Tag: Gray’s Inn Road

Heartache for one couple as their baby boy disappears with his nurse

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The state of mind of George Augustus Mahon can only be guessed at when he turned up at Bow Street Police court to seek the help of the magistrate. His appearance there is a reminder that not everyone that came to court was brought by the police or a summons. Mahon and his wife had suffered a terrible shock and they turned to the magistrate as the most obvious person to advise and assist them.

Mahon was a commercial clerk, an upright member of the middle class, who lived at 15 Serle Street in Lincoln’s Inn, in London’s legal quarter. Two months earlier the Mahons had employed a new servant, Kate Curly, a steady sober woman of 26 years of age and she had served them well thus far. Families like theirs would probably only have afforded one or two domestics but Kate was hired as a nurse to look after their infant son, who was just a few months old.

On Monday 9 May 1870 Kate requested permission leave to visit her mother who lived locally.  She wanted to show her the baby she said and Mr Mahon granted her request. He had no doubts about Kate as she her behaviour and work had been exemplary up to then. However, when it got to 4 o’clock and Kate had not returned home Mrs Mahon began to get concerned. 5 o’clock came and went and still there was no sign of the servant. In the evening, when George returned from his office he went in search of her.

Mahon visited Kate parents and they told him that she had left their house around 7 or 8 in the evening that they had walked with her as far as the Gray’s Inn Road where they had said their goodbyes. No one had seen Kate or the baby boy since. If they were telling the truth then the servant and the child had disappeared close to Holborn. Had something happened or had Kate abducted the baby boy?

The clerk went to the police and detective sergeant Kerly of E Division sent a description to every police station and had dispatched men to enquire at the local hospitals to see him Kate had met with an accident. The chief clerk at Bow Street asked the sergeant if he had placed a notice in the Police Gazette. He hadn’t but he would consider it. Sir Thomas Henry, the Bow Street magistrate, suggested that the following description of Kate and the child be placed in all the newspapers:

‘The child is described to have been dressed in long clothes, and a white cloak trimmed with blue silk. The nurse [Kate Curly], was 26 years of age, and about five feet three inches in height, with dark complexion and black hair. She wore a black and white cotton dress, black cloth jacket, and black lace bonnet with white flowers’.

Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reported this as ‘another case of child stealing suggesting that there had been a spate of abductions in the capital, but then it was a more sensational publication that the sober Morning Post.  I wish I could say what happened to the Mahon’s baby and their nurse but I haven’t managed to find anything that follows up on this story. I hope they both turned up or were found, perhaps having been involved in some minor accident as the police suspected. If not one can only imagine the heartache of the Mahon’s, who entrusted their child to someone they’d only know a matter of months.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, May 13, 1870; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper , Sunday, May 15, 1870]

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]

A brothel madam falls foul of the law

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In Victorian London overcrowding was common and tensions often flared between occupants of lodging houses and those that owned them. Disputes over non payment of rent were frequent and overcrowding and the demand for somewhere to sleep meant that landlords were able to kick out their tenants with relative ease. If they didn’t immediately evict those who were behind with the rent it was rarely out of any consideration for their welfare. More likely they were aware that if someone owed several weeks’ rent then evicting them was hardly likely to get the debt settled.

One option was to distrain their goods against the value of the debt. This was what happened to a young woman that lived in a house owned by Mary Lawson near the Gray’s Inn Road.

Mary’s unnamed tenant owed her the small sum of 2s 6d, or about £5 today. It wouldn’t buy you that much and helps illustrate how cheap the lodgings Mary ran were. Was this a week’s money, a month’s, we don’t know. What we do know is that the girl didn’t have the money to pay it and so Mary Lawson employed a broker named Chase (from nearby Saffron Hill) to seize her possessions.

The girl was obviously poor but she also had a child to support and so ‘was driven to wander about in great want’, until her former neighbours undertook to support her. The property she lived in at George Court,  Gray’s Inn Lane was home to many other people. Nothing remains of this property today and the space is occupied by Fox Court a modern office building which is home, a little ironically perhaps, to Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (Social Security and Child Support).

In 1845 George Court was a brothel, and a large one. It had ‘accommodation for 46 girls’ in no less than seven houses, all of them owned by Mary Lawson. This ‘elderly woman’ was a madam on a large scale. The girl who she was in dispute with was a prostitute; we know this because when she came to the Clerkenwell Police Court to complain that Lawson had assaulted her she was described as ‘unfortunate’, Victorian code for a sex worker.

When Mary had heard how the other residents had clubbed together to help the girl she went into a rage, shouting at them and threatening to evict them all or seize their property. She couldn’t have her authority undermined in so direct a manner.

In court the magistrate, Mr Greenwood, saw an angle to challenge both Mary and her practice of extorting money with menaces. He called the broker over and told him, as one lawyer to another, ‘that no money can be due arising out of such places of immorality’. In short, Mary Lawson couldn’t charge her residents rent or distrain their goods for non payment because she was in effect living off their immoral earrings. He said he would inform the parish authorities (at St Andrew’s, Holborn) and have them put ‘down the nuisance’.

