Tag: Fare dodging

The tables are turned on a gentleman whose pockets are empty

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

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

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

As the report noted:

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

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

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

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

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

Probably indeed.

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

The man on the Dalston tram stands up for commuters everywhere

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In these days of contactless payments and Oyster cards it’s easy to forget that not so long ago one used to need a ticket to travel on London transport. I remember bus conductors with their machines spewing out paper tickets like the waiting systems in some supermarkets and surgeries, and we still have travelcards on the tube and trains. But how did our ancestors prove they had paid their fare, were tickets always required, and how were they issued?

When Alfred Pearl appeared at Thames Police court charged with ‘dodging’ his fare to Dalston Junction it revealed the system one tram company deployed to check passengers had paid.

Apparently the North London Tramways Company (NLTC) didn’t trust its their own employees. It had adopted a system whereby none of its conductors could collect fares from those boarding their trams. Instead a ‘collector mounts the car and collects the fare, giving to each passenger a ticket, which is to be delivered up on leaving the car’.

So you got on, waited until a collector got on, then paid him, and carried on your journey clutching your ticket. As long as you had one you were ok; fail to produce it however and you’d be asked to cough up. This seems very like the system of inspectors we have now. They may be infrequent visitors to the buses and trains of the capital but I’ve been asked for my ticket (or my contactless debit card) a number of times in the past 12 months.

Alfred Pearl had boarded a tram car at somewhere before Kingsland Road on a Saturday afternoon in August 1873. At Kingsland Road Philip Egerton, one of the company’s collectors, ‘demanded his fare in the ordinary way’ but Pearl refused him. He said would not pay his fare in advance, but only once he had reached his destination.

I suppose this is a reasonable position to hold given the unreliability of transport systems now and then. After all most people paid for services they had received, not that they were about to receive. Pearl said he was going to Dalston Junction and would pay his fare there, and so the tramcar carried on. At the Junction however Pearl now insisted he wanted to continue his journey further, and remained adamant that he would only pay on arrival.

The collector asked him for his name and address, and when Pearl refused to give them Egerton called over a policeman and asked him to arrest the man. The policeman was not inclined to waste his time but Pearl decided he was going to clear his name, and make a point, so he took himself to the nearest police station where he again refused to pay or give his name. The desk sergeant had him locked up and brought before a magistrate in the morning.

In front of Mr Bushby at Thames Police court Alfred insisted he had done nothing wrong. He ‘denied the right of the [tram] company to demand or receive his fare before he had completed his journey’. In response the NTLC’s solicitor Mr Vann ‘produced the by-laws of the company’, which clearly demonstrated (at section nine) that they were perfectly entitled to do just that.

Mr Bushby wasn’t clear how to proceed. He wasn’t aware of whether the company’s own by-law was valid and he would need time to seek advice and consider the legal implications of it. For the time being he adjourned the case and released the prisoner who went off loudly complaining about being locked up in the first place. Mr Pearl was no ordinary traveller either, he was smartly dressed and may have been ‘a gentleman’. It seems he was quite keen to test the law but hadn’t bargained on being held overnight as an unwilling guest of Her Majesty.

The case came back to court in October 1873 where the tram company were represented by a barrister as was the defendant. Astonishingly here it was revealed that Pearl had actually offered the policeman 10sto arrest him and the collector (Egerton) a whole sovereign if he would prosecute. It was claimed he declared he  ‘would not mind spending £100 to try the matter’.

This then was a clear case of principle to Mr Pearl.

His lawyer (Mr Wontner) cross-examining the ticket collector ascertained that Pearl’s defence was that when he had been asked to pay had explained that he had refused because:

‘his mother had on the previous day lost the ticket given on payment being made, and had been compelled to pay again’. He had told the collector in August that his own ticket had ‘blown away in a gust of wind’.

Evidently Pearl was not the usual fare dodger (and there were plenty of those brought before the metropolitan police courts) and Mr Bushby had no desire to punish him as such. He (the magistrate) also felt the circumstances of the arrest and imprisonment had been unjustified and so agreed Mr Pearl had been treated poorly. The by-law however, was ‘a very excellent regulation’ but ‘it was informal, and consequently not to be enforced’. The whole matter was, he was told, to go before the Queen’s Bench court for consideration so there was little for him to do but discharge Mr Pearl without a stain on his character.

Thus, the man on the Dalston tramcar (if not the Clapham omnibus) had won a small victory, but I doubt he won the argument in the end as we are well used to paying up front for a journey that might be uncomfortable, delayed, or indeed never reach the destination we ‘paid’ for.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper , Sunday, August 24, 1873;The Morning Post , Saturday, October 04, 1873]

Transport woes mean a bad start to the week for one Victorian worker

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London Railways, 1899

In the 1800s increasing numbers of people commuted to work five or six days a week. Trams and railways were the preferred option for the working classes, as horse drawn omnibuses ran a little later and were a bit more expensive. Most working men had to be at their place of employment very early, by 7 o’clock, so they either needed to live close by (as the dockworkers in the East End did) or required reliable public transport to get them there.

Given that wages were low transport had to be cheap, which is why men like Alfred Shepperson took the train. Thousands used the workmen’s trains from the beginning of the 1860s, these usually ran early and charged just two pence return (instead of the flat rate of a penny per mile that was the cost of third class travel on the railways). It was an imperfect system however, some train services ran too late, others too early, and casual workers were particularly badly affected by this. Calls for better transport echoed down the century as the government recognized that this was crucial if they were to encourage migration to the developing suburbs north and south, and so clear the crowded slums of central, south and east London.

On Monday 27 July 1868 Alfred Shepperson had a bad Monday morning. He arrived at Walworth Road station at 7 am as usual, ready to start work nearby as a sawyer. He presented his ticket (a workman’s ticket) to Henry Ricketts at the gate but the Chatham & Dover Railway employee refused it. It had expired on Saturday he told him, and he’d need to pay 4d for his travel.

Shepperson growled at him declaring he see him damned first and an altercation seemed inevitable. Then a man stepped forward, smart and of a higher social class, who paid the sawyer’s fare. This might have been the end of it but Shepperson’s blood was up and he was in no mood to be reasonable. He continued to protest and was asked to leave the station quietly.

Unfortunately ‘he refused, made a great disturbance, calling [Ricketts] foul names, and threatening to have his revenge on him at the first opportunity’.

The ticket inspector was called and when be tried to steer the sawyer out of the station Shepperson’s rage intensified and he became ‘extremely violent’ assaulting both men and ripping the inspector’s coat in the process. Bystanders intervened before Shepperson could throw the man down some stairs. Eventually he was subdued and hauled off to a police station.

On the following morning he was up before Mr Selfe at Lambeth Police court where Shepperson claimed he didn’t know the ticket was out of date.

‘Can you read?’ the magistrate asked him.

‘Yes, sir’

‘Then you must have seen the ticket was not available, for it is plainly printed on it’.

Shepperson had no answer for this so tried to deny the violence he was accused of, and hoped the magistrate would ‘overlook it’.

‘It is quite clear to me you have acted in a disgraceful manner’, Mr Selfe told him, ‘and I shall certainly not overlook such conduct. You are fined 20s., or 14 days’ imprisonment’.

The sawyer didn’t have 20s (about £60 today, but 4-5 days’ wages at the time) so he was led away to the cells to start his sentence, one that might have had more serious repercussion if he had then (as was likely) lost his job.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, July 29, 1868]

The showman, the tram conductor, and the irritated magistrate.

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Fare dodging was frequently punished at the summary courts. Conductors of trams or buses, hackney coachmen, and train guards brought in travellers  who had refused or neglected to pay for their journeys. In some circumstance this was because they disputed the amount charged (most often when it came to cabs) or claimed that they hadn’t realised the vehicle was going as far as it was, or had missed their stop. It seems that in most of the instances that were reported by the press the customer paid up, often with an added penalty of paying the transport company’s court costs.

Harry Perkins was one such example of a fare dodger that annoyed the sitting magistrate  at Thames and ended up paying much more than he need have had he simply bought a ticket in the usual way.

Perkins was described as a ‘showman, living in a caravan at Dalston’. So perhaps he was a part of a travelling circus. His actions in late October 1890 certainly entertained the editor of The Standard who decided to submit his story to print for his readership. The circus man boarded a tram in Dalston and travelled to Shoreditch where he attempted to get off. At this point the conductor (‘Conway, badge 1227’) asked him for 1s for his fare. When this was refused Conway restrained his customer until a policeman was found who could take him into custody.

