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A Poor Man's System of Justice: the London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Jennifer Davis
Jennifer Davis
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Extract

Of the three major innovations in law enforcement in nineteenth-century England, the penitentiaries, the new police and the stipendiary magistracy, the stipendiary magistracy came first. Three years before Patrick Colquhoun published his influential Treatise on the police of the metropolis, urging the foundation of a centralized preventative police force, the Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 established a system of paid magistrates for metropolitan London. The stipendiary magistracy sitting in police offices was further reformed in the 1820s and 1830s, the same decades which saw the organization of the metropolitan police. By 1838 the police courts had taken their final shape, remaining largely unaltered into the twentieth century. Side by side with the new police, stipendiary magistrates were the primary instruments of public order in Victorian London.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 1984 , pp. 309 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 Milton, Frank, The English magistracy (London, 1967), pp. 2–32Google Scholar; Sidney, and Webb, Beatrice, The parish and the county (Hampden, Conn., 1963), pp. 558–78Google Scholar; see also Babington, Anthony, A house on Bow Street: crime and the magistracy, London, 1740–1881 (London, 1969)Google Scholar.

2 The courts were Bow Street, Clerkenwell, Greenwich and Woolwich, Hammersmith and Wandsworth, Lambeth, Marlborough Street, Marylebone, Southwark, Thames, Westminster and Worship Street.

3 Quoted in Milton, The English magistracy, p. 32.

4 Sir Thomas Henry was educated at Trinity College Dublin, before being called to the bar at the Inner Temple; his successor Sir James Ingham was a scion of the English gentry and a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. Various others included a ‘principal’ contributor to the Westminster Review (Peregrine Bingham), a translator of Goethe and Schiller (T. J. Arnold), and a son of an Indian high court judge (Henry Bushby). (Details from the Dictionary of National Biography.)

5 The standard volume that lists the magistrate's powers runs to over 1,000 pages. Burn, R., Justices of the peace and parish officers (London, 1869 and periodically revised)Google Scholar.

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8 Marylebone Mercury, 5 Oct. 1867.

9 West London Observer, 30 May 1863.

10 See for instance Philips, David, ‘“A new engine of power and authority”: the institutionalisation of law-enforcement in England, 1780–1830’, in Gatrell, V. A. C. et al. (eds.), Crime and the law: the social history of crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

11 See for instance Ignatieff, Michael, A just measure of pain: the penitentiary in the industrial revolution, 1750–1850 (London, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also. Bruce Lenman and Geoffrey Parker, ‘The state, the community and the criminal law in early modern Europe’, in Gatrell, et al. (eds.), Crime and the law. Above all, this view has been advanced by Foucault, Michel, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (New York, 1975)Google Scholar.

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18 Select committee on metropolitan police offices (Parl. papers 1838, xv), Report, p. 28.

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35 These figures are calculated from a sample of witnesses' depositions in all larcenies tried under the CJA in Middlesex: MJ/SR, 1856–1875 (GLC Record Office). The sample consisted of convictions registered in January, May, July, October and November of the years 1856, 1862, 1869 and 1875 at the Bow Street, Clerkenwell, Hammersmith, Marylebone, Westminster and Worship Street police courts. In fact the proportion of working-class prosecutors is probably higher, but all cases involving employers against employees have been excluded, even though some of the prosecutors here would be working class.

36 V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘The decline of theft and violence in Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Gatrell et al. (eds.), Crime and the law, p. 240.

37 Report of the Kensington medical officer, West London Observer, 7 June 1856.

38 Marylebone Mercury, 10 Nov. 1862. The notorious Simpson family, who kept a beershop and a lodging house in Jennings' Buildings which was also a repository for stolen goods, often used the Hammersmith police court to further their feud with the equally notorious Welsh family, also of the buildings.

39 Williams, Later leaves, p. 519. For a detailed picture of changes in working-class attitudes to family violence see Tomes, Nancy, ‘A torrent of abuse: crimes of violence between working class men and women in London, 1840–1875’, Journal of Social History, xi, 3 (1978), 328–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 West London Observer, 6 June 1868. The police probably refused to make an arrest because they had neither witnessed the assault nor seen marks of violence on Mrs Wilson.

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47 Williams, Later leaves, p. 308.

