Tag: Lower Thames Street

‘Drunken fellows like you should not be allowed to give all this trouble’: An Irishman in the dock in the City

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By far the largest element of a Victorian Police Court magistrate’s business was dealing with those arrested for being drunk, drunk and disorderly, drunk and incapable: – or a variation of these charges that might include using foul and abusive language or violence when resisting arrest.

Every morning (but particularly Monday morning) across the capital police cells were emptied as the various offenders were taken to the Police Courts to be reprimanded, fined, or sent to gaol for a few days or weeks. Many were repeat offenders, others were ‘Saturday night drunks’ – normally ‘respectable’ individuals who just overdid it on a night out.

I’m not sure which category Patrick Sullivan fell into but he was fast asleep on the pavement in Lower Thames Street when a City policeman found him and nudged him with his boot. Sullivan woke with a start and gave the officer a mouthful of drunken abuse. It was clear he could hardly stand up and when the policeman told him to go home he refused. Instead he declared that the only place he would go was to a police station house.

The officer was only too happy to oblige and started to pull him up off the street when the man objected. He now told the policeman that he would have to carry him, and threw himself to the floor. The City man called for help and eventually he and another officer carried Sullivan back to the station. Even now he caused as much trouble as he could, refusing to stand at the desk while the sergeant took his details and read the charge, and then once more throwing himself on the floor of the station. It took a couple more officers to carry him to a cell where he was left to sober up for the night.

In the morning he was taken before Alderman Abbiss at Guildhall Police court where he gave his name and his occupation, a tailor. Sullivan was an Irishman, a nation with a reputation in Victorian society for their love of alcohol and belligerence. This probably counted against him in Mr Abbiss’ courtroom. Not surprisingly perhaps Sullivan could remember little or nothing of the previous night and had nothing to say in his defence.

The alderman told him that ‘drunken fellows like him’ should ‘not be allowed to give all this trouble for nothing’. He fined him 10s or ten days inside. If is was a tailor I suspect he was able to pay his fine, if not he wouldn’t be the first person to spend a long week in a Victorian house of correction for an inability to control his drinking.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, July 17, 1860]

‘Such things are a disgrace there’: A Dutchman tries to save his father’s shame by dumping his grandchild on the streets of London

Fish wharf at Billingsgate Market CC72_01834

Lower Thames Street in the late 1800s

One of the subjects that continues to fascinate my undergraduate students is infanticide. Almost invariably they approach the topic wanting to understand how a mother could deliberately murder her newborn baby. Looking through the very many cases that came before the Old Bailey they are understandably shocked at the stories of women who cut their infant child’s throat, or smothered it at birth, before dumping the body in the nearest privy.

Without wishing to deny the reality that some mothers did kill their newborn babies I think most historians would agree that this was probably the exception rather than the rule in infanticide cases. Babies died in childbirth much more often in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before advancements in medical care arrived in the 1900s. Most importantly the women accused were invariably single, poor, young and from the servant class. These young women had fallen pregnant and then had tried to conceal this from their families and employers, for fear of being condemned as immoral and, in the case of servants, being dismissed from service.

Illegitimacy is not an issue in most Western societies today. Very many people choose to live together before they marry and some do not marry at all yet still have children. This has been widely accepted in most communities in Britain since the 1970s if not a little earlier and the word ‘bastard’ has almost lost its original meaning.

However this was far from true in the 1800s, even if – as this case perhaps implies – London was seen as a more progressive city than some in Europe.

In December 1875 Samuel Whiffin was walking towards London Bridge on Lower Thames Street when he noticed a parcel lying near a doorway. As a policeman was approaching from the opposite direction Whiffin called him over and pointed out the package. PC Holly examined it and realized that it contained the body of an infant.

To his relief the baby was alive but very cold, so PC Holly carried it off to the Home for the Houseless Poor. This charity provided ‘nightly shelter and sustenance to the absolutely destitute working- classes, who are suddenly thrown out of employment by inclement weather’.* Having been looked after by the charity the child was next taken to the Homerton Workhouse and the search for its parents began.

Three days later Jans Hans, a Dutch labourer living at 3, Walburgh Street, St George-in-the-East, was brought before Sir Robert Carden at  Mansion House to be examined concerning the abandonment of the child. He was accused along with his sister, who was in St George’s hospital and too ill to attend.

The court heard the evidence of PC Holly as to the finding of the baby and then from a Mrs Plaggenine, a German woman who was landlady to Hans and his sister. Sir Robert was interested in the revelation that the siblings shared a single room in the property, and intimated that this was not normal. Mrs Plaggenine ignored, or did not understand, the magistrate’s question, but the suggestion of incest was left hanging in the air.

The policeman that had arrested Jan Hans questioned him about the child and reported that the man had admitted leaving it in the street on the previous Thursday. Hans told him that he had set the child down then retired to a safe spot where he could watch to see that someone stopped and rescued the baby. He had tried advertising the baby for adoption but had no success.

Hans and his sister were desperate, the Dutchman now explained to the alderman. They were very poor and couldn’t afford to raise a child. His sister had traveled from Holland ‘to be confined’ (to give birth) because the father refused to take responsibility for it. He added that ‘such things were a disgrace there’.