In court the next day Perkins was charged with refusing to pay his fare and with being drunk. The magistrate started by questioning the tram’s conductor as to Perkins’ conduct.

Was the prisoner drunk, Mr Williams asked Conway.

‘Well that depends’, came the reply.

‘What?’ said the justice.

‘It is a very difficult thing to say whether a man is drunk or not’, was Conway’s response.  ‘Some people say that a man is not drunk when he can stand; others say that…’

At this point the magistrate cut him off.

‘I don’t want a lecture on drunkenness’ he grumbled, ‘if you can’t prove that the man was drunk on your care there is an end of that part of the charge. How about refusing the fare?’

Once a sheepish Conway had muttered that yes, he had refused the shilling demanded Mr Williams turned his attention (and clear irrigation) to the showman in the dock. Why had he attempted to get off without paying he wanted to know.

‘I did not want to ride’, answered Perkins. ‘I got on the car, and found the seats on top wet, and the inside was full, so that I wanted to get off, and the conductor would not let me’.

‘But you had a good long ride’ declared Mr Williams, adding ‘so it took you about half-an-hour to find out that the seat was wet?’

The prisoner could only restate his previous explanation that he ‘did not want to ride’. The magistrate dismissed this with a curt statement that he was fining him 10s for the trouble he had caused when all this could have been avoided had he simply paid, when asked, the 1s fare.

I rather suspect that the message Mr Williams was sending was intended for a wider audience than the circus man. His time had been wasted unnecessarily and he wanted to avoid similar cases coming before him in the future. It probably also served as a rebuke for the conductor (and therefore all bus and tram conductors) and allowed readers to chuckle over the discomfort of ‘jobsworths’ everywhere.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, October 29, 1890]

An argument over what was written on the side of a bus lands the conductor in court.

Blackwall Viaduct 1843

Blackwall viaduct, 1843

In late June 1850 Lady Lennard was travelling with her steward, Mr Parrott, on a London omnibus towards The Blackwall Railway. They had picked this ‘bus in particular because it advertised the railway as its destination. This was made quite clear, they thought, because the words ‘Blackwall Railway’ were ‘conspicuously painted on a board in the form of a board immediately over the door’ of the vehicle.

Mr Parrott had handed the conductor Lady Lennard’s bags and he had deposited them in a storage area and set off. However, when the ‘bus reached Fenchurch Street and the end of Railway Place, it stopped. The conductor told the pair that ‘he did not go any further’.

Now Fenchchurch Street is not remotely close to where the Blackwall Railway station (on the Docklands Light Railway line) is today, nor was it in 1850. In fact it was just over 3 miles from the Fenchurch Street terminus of the London and Blackwall Railway. The conductor presumably believed that the omnibus’ sign was self explanatory; they transported passengers to Fenchurch Street (which served the London and Blackwall railway) , but Lady Lennard’s train went from Blackwall Station, close by the River Thames, so she wasn’t happy.

With bags to carry and being and three miles from her destination, Lady Lennard was not inclined to pay for her ride, and so refused. The conductor promptly seized her luggage and said he would not return it without his fare, throwing them ‘down with violence’, onto the pavement. Mrs Lennard strode off towards the station, with her lady’s maid in two.

Meanwhile Mr Parrott tried to reason with the driver, to little effect. He was met with a mouthful of invective which attracted the attention of a police constable. He hurried after Lady Lennard and advised her to pay the fare, retrieve her luggage and then summons the conductor for his poor behaviour.

As a result the whole sorry affair ended up before the alderman magistrate at the Guildhall Police who took a very dim view of the conductor’s attitude.

In his defence the conductor, who was not named in court, said ‘he was not bound to take luggage, but having done so, it to it to the station’. He had gone to the station and and onto railway property, if the lady was unhappy she should take it up with his master, he was simply obeying his instructions.

The magistrate was unimpressed. He didn’t accept the conductor’s argument that he wasn’t obliged to carry luggage. If that was the case then he shouldn’t have accepted it, or crazed an extra fee for it. Nor was he in agreement that ‘going on to railway property was the same as going to the railway, as the direction on the omnibus indicated’.

