Month: October 2016

A far sighted optician thwarts a spectacle thief

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When Mr Anderson, an optician who traded from premises at 151 High Holborn*, finished his dinner on a Thursday in October 1859, he went through to check on his shop. As he cast his eyes over his stock he immediately noticed that a string of spectacles was missing. He had left these on his counter the night before but now they were nowhere to be seen.

Fortunately for the optician these were marked ‘with a number on the glass’ (rather than on the rim) and so he hoped they would be ‘easily identified’. Anderson now set about advertising the loss amongst his fellows in the trade and this quickly brought results.

On the next day an ‘elderly man, of shabby appearance’ walked into an optician’s shop at 2 Cranborne Street, near Leicester Square. He approached the owner, Mr Whitehouse, and offered him ‘half a dozen eye-glasses for sale’.

Whitehouse recognised the numbers on the glass as those listed on the handbill Mr Anderson had circulated the previous afternoon and secured the goods and the old man. The police were called and he was taken into custody.

Back at the police station the thief was searched and more glasses were found on him. Now he admitted selling to other opticians in and around the area and officers were despatched to retrieve the goods. All of this was revealed at Bow Street Police Court and the unnamed ‘elderly man’ was fully remanded for the theft of over £6 worth (over £250 in today’s money) of spectacles.

[from The Morning Post, Saturday, October 22, 1859]

The US have a Museum of Vision with a  large collection of spectacles (many online) – its fair to say that these were a world away from the designer pairs we see (no pun intended) today.

  • in 1860 (a year later than this case, these premises are listed as being occupied by a ‘brass letter and glass letter cutter’  called Nicholas Flogny. Whether he and Anderson were connected or shared a premises is unclear. Cranbourne Street is at the heart of London’s West End, close by the busy Leicester Square (there is no sign today of Mr Whitehouse’s shop.

A beggar who was not so ‘armless after all

Joseph White was a charlatan who pretended to be disabled when in reality he was as able-bodied as many another working-class man in late Victorian London.

In October 1885 White had positioned himself on Camden High Street so as to beg money from the many passer-by. He wore no boots and one sleeve of his jacket was empty, suggesting that he had lost a limb in an accident or while serving his country.

However, White was not all he seemed (or was in fact, more!) His begging attracted the attention of the local beat constable, PC BOxall of Y Division, who was reacting to complaints made by several pedestrians nearby.

PC Boxall asked him how he had lost his arm. ‘In an accident’ the man replied. Regardless of his injuries the constable decided that he ‘was imposing himself on people’ and so made to arrest him. As the policeman pulled him along towards Somers Town police station White slipped his (entirely healthy) arm from inside of his trousers and attempted to wriggle free of his captor.

PC Boxall called for help and a second copper appeared to convey the fraudulent beggar to the station. Once there it was discovered that far from having nothing to wear on his feet White had secreted his boots in ‘in the seat of his trousers’!

The magistrate asked White what he had to say for himself. All he could do was deny it and say the policemen had made it all up. The beak was falling for that; ‘you are a regular imposter’ he told him, before seeing him to prison for 21 days.

[from The Standard, Tuesday, October 20, 1885]

A sadly typical tale of domestic abuse

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Thomas Looker was a cabinet maker who lived in Bethnal Green with his wife Matilda and their four children. In October 1854 Matilda appeared before the magistrate at Worship Street, battered and bruised and with her youngest child in her arms.

She said that on the previous Saturday night she had got to fetch her husband from the public house (where he usually was) at midnight. The pair had returned home but almost as soon as he got in, Thomas turned around and went out again.

When he came back he set about her, abusing and berating her because ‘his supper was not ready’. Matilda had, she insisted , merely been waiting for his return to prepare him some bacon and potatoes, but this fell on drunken ears and she took a fearful beating.

While she struggled with him she had her baby ‘at her breast’ and he tried to pull it away from her. He hit her about the head and blackened one of her eyes (which was all too evident in court).The attack only stopped when a female lodger nearby intervened.

The justice, Mr Hammond, asked if this was a regular occurrence and Matilda confirmed that it was. Her husband drank all the money he earned so she and children had little for food or clothes (the reporter described her as ‘careworn and scantily-clad’). She ended by saying she and kids would be better in the workhouse, so much did she fear her partner’s violence.

