Miss Philips was a barmaid working at Victoria Railway Station, in the London, Brighton and South Side refreshment bar. One of her customers had already raised her suspicions that day and when she handed over a florin that looked a little dodgy she called her manager’s attention to it.

Mr Sweeting looked ay the coin and compared it with a few others that the bar had taken that day. He was pretty sure they were counterfeit and moved quickly to have the elderly woman that had paid for her brandy with it arrested. Sweeting also noticed a man in the station who had been seen with the prisoners earlier making a hasty exit and sent the police after him as well.

The next day Laura Deane (an 80 year-old ‘disorderly woman’) and Thomas Shoster (a ‘well-dressed, middle-aged man’) were both brought before Mr Woolrych the sitting magistrate at Westminster. Shoster hailed from Liverpool and had been seen conversing with Deane at several points at Victoria. When he was searched at the police station a ‘shilling was found in an old glove’ along with several pieces of paper which had evidently been used to wrap coins in.

The suggestion was that Shoster was sending Deane out to ‘utter’ (to pass the counterfeit coin) and so change it for ‘good’ money. As for Laura Deane, she was found to have a string of pockets that she wore under her dress, seemingly to conceal coins on her person. But for the sharp eyes of the barmaid and her boss the criminal pair might have gotten away with more sharp practice that afternoon. Instead they were both remanded in custody so that the police had more time to investigate.

Interestingly Thomas Shoster gave his Liverpool address as Titheburn Street. Historians of crime will recognise this as the scene of Liverpool’s first recorded gang murder, in August 1874, just seven months before this news report in London. Richard Morgan was beaten to death by John McGrave and other members of the notorious ‘cornermen’ that infested the area.

The ‘Titheburn Street Outrage’ made national news and provoked much soul-searching about the state of Britain’s urban centres and the problem of gangs, something that has never really gone away. As for Deane and Shoster this may have been the end of their story. They leave no record in the Old Bailey or in the related records of the Digital Panopticon.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, March 21, 1875]