Tag: White Tower

A thief is nabbed at the Tower and a cross-dresser is arrested for dancing: all in a day’s work for Mr Lushington

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Visitors to the Victorian Tower of London Armouries

Two contrasting cases from the Thames Police court today, one of who courts that served the East End and the river from the Tower of London. The first concerned the Tower itself, or rather the collection of arms and armour it displayed there.

The Tower Armouries was always one of my favourite places to visit when I went to the Tower as a boy. Housed in the White Tower (the original Norman keep) the collection of edged weapons, guns and suits and armour fascinated me just as it has so many other visitors before and since. Now it has been removed from the Tower and sent to the north of England to a purpose built museum in Leeds. It’s great there too, but not quite the same.

John Passmore was only a young man when he visited the Tower in 1877. He worked as a labourer and had gone to see the armouries with some mates. As he was coming out he noticed some horse pistols hanging on hooks, easy to reach and not behind bars. Without really knowing why he snatched one and hid it under his jacket.

Several such pistols had gone missing in recent weeks and David Deedy, one of the armories’ attendants, was keeping his eyes peeled for further depredations. Something about John caught his eye, was that a bulge under his jacket, or a smudge of dirt on his lapels? He moved forward, stopped the young man and searched him. John pleased with him not to have him arrested but, given the recent thefts, Deedy was understandably keen to prosecute. John Passmore apologized for his momentary act of recklessness and paid for it with seven days imprisonment at hard labour.

The other reported case that Mr Lushington (who known to be harsh) dealt with that day was distinctly different. John Bumberg was a foreign sailor (his precise nationality was not stated, he was just ‘foreign’) and he was in court for causing a disturbance.

PC George Carpenter (102H) told Mr Lushington that he had been on duty in St George’s Street when he’d heard what sounded like a large crowd up ahead. Hurrying along he discovered that there were about 200 boys and girls gathered around a dancing figure, who was being accompanied by a barrel organ. The dancer was dressed in woman’s clothing but was quite clearly a man. PC Carpenter approached and questioned him, established he was sober (if a little ‘excited’) and then arrested him.

Causing a nuisance and obstructing the streets were both misdemeanors so Carpenter was within his rights but it seems a fairly unnecessary action to take. I think that Mr Lushington   might have agreed because on this occasion he was fairly lenient. Given that Bumberg had been locked up all night he simply told him he had acted ‘foolishly’ and ‘advised him to behave more decently in the future’ before letting him go. The man left the dock carrying ‘a bundle of female wearing apparel in his arms’.

Was John Bumberg a frustrated female impersonator who wanted to be on the stage like the starts of the musical halls?  Was he perhaps a transvestite or cross-dresser? Whatever he was and whatever his motivation for entertaining the children of the East End that night I don’t believe he was doing anybody any harm and I think H Division’s finest might have found more suitable targets for their attention.

In 1881 George Carpenter was still in the force and on 14 May that year he brought Catherine Scannel into the Thames court charged with being drunk and disorderly. She was 46, quite possibly a streetwalker and Mr Lushington sent her to prison for 7 days, mostly likely because she gave the policeman some well-aimed verbal abuse. A week later he was back with another woman, Julia Hayes, who was charged with fighting. This time the magistrate let her off with a warning. PC Carpenter brought in a couple more drunks that May, this was after all, much of the traffic of the police courts, most of which the papers didn’t bother recording. We only of this because a few archival records survive.

[from The Standard, Monday, June 18, 1877]

H Division was, of course, the main police district tasked with catching the Whitechapel murder 11 years after these two defendants appeared before Lushington at Thames.  Drew’s new book (co-authored with Andy Wise) is published by Amberley Books this week. It is a new study of the Whitechapel murders of 1888 which offers up a new suspect, links the ‘Jack the Ripper’ killings to the unsolved ‘Thames Torso’ crimes, and provides the reader with important contextual history of Victorian London. The book is available to order on Amazon here:

Trouble at the Tower of London

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The Tower of London stands today as a popular tourist attraction maintained by the Royal Palaces. Almost every day of the year it is thronged with visitors snapping selfies with the Yeomen of the Guard (or Beefeaters) or the ravens. It remains a royal palace and a functioning building but is no longer a prison or a fortress as it once was.

When I used to visit the Tower as a boy my main interest was in the Tower Armouries, then housed in the White Tower. I was fascinated by the arms and armour on display nearly all of which has been moved to an excellent (but sadly distant) museum in Leeds. The Tower was home to the Office of Ordnance (responsible for the stores of weapons held there) from the early 15th century.

