Met police Black Museum items to go on public display for first time

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jun/04/met-police-black-museum-exhibition

Version 0 of 1.

A handful of objects including a Victorian cast of the head of a hanged man and a delicate lace pillow embroidered with her own hair by a woman arrested hundreds of times for public drunkenness have left one of the most private collections in the world for the first time, for the first public exhibition from the Black Museum of the Metropolitan police.

But the doors of the small rooms in Scotland Yard, filled to overflowing with thousands of macabre and poignant objects tracing centuries of crime and detective work, will remain firmly closed: the exhibition will open at the Museum of London in October.

The Museum of London curators Julia Hoffbrand and Jackie Keily said they had chosen objects to illustrate both human stories and developments in detective work.

All 600 objects chosen for the exhibition have been vetted by an ethics committee including representatives of the police, victims of crime, and the London mayor’s policing and crime office. Their verdict ruled out a gruesome reminder of an infamous serial killer, the cooking stove on which Dennis Nilsen boiled down parts of the bodies of young men he murdered in the 1970s and 80s.

Finbarr Whooley, director of content at the Museum of London, said not only were there still families of missing men tormented by the thought that their paths might have crossed Nilsen’s – he is believed to have killed at least a dozen men, but the true total was never established – but there was nothing new about either the crime or its detection. Nilsen was caught after plumbers found a blocked drain choked with human flesh.

The Met assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt said he would be horrified if people viewed the exhibition as akin to the London Dungeon visitor attraction. “I will be very disappointed if anyone comes away thinking we are glamorising crime in any way,” he said.

The death mask is that of Daniel Good, whose success in evading a police hunt for weeks after he murdered his wife in 1842 led to the formation of a dedicated team of detectives.

David Greenwood was convicted of murder in 1918 after detectives traced the wire on a coat button found at the crime scene to the factory where he worked. He had been badly injured in the first world war, and there was a public outcry over his conviction, leading to the sentence being commuted to life imprisonment. He was freed in 1933, still protesting his innocence.

A bloody thumbprint on a cashbox became the first used in obtaining a conviction in 1905, sending to the gallows the Stratton brothers who battered an elderly couple to death in a bungled raid. Almost 7o years later the Great Train Robbers made the same mistake: they wiped down all the surfaces as they left their Buckinghamshire farmhouse hideout, but forgot the bottles and cans they were throwing out. A fingerprint on an empty Veuve Cliquot champagne bottle became part of the evidence against them.

If the exhibition doesn’t glamorise the criminals, it will humanise them. Charles Peace, a cat burglar hanged in 1879, is represented not just by his ingenious folding stepladder but by the violin with which he was apparently an excellent performer.

The saddest object is the little lace pin cushion, embroidered with pious mottoes in her own hair by Annie Parker. She was an alcoholic arrested more than 400 times, but clearly found some kindness in the unexpected surroundings of the House of Detention where she made the cushion in 1879 and presented it to the warden.

• The Crime Museum Uncovered: Museum of London is open from October 2015 to April 2016.