Tag: soldiers
‘You are manifestly in a state of suffering, but I am not certain that this should be taken into consideration’. No pity for a East End thief
There were some curious and sad stories from the police courts on 30 August 1864.
At Bow Street a man was sent for trial for stealing his landlady’s shawl (value £1) but the circumstances were most peculiar.
She had found him drunk in her room, sitting on one chair with his feet up on another. When she asked him to leave he dropped to all fours and started barking like a dog and meowing like a cat. A policeman gave evidence that just days before the same man had been seen trying to persuade soldiers in uniform to desert to join ‘the Federals’ (meaning the Northern ‘Union’ army fighting the American Civil War against the Southern ‘Confederates’).
At Worship Street Maurice Lawrence cut a sad figure in the dock. Described as ‘a general dealer’ who lived on Plumbers Row, Whitechapel, he was clearly down on his luck. He struggled to stand on his one good leg, the other was ‘withered’ and ‘about to be amputated’ the court was told.
He had been discovered by Michael Mahon, allegedly stealing flowers from Victoria Park. Mahon was an old soldier – a sergeant major who’d seen service in the Crimean War – and he caught Lawrence plucking ‘three dahlias and two geraniums’ and, in his new position as park constable, arrested him. As he was bring led away to the station house Lawrence begged to be set free, offering Mahon 5s for his liberty.
In court he admitted taking the flowers but denied attempting to bribe the park constable, and then threw himself on the mercy of the magistrate. He rolled up his trousers to reveal his withered limb ‘which was seen to be no thicker than an ordinary walking stick’.
If he hoped the magistrate would let him off he was disappointed. The magistrate declared that unless people that stole flowers were punished ‘the beds will very speedily be destroyed’.
‘You are manifestly in a state of suffering’, he said, ‘but I am not certain that this should be taken into consideration’.
So for stealing a small bunch of flowers from a public park Maurice Lawrence was fined a shilling and the cost of the flowers. Since he was unable or unwilling to pay this he was sent to prison for a day instead. Perhaps that represented leniency, but it seems a fairly unkind punishment for a man that was so obviously in a state of extreme poor health.
The last story that caught my eye (leaving aside a man that tried to kill himself with a dose of laudanum) was that of two landlords prosecuted for keeping unlicensed lodging houses. Both prosecutions were at Greenwich Police court before Mr Traill, the sitting justice. John Buckley (in absentia) and Johanna Keefe were both accused of renting rooms (although the term is hardly apt, ‘space’ would be more accurate) without a license.
The cases were brought by Sergeant Pearson (45A) the inspector of lodging houses in the district’. He testified to visiting both properties (in Mill Lane) and describing the scene he found there.
At Buckley’s he found a room with:
‘with beds, each occupied by a two men, three of whom paid 4d a night each, and the other 2s a week; and in a cupboard in the same room he found a bed on the floor occupied by two men, each paying 1d a night. The size of the cupboard, which had neither light nor ventilation, was about 6 feet in length, by 4 feet in width and 5 feet high’.
There were other rooms with similarly cramped lodgings within them. At Johanna Keefe’s he found a room that had:
‘three beds, each occupied by two men, five of whom paid 2s per week each, the sixth being the defendant’s son’.
‘What!’, interjected Mr Traill, ‘Ten shillings a week rent for one room?’
‘Yes, your worship’, the sergeant replied, ‘and a small room, not being more than 12 feet square’.
The magistrate issued a warrant for Buckley’s arrest (he had form for this offence) and fined Keefe 20s. Hearing that she had eight years worth of previous convictions he warned her that if she persisted in taking lodgers without obtaining a license he would start fining her 20 shillings a day.
All in all the day’s reports made a fairly depressing read and reminded Londoners that their city had plenty of social problems in the mid 1860s.
[from Morning Post Tuesday 30 August 1864]
‘A Mysterious tragedy in London’, as Martha Tabram’s murder sets off the hunt for ‘Jack the Ripper’.
“Mysterious tragedy in London”.
