For hundreds of years many religious houses had offered sanctuary or immunity from arrest to fugitives from the law. This ecclesiastical privilege was largely swept away in Tudor times but ‘sanctuaries’ of another sort remained in London. These were the ‘rookeries’ which were effectively criminal enclaves whose inhabitants mostly lived by begging and by theft, robbery and other criminal practices. Only the most foolhardy of strangers ever penetrated these places and they were visited by the authorities on rare occasions and then at great risk to themselves. Individuals or gangs of criminals simply melted away down the nearest forbidding passage where any pursuer would find every hand turned against him. In the sixteenth century the most notorious of these places was Whitefriars later renamed ‘Alsatia’, close to the Temple on the south side of Fleet Street. Its inhabitants claimed that it was outside the jurisdiction of officialdom and in practice this was so. It continued to provide a safe haven for the members of the underworld until the nineteenth century. Later on, other rookeries such as St Giles and the Southwark area on the South Bank played the same role, providing a secure base for criminals and all sorts of underworld creatures.
Although historians argue about the extent to which the dissolution of the monasteries was a cause, it cannot be denied that there was a large increase in the number of beggars throughout the kingdom and on the streets of London in particular during the sixteenth century. An estimate in 1517 put the number of London’s mendicants at about 1,000 but by 1594 the number had risen to more than 12,000. The perception is that during the same period there was a substantial increase in crime and therefore it was easy and convenient to link vagrancy with crime and to discredit all those who could or would not work. In fact, many vagrants had been physically stigmatised and were left with few options other than crime, begging or starvation. Draconian measures against beggars failed to stem their increasing numbers in London, and in Houndsditch, Smithfield and the Barbican unsavoury shanty towns sprang up, as they do today in cities in the developing world.
The practice developed of placing the indigent into three categories: orphans; the sick, feeble and aged; and ‘sturdy vagabonds’. It was readily assumed that fit-looking men without obvious means of support were wilfully refusing to work and preferred to beg or indulge in crime. It was these ‘sturdy vagabonds’ who were seen as the real problem. The authorities in the City of London took over the old Bridewell Palace and converted it into a house of correction where it was hoped that a judicious mixture of whipping and forced labour would both punish them and instill the work ethic into all but the hardest cases. However, beggars and thieves continued their depredations unabated. Modes of operation were many and varied. There were, for example, beggars known as ‘Abraham men’ who pretended to be simple-minded while ‘dummerers’ feigned being deaf mutes. Constables did not deal gently with such people and there is a record of a constable tying up a dummerer, hoisting him high over a beam and then letting him hang there. The constable laconically remarked that this treatment effected a rapid cure, for the man was soon howling in agony and imploring to be taken down. ‘Demanders for glimmer’ and ‘freshwater mariners’ beseeched alms on the grounds that they had been ruined by fire and shipwreck respectively. There were innumerable other tricks.
In Elizabethan London one of the hazards with which those on the streets had to contend with was the activity of the ‘cony-catchers’. They walked the streets looking for a likely victim who would probably be a gullible stranger up from the country. A way would be found to engage him in a friendly chat and, pleased to have found someone to befriend him in the unknown city, the unwitting victim would be only too happy to step into a nearby tavern for a pot of ale. The tavern was likely to be a ‘flash house’ which combined the functions of a drinking place, a brothel and a place of resort for the local low-life where they planned their next villainy and shared out the spoils from earlier ones. Once the man was in there, he was unlikely to leave without having lost all his money and valuables. He might be cheated at cards or dice or be unable to resist the temptation when a whore was laid on for his delectation. In this case, it is likely that he would be robbed when in flagrante delicto. Then, finding himself penniless and once again alone, he would be left to ponder ruefully over the moral turpitude of London and its inhabitants.
Orphans were recruited into the underworld at a young age, often learning their skills in a bizarre parody of the modern concept that combines classroom education with work experience. There were ‘academies’ where they learned how to extract coins silently from the pockets of garments hung round with bells or to cut the strings attaching a purse to a belt without the victim sensing anything. Others learned the skills of attracting attention and sympathy as beggars. Even small children might be veterans of crime. One Thomas Miller received his first conviction in 1845 at the age of eight and by the time he was twelve he had been in prison five times and received two whippings. Many of the children responsible for a myriad of street offences were orphaned or abandoned and it is difficult to see what alternative they had to living by crime.
