London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (36 page)

Housebreaking was sometimes opportunistic but also relied on sound intelligence as to the whereabouts of the inhabitants. Breaking into a house during the day certainly carried many risks but was perhaps less dangerous than doing so at night when the occupants were more likely to be at home. One solution, of course, was to watch a property and note the comings and goings of the household. On Christmas morning 1887, Charles Statham, his wife and their servant visited his father-in-law to enjoy the season's festivities. They returned to find their had been home broken into, seemingly with a jemmy, and the house ransacked. The housebreakers had taken a `marble clock, a silver cruet stand, 13 silver spoons, and other articles, valued at about £15. Statham, a small businessman running a delivery service, told his wife and servant to go and stay at her father's for the night and in the morning he went to the Thames office to give evidence about the goods taken from his home. When he got back he found that thieves had broken in again. This time they had been seen coming out of John Tattersfield's house (Statham's neighbour). When he challenged them they shoved him aside and ran off, with Tattersfield in hot pursuit. It being Boxing Day there was no one about, even on the usually busy Mile End Road. The criminals split up but as one ran into Grove Road Tattersfield called to a nearby policeman who caught and arrested the thief. One of the thieves had escaped this time but Henry Burrows - who confessed to another housebreaking in the previous year - was sentenced to ten months' hard labour. Mr Statham's property was recovered.59 Statham's property had been found in Bow in a room occupied by Jane Ward who was convicted of harbouring the person who had committed the first robbery on the Statham household and of attempting to pawn the stolen items. The judge sent her to prison for a year.60

The ability of John Tattersfield to keep up with Burrows having seen him exit Statham's house was crucial in persuading the jury of Burrows' guilt. Even when the evidence seemed stacked against the defendant any doubt that could be sown in the minds of the jurors might help secure an acquittal. Emanuel Krost kept a provisions store on Brick Lane and one June evening he locked up his premises to go out for an hour. As he opened his gate on returning he noticed his barrow had been moved; puzzled, he went over to examine it. As he did a man jumped out of the passageway and tried to get past him. `What do you want here?', Krost demanded, but the intruder mumbled something incoherently and fled, slamming the gate in Krost's face and making for Flower and Dean Street. Krost was aware of the poor reputation of the area and was afraid to go after the man. Instead he returned to his shop to find he had been robbed. He described the scene to the court:

the door leading to the shop parlour was broken open, and another door was open - I missed from a chest of drawers a few dozen briar pipes, three of which were in cases - one was silver mounted, and had an amber tip, and another was mounted with silver and amber, also some cigar-cutters; two suits of clothes were on the ground ready to be taken away, and two linen shirts, half-a-dozen towels, value altogether 71. or 81.

Krost reported the crime to the police who arranged an identity parade of 10 or 12 local men. He picked out George Cullen as the man he had seen based on his height and the fact that he had noticed he was not wearing a collar. Cullen's lawyer caused the jury to question Krost's identification on the grounds that after 9 p.m. it would have been dark. Krost was sure it was Cullen as the lights from the local pub flooded his yard. Cullen had been arrested on the following day by Walter Dew - then a young policeman but later to become famous as the detective that caught Dr Crippen - as he patrolled on Brick Lane with a detective investigating the break-in. Both were in plainclothes and their studying of Cullen and several others brought a fair amount of abuse in their direction. Cullen threatened Dew saying `G - blind me, if ever you attempt to take me I will chevy you - that means stab you, as the officer told the court. However, despite Dew's suspicions and Krost's identification, Cullen, perhaps because his lawyer was able to mount an effective challenge or on account of his relative youth (he was just 18), was found not guilty."

