Tag: Leicester Square

‘I suppose you want something?’When a failure to tip leads to violence

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The Alhambra Theatre of Variety, Leicester Square c.1874

Today’s blog concerns the problematic area of tipping in a restaurant or bar. Should you always do it? How much should you leave? What happens if you don’t?

John Bartholomew and his friend Lenning had come up to London from Acton where they each farmed land. Both had money and a night out at the Alhambra Music Hall was probably part of a business trip to the capital to sell, or make arrangement to sell, their produce.

Having enjoyed some of the performance the two men decided to visit the bar and ordered drinks. They called over a waiter who brought them brandy and lemonade. Bartholomew put down a half-crown and the waiter, Thomas Lipman, left 6d in change.

‘I suppose you want something?’ Bartholomew asked the waiter, meaning a tip.

Lipman thanked him and picked up the coin but the farmer stopped him, making a grab for the money.

‘Then you wont get it’, he said.

Lipman was understandably annoyed and muttered something along the lines of of ‘how do you expect me to live?’ At this point Bartholomew pulled a large roll of banknotes from his pocket and made a very public display of counting them, showing off his wealth in front of his friend and the waiter .

It was crass in the extreme and it was also dangerous. The music hall attracted all sorts of London lowlife and the farmer was risking being identified as someone worth robbing, and Lipman said so. Bartholomew was not bothered and rejected the warning; he declared he’d kill anyone who tried. The waiter told him he was fool to say so and at this the farmer lost his temper completely and punched Thomas in the face, blackening his eye.

This led to Bartholomew’s arrest and his appearance at Marlborough Street Police court the following day. Mr Tyrwhitt was presiding and he listened while first Lipman and then Bartholomew gave alternate descriptions of what had happened the previous night.

Bartholomew claimed that Lipman had insulted him, calling him a fool, snatching the sixpence from him, and dismissing the roll of money he produced as counterfeit. Mr Tyrwhitt commented that the last was a quite ‘natural remark’ to make as ‘no one would suppose that anybody would pull out genuine ones in such a place’. The famer’s companion suggested then that Lipman had dismissed them both as not worthy of his attention and even called over another waiter to serve them champagne at his expense since they clearly had no real money of his own.

This seems highly unlikely and evidence of two visitors to the capital being unsure of how to behave in it. Mr Tyrwhitt fined John Bartholomew the relatively small sum of 5s and sent them off to lick their wounds. Lipman returned to Alhambra to renew his acquaintance with the music hall’s often drunken and demanding clientele.

Waiting staff wages vary considerably but they still rely on tips to supplement what a fairly basic wages.  The minimum wage has made a difference but you wont get rich working in bars and restaurants in the capital today. The average annual salary is between £18,500-26,500 and given that the average cost of renting a flat is about £750-£1000 a month you can see that their money won’t go very far. So yes, always tip if you can and, if the service is particularly good, give a little more.

The Alhambra Theatre of Variety on Leicester Square was a popular destination for lovers of entertainment. There one could listen to music and opera, watch ballet, or take in one of the ‘patriotic demonstrations’ of Britain’s imperial power. Today the Odeon cinema stands on the site of the music hall, and Leicester Square remains a magnet for tourists visiting the capital. I certainly wouldn’t flash my money about in public there at 11 o’clock at night today.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, September 29, 1869]

‘Take me back to prison; take me to my dungeon and my chains!’

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In most assault cases heard before the Metropolitan Police courts the magistrates had the option to fine or to imprison defendants. There was clear class bias in operation  and not simply because wealthier defendants could afford fines while poorer ones could not. There seems to have been an unwritten understanding that ‘respectable’ persons would be fined for their indiscretions while the ‘rougher’ element needed to be taught a harsher lesson.

Fines were levied on a sliding scale that also appears largely to have been at the discretion of the magistrate. For disorderly behaviour and drunkenness you might receive a penalty of a few shillings, for assault this could rise into towards a few pounds. If a justice wanted to punish someone severely he could impose a fine that he didn’t expect the prisoner to be able to pay, meaning that the culprit would end up serving a prison sentence by default.

