Tag: romance

An unwanted admirer on Regent Street

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Edith Watson, a young lady who was employed as a bonnet trimmer had made a big impression on one foreign immigrant in London. Alick Korhanske was infatuated with her but what might have ended in marriage and domestic bliss actually ended up in front of a Police Court magistrate at Westminster.

It isn’t clear when Korhanske, who ran the London, Chatham and Dover Toilet Club at Victoria Station, first fell for Edith but the pair met, by accident, on Regent Street in June 1885. Edith was on her way home to Pimlico from Madame Louise’s millinery shop when Korhanske approached her.

‘I have been watching you for some time’, he said, ‘and I love you. May I pay my addresses to you?”

Edith was careful not to start up a conversation with a strange man she had never met before, especially in Regent Street where women (notably Elizabeth Cass in 1887) could easily be assumed to be prostitutes if they were unaccompanied, so she ignored him and walked on.  The 33 year-old hairdresser was not so easily rebuffed however, and he followed all the way back to Tachbrook Street.

A few nights later he turned up at her door and asked to see her. She again refused and he went away, but not far. As she walked along York Street later that evening with a female companion he grabbed her by the arm and tried to force her into a cab. Fortunately her friend helped her escape. The women set off in hurry back to Tachbrook Street but Korhanske followed after them and hit out at Edith from behind, knocking her to the pavement with his walking cane.

The next day he again accosted her in the street and this time asked her to marry him. She declined.

This state of affairs evidently continued for several months until, on the 2 March 1886, Edith was again stopped by Korhanske in the street and threatened.

‘I will kill you the first time I see you out, and myself afterwards’.

That was more than enough for Edith who took out a summons to bring him before Mr Partridge at Westminster. The hairdresser produced a number of ‘love letters’ from Edith to challenge her version of events, suggesting that his overtures had been welcomed, not rejected. They showed that she had ‘made appointments’ to see him and had signed them ‘With love, your affectionately, Alice’.

This produced a burst of laughter in the courtroom. Her name was Edith, not Alice, was she deliberately giving him a false name or even channeling the eponymous fantasy character of Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel? Edith admitted writing the letters but only out of fear of him, ‘to pacify him, and for her own protection’. She had not meant a word she’d written.

Korhanske would be considered to be a stalker today, and that can be a very dangerous situation for the prey. He may simply have been another love struck suitor whose passions were unrequited, but it might also have made good on his threat to kill the object of his affection and then end his own life.

Mr Partridge decided that enough was enough and demanded he enter into recognizances of £50 to keep the peace and ‘be of good behaviour’ for six months. Otherwise he would lock him up. Let’s hope he stayed away and let the young milliner get on with her life.

[from The Standard, Friday, March 12, 1886]

A young postman is overwhelmed by Valentine’s Day

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Amidst all the commercial celebration of Valentine’s day, with every supermarket making special ‘dine in’ offers, shops filling their windows with hearts and chocolates, and florists selling red roses at double the normal price, it is easy to see that for some of these traders this has become one of the key income generating weeks of the year.

Once Christmas and the sales are over there is usually a slump in trade before Easter that [St] Valentine’s Day has now assumed such an importance to the retail industry. But do we have an idea of how busy it was in the past I wonder? We know the Victorians celebrated the occasion and sent love tokens as we do, but what effect did that have on everyday life?

Well we can get an idea of how it affected the people that delivered those messages, the postmen of the Victorian capital, in this case from 1871. An unnamed postman was prosecuted at Westminster Police court for drunkenness whilst on duty. His offence was minor but had the potential for serious consequences, his defense however, was most illuminating.

Mr Woolrych, the sitting magistrate at Westminster that day, was told that a crowd of ‘disorderly persons’ had gathered around a postman, drawing the attention of a passing police officer. As the bobby pushed his way through the throng he found the postman sorting a pile of letters under a lamppost. It was late at night, past 10.30, which was why he needed the gaslight to read the addresses on the mail.

Most of the letters ‘were valentines’ and they should have been delivered much earlier in the day by a colleague but that postie had failed to find the addresses and so they had gone back in the system, and our man was now tasked with uniting them with the correct (and probably by now quite desperate) recipients.

