Arthur Jacobs was a porter who worked for Crosse & Blackwell’s in Soho. He was 28 years old and had a wife and family. The firm (described as Italian warehousemen in the press of the day) paid him 30s  and Jacobs had worked for them for 14 years and was a trusted employee.

Over the past few months Thomas Blackwell had been compelled to sack some of the company’s workers because they had been found to be stealing from them.  Crosse and Blackwell employed around 300 persons in 1864 and had dismissed a handful of these when the thefts were discovered. However, they hadn’t managed to stop the pilfering and called in the police to investigate.

On Thursday 14 October, at night, a plain clothes officer from A Division – Henry Dawson (301A) – watched Jacobs leave the firm’s premises at 21 Soho Square via the Sutton Street entrance. He followed him as he entered a pub and waited for him. When he left the pub the policeman noticed that the porter’s ‘pockets were very bulky’ and challenged him.

‘What have you got in your pockets’ the officer demanded. ‘Nothing’, replied Jacobs. Informing him that he was a police officer Dawson now insisted that he turned them out. Lo and behold he revealed two pots of jam.

PC Dawson said he was now going to arrest him for stealing from his employers but the porter begged him not to. ‘You might settle it without doing so’, he pleaded, ‘as I have a wife and family’. Sadly for him the copper was in no mood to turn a blind eye. Dawson arrested him and took him to the station before setting off to search Jacob’s lodgings.

There he found:

’12 bottles of cayenne pepper, 10 bottles of source, 8 pots of jam, 10 pieces of preserved meat, a quantity of pepper, mustard, isinglass, nutmegs, etc.’ When he told Jacobs what he discovered the porter said nothing.

When the case came before the Marlborough Street Police Court Thomas Blackwell appeared to give evidence. He confirmed that the goods were his and that Jacobs worked for them. Mr Yardley supposed that ‘confidence was placed in the prisoner?’

‘Great confidence’ said Mr Blackwell. ‘we have been continually missing property, but only  suspected the prisoner for the last three weeks in consequence of goods disappearing from a place where the prisoner had access’.

The value of the items stolen by Jacobs amounted to about £5 he added, or about £450 in today’s money. As to the total costs to the company of all the depredations they had suffered, he had no idea. The magistrate (Mr Yardley) committed Jacobs for trial and on 17 October he pleaded guilty (and was convicted) at the Middlesex Sessions and given a short prison sentence in Cold Bath Fields.

Crosse and Blackwell were well established by 1864 and had moved to the Soho Square site in 1839. Thomas Blackwell had joined the firm of West & Wyatt as an apprentice in 1816 and became friends with a fellow apprentice, Edmund Crosse. According to one history Crosse ‘sourced the ingredients and Blackwell created the recipes’. When the owner of West & Wyatt’s retired in 1830 Crosse and Blackwell borrowed the necessary funds to buy the business. The rest, as they say, is history.

[from The Morning Post, Saturday, October 15, 1864]