This is how one regional English paper reported the death of a woman in East London in early August 1888. At that point they didn’t know that this was about to become the story of 1888 and one of the most notorious crime stories of this or any other age.
The Sheffield paper described how John Reeves was on his way to work, descending the stairs from his room in George Yard Buildings in what is now Gunthorpe Street, Whitechapel, when he came across the body of a woman. She was lying in a pool of blood and Reeves rushed off in search of a policeman. PC Barrett (26H) quickly found a doctor who examined the woman in situe.
Dr Keeling ‘pronounced life extinct, and gave it as his opinion that she had been brutally murdered, there being knife wounds on her breast, stomach and abdomen’. It was hardly a contentious conclusion to draw, the poor woman had been stabbed 49 times and only one of those blows (to the area close to her heart would have been needed to kill her.
The paper reported that the victim was ‘unknown to any of the occupants of the tenements on the landing of which’ she was found, and no one had heard ‘any disturbance’ that night. A killer had apparently struck and killed with extreme violence without anyone seeing or hearing anything.
The murder had, the paper continued, been placed in the capable hands of Inspector Reid of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), who was now ‘conducting inquiries’. So far these inquiries had not resulted in any clues being found but that didn’t stop the press from speculating. There were dark muttering about the type of wounds that the unknown woman had suffered, some of which were described as ‘frightful’, one described as being of ‘ almost revolting nature’.
While the identity of the victim was just as much as a mystery as her assailant the papers did agree that she was ‘undoubtedly an abandoned female’. By this they meant that she was a prostitute and so speculated that her client might have killed her. Moreover it was stated that her wounds were ‘probably inflicted by a bayonet’ and so the search was soon on for one of the several soldiers seen drinking near the scene of the crime earlier that night.
The woman was Martha Tabram (or Turner) and although DI Reid followed up the soldier angle it was soon clear that no squaddie was responsible for Martha’s murder. While her death has previously been only loosely linked to the series of killings history has called the Whitechapel Murders I think we can now be fairly sure was among the first of ‘Jack the Ripper’s victims. Killers MOs develop over time and adapt to circumstance (the Zodiac killer in California in the 1960s is a good example of this) and so while Martha’s throat was not cut they are similarities in respect of the other murders in 1888-91.
I believe Martha Tabram was actually the third person that the serial killer known as ‘Jack the Ripper’ murdered, the first being over a year earlier in May 1887. Along with my co-research Andrew Wise we have set out our arguments for drawing link between the Whitechapel murders and another set of unsolved homicide (the Thames Torso mystery) which occurred at the same time. While London might have had two serial killers operating at exactly the same time we think it is unlikely and we believe we might have uncovered a possible suspect to hold responsible. Obviously proving someone is guilty after 130 plus years has passed is all but impossible and so we offer our suspect as a possible killer, not the killer.
The pursuit of Jack the Ripper has become a parlour game which anyone can play and we are not so arrogant as to believe that solving it is easy or straightforward. We’ve presented our case in our new book – Jack and the Thames Torso Murders: A New Ripper? (published by Amberley this summer) – give it a look if you are interested in finding out more about the case, our suspect, and late Victorian London. It is available in all good bookshops and online.
[from Evening Telegraph and Star and Sheffield Daily Times, Wednesday, August 8, 1888]
The soldier who found it all too much to bear
This is one of those stories that could make a mini drama series all of its own, despite there being very little detail to go on. All it needs is a storyteller with a vivid imagination.
In July 1861 a ‘tall, military-looking man; named James Moxham was set in the dock at Southwark Police court. He was charged with two counts of theft and one of attempting to kill himself in his cell. How on earth had he come to this desperate state?
It seems that Moxham, a soldier in the army, had been courting a young woman named Jane Clerk. The court heard that he was accused of stealing two gold rings and a pawnbroker’s duplicate (ticket) for a gold chain. The jewelry belonged to Jane but one wonders if the rings had been intended for the two of them at some future wedding ceremony.
Clearly something had gone very wrong for Jane to bring a charge of felonious theft against her paramour but what exactly happened isn’t revealed in this report. All we are told was that in court Jane pleaded for leniency on the grounds that Moxham had since returned the stolen items and she’d forgiven him.
