Month: November 2019

A casual thief with a lot of attitude

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Hannah Newman was a confident (one might say ‘cocky’) character. At half past ten on the 29 November 1858 she was on Cheapside, in the City of London. She was dressed smartly and carried a muff to keep her hands warm.

As a man walked towards her along the road she engineered a collision, running into him and apologizing. When he checked his pockets he found his purse was missing. Turning to Hannah he accused her of stealing it which she denied.

The gentleman (who had lost over £13) didn’t  believe her and threatened to call the police. Seeing a constable near by Hannah retrieved the purse from her muff and handed it over, ‘begging to be allowed to go free’. But her appeals fell on deaf ears and she was handed over to the police and taken back to the nearest station house.

When she was searched more money was found along with a porte-monniae (a wallet) with 7s 6d in it. The police also found some calling cards belonging to another gentleman. When they followed up this lead he told them he had been similarly robbed in Jewry Street about an hour earlier.

All this was outlined to the sitting justice at Mansion House along with the suggestion that there was a third victim who did not wish to come forward. Hannah claimed that she had merely picked up the purse for safe-keeping and had no knowledge of how she had come by the other man’s cards. She requested that her case be dealt with summarily and not taken to a jury court.

The Lord Mayor disagreed and said her crimes were too ‘flagrant to permit him to take such a course’ and that for her ‘barefaced’ actions he would send her to the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) for trial.

At this she requested that at least she might keep the money (19s and 6d) that had been found on her. This the magistrate refused, telling her that it would be put ‘towards her maintenance in prison’.

There is no trial of a Hannah Newman at the Old Bailey in 1858 so perhaps it wasn’t published (not all were) or she was released before then or the trial collapsed (perhaps because the ‘gentlemen’ involved preferred not reveal why they had been out on those evenings or because they simply preferred to stay out of the papers). There was a case 8 years earlier however when  a 14 year old girl named Hannah Newman was convicted of stealing a shawl and other goods from her master and mistress. She was sent to prison for 6 months.

Was this the same Hannah? Chances are unlikely I concede, but not impossible. Research at the University of Liverpool has shown that offending patterns in women started young and that many had several  convictions before they stopped offending in later life. If it was was the same Hannah then she might have been 22 at the time of her encounter at Mansion House. Unmarried and out of work she was represented the ‘norm’ for female thieves in mid nineteenth-century London.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Tuesday, November 30, 1858]

A riot caused by a clergyman’s violence

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Mary Barrow surrendered her bail and appeared before the magistrate at Highgate Police court to answer a charge of being ‘drunk and riotous’. However, what was often a fairly straightforward example of working-class inebriation clashing with police attempts to ‘keep the peace’ seems to have been rather more complicated in this case.

Sergeant Fickling was called to an incident in the Archway Road on the 11 November 1885 because a woman, much the worse for drink, was creating a disturbance outside the house of Major Platt. A crowd had gathered and some bricks had been thrown at the major’s windows, breaking some of them.

The police sergeant asked the crowd to disperse and told Mary to go home. When she refused he arrested her, taking her back to the station where she was charged. Oddly it seemed that major Platt did not want to press any charges of damage against the woman and the reasons for this only became clear when the case was heard in court.

Mary denied being drunk that night and instead accused a clergymen (not present) of assaulting her. She said that she’d been standing at her gate on Landsdowne Terrace when a man of the cloth had run up to her, used offensive language, and kicked her to the ground. As he ran away she followed after, a crowd joining in with the pursuit. He’d taken refuge in the major’s property.

Major Platt explained that the clergyman in question was his brother, Thomas, who had been staying with him that week and had indeed come home chased by a mob led by Mary.  Given this new information Mary was bailed, the sum put up by her husband, and the case adjourned while a summons was issued to bring the Reverend Thomas Platt before the court to answer Mary’s allegation.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, November 29, 1885]

Gang fights and assaults on the police – taking the long view

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With all the trouble surrounding the release of Blue Story, Andrew Onwubolu’s (aka ‘Rapman’) new film about love and friendship amongst rivals London gangs the issue of youth violence is back in the news. As this blog has touched on several times already in last few years, none of this is anything new. London has a history of gang violence that stretches back at least 150 years.