Mr Schmidt (of the firm of Schmidt and Co. music publishers) was not your usual drunk or street brawler but in August 1869 he found himself facing a charge of assault at Marlborough Street Police court. What will quickly become clear is that Schmidt, while a respectable businessman, was clearly not in full command of his senses. This was to have dire consequences, especially so given his social rank.

The publisher was attending a performance (of what is not stated) at the Judge and Jury club in Leicester Square. This club (or these, as I think there might have been more than one in the capital) were gatherings where you might enjoy a fairly disreputable evening’s entertainment as this clipping describes:

‘The one I speak of met in an hotel not far from Covent-garden, and was presided over by a man famous in his day for his power of double entendre. About nine o’clock in the evening, if you went up-stairs you would find a large room with benches capable of accommodating, I should think, a hundred, or a hundred and fifty persons. This room was generally well filled, and by their appearance the audience was one you would call respectable. The entrance fee entitled you to refreshment, and that refreshment, in the shape of intoxicating liquor, was by that time before each visitant.

After waiting a few minutes, a rustle at the entrance would cause you to turn your eyes in that direction, when, heralded by a crier with a gown and a staff of office, exclaiming, “Make way for my Lord Chief Baron,” that illustrious individual would be seen wending his way to his appointed seat. […] the Lord Chief Baron called for a cigar and glass of brandy and water, and, having observed that the waiter was in the room and that he hoped gentlemen would give their orders, the proceedings of the evening commenced. A jury was selected; the prosecutor opened his case, which, to suit the depraved taste of his patrons, was invariably one of seduction or crim. con. Witnesses were examined and cross-examined, the females being men dressed up in women’s clothes, and everything was done that could be to pander to the lowest propensities of depraved humanity. 

These Judge and Jury Clubs after all are but an excuse for drinking. They are held at public-houses – there is drinking going on all the time the trial lasts, – nor could sober men listen unless they had the drink.’ 

                                       The Night Side of London, by J. Ewing Ritchie, 1858

The emphasis on the heavy consumption of alcohol might explain Schmidt’s behaviour that night. According to the chief witness against him – Mr Brooks, the ‘Chief Baron’ himself – the publisher was acting in a very disorderly way, so much so that the Baron had to have a word with him. However, if he hoped that this would calm him down he was sadly mistaken. Schmidt leaped up from his seat, grabbed Brooks by the throat and screamed ‘I’m the vulture, I’m the vulture!’ at him.

It was a bizarre display and as Brooks tried to wrestle himself away he was knocked to the floor and his watch was trampled on. Eventually half a dozen other people rushed in to help pull the music publisher off him and Schmidt was subdued and handed over to the police.

The magistrate had heard enough to declare that this was a case that demanded a prison sentence not a fine and was about to hand that down when a man came into court waving his hands to get the justice’s attention. Edward Lewis said he was a friend of the accused and said that Schmidt was ‘labouring under a temporary aberration of intellect’.

In other words he was not himself and Lewis promised that he and others would take him under their care and look after him while he recovered. He was, he added, a ‘most respectable man’. Mr Knox turned to the wronged party to ask his opinion on the matter. The ‘Chief Baron’ was gracious: he said he would ‘very sorry to press severely on a respectable person under such circumstances’. He would leave to the magistrate to decided what to do with Mr Schmidt.

Mr Knox relented and ordered that  a fine of £5 be paid. Schmidt was removed to the cells while a messenger was sent to fetch his business partner and his cheque book. When he returned Schmidt was brought up and asked to make his payment to the court. This is where it could have all ended reasonably happily but Mr Schmidt was still possessed with whatever rage had caused him to overact in the Judge and Jury club.

He ‘seized the cheque book, flung it to the end of the room, shouting, “Take me back to prison; take me to my dungeon and my chains”.’

His wish was granted and the gaoler led him away to start a month’s incarceration in the local house of correction. It was a dreadful fall from grace and one, I fear, he will have struggled to recover from, despite the best efforts of his friends.

[from The Standard, Monday, August 16, 1869]

‘You won’t see me alive in ten minutes’: a strongman’s wife reaches the limits of her despair

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I am struck by the frequency of attempted suicide cases that came before the London magistracy in the late nineteenth century. The Police Code book stated that:

‘A person who kills himself in a manner which in the case of another person would amount to murder, is guilty of murder’,1 which seems a supremely unhelpful directive under the circumstances.

