Tag: youth crime

‘Give it to him lads!’ Violence and theft at the Lord Mayor’s Show

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“The Ninth of November, 1888” by William Logsdail

I remember watching the Lord Mayor’s Show on television as a boy, fascinated by the uniforms, floats and military bands. I watched it this year in glorious colour (a change from the days of black and white I recall) and was reminded how orderly it is. Thousands of Londoners watch as hundreds of marchers process through the streets of the City of London celebrating the guilds and companies of the capital and the lection of a new Mayor.

It is one of London’s great traditions and it is has been around for centuries.

In 1888 the parade took place as usual, but clearly it didn’t pass off completely peaceably or without incident.  On the Monday following the Show the new Lord Mayor (Alderman Whitehead) convened his first set of hearings at the Mansion House Police court. He started by thanking the clerk and other court officials and by stating that the parade was one of the best he’d attended and remarked that the crowd was well behaved and happy.

Most of them, at least.

Three young men were brought before him charged with the theft of a gold repeater watch valued at £145. This was a very expensive watch which belonged to Dr Adolf Stern, an attaché at the Imperial Russian Embassy in Berlin. He told the Lord Mayor that on the Saturday of the show he had been on his way from his hotel in Blackfriars to the Deutsche Bank on Throgmorten Street when he ran into the procession.

He soon found himself surrounded by ‘roughs’, who insulted him and pushed him around. He struggled to keep his balance and at some point in the scuffle his waistcoat was opened and his watch stolen. He saw one of the prisoners (Frederick Wood, 17) make off with it and as he shouted the lad passed it to another, Thomas Daley, also 17). Daley then threw it to John Connell (22) who started to run off before a mounted constable responded to the attaché’s cries for help and rode down the thief.

All three roughs were sentenced to six weeks imprisonment and the watch was returned to a grateful diplomat.

Next up three medical students were charged with assaulting the police during the Show. Henry Sherwood (19) and George Monkhouse (17) had been part of group of around 4-50 students who joined the procession as it wound down Ludgate Hill. They were all carrying sticks and making a nuisance of themselves; perhaps they were part of the parade or just a group of rowdy hangers-on, it isn’t clear.

The route was lined with police and as Monkhouse and Sherwood passed police sergeant Couldrey of the City force Monkhouse lashed out with his cane, hitting the officer in the face. When the policeman recovered sufficiently to grab his assailant Sherwood waded into the attack shouting, ‘give it to him lads!’

It took the police a while to subdue their attackers but eventually Monkhouse and Sherwood were manhandled back to station and charged. In court they both denied using any violence but the Lord Mayor fined them each £1. Pulteney Garrett, another medical student, was accused of leaping on the back of a policeman and forcing him to the ground, hurting his knees and then biting his thumb! He was fined £5.

The scale of punishment reflects the fact the medical students were all relatively wealthy young men. They could avoid gaol while the ‘roughs’ could not and their behaviour – whilst unwelcome – was a usually seen as a boisterous high spirits while similar behavior by working class lads was symptomatic of their lack of decency and class.

November 1888 was significant for a much more serious crime in 1888. On 9 November Mary Kelly became the  fifth ‘canonical’ victim of the Whitechapel murderer. She had been looking forward, as many Londoners did, to the pomp and ceremony that was the Lord Mayor’s Show. Sadly she never saw it that year.

[from The Standard, Monday, November 12, 1888]

‘A very serious thing’ means a birching for one young boy

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When Louis Perry sent his errand boy off to deliver some work for him he gave him strict instructions. Lipman Forkell was to take some boots to his customer on a barrow and then drop the barrow off at the hire place. The lad was told not to forget to collect the 10d change due from his deposit of a shilling.

However young Lipman – a 12 year-old boy who lived in Eastman Court, Whitechapel in London’s East End – carried out the task but failed to return Mr Perry’s money. This was a second chance for Lipman; he’d been accused of stealing money before but had been let off with a warning. He wasn’t to get a third chance and the boot maker was determined to teach him a lesson.

On Thursday 7 August 1879 the boy was brought before Mr Bushby at Worship Street Police court and formally charged with stealing 10d in silver coins. The magistrate warned Mr Perry that he was also liable to be prosecuted, ‘for employing  a lad under age’. On this occasion he got off with a warning.

Lipman was not so fortunate. The magistrate told him that to have taken to stealing at such a young age was very serious and he would be punished for it. On top of sending him to prison for three days Mr Bushby ordered that the boy be given ‘twelve strokes of the birch rod’. These would be administered by a local policeman, which helps explain why the ‘old bill’ were far from popular in the district.

