Tag: Metropolitan Meat Market

Who lived in 1880s Holloway? Milkmen, posties and the police it seems

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On Wednesday this week I began a slightly different blog series, which, while it will still focus on London in the nineteenth century will not always use the metropolitan police courts for its primary sources material. Today I’m using Charles Booth’s poverty maps and notebooks from the late 1880s and early 1890 to explore the roads around Tufnell Park (where I was born in the 1960s) to see what sort of a district it was at the time.

The previous blog was a reminder that while modern Upper Holloway is a densely populated urban sprawl, in the 1880s open green space still existed and drovers still brought flocks of sheep through the streets to the Metropolitan Meat Market at Caledonian Road.  A friend also pointed out that sheep herding continued in Finchley (where I later grew up) right up to the middle of the last century, the 1950s although the last recorded incident of sheep ‘rustling’ was in 1839.

My family lived in St George’s Avenue in the early 1960s, moving there just before or during the Second World War from a property not that far away. I can’t find Booth’s notebook entries for St George’s Avenue but we do have them for nearby street like Lady Margaret Road. Booth coloured Lady Margaret Road pink, meaning it was ‘fairly comfortable’ with ‘good ordinary earnings’. It was a better off street to some of those around it, notably Fulbrook Road (which was ‘not quite so good, used to be rough’ and Brecknock Road which had elements that were purple (meaning some residents were poor).

The people living in Warrender Road in 3 storey sub-letted houses were paying £34 to £40 rent per annum and were mostly milkmen, police and postmen. The two storied houses in Brecknock Road had seven rooms, so clearly houses of multiple occupation are not a ‘modern’ thing at all. It cost more to live in Southcote Road and Lady Margaret Road (£40-45 in the former, £52 in the latter) and so we’d expect the residents there to be clerks and better paid artisans and shop workers. For comparison £52 in 1889 would equate to about £4,250 today.

This area of North London was the setting for George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of Nobody (serialized in Punch in 1888-9, later published as a book in 1892). The fictionalized diary is kept by Charles Pooter, a London clerk, and records his misadventures in social climbing and reflects a contemporary view of the sort of people that were buying and renting property in the expanding Northern suburbs of London.  Pooter and his wife end son lived at ‘The Laurels’ (pictured, right below). It is very funny and well worth your time if you haven’t read it.

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Going east from Lady Margaret Road, Booth’s enumerators noted that while the people living in Celia Road, Corinne Road and Hugo Road were all ‘mostly comfortable’ the property they were living in was ‘all badly built’. Despite the houses being ‘not 10 years old’ they were ‘cracking above the windows’, had ‘very small backs’ and would ‘probably go down in character’. This might reflect rapid expansion in the area with builders and developers keen to cash in on the growth of London’s population and the desire to move out of the East End and centre.

He went on to comment that while the north west end of Upper Holloway was pink and the south red, suggesting comfortable living and some relative affluence, the north east was light and dark blue, revealing poverty. Moreover he reflected that ‘the best people are leaving’. Adding that if good new small houses for rent were built then the area could maintain its ‘pink’ status (like Stamford Hill) but if not there was a risk that it would only attract the poorer elements and ‘go rapidly down’.

Today the street layouts around Lady Margaret Road remain almost identical to the 1880s so in my final blog of the first trio I will head off to the area on foot to see what it looks like today. Hopefully you’ll see the results on Sunday or Monday of next week.

Sheep rustling in Holloway; a reminder of our rural past

The new Metropolitan Cattle Market, Copenhagen Fields

Today I am starting a new blog series which will look at the smaller events (and some larger ones) associated with London’s streets and the people that lived in them in the past.

I am going to start with Tufnell Park Road in north London because it very close to where I was born and my family lived. Today it is a very urban, built up area, with some fairly well heeled residents living alongside rougher areas of relative deprivation. In that respect then Tufnell Park and Holloway is quite like a lot of the capital in the 21st century.

In May 1867 Richard Allcock was walking along Kentish Town Road at about 10 or 11 at night when he saw a man approaching, driving a ‘drove’ of lambs towards him. He knew the man, John (or ‘Jack’) Read as a fellow drover from the Highgate area. He counted 30 lambs and recognized as a breed native to the Isle of Wight.

He hailed his colleague who replied with a cheery,  ‘holloa Dick, is that you? Will you have a glass of ale?’ Allcock happily agreed and the pair enjoyed a few beers at a nearby public house.

On the following Thursday Allcock ran into Read again, this time at the Metropolitan Cattle Market at Copenhagen Fields by Caledonian Road. The market had moved there just a dozen years earlier from Smithfield as the City authorities attempted to ‘improve’ the built up centre of London. This, and the fact that Allcock later stated that flocks of lambs were regularly graved in Tufnell Park reminds us that, in the mid Victorian period, the area was very far from being as urban as it is today.

At market Allcock was speaking to another drover about his conversation with Jack when he came over and took his mate to one side. ‘Don’t say anything to anyone that you saw me on Monday night’, he said. If Allcock was puzzled it all soon became clear. On the night in question the lambs, part of a larger flock of 71 belonging to John Fuller, had vanished. Police sergeant David Older (16Y) had arrested Read following a tip off.

Read denied stealing them and said he was in bed by 5 o’clock that night, and didn’t get up again that day. Allcock’s evidence undermined that because he’d been drinking with him between 10 and 11. The police were sure they had their man but he wasn’t acting alone. Read himself came close to admitting his crime but muttered that he was ‘not going to take this all alone’.

His solicitor asked for bail when he appeared before the magistrate at Clerkenwell but Mr Cooke refused. Apparently Read had previous for stealing livestock and the police were reluctant to see him at liberty. Off to prison he went while the investigation continued.

Looking at George W. Bacon’s map of London for 1888 Tufnell Park Road is much less built up that it is today. There is a cricket ground and considerable open space on the north side, in Upper Holloway, although there are buildings along most of the street. By the early 1900s the cricket ground is surrounded by housing and other property; all the green space has gone and a railway (the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction) runs across its northern edge.

In Charles Booth’s 1889/90 map of the northern suburbs Tufnell Park Road is solidly red in colour, marking it out as a comfortable middle class area with, as one might expect for a major thoroughfare, plenty of commercial property. Tufnell Park Road looks then, like a respectable street in a mixed working-class area but the situation does vary across Holloway, something I’ll pick in more detail by looking at Booth’s notebooks in the next blog.

[from Daily News, Thursday, June 6, 1867]

‘The wonder-stricken animal then tried to turn around’: An actual ‘bull in a china shop’

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According to some sources the expression ‘a bull in a china shop’ (used to refer to a clumsy person) has its origin sometime before it was first written down in Frederick Marryat’s 1834 novel, Jacob Faithful. As you can see from the illustration above however, the expression was in use well before then.

Londoners would have been familiar with the sight of bulls and others livestock being herded through the city streets in the 1800s. Smithfield market had been the destination for hundreds of thousands of beasts throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as drovers brought in animals to sold and then herded east to the slaughterhouses in Spitalfields and Whitechapel.

Occasionally an animal would escape and run amok but more frequently, as the records of the eighteenth-century Mansion House and Guildhall justice rooms reveal, they were deliberately separated from the herd and chased through the streets by boys and young men. These incidents of ‘bullock-hunting’ (akin to the annual bull run in Pamplona, Spain) caused chaos on the City streets and ended in prosecutions before the magistrates.

Bullock hunting seemed to tail of off in the 1830s and had pretty much disappeared by the Victorian period. Urban areas were ‘improving’ and the authorities and public were increasingly intolerant of rowdy folk customs that interrupted the ‘polite and commercial’ pattern of day-to-day life.

By the 1840s campaigners were active in trying to close Smithfield as a cattle and sheep market. They cited the noise, the smell and the impracticality of moving animals through the streets. The market had also become too small to serve the city’s needs and was required to expanded, but not in the centre. In 1852 work began on a new market in Islington, which opened in 1855 as the Metropolitan Cattle market. Smithfield underwent a rebuilding and emerged, in 1868, as the new Smithfield meat market, selling dead meat rather than live animals.

Two years before trading ceased at Smithfield John Waistcoat appeared in the Guildhall Police court charged with ‘driving cattle without a license, or a drover’s badge’. This tells us cattle were still being brought into the centre in December 1850 and, as we will see, were still causing chaos. It also reveals that ‘bullock hunting’ was still very much alive, long after it was supposedly stamped out.

Waistcoat was only 15 years of age when he arrested by City police constable 117. The officer had seen two animals running towards Skinner Street, ‘apparently very excited’ and being chased by a group of small boys. Waistcoat was older and seemed to be trying to catch them so the copper stopped him and demanded to see his badge and license. When he was unable to produce either he collared him.

