Tag: money

‘It’s no use crying over spilt milk’, one young charmer tells the maid he has ruined. Bastardy at Westminster

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The poor servant girl ‘undone’ by the master (or another male of the house) is a well-worn trope of Victorian fiction. That said it is fairly rare for stories like this to reach the newspapers, at least in the reports that I have been looking through for the last three years.

In mid October 1879 an unnamed domestic servant applied for a summons at Westminster Police court to bring Edward Salmon to court. She alleged that he was the father of her unborn child and that he had run away from his responsibilities and left her ‘ruined’.

Salmon was not in court, nor was his mother – Mrs Hermina J. Salmon – for whom the girl had worked. She had employed as a maid in the salmon’s house at 55 Oxford Road, Ealing and the girl told the magistrate that Salmon had ‘accomplished her ruin in the early part of last year’. When it became obvious that she was pregnant she was sacked and turned out of the house.

This was the usual consequence of intimate relationships between female servants and male members of the household, regardless of whether the sexual relationship was consensual or not. In this case Mrs Salmon clearly held her maid responsible. She told her in a letter that she could not have been ‘a “correct” girl when she entered service, for had she been so she would not have allowed [her son] to take liberties with her’.

Edward had also written to the girl (who had been asking for money) telling her that she should not ‘get cut up about it’. Instead she should:

‘keep up her spirits, and although he was sorry, it was “no use crying over spilt milk”.

He also advised her not to threaten him for he would be happy to ‘let the law take its course’.

He warned her to stay away until ‘any unpleasantry passed over’ (until she’d had the baby) and that she was not tell his mother either.

He wasn’t afraid, he said, of his character being dragged through the mud because ‘it was so bad at present it could hardly be made worse’.

What a charmer.

Edward Salmon had sent the girl £2, as had his mother, but they promised no more saying that was all they could afford. As a result the servant, showing considerable courage and determination, had gone to law.

Mr. D’Eyncourt was told that Edward Salmon was not available and nor was his mother. Both were represented by a lawyer. There was a certificate from Mrs Salmon explaining her absence (the reasons were not given by the paper however) but a witness appeared to depose that he’d seen Edward boarding a ship at the docks. Edward Salmon had taken a ship bound for India and was currently in Paris, although his lawyer said that he would return in a ‘few weeks’.

D’Eyncourt declared that the summons had been duly served and so the law required Salmon to appear. That explained why he ‘had bolted’. He issued a maintenance order for the upkeep of the child – 5sa week until it reached 15 years of age. Salmon would also have to pay cost of 25s, and he backdated the order to January, which was when the maid had first made her application.

I do think this case is unusual but perhaps because of the determination of this woman to hold the father of her unborn child to account. To take on a social ‘superior’ in this way was a really brave thing to do. The court also supported her, naming Salmon publically (making it harder for him to shirk his responsibility) and handing down a maintenance order, while keeping her name out of the news.

Her reputation may have been ruined by the careless action of a young man who took advantage but she had won back some self respect at least. Whether he ever returned or made and kept up his payments to her and his child is a question I can’t answer. I would doubt it but at least this young woman had tried.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper (London, England), Sunday, October 19, 1879]

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

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The Alhambra Theatre of Variety, Leicester Square c.1874

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

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

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

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

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

‘Then you wont get it’, he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bit of good luck quickly turns into a personal disaster for one London plumber

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An 1865 issue Victorian florin (not actual size…)

I suppose that in these days of contactless payment fewer and fewer of us use real money any more. Even when I go the pub I rarely pay with case, and never do so in shops any more. Am I unusual, I doubt it?

If you do use cash and a barman or shop assistant gives you change, do you check it? If its short I imagine you’d say something but what if they give you back too much? I expect most of us would quietly offer a prayer to  the gods of good fortune and walk away.

