Tag: crowd

The Canine ‘Bon Ton’ cause an obstruction in Brunswick Square

In December 1832 two Italian street artists (or ‘strollers’), Bartalona Carstilina and Louiza Caraaro where charged with obstruction the passageway near Brunswick Square.

They had a small caravan ‘drawn my two foreign half-starved dogs’, an ‘indelicate-looking monkey’, many more dogs (one dressed up in military uniform, while others were dressed according to their gender, either in a motely collection of ‘muslin spangled dresses and fashionable bonnets’, complete with ‘busks so as to resemble ladies of ton’ [i.e fashionable  members of the Bon Ton] or as gentlemen ‘dandies’.

They must have made a memorable impression on anyone that witnessed i=the spectacle, no less so when they appeared together in the police court at Hatton Garden. PC Collins (from E Division) told the magistrates that he had heard the troupe before he saw them, the sounds of drum and trumpet accompanied by the ‘bellowing and laughter of a large crowd of persons’, had carried some distance and attracted his attention.

When he arrived at the scene the dogs were performing a dance (a ‘lively reel’ ) before being led through a series of exercises where they leapt over each other or jumped sticks held by the Italian couple. All of this watched over by the monkey who apparently acted as ‘master of ceremonies’.

There had been several complaints he deposed, from ‘gentlemen’ and mostly about the appearance of the monkey who was ‘horrible to look at’. The question of whether the dogs were being mistreated was not aired in court, presumably because no one was that bothered about ‘foreign’ animals, despite the obvious and parlous state of them.

As they spoke little or no English the accusations were put to the Italians via an interpreter who explained that the troupe had only just arrived in London from the Continent. The sitting justices discharged them on the grounds they back their bags and return directly to Italy, they were not wanted in London however entertaining their show might be to the many Londoners that had gathered to watch it. 

Had they remained, or indeed had they been resident in Britain they might have expected a fine for obstructing or ‘causing a crowd’ to gather. One presumes that was a risk they were prepared to take, street entertainers like themselves were well used to being moved on by the police and would have accepted the occasional fine as an occupational hazard that would be more than compensated by the money they earned passing round the hat during performances.

On this occasion however they promised to return to Italy forthwith, taking their colourful troupe with them.

[From Morning Post, Thursday 20 December 1832]

‘You shan’t take him’; mob rule breaks down in the East End

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Some areas of the capital were notoriously difficult to police. There were several streets and alleyways in Spitalfields and Whitechapel where the police simply did not go unless they were in twos or threes; a single beat bobby was at serious risk of being assaulted if ventured into ‘the Nichol’ for example, or strolled down Dorset Street unawares.

In September 1883 one unfortunate copper had affected an arrested  on Brick Lane, just south of the notorious old Nichol Street slum. He’d been given the man in custody on an accusation of assault and was attempting to take him to the nearest station house when a man started winding up the watching crowd against him.

William Harrils shouted at the policeman: ‘You shan’t take him’, before urging the gathered people to intervene. They did, and a ‘mob’ of about 50 started jostling him and trying to get the prisoner away from his captor.

Suddenly the officer was tripped from behind and landed on his face. A woman rushed in and started to kick at him as he lay on the ground, Harrils punched him in the eye as he sat up. Thankfully help soon arrived in the person of a fellow officer and the crowd melted away leaving the female attacker and Harrils in the arms of the law.

The pair were brought before Mr Hannay at Worship Street Police court where Harrils received a sentence of 21 days in gaol and his accomplice, Emily Manley,  was fined 10s(or a weeks’ imprisonment if she was unable to pay).

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, September 27, 1883]

A life destroyed by the ‘demon drink’

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Alcoholism is a debilitating addiction than ruins not only the life of the person affected but that of those around them. Since the Second World War most of the attention of the police, courts, and prison service has been on  drugs such as cannabis, heroin, cocaine, and MDMA (with all the various derivatives and combinations) and with good reason. All these drugs have the capacity to destroy lives as well. But while all of the above are proscribed and subject to sanctions under the criminal law, alcohol remains legal and freely available. Like tobacco, alcohol is recognized as being harmful but is simply taxed, not banned.

