Tag: drinking

‘Rough justice’ is meted out by Mr Sainsbury

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Samuel Sainsbury was a 45 year-old carman – the late nineteenth-century equivalent of the modern ‘white van man’. I think it is fair to say that he was a man who took no nonsense from anyone and was quite prepared to defend himself and use controlled violence to do so.

So it was unfortunate that William Parris had decided to date Sainsbury’s daughter. Parris was a young plasterer but he also belonged to a gang of  ‘roughs’ (soon to termed ‘hooligans’ by the press of the day) and so was hardly deemed a suitable candidate by the girl’s father. Neverthless William persisted and attempted to get Miss Sainsbury to see him by sending a message with a marriage proposal. When she realised that his attentions did not run quite that far she upped and left and returned home to her father.

A more sensible young man would have licked his emotional wounds and reminded himself that there were plenty of other fishes in the sea. Not William Parris however. He spoke to his mates, and set off at night to make the Sainsburys pay for the rejection.

Parris and a number of others gathered outside the Sainsbury home at Down’s Buildings in Southwark. They had been drinking and only left the pub when the landlord closed up for the night. They knocked loudly on the front door, warning the residents that they had come to ‘lay out’ the Sainsbury family. No one answered so they went around to the back of the house and climbed over a six-foot wall.

Parris and lad named Magner reached the back door and forced it open. As they began to climb the stairs Samuel Sainsbury heard them and got up, alerting his son. Both readied themselves to repel the intruder but neither were dressed, Samuel was barefoot in his trousers and shirt, his son was just wearing a long nightshirt.

Samuel saw Magner and knocked him backwards down the stairs then, seizing a hammer, he went for Parris and the rest of the gang who crowded at the foot of the stairs by the door. He raised the weapon and struck Parris and then the recovering Magner. The rest of the gang fled as fast as their legs could carry them, scrambling to get over the wall and away from Mr Sainsbury’s wrath.

The police arrived but arrested Sainsbury, taking Parris and Magner to hospital to have their wounds dressed. It took a few weeks before the trio was reunited at Southwark Police court where the father was charged with assault.

Mr Kennedy, the sitting justice, was told that Parris had a previous conviction for wounding Mr Sainsbury and one for an assault on tram conductor. The police knew Magner and several other members of the gang. The magistrate declared that the youths had brought their injuries on themselves and he granted warrants to arrest Parris, Magner and several other lads on a charge of causing a riot outside the Sainsburys’ home. As for Samuel, he discharged him and he left court with his reputation significantly enhanced.

[from The Standard, Friday, August 19, 1898]

A close encounter on Holborn Hill: two young women have a narrow escape

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Holborn in the mid Victorian period 

This blog has noted before that violence towards women was endemic in the Victorian age. The court reports are full of husbands and partners hitting, stabbing, burning, and otherwise beating their wives and lovers, and casual violence towards women in the streets is also a reality of daily life in the nineteenth-century city.

None of this should come as a surprise of course; violence towards women remains a serious social problem alongside the sexual abuse that has precipitated the Me Too movement in recent years. Some men it seems believe they have a ‘God given’ right to abuse women or, at the very least, to treat them as inferiors. I place ‘God given’ in inverted commas but note that it is the great religious texts that created the idea that women are in some way second-class citizens under a system of male domination. I don’t necessarily believe that religion is ‘bad’ but this element of religion continues to provide an excuse for discrimination and violence.

In 1855 two sisters were walking through Holborn and got lost. It was late and as they wandered the streets they saw a man standing on Red Lion Street and asked him the way to Haverstock Hill. He agreed to show them and they set off together.

The man was well dressed, gave his name as Thomas Reddington, a jeweler, and so they had no fears about walking with him. At some point one of the sisters, Mary McKay, said felt tired and needed to rest. Reddington said he had rooms nearby in Holborn Chambers and she was welcome to sit down their for a while before continuing her journey. The women agreed and followed the jeweler to a building in Union Court on Holborn Hill.

These rooms were not lawyers chambers however, they were quite ‘low and dirty’ and the women immediately felt uncomfortable there. The elder sister (Susan Hale, who was married) complained and said they should leave and was about to go when the man seized her and punched her in the face. Shocked she grabbed her sister and they ran out. They soon found a policeman on Holborn Hill and told him what had happened. PC Swinscoe (Sity 216) said he found Reddington at ‘an ice shop’ near Union Court and arrested him based on the women’s description.