That may be what Edward Pearce did in September 1892 as he paid for drinks at the bar of the Orange Tree pub in the Euston Road. The 48 year old plumber insisted that he’d handed over a florin for two glasses of ale, for which he was given 1s 6d in silver, and a further 4d in bronze as change. A florin was worth around 24 old pence, or a tenth of a pound. Since a shilling was 12 pence, we can assume his drinks cost him twopence. Today in my favourite pub I’ll pay about £10 for two ‘glasses of ale’.  Edward was paying around 68p in today’s money.

However, the barman quickly realized his mistake when he saw that instead of a florin Edward had only given him 2d  and so wasn’t entitled to any change at all. He demanded the money back but Pearce refused, insisting he’d handed over a two-shilling piece (the florin).

The police were called and since Pearce stuck to his story and the barman stuck to his the case came before the magistrate at Marylebone Police court where the plumber was tried for theft. It may have been an honest mistake or simply a cheeky attempt to get away with a bit of good luck. Sadly for Pearce all he ended up with was a week’s incarceration with hard labour. A little harsh even by late Victorian standards.

[from The Illustrated Police News, Saturday, September 17, 1892]

‘It was an impulsive theft, and I beg for mercy’: the sad fall of an unemployed clerk

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Robert Stevens been out of work for some time when he entered a baker’s shop in Mile End in May 1859. Stevens had previously earned a living as a clerk, a gateway situation for someone hoping to move up the social ranks from the working to the middle classes.

The nineteenth century saw the establishment of the middling classes as the solid centre of Victorian life with their values of hard work, education, thrift, and family life. The social climbing of members of the middle classes were gently mocked in the 1892 novel The Diary of a Nobody where the character of Mr Pooter struggles to be taken seriously by superiors, friends and tradesmen alike.

In an unfortunate coincidence another clerk was in Mr Bradbrook’s  bakery that day and he was collecting money on behalf a firm of coal merchants. The baker had opened his till and placed four gold sovereigns on the counter just as Stevens approached to buy some bread. As the collections clerk and the shopkeeper discussed the account Stevens dashed in and swept the money from the counter and ran out of the shop.

The baker and John Griffiths (the clerk) recovered from their initial shock and rushed off after him, catching him up a few streets away. He had one coin on him having lost the others in his haste, these were picked up by Griffiths  in the chase. The unfortunate young man was handed over to the police and brought before the magistrate at Worship Street Police court to be dealt with by the law.

Robert Stevens pleaded guilty and apologized for his crime. ‘I went into the shop to buy’, he told Mr Hammill, ‘but but catching sight of the gold lying close to my hand, was seized with an irresistible desire of appropriating it to my own service, and unfortunately did so.

‘It was, I assure you, an impulsive theft, and I beg for mercy, having long been out of employment as a clerk’.

John Griffiths spoke up for the prisoner and urged the justice to show mercy and be lenient. As a fellow clerk he perhaps understood better than most how easy it was to lose a ‘respectable’ position whether because of the precarious state of the economy or the capricious  nature of employers.

It did little or no good however, Mr Hammill ignored the request for compassion and sent Stevens to prison for four months at hard labour. Having served a sentence in a mid nineteenth-century goal I doubt that Robert would have found white-collar work easy to come by afterwards. He was dogged by a criminal record, albeit one of his own making, and the stain of the prison would be on him. Hopefully he recovered and found a new path but this is another example of how a lack of real support for those that find themselves unemployed can have catastrophic and life changing consequences.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Monday, May 23, 1859]

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:

‘Getting away with it’ in Victorian London: two cautionary tales from Marlborough Street Police court

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Here are two theft charges, heard at the Marlborough Street Police court in 1889, neither of which resulted in convictions or further action. There must have been huge numbers of pre-trial hearings which were resolved at summary level and yet we have very few surviving documentation about this important tier of the criminal justice system. There are a handful of late nineteenth-century minute books for the Thames Police office, a few for Bow Street a little earlier, and then most of what survives is for the early twentieth century.

