Month: August 2017

Fire and murder in the East End but business as usual for Mr Lushington

John Tenniel The Nemesis of Neglect

John Tenniel’s Nemesis of Neglect, Punch (29/9/1888)

On Friday 31 August 1888 the Standard newspaper reported on the ‘great fire’ that had raged at the London docks the night before. Workers had knocked off at 4 that day as usual but at 8.30 in the evening someone noticed the smell of burning. It took until nine for the authorities at Whitechapel to be alerted whereupon officials there ‘ordered every steamer to proceed to the scene’. By the time they got there (coming from all over the city) a massive fire was underway.

The fire was raging in the South Quay warehouses which were ‘crammed with colonial produce in the upper floors and brandy and gin’ at ground floor level. With so many combustibles it is not surprising that the 150 yard long building blazed so violently. The conflagration not only drew the police and fire brigade to the site it also attracted thousands on Londoners  in the East End to step out of their homes to see the fire.

The Pall Mall Gazette also featured a report on the fire within its fourth edition that day. It described the warehouse as 200 yards long and said 12 steamers were engaged in fighting the blaze. It reported that soon after the first fire was brought under control a second broke out at the premises of Messrs. J. T. Gibbs and Co. at the dry dock at Ratcliffe, damaging workshops, goods and a nearby sailing ship, the Cornucopia.

As dramatic as the dockyard fires were they were eclipsed by an adjacent report on the same page which read:

HORRIBLE MURDER IN EAST LONDON

ANOTHER WHITECHAPEL MYSTERY

This of course refereed to the gruesome discovery made by police constable John Neil as he walked his beat along Buck’s Row (now Durward Street) parallel to the Whitechapel High Street. PC Neil had found the dead body of a woman later to identified as Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, the first ‘canonical’ victim of murderer known to history as ‘Jack the Ripper’.

The Gazette’s reporter must have seen the body in the Whitechapel mortuary because he was able to describe it in some detail for his readers.

‘As the corpse lies in the mortuary it presents a ghastly sight […] The hands  are bruised, and bear evidence of having been engaged in a severe struggle. There is the impression of a ring having been forced from one of the deceased’s fingers, but there is nothing to show that it had been wrenched from her in a struggle’, ruling out (it would seem) robbery as a motive.

No one, it seems, had heard anything despite there being a night watchmen living in the street. It was a mystery and as more details of Polly’s injuries emerged in subsequent days the full horror of the killing and the idea that a brutal maniac was at work in the East End gained ground in the press.

Meanwhile it was business as usual for the capital’s Police Courts; at Thames Francis Greenfield was charged with cruelty to a pony. He was brought in by PC 73K who had found the man beating the animal as he exercised it around a circle, presumably training it. The poor ‘animal was bleeding from the mouth, and there was a wound on the side of its lip’. The constable was told by several bystanders that Greenfield had been ‘exercising’ the beast for well over an hour. Mr Lushington, the magistrate, adjourned the business of his court  to go and see the pony for himself. When he returned he sentenced Greenfield to 10 days imprisonment with hard labour for the abuse.

Having dealt with that case the next reported one was of Philip McMahon who was in court for beating his partner, Emily Martin. The pair had been cohabiting for four or five years and it wasn’t the first time he had hit her. After a previous incident, when he’d blacked her eye, she had forgiven him and had done so several times since. Then on Monday (27 August) he had come up to her on the Mile End Road and grabbed her by the throat. He tore off a locket that she wore and assaulted her. He declared he was leaving her and when she tried to reason with him and implore him not to go he hit her again, knocking her senseless. Mr Lushington gave him 6 months hard labour.

Both cases testify to the violence and cruelty that was often associated with the working class residents of the East End of London. This allowed the press to construct a picture of Whitechapel as a place that had abandoned any semblance of  decency. The area became the ‘abyss’, a netherworld or living hell, where life was cheap and personal and physical corruption endemic. The “ripper’ became the embodiment of this vice and crime-ridden part of the Empire, given form by John Tenniel’s nemesis of Neglect, published on 29 September 1888 at the height of the murder panic. As with the modern press, historians and other readers need to be very careful before they take everything written in them at face value.

[from The Standard , Friday, August 31, 1888; The Morning Post, Friday, August 31, 1888;The Pall Mall Gazette , Friday, August 31, 1888]

for more Ripper related posts see:

Cruelty to cat grabs the attention of the press while across London the ‘Ripper’ murders begin.

“Let me see the Queen, I know who the ‘Ripper’ is!”

