Tag: Leadenhall Market

A coster’s barrow stinks out the Guildhall

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Sometimes it is the banality of the Police courts that interests me. The magistrates that presided in London’s summary courts sent thousands of offenders up through the system  to face trials at Old Bailey or Clerkenwell where they were, if convicted by a jury, sentenced to transportation, imprisonment and even to death. Many more petty criminals, drunk and disorderly men and women, or anti-social juveniles were sent for spells of hard labour, expelled to a reformatory, or fined a few shillings or pounds.

The justices (the magistracy of London) had wide ranging powers which were hardly constrained by the right of appeal. Tremendous discretion rested with these men, all of whom had a legal background and many of whom served their communities for years.

One of the responsibilities they had was to keep to peace and another was to help regulate trade and maintain what we might term, health and safety. The metropolis had a infrastructure of inspectors and health officers but it fell to the magistrate to deal with those that broke the numerous rules that governed food sales and preparation or the maintenance of property.

In October 1889 Alfred Woodbridge was summoned to appear at the Guildhall Police Court before the alderman magistrate who presided there. Woodbridge was a costermonger, a trader who sold goods cheaply from a barrow. Costermongers didn’t enjoy a terribly respectable reputation and had frequent and endemic run-ins with the police who were forever moving them on from their pitches on the city’s streets.

Woodbridge wasn’t in trouble for obstructing the highway however; he had been brought on the instructions of the Commissioners of Sewers for having in his possession meat that  unfit for human consumption.

The coster had been spotted outside one of the City’s markets (either Smithfield, Fleet or Leadenhall – the report did not specify which) by a meat inspector named William Allen. Mr Allen told the court that he had discovered that Woodbridge had on his barrow:

’29 hams and eight pieces of pork, which were diseased and totally unfit for human food’. He seized them and took them to Dr Sedgewick Saunders – the Medical Officer of Health for the City of London – to be examined.  Dr Saunders confirmed the meat was bad saying that:

‘The odour from them was filthy, and they were quite black. It would have been a very serious result had they been eaten’.

Luckily they weren’t and so no harm had been done. Woodbridge made no attempt to deny the charge and he was fined £9 and 5s with a warning that if he could not find the money to pay he would go to prison for a month.

The magistrate then was enforcing the regulations that allowed trade to function across the City and at the same time protecting the public from unscrupulous traders. Whether Woodbridge learned his lesson and made sure his produce was safe in future is of course unknown. But a £9 fine was no small beer and we can be fairly sure that if he showed his face again in the area inspectors like Mr Allen would be quick to check his barrow.

[from The Standard, Friday, October 18, 1889]

The curious (and confusing) case of the dog in the Shepherd’s Bush pub

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In January 1876 George Leeds paid Thomas Stevens £10 for a white fox terrier. He named the dog ‘Norman’ and asked no questions about its pedigree, or how Stevens had come by it.

In fact Stevens had acquired the dog by chance, or rather the dog had acquired him. Stevens had been in the Swakeley Hotel, a pub on Goldhawk Road at Shepherd’s Bush, when he noticed a dog running around the place. It followed him home and he had kept it for several weeks, renaming it ‘Tiger’,  before selling it to Mr Leeds. In the meantime he said he notified the police that he had found a missing dog, but nothing had come of it.

However, the dog was not Stevens’ to sell, it already had an owner, a Mr Alfred Larmuth. Alfred Larmuth had been looking for his pet since he had lost it, in October 1875. Larmuth and the dog, who he called ‘Prince’, had been in the Swakeley when the dog had disappeared. He had called out for it but couldn’t find it.

Presumably his search was eventually successful because, perhaps with the help of the police, he had tracked down his dog (or seen it with Leeds in the street) and he took out a summons to bring it (and George Leeds) to court.

The magistrate in the Hammersmith Police Court now had a complicated issue of ownership to adjudicate on. George Leeds was summoned for ‘detaining’ Larmuth’s dog. Thomas Stevens appeared to give evidence, but was not charged with theft. Just whom did the dog belong to, and was it the same dog anyway?