The case came up before Mr Corrie at Clerkenwell Police court and one the face of it was a fairly straightforward incident of assault, perhaps with a darker sexual motive. Reddington’s key defense was that he was drunk at the time. ‘I’d been drinking all day long’ he told the magistrate, as if that was justification of his actions.

Incredibly, Mr Corrie seems to have taken this as mitigation and turned his ire on the young women, especially on Susan Hale as she was married. He told she had ‘acted most indiscreetly in accompanying a complete stranger into a house, even if what he represented to them was true, that he had chambers there’.

He ascertained that Reddington earned 30s a week and because the offence was serious he fined him £3. Reddington didn’t have the money (presumably because he’d drunk it all away) so he was sent to gaol for three months. The ‘young ladies quickly left the court’ chastened no doubt both by their narrow escape from a possible worse crime and the rebuke they had received from the magistrate. This was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a rape victim being told that her choice of clothing was to blame for the assault she suffered. Corrie may have been punishing the drunken jeweler but he was asserting the dominance of the patriarchy as he did so.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, July 04, 1855]

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 on Amazon here

‘Such a state of things is not permitted in any town in Europe. The sooner a stop was put to such places the better’: Soho in 1888

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Berwick Street market in the 1950s or 60s.

Much of the housing would’ve been there in the late 1800s

Madame Akker Huber ran a lively club in Soho, ostensibly for members only. Le Cercle des Etrangers (or Circle of Strangers) was situated in Berwick Street and seems to have attracted a mixed clientele, especially from London’s multinational immigrant community.

One such person was Nestor Lacrois who enjoyed the hospitality of the club but didn’t always have the funds to pay for it. On the evening of 19 May 1888 Nestor was at the bar of the club pleading with Madame Huber to lend him some money so he could carry on enjoying himself.

Madame Huber was disinclined to help however. Lacrois already owed her money and wasn’t at all forthcoming about when that debt would be settled. Her refusal only enraged him; he picked up a glass and threw it at her. As she evaded the missile he tried again, then swept several glasses from the bar, smashing on the floor before storming out.

It took a while (and possibly some failed attempts at reconciliation or recompense) but in June Madame Huber obtained a summons against Lacrois and she and him appeared together at Marlborough Street Police court. Lacrois was accused of the criminal damage, assault and challenging her to a fight when drunk. Lacrois counter-sued, claiming that the landlady had smashed a glass in his face, drawing blood.

Apparently ‘five or six fights occurred in the club’ that night and Mr Newton listened with mounting alarm to the description of the club as a chaotic, drunken and disorderly venue. Several women were produced who claimed they could come and go as they pleased without being members and it was alleged that drinking continued late into the small hours.  In the end he declared that he didn’t believe any of the witnesses before him in the case between Huber and Lacrois and dismissed the summonses.

As for the club itself: ‘such a state of things is not permitted in any town in Europe. The sooner a stop was put to such places the better’.

One imagines the local police and licensing officers took note.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, June 10, 1888]

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

“Stab me you b——if you are a man, stab me, stab me”: Drink and domestic violence end in tragedy

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John Wicks and his wife had both been drinking on the 14 April. John was well known in the community as a drinker and for being violent when he was under the influence. His wife, Elizabeth, could also resort to violence when her temper flared. The couple lived in Kensal New Town in northwest London and Wicks earned his money as a chimney sweep.

When John came home on the 14than argument flared about money. He was drunk and Elizabeth had shared two or three pints with a friend, so she wasn’t sober either. Wicks complained that he had nothing and demanded she hand over the money she’d sewed into the pocket of her skirt. She refused and they came to blows.

Reports are mixed with conflicting evidence from Wicks, his mother-in-law, and other witnesses (domestic fights like this were quite often public affairs, given the crowded accommodation of late Victorian London). It is possible that in order to defend herself Elizabeth picked up the fender from the fire and threatened her husband with it. He pulled a knife and she threw the fender at him as he retreated out of the room. His wife then seized the next available weapon she could find, a large spoon, and came after him.

The pair ended up in the garden which was where George Abbott, a van boy who lived opposite, saw them. He’d been drawn to the quarrel by the noise, as had Henry Stacey (another neighbour) and both saw Elizabeth strike John with the spoon. Stacey later testified that Elizabeth was in a rage and was shouting: “stab me you b——if you are a man, stab me, stab me” at John. Soon afterwards the sweep aimed a blow at her neck and when his hand came away blood spurted from the wound.

