Crime in England 1880-1945

The rough and the criminal, the policed and the incarcerated

Barry Godfrey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134609444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

This book is an ambitious attempt to map the main changes in the criminal justice system in the Victorian period through to the twentieth century. Chapters include an examination of the growth and experience of imprisonment, policing, and probation services; the recording of crime in official statistics and in public memory; and the possibilities of research created by new electronic and on-line sources; an exploration of time, space and place, on crime, and the growth internationalisation and science-led approach of crime control methods in this period.

Unusually, the book presents these issues in a way which illustrates the sources of data that informs modern crime history and discusses how criminologists and historians produce theories of crime history. Consequently, there are a series of interesting and lively debates of a thematic nature which will engage historians, criminologists, and research methods specialists, as well as the undergraduates and school students that, like the author, are fascinated by crime history.

1 The Convict’s Story

DOI: 10.4324/9781315886299-1

Just before midnight a group of men skulking in the shadows of Sheffield’s Cambridge Street pounced on a hapless victim. One man kept him in an armlock whilst three others robbed him, thereafter pushing him to the ground and kicking him repeatedly. This incident of ‘garrotting’ reported in 1871 fitted the public imagination of how the city streets contained danger and threat to respectable passers-by. Whilst the courts sentenced three men for this assault, one of the accused, Patrick Madden, was released because he could not be identified by the victim. Madden was a well-known fixture of Cambridge Street. Later he was identified and singled out as a ringleader of a group of ‘Irish Toughs’, pursued and cornered by the police during a ‘Cambridge-Street riot’ at Christmas in 1871. It was not surprising that they had recognised him because the teenager was well known to the courts, having had three convictions for violence and for theft by his seventeenth birthday. The police probably had an added incentive to apprehend Madden because two years earlier he had kicked a police officer so hard that the man was disabled for life. When they took him away, four officers escorted him in the back of the police van – for their own protection, or to mete out some informal punishment of their own perhaps. For his part in the riot he received a year’s prison sentence, but this would be a relatively short visit to prison for a man who would ultimately serve nearly a quarter of his life in prison. What sort of man was Patrick Madden?

Patrick’s story

Born in Ireland, he had immigrated to Sheffield as a youth accompanied by his brother, no doubt looking for work and for a better future. Today he would be considered a man of average height and of slim build, but at 5 feet 8 inches and at more than 10 stone he would have been considered a tall and muscular figure when he plied for work as a plasterer in the 1880s. Men and women were physically much slighter in those days and certainly shorter in stature. That is why Madden was described as a ‘brute of a man’ by the newspapers, and his brutishness was confirmed not only by his height but also by his physical appearance, which betrayed a rough background. Notes on his prison record written in 1879 gave his notable physical characteristics:

Left eye injured as result of accident with a stick which left him partially blinded, scar on crown of head, scar on top of head, scar on right eyebrow and left cheek, scar on right jaw and on nose. Scar on left wrist, scar on left forearm and on little finger and buttocks, scar on hip. Scar top arm and elbow, cut across top of thumb, scar on ribs, scar on side of thigh, and below knee, cuts to back.

(Prison Licence of Convict F. 704 Patrick Madden, National Archives PCOM 3)