 

A magistrate falls victim as he leaves work

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If a reader had opened his newspaper on the morning of Thursday 30 August 1888 they would, as yet, have had no inkling of the major news story that was about to dominate the news hole in the summer autumn of that year. Within 24 hours the unknown murderer known to history at ‘Jack the Ripper’ would have began a killing series that left at least five women dead and horribly mutilated. The story of the Whitechapel murders came to be known across the world as newspaper readers were treated to a detailed and blow-by-blow account of the police investigation and the panic that gripped the East End of London.

On 30 August however that all lay in the future. The Standard‘s readers were instead entertained by a series of reports from the capital’s Police Courts, and, on this occasion by the robbery of one of the magistrates themselves, Mr Saunders who presided at Worship Street in Shoreditch.

Mr Saunders was making his way home from the court having left it at four in the afternoon. As he headed towards Liverpool Street station to catch a train he was jostled by a young lad. The boy was 16 or 17 years of age and he ran into the magistrate making out that it was an accident.

This was a common form of street theft; before the elderly magistrate realised what had happened the lad had pinched his pocket watch and had made his escape. Being somewhat ‘infirm’, Saunders was unable to chase after him.

The story was reported underneath all the other reports from the London courts. These were read avidly by Londoners of all classes and it is quite likely that some of the audience enjoyed the fact that a ‘beak’ like Saunders had fallen victim to one of those that he spent so much of his time locking up. Street theft like this was hard to prove unless the culprit could be caught quickly with the evidence on him. Hopefully for the lad’s sake he did get away on this occasion because I hate to think what Mr Saunders would have done if he later appeared before him in the dock!

[from The Standard, Thursday, August 30, 1888]

A ‘murderous assault’ in Kensington

TP128-saddler-harness-leather

Francis Harben and George Parr both worked for as a harness maker in Kensington but their relationship wasn’t good. Parr had quarrelled with Harben’s uncle (about what it is not clear) but the two young men (Parr was 20) hand;t spoken to each other in weeks.

At half past four on 31 July 1881 Harben entered the saddler’s shop at 10 Holland Place to ‘brush his clothes’. Parr was already there and, seemingly without provocation, he ‘sprang upon him’ and attacked him.

The attack was brutal and almost deadly:

Parr ‘caught hold of his throat and pushed him against the wall’, Harben ‘struggled to get away but [Parr] picked up a leather-cutter’s knife from the board and stabbed him in the throat with it’.

Harben was then stabbed in the back of head and three more times in the face and neck. As he fell to the floor he dragged his attacker down with him and the pair wrestled for some moments before Harben managed to escape.

At no point did the other man say anything that might explain his ferocious attack on the harness maker. PC Northover (T415) eventually arrived at the shop and found the attacker himself bleeding profusely from a wound in his throat. He helped Parr get to the St George’s Hospital where he was treated for his injuries. Soon afterwards Harben also arrived at the hospital having been helped there by some passers-by.

The surgeon that rated them said that Harben was ‘in a state of collapse, suffering from great loss of blood’ and he kept him in hospital for several days before he could appear at the Hammersmith Police Court as a witness against his work colleague. As for Parr he too was close to death with ‘a dangerous wound, [that] must have been done with considerable violence’, he later told an Old Bailey courtroom.

At Hammersmith Parr was charged with ‘cutting and wounding’ and with attempted suicide. The suggestion was that he had, for no stated reason, attacked Harben and then turned the knife on himself. Parr had no recollection of doing anything and so his mental health was called into question. Mr Shiel at Hammersmith committed him to take his trial at Old Bailey and there the house surgeon at Newgate was called to speak to his mental state.

Mr Rowland Gibson did not think that Parr was ‘mad’: ‘the prisoner appeared to be perfectly placid, and quite rational’ when he examined him he said. He ‘had lost a great deal of blood, and was very pale, and is now—the loss of blood might take away his memory for the time—he offered no explanation of how the thing occurred—he said he could not remember anything about it’.

Parr was charged with attempted murder and inflicting grievous bodily harm and tried on 12 September 1881. The jury acquitted him of the first charge but found him guilty of GBH. The judge handed down a sentence of penal servitude for five years.

[from The Standard , Monday, August 29, 1881]

An unhappy husband gets sympathy but little help from Mr Yardley

NPG D12316; Sir Francis Buller, 1st Bt ('Judge Thumb') by James Gillray, published by William Humphrey

‘Judge Thumb’ or Sir Francis Buller, 1st Bt (‘Judge Thumb’), by James Gilroy (1782)

As I mentioned in previous post about domestic violence the Aggravated Assault Act (1853) was well intentioned. Under its term magistrates could send men that beat their wives or partners to prison for up to six months at hard labour and it was considered necessary because of the widespread abuse that women (most visibly working-class women) received in mid nineteenth-century England.

