Tag: Lisson Grove

The Victorian gang murder that was eclipsed by the ‘Ripper’

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In mid June 1888 the dock at Marylebone Police court was crowded, as were the public spaces. This was a hearing that plenty of people wanted to see and hear and not just because it involved a lots of defendants. This was one of the most high profile cases of homicide that the press reported on in 1888 and, had it been another year, maybe we would have heard more about it.

But 1888 as many if not every schoolchild knows of course, was the year that ‘Jack the Ripper’ terrorized the East End of London. While other stories made the news (and many other murders were committed), after August the newspapers were almost exclusively dominated by the ‘news from Whitechapel’.

So let us return to Mr De Rutzen’s courtroom to ‘hear’ the voices of those that stood in front of him to give evidence that day.

In the dock were several young men, all allegedly members of a youth gang which was associated with the area around Lisson Grove and Marylebone. George Galletly was the only one who was unemployed. This is important because contemporary rhetoric about youth (and indeed more modern views) have tended to associate youth crime and gang membership with idle unemployment.

Galletly was joined in the dock by William Elvis (16), Micheal Doolan (15) and Fancis Cole (16) were all porters. Peter Lee (19) was a sailor, William Graefe (19) a cutter, William Henshaw (16) was a french polisher, and Charles Govier (16) a farrier’s boy. Collectively they were all accused of involvement in the murder of Joseph Rumbold, a printer’s machinist, as he strolled with his sweetheart Elizabeth (‘Lizzie’) Lee in Regent’s Park.

The killing had already made the papers and so the reporter didn’t need to refresh his audience’s knowledge of events too much. Thomas Brown, a member of the ‘gang’ but not present on the night Rumbold died, testified that Galletly had admitted stabbing the victim by York Gates. Whether he told his mate out of sense of shame or, more likely, from bravado is impossible to say, but it was to be damning evidence.

Alonzo Byrne (or Burns) was a friend of Rumbold and a fellow machinist. He was out with Joe, double dating with his own girl (Elizabeth’s sister Emily) and the four had been walking around the park as they often did. The couples had separated and Alonzo and Emily were walking together when about half-a-dozen ‘chaps’ ran past, stopped and then one said, ‘I know them’, and they hurried on.

Up ahead he heard one person shout ‘that is the one’ which was followed by sounds of scuffle. The lads had caught up with Joe and Lizzie who now tried to run off to escape. When he caught up to the couple he was far too late; Rumbold was being helped into a cab to be taken to hospital.

He didn’t make it, dying in Lizzie’s arms on the way.

Byrne recalled that he’d asked one of the lads why they attacked Joseph. They explained that they were members of ‘The Deck’ (a gang from Seven Dials) and were meting out vengeance on Rumbold as they believed he was a member of the ‘[Lisson] Grove Lads’ whom they held responsible for an attack on one of their own the previous night.

All the prisoners pleaded not guilty and Mr De Rutzen committed them all to take their trials at the Central Criminal Court. He allowed bail just for Henshaw and Graefe, the rest were taken back to the cells to be transferred back to prison.

It came up at Old Bailey at the end of July that year. The report here is more accurate for ages and it was revealed that Galletly was in fact under 18, as was Lee who must have lied when he gave his age as 19, he was just 17. The jury had quite a job to pick through the events of that fateful night in Regent’s Park but eventually they decided that George Galletly was most responsible for killing Rumbold. All of the others were acquitted of murder or manslaughter but pleaded guilty to unlawful assembly and were given varying prison sentences from six to fifteen months.

George Galletly was sentenced to death.

He was reprieved however, on account of his age and the recommendation of the jury. He served just 10 years for the killing, being released on license in July 1898 and being recorded on the habitual offenders register. I haven’t look but there is supposedly a photo of George in the MEPO6/009/0022 (228) files at the National Archives, Kew. I must go and see it sometime as this is case I’ve written about before and one that, given all the current concern with gangs and violence, I continue to find fascinating.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, June 17, 1888]

1888 was of course the year of the ‘Ripper’, that unknown killer that stalked the streets of the capital seemingly without any fear of being caught. Nobody knows who ‘Jack’ was or do they? Drew’s new book (co-authored by Andy Wise) is published by Amberley Books this week. It is a new study of the Whitechapel murders of 1888 which offers up a new suspect, links the ‘Jack the Ripper’ killings to the unsolved ‘Thames Torso’ crimes, and provides the reader with important contextual history of Victorian London. The book is available to order on Amazon here

