Tag: Mr Dayman

‘I would rather send her to Australia than have it done’. A misguided father refuses to vaccinate his daughter

Mary_Jane_Vacc

In 1867 parliament passed one of its more sensible pieces of legislation, the Vaccination Act (30 & 31 Vict. c.84). This built upon several previous smaller acts to insist that all newborn children were vaccinated (at the parish’s expense) within three months of birth. If they did not, or if they failed to bring in their children to be examined, they faced summary conviction and a fine of up to 20s (or prison if they could not pay).

It was this act that James Bovingdon fell foul of in late August 1868. The Merton based poulterer was summoned before the magistrate at Wandsworth Police court by Edwin Bailey, the registrar of births and deaths for Mitcham. He explained that Bovingdon was yet to vaccinate his daughter Emily, who had been born on 3 December 1867.

James Bovingdon told Mr Dayman that he had not vaccinated his child ‘on principle’. When issued with a  notice to vaccinate on 8 January he had declared that he ‘would rather send it [Emily] to Australia than have it done’.

The magistrate asked him why he took this view. Bovingdon replied that he’d heard several opinions on the merits of vaccination and was under the impression that it was optional. UnknownThere was misread mistrust of vaccination and immunisation in the 1800s, born in part of a more general mistrust of the medical profession by the working classes. Powerful anti-vaccination images (like the one of the right) were produced with dark warnings that doctors were more liable to kill your child with the vaccine than save it from smallpox (the killer disease of the nineteenth century).

Bovingdon said also that he’d no idea that a new law compelled him to vaccinate his child. He had, he added, taken the child to be vaccinated after he was summoned to court. That was good but he was still in breach of the law and Mr Dayman fined him 10s  with a further 10s  costs (20s in all, as the law prescribed). He added that if he didn’t pay the fine he would go to prison for 14 days.

In 1898 a new act was appeased that recognized that some magistrates were not applying the law (which had been tightened further in 1873 to make vaccination compulsory). The 1898 act allowed parents to avoid conviction and a penalty if they ‘made a statutory declaration that [they] confidently believed that vaccination would be prejudicial to the health of the child, and within seven days thereafter delivered, or sent by post, the declaration to the Vaccination Officer of the district’.

Today we have reached a situation where vaccination (for diseases such as measles) has become a serious issue once again. As a result of misinformation being circulated on the Internet some parents fear vaccination even when it is both safe and essential. This risks the return of killer diseases (like smallpox and TB) that were thought to have been eradicated by modern medicine.  It is hard not to see the parents that risk their children’s lives (and the lives of many others) as ignorant at best and willfully stupid at worst.  Surely it is time to take that decision away from them and reintroduce compulsory vaccination for all children, with appropriate punishment for parents that do not comply.

[from The Morning Post, Monday, August 31, 1868]

A vicar refuses to baptise a woman’s ninth childi

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As an example of how the London Police courts were used for all manner of business and as a one-stop advice bureau I present this case from October 1861. A woman named Evans (I cannot call her ‘Mrs Evans’ because she declared herself to be Unmarried) at Wandsworth Police court to ask for Mr Dayman’s advice.

Ms Evans had recently given birth to her ninth child, each of whom she had taken to be christened at Battersea Church, most of them by Reverend Jenkinson the presiding minister. However, on this occasion when she showed up with her infant he refused either to christen the baby or to ‘church’ her after her confinement.

Churching refers to the blessing given to mothers soon after they have given birth and is even performed if the child had died or the mother chose not to baptize it. So it was strange that the reverend refused both to christen her newborn or offer his blessing on the mother.

Ms Evans thought she knew why Rev. Jenkinson had refused her:

‘I suspect the reason of his objecting is because I am not married’, she told the magistrate.

‘That would not be a reason’ Mr Dayman responded.

‘I asked him the reason and he said that as I was not married he would neither church me nor christen my child. I went again on Sunday, and I could not have it done’.

The justice wasn’t sure what to do in this case. He wasn’t familiar with ecclesiastical (church) law but had never heard of a clergyman refusing to baptize a child, regardless of whether it was legitimate or not. Thousands of babies were born illegitimate in London every year since marriage amongst the working classes was not as common as we might think.

Ms Evans had gone along with two godfathers and was angry and upset that the vicar had refused her. All the magistrate could suggest was that she went over the vicar’s head and complained to the Bishop  (in this case the Bishop of Winchester). The court clerk furnished her with the bishop’s address and she thanked his worship and left.

