Tag: Arsenal FC

A birching for two boys as Arsenal get their first manager

The gate at Woolwich Arsenal

Charles Robinson was packing up his butcher’s stall at Woolwich Market on Saturday evening when he spied a couple of boys acting suspiciously. They ran off and Charles thought no more of it. 

Until he checked his cash box that is. The box was about 15 shillings light but there was little he could do, the lads were nowhere to be seen. 

The following evening PC Shove (445R) was stopped by a tram conductor in Plumstead. The conductor told him that he’d seen two boys moving in between the passengers queuing for the trams on the High Street. He was pretty sure they were up to no good and he gave PC Shove a description of the pair. 

Later on, at about 10.30 at night, the officer spied his quarry and collared them. He asked them to turn out their pockets and discovered two purses and about 12s in loose coins. Neither lad could give the policeman an adequate explanation as of how they came to be in possession of so much money and eventually owned up to stealing it from Mr. Robinson’s stall the previous day. 

The boys were taken to court at Woolwich and charged with theft. They gave their names as George Bell (11) of Lower Robert Street, and William Igglesden (10) who said he lived in Ann Street. Both addresses were in Plumstead but there was no mention of their parents appearing in court. 

Sergeant Gilham, the gaoler at Woolwich Police court, recognized the boys: the younger child. William Igglesden had been sent to a truant school on two previous occasions he told the magistrate, while the pair had also been in trouble together in the recent past.  

The gaoler informed the magistrate (Mr Taylor) that George and William had been caught in ‘the refreshment bar of the Arsenal football ground’. They’d broken in, helped themselves to whisky, and had got quite drunk. All that brought was a telling off and a warning not to offend again. 

Perhaps it was thought that a warning would suffice and a lesson would be learned, but that leniency was not about to be repeated.  

Mr Taylor told the pair that if they continued to misbehave they risked being sent to prison, regardless of how young they were. To reinforce the message he ordered that a police sergeant beat the pair of them with a birch rod.  

Maybe that did the trick because there’s no prison record for anyone with either name from the 1890s onwards. Of course names could be changed but one can only hope that George and William realised that they were pushing their luck too far. 

1897 was an important year for Woolwich Arsenal, the club whose bar the boys had raided earlier that year.  

On 2 April Thomas Mitchell became the club’s first full-time manager, beating 53 others who had applied for the position. Mitchell had previously managed Blackburn Rovers and been a referee, so he was an experienced football man. He knew about winning as well, having led Rovers to no less than four FA Cup victories.

Presumably the board hoped Mitchell would bring success; after all in January local rivals Millwall Athletic had knocked the Arsenal out of that season’s competition with a 4-2 away defeat. Mitchell never really got the chance to show what he could do at Arsenal because he felt the board of directors was constantly meddling in his efforts to improve the team. So in March 1898, just under a year after he took the job, he resigned, one of the shortest managerial reigns in the club’s 134-year history. 

Arsenal would have to wait a long time to win their first FA Cup, with victory over Huddersfield in 1930. Today of course the modern Arsenal Football Club holds the record for the most FA Cup wins (14) and the most cup final appearances (21). Today they take on all conquering Liverpool in the ‘largely meaningless friendly’/’first trophy of the season’ (delete as applicable) behind closed doors at Wembley in the FA Community Shield. 

I like to hope that the ancestors of William and George are watching somewhere, cheering the Gunners on. Who know eh? 

[from Morning Post, Monday 1 February 1897]

For more on Arsenal’s history visit the excellent Arsenal History Society site. The Arsenal History Society is an integral part of AISA (the Arsenal Independent Supporters Association) and you can find out more about their work here.

‘The people in this part of the world are not acquainted with the Manchester language’: a stowaway at the Royal Arsenal.

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PC Monaghan was on patrol at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich in the early hours of the morning on Tuesday 21 April 1880. As the constable entered the canon cartridge factory site he thought he heard something and went to investigate. The area was restricted since, being ‘devoted to the manufacture and storage of explosives’ it was one ‘of the most dangerous areas of the Arsenal’. Even the workforce at the Arsenal was not permitted inside without a special order but somehow someone had got in.

The arsenal’s store was about two miles from any inhabited buildings but it was accessible from the river, and this is how a man had gained entry and was now hiding inside. PC Monaghan secured him and asked him his business there. The man told him his name was William Smith and that lived at an address in Kennington and was a blacksmith by trade. He ‘was quite sober’ but could not give a satisfactory explanation for being there.

The policeman took his prisoner back to the station where he was formally charged with ‘being in the Royal Arsenal for a felonious purpose’. The police took the details he’d given them and visited an address at Park Street, off the Kennington Road. The address appeared to be a false one however, as no one knew of him there. Later that day William Smith (if that was indeed his name) was presented at Woolwich Police Court before the sitting magistrate, Mr. Balguy.

Smith explained, ‘in a provincial accent’ that he had come down from Manchester looking for work at the arsenal, but he’d got lost. Why had he given a false address to the inspector at the station house then? Smith insisted he hadn’t but the inspector testified that the address he’d heard was ‘on Kennington Lane’. Perhaps it was the prisoner’s accent that was causing the problem Mr. Balguy suggested:

‘Perhaps you did not understand him? The people in this part of the world are not acquainted with the Manchester language’, adding that he would remand him overnight so more enquiries could be made.

Smith doesn’t reappear in the newspaper gleanings over the next few days so perhaps he was able to verify his address or was simply sent to prison as a vagrant, perhaps even despatched back to the North West. The Royal Arsenal employed workers from all over Britain and when these men weren’t building the armaments to defend the Empire they enjoyed a relaxed a game of football from time to time. In September 1886 they played ‘one or two games’ as Dial Square Cricket Club. In January 1887 they played their first game (against Erith) as the Royal Arsenal and the rest, as they say, is history.

[from The Standard (London, England), Wednesday, April 21, 1880]

If you want to know more about Arsenal’s history there is no better place to go than the AISA Arsenal History Society’s website, run by Tony Attwood. As I write this the news has emerged that the modern Arsenal Football Club, now based in North London since it moved there in 1913 (but still called ‘Woolwich’ Arsenal) have decided that this season will be the last under Arsene Wenger’s management. I am a season ticket holder at Arsenal and this is a sad day but also an exciting one. I’m sure he reads this blog so I’d like to say thank you and all the very best for whatever you do next Arsene, you will be a very hard act to follow.

 

A ‘perfectly honest’ man is cleared at Woolwich

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Today we move south of the river and up to Woolwich, home of the Arsenal (the ordnance factory that is, it would be another three years until the football club of that name was founded). Henry Rollings, a tramcar conductor, was charged at the Woolwich Police Court ‘for neglecting to deposit an article of lost property within 24 hours’.

The charge was brought by a tramway inspector, a Mr Naudi, and he appeared in court to press the case while Rollings was supported by a number of people who spoke up for him as being an honest man.

On the 18th January 1883 Agnes Brookes was riding on Rollings’ tram as she often did. Rollings knew her well but not well enough to know where she lived. When Agnes got off to her rooms in Thomas Street, Plumstead, she was upset to discover that she had lost her brooch. It must have fallen off as she traveled on the tramcar, and thinking this she later applied to the Woolwich and Greenwich tramcar company’s office to see if anyone had found it.

She was in luck. The clerk told her that it had been handed in and sent to Scotland Yard, as was their standard procedure. The brooch had been found by another passenger, Eliza  Payne, who gave it to the conductor, Rollings. However, Rollings thought he recognised it as belonging to Agnes and so hoped to be able to return it in person, rather than simply sending it off to lost property as he was supposed to. He told Eliza this and she believed him.

So how did this case of lost property end up before Mr Balguy, the Woolwich Police magistrate?

Well it seems that when Miss Brooks first went to the office to enquire about her missing brooch Rollings hadn’t told anyone he’d got it, nor did he say that he knew her. It was only when he heard she was looking for it that he handed it over at the office. This was the story that Mr Nuadi told at least, and it placed Rollings in a difficult position. He was effectively being accused of keeping the jewellery for himself and only owning to finding it when forced to.

A police inspector explained that the tramway inspector had deposited the brooch with him on Sunday morning (three days after Agnes lost it) and Rollings turned up a few hours later to sign the record sheet. The brooch was then sent on to Scotland Yard to wait for its owner to claim it.

Luckily for the conductor the magistrate chose to believe his version of events. The man had acted foolishly, but not criminally and he doubted Mr Nuadi’s testimony. In fact he said that the tramway inspector was ‘famous for his incredulity in the honesty of people’. Rollings would have been liable to a penalty of £10 or even a term of imprisonment but he would only impose a fine of 10s on this occasion.

The traffic manager (possibly Rollings’ boss) was in court and Mr Balguy hoped that this incident and his appearance in court would not cost the conductor his job. No, said Mr Huddlestone, it would not. Rollings was, in his view, a ‘perfectly honest’ man. Which seems like the sensible outcome. Agnes got her brooch back, Rollings was fined but kept his job, and the tram company protected their reputation as a safe means of transport in public.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, January 31, 1883]

You can use this site to search for specific crimes or use the Themes link in the menu on the left to look for areas or topics that interest you. If you are interested in a particular court (such as Bow Street or Marylebone) you can also limit your search to one court in particular. Please feel free to comment on anything you read and if something in particular interests you then please get in touch. You can email me at drew.gray@northampton.ac.uk

A ‘murderous affray’ at the Arsenal

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Sometimes the newspaper ‘headlines’ above a story have a tendency to exaggerate. Now I’m sure that comes as no surprise to anyone reading the modern newspapers. But they presence of sensational headings in reports from the Police Courts suggest to me that the late nineteenth-century press was still evolving ways in which to present news to their readers. Newspapers had reacted to the rise of the serialised novel, and of ever more ‘sensational’ theatre productions, the ‘penny dreadful’ and other cheap prints that competed for the Victorian public’s attention and hard earned cash.

In an article entitled ‘the murderous affray at Woolwich Barracks’ The Standard reported a fight between three members of the Royal Artillery and  a civilian working at the barracks. The case came up before the Woolwich Police Court magistrate and ultimately ended in a  trial at the Old Bailey. No one was badly hurt and all parties were eventually acquitted of any crime.

Two gunners, Francis Murphy and William Dewdney, were attacked by Jeremiah Maher (a fellow gunner) at the barracks. Maher was deep in conversation with William Baldwin who worked there but was not a soldier. A quarrel broke, possibly because Murphy and Dewdney were both a little the worse for drink. and Maher took down and drew a sword. In the resulting skirmish both gunners were stabbed and ended up in hospital, although none of their wounds were deemed life threatening.

The magistrate quickly dismissed Baldwin as he was clearly just an innocent bystander, he’d taken no part in the assault. The wounds, whilst not likely to result in serious long term injury, were at first considered ‘dangerous’ however and so Maher was remanded and later committed for trial.

The only evidence presented in defence of Maher came from Baldwin who supported his allegation that the two gunners had started the row and he was only acting in self-defence. Apparently Baldwin had heard the pair say: ‘Don’t stab them; but shoot them’. The case was no clearer in the report from the Old Bailey a week later. There Maher was found not guilty after a handful of persons gave evidence, most of which would seemingly have supported the case for the prosecution. The surgeon, for example, didn’t think the wounds the men had sustained were commensurate with self-defence.

It didn’t matter because Maher was given a good character but someone unnamed by the court reporter, and walked free. In the end then, it was a much less ‘murderous’ affair than the paper suggested. A few years later they could all have simply taken their aggression out on the football pitch, watching the Woolwich works’ team, the Royal Arsenal.

[from The Standard, Thursday, January 08, 1880]

You can use this site to search for specific crimes or use the Themes link in the menu on the left to look for areas or topics that interest you. If you are interested in a particular court (such as Bow Street or Marylebone) you can also limit your search to one court in particular. Please feel free to comment on anything you read and if something in particular interests you then please get in touch. You can email me at drew.gray@northampton.ac.uk

A beer shop owner’s gamble fails to pay off

magistrates

Just this week, in the wake of the professional footballer Joey Barton being banned for placing bets on his own team, the Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, declared that he thought there was too much gambling in modern society. He told the press:

‘It is a little bit I must say the general problem in our society. You you have everywhere, on every advert, bet … bet on Sky … bet on here and there, so you have not to be surprised when people get addicted to betting’.

Gambling and indeed, concerns about gambling are nothing new. There were worries about the effects of the lottery in eighteenth-century London, and plenty of pamphlets and tracts were written condemning games of chance such as cards or dice. It was especially concerning when apprentices or other young people were involved.

Georgian worries turned into Regency ones, and then into Victorian ones; what we see today is perhaps only the inevitable slide towards everyday betting on anything, that all those previous commentators had warned us about.

Nineteenth-century critics of gambling condemned the practice for the same reasons they (for it was often the same people) attacked the consumption of alcohol – at least to excess. Gambling, like the ‘demon drink’, drained the pockets of the poor and brought destitution and moral collapse. As a result most gambling was highly regulated, just like the sale of alcohol.

Which is why James Knott found himself in front of the police magistrate at Worship Street in late April 1857.

Knott ran a beer shop in Shoreditch which had aroused the suspicions of the police. Inspector Cole thought Knott was engaged in an illegal betting operation and had the shop watched. Having assured himself that the shop keeper was up to mischief he called on him one afternoon to ask some questions.

Inspector Cole wanted to look inside a desk which was nailed to the floor but Mrs Knott was reluctant. She told him that ‘the key had been taken away by her husband’ and she couldn’t open it. Cole’s response was to say he was quite happy to break it open.

Knott then appeared and miraculously produced the key and opened the desk. Inside (to Knott’s apparent ‘surprise’) the inspector found what he was looking for: ‘various documents relating to races, amongst which were telegraphic messages from York and Doncaster, and numerous betting cards and books’, with details of races run since September 1856.

Knott had explained when questioned by Cole that a man known only as ‘Jemmy’ ran the betting organization, but so far the police had been unable to apprehend him. Knott had a lawyer to speak for him in court who told the sitting magistrate, Mr D’Eyncourt, that his client was innocent, that at worst he had acted in ignorance of the law, and since he was ‘impoverished’ he hoped the justice would be lenient with him.

Mr D’Eyncourt wasn’t inclined to leniency however, and fined him the full amount – £25 (or nearly £1,500 in today’s money) – warning him that failure to pay would earn him three months in the house of correction. At first the ‘impoverished’ beer shop owner looked destined for a spell of hard labour but then, as miraculously as he had found the key to a desk the contents of which he claimed to be entirely ignorant of, he paid his fine and left.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Thursday, April 30, 1857]

A ‘suspicious person’ at Woolwich, but ‘not clever enough’ to be a terrorist.

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In the 1880s Woolwich was home to the Royal Arsenal, as it had been since the 17th century (and in fact earlier as there had been used for gun storage from the mid 1500s). After 1886 it was also home to what was to become one of London’s most successful football clubs, Arsenal FC.

Given that artillery and shells were manufactured at Woolwich in the 1800s the site was an important one for the Victorian military, but also a target for the enemies of the state. Security, then, as now, was an issue of national importance and the Victorian state was concerned about internal threats just as much as it was about  those posed by rival imperial powers.

In the 1880s there were  a series of terrorist incidents in London, all part of a long running campaign by Irish nationalists in the cause of independence. It is a subject I have looked at as part of my research into late Victorian London and I drew heavily on the capital’s newspapers and the work of K. M. Short, whose study of Fenian terrorism remains the most comprehensive one out there, despite its age.

So, given the background, we might expect the authorities at Woolwich to be on the look out for potential terrorists, and in April 1881 they thought they might have caught one.

Two constables from the Arsenal were patrolling by the river front when they saw a man rowing up and down, seemingly watching the shoreline. It was particularly suspicious because this was at just after one o’clock int he morning and they could not see what legitimate purpose he had for being there so late (or early). At three he was still there so they called to him and asked him what he was about.

He replied that he was lost and was it possible for him to land. The constables directed him to a pier, and when he docked and climbed the steps they arrested him. The police were called and they questioned him. It was soon discovered that the boat he was in had been stolen from an MP who lived at North Woolwich, Mr (later Sir) Thomas Brassey the member for Hastings.

The man’s name was Michael Sullivan and his peculiar behaviour and Irish background raised concerns that he was a Fenian bent on mischief at the Arsenal. However, when Inspector McElligot was called to give evidence he ‘repudiated any supposition that Fenianism had anything to do with the case, and complained that the most extravagant and unfounded rumours had been circulated’.

The magistrate agreed, he commented: ‘I agree with you that he is not a Fenian. I doesn’t look clever enough’, which was met with much laughter in the Woolwich Police Court, before his worship (Mr Balgey) sent him to prison for a for a month at hard labour.

1884 saw a number of terrorist outrages in London. A bomb was placed at Victoria Railway Station and other London termini, and a fairly inept attempt to blow up London Bridge resulted in the death of the bombers. In May 1884 two boys kicking an abandoned briefcase attracted the attention of a policeman who found they were playing with a case containing dynamite, fuses and a detonator! These incidents followed attacks in 1882 (at the Lord Mayor’s residence, Mansion House) and at the offices of The Times newspaper in 1883. In January 1885 the Houses of Parliament were targeted  along with he Tower of London, and the new underground railway was also subject to a bomb attack, as the Hammersmith train left Aldgate station.

