Tag: Temple Bar

A cheeky fraud that reveals the deep roots of British industry

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Twining’s Bank, at 215 The Strand 

On 6 June 1870 Elizabeth Smith pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to ‘feloniously forging and uttering’ a cheque for £120 with intend to defraud. She gave her age as 32 years and said she was unmarried: the judge respited her sentence. No reason is given for this but respites were commonly applied to women who were pregnant or in cases where the law was in some way in doubt.

Elizabeth had first appeared before the Lord Mayor at Mansion House on 22 April 1870 where this charge was laid. The prosecution was conducted by Mr Samuel Mullens on behalf of his client, the Banker’s Protection Association.

The victim (the bank) was Smith, Payne, and Smith of 1 Lombard Street, City of London and the cheque was drawn in the name of William Longman, the ‘well-known publisher’.

The Lord Mayor was told how the fraud was perpetrated. Smith (calling herself Mary Simson) had presented herself at Twining & Co.’s bank in the Strand and had handed over a letter of introduction. This was supposedly written by a Dr Charles Brooke of Fitzroy Square, and described Elizabeth as a ‘dear old friend of mine’.

Elizabeth explained that she would like to open an account and handed Mr Twining a cheque for £120 ‘purporting to be drawn by Mr Longman upon Messrs. Smith, Payne, and Smith’. ‘Mary’ had endorsed it with her own signature. She asked for some money there and then and she was given a chequebook from which she cashed a cheque for £50. The cashier (as was customary) made a record of the bank notes (five at £5 each) he issued. The balance was in sovereign coins.

The bank only realized something was wrong when Dr Brooke arrived later that day and told them the letter was a forgery and that he’d nothing to do with it or any ‘Mary Simpson’. Three days later the cashier that had served Elizabeth – Donald King – recognized her in Fleet Street. She’d just left a ‘refreshment house’ with another woman and King decided to follow them.

As they reached Temple Bar (pictured below in 1870) Elizabeth stopped and turned around. Was he following her, she asked?

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King admitted he was and said that she must now accompany him to Twining’s Bank or he would call a policeman to arrest her. After a brief hesitation she agreed and the pair returned to the Strand where Elizabeth was shown into a private room at the bank. Interviewed there she caved in and promised to return all the money if only they would ‘overlook the matter’. Mr Twining told he could not possibly do that and sent for the police. While they waited Elizabeth took out some papers and letters and tore them up.

As detective sergeant Hancock led her away Elizabeth denied forging the letter and told him she’d been forced to signed the cheque by someone else, but gave no name he could trace. At Bow Lane police station Elizabeth was searched (by a female searcher) and three of the £5 notes that Donald King had issued to her were discovered. In addition Mts Johnson (the searcher) found:

‘three sovereigns, a gold watch, chain, and three lockets, an opera glass, an eye-glass, a gentleman’s ring, a brooch, penknife, [and] three keys’.

It would seem that Elizabeth Smith was not only a fraudster and forger, she was a practiced ‘finger smith’ (pickpocket) as well.

In court at the mansion House Mr Longman appeared and said he knew Elizabeth and her family. She had written to him, he stated, in great distress and asking for money. He’d sent her a cheque for £5 but when she failed to acknowledge it he wrote again, complaining about her ingratitude. This prompted her to write back apologizing and making excuses, before asking for more money. Longman wrote to the local parish priest who was unable to verify the story Elizabeth told about her desperate situation. Nevertheless the publisher sent her another £5.

The Lord Mayor remanded her and we know of course that that remand eventually resulted in a trial at Old Bailey where, perhaps unsurprisingly given the evidence against her, she pleaded guilty.

Thomas Twining had opened a teashop – London’s first – on The Strand in 1706. It did well and the company braced out into banking in 1824. By 1835 banking was successful enough to warrant building a new property next to the teashop. Twining’s Bank lasted until 1892 when Richard and Herbert Twining sold it to Lloyds.

Smith, Payne, & Smiths bank had been established in 1758 as a collaboration between Abel Smith (a Nottingham banker) and John Payne, a London merchant and line draper, and chairman of the East India Company. The bank moved to new premises in Lombard Street in 1837, just two years after Twinings opened their new doors. In 1902 Smiths (which owned 5 family banks in the chain) merged with the Union Bank of London to form Union of London & Smiths Bank Ltd. This new bank lasted until the end of the First World War when it became the National Provident & Union Bank of England, eventually turning into first, the Westminster Bank (1968) and then the National Westminster Bank (Natwest) in 1970.

Thomas Longman founded his publishing house in Paternoster Row in 1724, buying a shop owned by William Taylor who had published Jonathan Swift’s Robinson Crusoe. The firm prospered through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, most famously publishing Maclaulay’s Lays of Ancient Romeand then his History of England(which sold in excess of 40,000 copies). Longman’s continued into the 1900s, survived a direct hit during the Blitz (which destroyed their premises and their stock), before Pearson bought it in 1968.

I suppose what this little story of fraud and forgery from 1870 reveals is the deep roots that some of our household names have, even if very many of them are now owned by global multinational companies. Elizabeth Smith, by contrast, leaves very little behind her, just one of many who came before the courts in the 1800s accused of stealing or defrauding those with much deeper pockets than she had.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, 28 April 1870]

While Elizabeth Smith is hardly an unusual name for the Victorian (or any other) period there is another mention of someone with that name in the Digital Pantopticon for 1870. An Elizabeth Smith was tried at Clerkenwell (the quarter sessions for Middlesex) in October 1870 and sentenced to seven years. She was sent to Millbank Prison from where she was released, on license, on 19 May 1874. Did Elizabeth have a baby between June and October and find a home for it? Or was it taken away so the law could take its course?