Perhaps the vicar was trying to make a point about marriage and legitimacy; having blessed eight previous products of a relationship unordained by God however, it seems a little churlish of him to refuse the ninth however.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Wednesday, October 23, 1861]

‘Nothing but skin and bone’; animal cruelty on Putney Fields

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The British are, as everyone knows, a nation of animal lovers. The RSPCA was formed in 1824, fully 60 years before an equivalent society was founded to protect children. Of course we are also a nation of meat eaters, we just don’t like see animals abused before they become the centre piece of our Sunday roast or that morning breakfast bacon sandwich.

There were clear guidelines and rules to protect animals and humans in the Victorian meat industry. Inspectors regularly prosecuted butchers and market traders at the Police Courts and in 1858 the RSPCA helped the police bring a prosecution against an amateur  pig farmer from Putney.

William Watts was described as a tailor when he appeared before the police court magistrate at Wandsworth. He was accused of cruelty to animals; in this case several pigs that he kept on Putney Fields.

Several locals had complained to the police about the state of the animals and a policeman, Sergeant Backing (V Division) paid a visit to the piggery. He found the animals there in a dreadful state:

‘There were 2 pigs in a most miserable condition’ he reported. The animals were housed in 4 compartments and in these there ‘was a large quantity of stagnant water and a quantity of dung in each compartment, but there was no straw on which the pigs could lie’.

Worse still, the ‘animals appeared almost starved, and two of them stood up in a corner perfectly paralysed with cold and hunger’.

Watts promised to feed them better in future and the sergeant went away. When he visited again a few days later things seemed to have improved slightly but it was a false dawn. On a subsequent inspection Sergeant Backing found that the animals had been attacking each other. Watts claimed they had been fighting as pigs do, but the policeman was sure that they had been trying to eat each other, so starved were they.

He declared that he’d never seen pigs in such a poor condition; they were ‘perfect skeletons’ he said and averaged only 3 stone in weight even though they were at least 17 months old. Either he or the public alerted the RSPCA who sent an inspector named Knight to take a look.

Knight arrived too find one of the sows dead in the stye.

‘It was quite a skeleton’, he reported, ‘the carcase being nothing but skin and bone’. As for the other animals:

They were ‘large pigs, and their hind quarters were drawn quite to a point, and nothing remained but their frames’.

It was awful and Watts was fully convicted of animal cruelty at Wandsworth Police Court. He said he’d fallen ill himself and with no one to look after the pigs they’d been left to starve. He claimed to have looked after them well before that but Mr Dayman was not interested in his excuses. He wasn’t sure which was worse, the man’s ‘folly or his cruelty in withholding the food’. The animals would hardly be worth anything now in the state they were in, he’d get no meat from them even if they were now improving as Watts had argued.

He fined the tailor 50s and 2s costs which the man could not pay. Thus, for failing to feed his animals and allowing them to live in squalor William Watts was sent to prison for a month. One wonders who fed the pigs in the meantime.

[from The Standard, Monday, March 01, 1858]

Chaos at Westminster as a dress is ruined and a dog eats an expensive shawl

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A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society, by Edwin Landseer (1838)

Madame Courtney was a ‘foreign’ (probably French) dressmaker who ‘spoke English very badly’. Just after Christmas 1859 a woman called at her house to ask her to make a ‘very handsome’ dress for her. She returned a week later to try the dress on for size and said she should like to keep it on and send the money at a later date.

The dressmaker was unhappy about this because she knew the customer, Mrs Emily White, as someone who had not settled all of her outstanding debts, so she refused. Instead she suggested that Mrs White either paid  for the dress or left the dress she had arrived in as security.

This upset Mrs White who flew into a rage. According to Madame Courtney White then ‘struck her several times, and the seizing a pair of scissors, [and] demolished her own new dress’.

As a result both Mrs White and her dressmaker appeared in court at Westminster in front of the magistrate, Mr Dayman. The dress in question was produced:

‘It was chequered with incisions as the costume of any harlequin, the pieces being held together merely by the lining’.

The whole exchange caused much amusement in the court and this continued as Mrs White’s defence counsel (Mr Lewis) offered an alternative explanation for the state of the garment. He cross -examined the dressmaker to establish that she employed several ‘workmen’ and owned a large Newfoundland dog. Newfoundlands were very popular in the Victorian period, as much as Labradors are today it seems, but they are massive animals.  Madame Courtney confirmed that this was true and admitted that her ladies had rushed to her aid. However, she said this had prompted Mrs White to seize a nearby poker and threaten to ‘split all their heads open’.

