Tag: dogs

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]

The sad end of a champion ‘mouser’

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Are you a cat person or a dog one? I have cats but love dogs too; I just don’t have time in my life for them at the moment. Cats are more self-contained after all, they pretty much do what they like and interact with us when they want food or attention. These days cats are – at least in urban areas – simply pets. Their role is solely to provide companionship. In the past people kept cats for other reasons, most often to keep down pests like mice.

That’s why Benjamin Carter and his wife had a cat. They had ‘no end of mice’ and so when their cat disappeared in June 1890 they were both upset and angry to find that a neighbour had killed it.  Carter obtained a summons and brought James Butterfill to court at Woolwich.

There he explained the situation to Mr Marsham, the sitting magistrate. The cat had vanished on June 28 and, having heard rumours that Butterfill was responsible, he confronted him. James admitted taking the cat but said he had put it into a basket (intending to give it ‘a hiding’) but it escaped.

The cat never returned and Carter carried on with his investigations, finding a little girl who said she saw Mrs Butterfill take the cat from the Carter’s door and carry it into her own house. This girl told the magistrate the same story and it became clear that the cat was now dead, killed by the Butterfills. The question was why?

James Butterfill told Mr Marsham that he and his brother-in-law kept pigeons, trained ones (so perhaps racing pigeons or ones used to carry messages). The Carter’s cat had killed several of these by June and they decided enough was enough.

‘You should have sued the owner in the county court’, the justice told him.

‘We did, and were nonsuited’, Butterfill replied.

Nonsuiting means that the case was stopped in court, either because the plaintiff (Carter) withdrew – unlikely here, or because the judge decided there was insufficient evidence for the case to carry on. However, the judge at the time declared that if he’d found a cat killing his pigeons he would have destroyed it. That was enough for the Butterfills who resolved to deal with the problem themselves should it happen again.

It did happen again. The Butterfills lost four pigeons and then six more a few days later.

Robert Ashdown, the brother-in-law, said that his pigeons were worth £5. They had acted to defend their property and Mr Marsham had some sympathy with them. He added that if anyone was directly to blame it was probably Mrs Butterfill, not James and so the summons was incorrectly directed. He thought the action taken was justified and dismissed the summons on a technicality.

The Carters would have to find a new ‘mouser’ (apparently they were readily available for about 10s– £40 today) but hopefully one that didn’t attack birds. They could do with one of my two. They will kill mice if they catch them but just sit and stare at pigeons, making that strange noise that cats make.

The pigeons are not at all bothered by them.

[from The Morning Post, Saturday, August 30, 1890]

An excess of zeal as a man tries to avoid the shame of a court appearance.

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This is one of those unremarkable cases, which, at the same time, serves to illustrate how the police courts of Victorian London actually operated. Most of the time the press does not discuss the various functions of the court. Partly this was because it is unlikely that the reading public were interested but also presumably because most people knew anyway. After all these were popular arenas for negotiating social issues and held few secrets for most of the people of Victoria’s capital.

On Thursday 24 June 1880 a number of people were brought to the Worship Street Police court charged with keeping dogs without paying for license to do so. We might have forgotten but until 1987 anyone owning a dog had to buy an annual license.  In 1880 this cost 7s 6d (equivalent to about £25 today) so while not a huge sum it was still a cost on the stretched income of the workingman. So it is not surprising that large numbers of people tried to avoid it.

This meant that periodically the capital’s police courts were filled with defaulters, most of whom were expected to pay up on the spot or face a possible fine and/or imprisonment if they couldn’t pay. Being sent to gaol for not having a dog license was not impossible but it was extremely unlikely.

On this occasion one man seemed keen to pay what he owed but then get out of court quickly and without drawing attention to the fact that he’d been there. This was understandable; no one wants his neighbours to know that he has been in court or in trouble with the law, it was potentially embarrassing. So he popped his 5s fine on the ledge of the dock and tried to leave by the main entrance. A warrant officer stopped him and told him he had to go out by the door marked ‘prisoners’, which he was reluctant to do.

When the fellow refused point blank the officer picked up his coins and shoved the man towards the exit door. However, the poor man clung to the dock and continued to refuse to be expelled via the prisoners’ exit. Two more officers arrived, and a police sergeant, and a struggle ensured which ended in an unseemly wrestling match on the court floor.

Finally the man was dragged out of court by his collar and thrown into the street. If he wanted to avoid attention he’d failed quite spectacularly but it was the behaviour of the police and court officers that upset Mr Bushby, the presiding magistrate.

In the afternoon he called the sergeant and officers before him and upbraided them. He told them that they had exceeded their authority and had shown too much ‘zeal’. Given the minor nature of the man’s offence there was no need for rough stuff. He was not supposed to leave his money on the ledge nor was the warrant officers supposed to pick it up from there. They should have told him to pay it to the ‘proper officer’ and, had he refused, they were required to let him leave. There was no requirement that he be imprisoned in default of payment and the proper procedure was for a distress warrant to have been issued if he continued to default on payment.

The man had been injured in the kerfuffle and Mr Bushby wanted it made clear to the officers that he didn’t want to see that sort of incident in his courtroom ever again, and he wrote a letter to the police inspector for K Division to place that on record.

So this uninteresting case becomes interesting (to me at least) because it shows how the courts operated when a fine was due to be paid. It also reveals that there was an exit designated for prisoners (or anyone presumably who had been charged, regardless of whether they came in from the street or from the cells). These were multi-purpose courts; they didn’t simply deal with ‘crime’ and we can all appreciate that some of those that found themselves there were hardly ‘criminals’ by any measure of that term. So making them walk out of a door marked ‘prisoners’ was probably likely to upset those that felt they had done little to deserve the blemish on their character.

[from The Standard, Friday, June 25, 1880]

Dangerous dogs or well loved pets? Two magistrates, two very different interpretations of the law.’

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The law is, of course, open to interpretation. In the 1880s the law concerning the control of pet dogs was, seemingly, as a clear as mud and so we can see that two magistrates chose to apply it in two different ways.

At Lambeth Mr Biron was in the chair on 8 June 1886. The clerk produced a string of dog owners were charged, by the treasury, with failing to keep their dogs under control. For the magistrate the law depended on how one interpreted the word ‘control’.

In a number of cases dogs had been found by police, wandering 20-30 yards from their owners or their owner’s home. If the dogs were muzzled, not on a lead, or no one appeared to be in control of them, more often than not a policeman would take their collars and take them back to the station. In those instances, if they had a name on the collar the owner was summoned to collect them.

In several of the cases brought before him Mr Biron dismissed the charge. If, for example, the owner said that the dog had just been let out in the morning (to do its ‘business’ one supposes) and was within 20 yards of the house then that was ‘under control’. In another case the owner said his animal was ‘within call’ and the justice accepted that. Indeed he accepted most explanations for why dogs were not on leads or muzzled and only one case, where a dog had bitten a child, did he find strongly against the owner who was penalised with a 10s fine.

In this case though the owner had already been warned about the behaviour of his beast so perhaps that was more about demonstrating that the law had to be obeyed than anything else. The courts were quite strict on those that ignored instructions previously handed down by the magistracy.

Overall Mr Biron declared that it was ‘doubtless right to take dogs unmuzzled and without owners to the station, but when animals were within a few yards of the owner or his premises he could not see much good sense in it’.

North of the river at Clerkenwell Mr Bartsow took a different line on ‘dangerous’ dogs. John Adams was brought before him charged with not keeping his good ‘under proper control’ contrary to police regulations. Adams said that the dog was walking a yards ahead of him and that ‘some magistrates held this to be “under proper control”.’

Mr Barstow told him that ‘he could be bound by the decisions of other magistrates’ and fined him 5s. If it was off the leash and without a muzzle, it wasn’t under control. I suspect the newspapers focused on this because it was a law that was commonly interpreted differently, something that must have been confusing for dog owners and policemen alike.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, June 09, 1886]

On June 15 Drew’s new book (co-authored by Andy Wise) is published by Amberley Books. 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

Cruelty to a cat, or a dog, or both. Either way Mr Paget and the RSPCA were not happy about it.

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I’m not quite sure what to make of this story so offer it up as an example of how difficult it must have been on occasions, for a magistrate to know who was telling the truth or how he should proceed.

