London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (35 page)

Pickpockets were less feared because they eschewed violence but were no less criminal. Picking pockets was also an offence that was more likely to feature younger defendants and women. Embezzlement often involved stealing from one's master or employer but usually meant the embezzlement of money rather than the theft of property or goods. Much of this form of theft was prosecuted through the summary process (as we saw in the case of the well-respected but light-fingered vet prosecuted at Thames) and it is also quite likely that servants and clerks found to be stealing from their employers would simply have been dismissed without references or the prospect of finding work elsewhere. Therefore, though the Old Bailey merely represents the numbers of cases that reached trial, it is by no means a true reflection of the amount of crime in society. Goods stolen needed to be sold on or exchanged and so thieves needed receivers to `fence' their ill-gotten booty. Thus receivers account for fewer than 3 per cent of those accused of property crimes at Old Bailey. The Victorians had a ready made image of the receiver in Dickens' Fagin (himself based upon the real-life character of Ikey Solomon) but the reality was probably much more prosaic: second-hand clothes dealers and pawnbrokers were sometimes complicit in facilitating the market in stolen property in London.

Before looking in detail at robbery, burglary, shoplifting and a number of other specific offences, let us finish this brief introduction to the range of offences heard at the central criminal court. The theft of mail is interesting as the postal service (created in 1841) was still a relatively new organization. It would seem that the majority of those prosecuted for taking letters and parcels (and the money, postal orders and goods they contained) were employees of the Post Office. The elaborately named Weston Montacute was among 30 Post Office employees prosecuted in 1888 for stealing the mail out of a total of 38 prosecutions for this particular offence. Montacute was sent to prison for five years .41 In the same year there were 22 prosecutions at the Old Bailey for animal theft. Peter Wallace stole a horse and harness from a carman's cart in December 1888 while he was delivering goods at the Albert Docks, while Alfred Stewart made off with six chickens and five pigeons. Stewart was caught by a policeman after a long chase through the back alleys of Mile End and received a sentence of 15 months' imprisonment.50 Poaching, an offence that was featured heavily in the caseloads of magistrates in the countryside around London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was understandably less of a problem in the capital proper.

Finally, there were two trials for extortion in 1888. Margaretta Becker was accused of demanding money with menaces from a Leornhart Krott in May but acquitted. Krott had run a restaurant in Amsterdam where he had employed Becker as a waitress. She followed him to London claiming he was the father of her child, which he vigorously denied. Despite the fact that Krott seems to have been a very shady character - accused of living in a brothel, being expelled from Antwerp by the authorities there and arrested on suspicion of being an anarchist and possessing dynamite by the Hamburg police - the Old Bailey jury found insufficient evidence to convict him on this occasion. In the other case William Milne was convicted of threatening William Harris, a pork butcher, to obtain money from him. Milne told Harris that he had receipts that proved that Harris had bought bad meat from Smithfield market - meat that Milne had sent there - and promised that unless the butcher paid up he would expose him and ruin his business. However, Harris was presumably wise to this scam and confident that he was careful in selecting what he bought from market: he called for a constable and had Milne arrested. In his defence Milne argued that he was simply trying to expose the trade in so called `croaker' or diseased meat and that to shut him up Harris accused him of extortion when he had not asked for any money at all. As he stated in court, `My only object has been to get inquiries to stop the traffic in diseased and bad meat' Unfortunately for him the jury did not believe his story and he was sent down for three months' hard labours'

It is perhaps more useful to look at the percentages of individual crimes as prosecuted at the Old Bailey rather than at absolute numbers. If we do so then for the key offences we get the following table:

Table 7.5 Property offences at the Old Bailey, 1850-1899 by percentage occurrences

Table 7.5 reveals that prosecutions for robbery increased significantly at the end of the 1850s (probably reflecting fears about garrotters) while larceny fell slightly and then remained fairly constant to the end of the century. We can see that pocket picking and thefts from masters fell away (presumably because these are more often dealt with by the police courts) and the same is possibly true for embezzlement. Receiving, as we might imagine given its close relationship with all forms of theft, is stable throughout the nineteenth century while mail theft increases - perhaps with an increased quantity of letters and parcels in circulation. The first offence that I would like to look at in detail, however, is burglary (with the related crime of housebreaking) because trials of unwanted intruders clearly grew in proportion to other offences over this period.