Those attempting to kill themselves were ordered to be given medical assistance and then prosecuted for a misdemeanor. In most cases I’ve found the accused was remanded so that enquiries could be made into their mental health and character with the aim being, it seems, to ensure that they didn’t try anything so drastic again.

While there were several attempts at hanging and one of a man who walked into an underground train tunnel to end his life, most of the attempted suicides that made the pages of the newspapers were of women who had been prevented from drowning themselves in the Thames or one of the capital’s canals. In almost all instances their lives were saved by the quick reactions of a nearby beat bobby or member of the public. The case of Edith Sampson was a little different.

In late March  1892 Dora Hoffmeister was working as a servant at the Empire Hotel in Leicester Square. She knew Edith as one of the guests and met her by the front door to the hotel on the 31 March in the afternoon. Edith spoke to her saying darkly: ‘You won’t see me alive in ten minutes’, before hurrying off upstairs to her room.

Alarmed, Dora followed her and entered her bedroom where she saw Mrs Sampson sat at her dressing table. She took a small bottle from the table and poured its contents into a glass. Dora seized the bottle and realized it was marked ‘Laudanum. Poison’. She remonstrated with Edith who relented and poured the liquid back into the bottle and set it down.

Dora stayed as Edith dressed and went out, and then returned to her duties. About an hour later she decided to check on her again and went up to her room. There she found Edith lying on the bed where she had been carried by one of the hotel’s waiters after she’d been discovered earlier. Apparently another servant, Harriet Perrett had found Edith slumped on the stairs, a handkerchief in one hand and the bottle of laudanum in the other.  Dora rang for help and stayed with Edith until a surgeon arrived.

Dr Clarke examined his patient and the bottle and administered an emetic. Edith vomited up the poison and complained that the doctor should have let her die. ‘You don’t know my troubles’, she declared and continued to bemoan her fate until her mother arrived. Edith Sampson was just 18 years of old her mother explained, and had married  ‘Sampson, the Strong Man’ in September 1891. He was not about having left for Liverpool earlier that week. The couple had quarreled and Edith was clearly unhappy in her marriage. Nevertheless Edith’s mother was sure that this was a one off and told Mr Newton (the magistrate at Marlborough Street) that her daughter would never take her own life.

Mr Newton was much less sure however, and said she’d already made that attempt and might well try again. In his opinion the best course of action would be to have Edith secured in the infirmary at the local house of correction for a week. Edith Sampson ‘was led away crying, and evidently in deep distress’.

Edith was probably married to Charles A. Sampson, a famous strongman in the late Victorian period. He claimed he owed his remarkable strength to being hit by lightning when he was a child and he would appeared on stage throughout Britain and further afield. As a vaudeville showman Sampson would have been on the road a lot, with little time for his young wife. Edith, who was described as ‘good-looking’ and ‘fashionably attired’ might have enjoyed the trappings of a prosperous theatre existence but she may well have been quite lonely and worried that her new husband might be subjected to the charms of other women while he was out of her sight and care.

Hopefully this incident was enough to alert Edith’s family and friends to rally round her and give her the support she needed and, had it not been for the attention of a stranger, Dora Hoffmeister, a European immigrant worker in London, Sampson might have been burying his young wife without even celebrating his first wedding anniversary.

[from The Standard, Saturday, April 02, 1892]

  1. Neil R A Bell and Adam Wood (Eds), Sir Howard Vincent’s Police Code 1889, (Mango Books, 2015), p.174

A teenage girl succumbs to temptation and is ruined

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Theft by domestic servants was a common enough occurrence in the nineteenth or indeed any century. There were constant complaints about staff who pilfered, prompting one eighteenth-century commentator to quip that the servants of the wealthy ‘beggared them by inches’.

Two realities are clear of course: that servants were daily presented with an array of temptations and that this was compounded by the fact that they were paid very little.  So it is hardly surprising that some, like young Ann Scully, succumbed to these temptations.

Ann was probably a teenager. She came from a ‘respectable’ working class family in Poland Street, Soho. She was employed by Mr. and Mrs Cook in their home at 18 Berwick Street nearby. On her days off Ann liked nothing better than a trip to the theatre or a concert to hear the latest sounds or laugh at a play. Perhaps she went with a friend or even a sweetheart. In early February she was going to a concert and wanted something new to wear.

