Tag: laughter

‘I shouldn’t have been here now, only I was dhrunk, yer Honour’.

oldlday

Although they feature relatively rarely in the written reports that were published in the newspapers the most common occupants of the Police court dock were those accused of being drunk. ‘Drunk and disorderly’ and ‘drunk and incapable’ were subtly different: the former meant that an offender had probably challenged a policeman’s direct order that they ‘go home quietly’ whilst the latter reflected the reality that they couldn’t.

Anne Murphy fell into the second category. She was found lying on her back in Cleveland Street, until to stand and seemingly having some sort of fit. The constable that discovered her helped her to her feet and walked her, with some difficulty, to the Middlesex Hospital in Mortimer Street, which was just nearby. After a quick examination to make sure she was medically fit and well she was released.

Anne was still far too drunk to walk far however and the police officer was obliged to fetch the station’s Bischoffsheim hand ambulance. He then wheeled her back there to spend a night sobering up in a cell. In the morning she was one of the many drunks that took their turn to be processed before the magistrate at Marlborough Street.

In her defense she told Mr Hannay that she was ‘subject to fits, yer honour’.

‘Drunken’ ones, the justice muttered under his breath. Anne’s hearing was good however, and she denied it.

‘Upon my word, I had none of the creature yesterday. I only had had a share of a pint and a half of four ale, and that was between my daughter, my daughter-in-law, another woman, myself, and a gipsy woman, and we were all sober as aldermen – Lord love ye’.

The court was laughing now, either at Anne’s performance or the idea that aldermen were sober. Mr Hannay spoke to the gaoler saying ‘I see she is not know’. The prisoner in the dock heard him and took offence:

‘Not known, indeed” Oh yes I am. I’ve been in one situation two years’. She meant she had a job, but Mr Hannay was establishing that she had not been in trouble with the law before. ‘I mean you are not known to the police’, he explained.

‘Certainly not, never; why, bless you, I’m a widder of the highest respectability’.

As the court collapsed in laughter the magistrate told her he would let off this time with a warning to behave herself in future, and keep off the drink.

‘I shouldn’t have been her now’, she replied, ‘only I was dhrunk, yer Honour’.

Anne then left the dock, curtsied to the bench and went home, her day in dock to no doubt be retold several times over several glasses of beer.

[from The Standard, Tuesday, March 03, 1891]

‘Marry in haste’:An unhappy husband and his reluctant bride

The Metropolitan Magistrates

Police Magistrates had to deal with all sorts of things on a daily basis. As well as often being the first stage in most serious criminal prosecutions police court magistrates had the power to lock up drunks, vagrants, wife beaters and a host of other petty offenders who opted to have their cases dealt with summarily. In addition the magistrate was also assumed to know everything about the law, and so people came to him to ask advice on all manner of issues.

In early July 1898 a man turned up at the North London Police court to ask for Mr D’Eyncourt’s counsel. The man, whose name wasn’t reported by the The Standard newspaper, told the experienced magistrate that he’d only been married for fours months and he’d just discovered that his wife ‘was a wrong ‘un’.

‘In what way?” D’Eyncourt enquired.

‘When we was courting’, the man began, ‘we agreed that she was to get up and boil the kettle and I was to fry the bacon. But she won’t do either’, he complained.

This glimpse in to the mundane provoked laughter in the courtroom.

‘She lies in bed whilst I get my own breakfast, and when I ask her to get up she threatens to do all sorts of things’.

Asked to elaborate the poor young husband continued.

‘The other night she started breaking up the home, and threatened to knife me. She then went to bed with the landlady…last night she went to Sadler’s Wells with a woman, and came home at half-past twelve. I was in bed and asleep, and she and the woman came home and pushed their fists into my face, and swore they would chuck me out’.

Mr D’Eyncourt was sympathetic but also puzzled that  the young man had married ‘a woman about who  you know very little’. He advised him to move out, take rooms elsewhere and ask his wife to join him (without her friends of course). If she didn’t comply ‘within a reasonable time’, he should have no more to do with her.

The poor lad mumbled ‘she says she don’t want me’.

‘I can tell you know more’ said the justice, dismissing him.

[from The Standard, Monday, July 04, 1898]