MÜLLERED

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Thomas Briggs worked in the City of London as a clerk. On 9 July 1864 he took a train from Fenchurch Street Railway Station in order to return to his home in Hackney Wick. During the journey he was attacked and thrown from the carriage in which he had been sitting. He was spotted by the driver of an oncoming train. He was taken to The Top of The Morning pub, where he died from the injuries that he had sustained. He was the first person to have been murdered as a result of having been assaulted while travelling upon a train. It was noticed that his top hat was missing. A black beaver hat had been left in its stead.

The Metropolitan Police investigation was led by Detective Inspector Richard Tanner. A Mr Matthews, a cab driver, came forward to say that he believed that Franz Müller, a young German tailor, had carried out the assault. The fellow had been engaged to Matthews’s daughter. The cabbie was able to confirm that the young man was given to wearing a black beaver hat. When the police went to arrest Müller they learnt that he had already sailed for New York.¹ D.I. Tanner and a Scotland Yard colleague boarded an iron-hulled steamer, which was faster than the wooden sail packet upon which the tailor was travelling. The pair were able to meet his vessel when she docked at Staten Island. They arrested him.

At the time, the American Civil War was being waged. The Union side was of the belief that Britain had been supporting the Confederacy unduly. Therefore, the man’s extradition proved to be the subject of diplomatic negotiation rather than just due legal process. The matter was complicated by King Wilhelm I of Prussia claiming that Müller was being victimised because he was a German.

Eventually, the tailor was sent back to London. At his trial much of the evidence that was presented against him was circumstantial. However, after only fifteen minutes’ withdrawal, the jury concluded that he was guilty. He was sentenced to be hanged outside Newgate Prison in November 1864. On the scaffold, watched by a crowd of over 50,000 people, he confessed to having attacked Briggs.

Müller had used his tailoring skills to rework his victim’s hat to create a new shape. When he was arrested in New York the headgear had been discovered in his luggage. His notoriety may have helped the Müller Cut-Down, as it became known, to become a fashionable item of headwear. Winston Churchill was to be given to sporting one.

There was a lasting legacy from the case. This was an improvement in train security that led to the development and installation of an emergency cord to enable passengers to communicate to the train driver that something is awry. There may have also been a second one. It has been claimed that the slang term ‘mullered’, to refer to someone as being very drunk, may have derived from the murder. This is plausible given the fact that Cockney slang tends to be associative and ‘slaughtered’ is also a term for extreme drunkenness.

¹. For most of the 19^thC New York City possessed one of the world’s largest urban German-speaking populations.

© David Backhouse 2024