Unlike many other convicts, he lacked significant (one might even call them communicative) tattoos. One blue mark between thumb and forefinger denoted that the convict had already served time in a juvenile reformatory; blue dots on the knuckles seem to have referred to the number of previous bouts of penal servitude in convict prison; and a ‘D’ meant either dishonourable discharge from military service or some kind of military discipline (a flogging perhaps). These last marks were made by the authorities, of course, rather than by the convict. But many convicts had homemade tattoos to remind them of past loves, family, places they had been (or served on military duty), and so on. For the prison authorities, these all provided a means of identifying those who tried to hide within aliases, as is discussed later in the book. Clearly Madden liked to drink, for his offending was often connected with drunkenness, and he seems to have made friends (and accomplices) easily in his neighbourhood. Perhaps friendship was mixed with fear and admiration for his fighting prowess, because his allies must have witnessed many of the fights he initiated that then ended up in court, and many other altercations that were never reported or prosecuted. He must have been an unpredictable and unreliable fellow to hang around with, given his unprovoked assaults on people he hardly knew. One Sheffield cabman felt Madden’s fists in July 1874 when he disputed the fare he was being charged – in that the cabbie expected some payment at all. With no love lost between Madden and the police, he attempted to strangle the arresting officer when he was being escorted to the police station to be charged. Three years later a publican should have thought better of refusing to serve Madden when the pub was closed. The brutal assault – many repeated blows to the man’s head – was interrupted by the publican’s wife who put herself between the two men. This was a mistake. Madden never respected the concept of chivalry, and indeed seemed to have developed an unhealthy hostility towards women by this date. Still spitting blood as she gave evidence in court, the woman described how Madden had struck her in the face and strangled her till she was unconscious. The bitter taste in her mouth and the distaste of the authorities for Madden’s repeated offending meant that he was heading for a lengthy spell in prison. It came in the summer of 1879 when he found himself before the judges at the Quarter Sessions at Wakefield. Convicted of assault, theft, and robbery with violence, he was sentenced to ten years’ Penal Servitude, followed by a further five years’ supervision by the police upon his release from incarceration. Thus began his cavalcade through a number of notorious convict prisons – Wakefield, Pentonville, Wormwood Scrubs, Portland, and Millbank – before being released on conditional licence in 1887.

Madden the convict

Prison conditions were harsh, but Madden was tough, and he seems to have coped fairly well with the prison regime and the informal community of prisoners that could make things difficult for prisoners who could not fit in and hold their own. He received punishment for talking to other prisoners during exercise periods or during religious services in the prison chapel, and occasionally he was punished for thieving from fellow inmates or for fighting with other prisoners. He was not – not by a long chalk – a troublesome prisoner. Many were much worse, and many other prisoners racked up a large number of prison offences over the course of their sentences whilst Madden only committed a handful of regulatory breaches. One breach, however, reveals an interesting side to his character. The short entry in the prison records for 13 March 1885 reveals that Madden had a prohibited article hidden in a leaf of his Bible when on parade:

My dear C_ G_ This is to fulfil my promise. My name is P. Madden. I am a plasterer by trade 30 years of age. I was transported for taking a parcel of books from a man under the impression that they were my own. If you can wait for me I will endeavour to make you quite happy for the rest of your life – If you leave Portland write to me. I would not answer your letter but when my time is up I would come to you to the furthest end of the world. Dear C_ G_ do not shew this to anyone I be very severely punished. If you do not write to me I shall know you have forgotten me. If you knew what a true heart I have you would wait for me, Adieu X.

The letter is stamped ‘Convict Department Bermuda’ on the back and was written on a colonial issue Bible.¹ Following one’s heart in prison could be a very dangerous route, and affairs and liaisons between two male inmates resulted in convicts serving longer periods inside prison walls. Madden risked much in revealing his desires in this way, but he had no wish to remain in prison any longer than he needed to. Indeed, he petitioned the Secretary of State to reduce his sentence from ten years to seven years on the grounds that ‘he was intoxicated when the offence was committed, which was not intentional’. Petitioning was a routine right that prisoners held dear. Just as routinely, the petition was dismissed. It would have been extraordinary for Madden to successfully petition for release or reduction of sentence. Petitioners with far better claims for leniency never had any joy from the authorities. However, like the vast majority of convicts, he was released well before his sentence expired. The final two years and three months of his sentence would be served ‘on licence’ or, more colloquially, on a ‘Ticket of Leave’. So long as he reported regularly to the local police station and committed no further offences, Patrick would retain his liberty. Perhaps not surprisingly given his history he did not manage to see his licence period out. He lasted six months. ‘Assault by Ticket of Leave Man’ screamed the local newspaper when, again, Madden vented his fury on an innocent woman. Smarting after being turned out of his lodgings when his landlady found out he was an ex-prisoner, he might have drowned his sorrows on his own had he not bumped into her in the streets. Refusal to join him for a drink resulted in a punch to the face and a trip to the local magistrates’ court, but his licence was not withdrawn. His next assault was also unprovoked, but was more serious. In March 1890 ‘A Savage Irishman at Mexbro’ rounded on a man in the street. He knew not his victim, nor did he care that he kicked out two of the man’s teeth when he was on the ground. All he cared about was that the man did not call the police, and if he did, he would find him and kill him. The threat was ineffective, and so was the short prison sentence. Once more out on the streets, Madden carried out a ‘Serious Assault at Swinton’. Looking for drink after a musical evening in the town, and looking for a man who owed him money, he found trouble in the Corner Inn. Failing to find the man he searched for, he found the man’s wife instead. She was kicked until she lost her senses, but Madden’s offer to pay six pennies for the damage he had caused was frowned on by the magistrates who judged the case. Even so, and although this seems odd to our sensibilities today, the fairly routine imposition of a fine for this act of violence was thought a sufficient punishment; a similar crime took place in the same town a few months later – he assaulted a man and threatened to kill his wife if she interfered, and, again, received a fine. Residents of South Yorkshire must have been sick of Madden, and only when he stole a horse did they find relief (for fifteen months) when he was sent back to prison.