In the 1800s the negative effects of drink were well understood; drink was blamed for all manner of society’s problems form unemployment to fecklessness, poverty to mental illness, domestic violence to mental illness and suicide. All of these social issues were linked to the excessive consumption of the ‘demon drink’. In the early years of Victoria’s reign the Temperance movement established itself; from small beginnings in the late 1820s it had grown into a significant lobbying group by the 1850s. It attempted, unsuccessfully, to  get parliament to pass a prohibition bill in 1859 but it continued to promote abstinence by urging working men and women to sign the pledge.

It was recognized from the middle of the century that alcoholism was a disease and not simply a vice. Since it was not merely a weakness of character it was possible to treat it, and cure it and this was the beginning of modern efforts to deal with addiction to all sorts of substances.

Margaret Malcolm was a good (or perhaps ‘bad’) example of the evils of drink. She was brought before the sitting magistrate at Westminster Police court in August 1878 for being found drunk and disorderly in the Vauxhall Bridge Road. She’d been carried to the local police station on one of the new Bischoffsheim hand drawn ambulances, being incapable of walking.

That was Friday 16 August and the magistrate fined her 8s which her husband  paid to keep her out of gaol. On Monday (the 19th) she was back in court and this time Mr Woolrych fined her 21sand told her she was an ‘incorrigible drunkard’. Margaret pulled out a card to show that she had ‘joined the teetotalers’ and promised that she ‘would never drink again’.

Her pledge didn’t last the day: at around five in the afternoon PC Charles Everett (185B) found her drunk, ‘stopping the vehicles in the street, [and] making a great noise’. When he went to arrest her she threw herself to the ground and refused to budge. It took some time to get her up and into custody and in the meantime a large crowd had gathered to see what all the fuss was about.

Back in court before Mr Woolrych she had nothing to say for herself. The magistrate was told that Margaret had been in court on at least fifty occasions previously. Her long-suffering husband had paid nearly £200 in fines in just a few years. To put that in context £200 in 1878 is about £13,000 today. It would have represented almost two years wages for a skilled tradesman, or you could have bought 7 horses with it. Margaret must have had a loving husband (more than many working-class women had in the 1870s) and one who was, whenever possible, determined to keep her out of prison.

He hadn’t always succeeded; she’d been to prison several times when magistrates like Mr D’Eyncourt had refused the option of a fine in the forlorn hope that it would curb her drinking. On this occasion the law continued to be a blunt instrument: with no option available to him to send Margaret for treatment (as a court might today) she was fined 25s (£80) or three weeks’ hard labour. The court report doesn’t tell us whether Mr Malcolm dipped into his pocket this time.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, August 25, 1878]

A thief is nabbed at the Tower and a cross-dresser is arrested for dancing: all in a day’s work for Mr Lushington

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Visitors to the Victorian Tower of London Armouries

Two contrasting cases from the Thames Police court today, one of who courts that served the East End and the river from the Tower of London. The first concerned the Tower itself, or rather the collection of arms and armour it displayed there.

The Tower Armouries was always one of my favourite places to visit when I went to the Tower as a boy. Housed in the White Tower (the original Norman keep) the collection of edged weapons, guns and suits and armour fascinated me just as it has so many other visitors before and since. Now it has been removed from the Tower and sent to the north of England to a purpose built museum in Leeds. It’s great there too, but not quite the same.

John Passmore was only a young man when he visited the Tower in 1877. He worked as a labourer and had gone to see the armouries with some mates. As he was coming out he noticed some horse pistols hanging on hooks, easy to reach and not behind bars. Without really knowing why he snatched one and hid it under his jacket.

Several such pistols had gone missing in recent weeks and David Deedy, one of the armories’ attendants, was keeping his eyes peeled for further depredations. Something about John caught his eye, was that a bulge under his jacket, or a smudge of dirt on his lapels? He moved forward, stopped the young man and searched him. John pleased with him not to have him arrested but, given the recent thefts, Deedy was understandably keen to prosecute. John Passmore apologized for his momentary act of recklessness and paid for it with seven days imprisonment at hard labour.

The other reported case that Mr Lushington (who known to be harsh) dealt with that day was distinctly different. John Bumberg was a foreign sailor (his precise nationality was not stated, he was just ‘foreign’) and he was in court for causing a disturbance.

PC George Carpenter (102H) told Mr Lushington that he had been on duty in St George’s Street when he’d heard what sounded like a large crowd up ahead. Hurrying along he discovered that there were about 200 boys and girls gathered around a dancing figure, who was being accompanied by a barrel organ. The dancer was dressed in woman’s clothing but was quite clearly a man. PC Carpenter approached and questioned him, established he was sober (if a little ‘excited’) and then arrested him.