Meanwhile the beasts continued to run wild in the City streets.

A Mr Pierce said he saw one bull run into Rose and Crown Court and enter his house, which operated as a workshop. A witness who was inside the property described what happened next:

‘I was in the room on the ground floor at work, when I heard a great noise outside, and the next minute, to my great surprise, I saw a bull’s head thrust into the passage over the little wicket gate at the street door. I immediately closed the room door and he [the bull] went into the passage’.

By this time his testimony had reduced the Guildhall court’s occupants to unrestrained laughter as they imagined the scene.

‘I felt the wainscotting giving way’ he continued, ‘and accordingly pressed against it on the inside, while the bull pressed against it from without. ‘I felt the partition cracking under the weight, and at the same time the females in the room began to scream and make such a noise that I believe the bull was frightened, and he passed along the passage and I thought he was going upstairs’.

The people in court continued to laugh as the poor man tried to explain what had occurred to the alderman justice on the bench. For the reporter from Reynold’s it must have seemed as if he had the scoop of the week; many of the daily reports from the police courts were mundane, this was anything but.

‘The wonder-striken animal then tried to turn around’, the witness told Sir Peter Laurie (the magistrate), ‘and in doing so he knocked down the whole of the partition between the passage and the room with his hind quarters, and backed out, sending the little wicket gate flying over to the public house opposite. The bull then got clear of the court, and left me master of the ruins’.

The damage was estimated by Pierce to be between £2 and £3 which might not sound a lot but probably equated to about two weeks wages for a skilled tradesman, so not insignificant. The question was, who was to pay? Sir Peter decided that Waistcoat was not responsible and discharged him. Instead he decided that the man that bought the cattle should pay, and directed Mr Pierce to send his bill to a Mr Lowe.

[from Reynolds’s Weekly News, Sunday, December 1, 1850]

An expensive day out in the capital for two east midlands butchers

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The Metropolitan Meat Market at Smithfield 

The City of London actively policed the market at Smithfield so as to protect the citizens of the capital from the ill effects of diseased meat. Prosecutions were brought to the Guildhall Police court by the Commissioners of Sewers who used inspectors backed up by doctors from the Medical Board of Health. Those caught selling or supplying meat deemed unfit for human consumption could expect hefty fines.

The process means that we get a rare chance to see how the meat trade operated in the late nineteenth century when of course nearly all animals were farmed outside of London (as it true today). In the earlier part of the century farmers would have driven their cattle into London to be sold at Smithfield and then slaughtered in the East End but drovers were increasingly being prevented from driving cattle and sheep though the crowded city streets, which were dominated by pedestrians, omnibuses, and cabs by 1889.

There were two prosecutions at Guildhall on the 19 June 1889 when Alderman Phillips was in the magistrate’s chair.

The first was John Stafford, a butcher from Wharf Street in Leicester who had sent four pieces of beef to the market on the 16 may that year. These had been inspected and found to be unfit. Stafford pleaded his innocence saying the meat was fine when he’d dispatched it but Dr Sedgewick of the Board of Health disagreed. He testified that he’d seen the meat and it was:

 ‘wet and emaciated, was very dark, and had a very offensive odour. It had’, he added, ‘the appearance of coming from an animal that had been ill for some time’.

The butcher had been brought south by an officer from the Leicestershire constabulary, detective-sergeant George Crisp, who had been asked to make inquiries by the Commissioners in London. Stafford said he’d bought the animal at a local fair then had killed it, and prepared the cuts himself.  The alderman was convinced the butcher had known the meat was bad and fined him a huge sum – £60 (£15 for each piece) – and added 3 guineas costs on top.

The next defendant was also from the east midlands. Francis Height was a butcher who gave his address as Polebrook in Northamptonshire. He was accompanied by Dennis Andrews, an police inspector in the Northants constabulary.

Height had sent a sheep to the market for sale and this had been seized by one of the market inspectors. Dr Saunders, for the Board, said the animal suffered from a lung disease and the meat was not fit to be eaten by people. The Northampton man admitted sending the sheep but again declared that he thought the meat was fine when he let it go. It was no defense and he was fined £20 and costs.

So that day the Commissioners of Sewers and the Guildhall court pulled in £80 in fines, a whopping £6,500 in today’s money. That would have bought you eight cows in 1889 so those butchers had a very expensive trip to the ‘smoke’ that week.