The soldier had also tried to hang himself in his cell, though whether this was because he believed he’d lost his chance at love or could not cope with the public shame of a court hearing for theft, is again, open to question. He told the sitting justice, Mr Maude, that he deeply regretted his actions and it was evident he was still traumatized from his experience.
Since Jane no longer wished to bring a prosecution and the jewelry had been reunited with its owner, Mr Maude admonished the soldier for his bad behaviour but directed the clerk of the court to discharge him. That should have been that but a policeman piped up that Moxham was wanted by the army, as a deserter. That may have been the real shame he was trying to escape from. He was immediately re-arrested and taken back to the cells to await the visit of his company sergeant.
So there you have it, a drama in several acts: a tale of unrequited love or star-crossed lovers? An attempt to run away from the army to marry the woman he loved? A mental crisis occasioned by the impending doom of public shame? Over to you novelists!
[from The Morning Chronicle, Friday, July 5, 1861]
Soldiers are caught stealing from the stores as amateur football is eclipsed by the professionals
An impression of the 1892 FA Challenge Cup final at Kennington Oval between West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa
Yesterday Manchester City completed an unprecedented clean sweep of the domestic trophies for men’s football in England. In beating Watford 6-0 at Wembley they emphasized their dominance in professional football in this country and equaled the record for the largest winning margin in an FA Cup final (held by Bury who beat Derby by the same score in 1903). City epitomize the modern game: they are a team of millionaires playing for club that is owned by an oil rich nation, who play in a league that is funded to a large extent by the revenue it draws from selling the TV rights to subscription media companies like Sky and BT Sport.
Never before have the players and fans of football clubs been so distant (economically and socially) from each other. In 1883 Blackburn Olympic won the old FA Cup final, beating the Old Etonians 2-1 at the Kennington Oval after extra time. The final was significant because for the very first time a working-class team (and a northern one at that) had won against a team of ‘gentlemen’ amateurs. In fact the Old Etonians were the last amateur club to win what was then the most prestigious trophy in English football. Thereafter football changed and northern or midlands teams went on to win the prize until 1901 when a little known southern non-league side won it, beating Sheffield United after a replay at Burnden Park in Bolton. Spurs’ victory in 1901 was a rare one for southern teams and the north and midlands dominated the history of the FA cup, at least until the modern era.
While today’s newspaper will be full of pictures of celebrating Manchester City players (and images from last night’s Eurovision song contest – something our Victorian ancestors did not have to suffer!) the papers in 1883 would have given much less space to football than ours do. It was a very popular working-class pastime but the 1883 final drew a crowd of just 8,000 to south London, and of course it wasn’t on television or the radio. Instead perhaps contemporaries would have lapped up the latest news from the police courts in 1883 as they digested their breakfast or supper, or sat around with their friends in the pub.
In May 1883 they might have read about the antics of three members of the Army Commissariat and Transport Corps who were set in the dock at Westminster and charged with stealing from the stores at the Chelsea barracks. Joseph Maslin, William Earl and James Lane were accused of pinching 47 pairs of boots, 10 pairs of gloves and ‘other articles’, all valued at £46 11s (or around £3,000 at today’s prices). All three men had previously unblemished service records and wore ribbons that indicated they had earned the Egypt medal for their efforts in the recent conflict with insurgents opposed to the British backed Khedive, Twefik Pasha (pictured right). 
All three were remanded and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. There, on 28 May 1883 Earl was acquitted of all charges, Maslin was convicted of theft and Law of receiving stolen goods. Their previous good conduct and military service went in their favour as the jury recommended leniency: Law was sent to gaol for four months, and his partner Maslin for six, both were ordered to do hard labour whilst in prison. Presumably both men were also dishonorably discharged from the army and the stores, which was described as being run in a ‘lax way’ by the judge at the Central Criminal court, underwent a reorganization.
[From The Morning Post, Saturday, May 19, 1883]
If you enjoy this blog series you might be interested in Drew’s jointly authored study of the Whitechapel (or ‘Jack the Ripper’) murders which is published by Amberley Books on 15 June this year. You can find details here:
‘A lawless rabble’: A jeweller is charged as guardsmen riot in Knightsbridge
Police constable James Jacobs (404B) was on his beat in Knightsbridge at 11.30 on Tuesday 8 May 1877. He was quickly alerted to the behaviour of a large group of soldiers who were abusing passers-by and causing a breach of the peace. The 15 or 16 men of the Coldstream Guards were drunk and Jacobs ordered them to move along and go back to their barracks as quietly as possible.
The guardsmen were in no mood to obey a policeman’s order or cut short their fun and games so instead they headed for the nearest pub, the Queen and Prince tavern. As soon as they pushed their way in though the landlord refused to serve them, ordered them out, and closed up. PC Jacobs once again told them to go home and they again refused him.
A confrontation was now brewing and another officer came to assist his colleague. PC Smith (273B) waded into the dispute and got his ears boxed for his trouble. He seized the solider that had hit him and the pair fell to the ground wrestling. As the officer was down a solder kicked him in the head and another attacked Jacobs, punching him in face, splitting open his cheek and temporarily stunning him.
More police arrived and several of the soldiers were arrested and dragged off towards the police station. By now a crowd of onlookers had gathered and decided to hiss and boo the police and call them names. Shouts of ‘cowardly beasts’ were heard and sticks and stones were hurled at the backs of the officers who were trying to escort their captives to custody. A jeweler named Frederick Buxton tried to haul an officer away from his charge and was himself arrested.
James Vince, a groom, also intervened trying to rescue one of the guards and swearing at the policeman holding him. A woman named Harriett Ansell rushed up and struck a policeman over the head with one of the sticks the soldiers had discarded. Both she and Vince were also arrested.
It had turned into a riot with dozens of people involved and utter chaos on the streets. Eventually the soldiers and the three civilians were brought back to the station house but at least one of the guardsmen had to be carried face down ‘kicking and biting like a wild beast’. The soldiers were probably collected in the morning by their regimental sergeant at arms to face whatever punishment the army had in store for them. Meanwhile the three civilians were set in the dock at Westminster to be summarily tried by Mr Woolrych the sitting Police Court magistrate.
He dismissed the charge against Harriett for lack of concrete evidence and suggested that the young groom had been set a ‘bad example’ by Buxton who, as a respectable jeweler, should have known better. Buxton was fined £4 (or two months goal) and Vince was told he would have to pay £2 or go to prison for a month. He described the soldiers, who were members of one of the finest regiments in the British army, as a ‘lawless rabble’ who had attacked two policeman who were only doing their duty. It was the soldiers who were ‘cowardly’ that night, not the police.
Twenty years earlier the Coldstream Guards had distinguished themselves in service in the Crimean War, fighting at the battles of Alma, Inkerman and the siege of Sebastopol. Four soldiers won the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry, in that conflict. So I like to think the army punished the men that disgraced the uniform of such a famous regiment, the oldest in the history of the army, for brawling drunkenly in the streets of the capital of Empire.
[from The Standard, Thursday, May 10, 1877]
If you enjoy this blog series you might be interested in Drew’s jointly authored study of the Whitechapel (or ‘Jack the Ripper’) murders which is published by Amberley Books on 15 June this year. You can find details here:
No help (or sympathy) for an old ‘hero’ who lashes out
Thomas Cooney was a crossing sweeper on the Bayswater Road. Sweepers were ‘beggars of a sort, demanding alms in return for a useful, almost essential public service’: clearing a path through the mud that covered most of the capital’s streets and paths.1 Cooney asked for tips from the ladies and gentlemen that preferred not to drag their crinolines or trouser legs through the filth churned up by countless road users. He could probably find no other work since service in the army had left him crippled with two wooden legs. He drew an army pension of 10s 6d a week but that wouldn’t have gone very far in 1859.
Today I doubt that even Esther McVey or Ian Duncan Smith would expect Thomas to work for a living but the Victorian state was much less considerate in giving benefits to those that so obviously needed them. As a result the man with (literally) no legs to stand on was forced to do exactly that, day after day, in all weathers.