After Jonathan Wild’s downfall in 1725, his criminal empire broke up. He was the master thief-taker and London’s first underworld leader and his meticulous methods of organisation were copied by other underworld operators. In the 1750s one of these gangs is recorded as having members who specialised solely in ‘cheating, thieving or robbing’, meaning that they were card-sharpers, pickpockets or footpads. It also had administrative ‘offices’, its ‘treasury’ or fund of venture capital and its pool of peripheral gang members who were only too happy to act as false witnesses. Many of the gangs who operated in London from the mid-1700s to about 1800 were both formidable and fearsome. They brazenly ranged the streets in bands numbering twenty to thirty virtually immune from arrest, openly attacking passers-by and robbing them in broad daylight. Anyone foolhardy enough to try to fight back risked injury or death, while the constables and watchmen would usually turn a blind eye for fear of being set upon themselves. The authorities felt that the only way to combat rising crime was the already well-tried and unsuccessful one of increasing the number of capital offences and displaying the gory remains of highwaymen, footpads and others on gibbets in prominent public places in the hope that these would have a deterrent effect.
Among the most frightening street gangs were the ‘Mohocks’, whose activities are first recorded in 1712. They were young men from fashionable, well-off families who roamed the streets of London looking to create trouble. This sometimes took the form of robbery but was just as likely to start when they spied anyone who looked vulnerable or different. They might beat them with sticks, mutilate or stab them and on occasions they would place one of their victims in a barrel and roll them down a hill. One of their favourite tricks was to catch hold of an attractive young woman and force her to do a handstand in the street. In the days when women did not wear drawers, the humiliation that this involved can only be guessed at.
Pickpockets and shoplifters were regarded as among the more lowly members of criminal society, and the former were everywhere. A foreign visitor to London wrote: ‘Pickpockets are legion. With extraordinary dexterity they will steal handkerchiefs, snuff-boxes, watches – in short, anything they can find in your pockets. Their profession is practised in the streets, in churches, at the play, and especially in the crowds.’ This crime was committed by thieves of all ages but especially by young children who often used it as a stepping-stone to greater things in the world of crime. A small boy, Richard Oakey, was hanged for robbery in 1723. He was a cutpurse and would trip a woman up from behind and in the wink of an eye as she fell, he would have her purse. A variation of this trick was to seize a woman as a coach sped by on the pretext of saving her from being run down. The woman’s first instinct might be gratitude towards her saviour which would swiftly turn to outrage when she realised she had been most skillfully robbed.
Many parts of London were dangerous to pass through even in daylight hours. Moorfields was nicknamed ‘Sodomites Walk’ because of the depredations of the youths and young men who seized older men and extorted money from them by threatening to take them before a magistrate and have them charged with ‘unnatural’ acts. ‘Witnesses’ were on hand to attest to any complaint. In that part of Smithfield known as ‘Jack Ketch’s Warren’, an ingenious arrangement allowed refugees from the law to escape through an upstairs window of The Red Lion Inn on a sliding plank that would pass them over the Fleet Ditch to a house on the far side. Then the plank would be drawn in behind them. This area was notorious for its pickpocket and shoplifting ‘academies’. The streets and myriads of entries, alleys and courtyards provided an almost perfect location for robbery. At certain times of the day traffic was almost at a standstill. Tempers were easily frayed and in the mêlée that followed it was all too easy for gangs of pickpockets to jostle people in the crowd and to rifle through their pockets in the ensuing confusion.
Everyone feared the activities of the vicious footpads. The crowded streets and the dingy alleys, courts and teeming rookeries of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century London provided the ideal location for their activities. Knowing that if caught they would almost certainly be hanged, they were prepared to kill their victims secure in the knowledge that ‘dead men tell no tales’. The hazards encountered walking the streets of Georgian England did not just include highwaymen, footpads and the like, frightful though they may have been. They also involved running the gauntlet of constant importuning from prostitutes and supplications from legions of beggars, some of whom were extremely aggressive. To walk the streets of any town at this time was also to take a chance with refuse, excrement and other ordure heaved out of upstairs windows or tossed at random out of front doors.
Sometimes footpads, and they usually worked in gangs, specialised in quite sophisticated types of crime. In the 1720s a gang led by Obadiah Lemon developed ‘the rattling lay’, or robbery from coaches. They adapted a technique used by burglars which involved putting a fishing hook and line through a window and using it to snatch hats, wigs and scarves from travellers in carriages. The gang graduated to bushwhacking coaches and carriages when they ground to a halt in traffic. They would emerge suddenly from a dark alley and rush the vehicle, grabbing any trunks, boxes and other items they could and then immediately disappear down the same stygian passage into the rookeries, making pursuit virtually impossible. Growing bolder still, they would place an obstacle across the highway forcing a stagecoach to stop and when the coach driver alighted they would fire a couple of shots to terrify the passengers and then proceed to strip them of all their valuables. In the wink of an eye they were gone. These thieves were known as ‘dragsmen’ and from the 1830s found promising new hunting grounds around the big railway stations. Here large numbers of travellers gathered, often accompanied by copious amounts of luggage and with cabs and other conveyances moving here and there. Hackney cabmen had a dubious reputation and were often in league with the thieves.