In 1855 the Ordnance employed many men to work in different capacities at the Tower, and amongst these was William Handley whose title was ‘foreman of labourers’. He lived in the Tower itself, in one of the houses (no. 41) with his wife and four children. We know this because he appeared on both the 1841 and 1851 census returns.

One of the men that Mr Handley supervised was Patrick Dawson, an ‘elderly Irishman’ who worked as a ‘porter and timekeeper’ on one of the bridges leading over the Moat and into the Tower grounds. Dawson however is not listed amongst the Ordnance’s employees in the RA’s document so perhaps he was casually employed or simply not recorded.

He was certainly there though because on the 27 June 1855 he was controlling the bridge crossing when a house and cart pulled up with a load of iron coal boxes to deliver. The driver, or carman, was called Benjamin Matthie and he was employed by a man named Porter who was a contractor used by the Ordnance. Porter operated out of premises in Camden Town and he had despatched Matthie with his load to the Tower that day.

Apparently there was a small railway on the bridge, ‘to facilitate the traffic’ (which was Dawson’s responsibility to regulate), and the carman duly pulled his horse and van up on it and began to start unloading his cargo. He removed the boxes from the van and was lowering them in to the dry moat below when another vehicle arrived.

This cart was going directly into the Tower and so Dawson called down to Matthie and asked him to move his van out of the way so the other could pass. Now without wishing cast aspersions or generalise too wildly, delivery drivers do tend to be a bit grumpy when asked to stop unloading or to move out of the way when they are busy in their work. A Victorian carman was the equivalent of the modern day white van man, and they enjoyed a similar reputation.

Matthie looked up at the old porter and told him that the other van would have to wait. Dawson insisted he move and the carman again refused. The porter went to fetch his boss, Mr Handley who also asked Matthie to move his van.

He too was refused.

At this Handley called over another man to take hold of the horses’ reins and move them back over the bridge. Seeing this Matthie threw down the box he was holding and declared that he ‘would be ______ if he unloaded any more’.

You can fill in the blanks from your imagination.

Once the other driver had passed over the bridge Matthie attempted to move his cart back onto it, so he could continue to unload at a convenient point. Dawson was having none of it however. His duty, he said, was to keep the bridge clear and Matthie had already demonstrated that he wouldn’t do as he was asked to.

Matthie seized him by the collar and said he didn’t ‘give a ____ for his duty’ and that he would ‘throw him over the bridge and break his ______ neck’ if he did not let him place his van back on it. A scuffle ensued and Dawson was indeed pushed over the bridge, falling nine feet down to land on the boxes below.

The poor old man was badly hurt. He was taken to the London Hospital in Whitechapel where he was treated for broken ribs, ‘a contusion of the leg’ and other injuries. The police were called and Matthie was arrested. When he was charged he told PC Josiah Chaplin (124H) that he admitted shoving Dawson. ‘I told him to stand away from me three times’, he added, before pushing him over the edge.

The case came before the Thames Police Court several times from late June to late July 1855, partly because it was initially feared that the porter would not recover from his injuries and was too ill to attend court. He was kept in  the hospital for two weeks but continued to be a day patient right up until the case again came up in late July.

When Mr Yardley reviewed the case on July 26 he listened to various witnesses for both the prosecution and defence.

Mr Porter, on behalf of Matthie, told him that his employee had a good record of employment previously and was the sort of person to deliberately set out to harm anyone. He was, he told him, ‘very civil, industrious, and sober’. Two other witnesses vouched for the carmen. But there were also other labourers working for the Ordnance who saw what happened and heard Matthie threaten Dawson.

Mr Porter was continuing to plead for his servant when the magistrate interrupted him. As far as he could see, he said, there was such a disparity in strength between the defendant and the victim that ‘he would not be doing his duty if he did not commit the prisoner for trial’. A jury could decide on intent or provocation he added.

He bound over the various witnesses to appear and give their evidence. Porter asked him to bind Handley over as he felt he could affirm that his man had the right to unload his vehicle on the bridge (perhaps suggesting that Dawson had overstepped his authority). Mr Yardley didn’t really see why that was necessary given the evidence he had heard but he agreed, and insisted Porter turn up for the trial as well. Having completed all the paperwork he committed Matthie for trial (at the Middlesex Sessions I imagine since there is no record of it at Old Bailey) and released him on bail.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, July 27, 1855]