Deterring the souvenir hunters at Temple Bar

Dismantling-of-Temple-Bar

I own a small piece of the Berlin Wall, from Checkpoint Charlie. Well at least that’s what it says it is on the attached postcard a good friend gave me some years ago. The reality is that it could be a piece of concrete from any twentieth century structure such is the demand for mementos from the past. In the aftermath of the fall of the wall in 1989 many thousands of its pieces were taken home, treasured, sold or otherwise traded as relics of the old communist regime. Across the collapsing Soviet Union similar symbols of power were torn down, often to enter the market in souvenirs.

Human beings seem to like to keep relics of the past, some grim (like parts of the rope that hanged criminals) or sacred (such as the bones of saints), or otherwise memorable (the broken goalposts at Wembley removed by Scottish football fans springs to mind). So in 1878 when Temple Bar was being taken down – brick by brick – it is not surprising that some people thought they would like a piece of it.

Temple Bar used to mark the entrance to the City of London, one of several gates that once marked the limits of the city. Some sort of bar (perhaps just a chain or wooden beam) existed in the 13th century but by the late 14th it had become a fixed stone structure marking the entrance to the legal quarter, hence its name of Temple Bar.

The gateway survived the Great Fire in 1666 but was pulled own and rebuilt (possibly by Christopher Wren, no one seems to be entirely sure) in 1669. You can still see the 17th century gateway (which used to display the heads of traitors atop it) in Paternoster Square, by St Paul’s Cathedral.

Temple_Bar,_London,_1878-768x967

But it had stood, from the medieval period, in Fleet Street, and by the early nineteenth century Fleet Street had become such a busy thoroughfare, and the city had expanded so much, that Temple Bar was simply too narrow a gateway in and out of old London. In addition the Royal Courts of Justice was beginning construction in Fleet Street and the two circumstances cemented a decision to remove the gateway.

The Corporation of London opted to keep the gateway until they could decided what to do with it rather than destroy it completely. So on 2 January 1878 workmen began to carefully dismantle the structure, ‘brick by brick, beam by beam, numbered stone by stone’.  Which brings us back to the desire for ‘relics’ and the proceedings at Guildhall Police Court on Saturday 5 January 1878.

Reynold’s Newspaper reported that:

‘A man named Bell prosecuted for having wilfully damaged the stonework at Temple Bar, now in the process of removal. It was stated that the practice of chipping off pieces of stone from the building, with a view to keeping them as relics, was an exceedingly common one’.

The alderman magistrate decided enough was enough and, with the intention of deterring other souvenir hunters, he imposed a hefty fine of 40s on the unfortunate Bell with the threat that if he didn’t (or couldn’t) pay up he must go to prison for three weeks at hard labour.

It took 11 days to complete the removal of Temple Bar and two years later, in 1880, the City set up a memorial to mark its original site; a griffin on top of a tall pedestal now stands in Fleet Street where the gateway once did. The dismantled parts of Temple Bar eventually found their way to Hertfordshire and the estate of Lady Meux at Theobalds Park. It stayed there until the City repatriated it in 2004 to its present location.

There are no severed heads on Temple Bar these days. Well not as write at least…

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, January 6, 1878]

NB the history of Temple Bar cited above owes much to the Temple Bar website [http://www.thetemplebar.info/history.html]

You can use this site to search for specific crimes or use the Themes link in the menu on the left to look for areas or topics that interest you. If you are interested in a particular court (such as Bow Street or Marylebone) you can also limit your search to one court in particular. Please feel free to comment on anything you read and if something in particular interests you then please get in touch. You can email me at drew.gray@northampton.ac.uk

A fracas in a hospital over a lost diamond stud

SJH-1887-1905

William Watts was either an exceedingly unpleasant individual or ‘not quite right in the head’ as contemporaries might have put it. I’m going with the former however, as he held down the job of a hotel manager, so presumably was a capable person.

In October 1885 he was arrested at a hospital in Leicester Square. St John’s specialised in diseases of the skin and Watts had been there on more than one occasion. Some weeks previously he had lost a gold topped walking cane and accused the staff at the hostel of stealing it. This time he claimed to have lost a diamond collar pin and angrily demanded its return.

‘As the pin could not be found, and as no one in the hospital knew anything about it, the accused became disorderly, and interrupted the business of the hospital for about half an hour’. 

He was asked to leave and then removed from the premises, only to return and start complaining again some time afterwards. The hospital’s secretary now had no choice but to call for the police, who arrived and took the disgruntled hotel manager away.

Back at the police station a police search quickly found the gentleman’s diamond pin, ‘fixed on the back of his shirt, where he himself admitted having placed it’.

Appearing at the Marlborough Street Police Court Watts, who gave his address as Thanet Place, Temple Bar, must have cut a sheepish figure. His previous altercation with the skin clinic was aired and the magistrate bound him over to the amount of £10 to keep the peace for three months. He advised the hospital not to receive him as patient in future.  The secretary probably made a note to do so, since he explained to the court that ‘such imputations were very unpleasant both to the staff and to the patients’.

One imagines this was the Victorian equivalent of the sign often seen in hospitals that reminds visitors that NHS staff should be the victims of abuse, violence or aggressive behaviour. They have a hard enough job to do without having to put up with idiots like William Watts or his modern incarnation.

[from The Illustrated Police News etc, Saturday, October 3, 1885]

ST John’s hospital no longer exists, according one ‘history’ it moved to 49 Leicester Square in 1887 but this article would suggest they had a presence there at least 2 years earlier. It is now a bar, the Slug and Lettuce. Perhaps Mr Watts would be happier there.