While the magistrate decided ‘Prince’, ‘Tiger’, or ‘Norman’, sat quietly in court waiting to find out who would be taking him home. It was quickly decided that regardless of the different names it had bene given, it was the same terrier Mt Larmuth had lost back in October.

In the end the magistrate, Mr Ingham, determined that no crime had been committed but Alfred Larmuth was not the legal owner. If he had bought ‘Prince’ in Leadenhall Market he would have ‘had an indefeasible right to it’, but instead he had bought it privately, which conferred no legal protection.

Nor was Stevens the owner; after all he had just found ‘Tiger’ in a pub. Which left Leeds in possession. The magistrate did say that the complainant (Larmuth) had a right to ask Stevens for the £10 (since the dog was not his, but Larmuth’s, to sell).

Confused? Me too!

All that is clear here is that the dog that was once Prince, then Tiger was to spend (hopefully) its remaining days as Norman, and it went home with George Leeds, who had the summons against him dismissed.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, June 01, 1876]

Exposed – a profitable trade in stolen dogs in Victorian London

 
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In June 2016 the BBC reported that the theft of pet dogs was on the rise. Figures showed that over 100 dogs were being stolen in England and Wales each month, an increase in the past two years of around 22%. The loss of a pet is distressing and the Ministry of Justice told the BBC that this is taken into account by the courts, presumably in sentencing. Like many things of course, there is nothing new in animals being pinched, nor in the close relationship between the British and our pets.

In April 1873 the editor of the Morning Post chose to feature two dog thefts as part of his paper’s coverage of the metropolitan police courts.

At Marlborough Street a young man named Walter Handley, who said he was  a poulterer, appeared in court accused of stealing a French poodle. The dog belonged to Captain Randolph Stewart, who had a fashionable address at 85 Eaton Place, Pimlico. The dog was a pedigree and valued at the princely sum of £50 (or over £2,000 today).

The captain told Mr Knight, the sitting magistrate, that the dog had gone missing on the 17 March. He had reported it stolen to the police at Vine Street but 10 days later it had come home on its own. Meanwhile Sir John Sebright, a broker in Bond Street was sold a dog at Leadenhall Market. The man selling it was identified as the prisoner, Handley, who had asked £20 for it. Sir John paid him just £10 and took the dog home with him, giving it into the care of his butler.

That was on the 21st March but in less than a week the animal had escaped and made it way back to its original owner. The captain then visited Sir John to explain that the dog was his and that it had returned home. The mystery of how Captain Stewart came to visit the man that had bought his dog is explained by the actions of the police.

Today it is very unlikely that the police will give over much if any time to investigating the theft of family pets unless it is connected to a more serious case of dog smuggling. In 1873 however a detective was assigned to look for the captain’s missing poodle. Did the fact that this was an expensive pedigree dog belonging to a bona fide ‘gentleman’ influence their actions? Or was it because the theft of digs was often connected to an illegal dog fighting and betting circle that involved more serious forms of criminality?

Detective-sergeant Butcher of C Division investigated the theft and presumably introduced Captain Stewart and Sir John. When the latter explained how he had come by the dog he accompanied him to Leadenhall Market and they found Walter Handley. Sir John told him he had sold him a stolen dog and asked him for his money back. Walter panicked and tried to run off, unsuccessfully.

In court he told Mr Knight that he had bought the dog himself from another man (who, of course, he could not identify). The poor animal had been shaved to make it harder to trace, and when Handley was searched at Vine Street the police had found a piece of liver on him. This was termed ‘pudding’ DS Butcher told the magistrate, and was commonly used to tempt dogs into the clutches of thieves. The detective added that Handley had been seen ‘in the company of dog-stealers, one of who had only just come out of prison after being their for 18 months’. Dogs were often stolen to be used in fights or for rat baiting, he said. This one was not destined for the pits however, its value was as a luxury pet.

Captain Stewart had been determined to prosecute he said, because several of his friends had lost animals to thieves in recent months, and he wanted to stop the trade in stolen dogs. So did the magistrate, he found Handley guilty and sent him to prison for six months at hard labour.

Over at Westminster Police Court another serial offender was produced, but he had a much better outcome than Walter Handley. Charles Burdett was well known to the police and the courts; the court reporter even described him as ‘an old dog stealer’.  Burdett, who was from Bethnal Green, was accused of stealing a ‘valuable Russian retriever dog’ from a gentleman in South Kensington.

A few days after the dog disappeared a note was delivered to the owner’s house at 7 Cromwell Road. The missive was opened by the butler on behalf of his employer, Mr Reiss, and he followed the instructions which were to pay £10 for the safe return of the animal. Accordingly the butler went to a pub in Bishopsgate Street, met with Burdett and handed over the money. Burnett vanished almost immediately while the dog just as miraculously appeared.

The police soon caught up with Burdett and he was, like Walter Handley, accused of theft. The court was told he had a string of convictions and had served time in prison. This time, however, the magistrate was uncomfortable with the procedure. He suggested that the previous convictions appeared to be suspect, and he could not proceed against Burdett under the charge that had been laid. He decided to convict him under the Police Act which allowed him to level a fine £20 or 3 months imprisonment. Burnett ‘heartedly thanked his worship’, paid his fine, and ‘left the dock smiling at his lucky escape and rubbing his hands’.

It would seem then, that dog stealing was just as prevalent in the 1800s as it is today and that it was a lucrative industry; so lucrative in fact that a criminal like Burdett could afford to pay the odd hefty fine.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, April 18, 1873]

An embezzling gambler’s luck runs out

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Leadenhall Market

Edward Bristow had a good  job in the eyes of Victorian society. He was a respectable middle-class clerk and bookkeeper  in the employ of a meat salesman at Leadenhall Market in the City of London. But he also had an addiction, an addiction all too well understood today to gambling.

Mr Lee, the meat salesman, was elderly and infirm and for the past four years had placed all his confidence in his 36 year-old assistant. Bristow received the payments for meat from butchers such as Charles Parrott (who had a stall at the market) and entered then into the ledger.

But he was also taking money out of the account and using it to place bets of his ‘favourite horse at Ascot, Epsom and other places of entertainment in that way’. Eventually he came unstuck because Henry Lee, the son of the salesman (and a butcher at Leadenhall in his own right) became suspicious. He looked into the books and found them ‘to be in a state of confusion’ and asked Bristow about it.

Henry Lee knew his fellow butcher Parrott who told him he had a receipt for two cheques recently, one for £374 and another for £100. Lee could find neither of these in the ledger. On enquiring at his father’s bank he discovered that the account had frequently been overdrawn and that had it not been for the fact that he was ‘a person of very large property’ the bank would have not have continued to give him credit. As it was they were already making arrangements to cease their connections with the salesman.

Henry Lee’s research revealed that Bristow had embezzled somewhere between £1000 and £2000 in money to feed his gambling habit. It had imperilled a well established business and at last brought the clerk to book at the Mansion House  Police court in December 1852.

The justice (the sitting Lord Mayory) committed Edward Bristow for trial at the Old Bailey and the clerk asked him not to remand him custody while he waited for that examination. But the Lord Mayor refused; ‘I would not accept bail of any amount, of the most unexceptional kind in a case like this’ he told Bristow before the sergeant took him away.

At Old Bailey in January of the following year Bristow pleaded guilty to embezzlement. The prosecution barrister asked for judgment (sentence) to be respited. This may mean that Bristow was sentenced at a later date (although he doesn’t appear in any of the records), or it could be that the case was referred up (the to 12 judges) because it might have issues of doubt attached (which is unlikely here). It may be that the Lees took pity on their family employer and wished to save him in some way.

We can’t say for certain what happened to Edward Bristow but it is safe to conclude that his gambling habit ruined him, robbed him of his livelihood, stripped him of his reputation and most probably rendered him destitute. Sadly we can say that this is still a very likely outcome for the compulsive and addicted gambler.

[from The Morning Post, Saturday, December 11, 1852]