Shundicknicks, spielers and gonoffs
Christopher Howse
STINIE: MURDER ON THE COMMON by Andrew Rose Bodley Head, £9.95 There's nothing like a mysterious mur- der to spawn books. And the murder on Clapham Common in the early hours of 1 January 1911 was a good one. Leon Beron, a shady Jewish immigrant who was at home in the criminal streets of Whitechapel, was found dead with a black handkerchief shrouding his head. Beneath it, a horseshoe-shaped death blow had broken his forehead and two S-shaped cuts marked his cheeks. A few days later, a 29-year-old Russian Jew called Stinie Morrison was arrested and in due course found guilty of his murder.
But did Morrison do it, and, if not, why was Beron murdered? Andrew Rose, a barrister, is convinced he did not. He calls Morrison 'a representative alien criminal whom the authorities were very anxious to see publicly condemned, and they had no qualms when it came to cutting corners.' After all, the Clapham Common murder took place only a few days after the murder of three policemen by armed anarchists in Houndsditch. Then, while Beron's body was under the pathologist's knife, police and anarchists were exchanging shots in Sidney Street, down the road from Beron's haunts. (Among those who escaped the siege was Jacob Peters, who was to become deputy head of Lenin's Cheka, responsible for countless future murders and acts of torture.) It was all most sinister and Lon- don was outraged.
Morrison was a likely murderer. He lived in a world of poor honest Jewish immigrants, poor crooked Jewish immig- rants and ordinary English criminals, of shundicknicks (ponces), spielers (illegal gambling dens), gonoffs (thieves), and whizzers (pickpockets). Twelve years be- fore Morrison landed in England, the same Whitechapel police who arrested him had been taunted by a scrap of verse: I'm not a butcher
Nor a Yid Nor yet a foreign skipper, But I'm your own light hearted friend,
Yours truly Jack the Ripper.
The level of criminality in Morrison's neighbourhood may be judged from one short street off Brick Lane in which 64 men on parole from prison lived.
Morrison was a villain. He had arrived in England from the Ukraine in 1898, aged 19. Of the next 12 years, he spent 11 in prison. Moreover, he was a wild fantasist who liked to claim that he had been a cowboy and was an Australian, despite his broken English. He had called himself Moses Tagger, Morris Stein, Morris Jag- ger, Morris Stein again, and then Stinie (or Steinie) Morrison. The circumstantial evi- dence against him was strong: he had spent the evening with Beron and was the last man to be seen with him. He knew Clapham Common well, having spent some time there as a baker (`making an effort to find honest employment', says Mr Rose, without warrant). Though the jury found him guilty, Mor- rison was never hanged. Mr Rose has it in for the 'authorities', but the judge at his trial was careful not to endorse the jury's verdict; there was an unsuccessful appeal, then a commutation to life imprisonment on the insistence of the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill. There had been a petition of 75,000 for his reprieve and of 42,000 for his release. None of this points to an establishment conspiracy or an ex- pression of public xenophobia as Mr Rose suggests.
It is likely Morrison did not kill Beron himself. Many attempts have been made to solve the mystery before, the most recent being Eric Linklater's The Corpse on the Common in 1971. Linkiater blames it on an unknown Mr X. Mr Rose, who has had access to Home Office files for the first time, shows X to have been the estranged husband of a prostitute, Ethel Pool, who became notorious for making wild claims about the murder. Linklater also blames the Russian secret service, anxious to provoke the British police into action against anarchist societies in the East End. Far-fetched.
Mr Rose's main conjecture (though he makes darker hints, which I shan't reveal) is much more reasonable. Beron was a receiver of stolen goods and a police informer. The Ss on his face stood for szpieg or szpic, a sign cut on informers' bodies during the Polish revolt against Russia in 1863.
It is a pity that Arthur Harding is not still alive. He was a criminal and gangster, born in the Nichol (the `Jago' of Arthur Morri- son's novel), and knew Stinie well in prison. Mr Rose does not discuss his opinions, but Harding held conversations between 1973 and 1976 with Raphael Samuel, recorded in his East End Under- world. Harding confirms that Beron (or Behren as he calls him) was a fence and says:
Morrison was told a gang had a large haul of stolen jewellery to dispose of, but it was highly dangerous to do any business in the usual place because of police activity, so the meeting place was made for Clapham Com- mon, because Morrison was acquainted with the locality . . . When they arrived at the meeting place, Morrison left Behren with his executioners, not knowing the fate that awaited his former friend. After leaving him, Morrison then went to a house he knew and burgled it. The next morning, he went into Cockie Flatnose's place — a spieler off the Commercial Road — and heard the news. He shouted excitedly: `So that's what they got me to lumber him for.'
Morrison died after serving 10 years of his sentence. Mr Rose tells his story racily, with more documentary support than any author to date. In his anxiety to blacken the reputation of the judge who con- demned Morrison, Mr Justice Darling, he even criticises his jokes. The example he gives seems all right to me: a witness in another trial told of going into the Elephant public house to use the tele- phone; 'A trunk call?' enquired the judge.
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