Death in the Bow Street cells

Why did a Victorian private detective kill himself after being arrested?

It was August 1899, and Robert Charles Joel was brought into Bow Street police court in handcuffs. The police had been trying to find him for some time. They did not search him - it was not standard practice to do so, and they saw no reason to do so anyway, as he looked fairly chipper. As much as anyone who had been arrested could be.

Joel, a 47-year-old man who lived in Bermondsey, was taken down to the cells. The police sergeant locked him in a cell, and continued his duties. At 2pm, however, Joel shot himself in the head with a gun he always carried on him - a gun the police had not check him for. He died instantly.

Who was Robert Joel, and why had the police been trying to find him?

The cells at Bow Street, where Robert Joel died (© Nell Darby)

Joel was born in 1855 in Windsor, into a humble family - his father was a servant and his mother a laundress. Joel started work in his teens as a gardener, but moved to London and became a solicitor's clerk. In 1877, he married Martha Emily Ruck at Hammersmith. Martha was the daughter of architect Edwin Jesse Ruck, but she had spent most of her life being brought up by her grandparents in Lambeth.

Over the next decade, the couple had five children, born in various places in London - an illustration of how the Joels moved around the capital. 1881 saw them living in Camberwell, after stints in Wapping and Marylebone. Robert was working as a solicitor's clerk - and, as I've noted before, many private detectives went into the profession after stints as such, having learned much about the law in the job, as well as making useful contacts.

At some point between 1888, when their last child, Ellen (known as Nellie) was born, and 1891, Robert Joel left his wife. She was left struggling to maintain their children on her own, living in Deptford with the five young ones - aged at most between three and 13 - and working as a mantle maker. It seems likely that she had needed to seek relief from the Greenwich parish authorities, as they then started to investigate Robert's whereabouts. The 1891 census describes Martha as a 'deserted wife'.

Martha Joel’s entry in the 1891 census, where she is listed as a deserted wife (TNA/TheGenealogist)

By the end of that year, Martha was dead. She had died aged only 34, her financial issues having never been sorted. At the time of her death, a warrant was out for Robert for his desertion and lack of maintenance for his family.

On 13 November 1895, at Gunnersbury in west London, Robert Charles Joel married Winifred Elizabeth Hopkins, more than a decade his junior. I can't find out much about Winifred; she claimed to have been born in Liverpool, but there's no birth registration for her there. She claimed to be a spinster, but she was also known by the name of Neale, and had had a daughter a few months before Martha Joel died. Her daughter also had the surname Neale, but there is no record of a marriage between Winifred Hopkins and a Mr Neale. Later, she claimed to have had four children, with Winifred being her only surviving one. She had at least one child by Robert Joel, a daughter, who did not live.

By 1895, Robert was working as a private detective, and it is likely that he started doing this job after leaving his wife, his life changing in more than one respect. He was still doing the job in 1899.

Robert Joel and Winifred were only married for four years before Robert's suicide. Letters found on him stated that he was the 'victim of a bitter persecution', blaming his first wife's attempts to get maintenance on his depression, despite the fact that she had died in poverty several years earlier. He also asked a friend to look after a woman - unnamed by the coroner at his inquest, but presumably Winifred, stating that she was 'the one person who has been kinder to me than anyone in the wide world'.

There were mixed fortunes for those Robert left behind. His eldest child, son Arthur, aged 21, had to give evidence at the inquest about his father and how he had left his mother - a traumatic thing for a child to do. The children had likely been split up after their mother's death, and in 1901, the two youngest daughters were at a workhouse school in Surrey, while another was working in south London as a housemaid. I believe that one of the workhouse daughters was, a couple of years later, charged with obtaining food and lodging by false pretences; at this time, she was homeless. There was better luck later for three of the children, who married and started their own families.

Meanwhile, Winifred Neale moved to Berkshire, where she lived with her much older sister Elizabeth, who acted as her housekeeper. She never remarried after her private detective husband's suicide.