Plenty of the early concerns about youth violence and gangs focused on the ‘roughs’ and (later, in the 1890s) ‘hooligans’ who terrorized districts such as Southwark. Marylebone and the East End.

Christopher Eaton and John Marr (both just 16 years of age) were apparently connected to ‘a gang of roughs’ that were ‘infesting Bermondsey New Road’ in November 1875.

An elderly man named Richard Carney testified before the magistrate at Southwark Police court that on Friday 23 November he was walking home when he saw two boys fighting with a crowd gathered around them. He – rather unwisely it had to be said – pushed his way through the throng to try and separate them.

The crowd now turned on him and started to kick and punch him. As he collapsed a reserve policeman came running up to help, only to be subjected to the same treatment by the lads.

As the youths ran away PC Robert Atkins managed to secure the two boys and, having summoned a fellow officers to help, got them to the station and Mr Carney to Guy’s Hospital. Fortunately neither man was badly hurt although the youths had attempted to escape, kicking out at the officers that arrested them.

Mr Benson in the chair commented that ‘these street outrages must be put a stop to, as the peaceable inhabitants of Bermondsey could not pass along the streets without being assaulted after dark’. He sentenced Eaton to 21 days hard labour and Marr to 10.   Whether it did any good is anyone’s guess but given that several police were injured as gang’s clashed in Birmingham just this weekend it would seem that 144 years later little has improved.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, November 28, 1875)

Charges of pomposity, adultery and theft are levelled at a couple from the East End, but little sticks

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Anne Ferrell (or possibly Varrell) had only a short interval between her twin appearances at the bar of the Worship Street Police court in 1844. On the first occasion she’d been accused of pledging the contents of a room she shared with William Smelt in Blue Anchor Alley in the parish of St Luke’s, east London.

On 1 November her partner abandoned her and the landlord, finding the room emptied of his property, took her to court. She admitted that she and Smelt had pledged the items but pleaded poverty. She said her legal husband (another William) had run out on her and their four year-old daughter some months previously and she was close to starving when she set up with Smelt.

This story had elicited considerable sympathy from the court and ‘several subscriptions’ were raised to help her. The parish officers were also asked to look into her circumstances to see he was eligible for their help.

They discovered that while William Farrell had indeed left her it was on account of her own behavior. He alleged (and others agreed) that she was ‘a woman of most profligate habits, who had pledged and sold every article belonging to her husband that she could lay her hands on’.

When she had finished with him she moved in with Smelt instead. The magistrate commiserated with Farrell and ordered that the monies that had been paid to her be repaid into the poor box. He’d not long finished with her when she was called back into court to answer a charge of conspiring with Smelt to rob their lodgings in Blue Anchor Alley.

Mr Broughton was told that the room was let by a poor shoemaker named Thomas Howes and once the pair’s guilt was clearly established he asked Smelt if he had anything to say for himself. He certainly did.

Smelt ‘with great pomposity’ declared himself to be ‘a socialist, and that he had been actuated by principles, the perfect rectitude of which would, he felt satisfied, be made truly manifest to the whole world’.

The justice asked him if his so-called ‘principles’ extended to ‘living in open adultery with another man’s wife?’

Smelt had an answer for this too.

He said that ‘on the day of resurrection there would be neither marrying nor giving in marriage; and that the ties of mutual attachment would be held as scared as any bonds sanctioned by mere human institutions’.

He had launched into his own sermon when Mr Broughton cut him short. Was he attempting to justify robbing a poor man of his property he asked.

Smelt replied that he was only ‘borrowing’ the items and fully intended to repay the ‘debt’ he accrued.  He followed this up with a long winded diatribe against everyone that had ever slighted him or done him wrong, saying that his talents and virtue had ‘utterly been lost’ as the country had gone downhill in recent years.

Mr Broughton had heard enough. Silencing him again he said his words were ‘utterly subversive of every principle of morality and religion’, and he committed them both to Newgate to face trial for the thefts.

They did face trial, on the 25th November 1844. Both were cleared.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, November 27, 1844]

‘If you attempt to go to work today, I will tear you to pieces’. Dark threats of eviction at the Arsenal

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This is a case of conflicting versions of ‘the truth’, which has probably been lost somewhere in between.

On 25 November 1888 four people appeared at Woolwich Police court in South East London. John and Ellen Moore had been summoned for threats that they were alleged to have made towards George and Charlotte Tuffnell, from whom they rented an upstairs room in their house.

George Tuffnell explained that he and his wife lived at 2 Stanley Villas in Bullfields, Woolwich and that he worked at the Royal Arsenal. As he was leaving for work at 9 o’clock on Saturday morning John Moore confronted him.

‘If you attempt to go to work today’, he warned him, ‘I will tear you to pieces’.

Mr Marsham, the incumbent magistrate, wanted to know why on earth Moore would say such a thing, what had Tuffnell done – if anything – to provoke that reaction?

‘Well, you shall judge for yourself sir’, Tuffnell continued, ‘when I tell you what happened on the previous night’.

He went on to describe how he and his wife had returned home at 11.30 on the Friday night with the determination to evict their lodgers. We don’t know why, they didn’t say, but very few if any protections were in place for tenants in the 1880s and so while the Moores might have been behind with their rent, their landlords might simply have taken against them for no good reason.

Either way, Tuffnell loudly turned to Charlotte and declared, ‘Are the lodgers in?’, adding, ‘I mean to have them out’.

At this the Moores, who’d overheard (as I’m sure they were meant’) came rushing downstairs ‘like a couple of tigers in their nightshirts’. This dramatic description brought laughter from the court but covered the fact that a family was about to be turned out in the cold just a month before Christmas.

Tuffnell presented the altercation as one that threatened his wife and family: ‘Our three children were in a bedroom upstairs’, he said, ‘frightened out of their wits’, and he and his wife couldn’t get to them.

One wonders why they had gone out and left them in the first place if they cared so much.

John Moore presented an alternative version of the situation. He said he and his wife were ‘decent people, while the Tuffnell family were given to strife and mischief’. On Friday night he and Ellen were asleep in bed when they were rudely awakened by someone banging on their door.  Tuffnell was ‘raving and roaring like a caged animal’ and ‘battering the staircase with a hammer to emphasise his threats and imprecations’.

He and Ellen got up and opened the door and asked him to keep quite until morning when they would answer his requests for them to leave. At this Tuffnell said:

‘What did you say [to me]?’

‘I said, “Go in, Looney!”’ Moore admitted (and once more Mr Masham’s courtroom collapsed into laughter).

The magistrate turned to Moore and demanded to know if he nad his wife had vacated their rooms. ‘Not yet’, Moore told him. ‘We are going next week’. In that case, the justice replied, ‘I will adjourn the case until Thursday, and if you have left the house you need not appear again’.

Regardless of the truth of that’s night’s events it seems evident that the couples did not get on and so it was probably best that they went their separate ways.

[from The Standard, Monday, November 26, 1888]

A case mistaken feline identity

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Alfred Mackness was insistent that Robert Couldry had stolen his prize-winning show cat. So convinced was he that he took out a summons to bring the other man to court at Lambeth to answer his charge.

The case was heard before a Police Court magistrate and Mackness attempted to prove that Couldry had somehow obtained the cat illegally after it had won a 25s  prize and had been ‘highly commended’ at a show at Birmingham.