Both Statham and Krost were quick to tell the court that they had secured their property prior to going out. Home insurance was a relatively new concept, being offered by Lloyd's of London from 1887 onwards, but throughout the period the police and papers reminded the public that they had to take responsibility for making their homes hard to steal from. As Reynolds's Newspaper warned, `Every unoccupied dwelling and every unfastened door or window is a standing invitation to the burglar and housebreaker to enter, and one of which they are not slow to avail themselves' The police had discovered 28,915 windows and doors open as they patrolled and the paper further condemned `the reprehensible practice of certain shopkeepers who are in the habit of exposing goods for sale without keeping any effectual watch over them'.62

By 1881 the failure of the police to effectively thwart so-called `professional' burglars and housebreakers revealed itself in the satirical periodicals of the day before emerging in direct attacks on police competence more generally in newspapers such as the Pall Mall Gazette and Reynolds's. In February 1881, Punch reported the fictional meeting of the `Association of Burglars' (presided over by Mr Matthew Arnold Sikes, with interjections from the floor by Mr Smashem among others). Here the scientific nature of `modern' burglary was praised and it was remarked (by a retired felon) that it was a lot safer and less risky now than it had been in his day. The meeting, after the obligatory vote of thanks to the chair, broke up with `each member going to somebody else's house in the fashionable quarter now known as At the same time Funny Folks gently mocked the Daily Telegraph for advising its readers to take precautions against burglars, such as fitting electric door handles or keeping geese, by itself recommending the buttering of doorsteps and the distribution of orange peel - both presumably designed to cause intruders to slip and fall, to then be swept up by the maid servants in the morning.64 By 1887 the situation was apparently unchanged with Moonshine again suggesting that Mrs Muggins would not have her plate and Dresdenware if her husband had invested in a'Patent Electric Burglar Detector' While the article is clearly satirical it is also indicative of the necessity of individuals protecting their homes (and the goods therein) by all means possible and not to rely upon the police to do so.65

While both burglary and housebreaking were serious offences that reminded late Victorian society that their homes and property were vulnerable to the most skilled members of the criminal class, it was highway robbery that carried the greatest threat to contemporary sensibilities. Around 16 per cent of property prosecutions in Table 7.3 were for some form of robbery, which was slightly up on previous decades. Despite this the Daily News, in reporting an article penned by the surveyor-general of prisons, Edward Du Cane, in 1887, noted that highway robbery had `all but disappeared' and suggested this was as a result of the improvements in banking facilities and transport links which had removed the necessity for individuals to carry large amounts of money around with them. Unfortunately people were not solely robbed of money and street robberies - muggings, as we would understand them in the modern context - were a regular feature of life in the late nineteenth-century capital.

Highway robbery has been highly romanticized in popular culture and the Victorians were familiar with the tale of Dick Turpin's ride to York from Harrison Ainsworth's epic novel Rookwood and the many versions reprinted in the penny dreadfuls of the day. The reality of Turpin's life and crimes was very different as recent work has shown: he and the Gregory Gang terrorized the Essex countryside before Turpin moved on to murder and horse theft in Lincolnshire. He never owned a horse called Black Bess, let alone rode her to within sight of York Minster.66 The echo of Turpin and the masked cavaliers of the highways can be heard in the reporting of street robberies as `daring' by the London press: burglars and some pickpockets were `experts; muggers were `daring'.

This was how James Flewett was described by the press when he was involved in stealing from John Dudley on Tower Hill in August 1887. As the retired engineer was crossing the road he dropped his cigar. As he bent down to retrieve it three or four men surrounded him and knocked him to the ground. Dudley struggled to get hold of Flewett who kicked him in the hip while he was on the pavement and pulled his watch and chain from his pocket. All the robbers escaped but the victim - who walked with a stick that was also stolen from him - was able to identify Flewett in a parade from suspects gathered by the police.' James Flewett, a resident of Whitechapel, was aged 25 and claimed he was at home at the time of the robbery having failed to get work at Billingsgate market that morning. Despite a number of witnesses that confirmed this he was convicted and sentenced to 5 years and 25 strokes of the lash. Some 12 years later a James Flewett stood trial at the Old Bailey and was gaoled for 18 months for highway robbery. He was 38 and had 13 other offences proved against him; it seems likely that this was the same man who had robbed the engineer.6R