‘It is really quite dreadful to see young children standing in the dock charged with drunkenness’. Two young girls are led astray

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We might like to believe that children grow up faster these days or lose their innocence at an earlier age than they did in the past, but how true is this? There is a temptation to believe that everything was better in the past when prices were lower, the elderly were respected, and there was less crime. Often this mythical ‘golden age’ is associated with the 1950s the last decade before standards dropped as the ‘swinging sixties’ turned society upside down.

In reality of course the problems we face today are not really new ones just old ones in modern packaging. There were, for example, concerns about youth gangs in the Victorian period, and fears about the feckless nature of working-class youth go back to the end of the Napoleonic wars and beyond, as Geoffrey Pearson showed in his seminal study of youth crime Hooligans in 1983. So it is not at all surprising to find Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reporting on ‘rival gangs of roughs’ staging pitch battles in the capital in 1887.

Members of ‘gangs’ from Child’s Hill and Hendon fought with ‘lads’ from Maida Vale, Kilburn and Lisson Grove that autumn, arriving in ‘forces of 50 to 100, armed with sticks and belts’. According to the police ‘quite a riot followed’. Two of the combatants ended up before the magistrate at  Marylebone where they were charged with assault on a policeman that intervened in the battle. Edward Martell (17) was sent to gaol for 21 days and Arthur Hillman (19) for two weeks. But it was two other young people that caught my attention in the report of cases heard at Marylebone that week, Mary Ann Cook and Helen Cawthorn.

Mary was 12 and Helen 13 and they were brought in for being found drunk and incapable. The magistrate, Mr De Rutzen, was told that Mary Cook was lying in the gutter late on Sunday night when PC Miles (122S) discovered her as he patrolled Camden High Street. He picked her up and took her to the police station. Helen Cawthorn had already been taken to the Temperance Hospital on Hampstead Road and PC Sinclair (302S) had been called to collect her by officials there. Once they were both at the police station the desk sergeant sent for a doctor to examine the girls and he confirmed that they were both quite drunk.

In court the police deposed that enquiries were made and it had been discovered that the pair had ‘been with some ‘low rough boys’ from the neighbourhood and it was them that had led them astray and encouraged them to drink. They suspected that the boys had taken them to a public house but they couldn’t find out yet which one that was. Presumably they would have brought a prosecution against the landlord if they had.

Both girls’ parents were in court to speak up for their children. Mrs Cook said that her daughter had asked to go out to play on Sunday evening and she had allowed it. The first she heard of any trouble was when the police informed her that Mary was in custody. The mother was clearly shocked as she and her husband ‘were abstainers and encouraged their children in temperance principles’. Mr Cawthorn also said his daughter was usually very well behaved and that this was out of character.

The magistrate addressed the girls and said that ‘really quite dreadful to see two young children standing in the dock charged with drunkenness’. He accepted that the local boys had led them on but they should have known better than to go to a pub with them.  ‘It was the first step down hill’ he declared but fining them would do not good (since they’d have no money to pay)  and prison would ‘only make them worse’. So he discharged them into the care of their parents and hoped the disgrace of a court appearance would serve as sufficient warning for the future.

At this point a Mr Thompson steeped forward. He was a police court missionary, a member of a charitable organization that acted to help defendants if they promised to take the pledge and abstain from alcohol. He stated that it was his belief that both girls had once belonged to a Band of Hope, a temperance organization that had been established  mid century in Leeds. Children could join at the age of six and were taught to avoid the evils of drink. Thompson said he would try to get the pair reinstated in the group so they could be steered away from the dangerous path they had set themselves upon.

The police court missionaries started as an offshoot of the Temperance  movement but established themselves as an important part of the life of the police courts. They advised magistrates who came to trust them, especially where  (as was often the case) the offence the accused was up for involved drunkenness. In 1887 parliament passed the Probation of First Offenders Act which allowed a person charged on a first offence to be released without punishment if the court deemed it appropriate. There was no supervision order at first but this followed in subsequent legislation and eventfully, in 1907, the Probation service was created. Not only did probation offer the first real alternative to a custodial sentence it also signaled a new welfare approach to offenders, once aimed at helping them to reform rather than simply locking them up and hoping they learned the appropriate message.

