• Home
  • About
  • Copyright
  • Portmanteau of terror
    • The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
    • Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe
    • The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
    • The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
    • The Ash Tree by MR James
    • The Open Window by Saki
    • The Reticence of Lady Anne by Saki
    • To be taken with a grain of salt – a ghost story by Charles Dickens
    • Madam Crowl’s Ghost by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu
    • The Horla, or Modern Ghosts by Guy de Maupassant
    • The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    • To Let by BM Croker
    • The Upper Berth by F Marion Crawford
    • The Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs
    • The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford
    • The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford
    • The Haunted Dolls House by MR James
  • Books
  • Podcasts

The Haunted Palace

~ History, Folkore and the Supernatural

The Haunted Palace

Monthly Archives: May 2021

Available now on Amazon! The Haunted Mirror: History, Folklore and the Supernatural, from the Haunted Palace Blog

30 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Lenora in Crime and the underworld, eighteenth century, England, Ghosts, History, Legends and Folklore, Macabre, Medieval, mourning, Murder and murderers, nineteenth century, Photography, Stately Homes, Supernatural, Victorian, Witchcraft

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

dark history, folklore, Ghosts, Haunted Palace book, haunted palace collection, Macabre, new book, supernatural

Published 16 May 2021, 230 pages

Paperback £8.99

Kindle £3.99

Buy now on Amazon, click here: The Haunted Mirror: History, Folklore and the Supernatural from the Haunted Palace Blog (The Haunted Palace Blog Collection): Amazon.co.uk: ., Lenora, Jessel, Miss: 9798505220504: Books

@chknstyn

A compendium of dark history, strange folklore and mysterious hauntings culled from the Haunted Palace Blog. Lenora and Miss Jessel have selected and re-worked some of their favourite posts for your enjoyment.

Did you know that a prodigious palace once stood in the London Borough of Wanstead and Woodford but a dissolute Earl threw it all away, leaving his heart-broken wife to haunt its ruins forever? Or that Victorian tourists flocked to the grim spectacle provided by the Paris Morgue – the best free theatre in town? Or that a murderous jester is reputed to have lured people to their deaths at a castle in Cumbria? Join us as we explore a past populated by highwaymen, murderers, eccentrics, and lost souls.

Lavishly illustrated with specially commissioned art, engravings and photographs from the Haunted Palace Collection, and national collections.

@igamagination

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Art of the Pickpocket and Cutpurse: Schools of Fobology – Part 1

16 Sunday May 2021

Posted by Miss_Jessel in Crime and the underworld, England, General, History, nineteenth century, Victorian

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

child crime, crime, cut purses, Fagan, pickpockets, poverty, slums, theft

Training with Fagin

When the breakfast was cleared away, the merry old gentleman and the two boys played at a very curious and uncommon game…The merry old gentleman, placing a snuff-box in one pocket of his trousers, a note-case in the other, and a watch in his waistcoat pocket, with a guard chain round his neck, and sticking a mock diamond pin his shirt, buttoned his coat right round him, and putting his spectacle-case and handkerchief in his pockets, trotted up and down the room with a stick…All this time the two boys followed him closely about; getting out of his sight so nimbly, every time he turned round…If the old gentleman felt a hand in any one of his pockets he cried out where it was; and then the game began all over again. [1]

“The merry old gentleman’s pretty little game” by Frederic W. Pailthorpe — seventh illustration for “Oliver Twist” (1886) (victorianweb.org)

This passage from Oliver Twist is the most famous description of the training of young thieves in literature. Although it is a fictional account, as with all Dickens’ books it was taken from real life stories and events he had witnessed, read about or heard of from the people involved. The details of how pickpockets learnt their trade are corroborated by numerous factual accounts and Saffron Hill where Dickens placed The Three Cripples, Bill Sikes favourite alehouse was actually a lodging house in the Victorian period. Next to the lodging house was a pub called The One Tun which Dickens patronised. This public house was established in 1759, and is one of only two pubs of this name still in existence and trading in London today[2].

The One Tun of Old Pye Street

Incredibly there was another One Tun public house during the same period which also boasted a connection to Dickens. Although both pubs were located in slums, the pub in Old Pye Street managed to reach new lows even in a city noted for areas of abject poverty. The name of this infamous area of London paints a vivid picture – The Devil’s Acre. The Devil’s Acre was only a few yards from Westminster Abbey and the prestigious houses which surrounded it. The irony of its location was not missed by Dickens who wrote “The most lordly streets are frequently but a mask for the squalid districts which lie behind them, whilst spots consecrated to the most hallowed of purposes are begirt by scenes of indescribably infamy and pollution; the blackest tide of moral turpitude that flows in the capital rolls its filthy wavelets up to the very walls of Westminster Abbey”[3]. This notorious rookery (a popular slang word for slum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) with its narrow streets, gloomy alleyways, overcrowded and dilapidated buildings was home to thousands of destitute and poor inhabitants, many of whom eked out a meagre living through criminal activities and prostitution.

Dorset Street 1902. Jack London, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The pub in Old Pye Street was known to be a hideout for a thief-trainer and his boys, orphans who had been taken off the streets. On a visit, Andrew Walker, a member of The City of London Mission, was horrified to find the children living in such a place. He nicknamed it ‘The School of Fobology’[4] and witnessed first-hand, children being taught the art of pickpocketing. His report so shocked the Mission that the wealthy philanthropist, Adeline Cooper in 1853, bought the pub and along with the famous social reformer, the Earl of Shaftesbury, founded the first Ragged School which gave free basic education for poor children. Interestingly the landlord left without paying his rent and stripped the pub of all its furnishings and fittings. By 1871, the school had around 133 pupils[5].

The Billigsgate Cutpurses

One of the earliest known schools of theft was found at an alehouse at Smarts Key near Billingsgate in 1585. It was run by Wotton, a gentleman who had fallen on hard times. The Recorder, Fleetwood, wrote that somehow Wotton convinced all the cutpurses in the area to come to his house. He set up a school to train thieves and devised some ingenious methods to help them learn their trade. Two objects were hung from the roof, one a pocket and the other a purse. The pocket contained counters and was hung up with hawk’s bells and a little scaring bell. The purse held silver. The boys would try to remove a counter and the silver without disturbing the bells. Those that managed to get the counter became a “public foyster”(pick-pocket) and those that took out the silver was “adjudged a judicial nypper” (cutpurse or pick-purse)[6].

Life on the Streets

Amongst the filth and poverty and largely ignored were the street children. Neglected and abandoned both by their parents who were often in prison, absent or dead and society to whom they were either invisible or treated like vermin, they stole to survive. The large number of children in prison or in Houses of Correction is heart-breaking. In 1849, in England and Wales 10,460 children under 17 had been arrested and convicted[7]. Living on the streets, preferable to the brutal workhouse, was dangerous and so many preferred to band together into child gangs as there was safety in numbers.

See page for author, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It is therefore no wonder that the professional thief-trainers had their pick of candidates. For street children suffering malnutrition and living in filth this represented a step up as they would gain a roof over their head and food in their belly. Thief-trainers would look out for boys and girls who were quick, sharp and steady. Sometimes they would notice a child stealing and approach them. If the child was good-looking this would be another point in their favour.

As well as teaching them the tools of their trade they would also instruct them on how to behave and dress in fashionable places such as railway stations and race-courses so they could blend in with the crowd. As for the thief-trainers they gained a source of income and knew that if the child got caught it was nearly impossible to trace the crime back to them and so they could “concoct crimes with a readiness and a recklessness arising only from impunity”.[8]

“Oliver amazed at the Dodger’s mode of going to work,” fifth illustration of “Oliver Twist” by George Cruikshank (victorianweb.org)

How to be a Thief

Nearly two hundred years later the Annual Register of the 5 March 1756, records another school which had managed to achieve notoriety[9]. The school was sited in a public house near Fleet Market where a club of boys were instructed on pickpocketing. Taken from the evidence given by the four boys who were arrested, an idea emerges of the techniques and skills which the boys were taught at this school.

Stage One: The ability to remove a handkerchief out of the thief trainer’s pocket and then a watch. They were taught to go for small light objects such as scarf pins which were easy to remove and hide; how to bump into and distract their prey; and where they could find the best pickings such as at crowded fairs and firework displays. Practice made perfect and eventually the trainee thief could remove the items without the owner being aware that their property had gone.

Image courtesy of www.janeaustenslondon.com

Stage Two: The next stage was how to pilfer from a shop. The first important step was to choose a shop with a hatch. One boy would distract the owner or manager by gaining entry whilst the other would lie on his belly close to the hatch. The hatch would be left slightly ajar when the first boy left. Once the owner had disappeared from the shop floor the second boy would crawl in on all fours and take whatever items they could, including money from the till. They would then escape the same way.

Stage Three: This stage saw the pickpocket move on to breaking and entering. Here they were instructed to work in pairs. The boys would be sent to a potentially lucrative target and pretend to be beggars. They would then lie down under the shop’s window and feign sleep whenever someone passed them. During the intervals when they were unobserved they would scrape out the mortar from around the bricks in the wall (which were usually thin and poorly constructed). Once they had a hole big enough, one of them would crawl in and steal anything they could carry and the other would hide the gap with his body, pretending to be asleep[10].

Lodging Houses and Flash Houses

Lodging houses also gained a bad reputation and as with public houses sometimes functioned as schools for thieves. These schools flourished during the Victorian era largely due to the end of apprenticeships and the march of industrialisation which worsened conditions in the slums.

Generally the training techniques did not vary that much wherever the children received their education. An unidentified lodging house trained both boys and girls (girls were often used as decoys and could be more successful as thieves since they could get closer to wealthy ladies without arousing suspicion). In this school a doll was hung up and dressed in the image of a gentleman or lady and a purse placed in its pocket. The purse contained 6 old pence and a bell. Again the children had to remove the money without ringing the bell[11].

Pubs because they sold alcohol were seen as places of vice and disrepute and so it is not surprising that they often became centres “for thieves and other evil-doers”[12]. Those pubs which had a particularly bad reputation became known as ‘flash-houses’ and were labelled “nurseries of crime”[13]. It was believed that in the first half of the 1800s, at least 200 flash-houses functioned in London. Here the police and crooks would drink side by side. Often the police ignored any dubious goings on within their walls such as the fencing of stolen goods since they provided such a rich source of information for any more serious criminal activities in the area. The infamous Mrs Jennings of the Red Lion in White Cross Street ran a very profitable flash-house where she acted as a fence, hiding goods behind cupboards and at the same time controlled a number of boys and girls who reported to her and lived with her [14].

Final Thoughts

In my mind the image of the Victorian thief and their training will always bring to mind Ron Moody from the musical Oliver dressed in a tatty green coat with handkerchiefs hanging out of his pockets dancing and singing You’ve got to pick a pocket or two to a group of cheerful urchins. Although, I know that in reality life for these children was far from jovial, I do find it fascinating that the musical does in its own way show the reality of how juvenile pickpockets and cutpurses were trained.

So who were the thief-trainers? That is another post…

Ron Moody as Fagin in Carol Reed’s 1968 musical drama film, Oliver!

Bibliography

Thomson, J. & Smith, Adolphe: Victorian London – Publications – Social Investigation/Journalism – Street Life in London, 1877, http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications/thomson-35.htm

Garwood, John: Victorian London – Publications – Social Investigation/Journalism – The Million-Peopled City, 1853, http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications4/peopled-01.htm

Rookeries, flash houses and academies of vice, https://forromancereaders.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/rookeries-flash-houses-and-academies-of-vice/

Slum Living: London’s Rookeries-, http://georgianlondon.com/post/49461306842/slum-living-londons-rookeries

Cholera and the Thames: The Devil’s Acre, https://www.choleraandthethames.co.uk/cholera-in-london/cholera-in-westminster/the-devils-arce/

White, Jerry: London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘a Human Awful Wonder of God’,  Bodley Head , 2016

Hindley, Charles (ed.): Curiosities of Street Literature: Comprising ‘Cocks,’ Or ‘Catchpennies’, Palala Press, 2012

Lower Thames Street, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol2/pp41-60

Saffron Hill, https://exploring-london.com/tag/the-three-cripples/

Day, Samuel Philips: Juvenile Crime: Its Causes, Character, and Cure, Samuel Phillips Day, (originally published 1858), 2014

Rookery (slum), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rookery_(slum)

Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist

Plaque: One Tun pub – Saffron Hill, https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/one-tun-pub-saffron-hill

The One Tun Ragged School, Perkins Rents, c.1870, http://www.museumoflondonprints.com/image/750780/the-one-tun-ragged-school-perkins-rents-c-1870

Rookeries, flash houses and academies of vice, https://forromancereaders.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/rookeries-flash-houses-and-academies-of-vice/

One Tun, 3 Perkins Rents, St John, Westminster, https://pubshistory.com/LondonPubs/WestminsterStJohn/OneTun.shtml

Notes

[1] Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

[2] Plaque: One Tun pub – Saffron Hill

[3] The Devil’s Acre

[4] Cholera and the Thames – The Devil’s Acre

[5] The One Tun Ragged School, Perkins Rents, c.1870

[6] Thames Street

[7] Victorian London – Publications – Social Investigation/Journalism – The Million-Peopled City

[8] Juvenile Crime: Its Causes, Character, and Cure

[9] Victorian London – Publications – Social Investigation/Journalism – The Million-Peopled City

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid

[12] One Tun, 3 Perkins Rents, St John, Westminster

[13] Juvenile Crime: Its Causes, Character, and Cure

[14] Rookeries, flash houses and academies of vice

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest

Like this:

Like Loading...

Recent Posts

  • The Thieves’ Accomplice: The Hand of Glory
  • The Haunting of Willington Mill – a true life haunting for Halloween
  • Halloween Podcasts – out soon!!
  • HM Queen Elizabeth II 1926-2022
  • The Deviant Nuns of Littlemore Priory

Archives

  • December 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • November 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • June 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013

Categories

  • Art Reviews
  • Bizarre
  • Book reviews
  • Castles
  • Colonialism
  • Crime and the underworld
  • death
  • eighteenth century
  • England
  • Ethnography
  • fakes
  • Films
  • General
  • Ghosts
  • Ghosts and Horror
  • Guilty Pleasures
  • Halloween
  • hiking
  • History
  • hoaxes
  • Hoodoo and Voodoo
  • Legends and Folklore
  • Macabre
  • Medieval
  • memento mori
  • mourning
  • Murder and murderers
  • nineteenth century
  • Photography
  • Poetry
  • Poetry Reviews
  • Poltergeists
  • post mortem
  • Religion
  • Reviews
  • ritual
  • Scotland
  • scottish borders
  • seventeenth century
  • sixteenth century
  • Spoken Word
  • Stately Homes
  • Supernatural
  • Theatre Reviews
  • Uncategorized
  • Vampires
  • Victorian
  • Whitby Goth Weekend
  • Witchcraft

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

  • Follow Following
    • The Haunted Palace
    • Join 257 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • The Haunted Palace
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: