The Art of the Pickpocket and Cutpurse: Thief-trainers – Part 2

Child criminals. Image courtesy of Dorset History Centre.

Although many children were arrested again and again for stealing, a few were never caught, moving silently amongst crowds like ghosts and melting away into thin air. Those that were trained by a thief trainer possibly had a better chance of survival than those working alone or in small groups, but not by much. Even though the names of fences of goods such as Ikey Solomon and child thieves have come down to us through the public criminal records not many of the thief trainers were ever caught, maybe due to lack or proof or because many members of the gangs were too afraid to rat out their bosses.

Despite the fact that there were lots of thief-trainers both male and female in all the big cities in England most are shadowy nameless figures. Even those that are known such as Thomas Duggin of St Giles and Jemima Matthews of Upper Keate Street in the Flower and Dean Street rookery, who sent eight children out daily to steal in 1820[1], little is known of their background.

Cabbage Ann of Angel Meadow

There are some exceptions for example Cabbage Ann (real name Ann Powell) who lived in the infamous slum of Angel Meadow in Manchester. A widow aged 42, she ran a grocery shop and lodging house and was acquainted with criminals from across England. She was also well-known for regularly giving shelter to thieves. Despite her obvious fishy and underground activities she seems to have been a slippery character. The police to their frustration never seemed to have enough evidence to arrest her.

Angel Meadows slums. Courtesy of Manchester Libraries.

Finally in 1867, she was arrested after a stolen coat belonging to a milkman was found in her cellar. She denied all knowledge and accused 13 year old Michael Crane. Crane admitted to the theft and having left it without permission – whether he was truly responsible or taking the fall for Ann we will never know. To the authorities dismay she was let go but not before the Judge, Mr Fowler issued a damning statement “you are a regular trainer of young thieves – one of the worst women in Manchester – and I will take care to help the police in every possible way to get you transported as soon as possible”[2].

Grassing up the Boss

Although as said before most young thieves refused to dob in their leaders, some did – maybe hoping for a reduced sentence. One such case was reported in the Manchester Guardian on 28 May 1821, when a boy arrested on the charge of petty felony led the beadles to the lair of a 50 year old thief-trainer or fence who was with three other boys trying to melt down and disfigure a brass cock. The group was arrested and the man condemned to 14 years transportation[3].

Transportation to Australia. Courtesy of Hall of Names website.

Another famous story of a young thief turning against his master was the case of John Reeves and Charles King.

The Fall of Charles King

Charles King is for me a fascinating character because he managed to successfully work both sides of the law and reap awards – both as a thief-trainer and as a policeman remaining undetected for years.

During the heyday of his shady activities King was employed as a Metropolitan police detective and was considered a worthy man and who regularly received praise from his superiors for his “extraordinary vigilance”. In his other life he visited daily, the Prig’s Haunt in Tyndal’s Building, Gray’s Inn Lane where he would train ‘outcast’ boys to become efficient burglars. He demonstrated how to use various instruments and tools which would help them in their work and taught them how to pickpocket without being noticed. He would swing a coat on a line and get the boys to practice their skills both singly or in twos and threes. Possibly if the boys got out of hand King could punish them by arranging their arrest and conviction as he knew where and when they would be.[4].

Eventually King’s luck ran out when one of his most successful boys, 13 year old John Reeves turned against him. Reeves had been in and out of prison for years. He had started thieving from a young age. His first arrest had been for stealing bread from Newport market for which he was imprisoned for seven days; his other charges included stealing a bunch of cigars and pinching bacon from shops. According to Reeves he started on his career as a pickpocket after his 6th arrest (maybe it was around this time he first met King). Despite being caught numerous times he was considered a successful thief and must have brought King a tidy sum, for instance one week he managed to steal £100 worth of goods. It was even reported that he could afford “to keep a pony and to ride in the parks”[5].

It seems strange that all of a sudden Reeves agreed to testify against King since by his own admission King always watched over and protected him; trying to get him off charges and never giving evidence against him. Maybe Reeves was threatened or promised a lighter sentence (he was at the time serving a two year sentence for theft at Bridewell) or maybe he was just fed up with being controlled by King.