It was an important breakthrough in offender management so it is deeply troubling that 112 years later probation has been allowed to fall into such a parlous state that the justice secretary has had to admit today that its experiment with part privatization has failed. David Gauke has effectively reversed the 2014 decision of one of his predecessors, the woefully incompetent Chris Graying, and returned the supervision of those on probation to public sector control. Grayling’s mistake has cost the taxpayer close to £500,000,000 and Dame Glenys Stacey (Chief probation inspector) said it was ‘irredeemably flawed’. It is not just the financial cost of course, Grayling’s bungling has had a negative effect on the lives of those realised into supervision and the general public who have suffered because of poor or insufficient supervision.

In May this year Grayling cancelled was forced to cancel ferry contracts he’d sanctioned to ‘ensure critical imports could reach the UK in the event of a no-deal Brexit’ costing us £50,000,000. He had already been forced to pay £33,000,000 in compensation for not including Eurotunnel in the bidding for the same contracts. £1,000,000 was paid to consultants in seeking to make a contract with a ferry company (Seaborne Freight) who had no ships.

Chris Grayling is still a minister in Her Majesty’s government.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, September 25, 1887]

If you enjoy this blog series you might be interested in Drew’s jointly authored study of the Whitechapel (or ‘Jack the Ripper’) murders which is published by Amberley Books on 15 June this year. You can find details here:

“Well, you needn’t make all this fuss. I only did it to frighten the children”: child abuse in mid Victorian London

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The police had their work cut out for them in ensuring Edward Smith reached the Marylebone Police court safely. A large crowd had gathered outside the police station that was holding the ‘ruffianly looking fellow’ – a 26 year-old sawyer who lived in Paul Street, Lisson Grove. Had the crowd been able to get to him the press reported, ‘he would no doubt have been subjected to much violence’.

Smith did make it to court that day and Mr Broughton’s courtroom was crowded as the public crammed in to see that justice was done to Smith. The exact details of his offence were alluded to rather than described in detail by the Morning Post and that was because they involved the attempted rape of a young girl.

That child was Sarah Harriett Cooper and she was also in court that morning. Today Sarah would have been spared another direct confrontation with her abuser but in the mid Victorian period there were no such considerations for the welfare of the vulnerable. Sarah, aged 11 or 12, was stood in the witness box and asked a series of probing questions about her experience.

She told the magistrate that while her mother was a work she and some other girls were playing in a piece of open ground on the Harrow Road which was owned by a nurseryman. The little girls were trespassing but doing nothing more than running about and having fun. Suddenly Smith appeared and seized hold of Sarah and the three other children ran away in fear. Sarah said she pleaded with him to ‘let me go home to my mother’ but the sawyer put his hand over her mouth, told her not to make a noise, and threatened to cut her throat.

What happened next was not recorded by the press except to state that it amounted, if proven, to the committal of a ‘capital offence’. By 1852 adult rape was no longer capital but Sarah was under the age of consent (which was 13 until 1885) so perhaps that was a hanging offence. Sarah testified that she had ‘cried all the while he was ill-using me’ until ‘he at last lifted me up and brushed down my clothes, which were dirty’ [and] I ran away’. A crowd had gathered near the gates of the gardens and she told them what had happened.

Smith had hurt the child in other ways; he’d used a knife to cut a wound in her hand and she held it up to show the magistrate the puncture mark on her left palm. If this wasn’t evidence enough of Smith’s cruelty there other witnesses appeared to add their weight to the charge.

George Ashley had been walking past the gates to the nursery with friend when a small boy ran out shouting that his sister had been taken away by a man there. Ashley entered the gardens and saw Smith lifting the child up. Sarah was screaming at the top of her voice and the man was telling her to be silent. He sent his companion to fetch a policeman.

PC Lane (372A) arrived soon afterwards, finding a large crowd gathered around Sarah, who hand was bleeding badly. He soon discovered Edward Smith hiding in an outside privy at one end of the nursery grounds. The door was locked but PC Lane burst it open and arrested the sawyer. Questioned about his actions Smith simply declared:

‘Well, you needn’t make all this fuss. I only did it to frighten the children, knowing they had no business in the garden’.