Mr Lewis now claimed that while all this distraction was going on the dog, ‘amused himself by eating up Mrs White’s shawl, which cost 20 guineas’. His client refused to pay for the dress because it did not fit, and had since been ‘shamelessly imprisoned for four hours’ and her own dress had not been returned to her. After she had cut off the new dress (which she said she was perfectly entitled to do) she sat in her underwear while the huge dog ‘growled at her display of uncovered crinoline’. Finally she said that she had since paid the dressmaker for the work she had done.

The case had become pure farce and I imagine the magistrate was becoming increasingly frustrated at the deteriorating decorum of his courtroom. He grumbled that while women were the ‘weaker sex’ they definitely ‘were not the “gentler” sex when aroused’. He dismissed the complaint from Madame Courtney and suggested that if she wanted to pursue a claim for non payment or damage to the dress she would have to take it to the county court. She had no right to detain Mrs White and therefore she also had the right to sue the French woman for false imprisonment and the value of her shawl.

Then, much to his relief, both women left the Westminster court room.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, January 04, 1860]

The callous churchwardens who dug up a child’s grave to make a new path

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This is an unusual case, and one that remained unresolved (as many did that came before the London Police courts). In mid November 1867 a solicitor approached the sitting magistrate at Wandsworth for a summons to bring the churchwardens of St. Mary’s Church, Battersea, to court.

The solicitor, Mr Condy, said he was representing the parents of a child who had died six weeks earlier. The child – aged just nine – had been buried in the churchyard but his grave had recently been dug up, and his body exhumed. Naturally this was extremely upsetting for the parents of the child and so they had asked the lawyer to intercede on their behalf. Since they were very poor, time was of the essence, as they could not afford a long drawn out legal action.

In court it was explained that the churchwardens had decided to lay a new path through the churchyard and they needed to move the boy’s grave as a consequence. The churchwardens ordered the newly laid grave to be opened and the child’s coffin to be removed and reburied somewhere else in the graveyard.

At no point, it seems, did they deem it necessary to consult with the bereaved parents, or even inform them so they might attend. Nor, and this was important, had they obtained any legal permission to move the child’s grave. According the the evidence presented they should have applied for a faculty (a legal term for reserving a burial spot) or a license from the secretary of state. The churchwardens had therefore infringed the terms of the Burial Act (1857).

However, Mr Dayman, the magistrate, thought the summons should be issued against the person that had dug up the child, not those that had instructed him, and that was the sexton. Mr Cindy said he’d approached the sexton but he insisted he was only following instructions, as ‘he was only a servant’.

The magistrate was insistent however; ‘If a man were told to do an unlawful act, he was not bound to do it’.

At this point a suggestion was made to the court that the parents might bring a civil action or take the churchwardens to the ecclesiastical (church) courts. Mr Condy said the first option was no use since the family had ‘no property in the body’. He added that, from his experience, pursuing a case in the ecclesiastical courts was ‘a tedious affair’. And in case they parents were too poor to do either. The police courts were the cheaper option, which explains why they were so frequently used by London’s poor.

Mr Dayman issued a summons to bring in the sexton. There was little hope that the parents would get much more than an apology and perhaps a small amount in compensation.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, November 15, 1867]

‘A very bad case’, as temptation gets the better of a young servant girl

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The temptations faced by servant girls working in the homes of the wealthy must have been very hard to resist. For a young woman like Ellen Shean her mistress’ home, with its fine furnishings, ornaments, silver plate and glass, and other comforts would have been a world away from her own humble beginnings. Even more stark was the contrast between Ellen’s personal belongings (such as they were) and those of her employer, Mrs Elizabeth Bailey.

When Ellen began her service, in mid September 1862, she arrived with just a couple of changes of clothes and a few personal effects – she had no money at all. By contrast Mrs Bailey lived in relative luxury, at 13 Sutherland Place, in fashionable Westbourne Grove. 

It wasn’t long before Mrs Bailey began to notice that money was going missing. Servants weren’t paid weekly or even monthly in the 1800s, they had an annual salary (of around £10-£20) which was paid out quarterly. Wages were low but of course their bed and board was included, as was a uniform, so what money they had was supposed to be for ‘treats’ (the odd day out) and to save for their future.

London of course, was a very tempting place with all sorts of sights and delights to turn the head of a young woman. Many domestics migrated to the capital looking for work so while Ellen may have been a local girl it is entirely possible she had traveled from as far away as Ireland. Shean is a surname with a variety of roots, from Ireland (as a shortened version of Sheenan) to Surrey and Staffordshire. Sheens are also found in the census in south Wales and across the Bristol Channel.

