Tag: RSPCA

A ‘very gross case of cruelty’ to a cat

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I am (sadly) rarely supervised at the cruelty that some human are capable of showing to others and to defenseless animals, but this case is extreme and so comes with a warning that it may be upsetting to some readers.

In September 1872 the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later to be come the RSPCA) brought a prosecution against John Kelloch. The case came before Mr Woolrych at Westminster Police court and concerned the killing of a cat.

Charles Rogers testified that on Tuesday 20 September he was a passing Kelloch’s house in Warwick Street, Pimlico when he noticed ‘a little cat’ enter the elderly man’s home. Two minutes later he saw Kelloch emerge chasing the cat, and then watched in horror as he struck at it with a large stick.

Kelloch seemed to be trying to break the cat’s back and when it was lying still on the ground he picked it up and started to whirl it around his head by its tail. The poor animal was hurled 20 feet into the air and fell back down again on to the earth. Kit took a further two hours for it to die, Rogers explained.

When Rogers challenged Kelloch about his actions he was warned that he’d do the same for any other cat that entered his cellar and for Rogers if he tried to intervene. Instead Rogers decided to tell the officers at the SPCA who obtained a warrant to arrest the culprit.

It was, Mr Woolrych the justice agreed, a ‘very gross case of cruelty’ and he fined Kelloch £5 plus costs, telling him he would go to prison for two months at hard labour if he failed to pay. He paid in full.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, September 26, 1872]

Lessons from history : we don’t want your Chlorinated chicken America

Cock fighting

The crowd that had gathered around Thomas Masters on Houndsditch one early evening in August 1867 looked angry. Angry enough at least to worry one passerby who took it upon himself to find out what was going on.

As he pushed his way through he saw an old man holding a cockerel. The bird was dripping blood and had lost a lot of its feathers along with its claws and spurs, but was alive. The man seemed drunk and the crowd was berating him.

The ‘good Samaritan’ (a Mr Moore) decided to act quickly lest the crowd used violence against their quarry. He called a policeman over and had the elderly man arrested on suspicion of animal cruelty.

The next day the man was brought before the Lord Mayor at Mansion House police court. He gave his name and admitted being a little drunk that day. He said he had clipped the bird’s spurs and claws, and removed some feathers ‘to improve his appearance and make him look younger’. One wonders why he would go to such drastic lengths, was trying to use the bird for cock fighting (illegal by the 1860s having been banned in 1835) or was he hoping to sell him?

The Lord Mayor fined him 5s for the cruelty but Masters had no money so was sent to prison for three days in default.

I think this story tells us that the British have a low tolerance for animal cruelty, at least when it is flaunted in front of us. The RSPCA was founded quite early in the nineteenth century, in 1824, and long before a charity to protect children from cruelty. We have been a nation of animal lovers for a very long time and pets are much more closely integrated into out way of life than they are in many other countries.

I think that the Americans might do well to remember this as they make sweeping statements about post-Brexit trade deals. When it comes to animal welfare the States do not have standards that are anything like as rigorous as ours or the European Union’s. Chlorinated chicken may be safe but that is to miss the point. British consumers want to know that their food is both safe and – to a large degree at least – ethically sourced. We may not ask too many questions about where our meat comes from at first, especially if it cheaper. But campaigners will soon let the public know if animals were being abused to put cheap food on our tables and then, I believe, a very British sense of fair play will demand that our supermarkets source produce elsewhere.

So the Americans can demand whatever they like in terms of access to UK markets for their agriculture, it doesn’t mean we are going to buy it. We’ve had consumer boycotts before (in the Apartheid years for example) and the US might soon learn that we are capable of saying ‘no thank you’ to a vast range of American goods.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, August 22, 1867]

Cruelty to a cat, or a dog, or both. Either way Mr Paget and the RSPCA were not happy about it.

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I’m not quite sure what to make of this story so offer it up as an example of how difficult it must have been on occasions, for a magistrate to know who was telling the truth or how he should proceed.

