Tag: Mr Biron

The death of a child is always a tragedy, this seems even worse somehow.

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Denmark Hill, Camberwell near the turn of the century.

1888 is a year forever synonymous with brutality and murder. Between August and November that year the papers were to become obsessed with the failure of the police to catch the ‘Whitechapel fiend’, the man that has gone down in history as ‘Jack the Ripper’. 

But the murders of the as yet undiscovered ‘Ripper’ were not the only killings in London that year, even if they were the most ‘newsworthy’.

In late May a man was brought before the sitting magistrate at Lambeth Police court, charged with murdering his infant son. 

William Albert Pierrepoint, a 31 year old hammerman from Camberwell, was accused of killing Sidney Gilbert John Pierrepoint, a child just one year and 10 months old*. 

The tragedy had happened on a Saturday evening as the Pierrepoints were leaving their lodgings at 158 Neate Street, Camberwell. As was often the case when a family left a small crowd had gathered outside. Some would have come to wish the couple and their children well, others to gawp, perhaps some even to revel in their neighbours’ misfortune. William Pierpoint was out of work, and seemingly had been for some time. The late 1880s were hard years for the British economy and the ranks of the out of work and underemployed grew, leading to protest rallies in Trafalgar Square and riots in Pall Mall. In 1888 the word ‘unemployment’ entered the Oxford English dictionary for the first time. 

As the family carried their small collection of personal belongings into the street to pile onto a barrow and made ready to leave, William, already slightly the worse for drink, railed against the world and his landlord. Perhaps because they were behind with the rent the Pierpoints had some of their furniture detained; most significantly their bed.

This was too much for the hammerman who suddenly raised his infant son up high and, with a cry of ‘Patty, Patty, you shall be the victim’, threw it to the ground. 

Stunned by what he’d done William stood there for a moment until the crowd became agitated. As they moved towards him and child a woman was heard to shout: ‘Don’t hurt him; he will have enough to answer for’. William fled and was picked up some time afterwards, even more drunk at the Little Wonder beer house nearby. 

The policeman that arrested him said that he went quietly when confronted with the assault on his child. ‘I had no intention of doing such a thing’, he explained as he was led to the station. Interviewed by Inspector Webb at 11 at night Pierpoint must have realised the enormity of his situation and tried to defend himself. ‘No one saw me do it’, he said, claiming that the ‘child fell off my arm’. 

In court before Mr Biron he said little except to repeat that the child’s death was not intentional. ‘I let the child fall’, he stated in the dock. The magistrate was unconvinced: ‘He did not let if fall, but dashed it to the ground’. William Pierpoint was first remanded and later indicted for murder and sent for trial at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey. 

The case came on in July 1888 and there the Pierpoints’ landlady, Sophia Moon, gave the court a bit more context for the events of that fateful evening in May. By the 26 May William owed her 19s 6d, or six weeks’ arrears. She had asked him for this and he told he hadn’t anything to give her. He had piled the family’s belongings into a barrow but told her she could have all the furniture – ‘You can have the b_____ lot’ he said, and apparently said quite a lot more, none of which she was prepared to repeat in a courtroom. 

He threw his key down and stormed off, his youngest child (Gilbert) in his arms. It was soon after this the then that the tragedy occurred. Despite William’s comment to the police there were witnesses that saw him throw his child to the ground. Eliza Howell, a leather dresser’s wife, saw it and later identified William to police at the beer house. Sarah Store also witnessed William’s actions, saying he was ‘dreadfully excited’ and had offered to hold the baby urging William to go and get the bed from upstairs. 

She was insistent that that child had not fallen, William had thrown it down. Others witnessed this and so despite his not guilty plea, his agitated state of mind, and the fact that several testified to his usual good nature towards children, Pierrepoint was convicted of murder. The jury strongly recommended mercy but judge passed sentence of death on him. 

William Pierrepoint did not hang for his son’s murder. On 22 July 1888 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reported that a respite had been received at Wandsworth Prison, where he was being held. Justice Hawkins, the trail judge, had added his name to that of the jurors in asking for clemency and it seems as if Pierrepoint’s sentence was then commuted to life imprisonment. 

