Tag: poker

A Soho gambling den is raided but Mr Hannay shows some leniency

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Gamblers playing at Faro in the American midwest 

In November 1889 detectives and regular police constables led by Superintendent Heard of C Division raided a suspected gambling den at 14 Meard Street, Soho. The rounded up about 20 suspects, all of them Jewish immigrants, and took away several packs of playing cards and a Faro table.

Faro (or Pharo) was a old card game closely associated with gambling. It used a table, often covered in green baize and marked out in squares. There was a banker and the players laid bets. It was a simple game but, like other card games such as Poker, it was open to cheating by the ‘house’ and players. As a result it was banned in most European cities.

Despite the large number of participants the police only found small sums of money were involved. The men were gambling with their weekly wages, not their life savings and so Mr Hannay, the presiding magistrate at Marlborough Street (where the case was heard) was not inclined to penalize them overmuch.

Charles Levi, a tailor, was held to be the most responsible and was convicted of ‘keeping a common gaming-house’. He was fined £20, a large sum but still ‘small when compared with the fines that had been imposed in other cases’, Mr Hannay told him.

All the others were liable to fines of 6s 8dbut on this occasion the magistrate said he would be lenient and simply demand that they all entered into recognizance of £5 each to ensure they did not offend again. He also allowed Levi time to find the £20 fine, paying by installments if he chose, and so saved him from the default of going to prison for a month instead.

I wonder if Mr Hannay enjoyed a flutter himself and so considered moderate gambling no bad thing. He had to act of course, since a large police operation had been carried out; but he was able to be as lenient as possible.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, December 1, 1889]

A sorry tale of an old abuser who finally went too far

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Isaac Jones was a violent man when he was in his cups. He had that in common with very many in nineteenth-century London and his poor wife and family suffered for it.

On the 21 July 1860 he’d come home late, drunk as he often was, and belligerent with it. His wife and he had the usual exchange of words and a fight broke out. The exact details are not clear but at some point Isaac lunged for his wife Jane who, fearing for her life, grabbed the nearest weapon she could and defended herself.

She selected a poker but she might have easily picked up an iron, a saucepan or a rolling pin; when women fought with their menfolk it was often one of these they used (or had used against them). The poker connected with Isaac’s leg and he slipped and fell, unable to maintain his balance as he was so drunk after the evening’s excesses.

He cried out and his groans brought a policeman to the door of the house. PC 256M came into the room and found Isaac on his side his leg bent horribly under him and ‘the bone of the fractured limb protruding through the skin’. A cab was called and the injured man was ferried to Guy’s Hospital where his leg was amputated. Since it seemed evident that Jane was to blame she was arrested and taken into custody.

Events unfolded with some inevitability given the state both of Isaac’s general health (he was an elderly man with a drink problem) and Victorian medicine. The local magistracy were informed that the old man was dying so went to see him in hospital to ascertain who was responsible for his condition. Jane went along as well and he kissed her warmly saying ‘that it was the last time’.

Isaac was too ill to say anything else, and did not condemn his wife in the presence of the justices. He died a day later and so Jane was taken before Mr Maude at Southwark Police court accused of causing his death by striking him with the poker.

An inquest had concluded that he had died from the injury but ‘there was nothing to show how it was done’. Isaac’s daughter (also named Jane) gave evidence of the row and the fight but said she’d not seen her mother hit her father with the poker, adding that she’d told her she had not. She elaborated on the fight saying that Isaac had a knife and was threatening her mother with it.

Mr Maude heard a report form the surgeon at Guy’s which was pretty clear that the leg was broken by an impact injury not a fall but he was trying to find a way to clear Mrs Jones if at all possible. Isaac Jones had been a wife beater, she was a domestic abuse survivor and, on this occasion, the tables had turned on the old man. There was clear evidence that Jane had been defending herself and that the attack – if attack there was – had been spontaneous not premeditated.

There was also sufficient doubt over the exact cause of death to give Jane the benefit of the doubt. It is unlikely that a jury would have convicted her anyway and she was evidently remorseful at the death of her husband, however bad a man he was. It would do no one any good to see her go to trial much less go to prison so Mr Maude commented that it was ‘a very painful case’ but he would detain her on longer; she was free to go.

Mrs Jones, who had ben allowed to sit the clerk’s table instead of occupying the dock wept throughout the examination but was helped to her feet and led out of court on her daughter’s arm.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Tuesday, August 28, 1860]

‘I’ll knock your brains out, Policeman’: the perils of being a ‘grass’ in Victorian London’

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Working class communities were tightly packed in Victorian London. This meant that everyone knew everyone else’s business and gossip was rife. Communities also tended to band together against outsiders, be they immigrants, newcomers, or the police.

Stephen Dempsey had broken one of the cardinal rules of working-class communities: he had given information to police that had led to the arrest and prosecution of some of his near neighbours. That act had marked him out as a ‘grass’, a ‘snitch’, a police informant and the consequences were dire.