The crimes were broadly the same: burglary was the illegal entering of premises at night to commit a felony (which was usually theft) while housebreaking took place during daylight. Burglary was considered to be more serious because the inhabitants were likely to be asleep in their beds and so the level of fear was increased. We should note that in both offences the term `house' could also include `attached buildings, shops and warehouses"' Housebreaking could be quite opportunistic, especially as many premises were largely unprotected and open for most of the day - only being secured at night. Burglary could equally be a matter of trial and error - the trying of door handles or looking for open windows or breaks in the fence - but it was suggestive of premeditation.

Between 1 January 1880 and 31 December 1889, 1,034 defendants stood trial for burglary at the Old Bailey. The overwhelming majority of defendants (96.1 per cent) were male and over 80 per cent of trials resulted in a guilty verdict (and around 40 per cent of defendants chose to plead guilty in the hope of a more lenient sentence). We can now look in detail at some of the cases that touched, in some way, on the East End of London.

In June 1888 Frederick Frewer, an assistant at Telford's pawnbroker's shop on Whitechapel High Street, took in a silver hunter watch brought in by a James Smith who gave his home address as somewhere in Bethnal Green. Several days later Joseph Jones, who worked in his father's pawnbroker's on Church Street, Spitalfields, received a signet ring pawned by Richard Wood. Several other pawnbrokers were also the recipients of watches and jewellery over the last two weeks of June and early July that year, ranging across North and East London. The goods - 84 watches, 30 rings, 18 or 20 chains and 6 or 8 brooches - had been stolen from the premises of Selloff Seligmann in Lower Clapton. Mr Seligmann had retired for bed at 11.30 p.m., having closed his shop up at 10 p.m. leaving his stock of jewellry and watches in the window. At 8 a.m. the next day, he came down to find that he had been burgled: the thieves had entered through the rear of his property and had made a great deal of mess, lighting the gas and scattering the floor with matches and jewellry that they either did not want or could not carry. The watchmaker called the police who sent an officer round at 9 a.m. that day. He reported that the intruders had slipped the catch of a rear window and had climbed in over the top of the shutters before ransacking the jeweller's stock and making their escape without disturbing the sleeping owner. While most of the pawnbrokers who gave evidence at the Old Bailey had simply taken in the goods they had been offered, one clearly suspected something was not quite right and decided to ask a few questions when James Keightley appeared in his establishment on Kingsland High Street. Edward Brooks had received a list of stolen goods (goods were often advertised as stolen and details posted in the Hue and Cry or the Police Gazette as well as in the more general newspapers of the day) and this watch attracted his attention. `Does this belong to you?', he enquired of Keightley. `Yes, he replied `I bought it in the "Lane" [Petticoat Lane, or more properly Middlesex Street, Spitalfields] on Sunday morning' Keightley went on to add that he wanted to pawn the item so as to have some money to attend the Alexandra Park race meeting. As soon as he realized the pawnbroker was suspicious Keightley took off, with Brooks in pursuit. Brooks soon caught the thief and, after a struggle, and with the help of a nearby jeweller, handed him over to a police constable to be charged. When he was searched at Hackney Police Station he was found to be in possession of five silver watches and one gold one, a gold ring and a gold key. When they went round to Keightley's home address they caught his wife, Hannah, attempting to hide other items before rounding up Martha Wood who had also been pawning stolen watches and jewellery as a result of the raid on Mr Seligmann's shop. Another suspect, Richard Wood, was picked up after he ran away from a police detective who was searching Keightley's home. Wood denied being involved declaring `the Lord strike me blind, I never committed the burglary, but it was later found that he had also pawned some of the items taken from the jeweller's premises and so he too faced trial. Keightley claimed that he was just pawning the goods for a man he refused to name while his wife denied any knowledge of the affair; Wood too pleaded his innocence and told the court that he was asked to pawn a few things by a passerby who had noticed in what a poor state his boots were and offered to get him a better pair.54 Wood stated he was out of work through sickness and had been duped by the supposed good Samaritan: `I was too ill to work or I should not have met him'. The court did not believe him but there was not enough evidence to convict anyone of the burglary: Wood and Keightley were sent to prison for receiving stolen goods (the former for nine months the latter for five years) while Hannah and Martha escaped punishment this time." This was a straightforward, if daring, robbery: the value of the goods stolen was in excess of £300, a large sum of money for the 1880s. Perhaps Keightley was innocent of the theft as he claimed. The case reveals a great deal about the trickle-down effect of property crimes such as this: the thieves were unlucky that one of the pawnbrokers was both vigilant and prepared to risk his own life in pursuing a criminal. Most of them simply pocketed the watches and other items and turned a blind eye to wherever they had come from.

