When Isaac Sinclair appeared at Worship Street police court on 12 January 1854 it was his second time in a fortnight. He had been remanded the week before, by Mr D’Eyncourt, for an assault on a local char woman who was too poorly to appear to testify against him.

Char women collected dirty laundry to wash for others and were at the bottom of the domestic service ladder in the nineteenth century. The women in question, Hannah Dighton, was evidently very poor and lived in Flower and Dean Street in one of the roughest parts of the capital. In fact later in the century Flower and Dean Street would become synonymous with the Whitechapel murders of 1888, with several of the victims lodging in houses along the street and those nearby (like Wentworth Street or Thrawl Street).

The assault that brought Sinclair (described as ‘a mulatto’ – or more properly, mixed race – and a ‘strolling player’) before first Mr D’Eyncourt and then Mr Hammill, was caused by an altercation between the himself and Hannah. He had accused the char woman of stealing a shirt she had taken to wash for him. He said she had pawned it but this was hotly denied.

Sinclair then ‘struck her a blow on the mouth with his fist’, and when she ran out of the house to find a policeman he chased after her and knocked her to the street. Not content he continued to kick at her while she was prone and caused her to become lame in one leg. Her eye was cut and she bled so much she was taken to the London Hospital and held there for several days before she was released.

When he was asked to speak for himself Sinclair alleged that the woman had struck first, hitting him with a pot. It was a plausible story; women did tended to use weapons close at hand and a chamber pot or a cooking pot (the report is not specific) would fit the bill. But Hannah denied instigating the violence and she was able to produce a another female lodger to corroborate her evidence.

Mr Hammill also heard from PC Michael Duffey (85A) who testified to helping Hannah and to her injuries. The assault had clearly taken place and regardless of its cause or the exact circumstances Sinclair was in the wrong. There must have been a spate of such attacks in recent weeks or days because the newspaper reporter entitled his article ‘More assaults upon females’. papers tended to return to themes that interested, alarmed or informed their readership and violence to women was  a standard one.

Having been detained in custody for over a week Sinclair might have hoped for leniency. He was unlucky however, Mr Hammill made a point of stressing his ‘brutality’ and imposed a sentence of six months imprisonment at hard labour.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, January 13, 1854]