As Ellen was a new servant Mrs Bailey soon began to suspect that she might be the source of her missing money and so she decided to set a trap for her employee. She marked a florin (a coin valued at 1/10 of a pound) and left in in one of her dresses. Some time after Ellen had finished her rounds upstairs Mrs Bailey decided to investigate whether she had taken the bait.

Sure enough, the coin was missing and Elizabeth confronted her servant with the theft. At first Ellen denied it but soon broke down when Mrs Bailey threatened to involve the police. Ellen threw the coin onto the carpet in front of her and then reached into her pocket and took out a purse. Inside was a significants amount of money in coin (£1 8s) and Mrs Bailey’s wedding ring.

Ellen admitted her crime and the next day both women appeared before Mr Dayman,  the Police Magistrate at Hammersmith. Questioned in court Ellen burst into tears and could say nothing in her defence. She must have known that she was effectively ruined; no one would be likely to employ her again as a servant in a respectable household and with a criminal record and no references her future looked very bleak indeed.

It was a serious offence which merited a jury trial and possibly a long prison sentence but Mrs Bailey (perhaps wishing to avoid further embarrassment to herself as well) requested that the justice deal with her servant summarily. She told he she ‘did not want to press the case severely’ and Mr Dayman agreed. However, he said ‘it was a very bad case, as servants must be trusted. There was no excuse for the prisoner to rob her mistress, as she had a comfortable house’.

He sent Ellen Sheen to prison for two months, with hard labour.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, October 31, 1862]

Delays at Clapham Junction lead to a punch up in the bar

Starzina Z Railways Direct Line Clapham Junction station 1889

Sometimes the press reports from the Police Courts inadvertently reveal elements of the summary process which are not otherwise made obvious. For example, in the case I’ve selected today, the sitting magistrate cautioned a police witness for remaining in court while evidence is being heard. This undermined the authority of his testimony and ultimately led to the discharge of the accused (who were clearly guilty as charged). This may seem like a minor detail, but it is exactly this sort of detail that helps me establish exactly how these courts operated in the 1800s.

Henry Clark (an architect) , John Lumsden (no trade given, so perhaps an ‘independent man’) and Thomas Oliver (engineer) had been watching the cricket at the Oval and had returned to Clapham Junction to catch a train home. Having just missed one they were forced to wait an hour for the next service and headed for the station’s ‘refreshment bar’ for a few drinks.

Here two very different stories emerge.

According to constable White of the South Western Railway Police the men arrived at the bar to find it closed. Annoyed, they complained loudly and constable White was called to intervene. However, his appearance just irritated them more and as he approached Oliver the engineer attempted to grapple him to the floor. The constable’s helmet was knocked off and rolled over to Clark who picked it up and threw it.

White managed to retrieve it and now attempted to regain his authority, placing the damaged helmet on his head and demanding they all leave at once, as he wanted to lock up. The men were having none of it however, and Clark hit the railway policeman and the pair wrestled. As they were down Lumsden came up and started aiming kicks at the stricken officer.

Either because the noise they made alerted a local bobby, or perhaps because a nearby passenger witnessed the assault and went for help, because soon afterwards a Metropolitan Police constable (PC Hooper of V division) turned up and arrested all three men and took them to the nearest police station.

Appearing in court at Wandsworth the next day the trio, all respectable lower middle class men it would seem, were represented by a lawyer, Mr Haynes. His version of events different somewhat to constable White’s. Haynes explained that the three had arrived at the station and gone to the bar. There White had joined them for a few drinks and had got quite drunk in the process.

The drinking led to horse play (or ‘larking’ to use the contemporary term for rough house behaviour). When constable White felt things had  gone too far he called for help and PC Hooper appeared.

So the magistrate, Mr Dayman, was presented with conflicting testimony; did he believe PC Hooper and the railway constable, or the three cricket fans? He clearly thought there was fault on both sides. He told White that it was clear that he ‘had been larking, and, getting the worst of it, he gave the prisoners in charge fancying his uniform would protect him’.

But it was also pretty obvious that the men had assaulted a police man (albeit a railway policeman not a member of the Met), so what to do with them? I think he fell back on a procedural dodge here by turning his attention to PC Hooper’s evidence (or rather his actions). He may well have suspected the two men were in cahoots, as ‘brothers in arms’ so to speak. PC Hooper had stated that as he took the men into custody they had tried to bribe him. The men ‘had offered him a sovereign to swear that White was drunk’, yet he insisted that he was sober.