The accused was taken back to the police station house and a search was made of the water closet. PC Cookman (55D) found a large bladed knife buried in the loose soil by the WC, which was open (suggesting it had been recently used and abandoned in a hurry). The girls’ mother described Sarah’s injuries and trauma when she’d got home, and a certificate from the surgeon that had treated her was read out in court detailing her injuries.

Finally the magistrate turned his attention to the man in the dock. Smith denied using violence against Sarah, or at least denied acting in an unlawful way. She and her friends were trespassing and he insisted he was only intending to ‘pull up her clothes for the purpose of giving her a smack, when she began to cry, and ran off’. He said the knife wasn’t his and he had no idea why it was found by the closet. He’d been drinking he said, and because he rarely touched alcohol, that had affected his head. Mr Broughton remanded him for a week and he was taken away to Clerkenwell Prison in a police van, followed all the way by a baying crowd of angry locals.

Just under a month later Smith was formally tried at the Middlesex Sessions of the Peace for an aggravated assault with the intent to rape. Smith was convicted by the jury and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, March 30, 1852; The Morning Post, Wednesday, April 14, 1852]

Knife crime: a salutary lesson from 1888

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In 2010 I started writing an article which eventually saw the light of day in May 2015 in a journal called Cultural and Social History. It concerned a murder case in London in 1888. No, not the ‘Ripper’ or even the ‘Thames Torso mystery’, instead this was the killing of a young man, stabbed to death in Regent’s Park by another young man.

This is how my first draft started:

In the recent 2010 election campaign government and opposition spokesmen traded insults and apportioned blame for what is a perceived increase in youth crime and gang violence over the past decade. Chris Graying, as the Conservative shadow home secretary, declared in February 2010 that, ‘the Government’s policies on crime have failed. After eleven years of claiming to be tough, these figures show shocking levels of violent crime’ and he cited statistics showing that the number of under 16s fatally stabbed has doubled since 1997. In 2007 alone, one teenager was killed each week in gang related attacks. Gang related violence in London claimed the lives of 28 young people aged under 20, while a further 1,237 were injured by guns or knives between April and November of that year. Commentators, politicians and parents have agonised over the causes of this increase in youth violence and, more particularly, about the rise of youth gang culture. Social workers, police, and gang members themselves have offered explanations for why our children are suddenly carrying guns and knives but with very little effect. 

Today, nine years later, we are once again ‘agonising’ over knife crime with the death of two more teenagers in the last week, one in Romford, the other in Greater Manchester. The Tories are now in charge and the current PM (Teresa May) finds herself answering probing and difficult questions on her role in cutting police numbers during her time as David Cameron’s Home Secretary.

I went and spoke to the Whitechapel Society about the murder (and the press coverage that surrounded it) in 2011, on the night that (coincidently) that the Tottenham riots erupted following the shooting, by police, of Mark Duggan a local black youth. I’ll try and set out the story of the ‘Regent’s Park Murder’ below because, in the wake of the recent spike in gang related violence, I think it is worth reflecting on what history can (or cannot) tell us.

On May 23 1888 Cissy Chapman and Francis Cole were walking out together on the Marylebone Road and had reached the junction with Lisson Grove when two young men approached them. Cissy and Francis were loosely involved with a youth ‘gang’ that claimed territorial rights in that area. They had unwittingly crossed into territory claimed by another however, and the two young men soon became a small crowd. The pair were called out, identified as the ‘enemy’ and beaten up.

The next day Francis was out with his mates and told them what had happened. His gang (the ‘Tottenham Court Road’ lads) decided they couldn’t let this attack on one of their number go unanswered and so they set out to ‘get’ the Fitzroy Place Lads or the Seven Dials Lads (the groups they deemed responsible).

It seems (and reports are  not clear) that they set off for nearby Regent’s Park, a location where trysts, dangerous liaisons, petty crime, and gang warfare was relatively common. If the newspaper images are to be believed the lads were tooled up – carrying clubs and sticks and coshes – but only one took a knife with him. Peter Lee had a large sheath knife attached to his belt and George ‘Garry’ Galletly (the youngest member of the gang) asked him to lend it to him. Lee handed the knife over.  ‘This will do for them’ Galletly swore before he set out to look for the rival gang members.

