Frederick Caius was a telegraph boy. Employed to deliver messages, sometimes by bicycle but mostly by foot, he would have been a familiar figure around the Westminster streets. The service was operated by the General Post Office from its head office in St Martin’s-le-Grand and over 300 locations throughout the capital. You could send a message from almost anywhere in the country to a receiving office and then have it hand delivered by a boy like Caius.

Dressed in a smart uniform and well trusted by their employers boys like Caius may well have attracted the wrong sort of attention. Telegraph boys might have carried sensitive messages, or the proceeds of tips from generous customers; or they may simply have been the cause for some resentment from other youngsters less fortunate than themselves.

If the example of Charles Swinscow is anything to go by, telegraph boys could earn around 11s a week, not a huge sum of money but not insignificant for a teenager either. Swinscow was the boy at the centre of the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889 which exposed the goings on at a male brothel run by Charles Hammond. The scandal helped cement the idea that homosexuality was an aristocratic male vice, born of the debauched nature of the rich elite. The scandal was investigated by Fred Abberline who had played a prominent role in the Whitechapel murder case a year earlier. It was also rumoured to have connections to Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria (himself later named as a possible suspect in the Ripper case).

All that was in the future in 1881 however when the 13 year-old Fred Caius made his way through Chelsea at seven in the evening. He was close to the King’s Road, on the corner of Jubilee Place and Cale Street when he heard a shout of ‘take that!’ A fearsome blow to his head knocked him flying and when he came to his senses he was lying in the arms of a policeman.

Cause had seen the man that hit him but was unable to avoid the blow, he was however able to identify him. Two men appeared in the Westminster Police Court; one (James Cummings, 19) charged with assaulting Caius and other (Martin Sullivan, 22) with attempting to rescue the culprit from custody.

Both young men, the magistrate Mr D’Eyncourt was told, were part of a ‘gang of roughs’ who ‘infested’ the neighbourhood making life ‘unbearable’ for local businesses and their customers. The attack on the telegraph boy had occurred, PC 115B explained, after a large number of roughs had been excluded from the Red House pub for behaving riotously. The landlord had refused to serve them as they were already intoxicated and they had reacted by leaning over the bar and ‘turning the spirit pumps and then sallied out in a raid against any inoffensive person who might pass them’.

A second officer appeared to support his fellow’s testimony and to add that plenty of local shopkeepers and publicans would be prepared to testify to the trouble caused by these roughs if the justice required them to. Mr D’Eyncourt did not need any more evidence however, he was convinced of the defendant’s guilt and the need to punish them for it.

Turning to the men in the dock he declared that Cummings was by ‘his own showing a brutal ruffian’ and he sent him to prison for two months with hard labour, while his companion Sullivan would go down for six weeks of the same. The magistrate was sending his own message to the local youth that their sort of ruffianism would not be tolerated.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, July 19, 1881]