Tag: St. John Wontner

A Victorian version of a very ‘modern’ crime

Collinson, Robert, 1832-after 1890; Ordered on foreign Service

Ordered on Foreign Service, by Robert Collinson (The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology)

One of the most modern of crimes is the sale of fake goods and the evasion of copyright. Most of us will have seen street traders selling what purports to be expensive perfume, handbags and watches at knockdown prices, and some of us may even have been offered unrealistically cheap electrical goods from someone called ‘Nigel’. Many people I know download movies or music from the internet without the creators getting the full (or any) remuneration for their talent and others live stream football or other sports events directly, bypassing Sky or BT’s commercial operation.

I say this is ‘modern’ but of course, like most crime, it really isn’t. There are new methods for criminality (like cyber crime and identity fraud) but the underlying crime remains the same. The same is true for selling things without the license to do so and ripping off the creator of art or music in the process. This is what brought three men before the Lord Mayor of London at his Mansion House courtroom in December 1868.

William Coleman, John Lawrence, and William Hooper were severally charged with conspiring to ‘sell pirated copies of photographs of copyright paintings and drawings’. The prosecution was led by George Lewis ,a  lawyer representing Graves and Co, a well established firm of publishers and engravers based in London’s Pall Mall.  All three defendants had engaged lawyers of their own, including Mr St John Wonter (who has appeared elsewhere in this series).

The facts were thus: detectives employed by Graves & Co. had been watching the trio for some time.  He had bought several pirated copies of famous paintings including William Powell Frith’s ‘Railway Station’, and other works such as ‘The Last Kiss’, ‘Nutcrackers’, and ‘Ordered on Foreign Service’.

To give some idea of the value of these the Lord Mayor was told that on its own the copyright for ‘Railway Station’ had cost Graves & Co. £24,000. That was a huge sum of money in 1868, about the equivalent of £1.5m today. This shows that the market for reproductions of Frith’s famous painting (below) was vast, so no wonder the three men were prepared to take a risk to make money for themselves.

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The Railway Station by William Powell Frith

A picture dealer who operated out of premises in Vauxhall testified that he’d bought several copies of each of the images (including ‘Railway Station’ and ‘Last Kiss’) for 1s 6da dozen. At such low prices he could make money on top and he saw nothing wrong in doing so. In court the defense was that the men had no intention to injure Graves & Co. by selling cheap copies, there were just filling a hole in the market. Hopper said he was sent similar photos every day for mounting and he hadn’t seen there to be any crime in creating photos of his own.

The Lord Mayor saw things differently however and committed all of them to face trial at the Old Bailey in the New Year. Lawrence and Hooper he released them on significant bail  (£100 each) but Cooper was unable to find sureties and so was locked up again. He would spend Christmas in gaol.

It took until May 1869 for the three men to be brought to trial at the Central Criminal Court. There Coleman pleaded guilty to the charges and Lawrence was convicted and sent to prison for 12 months. Hooper was acquitted and left court a free man.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, December 25, 1868]

I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone reading this (and amazingly there are quite a lot of you now!) a very merry Christmas! I’ve been writing this blog since April 2016 and the numbers of readers has steadily increased. I’d be interested to know if ‘regulars’ would like something different or more of the same in 2019. Leave a comment or email me at drewdgray17@gmail.com if you have any thoughts.

Thanks for reading!

Drew 

Police rivalry as a City man busts a man from the Met

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Henry Morey served in the City of London Police, a separate institution to the Metropolitan Police created by Robert Peel in 1829. The City jealousy guarded its independence from central control and resisted calls to reform its policing in the long eighteenth century. In 1839 an act of Parliament gave the existing day and night watch full legal authority to act as the square mile’s police force and effectively ended attempt to merge them with the Met. To this day the City retains its own independent police who wear slightly different uniforms to their colleagues in the rest of the capital.

I suspect that as with regional forces outside of London, there is some tension between the City Police and the Met. This was certainly evident in 1888 when the Whitechapel murderer strayed onto City territory to murder Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square. Now there were two sets of detectives hunting the killer and almost immediately they clashed over the finding of evidence in Goulston Street.

This rivalry or jealousy may well have manifested itself in small scale personal moments of friction between City police and their brothers in the Met. So when PC Morey found that he had a member of the Met in custody he must, at least, have felt a certain sense of superiority if not triumph. This is his story from February 1869.

Morey was watching a man named Smith who he suspected of smuggling. George Smith was a seaman and just before 9 o’clock in the evening of Wednesday 14 February PC Morey saw the sailor in King’s Head Court, Fish Street Hill. The hill ran down from the Monument towards London Bridge and was close to Billingsgate Market. Now it is all fairly quiet at night and few residents live there; in 1869 it is likely to have been a livelier place.

The policeman watched as Smith met with two others and handed over a package of goods. Calling for assistance the policeman moved in and arrested the trio. Back at the police station he established that Smith had been passing them contraband goods that he’d smuggled from the quays with the intention of avoiding the duty on them. There was some brandy, a bottle of Holland (jenever or Dutch gin) and a quantity of Cavendish tobacco.

Smith owned up to the offence at the station but claimed that the men, who were his brothers-in-law, were unaware that there was anything illegal about the transaction. He said he’d given the others the goods to say thank you for their support while he’d been in hospital recovering from an accident.

James Salmon was a local carpenter but the third man was James Brand, a Metropolitan policeman with 21 years service in the force. He had the most to lose from this court appearance, as his lawyer explained. Mr St. John Wontner told the magistrate (Sir William Anderson Rose) that:

‘there was sufficient doubt his [client’s] knowledge that the goods were contraband to justify the alderman in discharging him. He had been in the police force for a long period of years, and on quitting it would be entitled to a considerable pension (about 15s a week), but if convicted that pension would be forfeited’.

Brant’s station inspector appeared to vouch for his man, saying he’d had nothing said against the officer for 13 years (suggesting a not unblemished record however). Smith again pleaded in court that he was entirely to blame and the others knew nothing of it.

Sir William wasn’t convicted however. He declared that they must have know something was wrong, especially Brant who, as a police officer, knew the law. However, he was minded to be lenient where the man from the Met was concerned; he would only fine him £1 12s as his ‘conviction would be followed with serious results’ (i.e the loss of his pension most likely). Salmon and Smith were also fined similarly, with the threat of seven days in prison if they failed to pay.

I suspect there were some harsh words or long stares exchanged between PC Brant and his supporters and the members of the City Police gathered in the Mansion House Police Court. PC Morey was just doing his job, preventing the evasion of tax, but PC Brant had hardly been guilty of a heinous crime. For him, however, the result was potentially catastrophic. Not only did he lose his job and his reputation, he risked losing around £40 a year (just about £2,000 today) if the police canceled his pension.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, February 26, 1869]

Libel and crim.con as the ‘better sort’ are dragged through the Police Courts

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Sir Albert de Rutzen

Most of those appearing before the police magistrates of London were members of the working class. The vast majority were being prosecuted for all manner of petty and not so petty forms of crime and violence. When the more ‘respectable’ middle classes appeared it was usually as witnesses or victims (although there were plenty of these from the lower order as well – especially women) and the very wealthy rarely feature in the newspapers reports. T

here were exceptions however.

Crime was big news in the Victorian press and the daily ‘doings’ of the police courts are testament to the popularity of this amongst the reading public, of all classes it should be said. Alongside the police court news and the more sensational ‘murder news’ were the reports of adultery served up as scandal for public consumption. ‘Criminal conservation (or ‘crim. con’) cases offered readers a peep into the bedrooms of the rich and famous. This was where the ‘better sorts’ made the pages of the newspapers for reasons they would rather have kept to themselves.

Often linked eventually to divorce, crim.con proceedings were a legal procedure  whereby one man sued another for having an affair with his wife (on the basis that he could claim financial damages, as his wife was his property).

In February 1886 two wealthy individuals appeared at Marylebone Police court represented by their lawyers. Mr St. John Wontner was there to defend his client, Robert Bailey, against a charge of libelling the elaborately entitled Charles V. J. Frieden de Friedland and for assaulting him at the theatre.

The reporter is fairly careful to skirt around the issue at the centre of this case; namely that both men appear to have been having a relationship with the same woman, a woman that neither of them was married to. Her name was Mrs Astay and it isn’t clear whether she was married or a widow.

The magistrate, Sir Albert De Rutzen, was at pains to try and keep any of the details behind the libel accusation  out of his courtroom but, since some evidence had to be offered (so a formal committal could be made),  this was fairly difficult and ultimately impossible.

