The seven curses of London

by James Greenwood

Now it is evident on the face of it that the above quoted clause of the proposed “Habitual Criminals Bill” is beset by many grave objections. In the first place, to vest such an amount of irresponsible power in the police is a step hardly warranted by one’s experience of the intelligence and integrity of the “force,” satisfactory on the whole as it may be. There can be no question that as a rule the superintendents and inspectors and sergeants are in every respect equal to the duties imposed on them; only for the unenviable notoriety lately achieved by a functionary still higher in command, commissioners also might have been included in the favourable list.

It is equally true, too, that the great majority of the men of the “force” discharge their duty with efficiency; at the same time it is undeniable that there are exceptions to the good rule. But too frequently do our criminal records remind us that virtue’s perfect armour is not invariably represented by the helmet and the coat of blue. Only lately there occurred an alarming instance of this. A gang of plunderers and receivers of stolen goods was apprehended, and presently there appeared on the scene an individual, then an inspector of railway detective police, and formerly holding a responsible position in the Metropolitan force, taking on himself, with a coolness that bespoke his long experience, the office of screening the thief and arranging his escape from the law’s righteous grasp. Richards is this fellow’s name, and he was evidently well known to a large circle of acquaintance, whose fame is recorded in the records of the Old Bailey. With amazing audacity Mr. Richards addressed himself to the two detective policemen who had the case in hand, and offered them ten pounds each if they would accommodate his clients by committing perjury when the day of trial came. Happily the integrity of the two officers was proof against the tempting bribe, and the unfortunate negotiator found himself even deeper in the mire than those his disinterested good nature would have aided. At the same time one cannot refrain from asking, is this the first time that Mr. Richards has evinced his obliging disposition, and the still more important question, does he stand alone, or are there others of his school? As is the case with all large communities, the police force must include in its number men malicious, prejudiced, wrong-headed and foolish. Probably there are no serious grounds for the alarm that under the convenient cloak the clause in question provides, the policeman, unscrupulous and dishonest, might by levying black mail on the poor wretches so completely in his power, reap a rich and iniquitous harvest, and render nugatory one of the Bill’s prime provisions. This is an objection that carries no great weight. No law that could be passed could put the criminal, the burglar, and the house-breaker more at the mercy of the dishonest policeman than he now is. As repeatedly appears in our criminal reports, the sort of odd intimacy that commonly exists between the thief and his natural enemy, the policeman, is very remarkable; the latter is as well acquainted with the haunts of the former as he is with the abodes of his own friends and relatives. Should the enemies meet in the street, the acquaintance is acknowledged by a sort of confident “I-can-have-you-whenever-I-want-you” look on the one part, and a half devil-may-care, half deprecatory glance on the other. When the crisis arrives, and the thief is “wanted,” he is hailed as Jack, Tom, or Bill, and the capture is effected in the most comfortable and business-like manner imaginable.

Under such an harmonious condition of affairs, nothing could be easier, were they both agreed, than bribery and corruption of the most villanous sort, and, taking Colonel Henderson’s word, “that no case has ever been known of police levying black mail on licence holders,” and further, considering the inadequate pay the policeman receives for the amount of intelligent and vigilant service required of him, the country may be congratulated on possessing, on the whole, such an almost unexceptionally good servant.

It is the wrong-headed policeman, probably, who would work the greatest amount of mischief in this direction. The busy, over-zealous man, neither malicious, dishonest, nor vindictive, but simply a little too anxious to win for himself a character for “shrewdness and intelligence.” This would probably be the young policeman, desirous of making up for his lack of experience by a display of extraordinary sagacity. To such a man’s home-bred, unofficially cultivated ideas of right and wrong, it would appear of small use “suspecting” an individual, unless he immediately set about testing him with the utmost severity to know the extent to which the suspicion was justified.

To be sure, an attempt is made in the Bill, as it passed the Lords, to guard against the weaknesses and shortcomings of constables by making it incumbent on them to obtain the written authority of a superior before they arrest and take a man before a magistrate; but really this may mean just nothing at all. It may be assumed that all the evidence a director of police would require before he granted a written authority, would be the declaration of the policeman applying for it that he had fair grounds for making the application. Undoubtedly he would be expected to make out a good case; but that, as an over-zealous and prejudiced man, he would be sure to do. The superintendent, or whoever it was that had power to issue a written warrant for a “suspect’s” apprehension, could not, by examination of the prisoner, convince himself of the justice of the act of his subordinate, to do which would be to usurp the magisterial office. And the process would probably be attended with this disadvantage,—that the said written order for arrest would wear an importance that really did not belong to it. If a man were arrested simply on the authority of a common policeman, the chances are that the magistrate would scrutinise the case narrowly, and be guided to a conviction solely by the evidence and his own discretion; but the case would come under the new act before him to a large extent prejudiced. He is instructed that the warrant that legalised the man’s apprehension was not issued in vague supposition that it might he justifiable: an official of the law—a man high in authority—has sanctioned the arrest, and here is his written testimony that he considered the step expedient.