Plenty of other robbers were tried at the central criminal court in this period and the circumstances of their crimes are similar to Flewett's. At 7.30 on a cold January evening, George Hammersley, a caretaker, was at the junction of Commercial Street and High Street, Whitechapel, when several men emerged out of the thick fog and pushed him about. They took his watch and chain and ran off. Despite his inability to positively identify the men due to the conditions, another witness corroborated his story and the men were convicted and imprisoned for a year. The other culprits were later rounded up and prosecuted for the theft in February and April at the same court.69 John Wade was visiting London on business in March 1888 and had arrived outside the Snider's factory on Buck's Row, close to where Polly Nichols was to become the Ripper's first canonical victim less than six months later. As he entered the building three young men approached him, one of whom grabbed him around the waist and removed his watch and chain with force. James Elliot was eventually convicted of the attack and sent down for a year after confessing to a further robbery in 1886.7° It took the police four months to track Elliot down but this does demonstrate that they actively pursued actions against this type of offender and were not simply reliant on criminals being caught red handed or arrested in the immediate aftermath of their crime.

Clearly then the lack of cash was no disincentive to street crime: watches were easily pawned or sold on and made tempting targets for small gangs of robbers. Others became victims when they left one of the area's many drinking establishments a little the worse for wear. John Ford was drinking with William Warner in a pub on the Whitechapel Road and the pair left just before 11 p.m. and went their separate ways. The next thing Ford remembered was Warner's hands in his pocket as he attempted to steal his money. As Ford tried to stop him, Warner, who was very drunk, cut Ford's finger with a knife before he got away. The victim made his way to the London Hospital to get his wound dressed before pressing charges against his acquaintance for robbing him of over 17s in change. The jury found Warner guilty of the attack and he received a nine-month prison sentence after Ford spoke up for him in court.71

This section has looked at the prosecutions of property offenders at the Old Bailey and has hopefully shown that while a range of criminal activity was dealt with, much of it could be described as relatively petty and opportunistic. This was the nature of much of the crime that troubled Victorian society. With few exceptions the perpetrators were working-class men, many of whom appeared and reappeared before the judges at the Old Bailey and the magistracy at the police courts with depressing regularity. It has been suggested that the nineteenth century saw the development of a disciplinary assault on the depredations of the working-class criminal that was out of proportion to the actual level of crime and its consequences. The identification of a section of society as representing a real threat to order was echoed in a drive to identify a'criminal class' that could be held responsible for committing the lion's share of robberies and thefts. Once it had been established that crime was not simply the product of individual failings but was in fact a by-product of industrialization and urban living then a scientific approach might be usefully employed to counter it.

Here the Victorian state, itself a much greater and more all-encompassing entity than its Hanoverian predecessor, was able to take centre stage. The idea that crime was something that could be measured, studied and that criminals could likewise be analysed, understood and reformed, was abroad in the late eighteenth century. However, it was the state bureaucracy, wealth and determination of the Victorians that allowed the emergence of social agencies intent on controlling and rehabilitating offenders. The emergence of what professor Gatrell calls the policeman-state' is one of the most interesting meta-narratives of the nineteenth century. In this period crime became `the repository of fears which had little to do with its relatively trivial cost to the society and economy at large. It came to be invested with large significance because it provided a convenient vehicle for the expression of fears about social change itself"' In the final section of this chapter we will look at the ways in which these ideas about crime and criminals determined the ways in which society punished those found guilty at the Old Bailey and elsewhere and how these methods may have differed from the generations that preceded them. The eighteenth century has been characterized as the age of the gallows, the `bloody code' of Hanoverian justice cowing an awed populace into submission. By the early decades of the nineteenth century the gallows had largely been abandoned in favour of transportation and the prison. By the time the Ripper stalked the streets of London the prison had reached its apogee and we can now explore this change in detail.