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Meanwhile Joseph Rumbold, a printer’s machinist who lived just a few streets to the west of Regents’ Park, was walking out with his sweetheart Elizabeth Lee, her sister Emily and her young man, Alonzo Byrnes. Alonzo and Emily had hung back as they promenaded around the Outer circle of the park, while Joseph and Elizabeth walked on ahead. Shortly afterwards they heard a scuffle up ahead. They hurried on and saw James Rumbold trying to fight off a group of lads. Rumbled, tried to escape by running off towards the York Gate but he was pursued by most of the gang.

Alonzo demanded to know what had happened. He was told that Rumbold had been attacked because the ‘other night we were up here and we and the girls were struck, and we thought he was one of them from the Dials’. He wasn’t but before they realised that Joseph Rumbled had been fatally wounded, knifed in the neck by George Galletly, perhaps keen to make a name for himself in front of his older chums.

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Rumbold’s death, widely reported in the media, led inevitably to a murder trial at the Old Bailey. There were eight young men in the dock of the Central Criminal court on 30 July 1888 but only Galletly was convicted.* The judge leaned forward and addressed the 18 year-old in the dock:

You and the gang that accompanied you found this unfortunate young man walking with a girl in Regent’s Park. He had done you no harm, had not wronged one of your party, but simply because you thought he lived in the district where some men resided who had insulted and outraged two of your comrades on the previous evening, you cruelly stabbed him twice, defenceless as he was. 

He then sentenced him to death.

Galletly’s execution was set for the 18 August but he was spared the rope on account of his youth. He served 10 years instead, being released on license in 1898 at the age of 27. The story shocked society and later that year the Pall Mall Gazette ran a feature on the ‘gangs of London’ and the inability of the police to deal with them.

What does the Regent’s Park Murder tell us? Well, the obvious truth that youth violence, testosterone fuelled bravado, and senseless killing is nothing new. And also that the media likes to fan the flames of incidents like this, creating moral panics that help raise awareness but also sell newspapers. It also reminds us (as does Grayling’s attack on Labour in 2010) that governments have systematically failed to tackle the causes of youth violence. The current incumbent of Downing Street’s pledge to host a summit sounds like more excuses to do nothing about a really serious societal issue.

This is probably because the issue is far too complicated for any government to ‘solve’. I don’t pretend to have any solutions either but while increasing police numbers, with more stop and search, and a knife amnesty might all be valid strategies I doubt increasing sentences for offenders or putting he army on the streets will do much good. Fundamentally however I suspect we need better opportunities for those that live in the areas where gang and knife crime festers, more social mobility, more ‘good’ jobs, better education (academic and vocational), more community cohesion, things for young people to do after school, and more support for beleaguered parents, teachers, police and social workers.

All of that costs money, lots and lots of money, and that comes from taxation (unless you want to cut the money we spend somewhere else) and no government wants to pledge to raise your tax. And then we have the small matter of the fact that Britain is facing up to the reality that austerity might go on a lot longer than Cameron and  Osborne promised us it would, given that over half the population voted to pull us out of a union with our closest trading block.

So, I fear, there will be a lot more victims like Joseph Rumbold, Damiola Taylor, Stephen Lawrence, Yousef Makki, and Jodie Chesney. The press will wail and the government will wring its hands, and our young people will continue to be murdered under our noses.

[from The Pall Mall Gazette, Saturday, May 26, 1888]

For other posts on gang crime see:

A London ‘scuttler’ in the dock at Marylebone?

Gang violence in Dalston as a new year dawns : an echo from 1877

*several of the others pleaded guilty to unlawful assembly and assault.

‘Well sor, this ‘ere perliceman comes rushing in, and, with “Out you go, missus,” capsizes me into the street’: one drunk’s story a year on from the Dorset Street horror.

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Today is the 130 anniversary of the discovery of the body of Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, Spitalfields in November 1888. Mary Kelly was the fifth ‘canonical’ victim of the killer known only as ‘Jack the Ripper’ and hers was the most brutal of all the murders in the series.