Moreover, the local youth had identified him as a figure of fun, worthy of their abuse. Most days a pack of them would taunt him, fling stones and mud at him, and occasionally be brave enough to get close enough to prod him and try to knock him over. What larks!
Cooney retaliated by shouting at them, waving his sticks, throwing stones back, and threatening to ‘do for them’. One day in April 1859 the boys were teasing him and he was chucking stones back when a little girl, just 11 years of age was passing on her way home from school. As she passed Cooney he wacked her with his stick, hitting her in the face, and she ran off home in tears.
Her father was a respectable tradesman living in Blandford Street, just off Manchester Square (where the Wallace Collection is housed today). Mr Woolter was so outraged by the attack on his daughter Anne that he set out at once to confront the crossing sweep. He gave him a piece of his mind but Cooney was far from repentant, instead of an apology all Woolter got was a punch in the mouth. The blow dislodged a tooth and unsettled the rest. Cooney was arrested and produced before Mr Broughton at Marylebone Police court.
The magistrate heard that Cooney had a long history of hitting out at anyone – youths, members of the public, and the police – that encountered him. He was described as a ‘brutal fellow’ and ‘a most desperate character’. I’m sure he was but perhaps he had his reasons. PC Reed (60D) said Cooney had been drinking and had resisted arrest. All Cooney offered by way of a defense was the unceasing abuse he’d received from the boys.
That didn’t wash with Mr Broughton. A respectable citizen and his little girl had been assaulted and the latter was fortunate not to have ‘been killed on the spot’ he declared. The justice requested a certificate from the surgeon that had treated Anne so he could assess the severity of her injuries before passing judgment on Cooney. In the meantime the sweeper was sent to the nearest house of correction to await his fate.
[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, April 20, 1859]
1 Lee Jackson, Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, (Yale University Press, 2014), pp.32-3
Drew Gray is the joint author of Jack and the Thames Torso Murders, published by Amberley Books in June 2019. Details available here
‘It was a tolerably fine night for a walk’:a freezing night in London brings little humanity from the parish
Ratcliffe Highway in the late 1800s
Robert Mace was a former solider, discharged from the army in 1853 having previously served in India. He was 31 years of age, had no job and no home to speak of. He was in London, in Ratlciffe, on the night of the 3 February 1860 and was intending to make his way back to his last place of settlement, Maidstone in Kent. However, it was cold, it was getting dark and he was hungry so he knocked at the door of the Ratcliffe workhouse and asked for relief.
Mr Snelling, the porter at the union workhouse opened the door and told him to go away. He would t be admitted there and that was the end of it. Mace did go away for a bit but unable to find shelter and still starving from lack of food he tried again, with the same response from Snelling. As he walked away from the workhouse gates he saw a policeman, PC Polter (276K) and asked him to help. The constable said he was sorry but he couldn’t make the workhouse admit him.
Mace bent down, picked up a stone from the street and lobbed it at a gas lamp that illuminated the gates of the poor house. The lamp smashed and since he’d committed criminal damage right in front of him PC Polter had no option but to the arrest the man and take him before a magistrate.
Robert Mace appeared before Mr Selfe at Thames Police court on the following morning. He explained his situation and the magistrate had some sympathy with him. Since the workhouse porter was also summoned to give evidence Mr Selfe wondered why he hadn’t simply admitted the man as he’d requested?
Because. the porter insisted, the man was perfectly capable of making his way to Maidstone. Mr Selfe was amazed at this, did the porter rally think this man could make that trip and find shelter and ‘refreshment’ on the way?
‘There are half a dozen workhouses between ours and Greenwich’ Snelling stated, ‘He could have called at any of them on the way to Maidstone’.
‘Well you might have taken him into the house, I think, and given him some bread and a night’s lodging’ Selfe said, adding ‘he is a poor, emaciated fellow’.
Snelling dismissed this:
‘The weather was fine last night. He could have got several miles on his road between three o’clock and eight’.
‘Not so fine’, the magistrate countered, ‘I walked home in the snow from this court at five o’clock, and I was very cold, although I had an overcoat on, and was well wrapped up’.
‘It was tolerably fine for a walk’ the porter insisted.
The lack of humanity the porter displayed was clearly staggering even to a contemporary audience – the reporter ‘headlined’ the piece as ‘The model union’ with deep sarcasm. Regardless of whether the Ratcliffe workhouse should have admitted him or not Mace was guilty of criminal damage although the victim was the Commercial Gas Company not the union.
Mr Selfe decided that it would probably do the former soldier more good to be incarcerated in a prison than a workhouse so sentenced him to five days. He hoped that the bed and board he’d receive there would be sufficient to set him up for the long walk to Maidstone which, depending which route he took, was considerable being about 50 miles from London.
[from The Morning Chronicle, Saturday, 4 February, 1860]
No help for heroes at Westminster, just a prison cell
In 1892 Rudyard Kipling published a collection of poems called ‘Barrack Room Ballads’. This included ‘Tommy’ which he’d penned a coupe of years earlier and contrasted the public view of the Victorian soldier in wartime and peace. This is best summed up by this line:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play,.
Soldiers – as Kipling’s poem suggested – were to be valued when there was fighting to be done but were considered a nuisance at other times. I grew up watching the annual Festival of Remembrance that honours the dead of two world wars (and subsequent conflicts) but while the British Legion have done much for ex-servicemen and their families it was still deemed necessary to create the Help for Heroes charity in 2007 to support men and women wounded in the course of serving in the armed forces.
We might well ask why such a charity is needed in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a country which is a founder member of NATO and that has an arms trade that generates billions from the sale of lethal weapons across the globe. Then again we might ask ourselves why over half a million people used food banks in Britain last year, or why the DWP (Department for work and pensions) concluded that in 2016 over 21m Britons were living in ‘relative poverty’.
But back to ‘Tommy Atkins’ and public attitudes in the 1800s. There was no ‘help for heroes’ then, or a British Legion. All the ex-soldier without work could rely on at mid century was his army pension (if he had one) charity, the Poor Law, and his wits. George Hill had no pension because he’d been kicked out of the army for getting drunk and assaulting an officer.
Hill was lucky; if he’d attacked the officer whilst on active service he’d have faced a court martial and the possibility of a firing squad. Instead he’d been released ‘with ignominy’ and no pension and had subsequently found it difficult or impossible to secure gainful employment. As a result Hill sat himself on the streets of London with a painted sign that read:
9th Regiment of foot.
I have served 22 years in the 9thFoot – 20 years in India, and have been in eight general engagements, and am now discharged without a pension’.
Begging was a summary offence and so when PC James Light (128B) discovered him on his beat he asked him to move along and, when this request was ignored, arrested him. The former infantryman was brought before Mr Broderip at Westminster Police court where his previous military indiscretion was revealed. In the eyes of Victorian society Hill was a violent drunk who deserved nothing from a society he had served for 22 years expect condemnation and a prison cell. The magistrate duly obliged and sent him down for three months.
George Hill may well have been a ‘impudent, violent beggar’ and he certainly had previous convictions for vagrancy but today we recognize that ex-servicemen suffer mental as well as physical wounds as a consequence of what they’ve been through. Perhaps Hill’s 22 years in the colours had left him similarly scarred and unable to function as a part of ‘normal’ Victorian society.
He had probably fought at the battles of Mudki and Ferozeshah during the First Anglo-Afghan War and so, like many modern soldiers, had been to Kabul. He would also have been with the colours at the battle of Soprano (right) in the First Anglo-Sikh war. Technically of course he was fighting under the general banner of the East India Company but that matters little, the danger and suffering is the same.
In 1852 then soldiers like George Hill were not valued by the society they had served. Within two years however thousands of then were fighting for ‘Queen and Country’ once more as Britain took on the might of Imperial Russia in the Crimea and then the challenge to the Empire in India in 1857. So once again it was ‘ “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play’.
[from The Morning Post, Monday, 5 January, 1852]
the police magistrate 