As the postman at last moved off to make his deliveries the policeman noticed that he was rather unsteady on his feet, and stopped him. He quickly realized that the man was under the influence of alcohol and he arrested him. In court the postman apologized but said he had been on duty since four in the morning, had had very little if anything to eat all day, and so when a kindly woman had treated him to a ‘tumbler of sherry’ it had ‘produced an effect over which [he] had no control’.

His supervisor appeared to confirm that the young man had an exemplary record in his four and a half years with the Post Office:

‘He was a steady, honest, and industrious servant, against whom no complaint had ever been made; and should he be convicted…dismissal from the service would certainly follow’.

In this case common sense prevailed. Mr Woolrych accepted that while drinking on duty rendered the man  ‘blamable’ for the offence there were mitigating factors. There was no need to ruin a young man with such a previously unblemished record and so he discharged him (which is probably why the papers decided not to reveal his name).

The evidence revealed that (as noted earlier):

the ‘defendant had been on duty since four o’clock in the morning without intermission or opportunity of taking a meal, as the valentine delivery was very heavy, and the reserve men had even been called upon to perform the duties of letter-carriers’.

Valentine’s Day was a big day then in Victorian England with very many people using the postal service to send their tokens of affection to their sweethearts. After Christmas this was probably the busiest period of the year for the men of the Post Office, just as it is today for the florists, chocolatiers and restaurateurs of the capital.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, February 16, 1871]

A pantomime villain is hissed out of court

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Horace Moore was a blackguard. He was the sort of character that might have  appeared in a Dickens novel and, at the end of his court appearance in December 1887, the watching public treated him accordingly.

Moore wasn’t in court for anything criminal he had done, in fact he wasn’t in the dock at all. He had chosen to go to court to prosecute a man that had assaulted him but it was the circumstances surrounding the assault – and the reason for it – that earned him the opprobrium of the public gallery.

Horace Moore was the son of a hay and straw dealer and lived at home on the Harrow Road. From this we might ascertain that he was a young man, probably in his early twenties. In November 1887 he was ‘walking out’ with a young lady named Miss Battrum. Horace’s brother was engaged to the girl’s sister and the couple had met at Yarmouth earlier that year.

As Horace and his companion strolled together on the 27 November Mrs Battrum (the young woman’s mother) came up behind and overtook them. She stopped, raised her umbrella, and struck Horace repeatedly over the head with it. Words were exchanged and Mrs Battrum led her daughter away.

The very next day Horace was having his shoes cleaned by a shoeblack on the Harrow Road when Mr Thomas Battrum marched up to him. He said he had insulted his wife the previous day and then hit him on the head with his fist, ‘which knocked his hat off and sent him staggering’. It was this assault which prompted the summons to Marylebone Police court.

So what had merited this seemingly unprovoked attack on a young man walking out with his girlfriend? Under cross examination by Battrum’s lawyer the truth gradually began to emerge that Horace Moore was the sort of person that enjoyed the company of women but was very far from being any father’s ideal son-in-law.

At the time Moore had met Miss Battrum at Yarmouth he had just the subject of a civil prosecution in which he had lost. He had been found to have seduced a young woman named Miss Bosher who was under 16 years of age. For that he was made to pay compensation of £250.

This was not his first offence although it may have been the first one for which he was successfully prosecuted. Miss Bosher had testified that Moore had told her he had been accused of seducing a Miss Goddard but added that ‘nothing came of it so it would be all right’.

Moore denied this and also denied ‘having ruined a Miss Taylor or any one of the name’. He wasn’t engaged to Miss Battrum he explained to Mr Cooke (the sitting magistrate) ‘he was simply walking out with her as a friend’.

The assault had been violent and he had lost the sight in one eye as a result of it. The court could not ignore the violence but Mr Cooke was not about to let a father’s defense of his daughter’s reputation earn him anything more than a slap on the wrist. What he had done was simply what any man might have done faced with the revelation that his daughter was dating such a dishonest and predatory young man.

The magistrate told Buttram that ‘no man had any right to commit an assault, no matter what the misconduct of another might be’, and then fined him sixpence, an entirely nominal sum for the builder to pay, and refused to award any compensation to Horace Moore. As the young man left the court ‘he was hissed’ like the villain in a Victorian melodrama. With a bit of luck the publication of his name by the papers would alert his future victims (or at least their fathers) to steer clear of his romantic advances.

[from The Standard, Friday, 9 December, 1887]