Causing a nuisance and obstructing the streets were both misdemeanors so Carpenter was within his rights but it seems a fairly unnecessary action to take. I think that Mr Lushington   might have agreed because on this occasion he was fairly lenient. Given that Bumberg had been locked up all night he simply told him he had acted ‘foolishly’ and ‘advised him to behave more decently in the future’ before letting him go. The man left the dock carrying ‘a bundle of female wearing apparel in his arms’.

Was John Bumberg a frustrated female impersonator who wanted to be on the stage like the starts of the musical halls?  Was he perhaps a transvestite or cross-dresser? Whatever he was and whatever his motivation for entertaining the children of the East End that night I don’t believe he was doing anybody any harm and I think H Division’s finest might have found more suitable targets for their attention.

In 1881 George Carpenter was still in the force and on 14 May that year he brought Catherine Scannel into the Thames court charged with being drunk and disorderly. She was 46, quite possibly a streetwalker and Mr Lushington sent her to prison for 7 days, mostly likely because she gave the policeman some well-aimed verbal abuse. A week later he was back with another woman, Julia Hayes, who was charged with fighting. This time the magistrate let her off with a warning. PC Carpenter brought in a couple more drunks that May, this was after all, much of the traffic of the police courts, most of which the papers didn’t bother recording. We only of this because a few archival records survive.

[from The Standard, Monday, June 18, 1877]

H Division was, of course, the main police district tasked with catching the Whitechapel murder 11 years after these two defendants appeared before Lushington at Thames.  Drew’s new book (co-authored with Andy Wise) is published by Amberley Books this week. It is a new study of the Whitechapel murders of 1888 which offers up a new suspect, links the ‘Jack the Ripper’ killings to the unsolved ‘Thames Torso’ crimes, and provides the reader with important contextual history of Victorian London. The book is available to order on Amazon here:

“Well, you needn’t make all this fuss. I only did it to frighten the children”: child abuse in mid Victorian London

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The police had their work cut out for them in ensuring Edward Smith reached the Marylebone Police court safely. A large crowd had gathered outside the police station that was holding the ‘ruffianly looking fellow’ – a 26 year-old sawyer who lived in Paul Street, Lisson Grove. Had the crowd been able to get to him the press reported, ‘he would no doubt have been subjected to much violence’.

Smith did make it to court that day and Mr Broughton’s courtroom was crowded as the public crammed in to see that justice was done to Smith. The exact details of his offence were alluded to rather than described in detail by the Morning Post and that was because they involved the attempted rape of a young girl.

That child was Sarah Harriett Cooper and she was also in court that morning. Today Sarah would have been spared another direct confrontation with her abuser but in the mid Victorian period there were no such considerations for the welfare of the vulnerable. Sarah, aged 11 or 12, was stood in the witness box and asked a series of probing questions about her experience.

She told the magistrate that while her mother was a work she and some other girls were playing in a piece of open ground on the Harrow Road which was owned by a nurseryman. The little girls were trespassing but doing nothing more than running about and having fun. Suddenly Smith appeared and seized hold of Sarah and the three other children ran away in fear. Sarah said she pleaded with him to ‘let me go home to my mother’ but the sawyer put his hand over her mouth, told her not to make a noise, and threatened to cut her throat.

What happened next was not recorded by the press except to state that it amounted, if proven, to the committal of a ‘capital offence’. By 1852 adult rape was no longer capital but Sarah was under the age of consent (which was 13 until 1885) so perhaps that was a hanging offence. Sarah testified that she had ‘cried all the while he was ill-using me’ until ‘he at last lifted me up and brushed down my clothes, which were dirty’ [and] I ran away’. A crowd had gathered near the gates of the gardens and she told them what had happened.

Smith had hurt the child in other ways; he’d used a knife to cut a wound in her hand and she held it up to show the magistrate the puncture mark on her left palm. If this wasn’t evidence enough of Smith’s cruelty there other witnesses appeared to add their weight to the charge.

George Ashley had been walking past the gates to the nursery with friend when a small boy ran out shouting that his sister had been taken away by a man there. Ashley entered the gardens and saw Smith lifting the child up. Sarah was screaming at the top of her voice and the man was telling her to be silent. He sent his companion to fetch a policeman.