It’s a very sad story, all arising from the stress that poverty can cause, leaving one child dead, and depriving the other of his father and Mrs Pierrepoint of her husband. And all for the want of 20 shillings, or about £80 today. 

Curiously, but not related, the name Pierrepoint is as associated with hanging as 1888 is with murder; from 1931 to his resignation in 1956, Albert Pierrepoint either assisted or was the lead executioner who hanged between 450-600 persons in his 25-year career. Of these 200 were war criminals executed as a result of the Nazi atrocities in WW2. 

Writing in his autobiography, published in 1974, Pierrepoint reflected on the death penalty (which by then had been suspended): 

… is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree. There have been murders since the beginning of time, and we shall go on looking for deterrents until the end of time. If death were a deterrent, I might be expected to know. It is I who have faced them last, young lads and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown. It did not deter them then, and it had not deterred them when they committed what they were convicted for. All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder.

[From Morning Post, 28 May 1888; Daily News 29 May 1888; Ipswich Journal 31 May 1888; The Standard, 31 May 1888; Reynolds Newspaper 2 June 1888; Lloyds’ Weekly Newspaper 22 July 1888]

*soem reports say that ‘Sidney’ was 2 and half years old.

‘Your husband can take everything you have and sell it’. Why the right to vote really mattered.

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1882 saw an important breakthrough in women’s rights. Not quite as important as the vote perhaps, but more practical, at least for women who worked for a living (as most working-class women did). The Married Women’s Property Act (45 & 46 Vict. c.75) fundamentally changed the prevailing principle under which women who married became subservient to their husbands in law. The legal term of ‘feme covert’ effectively removed the rights of married women to any property they owned, including those they brought into the marriage or those they acquired afterwards, even if those goods were purchased with money they had earned themselves.

It was a disgraceful state of affairs that the 1882 act swept away. Women now had a legal identity; they could buy, sell and own property, and could sue and be sued in law. They were also now liable for any debts they ran up (so the new legal status has some drawbacks!)

However, while the act was passed in 1882 it was not applied retrospectively. This meant that women who married before the act became law were not protected by it. This led to the following situation at Westminster Police court in September 1888.

Two women came to see Mr Biron to ask for his help. Neither were named by the court reporter who seems to have been using their examples to highlight the limitations of the law in this area. The first applicant was a ‘decently dressed’ if poor woman whose husband had left her six months previously. She came to beg the magistrate for a separation order because he’d come back suddenly and had started to sell the contents of her home.

He didn’t work, she said, and chose instead to sell the things she’d bought with her own money. He had a history of violence towards her and she was now afraid that as well as stripping the family home of furniture and clothes he would start hitting her again.

‘You could have brought him here for the assault’, Mr Biron told her.

‘I did’, she said, breaking down in the witness box, ‘but, like a fool, I did did not go against him’.

She had brought him to court before for his violence but when asked to testify had, like so many women before and since, refused to give evidence against her abusive partner.

‘Can he take my bit of furniture?’

Having ascertained that she had married 18 years ago (in 1870) Mr Biron told her:

‘Your husband can take everything you have and sell it’.

‘It cannot be so cruel’, the woman exclaimed, with tears rolling down her cheeks.

The magistrate assured her that he would put a stop to any violence but there was nothing else he could do for her. ‘That is the law, madam’.

The second woman had a similar tale to tell. Her husband had lost a good job and didn’t seem inclined to look for another one. Instead he had started to sell their marital property, much of which she had scrimped and saved to acquire. He had even removed the children’s bed while they had been sleeping in it!

She too had been married since 1870 and so she too was unable to benefit form the 1882 legislation. Through her tears this woman told the magistrate that she could see no future for her and her children but the workhouse. ‘She bought the furniture, and if her husband could sell it, that was a bad law’.

