Charles Peace was a burglar from Sheffield who killed two men within four months in 1876. On the night of August 1 he shot Police Constable Nicholas Cock, a young officer who tried to stop him outside a house in Whalley Range, a suburb of Manchester. On November 29 he shot Arthur Dyson, a civil engineer, behind Dyson's new home at Banner Cross, on the southwest edge of Sheffield. Dyson and his wife Katherine had moved there to get away from Peace.
Peace was never charged with the death of Nicholas Cock. A 19-year-old Irish laborer, William Habron, was convicted of it and sentenced to death, and Peace sat in court to watch. Habron's sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. Peace went on to live for nearly two years under a false name in a villa in Peckham, in south London, while he burgled houses across the southern suburbs. He was caught in Blackheath in October 1878 after shooting a constable through the arm, was identified, and was convicted at Leeds Assizes in February 1879 of murdering Arthur Dyson. In the days before he was hanged he confessed that he had shot PC Cock. The Home Secretary found the confession corroborated, and Habron was given a free pardon and released in March 1879.
What follows is drawn from the 1878 Old Bailey trial record, the Home Secretary's answers in the House of Commons in 1879, a Sheffield City Archives catalogue of a letter Peace wrote from the condemned cell, newspaper reports of 1878 and 1879, and two early twentieth century accounts that worked from the trial reports and the press of the time: H. B. Irving's "A Book of Remarkable Criminals" (1918) and Raymond Postgate's "Murder, Piracy and Treason" (1925).
Peace was born in Sheffield on May 14, 1832, the youngest of four children of John Peace, according to Irving; the Sheffield City Archives catalogue gives Nursery Street as his birthplace and describes him as the youngest of four sons. His father had worked as a collier at Burton upon Trent, lost a leg in an accident, and spent some years as an animal tamer with Wombwell's traveling menagerie before settling in Sheffield as a shoemaker. His mother was the daughter of a naval surgeon.
As a boy Peace went to two schools near Sheffield and then into the steel trade. In 1846, at about 14, he was working at a rolling mill when a piece of red-hot steel went into his leg below the knee. He spent 18 months in the Sheffield Infirmary and left with a permanent limp, Irving wrote. The Sheffield Archives catalogue names the works as Kelham Rolling Mills and says two accidents there left him with the limp and the loss of fingers on one hand. Accounts differ on the fingers: the police description issued in 1876 said he lacked the use of three fingers of his left hand, while Irving wrote that he had lost one finger, which Peace said had been shot off in a quarrel and which others believed he had shot off by accident.
Peace taught himself the violin and played at concerts and in public houses, sometimes on a single string. He later worked as a picture framer and dealt in musical instruments and small antiques.
Irving, working from the court records, traced the following record. In October 1851 a house in Sheffield was broken into, some of the property was found on Peace, and he was given a month in prison. In 1854 a run of burglaries hit well-off houses in and around Sheffield; on October 20, 1854, Peace was sentenced at Doncaster Sessions to four years' penal servitude, and his sister and a young woman he was courting each received six months for having the stolen goods.
On the night of August 11, 1859, a house in Manchester was robbed and the haul hidden in a field. Police waited for the thieves to return. When Peace and another man came for it, Peace fought the officer who tried to arrest him so hard that he nearly killed him, Irving wrote. He was sentenced to six years' penal servitude. Released in 1864, he went back to Sheffield and then to Manchester, where in 1866 he was caught in the act of burglary at a house in Lower Broughton. On December 3, 1866, Manchester Assizes sentenced him to eight years.
While serving that term at Wakefield Prison he tried to escape through a hole he cut in his cell ceiling, knocked down a warder, and was recaptured in the governor's house. He was also held at Millbank, Chatham and the convict establishment at Gibraltar before his release in 1872. The Sheffield Archives catalogue puts his total sentences for the Sheffield and Manchester burglaries of the 1850s and 1860s at twenty years before remission.
In 1859 Peace married Hannah Ward, a widow with a young son, Willie Ward, according to Irving; the Sheffield Archives catalogue says he "is believed" to have married her. They had a daughter, Jane, and a son, John Charles, who was born while Peace was in prison and died before his release. After 1872 Peace lived with his family in Sheffield and worked at picture framing. In 1875, by Irving's account, they moved to Darnall, a suburb on the east side of the city. (A 2015 article in The Star, Sheffield, puts the move to Britannia Road, Darnall, in 1872.)
Arthur Dyson was a civil engineer. He had spent some years in the United States, where he worked on the Atlantic and Great Western Railway and where, in 1866, he married. The New York Herald reported in 1879 that the wedding took place in Cleveland, Ohio. His wife, Katherine, had been born in Ireland and had gone to America at about 15. In a statement she left when she went back to America in 1879, she described driving her husband by buggy through rough country while he worked on the line, and said they had been happy: "My husband loved me and I loved him." When Dyson's health broke down they came to England, at the end of 1873 or early in 1874, and he took a post with the North Eastern Railway. Irving described him as over six feet tall, very thin and gentlemanly in manner. The job ended when he failed to report to a station where he had been posted, which people who knew him at the time put down to trouble at home.
The Dysons lived two doors from the Peaces in Darnall. Peace came to know them first as a tradesman and then as a friend of the family. What happened between Peace and Katherine Dyson was argued over in court and has never been settled. She agreed that she had been to public houses and a music hall with him, that they had been photographed together at a Sheffield fair, and that he had given her a ring. She denied any affair. In her 1879 statement she said that Peace had pressed her to leave her husband and go with him to Manchester, had offered her gifts, listened at keyholes, looked in at the windows, followed her and threatened her with a revolver. Peace, near the end of his life, told the vicar of Darnall that she had been his mistress.
At about the end of June 1876, Arthur Dyson threw a card over into Peace's garden. It read: "Charles Peace is requested not to interfere with my family." On July 1 Peace met Dyson in the street and tried to trip him, and that night he came up to Katherine Dyson while she was talking with friends and threatened to blow out her brains and her husband's, Irving wrote; at the Leeds trial three witnesses besides Mrs. Dyson backed her account of the July threats. Dyson took out a summons, and a warrant was issued for Peace's arrest. Peace left Darnall for Hull, where his wife opened an eating house. Irving recorded that Peace resented Dyson bitterly for driving him from his home.
Nicholas Cock was a police constable in the Lancashire Constabulary, stationed in the Manchester suburbs south of the city. The Greater Manchester Police Museum and the UK Police Memorial both give his age at death as 23. Angela Buckley, a historian of Victorian policing, gives a fuller picture in her book "Who Killed Constable Cock?": by the publisher's description, he was born in Cornwall in 1856, the youngest of nine children of a miner who died when Nicholas was 11; he worked as a copper miner and then as a collier in Durham, and joined the Lancashire Constabulary just before Christmas 1875, at 20. Because of his youth he was known locally as "the little bobby." Irving described him as a zealous young officer, perhaps too eager in his duty.
That July, Cock had taken out summonses for drunkenness and disorderly conduct against two brothers, John and William Habron, Irish laborers who worked for a nurseryman in Whalley Range; an American paper later described William as a young man from County Mayo. William was fined five shillings on July 27. John was fined half a sovereign on August 1. Between those dates the brothers were heard to say they would "do for" the constable.
Peace had traveled from Hull to Manchester. About midnight on August 1, 1876, he went into the grounds of a house in Whalley Range, and two policemen saw him. In his later confession Peace said he had passed the two officers on the road beforehand. One of them followed him into the garden. Peace climbed the wall and dropped down on the other side almost into the arms of the second constable, Nicholas Cock. Peace said he warned Cock to stand back and fired a shot wide of him. Cock drew his truncheon and came on, and Peace fired again.
The police memorial record says Cock was shot in Upper Chorlton Road and died shortly afterward at a nearby surgery; the Greater Manchester Police Museum gives the date of death as August 2, 1876, and a witness found him lying in the road with a chest wound. His colleague heard the shots, but by the time he reached Cock the gunman was gone. Peace went back to Hull.
Police arrested the Habron brothers that same night; the senior officer at the Old Trafford police station was Superintendent Bent. William was in bed when he was taken. The case against William, as Irving summarized it from the trial reports, rested on the threats, on a gunsmith's evidence that William had asked the price of cartridges a day or two before, on two percussion caps found in the pocket of a waistcoat his employer had given him, on the other constable's statement that a man seen near the house resembled William in age, height and complexion, and on a boot print that matched in some respects. No firearm was ever traced to him. A third brother, Francis, was not indicted, according to an account reprinted in American newspapers in 1879.
The trial opened at Manchester Assizes on Monday, November 27, 1876, before Mr Justice Lindley, and lasted two days. John Habron was acquitted. In his summing up the judge told the jury that the identification and footprint evidence did not go very far, and reminded them of William's good character and that he had been found in bed. The jury convicted William and recommended mercy. The judge sentenced him to death. William Habron was 19 by most accounts, 18 by others. Peace attended both days of the trial.
Letters to the Manchester Guardian questioned the verdict, and on December 6 a meeting of about forty men resolved to petition the Home Secretary, Richard Assheton Cross. Two days before the date set for execution, Habron was respited, and his sentence was then commuted to penal servitude for life. Cross told the House of Commons in March 1879 that he had concluded at the time, with the trial judge agreeing, that the evidence tended to show Habron had not fired the shot, and that this was why the sentence was respited.
On October 29, 1876, the Dysons moved to a house at Banner Cross Terrace, on the Ecclesall side of Sheffield, to get away from Peace. Katherine Dyson testified that one of the first people she saw there was Peace, who told her he was there to annoy her and would annoy her wherever she went.
Peace left Manchester as soon as Habron was sentenced. On Wednesday, November 29, he surprised his mother by arriving at her house, saying he had come for the fair. He spent the afternoon at a public house in Ecclesall, drinking and playing tunes for the customers. At about six in the evening he called on the Rev. Mr. Newman, the vicar of Ecclesall, whom he had visited about five weeks earlier to make claims about the Dysons, and showed him cards and photographs that he said proved his intimacy with Mrs. Dyson. He told the vicar that Dyson had driven him from his home and that he would follow the couple wherever they went.
At about eight o'clock a laborer named Brassington was standing outside the Banner Cross Hotel, a few yards from the Dysons' house. A man he did not know asked him whether any strangers had come to live nearby, offered him a bundle of letters to read, and said he would shoot both of the "strange folks" before morning. Brassington later identified the man as Peace and held to it under cross-examination.
Shortly after eight, Katherine Dyson went across the yard behind the house to an outbuilding. When she came out, Peace was standing there with a revolver. "Speak, or I'll fire," he said. She went back in fright. Arthur Dyson came out into the yard. Peace made for the passage that led from the backs of the houses to the road, and Dyson followed him. Peace fired once; the bullet struck the lintel of the passage doorway. Dyson kept after him, and Peace fired a second time. Dyson fell, shot in the temple. His wife ran to him and cried out that Peace had shot her husband. A neighbor, Mrs. Gregory, whose house lay between the Dysons' and the passage, heard Mrs. Dyson's clogs in the yard, a scream, then two shots and another scream, but no sound of a scuffle. Arthur Dyson died about two hours later without speaking again.
Peace climbed a wall across the road and made his way back into Sheffield. He told his mother and brother he had shot Dyson and said goodbye. He took a ticket at Attercliffe station for Beverley, changed his plans on the way, spent the night in the station yard at York, and reached his wife's eating house in Hull the next day. A bundle of letters was found near the scene the next morning; among them was the card Dyson had thrown into Peace's garden. An inquest was held at the Stag Inn, The Star has reported.
A reward of £100 was offered for Peace's capture. The police notice described him as thin and slightly built, with grey, almost white hair, beard and whiskers, lacking the use of three fingers on his left hand, walking with his legs wide apart and speaking as if his tongue were too large for his mouth. It gave his age as 55 to 60; he was 44. Detectives searched his wife's shop in Hull twice in one day while he hid on the roof behind a chimney stack. Over the next weeks he shaved his beard, dyed his hair, wore spectacles and, for the first time, used his ability to change the set of his face. Irving wrote that he wore a false arm of gutta-percha, ending in a hook, to hide the damaged hand.
Around the turn of the year he moved constantly: Hull, Doncaster, London, Bristol, Bath, Oxford, Birmingham and Derby. On January 9, 1877, he reached Nottingham, where he lodged with a woman who received stolen goods. There he met Susan Grey (Irving spells it Gray), who had been married to a man named Bailey and who became his mistress and took the name Mrs. Thompson. Irving wrote that Peace had threatened to shoot her if she would not be his. He burgled in Nottingham and in Hull, where he once lodged in the house of a police sergeant, and he slipped away from Nottingham detectives who found him in bed and let him dress in private.
Peace moved to London and took lodgings in Stangate Street, Lambeth, describing himself as a dealer in musical instruments and calling himself Thompson. He later moved to Greenwich and then to a house at 5 East Terrace, Evelina Road, Peckham, with a garden that ran down to the railway and a stable he built for his pony and trap. Susan Grey lived with him as Mrs. Thompson. Hannah Peace and her son Willie lived in the basement, with Hannah passing as Mrs. Ward.
The household entertained neighbors with tea and music. Peace went to the parish church on Sunday evenings, kept a menagerie of cats, dogs, rabbits, birds and parrots, and with a neighbor, Henry Brion, patented a device for raising sunken ships; the patent appears under the names Henry Fersey Brion and John Thompson. Irving, Postgate and later writers describe the house in detail and with some admiration. The other side of it was recorded too: when Susan Grey went out drunk and talked to neighbors, she was followed, brought home and beaten, Irving wrote, and Peace's household lived by his nightly burglaries.
Irving wrote that Peace's London burglaries ran from early 1877 to October 1878, mostly in Blackheath, Streatham, Denmark Hill and other southern suburbs, with excursions to Southampton, Portsmouth and Southsea. He carried his tools in a violin case or in pockets sewn into his trousers. A 2022 article in the Sheffield Tribune linked him to at least 26 London burglaries. Many of the stories told about his exploits, Irving cautioned, rest on slender foundations.
At about two o'clock in the morning of Thursday, October 10, 1878, PC Edward Robinson of the Metropolitan Police's R Division was on duty in the avenue behind 2 St John's Park, Blackheath, the house of a Mr. Burness, when he saw a light moving in the back drawing room. He fetched PC William Girling, and Sergeant Charles Brown joined them. Brown went round to ring the front bell. The light went out, and a man came out of the drawing room window onto the lawn.
Robinson gave his account at the Old Bailey. He jumped into the garden and chased the man, who turned at about six yards, pointed a revolver at his head and said, "Keep back, keep off, or by God I will shoot you." The man fired three shots at Robinson's head, two passing to the left and one over it. Robinson rushed him, and a fourth shot went past the right side of his head. Robinson closed with the man and struck him in the face, guarding his own head with his right arm, and the man fired a fifth shot, which went through Robinson's right arm above the elbow. Robinson threw him to the ground and hit him on the head with the revolver, which was strapped to the man's wrist, until Brown arrived. Girling heard five shots within a minute; when he took hold of the prisoner, the man said he had only done it to frighten Robinson so that he could get away. Brown found that all six chambers of the revolver had been fired.
On the prisoner the officers found a silver flask, a cheque book and a letter case belonging to Mr. Burness, a small crowbar and a set of housebreaking tools. Inside, the dining room window had been forced and plate set out on the table for removal. Asked his name at the station, the man said, "Find out." He was described at Greenwich Police Court the next morning as a man of about sixty and of mixed race; his face had been stained dark. Robinson was five weeks under a surgeon's care.
Peace was held under the name John Ward. On November 2 he wrote, in deliberately poor spelling, to Henry Brion asking him to visit; Brion came to Newgate and found himself facing his neighbor Mr. Thompson. The police later said information from Peckham, most likely from Brion, first put them on the right track. Susan Grey also claimed credit: on February 5, 1879, she applied to the Treasury for the £100 reward, saying she had given information to the police on November 5, 1878. Postgate wrote that she turned the police's suspicion into certainty.
The household in Peckham had broken up after the arrest. Hannah Peace took boxes north to Sheffield, to the house of her son-in-law in Hazel Road. Police searched it on November 6 and found stolen property and evidence that John Ward was Charles Peace. A Sheffield constable who had known Peace was taken into the exercise yard at Newgate and picked him out: "That's Peace," he said. Hannah Peace was later tried at the Old Bailey for receiving stolen goods and acquitted on the ground that she had acted under her husband's direction.