He said he’d seen the cat, a striking white female with distinctive blue eyes, at cat shows at Alexandra Palace and Crystal Palace and had challenged Couldry about it.  Couldry denied any wrongdoing and insisted by turn that the cat – who he called (ironically perhaps) ‘Charcoal’ – was and had always been his.

The court then witnessed the curious spectacle of a number of white cats being brought before the bench for inspection. Three cats were taken out of baskets and examined by Mackness but none could he identify as his own. C

ouldry swore on oath that the cat he had exhibited at the shows in question were his property and, without any clear evidence to the contrary, the justice agreed.

The summons was dismissed and poor Alfred went home empty handed.

[from The Illustrated Police News, Saturday, November 25, 1876]

‘Where are your father and mother?’ A young girl, broken by poverty, breaks windows and then breaks down in court

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I know that there are people in this world that believe that society has become too soft: too soft on crime, on beggars, on children, on immigrants. They will often look back to the distant past and make specious pronouncements on how there was more respect or deference in the past. It is part and parcel of a lack of empathy for others – perhaps best (or rather worst) expressed by Jacob Rees-Mogg in his hateful comments about the ‘stupidity’ of the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Before the Liberal reforms of the early twentieth century and the transformative Labour government of 1945 this country treated its poorest with callous unconcern. This indifference to the suffering of the poor was extended to the mentally ill, the sick poor, elderly, and orphaned children. If you weren’t wealthy you simply didn’t matter in the eyes of the elites that ran the country.

I think we can see this in the treatment of one young teenage girl in east London in 1865.

Priscilla Herman was an inmate of the Bethnal Green workhouse. She was under 16 years of age and in November she was brought before the magistrate at Worship Street Police court charged with criminal damage.

The court heard that Priscilla, described as ‘placid’ but displaying ‘features indicative of aught but abandoned and vicious conduct’, had smashed five panes of glass and verbally abused a female overlooker.

That was Ann Summers, who testified that when she’d asked her to do some cleaning work Priscilla had refused and threatened her. Summers was old and the girl had threatened, she said, ‘to beat my _______ old head in’.

The magistrate asked the overlooker why she hadn’t found Priscilla work as a domestic servant outside of the workhouse. She’d tried, Summers explained, but she kept getting dismissed.

‘A great many of the girls turn out bad after leaving us; the language of this one is most shameful and disgusting’.

The police constable that had escorted Priscilla to court agreed that her language was ‘dreadful’. He added that she’d admitted braking the windows but no one knew why she did it.

I doubt anyone really cared why she did it, they simply wanted to punish her for doing so. The magistrate did ask her some questions however:

‘Why did you leave your last place, girl?’

No answer.

‘Did you do wrong?’

No answer.

‘Where are your father and mother?’

At this Priscilla broke down in the dock and started sobbing.

‘I haven’t any’, she cried.

She admitted behaving badly at her last job and promised to do better and ‘be a good girl’ if she were given another chance.

As an orphan under 16 I would hope we would give Priscilla a chance today although given the large numbers of teenagers sleeping rough on our streets I’m not confident that our society would do much better by her.  However, I doubt even  the most heartless of Rees-Mogg’s chums would do as the magistrate here did, and send Priscilla to prison for three weeks, effectively minimalizing any chance of her finding an honest living outside of the ‘house in the near future.

She was led away, still sobbing he eyes out, her future looking bleak as winter approached.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, November 24, 1865]

A cunning thief who finally runs out of luck

Doctor examines the patient's state of health during home visits - 1896

Joe Jackson was a thief with a clever modus operandi. Operating in the late 1880s he perfected a ruse whereby he approached the houses of ‘well-known physicians’, knocked on the door, and claimed that his mother (or elderly aunt) was ill. In the days before GP waiting rooms he would be shown into the library or study.

He would then ask for a pen and paper, so that he could write known his relative’s symptoms for the doctor, and while this was fetched by the servants, he’d quickly steal anything of value he could and leave.

On the 22 November 1888 Jackson’s mini spree came to an end when he was brought up before Mr Shiel at Southwark Police court. There he was formally charged with stealing a silver salver from the home of Dr Taylor in Thomas’ Street, the Borough.

He’d taken the salver while the butler was out of the room but the servant had chased after him and nabbed him. Thereafter he was handed over the police, in the person of PC Greenwood.  Jackson commented to the officer that ‘it was rather hard that he should be given into custody, as the article he stole was not silver, ‘it was “only plated”.

He told Mr Shiel that his mother really was ill, he himself was ‘hard up’ and so he only stole to ‘get a little money’. Sergeant Hardy informed the magistrate that Jackson was wanted for at least 20 similar cases and that 16 pawn tickets, all traceable to items stolen in similar robberies, were found when they searched him.

The magistrate fully committed him to trial.

[from The Standard, Friday, November 23, 1888]

Doctors were very much in the news in 1888. North of the river from the Borough, in Whitechapel, a series of brutal murders had shaken Victorian Britain. The killer was never caught but in our recent book myself and Andy Wise believe we might have a new suspect to discuss. If you are looking for a good new read or  present for a family member that enjoys True Crime and Victorian history can I nudge you towards Jack and the Thames Torso Murders? Published by Amberley Books it is available on Amazon now, ideal for Christmas! 

‘The more I look at you the more convinced I am that you are the man that tricked me’

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William Hurley admitted to being a thief.  However, on this occasion, as he stood in the Bow Street dock on 21 November 1898 he strongly denied he had committed the crime for which he’d been charged. He brought in a lawyer to represent him but in the course of his examination he dismissed him and took over his own defense.

His accuser was a Miss Alice Bull who gave her address as Haverstock Hill in northwest London. She had traveled into central London on the train, stopping at Charing Cross where she deposited a black box at the cloakroom. As she was leaving the office a man came running up to her and said:

‘Excuse me; you have just left a black box in the cloak-room, and I have left a Gladstone bag. Unfortunately, you have taken my ticket, and I have got yours’.

He showed her his ticket and suggested they swap. Alice was wary:

‘How am I to know that your story is correct’, she asked.

‘’It’s all correct’, he assured her. ‘If you have any doubt about it, come back to the cloak-room with me’.

Reassured, Alice handed over the ticket and went off to spend the day in the capital. However, when she returned to the station in the evening and produced what she thought was her ticket she was given a brown paper parcel, which contained nothing other than a daily newspaper. Her box, and the watch and chain, three gold brooches, and clothing – valued at around £30 – was nowhere to be seen.

She reported the theft and the police investigated. The box turned up in a railway carriage at Action, lodged under a seat and devoid of its contents. The police did track down and arrest a suspect – William Hurley (23) and Alice picked him out in an identity parade at Old Kent Road police station.

Thomas Jones, the porter at the Charing Cross cloak room having at first failed to identify Hurley was more sure it was him when he saw him at Bow Street Police court. However, since he admitted that since 12,000 parcels were deposited each day at the station (a staggering amount when one thinks about it) there must have been some degree of doubt in his mind.

Alice went on the offensive in court, clearly annoyed that she had been robbed in this way. The only thing that had been found in her box was a ball of string.

‘Is that yours?’ she asked the man in the dock.

The magistrate (Mr Sydney) reminded her that she was not allowed to cross-examine the defendant, but she was not to be put off. When Hurley claimed it was a case of mistaken identity and that he knew who had stolen her property, and it wasn’t him, she said:

‘Why don’t you bring him here so that I might compare you? The more I look at you the more convinced I am that you are the man’.

Hurley, having dismissed his lawyer, again denied the charge, told the court he was a tailor and said he ‘had ten or eleven witnesses that he was at Gatwick Races on the day of the this occurrence, and did not return to London until 10 o’clock that night’.

The justice committed him to take his trial.

[from The Standard, Tuesday, November 22, 1898]