Mr Biron agreed, ‘that is possible’ he said. The law had been altered he added, ‘but it doesn’t affect you’. This was little comfort to the poor woman who shuffled out of the box and made her way out of court.

It was ‘bad law’ and now I believe we wouldn’t legislate in such a way that only protected women after a certain point. There is an acceptance that retrospective legislation is sometimes necessary to redress long-standing grievances and legal wrongs. I cant imagine why this wasn’t done in the 1880s unless we are to understand that the male dominated political system didn’t think that women mattered that much, especially the wives of working-class men. Which is why, of course, women needed the vote. Once women had the vote men could no longer ignore their voices and their rights.

[from The Morning Post, Monday, September 10, 1888]

Dangerous dogs or well loved pets? Two magistrates, two very different interpretations of the law.’

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The law is, of course, open to interpretation. In the 1880s the law concerning the control of pet dogs was, seemingly, as a clear as mud and so we can see that two magistrates chose to apply it in two different ways.

At Lambeth Mr Biron was in the chair on 8 June 1886. The clerk produced a string of dog owners were charged, by the treasury, with failing to keep their dogs under control. For the magistrate the law depended on how one interpreted the word ‘control’.

In a number of cases dogs had been found by police, wandering 20-30 yards from their owners or their owner’s home. If the dogs were muzzled, not on a lead, or no one appeared to be in control of them, more often than not a policeman would take their collars and take them back to the station. In those instances, if they had a name on the collar the owner was summoned to collect them.

In several of the cases brought before him Mr Biron dismissed the charge. If, for example, the owner said that the dog had just been let out in the morning (to do its ‘business’ one supposes) and was within 20 yards of the house then that was ‘under control’. In another case the owner said his animal was ‘within call’ and the justice accepted that. Indeed he accepted most explanations for why dogs were not on leads or muzzled and only one case, where a dog had bitten a child, did he find strongly against the owner who was penalised with a 10s fine.

In this case though the owner had already been warned about the behaviour of his beast so perhaps that was more about demonstrating that the law had to be obeyed than anything else. The courts were quite strict on those that ignored instructions previously handed down by the magistracy.

Overall Mr Biron declared that it was ‘doubtless right to take dogs unmuzzled and without owners to the station, but when animals were within a few yards of the owner or his premises he could not see much good sense in it’.

North of the river at Clerkenwell Mr Bartsow took a different line on ‘dangerous’ dogs. John Adams was brought before him charged with not keeping his good ‘under proper control’ contrary to police regulations. Adams said that the dog was walking a yards ahead of him and that ‘some magistrates held this to be “under proper control”.’

Mr Barstow told him that ‘he could be bound by the decisions of other magistrates’ and fined him 5s. If it was off the leash and without a muzzle, it wasn’t under control. I suspect the newspapers focused on this because it was a law that was commonly interpreted differently, something that must have been confusing for dog owners and policemen alike.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, June 09, 1886]

On June 15 Drew’s new book (co-authored by Andy Wise) is published by Amberley Books. 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

September 1888: A killer in the East overshadows the everyday reality of domestic abuse in Victorian London    

Catching Jack

I have just completed the final draft of my ‘Ripper’ solution book and its now off with my co-author for his last amendments. We have to do a little work on the images and maps but it looks like we will comfortably meet our end of September deadline. Having put down my pen (so to speak) on the project I thought I’d return to Whitechapel in 1888 to see what was going on in the Police Courts of the capital in the midst of the most infamous murders London has ever known.

For context, by Wednesday September 18 1888 the murders of four women were being investigated by the police: Emma Smith (4/4/88), Martha Tabram (7/8/88), Mary Ann Nichols (31/8/88), and Annie Chapman (8/9/88). Within  less than two weeks both Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes would be added to that list, their murders occurring within an hour of each other.

Very few people (including me) believe Smith to have been a ‘Ripper’ victim and some dispute whether Tabram was. Either way, by this time 130 years ago the police were desperate to catch a murderer who was mutilating defenseless women in the heart of the East End.