Image Courtesy of Victorianera.org

King was arrested and tried on the charge of ‘larceny from a person’ on the 9 April 1855[6]. The account of the proceedings can be read on the Old Bailey online records. The crime had taken place on the 31 December 1853, at the Serpentine where crowds of people had gathered to skate on the frozen lake. He was accused of having planned and orchestrated the theft. Reeves stated that he had known King for three years having first met him in Soho. Their association was confirmed by other witnesses seeing them together at other locations.

Reeves described what happened that day; how he met King at a public house in Pulteney Street, Soho, how they met up with other thieves many of whom he recognised at Hyde Park, how he was instructed to steal from a lady watching the skaters from a bridge, how King removed the money and placed the empty purse in the hollow of a tree and how the money was divided up. He also stated that King tried to obstruct another boy from being arrested by tripping a man up. Unluckily for King, Benjamin Sims, a Park Keeper had noticed King and his group acting shifty around the tree. After the party had moved on he found and handed the purse into the police. Other police on duty also recognised King including Police Sergeant Hubbersley who spoke to him and noticed some boys close by who seemed to be following King’s instructions[7].

At the time of the trial King was 32 and married with four children. He had left the police and was running a coffee shop possibly in Soho where he also lodged. He was arrested on the 3 January 1855, and was taken to Bow Street Station. Based on the evidence he was found guilty and sentenced to 14 years transportation to be served in Western Australia.

So the incredible criminal career of corrupt policeman-cum-thief trainer King came to a sudden end. When the full extent of his crimes was revealed it must have been a shock to many who had worked with him. Their feelings were summed up by a fellow policeman who said that he “had never heard a whisper against his character up to the time this charge was made against him”[8].

Concluding Thoughts

Society changed as more people began to campaign to eradicate poverty. The rise of orphanages and free schools together with the razing of slums and their replacement with housing associations such as the Peabody Trust ended much of the need for schools of thievery. Unfortunately, even though the image of a man wearing a long coat with a handkerchief in his pocket teaching urchins to remove it silently is no longer relevant, criminals taking advantage of neglected children and leading them into a life of crime will never disappear completely.

Victorian children. Image courtesy of Victorianera.org

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

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’, 2012 (digital version)

Old Bailey Online Records: Charles King, https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=def1-484-18550409&div=t18550409-484#highlight

Mayhew, Henry: The London Underworld in the Victorian Period: Authentic First-person accounts by beggars, thieves and prostitutes, Dover Publications, 2005

Gilfillan, Ross: Crime and Punishment in Victorian London: A Street-Level of the City’s Underworld, 2014

Kirby, Dean: Angel Meadow: Victorian Britain’s Most Savage Slum, Pen & Sword History, 2016

Day, Samuel Phillips: Juvenile Crime: Its Causes, Character, and Cure, (original published in 1858), Sagwan Press, 2018

The Cornhill Magazine, Volume 2; Volume 6, October 1862

Vaughan, Robert: The British Quarterly Review, Volume 35, January and April 1862

Duckworth, Jeannie: Fagin’s Children: Criminal Children in Victorian England, Bloomsbury Academic, 2003

Notes

[1] London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘a Human Awful Wonder of God’

[2] Angel Meadow

[3] Fagin’s Children

[4] Curiosities of Street Literature: Comprising ‘Cocks,’ Or ‘Catchpennies’

[5] London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘a Human Awful Wonder of God’

[6] Old Bailey Online Records – full account of the proceedings

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibi

Enon Chapel – Dancing on the dead in Victorian London

Tags

body bugs, burial, Burial Act, Burial reform, Cemeteries, churchyard, crypts, dancing on the dead, Enon Chapel, George Graveyard Walker, London, Mr Howse, open sewer, pyramid of bones, vaults, Victorian

Slums, sewers, corpses, a corrupt clergyman, a pyramid of bones, and …dancing on the dead. Sometimes the Victorian’s failed, quite spectacularly, to live up to their prim and proper reputation.

Bunhill Fields burial Ground, London.

