Tag: Drury Lane

A second chance for the lad that strayed

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Augustus Harris (1852-1896)

It seems as if young John Davenport was trying to escape his environment and make a better life for himself. For a 14 year-old working-class lad like John there were few opportunities to scale the social ladder or win any kind of wealth or fame. An entrepreneurial boy might strike lucky and make a fortune in business; by contrast serious crime was a pathway out of poverty (albeit a rocky and precarious one).

I once had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with the Strictly Coming Dancing judge Len Goodman. Len told that growing up in East London he knew that his passport out of the area was dancing. It was that, he said, or football or becoming a gangster. While he loved football, dancing was his passion and what he was best at.

Entertainment was also John Davenport’s thing and he got a break, being selected as part of the touring company performing Augustus Harris’ Human Nature (written in 1885). Augustus Harris was a big name in late Victorian theatre. Dubbed the ‘father on modern pantomime’ Harris was manager of the Drury Lane Theatre and co-wrote a number of plays and pantomimes. Several of these will be familiar to modern readers including Babes in the Wood (1888), Beauty and the Beast (1890) and Cinderella (1895).

So it was a ‘big thing’ to be chosen by Harris and should have meant to start of a long career in show business. Unfortunately John found himself on the wrong sort of stage in June 1888, after being caught in the wrong sort of act.

At the beginning of June he was brought into the Bow Street Police court and charged with stealing a pocket-handkerchief. He was first remanded so enquiries could be made and these revealed his links to Harris and the theatre company. It also revealed that his father – a costermonger –  wasn’t keen to see his boy fly the nest, at least not if it meant he would be excluded from his son’s earning potential.

As a 14 year-old thief with a previous unblemished record the magistrate, Mr Vaughan, was minded to be lenient. A member of the St Giles’ mission appeared and said he would be happy to find the boy a temporary home so long as the father would ‘give an undertaking not to interfere with him in future’. Mr Wheatley (from the mission) was clearly keen to remove the old bad influences from John and set him on a better road. Mr Davenport however refused to play along and said he would rather see John imprisoned for month instead.

Mr Vaughan told the father that he was extremely selfish and saw through his attempt to conceal his avaricious desires on his son’s earning under a cloak of parental indignity. Now it transpired that Augustus Harris had heard about John’s arrest and far from abandoning the lad as yet another wastrel that had failed to take the opportunity offered to him, ‘interested himself on the boy’s behalf’. The court was informed that Harris had found him a job in domestic service, would pay for a new suit of clothes and the fare to get him there.

It was a kind and generous offer and presented a viable solution to the magistrate. John was released to begin his new life. Let’s hope he took full advantage of this second chance the impresario had given him.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, June 3, 1888]

P.s Augustus Harris was a lover of food and drink as well as the theatre and there is a bust of him on the corner of Catherine Street in Covent Garden, where he might have enjoyed a glass or tow. There’s even a smart Italian restaurant named after him.

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

A scandal in Fitzrovia, or a simple case of under age drinking?

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At seven o’clock in the evening of Thursday 15 December 1887 police constable 432D was on duty in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia. As the officer walked his beat he noticed a young girl ‘reeling about’ and seemingly unwell. He approached her and caught her by the arm and soon ascertained that she was drunk. He asked her name and she told him it was Betsy.

Betsy Embery was just 14 years of age and worked as a servant in Bloomsbury High Street, not far away. The constable took her to the police station and her father was summoned. When Mr Embery arrived he was shocked to see his daughter in such a state and declared that someone must have drugged and assaulted her.

This was a serious allegation that the police were bound to investigate. Betsy was examined by the divisional surgeon, who quickly decided that there had been no assault; in his opinion the girl had just been drinking. The next day she was brought before Mr Mansfield at Marlborough Street Police court on a charge of being drunk and incapable.

‘Where did you get the drink, little girl?’ the magistrate enquired.

‘’My sister and a woman gave it to me in a public-house near to Drury Lane’, the girl replied.

Her sister was 23 years old but Betsy didn’t know much more about her than that, not whether she was married, or the name of her drinking companion. Betsy was released into the care of her father but it all seems a little fishy to me. How had she got from Drury lane to Cleveland Street and what was she doing there anyway?

