SALHS LECTURE – NIK PRINGLE ON THE FOX TWINS – 11 November 2022
Nik commenced his talk with a brief description of his police career and outlined his extensive experience as a constable, thenas a Special Constable and member of the Police Historical Society. After this introduction he spoke about the Fox Twins.
Born in 1857 to Henry a Baptist minister, and Charlotte Fox, they were identical twins and even their parents had major difficulty telling them apart and had to resort to tying coloured ribbons on the boys’ wrists. One was named Albert Ebeneezer, the other Ebeneezer Albert. HALS has a very early photograph of their, rather ramshackle house in Simmonds Green, which was burnt down when Charlotte upset a lamp. Their disciplinarian father would punish them severely if he could identify the culprit, but from an early age the twins realised such punishments could be avoided if they could prove mistaken identityand their father, firm but fair, would not pursue the punishment if he thought he’d caught the wrong one. Thus they developed the strategy they continued to use to good effect throughout their criminal careers having started poaching at around the age of 10. They soon realised that the strategy wouldn’t work if they were caught together, but if caught when they went poaching alone they could claim mistaken identity. They were crack shots and were reputed to have taken more than 1000 rabbitsin one month alone and had approximately 50 guns confiscated over time. Strangely, they were highly revered and their fame even spread to the USA. They were reputedly quite decent people, although incorrigible rogues, although on one occasion one did assault a gamekeeper, Nik suspected that there may have been some sort of provocation. Police Officers liked them as they submitted easily when caught and were described as“the most courteous liars he had ever sentenced” by a magistrate.
One local landowner decided to employ one brother not to poach on his estate but made the mistake of only paying Albert, Ebeneezer meanwhile, was busy poaching. Frequently, after being fined, they would use their earningsfrom selling rabbits to pay the (often quite substantial) fines and at least once asked for time to pay so they could amass enough money.
Once, after his car had broken down near Stevenage, the Prince of Wales met them in a local hotel, and had been informed of their shooting prowess. The Prince, impressed, contacted a local landowner and got the twins the right to shoot for a day or so to demonstrate their skills without risk of capture. They did have a rather inverted sense of fairness, once a lady walking home found a bag of chickens which she took with her, removing two for her own use, before mentioning her find locally. One of the twins came to collect them and objected strongly to her having taken two.
In the end Ebeneezer amassed 118 convictions, but Albert only 83 due to his having died 10 years before his brother. At this point they often had their convictions quashed by claiming to be the other twin,leaving police unable to prove their guilt “beyond all reasonable doubt”. They got off approximately 70% of the time. One of the methods used to establish identity at that time was Bertillion measurements; measuring a person’s particular features such as the length of fingers,size of the head and length of the face, but this was too imprecise to individually identify one twin. However, in the 1890’s Chief Constable Lieutenant Colonel Henry Daniel took over the failing Hertfordshire police force. Nik thought he was the greatest Chief Constable Hertfordshire had ever had due to the improvements he made. Initially he sacked 30% of the force for dereliction of duty but he looked after those who remained, introducing 1 day off per month and increasing annual leave and their pay,aswell as building new police stations and improving domestic accommodation. He had come from India where fingerprints had begun to be used for identifying individuals.Hertfordshire was the first county to fingerprints for detection and the Fox twins were the first to have theirprints recorded, which made a huge difference to their conviction rate, destroying many of their claims of mistaken identity and dramatically reducing their opportunities to demand compensation for wrongful arrest, and they started to accumulate gaol terms.
They lived rough and very cheaply but occasionally augmented their income with casual
labouring jobs including building the cell lock at Stevenage Police station. Unusually
Ebeneezer was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for beating up the gamekeeper, their
only recorded violent episode. So ironicallyhe was the first inmate in a cell block
which he had built himself. The block has been demolished but the Hertfordshire
crest was saved and will be re-
As a result of his incarceration he was “softened up” and soon after his release became ill and died, while his brother continued living rough for a further 10 years. There was a pub named after them in Stevenage: The Twin Foxes, but it has ceased to exist. In Woolmer Green there is an estate called The Twin Foxes.When poaching they ranged across a wide area stretching from St Albans to Tring and Hatfield, although mainly around Stevenage.
Nik drew attention to a number of developments in policing which had a direct effect on the Fox twins’ criminal careers and that of their contemporaries. Sellotape was developed in Welwyn Garden City in the 1920s and discovery of its ability to display fingerprint patterns on the sticky side resulted in its being used for transferring prints from shiny surfaces for later photographing and recording.Another Hertfordshire innovation was in their finding how to take prints from rough surfaces such as brick. Until then identifying prints on rough surfaces had been impossible. When a person makes contact with a surface a small amount of sweat and oil is left as a deposit. Hertfordshire spent a fortune trying to find a way of recording such prints and almost by accident invented superglue to enable this process. A little while later, after some constables became a little too attached to the walls they were trying to collect prints from, they managed to develop an antidote to loosen the glue.
Nik with a question and answer session and noted that rabbit poaching was now fairly unusual but hare coursing was far more common. An additional problem was the amount of damage hare coursers’ vehicles could cause as they drive across crops and through hedges, gates, fences and so forth. Nowadays police are able to seize vehicles used in such crimes and this has been a fairly effective deterrent. Recent fines recorded were for £2,000 to £3,000, but he couldn’t recall the last time there was a conviction for pheasant taking though fines for poaching swans, geese and ducks were fairly commonplace.Information sharing and improved dialogue with neighbouring forces has simplified tracing vehicles used in such crimes. Automatic number plate recognition has also helped by sending alerts as vehicles can be identified when moving between villages and towns where APNR cameras are commonplace. Poaching is quite difficult to prove, fishing without a licence much easier.
Bob Hunt thanked Nik for a very entertaining evening and gave details of forthcoming events.
Report written by Rob Gifford. Nov 2022