The magistrate agreed and told the authorities to make arrangements for accepting her and the children at the Parish Workhouse. He added that before they left they should be given a proper hot meal. As for Thomas, he sent him to the House of Correction for six months at hard labour.

 

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, October 19, 1854]

Washerwoman ‘steals away’ two lads in revenge

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Emily Brown, a 36 year-old ‘laundress and  hawker’ was summoned before the magistrate at Thames Police Court along with her husband Charles. The pair were charged with the unusual offence of enticing away two young boys from their parents and then getting them to rob them. The motive is unclear but might well have been revenge, as we shall see.

The first by named was William Francis Chesterton (aged 14) who, it was claimed, was included to leave his father’s house and to steal ‘three blankets and two sheets’, which were later pawned by Emily.

The other lad, just over 14, was called Myers (no Christian name was recorded) and he too had been taken ‘unlawfully’ from his ‘very respectable’ family by the ‘artifices of the prisoners’.

It seems that having separated them from their parents Mrs Brown persuaded them to head south west on their own. While the boys were traveling towards  Whitstable  (in Devon) Myers was arrested for throwing stones and breaking a window. He was brought to Greenwich Police court and sentenced to 14 days imprisonment. This ‘brought the journey of the two lads to a standstill, and Chesterton returned to London alone’. He was then eventually reunited with his parents, who presumably investigated his abduction and brought charges against the Browns.

Young Myers confirmed the evidence heard and his father also appeared in court to add some insight or explanation to the case. The boy’s father then appeared. Mr Myers lived off the Commercial Road in Whitechapel at no. 14 Hereford Place, the Chesterton lived next door at 14. Myers testified that he had employed the female prisoner as a laundress earlier in the year. However, in July he had brought her to court to accused her of ‘detaining some linen he had entrusted to her to wash for him’. He therefore thought she had taken his son in revenge for him bringing a prosecution against him.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, October 18, 1870]

Stealing His Grace’s kippers

John Williams was a ‘labourer of no fixed abode’ when he was charged at Clerkenwell Police Court with stealing a hamper. The charge was brought by the Great Northern Railway Company, whose representative testified that Williams had been seen removing a hamper of fish from one of its  delivery vans parked in Charles Street, Farringdon.

Williams approached the front of the vehicle, reached in and took up the hamper and ran off pursued by a member of railway’s staff. He was soon captured and handed over to the police.

The hamper was addressed to the Duke of Northumberland* and while its contents were not disclosed in court one imagines they included smoked haddock and salmon, both staples of a good breakfast or supper for those that could afford them.

John Williams clearly could not but saw an opportunity to make some money or put some food in his belly. Williams was described as a ‘man of colour, and a native of Jamaica’ which reminds us that London had a diverse population at the turn of the 19th century (as indeed it had at the beginning of it).

Williams did not get to eat the sea fruits of his opportunism, but he was soon to taste prison food; the magistrate sent him to gaol at hard labour for a month.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, October 17, 1897]

  • this would have been the 6th Duke, Algernon Percy who had succeeded to the title in 1867 and who had a long political career, serving under Disraeli and Lord Derby. He was also a Garter Knight and by 1897 was in the twilight years of his life, dying as he did two years later.

‘Matrimonial miseries’ at Bow Street

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This blog takes as its source material the court reports from the early to the late 1800s. I have begun to notice some differences of style between articles written in the ‘teens and early ’20s and those penned later in the century. One of the clear variations is in the use of an underlying humour in the tone of reporting. This would align quite nicely with changing attitudes towards certain sorts of offences and offenders but at this stage I’m still thinking around this observation; it may be little more than an accident of selection.

In 1824 a man named Hurley (a law stationer) and his step-sister (a Miss Thomas) appeared at the Bow Street Police Office to make a complaint about Mr Hurley’s wife. The paper described the pair as hailing from ‘the Sister Country’, by which it meant Ireland.