Cleveland Street was about to become notorious in the late 1880s. In 1889 the chance arrest of a 15 year-old boy for a suspected theft uncovered a male brothel that catered to an elite clientele. The Cleveland Street scandal resulted in no prosecutions of anyone ‘in society’ (merely light sentences for some of the male prostitutes that worked there) but it sent shock waves through the establishment.

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It has been suggested, but never proven, that Prince Albert Victor (Queen Victoria’s grandson) was a customer. The scandal fuelled contemporary homophobia which culminated in the prosecution of Oscar Wilde two years later for having an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas.

So I wonder if young Betsy was simply there by accident or whether she had been ‘drugged’ as her father claimed, and taken to Cleveland Street to be used as a child prostitute. This was only a couple of years after William Stead has exposed the extent of child prostitution in ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’; an article that had helped push through legislation to raise the age of consent.

Was Betsy set up by a predatory procuress or had she simply wandered into Cleveland Street after an afternoon of drinking with her big sister? Was her father’s claim correct or was he just trying to rescue his daughter’s (and his own) reputation?

[from The Standard, Saturday, 17 December, 1887]

“I think you are in my seat sir”: A Row in the Dress Circle

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Today if you decide to go to see a West End show, concert or play you will always buy tickets, usually in advance, and sometimes on the door. The tickets will indicate where your seat is and that seat is yours regardless of whether you choose to sit and watch the performance of spend the entire evening propping up the bar. We might imagine it was ever thus but this story from October 1855 reveals that while you might pay to access a certain section of the theatre buying a ticket did not necessarily guarantee a particular seat.

Henry Burroughs and William Horner had decided to spend a night at the Drury Lane Theatre. They had paid to sit in dress circle and had occupied seats in one of the boxes there. They’d arrived around seven o’clock but at some point after that had gone down to the bar for some refreshment. When they returned (at about nine) with a friend they found two men sitting in their seats.

They politely asked the newcomers to leave but were (just as politely) rebuffed:

‘If the box-keeper says they are yours, we will give them up’, William Burt (one of the two occupants) replied, otherwise he was staying put. The theatre assistant (the ‘box-keeper’) was called over but assured them that no one had asked him to mind the gentlemen’s’ seats. Nor had any of the theatre-goers in the neighbouring seats. As far as William Burt (and his friend Seymour, a City solicitor) the seats were vacant and they were entitled to sit there.

Burroughs and Horner thought otherwise however and one of them leant foreword and grabbed Burt by his shirt collar, pulling his head back. His companions joined in and a fight broke out between the five men. The theatre erupted into chaos and the playhouse’s inspector was summoned. With some difficulty all the men were arrested and led away so the performance could continue in peace.

The next day Burroughs and Horner, ‘smartly-dressed young men’, were presented at Bow Street Police court to answer for their actions. They complained that they were the victims in all this: they’d only vacated their seats for a ‘few minutes’ and others had unfairly occupied them. They’d politely requested them to leave but they hadn’t. The row was regrettable but not entirely their fault.

Inspector Hancock from the theatre said he’d never had such a dreadful disturbance in all his four years of service. Nor was it normal for the box-officers to reserve seats in the outer circle, you took your chance and the men should have asked others to keep their seats for them while they sought refreshment. Mr Jardine the sitting magistrate agreed. While the fight had involved all five of them it was Burroughs and Horner that had started it and so he fined them 40s each, which they paid.

So next time you are sitting in a West End theatre make sure you are sitting in the right seat but if someone is in yours, be careful to ask the attendant to make them move.

[from Reynold’s Newspaper, Sunday, 21 October, 1855]

‘The road is as much mine as yours to-night and I shan’t drive you an inch’: A cabbie who won’t go south of the river without a hefty tip

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In 1875 the Adelphi theatre in the Strand was staging a production of Nicholas Nickelby. Dickens’ third novel had been turned into a play almost as soon as it had appeared in print and the author didn’t profit from the misappropriation of his work. By 1875 Dickens was dead anyway and the story of Nickelby, the impoverished schoolmaster and the quite awful Wackford Squeers, was a popular standard for Victorian audiences and the Adelphi had been amongst the first theatres to put it on.

Once the show was over the Aldelphi’s manger, a Mr Chatterton, went on to enjoy an evening of the opera at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane before meeting up with a friend for drinks. Chatterton finally left the Albion Tavern at just after midnight and he and his chum, Mr Webster, asked a linkman to fetch them a cab.

It was a dreadful night, pouring with rain and it took the man about a quarter of an hour to secure a hansom cab for the friends as he’d had to go all the way to the Haymarket to find one. Chatterton helped the other man into the cab (which suggests to me at least that he was a little the worse for drink) before clambering in himself. The driver (John Dredge) got down from his seat to ask them where they wanted to go.

‘Clapham Road, near the Kennington Church’ Chatterton told him.

While this was only a journey of about 3 miles it did involve going south of the river and would probably have taken half an hour (and of course another 30 minutes for Dredge to get back into town and home). Under the bylaws governing licensed cabs he had to be home by 1 in the morning (or a pay a fine at the rate of 1s 6d an hour), so given how late it was he was reluctant to ‘go south of the river’ at that hour. However, if the money was right he was prepared to carry the gentlemen.

‘I am not obliged to go that way, and shall not go unless you pay be liberally’, Dredge told them, ‘what are you going to give me?’

Chatterton didn’t want to get into an auction with a cabbie so decided to find an alternative way home. ‘If you won’t go there’ he insisted, ‘drive me to the station in Bow Street’.

This infuriated the cab driver. Bow Street was literally just around the corner from the pub. ‘Oh that’s your game is it?’ he told them, ‘The road is as much mine as your to-night and I shan’t drive you an inch’. Webster tried to reason with him but Dredge was having nothing of it; he clearly felt the gentlemen were taking the mickey because they were tipsy. Chatterton was not at all amused however, and called a policeman who took the cab driver’s number.

Ten days later Dredge was summoned to appear at Bow Street Police court before Mr Vaughan. Cab drivers had a poor reputation for insolence and magistrates rarely missed a chance to punish them for it. Despite Dredge insisting that he thought the two men were drunk but now apologising for being mistaken and for ‘having cast such an imputation’ the justice decided to throw the book at him.

He said it was evident that Dredge’s intention was to ‘extort more than his legal fare’ and the ‘public were not to be exposed to such a system’. So, as a ‘warning to other cabmen’ he fined him 40s (or a month in prison) and suspended his license for a month.

Dredge was stunned, and so was the theatre manager. Surely Mr Vaughan didn’t mean to deprive the man of his livelihood as well as fining him the equivalent of £120 today (about two week’s wages at the time). The Bow Street magistrate was unmoved by either man however, and insisted his mind was made up and the penalty would stand.

I suspect this decision would have filtered down to Dredge’s fellow drivers but not necessarily with the effect that the justice wanted. London cab drivers are unlikely to have reacted well to being told what to do, or to one of their own being treated quite so harshly.

[from The Morning Post (London, England), Wednesday, May 12, 1875]

for other stories featuring London hansom cab drivers see:

Cabbies get a raw deal at Westminster

A cabbie pushes his luck at Bow Street

An unfortunate cabbie picks a fight he can’t win

The cabbie and the lady who knew too much

 

 

 

A strange man at Worship Street – was he the ‘Ripper’?

Illustrated Police News Jack the Ripper

Today I am spending most of my time in Whitechapel planning out a history trip for my undergraduate students. This is something I do every year – take a party of students studying my third year module on ‘Crime and Popular Culture’ in the nineteenth century to visit the sites associated with the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders. Plenty of commercial walking tours exist of course, some much better than others.

Personally I’m not a fan of the exploitative type that thinks that projecting an image of a dead woman onto the brick walls of modern Spitalfields is appropriate. I’d much rather listen to an expert who can impart some context and tell the audience about the history of the area and its peoples as well as treat the murder victims with the respect they deserve. Those tours do exist, so if you want to take one do some research before you make your choice.

I don’t have the luxury of being able to pay for a commercial tour so I do it myself. But Whitechapel is constantly changing so I need to revisit the place regularly to see what changes I need to make to my route. This time however there is added piquancy to my trip because I have almost finished making the edits to my first draft of a new ‘Ripper’ book. This has been written in collaboration with a former student of mine who thought he had a new solution to the world’s most infamous cold case. Andy has done the research on the murders and has added several to the original police file, while I have concentrated on the social history to provide context. We have a draft manuscript, all we need now is a publisher…

Anyway, back to Whitechapel and back to 1888 and a month after Mary Kelly became the fifth canonical (but not , we argue, the last) victim of ‘Jack’, what was happening at the Worship Street Police Court? Worship Street (along with Thames) served the East End and several of the murdered women in the ‘Ripper’ series appeared here on a variety of cares relating to prostitution, disorderly behaviour and drunkenness in the late 1880s.

Joseph Isaacs, a 30 year-old cigar maker, was charged with theft. His name suggests he belonged to the large immigrant Jewish population of the area which have been closely associated with the murders. Quite early on a man named John Pizer was arrested on suspicion of being the killer. Pizer (who was also known as ‘leather apron’ – a local man with a reputation for threatening prostitutes). Pizer was able to provide an alibi and was released but some experts still believe he may have been the killer.

The idea that the murderer was a Jew was helped by widespread anti-semitism and the belief that ‘no Englishman could do such a thing’. Xenophobia, racism and anti-immigrant tension suffused society in the 1880s and the killings brought all of this to the surface.

Joseph Isaacs was accused of stealing a watch. He had entered a shop in the West End of London holding a violin bow. He asked the shop’s proprietor, a Mr Levenson, if he could repair the bow. As they discussed the transaction however, Isaacs suddenly ‘bolted out’ of the shop. Mr Levenson quickly realised that he stolen a gold watch and raised the alarm.

Isaacs was arrested some time later in Drury lane but not in connection to this offence. He’d been picked up because his appearance seemingly matched the description offered of a man seen near Mary Kelly’s home on the night of her murder. At Worship Street Police court Mary Cusins, the deputy of a lodging house in Paternoster Row, Spitalfields, testified that Isaacs had stayed there for ‘three or four nights’ around the time of Kelly’s murder.

‘On the night of the murder she heard him walking about the room’. She added that ‘he disappeared after that murder, leaving the violin bow behind’.

All this had emerged as the police made house-to house enquiries in the wake of the murders. The police have ben widely criticised for their failure to catch ‘Jack’ but most experts now acknowledge that they did all the right things things at the time. Without forensics, and chasing a man that attacked strangers, they had very little to go on and were really dependent on the killer making a mistake. Jack didn’t really make any mistakes, however, and eluded the growing cordon that the combined force of the Met and the City Police threw out to trap him.

Isaacs was remanded by the sitting magistrate at Worship Street (Mr Bushby). He had allegedly stolen a watch but there was no sign of it. But more importantly Detective Record said that he still had some questions to answer with regards to his movements around the time of Mary Kelly’s murder. Isaacs appeared a week later, again in the company of Detective Record. He had been cleared of any involvement in the Ripper murders was convicted of stealing Julius Levenson’s watch and sent to prison for three months at hard labour.

Another possible suspect eliminated and another line of enquiry completed, the men of H Division’s search for the world’s first serial killer continued…

[from The Standard, Saturday, December 08, 1888]

Did a ‘wife’ take poison to escape her abuser? Or did her cry for help go unnoticed?

Cyanide

On Wednesday this week I related the story of a man who was woken by his wife hitting him. In hitting her back too hard he caused her death. He was sent to face trial at the Old Bailey and convicted of manslaughter. The culprit seems to have had a history of domestic violence and so while he was treated gently by the court (since his wife was a drunk and a sloven, in the eyes of the society they lived in I hasten to add) we should not be quite so understanding. As one correspondent to me on Twitter noted, ‘domestic violence is tragedy’.

