Tag: bedroom

‘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]

The uninvited guest who was under the bed

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We’ve all heard strange noises at night and wondered if an intruder is in the house. Mostly it is the wind, or mice, or our imagination, but, just occasionally, it might actually be a burglar.

One young lady in a City pub near the Mansion House was convinced that there was someone in the room upstairs. She was in the first floor kitchen and was sure that someone (or something) was moving in the floor above so she went to investigate.

She knew no one was supposed to in any of the upstairs guest bedrooms since none had been let so she proceeded with caution. As she entered one room there was nobody there but she heard a  ‘slight rustling’. She said nothing but as she looked down she saw a man’s arm sticking out from under the bed.

The young woman now left the room, locking the door behind her and removing the key, and headed downstairs. Without saying anything to anyone she went out on the street and found a policeman. Having been appraised of the situation the officer took the key and went up to the room.

First the policeman knocked the door and announced himself. The intruder now came out and tried to leave. Finding the door locked he began knocking to be let out. The bobby opened the door and asked him his business. The man – who name was Samuel Sale – claimed that it was all a mistake, that he’d ended up in the room by accident and had got locked in. When he’d heard people in the house he had hidden under the bed for fear of being taken for a thief. He gave the policeman a false address and said he had gone upstairs instead of downstairs after being misdirected by a waiter in the house.

The policeman believed none of this and took him into custody. He was brought before Alderman GIbbs at Mansion House police court on the following day. There the magistrate listened to the prisoner’s version of events (it was all a mistake, he had no intention to intrude let alone steal anything) before asking him why he had given a false address.

‘The officer mistook me’, Sale replied. In other words the policeman had taken the address down incorrectly.

‘Then we are all in a mistake’, the alderman declared.

‘You mistook the bedchamber, the officer mistook another address for your address, and I mistake you for a thief who had an intention to rob this house’.

After the laughter that this caused had subsided he went on:

‘The young lady has acted with a great deal of presence of mind and prudence in completing the business without terrifying her mother, and you shall go to Bridewell for three calendar months with hard labour’.

With that the unfortunate man was led away to start his sentence.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, October 27, 1850]

A burglar nabbed by a quick thinking householder and a brave bobby

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The men that served as Police Court Magistrates in the various summary courts of the capital were not appointed to a single court indefinitely. The policy seems to have been to move them around after a period to time so that they had experience of a variety of locations. This would serve a number of purposes: some courts (notably Bow Street) were more prestigious; others, (like Worship Street) were particularly busy with drunks and petty criminals.

It also meant that no single magistrate could (well not for long at least) establish a sort of fiefdom in any one part of London and so it guarded against corruption in public office. It also served to share they experience of the magistracy around the metropolis and make it that much harder for repeat criminals to avoid being recognised by the bench (something my research has shown they went to great lengths to do, providing a string of aliases to avoid the repercussions of revealing ‘previous convictions’ which would drawn down a heavier sentence.

On Monday 11 August Mr Tennyson D’Eyncourt was beginning his spell at Worship Street in the East End. He had replaced Mr Arnold who was off to the slightly calmer atmosphere of Westminster. D’Eyncourt’s first task to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to commit a burglar for trial by jury.

In the dock at Worship Street stood an ‘athletic middle-aged man’ who refused to give his name. He was charged with breaking into the house of Miss Jane Harriett Burgess, a ‘maiden lady’ living on the City Road at Fountain Place. Miss Burgess herself had played an active role in the arrest of the unarmed intruder and he had finally been apprehended by the determined work of police constable Mattock (G162) who was also in court that day.

Miss Burgess told the magistrate that at 10 o’clock on Saturday night she had retired to bed and as she entered her bedroom she noticed that the window was open. The room had been ‘thoroughly ransacked’ and she quickly determined that a number of her possession were missing including ‘a mahogany writing-desk’ and a carpet bag. She stated, for the record, that they had all been in the room earlier that evening.

Hearing a policeman’s rattle sprung (police were not issued with whistles until the 1880s) she rushed over to the window and looked out. There she saw a man moving carefully along the parapet to the next house along. When he got to the party wall in between the houses he couldn’t go any further though, and stopped.

Miss Burgess now demanded to know what he was doing there and the  man ‘cooly replied that a burglary had been effected, and that he had made his way up there to assist in apprehending the thieves’. He then turned around and tried to retrace his steps back past the lady’s window as quickly as he could. Miss Burgess pounced and grabbed the man’s leg as tried to make his escape. She clung on tight and was almost pulled out of her window and over the parapet, letting go just in time.

Meanwhile PC Matlock, who was walking his beat along Fountain Place, had been alerted to the crime by a gentleman in an adjoining house. He had seen the head and shoulders of a man appear from the window of an unoccupied house next to him. PC Matlock made his way up to the roofs of the buildings via a trap door and soon found Miss Burgess’ property arranged so the thief could retrieve it. He also picked up two (probably stolen) silk handkerchiefs the burglar had dropped.

It seems the thief was making his way along the roof of the properties dropping down and through windows where he could to plunder the rooms below. PC Matlock caught up with him and challenged him. The man gave the same story about being engaged in catching burglars and then again tried to slip past the constable. He was too slow however, and PC Matlock took him into custody and back to his station.

In court the burglar offered no defence and no clue to his identity so D’Eyncourt remanded him in custody so that the paperwork could be completed for the man to take his trial.

The trial was called for the 18 August that year and the man, now revealed as George Andrews (42) pleaded guilty to ‘theft from a specified place’ and was sent to prison for 12 months. It was a lesser charge than burglary and perhaps he was offered (or his brief suggested) owning to that rather than risking being found guilty by a jury of that more serious offence  which carried a punishment of transportation to Australia.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Tuesday, August 12, 1851]