On Friday 4 June 1880 the manager of the Ladbroke Hotel in Notting Hill Gate was brought before Mr Paget at Hammersmith Police court. The defendant, William Gimlett, was represented by a lawyer (a Mr Claydon) and the case was brought by the RSPCA and presented by their lawyer, Mr R Willis.

The matter at hand was cruelty to a cat but there seems to have been some abuse of a dog as well, even though the case turned on the actions of the dog itself. The RSPCA accused Gimlett of cruelty by ‘urging a dog to worry a cat’. According to one or more witnesses the hotel manager was seen trying to get the dog to ‘worry’ a cat, presumably to make it go away but possibly out of simple base cruelty.

One witness testified to seeing Gimlett on the morning of the 13 May outside the hotel. He was allegedly ‘hissing a brown bull dog, which had the cat by the throat’. The cat escaped but only temporarily, the dog soon caught it again, and this tie it dragged it down into the coal cellar where it was discovered, ‘three-parts dead’ by one of the hotel’s footmen.

For the defence Claydon argued that the dog could not have harmed the cat ‘as it had lost its front teeth’. Mr Paget wanted to see for himself and asked the lawyer if he would open the animal’s mouth so he could check the veracity of the defence. The lawyer happily obliged, lifting the dog onto a small table and prizing its jaws open. Presumably satisfied that this wasn’t a dangerous beast the magistrate turned his attention to the barmaid of the hotel who gave evidence to support her manager.

Emily Mawley told the justice that the cat was a stray, and that again may well have meant it was unwelcome and needed to be shooed away. She added that her boss was nervous of the dog since he didn’t know it, and so ‘he threw a brick at it’. Was this intended to incite the dog or scare it away? This bit I find odd and without a more detailed report it is quite frustrating. Especially as the defence lawyer then went on to explain that the dog had been left to the house by a previous landlord and Mr Gimlett had inherited it, taking ‘the dog as one of the fixtures’.

Mr Paget wasn’t convinced by the barmaid’s testimony. He said she had ‘attributed to the defendant a degree of timidity which he would not impute to him’.  He found for the prosecution and fined Gimlett 40swith £1 18scosts. While this was confusing I think it does show the growing effectiveness of the RSPCA by the last quarter of the century. By 1880 they had been around over 50 years and had presumably become adept at bringing cruelty cases.

Given some of the acts of animal abuse which I have seen on social media recently I really hope that modern magistrates are as quick to side with the ‘dumb’ animals as Mr Paget was. After all in 1880 the fine and costs that was awarded against this abuser amounts to about £270 in today’s money but was almost two week’s wages for skilled tradesman then. No small sum at all and so, hopefully, a lesson not to be so quick to harm a stray cat (or dog) in the future.

[from The Morning Post, Saturday, June 05, 1880]

P.S in Victorian London pets were popular, just as they are today. The image at the top of the post is of a cats-meat man; someone that sold cheap pet food door-to-door. The meat was horse meat  a  by-product of the horse slaughtering trade and if you are interested in discovering what connection there is between cats-meat, horse slaughtering, and the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 then you might like to read Drew’s jointly authored study of the killings  which is published on June 15 by Amberley Books. It is available to pre-order on Amazon now: 

The punishment fits the crime as a cab driver is prosecuted for cruelty

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Animal cruelty is nothing new sadly. In recent weeks there have been reports of dog fighting gangs, hare coursing, even the re-emergence of cockfights; and there countless small acts of human cruelty towards animals, most of which don’t get reported. One area which has decreased is cruelty towards working animals, notably horses. This is chiefly because we don’t employ horses as we used to.

In my forthcoming book on the Whitechapel (or ‘Jack the Ripper’) murders I look in some detail at London’s meat trade and at the role of the Victorian horse slaughterer. Horses were ubiquitous in the nineteenth-century capital: the pulled hansom cabs, omnibuses, trams, carriages for the wealthy and carts for tradesmen, individuals rode horses and horses were everywhere. Horses died or grew old or sick and were slaughtered and invariably their carcasses were processed and reused as meat or glue or some other by-product.

