What do the police display in their museums? Until now, the answer was only known to serving officers and a select band of VIPs. The arrival of The Crime Museum Uncovered exhibition at the Museum of London will allow members of the public to view a range of objects associated with cases ranging from the infamous to the all-but forgotten. But the 600 artefacts on loan from the Metropolitan Police are not just macabre relics of desperate acts; they also shed light on how detection has evolved over the decades, and the way in which the Force presents its history to fledgling officers.
The presence of weapons such as guns and knives or replicas of terrorist bombs in a teaching collection designed to ready recruits for the dangers they could face is hardly surprising. Far more challenging is the presence of seemingly innocuous everyday objects. Usually the presence of such artefacts in a museum provides an opportunity to illustrate a culture’s technology, trading links, artistry, or beliefs. Here, though, the wider social implications of mundane, mass- produced merchandise are eclipsed by their use in unintended ways, sometimes with tragic consequences.
‘What I find most poignant are the personal items’, says Jackie Keily, exhibition co-curator at the Museum of London, ‘things that belonged to people, like stockings or a scarf, which you can imagine lying around a house. And which, because of a terrible situation or circumstance, ended up as a weapon. It’s easier to be dispassionate about guns or bombs, because we know what they can do. Everyday items are far more upsetting, in a way. But these items still relate back to powerful stories, which it’s important to tell.’
Curating the detectives
Today, the Metropolitan Police’s Crime Museum holds in the region of 2,000 artefacts. It emerged in the mid-1870s, out of a collection of objects that had been retained in a haphazard way as teaching aids and even souvenirs of famous cases. The impetus to establish a museum – albeit one that was strictly out of bounds to the public – stemmed from the confluence of two developments. One was the increasing formalisation of training methods, which meant that more thought was being expended on teaching techniques. The other was a change in legislation that made the police liable for prisoners’ property, often evidence gathered in the course of an investigation, while they were behind bars. As much of this subsequently went unclaimed, the police were left in possession of unprecedented quantities of case material.
‘The exhibition is very much about the Crime Museum collection’, says Jackie. ‘Some of the earliest objects are 11 death masks from Newgate, which were taken from prisoners executed outside the prison. Up until the 1860s, public execution was the norm, and it would draw crowds of thousands of people. The death masks are made out of plaster, and they were probably cast for study as part of what was then seen as a scientific subject: phrenology. This involved taking measurements of the head and skull, and the idea was that one would be able to identify criminals from the shape of their head. At that time, phrenologists were very keen to get casts of the heads of known criminals, to help build up a database of what they looked like. Obviously it didn’t work.’
‘There was a lot of pseudo-science around at the time, but some of these ideas proved very successful, like fingerprinting. The first time that a fingerprint secured a murder conviction in Britain was in 1905, from a mark left on a cashbox by the Stratton brothers in a botched raid.’ Fingerprinting, of course, remains a staple of police investigation techniques, and it proved pivotal to the resolution of a famous case in 1963. ‘One of the biggest collections they have is material associated with the Great Train Robbery’, Jackie reveals. ‘A lot of this is from Leatherslade Farm, where the gang holed up after the robbery. Famously, the material included Monopoly money. But the gang left in a hurry, and although they wiped down the surfaces, they forgot to clean the everyday objects like cups, plates, and wine bottles. So all of these objects have keyhole shaped labels attached to them, pointing to where fingerprints were found.’
‘During the robbery, the train driver was hit over the head, and never really recovered from his injuries. He died young. It is very sad, and that’s a side that we want to bring out, because otherwise the Train Robbery can be a lot like the Krays: just another mythologised part of the Swinging Sixties. But real people were injured, and, in the case of the Krays, real people were murdered. The Krays also feature in the exhibition. We have a briefcase with cyanide and a syringe concealed within it, which was going to be used to assassinate one of their enemies. The idea was that pulling a ring on the briefcase made the syringe slide out. It was very much of its time, and when it was initially produced as evidence Reggie asked “Is James Bond going to give evidence in this case?”. But it would have worked.’
‘Learning about these cases allows new officers to discover the history of the Metropolitan Police. The museum has always been based at their headquarters, and it illustrates the longevity of investigation. Now that we can all see these objects too, they remind us that people do care, they do investigate, and they keep trying to find the answers. It often takes hard work by many people, not just the police, but also families and friends, but people will push and push to get answers. That’s a strong, positive message that can be taken from this.’
All images: Museum of London