Mary (or Marie) was found lying on her bed when her landlord’s man came calling for her back rent. He peered through the window at the horror inside and rushed to find his boss and then the police. No one that saw Mary’s mutilated corpse ever forgot how awful it was.

However, within a year the room in Miller’s Court had been re-let and the landlord, McCarthy, merely sent someone round to scrub the blood off the walls and floors. Rooms in Dorset Street were cheap and new tenants could hardly afford to be too picky if all they could afford was a room in the ‘worst street in London’.

A year after the murders seemed to have ceased although many researchers are far from convinced the killer had stopped with Kelly. My own research suggests he continued into the early 1890s only stopping when his own body succumbed to the disease that killed him.

Meanwhile the day-to-day business of the Police courts rumbled on. Over at Marlborough Street Mary Jones appeared in early November 1889, charged with being drunk and disorderly, a commonplace offence at this level of justice.

Mary had been arrested after she had resisted arrest. Mr Newton (the presiding magistrate) was told that she had entered the King’s Arms in Titchfield Street late the previous night and had caused a scene. She’d asked for ‘two of unsweetened and a bit of sugar’ but the landlord refused to serve her as she was already quite inebriated and he had a care to his license.

He called in the passing street bobby, PC 282D to eject her and she squabbled with them both. She shouted abuse at both men and had to be restrained. In court she was apologetic (presumably having sobered up) and begged the magistrate’s “parding”.

She had been in hospital that day she said and explained that after she’d been released she’d felt dizzy. She’d gone into the pub to rest she insisted, and was as surprised as anyone when ‘this ‘ere perliceman comes rushing in, and, with “Out you go, missus,” capsizes me into the street’.

Mr Newton asked her where she lived.

‘Lisson Grove, your Wurchip’ she replied.

‘Then go back to Lisson Grove sharp, and don’t come back here again’ he told her.

And with that she stumbled gratefully out of court as the public gallery collapsed in laughter.

[from The Standard, Saturday, November 09, 1889]

A London ‘scuttler’ in the dock at Marylebone?

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Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century the subject of gang crime periodically troubled the newspapers. Concern about ‘roughs’ first surfaced in the 1870s in London and elsewhere, with specific incidents involving ‘corner men’ in Liverpool, and ‘scuttlers’ in Salford before the ‘hooligan panic’ broke in the 1890s. I’ve written about gang fights (including one fatal stabbing) before but the pages of the newspapers would suggest that while youthful ‘bad behaviour’ was endemic, fatalities were rare.

Today we have a fairly clear idea of what we think a ‘gang’ is even if very few of us are qualified to judge. So called ‘post code wars’ involving territorial disputes have dominated press coverage along with shootings and the seemingly routine carrying of knives in some parts of London and other major British cities. Those involved are usually young – below 25 – working class, and often from the poorest, most marginalised sections of society.

When I looked at the make up of the ‘gang’ responsible for the murder of Joseph Rumbold in 1888 only one of the 10 young men that appeared at the Old Bailey accused of his murder was unemployed. That was 18 year-old George Galletly, the person who actually stabbed Joe by the York Gates at Regent’s Park. Galletly was the only one convicted and his sentence of death was quickly commuted to life imprisonment on account of his tender years.

I’m not clear that the Victorians believed they had a problem with gang violence in the way that we do today; crucially while the Pall Mall Gazette ran one of its periodic ‘exposés’ on the London gang issue the papers mostly dealt with the topic as a routine, if unpleasant, consequence of urban living. Even when a case like the Regent’s Park murder was fresh in the memory the papers weren’t always keen to hype an incident like the one that I’ve picked for today’s visit to the police courts.

Rumbold had been killed on the 24 May 1888 and the trial had taken place at the Old Bailey in August and Galletly set to hang on the 21st, exactly 130 years ago today. By the 21 August 1888 however Galletly had already been reprieved by Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary and the press had moved on. After all, an even more sensational murder story was just around the corner…

At one in the morning on Sunday 19 August 1888 PC Nicholas (100D) was walking his beat in Lisson Grove when he came across a group of young men in the street. There was about a dozen of them and they were rowdy, quite possibly drunk, acting ‘in a very disorderly fashion, and fighting’. The copper did what he was expected to do and asked them to go home quietly.