Prosecuting, Mr Lickfold explained that his client was a member of the Supper Club which had a premises in Paris and at Langham Place in London. Mr de Friedland was staying in London and had been receiving ‘communications’ from Mr Bailey.

These were quite unpleasant and contained ‘threats , and were written in a language quite unfit for publication’. Bailey and de Friedland had then met at the Alhambra in Leicester Square where they had argued.

Bailey had, he alleged:

‘knocked the Complainant’s hat of and abused him. In fact the conduct of the Defendant had been so bad that, unless restrained, the Complainant’s life would be insufferable’.

Wontner now cross-examined and this is where some of the detail that the magistrate presumably wished to keep hidden began to seep out. The readers would be able (as you will be) to fill in the gaps and make a judgement on what de Friedland had been up to and what sort of a man he really was.

De Friesland said he was a director of the Supper Club which was a respectable establishment and not a gaming club (as the lawyer must have suggested). He admitted that ‘baccarat was played there’ but refuted allegations of gambling. He admitted as well to being married, and that his wife lived in Paris but he wasn’t (as was suggested) in the middle of divorce proceedings with her. He also admitted knowing and visiting a ‘Mrs Astay’, but ‘refused to say whether he had been intimate with her’. He added that Bailey had been intimate with the woman, a libel itself if not true.

Mr Lickfold objected to his opposite number’s line of questioning but Wontner contended that his client’s defence in court would be that he was provoked and that he would counter sue de Friedland for libelling him. As such it was necessary to set his stall out at this stage.

The magistrate was not happy with this and told the defence lawyer to keep his defence for the senior court trial. He heard from several witnesses who confirmed seeing the trail of letters and cards sent to the complainant and fully committed Bailey for trial. He then bailed him on his own recognisances of £100 – a considerable sum – demonstrating the wealth associated with these two protagonists.

[from The Standard, Thursday, February 25, 1886]

Sir Albert de Rutzen died in 1913 at the age of 84. An obituary noted ‘his patience and gentleness alike with the highest of criminals and the Suffragettes, with whom he had to deal of late, were remarkable’. 

Striking workers in West Ham are thwarted with the help of the bench

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If the Match Girls’ strike of 1888 and the Great Dock Strike of August 1889 can be seen as two of the most important victories for the British Trades Union movement then another dispute in 1889 must go on record as equally important, if only for demonstrating the limits of that success.

The Silvertown strike, by workers at Silver’s India Rubber and Telegraph factory in West Ham, lasted for 12 weeks as the workers, emboldened by the success of other unionists in the capital, demanded better pay and conditions. However, the owners of the factory, S.W.Silver and Co, resisted the best efforts of the striking workforce to force them to negotiate and succeeded, in the end, in breaking the strike.

The workers were aided by Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl, and Tom Mann the co-author of New Unionism, the defining work of the new Labour movement in London. But the bosses in this case held firm and refused to capitulate, using the press to criticise the actions of the strikers and questioning the use of picketing. This had been a tactic used in the Dock Strike but then it had failed to dent public  support for the dispute; in 1889 at Silvertown it was seemingly much more effective.

We can see the ways in which the courts were used to break the strike in this report from   The Standard, in November. A number of summoned were heard by the sitting magistrates at West Ham concerning employees of the factory who were accused of ‘intimidation and riotous conduct’.

The summonses were brought by Mr Matthew Gray, an employee of the firm, and prosecuted by the company’s legal representative, Mr St. John Wontner. The strike had ben underway for six weeks and the legal questions turned on the legitimacy (or otherwise) of picketing. St. John Wontner explained the tactics used by the striking workers:

‘The entrance to the works was in a cup de sac‘, he told the bench, ‘and every day hundreds of the workers collected at the top and and hooted at the people as they came out, and shortly afterwards the women left their employment’.

Mr Baggallay warned the strikers that if they continued with this sort of behaviour they would be severely dealt with. ‘They were perfectly entitled to go on strike’ he conceded, ‘but they had no right to threaten others who desired to go to work’. He bound them all over on their own recognisances for £5 each and dismissed them.

In January 1890, unable to support their families through the strike and with a hardline attitude from management continuing, the workers were literally ‘starved back to work’ and the strike collapsed. Other firms were quick to congratulate Silver’s management for their fortitude and equally quick to learn the valuable lessons it taught them.

[from The Standard, Saturday, November 09, 1889]

Today the site of S.W.Silver and Co is the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery on the banks of the Thames