With plans to turn Bow Street Magistrates’ Court into a hotel, James Morton offers a rogues’ gallery of the celebrated criminals who have appeared at the historic seat of justice

So, after more than 250 years, Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in London, somewhere which could genuinely be called a cradle of English justice, has been sold, and may be turned into a hotel.


Irish property developer Gerry Barrett has bought the building and plans to convert it into a boutique hotel. Will the bedrooms and suites be named after the chief stipendiary magistrates such as de Veil and Fielding, or the criminals – Casement, Crippen, Pankhurst – who passed through the dock? Will dishes in the restaurant be named after famous cases heard there – Salad Lady Chatterley, Lobster Le Neve ?


Magistrate Thomas de Veil moved to Bow Street in 1740. Originally apprenticed to a mercer whose business failed, he joined the army and later became a private secretary of Viscount Galway. Eventually he found his way to Scotland Yard, where he drafted petitions for discharged army officers, before becoming a magistrate in 1729, opening an office first in Leicester Fields, and then Soho.


He was a man who had at least 25 legitimate children and an unspecified number of illegitimate offspring, since his ‘greatest foible was a most irregular passion for the fair sex’, according to one account. Although he was the first justice to sit in open court, promising female witnesses were interviewed in his private room.


He was succeeded in 1748 by the novelist Henry Fielding. He was a fearless and independent man who thought ‘the splendid palaces of the great, are often no other than Newgate with the mask on’. He established the use of the bind-over for juveniles and first offenders, so keeping them apart from the felons.


His most celebrated case was known as the Canning Enigma. A young girl, Eliza Canning, claimed she had been kidnapped and held prisoner in a brothel near Enfield by a Mother Wells, a gypsy named Mary Walsh and another prostitute curiously named Virtue Hall. Fielding believed Canning, but he was sadly deceived. Wells was sentenced to death and Walsh had her hand branded, before they were pardoned when it became clear that Canning and Hall – who had turned King’s evidence – had committed perjury.


Canning received a month’s imprisonment and seven years’ transportation. To the end of her life she maintained her innocence, but it is likely her story was a cover for time with her lover, an abortion or treatment for syphilis. Perm any two. The case provided the plot for Josephine Tey’s novel, The Franchise Affair.


During his time as magistrate, Fielding also established the Bow Street Runners. Initially nicknamed ‘Robin Redbreasts’, on account of their scarlet waistcoats, the original eight Bow Street Runners were the capital’s first band of constables.


The great Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova appeared at the court before blind magistrate Sir John Fielding, who succeeded his brother. In London, Casanova had become besotted with the charms of Marie Charpillon, who led him a merry dance and into Bow Street charged with a breach of the peace. The now middle-aged lover was thoroughly duped – and metaphorically debagged – by her, the affair ending with a bind-over by Fielding, who addressed him in Italian. Casanova was required to find sureties for his good behaviour. He thought well enough of the magistrate, but it was the beginning of the end of his own career.


The celebrated criminals who passed through Bow Street on their way to the Old Bailey would themselves fill several jury boxes in Madame Tussaud’s old Chamber of Horrors. In 1864, Franz Müller was the first man charged with murder on a railway train. He killed Thomas Briggs in a botched robbery and threw the body on to the line between Bow and Hackney Wick. Müller sailed to New York on the SS Victoria, where he was arrested on arrival. A detective had sailed on the faster City of Manchester.


Müller appeared before Frederick Flowers, a barrister with some sort of practice in Lincoln who ‘had now and then a brief in Nottingham, he was hardly known at Derby. He made no pretensions to any remarkable knowledge of the law’. Despite this, Flowers turned out to be a fine magistrate. Müller was hanged.


The chase after Müller was repeated in July 1910 after the body of the one-time actress Belle Elmore was found in the cellar at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. This time the hunter was Inspector Walter Dew, and his quarry the quack dentist Harvey Hawley Crippen and his girlfriend Ethel Le Neve. Dew had rather lazily let them out of his sight during his investigations, and they too fled across the Atlantic on the SS Montrose, posing as father and son. The captain telegraphed to England, and Dew was dispatched on a faster ship.


Crippen was defended by Arthur Newton, the talented if unprincipled and thoroughly dishonest solicitor. When Newton took the brief to Sir Edward Marshall Hall, and was asked to pay cash with the brief by Sir Edward’s clerk, the solicitor stormed out of the clerk’s room and instructed one of the dullest men at the bar, Alfred Tobin. Sir Edward always claimed he would have obtained a manslaughter verdict. Newton was suspended over his conduct of the case and later went to prison for a land fraud.


Famous trials produced great interest among the great and the good, and WS Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) sat on the bench for Crippen’s committal proceedings with the magistrate Arthur Hopkins.


George Joseph Smith – the ‘brides in the bath’ murderer who played ‘Nearer, my God, to thee’ on the harmonium to drown the shrieks of the dying women – was another who two years later passed through Bow Street court on the way to the Old Bailey. He was defended by Sir Edward.


The suffragette movement saw Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst in and out of the court on the way to Holloway – though they cannot in any way be regarded as criminals. The most famous of all criminals in the dock at the court, certainly in modern times, were the Kray twins, their brother Charles and their helpmates.


Then there were the spies and traitors. In 1916, Sir Roger Casement, in a submarine escorting a vessel laden with arms and ammunition – probably on his way to lead an Irish uprising – was captured by a naval patrol boat. He was brought to Bow Street on his way to the Central Criminal Court, where the argument that he could not commit the offence of treason while outside the country failed. He was executed at Pentonville.


Thirty years later, William Joyce – ‘Lord Haw Haw’ as he was known – was captured near the Danish border and he followed Casement’s route. When the spies Harry Houghton, Ethel Gee and their dock-mates appeared before Sir Robert Barraclough, they asked for bail so ‘they could clear up a few things at home’. But home was up to 14 years away.


Although for most of these characters Bow Street was simply a stopover, the court has seen plenty of trials that began and ended there. Very often for defendants like Henry Vizetelly – charged with possessing obscene publications including the works of Flaubert, de Maupassant and Balzac – it was a short step to the cells. He received three months in 1889 for publishing an expurgated edition of Zola.


In fact, Bow Street was the battleground, or rather destruction ground, for many books including DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow, when Sir John Dickinson said he regretted that Methuen & Co ‘had allowed its reputation to be sullied by the publication’.


In 1928, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness did no better. The publisher Jonathan Cape produced an impressive line-up of authors, including Virginia Woolf and EM Forster to argue its literary merits, but Sir Chartres Biron was having nothing of it. It was about ‘inversion’ and that was obscene.


Magistrates’ courts were regularly used to obtain destruction orders if it was feared a jury might acquit on a charge of obscene publication.


Fanny Hill was one of the next to suffer at Bow Street, and had Lady Chatterley been dealt with on a destruction order by one of the more austere magistrates of the day, instead of by a jury, our wives and maidservants might have had to wait many years before they read of the exploits of the naughty gamekeeper.


Ah well – those were the days. Bring on the room service, soup and Krayfish.


James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist