Tag: credit

Pay your bills young man, or face the consequences!

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On Saturday 8 October 1853 Henry Julian, a young ‘gentleman’, took delivery a new suit of clothes. He had ordered a week earlier, from Thomas Dando’s tailor’s shop close to the Blackfriars Road.  He was quite specific in his instructions; the suit was to be in black as he needed to go to a funeral.

As soon as Dando’s shop lad arrived at Julian’s home on Stamford Street he handed the bundle over and waited while his customer tried them on. Julian came down dressed in his new suit and immediately declared that he was unhappy. They weren’t to his satisfaction and so he wouldn’t be paying Dando’s bill, which was £5 8s (or around £450 today).

In that case, the boy said, he would have to take them back as his master had told him not to leave the goods without receiving full payment. Julian again refused. He needed the suit as the funeral was that day. He instructed the lad to return to Dando and tell him he’d pay the bill within six months; like many middle class and wealthier people in the 1800s he was demanding credit.

Having said his piece he placed a hat on his head, escorted the young lad off his property, and set off for the funeral, closely followed by the boy. The route Julian took went directly past Dando’s shop on Charlotte Street, off Blackfriars Road.

Thomans Dando saw him coming and his lad behind and perceived something was wrong. He stepped out and pulled the young man into his shop and demanded to know what was going on. Julian repeated his desire to enter into a credit arrangement and again refused to pay cash there and then.

Dando was furious and seizing his customer by the collar marched him to the nearest constable, demanding he be arrested for fraud. The local police duly obliged and later that day he was set in the dock at Southwark Police court where Mr Combe remanded him in custody. He was taken down to the cells, his new suit swapped for prison clothes and he was left to reflect on his actions for a few days.

On the 11thhe was back in court, wearing his prison outfit and facing Mr. Combe’s interrogation.

Having been reapprised of the details of the case the magistrate was told that Dando no longer wished to press charges. He’d got his property back and as far as he was concerned that was that. Mr Combe now told the prisoner that he was free to go but warned him that he might not be so lucky next time. However, he would have to return the prison clothes he was wearing and, since he could hardly walk naked through the streets, the gaoler would accompany him back to his home at 110 Stamford Street to affect the exchange.

One can imagine the shame he now experienced; walking through the streets of Southwark, dressed in prison garb, like a penitent in sackcloth, while all his neighbours watched. The message to the reading public was clear: settle your bills, especially if you shop at Thomas Dando’s!

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, October 12, 1853]

‘You only have to order for one of the cafés, they put it down in their books, and all is settled up all right’: testing the boundaries of credit in Victorian London

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Today we operate a society largely underwritten by credit. I hardly use cash to pay for anything and for many things that I buy I use a credit card. My grandmother would no doubt be horrified if she was alive today. She was an Edwardian, born before the outbreak of war in 1914 in a very different country to the one we live in today. There credit was usually reserved for the wealthy although many small shopkeepers recognized that poor people needed some help in making ends meet and did them credit where possible.

But the real beneficiaries of credit in the way we understand it today (not paying for goods or services for sometime after you received them) were the middle class and elite. Many of wealthy in Victorian and Edwardian society simply lived on the ‘never never’, paying their bills when they really had to. Naturally this system was open to abuse as while the payments came from those at the top many of purchases were actually made by their servants.

In April 1888 Mary Hughes was prosecuted at the Marlborough Street Police court for ‘unlawfully obtaining three slices of salmon, value 10s (or about £40 today). Hughes had entered Mrs Ann Crump’s fishmonger’s shop on New Bond Street and had asked for the fish. She said that the fish was for her mistress, the Countess of Dudley, and so the salmon was wrapped and the bill added to the countess’ account. Normally the fishmonger would have delivered the item later but Mary insisted that it was needed in a hurry, so she was given it straight away.

Something about her demeanor raised the cashier’s (a  Mr Woodwatd) suspicions however, and he decided to follow her. Woodward followed Mary along Bond Street to St James’ Street where she boarded a bus headed for Victoria. When they reached the Vauxhall Road Woodward collared her and told her he suspected her of committing a fraud. Mary spun him a line about having to go somewhere before she returned to her mistress but he didn’t fall for it. He called over a passing policeman and had her arrested. The officer took her in a cab to Dudley House, (below right) the home of the countess, and Woodward followed behind. dudley house

At Dudley House Mary’s unraveled: the housekeeper stated that she didn’t know her, she had never worked there and no one had sent her out to buy salmon. Mary was taken back to a police station to be charged and brought before the magistrate the next day. In court it was revealed that she’d told the officer on the way to the station that her ruse was an easy one to perpetrate:

‘You know what it is, constable, in these large firms. I have had many a piece there; you only have to order the salmon for some of the cafés, and then they put it down in their books, and all is settled up all right’.

This admission brought chuckles of laughter in the courtroom but the magistrate was unlikely to have been amused. This exploitation of the credit system undermined it and that, ultimately, affected people like him who enjoyed the freedom to choose when to pay that it brought. Mary said she had a relative who worked for the Countess of Dudley which is how she knew where the household placed its orders, let’s hope there were no repercussions for that employee. She added that on the day she’d committed the fraud she’d been drunk.

It was a lame defense at best but Mr Mansfield decided to remand her for a week while he decided what to do with her.  In the end Mary was tried and convicted at the quarter sessions and sent to Millbank prison for two months.

[from The Standard, Saturday, April 14, 1888]

The tables are turned on a gentleman whose pockets are empty

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A refusal to pay a cab fare was a common enough reason to find a person in court in the nineteenth century. Cab drivers were quite vulnerable to being short-changed or simply to customers that claimed not to have any money. Given that many of their clients were wealthy this was sometimes just a temporary inconvenience as the driver could take an address and visit the following day to be paid. Not everyone that looked wealthy was of course and appearances could be deceptive.

Captain E. W. Pearce was a gentleman and would have been admitted into society as such. Yet he was also a gentleman who was in considerable debt, a situation that seemed not to bother him over much as he continued to live on credit, presumably hoping that his creditors would never catch up with him.

In February 1838 the captain was in court at Bow Street to prosecute a cab driver who he said had ‘created a disturbance in the street’. In reality however, it was Pearce’s refusal (or inability) to pay the driver that had resulted in the altercation and the arrival of a crowd of people.

As the report noted:

The Captain ‘had hired the cab for the purpose of making a few visits, and when done with it he found on searching the pockets of his inexpressibles to the furthest corner that he had nothing to pay the fare’.

The driver wasn’t at all happy with this and an argument ensured. This drew a crowd and, feeling threatened, Captain Pearce flagged a nearby policeman and had the cabbie arrested. At Bow Street Sir Frederick Roe sided with the cab driver, telling the captain that he should have paid the man. He released the cab driver after dismissing the charge but this wasn’t enough for the driver who was still out of pocket for an afternoon’s work.

Well, Sir Frederick said, you should summon him for the non-payment of the fare.

‘I can’t summon him, your worship. No one knows where he lives. He owes everyone’.

Captain Pearce then refused to give his address but said if the driver gave him his he would make sure he received his money within a week. The cabbie grumbled that he’d rather have the captain’s address, so he could summon him. At this, and ‘finding the tables turned’ the military man beat a hasty retreat and the reporter noted that ‘when he again tries to hire a cab to pay his visits he will carry his purse about with him probably’.

Probably indeed.

[from The Morning Post, Monday, February 19, 1838]

An avoidable tragedy at Christmas

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James Arthur and Timothy Howard worked together at a charcoal factory in New Gravel Lane, Shadwell. They were workmates and drinking buddies but not close friends. That said, they rarely quarreled and both were hard workers who were well spoken of by their employer.

They were employed to work on a platform which stood 18 feet above the factory floor and on Christmas Eve 1868 both were working there even though it was late in the evening. Perhaps with their minds on how they would celebrate Christmas and the Boxing Day holiday they started to talk about beer and how much they might drink. A ‘chaffing match’ ensued as each man boasted about the amount of drink he could get on credit (a measure of their financial worth of sorts) and this escalated into a row.

Howard taunted Arthur, suggesting that in the past he’d used a woman poorly and run up a debt on her behalf before leaving her. What had began as friendly ‘banter’ quickly descended into open hostility and Arthur looked dagger at his mate. He reached for a shovel and threatened Howard with it.

Realising he’d gone too far Howard tried to calm things and told his workmate to put the makeshift weapon down. When Arthur declined the two came to blows and the pair swore at each other. Howard struck him once or twice without return and Arthur staggered backwards. He missed his footing, slipped, and tumbled over the edge of the platform, plummeting the 18 feet down to the floor.

Howard clambered down the ladder and ran over to his mate, ‘who was quite dead’, his neck broken.

The foreman arrived on the scene and, seeing what had occurred, called the police. Howard was arrested while the police surgeon examined the deceased. Howard tried to say he’d not hit his friend but there had been at least two witnesses who’d been drawn to the noise the pair had made in their arguing.  Mr Benson (the magistrate at Thames Police court) remanded Howard in custody so that these witnesses could be brought to give their testimony.

