HUFFUM WHITE
The decay of the highwayman's trade and its replacement by that of the burglar and the bank-robber is well illustrated by the career of Huffum, or Huffy, White, who was first sentenced for burglary in 1809. Transportation for life was then awarded him, and we might have heard no more of his activities, had not his own cleverness and the stupidity of the authorities enabled him to escape from the hulks at Woolwich. Thus narrowly missing the long voyage to Botany Bay, he made direct for London, then as now the best hiding-place in the world. He soon struck up an acquaintance with one James Mackcoull, and they proposed together to enter upon a course of burglary; but at the very outset of their agreement they were arrested. Mackcoull, as a rogue and vagabond, was sent to prison for six months, and White was sentenced to death as an escaped convict, the extreme penalty being afterwards reduced to penal servitude for life.
HUFFUM WHITE ESCAPING FROM THE HULKS.
On January 20th, 1811, Mackcoull was released, and at once, like the faithful comrade he was, set about the task of securing White's escape from the convict ship to which he had again been consigned. Dropping overboard in the fog and darkness that enshrouded the lower reaches of the Thames on that winter's evening into the boat that Mackcoull had silently rowed under the bows of the ship, White was again free.
An astonishing enterprise now lay before White, Mackcoull, and a new ally: a man named French. This was nothing less than a plan to break into the premises of the Paisley Union Bank at Glasgow. Arrived in Glasgow, they at length, after several disappointments, succeeded in forcing an entry on a Saturday night, selecting that time for the sake of the large margin it gave them for their escape, until the re-opening of the bank on the Monday morning. Their booty consisted of £20,000 in Scotch notes: a large sum, and in that form an unmanageable one, as they were eventually to discover.
The burglary accomplished, their first care was to set off at once for London, posting thither by post-chaise, as fast as four horses could take them. At every stage they paid their score, which they took care should be a generous one, as beseemed the wealthy gentlemen they posed as, with a £20 note: thus accumulating, as they dashed southward along those four hundred miles, a heavy sum in gold.
On the Monday morning the loss of the notes was of course at once discovered. Information was easily acquired as to the movements of the men who were at once suspected, and they were followed along the road, and some days later White was arrested in London by a Bow Street runner, at the house of one Scoltock, a maker of burglars' tools. None of the stolen property was found upon White, Mackcoull having been sufficiently acute to place all the remaining notes in the keeping of a certain Bill Gibbons, who combined the trade of bruiser with that of burglars' banker.