Tag: Liverpool Street

Racism ‘on the buses’?

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In the 1880s London buses (more properly ‘omnibuses’) were privately run. This meant that they sometimes switched their routes to take advantage of a sudden influx of passenger business. So instead, for example, of the modern 242 going to Dalston from Liverpool Street it might choose to run to Islington if sufficient people wanted to go there. I can’t imagine a situation where that would happen today but if it did there would be uproar from the stranded passengers left waiting at the stop.

This is exactly what happened in June 1880 however, as Jacob Allen was trying to get home late at night on a Sunday from Bank. An omnibus pulled up and the conductor shouted: ‘Burdett Road and Mile End’ and a number of people boarded, including Allen.

Then, as a number of other ‘buses appeared, all heading in the same direction, the conductor shouted ‘Limehouse and Blackwall’, thereby ‘altering the direction altogether’. He ordered everyone to get off declaring:

‘Come out, come out, I wont carry you to Mile-end’.

Everyone did get off the bus except for Allen; the engineer realized that  this revised route suited him much better anyway so he sat down and puffed on his cigar and waited to be carried home. The conductor still insisted he leave however, and when he tried to explain the bus man abused him verbally, calling him a ‘stuck up monkey’ and grabbed the cigar out of his mouth.

Allen complained at the man’s rudeness but it did no good, the conductor manhandled him off the bus and left him fuming on the pavement. Determined to have satisfaction Jacob Allen applied for a summons and had the man hauled up before Sir Robert Carden at the Mansion House Police court.

The conductor’s name was Moore and he had little by way of a defence. Allen had found at least one witness who supported his version of events and added that Moore appeared to be drunk at the time. Apparently he had told Allen that ‘he would not carry such trash’. Given that the complainant was an engineer and smoking a cigar I wonder if Allen was black and this was a case of racism? All Moore would say was that the man was intoxicated and that was why he refused him travel but this was vehemently denied. If he’d been out in London late on Sunday Jacob Allen may well have been drinking but this seems like a slur and Moore could produce no evidence for it.

Sir Robert found for the complainant and commented that Moore’s ‘omnibus was one of those private ones which went anywhere. It was clearly proved  that he had used bad language’, adding that ‘the sooner his master got rid of him the better. Civil language cost nothing’ after all.

He fined him 20s or 14 days in prison.

London had (as it has today) an extensive transport network involving omnibuses, trams, over ground and subterranean trains and the ever-present hansom cabs. This allowed Londoners to move around the city from east to west, south to north, at almost all times of the day or night, regardless of the depth of their pockets. It may also have helped one deeply disturbed individual carry out some of the most heinous murders this country has ever known. For more about the man who might have been ‘Jack the Ripper’ see Drew’s new co-authored study on the Whitechapel and Thames Torso murders of 1887-1891 available now on Amazon:

[from The Standard , Saturday, June 26, 1880]

‘A great nuisance’ but a dedicated body of men and women. How the Salvation Army got their message to the people

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Yesterday’s blog concerned the Salvation Army with two of their ‘soldiers’ being warned about annoying a local man with the ‘infernal din’ they made playing music outside his house on a Sunday. That was in 1896 when the organization was beginning to establish itself in late Victorian society. It was still an object of suspicion for some, and ridicule for others but it was well on its way to being widely recognized as the charitable religious body it is regarded as today.

William Booth had founded the East London Christian mission in 1865 and adopted the name ‘The Salvation Army’ in 1878. Booth and his wife Catherine (pictured below right) were Methodists and their intention was to bring religion and abstinence from alcohol to the poor of the East End. Unusually for the time Catherine (and all women in the mission) was able to preach on the same terms as her husband. In the early 1880s the Salvation Army began to expand its operations overseas, opening branches in the USA, Ireland and Australia and of course their success was in no small part due to their ability to promote the Army and to as many possible ‘volunteers’ as possible.

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They did this by public meetings and marches, all accompanied by brass bands made up of members, a military system of organization (with “General’ Booth at the head), and by selling their weekly paper, The War Cry. This was sold on the streets and in public houses and, as this case from 1882 shows, this could sometimes bring them into dispute with the local constabulary.

Thomas Dawson was an unlikely looking occupant of the dock at the City Police court. He was described as being about 30 years of age, ‘delicate looking’ and wearing the uniform of the Salvation Army. He had been summoned for ‘obstructing the footway in Liverpool Street’ while attempting to hawk copies of the Army’s publication.