[from The Standard, Friday, August 08, 1879]

NB this post first appeared in August 2018

An unwanted ‘guest’ under a Whitechapel grocer’s bed

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Harris Rosenthorn ran a small grocer’s shop on Plummer’s Row, Whitechapel. For a few days he’d noticed a young immigrant loitering nearby and suspected he was up to no good. Then, on Thursday 2 November 1893 the lad had come into the shop and bought some butter. From his accent Mr Rosenthorn determined that the teenager was probably a Russian Pole, one of many in the East End.

At around 9.30 the grocer went upstairs to the second floor and into one of the bedrooms. The candle lighting the room had just gone out and worried, Rosenthorn lit another. He soon found the strange young man hiding under the bed. The lad crawled out and, before the shopkeeper could stop him, he pushed past and down the stairs.

He ran straight into one of the Rosenthorns’ servants, who, alerted by her master’s cries of alarm, tried to tackle him. She was punched in the chest and pushed to the floor and the man got away.

He didn’t get far however, soon several neighbours were after him and overpowered the burglar a few streets away. As he ran he dropped a chisel he’d been carrying, either to use as a jemmy or a weapon. His captors handed him over to the police and on Friday 3 November he appeared before Mr Dickinson at the Thames Police court.

The young man gave his name as Max Landay. He was just 17 years of age and under the powers bestowed on magistrates by the summary jurisdictions acts of the 1800s the justice decided to deal with him without recourse to a jury trial. Max was sent to prison for six months with hard labour.

[from The Standard, Saturday, November 04, 1893]

‘What a shame for four men to beat one’: One woman’s brave but foolish intervention

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Violence was topic for most of the cases reported in the evening Standard newspaper on 13 October 1877. Just as modern readers are shocked by hearing of stabbings and attacks on defenseless elderly people and children, our ancestors must have shaken their heads and wondered what the world was coming to.

Of course the accounts of assaults and domestic violence were both real and relatively unusual; it was this that made them newsworthy. So we do have to be aware that when we read the nineteenth-century papers we are looking at a selection of ‘crime news’ that the editor thought his readership would ‘enjoy’. Plenty of less sensational news was generated by the ‘doings’ of  the metropolis’ police magistrate courts.

But let’s return to October 1877.

The first report that evening was of ‘an unprovoked assault’ on Mrs Jane Nash. Jane was walking out with a friend to meet her husband for Friday night drinks. As she made her way along Newington Causeway a drunken man collided with her, and ‘nearly knocked her down’. Jane gave him a piece of her mind, telling him to watch where he was going.

The man turned round, punched her in face twice, and would have started kicking her as she lay on the ground if two men hadn’t intervened and pulled him off her. At Southwark Police court he was sent to prison for 14 days by Mr Benson.

Staying south of the river Edward Richards surrender his bail and appeared at Wandsworth Police court charged with ‘a gross outrage’. He was accused, along with three other men not in custody, of attacking a man at a farm in Merton. John Ebliss, a ‘native of Bengal’, was sleeping at Baker’s End farm when Richards and the others hauled him out in a blanket and threw him in a ditch. Whether this was a prank or they had discovered Richards sleeping rough on their property wasn’t made clear in the report. The magistrate, Mr Paget, remanded Richards for a week so that the other men could be apprehended.

At Marlborough Street George Webster was charged with assaulting William Bowden, one of the surgeons attached to St John’s Hospital in Leicester Square. Webster had been making a disturbance in the hospital, probably drunk, and was thrown out. This sort of behavior still happens in hospitals today and every  night NHS are abused and assaulted by members of the public who’ve had too much to drink. Webster had come back into the hospital and in an argument with the surgeon he punched him in the ear. Mr Cooke warned him that behaviour like that could get him a prison sentence but on this occasion, and with the surgeon’s agreement, he merely bound him over to keep the peace for a year.

The final case was the worse. At half past midnight on the previous Friday (the 5 October) Emily Withers was passing the corner of Cannon Street Road when she saw a street robbery in progress. Four young men had set on another. When they discovered he had no money that started beating him up and Emily, unwisely decided to intervene.

‘What a shame for four men to beat one’, she cried, drawing the attention of one of them.

‘What is it to do with you?’ Robert Martin asked, moving over to her.

