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The Crime Museum is a collection of
criminal
In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definitions of", in Can ...
memorabilia
A souvenir (), memento, keepsake, or token of remembrance is an object a person acquires for the memories the owner associates with it. A souvenir can be any object that can be collected or purchased and transported home by the traveler as a m ...
kept at
New Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard (officially New Scotland Yard) is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing Greater London's 32 boroughs, but not the City of London, the square mile that forms London' ...
, headquarters of the
Metropolitan Police Service
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), formerly and still commonly known as the Metropolitan Police (and informally as the Met Police, the Met, Scotland Yard, or the Yard), is the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement and ...
in London, England. Known as the Black Museum until the early 21st century, the museum came into existence at Scotland Yard sometime in 1874, arising out of the collection of prisoners' property gathered as a result of the
Forfeiture Act 1870
The Forfeiture Act 1870 (33 & 34 Vict c 23) is a British Act of Parliament that abolished the automatic forfeiture of goods and land as a punishment for treason and felony. It does not apply to Scotland, which did not fully abolish forfeiture u ...
and intended as an aid to the police in their study of crime and criminals. Initially unofficial, it had become an official if private museum by 1875, with a police inspector and a police constable assigned to official duty there. Not open to the public, it was used as a teaching collection for police recruits and was only ever accessible by those involved in legal matters, royals and other VIPs.
Now sited in the basement of the
Curtis Green Building (the present
New Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard (officially New Scotland Yard) is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing Greater London's 32 boroughs, but not the City of London, the square mile that forms London' ...
), the museum remains closed to the public but can be visited by officers of the Metropolitan Police and any of the country's police forces by prior appointment.
History
Origins
In his 1993 book ''The Black Museum: New Scotland Yard'', the Museum's then-curator Bill Waddell asserted that its origins lay in an 1869
Act giving the police authority to either destroy items used in the commission of a crime or retain them for instructional purposes, when previous to that Act they had been retained by the police until reclaimed by their owners. No such Act was
passed in 1869 and this misapprehension seems to originate in a misdated mention of the
Forfeiture Act 1870
The Forfeiture Act 1870 (33 & 34 Vict c 23) is a British Act of Parliament that abolished the automatic forfeiture of goods and land as a punishment for treason and felony. It does not apply to Scotland, which did not fully abolish forfeiture u ...
in an 1877 newspaper report on the Museum :
The 1870 Act abolished forfeiture of property for
felony
A felony is traditionally considered a crime of high seriousness, whereas a misdemeanor is regarded as less serious. The term "felony" originated from English common law (from the French medieval word "félonie") to describe an offense that resu ...
and treason—instead it vested that property's "custody and management" in an "administrator", who would then return it at the end of the prisoner's sentence.
The Black Museum was conceived in 1874 by Percy George Neame, a serving inspector. The first exhibits for display were clothing and items belonging to Jane Clouson, 17, murdered in Eltham who at that time had collected together a number of items, with the intention of giving police officers practical instruction on how to detect and prevent crime.
By the latter part of 1874, official authority was given for a crime museum to be opened. Neame, with the help of a
P.C. Randall, gathered together sufficient material of both old and new cases—initially pertaining to exhibits found in the possession of burglars and thieves—to enable a museum to be subsequently opened. The actual date in 1875 when the Black Museum opened is not known, but the permanent appointment of Neame and Randall to duty in the Prisoners Property Store on 12 April suggests that the museum may have come into being in the latter part of that year.
There was no official opening of the museum, whose first two years saw a steady increase in visitors, particularly by CID officers being instructed in the museum as part of their training, keeping it in constant use. However, no record of visitors was kept until 6 October 1877, when a group of dignitaries were shown round the collection by Commissioner
Sir Edmund Henderson, KCB and Assistant Commissioners
Lt. Col. Labalmondiere and
Capt. Harris. They were the first entries in a visitors' book which ran until 1894 and—though not all visitors were asked to sign it—it contains many notable figures from the period. One reporter from ''
The Observer
''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. It is a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', whose parent company Guardian Media Group Limited acquired it in 1993. First published in 1791, it is the w ...
'' newspaper was refused admittance by Inspector Neame and on 8 April 1877 that journalist coined the name 'Black Museum' for the collection.
1890–present
In 1890 the museum moved with the Metropolitan Police Office to new premises at the other end of Whitehall, on the newly constructed Thames Embankment. The building, constructed by Norman Shaw RA, and made of granite quarried by convicts on Dartmoor, was called
New Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard (officially New Scotland Yard) is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing Greater London's 32 boroughs, but not the City of London, the square mile that forms London' ...