Appearing for the City of London police chief inspector Tillcock said that there had been a growing problem with Sally Army men and women standing on the streets and drawing crowds. It was ‘a great nuisance’ he stated and caused by the ‘peculiar actions and dress’ of those involved. Perhaps the public was curious and stopped to hear what the soldiers of Booth’s army had to say; I suspect some stopped to harangue them as misguided or laugh at their costumes.

PC 934 City had tried to move Dawson on several times but each time the man had simply returned to the same position and carried on his business. When challenged about it in court Dawson declared that he had just as much right to sell the paper as anyone else and was causing no more obstruction than a Punch and Judy show. He felt the constable was picking on him because he didn’t like the message the Army was keen to broadcast but he wasn’t about to stop for anyone. The Salvation Army was, he stated in court, ‘something they wanted everyone to know about’.

Sir Robert Carden, the presiding magistrate, found for the police and begged to differ regarding the merits of an organization that took a doctrinal position that differed from the established, Anglican, church. Regardless of the virtues of the War Cry or the Army’s message he couldn’t allow the obstruction of City roads and pavements so he fined him 2s 6d plus costs and warned him that if he came before him on a similar charge again he would double the fine. Dawson asked the justice what the alternative to paying the fine was.

‘Three days imprisonment’ he was told. He thanked the magistrate and was taken into custody. Perhaps he preferred to suffer some gaol time rather than reducing the income of the Army. If so he was a very dedicated soldier for the cause and that probably tells us all we need to know about the eventual success of the Salvation Army. Whatever we might think of it, or the people that sign up as new recruits, it was men and women like Thomas Dawson that  helped ensure that William and Catherine Booth’s vision prospered and developed into the global charity it is today.

[from The Illustrated Police News etc, Saturday, April 29, 1882]

A pair of well-read rogues at the Mansion House

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The New Police (created in London in 1829) spent most of their time on patrol. They were tasked with knowing their beat inside out; all the locals, shops, warehouses and dwellings while keeping an eye out for suspicious characters, open windows and broken locks. The aim of the police was crime prevention and deterrence and in this they were a ‘modern’ extension of the old watchmen of early modern and eighteenth-century London.

One of these new ‘Peelers’ (after Sir Robert Peel, the home secretary that created them) was walking his beat on Liverpool Street in early December 1851 when he noticed two men acting suspiciously. One seemed to be trying to hide something under his coat while the other glanced about, as if checking whether anyone had seen them.

Perhaps noticing the policeman they turned into a street and the ‘bobby’ (another nickname derived from Peel) watched as one stopped and trued to time a pair of books up with a piece of string.  The officer (named in the newspaper report) approached and stopped them and asked what they were doing.

The men, Henry Robinson and Henry Hamper, said they had been given the books by a beer-shop owner to take to a pawn shop on her behalf. The books in question were two volumes of the Waverley Novels by Sir Walter Scott. They were ‘elegantly bound’ and the policeman was unconvinced by the pair’s explanation.

It wasn’t hard to trace the beer shop owner, who doubled as the men’s landlady, and she and the would-be thieves all appeared at the Mansion House in front of the Lord Mayor. She explained that she had bought the books at £1 8s  a volume and had a set of them.  There were a lot of the Waverley novels, published by Scott (anonymously at first) from 1814 to 1831. The novels (which included Ivanhoe, a work I have at home) were extremely popular with readers in the nineteenth century. The landlady’s set must have been worth quite a bit, as just one of them would be the equivalent of about £80 today.

In recent weeks she’d found that four of the books had been stolen from the trunk she kept them in. When challenged in court one of the Henrys admitted taking two books out of the trunk and selling them in Petticoat Lane for 5s, a fraction of their value.

The Lord Mayor chose not to send them for trial before a jury, possibly because the evidence was not as concrete as it might be. A jury might not be convinced that both of them had taken the items or that they hadn’t simply found them. Better then to use his summary powers and convict them as ‘rogues and vagabonds’ which required much less of a burden of proof. He sent them to prison for two months.

Sadly I don’t think they were allowed to take the books with them as reading matter.

[from The Morning Post , Tuesday, December 02, 1851]

A ‘sex pest’ is exposed on the Liverpool Street to Stratford line

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Today’s papers are understandably full of discussion about sexual assaults on women by men in positions of power. Following the ongoing revelations about the American film producer Harvey Weinstein and suggestions that such exploitation of women is rife at Westminster , the world seems to be waking up to the reality that casual sexual assault is endemic in our society.