PC Lane (372A) arrived soon afterwards, finding a large crowd gathered around Sarah, who hand was bleeding badly. He soon discovered Edward Smith hiding in an outside privy at one end of the nursery grounds. The door was locked but PC Lane burst it open and arrested the sawyer. Questioned about his actions Smith simply declared:

‘Well, you needn’t make all this fuss. I only did it to frighten the children, knowing they had no business in the garden’.

The accused was taken back to the police station house and a search was made of the water closet. PC Cookman (55D) found a large bladed knife buried in the loose soil by the WC, which was open (suggesting it had been recently used and abandoned in a hurry). The girls’ mother described Sarah’s injuries and trauma when she’d got home, and a certificate from the surgeon that had treated her was read out in court detailing her injuries.

Finally the magistrate turned his attention to the man in the dock. Smith denied using violence against Sarah, or at least denied acting in an unlawful way. She and her friends were trespassing and he insisted he was only intending to ‘pull up her clothes for the purpose of giving her a smack, when she began to cry, and ran off’. He said the knife wasn’t his and he had no idea why it was found by the closet. He’d been drinking he said, and because he rarely touched alcohol, that had affected his head. Mr Broughton remanded him for a week and he was taken away to Clerkenwell Prison in a police van, followed all the way by a baying crowd of angry locals.

Just under a month later Smith was formally tried at the Middlesex Sessions of the Peace for an aggravated assault with the intent to rape. Smith was convicted by the jury and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, March 30, 1852; The Morning Post, Wednesday, April 14, 1852]

A young postman is overwhelmed by Valentine’s Day

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Amidst all the commercial celebration of Valentine’s day, with every supermarket making special ‘dine in’ offers, shops filling their windows with hearts and chocolates, and florists selling red roses at double the normal price, it is easy to see that for some of these traders this has become one of the key income generating weeks of the year.

Once Christmas and the sales are over there is usually a slump in trade before Easter that [St] Valentine’s Day has now assumed such an importance to the retail industry. But do we have an idea of how busy it was in the past I wonder? We know the Victorians celebrated the occasion and sent love tokens as we do, but what effect did that have on everyday life?

Well we can get an idea of how it affected the people that delivered those messages, the postmen of the Victorian capital, in this case from 1871. An unnamed postman was prosecuted at Westminster Police court for drunkenness whilst on duty. His offence was minor but had the potential for serious consequences, his defense however, was most illuminating.

Mr Woolrych, the sitting magistrate at Westminster that day, was told that a crowd of ‘disorderly persons’ had gathered around a postman, drawing the attention of a passing police officer. As the bobby pushed his way through the throng he found the postman sorting a pile of letters under a lamppost. It was late at night, past 10.30, which was why he needed the gaslight to read the addresses on the mail.

Most of the letters ‘were valentines’ and they should have been delivered much earlier in the day by a colleague but that postie had failed to find the addresses and so they had gone back in the system, and our man was now tasked with uniting them with the correct (and probably by now quite desperate) recipients.

As the postman at last moved off to make his deliveries the policeman noticed that he was rather unsteady on his feet, and stopped him. He quickly realized that the man was under the influence of alcohol and he arrested him. In court the postman apologized but said he had been on duty since four in the morning, had had very little if anything to eat all day, and so when a kindly woman had treated him to a ‘tumbler of sherry’ it had ‘produced an effect over which [he] had no control’.

His supervisor appeared to confirm that the young man had an exemplary record in his four and a half years with the Post Office:

‘He was a steady, honest, and industrious servant, against whom no complaint had ever been made; and should he be convicted…dismissal from the service would certainly follow’.

In this case common sense prevailed. Mr Woolrych accepted that while drinking on duty rendered the man  ‘blamable’ for the offence there were mitigating factors. There was no need to ruin a young man with such a previously unblemished record and so he discharged him (which is probably why the papers decided not to reveal his name).

The evidence revealed that (as noted earlier):

the ‘defendant had been on duty since four o’clock in the morning without intermission or opportunity of taking a meal, as the valentine delivery was very heavy, and the reserve men had even been called upon to perform the duties of letter-carriers’.