However, not everyone agreed that it was a good idea and some pointed out its flaws and unexpected side-effects. Mr Yardley, one of the capital’s Police Court Magistrates was clearly not a big fan of the new act. While he recognised its purpose he declared that one of its effects was ‘to make […] women a good deal worse, and he had made his mind up to punish drunken and disorderly women brought before him as severely as he could’.

His words presupposed of course that the reason that men beat their wives was because they were disobedient, slovenly and drunken in the first place. Rather than questioning the rights of men to discipline their partners the law was actually trying to limit the amount of violence they used rather than stop it altogether. Yardley was of the school of thought that physical punishment was appropriate so long as it did not go too far. In that regards he was a echo of the possible apocryphal Justice Buller who suggested that men might beat their wives so long as they only used a stick ‘no thicker than their thumb’.

Yardley delivered his statement on the new act during a hearing at Thames Police Court when a man had appeared in court asking for help and guidance on controlling his own, rather disobedient wife. The ‘very respectable man’ (who was not named by the reporter, no doubt to save his blushes), told the magistrate that his wife was an incorrigible alcoholic.

‘The applicant, whose anxieties and troubles were depicted on his countenance, said that his wife was repeatedly drunk; that she had made away with a good deal of property to indulge her propensity for strong drinks; and that when he expostulated with her, she abused him, and used the most foul epithets towards him’.

She had sold off his property to feed her habit and in desperation he had even offered to separate with her and grant her half his navy pension of £60 a year. She had refused his offer and continued to torment him. He wanted help from the court to deal with her but the magistrate was unable to offer any.

Had she been violent towards him? No, the only ‘violence’ was verbal. The poor man was clearly at his wits end and feared that if he tried to repress her with force he would find himself on a charge under the new act and would soon be facing a spell in prison.

Yardley sympathised with him but reiterated that his hands were tied. In his opinion the Aggravated Assaults Act had seemingly emboldened women and innocent men like the applicant were likely to continue to suffer the consequences. He wanted it known that he would deal severely with any drunk and disorderly woman that came before him but that was little comfort to the anonymous husband in his court.

‘Can’t you compel my wife to accept of a separate maintenance?’ he implored the magistrate. ‘No’, said Yardley, ‘I cannot give you the least assistance’.

[from The Era, Sunday, August 28, 1853]

The pitfalls of being a newly arrived sailor in Victorian London

Sailors' Home, Well Street, London Docks

The Sailors’ Home, Penny Illustrated Paper, (29 August 1868).

London was the world’s largest and busiest port in the Victorian period, and ships and sailors from all over the globe traveled to and from it. Merchant seamen were generally paid off when they arrived in port, getting their money from the Mercantile Marine Office that was situated in the Minories, close to the borders of East London and the City.

After weeks or months at sea many sailors simply blew their hard earned cash in a  matter of days or even hours on drink or women or both. Others fell victim to thieves. These were often the prostitutes that picked them up in the many pubs and lodging houses along the Ratcliffe Highway.

As a result (either of criminality or their own carelessness and profligacy) many sailors found themselves destitute and in danger of falling into crime themselves, especially if they couldn’t quickly find another ship to take service on. In 1827 the Destitute Sailor’s Asylum was founded in Dock Street but welcome as it was it soon became inadequate to the needs of the hundreds of seaman that required its help. In 1835 a second institution opened its doors: the Sailors’ Home in Well Street.

The Home also helped sailors avoid some of the dangers associated with being a fresh face (and a potential meal ticket) for unscrupulous locals in the dock area. They did this by sending agents or arranging for others to meet sailors at the Marine Office and escort them to safety at the Home. We can see this in operation in a case that reached the Mansion House Police Court in 1868.

On the 19 August a  sailor presented himself at the Marine Office to collect his wages of £6. He wanted to get home to Liverpool as soon as possible and was worried about getting distracted or robbed  and so he asked if an agent could escort him to the Sailors’ Home.

John Williams, who was employed by the Marine Office as a messenger, was directed to accompany the seams through the throng of ‘loose characters waiting outside’. However, ‘the moment they got into the streets they were mobbed by a number of crimps, touters, and lodging-house keepers’. The sailor was bundled into a waiting cab and driven away.

One of the crowd of vultures was identified as William Lee and he was later arrested and brought before Alderman Causton at Mansion House on a summons.  The justice fully convicted him of using ‘threatening and abusive language’ towards the Marine Office messenger and condemned the fleecing of newly arrived sailors. He told Lee that these ‘poor fellows who received their money after long and severe labour should be protected’ and he fined the lodging-house keeper 40s and made him enter into a recognisance of £10 to keep the peace for six months.