48 Bethnal Green Times, 17 Oct. 1862.

49 Williams, Later leaves, p. 319; see also, Tomes, ‘A torrent of abuse’, p. 333.

50 West London Observer, 3 Aug. 1867; see also East London Observer, 14 Jan. 1871.

51 Islington Gazette, 1 Dec. 1884.

52 West London Observer, 23 April 1856.

53 Cairns, The loom of the law, p. 226.

54 Waddy, The police court, p. 86; for a typical case, see West London Observer, 21 Nov. 1868.

55 Gamon, The London police court, p. 4.

56 Central Criminal Court Sessions Papers, XLIV (1855–1856), 468Google Scholar.

57 Islington Gazette, 16 Dec. 1884; see also Tower Hamlets Express, 20 Aug. 1870.

58 Report of the S.C. on the Pawnbrokers' Bill (Parl. papers 1871, XII), q. 566Google Scholar.

59 Ibid. q. 47.

60 S.C. on the pawnbroking trades, q. 2260.

61 Testimony of Sir Thomas Henry, ibid. q. 3629.

62 Ibid. q. 3632.

63 Ibid. qq. 3573, 3574. Magistrates also frequently adjudicated in cases of pawnbrokers who ‘mistakenly give up property to A that belongs to B’ (Testimony of T. J. Arnold, S.C. on the Pawnbrokers' Bill, q. 564). In these cases, Arnold usually found the pawnbrokers ‘ perfectly willing to listen to reason’.

64 Bethnal Green Times, 25 July 1862.

65 S.C. on the Pawnbrokers' Bill, q. 528.

66 Ibid. q. 460.

67 Sixty years later, a painting of the Thames magistrate, Mr Selfe, distributing relief in January 1861, was hung in the magistrates' room of the court (Waddy, The police court, p. 164).

68 East London Observer, 28 Dec. 1861.

69 Waddy, The police court, p. 164.

70 West London Observer, 17 Jan. 1863.

71 East London Observer, 13 Feb. 1875.

72 Islington Gazette, 16 Dec. 1884.

73 West London Observer, 14 May 1879.

74 West London Observer, 13 Feb. 1858.

75 Marylebone Mercury, 19 Jan. 1867.

76 See for instance East London Observer, 17 Jan. 1875; and the Marylebone Mercury, 22 July 1865.

77 West London Observer, 17 Jan. 1857.

78 East London Observer, 17 Oct. 1857.

79 Marylebone Mercury, 8 June 1861.

80 Miller, Wilbur, Cops and bobbies: police authority in New York and London, 1830–1870 (Chicago, 1973), pp. 86Google Scholar.

81 HO 45 9513/18010 (P.R.O.); and the Eastern Post, 12 Dec. 1874.

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84 Miller, Cops and bobbies, p. 106.

85 East London Observer, 17 Jan. 1885.

86 West London Observer, 14 Dec. 1872.

87 Marylebone Mercury, 5 Aug. 1876.

88 Philips, David, Crime and authority in Victorian England: the Black Country, 1835–1860 (London, 1977), p. 128Google Scholar; see also Gatrell, ‘The decline of theft and violence’, p. 240.

89 In a typical case, the prosecutor and defendant were room-mates in Old Nichol Street. The defendant took a chair and a bolster from the room. The prosecutor testified, ‘I asked him to bring them back and I would not lock him up. He said he should not do so and I was to lock him up and I gave him into custody.’ (MSJ/CD, July 1875, GLC Record Office.)

90 Marylebone Mercury, 20 Jan. 1864.

91 Morning Herald, 10 june 1862. In this instance, it was the magistrate's belief that parents (most often mothers who remarried) frequently used the reformatories as repositories for children from previous marriages for whom they were no longer either willing or able to care. (West London Observer, 7 May 1870.)

92 West London Observer, 6 April 1867.

93 Waddy, The police court, p. 2 and p. 56.

94 Mayhew, Henry, London labour and the London poor, 1 (London, 1861), 497Google Scholar.

95 HO 45 9496/6739. By 1888, physical conditions at some police courts were so poor that a parliamentary committee was formed to investigate them. By 1905 little had changed and the unhealthy atmosphere in the police court cells led to an exposé in the Lancet, 11 Feb. 1905; see MEPO564 (PRO).

96 Jennifer Davis, ‘The London garotting panic of 1862: a moral panic and the creation of a criminal class in mid-Victorian England’, in Gatrell et al. (eds.), Crime and the law, pp. 190–214.

96 Gamon, The London police court, p. 48.

98 The Webbs dismissed the stipendiary magistrates in a sentence: ‘We accordingly leave the stipendiaries in 1835, now grown to thirty, all barristers, “ as a set of quiet, gentlemen-like persons” perhaps the “failures” of their profession: concentrating their attention on trying the ordinary cases of a London police court; entirely divorced from County business, and letting slip even their magisterial control of the poor law, for which they had neither desire nor aptitude.’ (The parish and the county, p. 580.)