Tag: Watch House

Young love triumphs as the old police give way to Peel’s bluebottles

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Today’s post takes us further back into the nineteenth century than this blog usually ventures. We step out of the Victorian period and into the last months of the reign of George IV. The newspapers had been reporting the ‘doings’ of the Metropolitan Police Courts for  several years but their coverage was still quite patchy, and there was no systematic attempt to report from all of the capital’s magistrate courts. This report, from Bow Street in March 1830 – the capital’s premier summary court – is of interest because it shows the public and private role of the police courts in the early 1800s. It also mentions the New Police, created by Robert Peel in 1829, who had just started their their dual mission to protect the ‘person and property’ of Londoners and ‘preserve the public tranquility’*.

In the months following the creation of the Met existing parochial policing arrangements seemingly continued in some manner. The Watch were largely disbanded and replaced by the ‘boys in the blue’ but parish constables continued in some places in London as they did outside the capital. These men were possibly amateurs serving the communities in rotation or entrepreneurial thief-takers acting like modern private investigators. One of these of was a man named Wright (we don’t have his first name) who was described as ‘a constable of Chiswick’ by the Morning Post in March 1830.

Wright was summoned to Bow Street to answer a charge of assault. He had allegedly attacked two brothers – George and Charles Ideyman – in an attempt to ‘rescue’ a young woman. When the case came before the magistrate (Mr Minshull) it quickly became clear that this was not a ‘public’ or criminal matter (of theft or violence) but instead a ‘private’ (or civil) one.

Charles Ideyman was in love with a 16 year-old heiress who lived in Chiswick. The girl is named only as Miss Smith and her mother was in court to hear the case and give evidence. Miss Smith was due to inherit £7,000 when she reached the age of maturity at 21 and her parents had very clear ideas about who would be a suitable match for their daughter. They made it abundantly clear to her that Charles Ideyman was not marriage material.

The Smiths did everything they could ‘to prevent the match; but on Sunday evening last [the paper reported] Miss Smith ‘contrived to escape from home, and on the following morning she was married at Chiswick church to [Charles] Ideyman’.

Having lost their daughter (and her marriage value) the Smith employed constable Wright to get her back. He went to the Ideyman family home and demanded access. When he was refused entry he turned violent , punched George Ideyman and:

‘broke down every door in the house with a pair of tongs, and demolished several windows’. When Charles confronted him he too was attacked and so scared was his younger sister that she remained in a ‘precarious state’ for several days afterwards.

Under questioning Wright said he was only doing what he thought was appropriate to fulfil the task he had been sent. He believed he was ‘authorised in adopting the best means he could in effecting his object’.

When the magistrate suggested that it must have been a ‘love match’ Mrs Smith declared that while it was it was ‘in decided opposition to her daughter’s best friends’. She and her husband did not accept the marriage and would never be reconciled to their daughter or her new husband. The Ideyman’s solicitor pleaded for calm and reconciliation. He urged Charles to be good husband to his young wife and added: ‘do not permit any one to widen the breach which you have already been the making of in the family’.

Wright was bailed to appear at the next Sessions of the Peace to answer for the assault. Bail was set at 40s for himself and two sureties of 20s each. Hopefully his employers (the Smiths) stood these. We might hope also that Charles and his bride lived happily ever after and perhaps were even reconciled to her parents. Mr Minshull clearly didn’t think it was any business of his to interfere however.

The footnote to this report of a private quarrel was the appearance in the dock of a ‘miserable-looking man’ named Daniel Hobbs. Hobbs, without even ‘a shoe to his foot’ was brought before Mr Minshull having been arrested the evening before by a constable of the New Police for being drunk. Hobbs had been ‘lying in one of the kennels in the neighbourhood of Long-acre’ [Covent Garden]. He was taken to a watch house (the predecessors of police stations) and searched.

Amazingly he had loads of money on him, including a £50 note and several gold sovereigns. In court Hobbs was recognised as someone who was often found drunk and sleeping rough, sometimes with as much as £400 in his possession. Who was this person and what was his story? Sadly (and typically) the paper doesn’t tell us so you’ll have to make up your own. What these two reports do show is that in 1830 the ‘old’ police and the New were operating at the same time (if not, it seems, side-by-side) as Londoners adjusted to the coming of the professionals and the courts worked out who now had the authority to act as law men and when.

[from The Morning Post, Saturday, March 13, 1830]

*to quote Charles Reith, A New Study of Police History, (1956)

Two urchins and a strumpet; three different fates.

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In March 1842 two teenagers were set in the dock at Lambeth Street Police Court before the sitting magistrate Mr Henry. The pair, John Pierse (16) and John Hawes (14), were charged with burgling a house north of the river, in Goodman’s Fields. The evidence against them was provided by another ‘young urchin’ who wasn’t named in court. Their hearing was quickly followed by that of a young girl who was accused of receiving the property the had stolen.