It is unlikely that it would have done much good however, the sailor was probably already parted from his £6 and if he made it to Liverpool there were just as many ‘crimps and touters’ there to exploit him. Lee would have chalked it off to bad luck at getting caught, I doubt it would have altered his behaviour much. The Ratcliffe Highway was a notorious area for crime and prostitution and a magnet for discharged seamen throughout the 1800s and beyond. The Sailors’ Home itself only closed its doors in 1974, more than 100 years later.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, August 27, 1868]

Thieves use chloroform to overpower their victim

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This summer London has been subject to a number of acid attacks. Teenagers (some as young as 12 or 13) riding mopeds have swooped on victims to steal mobile phone or overpower other scooter riders to steal their vehicles. What has made these attacks even more heinous is the use of acid (or liquid victims believe to be acid) sprayed in the faces of those attacked.

The main crime here is robbery, ‘highway robbery’ in eighteenth-century terminology in fact. Thieves that stole money or property using force or the threat of force, and robberies that took place on the street (or ‘highway’) were deemed highway robbery. We might call them muggings of course.

Judges and juries tended to view any theft that was accompanied by violence or the threat of it more seriously than simple larceny, and so those convicted could expect the full force of the law. The same is still pretty much true today; violent theft is dealt with more severely than indirect non-violent theft (such as picking pockets or shoplifting).

In the 1700s this meant death by hanging but by the mid Victorian period imprisonment  had largely replaced all other forms of punishment. Highway robbers could expect to be transported to Australia in the 1830s and 40s but by the late 50 transportation was effectively at an end. English prisons now filled with thieves, robbers and burglars.

When he was brought before the Marylebone magistrate in August 1858 John Jones was accused of perpetrating a robbery with a difference; a  difference which singled it out as worthy of press attention and (potentially at least) the full severity of the law.

Francis Stretch was walking along Munster Street near Regent’s Park between 10 and 11 in the evening of the 25 August when he was attacked from behind. As he stooped to tie his shoelaces three men rushed up and one thrust a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Stretch noticed that the hankie was wet but wasn’t able to react quick enough.

He did notice a man he later identified as Jones take his watch from his pocket but before he could attempt to stop him or take hold of the thief he ‘became insensible’ and collapsed. The men ran off and Stretch later realised that he had been knocked out with chloroform.

Meanwhile the attack had been witnessed by a woman who was nearby. Shouting ‘stop their’ she ran after the fleeing thieves and a policeman, PC Whinkler (191S) joined the chase. The three men split up, the two others calling out ‘There’s no Peeler here, change your coat’, to Jones. PC Whinkler caught up with his prey soon afterwards in Charles Street and arrested him.

No watch was found on Jones and in court he denied any knowledge of it. Unfortunately for the victim and the policeman the female witness was not in court to confirm their testimony. As a result Mr Long, presiding, remanded the defendant for a few days to see if she could be produced. I expect that if PC Whinkler was able (as he insisted he was) to produce his witness then the magistrate would have committed Jones for a jury trial. It is likely this went to Clerkenwell and the Middlesex sessions because I can’t find it at Old Bailey. There, if the jury were convinced, Jones could expect a lengthy spell behind bars. Other Londoners would now be on the alert for the chloroform thieves just as modern city dwellers are (hopefully) keeping their wits about them when using their phones in public.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, August 26, 1858]

A sorry pond dipper is saved by the local bobby

New_Buildings_at_Dulwich_College._ILN._1869

Dulwich College in the mid-nineteenth century

Police constable Milne (163P) was walking his beat close to Dulwich College, south of the River Thames when he heard a noise. It was about 10.30 at night and so he clearly wasn’t expecting to here sound near the school and set off to investigate. The sound seemed to have come from close to a pond near the college and to his horror PC Milne now saw a pair of feet and ankles sticking up from the water.

Removing his helmet and stripping to the waist the policeman dived into the pond and made his way towards the feet. ‘With difficulty he managed to reach the place where he had noticed the feet’ [they had since disappeared beneath the water], and was then able to drag the person out and on to the bank. The pond, he observed, was about nine feet deep.

Using the first aid he had been taught as a police trainee he revived the man he had rescued but he was far from grateful. As soon as he came to the bedraggled pond dipper ‘made a rush for the water’. Constable Milne secured him and conveyed him back to the nearest police station.