Valentine’s Day was a big day then in Victorian England with very many people using the postal service to send their tokens of affection to their sweethearts. After Christmas this was probably the busiest period of the year for the men of the Post Office, just as it is today for the florists, chocolatiers and restaurateurs of the capital.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, February 16, 1871]

A mother’s cruelty and a son’s desperate violence as news of the latest Whitechapel ‘horror’ emerges.

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On the 9 September 1888 London was still digesting the news of Annie Chapman’s murder in Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. The full details of this latest ‘horror’ wouldn’t become public knowledge until after the inquest on the 13 September but there was sufficient rumour and speculation to throw the capital into a panic in the meantime.

There was no mention of Chapman’s killing in Lloyd’s Weekly’s daily summary of the police courts of the metropolis but there was plenty of reference to violence. Frederick Percival was charged at Lambeth Police court with shooting at his own father with a revolver. The incident had followed an argument during which Fred, a clerk, had thrown a cup and then ran out of the room, turning once to fire his weapon at the door. It seems that suicide was actually uppermost in the young man’s thoughts and he was remanded so the doctors could examine him.

Also at Lambeth Henry Baker was fully committed to trial for the attempted murder of Mary Cowan whom, it was alleged, he had stabbed in the chest and back in July. The case had taken so long to come before a magistrate because Mary had been dangerously ill in hospital.

At Woolwich PC Williams (127R) reported that he had been called to an incident in the High Street where a woman was mistreating her child. It was late at night and when he arrived he found Mary Sullivan, quite drunk, in the processing of dashing her baby’s head against a wall. He intervened to stop her and told her to go home. She had no home, she replied. A few onlookers had gathered and one offered to pay for bed for the night, something Mary indigently declined.

PC Williams moved her on but when his beat brought him round again he found her ‘sitting on a doorstop with the child exposed’. A crowd had gathered and was berating her for her conduct, and some ‘threatened to lynch her’. As she should probably have done on the first occasion he now took her into custody and escorted her back to the station. After being checked out by the police surgeon her child was taken to the workhouse. Mary was brought before the magistrate in the morning and sent to prison for 14 days.

There were a number of other assaults, acts of cruelty, and an attempted suicide by a woman throwing herself into the Thames. All of this was recorded as part and parcel of everyday life in the city. So we should consider the Whitechapel murders in context; they were exceptionally brutal killings but their victims – poor working-class women – were the usual recipients of casual violence in late Victorian London.

This violence was frequently punished and often condemned but little if anything was done to prevent it, or to prevent the associated causes of violence, or improve the environment in which so many Londoners lived. The ‘Ripper’ shone a spotlight on East London in the autumn of 1888, and so is credited with forcing the ruling class to act to clean up the appalling poverty and housing conditions of the East.

That this ‘improvement’ was both half-hearted and temporary is less often reported. Inequality, unemployment and want continued and within a few years the authorities turned their attention elsewhere; it took two world wars and a socialist government to really tackle the endemic problems of poverty in British society and, some might say, even that progress has largely been lost given the prevalence of food banks and homelessness in modern Britain today.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, September 9, 1888]

Shock and anger as a ‘respectable clerk’ assaults a six year old girl in the park

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The Duke of York’s Monument, c.1840

A heightened awareness of child abuse in the last decade has raised the media profile of this awful crime to the extent that it is one of the key concerns of 21stcentury Britain. From the discovery of Saville’s historic abuse of children at Stoke Mandeville and elsewhere, to the grooming of young girls in several British cities, to stories of abusive football coaches and priests, it would sometimes appear that we have witnessed an epidemic of paedophile behaviour in the UK. It is more likely of course that what we have experienced is a rise in the reporting of incidents.  This is not a modern crime, it is something that has always happened but it is likely that in the last 10-15 years society has taken victims’ testimony more seriously.

At the end of July 1862 Thomas Percy was relaxing in the band enclosure at St James’ Park. The musician was watching the promenaders and the families enjoying the summer sunshine in the late afternoon when a fellow musician drew his attention to a little girl holding a baby. She was about six years of age and a well-dressed young man was sitting near to her. Percy saw the man throw a penny to the girl, who threw it back. To his horror the man then moved over and started to sexually assault the child.

The man named Brown was on his feet in seconds and raced over to the offender, pulling him off the girl. He ‘boxed the child’s ears and sent her away’ and then turned his anger on the young man. Several other bystanders had seen the ‘filthy conduct’ of the man and as he tried to run away they gave chase. He made it to the foot of the Duke of York’s monument near The Mall where he was surrounded by a mob. A soldier on duty kept them from attacking him and the young man apparently bribed the sentry and clambered up the monument to temporary safety.