He was regularly abused, verbally and physically, and on Saturday the 8 June 1872 he was in his room when he heard a shout outside his door:

‘I’ll knock your brains out, Policeman’.

This was followed a crash and yelp as a pail of water was thrown at his wife as she climbed the stairs to their room. Then the door was kicked in and a man was standing there armed with a poker. The man, William Reardon, rushed at him and hit him twice about the head before another neighbor helped subdue and wrestle him clear.

The affair ended up with Reardon in the dock at Marlborough Street charged with assault. He denied the charge but admitted throwing water over Mrs Dempsey, but alleged it was in retaliation for her swearing at him.  She corroborated her husbands’ version of events and Dempsey’s role in informing on Reardon’s associates was revealed. Dempsey had earned the nickname ‘policeman’ for being a well-known police informer. Mr. Newton accepted bail but committed the prisoner for a jury trial. Reardon was indicted for wounding but acquitted on that charge and released.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, June 16, 1872]

A man lays about his wife with an iron poker, ‘saying he would have her life’: an everyday domestic trauma in Mile End

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Nowadays we have a number of organizations (state run and charitable) that look out for the interests of women and children, especially those caught up in abusive relationship or poverty. The laws protecting women are also much more stringent and the support mechanisms (if nowhere near perfect) much better than they were in the nineteenth century. Any regular (or even causal) readers of this blog will have seen that domestic violence was a daily event in Victorian London and something many of the Police Court magistrates railed against.

Charities did exist to help, one of which was the Associate Institute for Enforcing the Laws for the Protection of Women and Children (AIELPWC). Organizations such as this were often run by well-meaning members of the middle class, who saw it as their mission to intervene in the ‘savage’ lives of the working class. The AIELPWC were run by Henry Newman and based at 30 Cockspur Street, just off Trafalgar Square. In September 1869 William Moore, a member of the charity, followed a case that was of interest to them at the Worship Street Police court in Stepney.

Benjamin Briggat, a ‘looking-glass frame maker’ from Mile End was up in court, accused of a violent assault on his wife. Mrs Briggat appeared in the witness box swathed in bandages. She was able to give chapter and verse on her husband’s serial abuse of her in the five years they had been married.

Many women suffered for months or years before they built up the courage to take their spouse before a magistrate as Mrs Briggat had done. It took determination and resignation in equal measure, and the outcomes were rarely positive anyway. At best the husband would be locked up and the household deprived of the principal bread-winner, or he was fined (reducing the family budget even further), and worse he’d be reprimanded and she’d have to go back home with him, angered and embittered.

Mrs Briggat told the bench what had happened on the previous Saturday when Benjamin had come home late from work, clearly ‘three sheets to the wind’ (i.e. drunk). She’d made him a stew but he said he didn’t want it.

They argued and he started to kick at her as she was bent over the stove. At this she tried to get away, running to the bed but Briggat ‘seized the iron pot off the fire and beat her about the head with it’.

There was more, she said:

‘She was soon covered with blood and fell to the floor. The prisoner again kicked her repeatedly while she was down, He also got the poker from the fire-place, and struck her over the back and arms with it, saying he would have her life’.

She must have been terrified and with good reason, most homicide victims in the nineteenth century were wives, children or in some other way relatives or friend of their killers. Her neighbours were too scared of Benjamin too come to her aid but they did call for the police and she was then able to escape from the room. Her husband’s last act was to throw a pail of water over her as she ran out of their home.

It took PC 187H a long time to contain Briggat and get him to the station. It took Mr Newton a few moments to send him to gaol for four months at hard labour. Presumably Mr Moore made a point of recording the incident in his notebook to discuss with his colleagues. Would it make a difference? Sadly, I doubt it.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, September 07, 1869]

‘Oh don’t do that. It is I and not he who should be punished’: A wife’s desperate plea to save her abusive husband

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North-east London, almost a year from the start of the Whitechapel murders and the newspapers reports of the Police courts are full of violence. On the Commercial Road a blind man was repeatedly stabbed in the face, at Wandsworth two lads were summoned for beating up a newsboy so badly he was left hospitalized and unable to walk. In Islington a mother punished her 7 year-old son for losing the money she’d sent him to by bread with. Not content with a clip round the ear she pressed a red hot poker in his mouth, burning his tongue.

Over in Hackney two policemen were patrolling near Cross Street late on Sunday night (4 August 1889) when they heard cries of ‘murder!’ and ‘police!’ They hurried towards the sounds and found a small crowd by a house and a woman bleeding from cuts to her arms. A domestic dispute had occurred – something the police were generally rather keen to avoid but perhaps the heightened tensions in the wake of the ‘Ripper’ caused these officers to intervene.

William Elvidge was standing close to his wife Alice and it seemed he had attacked her. Both parties were taken to the police station to be examined and for Alice’s wounds to be dressed.  She’d suffered two cuts only one of which was at all serious, cutting her muscle but she didn’t want to press charges against William.

‘The police, however, thought themselves justified in taking the responsibility of the charge’, and so the case came before Mr Horace Smith, the sitting magistrate at Dalston Police court. Magistrates were often frustrated by the reluctance of women to prosecute their partners; too frequently they simply dropped the charges before their hearing came on, refused to give evidence against husbands in court, or pleaded for mercy for the when they were convicted.

Alice was a woman in this mould.

The court was told that the incident had resulted from William being ‘late for his tea’. An argument had begun and Alice had thrown a plate at her husband who had retaliated by seizing a knife and threatening to ‘cut her throat’.

The magistrate said this was a case that needed to go before a jury and indicted Elvidge to appear at the next Sessions of the Peace. This sent Alice into ‘violent hysterics’ as she pleaded with the justice not to send her man to trial.

‘Oh don’t do that. It is I and not he who should be punished’, she cried. ‘He is a good, kind, affectionate husband, and good to his children’.

As she was led away by a policeman she screamed:

‘Oh, dear, it’s all through me!’

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, August 06, 1889]

‘A murderous outrage’ in Holloway

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We are staying in 1891 today to see if any there were any Police Court developments in the wake of Frances Coles’ murder on the 13 February of that year. Lloyd’s Weekly  carried reports from seven of the capital’s courts but there was no mention here of Coles, the ‘Ripper’ or the man who became associated with this killing, James Sadler.

Instead the paper covered a complaint about the mis-labelling of Turkish cigarettes, theft from a theatre district club, two different frauds (one by a nine year-old boy), a gold robbery, a so-called ‘fair fight’ that turned nasty, and the case I’d like to focus on today, which was described as ‘a murderous outrage’ .

The case had come up before at North London Police Court and the accused, a 35 year-old bricklayer named Daniel Shannon, had been remanded for further enquiries. He was charged with assaulting Jessie Bazely with whom he cohabited in Chapel Road, Holloway. Jessie had been too poorly to attend on the first occasion Shannon had appeared and the court was told she remained in that state, if not a worse one.

The paper reminded its readers of the basic details of the case: Shannon had objected to his partner’s drinking and they had argued. In the scuffle that followed Shannon had grabbed a poker and smashed her over the head with it. In his defence the bricklayer argued that it was an accident:

‘he said that ‘the woman took up the poker to strike him, and in struggling they fell on the floor, the woman’s head coming in contact with the fender’.

The police investigated the assault and Inspector Charles Bradley of Y Division was present in court to report on their findings so far, and in particular the condition of Jessie. Her evidence would be crucial in determining what happened to Shannon next.

The inspector told the magistrate that the poor woman was being held in the workhouse infirmary and had gone quite mad as a result of her injuries and her previous addiction to drink. When asked what evidence he had for this the policeman declared that he had seen her there ‘being held down by five nurses’. Moreover, she had attempted her own life and had bitten several of the staff there. Dr George Wright, the divisional police surgeon, then confirmed the inspector’s report.

From the dock of the court the prisoner asked for the fender to be produced. He said he wanted to demonstrate what had happened so he could clear his name. Inspector Bradley said that he had asked for this previously, but had been denied. The magistrate also refused his request and remanded him in custody once more.

We shall see if the case is picked up later in the week, or if the attention of the press became fixated on events in the East End instead.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, February 15, 1891]

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]

Fined for hanging a cat – a porter’s shame at Marlborough Street

I have written about cruelty to animals in previous posts on this site and, sadly, it seems to have been all too common in Victorian London. Cats, dogs and even performing monkeys were subjected to abuse or neglect by their owners or strangers and, occasionally, this was deemed serious enough to bring the perpetrators before the summary courts.

Henry Lewis, a porter  working at 31 Pall Mall (a very ‘respectable’ address in the 1840s) was charged at Marlborough Street with ‘cruelty towards a cat’ in early November 1846.

The case (for anyone reading, but especially those of you – like me – who live with cats) was horrific.

Mr Hardwick (the Police Magistrate) was told that Lewis was seen:

‘to hang the cat by the neck to a shutter in an area of the house. He then took a poker, and struck it with the nobbed end several blows on the head. Afterwards he cut down the cat whilst alive, and threw it in the dusthole‘.

Asked why he acted in such a cruel way all that Lewis could offer in his defence was to say that the animal was ‘troublesome, and mischievous’ and that once he had trapped it he thought that was the best way of getting rid of it.

Cats can be  a nuisance of course; doing damage to property or taking food from kitchens but that can never justify the level of violence the porter meted out in this instance. Mr Hardwick agreed and ‘sharply rebuked the man’, while fining him 40s.

This week President Trump, that well known humanitarian, described the terrorist that ran down and killed eight people in New York as ‘an animal’. Technically he may have been correct – we are all animals. But he is wrong in the sense that he intended it. Most animals don’t kill their own kind for political, ideological, or religious reasons, only homo sapiens (i.e us) do that.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, November 03, 1846]

for other posts concerning cruelty to animals see:

Animal cruelty exposed in the early years of the RSPCA

Cruelty to cat grabs the attention of the press while across London the ‘Ripper’ murders begin.

Six weeks in gaol for cruelty to a cat