He kicked out at her, landing a blow on her knee. As the young man struggled free of his attackers and ran for help Martin now kicked Emily in the stomach. The violence knocked her off her feet and ‘she was in such agony that she could neither move nor speak’. It took some moments before a policeman came running up and arrested Martin.

Emily spent four days confined to bed as a result of the attack but recovered sufficiently by the following Friday to give evidence against her abuser in court. Mr Chance, the presiding magistrate at Thames Police court sentenced the 17-year-old lad to six month’s hard labour.

So here were four acts of violence to unsettle the readers of the Standard as they digested their supper. It would remind them that while crime had fallen considerably since the early decades of the century there was still plenty to fear on the capital’s streets. However, the reports were also reassuring  in that in each case someone was in custody or was being punished for their acts of violence. They were off the streets and no threat any more.

Today I think we operate in a similar way. I live in London and stabbings are reported weekly, sometimes more.  Every death is a tragedy, a young life cut short, and a family bereaved.  It is made worse because the culprits are rarely caught and so remain at large, as an ongoing danger. But are they are a danger to me and my life? The news reports suggest that this sort of violence – knife crime committed by teenagers on each other – is unlikely to affect me directly because I am a white man in my fifties. That said local reports suggest that there was a stabbing just up the road from us, and several muggings (by youths on scooters) had also been reported.

London can be dangerous; anywhere can be dangerous, just ask the victims of the recent assaults in Manchester. But violence is still rare and reported because it is rare, and therefore newsworthy. As Nick Ross always used to say, ‘don’t have nightmares’.

[from The Standard, Saturday, October 13, 1877]

A ‘most daring (and painful) robbery’

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Fanny Corzinski had just left home with her husband to go to a wedding. She was dressed in her best outfit and was wearing gold earrings for the occasions. They hailed a cab and had just sat inside when a large crowd of boys and young men appeared, and proceeded to ‘mob’ the hansom.

One of the youth reached through the cab’s window and struck at them, hitting Mr Corzinski on the head with a walking cane. He hurriedly pulled up the window and urged the driver to move. The cab was going nowhere however, stranded as it was in the crowd of riotous lads.

Another lad smashed the window with a stick and tried to grab at Corzinski’s watch and chain. When he failed in this attempt he noticed Fanny’s earrings and lunged for them, pulling one off and getting away. In doing so he tore the lobe of her ear, injuring her.

Her husband wanted to run after the lad but it was simply too dangerous. Fortunately the crowd soon dispersed and the river was able to effect an escape from the danger. In the days following the robbery Fanny had noticed the main culprit and pointed him out to police. The lad was identified as Patrick O’Leary and he was picked up by PC Bolton and brought before Mr Hosack at Worship Street Police court.

The prisoner had no defense for his action and admitted his guilt, hoping for a more lenient sentence. Mr Hosack told him it was a ‘most daring and painful’ robbery and sent him to prison for three months with hard labour.

[from The Morning Post, Thursday, August 14, 1884]

Upper class boisterousness Bloomsbury Square and a reminder that double standards persist

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Police constable Fisher (32E) was on duty in Great Russell Street in the early hours of Friday morning, 26 July 1867. As he approached Bloomsbury Square on his beat he heard what sounded like gunshots, and he rushed towards the sound. Nearby PC Vindon (34E) had also heard the sounds and was hurrying to investigate.

As the two officers converged on the square they saw two young men aiming rifles at the gas lamps. They had missed more than once but had now succeeded in putting out two of the square’s lamps. When they saw PC Vindon they turned tail and ran, one of them running straight into the arms of constable Fisher.

‘That is nice conduct for a young man like you – firing off powder and putting the lamps out’, PC Fisher admonished his prisoner.

‘There you are mistaken’, the young man replied, ‘it was only caps’.

Looking down PC Fisher saw 12 exploded caps on the ground, six by each lamppost. He arrested the lad, who gave his name as Frank Hughes, and took him back to the police station to be charged.

At the station he explained that he’d just returned from Wimbledon where he’d won a prize for shooting. He claimed he didn’t know there was any powder in the rifle (which seems unlikely). However, he was clearly ‘respectable’, being described as having a ‘gentlemanly appearance’ and this probably helped him when he was brought before Sir Thomas Henry at Bow Street Police court.

There he apologize and said he hoped the magistrate might overlook his indiscretion. No, said Sir Thomas, he could not possibly do that but he only fined him. The sum was large, 40s, but not hard to find for someone with deep pockets like young Frank. He paid up at once and was released.

