Edward Oakey was seemingly a man for whom frequent court appearances and even prison were no deterrence, at least when he was under the influence of alcohol.

The 32 year-old German-born watchmaker lived with his wife in east London but the pair were far from happily married. Described as ‘somewhat addicted to drink and abusing his wife’, Oakey had already seen the inside of a London prison when the Thames Police court magistrate sent him down for assaulting his wife earlier in 1883.

Now, in late December he was back, charged once more with assault, on this occasion by ‘kicking her on the body’.

Oakey had returned home from his workplace at dinner time and set about his partner, grabbing her by the throat and propelling her around the room. He dared her to go back to the law again, saying he ‘wanted to do six months for her’. Mrs Oakey tried to calm him down and eventually he went out again with her pleas to avoid the drink following him down the street.

Her good advice was ignored however, and by 10 at night he was back, ‘very drunk’, and the violence and abuse started again. He punched her in the face and knocked her to the floor, before starting to kick her with his booted feet. Someone must have heard her cries and a police constable was summoned to help. Oakey was arrested and the next morning was hauled up before the magistrate at West Ham Police court. There he received not six months but just three, with the additional penalty of hard labour.

Did it do him any good? I doubt it. Domestic violence like this was endemic in the working-class communities of London and had little regard for ethnic origin. Oakey was probably lucky he hadn’t come up before Mr Lushington at Thames because he was particularly intolerant of wife-beaters.

Mrs Oakey may also have a part to play in the relative leniency he received. Many wives wanted their abusive husbands reprimanded, they wanted the violence to stop, but often not at the cost of losing his pay-packet for any significant period of time. Two months’ loss of earnings must have been hard to bear; three months was worse but to send him away for much more than that may have plunged the family into rent arrears, critical debt, poverty and the workhouse. For some a ‘bad’ husband was better than no husband at all in a society which provided little or no support for this occupying the bottom rungs of the ladder.

So let’s hope that when the watchmaker came out of prison in early 1884 he had mended his ways as skilfully as he usually mended timepieces and that, for Mrs Oakey at least, there was a happy new year ahead.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, November 30, 1883]