Advert for a magic lantern. c.1885

Have you ever stood and watched the rolling advertisement we now get in some underground and other railway stations? These have moved beyond the static poster advertising a new film, holiday destination or fashion retailer, and catch our attention with moving images. On some escalators you can watch the same advert appear and disappear before your eyes as to ascend or descend the stairway.

If you had assumed this is another example of the innovative and all pervading reach of modern marketing – think again! As with so many things the Victorians were at over a hundred years ago.

In early April 1891 William Harris appeared before the chief magistrate for London at Bow Street Police court. Mr Harris, a prominent butcher, was charged with causing an obstruction on the pavement opposite his shop on the Strand. The butcher was a colourful and flamboyant character and brought his three sons (simply known as “no. 1, No. 2, and No. 3”) into court dressed in ‘white slops, etc, to resemble miniature pork butchers’. He had also hired a defense attorney, Mr Wildey Wright, to represent him.

Chief Inspector Willis of the local police said that at around 9 o’clock on the 28 March last a crowd of around 50 people had gathered across the Strand from Harris’ butcher’s shop and they were staring at his roof. The crowd had become so large that passers-by had to step out into the road to avoid it. Those standing on the street were watching a magic lantern display that Harris had installed above his premises as advertising.

As a constable tried to move the crowd on CI Willis watched as the display passed though several images of the Queen and other members of the royal family followed by cuts of meat and sausages, and then back to scenes from politics and public life.

The inspector agreed that there was ‘nothing objectionable’ about the images shown it was just that people were entranced by it and stood watching, thus blocking the passage of the street. It was a Bank Holiday, he explained, and the crowds were bigger than they normally were. This suggests that the butcher regularly used a magic lantern show to advertise his ‘chops and kidneys’.

Sir John Bridge, the magistrate, said Harris was a ‘very good Englishman and a good neighbour no doubt, and very fond of pigs; but there seemed to be some evidence of obstruction’. The defense lawyer said his client would certainly withdraw the images of the Queen and politicians of the day if that is what his neighbours demanded but he had invested a lot of money in the display.

The justice decided to suspend judgment for a month to take some soundings from local people and the police. Mr Harris meanwhile (to rising laughter in the courtroom) promised he would only show pictures of his meat products in future, and not Her Majesty or her cabinet.

[from The Standard, Friday, April 10, 1891]