that apparently impressed most of his listeners except the judge. Peace said:
I swear before God I never had the intention to kill the policeman. All I meant was to frighten him in order that I might get away. If I had the intention to kill him I could easily have done it … I declare I did not fire five shots. I only fired four shots … I really did not know the pistol was loaded, and I hope, my lord, you will have mercy upon me. I feel that I have disgraced myself and am not fit to live or die … Give me a chance, my lord, to regain my freedom, and you shall not, with the help of God, have any cause to regret passing a merciful sentence upon me. Oh my lord, you yourself do expect mercy from the hands of your great and merciful God. Oh my lord, do have mercy upon me, a most wretched, miserable man – a man that am not fit to die. I am not fit to live; but with the help of my God, I will try to become a good man …
Peace was sentenced to penal servitude for life.
The judge then called PC Robinson forward, commended his courageous conduct, recommended him for promotion and for a reward of £25. Robinson was duly promoted to sergeant, and for many years a waxwork of him stood in Madame Tussauds beside that of Charles Peace.
The prisoner was incarcerated in Pentonville Prison, which in 1878, wrote Phillips, was ‘a preparatory prison for all convicts sentenced to Penal Servitude. It was here they performed the first nine months of their sentence, under what was known as the solitary system.’
Meanwhile, under pressure from the police, Susan Thompson had revealed the true identity of Mr Thompson, alias John Ward. She told DI Phillips: ‘He is the greatest criminal that ever lived and so you will find out. He used to live at Darnall near Sheffield and is wanted for murder and there is a reward for his arrest.’ Susan Thompson eventually claimed and received that reward – £100.
Phillips was sent north by the Director of the CID, Mr Howard Vincent, to pursue his inquiries and to find Hannah Peace (or Ward), who had returned with her son to Sheffield. It seems that Phillips had never been north of Finchley, and his experiences over the next few weeks left a lasting impression. Over twenty years later he wrote: ‘We went by the Midland Railway, all the way in the dark. The Country looked very dismal, but was lighted up by various bonfires, it being the 5th November.’ He was also very impressed by the Yorkshire police – ‘I had never got in contact with such men before. They seemed to have the Knack of making you feel you had known them for years.’
Hannah Peace (or Ward),