Meanwhile over the river at Lambeth Henry Baker (alias Williams) was being charged with the attempted murder of Mary Cowen. The attack had taken place in mid July but Mary was dangerously ill in St Thomas’ Hospital, and was too weak to attend court until early September. However, on the day of the first committal hearing she failed to appear in court to prosecute the case against Henry.

The policeman in charge of the case, Chief Inspector Chisholm, had then told the magistrate at Lambeth Police court that he was convinced that friends of the prisoner had conspired to prevent Mary giving evidence that day. Mr Biron had granted the police a warrant to force her to attend at a subsequent date, and therefore she was in court on the 18 September to start the case against her attacker.

Mary Cowen was still suffering the effects of the assault: ‘she appeared very ill, and evidently was most reluctant to give evidence against the prisoner’, the paper reported. The case was opened by the Treasury solicitor Mr Pollard. He ascertain (‘with some difficulty’) that Mary had lived with Henry in Birmingham but they had been separated ‘for some time’. As was the case much more frequently than we might imagine today, many working class couples lived as man and wife without ever formally marrying.

In July the couple had met in London and had a violent argument. She admitted striking her ex-partner in the face with her bag and calling him ‘foul names’. That was the 10 July 1888 and on the following Monday, the 16th, he found her again and this time he attacked her, stabbing her two or three times with a knife. Mary collapsed and lost consciousness. Someone must have helped her because she woke up in hospital.

Henry Baker denied the attack and objected when the solicitor played his trump card and produced a written statement, from Baker, admitting his guilt. Baker said no one could prove it was his handwriting but Mr Pollard begged to differ. The crucial witness was Mary however, and having finally persuaded (or forced) her to testify against her former lover the police must have ben relatively confident of securing a conviction. Mr Biron now fully committed the man to trial at Old Bailey for the attempted murder of his common-law wife.

The trial did take place, on 22 October 1888 and ‘Harry’ Baker was convicted, not of attempted murder but of the lesser offence of wounding. The court report stated at the end that:

the prisoner, ‘in his defence stated that he had been subjected to great annoyance by the prosecutrix, whose habits were very intemperate, and that he pleaded guilty to assaulting her after great provocation’.

An all male jury clearly agreed with him and even when he’d admitted having a previous conviction (from 1887 in Chester) the judge merely sent him away for a year’s imprisonment.

This is the surgeon’s report of the injuries Mary had sustained (and that Baker admitted inflicting):

The prosecutrix was brought there [St Thomas’ Hospital] with a deep incised wound on the right side of the chest, penetrating into the cavity of the chest, between 3 and 4 inches long and 1 inch deep or more, and another wound in her back behind the right shoulder blade an inch and a half long and half or three-quarters of an inch deep; there was considerable bleeding from the wound in front, a large artery was divided—she was in very great danger for some time—she remained in the hospital till September 3rd and after having recovered to some extent was allowed to go—her life was in danger till July 22nd

When juries were prepared to accept as mitigation the accusation that a ‘wife’ was ‘intemperate’ and that being called ‘foul names’ and slapped in the face with a bag counted as ‘provocation’ it is quiet easy to understand why women were so reluctant to prosecute their husbands and partners in the late Victorian period.

We should also see the actions of a misogynistic serial killer in the context of the way women were treated everyday in the 1880s, and not view him as an aberration (a ‘monster’) or some sort of criminal mastermind. Women were beaten up, stabbed, abused, raped and murdered on a very regular basis in the nineteenth century and ‘Jack’ wasn’t the only one to get away with it.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, September 19, 1888]

A simple case of imposture or a glimpse into the transgender community of Victorian London?

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I often wonder what the Victorians would make of our society if they could visit it. I imagine they’d be both awed and shocked if they were able to time travel forward to 21stcentury London. Awed by the technology perhaps: the cars, neon lights, television, mobile phones. Shocked by what they would see as irreligion, immorality and a lack of deference.

