Henry Lucy

Sixty Years in the Wilderness: More Passages by the Way

Smith, Elder & Co., 1912.

October 30, 1888. On the stroke of seven o'clock a chill October morning breaking over Regent's Park beheld a strange sight. It was nothing less than Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Police, chased by bloodhounds from cover to cover, and not a policeman in sight? A gentleman who was present tells me the agility with which Sir Charles covered the grounds as the hounds approached within measurable distance was more than could have been expected from his age and his official responsibility.

The author was a well-known journalist of the period, reporting for both The Observer and Punch on parliamentary matters. The Commissioner had been appointed two years earlier: one of the first problems he faced was the Jack the Ripper murders.

The little entertainment took place in conjunction with a Yorkshire gentleman who is the happy possessor of a pair of famous bloodhounds. Sir Charles, anxious to test for himself the possibility of the dogs rendering service in connexion with the Whitechapel murders, made an appointment in Regent's Park, and, anxious to obtain the fullest personal information on the subject, he made believe that he (Sir Charles) was the murderer. Assuming a guilty air, he swiftly made off across the Park. After he had got a fair start the hounds were placed on the scent, and in two cases led straight up to the place where the agitated head of the Metropolitan Police was hiding

Warren's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says of the bloodhounds: 'His supposed support for the use of bloodhounds, two of which apparently got lost during trials in fog on Tooting Common, was not true. He remained sceptical, and had the animals imposed on him by the Home Office reacting to public pressure. In the end the dogs were not used because Warren refused to buy them.' There is no mention of the Regent's Park trial.