Eventually PC John Richardson (C167) arrived and forced his way through the crowd. The young man, who’s name was William Pinkstone, denied doing anything wrong and said he was a married man with children himself. Ricahrdson took him into custody and he was presented at Bow Street Police court on Friday 1 August.

There Percy’s evidence was heard along with that of Mr. Blake, (a French polisher), John Dickenson (a baker), and Francis Tyman (who was unemployed). All of them had been in the park and had seen what happened. The person missing was Brown and there was something suspicious about his absence. The magistrate, Mr Henry, asked for him to be fetched if possible and was told he worked at the Pavillion Theatre. After the case was heard new information came to light that suggested that Brown and some friends had been ‘seen drunk outside the court’ having been paid money (by the defendant?) to stay away.

By that time Pinkstone, a ‘respectable’ clerk, had been bailed for 40s but committed to face a trial for indecent assault on a minor. On the 18 August Pinkstone appeared at the Bailey on three charges of indecent assault. He was acquitted of assaulting Amelia Porter (who was under 10), convicted of assaulting an unknown girl (probably the child in St James’ Park who had run away), and pleaded guilty to assaulting Rosina Masters.  He was sent to prison for 15 months but no other detail is recorded in the Proceedings (which is normal, they very rarely gave any detail of sexual assaults for fear of offending public morals).

[from The Morning Post, Saturday, August 02, 1862]

‘Fracas in the Seven Dials’: Police hurt as a mob runs riot in London

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Street fight in Seven Dials, by George Cruikshank c.1839

Seven Dials was notorious in the 1800s as a place of desperate poverty and criminality. It was an area that the police were not inclined to go, full of rookeries with traps set for the unwary and locals whose antipathy towards anyone in authorities made it a very dangerous place for the ‘boys in the blue’.

To give just one example of the risks officers took in entering the district we can look at this case from the middle of June 1883.

Officers were called out from the police station at Great Earl Street to tackle a riotous crowd that had gathered in the Dials. One of those involved had apparently been thrusting a muddied cloth into the faces of random passers-by in an aggressive manner. When the police moved in to arrest this man they were attacked and pelted with stones, ‘ginger beer bottles, and pieces of iron’.

The instigator of the violence – the man with the muddy cloth – was rescued by the crowd and it took police reinforcements to recapture him along with another man that had been identified as a ringleader in the riot.

Eventually, and not without a struggle, the two of them were conveyed to the station house. On the way the officers were kicked at, bitten and wrestled with as their prisoners ‘behaved like wild beasts’. A passing solicitor and an off duty police officer came to the aid of the lawmen and helped subdue their charges.

All the while the crowd had followed from Seven Dials and continued to try to affect a rescue of their friends. Stones rained down on the officers and one struck the off duty copper, PC Bunnion, on the ear. He was hurt so badly that he lost his hearing (hopefully only temporarily) and was placed on the police sick list. A woman rushed in and grabbed one of the officers’ truncheons and started to beat them with it – she too was eventually arrested.

After a night in the cells both men and the woman were brought up before Mr Vaughan at Bow Street Police court. William Learey was given four months at hard labour for his part in the assaulting on the police but the other man was cleared. John Hurley’s solicitor was able to persuade the magistrate that his client had taken ‘any part in the original disturbance’. He’d been falsely arrested therefore, and so was excused his subsequent behaviour.

Mary Taylor – the woman who’d used the police’s own weapon against them – didn’t escape justice however. She was given 21 days for one assault and 14 for another, a total of just over a month in prison. An unnamed gentleman who gave evidence in court challenged this decision. He alleged that the police had used unnecessary force in arresting Mary but Mr Vaughan upheld his decision while suggesting that the man take his complaint to the Commissioners of Police.

It is always hard to know who is to blame in a riot. The very nature of the event makes its hard to identify those who are active participants and those who are innocent bystanders, or even individuals whose motive is simply to stop the riot escalating.  One of the functions of the New Police after 1829 was to deal with exactly this sort of disorder but it was not until over 100 years later that the police began to receive the sort of specialist training and equipment they needed to be able to do so.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, June 17, 1883]