On Friday 4 June 1880 the manager of the Ladbroke Hotel in Notting Hill Gate was brought before Mr Paget at Hammersmith Police court. The defendant, William Gimlett, was represented by a lawyer (a Mr Claydon) and the case was brought by the RSPCA and presented by their lawyer, Mr R Willis.

The matter at hand was cruelty to a cat but there seems to have been some abuse of a dog as well, even though the case turned on the actions of the dog itself. The RSPCA accused Gimlett of cruelty by ‘urging a dog to worry a cat’. According to one or more witnesses the hotel manager was seen trying to get the dog to ‘worry’ a cat, presumably to make it go away but possibly out of simple base cruelty.

One witness testified to seeing Gimlett on the morning of the 13 May outside the hotel. He was allegedly ‘hissing a brown bull dog, which had the cat by the throat’. The cat escaped but only temporarily, the dog soon caught it again, and this tie it dragged it down into the coal cellar where it was discovered, ‘three-parts dead’ by one of the hotel’s footmen.

For the defence Claydon argued that the dog could not have harmed the cat ‘as it had lost its front teeth’. Mr Paget wanted to see for himself and asked the lawyer if he would open the animal’s mouth so he could check the veracity of the defence. The lawyer happily obliged, lifting the dog onto a small table and prizing its jaws open. Presumably satisfied that this wasn’t a dangerous beast the magistrate turned his attention to the barmaid of the hotel who gave evidence to support her manager.

Emily Mawley told the justice that the cat was a stray, and that again may well have meant it was unwelcome and needed to be shooed away. She added that her boss was nervous of the dog since he didn’t know it, and so ‘he threw a brick at it’. Was this intended to incite the dog or scare it away? This bit I find odd and without a more detailed report it is quite frustrating. Especially as the defence lawyer then went on to explain that the dog had been left to the house by a previous landlord and Mr Gimlett had inherited it, taking ‘the dog as one of the fixtures’.

Mr Paget wasn’t convinced by the barmaid’s testimony. He said she had ‘attributed to the defendant a degree of timidity which he would not impute to him’.  He found for the prosecution and fined Gimlett 40swith £1 18scosts. While this was confusing I think it does show the growing effectiveness of the RSPCA by the last quarter of the century. By 1880 they had been around over 50 years and had presumably become adept at bringing cruelty cases.

Given some of the acts of animal abuse which I have seen on social media recently I really hope that modern magistrates are as quick to side with the ‘dumb’ animals as Mr Paget was. After all in 1880 the fine and costs that was awarded against this abuser amounts to about £270 in today’s money but was almost two week’s wages for skilled tradesman then. No small sum at all and so, hopefully, a lesson not to be so quick to harm a stray cat (or dog) in the future.

[from The Morning Post, Saturday, June 05, 1880]

P.S in Victorian London pets were popular, just as they are today. The image at the top of the post is of a cats-meat man; someone that sold cheap pet food door-to-door. The meat was horse meat  a  by-product of the horse slaughtering trade and if you are interested in discovering what connection there is between cats-meat, horse slaughtering, and the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 then you might like to read Drew’s jointly authored study of the killings  which is published on June 15 by Amberley Books. It is available to pre-order on Amazon now: 

One magistrate and his dog: or a drunken Yorkshireman earns a night in the cells

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Interior of the London Pavilion Music Hall (c.1861)

There is tendency for people to act differently when they are away from home. We let our hair down on holiday for example, and perhaps do things we might not usually do when surrounded by more familiar scenery and faces. London offers visitors the opportunity to be anonymous; to become almost invisible for a few hours. Along with its proliferation of bars and clubs I’m sure this is one of the reasons it features high on the list of destinations for hen nights and stag dos.

I wonder if this helps explain the behaviour of George Camell, who came to London in 1862 and found himself up before the magistrate on a charge of creating a disturbance. Mr Camell, a native of Yorkshire, appeared in the dock at Marlborough Street with his pet dog by his side.

The dog was significant because it was his attempt to enter the newly re-opened (and very popular) London Pavilion Music Hall in Titchborne  Street with his animal, that had led to his arrest. The case was presented by PC Robert Martin (86C) who testified that he’d been stationed outside the Pavilion at 8.30 on the previous Saturday evening (19 September) when Camell had tried to push his way in. The policeman explained to him that he was not allowed in with his hound but Camell, who was drunk, insisted.

This sent Camell into a rage and he challenged the officer to a fight in the street. He was holding his dog on a chain but said he’d fight one handed. PC Martin declined and told him to go home. Camell replied that he’d come all the way from Yorkshire and was determined to enter. Then he’d had to leave his dog outside, the copper told him. In which case would the policeman look after his dog?

No, he would not, said PC Martin. ‘You can fasten it to your button”, suggested Camell, at which point the policeman lost his patience and, deciding things had gone far enough and the man was creating a scene, he marched him off to the police station, where he spent the night.

Camell was bailed to appear at Marlborough Street and brought a solicitor that had known him for years to speak for him in court. He told the magistrate (Mr Tyrwhitt) that his client was incapable of such conduct’.

‘Yes, when he is sober’, Mr Tyrwhitt agreed. Not when he was drunk, as the police had proved, with witnesses, that he was.

Camell had come straight to the Pavilion from dinner where he’d presumably had plenty to drink. He claimed to be a gentleman and a magistrate and gave his address as New Hall, near Hartley (which may be on the Yorkshire and Lancashire borders). He’d been locked up for several hours and since he’d only made a disturbance and not actually fought with PC Martin the justice decided he’d probably been punished enough. He released him.

As for Camell he said:

‘I never was in a police court in such a position before, and I shall never forget it’.

His appearance in court was clearly something of an embarrassment and he must have hoped it would not make the pages of the Yorkshire press.  Sadly for him his anonymity in London didn’t save him from local scrutiny. The Bradford Observer carried the story (lifted entirely as written) in its Thursday edition with the ‘headline’: ‘A Yorkshire Magistrate in the London Police Court’. Eeh by gum…

[from The Morning Post , Tuesday, September 23, 1862; The Bradford Observer , Thursday, September 25, 1862]

A sharp eyed copper helps foil a dog napper

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Queen Victoria’s Skye terriers, by Otto Weber (1874)

In recent years there have been a spate of dog thefts in London and elsewhere. Like many crimes I’ve written about on this blog about the past, nothing is very new about this. Pets (particularly pedigree dogs) have a value and that makes them vulnerable to theft.

In August 1883 PC Webb was in plain clothes as he walked along Chiswick High Road. He may or may not have been on duty but his police intelligence was certainly working keenly. He noticed a a young man driving a horse and van and a little Skye terrier seated next to him on the cab. A Skye terrier was not your ’57 varieties’ of mongrel hound usually owned by the working classes, in fact Queen Victoria famously owned a pair, and so the policeman decided to follow at a distance.

Presently the man pulled up outside a beershop, picked up the dog and gestured to a man inside. Did he want to to buy the animal he asked him? ‘No’, came the reply. Was he sure the carter asked; he could have him for 2s 6d, which was a good price, he having paid 2s for it himself.

The beershop owner wasn’t interested. So he moved on to a barber’s shop and tried to sell it there. Again he got no interest and at this point PC Webb revealed himself and asked the man who he was and where he’d got the dog.

The man’s gave his name as George Cole and reiterated that he’d bought the animal that morning for 2s. PC Webb didn’t believe it and took him, and the little terrier, into custody. On the next day man Cole and his dog were brought before Mr Paget at Hammersmith Police court where the prisoner repeated his claim. The magistrate remarked that he thought the dog was likely lost or stolen and so would be advertised, for the real owner to claim him. In the meantime he remanded Cole in custody for further enquiries. The dog was given to the police to look after.

[from Morning Post, Monday 13 August 1883]

Class wars in Hampstead as a dog gets amongst the model boats

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Whitestone Pond, Hampstead Heath in the 1920s

Mr Horace Lister was a member of the respectable middle class. He lived in Kilburn with his wife and family, and practiced as a barrister. On Sundays he enjoyed nothing more than taking his kids up to Hampstead Heath so they could sail their model boats on Whitestone Pond.

On the 29 April 1893 Lister was up at the pond with his children enjoying the spring sunshine and joining in with all their other families floating their yachts and other craft. I can picture the scene because in the 1970s I can remember my father taking myself and my brother to watch the boats and walk on the heath.

It was there he told me tales of Dick Turpin and his famous ride to York, and how the notorious highwayman had shot at his pursuers, leaving holes in the walls of the nearby Spaniard’s Inn. It was a tall tale, but I didn’t discover this till much later.  Perhaps Mr Lister was equally inventive, or shocked his children with stories from the courts he attended. I doubt he expected to feature in one that day.

As he watched his children play he saw a dog launch itself into the water and chase the boats. The animal was ‘fetching’ the boats “without being asked to do so” (as he later observed). When it grabbed hold of his daughter’s with its teeth Lister shouted at it to drop it. He had already noted who owned the dog and so he called across to him to keep better control of his beast.

His attempts to make the dog drop his child’s toy were as ineffectual as his attempt to get the animal’s owner to intervene so he decided to take the law into his own hands.

Taking his umbrella he struck the poor dog several times across its neck and back, to force it to dislodge the boat. Seeing this, the animal’s owner rushed over and caught hold of the barrister by the arm. Arthur Smith was a coachman and strongly built, and he remonstrated with his dog’s attacker. Smith threatened to ‘duck’ him in the pond if he didn’t leave his pet alone.

There were several witnesses to the skirmish and at least one, a gentleman horse rider who was passing by and saw the whole episode, was happy to corroborate Lister’s version of events when the case came before the justices at Hampstead Police Court. Mr. O’Connor, the equestrian, said he was worried that the rougher man was about to throw his victim right into the water. Lister’s ten year-old son also testified to the veracity of his father’s story, as we might expect him to.

As for Arthur Smith, well he was outnumbered and quite literally, outclassed. As a member of the working class, and not a very well respected one at that (coachmen and cab drivers had a reputation for being ill-mannered and surly) he was never going to win this battle. He claimed his dog had only gone into the water the once, and that he’d ‘called it out immediately’. He described the attack as unnecessarily violent and the charge as ‘wicked’; his dog was valuable and it had been badly hurt he added.

Not surprisingly the bench sided with the barrister and fined Smith 10s or seven days imprisonment if he couldn’t pay. He paid up and left, and hopefully chose a different route to walk his dog in the future.

[from The Standard, Thursday, May 11, 1893]

A fishmonger takes extreme measures to protect his stock

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A brief entry today, if I may be permitted, but an odd one.

We are a nation of animal lovers. I am not sure when that started but it seems to have been in place for much of the Victorian period. Whether this ‘love’ extended past our pets (predominately cats and dogs and small birds) to livestock is a moot point but the RSPCA were founded early in the century (in 1824).

Cruelty to animals has been highlighted in several posts in this blog because on many occasions people were taken before Police Magistrates to answer for their behaviour. Such incidents included stolen dogs (a supposedly ‘modern’ phenomenon), horses worked until they literally died in the streets, or monkeys mistreated as they helped musicians beg for money.

But this one struck me as particularly unpleasant and unusual.

A summons was applied for at the Dalston Police Court in north east London to bring in a fishmonger who lived in Hackney-Wick. The tradesman was not named in the newspaper report but Mr Bros (the sitting magistrate) asked what the summons was for.

The applicant was a woman (also unmanned) and she told him that the fishmonger used a gun to scare off cats that came into his garden, no doubt attracted by the smell of fish.

According to her ‘he frightened everybody by firing across the gardens at the cats that went after his fish. On a recent afternoon the man fired at a cat two gardens off, the shot going through the cats head and killing it’.

This was a regular activity, she complained, and she was ‘afraid to go into the back yard’ for fear of being shot herself.

Mr Bros granted the summons. I have two cats and they roam across the neighbours’ gardens (and we are visited by several other local felines). It can be a nuisance, they are a danger to local wildlife, especially birds, and they have an unpleasant habit of digging holes in the beds and filling them. So I understand people wanting to keep them out.

The fishmonger undoubtedly wanted to scare them away for good reason, but shooting them two gardens away? I hope he got his just desserts.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, August 5, 1888]