Several cases of gigantic fraud, rivalling any already recorded, were brought to light between 1856 and 1873. I propose next to describe the leading features of the most important of these. Another case of long-continued successful forgery was brought to light two years after the convictions of Saward and his accomplices. This conspiracy was cleverly planned, but had scarcely so many ramifications as that of Saward. Its originators were a couple of men, Wagner and Bateman, who had already been convicted of systematic forgery, and sentenced to transportation, but they had been released on ticket-of-leave in 1856. As a blind for their new frauds, they set up as law-stationers in York Buildings, Adelphi, and at once commenced their nefarious traffic. Forged cheques and bills were soon uttered in great numbers, as well as base coin. The police suspecting the house in York Buildings, put a watch on the premises, which they kept up for more than a year, and thus obtained personal knowledge of all who passed in and out, but without obtaining any direct evidence. At length a man was caught in the act of passing a forged cheque at the Union Bank, and recognized as one of the frequenters of the bogus law-stationers. His arrest led to that of others. Among them was a man named Chandler, formerly a bill discounter by profession, who by degrees, to meet his extravagant expenditure, took to appropriating the bills intrusted to him, and so lost his business, after which he became a clerk to Messrs. Wagner and Bateman. Chandler while in Newgate turned informer, and betrayed the whole conspiracy. Besides his employers, a jeweller named Humphreys was in the “swim,” at whose shop in Red Lion Square was discovered a quantity of base gold and silver coins, with all the latest appliances for coining, including those of electroplating; also a furniture dealer and one or two more commonplace rogues. The arch villain was never taken into custody. He, like Saward, was an artist in penmanship. He was a German named Kerp, eighty years of age, who had spent his whole life in imitating other people’s signatures, and had acquired the most consummate skill in the practice. His copies were generally pronounced indistinguishable from and as good as the originals. The aged but wary Kerp, the moment the plot was discovered, vanished, and was never more heard of. Much the same plan was adopted by these forgers as by Saward to get their cheques cashed. They advertised for clerks, and employed the most likely of the applicants by sending them to the bank. It was one of these, Glendinning, who had allowed himself to be utilized for some time in this way, whose capture led to the breaking up of the gang. The principals in this conspiracy, Wagner and Bateman, were sentenced to penal servitude for life, the others to twenty and ten years. It was stated in evidence that the monies obtained by these forgeries amounted to £8000 or £10,000, and that the forged cheques which had been presented, but refused, amounted to double the sum. Wagner, after conviction, offered to reveal, for a reward of £3000, a system which had long been in practice of defrauding the Exchequer of vast sums by means of forged stamps. His offer was not, however, accepted.
A more elaborate plot in many ways, more secretly, more patiently prepared than the preceding, or indeed than any in the calendar, was the case of the forgeries upon the Bank of England discovered in 1863, but not before the forged paper had been put in circulation for more than a couple of years. In 1861 a man named Burnett came with his wife and took up his residence at Whitchurch, Hampshire, at no great distance from Laverstock, where are Messrs. Portal’s mills for the manufacture of bank-note paper. Burnett had only just come out of gaol after completing a sentence of penal servitude. His object in visiting Whitchurch was to undermine the honesty of some workman in the mills; and he eventually succeeded, his wife making the first overtures, in persuading a lad named Brown to steal some of the bank paper. Brown took several sheets, and then was detected by Brewer, a fellow-workman of superior grade, who threatened to betray the theft. But Brewer, either before or after this, succumbed to temptation, and stole paper on a much larger scale than Brown. All that was taken was handed over to Burnett, or a “woman in black” whom Brown met by appointment at Waterloo station. To facilitate his operations, Brewer obtained a false master key from Burnett, which gave him access to all parts of the mills, the packing-room included. In this part of the mills a large quantity of bank-note paper was kept at the period of the robbery, and in the states known as “water-leaf” and “sized,” which are the penultimate processes of manufacture. One more remains, that of “glazing,” without which no paper is issued for engraving. None of the stolen paper was glazed, and this was an important clue to the subsequent discovery of the crime.
Some time in 1862 a large deficiency in the stock of bank paper unglazed was discovered at the mills. Soon afterwards the inspectors of bank-notes at the Bank of England detected the presentation at the bank of spurious notes on genuine paper. The two facts taken in conjunction led to the employment of the police, and the offer of a reward of £1500 for the detection of the offenders. By this time Brown alone had stolen three or four hundred sheets, each containing two notes, many of the sheets suitable for engraving any kind of note from £1000 downwards. The amount of Brewer’s abstractions (who was eventually acquitted) was never exactly estimated. Suspicion appears to have rested on Brown, who had left Laverstock, and he was soon approached by the police. Almost directly he was questioned he made a clean breast of the whole affair. The next step was to take the principals, and under such circumstances as would insure their conviction. A watch was set on Burnett, who was followed to the shop of one Buncher, a butcher in Strutton Ground. Buncher was then tracked to North Kent Terrace, New Cross, where a Mr. and Mrs. Campbell resided, with whom he did business in exchanging the false notes. The police officers now taxed Mrs. Campbell with complicity, and frightened her into collusion. With her assistance on a certain day a couple of bricks were taken out of the wall dividing her front and back parlours; the officers ensconced themselves in the latter, and waited for Buncher’s expected visit. He came to complete a sale of forged notes, and he wanted a couple of hundred pounds for what he had. Mrs. Campbell offered him less, and there was an altercation, in the course of which Buncher became very violent, and at length, after using much intemperate language, he left the place in a huff. In the course of his remarks, however, he said, “I am the man that has got all the bank paper; I have £30,000 now, and the Bank of England cannot stop it.” This was all the police wanted to know.
They next watched Buncher, and found that he paid frequent visits to Birmingham. They also discovered that through the intermediacy of one Robert Cummings, well known as a reputed coiner, he had been introduced to a man named Griffiths, an engraver and copper-plate printer. Griffiths was an unusually clever and skilful workman, who had devoted all his talent and all his energies for some seventeen years to the fabrication of false bank-notes. On a certain day, the 27th October, 1862, the two were arrested simultaneously; Buncher in London, and Griffiths in Birmingham. Nothing was found in Buncher’s premises in Strutton Ground, which were thoroughly searched, but proofs of Griffiths’ guilt were at once apparent on entering his work-room. In one corner was a printing-press actually in use, and on it were twenty-one forged Bank of England notes, without date or signature. On the bed were twenty forged ten-pound notes complete and ready for use, and twenty-five five-pound notes. “Mother plates” for engraving the body of the notes lay about, and other plates for various processes. More than this, Griffiths took the police to a field where, in a bank, a number of other plates were secreted. Griffiths afterwards admitted that he had been employed in defrauding the bank since 1846, and the prominent part he played secured for him on conviction the heaviest sentence of the law. This was penal servitude for life, Buncher’s sentence being twenty-five, and Burnett’s twenty years.
Cummings, who had introduced Buncher to Griffiths, was also tried for being in possession of stolen bank paper for improper purposes. But as there was no independent corroboration of the informer’s evidence, according to the custom of the British law, the case was considered not proved, and he was acquitted. On his return to Newgate to be finally discharged, Cummings jumped up the stairs and fairly danced for joy. But he was not long at large; he was too active an evil-doer, and was perpetually in trouble. Commencing life as a resurrection man, when that trade failed through the change in the law, and no more bodies were to be bought, he devoted his energies to coining and forgery, and in the latter line was a friend and associate of Saward’s. One narrow escape he had, however, before he abandoned his old business. A Bow Street officer saw him leaving London in the evening by Camberwell Green, accompanied by two other men. It was well known that they were resurrectionists, and a strict watch was kept at all the turnpike gates on the southern roads leading into London. An officer was placed for this purpose at New Cross, Camberwell, and Kennington gates. Presently “Old Bob” drove up to Camberwell Gate in the same cart in which he had been seen to start. The officers rushed out to detain him. “What have you got here? We must search the cart,” they cry. “By all means,” replies Bob, and a close investigation follows, without any detection of the corpse concealed. Bob was therefore allowed to pass on. But they had the body, all the same; it had been dressed up in decent clothes and made to stand upright in the cart. With the police officers it had passed muster as a living member of the party.
Cummings was repeatedly “run in” for the offence of coining and uttering bad money, whether coin or notes. His regular trade, followed before he took to the life of resurrectionist, was that of an engraver. He was a notorious criminal, an habitual offender in his own particular line, one who would stick at no trifles to evade detection or escape capture. It is told of “Bob” Brennan, an official specially employed for years by the Mint to watch and prosecute coiners, that he received information that coining was carried on by Cummings and others at a place in Westminster. He went there with a posse of officers and forced his way upstairs to the first floor, where the coiners, unexpectedly disturbed, fell an easy prey. But the police nearly paid the penalty of capture with their lives. Proceeding cautiously down the stairs, they found that the flooring at the bottom had been taken up. Where it had lain was a yawning gulf or trap sufficient to do for the whole body of police engaged in the capture. Cummings was caught shortly afterwards. He was a tall, slender man, with a long face and iron-gray hair. The community of coiners of which he was so notorious a member were a low lot, the lowest among criminals except, perhaps, the ‘smashers,’ or those who passed the counterfeit money. It was not easy to detect coiners, or bring home their guilt to them. Those who manufactured and those who passed had no direct dealings with each other. The false coin was bought by an agent from an agent, and dealings were carried on secretly at the “Clock House” in Seven Dials.
The annals of fraudulent crime probably contain nothing which in dramatic interest can compare with the conviction of William Roupell for forgery. As the case must still be well remembered by the present generation, it will be necessary to give here only the briefest summary. William Roupell was the eldest but illegitimate son of a wealthy man who subsequently married Roupell’s mother, and had further legitimate issue. William was brought up as an attorney, and became in due course his father’s man of business. As such he had pretty general control over his father’s estates and affairs. In 1855 he instructed certain solicitors to prepare a deed of gift as from his father, conveying to him estates near Kingston. The old gentleman’s signature to this deed of gift was a forgery, but upon this forged and false conveyance William Roupell, who had already embarked upon a career of wild extravagance, obtained a mortgage of £7000. In 1856 the father died. It had been supposed up to this date that he had willed his property, amounting in all to upwards of £200,000, but after the funeral William Roupell produced another and a later will, leaving everything to the widow, and constituting William sole executor. This will was a deliberate forgery.
Five or six years later, William Roupell minutely described how he had effected the fraud. The day his father died he got the keys of his private bureau, opened it, and took out the authentic will. After reading it, and finding this unfavourable to himself, he resolved to carry out his deliberate plan, namely, to suppress it and substitute another. He himself prepared it on a blank form which he had brought with him on purpose. To this fraudulent instrument he appended forged signatures, and in due course obtained probate. As he possessed nearly unbounded influence over his mother, her accession to the property meant that William could dispose of it as he pleased. He embarked forthwith in a career of the wildest extravagance, and ere long he had parted in his mother’s name with most of the landed estates. One large item of his expenditure was a contested election at Lambeth, which he gained at a cost of £10,000. No fortune could stand the inroads he made into his mother’s money, and in 1862 he was obliged to fly the country, hopelessly and irretrievably ruined.
His disappearance gave colour and substance to evil reports already in circulation that the will and conveyance above referred to were fictitious documents. His next brother, who should have inherited under the authentic will, forthwith brought an ejectment on the possessor of lands purchased on the authority of the forged conveyance and will. The case was tried at Guildford Assizes, and caused intense excitement, the hardship to the holders of these lands being plain, should the allegations of invalidity be made good. The effect of establishing the forgeries would be to restore to the Roupell family lands for which a price had already been paid in all good faith to another, but a criminal member of the family. At first the case was contested hotly, but, to the profound astonishment of every one inside and outside the court, William Roupell himself was brought as a principal witness to clench the case by a confession altogether against himself. He told his story with perfect coolness and self-possession, but in a grave and serious tone. “Every word he uttered was said with consideration, and sometimes with a long pause, but at the same time with an air of the most entire truthfulness and candour.” He confessed himself a perjurer in having sworn to the false will, and a wholesale forger, having manufactured no less than ten false signatures to deeds involving on the whole some £350,000.
For these crimes William Roupell was tried at the Central Criminal Court on the 24th September, 1862. He declined to plead, but a plea of “Not Guilty” was recorded. The case was easily and rapidly disposed of. Roupell made a long statement more in exculpation than in his defence. He complained that he had at first been the dupe of others, and admitted that he had too readily fallen astray. But while repudiating the charges made against him of systematic extravagance and immorality, he confessed that his whole life had been a gigantic mistake, and he was ready to make what atonement he could. Mr. Justice Byles, in passing sentence, commented severely upon the commission of such crimes by a man in Roupell’s position in life, and passed the heaviest sentence of the law, transportation for life. Roupell received the announcement with a cheerful countenance, and left the dock with evident satisfaction and relief at the termination of a most painful ordeal. Roupell was quiet and submissive while in Newgate, unassuming in manner, and ready to make the best of his position. He carried this character with him into penal servitude, and after enduring the full severity of his punishment for several years, was at length advanced to the comparative ease of a post much coveted by convicts, that of hospital nurse. His uniform good conduct gained him release from Portland on ticket-of-leave in 1882, just twenty years after his conviction.