This is a reminder that class determined outcomes in the summary courts of the capital. Working class ruffians were mostly sent to prison (many would not have afforded such a fine anyway) because their behavior was deemed disorderly and a sign of latent criminal intent. By contrast the transgressions (however serious) of the upper class were put down to ‘youthful excess’ and deemed in some way ‘natural’.

I’d like to say we’d left those class distinctions behind but when we have our second Old Etonian and ex-Bullingdon Club Prime Minister in a decade I doubt we have.

Today my current cohort of students graduate from the University of Northampton with degrees in History. Young people, students especially, can get a very bad press but that is unfair and unjustified. I’ve taught most of these students over the past three years and while I know some better than others they are all a bright, hardworking and thoughtful bunch of young people. I wish them all the best for their future and hope they take some of the things they’ve learned forward with them, whatever they do, and stay in touch with us here.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, July 26, 1867]

Drew’s new book (co-authored by Andy Wise) is published by Amberley Books. 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 on Amazon here

A disgusting and cowardly attack in Hyde Park is a reminder that the past could be just as bad as the present

 

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The idyllic view of Hyde Park (by Count Girolamo Pieri Nerli), which was very far from the reality for Sophia Freestone in 1865.

Not surprisingly there was considerable outrage in early June this year when the news broke that a group of youths had attacked two women on a London bus. The women were targeted for being gay and abused when they refused to kiss for the entertainment of the youths, several of whom were soon in custody. The assault which can viewed as both homophobic and misogynistic occasioned social media posts along the lines of ‘what have we become’ and ‘what sort of society are we living in?’

Not for the first time however I think that we can be too quick to compare our own society unfavorably with that of the past. The attack on Melania Geymonat and her partner Chris was disgusting but sadly not that unexpected nor was it without historical precedent.

154 years ago, in June 1865, in a period of relative stability and low crime levels, John Nally was prosecuted for an similarly disgusting assault on a woman in Hyde park.

Sophia Freestone was minding her own business sitting on a bench in the park when Nally and three other lads came up behind her and tipped her onto the grass. That might have been a prank – unpleasant certainly, but possibly attributable to youthful excess. What happened next escalated this assault well beyond the boundaries of any sense of common decency.

As the other held the unemployed servant down John Nally  forced open her jaws and ‘thrust a quantity of sheep’s dung into her mouth’. Then he and his friends ran off, delighted with their exertions.

Fortunately for Sophia, someone saw what happened and went in search of a park constable. PC Lippett (no.31) chased after the boys and managed to catch Nally. He dragged him back and Sophia identified him as her abuser. In court at Marlborough Street the lad tried to excuse himself as merely an onlooker and blamed his confederates but Mr Mansfield wasn’t in the mood to believe him.

It was a shocking, cowardly attack and by fining him a huge sum (£5) that he knew he would not be able to pay, the magistrate ensured that justice of a sort was done as Nally was sent to prison for two months with hard labour.

Both this attack, perpetrated as it was on a vulnerable and random innocent, and that on the two women recently have in common the fact that some people think that it is acceptable to use violence towards others for their own self gratification. I don’t know why society produces people who are so morally bereft that they can imagine and then carry out such horrific assaults on people that have never done them any harm whatsoever.

I would agree that certain forms of hate crime are on the rise, and that some nasty people have been emboldened by recent political events but that doesn’t take away the fact that our society has produced cowardly (and usually) male bullies for centuries.

I am not an advocate of prison as a useful means of correcting behaviour but in the case of John Nally and in that of the persons responsible for the homophobic attack on those Ms Geymonat I think it is entirely appropriate and I hope the law takes its course.

[from The Morning Post  Thursday, June 22, 1865]

Misogyny was at the heart of two brutal sets of murders in the 1880s: the Jack the Ripper or Whitechapel killings of 1888 and the Thames Torso murders which began in 1887 and continued to 1889. Drew’s new book (co-authored by Andy Wise) is published by Amberley Books. 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:

The Victorian gang murder that was eclipsed by the ‘Ripper’

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In mid June 1888 the dock at Marylebone Police court was crowded, as were the public spaces. This was a hearing that plenty of people wanted to see and hear and not just because it involved a lots of defendants. This was one of the most high profile cases of homicide that the press reported on in 1888 and, had it been another year, maybe we would have heard more about it.

But 1888 as many if not every schoolchild knows of course, was the year that ‘Jack the Ripper’ terrorized the East End of London. While other stories made the news (and many other murders were committed), after August the newspapers were almost exclusively dominated by the ‘news from Whitechapel’.