The trial of "John Ward alias Charles Peace," given in the court calendar as 60 years old, opened in the November 1878 sessions of the Central Criminal Court. He was charged with feloniously shooting at Edward Robinson with intent to murder, with alternative counts of intent to do grievous bodily harm and to resist arrest. Messrs. Poland and Straight prosecuted; Montagu Williams and Austin Metcalfe defended. Irving gives the trial date as November 19 and the judge as Mr Justice Hawkins.
The jury found him guilty on the first count, shooting with intent to murder, and he was sentenced to penal servitude for life. The jury praised Robinson's courage and asked that it be rewarded, and the court ordered £25 paid to him. Irving recorded that Peace pleaded with the judge for mercy, saying the pistol went off easily and that he had not meant to kill, and that the judge did not believe him and said that if Robinson had not guarded his head he would have been killed. Peace was sent to Pentonville to begin his sentence.
Katherine Dyson had gone back to America after her husband's death. A detective found her in Cleveland, Ohio. Against the advice of her friends, by her own account, she agreed to return and testify, saying she would go back "if I have to walk on my head all the way."
On January 17, 1879, Peace was taken by an early train from London to Sheffield, where the stipendiary magistrate opened the committal hearing on the charge of murdering Arthur Dyson. Mrs. Dyson gave her evidence, her cross-examination was adjourned, and Peace was taken back to London.
On Wednesday, January 22, the day of the second hearing, Peace left King's Cross on the 5:15 a.m. train for Sheffield in the charge of two warders. He was troublesome from the start and kept asking to leave the carriage. Just after the train passed Worksop he asked to use one of the bags the warders had brought for the purpose, and when the window was lowered to throw it out he jumped through it. One warder caught his left foot. Peace hung from the side of the moving train, kicking the warder with his right foot, while the other warder tried to stop the train with the communication cord. After about two miles Peace worked his left shoe free and fell onto the line. The train ran on another mile before it could be stopped. The warders went back and found him beside the track near Kiveton Park, apparently unconscious and bleeding from a scalp wound. A slow train took him to Sheffield, where he was put in a police cell.
Peace later told his stepson that he had meant to kill himself. He said he had pricked the words "Bury me at Darnall. God bless you all" on scraps of paper and hidden them in his clothes, hoping to be killed under the wheels so that his body would be taken to an inquest at Darnall and buried there. Irving thought this was mostly true, but that Peace may also have hoped to survive and escape, or to be hurt badly enough to delay his trial past the Leeds Assizes. The magistrate adjourned the case for eight days.
The hearing resumed on January 30 in a corridor of Sheffield Town Hall, lit by candles, with no public present; Peace sat in an armchair and complained of the cold. His solicitor, Mr. Clegg, cross-examined Katherine Dyson for most of the day. He tried to show that she had been closer to Peace than she admitted and that Dyson had died in a struggle he started. He put to her a bundle of pencilled notes, found near the scene, that the defense said she had written to Peace. She denied writing them; at the inquest she had said she never wrote to him, and her husband had called the notes forgeries made by Peace or his family. She held to her denial and to her evidence that there had been no struggle. Peace was committed for trial and taken to Wakefield and then to Armley Gaol in Leeds.
The trial began and ended on Tuesday, February 4, 1879, before Mr Justice Lopes. Campbell Foster QC led for the prosecution. Frank Lockwood, later Solicitor General, defended. Both counsel complained in court about the stories the newspapers had printed about Peace before the trial; Lockwood said papers had tried to prejudice the prisoner's life for the sake of selling copies.
Katherine Dyson was the first witness. She described coming out of the outbuilding to find Peace with the revolver, his words, and the two shots. Lockwood tried to get her to agree that her husband had seized Peace after the first shot and that the gun had gone off in the struggle. She would not: she had said before the magistrate that she could not say her husband did not get hold of the prisoner, and now asked the court to "put in the little word 'try.'" Lockwood had more success on her friendship with Peace. She admitted that her husband had objected to it in the spring of 1876, that she and Peace had been photographed together at the fair that summer, that she had accepted a ring, and that she had gone with him to a public house and a music hall. She could not remember in which year she came to Darnall. The Times called her explanations feeble.
Five witnesses placed Peace near Banner Cross Terrace that night or heard the shots, among them Brassington and Mrs. Gregory. The surgeon who attended Dyson said marks on the dead man's face came from his fall, not from a blow. Witnesses described the July 1876 threats. The prosecution produced the revolver taken from Peace at Blackheath and showed that the rifling marks on the bullet removed from Dyson's head matched those of a bullet fired from it. The judge ruled out the card and the bundle of letters as evidence; Lockwood had been entitled to question Mrs. Dyson about them, he said, but was bound by her answers.
Lockwood told the jury that Mrs. Dyson had gone out that night to meet Peace, that her jealous husband had followed and grabbed him, and that the gun had gone off by accident. In summing up, Lopes called the accident theory an "absolute surmise," invited the jury to try the trigger of Peace's revolver themselves, noted that Mrs. Dyson's account of the threats was corroborated by three other witnesses, and said it had been clearly proved that there was no struggle before the shooting. The jury retired at a quarter past seven and returned ten minutes later with a verdict of guilty, by Irving's account; a Welsh newspaper report of the trial gave the time as fifteen minutes. Asked if he had anything to say, Peace answered, "It is no use my saying anything." Lopes sentenced him to death.
In the weeks before his execution, Peace sent for the governor of Armley Gaol, asked for drawing materials, drew a plan of the place where Cock had been shot, and gave a full written confession, Irving wrote. He repeated it to the Rev. J. H. Littlewood, the vicar of Darnall, who had known him as chaplain of Wakefield Prison. "People will say," Peace told him, "that I was a hardened wretch for allowing an innocent man to suffer for the crime of which I was guilty, but what man would have given himself up under such circumstances, knowing as I did that I should certainly be hanged?" Now that he was going to die anyway, he said, it was right to clear the young man.
To Littlewood, Peace also gave his own account of Dyson's death: that he had wanted Mrs. Dyson to persuade her husband to withdraw the warrant, that Dyson had seized him, and that the second shot was fired as he wrenched his arm free. He said he had never intended to take a man's life, and that Mrs. Dyson had lied in saying there was no struggle. The jury had heard and rejected that defense. On February 21, 1879, four days before his execution, Peace sent Littlewood a four-page letter, mostly in the prison chaplain's hand with its last lines in his own, which is now in Sheffield City Archives. In it he looked back on his youth in Sheffield and wrote that "my base and awful badness has brought me to my present sad condition."
Peace's family visited him for the last time on February 24. He gave his wife a funeral card he had designed, giving his age as 47. On the morning of Tuesday, February 25, he wrote letters to his family and an old friend, ate breakfast, and asked the executioner, William Marwood, not to make him suffer. On the scaffold he stopped Marwood from covering his face so that he could speak to the reporters present. He said his life had been base, asked them to note how a man could die in fear of the Lord, said he believed his sins were forgiven, and asked that no one taunt his children on his account. He died at once and was buried inside the prison. The New York Herald's London correspondent cabled the next day that he had died forgiving all his enemies.
News of the confession reached the press within days of the execution. The London dispatches printed in New York on February 27 reported that the Manchester newspapers had found discrepancies between Peace's statement and the circumstances of the Whalley Range case, that it was suspected he hoped to delay his execution while it was checked, that he held to it to the end, and that the Home Office had opened an inquiry.
On March 17, 1879, Home Secretary Cross told the House of Commons that he had laid the whole matter before the Law Officers of the Crown and a senior Queen's Counsel, with the help of the trial judge, and that Peace's statement had been "so entirely corroborated in many important points" that he would recommend a free pardon for William Habron. The trial judge and the Law Officers agreed. An American press account of the inquiry said a gunsmith found that the bullets that killed Cock and Dyson were alike and of an unusual make that fitted Peace's revolver, and that the dealer who believed Habron had bought cartridges had never stocked such bullets.
That night a telegram went to Portland Prison, where Habron had spent months picking oakum and then working in the quarries. On the morning of March 18 he was woken, weighed, dressed in other clothes and sent to Millbank in London, handcuffed for part of the journey, without being told why. At Millbank he found his old employer, Mr. Deakin, waiting with the governor. "Then the door opened and I saw Mr. Deakin and the Governor, and knew I was free," he said in an interview reprinted in American papers. Asked about the handcuffs in the Commons on March 21, Cross said he had not foreseen it and took the blame himself. Habron told the interviewer that for ten weeks he had lain under sentence of death and that Marwood had come to note his weight and the shape of his neck. Deakin gave him back his old job.
On compensation, Cross told the House on March 17 that it had never been the practice to compensate people wrongly convicted, but that he saw his way to arrangements for Habron's future. On March 25 he denied a Manchester Guardian report that the sum would be £250. On April 3, 1879, he announced that, after consulting the Treasury, the government would propose a supplementary vote of £1,000 for Habron. Irving, writing in 1918, gave the compensation as £800; whether the amount actually paid differed from the sum proposed is not clear. Cross also told the House, on April 7, that the trial judge had reported the police evidence in the Habron case to have been given fairly and without undue zeal.
Peace's capture and trials were front-page news in Britain and abroad, and the press filled the gap between the facts and the public appetite with invention. Postgate wrote in 1925 that a mass of legend and half-legend had grown up around Peace's name and that press and police accounts were very mixed. The historian John Springhall, writing in the Historical Association's journal The Historian in 2000, examined how newspaper coverage of Peace's two years on the run turned a Sheffield killer into a kind of popular hero.
Printers sold ballads about the case within weeks. Two broadsides now held by the National Library of Scotland, printed by John White of Liverpool, carried "Lines on the Sad Fate of Charles Peace" alongside "The Release of Wm. Habron," a ballad that called Habron "the poor young Irish boy" and argued that he deserved compensation for his false imprisonment. A figure of Peace was shown at Madame Tussaud's in London, the Sheffield Tribune has noted. Films followed: an early version by the showman Walter Haggar survives, and Argyle Productions released "The Case of Charles Peace" in 1949.
Objects from the case were kept by the Metropolitan Police in the collection now known as the Crime Museum. A violin, a fold-up ladder used for break-ins, and a prosthetic hand attributed to Peace were shown publicly for the first time at the Museum of London's "Crime Museum Uncovered" exhibition in 2015 and 2016, The Star reported.
In Sheffield, Banner Cross is still linked with the case. Peace's own letter of repentance is in the city archives. The two men he killed are remembered mainly through his story; Nicholas Cock's name is on the rolls of honour kept by the Greater Manchester Police Museum and the UK Police Memorial.
Proven at trial and final: the murder of Arthur Dyson (Leeds Assizes, February 4, 1879) and the shooting of PC Edward Robinson with intent to murder (Old Bailey, November 1878).
Confessed, never tried: the killing of PC Nicholas Cock. Peace was hanged before any court could test the confession. The Home Secretary found it corroborated "in many important points," and the trial judge and Law Officers agreed that William Habron should be pardoned, but no court ever convicted Peace of Cock's death. The Manchester newspapers at the time said they found discrepancies between Peace's account and the circumstances, though the later accounts that mention the objection do not spell those discrepancies out.
Whether Dyson's death was murder or an accident in a struggle: Peace said to the end that Dyson had seized him and that he fired to get away. Katherine Dyson, the only other witness, said there was no struggle, and a neighbor heard no scuffle. The jury accepted her account. A retired Sheffield detective, Parrock, later told Irving that he believed Peace had not meant to kill Dyson.
Peace and Katherine Dyson: whether they had an affair is unresolved. She admitted outings, a photograph and a ring, and denied any affair; Peace said she had been his mistress; the disputed letters were never admitted in evidence.
Who identified him: Susan Grey claimed the £100 reward for revealing his identity; the police said the first lead came from Peckham, probably from Henry Brion. Whether she was ever paid was not reported.
Where he jumped from the train: the detailed accounts place his fall near Kiveton Park, after the train passed Worksop. Postgate wrote that he jumped as the train passed Darnall; the hidden note asking to be buried at Darnall may be the source of that version.
Stories from the press of 1878 and 1879: some reports circulated at the time are contradicted by the record. The New York Herald's cable of February 27, 1879, said Peace stabbed Robinson with a knife and wounded him in the leg; Robinson's own sworn evidence at the Old Bailey describes five shots and a bullet wound through the arm, and no knife. The same dispatch carried a story that Peace had walked into Scotland Yard while wanted for murder; Postgate repeated a version in which he went disguised as a clergyman. No record supports it. A 1916 recollection by a Blackheath officer, quoted by Postgate, describes the arrest quite differently from the Old Bailey testimony, and Postgate himself noted it was wrong on at least one point.
Ages and dates: Nicholas Cock is 23 in police memorial records but would have been 20 if born in 1856, as Buckley's book says. William Habron is 19 in some accounts and 18 in others. Habron's release is dated March 18 in one reprint of the London account and March 8 in another; the Commons record of a telegram sent on Monday night, March 17, supports March 18. Peace's own funeral card gives his age at death as 47; by his recorded birth date he was 46.
May 14, 1832: Charles Peace is born in Sheffield.
1846: injured by red-hot steel at a Sheffield rolling mill; 18 months in the Sheffield Infirmary; left lame.
October 1851: first conviction, for a Sheffield housebreaking; one month in prison.
October 20, 1854: four years' penal servitude at Doncaster Sessions for burglaries around Sheffield.
1859: marries Hannah Ward, a widow (per Irving).
August 11, 1859: Manchester burglary; arrested after fighting a police officer; six years' penal servitude.
December 3, 1866: eight years' penal servitude at Manchester Assizes for a burglary in Lower Broughton; later tries to escape from Wakefield Prison.
1872: released; returns to Sheffield and works as a picture framer.
1875: moves to Darnall (per Irving) and meets Arthur and Katherine Dyson.
About the end of June 1876: Dyson throws a card into Peace's garden asking him not to interfere with his family.
July 1, 1876: Peace threatens the Dysons; a summons and warrant follow; Peace leaves for Hull.
Night of August 1 to 2, 1876: Peace shoots PC Nicholas Cock at Whalley Range, Manchester; Cock dies on August 2. John and William Habron are arrested.
October 29, 1876: the Dysons move to Banner Cross; Peace confronts Katherine Dyson there.
November 27 to 28, 1876: Manchester Assizes; John Habron acquitted; William Habron convicted, with a recommendation to mercy, and sentenced to death. Peace attends.
November 29, 1876: Peace shoots Arthur Dyson at Banner Cross; Dyson dies about two hours later. Peace flees to Hull. A £100 reward is offered.
December 1876: William Habron is respited; his sentence is commuted to penal servitude for life.
January 9, 1877: after weeks on the move, Peace reaches Nottingham and meets Susan Grey.
1877 to 1878: burglaries in Nottingham, Hull and south London; lives in Lambeth, Greenwich and then Evelina Road, Peckham, as John Thompson.
October 10, 1878: arrested in Blackheath after shooting PC Edward Robinson through the arm.
November 1878: identified as Peace while held as John Ward; Old Bailey jury convicts him of shooting with intent to murder; penal servitude for life.
January 17, 1879: first committal hearing in Sheffield; Katherine Dyson testifies.
January 22, 1879: jumps from the train near Kiveton Park on the way to the second hearing; recaptured injured.
January 30, 1879: committed for trial after a hearing in a Sheffield Town Hall corridor.
February 4, 1879: Leeds Assizes; convicted of the murder of Arthur Dyson; sentenced to death by Mr Justice Lopes.
February 5, 1879: Susan Grey applies for the £100 reward.
February 1879: confesses to the governor of Armley Gaol and to the Rev. J. H. Littlewood that he shot PC Cock.
February 21, 1879: writes to Littlewood from the condemned cell.
February 25, 1879: hanged by William Marwood at Armley Gaol, Leeds; buried in the prison.
March 17, 1879: Home Secretary Cross tells the Commons he will recommend a free pardon for William Habron.
March 18, 1879: Habron is brought from Portland to Millbank and released.
April 3, 1879: Cross announces a proposed supplementary vote of £1,000 as compensation for Habron.