Frederick Edwards was a printer and bookseller who lived on Leman Street, near Whitechapel. In 1888 Leman Street was the headquarters of H Division from which the investigation into the ‘Ripper’ murders was conducted. In 1842 that station was yet to be built and the Metropolitan police still lacked a detective branch (that would come later in the year). H Division were probably using an old watch house at 26 Leman Street in 1842 as their first purpose-built station (at 37-39) was not completed until 1847.

Between 2 and 3 in the morning of Thursday 3 March the young thieves broke into Mr Edwards’ property though a window and stole as much as they could. They boasted of their exploits to one of their young friends and ultimately that was to prove their downfall. This star witness told Mr Henry that:

‘they ransacked both parlours, and carried away all the portable property they could’. This included silver cutlery, candlesticks and plate as well as clothes. The lads then took their bounty to a field near Limehouse Church and buried it.

On Friday they returned to the scene and dug up the silver before handing it over to Mary Davis who pawned it for them. Later that evening the two Johns, Mary, and the ‘urchin who gave evidence against them’ all enjoyed ‘ gorge of roast-pork, plum-pudding, and ale, at a beer-shop’ before heading off to the Victoria Theatre for an evening of light entertainment.

Mr Henry asked the boy (whose name we later discover to have been Joseph Mason) what the trio had done next. He was told that they had walked back over London Bridge together but then separated; Pierse and Mason found digs in Wentworth Street while Hawes (also known as ‘greeny’ – perhaps because of his youth?) and Mary went off to sleep together somewhere. The magistrate was as outraged by this piece of information as he was by the theft itself. Hates was just 14 years old and Mary 18 and the notion that they had been sleeping together was ‘scandalous’ he said.

It took the police, in the person of PC Argent (H126), the best part of  week to track them down. He found the pair in a lodging house in Elder Street, Spitalfields in a room shared by five other men and two women. He added that Pierse, on the day following the robbery, had escaped from the police who had tracked him to a house on Essex Street, Whitechapel, where a gun had been found. For such a young criminal John Pierse was developing quite the reputation.

Mr Henry remanded the boys for further enquiries and now it was Mary’s turn to be examined.

She was described as a ‘strumpet’ and a ‘little prostitute’ by the court reporter. It was alleged that she had pledged several items of plate, knowing them to have been stolen. Mary admitted taking the items to the pawnbrokers for her friends but denied all knowledge of them being stolen. The magistrate clearly didn’t believe her so remanded her for a week as well.

The case came up at the Old Bailey on the 4 April and Hawes (who gave his age there as 12) pleaded guilty and was recommend to mercy by the prosecutor. The judge sentenced him to be sent to prison for a year. Davis (now determined as 17 years of age) and Pierse (or Pearce) were convicted after a short trial and sentenced to be transported to Australia for seven years.

Mary (or Maria) arrived in Van Dieman’s land on the 24 September 1842. She’d had a troubled journey, falling sick on the transport ship the Royal Admiral. In March 1844 she applied for permission to marry and so we might hope she made a new life for herself ‘down under’. It is less clear what happened to Pearce.

As for John (or William) Hawes he stayed in England following his period of imprisonment and doesn’t seem to have trouble the law thereafter. Tracing lives isn’t an exact science but the Digital Panopticon project suggests that William made it to old age, dying in 1907 at the age of 77.

So here we have three young lives caught up in crime as part of a strategy of survival in mid-Victorian London; it is worthy of a Dickens sub-plot. Who knows what happened to Pearce or indeed to Mason. Dod the latter stay out of trouble or get sucked back into a life of crime having avoided incarceration by grassing up his fellow diners? Did Mary really make it in Australia as we now know that some did? The colony was largely created by individuals such as her who cared out a new existence on the other side of the world. Perhaps John Pearce kept his nose clean in Van Dieman’s Land and didn’t trouble the record keepers thereafter. If he served his time and earned his ticket of leave he too might have enjoyed a new life away from the squalid slums of his native Whitechapel.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, March 10, 1842]

A not so ‘jolly Jack’ at Bow Street

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The Police Courts of London were established in the late eighteenth century, after the passing of the Middlesex Justices Act (1792). The press reported the goings on at these courts from the start but their coverage in the early decades was patchy and much less regular than it became by the 1840s and 50s. It seems that the newspapers were working out how to use the information and stories that these summary courts provided. The tales of prosecuted thieves and fraudsters offered opportunities to demonstrate the efficacy (or otherwise) of the criminal justice system, to critique (or laud) the ‘New Police’, and, to alert Londoners to the threat posed by particular sorts of criminal.

However, the overriding purpose of publishing a half dozen or more of these daily reports from the Police ‘offices’ (as they were first called) or courts was entertainment. The everyday stories of ordinary folk, sometimes rendered in their own words or dialect, presented what we might now call a ‘Dickensian’ view of life in Victorian Britain.

This story, with its depiction of an Nelsonian Naval ‘hero’, is a good example of the court report as a entertaining distraction from the serious news that the papers contained.

In June 1830 the superintendent of Police, Mr Thomas, was at the Covent Garden watch house. These buildings were the forerunners of the police stations that were built following the establishment of the Metropolitan Police after 1829. The watch house was where the old watchmen set off from to patrol their beats and where those they arrested at night were brought back to to be charged or left to sober up.