Legislation in 1849 and 1850 allowed prosecutions of those that willfully mistreated animals and many of these prosecutions were brought by, or with the support of, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) which had been founded as early as 1824. Sometimes however, accusations of cruelty were linked to other issues, as this case from 1839 (and before the acts applied) reveals.

In February 1839 Thomas Green was brought before Mr Rawlinson at Marylebone Police court charged with ‘being drunk and cruelly using his master’s horse’. Green was one of London’s cabbies, men who never enjoyed a very good reputation amongst the magistracy, police and press in the period.  Cab drivers like Green drove for others rather than owning their cabs and animals as independent businessmen. Theirs was a hard life with long hours in all weathers, and often with drunken or otherwise belligerent and difficult customers.

Hansom drivers had a reputation for being awkward, aggressive, and for drinking and all of these combined in Thomas Green to find him arraigned before a court of law. His boss was William Green (no relation) who lived in Dorset Square. William was too ill that day to attend court so his wife went along in his stead. Mrs Green told the magistrate that the prisoner had brought his horse home the previous night in a terrible state:

The poor beast was ‘covered in weals and sweat, and so weak it could hardly stand’. Moreover Green was drunk and when she berated him for this he turned on her and ‘called her the most disgusting names’.

Mrs Green called the police and had Thomas arrested.

There were plenty of offences that cabmen could be charged with, of which one was being drunk in charge of a vehicle. He might also be prosecuted for bad language, or assault. I suspect in this case Mr Rawlinson wasn’t clear exactly what he was going to do the man with but was intent on punishing in for something.

He decided to send Thomas Green to prison for a month and as he saw him as ‘a very bad offender’ he added ‘hard labour’ to the punishment: Green would spend a month on the treadmill, pointlessly walked and climbing until he literally fell down with exhaustion. Given that this is pretty much how he had treated his horse the punishment, for once, seems fitting.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Friday, February 22, 1839]

The man who was flogging a dead horse

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I start teaching my third year module on London in the late nineteenth century, which looks at crime, popular culture and social history in the 1880s. It will be the 10th year since I devised this module and its run in 9 of those. Over the years it has evolved and I’ve developed the context and assessments but the focus remains the same: using the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders of 1888 as a prism through which to explore a range of contemporary topics. It prompted my 2010 book (London’s Shadows) and my continuing interest in the ‘Ripper’ case.

While the Ripper case dominated ‘crime news’ in 1888 the police courts continued almost as if nothing was happening in the East End. The same range of petty thefts, domestic and public violence, fraudulent scams, drunks, disorderly prostitutes, and vagrants continued to be the stock of most lower court reports.

So take today in 1888 for example, the first case (from Bow Street) featured an elderly man who had tried to pass counterfeit currency in a central London pub. He was caught along with two accomplices and remanded in custody. Over at Westminster Police court two newspaper sellers were prosecuted for robbing a man in the street. Francis Hoare (a pub landlord on a visit to the capital) had fallen over in the street.  William Turner and Edward Lynch rushed to help but then used that as cover to lift his pocket watch; both men were ‘known’ to the police and the magistrate remanded them for further enquires.

Across the river Thames at Greenwich Police court Thomas Pettitt was accused of mistreating a horse. Mr Sheil was told that Pettitt, a potato dealer, had been working a horse that was clearly ill. The case was brought by an officer of the RSPCA who testified that the beast was ‘suffering from several sores and partly fractured fetlocks’.

Pettitt’s poor defence was that he had only taken up dealing in potatoes recently; he was previously a draper, and didn’t understand horses. Mr Shiel countered that excuse with:

‘any fool must have known the horse was not fit for work’.