This seems very like the Fitzroy Place or the Lisson Grove ‘Lads’ that had been involved in the Regent’s Park murder earlier that year. Groups of young men, aged 18-25, wandering the streets late at night, under the influence of drink, pushing, shoving and abusing passers-by; this has all the hallmarks of late eighteenth-century ‘hooliganism’.

One of the group, William Murphy (a 20 year old carman from Marylebone) took exception to being asked to ‘go quietly’ by a policeman. He squared up to PC Nicholas and took off his heavy leather belt. Wrapping it around his wrist, with the large brass buckle to the front, he aimed a blow at the officer.

PC Nicholas avoided being hit on his head but the buckle landed with force on his hand, doing some damage. He blew his whistle and help soon arrived; Murphy was overpowered after a short struggle and the others scattered. On Monday the carman was up in court before Mr De Rutzen at Marylebone Police court, where he’d been before.

The magistrate recognised him and dismissed Murphy’s claim that he was only defending himself against the policeman. He had previous convictions for assault, including at least one where he’d served 2 months for violence that involved him using his belt as he’d done the previous night. As Andy Davies’ work has shown the Salford and Manchester ‘scuttling’ gangs decorated their heavy leather belts with horse brasses that doubled as offensive weapons in their fights with rivals; it seems the tradition had also reached Marylebone.

De Rutzen sent him down for three months this time, but probably felt it would do little to change his behaviour. I suspect he was correct, most young men like Murphy seemed to treat gangs as stage on their journey to adulthood. Once they found a sweetheart to settle down with and the demands of a family intruded they left their wayward youth behind them. The violence didn’t necessarily stop of course, but the target became much closer to home.

[from The Standard, Tuesday, August 21, 1888]

A father washes his hands of his troublesome daughter as she lets him down yet again

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You might have noticed that we’ve been spending a lot of time in 1883 this week. 1883 corresponded exactly with our 2018 calendar so its been interesting to map a week’s progress through the police courts. Marylebone dealt with a central London area of mixed demography; there were wealthy areas south of Regent’s Park but also less well-heeled parts of the capital close in Lisson Grove.

We can see this by looking at Charles Booth’s poverty maps (1888-91) which reveal that while the south east of the parish was strongly marked in red and yellow (signifying wealth), the north west was blue and black. So, as with much of the metropolis we get a variety of people from all social classes coming into the summary court system.

Amelia Lucy Goodall was a juvenile thief. Aged just 16 she was charged with stealing a large array of items and money from her mistress in Paddington. Her employer was Miss Dewar of 16 Spring Street and she testified that Amelia had stolen the following:

‘a sealskin jacket, velvet jacket, silver watch, velvet muff, silk umbrella, silk shirt, £1 14s in money, breaking open a collecting box in aid of the Boys’ Cripples Home containing about £1 and stealing other things’.

It was quite a haul for the teenager and must have shocked the audience listening in the Marylebone Police Court (and those reading about the case in The Standard newspaper the next day).

Amelia had got the job on the strength of a recommendation made by her mother. She has started work at the beginning of January 1883 but ran away on the 8th. The things listed were discovered missing soon after she disappeared.

She must have fled to Southampton because Amelia was arrested and charged there with stealing a silver watch, perhaps by picking a pocket. The magistrates at Southampton sent her to Winchester Gaol for a fortnight and when she was released the police were waiting for her.

Detective-sergeant Crane had been investigating the theft at the Dewars and brought her back to face the music in London. Amelia tried to wriggle out the charge against her, blaming someone else and saying that anyway the charity box only contained  a few coppers, nothing like the pound that Mrs Dewar alleged.

Her parents were in court and all but washed their hands of their child. Mr Goodall said ‘he’d striven to bring up his large family in a respectable manner’,  but admitted that   Amelia had been a constant source of trouble and had been ‘in a Home’ from which she’d also stolen, pawning the goods to get money.

Mr Cooke reprimand the father for not informing Mrs Dewar of the extent of his daughter’s mischief in the past. He remanded Amelia in custody so that further enquiries could be made into her character and actions. The future, it has to be said, didn’t look that bright for the sixteen-year old.