[from The Standard, Thursday, June 20, 1889]

Praise for one old copper while a sharp eyed dealer intercepts the theft of another…

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Apologies in advance for the convoluted puns in the title but sometimes it is very hard to resist!

1856 was the year which saw the passing of the County & Borough Police Act – the final piece of legislation that ensured that professional police forces (the forerunners of the ones in place today) were created. The first act (in 1829) had established the Metropolitan Police in London (excluding the old City which retained an independent force). There were a series of small local acts and the important 1839 Rural Constabulary Act – or County Police Act (which allowed but did not demand) that counties create their own bodies on the lines of the Met.

The 1856 act finally ended the voluntary system of parish constables that had existed since the medieval period, in towns the old watch had gradually been replaced by uniformed constables under a hierarchical system of control.

Britain’s experiment with modern policing was now fully underway.

At Westminster Police Court in January 1856 there were just two hearings that caught the attention of the newspaper reporter sent there by his editor.

James Thomas was charged with stealing a copper (not a policeman but ‘a large kettle, now usually made of iron, used for cooking or to boil laundry’). Thomas tried to sell the copper to Charles Clark, a metal dealer who had a shop on Queen Street in Pimlico. 

Clark was suspicious because he thought from ‘its appearance that it had been stolen’, so he turned Thomas away. But when the prisoner left Clark quickly alerted a police constable who arrested Thomas and took him into custody.

The man denied the charge at Westminster and was remanded for further examination.

The press also reported that Inspector Moran from B Division was retiring from his present post to take up a position as the inspector of police at the House of Lords. Inspector Moran had served B Division for twenty years, so almost from the creation of the Met itself and the magistrate thanked him publicly for his efforts.

Mr Arnold told him:

‘I ought not, perhaps, to express regret at an event which I hope is conducive to your interests, but I will take this opportunity of publicly offering my testimony to the zeal and ability you have always exhibited in the discharge of your duties in this court, and of stating my entire satisfaction with your conduct in every instance brought under my notice’.

Praise indeed and evidence perhaps of the by now fairly widespread satisfaction with, and recognition of, established professional policing – something that was far from evident in the first decade of the Met’s existence.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Saturday, January 19, 1856]

A ‘ruffian’ at Clerkenwell

The Police Courts are filled with stories of domestic abuse, sadly an altogether too common occurrence in the nineteenth century. Women had few rights under law, and married women arguably less than most. Men frequently deserted their wives, who then struggled to keep the home and family together in the absence of the main breadwinner.

If  the man stayed and his spouse objected to his drinking or the hours he kept she could expect regular chastisements that often involved casual violence. In my research into the eighteenth-century courts plenty of ‘domestic’ incidents came before the justices of the peace, and the same is true for the 1800s.

Women could prosecute but it was a dangerous game to play. If the magistrate sided with them and many, (like Mr Lushington at Thames) heartedly disapproved of such ‘brutish behaviour’, they risked the imprisonment of the main earner in the family. If he avoided prison he would probably be fined – another expense that the household shared.

If all that happened was a reprimand then she faced an uncomfortable few days or weeks following the court appearance where he might well take out his anger on her at being summoned to such a public humiliation.

The best outcome – if the marriage had really broken down (and there was no divorce for ‘ordinary’ women in the 1800s) was a court sanctioned separation, with maintenance.

This is what Mrs Ganay achieved in the autumn of 1879. Her husband James worked at the Metropolitan Meat Market as a porter. He was brought before the magistrate at Clerkenwell by Mr Moore, a representative of the Associate Institute for the Protection of Women.

Moore  claimed that Ganay had been in the habit of beating his wife for years but she had always, loyally, refused to prosecute him. She said that when he was sober he was  decent hard-working man but drink transformed him and nowadays he was ‘almost always drunk’.

Having left her 10 weeks ago Ganay had returned demanding ‘food, money and clean linen’, and when she had asked him where he had been he simply ‘struck her in a most savage manner, knocking her down’.

I suspect this must have been the last straw for the poor women who sought the help of the association. The magistrate now acted to separate the couple (by ‘judicial separation’) and sent Ganay to gaol for 10 weeks with hard labour. He added that when related he would have to support his wife (but not live with her) to the tune of 5s a week.

We have no idea of course whether this maintenance was ever forthcoming or for how long it lasted.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, November 2, 1879]