At a later hearing Timothy Howard (described as an ‘Irish labourer’) was fully committed to trial for the manslaughter of his work colleague. On the 11 January 1869 he was convicted at the Old Bailey but ‘very strongly’ recommended to mercy by the jury who accepted that it was really a tragic accident, their was no intent on Howard’s part. The judge clearly agreed as he only sent the man to prison for a fortnight, a shorter term than many drunker brawlers would have received at Thames before the magistrates.

[from The Standard, Monday, 28 December, 1868]

Chaos at Westminster as a dress is ruined and a dog eats an expensive shawl

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A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society, by Edwin Landseer (1838)

Madame Courtney was a ‘foreign’ (probably French) dressmaker who ‘spoke English very badly’. Just after Christmas 1859 a woman called at her house to ask her to make a ‘very handsome’ dress for her. She returned a week later to try the dress on for size and said she should like to keep it on and send the money at a later date.

The dressmaker was unhappy about this because she knew the customer, Mrs Emily White, as someone who had not settled all of her outstanding debts, so she refused. Instead she suggested that Mrs White either paid  for the dress or left the dress she had arrived in as security.

This upset Mrs White who flew into a rage. According to Madame Courtney White then ‘struck her several times, and the seizing a pair of scissors, [and] demolished her own new dress’.

As a result both Mrs White and her dressmaker appeared in court at Westminster in front of the magistrate, Mr Dayman. The dress in question was produced:

‘It was chequered with incisions as the costume of any harlequin, the pieces being held together merely by the lining’.

The whole exchange caused much amusement in the court and this continued as Mrs White’s defence counsel (Mr Lewis) offered an alternative explanation for the state of the garment. He cross -examined the dressmaker to establish that she employed several ‘workmen’ and owned a large Newfoundland dog. Newfoundlands were very popular in the Victorian period, as much as Labradors are today it seems, but they are massive animals.  Madame Courtney confirmed that this was true and admitted that her ladies had rushed to her aid. However, she said this had prompted Mrs White to seize a nearby poker and threaten to ‘split all their heads open’.

Mr Lewis now claimed that while all this distraction was going on the dog, ‘amused himself by eating up Mrs White’s shawl, which cost 20 guineas’. His client refused to pay for the dress because it did not fit, and had since been ‘shamelessly imprisoned for four hours’ and her own dress had not been returned to her. After she had cut off the new dress (which she said she was perfectly entitled to do) she sat in her underwear while the huge dog ‘growled at her display of uncovered crinoline’. Finally she said that she had since paid the dressmaker for the work she had done.

The case had become pure farce and I imagine the magistrate was becoming increasingly frustrated at the deteriorating decorum of his courtroom. He grumbled that while women were the ‘weaker sex’ they definitely ‘were not the “gentler” sex when aroused’. He dismissed the complaint from Madame Courtney and suggested that if she wanted to pursue a claim for non payment or damage to the dress she would have to take it to the county court. She had no right to detain Mrs White and therefore she also had the right to sue the French woman for false imprisonment and the value of her shawl.

Then, much to his relief, both women left the Westminster court room.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, January 04, 1860]

A captain deploys desperate measures to keep the cheesemongers from his door.

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On the morning of Thursday 29 November 1877 the Wandsworth Police Court was full of shopkeepers and traders keen to witness the outcome of a case brought by one of their number, a cheesemonger on the High Street. Henry Lickfield had brought a charge of assault against one of his customers while another businessman, Mr Barrantz (another cheese monger) charged the same individual with fraud.

The defendant was Captain Edward Miller who lived at Spencer Road in Putney. The court heard that Captain Miller had ordered a leg of pork and 3lbs of sausages to be delivered to his residence. The goods were duly supplied but when the bill wasn’t paid Lickfield called on the captain in person to demand his money.

However when he knocked on the door no one answered. He tried again and this time a servant answered but refused to open the door. Finally he tried shouting through the letter box. As he attempted to get the attention of the household a lighted firebrand was thrust through the letter box towards him, striking him in the face!

Captain Miller was represented in court by a lawyer who offered a different version of events. He suggested that when Mr Lickfield’s assistant had called earlier he had been told that Mrs Miller would settle the bill on the following day and he had gone away. He denied any violence towards the cheese monger and said that he had no need to come in person, and that he should have waited for the money to be paid as promised.

The household was ‘alarmed’ by the repeated knocking on the door and no tradesman had the ‘right to recover their debts by a system of tyranny’, he insisted. Mrs Miller was ill and ‘the prisoner did nothing but protect himself’.