Apparently the animosity between him and the police lasted for decades, and in 1895 he threatened police with a poker, kicked and punched officers when arrested, and served another two months. A year later, he was arrested for loitering in a darkened alley and warned the arresting officer, ‘If I ever see you drunk and asleep on a doorstop, I shall murder you, you _____’. Never one to issue an idle threat, a poker was found in his pocket, ready for use. However, that was Madden’s last offence, and his last prison sentence.

Notching up just fifty years of life, over which time he had committed more than thirty offences, had numerous fights, had threatened many people, and had suffered loneliness and misery in some of Her Majesty’s toughest prisons, he died in Sheffield and was buried in the city shortly afterwards. We do not know whether his brother attended the funeral. This letter Patrick sent to his brother William from prison on 4 April 1887: ‘I very much regret not being able to see you when I am discharged. I thank you very sincerely for what you have done . . . I shall be discharged on 27 May 1887 if I am a good boy. Adieu dear brother. ’ The letter, now kept in Madden’s licence file in the National Archives (PCOM 3) was returned unopened. We also do not know whether any of his friends attended the short funeral service; newspapers seldom reported the final doings of men like Patrick, but it seems to have been a sad and lonely end to a tumultuous and sometimes vicious half-century of one man’s life.

Patrick, and all the Patricks

Patrick Madden, and indeed all the others like him who caused mayhem across England and Wales, left written footprints. Every interaction with each of the institutions of the criminal justice system – the police, the courts, the prisons – left a paper trail which allows us to trace Patrick’s movements over time and space. That is how we know so much of Patrick’s chaotic and violent escapades throughout most of his life, from his eye colour and weight to his sexual preferences. In fact, as we will see later in this book, modern research methods and available digital resources now allow researchers to trace a huge number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century offenders. The detail on each person is so good, that, if we ever had time to combine every individual’s story, we might have an almost complete understanding of the causes of crime in this period and of how each criminal justice institution affected the offender’s life. However, at present, we have a number of interesting individual case studies, fascinating ones actually, and the statistics of crime which can tell us how the bigger picture changed over time. The next two chapters suggest some ways of understanding and using oral histories, memories, and statistics to show how these very different kinds of historical sources can be combined to provide not only a bigger picture but also a sharper, better, and clearer picture of what drove people into offending and of how society and the media reacted to the problem of crime, as well as to examine how and why as modern researchers we remember and study the history of crime today.

Serious versus everyday offending

Who, however, should draw our gaze? Is it the serious offenders – the relatively few burglars and murderers who caused such misery for their victims and who suffered the most severe sanctions of the criminal justice system – on whom we should focus? Certainly they drew the attention of the media, particularly when women were involved as either victims or as perpetrators of the deadly deed themselves.