Of course the idea that the Victorians were prudish and all went to church has been successfully challenged by historians but it remains a fact that they were more conservative and less tolerant of some behaviours than we are today. Homosexuality was made illegal in 1885, and men could be sent to prison for engaging in sexual relationships with other men, as Oscar Wilde was. Suicide was a crime and there was considerably less understanding of mental illness throughout the period. The criminal justice system was harsh: many more people were incarcerated for relatively minor property offences and the death penalty existed, and was used, for murderers.

The newspaper reports of the metropolitan Police Courts are an excellent way to peer into this world. To quote Hartley, ‘the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’, and we can see this at Bow Street, Lambeth, Marylebone and all the other magistrate courts.

At the end of June 1886 two individuals were brought up at Lambeth Police court charged with begging. Begging remains an offence punishable under nineteenth-century legislation (the Vagrancy Act of 1824) but it no longer carries the risk of prison and is often ignored by the police unless it is aggressive or causing a particular nuisance. So while retain the power to prosecute beggars we rarely use it. Instead the emphasis is on helping those that beg, or (more cynically) in arguing about how best we should help them.

In 1886 there was a Mendicity Society; an organisation dedicated to the prevention of begging, especially by those it deemed to be imposters. I’ve written about them before  and their officers crop up frequently in cases that came to court. Joseph Boseley was one such officer and on the evening of Monday 28 June he was watching two beggars in Church Street, Camberwell.

Both appeared to be women and they held a Bible out to read from. As passers-by approached they would ask for a donation and if it was forthcoming they would reward the donor with a verse of scripture. However, if they were refused money, then, ‘as soon as the person walked on [they] made use of foul language to one another’. Boseley smelled a rat and he arrested them for impersonation.

Boseley knew this pair well and was watching them to gather sufficient evidence against them to prosecute. He knew also that they weren’t both women: one of them was a man dressed up as a woman, and this was assumed, I think, to be a ruse to separate pedestrians from their hard earned cash, as a pair of females asking for charitable donations to a ‘good cause’ seemed more believable.

In court the pair cut a sorry looking vision in the dock. Mary Ann Saunders was 55 and her partner, Henry Bennett ten years younger. Bennett was set in the dock still wearing ‘female clothing, with hat and ribbons, and hair hanging down his back’. When questioned he continued to speak in a high-pitched impersonation of a female voice, as he had being doing as he stood beside the kerb in Camberwell.

Boseley told the magistrate (Mr Biron) that there had been multiple complaints about the duo and that they ‘were old mendicants’. Saunders could often be seen pushing Bennett around in ‘a perambulator’, always dressed as a woman, and always begging for money. He saw them as a couple of charlatans who were entirely underserving of the public’s sympathy, let alone their money.

Today however, I wonder what we would make of them. Was Bennett merely donning female attire as a ruse to con people, or was he cross-dressing because he felt more comfortable in women’s clothes? We have only very recently begun to accept that gender is more fluid and the term ‘transgender’ wasn’t coined until 1971. In 1870 two men were put on trial for transvestism, but there was insufficient evidence to convict them.After 1885 men who dressed as women were sometimes prosecuted as homosexuals, again demonstrating a contemporary misunderstanding of those that cross gender boundaries.

The beginnings of attempts to understand transgender issues can be seen in the late nineteenth century but for a sympathetic understanding we have to wait till late into the twentieth century. Even now those that feel uncomfortable in the gender they were born into and who are brave enough to present themselves as the person they know and believe themselves to be can find it a very tough experience. We are only very slowly adjusting to the idea of all gender toilets and allowing people to be whom they want to be.

Was Henry Bennett ‘trans’? It is impossible to know of course. Mr Biron was convinced he was a beggar and said he would remand the pair for further enquiries. At this Bennett fainted in the dock, although the papers saw this as a yet another example of imposture and an opportunity to poke fun at him for the amusement of its readership. On the 9 July they were brought up again and the magistrate sent them both to prison for a month for begging, declaring them to be ‘rank imposters’.

As he was led away Bennett cried out: ‘A month, what for? I didn’t beg; I only give bits of scripture comfort’.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, June 30, 1886; Reynolds’s, Sunday, July 11, 1886]