Presumably because Jan lived and worked in London this seemed like a good solution to Hans senior. If he sent his daughter to England she could give birth and the child would be brought up by strangers in a strange country but at least his family’s reputation would be protected. The child had a lucky escape and it is hard to imagine the mental state of Hans’ sister who seems to have been almost entirely left out of the decision-making process. She was ill in hospital while her brother disposed of her baby and the alderman magistrate cast further doubt on her morality by suggesting it was the product of an incestuous relationship.

Jan Hans was remanded in custody so that the courts could decide what to do with him and his sister. If they couldn’t and wouldn’t care for the baby (and no adopted family could be found) then it would grow up in the workhouse like Oliver Twist, perhaps never knowing of it Dutch heritage.

[from The Morning Post, Monday, 20 December, 1875]

A ‘child of the Jago’ in the Mansion House court

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The Old Nichol area as shown on Charles Booth’s poverty maps (1889) showing the density of poverty maked out in black and blue.

The Old Nichol had a fearsome reputation in late Victorian London. The collection of about 30 streets at the north end of Brick Lane was in the area now occupied by modern day Arnold Circus. In the late 1800s the Nichol was home to around 5-6,000 people and it was immortalised in fiction by Arthur Morrison in A Child of the Jago (1896). It was a far cry from modern hipster Shoreditch and Bethnal Green.

In 1875 the Nichol was where Henry Stuck lived. Henry was nine and his parents occupied a room at 5 Old Nichol Street one of the most notorious streets in the Nichol slum. It seems that Henry played away from home, preferring to hang out with other boys in a property in Lower Thames Street, south of the Mansion House in the old City of London. He was also known to stay with known thieves in a lodging house in Shoreditch.

In fact reports said that a ‘gang of boys, 40 or 50 in number’ were ‘in the habit of frequenting a small coffee house’ in the street which they had dubbed ‘the House of Lords’. There they seem to have created their own private playground to ape the behaviour of their elders and (at least in the minds of the disapproving authorities) hatch plots to commit petty crime.

In July 1875 Henry was in court. He was brought before Alderman Phillips at the Mansion House Police Court charged with begging. As he stood in the dock a description of the boys’ haunt was delivered in court by Henry’s father:

‘Here they regaled themselves with halfpenny and penny worths of coffee’, he told the magistrate, ‘their language and behaviour being… of the most disorderly and disgraceful character when any of the parents visited the room in search of their children’.

When he wasn’t begging Henry went about the City selling fuses.

Why hadn’t the coffee house been closed down by the police the Alderman wanted to know? They had no power to do an inspector of police explained.

‘On one occasion when the boys were found tossing in the house, [in other words they were gambling, which was a summary offence] the police took out a summons, but it was dismissed’.

As far as Mr Stuck was concerned Henry was ‘a very bad boy’ who had been away for up to three weeks recently. His mother spoke up for him though, arguing that it was her husband’s poor treatment of the lad that had driven him out. She asked the magistrate to send Henry to a Reformatory school where he might learn skills and be away from bad influences. She added that her husband ‘would not work to support his children, and starvation only started the boy in the face at home’.

She had painted  a grim picture of life in the Nichol where poverty was endemic and many children lived hand-to-mouth on the streets. Morrison’s novel way well have served to exaggerate the reality of the ‘blackest streets’ of East London but the truth was bad enough.

A Reformatory was a popular choice for working-class parents who struggled to support let alone control their offspring. Many seem to have used the courts to try to get them off their hands. But magistrates were wise to this and often asked the family to make a financial contribution to the child’s upkeep, which may have deterred some from seeking this solution.

If this was Mr Stuck’s intention then he would have to wait to see if the Alderman would oblige him. The magistrate ordered the boy to be taken to the workhouse while the circumstances of the case were investigated. Mr and Mrs Stuck left the court without him, to pursue their domestic squabble in private. As for Henry, who was only nine, his future was far from certain but hardly appeared rosy.

[from The Morning Post, Monday, July 26, 1875]

A bargeman loses his ear in a tussle over a fishy snack

Thomas Williams, a Thames lighterman,  was enjoying a drink in Buckmaster’s beershop in Lower Thames Street when Lawrence Lawrenson entered the premises, carrying some sticks under his arm. Lawrenson immediately began to ‘flourish them as if about to conjure’. He was probably going to try and raise some funds for a drink or two but then he noticed Williams.

Thomas was holding a small parcel of cooked fish wrapped in his handkerchief and the would-be entertainer made a grab for it. When the lighterman resisted and pushed him away Lawrenson fell on him, and they both tumbled on the floor of the shop. As he tried to escape his attacker Williams felt Lawrenson’s teeth on his ear, biting him.

The assault resulted in a piece of Williams’ ear being bitten off. The offending item was then produced in court (‘preserved in spirits of wine’, the reporter noted). Poor Williams testified that he had bled badly from the wound and the justice in the Mansion House court remanded Lawrenson in custody while a medical opinion was sought.

[From The Illustrated Police News etc, Saturday, July 21, 1877]