The men that served as Police Court Magistrates in the various summary courts of the capital were not appointed to a single court indefinitely. The policy seems to have been to move them around after a period to time so that they had experience of a variety of locations. This would serve a number of purposes: some courts (notably Bow Street) were more prestigious; others, (like Worship Street) were particularly busy with drunks and petty criminals.

It also meant that no single magistrate could (well not for long at least) establish a sort of fiefdom in any one part of London and so it guarded against corruption in public office. It also served to share they experience of the magistracy around the metropolis and make it that much harder for repeat criminals to avoid being recognised by the bench (something my research has shown they went to great lengths to do, providing a string of aliases to avoid the repercussions of revealing ‘previous convictions’ which would drawn down a heavier sentence.

On Monday 11 August Mr Tennyson D’Eyncourt was beginning his spell at Worship Street in the East End. He had replaced Mr Arnold who was off to the slightly calmer atmosphere of Westminster. D’Eyncourt’s first task to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to commit a burglar for trial by jury.

In the dock at Worship Street stood an ‘athletic middle-aged man’ who refused to give his name. He was charged with breaking into the house of Miss Jane Harriett Burgess, a ‘maiden lady’ living on the City Road at Fountain Place. Miss Burgess herself had played an active role in the arrest of the unarmed intruder and he had finally been apprehended by the determined work of police constable Mattock (G162) who was also in court that day.

Miss Burgess told the magistrate that at 10 o’clock on Saturday night she had retired to bed and as she entered her bedroom she noticed that the window was open. The room had been ‘thoroughly ransacked’ and she quickly determined that a number of her possession were missing including ‘a mahogany writing-desk’ and a carpet bag. She stated, for the record, that they had all been in the room earlier that evening.

Hearing a policeman’s rattle sprung (police were not issued with whistles until the 1880s) she rushed over to the window and looked out. There she saw a man moving carefully along the parapet to the next house along. When he got to the party wall in between the houses he couldn’t go any further though, and stopped.

Miss Burgess now demanded to know what he was doing there and the  man ‘cooly replied that a burglary had been effected, and that he had made his way up there to assist in apprehending the thieves’. He then turned around and tried to retrace his steps back past the lady’s window as quickly as he could. Miss Burgess pounced and grabbed the man’s leg as tried to make his escape. She clung on tight and was almost pulled out of her window and over the parapet, letting go just in time.

Meanwhile PC Matlock, who was walking his beat along Fountain Place, had been alerted to the crime by a gentleman in an adjoining house. He had seen the head and shoulders of a man appear from the window of an unoccupied house next to him. PC Matlock made his way up to the roofs of the buildings via a trap door and soon found Miss Burgess’ property arranged so the thief could retrieve it. He also picked up two (probably stolen) silk handkerchiefs the burglar had dropped.

It seems the thief was making his way along the roof of the properties dropping down and through windows where he could to plunder the rooms below. PC Matlock caught up with him and challenged him. The man gave the same story about being engaged in catching burglars and then again tried to slip past the constable. He was too slow however, and PC Matlock took him into custody and back to his station.

In court the burglar offered no defence and no clue to his identity so D’Eyncourt remanded him in custody so that the paperwork could be completed for the man to take his trial.

The trial was called for the 18 August that year and the man, now revealed as George Andrews (42) pleaded guilty to ‘theft from a specified place’ and was sent to prison for 12 months. It was a lesser charge than burglary and perhaps he was offered (or his brief suggested) owning to that rather than risking being found guilty by a jury of that more serious offence  which carried a punishment of transportation to Australia.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Tuesday, August 12, 1851]