However, Mr Dayman remarked that the policeman had ‘remained in court though all the witnesses had been ordered outside during the hearing of the case’.

‘By remaining inside’, he explained, ‘he saw the point of the case, and therefore he (Mr Dayman) could not place that reliance on his evidence as he should otherwise have done. He was always ready to uphold railway officials as they had an arduous duty to perform, but they must come into court with clean hands’.

The three men were discharged and thus cleared of any wrongdoing and as a result both White and Hooper were effectively reprimanded and reminded that their authority was conditional on them maintaining the highest standards of conduct. For me though, the real interest in this story is in what it tells me about the process of summary court hearings. If we can extrapolate from this example it would seem that those giving evidence that was important to a given case would be expected (at least when they were instructed) to wait outside the court to be called in and sworn. This may sound obvious from a modern context but, given that we have little in the way of printed material on the procedural nature of the summary courts, it is nice to see this recorded.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, September 26, 1866]

The mysterious case of the butler and the drunken policeman

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At about four in the morning of June 23 1870 Mr Richard Valpy and his family returned to their home in Wimbledon, having spent the evening and night at a party. All seemed well; they were greeted by the butler – Turner – and went to bed.

At about half past five the household was rudely awaken by ‘an extraordinary noise’ , which Richard Valpy attributed at first to a storm. It seemed to have come from the room below (the drawing room) and since there was no storm raging, he went to explore.  As he descended the stairs he heard the sound of someone moving and shouted ‘who’s there?’

His son, Alfred, had also heard the noise, which he described as a ‘tremendous crashing’. When he heard his father’s voice he too rushed towards the drawing room.

When Richard Valpy reached the drawing room he was surprised to see a policeman coming out. He challenged him but the man ran off, and he was only able to take a description and his number (143). Father and son then entered the drawing room where to their shock they found it in a state of absolute chaos.

The ‘tremendous crashing’ noise that Alfred had heard was explained by a pier glass mirror that had come off the wall. It was ‘impaled upon a chair’, and could not possibly have got there on its own. The chandelier and two lamps were broken, as ‘if something had been thrown at them’. Two flower pots, which usually decorated the hallway, were in the fireplace.

There was more.

Several ornaments were knocked over and broken, lamp shades smashed, in total something in the region of £100 worth of damage (around £4,500 today) had been done. One of the windows to the garden was smashed and Richard could see that a cruet set was lying on the lawn. The gardener later brought  him a bottle of wine that he had discovered in the shrubbery.

What or whom had caused all this and why?

Moving on to the dining room the pair found yet more damage. It too was ‘in great confusion’, with three panes of glass broken and family effects ‘strewn about’. They hurried on down to the pantry, where the butler slept. The door was locked but when they were admitted they found the servant intoxicated with several bottles of wine by his bed.

The case came before the sitting magistrate at Wandsworth Police Court, Mr Dayman. From his police number the mysterious constable was produced in court to stand accused with Turner of criminal damage and the theft of ‘expensive wine’. Neither John Turner or PC Alfred Cummings (143V) were supported by defence counsel but the Met were represented in court by superintendent Butt of V Division.

Richard Valpy admitted that he had forgotten to secure the wine cellar before he had left the house that evening, but Turner had ‘no business’ to go down there anyway. In his defence Cummings said he knew nothing of the destruction, and when he was shown it he was as surprised as anyone. He had been seen by the sergeant, he said, on his beat at 3 that morning (it was the sergeant’s duty to check that all men were where they were supposed to be, at the correct time – so they undertook spot checks).

His evidence was slightly undermined by being found, ‘lying in a garden’ fast asleep at half nine in the morning near the Valpy’s home. When he was discovered, by sergeant Casserely (29V), his pockets were stuffed with four bottles of wine, ‘one in each of his trousers pockets, and the others in his tunics pockets’. This caused a ripple of laughter in the courtroom, but one imagines that this was not shared by the superintendent or the magistrate.

As for the butler he too denied, somewhat lamely, any recollection of what had happened. When he was taken to the drawing room he pronounced that it was ‘a perfect phenomenon’, and he was unable to explain it.

PC Cummings was given a good character, as a former dock worker he had not done anything previously to blot his copybook. Turner only added that he was innocent as charged and had merely let the policeman in to ‘share a glass of ale’.

The magistrate committed both of them for trial. Whatever the outcome of that, both men would most likely have lost their previously privileged positions and the certainty of paid employment. What motivated them to get so  drunk and then so destructive must remain a mystery.

[from The Illustrated Police News etc, Saturday, June 25, 1870]