There were two offences here, he added, both liable under the relevant act of parliament. He was minded to make an example for he conductor and fined him the large sum of 40s, 20 for each offence, plus costs. If the conductor chose not to, or was unable to pay then he could instead go to prison for two months.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Monday, June 30, 1851]

The ‘stupid, obstinate, and unreasonable’ man on the Notting Hill omnibus.

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William Rogers was a gentleman who lived in Shepherd’s Bush in the London suburbs and as such, he was as far from being the usual sort of occupant of a police court dock as one could get. Yet in April 1899 he found himself before the magistrate at the West London Police court charged with fare dodging.

The General Omnibus Company had applied for (and obtained) a summons and in court were able to prove that Rogers had been traveling on a ‘bus from Notting Hill Gate to Uxbridge Road Station, and had paid the penny fare.

However, ‘because the omnibus stopped  a yard or so from the bridge that crosses the railway he refused to get out, and travelled on to Shepherd’s-bush’. At this point the conductor asked him to pay the balance of the fare owing, another penny, which he refused.

Mr Rogers cut a frustrated figure in court. He thought it ‘contemptible’ that the Company had brought the matter to court for such a trifling amount and said the vehicle had not ‘pulled up at the ordinary stooping point’. He had waited inside for the driver to move it to the station only for it to continue to Shepherd’s Bush. Since he had not had the opportunity to alight, he wasn’t prepared to pay the excess fare.

The GEO had employed a solicitor to contest the case, presumably on the grounds that establishing precedent was as important as recovering a penny fare. Their solicitor pointed out that ‘there was no obligation on the part of the Company to stop their omnibus at any particular place’. If Mr Rogers had made a request the driver would have complied with it, but he hadn’t.

Mr Lane, the sitting justice at West London agreed.

He told Rogers that there ‘was nothing in law or reason, saying that the Company need not do more than carry a passenger to the station. It did not matter a button where the omnibus was stopped. He ordered the Defendant to pay the penny fare, with two guineas costs, and described his conduct as stupid, obstinate, and unreasonable’.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, April 26, 1899]

An extraordinary fare dodger at Lambeth

Theodore Hook was a cigar merchant and someone that had involved himself closely in the recent attempt by Morgan Howard to win the parliamentary seat of Lambeth.* But he was also a quite extraordinary fellow if the account of his appearance at the Lambeth Police Court in December 1880 is anything to go by.

During the election campaign Hook had behaved in such a disorderly manner in the Elephant and Castle pub that the landlord had called the police. This had led Hook to court but the solicitor representing the South London Licensed Victuallers; Protection Association declined to prosecute further. But the magistrate had remanded Hook because other claims were being made about him and he wanted these investigated.

PC 423P (no name given) revealed that Hook was in the habit of taking cabs but refusing to pay the fares. No fewer than 7 cabbies came forward to testify against him and it became apparent that Hook had ‘dodged’ fares amounting to over £8 (or around £400 in today’s money).

V0013739 The Hospital of Bethlem [Bedlam], St. George's Fields, Lambe

Bethlem (‘Bedlam’) Hospital in the 19th century

But there was more. Hook had also been charged with ‘wandering in the streets without any visible means of existence, or being under proper control’, the constable told the Lambeth court.

Hook’s brother now came forward to explain that his sibling had recently been in Bedlam (London’s notorious ‘lunatic asylum’). The magistrate said surely the family should take him in and care for him but the other Mt Hook said ‘it was quite beyond their power to do anything’.

Other witnesses now testified. One gentleman said he thought the prisoner’s cigar business was in ruins, another that he had seen Hook at Dulwich ‘building up stones’ to make a statue of the Queen. He added that Hook told him he ‘had been authorized to go over to Russia to put the Emperor Alexander in order’. This would have been Tsar Alexander II who was assassinated in 1881 (not by Hook it has to be said). He was also said to have walked into the sea ‘in a most daring manner’.

When this was put to Hook he denied being insane but admitted he could be ‘at times a little strange’. Mr. Chance the magistrate thought it quite evident that Hook was not fit to be ‘at large’ and felt that his friends and family were responsible for looking after him. Since, however, it seemed they were not prepared to do so he would order Hook to find two people that would post bail for him to the value of £20. No one came forward and so the unhappy man was remanded in custody once again.