John Wicks had stabbed his wife in the neck.

He was arrested and she was taken to hospital where despite the best efforts of the surgeons at St Mary’s, Paddington, she died 10 days later. ‘Inflammation of the throat’ had ‘set in the same night as she was stabbed, and she was unable to swallow anything except iced water’. She died as a result of ‘exhaustion caused through not taking food and inflammation of the lungs’. It must have been a terrible and extremely distressing way to die.

On 23 May after a number of appearances before him Mr D’Eyncourt formally committed John Wicks to take his trial for murder at the Central Criminal Court. He had pleaded not guilty and claimed that she must ‘have fallen against the knife’. He admitted he’d been drunk, and offered that in mitigation.

The police detective that interviewed Elizabeth in hospital confirmed the pattern of events as she described them but added that she had, at the last, described her husband as a gentle man when he was sober. ‘There is not a kinder man or a better husband’ she had insisted.

It is a familiar story for anyone who has looked at domestic violence in the past or worked with abuse survivors in the present. Women only went to the law when they had tried all other means to curb their partner’s violence. The courts fined or locked men up but little else was done to support the victims and in a society where women so often depended on men to survive there were few alternatives open to a wife than to take her man back again and hope for the best.

In court after the evidence of witnesses had been heard the house surgeon at St Mary’s testified. He described the wound and speculated on it cause. The court wanted to know if it could have caused by accident, as John had suggested. He doubted it was likely but admitted that it was possible: ‘it is unusual to get such a wound in that way, but it might be’ he observed.

That was enough for the all male jury. Despite the glaring evidence that John Wicks had killed his wife in a drunken rage while he was holding a sharpened knife in his hands, the jury acquitted him of all charges, manslaughter included. He walked free from the Old Bailey exonerated by men who clearly believed that he was provoked and that his incapacitation due to alcohol absolved him of the responsibility for his wife’s death.

Wicks died a few years later in 1884 at the relatively young age of 54. I like to think that the guilt he felt played a role in his death but it is more likely that he succumbed early to the ravages of alcoholism which had already consumed him in 1877 and must have got worse following this tragic sets of events.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, May 24, 1877]

This case is not untypical of many cases of domestic violence in the nineteenth century, not all of course ended in tragedy. For me though it is indicative of the prevailing attitudes towards women, attitudes which I believe directly fuelled the Whitechapel (or ‘Jack the Ripper’) murders. My co-authored study of those murders is published by Amberley Books on 15 June this year. You can find details here:

“For God’s sake, Jack, get this fellow off me or he’ll eat my head off”: ‘Knocked’ in the Old Kent Road

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I find all sorts of violent acts being prosecuted at the Police courts of Victorian London but few were as savage and, at the same time, bizarre, as this one.

Patrick Kieffe was drinking with several workmates in a pub on the Old Kent Road when the beer got the better of them and they fell to arguing. All of them worked at the gasworks and one of them, John Baxter, had the task of stoker – which demanded strength and courage – had the reputation of the hard man in the group.

As the beer overcame any inhibitions Kieffe had he started to shout the odds and challenge all and sundry, but especially Baxter, to a fist fight. Baxter ignored him and dismissed the challenge as bravado; Kieffe was a young man, Baxter more mature in years. Enraged Kieffe flew at his co-worker as he stood at the bar nursing a pint, knocking him to the floor. He leapt on him and started to pummel him with fists and, before the others could intervene, he bit him and tried to tear off one of his eyebrows.

One of the group, John Montague, rushed in to help as Baxter called out:

‘For God’s sake, Jack, get this fellow off me or he’ll eat my head off’.

Kieffe had Baxter’s eyebrow in his teeth and, like a dog with a bone, he was refusing to release him. Montague threatened to break his jaw and finally the younger man relented. The police arrived and PC  90P arrested Kieffe and took him away. Baxter’s wounds were dressed by a local doctor who later testified that ‘nearly the whole of the left eyebrow was bitten off’.

The case ended up before the Police magistrate at Lambeth, Mr Elliott, who was shocked at the violence of the act. He told Kieffe that he had acted ‘like a perfect savage’ and remanded him in custody until his father could be found.