Again, let us for a moment contemplate the difficulties that must always attend the proving of his honesty by a man who, according to the high authority of the Lord Chancellor, has “no character to lose.” “As to what was said about the injury done to a man’s character by supervision, he must observe that a man’s character was gone after two convictions. It was idle to say that after two convictions a man had a character.”

In the case of a man against whom nothing criminal was ever suspected, it might be easy enough for him to prove his honesty any day, or any hour of the day, he might be called on to do so; but it is altogether different with the individual who dare not even lay claim to a character for honesty, to prove that the suspicions entertained against him are unfounded. It should be borne in mind that the difficulties of the poor wretch’s condition almost preclude the possibility of his making a show of earning his bread in a worthy manner. In the majority of cases he will be found to be a man without a trade, or, if he has one, he will probably sink it, and endeavour to keep out of sight of all who knew him and the story of his downfall, by hiding amongst the great multitude who turn their hands to any rough-and-ready labour that will bring them a shilling. There are hundreds and thousands of men in London, and indeed in all great cities, who “pick up” a living somehow—anyhow, and who, though they all the time are honest fellows, would find it difficult to account for, and bring forward evidence to show, how they were engaged last Monday, and again on Wednesday, and what they earned, and whom they earned it of. Such men “job about,” very often in localities that, in the case of a man under police supervision, to be seen there would be to rouse suspicions as to his intentions. For instance, many a shilling or sixpence is “picked up” by men who have nothing better to do, by hanging about railway stations and steamboat wharves, and looking out for passengers who have luggage they wish carried. But supposing that a man, a “ticket-of-leave,” was to resort to such a means of obtaining a livelihood, and that he was seen “hanging about” such places day after day by a watchful detective who knew who and what he was,—with what amount of credulity would the authorities receive his statement that he was “looking out for a chance to carry somebody’s trunk or carpetbag”! In all probability the naïve assertion would provoke a smile on the face of the magistrate who heard the case, and there would be “laughter” in court.

Again, as is well known, hundreds of men seek work at the docks. It might be supposed by their innocent lordships that nothing could be easier than for a man to prove his employment at such gigantic and sternly-regulated establishments as the London or St. Katherine Docks, with their staff of liveried officials and responsible gate-keepers. The dock-labourer, on his admittance, is furnished with a ticket, and when he leaves he is searched so as to make sure that he has stolen none of the valuable goods scattered in every direction. But it is a fact that no system can be looser or more shambling or shabbier than that which rules in the drudgery departments of these great emporiums for ship-loading and warehousing. Every morning the dock-gates are besieged by a mob clamorous as that which in the old time swarmed about the door of the casual-ward; and if rags and patches and hunger-pinched visages go for anything, the quality of both mobs is much of a sort. It is only men who can find nothing else to do who apply at the docks for work, for the pay is but threepence an hour, and the labour, hoisting-out and landing goods from the holds of ships, is cruelly hard; and it is not uncommon to employ a man for an hour and a half or two hours, and then discharge him. But it is better than nothing, and it is the “ready penny”—emphatically the penny—that the miserable, shamefaced, twice-convicted man, with some remnant of conscience and good intent remaining in him, would seek as the last resource of desperate honesty, all other sources failing him. But it would be next to impossible for him to prove that he had been working at the docks; no one knows him there. He might be there employed twenty times, and each time in a different gang, and under a different ganger. His workmates for the time are strangers, bearing not names, but numbers. Were it to save his life, he would find it hard to prove that he occasionally found a “job” at the docks, and, despite all his honest exertions, he would he liable to have his ticket revoked, and be sent back to finish to its full length his original sentence.

Again, it might even happen that a suspected man able to prove his honesty would find himself almost in as complete a fix as the one who, through circumstances over which he had no control, was unable to do so. Under the existing system, we have Colonel Henderson’s word for it, masters are never informed by the police that they are employing a license-holder; but he would cease to be assured this immense advantage if Lord Kimberley has his way with him. As Earl Shaftesbury pertinently remarks: “A holder of the ticket-of-leave goes before a magistrate; and what happens? He proves that he is earning an honest livelihood, and the magistrate dismisses him. He returns to his work, and his employer dismisses him also. It has occurred before now that men have been dismissed by their employers under somewhat similar circumstances. How can you compensate a man for such a loss as that? You cannot do it; and yet you expose men who may be earning an honest livelihood to the danger of that happening to them if they refuse a demand for hush-money, or in any other way give offence to a dishonest police-constable. I know at the present moment a young man who, though convicted, is now in respectable employment, and in the receipt of good wages. He is living in terror, lest, under the circumstances to which I have referred, he may be brought before a police-magistrate. Depend on it that hundreds of men in that position are now watching the progress of this Bill.

“On the authority of the late Sir Richard Mayne it has been stated that the police have, through the clause that insists on convicts reporting themselves monthly, been enabled to furnish employment to a good many of the ticket-of-leave men; this, however, is very doubtful. That some situations may have been obtained for these men through the exertions of the police and the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society may be true; but of this I am certain, that whatever returns the police may make of the places they have obtained for released convicts, they have not obtained anything like the number that those men obtained for themselves before the adoption of so stringent a provision.”