The Irish provided the readership of London papers with plenty of opportunity for humour and what we would term ‘casual racism’. Throughout the 1800s the Irish were figures of fun or a cause for concern. Their words were often rendered phonetically, to maximise the comic value of dialect (this was also used to take the rise out of country folk and the London working class).

After the Great Famine of 1845-52 when tens of thousands of Irish men and women left their homes and traveled to Britain (and elsewhere) the Irishman became synonymous with poverty and pauperism. From the 1860s fears about Irish nationalism led to depictions of them as bomb throwing terrorists. Throughout the 1800s they were always associated with heavy drinking and with fighting amongst themselves.

Mr Hurley was exasperated when he came to seek the Bow Street justice’s help. He had married early in life back in Dublin; his wife a ‘strolling actress’ whom his parents disapproved of. In part to escape this parental abrobrium the couple moved to London but things went from bad to worse.

It seems their doubts about the future Mrs Hurley were well founded. Although the pair had six children Mrs Hurley’s behaviour grew more uncomfortable for her husband. She was a heavy drinker; ‘she was in the daily practice of behaving in such a manner, in the presence of her children, as must, if she had been suffered to continue with them, have seriously affected their moral’, he told the court.

Hurley had no choice he felt but to leave her and take the children with him. This was not easy however, because his estranged wife stalked him:

Wherever he took up his abode, and endeavoured to establish himself in comfort, she haunted him like an evil spirit, abusing him, raising a riot in his house, and uttering the grossest obscenities.

Finally his father decided to intervene and sent over Miss Thomas (his step-sister) to care for the children while Hurley worked. This did not deter Mrs Hurley however, who took to writing dramatically worded letters addressed to ‘the only seminary in London for parting man and wife’ and then visiting again to cause yet more chaos and upheaval. In the last visit she supposedly stole a gold watch and ‘some other  articles’ that belong to Miss Thomas, hence the court case.

The magistrate issued a warrant to bring Mrs Hurley to law.

[From The Morning Post, Saturday, October 16, 1824]

A shocking case of unlawful dissection

As Elizabeth Hurren’s recent work on the use of pauper corpses in teaching hospitals has shown there was a deep seated fear of both the legal and illegal dissection of the dead in Victorian England. For the poor burial was expensive and sometimes unaffordable but the alternative, a pauper burial by the parish, carried a stigma that most wanted to avoid at all costs. Hence the period saw a proliferation of burial clubs; a way of saving for the inevitable and drawing on the support of others in similarly dire straights.

The medical profession struggled to gain the trust of the public  in the 1800s and the fear that surgeon might be less than picky about where they got their cadavers to do their research upon contributed to an underlying reluctance of the working classes to embrace the doctor in the way we are used to today.

This case, from 1871, illustrates some of these concerns and sheds light on a practice that is often hidden from history.

In October 1871 John Connor (a ‘respectable looking man living in Trinity Square’, near the Tower) approached the sitting magistrate at Southwark with a complaint about Guy’s Hospital. Connor claimed that his brother had been admitted to Guy’s seven weeks earlier suffering from ‘dropsy and some other disease’. Dropsy is more commonly termed edema today and  ‘is an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the interstitium, located beneath the skin and in the cavities of the body, which can cause severe pain’. It is not thought to be life threatening but is (and was) uncomfortable.

However, poor Mr Connor’s sibling succumbed  to one disease or another because he died in hospital on the 5th October, in the presence of his family. They asked to have his body removed on the same evening so they could make the necessary arrangements for his funeral. However, it seems this did not happen.

The hospital said it was too late to transfer the most that night and promised it would be done in the morning. The Connors accepted this but made a point of saying that they wished that the body was not to be interfered with (I presume they meant not subjected to a post mortem examination). They made a note that notices displayed in the hospital specifically forbade any such dissection of the body wothout the approval of the relatives of the dead.

Imagine their shock then when on receiving the body of their loved one the next day they discovered that he had indeed been subjected to a dissection without their consent. Connor told Mr Benson (the magistrate) that his brother had ‘been cut about from the neck to the lower part of the abdomen’.

He had complained to Mr Steele (the resident medical officer) and had succeeded in meeting with Mr Habershon who had treated his brother at Guy’s. He told them how ‘shamefully’ they had been treated but all he got were denials and  obfuscation. The magistrate sympathised with him and said he had heard of similar complaints from other relatives of deceased patients in the hospital. However, there was nothing he (or the law) could do without specific details and the names of those concerned.

The magistrate continued his criticism of the hospital authorities for hiding behind the ‘wealth of the institution’ and stated that he was clear that illegal dissection was being carried out there. Mr Connor thanked him for his time and left, sadly without getting the ‘justice’ he sought.

[From Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, October 15, 1871}

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The Siege of Lucknow, 1857

Cormack Scolland (a ‘determined looking man’) appeared before the Lord mayor at the Mansion House Police court in October 1865 accused of deserting his regiment, the 5th Fusiliers.

Scolland had given himself up to a sergeant from the Coldstream Guards at the Tower of London on the previous Monday. The sergeant was surprised but on the strength of the man’s confession he took him into custody.

Now, a little under a week later, the Mayor asked him if he still persisted in saying he was deserter and reminded him that a false statement laid him open to a penalty of three months in prison.

The soldier stated that he had enlisted in 1846 and had served in India. He was present at the siege of Lucknow (in the so-called Indian ‘mutiny’) and had served there under General Havelock with distinction. In his career of 19 years he had served faithfully and been awarded ‘two medals with clasps’.

‘What had become of his medals’ the Lord mayor asked. He had sold them for 7s each he replied.

Now the magistrate asked him why he had taken the fateful decision to desert from the army. Scolland stated that:

‘He was very much put upon by one of the sergeants, and had suffered much from his tyranny, that he felt he should have done something worse if he had not deserted. He therefore thought it was the best course to do so.’

The Coldstream sergeant stated for the record that had he have deserted the man was entitled to a pension of 1s or 1s 2d per day. That, presumably, Scolland had thrown away such was his conviction that he was a victim of bullying at work.

This drastic action earned the Lord Mayor’s sympathy: he told the soldier that he ‘was sorry to see a man that had served his country… forfeit his character in the way he had done so’. But he gave him little else in the way of help and certainly there was no suggestion that the truth of his allegation against a sergeant of the Fusiliers should be investigated.

Instead the poor man was sent to Holloway Prison (not then a women’s prison) to be dealt with by the military authorities at a later date.

[from The Morning Post , Saturday, October 14, 1865]

An army deserter gets some sympathy but precious little help from the Lord Mayor

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the siege of Lucknow 1857

Cormack Scolland (a ‘determined looking man’) appeared before the Lord mayor at the Mansion House Police court in October 1865 accused of deserting his regiment, the 5th Fusiliers.

Scolland had given himself up to a sergeant from the Coldstream Guards at the Tower of London on the previous Monday. The sergeant was surprised but on the strength of the man’s confession he took him into custody.

Now, a little under a week later, the Mayor asked him if he still persisted in saying he was deserter and reminded him that a false statement laid him open to a penalty of three months in prison.

The soldier stated that he had enlisted in 1846 and had served in India. He was present at the siege of Lucknow (in the so-called Indian ‘mutiny’) and had served there under General Havelock with distinction. In his career of 19 years he had served faithfully and been awarded ‘two medals with clasps’.

‘What had become of his medals’ the Lord mayor asked. He had sold them for 7s each he replied.

Now the magistrate asked him why he had taken the fateful decision to desert from the army. Scolland stated that:

‘He was very much put upon by one of the sergeants, and had suffered much from his tyranny, that he felt he should have done something worse if he had not deserted. He therefore thought it was the best course to do so.’

The Coldstream sergeant stated for the record that had he have deserted the man was entitled to a pension of 1s or 1s 2d per day. That, presumably, Scolland had thrown away such was his conviction that he was a victim of bullying at work.

This drastic action earned the Lord Mayor’s sympathy: he told the soldier that he ‘was sorry to see a man that had served his country… forfeit his character in the way he had done so’. But he gave him little else in the way of help and certainly there was no suggestion that the truth of his allegation against a sergeant of the Fusiliers should be investigated.

Instead the poor man was sent to Holloway Prison (not then a women’s prison) to be dealt with by the military authorities at a later date.

[from The Morning Post , Saturday, October 14, 1865]