So let us return to Mr De Rutzen’s courtroom to ‘hear’ the voices of those that stood in front of him to give evidence that day.

In the dock were several young men, all allegedly members of a youth gang which was associated with the area around Lisson Grove and Marylebone. George Galletly was the only one who was unemployed. This is important because contemporary rhetoric about youth (and indeed more modern views) have tended to associate youth crime and gang membership with idle unemployment.

Galletly was joined in the dock by William Elvis (16), Micheal Doolan (15) and Fancis Cole (16) were all porters. Peter Lee (19) was a sailor, William Graefe (19) a cutter, William Henshaw (16) was a french polisher, and Charles Govier (16) a farrier’s boy. Collectively they were all accused of involvement in the murder of Joseph Rumbold, a printer’s machinist, as he strolled with his sweetheart Elizabeth (‘Lizzie’) Lee in Regent’s Park.

The killing had already made the papers and so the reporter didn’t need to refresh his audience’s knowledge of events too much. Thomas Brown, a member of the ‘gang’ but not present on the night Rumbold died, testified that Galletly had admitted stabbing the victim by York Gates. Whether he told his mate out of sense of shame or, more likely, from bravado is impossible to say, but it was to be damning evidence.

Alonzo Byrne (or Burns) was a friend of Rumbold and a fellow machinist. He was out with Joe, double dating with his own girl (Elizabeth’s sister Emily) and the four had been walking around the park as they often did. The couples had separated and Alonzo and Emily were walking together when about half-a-dozen ‘chaps’ ran past, stopped and then one said, ‘I know them’, and they hurried on.

Up ahead he heard one person shout ‘that is the one’ which was followed by sounds of scuffle. The lads had caught up with Joe and Lizzie who now tried to run off to escape. When he caught up to the couple he was far too late; Rumbold was being helped into a cab to be taken to hospital.

He didn’t make it, dying in Lizzie’s arms on the way.

Byrne recalled that he’d asked one of the lads why they attacked Joseph. They explained that they were members of ‘The Deck’ (a gang from Seven Dials) and were meting out vengeance on Rumbold as they believed he was a member of the ‘[Lisson] Grove Lads’ whom they held responsible for an attack on one of their own the previous night.

All the prisoners pleaded not guilty and Mr De Rutzen committed them all to take their trials at the Central Criminal Court. He allowed bail just for Henshaw and Graefe, the rest were taken back to the cells to be transferred back to prison.

It came up at Old Bailey at the end of July that year. The report here is more accurate for ages and it was revealed that Galletly was in fact under 18, as was Lee who must have lied when he gave his age as 19, he was just 17. The jury had quite a job to pick through the events of that fateful night in Regent’s Park but eventually they decided that George Galletly was most responsible for killing Rumbold. All of the others were acquitted of murder or manslaughter but pleaded guilty to unlawful assembly and were given varying prison sentences from six to fifteen months.

George Galletly was sentenced to death.

He was reprieved however, on account of his age and the recommendation of the jury. He served just 10 years for the killing, being released on license in July 1898 and being recorded on the habitual offenders register. I haven’t look but there is supposedly a photo of George in the MEPO6/009/0022 (228) files at the National Archives, Kew. I must go and see it sometime as this is case I’ve written about before and one that, given all the current concern with gangs and violence, I continue to find fascinating.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, June 17, 1888]

1888 was of course the year of the ‘Ripper’, that unknown killer that stalked the streets of the capital seemingly without any fear of being caught. Nobody knows who ‘Jack’ was or do they? Drew’s new book (co-authored by 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

‘It is really quite dreadful to see young children standing in the dock charged with drunkenness’. Two young girls are led astray

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We might like to believe that children grow up faster these days or lose their innocence at an earlier age than they did in the past, but how true is this? There is a temptation to believe that everything was better in the past when prices were lower, the elderly were respected, and there was less crime. Often this mythical ‘golden age’ is associated with the 1950s the last decade before standards dropped as the ‘swinging sixties’ turned society upside down.

In reality of course the problems we face today are not really new ones just old ones in modern packaging. There were, for example, concerns about youth gangs in the Victorian period, and fears about the feckless nature of working-class youth go back to the end of the Napoleonic wars and beyond, as Geoffrey Pearson showed in his seminal study of youth crime Hooligans in 1983. So it is not at all surprising to find Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reporting on ‘rival gangs of roughs’ staging pitch battles in the capital in 1887.

