Tag: 1840s

Inconsistency and the legacy of slavery as two assaults come before the courts

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Memorial to the Demerara slave rebellion of 1823, which commemorates the Guyanan resistance hero, Quamnina.

I suppose it is too much to ask for consistency from the criminal justice system when cases come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and the circumstances of each can be quite different. This is especially true when it concerns violence, specifically violence which fell under the very broad terms of ‘assault’ in the nineteenth century.

Assault was always a very fluid term in law, made clear in instructions to magistrates from Dalton to Burn from the 17th to the early 19th century. Even the advent a professional police and the creation of a Police Code book did little to cement a clear understanding of what assault really was. By the later 1800s there was at least distinction between ‘common’ and ‘aggravated’ assault, but the former definition was as vague as it had been in the 1700s:

‘A common assault is the beating, or it may be only the striking, or touching of a person’.

Police were advised not to arrest aggressors in these cases, ‘but leave the party injured to summons’ them. If actual violence was evident (wounds were obvious for example) the officer was obliged to take culprits into custody, even if they hadn’t seen the incident themselves.1

This allowed a lot of leeway and makes it quite hard for us, as historians, to compare assault cases. When we add to this the fact that most – almost all in reality – were prosecuted before the magistracy (where records are scant at best) we are at a severe disadvantage in understanding the contexts and causes of non-fatal violence in history. It makes it equally difficult to understand why some cases resulted in fines and others led to long prison sentences. It isn’t always as simple as looking at the level of violence used, as this pair of cases from 1843 illustrate.

Violence was often associated with drunkenness, and this took many forms. Mary Denyer was strolling along the Mile End Road, minding her own business one afternoon, when two young men approached her.

Thomas Webb and George Todd had been drinking, enjoying a holiday from work. They grabbed hold of Mary and ‘twirled her abou, but rather too vigourously. Perhaps this was ‘high jinks’, or two boorish young men behaving badly towards a vulnerable female that happened to cross their path.

Regardless of their motives – sinister, or simply crass and stupid – the young tailoress was pregnant and the shock and rough handling she received by being ‘twirled about’ caused her to faint to the pavement.

The men quickly ran off instead of helping her, not the best idea under the circumstances because they’d been seen by a policeman. The officer, having left Mary in the care of a passerby, set off in pursuit. The pals were quickly captured and when brought before the Thames magistrate, were very apologetic, but said they were  only having ‘a lark’. They were drunk, they’d seen a pretty girl and they’d had a dance with her. They didn’t intend to hurt her, and they had no idea she was with child.

None of this cut much ice with the magistrate, Mr Broderip. He condemned their behaviour and said they had committed a ‘gross outrage’ on the poor girl. As a result he fined them £5 each, money he almost certainly knew they didn’t have. That condemned them to spend the next two months in prison. 

I’ve no defence for Todd and Webb, they acted very badly and deserved punishment. But I am interested in justice Broderip’s seemingly inconsistent treatment of assault in his courtroom.

Broderip’s fury at the action of two ‘ruffians’ towards a pregnant women was not matched by his reaction to an assault on a sailor who complained at his court the following day.

Joseph Beale has signed up as an ordinary seaman on the Ludlow a merchant vessel sailing from Demerara (modern day Guyana) to London. On more than one occasion the captain, William Johnson, had abused Beale and accused him of failing to do his job properly.

There were two key incidents that Beale accused his master of:

beating him with a stick and punching him and smashing him in the face with a ‘spitting-box’ (a spittoon).

The violence he’d suffered was, by his own account, severe and certainly aggravated. It was also deliberate, related and sustained. Beale told Mr Broderip he had been struck more than a dozen times with a stick. Had he counted the blows he’d received the magistrate asked him Yes, the sailor replied, he had, or at least until he reached 12 when he stopped counting.

The captain was defended in court by Mr Price, a barrister who cross examined Beale and  discovered that the captain had also lowered his wages, on the grounds that he was only a ‘ordinary’ season not an ‘able’ one (as Beale had apparently claimed).

Beale said he’d never claimed any such thing but perhaps the damage was done and it certainly convinced the magistrate that the man was full of resentment towards his superior.

Broderip accepted that an assault had occurred but decided (with no corroborating evidence at all – indeed at least one crew mate corroborated Beale’s account) that Beale was exaggerating it. As a result the magistrate imposed a small fine and advised Captain Jonson to not ‘strike a man in the heat of passion’ in future or get involved in arguments with his crew on deck.

Compare this fine (10s) for actual and severe violence from a person in authority with the (relatively) minor assault that landed two working class men in gaol the day before.

There was another factor here though, Demerera had been a slave colony. In 1823 a rebellion of 10,000 slaves was crushed by the authorities and many of those accused of involvement were hanged. The revolt probably helped finally undermine slavery and the callous treatment of those involved and the horrors it exposed it undoubtedly ruled the abolition movement. In 1834 slavey was officially abolished in Demerera (under the terms of the 1834 abolition act), so just 9 years before this incident reached Broderip’s court.

We might note that while slavery was an abomination in many people’s eyes parliament still saw fit to compensate the plantain owners for the loss of their ‘property’. In Demerara this amounted to £4,297,117 10s. 6½d (or close to £300m in today’s money).

Joseph Beale was ‘a man of colour’, and so maybe one of those freed in 1843, or the son of freed slaves at least. So just perhaps, in the eyes of Mr Broderip, he was not worthy of more ‘justice’ in his courtroom, especially not when the subject of his complaint was a white man in a position of authority.

[From Morning Post, Wednesday 11 January 1843; The Standard, Thursday 12 January 1843]

  1. Sir Howard Vincent’s Police Code 1889 edited by Neil R A Bell and Adam Wood, (Mango Books, 2015), p. 25

Drew’s latest book, Murder Maps: Crime Scenes Revisited is available from all good bookshops (if you can find one open!) and online via various outlets: e.g Waterstones and Amazon

The menace of fireworks (a lesson from the past?)

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Bonfire night is upon us again and, despite the ongoing pandemic, dusk is ushered in by the sound of fireworks as it has been for the last few weeks.

This means that my social media feed is also full of people complaining about fireworks: children and young adults throwing them, pets being distressed by them, and our peace being shattered by them. But before we get carried away by thinking that this is in any way a modern problem, let me assure you that we’ve been complaining about fireworks for well over 150 years.

In 1846, for example, the London Daily News reported a case from the Edmonton Petty Sessions under the headline: ‘A caution to dealers in fireworks’.

Mary Emmune was summoned to court to explain why she had sold ‘a quantity of catherine wheels, squibs, etc.’ to a child. She faced a penalty of £5, which seems quite lenient but was the equivalent of around £300 today. Despite having a solicitor to represent her the bench still levied the full amount.

In doing this the chair (the magistrate in charge on the day) was probably mindful of his own experience of Guy Fawkes night that year. He told the dealer’s lawyer that his own horse had ‘nearly run away with him’ in fright at all the explosions around him, and that one of his friend’s animals had been ‘severely injured in consequence of fireworks’.

This is clear echo through time of the distress caused by loud bangs and flashes to our pets and work animals. In the past of course horses were ubiquitous in Victorian society. Pretty much everything we rely on motorised transport for (commuting, goods delivery, public transport) was provided by horse power in the 1800s.

So there was plenty of risk of animals being ‘spooked’ by fireworks (either those just ‘going off’ and those more mischievously thrown by youths. Youths were not allowed to be sold fireworks (which is why Mrs Emmune was prosecuted) and that is the case today. It is illegal to sell them to under 18s and it is against the law for anyone under 18 to be in possession of a firework in a public space.

In the following year there was tragedy in Exeter when an eighteen year-old apprentice was killed when two rockets exploded in his trouser pockets. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of ‘accidental death’ with a strong recommendation ‘against the use of fireworks being permitted by the authorities’.

The same paper also reported that a curate and his assistant were prosecuted in Topsham, Devon, for ‘rolling lighted tea-barrels through the streets’, despite this practice having been banned by local magistrates. The Rev. Cooke was fined £2 plus expenses.

The same problems continue to blight Guy Fawkes today of course. Fatalities are rare but they do happen, but between 2000-2005 (the last year that statistics were taken) an average of 1,650 people a year were bring injured by fireworks.

Two more fatalities in 1851 were the result of illegal firework manufacture in the Clerkenwell, London. William Phillips and James Prickett (both in their late teens) died at St Bartholomew’s hospital in early November of wounds sustained when testing fireworks they were making. The other man involved was ‘dangerously ill’ and so evidence was scarce but it seems the trio were employed by a chemist named Thomas Herring in Aldersgate Street. Unbeknown to Herring the lads were making fireworks ‘solely for the amusement of themselves’.

‘They had made a lot of squibs’, the court was told, ‘but they would not go off properly’. As they tried again one ended up in the fire, popped out of the grate and set off others. There was an explosion which blew out the windows, and a fire engulfed the premises, leaving all three lads severely burned.  The coroner concluded that the house might have exploded, taking down the nearby properties. He added that manufacturing fireworks was illegal, because it was deemed a ‘nuisance’ by law.

Your opinion on fireworks will probably be influenced by your age, where you live, and whether you have pets. I like displays but clearly that is problematic at the moment, especially as this year’s Bonfire Night marks the start of a new month long lockdown. In almost any other context they are nuisance at best. But, given that, as  history tells us, this is an issue with deep roots, I doubt we are going to solve it until retailers are banned form selling fireworks completely (or choose to refrain from doing so independently).

So whatever you do do, do it safely and with regard for the people (and animals) you live close to.

[From Daily News, Friday 13 November 1846; Examiner, Saturday 27 November 1847; Morning Chronicle, Thursday 6 November 1851).  

The artist’s model who left no trace

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An incident in the Revolutionary War of America (The Fraser Highlanders at Stone Ferry) – Robert Ronald McIan (1854)

Robert McIan probably thought he was doing someone else and himself a good turn when he ‘rescued’ John Coster from his perilous condition on the streets of central London. It was the dawn of the Victorian age – 1837 – and the comedian and artist was strolling near his home on Newman Street, off Oxford Street, he saw a man in ‘a wretched state of constitution and starvation’. He decided to take him home and feed him.

McIan would later admit that his motivation was more than just that of a good Samaritan; he recognized that Coster’s ‘picturesque appearance’ made him a perfect subject for artist study. Coster was an Indian from the Bengal, who had been born a ‘Mohametan’ but had converted to Catholicism. He spoke English, but with a heavy Indian accent.

He was treated with some compassion by McIan who made him a servant in his household but he was also a ‘curiosity’ and was shown to the artist’s friends, several of whom painted him themselves. Coster then was drawn and painted by no lesser figures than ‘Sir David Wilkie, Landseer, Etty, Ewins, and most of the celebrated painters of the day’.

In McIan’s head he had done the man a great service so it must have come a terrible betrayal of trust to discover that the man he had saved from the streets had robbed him. Yet in March 1840 that is exactly what he alleged. A pistol had disappeared from his painting room and, since Coster (who had also vanished) was familiar with the room and its contents, and the door had been forced open, suspicion fell on him.

A description of the missing servant and the gun – a ‘Highland pistol’ – were circulated and several months later both were recovered. The pistol had been pawned on Tottenham Court Road and it was easy to trace that back to Coster given his distinctive appearance as an Asian in London.

At his appearance at Hatton Garden Police court Coster was also accused of a second robbery. Since he’d quit McIan’s service he had been living in lodgings St Giles and his landlady deposed that he had plundered her rooms before running out on her as well. Coster admitted stealing the pistol but vehemently denied any knowledge of the other charge.

Mr Combe, the sitting magistrate that day, told Coster he would be remanded in custody while further enquiries were made and other witnesses sought. But he informed the prisoner that if he was convicted all of his luxurious long black hair would be shaved off.

‘No!’, Coster exclaimed from the dock, ‘da neber sall; me die first before da sal cut de hair off’.

Robert Ronald McIan (1802-1856) was a popular artist in the Victorian period known for his romanticized depictions of Highland life and history. He had trod the boards in the theatre in his youth (which may explain why he still described himself as a ‘comedian’ in 1840). He is most well known for his “Battle of Culloden’ and ‘A Highland Feud’ (both 1843) and in the same year he exhibited ‘An Encounter in Upper Canada’ which depicted the heroic fight between Clan Fraser and a larger French and American Indian force. The Highland pistol that Coster probably featured in some of these paintings and, who knows, maybe his former servant did as well in some way.

Edwin Landseer (1802-1873) also had his Scottish connections – his ‘Monarch of the Glen’ (1851) is one of the most famous images of nineteenth century art. In 1858 he was commissioned to create the four bronze lions that guard Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.

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Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841) was, famous for his historical paintings. Like McIan he was a Scot, born in Fife the son of a clergyman. Soon after the court case that involved Coster and his acquaintance McIan he travelled abroad, painting the portrait of the Sultan in Constantinople and various others on including Mehemet Ali in Alexandria, Egypt. He fell ill at Malta and died on the return voyage.

As for John Coster I’m afraid history doesn’t record what happened to him. There’s no record of a jury trial for this theft of an artist’s pistol or the robbery of a St Giles lodging house. Once again, the mysterious Indian with the ‘long black hair and dark piercing eyes’ vanished.

Above right: ‘General Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Sultan Tippoo Sahib after having Captured Seringapatam, on the 4th May, 1799,’ by Sir David Wilkie (1839) – National Gallery of Scotland

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday 10 March 1840]

A ‘ferocious looking woman’ and a distraught wife: female violence in 1840s Clerkenwell

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White Horse Alley, Clerkenwell  in the 1800s

Domestic violence (however it is defined) was a depressingly regular occurrence in nineteenth-century London. Most of the victims were women; beaten, kicked, and sometimes stabbed by (invariably) drunken husbands or common law partners, in the midst of arguments usually caused by the return of the man from the pub having spent the household budget on beer.

There were occasions when the woman was at fault (even if this did not justify the violence meted out on her body), through being drunk herself. Not that most men needed much of an excuse – a cross word from a ‘sharp tongue’, or dinner that was cold or ‘late’ – could earn you a beating.

Only a handful of these acts of assault ended up in the police courts and most of those were resolved quickly when the victim spoke up for her abuser or chose to forgive him. A working class woman (married or not) had more to lose than her partner if he was separated from her by imprisonment, or made to pay a fine.

Taking ‘your man’ to court might earn you respect amongst your long-suffering sisters, it might alert family and friends to his mistreatment of you, it might even shame him into behaving better (for a time). But it risked reprisals as well.

It was even rarer for men to take their spouses to court. For a man to stand up in court and declare that a woman had bested him was a humiliating experience. If things got that far then the situation at home had to be very bad.

Or the violence had to be very serious.

Women did instigate violence though, and were prosecuted for it. Most often their victims were other women. But here are a couple of examples – both from Clerkenwell in May 1844 – where female violence resulted in a court hearing.

On Tuesday 7 May Margaret Kelly was accused of stabbing John Dimmock. Dimmock lived with his wife at 13 White Horse Court in Turnmill Street. Kelly shared an address with the Dimmocks, living in a room below them. One the Monday night Kelly had argued with Mary Dimmock and it turned nasty.

Mary ran upstairs to her rooms where her husband was in bed, and Margaret followed her. She ran over to the bed, seizing a knife from the table as she did. Before John could raise himself she attacked, stabbing him just below the eye.

Horrified, Mary ran downstairs to fetch help.

Soon afterwards PC 38G arrived and found John Dimmock in bed, ‘bleeding profusely from a dreadful wound o his face’, the bed, he reported, was ‘saturated with blood’. Dimmock was taken to hospital (St Bart’s) but despite the surgeon’s efforts his life was still in danger.

In court Margaret Kelly admitted she had rowed with Mary and that she had thrown a basin of water at John but denied using a knife. The policeman said he had a witness that would swear she did. Kelly scoffed at this prompting the magistrate to tell her that this ‘was no laughing matter’. Mr Combe added that if Dimmock died she’d be on trial for her life.

She was remanded for a week.

Just under a week later – on Monday 13 May a different woman was accused of violence at Clerkenwell Police court. In an unconnected case Caroline King was charged with cutting and wounding her husband George at their lodgings in Little Warner Street.

The incident happened around midnight on Saturday 11 May. George –a  brassfounder – told the magistrate that they had quarreled. Caroline was drunk and she threw a ‘glass goblet at his head’. As the goblet smashed ‘several pieces of the glass entered close to [his] jugular, and severed a number of the smaller blood vessels’.

He (and Caroline) were lucky that his injuries were not more serious.

She didn’t try to deny her actions and the justice remanded her in custody for a few days while he decided what to do with her. In this it is probable that he would have been guided by the wishes of her husband, but he also would have wanted to make sure that the brassfoudner’s injuries were not any more serious than they appeared.

Three days later she was brought back to court. George was there but quite weak, so he was offered a seat in court. Caroline King was ‘convulsed in grief’ the paper reported, clearly distraught that she had so nearly killed her husband. She ‘begged his forgiveness’ and he told the magistrate he didn’t wish to press charges against her. They ‘went away arm in arm, apparently on affectionate terms’.

In this case then, all’s well that ends well.

Meanwhile Margaret Kelly reappeared on remand at Clerkenwell on the Monday (13 May). She was described as a ‘ferocious looking woman’ and a little more detail of the argument she’d had with Mary (or Anne as she was now called) Dimmock was provided. The pair had met in Sutton Street and Kelly had called her names. She ignored her but when she got home Kelly was there, and confronted her.

There was no more detail on the assault although the argument was apparently ‘a grudge’ carried over from Easter. Since John Dimmock (Or Dymmock) was still too weak to attend court Kelly was again remanded. On Monday 27 May  Dimmock was fit enough to attend. He gave his side of things and Kelly was committed to trial.

In June the case came before a jury at the Old Bailey. The court heard that Mary and Margaret had ‘been quarrelling for months’. Kelly accused John Dimmock of kicking at her down but he, Mary and some other witnesses all denied this. She aslo said she reacted when Mary threw a basin at her. No one denied that Margaret had been drinking, and it is likely that many of the rows had occurred when both women were under the influence.

In the end the jury found the prisoner guilty and she was sentenced to twelve months in prison. She was 42 years of age.

[from Morning Post, Wednesday 8 May 1844; The Standard, Tuesday 14 May 1844; Morning Post, Friday 17 May 1844; Lloyd’s Illustrated Paper, Sunday 14 May 1844; Morning Post, Tuesday 28 May 1844]

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]

‘Drown the bugger!’ A policeman is pitched into the canal

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At half past one on the morning of Saturday 3 November 1849 police constable Henry Hewitt (164N) was on his beat in Islington, proceeding along Thornhill Road and adjacent to the towpath of the Regent’s Park Canal.

He noticed two men, one carrying a large sack over his shoulder and he became suspicious that they were up to no good. PC Hewitt moved over and stopped them, asking to see what they had in the bag. Even by the dim light of his lantern he could see that the bag was stained with fresh blood.

The blood was from the remains of four dead geese and when the men failed to provide a satisfactory answer for why they had four dead birds he attempted to arrest them. The men were desperate however, knowing they’d been caught, and decided that attack was the best form of defense. They pushed him and tripped him up, turned tail and ran, dropping the sack in to the process.

PC Hewitt recovered himself and set off in pursuit, quickly catching one of the men. His captive shouted for help, calling on his accomplice to ‘drown the b_____r!’ At first the other man did help his mate, but as a battle raged between the policeman and his captive the other took the opportunity to make his escape.

Now Hewitt was left fighting with one thief and the pair tumbled into the canal. The policeman might have drowned in the water but he had a firm grip on his assailant’s neckerchief and in the end the noise of their fight and the officer’s cries for help drew assistance to the towpath and both men were dragged out of the water.

The next morning the prisoner was set in the dock at Clerkenwell Police court and identified as James Knight, alias ‘Macclesfield Bill’, and charged with theft and attempted murder. The court was packed and listened with horror as the policeman described his narrow brush with death.

The magistrate, Mr Tyrwhitt, wanted to know if the owner of the geese had ben traced. They had, the constable told him: two belonged to a Mr Millard of Salisbury Street, Agar Town, while the other pair were the property of a gentleman named Caxton.  In both cases the thieves had broken into buildings to steal the animals. This was a very serious crime – robbery and breaking and entering, plus attempted murder and violence. The justice had no hesitation in sending Knight to trial and Inspector Thatcher promised that ‘every exertion would be made to discover the prisoner’s confederate’.

Seemingly they never did find the other man nor was a jury convinced that Knight was guilty of attempted murder. At his trial on 26 November James (or William) Knight was found guilty of common assault, which usually attacted a small fine or short period of imprisonment. Since he’d been remanded in custody for the best part of a week he was released.

[from The Morning Post, Monday, November 05, 1849]

A Parisian romantic in a London court

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London was a cosmopolitan city in the nineteenth century. Just as today it was home for thousands of Europeans who lived and worked alongside native Londoners and migrants from all over the British Isles. It was, and is, one of the things that makes the English capital such a vibrant and exciting place to be.

One young Frenchman in 1844 was not enjoying life despite his best efforts to live it to the full. Frederick Marigny had found himself on the wrong side of the law, locked up in a cell and brought before a magistrate at Marlborough Street Police court on a charge of theft.

The theft was fairly petty but and Marigny believed that there had been a misunderstanding occasioned by the fact that he spoke little or no English. He appeared in court on the 24 October 1844 having been remanded in custody by Mr Maltby, the sitting justice at Marlborough Street.

The magistrate had been told that Marigny was a regular at Pamphilon’s Coffee house in King Street, off Golden Square (in Soho). There had been a series of thefts of newspapers from the café and so the proprietor had set a watch on customers. Marigny had been seen leaving the coffee house with a copy of National hidden under his arm. A waiter stopped him and he was arrested.

In court an interpreter was supplied to translate from French to English and back. The young man said the waiter had given him permission to borrow the paper, he had not stolen it. The magistrate had him locked up and while he was custody Marigny wrote to the French ambassador on London, asking for his help in gaining his freedom. He claimed that his actions had been lost in translation and that he’d been sent to prison by mistake.

When he reappeared the ambassador’s secretary was there to support him. However, the magistrate was told that in the intervening days a search had been made of Marigny’s rooms and several missing papers had been found. Moreover, the waiter that the young man had suggested had given him license to borrow the café’s reading material denied it. It was also suggested that Marigny was ‘not exactly in his right mind’.

Mr Malby now told the ambassador’s man that he had remanded Frederick for a few days on the understanding that if no one came to press charges against him after that he would be released. The café owner had been informed of this and, since he’d not turned up in court that morning, Marigny was free to go.

With that the young man – resplendent in a ‘high sugar-loaf hat, hair on [his] head close cropped, with beard and mustachios covering the lower part of his face’, left court, his head held high.

The papers described him as a ‘member of la jeune France’.

While this might literally translate as ‘the young France’ I think that here it refers to young members of Parisian society, satirized by Théophile Gaulier in an 1831 work of the same name. Les Jeunes France were part of the romantic arts movement in France, flamboyant and passionate, based in a belief that the revolution had failed to liberate the individual in the way that he at promised to do.

Frederick Marigny was liberated, in the literal sense, if only from a dark and uncomfortable prison cell in London.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, October 25, 1844]

‘It was a bigger boy, sir’: youthful pranks in Rosemary Lane

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Rosemary Lane had a reputation for criminality throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The street was one of several in Whitechapel where the police were cautious about patrolling at night and where they would often turn when they needed to locate the ‘usual suspects’ for a bit of local thievery.

In 1847 PC H180 was passing nearby when he heard a terrible noise emanating from the lane and decided to investigate. He soon found almost two dozen young boys gathered together as some sort of impromptu orchestra, making an awful racket.  Some were banging pots and pans, others clashing knives and cleavers together; even bones were being used to pound out a rhythm on kettles and saucepans.

The policeman waded into this row and tried to get the lads to disperse. The boys were in high spirits and in no mood to listen. That day there had been a wedding – a Jewish marine store dealer, unpopular in the neighbourhood had married, and the reaction of the boys might have been some sort of youthful communal protest.

From the early modern period right up to the early twentieth century it was not uncommon for communities to express their displeasure or antipathy towards those they disliked or disapproved of by way of a charivari or skimmington. This was an old folk custom involving a mock parade with discordant (or ‘rough’) music.

As the policeman tried to stop the noise and make the crowd of boys go to their homes several of them turned on him and attacked him. One in particular hit him over the head with a kettle, knocking his hat into the gutter (before 1864 the police wore tall top hats, not helmets like they do today). He grabbed the boy and took him into custody, the others ran away.

The next day the child was brought before Mr Yardley at the Thames Police court charged with assaulting a policeman. Isaac Gardiner was so small his face could hardly be seen as he stood in the dock. When the magistrate was told that the boy had uttered the words ‘take that blue bottle!’ as he aimed a blow at the constable there was laughter in court. Isaac denied the charge, claiming some other boy was to blame.

‘It was a bigger boy, sir’, he said; ‘How could I reach up to a tall policeman’s head?’

It was a fair comment even if it was probably untrue. Mr Yardley was in no mood to have his court turned into a comic music hall act however, nor was he about to condone bad behavior by street urchins like Isaac. He told the prisoner that ‘boys must be taught to conduct themselves properly’. Isaac would be fined 5s and, since he had no money to pay, he’d go to prison for three days.

The poor lad was led away whimpering that it was unfair and he ‘didn’t see much harm in having a lark on a weddin’-day’.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Wednesday, October 20, 1847]

‘I didn’t mean to knock it out of his mouth’: an old hand gets another month inside

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Some cases are best left to the imagination of the reader, and this, I think, is one of those.

Harriett Jackson was a regular at the Marylebone Police court. When she was hauled up before Mr Rawlinson in October 1840 the gaoler said it was ‘at least’ her hundredth appearance in the last ‘six of seven years’.

This charge was the same as most of those: being found drunk and disorderly and (by implication at least) soliciting prostitution. This time her accuser was a police constable of D Division who said he’d found her propositioning a man in the New Road.

Harriett, he said, had abused the man then struck him, knocking his cigar clean out of his mouth and into the street. Since the man didn’t press assault charges I think its fair to suggest that either the constable was exaggerating her violence or the victim was too embarrassed to come to court.

Instead of assault she was prosecuted for drunkenness and the magistrate questioned her about her behavior.

‘What have you to say now?’ he asked.

‘I’d got a bit of bacco and a pipe in my buzzom’,

Harriett replied,

‘and as the gentleman was smoking his cigar I thought I could get a light from that, but I didn’t mean to knock it out of his mouth’.

For her drunkenness or for her cheek, it isn’t clear which, Harriett was sent to prison for a month. It was a week off the street with regular food and water, perhaps even some weak tea or chocolate. Not the end of the world for oe of London’s many impoverished street women.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, October 08, 1840]