In Liverpool’s labouring district of Garston, Ellen Neill was beaten to death in her own house in Vulcan Street. The day before the murder, her husband had demanded that she bring more money into the house, and if she did not, then he would ‘swing for her’. Neighbours, hearing desperate screams from the house next door, broke down the door to find that Ellen was on the floor, her head being repeatedly smashed against the kitchen flagstones. Her husband, James, then stripped his wife of her clothes, dragged her to the fire, and raked red-hot coals over her body whilst screaming that he would roast her naked body. The Liverpool Mercury reported that she had only briefly and intermittently regained consciousness, and soon succumbed to her injuries, after which her husband was charged with wilful murder at Liverpool Assize Court. Mrs Nicholson suffered a similar fate to Ellen’s a few weeks later in Aston, Birmingham. Her husband struck her with a small axe around the head until she died of her wounds then propped her up in her favourite rocking chair (Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 24 September 1888). Arrested, charged, and convicted, he was hanged in Warwick in January 1889. The eighteen-year-old youth who stabbed, cut about, and almost decapitated a smaller child in Wales in September 1888 escaped the gallows. Thomas Lott was found to be of unsound mind and therefore unfit to stand trial by the jury at Swansea Assizes. Insanity, brutality, and horrific murder connect the crimes, all of these committed in the same month. For contemporary commentators another set of horrific crimes taking place in London could be used to link together these disparate events – the spectre of Jack the Ripper stalked newspaper columns as much as he did Whitechapel:

the callousness of the culprit, the determination of his conduct, and his subsequent indifference rivals the terrible incidents of Whitechapel life which have recently been brought before the public. It is true that the victim was not disembowelled, but a punctured wound in the stomach shows that some attempt to perpetrate this peculiarity of the London tragedies.

(Western Mail, 23 October 1888)

The Whitechapel murders were also linked closely, in the newspapers anyway, to other murders in various parts of England: ‘The affair caused quite a panic in the district, the resemblance to the Whitechapel tragedies encouraging the idea that the maniac who has been at work in London has travelled to the north of England to pursue his fiendish vocation’ (Daily News, 24 September 1888). Jack himself may not have ventured to the north, but the doctor who examined his London victims and Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officer Inspector Roots did, just to satisfy themselves that the Ripper’s geographical ambition had not increased – it hadn’t (Daily News, 26 September 1888). Neither had he ventured to the Midlands, though people were keen to invoke his name. The murderous husband of Ellen Nicholson in Aston had boasted to a friend that he would ‘make a Whitechapel job of her’ (The York Herald, 29 September 1888). Loose words such as these probably helped him on his way to the gallows, for the mere mention of Whitechapel could influence the judgement of juries as well as of the public and journalists.

The editor of the Pall Mall seemed to have a better grip on how these things worked:

The murder and mutilation of a woman near Gateshead yesterday morning will revive, in the provinces, the horror which was beginning to die out in London . . . and already the people in the neighbourhood have begun, it seems, to be haunted by the idea that the murderous maniac of Whitechapel may have found his way to the north of England. The idea is natural but improbable. What is far more likely is that the murder is not a repetition but a reflex of the Whitechapel ones. It is one of the inevitable results of publicity to spread an epidemic.

(‘The Political Moral of the Murders’, The Pall Mall Gazette , 24 September 1888)

The series of murders of prostitutes by person or persons unknown reached a ridiculously high profile in both the United Kingdom and abroad. Knowledge dripped into the public consciousness through tidbits of information released each day in the newspapers, and whilst Jack remained at large, readers could be engaged, scared, entertained, and curious about his identity and where he would strike next. The story seemed to seep into the public consciousness, into dreams, and into everyday concerns, as with an interview with someone who was once a small boy from Shropshire: ‘I remember that when Jack the Ripper was in London, he was doing all the murders . . . Father used to sometimes do night work, and this particular time Mother was afraid so she got a lot of furniture and pushed it against the doors so that he wouldn’t be able to get in’.² It is unlikely that, even if Jack had carried on offending after the three-month spree in 1888 that saw at least five women murdered, he would have left the dark streets of Whitechapel to have a murderous ‘holiday’ in Shropshire – even so, the woman was clearly scared. The sensationalism of the Ripper murders was part and parcel of the growing power and entertainment focus of the press towards the end of the century, as well as being related to contemporary anxieties about immigration, poverty and homelessness, prostitution, and the general sociopolitical climate in East London.

Murders and murderers were notorious b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 The convict’s story
• 2 What shall we do?
• 3 Statistics and the ‘capturing’ of crime on paper
• 4 From policeman state to regulatory control
• 5 Talking about crime
• 6 An ethical conversation?
• 7 New digital media
• 8 Impact
• 9 Time, place, and space
• 10 New technologies of police power
• 11 Paperwork, networks, information, connections, and theories
• 12 A just measure of punishment: A fair measure of reformation
• 13 The submerged criminal justice ‘state’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index