was understandably perturbed to notice blood flying through the open window and spattering her dress. Another passenger heard ‘a horrid howling’ but presumed it was a dog.
When the train arrived at Hackney Wick station, two young clerks entered an empty first-class carriage. They noticed that the seats were wet, red and sticky in a worrying way; they spotted a silver-topped cane, a black leather bag and a battered black beaver hat in the carriage too.
The clerks raised the alarm, the train was halted and the police called. It wasn’t long before the driver of a nearby train complained about a hump on the tracks that was looking a bit corpsey.
In fact, Thomas Briggs was still just about alive. His son was sent for, and identified all the items in the carriage as belonging to his father. Except for the hat. His father’s hat, he said, was very special. It was a very tall top hat made by a city hatter. His father wouldn’t be seen dead in a black beaver, he insisted – especially not one that looked as if someone had sat on it. Also missing were his father’s gold watch and chain.
Briggs died the next day, setting the case in history as Britain’s first rail-borne murder. The nation was shocked that such a thing could take place on the new method of transport that was being hailed as a modern wonder. ‘Who is safe?’ asked the Telegraph. ‘It would be impossible to imagine circumstances of greater apparent security than those which seemed to surround Mr Briggs. Well known – expected at home. Travelling First Class … If we can be murdered thus we may be slain in our pew at church, or assassinated at our dinner table.’
Dinner-table-based assassination thus became a worry for all those who had such tables, and descriptions of Mr Briggs’s unusual topper were circulated far and wide, supplemented by an offer of £300 – around £25,000 today – for hat-related information.
Soon there was a suspect. A Mr Death informed the police that a man had come into his jeweller’s shop and asked for a valuation on a gold watch chain. The man had been disappointed by the figure but accepted it and exchanged it for another chain, which was put in a small cardboard box. The man had had a German accent.
Foreigners, it seemed, were going around murdering hat-wearing City clerks in first-class carriages for substandard watch chains, and understandably the press went ballistic. Reading one such report, a taxi driver, John Matthews, remembered a box marked ‘Death’, which his daughter had been given by a family friend, Franz Muller. And Muller had possessed a hat that fitted the description of the beaver. Matthews gave a full description of the 25-year-old killer; he also happened to have Muller’s address and photograph. Unfortunately, Muller had set sail for America four days beforehand – he had apparently wanted to go for some time, but had suddenly found the money to buy a ticket the day after Briggs was killed.
The game afoot, the police rushed to Muller’s lodgings, where his former landlords said yes, that was his hat (they remembered because foreigners ‘wore them funny’).
Scotland Yard was on the trail and sent three detectives, Matthews and Death to New York on a fast boat to apprehend Muller. Having arrived two weeks before their quarry – how they amused themselves during that time is unknown – they seized Muller. They knew him for certain because he was wearing Briggs’s topper, which he had cut down in an attempt to disguise its identity. He was taken straight back to Britain.
His subsequent trial at the Old Bailey, which began on 27 October, must go down in history as the most hat-obsessed murder trial in history. Much of the evidence was about hats and there were arguments as to how high the top hat should be and whether Muller would have had the skill to amend its height. The defence declared it was all piffle – Matthews had falsely accused Muller for the reward money and the murder must have taken two men to carry out, hat or no hat. They also argued the mass of hysterical newspaper stories meant a fair trial was impossible. In an unusual decision, the judge said that all the media reports and accusations against Muller had actually helped matters because they had acquainted the jury with the case – i.e. they had saved time on all that dreary presentation of evidence in the court.
The jury took a quarter of an hour to convict Muller. His last words before he was publicly hanged were ‘Ich habe es getan’ – ‘I did it’.
The hanging was such a popular affair, with more than 50,000 people coming to see it (many, ironically, arriving by special train services laid on by the railway companies due to popular demand), that there were constant drunken fights and robberies among the spectators – a shameful sight which resulted in the political pressure that ended public executions four years later. The murder itself also resulted in the invention of the emergency communication cord that train passengers could pull to slam on the brakes, and the introduction of windows between carriages, which were named ‘Muller lights’.
Muller’s name lived on in the world of fashion too. As a result of accidentally picking up the wrong hat when he fled the scene of his crime, he started a national trend among young men for shortened toppers, which were known as ‘Muller cut-downs’. If you buy a top hat now, it’s almost certainly styled on Franz Muller’s.
A CASE TOO FAR – CHARLES DILKE EXCLUDES HIMSELF FROM GOVERNMENT, 1885
The sex lives of MPs never cease to amaze the British public and have been entertaining us for a very long time. Charles Dilke MP led the way in the Victorian era – his wife apparently put up with him conducting affairs but things went much more public than they had previously when his sister-in-law’s sister, Virginia Crawford, tearfully confessed to her husband that Dilke, the leading light of the Liberal Party, had ‘ruined’ her when she was a nineteen-year-old new bride, and that they had continued their affair for two years. Not only that, but he had taught her ‘every French vice’ and they had once had a threesome with the maid. What the maid had thought of it all she did not divulge.
Her husband, Donald Crawford MP, sued her for divorce and cited Dilke as a co-respondent. The case became terribly exciting – especially when Dilke claimed that he had never had an affair with Virginia, but he was conducting one with her mother. At the end of the trial, the judge gave one of the oddest decisions in English legal history – that Virginia had had an affair with Dilke, but there was no evidence that he had had one with her. As the public stood pondering this for a while, Dilke made a very foolish decision: he announced that he was going to sue to clear his name from the slur that he was the sort of man who would have an affair with his brother’s wife’s sister, when he was merely the sort of man to have an affair with his brother’s wife’s mother.
But he blundered in the legal application. Instead of bringing the case himself, he petitioned the Queen’s proctor to reopen the original case. This, ruled the judge, meant that he was not actually a party to the trial, merely a witness. So, throughout the week-long case, he was only allowed to sit mute while all sorts of allegations were made about him, and he was not allowed to dispute them one iota. His only chance to speak was when cross-examined about exactly what he had done with whom and where. He lost the case and Gladstone, who had been expected to name Dilke in the forthcoming Cabinet, made a single mark against his name: ‘unavailable’. The effect was far-reaching. Dilke had been the foremost of his generation in the Liberals. Without his leadership, the party ran out of steam and imploded, ensuring Tory governments for many years.
His decision might even have prevented Britain becoming a republic – Dilke was the last MP to suggest such a thing in the House of Commons, earning the eternal hatred of Queen Victoria – and had he gone on to become party leader and Prime Minister who knows what might have happened?
Years later, an inquiry was held. It decided that Virginia had been lying about the affair. Although nothing had happened after she had married, it is possible that she and Dilke had had an affair beforehand and he had reneged