London’s burial grounds: a mass of putrefaction

London in the mid nineteenth century had a problem: a burgeoning industrial and commercial centre with a population pushing at 2.5 million living souls, it also had an ever growing population of the dead. Inner city burial had been carried out in London for centuries -it has been observed that London, even today, is one huge grave, if you only know where to look. But by the mid nineteenth century fears of disease spread by the miasma from inner city graveyards and a fashion for wealthier people to be buried in suburban cemeteries, meant that London’s remaining inner city burial grounds were often terribly overcrowded and unsanitary. One such place, the ‘Green Ground’ on Portugal Street, a burial ground for the nearby workhouse, was described by George Walker as:

‘[A] mass of putrefaction’ and ‘The soil of this ground is saturated, absolutely saturated, with human putrescence,’ the author noting that ‘The living here breathe on all sides an atmosphere impregnated by the odour of the dead.’ [1]

It was not uncommon for gravediggers to chop into or even discard earlier burials in order to cram new ones into overcrowded graveyards:

‘What a horrid place is St Giles Churchyard! It is full of coffins up to the surface. Coffins are broken up before they are decayed, and bodies are removed to the “bonehouse” before they are sufficiently decayed to make removal decent’

So reported the Weekly Despatch in September 1838.

No wonder that women rarely attended burials. Yet these places were often the only resort open to the poor. One scandalous case that provided a catalyst for a change was the infamous Enon Chapel….

Dudley Street Slums, London, 1872. Image source Public domain [?]

Enon Chapel – undercutting the competition

Close to the Strand, on the west side of St Clement’s lane, an insalubrious neighbourhood was to be found. Accessed via a narrow court, Carey Street offered slum housing and overcrowding to the poorest of the poor. It was here in 1822, that an enterprising and cynical Baptist minister, Mr W Howse, founded his ministry: saving souls and selling burials. Enon Chapel itself, fitted into this down at heel locale, sited, as it was, above an open sewer which ran though its vault.

Image by Hogarth. Public domain [?]

As many scholars have noted, prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832, fear of the resurrection men was strong. Burke and Hare had yet to set up their fearsome murder trade north of the Border, but before them were others, stealing fresh corpses from graveyards for the anatomists table. This popular fear may have been one of the factors in Mr Howse’s calculations in setting up his burial business at Enon. It had a vault. At barely 59 feet by 12 feet it wasn’t a large vault, but Mr Howse was an enterprising individual and knew how to spin a profit from almost nothing. In 1823 Enon was licensed for burials.

Burials in the vault at Enon Chapel were a mere 15 shillings. This compared very favourably to the competitors – close by at St Clement Danes it cost £1.17s2d for an adult burial, and £1.10.2d to bury a child – and that only covered a churchyard burial.[2] At a time when poor families would often have to warehouse their dead in their homes until they had saved enough for burial, Enon Chapel had a clear advantage over the competition: offering both secure and, more importantly, affordable burials.

Things went well for Mr Howse for a number of years, if people marvelled at how capacious the tiny vault was, nobody asked any awkward questions. Even when worshippers retched into their hankerchieves or fell unconscious at the noxious stink that was rife in the chapel, especially in warm weather, they said nothing. It may have been harder to ignore the long black flies that emerged from the decaying coffins, or the ‘body bugs’ that would infest worshippers hair and clothes, and neighbours of the chapel noted that meat, if left out, would putrefy within an hour or two. By the 1830’s rumours were beginning to circulate, but still nobody suspected the true scale of the horror beneath their feet.

A Modern Golgotha uncovered

In 1839, following some concerns with goings on at Enon, the Commissioner of Sewers inspected the open sewer under the Chapel with the view that it should be covered or vaulted. However, their investigations took a grusome turn when they discovered human remains, some of them mutilated, discarded in the sewer – whether by design or accident, it was not clear. Oddly enough, despite the sheer horror of this discovery, the remains were not removed and burials did not stop. Mr Howse continued his profitable venture burying up to 500 people a year in the vault until his death in 1842. In total around12,000 people were buried in a vault measuring only 59 feet by 12.

In part, he appears to have managed to cram so many corpses into so limited a space because he discarded the coffins (he and his wife used them for firewood).  This would no doubt have increased the stench exponentially – Julian Litten, in his book The English Way of Death, notes that intramural vault burials usually required a triple encasing for the corpse, in both wood and soldered lead, so as to ensure that the coffin was water-tight and air-tight [3].  Discarding the outer shell of the coffin, Howse disposed of the occupants in deep pits filled with quicklime to help the bodies decompose.

It was also said that extensive building work, such as at Waterloo Bridge, allowed Howse to secretly remove upwards of sixty cart loads of decomposed human remains for use as landfill and bone-meal in the building trade; other remains were unceremoniously dumped in the Thames. It said that it was not uncommon to find a disembodied skull rolling down the streets around Enon Chapel.[4]

Dancing on the dead

Contemporary image of Enon Chapel’s notorious ‘Dancing on the Dead’. Image Source: Wellcome Images.

When Howse died in 1842, burials ceased and Enon Chapel was closed. The new tenant, Mr Fitzpatrick, took up residence in 1844. Despite making the surprising discovery of a large quantity of human bones buried under his kitchen floor, he was not put off, and simply reburied them in the chapel. Later tenants, a sect of Teetotallers, went one better. In the true spirit of Victorian enterprise, combined with a large and profitable dash of Victorian ghoulishness, they reopened Enon Chapel for dances using the great marketing tagline of  ‘Dancing on the dead’:

‘Enon Chapel – Dancing on the Dead – Admission Threepence. No lady or gentleman admitted unless wearing shoes and stockings’

Who says teetotallers don’t know how to have fun!

The Poor Man’s Guardian, somewhat disdainfully, reported on these events in 1847:

‘Quadrilles, waltzes, country-dances, gallopades, reels are danced over the masses of mortality in the cellar beneath”

The dances seem to have been very popular, proving that even the Victorian poor, many of whom may have known people interred beneath them, had a dark sense of humour. That, or a pragmatic view of their own mortality and the fleeting nature of pleasure.

George ‘Graveyard’ Walker

George ‘Graveyard’ Walker. Image source: Wellcome Institute.

Not everyone appreciated this grim humour.  George ‘Graveyard’ Walker, a surgeon whose practice was in the vicinity of Enon Chapel, and who had a side-line as a public health campaigner, was Not Amused. And with good reason, he had had the misfortune to have viewed Enon Chapel vault in all its gory glory, first hand. In his book, Gatherings from grave yards, a survey of 47 London burial grounds,  published in 1839, Walker described it thus:

‘This building is situated about midway on the western side of Clement’s Lane; it is surrounded on all sides by houses, crowded by inhabitants, principally of the poorer class. The upper part of this building was opened for the purposes of public worship about 1823; it is separated from the lower part by a boarded floor: this is used as a burying place, and is crowded at one end, even to the top of the ceiling, with dead. It is entered from the inside of the chapel by a trap door; the rafters supporting the floor are not even covered with the usual defence – lath and plaster. Vast numbers of bodies have been placed here in pits, dug for the purpose, the uppermost of which were covered only by a few inches of earth….Soon after interments were made, a peculiarly long narrow black fly was observed to crawl out of many of the coffins; this insect, a product of the putrefaction of the bodies, was observed on the following season to be succeeded by another, which had the appearance of a common bug with wings. The children attending the Sunday School, held in this chapel, in which these insects were to be seen crawling and flying, in vast numbers, during the summer months, called them “body bugs”..’ [5]

As well as a genuine disgust at the way material gain had trumped over moral and religious scruples at Enon Chapel, Walker, and many others at that time, considered the proximity of these putrefying burial grounds to human habitation to be injurious to public health.  It was believed that, similar to sewage, badly overcrowded burial grounds were giving off a deadly graveyard miasma. Walker, himself, had a flair for the dramatic, describing the miasma as ‘the pestiferous exhalations of the dead’.

This miasma was believed to cause diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Gravediggers and those living close by cemeteries were at particular risk, but the threat was to the population as a whole.

Victorian Image showing a slum court, with the living and the dead side by side.

The public scandal of Enon Chapel and its ilk, along with the tireless campaigning of philanthropists such as George Walker and reformer Edwin Chadwick, led to a Parliamentary Select Committee being set up in 1842. The committee was tasked to look at improving London’s overcrowded and unsanitary burial places. The law took it’s time, but pressure from Walker and The National Society for the Abolition of Burials in Towns eventually forced the government into action. The Burial Act of 1852 would seal the fate of London’s overcrowded inner city burial places, allowing the government to close them down. It also and allowed the creation of suburban garden cemeteries such as Highgate and Brookwood. Cemeteries that were designed as much to be enjoyed by visitors, as to bury the dead.

Roll up, Roll up – for the gravest show on earth!

There was to be one last macabre act in the tale of Enon Chapel. In 1848 Walker purchased the Chapel with the promise that he would give the inhabitants of the vault a decent burial, at his own expense, at Norwood Cemetery. This philanthropic gesture however, was somewhat marred by Walkers morbid sense of theatre. Rather than discretely disinterring the bodies and having them respectfully removed to their final resting place, he chose to open the event to the public. To drum up interest he had attendants strolling up and down the street holding skulls, a sure fire way to entice in the average Victorian death lover. And the public came in their droves – upwards of 6000 came to tour Enon Chapel and to view the immense pyramid of bones unearthed by Walker.

A Pyramid of Bones. Image source: John Sullivan public domain.

Despite criticism, Walker defended his approach in a typically Victorian way, he emphasised that the spectacle was educational (the same argument used by Madame Tussaud to elevate her Chamber of Horrors to a moral level) and he wasn’t precisely selling tickets – but he did accept contributions from visitors. Less educational and more sensational was the highlight of the Enon tour. Visitors came face to shrivelled face, with the long-dead proprietor Mr Howse. ‘A stark and stiff and shrivelled corpse’ identified by his ‘screw foot’ [6]

A case of poetic justice, the greedy speculator responsible for the desecration of so many of the deceased, found his own final resting place disturbed in the most unseemly way.

Footnote – it’s all in a name

It is interesting to note, as Catherine Arnold does in her fascinating book Necropolis, London and its dead, which I would highly recommend, that if you look beyond the traditional explanation for the name Enon (the place near Salim where John the Baptist baptized converts), a far darker etymology emerges. Arnold points to Hitchcock’s Bible Names Dictionary which provides one possible meaning for Enon as ‘Mass of darkness’ – how very, very apt.

Enon Chapel is long since gone, the London School of Economics sits on its site now and the bones of the dead lie in an unmarked communal grave at Norwood.

If you want to find out more about London’s hidden dead, see the excellent and funny You Tube video by Caitlin Doughty and Dr Lindsay Fitzharris at the end of the sources section)

Sources and notes

Images by Lenora unless otherwise credited.

Arnold, Catharine, Necropolis: London and its dead, 2007 [1] [2] [4]

Cochrane, Alex

http://www.unofficialbritain.com/enon-chapel-death-horror-and-dancing-in-victorian-london/

Fitzharris, Dr Lindsay

https://thechirurgeonsapprentice.com/2014/06/17/public-health-victorian-cemetery-reform/

Gibbon, Andrea,

https://writingcities.com/2015/04/08/the-deathly-surprise-on-portugal-street/ 

Jackson, Lee

http://blog.yalebooks.com/2014/10/31/dirty-old-london-graveyards/ [6]

Jackson, Lee

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/22/death-city-grisly-secrets-victorian-london-dead

Litten, Julian, ‘The English Way of Death, the Common Funeral since 1450’,1992 [3]

Valentine, Carla,

http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/enon-chapel-londons-victorian-golgotha

Walker, George Alfred, Gatherings from Grave Yards, Particularly Those of London: with a Concise History of the Modes of Interment Among Different Nations, from the Earliest Periods. And a Detail of Dangerous and Fatal Results Produced by the Unwise and Revolting Custom of Inhuming the Dead in the Midst of the Living,     1839 [5]

Find out where the secret burials of London are with Caitlin Doughty and Dr Lindsay Fitzharris:

 

intermission!

Just a quick post to let you all know that i am taking a short break from blogging right now but will be back online at the end of may.

Book Review: Serving Time by Nadine Ducca

I totally love Nadine Ducca’s debut novel and as I am a bit pushed for time this week, I thought I would be lazy and reblog the review I wrote for http://www.ingridhall.com while I am putting together my next blog post! Enjoy!