Professional beggars are almost without exception thieves; but as they are generally recruited from the lowest portion of the population, they never attain any of the higher ranks, but confine themselves to petty acts of filching, or to cunning methods of circumventing the honest. The half-naked wretch that appears to be addressing the basement floor in piteous terms, has a fine eye for the spoons he may see cleaning below; and the shipwrecked sailor just cast ashore from St. Giles’s would be an awkward person to meet with in a dark suburban lane. Professional beggars are migratory in their habits. They travel from town to town, not in the filthy rags we are accustomed to see them in, but in good clothing; the rags are carried by their women, and are only donned when they are nearing the place in which they intend to beg.
There is an audacious class of thieves, termed “dragsmen,” who plunder vehicles. At the West End they chiefly operate upon cabs going to or coming from the railway stations. As this kind of thieving is carried on under the very eyes of the foot-passengers, it is rarely attempted except in the dusk of the evening. The dragsman manages to hang on behind, as though he were merely taking a surreptitious ride, but in reality to cut leather thongs and undo fastenings, and be able at any convenient moment to slip off a box or parcel unobserved. The carelessness of the public is the best confederate of this sort of thief. In the case of Lady Ellesmere’s jewels, the box was put not inside, but outside, the cab in which the valet rode, and not in the middle of other boxes, but the hindermost of all—just the place in which the dragsman would have planted it. It is now known that the robbery was effected between Berkeley Square and Grosvenor Square, as a man was seen with the package standing at the corner of Mount Street, Davies Street, bargaining with a cabman to take him to the City. The man and his booty were driven to a public-house, but the box must have been shifted immediately, for in two hours from the time it was lost it was found rifled of its contents in a waste piece of ground in Shoreditch. It might perhaps for a moment be suspected that this was a “put up” robbery, but we are precluded from adopting this view of the case, as it is, we believe, suspected that the man sold the jewels, which were worth perhaps 25,000l., for a very trifling sum. He must have been entirely ignorant of their value, and having by a chance stroke obtained a magnificent booty, threw it away for an old song. Not many weeks after this extraordinary robbery, a plate-chest of her Majesty was stolen from a van between Buckingham Palace and the Great Western Railway. There were persons walking alongside the vehicle, and it seems marvellous how it could be possible to remove unseen a heavy chest under such conditions; but every facility was given in this case, as in the former, for the plunderers to do their work unmolested. In the first place the box was put in such a position that its bottom came flush with the ledge of the van. Next, the journey from Buckingham Palace to Paddington was, in the driver’s idea, too far to go without baiting on the way; therefore bait he did at a little public-house, and every person in charge of the property went inside to drink. According to their own account, they did not stop more than a minute; this minute was enough: like Laertes, the thief might have said, “’Twill serve.” In this instance also the box was found empty in a field at Shoreditch, and it is believed that a ticket-of-leave man had a hand in both robberies.
The habits of thieves have been somewhat modified since the institution of the new police, and the adoption of the principle of prevention instead of detection, in dealing with the criminal population. In the time of the old Bow-street Runners the different classes of thieves had their houses of call, in which they regularly assembled. The arrangement was winked at by the magistrates, and approved by the officers, as useful to them in looking after offenders that were wanted. John Townsend, when speaking of the supposed advantage of these flash houses, said, “I know five-and-twenty, or six-and-twenty years ago, there were four houses where we could pop in, and I have taken three or four, or five or six of them at a time, and three or four of them have been convicted, and yet the public-house was tolerably well conducted too.” Perhaps officers who lived upon the capture of thieves had good reason for maintaining these flash houses, in which most robberies were concocted; the case is far different now that the police are paid by day rather than by piece-work, by weekly salary rather than by blood-money, and all known flash houses have long been discontinued. Some fifteen years since a few remained in the Borough, but Superintendent Haynes broke them up, and rooted them out. Thieves cannot meet now in respectable houses, for if they did, the constables would become aware of the fact, and the landlord would speedily lose his license. The passing of the Common Lodging-house Act has also assisted in dispersing the desperate gangs, one of which, known under the name of “The Forty Thieves,” infested the town a few years since. It may be asked, what sort of mutual fellowship exists among these outcasts who live below the surface of “society”? Of the seven or eight thousand thieves in the metropolis, very few are acquainted with each other; they are, in fact, divided into as many sections as are to be found among honest men. Beyond their own peculiar set they do not associate with their kind. The swell-mobsman is as distinct a being from the cracksman as a Bond-street dandy from a South-Sea islander; they do not even talk the same slang, and could no more practise each other’s art, than a shoemaker could make a table. These natural divisions of the underground world of rogues immensely facilitate the operations of the police. The manner in which they do their work is also in some cases a pretty good guide to the detectives. Skill and individuality is evinced in unlawful as well as in lawful pursuits—in the manner in which a door is forced, as much as in the style a picture is painted; and a clever officer, after carefully examining a door or a window, will sometimes say, “This looks like ‘Whiteheaded Bob’s work,’” or “‘Billy-go-Fast,’ must have had a hand in this job.”
The leading swell-mobsmen are the only class of thieves who “touch,” if we may term it, the ordinary society of better men. The practitioner in this line must dress and be as much like a gentleman as possible, in order to pursue his avocation without suspicion. Accordingly, he lives with a woman, who passes for his wife, in genteel lodgings, and generally in the drawing-room floor. As his earnings are often very large, he has everything about him of the most expensive kind; his style of living is luxurious, and he drinks nothing less than hock and champagne. He sometimes keeps a banking account, and one man named Brown, lately apprehended, had a balance at his banker’s of 800l.! As the members of this fraternity work wholly in the daytime, going out in the morning and returning in the evening, the landlady believes that they are engaged in mercantile pursuits, and have business in the City; and, as it is part of their game to pay their way liberally, she esteems them to be model lodgers!
The domestic habits of thieves are all pretty much alike; fluctuating between the prison and the hulks, they exhibit the usual characteristics of men engaged in dangerous enterprises. They mainly pass their time, when not at “work,” in gambling, smoking, and drinking, and in listening to the adventures of their companions. It must be remembered, however, that the professed thief, even if he drinks, is never drunk; he is employed in desperate undertakings which require him to have his wits about him quite as much, if not more than the honest man. When a pickpocket is flush of money, he spends it in the most lavish manner,—takes a tour with his female companion to the Isle of Wight, or to any other place he has a wish to see, and puts up at the best hotels. In some of these trips he thinks nothing of spending 30l. in a fortnight, and when the money is gone he comes back again “to work.” Thieves are generally faithful to each other; indeed the community of danger in which they live develops this virtue to an unusual extent. If a “pal” is apprehended, they cheerfully put down their guinea apiece to provide him with counsel for his trial; and if he should be imprisoned, they make a collection for him when he comes out. A curious circumstance is the rapidity with which news of any of the body having been arrested travels among his companions. We are assured that no sooner is a young thief captured and taken to the station-house, although he may have been plundering far away from his home, than some associate brings him his dinner or tea, as a matter of course.
The best class of swell-mobsmen sometimes act upon the joint-stock principle “with limited liabilities.” When a good thing is in prospect—a gold-dust robbery or a bank robbery—it is not unusual for several of them to “post” as much as 50l. apiece in order to provide the sinews of war to carry on the plan in a business-like manner. If in the end the job succeeds, the money advanced is carefully paid back to the persons advancing it—several of whom have lived for years on plunder thus obtained, without the police being able to detect them. Often the receivers make these adventures in crime, and plot the robbery of a jeweller’s shop with as much coolness and shrewdness as though it were an ordinary mercantile speculation, and the produce is disposed of in the same business-like manner. Watches are what is termed “re-christened,” that is, the maker’s names and numbers are taken out and fresh ones put in; they are then exported in large quantities to America. All articles of plate are immediately thrown into the crucible and melted down, so as to place them beyond the hope of identification. In many cases, when the receiver cannot thoroughly depend upon the thief, it is, we believe, customary to employ intermediate receivers so as to render it impossible to trace the property to its ultimate destination. It must not be supposed that the passion for gain is always the sole incentive to robbery. “Oh, how I do love thieving! If I had thousands, I’d still be thief;” such were the words uttered by a youth in Coldbath-fields Prison, and overheard by the governor.[49]
If the machinery for preventing and detecting crime has so vastly improved within this present century, the same may be said for the method of dispensing justice. Up to as late as 1792, the magistrates of Bow-street—the first “police-office,” as it was then termed—were paid in that most obnoxious of all modes, by fees, which were often obtained in a manner so disgraceful that the magistrates got the name of “trading justices” and “basket justices.” Our old friend John Townsend, whom we must summon once more to our aid, gives an insight into their proceedings, and he knew them well. He said, “The plan used to be to issue warrants, and to take up all the poor devils in the streets, and then there was the bailing them, 2s. 4d., which the magistrate had. In taking up a hundred girls, that would make, at 2s. 4d., 11l. 13s. 4d. They sent none to jail, for the bailing them was so much better!” The old Bow-street worthy then draws a picture of the magistrate settling the amount of these ill-gotten fees with his clerk on the Monday morning. The “basket justices” were so called, because they allowed themselves to be bought over by presents of baskets of game. These enormities were so glaring, that, according to Townsend, “they at last led to the Police Bill, and it was a great blessing to the public to do away with these men, for they were nothing better than the encouragers of blacklegs, vice, and plunderers. There is no doubt about it.” In 1792 seven other “offices” were established, namely, Queen-square, Great Marlborough-street, Hatton Garden, Worship-street, Lambeth, Shadwell, and Union-street, each office having three magistrates, who did the duties alternately. These, by the addition of the suburban courts, have since been augmented to eleven. They form the judgment-seats to which all offenders in this great capital of 2,500,000 inhabitants are brought, either to be punished summarily, or to be remanded to the sessions to take their trial.
The police-courts may be likened to so many shafts sunk in the smooth surface of society, through which the seething mass of debauchery, violence, and crime, are daily bubbling up before the public eye. A spectator cannot sit beside the magistrate on the bench for a couple of hours without feeling that there are currents of wickedness flowing among the population as fixedly as the trade-winds in the tropics. A panorama of sin passes before his eye which he shudders to think is only like a single thread drawn from the fabric of vice which underlies the whole system of elegant, punctilious, and accomplished metropolitan life. On every case that comes before him the magistrate unassisted has to decide rapidly and justly, unless he desires to call down upon his head the thunders of an ever-watchful press. In addition to his judicial duties, he has to answer numberless questions, and to give advice upon law points to distressed persons: and all this amid a pestilential atmosphere which is calculated to depress both body and mind. Nevertheless, the work is done admirably, and justice, as speedy as that dispensed by cadis in Eastern tales, and much more impartial, is dealt to the throng brought before him.
From an analysis of the Criminal Returns of the Metropolitan Police, it is apparent that crimes have their peculiar seasons. Thus attempts to commit suicide generally occur in the months of June, July, and August, and rarely in November, according to the commonly accepted notion; comfort, it is evident, is considered even in the accomplishment of this desperate act. Common assaults and drunkenness also multiply wonderfully in the dog-days. In the winter, on the contrary, burglaries increase, and, for some unknown reason, the uttering of counterfeit coin.
The character of the cases brought before the police-courts varies, in some degree, according to the neighbourhood and other causes. Bow-street still maintains the pre-eminence over the other courts which it exercised in the old days, when the horse-patrol and the detective police, known as the Bow-street runners, were in existence; and this it does in consequence of its special jurisdiction over persons who are amenable to foreign law. The cases of this class—arson, murder, or bankruptcy—are heard in private, generally by the chief magistrate, and the depositions are forwarded direct to the Foreign Office. Ticket-of-leave men who have committed fresh offences, are here deprived of their tickets and apprehended by a warrant from the Home-Office. All Inland Revenue and Post-Office cases, such as stealing from letters, are adjudicated upon exclusively at Bow-street, which is, in fact, the Government office.