New forms of technology are frequently exploited by enterprising criminals and it was so with railways, which resulted in new forms of highway robbery developing. Villains soon found it was possible to rob lone passengers in compartments in the early trains which ran without corridor connections or any form of alarm system. After four robbers had picked on a Swiss traveller on the London and North Western Railway and stripped him of his possessions, forcing him to risk life and limb by jumping out of the train while it was moving, an anxious correspondent wrote to one of the newspapers: ‘Can nothing be done to bring back the good old days of Dick Turpin who was a brave and noble fellow compared with the cowardly brutes that infest our railways?’ As early as 1853, David Stevenson, the Goods Manager of the same railway company wrote: ‘Thieves are pilfering the goods from our wagons here to an impudent extent. We are at our wits’ end to find out the blackguards. Not a night passes without wine hampers, silk parcels, drapers’ boxes or provisions being robbed . . .’ Villains invented many ingenious tricks. They might, for example, enter the guard’s van of a train going from, say, Paddington to Oxford and deposit a worthless item of luggage marked for an intermediate station like Reading. They would then surreptitiously stick labels also marked ‘Reading’ to cover labels for ‘Oxford’ on any worthwhile-looking items of luggage. When Reading was reached they simply re-entered the guard’s van and carried away those items they had identified earlier.
Even before the advent of the railways, the criminal fraternity had found new opportunities on the first horse-drawn omnibuses that started running in London in 1829. These were owned by George Shillibeer and ran from Paddington to the Bank. The service was not very successful and Shillibeer withdrew the vehicles, but omnibuses soon successfully entered service elsewhere in London, and by 1839 600 were operating, rising to 1,300 in 1850. They provided excellent opportunities for pickpockets, who were invariably women. The fares were expensive at first and therefore the clientele well-to-do, which meant that pickpockets had much to gain from their method of travel. However, great care had to be exercised by robbers because of the difficulty of escaping from the vehicle once a theft had been discovered. The pickpockets were usually most interested in stealing coins because it was far more difficult to disprove ownership of these than a watch or a silk handkerchief, for example. The early vehicles were notorious for their poor springs and the sudden jerks and lurches helped to cover the actions of the thieves as they pressed against their victims. The conductors were known as ‘cads’ and often colluded with the pickpockets.
One of London’s major highways has always been the River Thames. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the river was alive with ships and smaller craft which conveyed merchandise of every sort, as well as passengers who usually found it quicker and sometimes safer to use the river when going about their business in the capital. Assaults on affluent travellers on the Thames by what were basically pirates occurred from time to time, although the main object of the riparian robbers was the cargoes of the ships being loaded and unloaded in the Pool of London. This theft was on a massive scale and was systematic and highly sophisticated. It was only the creation of the Thames River Police and the building of enclosed docks such as the West India Dock in 1802 and the East India Dock in 1806 that brought this form of highway robbery under some degree of control.
As ever, the poor preyed on each other. Footpads waited outside public houses for drunken men to leave because they were an easy target. They might simply knock them down and seize watches, wallets and other valuables or they might work with a woman posing as a prostitute when they would operate the ‘buttock and twang’. This involved the woman luring the victim down a darkened alley with the offer of sexual services. As soon as he had dropped his breeches and could not defend himself easily, he would be attacked and robbed by the woman’s accomplice. Footpads needed to be quiet and quick and they frequently used weapons that would temporarily incapacitate but not kill their victims. These might be short, thick cudgels, or a tube of canvas containing sand or a small piece of spherical shot, probably weighing 2 lb and enclosed in a stocking. In the middle of the eighteenth century footpad activity in London was so prevalent that well-armed robbers picked on individuals in places as busy as the Strand and Covent Garden, simply knocking them down and rifling through their pockets, sometimes in broad daylight. Footpads were especially active late in the evening when well-to-do people came out of the theatres. No footpad ever became a popular hero nor was there any sympathy for him or her when they were caught unless they had some extraordinary skill that aroused a degree of admiration. One such was ‘Jumping Joe Lorrison’, renowned for his dare-devil leaps into moving wagons in order to rob them, and another was Tom Gerrard, executed in 1711, who taught his dog to extract valuables from the pockets of passers-by.
Pickpockets frequently worked in small gangs. One would accost or bump into the victim, a second might carry out the actual robbery while the third kept a lookout or provided a diversion or obstruction if his fellows were discovered and chased. The street thieves of the highest calibre, the highly skilled adult pickpockets known as the ‘swell mob’, moved around widely in search of the richest pickings. They favoured places such as theatres, race meetings, public hangings and fairs and operated in well-co-ordinated gangs, relieving people in the crowd of items such as handkerchiefs, snuffboxes, watches, pocket books and banknotes. While they were the cream of street thieves, many drank to excess or took opiates and found that the speed and dexterity which they needed to remain at the top of their profession was compromised as a result.
‘Gonophs’ were run-of-the-mill pickpockets and street thieves. They would usually be found operating in the bustling streets close to the rookeries from whence they came and they bore out the inescapable truism that the poor largely stole from each other. They were opportunists who had no qualms about snatching a halfpenny from the grubby fingers of an urchin who had been sent by his mother to make some minor purchase at a nearby market stall. This type of robbery was known as the ‘kinchin lay’. They also flocked to the environs of the railway stations, which were frequently in the less fashionable districts, while docks and markets also attracted them in substantial numbers. These all offered a location in which they could move about readily without exciting suspicion. The poorer districts contained most of the receivers’ premises and possessed a subculture in which, despite the fact that villains preyed on each other and their neighbours, everyone would act together to confuse or obstruct police officers or others pursuing fugitives.
Because the law tended to deal so harshly with pickpockets using violence, those who had been robbed were sometimes reluctant to hand them over to the authorities, especially if what had been stolen was immediately recovered. Sometimes a good hiding would be administered there and then and the matter closed. However, no footpad or pickpocket could be sure of this. In 1826 George Catherall also known as ‘Captain Slash’ appeared in court at Northampton accused of having robbed a shoemaker at Boughton Green Fair of eleven half-crowns, one crown, one waistcoat, a neckerchief, a corkscrew and a few halfpennies. He was dishevelled and his head and hands were bound up with bandages. He had been beaten up when seized and among the injuries were a fracture of the skull, two broken ribs and broken bones in his hands. He was hanged.
What seems to be a surprisingly common form of street robbery was the stealing of laundry. Working class washerwomen would service the requirements of the better-off folk who lived in the relatively salubrious suburbs of London such as Camberwell, Earls Court or Camden Town. To do so it was necessary to transport cleaned and soiled items to and fro and this brought these women to the attention of small gangs, some of whom would restrain the victim while others grabbed the laundry basket and made off with it. Good items fetched worthwhile prices in the second-hand clothes markets. Girls were often involved in thieving in the street and one crime that seems to have been their speciality was ‘skinning’. This involved luring a small but well-dressed child into some dark corner where it was stripped, naked if necessary, and the attacker would make off with its clothes. This offence was usually carried out in the winter because the child would have more clothes on. No thought was given to the wretched infant then having to make its way home through streets that might be cold and wet. Female clothing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not really aid its wearer’s quick movement but it seems that women always excited less suspicion than men did if they loitered about. For this reason women frequently posed as shoppers and stole goods from market stalls and shops, many of which displayed as much as they could at the front in the open and on the pavement.
In the early 1860s, a wave of panic swept London because of the sudden proliferation of an old but fairly rare method of robbery known as ‘garotting’. To be effective, the robbers had to work in a small gang and to employ speed and skill. The ‘choker’ seized the victim from behind and slipped a rope, cloth or simply a brawny arm around the victim’s neck. He would then exert sufficient pressure to cause the victim to double up or even faint. While the victim was held in a steely grip the choker’s partners would rifle his pockets. The garotting scare was a minor example of mass hysteria and it reached its peak in the summer of 1862. In July, an MP called Pilkington was robbed swiftly and silently while making his way through a well-lit and fashionable part of London from Parliament to his club. On the same night an eminent and venerable antiquarian was similarly attacked nearby. Those who read the more sensational magazines of the time were already being treated to hair-raising tales of thuggee and other exotic forms of highway robbery in India. This added an element of spurious romance and mystery to these robberies and soon various people seeking the limelight were regaling the newspapers with entirely fictional accounts of how they had been assaulted by these stranglers of the night. Anti-garotting vigilante groups soon sprang up, and the mood of panic was whipped up by the newspapers. The Times declared the crime to be ‘un-British’ and expressed some surprise and not a little chagrin when those arrested for one of the early outbreaks turned out to be as British as The Times itself. The paper had been most gratified during an earlier scare in 1856 when some foreigners had been arrested for garotting. With xenophobia at fever pitch, The Times had urged that the ‘Italian ruffians’ who swaggered around with stilettoes in Whitechapel and Stepney should be instantly deported.
Neither did Punch magazine provide a measured response to the outbreak of garotting. Although it seemed to deplore these outrages, it made them into the theme for a sustained campaign of comical articles, songs and cartoons. This extract is from Punch, 6 December 1862.
Come let us be merry and drink while we may,
More Punch, Tom, and see that it’s hotter,
And hope going home we shan’t meet on the way
Sweet Sentiment’s Pet, the Garotter . . .
A gentleman’s walking perchance with a crutch
He’ll suddenly stagger and totter;
Don’t think that the gentleman’s taken too much
He’s unluckily met a garotter . . .
There are but three ways to get out of his beat
Turn coachman, or tiler, or yachter,
For no one who walks on her Majesty’s street
Is safe from the scoundrel Garotter.
Such publications undoubtedly played a role in orchestrating a sense of fear and in advocating the creation of bands of anti-garotte vigilantes. The Weekly Dispatch made continual references to this theme and in December 1862 it declared: ‘The manner in which antigarotters armed to the teeth proceed along the streets at night, clinking their sword canes and ready to draw at a moment’s notice, is calculated to strike terror into the breasts of others as well as those of the great enemy.’
The hysteria prevalent at this time had its effects in the courts and it is probably no coincidence that in 1863 more people were hanged for street robbery than at any time in the previous two decades. In the same year what was commonly known as the Garotting Act went through Parliament, which brought in flogging for convicted offenders, a punishment that was carried out with great rigour. To make it worse, the flogging was inflicted in instalments and even the most hardened of garotters quailed at the knees on being sentenced to receive this punishment. However, it had the desired effect and the garotting craze died out soon afterwards.
In Victorian England the most common experience of crime was probably to be the victim of a pickpocket. They infested public transport, the streets, meetings and gatherings of all sorts and places of entertainment. Street pickpockets were particularly keen on taking silk handkerchiefs from men’s coats because these fetched good prices in the second-hand clothing stalls around Petticoat Lane on the edge of the City of London. The extraction of these was usually the preserve of small boys who were inconspicuous, nimble and dexterous and who were serving an ‘apprenticeship’ in this trade before perhaps graduating to higher things in the world of robbery.
On the streets of Victorian towns and cities, especially London, begging and thieving were both highly organised operations. Beggars might do a spot of thieving when the opportunity arose, but professional thieves were unlikely to stoop to begging unless with age they had lost their skills and nerve. ‘Gegors’, professional beggars, showed extraordinary skill and ingenuity in faking the most appalling wounds, sores and suppurating ulcers. Exhibiting these brought them sympathy and, more importantly, money. It was not unknown, for example, for beggars to use vitriol to make sores look more inflamed or to sear the skin and stigmatise themselves with the use of substances like gunpowder. In doing so, they frequently produced real and serious injuries.
False ‘blind beggars’ had to employ amazing self-control in giving no hint that they were shamming. There is a record of an Irish beggar who worked the country and town fairs and on one occasion latched on to a particularly soft-hearted victim. He poured his heart out to the unsuspecting man, excluding no detail of the ill-treatment he had suffered during his life as a result of his blindness. His new-found friend took all this in and agreed to assist the beggar by taking him to the main highway out of town. Just as they were about to part, the beggar asked the Samaritan if there was anyone else in sight. When he was assured that the road was empty, he suddenly seized his companion, beat him up cruelly, seized all his valuables and made off. He was quickly caught but adamantly stuck to his story that he was blind even when prison staff forcibly tried to prove he was a sham. In court he continued to provide no hint that he was sighted and he was sentenced to be birched. This decision filled him with a thirst for revenge and he was determined to make the magistrate concerned pay for the injustice, and a few weeks later he ambushed him and beat him up with appalling ferocity. Again he was arrested and this time the court was in no doubt that the man had the full use of his eyes.
London has always attracted criminals. Its crowded streets and labyrinthine alleys offered opportunity, anonymity and easy escape. Methods of operation changed but robbers tended to be specialists and frequently developed great skills in the pursuit of their criminal activities. However, the robber on foot in spite of often being daring, ingenious and adroit, never achieved the legendary status that gathered around his mounted counterpart, the highwayman.