. A set of rooms in the basement housed the museum and, although there was no Curator as such, PC Randall was responsible for keeping the place tidy, adding to exhibits, vetting applications for visits and arranging dates for them. Inspector Percy Neame retired on 31 December 1901. In June 1902 he committed suicide "by blowing his brains out" when Chief Inspector Arthur Fair and another officer were at his front door, calling in respect of a "few things in his accounts which they could not understand with reference to money siezed at gaming houses". The museum was closed during both World War I and II, and in 1967, with the move of New Scotland Yard to new premises in Victoria Street, S.W.1, the museum was housed in rooms on the second floor, which underwent several renovations.
During the refurbishment and extension of the Curtis Green Building and New Scotland Yard's move into it, a major exhibition of artefacts from the museum, The Crime Museum Uncovered, was held at the
Museum of London
The Museum of London is a museum in London, covering the history of the UK's capital city from prehistoric to modern times. It was formed in 1976 by amalgamating collections previously held by the City Corporation at the Guildhall, London, Gui ...
from 9 October 2015 to 10 April 2016. Following the exhibition the Museum reopened in 2018 in a "dark and dramatic" room in the basement of the Building designed by
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris in collaboration with engineering consultancy
Arup.
Though the 2015–2016 exhibition was the only time a large number of exhibits have been displayed to the public, individual objects have been loaned to exhibitions at other museums in 2019–2020. This included objects from Leatherslade Farm in a
Great Train Robbery exhibition at the
Postal Museum
A postal museum is a museum dedicated to the display of objects relating to the postal service. A subcategory of postal museums are philatelic museums, which focus on philately and postage stamps.
List of postal and philatelic museums
Afric ...
and a cigarette lighter with a hidden compartment from the
Krogers
The Kroger Company, or simply Kroger, is an American retail company that operates (either directly or through its subsidiaries) supermarkets and multi-department stores throughout the United States.
Founded by Bernard Kroger in 1883 in Cincin ...
in a
GCHQ
Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the Unit ...
exhibition at the
Science Museum
A science museum is a museum devoted primarily to science. Older science museums tended to concentrate on static displays of objects related to natural history, paleontology, geology, industry and industrial machinery, etc. Modern trends in mu ...
, whilst exhibits from the trial of
Roger Casement
Roger David Casement ( ga, Ruairí Dáithí Mac Easmainn; 1 September 1864 – 3 August 1916), known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist executed by the United Kingdom for treason during Worl ...
have been on loan to
Kerry County Museum
Kerry County Museum ( ga, Músaem Chontae Chiarraí) is a museum located in Tralee, County Kerry in Ireland. The museum is based in the Ashe Memorial Hall in the centre of Tralee. The aim of the museum is to collect, record, preserve and display ...
since 2016.
Collections
The museum displays more than 500 exhibits, each at a constant temperature of . These include historic collections and more recent artefacts, including a substantial collection of
melee weapons
A melee weapon, hand weapon or close combat weapon is any handheld weapon used in hand-to-hand combat, i.e. for use within the direct physical reach of the weapon itself, essentially functioning as an additional (and more impactful) extension of th ...
(some overt, some concealed, all of which have been used in murders or serious assaults in London), shotguns disguised as umbrellas and numerous
walking-stick swords. The museum also contains a selection of
hangman's
nooses
A noose is a loop at the end of a rope in which the knot tightens under load and can be loosened without untying the knot.
The knot can be used to secure a rope to a post, pole, or animal but only where the end is in a position that the loop can ...
, including that used to perform the UK's last-ever execution, and
death mask
A death mask is a likeness (typically in wax or plaster cast) of a person's face after their death, usually made by taking a cast or impression from the corpse. Death masks may be mementos of the dead, or be used for creation of portraits. It ...
s made for criminals executed at
Newgate Prison
Newgate Prison was a prison at the corner of Newgate Street and Old Bailey Street just inside the City of London, England, originally at the site of Newgate, a gate in the Roman London Wall. Built in the 12th century and demolished in 1904, t ...
and acquired in 1902 on the prison's closure.
There are also displays from famous cases which include
Charlie Peace and letters allegedly written by
Jack the Ripper
Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in the autumn of 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer wa ...
. The infamous
From Hell letter
The "From Hell" letter (also known as the "Lusk letter") was a letter sent alongside half of a preserved human kidney to George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, in October 1888. The author of this letter claimed to be t ...
is not part of the collection. The more recent exhibits on display include the ricin-filled pellet that killed Bulgarian dissident
Georgi Markov
Georgi Ivanov Markov ( bg, Георги Иванов Марков ; 1 March 1929 – 11 September 1978) was a Bulgarian dissident writer. He originally worked as a novelist, screenwriter and playwright in his native country, the People's Repub ...
in 1978, a model of the possible umbrella that fired the pellet, the fake De Beers diamond from the
Millennium Dome heist and
Dennis Nilsen
Dennis Andrew Nilsen (23 November 1945 – 12 May 2018) was a Scottish serial killer and necrophile who murdered at least twelve young men and boys between 1978 and 1983 in London. Convicted at the Old Bailey of six counts of murder and two o ...