He added that it had already been allowed to be ‘carried on for too long a period, to the annoyance of the more peaceable and respectable inhabitants in the vicinity, as disturbances and robberies were the constant result of the nuisance, which had frequently been complained of’.

As for Mary Lawson, he took note of her relative wealth and how she had come by it and fined her the princely sum of 50s for the assault plus costs, and sent her on her way.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, Sunday, July 20, 1845]

Adulterated milk and the Inspector of Nuisances

 

There were no cases from the Thames or Worship Street Police Courts reported in the London press on 17 June 1881. As an exercise in following one court for seven days then this has been something of a failure. However, the absence of reportage is not evidence that the court did not do any work – we know these courts sat daily. Henry Turner Waddy recorded that:

‘All the police courts are open for business on every week-day of the year, Good Friday and Christmas Day only excepted. The ordinary hours are [from] 10 am to 8 pm’.  The Police Court and its Work, (London, Butterworth, 1925)

The manuscript records of the Thames court reveal that it opened on Saturdays as well. Given that they heard dozens if not hundreds of cases daily it stands to reason that the press representation of them is highly selective, when we can see that on some days they reported nothing from one or more of the courts then clearly we need to look carefully at what was (and was not) chosen by the reporter or his editor as worthy of inclusion.

With nothing from either of the two East London courts it is necessary to look at the others on this day.

Earlier in the week we had a short report of an assault that arose out of a dispute between rival milkmen. Well today that same milk company, the Farmers’ Dairy Company (FDC), were back in the news. George Shepparton, the manager of the FDC, was summoned to Clerkenwell Police Court for ‘selling as unaltered milk from which the cream had been extracted’.

We are encouraged to drink low fat milk and avoid cream but the Victorians had different concerns when it came to food. In the 1800s it was the adulteration of food which brought prosecutions: bread with bleached floor, or watered down beer, and of course milk from which the cream had been removed.

The case was brought by William Roache, the wonderfully entitled Inspector of Nuisances. He had seen a man selling milk in Lancing Street (near Euston Station) . The vendor was shouting ‘Fresh Farmhouse milk, twopence a quart’. He bought a pint and then informed the seller that he intended to have it analysed. This prompted the vendor to tell him that it was in fact ‘skimmed milk’.

In court the deface and prosecution lawyers argued over whether the milk had been intentionally sold as something other than skimmed milk. The prosecution said that since it was advertised at ‘Fresh Farmhouse milk’ that implied it was full cream. Mr Wakeling, for the dairy, argued that:

‘the price at which the milk was sold was sufficient to show that there was no pretence that it was anything but skimmed milk’.

Today a pint of milk is likely to cost much the same regardless of whether it is full fat, semi-skimmed or virtually far free. After all you are probably paying more for the packaging now than you are for the content. Supermarkets sell milk at ridiculously low prices compared to cost of producing it.

Back at Clerkenwell the magistrate felt he needed more time and advice before he could make a decision on the evidence he’d heard. He sent the parties away and asked them to return in a  week. Meanwhile he dealt with several other cases of adulteration.

Percival Hawes was convicted of selling milk from which all the butterfat had been extracted, he was fined £20 plus cost. Andrew Carrucio of Gray’s Inn Road was similarly convicted and fined, as was James Ernteman who operated a business on the same road.

George Matthews of Camden Town was summoned for selling adulterated mustard. Mr Roache claimed he had been sold mustard which was mostly flour with a small amount of turmeric (for colour). Matthews countered that he had bought it wholesale from a reputable business so ‘he thought he might safely trust them’. Roche said that the mustard powder he’d been sold came not from a wholesaler’s tin but loose from a drawer. The conviction stuck and Matthews was also fined £20 plus costs.

These are not petty fines, £20 in 1881 was a significant sum of money, close in fact to £1000 in today’s prices. So the state, in the form of Mr Roache the Inspector of Nuisances for St Pancras, was doing sterling work. Today I think that job is part of the role performed by councils and the Food Standards Agency, which checks up on labelling to make sure it is accurate and not misleading. It is worth remembering that this has such a long history.

[from The Standard , Friday, June 17, 1881]

Stealing the medals of Victoria’s Crimean heroes

Cookhouse of the 8th Hussars

In early 1856 the Crimean War – fought because of Russia’s desires to gain territory at the expense of the seemingly weakened Ottoman Empire – ground to a halt. The allies (Turkey, Britain and France) and triumphed over the Russian Empire because of superior weaponry and technology such as the international telegraph.

It was a ‘modern’ war, coming as it did between the Napoleonic and the Boer (South African) War and offered lessons for the upcoming Civil War in America. It was also the first war to be reported with photographs, meaning that it impacted the home front in a particularly evocative way. Britain lost 25,000 troops (the French four times that figure) but many were lost not to Russian bullets or steel but to illness.

