White-Collar Crime in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain

John Benson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429844799
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book throws new light on white-collar crime, criminals and criminality in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. It does so by considering the life of one man, Jesse Varley (1869–1929), who embezzled more than £80, 000 from Wolverhampton Corporation, and for a decade and more enjoyed an ostentatiously extravagant lifestyle. He was discovered, and despite serving a period of penal servitude, he turned again to white-collar crime (this time in Sheffield). Sentenced again to penal servitude, he died a few years later in Liverpool in what were said to be 'very poor circumstances'.

Part I

Motives

1 Predisposition

Personality and predictability

It is easy – and tempting – to think that some people are predisposed towards crime, violence and other forms of anti-social behaviour. And although such versions of the doctrine of original sin are less popular than they once were, they retain a powerful place in popular attitudes towards crime, policing and punishment. Some people, it is believed, are irredeemably evil. Sentencing Neville Hord to a minimum of thirty years in prison for the murder of his former partner’s daughter in 2017, Judge Jonathan Durham Hall told him that he was ‘truly and horribly rotten to the core’.¹ Child murderers, in particular, are commonly thought to be wicked beyond belief. Ian Huntley, the killer of two schoolgirls in Soham in 2002, ‘has never shown any real remorse’, a source told the Sun newspaper fifteen years or so into his forty-year sentence. ‘He is a very evil, manipulative killer and always be’.² The bereaved, not surprisingly, often share such views. ‘You can’t rewire evil’, protested James Bulger’s father when he learned in 2017 that one of his son’s killers was back in prison twenty-five years after the murder that had shocked the nation. ‘Let him out again’, he insisted, ‘and he will strike again’.³

Child murder and white-collar crime, one might think, sit at the opposite ends of the criminal spectrum. But there is a tendency to attribute financial wrongdoing too to the vagaries of individual personality, to the predilections of a minority of ‘rotten apples in the barrel’.⁴ It is an approach that enjoys a certain amount of academic underpinning. In a review of the literature on the psychology of fraud published in 2001, Grace Duffield and Peter Grabosky suggested, in what seems like a statement of the obvious, that ‘the risk of fraud is a product of both personality and environmental or situational variables’, which ‘means that individuals will vary in their propensity to commit fraud even when they are subject to similar environmental pressures’.⁵ Others put it more bluntly. Robert L. Kardell’s conclusion is unequivocal: ‘Some people just don’t have the morals or conscience to refrain from fraud. Apparently, these individuals have character flaws that compel them to commit crime when they don’t need to’.⁶

This then raises the possibility of predicting who will – and who will not – turn to fraud. Most scholars, understandably, fight shy of such generalisation, let alone any attempt at prediction. Recognising that personality and predisposition are less static, less one-dimensional than some commentators suggest, they adopt a broader, more nuanced perspective. ‘To fully understand what motivates some people to engage in acts of fraud’, argues Matthew Hollow,

it is necessary to adopt a more expansive approach that takes into account the personality and character traits of the individual involved, the pressure and strains affecting them in their personal and working lives, and the mental frameworks within which they attribute meanings to different causes and actions.⁷

Insofar as those seeking to understand the causes of fraud persist with the idea that some people possess an innate predisposition to criminality in general, and white-collar crime in particular, they couch their explanations in terms of specific, identifiable personality characteristics. As Hollow points out, this has resulted in a sustained effort to discover whether it is possible to distinguish – and perhaps isolate – those with criminal tendencies from those who would never think of breaking the law. ‘Amongst the tentative deductions that have been made in this respect has been the suggestion that those who commit fraud at work tend to be more reckless, more prone to risk-taking, and more egocentric than most other workers’.⁸

If this is true, it would be easy, one might think, to predict – and prevent – fraudulent activity in all its many guises. Some seem to think it might be possible. Tom Bower has forged a successful career out of his warts-and-all biographies about – some would say hatchet jobs on – a series of late twentieth and early twenty-first century tycoons such as Richard Branson, Robert Maxwell and Tiny Rowland.⁹ All three of them, according to Bower,

plotted ruses to speedily enrich themselves. Branson by evading taxes on the sale of records for over a year – “Taxes are a waste of money,” he would say; Maxwell by continuous deception and fraud; Rowland by black marketeering, tax evasion and a massive fraud against a Swiss bank.¹⁰

For Bower, recklessness, risk-taking and egotism just about sums it up.