At the station the prisoner revealed that he was ‘a hackney carriage proprietor’ named Mitchell who lived in Lower Norwood. He admitted that he had been trying to kill himself and was promptly charged with the same. At Lambeth Police Court he again confessed his fault and said that he hoped the magistrate, Me Ellison, would send him to prison for a year as it was all he deserved. Instead Ellison remanded him in custody so that enquiries could be made as to his mental health.

He commented PC Milne for his quick thinking and his bravery and said he deserved a reward. Hopefully Mr Mitchell recovered and perhaps recognised that the copper had saved his life, and maybe even rewarded him himself. At least for PC Milne he had a story to dine out on for the rest of his career.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, August 25, 1880]

When sleeping rough or accepting a dare lands a teenager in prison

220px-Robert_Nicholas_Fowler_Vanity_Fair_25_June_1881

Sir Robert Fowler,  by Theobald Chartran, Vanity Fair (June 1881) 

I am currently trying to write a research paper on the Police Courts for a conference in Liverpool this September (2017). I’ve only got 20 minutes to deliver my talk which always feels far too short (perhaps not to my audience however!) and so I’m considering what I need to say and what I want to say. Part of the talk is about the ways in which I’m combining fairly cryptic archival records of the Thames Police Court with the more narrative newspaper accounts, to better understand what is going on in them.

One of the offences that emerges occasionally in the 1881 register for Thames is that of being found on enclosed premises. Most of those charged were teenagers or even younger children (like Alfred and William Gay and their friend George Clarke who were 11,9 and 10 years of age). Walter Cummings was 17 when he was found in a building at 165 Queen Victoria Street in August 1887.

A policeman on his beta noticed that the door to the property was ajar and went to investigate. He discovered Walter in ‘a lumber-room under some papers’. He told the policeman that he had been dared into entering the premises by someone he only knew by a nickname.

The pair had gained access but broken a window in the process. The other lad had scarpered telling Walter to get out too, but he had presumably got scared and chose to hide. When the constable found him he was barefoot, the lack of shoes probably testimony to his poverty. The pair may well have been intent on mischief or even theft but Walter may well have made his ‘friend’ up and was simply looking for some shelter to sleep for the night.

Sir Robert Fowler (magistrate and former Lord Mayor, the last to serve two terms in fact) had no pity for the young man’s plight and sent him to prison for six weeks at hard labour. Under the rather extensive remit of the Vagrancy laws any person found within a house, warehouse or other building deemed to acting suspiciously or otherwise up to no good could be imprisoned for up to 3 months at hard labour, so Sir Robert was following procedure outlined in legal texts such as Oke’s Magisterial (my copy is 1881).

Quite what he hoped to gain by sending a teenager to prison for six weeks is anyone’s guess but I doubt it did him much good. I suppose the alternative course might have been to use some discretion and get him admitted to the workhouse. I’m not sure Walter would have much liked that either. At Thames the younger boys were discharged if they were under about 14 although if no parents appeared to claim them the magistrates may well have been within their rights to consider sending them to a reformatory or industrial school. That too was harsh punishment but at least it carried the intention of ‘helping’ them by intervening in their lives.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, August 24, 1887]

A man with a mission and some chalk

parry_1835_london_street_scene2

It was not Edward Barnbrook’s first time in court. He had appeared before the magistrates at Marylebone Police court on a number of occasions. He was described on the charge sheet as having ‘no home’ and ‘no occupation’, but he certainly believed he had an important task to complete.

His crime?

– ‘defacing walls and hoardings by chalking verses from Scripture on them, [and] also sentences  satirising our statesmen and country’.

In late August 1861 he was brought up before Mr Mansfield having been arrested by PC Gaze (356S) between one and two o’clock that morning in Little Albany Street, close to Regent’s Park. The constable had interrupted the men while he was chalking a message on a wall. What was that message, the magistrate asked.

‘What nation can fight?’ replied the policeman to stifled laughter in the courtroom. Since Barnbrook had refused to stop writing the constable had arrested him and taken him back to the station to charge him.

Thomas Taylor, a man with the wonderful title of ‘inspector of nuisances’ appeared next, to explain that Barnbrook was  serial offender and his daubing was a constant source of irritation to local residents.

Mr Mansfield asked the slogan writer why he did it.

‘Prisoner (solemnly): To fulfil the prophets and prophecy, also the saints, and to make the Bible universal. I have a mission’.

Religious zeal was as prevalent in Victorian society as it appears to be in our own and seemingly dismissed or tolerated as harmless unless it was attached to violence. The magistrate remanded the prisoner for two days. In effect the man was being imprisoned without being convicted of any offence,a fairly standard practice for those caught doing something but not really guilty of doing that much.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Friday, August 23, 1861]