Which means, unfortunately, that historians of crime are perhaps overly reliant  on the reporting of the summary (magistrate) process by the Victorian press. I say ‘unfortunately’ because the newspapers were, understandably, selective. In each of the daily reports from Thames, Bow Street, Marylebone or the several other metropolitan police courts the editors pick one, perhaps two cases out of dozens that came before them. In a week a police court magistrate would hear hundreds of cases but only a dozen or fewer would be written up for the newspapers’ readership.

Historians of the eighteenth-century justice system are well aware that for some periods of the 1700s the publishers of the Old Bailey Proceedings (which recounted trials that took place at what was to become the Central Criminal Court) often omitted cases which ended in acquittal for fear of demonstrating to offenders that there were successful ways to avoid conviction. One of the purposes in reporting trials of criminals was show that crime did not pay so anything that suggested you could ‘get away with it’ was unhelpful at best.

So I wonder why these two cases were the ones chosen by the editor of the Standard newspaper in April 1889 to represent the business of the Marlborough Street court?

First Clara Newton was accused of stealing £3 and 3s from a man she’d met in Oxford Street. Clara appeared in court dressed fashionably and wearing a red hat with a green feather. One imagines she cut quite a dash, and this might explain the reporter’s interest in her. She described herself as a barmaid, 21 years of age, who lived on the Euston Road. On April 22 1889 she met Captain Torry in the street and he invited her to have a drink with him.

The pair sat in a public house enjoying each other’s company until it was time to leave. Torry (rather ungallantly) ‘declined to see her home’ but did give her the money to take a cab. Now, I wonder whether he was hoping to extend the evening or perhaps even thought Clara was something other than a barmaid. Who knows?

She accepted his offer of a cab and asked to be shown to a waiting room where she could rest comfortably before the cab arrived. The captain told her where to go and was about to leave himself when she asked him to wait in the pub, presumably to ensure that she caught the cab safely. He agreed.

However, some moments afterwards he happened to ‘peep out of the bar door’ and saw her walking quickly away from the pub, and not towards the waiting room. Instinctively he checked his pockets and found his purse was missing. He grabbed his hat and followed afterwards, losing her briefly and having to ask a cab driver where she’d gone.

Torry caught up with her on Hanover Street and handed her over to the police. It was about 12 at night and the constable that took her into custody told Mr Hannay at Marlborough Street that she’d been searched at the station but the captain’s purse was not on her. She did have money – 2 sovereigns and 4s in silver to be exact – but none of the coins matched those that the captain thought he’d lost.

While there was a clear suspicion about Clara there was no real proof and so she was discharged. This result brought a smattering of applause from the court so either her friends were there to support her or the public felt that the captain was a ‘blackguard’ who had got what he deserved.

Next up was John Helmslie Hunt who was charged with trying to defraud a Piccadilly saddler named Garden. Hunt, using the name ‘Captain J.H. Hunt’ and giving an address in Wotton-under-Edge  (in Gloucestershire) had entered the saddler’s workshop in August 1888 and asked to purchase a holster flask. He was given the flask on credit since he appeared genuine and promised to pay the following day.

He never came back however. Not long afterwards inquiries made by Mr Garden ascertained that Hunt had pawned the flask on the Hampstead Road and had then disappeared. In fact he’d traveled to Canada where he’d stayed for several months before returning to London in the spring of 1889. In his absence a warrant had been issued for his arrest and in April the police caught up with him and thus he too was put in the dock before Mr Hannay on the same day as Clara.

It took a while for the magistrate to hear the case against Hunt but in the end he came to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to send him for trial. Quite simply he doubted whether a jury would convict him so there was no public interest in sending him to the ‘Bailey. He too was released.

Both cases were unusual or at least ‘interesting’ but both showed that con men and women could defraud the unwary or steal from the distracted. Perhaps that was why the editor of the Standard deemed them suitable material for his daily review of the business of the police courts: they were there to warn his readership to take more care of their property and not to be fooled by people who looked genuine but were anything but.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, April 24, 1889]

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 in June this year. You can find details here:

Fishy goings on in Pimlico land two servants in prison

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For some reason the morning paper on Halloween 1857 chose to concentrate on thefts by servants and other employees. Several of the stories from the Police courts told of light-fingered employees at banks, shops, and in the homes of the wealthy.