There were few deaths and nothing like the serious level of injury that modern terrorists have inflicted recently, but it still reminded Victorian society that as long as Britain insisted on claiming Ireland as a colony Victoria’s subjects would not be safe in their homes or their streets. It also contributed to wider prejudice and the stereotyping of Irish immigrants in London and elsewhere, something that we see repeated in the demonisation of moslems today.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, April 20, 1881]

Too lazy to go (back) to the Arsenal

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On the 3rd January 1877 two ‘young men’ appeared at Marylebone Police Court in front of Mr D’Eyncourt, the sitting magistrate. There they freely confessed to being deserters from the Royal Artillery.

The pair were stationed at Woolwich Arsenal, in south east London. They had been walking in Bayswater earlier that morning when they had stopped a passing policeman and had given themselves up.

The PC (from X Division) was convinced the soldiers were shamming and instead of deserting he suggested they were just ‘too lazy to walk to Woolwich’. He searched them and the ‘informations’ about deserters but could find nothing that suggested they had absconded or were not simply on leave.

The pair laughed about it in court, saying they were tired and hungry and hadn’t eaten in 24 hours. The magistrate, perhaps frustrated that they had broken no civil law, was forced to issue an order for them to be transported to the barracks at Woolwich to be dealt with ‘by the military authorities’. One imagines they might have got short shrift from their sergeant but little else.

Perhaps when they got back (and finished whatever menial task the sergeant set for them) they enjoyed a kick-about football match with their colleagues and local workers. After all the barracks was close to the armaments factory which had existed since the late 17th century. In 1886 the workers formed themselves into a football team and began to compete with rival squads. Eventually, from small beginnings, there emerged the professional club side that still delight (and frustrate) their supporters at a new venue, in North London.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, January 04, 1877]

A gun-toting burglar in the Hornsey Road

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The Hornsey Road, c.1900

At about 3 o’clock in the morning of the 31 October 1898 two men clambered over the back wall of a property in Hornsey Road and attempted to break in through a window. The property was a pawnbrokers belonging to Mr Lawrence situated at number 368 (near Tollington Park and what is now the Arsenal stadium). The pair had a ladder but their actions woke Mr Lawrence’s housekeeper who raised the alarm.

The would-be burglars (James Long and William Marlow) turned tail and ran. Two police officers were close by having hurried to the scene and both gave chase, blowing their whistles. This summoned more officers to the pursuit but Marlow managed to slip away through the park.

Long was not so lucky. As he sprinted into Palmerston Road he ran ‘full tilt against Constable Baxter, who seized him, and asked him where he was going’. The former ticket-of-leave man was not beaten yet however. Reaching behind his back he pulled a revolver and thrust it against the policeman’s stomach.

PC Baxter might have been forgiven for letting go of his captive but instead he ‘knocked his arm up, and after a struggle’ wrestled the firearm from him. The newly arrested Long was then marched to the station.

Marlow was soon picked up at 479 Hornsey Road by detectives acting on information and the pair were presented at the North London Police Court. The court heard that two women that lived at the Hornsey Road address and who cohabited with the men, gave evidence that the pair had gone out at eight that night and Marlow turned on his mate in the dock, accusing him of ‘putting him away’.He told the police inspector ‘if it wasn’t for the fact that I was living in the same house as Long, you wouldn’t have suspected me!’

Inspector Mountfield said that both men had been identified by the officers who were involved in the chase. A local milkman appeared to confirm that he had found two dark lanterns and a pair of ‘burglar’s jemmies’ abandoned in a garden in Victor Road. Inspector Mountfield added the forensic information that the jemmies had traces of yellow paint that matched that on Mr Lawrence’s window frames.

Long denied he had taken place in the burglary and also tried to deny threatening PC Baxter with a revolver. No one was fooled by the pair’s bluster and both men were sent to trail at Old Bailey. On the 21st November that year both men appeared at the Central Criminal Court where they were convicted of burglary. Both confessed to a number of other offences and Long was additionally charged with ‘shooting with intent to do grievous bodily harm’. He was sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, Marlow was sent away for five.

[from The Standard, Monday, November 14, 1898]