The magistrate, Mr Bridge, accepted the charge of assault and bailed the captain to appear at the next sessions of the peace.

The case then turned on the next accusation, of fraud. It was claimed by Mr Barrantz, that the Millers had ordered ‘one of the best hares to be sent to his house, to be paid for on delivery’. Again the goods were supplied but not paid for. Clearly Mr Barranz had done business with the Millers before and said he would not have sent the hares if there hadn’t been a promise to be paid on receipt.  He therefore charged Captain Miller with a fraudulent intent. Mr Bridge didn’t see it that way however. This was simply an unpaid bill not a deliberate attempt to defraud and he dismissed the charge.

Nevertheless I suspect the mere appearance of the captain in court was enough to ruin his reputation in his local community. The court was packed with local businessmen, all come to see ‘justice’ for a fellow tradesman. They would surely be reluctant to offer credit to the Millers in future and given the associations with credit and reputation this was social suicide for the captain and his wife. Unless they settled their bills quickly, or moved away they could hardly hope to hold their heads up in the streets around Wandsworth in future. As for the assault charge, while it was likely to end in a financial settlement (some compensation to Mr Lickfield) it was another example of the desperation of the family and further evidence to anyway dealing with them that they were best avoided.

[from The Morning Post , Friday, November 30, 1877]

Finders keepers? A diamond bracelet arouses the suspicions of a pawnbroker

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In 1871 Mr Tomlinson ran a pawnbrokers on the Kentish Town Road. Pawnbrokers served the whole community but mostly acted as a form of money lending for those unable to get credit elsewhere. For most people in Victorian London credit was very limited. Ordinary people didn’t have bank accounts as we routinely do today, and so lived week by week (sometimes day to day) on the small amounts of money they earned in cash paid work.

Rent, food and fuel consumed most of what they brought in and families were particularly at risk if they had children below working age (11-12 or under) and the mother had to stay at home to care for them. Many used pawnbrokers as a way of extending credit and coping with financial hardship. You could take an article of clothing, or some item of jewels (a watch say) to a pawnbrokers and pledge it against cash for a week. So long as you returned the money in the time allowed you would get your possessions back. If you did not then they became the property of the broker and he was allowed to sell them.

Pawnbrokers have not gone away but today they tend to be called something like Cashconverters and are a familiar sight alongside the fried chicken restaurants and betting shops on our depleted and decaying modern high streets.

On Monday 7 August a woman entered Mr Tomlinson’s shop and asked to pledge an expensive looking piece of jewellery. It was a ‘gold bracelet, set with diamonds and rubies’ and he estimated its value at over £40 (£1,800 today). Tomlinson’s foreman, Lewis obviously didn’t think the woman, Catherine Dickinson (a 48 year-old waistcoat maker who lived locally) was the sort of person to own such an item.

He wasn’t satisfied with her explanation of how she came by it so she promised to return later with her daughter, who had told her that her ‘young man’ had found it and had given it to her to pledge. About an hour later Catherine returned with Henry Benson, a 19 year-old cabman, who said he’d picked it up near a cab rank at Cremorne Gardens on the 22 July. The pleasure gardens were a fashionable spot for the wealthy (and not so wealthy) in the mid 1800s and it was entirely possible that a lady might have lost her bracelet there.

It was equally possible that Benson (or another) might have pinched it from her late at night or found it left in his cab,Either way he should have reported it to the police and handed the bracelet in but he hadn’t and the sharp actions of the pawnbroker had stopped him profiting from it. Pawnbrokers didn’t always have a good reputation and for over a century had been accused of facilitating the trade in stolen goods.

Tomlinson and his employee were no doubt aware of this and acted to make sure they weren’t tainted by the association with criminality. Mr Lewis reported the incident to the police and two detectives were despatched to make enquires. Detective constables John Dalton and Charles Miller of Y Division tracked down Benson and Mrs Dickenson and brought them before Mr D’Eyncourt at Marylebone Police Court.

The magistrate decided that both the young cabman Benson and his sweetheart’s mother should be held accountable for the potential theft of the bracelet so he bailed the former and accepted Catherine’s own recognisance to appear in a  week’s time. In the meantime the newspaper alerted its readers that the jewellery was available to view at Kensal Green police station in case anyone had recently lost it.

Presumably if no one claimed it at the very least Benson would be free to carry on as a cab driver, at best the bracelet would be returned to them and perhaps Mr Tomlinson would then be happy to hand over some cash (I doubt as much as £40 though) so the Dickensons could enjoy a bountiful summer for once.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, August 09, 1871]