On Wednesday morning (the 23 June) a sailor came into the watch house to make a complaint. He was a larger than life character and the Morning Post‘s reporter delighted in his representation of him for his readers. He described him as a ‘jolly-looking  weather-beaten tar, who came ‘tripping along with true sailor-like step’. He asked to be directed to the ‘captain’. In the watch house this meant the ‘super’, and Mr Thomas asked him what he wanted.

‘Your honour’, he began, ‘I am an old seaman and am come to you for redress’.

He went to explain that he had served his country for 15 years, seen many battles, including Navarino where he was part of the crew of the Asia. This battle, the last of the sailing ship age, had effectively decided the outcome of the War of Greek independence as the allied fleet (made up of Britain, France and Russia, led by Admiral Codrington) destroyed a superior Turkish one.

Navarino took place in 1827, and our hero had returned home some years later. He was ready to settle down it seems and, having ‘nothing particular to do’, he thought he’d travel to Windsor to ‘see the King, Lord protect him’. The king in question was George IV who was in the last few weeks of his reign at the time, because, on 26 June George died, at the age of 67. He was succeeded by the last Hanoverian king, his brother, William IV, who reigned for just under seven years.

In his patriotic fervour our unnamed sailor had made his way to Windsor and decided he liked it but that he needed a wife to complete his retirement from the sea.

He soon met up with a ‘jolly wench’ who’s name was ‘Fair-haired Poll’. It soon becomes clear that Poll was not your average Windsor maiden, but an experienced local prostitute who saw a sailor, recently discharged with deep pockets, as a profitable investment. The two soon became intimate.

The sailor told Mr Thomas: ‘I don’t like to be under any obligation, so I thought I’d buy her out and out’. They pair ‘struck a bargain’, and she was ‘his’ for ‘fifteen pounds’. They ‘got on comfortably well together’ at first, the tar explained, but he was getting bored in Windsor so decided to return to London.

‘So we tacked about, and got a-board a coach for town. Well, we comes to a place they call Piccadilly, or some such name, but my Poll thinks proper to bolt while I was treating the Jarvy, and she not only takes herself off but also £60 of my money, and all my toggery’.

So (to translate)  while the sailor had a drink with the coachman Poll ran off with his money and his trunk of clothes. Outraged, he headed for the nearest watch house to demand some help in finding her and his property. Mr Thomas, having listened to his tale brought him to Bow Street Police Court, to make a formal complaint.

There the magistrates sympathised with him (and were amused by the ‘naive style in which he presented it’) but could offer little real help. The man showed them several documents to prove he was who he said he was, but these were unnecessary, ‘as he completely embodied the appearance of a regular built tar’. He was told his best option was to return to Windsor as Poll would most probably have gone back to her old haunts.

The police superintendent promised to keep an eye out for her and his money but they all clearly thought it fairly useless. He was not the first ‘old salt’ to be separated from his prize money by a ‘privateer’ nor was he likely to be the last. Hopefully he found Poll in Windsor, if not then he was likely to end up as another of the hundreds of discharged seamen that struggled to survive in post-war nineteenth-century England.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, June 24, 1830]

Not so much a ‘dumb waiter’ as a mute diner

In late May 1813 while most of Europe watched the beginnings of the slow demise of Napoleon’s first Empire, Bow Street police court had to deal with a rather odd case.

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A Covent Garden coffee house

Mr. William Cunningham, a former Lloyd’s underwriter and wine merchant, was brought on the unusual charge of not paying for his dinner. Cunningham had walked into Hummums Coffee House at Covent Garden and been shown the menu. He indicated to the waiting staff that there was nothing on it he fancied but instead he’d like a neck of mutton and some Madeira wine.

Having eaten his fill and emptied the bottle he left, without paying. Staff pursued him but he ignored their entreaties to return by simply shaking his head. They then took him to Bow Street office (close by) where he was examined by the sitting justice, Mr. Read.

Cunningham refused to speak and so was taken to the Watch House to be detained. On the following morning he was again presented at Bow Street and Mr. Nares again asked him to explain himself. Not only did he continue to act dumb but the Watch House keeper reported that he ‘not uttered a syllable during the time he had been in his custody’. Nor did he have any money to pay for his keep in the Watch House (prisoners had to pay their own costs in this period, and often were not released until they had).

The magistrate committed him to Tothill Fields bridwell as ‘idle and disorderly’ (the default ‘catch all charge’ of its day) where, for ‘four or five days he refused to take any food’. The medical officer there offered him wine, which he drank but he hardly consumed anything else.

No one could be found who knew him (as he refused to speak) but some papers on his person indicated he lived in Whitechapel so the governor of the bridewell sent a request to have him transferred there. Parish officials knew of him and said he was ‘deranged’ but had no recollection of him being ‘dumb’. Once he had served his time he was let go, ‘care in the community’ we would call it today.

[from The Examiner , Sunday, May 30, 1813]