In the 1700s Daniel Defoe had commented that servants ‘beggar you inchmeal’ meaning they stole small amounts of property on such a regular basis as to gradually impoverish the rich. He exaggerated of course but theft by servants was one of the great fear and complaints of those employing them. Given the poor remuneration given to domestic servants it is hardly surprising that some chose to steal when they got the opportunity, to say nothing of the abuse many female servants suffered at the hands of their masters and their male offspring.

On October 30 1857 Margaret Ward appeared at Westminster Police court and was remanded for further examination by the justice, Mr Paynter. She worked for a Mr Bicknell at his home in Upper Ebury Street, Pimlico and he had accused her of stealing a £5 note from his writing desk.

He had questioned her after the money was discovered missing but she denied any part in it. However the court was told that Margaret had recently bought some fine new clothes and, since she’d arrived in service with ‘very bare of clothing’ suspicions were heightened and he had dismissed her at once.

A ‘very respectable’ woman then testified that she had previously employed Miss Ward and that following her dismissal by Mr. Bicknell Margaret had turned up at her door ‘decked in finery’. She was surprised that the girl had managed to earn enough to buy such nice clothes but Margaret allegedly told her that ‘there were other ways of getting money’. A local baker also declared that Margaret had come to his shop and had changed a £5 note, the court was then shown clothing valued at that amount that the police had found in her possession.

Margaret Ward was prosecuted at the Westminster Quarter Session in November 1857. In the face of the overwhelming evidence gathered against her, the 19 year-old servant pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six weeks in the house of correction.

Joseph Tonks followed Margaret into the dock at Westminster. He was much older (52) and gave his occupation as a fishmonger. Tonks was employed by Mr Charles in Arabella Row , also in Pimlico, and was accused of stealing some of his master’s fish.

Tonks had been in Mr Charles’ service for eight years and the master fishmonger had ‘considerable confidence’ in him. He paid him £1 5sa week which was a pretty good wage in 1857. However, after fish began to go missing Mr Charles grew suspicious of his his long term employee and had him followed. Tonks was seen visiting a broker in Artillery Row on more than one occasion and on a Thursday evening he was stopped and searched. Two whitings ‘were found in his hat, and five herrings concealed about his person’.

Clearly something fishy was going on…

The broker was summoned to court and testified that Tonks had called on his to borrow some paint and a brush and wanted to buy his wife a present. The journeyman fishmonger admitted his guilt and opted to have his case dealt with by the magistrate instead of going before a jury. This probably saved him a longer prison sentence but Mr Paynter  still sent him away for six months at hard labour since the court was told that Tonks had probably been robbing his master on a regular basis for some time.

Tonks seems to have had less of a cause than Margaret to steal from his boss. He was quite well paid and trusted and well thought of. But we don’t know what else was going on in his life. All sorts of pressures can pile up and force people to desperate measures. Then again maybe he just thought it was too easy an opportunity to pass up. He’d got away with it for so long that it had probably become routine for him to pack a couple of fish in his hat for treats.

On release from prison both Tonks and Margaret Ward would have struggled to find good work without the necessary references, and that was the most serious punishment of all.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Saturday, October 31, 1857]

An open window is an invitation to thieves

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Ellen Dunn was sitting at her desk in the evening, doing her household accounts. She had her receipts and an account book open in front of her, and a bag containing around £12 in cash on the floor beside her chair. The widow lived at 68 Warden Road in Kentish Town and her daughter was in a room upstairs.

At about eight o’clock Mrs Dunn heard a noise in the room. Looking up she watched with horror as the window ‘was thrown open’ and someone entered the room. Ellen ran out of the room to the front door to see who was breaking in but couldn’t get out; someone or something was preventing her from opening her own front door.

