Owen Swift arrived in London the same night, but not so his companion in misfortune; Sam’s exit was stopped by a detainer from London, for a forfeiture of bail, incurred in this wise.
A short time previous to the battle of Swift and Phelps, Sam, in company with a “noble earl” and some aristocratic friends, had been engaged in a fracas at a public-house in Piccadilly. This was the disgraceful period when, fired by a vulgar emulation of the worst characteristics of Pierce Egan’s vulgar, vicious, and silly caricatures of two town and country sporting gentlemen, whom he named “Tom and Jerry;” and whom he made the heroes of his wretched, grammarless galimatia called “Life in London,” clerks, apprentices, prigs, pugilists, and peers played the blackguard and ruffian on the stage of real life. The great and beneficial changes which have taken place in our police and street Acts, as well as in the hours and regulations of refreshment rooms and all licensed houses in the Metropolis, make it almost impossible for the present generation to realise the scenes of disorder, profligacy, and ruffianism with which “the West or worst End of the city” nightly abounded. From Temple Bar westward, through Drury Lane, Covent Garden, St. Martin’s Lane, Leicester Square, and its surroundings, to the Haymarket and Piccadilly, “night-houses” admitted the drunkard (when not too drunk), the night prowler, the debauchee, the gambler, the thief, and the prostitute of every grade—the only distinction being the higher or lower tariff. From the swell supper-room, saloon, elysium, or “finish,” of “Goody Levy,” “Goodered,” “Rowbotham,” “Mother H.,” or the “Brunswick,” through the musical and more respectable chop-and-kidney-grilling “Evans’s,” the “Garrick,” the “Cider Cellars,” “Coal Hole,” or “Shades,” down to the common dramshop kept open on the plea of the neighbouring cabstand or theatre until the small hours of the morning grew large, all appealed to those who sought “recreation and refreshment after the theatres.”
In one of these houses, the “Royal Standard,” in Piccadilly, on the morning of the 17th of February, 1838, there appear to have been assembled after a night’s debauch a number of loose characters. Among them were the Earl of Waldegrave and several “Corinthians.” According to the evidence of Mr. Mackenzie, the prosecutor, he, after leaving duty, entered the house in question, where “he saw the prisoner (Young Dutch Sam) and several gentlemen, some of whom he certainly had interfered with in their nocturnal sprees; indeed, he had been instrumental in introducing them to the magistrate at Marlborough Street.” We think nowadays this policeman’s conduct would be strictly canvassed. “Whilst he was standing before the bar,” we copy the report, “the prisoner whispered to Lord Waldegrave, and immediately afterwards, addressing the company, he said, ‘Gentlemen, do you care to see a policeman laid on his back?’ He then seized him (the prosecutor) and threw him on his back, falling upon him with all his weight. He was so much injured as to be under the doctor’s hands for some time, and unfit for duty. The prisoner was held to bail by the magistrates at Marlborough Street, and had forfeited his recognisances.”
Mr. Ballantine addressed the Court on the part of the prisoner in mitigation of punishment. The prisoner had been made the tool of certain parties with whom he had been drinking on the night before the assault was committed, and although they had urged him to the commission of the offence which led to his present position, not one of them had been to visit him, or render him the least assistance during his incarceration.—Mr. Doane, having addressed the Court for the prosecution, described the defendant as a pugilist, but added “that he did not say this to create a prejudice against him on that account, for he felt convinced that the unmanly and terrible crime of stabbing was increasing in this country, in consequence of the absurd and mischievous interference of the county magistracy with the sports of the Ring. Those sports (the learned gentleman observed) had some disadvantages, but they were amply counterbalanced by the habit they engendered of fighting in a fair and manly manner, and by the universal indignation with which anything unfair was regarded in a pugilistic contest.” The Court sentenced the prisoner to three months’ imprisonment.
A motion was subsequently made that the estreat on the recognisances might be taken off, but was refused, on the ground that the Court had no power to interfere.
We have been the more particular in the narration of this case as the facts were known to the writer, and as a most false and exaggerated report of the affair was subsequently published in the Morning Herald, in an attack upon the Prize Ring, penned by an Irish sporting reporter who had been discharged by the editor of Bell’s Life. The conduct of the policeman, to our thinking, more resembled that of a French agent provocateur than a guardian of the peace; and, without defending the assailant, we may remark that the fact that Young Sam so carefully avoided using his unquestionable pugilistic skill, although under the excitement of champagne and provocation, is a sufficient answer to the charge of “ruffianism” and “ferocity” cast upon him for this foolish escapade.
Shortly after this fracas a new police Act, and increased vigilance in the stipendiary magistrates, checked effectually these disgraceful excesses, by substituting imprisonment for fine, at the discretion of the justices, whereupon we find, in a contemporary “daily,” the ironical “Lament” of which the subjoined are a few of the leading stanzas:—
LAMENT OF THE “DISORDERLY GENTLEMEN.”
A plague on the new law! bad luck to the beaks,
Opposed as they are to “disorderly” freaks;