The Crimean War also saw the minting of a brand new award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross. Supposedly made from bronze  smelted from a Russian cannon (the cannon was actually Chinese) the VC continues to be Britain’s highest military honour.

But as with previous (and subsequent) conflicts those that served were given either a service medal or a silver bar to mark their presence at one of the key battles. There were five bars for the Crimean medal (representing the battles of Alma, Inkerman, Azoff, Balaclava, and Sebastopol).

This is the Crimean War medal below:

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Of course with tens of thousands of medals needing to be minted someone had a huge task, and it it seems that it also offered opportunities for those with light fingers to profit.

William Henry Sharman was a 33 year-old silversmith who worked for Messrs Hunt & Roskell, ‘the extensive silversmiths’*, at their Gray’s Inn  Road factory. In February 1856 (just a month before the final peace treaty officials ended the war) Sharman was called into the manager’s office.

Earlier that day he had been given 200 bars to work on. When he returned them there were five missing. In the office with the manager William Day was a detective sergeant from E Division, Metropolitan Police. Sergeant Smith (16E). Day questioned him and Sharman told him he had handed back all the bars he had been allocated, and so couldn’t account for any ‘deficiancy’.

Day knew that this was a lie because he had personally checked the quantity and he challenged the silversmith. Sharman’s defence collapsed and he came clean. He produced the missing bars from his pocket and was arrested.

The case came before the sitting justice at Clerkenwell and Sharman made no attempt to conceal his guilt, merely throwing himself on the mercy of the magistrate, Mr Corrie.

‘I am guilty’ he admitted, ‘It is the first time I have been in a police court, and if you will be kind enough to deal leniently with me, I will take very good care that such a thing will never occur again. I am very sorry for what I have done’.

No doubt he was but at a  time that Britain’s  bruised and bloodied heroes were returning home the act of stealing their medals must have appeared particularly callous. Mr Corrie was also quick to remind Sharman (and the reading public) that stealing by employees was a serious matter because it involved a breach of trust. It was, the magistrate told him, ‘far more serious than a thief purloining from a shop window’.

Nor did Sharman have the excuse of poverty he added; the silversmith earned between £1 8s and £1 10s a week and had money in his pocket when he arrested. This was greed and opportunism and Mr Corrie sent him to prison for four months at hard labour. Sharman ‘who appeared to feel his situation acutely’, was then taken away.

Whether he was able to recover from this blow is impossible to say. He was a craftsman so had something to sell when he got out but his reputation was in tatters. As someone that worked with precious metals it is unlikely that anyone that new the truth of his crimes would ever allow him to work with silver in the future.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Wednesday, February 13, 1856]

*the firm, founded in 1843,  still exists today

(Anarchist) bill stickers will NOT be prosecuted after all

In July 1893 all London was waiting for the marriage of the year – that Prince George the duke of York and Mary of Teck. Princess Mary had been supposed to marry the prince’s elder brother, Albert Victor, but he had died in 1892. The marriage was George’s grandmother’s idea and seems to have been quite embarrassing for all concerned. Mary was still mourning the loss of her intended and George must have been caught between duty and a desire to marry for love. Albert had died of a long illness which some have speculated was syphilis, caught whilst enjoying the company of prostitutes in the East End. More recent (and even wilder) speculation placed him at the heart of the Cleveland Street scandal and even have him as a candidate for being Jack the Ripper.

Not everyone in London was looking forward to an expensive royal wedding and a couple of days beforehand two men appeared at Clerkenwell Police Court charged with putting up posters on the Gray’s Inn Road. The actual offence was ‘posting and dispersing bills, the same not having the printer’s and publisher’s address thereon’.

The posters (which we don’t have so can’t tell what they said) supposedly carried ‘abusive allusions to the royal wedding’. The royal family was far from universally popular in the 1890s and London was home to several  radical political groups who opposed the very idea of monarchy.

In court the two young men (Thomas Cantwell, 20 and Ernest Young, 27) were described as compositors and so worked in the printing industry. Young refused to give his address, Cantwell lived on Sidmouth Street. The police prosecutor was in somewhat of a quandary he said, because the since the men’s arrest the owner of the hoardings where the bills had been posted had brought a separate charge of fly posting without their consent. He told the court that while ‘no one could sympathize with the prisoners for posting such an offensive placard’ there was little to be done but for him to withdraw the police charge and allow the prosecution by the hoarding owners.

The magistrate reluctantly agreed with him and ordered the men to be released. Canter now piped up and said that when he had been arrested the police had seized his keys. When he had returned to his premises he had been obliged to break down his own door. In the interim someone had entered his home and helped themselves to some of his possessions while he was in the process of getting bailed.

The justice was unsympathetic; ‘I can’t listen to you now. If you want to make an application come again in the morning’, he told him, and sent him away. The papers termed the two men ‘anarchists’ and so were probably amused by the short shrift the magistrate handed down to them.

[from Daily News, Wednesday, July 5, 1893]