Today’s case, from 1862 (some 27 years earlier) also involves a man being accused of causing the death of his partner, and he too seems to have gotten away with what must have been deemed routine and ‘normal’ violence.

John Lemon made ‘base coin’. Now whether this was a legitimate trade or a variation on illegal coining I’m unsure at the present. However, the Bow Street Police court where he appeared in May 1862 was interested in the death of his common law wife, not his occupation.

Lemon lived with Ann Gedling in a property on White Hart Street, off Drury Lane. When he got home late one evening, possibly the worse for drink, he and Ann argued. Lemon hit her ‘a severe blow on the head with a flat iron’ before staggering off to bed.

In the morning, in an echo of Charles Mills’ case from Wednesday, Ann was feeling sick and she called for him to help her. He found that she had swallowed a quantity of poison; namely cyanide, which they pair used in the coin manufacturing process. He told the magistrate it was used in extra-plating coins.

Whether Ann had taken it in an attempt to end her life (and rid herself of an abusive partner) is unknown but it saved Lemon from further prosecution for her death. A doctor was unable to help her as she passed away the moment he stepped through the door.

In court expect testimony was provided by a surgeon called Lovett. He pronounced that death was due to the ingestion of cyanide of potassium and that effectively trumped the blow that Lemon had landed. She may have died from the abuse she had received, and indeed her death could certainly be attributed to the coin maker, at least in terms of him provoking her to kill herself.

But the law, in the person of Mr Corrie the Bow Street magistrate, didn’t see it like that. Since he had not directly killed her Lemon was discharged.

[from The Morning Post, Monday, June 02, 1862]

Of oysters and late night drinking in Vinegar Yard

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In 1827 the Metropolitan Police were yet to be created. Sir Robert Peel (Home Secretary from 1822 to April 1827) was not in post but would soon take up the reins again in January 1828. The lack of an ‘official’ police however should not be taken to mean that the capital lacked policing before 1829. There were officers attached to each of the Police Offices (the courts that are the subject of this blog) and many patrolling the river Thames and its quaysides. The Bow Street runners had operated day patrols since the late 1700s and and watchmen continued a tradition started in the medieval period, of walking their beats at night.

So all told London had around 450 ‘police officers’ and 4,500 watchmen employed and answerable to the various watch committees, magistracy, and the government. The capital was then very far from being ‘unpoliced’ when Peel guided his important ‘reform’ through  Parliament.

The officers attached to the Police (or ‘Public’) offices like Bow Street, Marlborough Street, Lambeth or Thames, worked on the instructions of the police magistrates. They investigated crimes (or at least followed up leads); they served warrants and summons; searched properties for stolen goods; and watched premises where infringements of bylaws or other offences were suspected.

Interestingly while they were paid a small salary it appears that their superiors (including Peel) believed they were best motivated by financial incentives. Officers such as David Herring at Bow Street were able to earn bonuses on top of their salary for executing particular tasks or rewards from grateful victims of theft for the return of their goods; they could also earn money for displaying ‘zeal’. This might mean a reward of up to £500 for recovering property, or simply an extra shilling for working overtime on patrol (i.e working after dark).

Herring appears in 10 trials at the Old Bailey as an investigating or arresting officer and may well have profited from his work. According to Leon Radzinowicz (the founding father of the history of crime)  the practice of financial rewards among police officers was widespread and persisted long after Peel’s creation of the Met in 1829.*

I wonder if Herring was after some extra money before Christmas in 1827. At half past midnight he and a fellow officer from Bow Street entered an oyster shop in Vinegar Yard run by Mr Pearkes. He went upstairs and found a gentleman sitting at a bench with a pint pot in front of him. After greeting him with a friendly ‘How are you, Sir?’ Herring picked up the pot and sniffed at it before setting it down. The pot was empty and Herring and officer Price left the building without any explanation.

The gentleman was clearly annoyed and as he left the oyster shop he presented Pearkes with his card bearing his name: Mr Ellar. Ellar told Pearkes what had occurred and said he had been insulted by the officers’ behaviour.

Herring ran a respectable establishment and so he summoned Herring (as the conductor – or leader – of the patrol) to the Bow Street office. He alleged there that Herring had behaved improperly. Mr Pearkes told the justice (Mr Halls) that often served respectable persons last at night when they had been attending the theatres, sometimes men alone, sometime they brought their wives and children. He ‘never suffered improper characters to come there’.

He told Mr Halls that Mr Ellar had been drinking  pint of ale but that he had obtained from a local publican and was not selling beer himself (as he did not have a license to do so). The justice however sided with the officer and with the law. Herring and been sent out to keep an eye on the unlicensed sale of liquor in any form and while this was hardly a serious offence it was breach of the regulations. As the magistrates told the oyster shop keeper:

‘It was a very great hardship upon publicans, who were obliged to take out and pay for licenses, and were compelled to close at a given hour, that others who were not subjected to the same restraints, were making a profit upon the commodities at all hours’.

He and his fellow magistrates were ‘determined to punish, as far as the law allowed, all persons who disposed of excisable liquors on their premises without a license’

Herring would have earned some extra money and perhaps well knew that Pearkes bent the rules for his wealthy clientele. The charge was brought against the police officer but Mr Halls saw no merit in it; the only way he would countenance a charge was if Mr Ellar (as the injured person) appeared to prosecute Herring.

Since he hadn’t the case was dismissed.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, December 21, 1827]

Mr Pearkes’ oyster shop was well known to Londoners. Situated near Drury Lane (and illustrated above) it was the subject of a funny article (recounted later in 1880) when an oyster appeared to whistle! 

* Radzinowicz, L; ‘Trading in Police Services: An Aspect of the Early Police in 19th Century England’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 102/1 (November 1953)

Of cheap gin and forgiving husbands

One of London’s brand new police constables was on duty in Drury Lane in November 1829 when he came across the collapsed person of an elderly lady. She was very drunk having consumed too much cheap gin at the behest of a friend of hers.

The policeman called for assistance from a couple of passers-by and they managed to carry the woman to the nearest watch-house (the predecessor of the police station).

In the morning she was brought up before Mr Halls at Bow Street on a charge of being drunk and incapable. The magistrate noted that she was the eight such case he’d seen this morning already.

‘He did not know what was the matter with the old women, that they should reduce themselves to the level of swine for the pure love of gin’.

At this point an old man steeped forearm and told Mr Hall that the woman was his wife and the mother of his seven children. He said that his wife was ‘addicted to drinking, and on Saturday contrived to possess herself of every farthing of his hard week’s earnings, which she spent on gin, and left him and their children without a morsel of food to put in their mouths’.

The justice sympathised with the old man but remained him he had taken her ‘for better or worse’ and the husband quipped that ‘it had all been worse and no better’, prompting laughter in the court.

Mr Hall admonished the old drunk and told her she didn’t deserve such a decent husband, and then related her into his care.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, November 17, 1829]

A disgruntled teenager in Drury Lane

In May 1821 a young man was brought up for re-examination at Bow Street. He had been accused of attempting to rob a man in the crowds near  Drury Lane theatre.  The lad was unnamed but aged 18 and he worked in the Mews at Charing Cross. While he wasn’t a member of the Royal household he was employed alongside those that were.

Previously he had worked in the stables of  Lord William Petre,  a keen horseman who had acquired Napoleon’s horse Marengo after Waterloo. The accused stable hand had left his work at 6 in the evening (as he was allowed to do) and had gone out dressed in his ‘civvies’ (therefore not in his livery as a servant).

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The King’s Mews at Charing Cross (T. H. Shepherd, engraved by J. Tingle. 1830)

He mingled with the crowd and according to witnesses, he attempted to rob several persons before he was caught by a gentleman whose gold watch he lifted. The young man denied he had done anything wrong and claimed those testifying against her had sworn falsely. In the end he was remanded again and two witnesses were bound over to prosecute. Without any names (either of the boy or the supposed victim) it is impossible to trace this case any further. However, we might look to a possible motive: apparently he was to be let go from his position at the end of the week, so perhaps this was the action of a resentful teenager, having been turned out on the streets without much hope of employment.

         [from The Morning Post, Tuesday, May 21, 1822]