Tag: Victoria Cross

‘A lawless rabble’: A jeweller is charged as guardsmen riot in Knightsbridge

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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:

Medals count for little in class warfare

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George Walters was a hero of the Crimean War. At Inkerman on 5 November 1857 his quick thinking and bravery saved the life of an officer in the heat of battle. Sadly although he carried the Brigadier General to safety he later died of his wounds in the military hospital at Scutari. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for his gallantry and later left the army (and his home town of Newport Pagnell) to start a new career with the Metropolitan Police.

His mini biographer (in the link above) noted that he soon left the police and ‘joined the Regents Park Police, and little is known of what happened to him before the 1871 Census’. Well, thanks to the newspaper coverage of the Police Courts, I can fill in a small amount of detail, at least as to what he was up to in 1865 when he was about 36 years of age.

George was indeed working in Regent’s Park as a Parks constable and on 20 July a well-heeled group of men and women were enjoying a boat trip on the lake. At about twenty to nine in the evening ‘the whole party’ made their way to the exit gates close to the Zoo. The gates were locked and had been for some time it seems, as a small crowd of people were gathered there hoping to get out.

Henry Percy Berry, a ‘young gentleman’ of 81 Adelaide Road in fashionable St John’s Wood took matters into his own hands.

‘Being desirous that the ladies should not wait there for an indefinite period of time he got up over the gate and, as he was getting over a second gate for the purpose of going to the inspector’s lodge’, he was seized by constable Walters.

The park constable grabbed him by the throat, ‘and after shaking him violently said he should take him into custody and charge him with an assault’. Berry offered the man his card but he was ignored. Walter summoned another constable and together, with the help of ‘a drunken cabman who said he was a detective’ the young man was unceremoniously dragged to the nearest police station.

Berry claimed to have been beaten and kicked on the way and had the bruises and a torn coat to show for it. After a night in the cells he was presented before a magistrate in the morning (for assault) but the case was discharged.

Now, several weeks later he counter sued the constable for assault and so it was George Walters who found himself in front of a ‘beak’. The former soldier wore his medals with pride; the VC and Crimean Medal (with four bars) making a very clear statement as to his character. He was defended by counsel, Mr Johnson, and the case was observed by Inspector Caunt of the Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Works (who looked after the Park and employed the constable).

Berry’s testimony (that he was an innocent and the victim of an aggressive attack by Walters) was challenged in court and he was forced to deny swearing at the constable or throwing any punches. He admitted climbing the gate but didn’t consider that it had made him a ‘wrong doer’ in the eyes of the law. He was also ‘perfectly sober at the time’ he insisted.

The young gentleman’s evidence was backed up by two  ‘well dressed young named Edward Castle and Matthias Milner’. Neither knew Berry personally they swore, but they said that they had seen the event unfold.

The constable brief now called his own witness, a retired policeman turned cabdriver named John Holder. He painted an alternative account to Berry’s and it was one which corroborated our hero’s. Berry had used bad language he said, and was violent. He had been called to lend assistance as a former police colleague. As to the term coat he argued that the damage had been done by Berry himself and Walter had warned him about it at the time. His warnings had been treated with contempt and abuse by the young man however.

As for the former soldier, Holder declared that:

‘He never saw a man exhibit more civility and forbearance than did the defendant on this occasion, and he never saw a man behave more violently than the complainant did’.

Holder’s account was supported by the other park constable. So in the end it came down to who the magistrate would choose to believe. Would it be the working-class constable who was a decorated war hero, or a rich young man with a fashionable address?

I think you can probably guess.

Mr Mansfield had tried the previous case when Berry had appeared on a charge of assaulting the constable and had dismissed it. He was hardly going to admit he was wrong in open court. He declared that the defence that had been offered by Walters was a fiction and he ‘could not adequately give expression to his feeling of indignation at the manner in which the cabman had given his evidence’.

He turned to George Walters and fined him the huge sum of £4 for the ‘outrageous’ assault on a respectable young man and warned him that failure to pay would result in him going to prison for  a month.

England, a home fit for heroes? Not in 1865 it seems, not when the reputation of the ruling class was at stake anyway. It reminds me of Kipling’s Tommy:

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! “
But it’s ” Saviour of ‘is country ” when the guns begin to shoot;

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, August 10, 1865]

Stealing the medals of Victoria’s Crimean heroes

Cookhouse of the 8th Hussars

In early 1856 the Crimean War – fought because of Russia’s desires to gain territory at the expense of the seemingly weakened Ottoman Empire – ground to a halt. The allies (Turkey, Britain and France) and triumphed over the Russian Empire because of superior weaponry and technology such as the international telegraph.

It was a ‘modern’ war, coming as it did between the Napoleonic and the Boer (South African) War and offered lessons for the upcoming Civil War in America. It was also the first war to be reported with photographs, meaning that it impacted the home front in a particularly evocative way. Britain lost 25,000 troops (the French four times that figure) but many were lost not to Russian bullets or steel but to illness.

The Crimean War also saw the minting of a brand new award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross. Supposedly made from bronze  smelted from a Russian cannon (the cannon was actually Chinese) the VC continues to be Britain’s highest military honour.

But as with previous (and subsequent) conflicts those that served were given either a service medal or a silver bar to mark their presence at one of the key battles. There were five bars for the Crimean medal (representing the battles of Alma, Inkerman, Azoff, Balaclava, and Sebastopol).

This is the Crimean War medal below:

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Of course with tens of thousands of medals needing to be minted someone had a huge task, and it it seems that it also offered opportunities for those with light fingers to profit.

William Henry Sharman was a 33 year-old silversmith who worked for Messrs Hunt & Roskell, ‘the extensive silversmiths’*, at their Gray’s Inn  Road factory. In February 1856 (just a month before the final peace treaty officials ended the war) Sharman was called into the manager’s office.

Earlier that day he had been given 200 bars to work on. When he returned them there were five missing. In the office with the manager William Day was a detective sergeant from E Division, Metropolitan Police. Sergeant Smith (16E). Day questioned him and Sharman told him he had handed back all the bars he had been allocated, and so couldn’t account for any ‘deficiancy’.

Day knew that this was a lie because he had personally checked the quantity and he challenged the silversmith. Sharman’s defence collapsed and he came clean. He produced the missing bars from his pocket and was arrested.

The case came before the sitting justice at Clerkenwell and Sharman made no attempt to conceal his guilt, merely throwing himself on the mercy of the magistrate, Mr Corrie.

‘I am guilty’ he admitted, ‘It is the first time I have been in a police court, and if you will be kind enough to deal leniently with me, I will take very good care that such a thing will never occur again. I am very sorry for what I have done’.

No doubt he was but at a  time that Britain’s  bruised and bloodied heroes were returning home the act of stealing their medals must have appeared particularly callous. Mr Corrie was also quick to remind Sharman (and the reading public) that stealing by employees was a serious matter because it involved a breach of trust. It was, the magistrate told him, ‘far more serious than a thief purloining from a shop window’.

Nor did Sharman have the excuse of poverty he added; the silversmith earned between £1 8s and £1 10s a week and had money in his pocket when he arrested. This was greed and opportunism and Mr Corrie sent him to prison for four months at hard labour. Sharman ‘who appeared to feel his situation acutely’, was then taken away.

Whether he was able to recover from this blow is impossible to say. He was a craftsman so had something to sell when he got out but his reputation was in tatters. As someone that worked with precious metals it is unlikely that anyone that new the truth of his crimes would ever allow him to work with silver in the future.

[from The Morning Chronicle, Wednesday, February 13, 1856]

*the firm, founded in 1843,  still exists today