Members of ‘gangs’ from Child’s Hill and Hendon fought with ‘lads’ from Maida Vale, Kilburn and Lisson Grove that autumn, arriving in ‘forces of 50 to 100, armed with sticks and belts’. According to the police ‘quite a riot followed’. Two of the combatants ended up before the magistrate at  Marylebone where they were charged with assault on a policeman that intervened in the battle. Edward Martell (17) was sent to gaol for 21 days and Arthur Hillman (19) for two weeks. But it was two other young people that caught my attention in the report of cases heard at Marylebone that week, Mary Ann Cook and Helen Cawthorn.

Mary was 12 and Helen 13 and they were brought in for being found drunk and incapable. The magistrate, Mr De Rutzen, was told that Mary Cook was lying in the gutter late on Sunday night when PC Miles (122S) discovered her as he patrolled Camden High Street. He picked her up and took her to the police station. Helen Cawthorn had already been taken to the Temperance Hospital on Hampstead Road and PC Sinclair (302S) had been called to collect her by officials there. Once they were both at the police station the desk sergeant sent for a doctor to examine the girls and he confirmed that they were both quite drunk.

In court the police deposed that enquiries were made and it had been discovered that the pair had ‘been with some ‘low rough boys’ from the neighbourhood and it was them that had led them astray and encouraged them to drink. They suspected that the boys had taken them to a public house but they couldn’t find out yet which one that was. Presumably they would have brought a prosecution against the landlord if they had.

Both girls’ parents were in court to speak up for their children. Mrs Cook said that her daughter had asked to go out to play on Sunday evening and she had allowed it. The first she heard of any trouble was when the police informed her that Mary was in custody. The mother was clearly shocked as she and her husband ‘were abstainers and encouraged their children in temperance principles’. Mr Cawthorn also said his daughter was usually very well behaved and that this was out of character.

The magistrate addressed the girls and said that ‘really quite dreadful to see two young children standing in the dock charged with drunkenness’. He accepted that the local boys had led them on but they should have known better than to go to a pub with them.  ‘It was the first step down hill’ he declared but fining them would do not good (since they’d have no money to pay)  and prison would ‘only make them worse’. So he discharged them into the care of their parents and hoped the disgrace of a court appearance would serve as sufficient warning for the future.

At this point a Mr Thompson steeped forward. He was a police court missionary, a member of a charitable organization that acted to help defendants if they promised to take the pledge and abstain from alcohol. He stated that it was his belief that both girls had once belonged to a Band of Hope, a temperance organization that had been established  mid century in Leeds. Children could join at the age of six and were taught to avoid the evils of drink. Thompson said he would try to get the pair reinstated in the group so they could be steered away from the dangerous path they had set themselves upon.

The police court missionaries started as an offshoot of the Temperance  movement but established themselves as an important part of the life of the police courts. They advised magistrates who came to trust them, especially where  (as was often the case) the offence the accused was up for involved drunkenness. In 1887 parliament passed the Probation of First Offenders Act which allowed a person charged on a first offence to be released without punishment if the court deemed it appropriate. There was no supervision order at first but this followed in subsequent legislation and eventfully, in 1907, the Probation service was created. Not only did probation offer the first real alternative to a custodial sentence it also signaled a new welfare approach to offenders, once aimed at helping them to reform rather than simply locking them up and hoping they learned the appropriate message.

It was an important breakthrough in offender management so it is deeply troubling that 112 years later probation has been allowed to fall into such a parlous state that the justice secretary has had to admit today that its experiment with part privatization has failed. David Gauke has effectively reversed the 2014 decision of one of his predecessors, the woefully incompetent Chris Graying, and returned the supervision of those on probation to public sector control. Grayling’s mistake has cost the taxpayer close to £500,000,000 and Dame Glenys Stacey (Chief probation inspector) said it was ‘irredeemably flawed’. It is not just the financial cost of course, Grayling’s bungling has had a negative effect on the lives of those realised into supervision and the general public who have suffered because of poor or insufficient supervision.

In May this year Grayling cancelled was forced to cancel ferry contracts he’d sanctioned to ‘ensure critical imports could reach the UK in the event of a no-deal Brexit’ costing us £50,000,000. He had already been forced to pay £33,000,000 in compensation for not including Eurotunnel in the bidding for the same contracts. £1,000,000 was paid to consultants in seeking to make a contract with a ferry company (Seaborne Freight) who had no ships.

Chris Grayling is still a minister in Her Majesty’s government.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, September 25, 1887]

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: