Georgian London: Into the Streets (42 page)

Another, and more famous, highwayman associated with Hackney is Dick Turpin. His ties with Hackney’s Gregory Gang came as they were moving from deer poaching to housebreaking. As with highway robbery, housebreaking was a relatively unusual phenomenon outside central urban areas, but the rise of personal wealth and the appetite for new luxury goods meant that burglary had become highly profitable by the 1730s. The Gregory Gang operated all over London, staying away from Hackney, but eventually they were caught after one of their own members turned them in.

John Wheeler could have been as young as fifteen when he became involved with the gang. He came from a notorious Hackney family: his father, also John Wheeler, was a scourge of the area who came up before Norris numerous times during the 1730s. The first time was in 1731, when his wife, Thomasin, made a complaint to Norris against him for
‘
beating & abusing her being Sick & for denying to assist in the maintenance of her & her Children & threatning her Saying were no more pity to kill her than to kill a dog’. Norris granted a warrant for his arrest. Two years later, after being in and out of prison, Wheeler again threatened to murder his wife, and was again arrested. In 1735, Norris committed him to Newgate for ‘beating her very barbarously’. He was to be released ‘at his wife
’s desire’.

Norris recorded many instances of domestic violence. They are not all instances of husbands beating their wives and girlfriends. William and Mary Kingsland were a constant nuisance in the area, in the late 1730s. He beat her, she beat him, and they both assaulted other people on different occasions. Fights between women were common, and violent family rows make regular appearances in Norris’s notebook. His approach seems matter-of-fact, and though his entries are bald, they convey blame and painful details eloquently, such as ‘pulled by ye hair’, ‘punching him in the face with a Cartwhip’ and ‘beating her with a broomstick’. Just as now, it is impossible to impose any sort of measurement on the incidence of domestic violence in Georgian London, but Norris’s notes indicate that some justices took it seriously. From the scanty details surrounding the circumstances of those reporting the crimes, it appears they came predominantly from the lower social classes. However, Mary Wollstonecraft, who was born to a middle-class family in neighbouring Hoxton, took to lying outside her mother’s room as a teenager to prevent her father entering in a drunken and violent rage. This, like so many incidences of domestic violence, was hidden from the authorities.

The 1730s and 1740s, when Henry Norris was active, saw a spike in London crime – a result of the demobilization of parts of the army and widespread unemployment. Highwaymen were often out-of-work or demobbed soldiers. Housebreaking was on the rise, and householders were taking desperate measures to protect their property. In October 1736,
The Gentleman’s Magazine
reported that Mr Jones, a florist near the Hackney turnpike, having been ‘several Times Robb’d of Valuable Flowers-Roots, had provided a Gun with Several Wires to the Trigger that when touch’d would go off, which unawares doing himself, it shatter’d his Shoulder to Pieces’.

Hackney made early efforts to maintain public order: its night watch was instigated in 1617; and by 1630, there was a cage, a whipping post and a ducking stool installed in St Augustine’s churchyard. By the end of the seventeenth century, there was a watch house nearby and another at the end of the road to Cambridge Heath. In
1708, a fire station was also erected by the churchyard. In 1728, another watch house was opened in part of the Shoulder of Mutton at the end of Hackney Broadway, which is now the Cat and Mutton. Sixteen constables patrolled the streets at night. By 1740, the beats were well defined and the constables patrolled in pairs. Those watching the main roads to London were mounted. The watch was a serious business: each constable was equipped with a gun and bayonet, and keen to use them.

Hackney’s watchmen were initially paid through parish funds. But later, private subscriptions supplied most of the money. In 1738, the Turnpike Trust was set up to maintain the road to London; soon afterwards, it became clear that it would be necessary to light the road at night to deter criminals. By 1756, the roads towards London were lit by oil lamps. Hackney continued an impressive and committed night watch for the rest of the century. As the streets became built up, more foot patrols and more comprehensive street lighting were introduced.

The parish was rightly proud of its efforts. Yet criminal corruption was flourishing only a stone’s throw away, in Bethnal Green. Joseph Merceron was born to parents of Huguenot extraction in Brick Lane, around 1764. He began his career as a clerk in a lottery office but was soon appointed a churchwarden of St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green. He then became, in rapid succession, a vestryman, a tax commissioner and a Justice of the Peace. Soon, he dominated the area through the taxation system, receiving backhanders for favourable assessments. He was a larger-than-life rough character, who encouraged dog fighting and bull-baiting. Merceron’s success illustrated the power of the parish over local affairs, and the dominance that one man, if determined enough, could achieve. The Vicar of St Matthew’s was his arch-enemy, but he disappeared in 1818, whilst Merceron was imprisoned for appropriating £1,000 of public funds. Another enemy of Merceron’s was John Wilmot, whose father had been a labourer who raised enough money to start building houses in Bethnal Green. Merceron died, in 1839, with a fortune of £300,000, ‘
though he always appeared
to be in poor circumstances’.

In Merceron’s most successful period of corruption and extortion,
Hackney and Bethnal Green were celebrating their success at maintaining public order. Hackney even petitioned against the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, providing evidence of over a century of efforts to control their own crime. They also said they had driven all the criminals into lawless Tottenham.

From the early 1700s, the ‘Lunatic Trade’ flourished in east London. Just north of the turnpike was Hackney Mad House, more correctly known as Brooke House. Private madhouses were a feature of the Hackney and Bethnal Green area. It was quiet, peaceful and close to the City.

Until the 1845 Lunatics Act, there was little public provision for those suffering with mental health issues. Bedlam and St Luke’s in central London had limited capacity. Nor were all patients eligible for admission. Small private madhouses had been in existence all over London for centuries. Usually, they had one or two patients; the household was maintained by a minimal staff and supervised by a doctor, who was unlikely to be resident. These establishments usually escaped the notice of the authorities for the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. Many were well respected and maintained a high standard of sympathetic care for their patients. Brooke House was a grand Tudor building, converted to use as an asylum, in 1758, by a Hackney resident, William Clarke. It sat upon a fifty-acre estate, which was let out as farmland. Clarke was a friend of the Monro family of Bedlam asylum doctors, and John Monro recommended patients to be sent to Brooke House after 1762. These patients were mainly middle and upper class, and the standard of care they received was good.

The better establishments, including Brooke House, used treatments such as bleeding, purging and cold baths, as well as early forms of occupational therapy. But they were reserved for gentlemen and women who could pay. One of the main problems with these smaller, private madhouses was the confinement of those who were perhaps
difficult and troublesome, but not mentally ill. It was easier to incarcerate a wife for madness and appropriate her property than it was to obtain a divorce, after all. Awareness of mental health rose in the latter part of the eighteenth century: the periodic madness of King George III brought the matter into the public consciousness, where before it had been something to be hidden away. In 1774, an Act of Parliament was passed ensuring the regular inspection of London’s private madhouses by commissioners from the Royal College of Physicians.

More problematic were the pauper lunatics, the responsibility for whose care fell upon the parish. Larger asylums were established in east London to care for these patients. The Bethnal Green Asylum, established in the early 1700s, was one of the largest, taking patients from all over London and the south-east.

Conditions in London’s pauper madhouses, and particularly in Bethnal Green and Hoxton, were exposed by John Rogers in his 1815 pamphlet ‘A Statement of the Cruelties, Abuses and Frauds which are practiced in Madhouses’. He told of patients chained on filthy straw, and force-feeding techniques using iron spouts which had resulted in smashed teeth. Some patients became gangrenous after being restrained and subsequently neglected. There was a public outcry, and a Select Committee was hastily set up to inquire into the matter.

Thomas Warburton had been the proprietor of the Bethnal Green Asylum since 1800, and was called before the Committee. He explained the difficulties of caring for violent patients, the need for restraints and assertive handling. The subsequent report of 1816 was damning. Yet it did not stop Warburton continuing in business in Bethnal Green – both at the main asylum, now housing many hundreds of patients, and at smaller establishments, including Whitmore House in Hoxton. Then, in 1827, a Select Committee was again established to investigate conditions at the Bethnal Green Asylum. The investigating officers found conditions beyond their worst fears: ‘
disgusting objects
of humanity’ lay chained to the walls and floor, covered in their own excrement. The smell was so offensive that one of the officers had to excuse himself to vomit outside.

Thomas Warburton was discredited, yet the asylum was not closed down. Where, after all, could the hundreds of inmates go? Warburton’s son John took over the business, as the 1828 Act for the Regulation of Madhouses came into effect. One of the Act’s key stipulations was that in the large asylums, such as Bethnal Green, there must be resident medical officers. John Warburton appointed Charles Beverly. Beverly was not the obvious choice for the post. A forty-year-old Scottish naval surgeon who had spent most of his career in Arctic exploration, he had married, and wanted to settle down in London. Beverly was, however, competent and unflappable.

Warburton and Beverly set about transforming the asylum. The buildings, known as the Red House and the White House, were old and in poor repair. They were tidied up, and better provision was made to separate men and women. More staff were employed to supervise the inmates; at the time of the 1827 inquiry, there had been as few as one member of staff to every fifty patients.

The lack of pastimes or occupation had been a worry for the Committee, and soon Beverly installed an extensive library of 500 books, to which he added constantly until it numbered over 2,000. Fresh air and exercise began to play a part in the lives of the inmates, who had before been confined. It took fifteen years to transform the Bethnal Green Asylum, and massive investment on Warburton’s part. He had been made a wealthy man through his father’s ‘mad-farming’, and he had married the eldest daughter of John Abernethy, the prominent surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. The 1827 inquiry had almost destroyed his credibility, along with his father’s, and the improvements to Bethnal Green were also part of a professional transformation. By the mid-Victorian period, Bethnal Green Asylum was held up as a model of mental healthcare.

The cheapness of life in the emerging East End can be seen in the story of Carlo Ferrari, who became known by the press as ‘The Italian Boy’ after he was murdered for the value of his corpse.
Carlo earned his living
exhibiting white mice as a little sideshow on the streets of London. He lived mainly on the streets, moving around so as to exploit new audiences. In the winter of 1831, Carlo was murdered to order for dissection, because it was presumed, as a friendless immigrant, his disappearance would go unnoticed.

On 5 November

… 
two men, named Bishop and May
, called at the dissecting-room at King’s College, and asked Hill, the porter, if he ‘wanted anything’. On being interrogated as to what they had to dispose of, May replied, ‘A boy of fourteen.’ For this body they asked 12 guineas, but ultimately agreed to bring it in for 9 guineas … The appearance of the subject excited Hill’s suspicion of foul play, and he at once communicated with Mr. Partridge, the Demonstrator of Anatomy … To delay the men, so that the police might be communicated with, Mr. Partridge produced a £50 note, and said that he could not pay until he had changed it. Soon after, the police officers appeared upon the scene, and the men were given into custody.

The gang were found guilty and sentenced to death. Their evidence revealed

… 
that they had enticed the boy to their dwelling in Nova Scotia Gardens, a small slum now underneath Columbia Road Flower Market; there they drugged him with opium, and then let his body into a well, where they kept it until he was suffocated.

They had hawked the body around most of the London hospitals before trying King’s College in desperation. Throughout the trial, they swore that the boy they had murdered was an unknown from Lincolnshire, not Carlo Ferrari.

Quite why they insisted on a different identity for Carlo is a mystery. It seemed that he was a known figure on the streets, and perhaps they feared public backlash against their crime. They had removed his teeth to sell ‘to Mr. Mills, a dentist, for twelve shillings
’ and they hadn’t treated his body well in transit, all of which was reported in the papers and pamphlets to a huge public outcry. One paper reported a record circulation of 50,000 on the day of the confessions, which
was massive by the standards of the time. Carlo’s sad story highlights the vulnerability of London’s street children, and the cheapness of life in the poorer areas of the city.