[from The Standard, Monday, December 06, 1880]

* Howard (a barrister and judge) failed on this occasion but did subsequently enter Parliament as a Conservative MOP for Dulwich in 1885. He served just 2 years before resigning his seat and moving to Cornwall where he was appointed as a judge on the County Court Circuit.

The docks burn as Polly Nichols is murdered; meanwhile at the police courts…

The Times 1 September 1888 02

On the 31 August 1888 the Daily News had a short report of hearings at a handful of the capital’s Police Courts. At Westminster Mr. D’Eyncourt fined an omnibus conductor ‘for delaying a car in Parliament Square’ (the vehicle was changing its horses – the Victorian equivalent of the broken down bus) and the paper’s reporter thought it raised an interesting question about how traffic was prioritized.

At Clerkenwell Albert Rheese and 5 of his companions were charged with running an illegal gaming house in Islington. At Guildhall ‘a youth named Seals’ was accused of stealing a box containing gold, stamps and coins, to value of £300.

Thomas Green found himself at Lambeth on a charge of dodging his fare on the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. He was in third class and had fallen asleep and so went ‘beyond his distance’. The magistrate took pity and discharged him.

In the same column to paper also reported that their had been a meeting of dock workers to protest that the parliamentary committee assembled to examine the ‘sweating system’ was not interested in hearing the views of dockers. One of the meetings leaders was Ben Tillett who later went on to play a key role in the Great Dock Strike a year later.

After this item was a report of huge fire on the docks (at the South Quay warehouse). This fire brought thousands of East Enders onto the streets to watch and was the topic of conversation. While it raged however, a new terror was about to unfold on the Whitechapel streets. In the early hours of Saturday morning PC Neil discovered the body of Mary Ann (‘Polly’) Nicholls in Buck’s Row; she was the first* victim of ‘Jack the Ripper’, there would be at least 4 more that summer and autumn.

*the first according to most researchers, others suggest the killer had struck at least once if not several times before he murdered Polly.

[from Daily News, Friday, August 31, 1888]

A sailor’s display baffles the bench

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In June 1836 the Marylebone Police Court witnessed an entertaining performance of nautical wit delivered in defense of a charge of fare dodging.

Jack Robinson (described as ‘a jolly son of Neptune’) was brought in and charged with refusing to pay his fare to the driver of the No. 735 cab from Ratcliff Highway to Tottenham Court Road. Sailors have always been held in greater esteem than soldiers in English society and this was particularly the case in the nineteenth century when the memory of Nelson was still fairly fresh.

When he was asked why he had refused to pay his driver Jack’s response was full and passionate:

‘My Lord…the plain truth of the matter, without gammon or nonsense at all is this here: I came over in the Spartan from New York, and landed at Bristol, when I directly brought myself to anchor a-top a stage, and got into London yesterday’.

He went on to say that he met the cab on the Ratcliffe Highway, a notorious stretch of brothels, taverns and cheap lodging houses frequented by sailors that ran parallel to the banks of the River Thames (it is now simply called ‘The Highway’). He asked him to take him into town.

He agreed the fare with the driver in his own peculiar way:

“Now mate, what’s the price of my passage?” and he agreed to land me for two bob, with the understanding, my Lord, that on the road I was to stand grog for us both, which I did: and when I got out I offered him the blunt [the two bob – or 2 shillings] but he wouldn’t have it, and said he should charge for time instead of distance. “Avast, there my lad” says I. “I shan’t pay, so you may do you best and be d—d!”. and with that he calls up this blue-coated fellow (pointing to a policeman) who locked me up in this little square crib worse than the Black Hole at Calcutta.

With that he bowed to the justice and scraped his foot on the floor ‘in true sailor-like style’. Suitably impressed by his performance and persuaded of the honesty of his claim, the magistrate dismissed the case and let him go.

NB: HMS Spartan had been a famous ship of the line in the Napoleonic wars and the War of 1812 with America. But she had been broken up in 1822 so Robinson’s ship must have been a more recent version but perhaps one that carried the name of its predecessor and some of the associated glory. Robinson must have cut a dash in court and cabbies weren’t that popular in the period anyway.

[from The Morning Post , Thursday, June 09, 1836]