David Silverberg and his sweetheart, Esther Harris, returned home to the jeweller's shop that Silverberg owned on Great Alice Street, Whitechapel, to find the street door open and a man in the parlour with a roll of cloth under his arm. The thief tried to escape but Silverberg secured him and called the police. The burglar, a young man of 19 years, was convicted and sent down for nine months.56 Another Jewish business was the target of a burglary, this time in White's Row close to where Mary Kelly's body was found five years later. Henry Morris was convicted of stealing two watches, chains, £2 in cash and thirty pairs of boots from Hirsch Moses and his wife. Morris had surprised Johannah Moses in the bedroom where she slept with her sick husband (he was too ill to attend court) but fortunately for her an alert policeman had seen Morris use a nearby ladder to force his way in through the Moses' window. PC Thick, who was a sergeant by the time of the Whitechapel murders, recognized Morris from the Middlesex sessions of the previous year: this probably helped to earn Morris a five-year sentence for this particular robbery.s'

A burglary in Mile End three years later resulted in a vicious assault on the policeman who captured one of the thieves. PC Weir of H division stopped three men at 1.30 a.m. as they wheeled a costermonger's barrow down the street. Dennis Bryan told PC Weir that he was behind with his rent and `was going to do a shift' [i.e. move house at night to avoid his debts] but the policeman insisted on searching the barrow. As he opened a bundle the other two men ran off and Weir seized Bryan - a struggle ensued. Bryan bit the policeman's nose and then his hand, breaking the skin and drawing blood before kicking him and running off. Weir and another officer took the barrow to the station and issued a description of the thief before Weir's wounds were dressed. PC Weir was off work for two weeks and perhaps the seriousness of the attack explains the lengths to which the Metropolitan Police went to catch the perpetrator. Six weeks later Weir accompanied Inspector Abberline to Birmingham in plainclothes where a man fitting Bryan's description had been sighted. Bryan was arrested and at his trial a jemmy was produced that the police deposed had been found close to the spot where Weir had stopped the three men in Pelham Street. A detective with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) told the Old Bailey that the jemmy that had been found corresponded with marks on the shutters of Mrs Woodland's pawnbroker's: her premises had been robbed earlier that evening of two quilts, four shawls and several other items. The jury found Bryan guilty of the burglary (but innocent of wounding PC Weir), and guilty of causing grievous bodily harm to Thomas Ockwell, another policeman who had tried to arrest Bryan in the wake of a robbery in Whitechapel High Street that year. Ockwell, a police constable with 18 years service under his belt, was on duty when he heard the smashing of glass 300 yards away. Hurrying to the scene he stopped Bryan who was coming towards him and demanded to know what he had in his bundle. The two men struggled on the ground before Bryan aimed seven or eight blows at the policeman with his own truncheon before making off with it and goods stolen from Barnet Goldschmidt's shop. The constable came to his senses shortly afterwards and his whistle summoned help. He was treated by Dr Bagster Phillips who told the court that `his scalp was all pulp and jellied'. The extent of the constable's injuries left him permanently deaf and unfit for service; `he will probably never be able to resume duty, Phillips told the jury. Ockwell was able to go with Weir and Abberline to Birmingham to identify his attacker. This time the jury and ignored the defendant's claim that his identity had not been proven and that the witnesses that appeared against him were `influenced entirely by the circumstance of his being known as belonging to the criminal class'. The judge sentenced him to 12 years behind bars.58