She had her eyes on a bonnet that would set off her look, decked out with the latest ‘trimmings’ that would be sure to catch the attention of any young man worth his salt. Sadly she was short of money, her wages not sufficient for such luxuries. She knew her mistress kept some earrings in a salt cellar in the parlour and figuring she can’t have placed much store by them if she didn’t wear them Ann decided to pinch and try and sell them.

She took the earrings to a jewelers shop in Prince’s Street near Leicester Square. The owner, a Mr Borley, told her they weren’t worth much but gave her a few shillings and sent her on her way. Recognizing that the cases were better than the stones that they carried he had the latter removed, replacing them with other ones from his stocks.

Some hours later however Elizabeth Cook noticed that her earrings were missing and she questioned Ann. At first the girl denied it but she eventually caved in and confessed. The servant girl then led her mistress to Borley’s shop to try and retrieve the items. The jeweler flatly denied ever buying the earrings, even trying to persuade Ann (who insisted this was the place and the man) that she was mistaken. After some persistence however he produced the jewelry but only one of the stones that they had originally housed, one remained missing.

Mrs Cook might have left the whole affair there. She had the earrings and a confession from Ann and the girl had only recently joined her service. A reprimand was the likely punishment and perhaps Ann would be expected to forfeit some of her wages to pay for the missing stone. But Mr Cook was  not so inclined. He had ‘suffered through this sort of conduct’ before and ‘no one knew so well where the shoe pinched as those who wore it’.

So the case went before a magistrate, Mr Beadon at Marlborough Street. Mr Borley was called and PC Turner (77C) represented the police. The justice directed most of his ire at the jeweler who he held responsible for not asking more questions and for trying to pretend he’d never seen Ann before. One of the stones remained unaccounted for and the tradesman had ‘better lose no time in finding’ it he insisted.

As for Ann he was minded to be lenient given her youth and the respectability of her parents. So hoping she had learned her lesson he would not send her to prison for a ‘the long period he might do, but [just] for 14 days’. Given that this probably meant that she would be dismissed as well it was a heavy penalty for the young girl, who would now most likely have to return to her parents’ care in Poland Street and hope that work, or marriage, would be found for her. It was a heavy price to pay for a ‘jolly new bonnet’ and a statutory lesson for any young domestic that might be reading the papers that day.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Thursday, 3 February, 1859]

One in the eye for a foreign national in London

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Mr (or perhaps Monsieur)  Goughenheim was strolling along Bear Street near Leicester Square in mid August 1839 with an English friend (named Richardson) when he noticed a man across the road that he recognised. Goughenheim was a translator and he’d spotted one of his former clients, Jean Jaques Covin, who happened to owe him money for his services.

Crossing the road, Goughenheim hailed the man and demanded he honour his debt. Covin was literally taken aback, and took a moment to step backwards before lifting his cane and aiming an attack at the translator. It was a vicious assault and caught Goughenheim in the eye, seemingly popping it.

Richardson grabbed hold of the assailant and he was quickly given into he custody of the police with the help of some passers-by. It took some time to come to court (because of the victim’s injuries) but eventually the case was heard before the Marlborough Street Police magistrate in early September, 1839.

There several witnesses gave evidence but were unable to comment on what was factually said because the entire exchange had been in French.  One was able to testify however, that:

as he ‘was passing a portion of the aqueous humour [from Gugenheim’s eye] fell upon his clothes, and at first he thought the prisoner had squirted water over the prosecutor, until he saw that his eye was totally destroyed‘.

The justice, Mr Dyer, was pretty clear that this was too serious a case for him to deal with  summarily. Covin, through his solicitor, denied any attempt to injure the other man, saying he thought he’d been assaulted himself when Gougenheim placed his hand on his shoulder to get his attention in the street. He accepted he’d raised his stick but never meant to hurt Gougenheim. His solicitor asked Mr Dyer to be lenient and to fine his client rather than send it up through the system.

Gougenheim challenged Covin’s version of events and insisted he’d not acted aggressively himself. Probably on the strength of this and the seriousness of Gougenheim’s injury, the magistrate decided he would commit the Frenchman for a full jury trial. There would still be an opportunity for this to be settled however, if Covin offered to pay the translator what he owed him and added compensation for the injury he might have escaped an embarrassing public trial and a potential prison sentence.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Tuesday, September 3, 1839]

The perils of drinking with strangers

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William Kirbyshire, of Aswell in Hertfordshire, had come down to London to get married. As he strolled along Regent Street a man stopped him and asked the way to Leicester Square. William apologised and he too was a stranger in the capital and regretted he was unable to help. The man thanked him and walked away. A few minutes later William decided it was time for some refreshment and he entered the next public house he came to.

As he propped up the bar nursing his drink he noticed the man that had asked him for directions chatting to two others. One of them came over and introduced himself as William Hook. Hook asked William if he ‘knew of any place of amusement where the evening could be passed pleasantly’. William mentioned a couple of places and Hook suggested they go there together, but the visitor to London declined.

Hook was seemingly persistent in making friends however and offered to treat him to a bottle of champagne, an offer that was soon lowered to beer. As the pair were joined by Hook’s companions, Peter Stevens and William Smith, the drink began to flow and very quickly the conversation turned to boasts of strength.

Hook declared that he could throw a ‘certain weight 30 yards’ and was prepared to put money on it. It took some persuasion but eventually William agreed to meet Hook and the others at a different pub later that day. When he arrived the three men were already there, and Hook bought them a round. They soon moved on to a third pub – this was turning into what we might call a ‘pub crawl’ – and Hook was in effervescent mood.

He stated loudly that he ‘thought nothing of spending £20 on a lark, as he could have £100 whenever he wanted it’.

The impression he was giving was a wealthy young man who had deep pockets. He was also luring the unwary Kirbyshire in however, and Smith and Stevens soon played their part in this.

As William and his new found chums began to toss coins (a simple game of chance) Smith leaned over and whispered to him that since Hook ‘had plenty of money, he might as well have some of it as anybody else’. William was ready to play and bet and won a shilling from Hook straight away. The others now persuaded him to carry on and managed to get him to lay a huge bet of £10 (about £500 today). Reluctant at first he was only convinced when he saw Stevens put down 5 sovereigns.

Hook won the toss and paid up but William he felt he’d been cheated. He claimed that a ‘plant had been played on him’ by the men and demanded his money back. When they gave him back a few sovereigns but refused to hand over the rest he called a policeman and had them arrested. The next day the four men all appeared before the magistrate at Clerkenwell Police court.

Mr Beadon, the justice, was unsympathetic. As far as he was concerned while the trio of gamblers were ‘known bad characters’ in the area and this was clearly a scam, they hadn’t actually broken the law. Instead William was simply a dupe and he had ‘acted in a very foolish manner in drinking and betting with strangers’. Hook, Smith and Stevens were discharged while William Kirbyshire slunk away to lick his wounds and put the whole thing down to experience.

London was a dangerous place for the unwary. It remains so today and visitors were constantly being warned to keep a close eye on their possessions in the crowded streets and not to take strangers at face value. One wonders what William’s future wife thought of the whole affair, if he even chose to tell her.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, March 11, 1857]

A ‘bully’ is seized; a case of mistaken identity in Leicester Square

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Stagg & Mantle’s store on Leicester Square

One of the things that fascinates me whilst reading the reports of the Victorian police courts is the changing use of language, especially slang. Language is always evolving of course; one only needs to spend time around young people to see how they create new words and adapt old ones. Slang (like underworld cant or Cockney rhyming slang) effectively excludes those that don’t understand it and allows conversions to occur in the hearing of those we’d rather didn’t understand what we were saying.

However when we look back into history to read about the people from the past through their own words the changing use and definition of words can be quite confusing. For example ‘gay’ which has changed its meaning considerably over the centuries. Now it almost universally refers to homosexuality but this probably only dates back to the 1930s, and only to men (and possibly only in the US). For most of the twentieth century in Britain it means happy, cheerful and it still is used like that.

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In the late 1850s (a period of concern about sexual health following revelations about the disastrous state of British troops in the Crimean War) ‘gay’ was a slang term for female prostitution (as seen in a famous cartoon from the time – shown on the left).

Another family word today is ‘bully’ which I think we would all understand to mean someone who uses their strength or position of power to intimate or exploit someone else. Bullying is rightly at the top of school and work agendas as something that needs to be dealt with and that vulnerable people should be protected from.

So would you be surprised to discover that in the 1800s (and indeed earlier) ‘bully’ was a slang term for a protector? It seems strange until we unpack it a little more and find that ‘a bully’ in Victorian terminology meant a prostitute’s protector, or in modern language, her ‘pimp’. Victorian bullies profited from the money made by street prostitutes and ‘protected’ them from other bullies or competitors for their territory.

Once you know that this report from the mid 1870s makes more sense.

Detective Leader of C Division (Metropolitan Police) was standing at the corner of Leicester Square watching a crowd of people outside Stagg and Mantle’s department store. Some of the more fashionable London streets attracted prostitutes and thieves and the police often watched for well-known or suspicious characters to catch them in the act of committing crime. Detective Leader was in plain clothes and looked like an ordinary member of the public.

Looking across Leader suddenly noticed a man, possibly drunk, wade into the crowd and start an altercation with a small group of women. He quickly intervened to separate them only to find that the man seized him by the collar and then declared that he was under arrest. The man, who was a recently discharged soldier named William Corrington, told the policeman that he (the soldier) was a detective and that he was arresting him (the actual detective) and would take him to the nearest police station. His explanation was that Leader was a ‘bully’ and so he must have believed he was trying to protect the women from the former solider.

The detective tried to explain  that the man was mistaken; he was the copper and he had been watching these women, but Corrington was too drunk to understand. A nearby uniformed officer saw what was happening and came to his colleague’s assistance and the man stood aside. But this was only temporary, when he saw that the detective wasn’t going anyway the ex-army man lurched forward again declaring:

‘You are loitering here again, and I shall take you to the station’.

Since Corrington could not or would not see sense, Leader and PC Harding (28C reserve) hauled him off to the nick and he was presented before Mr Knox at Marlborough Street in the morning on a charge of ‘annoying’ the detective in the course of executing his duty. The magistrate fined him 20s (or 14 days imprisonment if he couldn’t pay).

Poor Corrington. He’d been discharged from the army only a few days earlier, we don’t know why. He was clearly drunk but possibly suffering in other ways. Prostitutes were exploited themselves of course, but they also preyed on drunk men and maybe William had fallen victim and had had his pocket pinched in the past. It is often remarked that the police (in plain clothes) can look remarkably similar to the criminals they are pursuing so maybe this was an honest mistake. This story does tell us as well, that the West End of London was considered a ripe spot for petty crime and vice in the 1870s, and little has changed there today.

[from The Morning Post, Saturday, January 09, 1875]

You can use this site to search for specific crimes or use the Themes link in the menu on the left to look for areas or topics that interest you. If you are interested in a particular court (such as Bow Street or Marylebone) you can also limit your search to one court in particular. Please feel free to comment on anything you read and if something in particular interests you then please get in touch. You can email me at drew.gray@northampton.ac.uk

A fracas in a hospital over a lost diamond stud

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William Watts was either an exceedingly unpleasant individual or ‘not quite right in the head’ as contemporaries might have put it. I’m going with the former however, as he held down the job of a hotel manager, so presumably was a capable person.

In October 1885 he was arrested at a hospital in Leicester Square. St John’s specialised in diseases of the skin and Watts had been there on more than one occasion. Some weeks previously he had lost a gold topped walking cane and accused the staff at the hostel of stealing it. This time he claimed to have lost a diamond collar pin and angrily demanded its return.

‘As the pin could not be found, and as no one in the hospital knew anything about it, the accused became disorderly, and interrupted the business of the hospital for about half an hour’. 

He was asked to leave and then removed from the premises, only to return and start complaining again some time afterwards. The hospital’s secretary now had no choice but to call for the police, who arrived and took the disgruntled hotel manager away.

Back at the police station a police search quickly found the gentleman’s diamond pin, ‘fixed on the back of his shirt, where he himself admitted having placed it’.

Appearing at the Marlborough Street Police Court Watts, who gave his address as Thanet Place, Temple Bar, must have cut a sheepish figure. His previous altercation with the skin clinic was aired and the magistrate bound him over to the amount of £10 to keep the peace for three months. He advised the hospital not to receive him as patient in future.  The secretary probably made a note to do so, since he explained to the court that ‘such imputations were very unpleasant both to the staff and to the patients’.

One imagines this was the Victorian equivalent of the sign often seen in hospitals that reminds visitors that NHS staff should be the victims of abuse, violence or aggressive behaviour. They have a hard enough job to do without having to put up with idiots like William Watts or his modern incarnation.

[from The Illustrated Police News etc, Saturday, October 3, 1885]

ST John’s hospital no longer exists, according one ‘history’ it moved to 49 Leicester Square in 1887 but this article would suggest they had a presence there at least 2 years earlier. It is now a bar, the Slug and Lettuce. Perhaps Mr Watts would be happier there.

Midsummer ‘madness’ at Marlborough Street

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There was much less understanding of mental health in the Victorian period than there is today. Public asylums were largely used as dustbins for the unwanted mentally ill poor, while private ones attempted to treat the ‘mad’ relatives of the better off. Some families simply locked their disturbed relatives away in the attic, too embarrassed to be seen to have insanity ‘in the family’.

But of course there was probably just as much mental illness in the 1800s as there is today, but while modern society has slowly become more accepting of it our ancestors saw sufferers as objects of pity, danger or ridicule. Just as casual racism is evident in reading the Victorian press, so are jokes at the expense of the mentally ill.

Jane Roderick (also known as Jane Waddy) was brought up before the Marlborough Street police magistrate charged with being drunk and disorderly. She had been arrested in Leicester Square a few nights before, proclaiming the health of the Queen and Royal family loudly to anyone in the vicinity.

She was still quite loud when she stood in the dock as she explained her behaviour to him. Jane told the justice that the reason she had undertaken her own public celebration was because she had heard the good news that the sons of Her Majesty ‘had been admitted into the House of Parliament to assume their rights as the Royal family without the consent of Parliament’, which she deemed a good thing.

It was such a good thing, she continued, that she felt duty bound to drink a toast (or two) in port wine.

She then entered into an elaborate story: she was, she said, born in Kent and was a ‘woman of Kent’. Her uncle worked in the Queen’s gardens, she claimed, and so she had brought a rose for him to plant for the Queen. Her father had made a communion table at Chislehurst, and now she heard the Queen was ‘ready to support her sons’. Finally she added that she was widowed and one of her sons lived in a vicarage at Greenwich under the Queen’s care.

It was probably a mix of fact and fantasy, but it was delivered in a chaotic manner that suggested that the poor woman was not in full control of herself. That is certainly how the press depicted her.

Mr Vine, the court’s gaoler, now appeared to give evidence to the fact that the same woman had been up in court on the same charge four months earlier, and had given exactly the same story in her defence.

At this Jane either affected deafness or really was unable to hear what the man said. On it being repeated to her she admitted to having been drinking: ‘I had a “little drop” then, of course, and unfortunately I have been given to it since my husband’s death’.

Mr Cooke, the magistrate, turned to her and asked her if she had any friends locally. She had claimed to have been born in Poland Street (which prompted titters of laughter in court, but why is not clear). In the 1880s it was quite a respectable place in Soho with a number of artisans and tradesmen living there. Jane replied that her sister-in-law lived nearby, and then told him (somewhat randomly) that she was the daughter of a carpenter, and that one of the guardians of the poor in Lambeth had a mortgage on her fathers house.

Again, this may well all have been true but it didn’t really answer the magistrate’s questions.

He declared: ‘I think you are not right in your mind. You will be sent down to..’

‘Sent down! Where?’ interrupted Jane.

‘To the House of Detention for a week; but they will not put you in the cell’.

She thanked him and added, ‘I shall charge you 13s for this; and if you have not money to pay, why, spout your ticker!’

This last remark brought the house down in laughter, clearly amusing the court reporter who added that she then left ‘with a  jaunty air’, calling the gaoler to ‘order her brougham [her carriage] to drive her to Hanwell’.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, June 21, 1885]

Happy solstice everyone!