He added – the RSPCA’s officer – that in future individuals shouldn’t be summoned but instead they should be arrested and the animal impounded so a magistrate could look at it and come to an opinion about its state of health. That, he said, was ‘better than the evidence of the whole College of Veterinary Surgeons’ (which I doubt went down well with that august body of men).

Any inspection of the horse was now impossible as Pettitt told Mr Sheil he thought it was dead. The magistrate fined him £3 with 2s costs and gave him a week to find the money or he would send him to prison for a fortnight. London was served by thousands of horses in the Victorian period, and very many of them were simply worked till they dropped.

At that point their masters called for a horse slaughterer to dispatch them and this usually meant someone from the firm of Harrison & Barber, who held a virtual monopoly in the capital. Not surprisingly, as men used to cutting up animals, some of the first people the police questioned in the aftermath of Polly Nichol’s murder in August 1888 were slaughterer’s from the nearby Barber’s yard.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, October 05, 1888

The RSPCA exposes appalling cruelty to a cat

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By 1883 the Society for the Protection of Animals had received royal approval and so carried the name we know it by today – the RSPCA. Britain prides itself on being a nation of animal lovers, and pets are very much a part of family life in this country. I’m on holiday at the moment and our villa is overrun with the local feral cats which we – as cat lovers – dutifully feed morning and night. As a result the pair of cats that turned up on day one has grown to a pride of 5-6 daily.

Not everyone shares our affection for cats however and plenty of people would rather not share the planet (or at least their neighbourhood) with our feline friends. There are still daily instances of animal neglect and animal cruelty which necessitates having an organisation dedicated to protecting them.

The RSPCA was founded in 1824 (more than half a century before the NSPCC, indicating , perhaps, where British priorities lie) and campaigned to protect animals from routine exploitation and cruelty. Officers of the charity investigated and brought prosecutions against abusers, as this example from 1883 shows.

Thomas Scoines, a bookmaker living near Berkeley Square in central London, was summoned before Mr Mansfield at Marlborough Street Police court, accused of maltreating a cat. The summons was taken out by John White, an RSPCA inspector and he produced three witness to testify to Scoines’ cruelty.

Mrs Hannah Beattie said that she’d seen the bootmaker beating a cat to try to get it out of his rooms. She challenged him and said such violence was unnecessary. It was also ineffective, as the cat kept coming back (as the one’s round our holiday home do). Here they try to sneak into the building and we shoo them out (in Greek!) but they still try. She added that Scoines had finally drowned the cat in a copper kettle.

Scoines was much less tolerant than us however, and William Stone declared that he’d seen the defendant knocking a cat out through a window with a broomstick. Another witness said he’d later seen that the poor animal’s back legs had been broken, allegedly as a result of Scoines’ violence.

In court he defended himself, denying cruelty but admitted he’d killed the animal. The cat’s legs had been broken as he shoved it into the kettle, but he clearly didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. The cruelty was appalling and the magistrate saw it for what it was. Mr Mansfield told Scoines that he was guilty of cruelty and declared that the ‘unfortunate cat had been brutally treated’. He fined him 20s with 12s 6d costs, so the RSPCA was not out of pocket for bringing the prosecution.

I can understand that stray cats can be a nuisance but I can’t understand why people feel the need to hurt them. Cats can be chased away with a simple spray of water and if you don’t feed them they will quickly realise that there might well be better pickings somewhere else.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, September 2, 1883]

‘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]

A snake trader charms the Mansion House

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The summary courts of the capital didn’t always deal with crime or antisocial behaviour; some of those that came before so did so for advice or to ask for help. One such person, named, was a traveler from the Caribbean, who appeared before the Chief Clerk at Mansion House in some distress.

The unnamed visitor, described by the press reports as a ‘respectable-looking young negro’, said he had arrived in London from his native Demerara via a circuitous route. He told  Mr Oke, the clerk that he had left Demerara (in what was then British Guiana and is now Guyana) in an attempt to make some money.

