The Safe That Wouldn't Fit Through the Door

What We Know

When the Office of Arms moved into Dublin Castle’s Bedford Tower in 1903, the Board of Works built Sir Arthur Vicars a strongroom to plans he approved himself, then found the safe would not go through its door. Sir George Holmes, the Board’s chairman, offered to knock out part of the wall and rebuild it, or take the bars off the window. Vicars declined; it would eat too much floor space. So it stayed in the office library, which was also the waiting room.

Inside it were the insignia of the Order of St Patrick: a diamond star, a badge, and the collars of five knights, 394 stones valued at £50,000. They were not crown jewels. Everyone called them the Irish Crown Jewels anyway. Vicars, Ulster King of Arms since 1893, liked showing them to visitors. At least seven latch-keys to the front door were in circulation, one held by the charwoman. Two keys opened the safe, and both were his: one on the ring in his pocket, one in a writing desk at the Clonskeagh house he shared with the Dublin Herald, Frank Shackleton.

On 11 June 1907 he showed the jewels to a visiting librarian. By his own account he never opened the safe again.

On the morning of Wednesday 3 July the cleaner, Mrs Farrell, found the front door unlocked. Told at noon, Vicars said “Is that so?” or “Did she?” and took no further notice. On Saturday 6 July she found the strongroom door standing open with two keys hanging in the grille, and left them on the messenger’s blotting pad. Vicars heard about that between half past twelve and one, and again did nothing. At a quarter past two he handed the messenger, William Stivey, a knight’s returned collar and the key to the safe. It was the first time Stivey had ever held it.

Stivey came straight back up. The safe was already unlocked.

Vicars opened it himself. The insignia were gone, the collars were gone, a case of his own mother’s diamonds was gone, and every empty case had been carefully shut and put back where it belonged. Edward VII was due in Dublin in four days to invest a new knight of the Order.

The Roadblock

Six months later Lord Aberdeen signed a warrant. It told three commissioners to investigate the circumstances of the loss, and to inquire whether Sir Arthur Vicars exercised due vigilance and proper care as custodian. That second clause was the entire inquiry, and the commissioners said so themselves: it was no part of their duty “to conduct a criminal investigation into the robbery of the Jewels, or to take evidence with a view to the ascertainment of the thief.”

They could not compel a witness to attend. They could not put anyone on oath. They sat in private, in the library, feet from where the safe had stood. Vicars’ counsel asked whether the hearing would be public; when the commissioners offered to consider it, he withdrew the application, said Vicars would take no part, and left with him. The clerk and the typist stayed away too, the typist because this was not a judicial inquiry.

So the only body ever convened took five days of evidence about a man who was not in the room, on a question that was not who took the jewels. On 25 January 1908 it found that Vicars had not exercised due vigilance. He lost the job on the 30th.

Chief Inspector John Kane of Scotland Yard, who ran the actual investigation, wrote his own report. Nobody has seen it since. In 2007 the National Archives of Ireland confirmed it is no longer extant.

Best Guesses

The housemate’s key

Vicars died believing it. The will, released only in 1976, names “the real culprit and thief Francis R Shackleton (brother of the explorer who didn’t reach the South Pole).” Shackleton was Dublin Herald, Vicars’ co-tenant, badly in debt, and one of few who knew where the spare key lived. He was out of Ireland for the entire window. Bulmer Hobson’s 1908 version names Captain Richard Gorges alongside him. Kane, asked if there was a shred of evidence against Shackleton, said: “Not the remotest.” The Commission agreed in writing.

The magpie pursuivant

Francis Bennett Goldney had been Athlone Pursuivant for five months when the insignia went. He died in 1918, and his effects held charters belonging to Canterbury, where he had been mayor, and a painting belonging to the Duke of Bedford. Audrey Bateman, who documented the pattern, found Canterbury lore about an oversized petrol tank fitted to an American’s car before a run to Amsterdam that autumn. Sean Murphy ranks him second suspect. He also had a fraction of Shackleton’s access, and no one ever put a safe key in his hand.

A Castle joke nobody undid

Vicars’ first theory was that they would come back. He told a detective he would not be a bit surprised to find them returned by parcel post in the morning. Gorges told Hobson why: Lord Haddo, the Lord Lieutenant’s son, had lifted the insignia once before at a drinking party and handed them back next day. Shackleton raised that accusation himself before the commissioners. He was told on the spot that he need not mention it, and nobody went near it again. A joke does not take a man’s mother’s diamonds.

A theft to sink Home Rule

In the Commons on 13 August 1907, Patrick O’Brien asked what police were doing to catch “the loyal and patriotic Unionist criminals who stole these jewels,” and whether they had searched the Kildare Street Club. Augustine Birrell said that since nobody knew who the thieves were, their politics were beside the point. Nobody answered his follow-up: whether anybody but Unionists had access to that part of the Castle. Cafferky and Hannafin built a book on the premise: a Unionist conspiracy to wreck Home Rule, the insignia handed back to the King in secret. Murphy read their sources and was not persuaded.

The file that was destroyed

Kane’s report is missing. Eight Home Office files on the theft were officially destroyed. Ulster’s Office correspondence has a hole from 1902 to 1908. At the National Library, the unsorted remainder stayed closed to Murphy until the Ombudsman intervened. On this reading the case was never unsolved so much as made unsolvable, by people who knew which paper they were pulling. Nobody has shown that any one of those files held a name.

The Verdict

The safe survives. It went to Kevin Street police station in 1908 and came back to Dublin Castle a century later. The library it stood in is still there, and so is the Clonskeagh house. What is missing is the paper and the stones.

Which makes the realistic next move a cataloguing job rather than an excavation. The National Library holds Ulster’s Office correspondence in the state Murphy found it: inward files out of sequence, volumes undated, a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings doing work the official record should have done. Either something in there names a person, or its silence tells you how thorough the weeding was.

Vicars wanted a hearing that could put people under oath. He was refused in 1908, and again every time he asked. Nobody was ever charged.