There is nothing new in this (in fact regular readers may be coming to the conclusion that the London Police courts reveal that there is almost nothing new today at all; when it comes to crime and anti-social behaviour our Victorian ancestors were just as ‘bad’ as we are). What may be different today is that the climate has changed and women feel more empowered to speak out – to speak truth to power as the saying goes.

It is not (and never was) easy for a woman to accuse a man of sexually assaulting her. In the nineteenth century a woman that cried ‘rape’ exposed herself to accusations that she was at best lying, and at worst had encouraged the perpetrator by placing herself in a vulnerable position. The Victorian lady that allowed herself to be alone with a male was effectively ‘asking for it’ in much the same way that those accusations are levelled at women who dress ‘provocatively’.

For Victorian society the answer was a separation of the sexes wherever possible. Of course this really meant a separation along class lines. The daughters of the wealthy middle and upper classes were chaperoned and never allowed out on their own. No ‘respectable’ women would be seen out at night without a male companion and so any woman that was on her own, could not, by definition,  be ‘respectable’. This led to women being accosted on the street in the evening (and in broad daylight if they were in areas where prosecution was common) by men who thought them ‘fair game’. Much of this went unreported of course, as did most of the assaults on servant girls by fellow domestic staff, or their masters and his sons.

When Victorian society began to develop a system of public transport the boundaries between public and private space began to become mutable. The railway carriage soon became a dangerous place for single or unaccompanied women, seemingly regardless of the time of day or even the other occupants. Today we are familiar with the problems some women face traveling on the London Underground (the ‘tube’) and attempts to get women to report offences. It would seem that from the very introduction of steam driven railways men were subjecting women to unwelcome sexual harassment.

Hobart Moore was one of these so-called ‘sex pests’. In October 1877 Mary Ann Cocks, a young governess, was travelling in a second-class carriage on the Great Eastern railway from Liverpool Street to Stratford. It was just after 8 o’clock in the evening and so Mary Ann was probably on her way home after a day out.

Moore entered the same compartment and sat down directly opposite her. There were three others in the car, a man and two ladies. Moore asked Mary Ann if the train went to Forest Gate, and she replied that it did. He had established conversation.

As the train left Bethnal Green nation Mary Ann noticed that Moore ‘shuffled about a great deal with his feet, and between Bethnal Green and Old Ford stations he leaned down and touched her’.

Clearly shocked by his behaviour, Mary Ann asked him move. One of the other women in the carriage then suggested they swop seats and the school governess gladly accepted the offer. Then the other man in the carriage then helped her move to another carriage when the train stopped. She had escaped the ‘pest’ but had still suffered form the unwanted contact with him.

This is a Victorian news report so it gives nothing in terms of detail about how or where Moore touched Mary Ann. But she considered that she ‘had been insulted’ and the gentleman that had assisted her now fetched a porter so she could make a formal complaint about Moore. The porter now rode in Moore’s carriage and handed him over to a policeman when they disembarked at the next stop.

Moore must have known what he had done and the embarrassing consequences should he be called to appear in a public court to answer the charges. He now compounded his crime by attempting to bribe his way our of the situation. He pressed a half sovereign into PC 79K’s hand and asked him to forget all about it. The constable did no such thing of course and so Moore found himself before the Police court magistrate at Worship Street in the East End.

In court Moore’s lawyer, a Mr Willis, explained that his client held a ‘highly respectable position’ in society and had ‘recently married’. Ms Cocks must have been mistaken in what she alleged he argued. His client had been out to dinner and had eaten and drunk too much.

As a result he was ‘sick, and leaned from the window. While ill in that way his foot or leg might have done all that the prosecutrix had said, but he denied the hand or any intention to insult’.

Mr Hannay, the magistrate, said that on balance the evidence suggested that there was a case to answer and so committed Moore to jury trial at the Middlesex Sessions. The Digital Panopticon has a record of a 28 year-old Hobart Robert Moore being in prison in 1879, although (and thanks to ActonBooks for the information on this) this wasn’t because he was convicted of the assault on the governess. Instead it seems that he pleaded guilty at the sessions to a common assault and was fined. Two years later he was sent to prison for stealing money from his employer, allegedly to feed his gambling habit (Cheltenham Mercury, Saturday 6 September 1879).

We have yet to see whether any of the current revelations in America or Britain result in prison sentences for those accused of sexually assaulting  vulnerable women. I’m not holding my breath however.

[from The Standard, Tuesday, October 30, 1877]