Whilst ‘out in the woods’ in Demerara he ‘had discovered a nest of boa-constrictors that had only just been hatched, and having heard that such objects were of value in foreign countries, he carefully secured his prize… and resolved to take the “little strangers” to the Zoological Gardens at Moscow, where he was told he would be paid a good price for them’.

It seems that there was nothing deemed wrong in the young man’s actions, the Victorians hadn’t yet determined that trading in live exotic animals was cruel. The RSPCA (who are concerned about such a trade in snakes today) had been in existence for around 50 years by 1873 (when this application came before the Mansion House Police Court) but perhaps they were busy enough dealing with cruelty to domestic animals.

Unfortunately for the adventurous snake dealer things didn’t go quite to plan however. He made his way to Hamburg where he was supposed to make a connection to take him on to Russia but the boas fell sick. Despite ‘all his endeavours’ the ‘young “boas” all died’.

With nothing to trade and most of his money gone the lad used the rest of his funds to get himself to England and the capital where he now asked for the Empire’s help to secure a boat back home. He had found ship at the West India dock that was prepared to carry him back to Guiana in return from him working his passage but he had no clothes. He asked the court therefore, if he might have some money from the poor box to purchase the necessary clothes for the voyage.

Mr Oke sent an assistant to check his story and, having ascertained that he was telling the truth, agreed to help. He was given a small sum and ‘left the court apparently highly delighted with the result of his application’.

There is a footnote to this story: Mr George Colwell OKe (1821-1874) served as the Chief Clerk to the magistrates in the City from 1864 onwards having started as a clerk in 1855. He was widely respected for his knowledge of the criminal law and assisted many aldermen and lord mayors in their decision making. Moreover, as a result of his deep understanding of statue law and practice Oke produced several volumes on the subject.

The best selling and most well-known of these was his Synopsis of Summary Convictions,(1858) which ran to 8 volumes and was popularly known as Oke’s Magisterial. You can find this online and while it is hardly an exciting read, it is invaluable to historians in understanding the legal structure under which all Police Court business was conducted. Oke rarely appears in the pages of the newspapers so it is nice to see such an influential figure pop up and act in a charitable way, demonstrating the alternative function of these central summary courts.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, October 23, 1873]

A fishmonger takes extreme measures to protect his stock

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A brief entry today, if I may be permitted, but an odd one.

We are a nation of animal lovers. I am not sure when that started but it seems to have been in place for much of the Victorian period. Whether this ‘love’ extended past our pets (predominately cats and dogs and small birds) to livestock is a moot point but the RSPCA were founded early in the century (in 1824).

Cruelty to animals has been highlighted in several posts in this blog because on many occasions people were taken before Police Magistrates to answer for their behaviour. Such incidents included stolen dogs (a supposedly ‘modern’ phenomenon), horses worked until they literally died in the streets, or monkeys mistreated as they helped musicians beg for money.

But this one struck me as particularly unpleasant and unusual.

A summons was applied for at the Dalston Police Court in north east London to bring in a fishmonger who lived in Hackney-Wick. The tradesman was not named in the newspaper report but Mr Bros (the sitting magistrate) asked what the summons was for.

The applicant was a woman (also unmanned) and she told him that the fishmonger used a gun to scare off cats that came into his garden, no doubt attracted by the smell of fish.

According to her ‘he frightened everybody by firing across the gardens at the cats that went after his fish. On a recent afternoon the man fired at a cat two gardens off, the shot going through the cats head and killing it’.

This was a regular activity, she complained, and she was ‘afraid to go into the back yard’ for fear of being shot herself.

Mr Bros granted the summons. I have two cats and they roam across the neighbours’ gardens (and we are visited by several other local felines). It can be a nuisance, they are a danger to local wildlife, especially birds, and they have an unpleasant habit of digging holes in the beds and filling them. So I understand people wanting to keep them out.

The fishmonger undoubtedly wanted to scare them away for good reason, but shooting them two gardens away? I hope he got his just desserts.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, August 5, 1888]