Murder, Mystery & My Family
Stephen Wade explains how BBC One’s Murder, Mystery and My Family investigates old crimes
Go behind the scenes of the hit series
On 1 April 1926, detectives from the City of Leeds Police called at a house in Amberley Road, Wortley. The previous day, Mrs Lily Waterhouse of that address had visited the Town Hall and told police that she was living in fear of her tenant and housemate, Louise Calvert. Lily was asked to return the day after, but she did not appear.
The police were worried, and they had good cause. Upon entering the house, the detectives found Lily’s body in a small bedroom. She had clearly been brutally attacked, and there were ligatures tied at her wrists and ankles. Obviously the officers’ first thoughts turned towards Louise Calvert, and they soon found where she lived. She had a husband and a son, but had been
‘Louie claimed she had accidentally hit Lily on the head with a poker’
living away, working with Lily as a prostitute in central Leeds.
Louise, or ‘Louie’ as she was known, was arrested and charged with murder. Her trial took place at Leeds Town Hall, and she was found guilty and sentenced to hang. Her last weeks were spent in Strangeways Prison, Manchester, where she was hanged on 24 June 1926. In prison, she had written about her life and the crime in a notebook, explaining she had not intended to murder Lily, but had picked up a poker when seeing Lily fighting with a male guest. She had, she claimed, accidentally hit Lily on the head, and then the man had taken over and finished the attack, leading to Lily’s death.
Retrial By Television
The case featured in the third series of BBC One’s Murder, Mystery and My Family, largely because there were some questions over how it had been handled by both the judge and the lawyers. I was a consultant on the episode. Sue Holt and Mick Walton, descendants of Louie Calvert who also took part, received a crash course in researching the investigation and prosecution of a crime from the early decades of the 20th century.
We had to bear in mind that for much of the time that Louie was in custody, the General Strike was in progress. National newspapers had dramatically fewer pages than usual, and reports of the law courts were hard to find. But regional papers supplied some material on the early stages of the enquiries and court proceedings.
The case raises an important question about the nature and scale of documentation when it comes to looking into an
ancestor’s involvement in serious crime in the 20th century. As demonstrated by actor Daniel Radcliffe’s episode in the 2019 series of Who Do You Think You Are?, the key records are those of the police and the courts.
Daniel’s great great grandfather Louis Gershon (pictured) had been a treasure hunter in Africa, who moved to the UK and set up a jewellery business in Hatton Garden in East London.
His sons, Edward and Daniel’s great grandfather Samuel, ran the family business after Louis died. However, when they sank into debt, the brothers were accused of attempting to gain insurance money with false claims. Worse was to follow: Samuel ended up killing himself.
In terms of the crimes involved, first there was the fraud (for a substantial sum) and then the suicide – killing yourself was a felony until the 1961 Suicide Act. Daniel’s family history had some serious crimes in the record.
Following The Paper Trail
When faced with the challenges of finding the facts, what is there available to help? The obstacles are many: in the archives at county record offices, sources such as police notebooks and occurrence books may be closed, especially if it was less than 100 years ago.
It is always worth contacting the archive concerned, however, because you may apply for special permission to view. You can find out where relevant police records are held by searching the catalogue of The National Archives (TNA) at discovery. nationalarchives.gov.uk, although there’s always a chance that the records you need have been lost. In addition, when it comes to prison records, particularly from the 1950s onwards, it was often left to the individual governor to decide whether they were kept or destroyed after 30 years.
However, the Old Bailey session papers site ( oldbaileyonline.org) is an excellent resource, although its proceedings end in 1913. For
regional resources, check the online catalogue for the relevant county record office as well as Discovery – it may have more details about the documents that they hold. For Louie Calvert, the sources we wanted were at Wakefield, and were found via the catalogue of the West Yorkshire Archive Service at www.wyjs.org. uk/archives. Bear in mind too that some offices catalogue their holdings more thoroughly.
The first port of call for any crime, however, is newspapers. The vast digitisation project undertaken by the British Library and Findmypast has made this research much easier. If you don’t have a Pro subscription to findmypast.co.uk, you can subscribe direct to britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk or access the records at your local library if they have the Cengage resource British Newspapers ( bit.ly/cengage-newspapers). Also, don’t neglect the digital archive of The Times ( thetimes.co.uk); the newspaper is not included in the selection of titles on Findmypast, but access to the archive should be available at your local library. If you have a library card, you may even be able to access both resources from your own home.
To narrow down the results when you search, include the county name plus “assizes” in your search for dates up to 1971, and the county plus “crown court” for later crimes.
For Louie Calvert, a newspaper search brought up a crime report; details of her arrest; a report on the magistrate’s court and coroner’s inquest; details of police activities; her trial at the assizes; and details of her incarceration up to her execution.
Did They Appeal?
There is another useful resource: records of the Court of Criminal Appeal, created in 1907. These are held at TNA, but transcripts of proceedings are available from specialist libraries such as those of universities with a law department. If your ancestor was convicted of a serious crime, there may well have been an appeal.
Note that the investigation of a serious crime generates a great many documents, because of the level of communication involved between the interested parties. For Louie Calvert, the police archives contain material from the prison, the Leeds police, the lawyers, the Director of Public Prosecutions and various administrators.
Some prison and court records are also available on ancestry.co.uk (mostly 19th century, although Swansea records go up to 1922, and Gloucestershire and West Yorkshire records go up to 1914) and Findmypast (up to 1935 for England and Wales).