[from The Standard, Friday, March 09, 1883]

The press ride to the rescue of a baby ‘bitten by rats’

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The Council of the Rats by Gustave Doré (1867)

This case demonstrates the power of the Victorian press in highlighting social issues, albeit on a local matter. The fact that the newspaper (in this example the popular Illustrated Police News) reported the circumstances of this particular case engaged the public and directly benefitted one poor woman and her child.

In late January 1872 The Illustrated Police News carried a story from the Worship Street Police Court about another who had complained about her living conditions. The woman, who was not named in the report, had appeared at the Police court to ask for the magistrate’s help. She told Mr Bushby that her lodgings, in Wilson Street, Finsbury, were ‘infested with rats’ and her child had been attacked by the animals.

She described how the rats ‘were in the habit of coming up from their holes and running about the room in midday. The child she held had, while left lying down, been bitten three times by them, and at length, by the directions of the doctor to whom she had taken it for treatment, she had come to the magistrate to inform him of the facts’.

It was testimony to the poverty she lived in and the dreadfully poor state of housing in some parts of the coastal, especially the East End. Mr Bushby told her to report the situation to the Sanitary Inspectors with the intention of getting the building condemned. He also advised her to move house as soon as possible.

The latter may have been sensible counsel but the woman was unable to go anywhere she said, because she owed two weeks rent and her husband was out of work. This was hardly an unusual situation in East London at the time; many people fell behind with the rent and faced eviction or were trapped in poor conditions while they struggled to make ends meet.

The doctor she had taken her baby to, Dr Timothy of Worship Street, had come to give evidence in her support and testified that she was a ‘deserving cause’. The middle classes of Victorian England had quite clear ideas about who did (and who did not) deserve the support of society and his opinion helped the woman’s case in the end.

A week later the newspaper told its readers that as  a consequence of their coverage of the story the court had received a large number of public donations for the woman. Individuals had read the horror story of rats and had sent in small sums of money that totalled £1 15s 6d (or about £80 today). Moreover, the landlord was shamed into saying he would allow her to move and accept her arrears in instalments. She was handed the money by the court  and expressed her gratitude to everyone involved. In the meantime, the paper added, the family had moved to a new home in Lisson Grove and the woman’s husband had also  found work.

For once then, the papers had a ‘good news’ story to tell and could take some of the credit for it. The readership could also feel suitably proud that they had helped a member of the ‘deserving poor’ escape a desperate domestic situation.

[from The Illustrated Police News, Saturday, January 27, 1872]

The flower pot man’s cunning plan backfires

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Victorian housekeeper c.1890

Emma Dunlop was employed as a housekeeper at 60 Cleveland Square in Paddington when she noticed a man descend the steps from the street and started inspecting the row of flower pots outside her windows. Opening the door Emma demanded to know what he wanted.

The man told her he ‘wished to see Mrs Davies’. There being no ‘Mrs Davies’ at that address he left. Emma, curious as to what he was up to, came out and poked around the flowerpots herself. She soon saw that one of the pots had been disturbed and digging below the surface she found some coins buried there.

In total there were 24s (around £50 today) and not surprisingly a few minutes later the man was back to retrieve it. However in the meantime Emma had removed the cash and so he was forced to knock at the door and ask her if she had found anything. Emma told him she had and he demanded she hand it over or he would call a policeman.

Fortunately a policeman was passing by at just that moment so Emma called him down and the three went into the kitchen. This is where it all started to go wrong for the man as PC Double (322X) suspected foul play. He arrested the man on suspicion of stealing the money and hiding it so it could not be discovered on him and made some local enquiries. He soon found out that the cook at number 55 Cleveland Square had reported that   24s and 6d were missing from the pantry.

The man was named as James Burton (aged 31 and a painter from Lisson Grove) and when the case was taken to the Marylebone Police Court the magistrate was told that Burton had been working in the kitchen that day. Burton was remanded in custody so the police could pursue their enquiries, his ‘cunning’ attempt to hide the proceeds of his theft and then bully Ms Dunlop into handing it over backfired. He doesn’t make it into the Old Bailey records so I suspect he eventually elected to be dealt with summarily and ended up with a short prison sentence, But maybe the police decided there was insufficient evidence to prove he had taken the money and he got away with it. As is often the case, it is unlikely we will ever know.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, September 14, 1879]