As with all tycoons, it was vanity and insufferable self-confidence that fuelled Robert Maxwell’s rise from shoeless son of an East European horse dealer to international figure feted by statesmen and feared by ordinary mortals, known to the powerful as ‘the small people’. And from this self-confidence everything else flows, such as the tycoon’s brazen ability to play outside the rules.¹¹

Historians are not necessarily any more objective than celebrity biographers. But they tend to shy away from fundamentalist explanations. Labour historians are a case in point: reluctant to blame those they are studying for their criminality – fraudulent or otherwise – they stress the financial constraints within which working people lived their lives and made their choices. Their argument is that many, if not most, of those who turned to crime did so, not because of some inherent predisposition to criminality, but, in order to cope with the persistent, nagging poverty of low wages, unemployment and underemployment.¹² Every type of local economy sustained, it is suggested, its own form of petty crime. On the coast, for instance, there survived a deep-seated tradition of plundering any wreckage washed up by the sea; in the countryside, children pilfered fruit on their way to and from school; in coal mining districts, it is said, the picking of coal ‘from pit heads and slag heaps was so deeply ingrained … that it formed part of the daily domestic routine for many children, who were expected to salvage coal both before and after school’.¹³ So it is that working-class crime has been reinterpreted as social crime, as a strategy of poverty – and working people cleared of any inherent predisposition to criminality.¹⁴

Those studying the history of white-collar crime have their own version of social crime: they present fraud not as a strategy of poverty but as a strategy of respectability. When studying the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century middle class, outward appearances, they stress, can be extremely misleading. Respectability, they point out, could be precarious and easily undermined.¹⁵ Even if those who turned out to be fraudsters seemed to be secure and comfortable, they might well be feeling insecure and uncomfortable as they struggled to sustain the standard of living, the respectability that they, their family, friends and neighbours expected of them. There is some sympathy for – and understanding of – the poorly paid clerk or bookkeeper who ‘puts his fingers in the till to pay his gambling debts’.¹⁶ Drawing, explicitly or implicitly, upon the concept of relative poverty, students of white-collar crime stress that the terms ‘financial prosperity’ and ‘financial pressure’ are both highly subjective. ‘Even those of above-average affluence may feel economically deprived in comparison to what they perceive to be their relevant standard. At times, “keeping up with the Jones’s” may require other than lawful conduct’.¹⁷ So it is that we sometimes clear middle-class fraudsters, like working-class criminals, from the taint of supposed inherent disposition to criminality.

Convict capitalists and bank clerks

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century commentators were less understanding. They felt, many of them, that certain individuals – indeed certain groups and certain races – were weak, morally compromised and inclined towards criminality. Foreigners were always suspect. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher’s classic description of mid-Victorian Britain’s ‘official’ view of the world still resonated at the end of the century.

Upon the ladder of progress, nations and races seemed to stand higher or lower according to the proven capacity of each for freedom and enterprise: the British at the top, followed a few rungs below by the Americans, and other ‘striving, go-ahead’ Anglo-Saxons. The Latin peoples were thought to come next, though far behind.¹⁸

When members of these groups left their home countries and came to Britain, they were met with a mixture of disdain and distrust. The prevailing view was that although immigrants were alien and unknowable, it was obvious that their communities were hotbeds of immorality, violence and crime.¹⁹ Legislation was needed to restrict immigration, observed the Birmingham Daily Post in 1904, because ‘the law as it stands today, has proven powerless to prevent the influx of the alien scum of Europe’.²⁰ The Jews and the Irish came in for particular opprobrium.²¹ As William W. Walker has pointed out in his study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Dundee, the only way for Irish immigrants to make themselves acceptable was to make themselves invisible.²²

It was not just foreigners who were stigmatised in this way. Whether or not they were newcomers to the country, substantial sections of the working class were stereotyped in almost equally derogatory fashion. Prostitution, even some reformers believed, was the consequence of individual moral weakness.²³ Slum-dwellers were another target. ‘I have seen the Polynesian savaging and in his primitive condition, before the missionary or the blackbirder or the beachcomber got at him’, reported Professor Julian Huxley in 1888. ‘With all his savaging, he was not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East London slum’.²⁴ Whether or not they were slum-dwellers, young people too came in for a good deal of criticism. It was easy in an urbanising society, some maintained, for working-class youths to give in to their baser instincts. The ‘restraining eye of the village community i...