Tag: communism

Deterring the souvenir hunters at Temple Bar

Dismantling-of-Temple-Bar

I own a small piece of the Berlin Wall, from Checkpoint Charlie. Well at least that’s what it says it is on the attached postcard a good friend gave me some years ago. The reality is that it could be a piece of concrete from any twentieth century structure such is the demand for mementos from the past. In the aftermath of the fall of the wall in 1989 many thousands of its pieces were taken home, treasured, sold or otherwise traded as relics of the old communist regime. Across the collapsing Soviet Union similar symbols of power were torn down, often to enter the market in souvenirs.

Human beings seem to like to keep relics of the past, some grim (like parts of the rope that hanged criminals) or sacred (such as the bones of saints), or otherwise memorable (the broken goalposts at Wembley removed by Scottish football fans springs to mind). So in 1878 when Temple Bar was being taken down – brick by brick – it is not surprising that some people thought they would like a piece of it.

Temple Bar used to mark the entrance to the City of London, one of several gates that once marked the limits of the city. Some sort of bar (perhaps just a chain or wooden beam) existed in the 13th century but by the late 14th it had become a fixed stone structure marking the entrance to the legal quarter, hence its name of Temple Bar.

The gateway survived the Great Fire in 1666 but was pulled own and rebuilt (possibly by Christopher Wren, no one seems to be entirely sure) in 1669. You can still see the 17th century gateway (which used to display the heads of traitors atop it) in Paternoster Square, by St Paul’s Cathedral.

Temple_Bar,_London,_1878-768x967

But it had stood, from the medieval period, in Fleet Street, and by the early nineteenth century Fleet Street had become such a busy thoroughfare, and the city had expanded so much, that Temple Bar was simply too narrow a gateway in and out of old London. In addition the Royal Courts of Justice was beginning construction in Fleet Street and the two circumstances cemented a decision to remove the gateway.

The Corporation of London opted to keep the gateway until they could decided what to do with it rather than destroy it completely. So on 2 January 1878 workmen began to carefully dismantle the structure, ‘brick by brick, beam by beam, numbered stone by stone’.  Which brings us back to the desire for ‘relics’ and the proceedings at Guildhall Police Court on Saturday 5 January 1878.

Reynold’s Newspaper reported that:

‘A man named Bell prosecuted for having wilfully damaged the stonework at Temple Bar, now in the process of removal. It was stated that the practice of chipping off pieces of stone from the building, with a view to keeping them as relics, was an exceedingly common one’.

The alderman magistrate decided enough was enough and, with the intention of deterring other souvenir hunters, he imposed a hefty fine of 40s on the unfortunate Bell with the threat that if he didn’t (or couldn’t) pay up he must go to prison for three weeks at hard labour.

It took 11 days to complete the removal of Temple Bar and two years later, in 1880, the City set up a memorial to mark its original site; a griffin on top of a tall pedestal now stands in Fleet Street where the gateway once did. The dismantled parts of Temple Bar eventually found their way to Hertfordshire and the estate of Lady Meux at Theobalds Park. It stayed there until the City repatriated it in 2004 to its present location.

There are no severed heads on Temple Bar these days. Well not as write at least…

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, January 6, 1878]

NB the history of Temple Bar cited above owes much to the Temple Bar website [http://www.thetemplebar.info/history.html]

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

Striking workers in West Ham are thwarted with the help of the bench

silvertown_woolwich

If the Match Girls’ strike of 1888 and the Great Dock Strike of August 1889 can be seen as two of the most important victories for the British Trades Union movement then another dispute in 1889 must go on record as equally important, if only for demonstrating the limits of that success.

The Silvertown strike, by workers at Silver’s India Rubber and Telegraph factory in West Ham, lasted for 12 weeks as the workers, emboldened by the success of other unionists in the capital, demanded better pay and conditions. However, the owners of the factory, S.W.Silver and Co, resisted the best efforts of the striking workforce to force them to negotiate and succeeded, in the end, in breaking the strike.

The workers were aided by Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl, and Tom Mann the co-author of New Unionism, the defining work of the new Labour movement in London. But the bosses in this case held firm and refused to capitulate, using the press to criticise the actions of the strikers and questioning the use of picketing. This had been a tactic used in the Dock Strike but then it had failed to dent public  support for the dispute; in 1889 at Silvertown it was seemingly much more effective.

We can see the ways in which the courts were used to break the strike in this report from   The Standard, in November. A number of summoned were heard by the sitting magistrates at West Ham concerning employees of the factory who were accused of ‘intimidation and riotous conduct’.

The summonses were brought by Mr Matthew Gray, an employee of the firm, and prosecuted by the company’s legal representative, Mr St. John Wontner. The strike had ben underway for six weeks and the legal questions turned on the legitimacy (or otherwise) of picketing. St. John Wontner explained the tactics used by the striking workers:

‘The entrance to the works was in a cup de sac‘, he told the bench, ‘and every day hundreds of the workers collected at the top and and hooted at the people as they came out, and shortly afterwards the women left their employment’.

Mr Baggallay warned the strikers that if they continued with this sort of behaviour they would be severely dealt with. ‘They were perfectly entitled to go on strike’ he conceded, ‘but they had no right to threaten others who desired to go to work’. He bound them all over on their own recognisances for £5 each and dismissed them.

In January 1890, unable to support their families through the strike and with a hardline attitude from management continuing, the workers were literally ‘starved back to work’ and the strike collapsed. Other firms were quick to congratulate Silver’s management for their fortitude and equally quick to learn the valuable lessons it taught them.

[from The Standard, Saturday, November 09, 1889]

Today the site of S.W.Silver and Co is the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery on the banks of the Thames

An ‘indescribable jabber’ at Marlborough Street

sims-2

It would seem that even the radical press in the nineteenth century were not above a little bit of casual racism. We might have expected The Charter, as a newspaper founded to represent Chartist views in London, to be more inclusive (to use a modern term) in portray of foreigners in the capital. Instead it seems to have replicated exactly the sort of representation of ‘others’ as all its less ‘radical’ rivals did.

Perhaps this was deliberate; in appearing to be as ‘normal’ as every other organ The Charter could position itself as a legitimate weekly newspaper covering all aspect of daily life but with a clear political purpose – that of promoting the People’s Charter and its call for universal manhood suffrage and five other demands. The Morning Star (the mouthpiece of the British Communist Party) does much the same thing today, providing its readership with a left of centre version of the news plus sport and entertainment.

So, let us return to the pages of the paper in October 1839, when it was at the height of its popularity. It reported the London Police Courts in much the same way as all the other newspapers did, and, as I suggested above, wasn’t shy of poking fun at foreign visitors to the capital. Two men appeared before the sitting justice (Mr Long) at Marlborough Street, one Prussian (Dirk Singer) and other Swedish (Tjebbes Raynor). Both men were tailors and they had come to blows after exchanging insults.

This was all fairly common material for the reportage of the summary courts; assault was a daily occurrence and most cases were settled or dismissed with just a few being sent on to the Sessions for a jury trial and some being dealt with by fines or even a short period of imprisonment. Unless an assault involved weapons or actual bodily harm it was unlikely to trouble the magistrates for very long.

Singer accused Raynor of putting ‘him in bodily fear, á-la-mode-Anglais‘ (which I take to mean with his fists). The case was conducted in weak English which the paper rendered in dialect for maximum comic effect. The essence of the case was that Singer has supposedly insulted Raynor by calling him ‘a Jew’.

To add to the European melting pot the main witness for the prosecution was Swiss. He explained what happened:

‘dey bote had much loud words. Dis-a man they call my fren a “Jew,” ven he am nevare dos von Jew’.

‘And I suppose this epithet was considered as a sort of affront?’ enquired the magistrate.

‘Vet mosh, Sare; zo my fren call upon him back as von verdomd “scheinhalt,” dat is der hedgehog ; and den dey stock upon each other’.

Earlier Singer had complained that the Swedish tailor had punched him in the face: ‘he made his fist for his box’ he said, ‘and knock upon my nose very not much’.

On can imagine the scene in court: a collection of angry and argumentative tailors dressed in their work clothes, with bristling beards and moustaches, and a cacophony of European accents being raised together. All of this was being conducted in a form of English which Mr Long struggled to understand. On top of this the case was clearly one which involved fault on both sides; insults had flown back and forth and both men had hit each others. It was hard for anyone to determine who was to blame and so, in the end, Mr Long declared that he ‘couldn’t make out who is in the wrong’ and dismissed the warrant against Raynor.

No one was satisfied with this outcome and the paper reported (with a last comic flourish) that the ‘foreigners set up an indescribable jabber, and were ushered into the passage’. Sadly even humorous stories like this were not enough to keep The Charter commercially viable. It launched in 1838 and reached a circulation of about 5-6,000 before folding in 1840. In London competition for readers was fierce and only a handful of papers continued to dominate the newsstands and survive into the 20th century.

[from The Charter, Sunday, October 27, 1839]