The South Metropolitan Gasworks on the Old Kent Road were built in the 1830s and the old gasholder (now disused) stills remains. The Old Kent Road is synonymous with South-East London working-class life, as immortalized in the old music hall song, “Wot Cher! Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road”.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, February 20, 1862]

A theatre heckler makes a pantomime of himself

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The Grecian Theatre, Shoreditch (1875) – (Islington Public Library)

Reginald H. Burkett of 1 Field Court, Gray’s Inn Road was that most ‘pooterish’ of nineteenth-century characters, a lower middle-class clerk. In mid January 1878 he and some friends had taken a box near the stage at the Grecian Theatre (a music hall on the City Road) to enjoy the festive pantomime.

However, it would seem they had enjoyed plenty of drink as well, as they were in a very boisterous mood, Burkett especially so.

The stage manager (a Mr Gillet) had his eye on them because of the noise and disorderly behaviour coming from their seats and when he observed that Burkett was smoking he moved in to tell him it was not allowed.

For a while there was calm and the pantomime continued but when the ballet dancers took the stage Burkett started to interrupt the performance. According to Mr Gillet, Burkett ‘behaved in a disgusting way, making motions to the dancers’ and, when they came in range, ‘he leaned out of his box and with his stick tried to hook the legs of one of the ballet women’. She burst into tears and ran from the stage.

When Mr Nicholls, one of the actors the show, began to sing Burkett started to abuse him, ‘using some nasty expressions’. Nicholls wasn’t having this and approached Burkett demanding to know exactly what he was insinuating.

Burkett swore at him and then leapt out of his box, onto the stage! Nichols aimed a punch at him and suddenly there was a full-blown fist-fight on stage. This almost brought the house down and the stage manager was quick to lower the curtain, ending the performance prematurely.

Burkett was held until the police could come and take him away and a few days later he appeared at the Worship Street Police Court. Here Mr Bushby, the presiding magistrate considered the case. He could see that Burkett had been disorderly but technically Mr Nicholls (the actor) had assaulted him first. In the end he decided to bind the clerk over and find sureties against his good behaviour in the future. A friend of his, a Bloomsbury-based solicitor named Warren stepped up to stand surety for him.

One imagines the Grecian took note of his name and appearance and barred him from all future performances.

[from The Standard, Monday, January 21, 1878]

The booze does the talking as a business transaction ends in injury

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Accidents do happen but they can still result in court cases, especially if injury is involved. This was the case with Thomas Clossy, a traveller who wound up in bed with a London prostitute one night in late December 1858.

Clossy had been drinking with a woman he’d met in the City Road. Earlier Fanny Herd (described in court as a ‘handsome and well-dressed female of the “unfortunate” class’) had ‘entertained him at her rooms on Westmorland Road. Now the pair were in the Eagle Tavern sipping glasses of ‘port wine-negus’ (which is port mixed with orange or lemon, species and hot water).

At her rooms Clossy had enjoyed a simple meal and a bottle of stout (along with the other ‘entertainment’) but he seemed reluctant to pay her for that. The pair argued and Fanny threw the contents of her glass on the floor, with some of it going over the traveller’s clothes. Clossy retaliated and hurled his drink at her, losing his grip of the glass in the process. The vessel broke as it hit the woman on the head and she was rushed off to be treated in hospital.

Appearing in court at Worship Street Clossy was sorry for what he’d done; it was an accident and probably the result of how he’d been holding the glass (by its base, presumably because it was hot). It took several days before Fanny was able to attend court but when she did she seemed content to accept the man’s apology so long as it was accompanied by a suitable compensation. The pair left the court together after Clossy agreed to pay whatever he owed her along with something extra by way of compensation for the injury he’d caused.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, 7 January, 1859]

A ‘flasher’ in the theatre is exposed

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Mr Hope was enjoying a night out at the theatre with his wife in early January 1842 when  his attention was caught by a young man in a nearby box. He was ‘fashionably dressed’ and appeared to be a little the worse for drink. This was not an uncommon sight at the Haymarket (or any other) Theatre, but Mr Hope felt there was something about the way that the young gentleman behaved that concerned him.

As he watched from the comfort of his private box he noticed that the other man seemed to be focused on a couple in a nearby box. When the man in that box rose and left briefly, the young man stood up, opened his trousers and ‘indecently exposed his person’. The poor woman had been ‘flashed’ and wasn’t sure what to do. Mr Hope reacted quickly, moving over and into her box and taking her hand to lead her back to the safety of his own. Leaving her in the reassuring company of his wife, he went in search of a policeman.

Having found one he returned to the box and explained to the woman’s husband exactly what had happened. The culprit – Thomas Sale Pennington – was pointed out and the constable asked him to come along quietly and without disturbing the other theatregoers or the performance. Pennington refused and suffered the indignity of being dragged from the venue by his collar before being frog marched to a police station.

On the following day Pennington was stood in the dock at Marlborough Street and charged with ‘an unparalleled act of indecency’. Whilst he didn’t deny exposing himself the young man did try to excuse himself on account of being drunk. Pennington said he had no recollection of the couple concerned and could hardly remember what he was supposed to have done. He also said he’d been a student at Oxford for the past four years and could provide plenty of character witnesses who would testify on his behalf.

If he thought this would go down well with Mr Maltby the magistrate he was sadly mistaken. The only issue for the justice was in establishing his guilt. For the victim and her husband (who were not named in the newspaper report, no doubt to save their blushes) the most important thing was in protecting her from having to relive the incident.  Mr Hope pleaded that his evidence and that of the lady’s husband were sufficient to save the lady from taking the stand but the magistrate and his chief clerk said she would have to answer a few questions.

Having satisfied himself that Pennington was guilty as charged and that his drinking did not mitigate his actions Mr Maltby turned to him. The justice told him that he was guilty of ‘committing a willful and intentional insult’. The public, he continued, ‘must be protected from such disgusting conduct’ and he sent him to prison for three months ‘as a rogue and vagabond’. He gave him leave to appeal to the Sessions but since there he might have been handed an even longer sentence had a jury convicted him, I doubt he took that up.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Thursday, 6 January, 1842]

A landlady receives an unwanted seasonal gift: slap in the face with a wet fish

DORE: BILLINGSGATE, 1872. Billingsgate fish market in the early morning. Wood engraving after Gustave Dore from 'London: A Pilgrimage,' 1872.

Billingsgate Marketing the morning by Gustave Doré, 1872

Drunkenness is usually associated with this time of year. People have plenty of time off work and numerous social occasions in which drink plays an important role. Whether it is sherry before Christmas dinner, beer on Boxing Day in the pub, or champagne and whiskey on New Year’s Eve, the season tends to lead some to imbibe excessively.

Not surprisingly then the Victorian police courts were kept busier than usual with a procession of drunkards, brawlers, and wife beaters, all brought low by their love of alcohol. Most of the attention of the magistracy was focused on the working classes, where alcohol was seen as a curse.

By the 1890s the Temperance Movement had become a regular feature at these courts of summary justice, usually embodied in the person of the Police Court Missionaries. These missionaries offered support for those brought before the ‘beak’ in return for their pledge to abstain from the ‘demon drink’ in the future. These were the forerunners of the probation service which came into existence in 1907.

In 1898 Lucas Atterby had been enjoying several too many beers in the Birkbeck Tavern on the Archway Road, Highgate. As closing time approached he and his friends were dancing and singing and generally making merry but the landlord had a duty to close up in accordance with the licensing laws of the day. Closing time was 11 o’clock at night (10 on Sundays) but Atterby, a respectable solicitor’s clerk, was in mood to end the party. So when Mr Cornick, the pub’s landlord, called time he refused to leave.

Mrs Cornick tried to gentle remonstrate with him and his mates but got only abuse and worse for her trouble. The clerk leered at her and declared: ‘You look hungry’, before slapping her around the face with ‘a kippered herring’ that he’d presumably bought to serve as his supper or breakfast.

It was an ungallant attack if only a minor one but if was enough to land Atterby in court before Mr Glover at Highgate Police court. The magistrate saw it for what it was, a drunken episode like so many at that time of year. He dismissed the accusation of assault with ‘a Billingsgate pheasant’ (as kippers – red herrings – were apparently called) but imposed a fine of 10splus costs for refusing to quit licensed premises.

The clerk would probably have been embarrassed by his appearance in court (and the pages of the Illustrated Police News) and if he wasn’t he could be sure his employer would have been less than impressed. It was a lesson to others to show some restraint and to know when to stop. A lesson we all might do well to remember as we raise a glass or three this evening.

A very happy (and safe) New Year’s Eve to you all. Cheers!

[from The Illustrated Police News, Saturday, 31 December, 1898]