's actual stove and bathtub.
Other items no longer on public display include items that once belonged to
Charles Black, the most prolific counterfeiter in the Western Hemisphere. These include a set of printing plates, a remarkable series of forged banknotes, and a cunningly hollowed-out kitchen door once used to conceal them.
Cases on display
*The eponymous pieces of evidence from the February 1918 "Badge and Button Murder", also known as the
Eltham Common murder
*
Udham Singh
Udham Singh (born Sher Singh; 26 December 1899 — 31 July 1940) was an Indian revolutionary belonging to Ghadar Party and HSRA, best known for assassinating Michael O'Dwyer, the former lieutenant governor of the Punjab in India, on 13 M ...
, an Indian revolutionary who shot and killed
Michael O'Dwyer
Michael Francis O'Dwyer (28 April 1864 – 13 March 1940) was an Irish Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer and later the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, British India, between 1913 and 1919.
During O'Dwyer's tenure as Punjab's Lieutenant Gove ...
, the former Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab in
British India
The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...
.
*
Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom, after being convicted of the murder of her lover, David Blakely.
*
John Reginald Halliday Christie, a notorious English serial killer active in the 1940s and early 1950s.
*The
Stratton Brothers, the first men to be convicted in Great Britain for murder based on fingerprint evidence
*
John George Haigh
John George Haigh (; 24 July 1909 – 10 August 1949), commonly known as the Acid Bath Murderer, was an English serial killer convicted for the murder of six people, although he claimed to have killed nine. Haigh battered to death or shot his ...
, an English serial killer, active between 1944 and 1949
![NevilleHeath](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/NevilleHeath.jpg)
*
Neville Heath
Neville George Clevely Heath (6 June 1917 – 16 October 1946) was an English murderer who killed two young women in the summer of 1946. He was executed in Pentonville Prison, London, in October 1946.
Early life and career
Neville Heath was bor ...
, an English killer who was responsible for the murders of at least two young women, and who was executed in London in 1946
*
Dennis Nilsen
Dennis Andrew Nilsen (23 November 1945 – 12 May 2018) was a Scottish serial killer and necrophile who murdered at least twelve young men and boys between 1978 and 1983 in London. Convicted at the Old Bailey of six counts of murder and two o ...
, a serial killer and necrophiliac, also known as the Muswell Hill Murderer and the Kindly Killer, who committed the murders of 15 young men in London
*
Thomas Neill Cream
Thomas Neill Cream (27 May 1850 – 15 November 1892), also known as the Lambeth Poisoner, was a Scottish-Canadian medical doctor and serial killer who poisoned his victims with strychnine. Over the course of his career, he murdered up t ...
, also known as the Lambeth Poisoner, a Scottish-born serial killer (his poisoner’s kit is on display)
*
Death of Keith Blakelock
Keith Henry Blakelock QGM, a London Metropolitan Police constable, was murdered on 6 October 1985 during rioting at the Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham, north London. The riot broke out after Cynthia Jarrett died of heart failure ...
in the
Broadwater Farm
Broadwater Farm, often referred to simply as "The Farm", is an area in Tottenham, North London, straddling the River Moselle (London), River Moselle. The eastern half of the area is dominated by the Broadwater Farm Housing estate, Estate ("BWFE") ...
housing estate in 1985 (his uniform is displayed)
*A cast of the hole drilled into the vault wall during the
Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary
The Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary occurred in April 2015, when an underground safe deposit facility in Hatton Garden, London, owned by Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd., was burgled. According to official sources, the total stolen had an esti ...
is on display. During the long weekend of Easter Bank Holiday in April 2015, four thieves burgled deposit boxes with a value up to £200 million
*The trunk from the
Charing Cross Trunk Murder
In other media
In 1951 British commercial radio producer
Harry Alan Towers
Harry Alan Towers (19 October 1920 – 31 July 2009) was a British radio and independent film producer and screenwriter. He wrote numerous screenplays for the films he produced, often under the pseudonym Peter Welbeck. He produced over 80 ...
produced a radio series hosted by
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his innovative work in film, radio and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential f ...
called ''
The Black Museum
''The Black Museum'' is a radio crime-drama program produced by Harry Alan Towers, which was broadcast in the USA on the Mutual network in 1952. It was then broadcast in Europe in 1953 on Radio Luxembourg, a commercial radio station, and was not ...
'', inspired by the catalogue of items on display. Each week, the programme featured an item from the museum and a dramatization of the story surrounding the object to the macabre delight of audiences. Often mistakenly cited as a
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
production, Towers commercially syndicated the programme throughout the English-speaking world. The American radio writer
that ran at the same time in the U. S. called ''
of Scotland Yard. The program debuted on 18 November 1951, and was hosted by Chief Superintendent John Davidson, curator of the Black Museum.