She went back into the room and leaned out of the open window and yelled ‘police!’ This brought her daughter running downstairs to see what the matter was. There was no one visible in the street but Mrs Dunn’s bag of money was missing. The next morning the empty bag was found in the front garden – Mrs Dunn realized had been burgled.

Fortunately the police had a witness from within the Dunn’s own household. Amy Sefton was a 14 year-old serving girl, probably very junior, but she proved to be a very capable young woman. She said she had seen a group of lads watching the house just before the robbery had taken place. She saw a boy she recognized as someone who lived locally run away from the house clutching a bag that seemed very similar to the one found that morning.

He took the bag to his mates who were clustered around a lamppost. Using the light it offered the boys peered inside. ‘Here is a go: there is some money!’ one of them cried, clearly delighted with the prize.

Then they removed the cash, stuffed it in their pockets and dashed off. One of them was dispatched to throw away the bag and this is when they spotted Amy watching them. They swore at her but she held her ground and made sure she got a good look at them. This resulted in the police picking up a lad one 17 named William Hine, who was produced at Marylebone Police court on the following day.

Hine was charged (along with several others in absentia) with entering a dwelling house and stealing £12. It was a serious property crime and the magistrate remanded William in custody so the police investigation could continue. The justice made a point of commending Amy for her quick thinking and bravery.

This would be a hard case to prove however; Amy said she would be able to identify William and one or other of the lads but without forensics or any of the money being found on them the police may have struggled to build a case against them. Hine doesn’t feature in the Old Bailey records or in the Digital Panopticon. His absence from both doesn’t mean he wasn’t prosecuted further but without a clear trail I wonder if, on this occasion, the lads got away with it. On thing is likely however: Mrs Dunn would have been careful not to leave her windows open in future.

[from The Standard, Thursday, September 28, 1893]

The old ‘money changing’ scam on the Docks

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For many people arriving in London in the 1880s the capital was a stopover en route to somewhere else; for many European Jews that ‘somewhere else’ was the golden medina, the United States of America. This had been the case for thousands of Irish migrants in the 1840s, fleeing famine and poverty after potato blight devastated their lives. Very many settled in London, Liverpool and Birmingham but plenty had the ambition to make a fresh start outside of the British Empire, an empire that had palpably failed to support them when they needed it.

London’s docks must have heaved with people looking for a passage across the Atlantic in the 1800s and a similar scene would have played out at Liverpool. Men like Messers, Koosch and Schack, two German travellers, asked around to find a berth on a steamer bound for Ellis Island. These two had struck lucky and secured a place on the Etna which had been built and launched in Greenock in August 1854.

However their luck was soon to run out when they were taken in by a fairly straightforward conman. John Louis befriend the pair and explained that he was a provisons dealer and was also travelling on the Etna. They had plenty of English money but no American dollars. That was no problem, Louis assured them, he was in an ideal position to change the money for them so they’d welcomed on to US soil with open arms.

Delighted, the two friends handed over all their money (about £10)  and arranged to meet Louis the following day. Of course he never showed up and they soon realised they’d been scammed and  robbed.

With the help of the local police Koosch and Schack traced Louis and he was arrested and brought before the Lord Mayor at Mansion House Police court. He was represented by a solicitor and he promised to return every penny that his client had taken. This must have been a relief for the two Germans whose chances of making a new life in America would have been devastated before they’d even arrived had they been force to travel with nothing.

But for the Lord Mayor this wasn’t enough; he needed to demonstrate to the public that anyone behaving in such a ‘villainous and disgraceful way’ could expect no mercy in his court. He sent Louis to prison for four months with hard labour.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, September 18, 1883]

‘Oh don’t be so hard on me,’ pleads an Irish philosopher and gentleman of the road

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I had a ‘conversation’ yesterday on social media with someone asking how he should act when homeless people ask for money in the street. Should he give money, or buy them food or a coffee, or should he simply take the time to chat to them? It is a complex question and I quite understood his dilemma; some charities (like the Salvation Army) tell us not to give money, believing it perpetuates the problem. Others suggest we should to help them get the basic necessities of life.

I’m also often told that ‘they will spend it on drink or drugs’, not that it is any of my business how they spend whatever money they have.

Homelessness, vagrancy and begging are not modern social issues, they have been with us for as long as humans have lived in societies. The ‘modern’ vagrancy laws in Britain have their roots in the Tudor period with laws to punish ‘sturdy beggars’ and the building of houses of correction to enforce them. By the Victorian period poverty was endemic and being dealt with by the Poor Law, with workhouses operating as a deterrent to the ‘work-shy’ in the belief that poverty was a personal failing, not a product of society or a capitalist economic system.

There was also limited understanding of mental health and very little state provision for those that suffered. That much is obvious form so many of the cases I’ve written about on this site. I am reluctant to say that nineteenth-century society didn’t care about the poor and homeless and mentally ill, just that it didn’t really understand them and the underlying reasons for their actions.

St. George Gregg was someone who often found himself in trouble with the authorities in the late 1830s and early 40s. He’d come up before the Police court magistrates at Queen Square on more than one occasion in 1840 and was there again in early May that year.

Gregg was an Irishman and was frequently charged for being drunk. He was about to be convicted and fined by Mr Burrell when he raised his hand and asked if he could say a few words. The justice agreed and listened.

The defendant held out a small book, offering it to the chief usher to give to the magistrate. He explained that he’d been writing a book ‘on the currency question’ and thought his worship might like a copy. Mr. Burrell wasn’t interested.

‘I don’t want your book. What have you to say to the charge against you?’

‘I walk frequently thirty miles a day’, replied Gregg, ‘That fatigues me, and if I have nothing to eat the liquor has an effect sooner. I had no dinner yesterday, in fact I had no “tin”.’

The magistrate didn’t know what he meant by ‘tin’, so asked him.

‘Tin is money’, the man explained, ‘and having no  money I had no dinner’.

He’d tried to sell his books for money but seemingly had no takers to he’d started to sing in the streets and that way he’d raised a few pennies which he spent on drink.

‘You might have purchased victuals with that’, Mr Burrrell remarked.

‘Oh, sure, I wasn’t victuals hungry, I was grog hungry’ Gregg shot back. ‘I was like the captivating chandler, wanted I wanted in starch, I made up in blue’, he said, warming to his theme.

‘So I had toddy till I had but a single copper left, then devil a bed had I, and was making my way to the church-yard to go to bed on a tombstone, when the police found me quarters’.

He added that he’d written a study of ‘ambition’ and would send the magistrate a copy.

‘I don’t want your book. You are fined 5s’ was Mr. Burrell’s response.

Gregg hadn’t got one shilling let alone five and the justice must have realised this. What was the point of fining a homeless tramp anyway? Gregg attempted to barter with the justice, offering him books that he probably hadn’t written (and certainly hadn’t ‘published’ as he’d insisted he had) as part payment of the penalty. Burrell was having none of it and ordered him to be taken away; if he couldn’t pay the fine he’d have to go to prison.

‘Oh don’t be so hard on me’, pleaded the Irishman, ‘I want to finish a poem’. He was led away protesting his freedom.

Society didn’t understand George Gregg. He didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t conform to what was expected of him. He chose to live by his wits and on his own terms. Perhaps he was a ‘popular philosopher’, who wrote tracts in notebooks or scraps of paper that nobody read. His logical response to accusations of being drunk (drinking on an empty stomach) or his choice of how to spend the money he’d earned (on drink because he was thirsty after singing and walking) would be quite reasonable if he was a ‘normal’ member of society. Because he was an outsider and had chosen to live differently to others, the law treated him as a problem. It punished him rather than helped him. I’m not entirely sure we have made much progress in the last 180 odd years.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Thursday, May 7, 1840]