Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

In those pre-war days, the foreign revolutionaries in London kept themselves aloof from English life and, as I have said, generally avoided unpleasant contact with the English law. Living in the foulest lodgings—I sicken still at the memory of the stench we encountered in some of their tenement houses—many of these young tailors, cigarette makers, and factory hands dressed themselves up in the evening and came down West with their girl friends to the music halls and night clubs in the neighborhood of Piccadilly, leaving the older folk to their squalor and the children to the playground of the streets and courts. Now and again they stabbed each other, or cut each other’s throats, but, as a rule, such incidents were hushed up by their neighbors, and the London police were not invited to inquire into affrays between these aliens.... The war made a great clearance of these foreigners, and many of their old haunts have disappeared.

By the merest chance I saw the disappearance of one of the oldest and most historic haunts of London lawbreakers. It was the abandonment of the Old Bailey, before its grim and ancient structure was pulled down to make way for the new and imposing building where Justice again pursues its relentless way with those who fall into its grip. Ever since Roman days there has been a prison on the site of the Old Bailey, and for hundreds of years men and women have languished there in dark cells, rattled their chains behind its bars, rotted with jail fever, and died on the gallows tree within its walls. The dark cruelties of English justice which, in the old days, was merciless with all who broke its penal laws, however young and innocent till then, belong to forgotten history, for the most part, but as time is counted in history, it is not long since the judges of the Old Bailey condemned young girls to death for stealing a few ribbons or handkerchiefs, and my own grandfather saw their executions, in batches.

But on the last day of the Old Bailey, when the police were withdrawn from its courtroom and corridors, before its furniture and fittings were to be put up for public auction, the crowd I met there did not remember those old ruthless days. They were the criminals of a later generation who had been put in the cells as “drunks and disorderlies,” as pickpockets and “petty larcenies,” brought up for judgment with the knowledge that short sentences would be inflicted on them.

It was one of the most remarkable crowds I have ever seen. Some queer sentiment had brought all these crooks and jailbirds to see the last of their old “home.” Frowzy women and “flash” girls, old scamps of the casual ward and doss house, habitual drunkards, and young thieves, sporting touts and burglars of the Bill Sikes brand, had gathered together, as though by special invitation, to the “private view.” Laughing, excited, full of loquacious reminiscences, they wandered through the charge room and the cells where they had been “lagged,” pointed out the cell from which Jack Sheppard had escaped, and other cells once inhabited by famous murderers and criminals, and surged into the great court where they had stood in the dock facing the scarlet-robed judge and all the majesty of law. They stood in the dock again, lots of them, jeering, with bursts of hoarse laughter at the merry jest.

They crowded up to the judge’s throne. One young coster, with a gift of mimicry, put on a judicial manner, wagged his head solemnly, and sentenced his pals to death. Shrieks of laughter greeted his pantomime. An old ruffian with a legal-looking face, sodden with drink, played the part of prosecuting counsel, addressed an imaginary judge as “M’lud,” the crowd as “gentlemen of the jury,” and asserted that the evidence was overwhelming as to the guilt of the prisoner, who was indeed “a naughty, naughty man.”

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!” screamed a girl with big feathers in her hat, and she laughed hysterically at her own humor.

There was something grim and tragic beneath the comedy of the scene. This travesty of the law by those who had been in its clutches revealed a vicious psychology lost to all shame and decency, but was also a condemnation of society which produced such types of men and women, for the most part victims of slum life, foul surroundings, and evil upbringing, tolerated, and indeed created, by the social system of England. It needed the pen of Dickens to describe this scene, and truly it was a hark-back to the days of Dickens himself. I was astounded that such characters as Bill Sikes, Old Fagin and Nancy, and Charley Bates should still remain in the London of Edward VII, as they appeared in the living image that day in the Old Bailey.

I wandered upstairs into deserted rooms. They were strewn with papers ankle-deep, and on the table I saw a bulky volume, bound in iron, which was the old charge book, dating from 1730. To this day I regret that I did not “pinch” it, for it was an historic relic which, with scandalous carelessness, was thrown away. But I was afraid of carrying off such a big thing, lest I should find myself on a more modern charge-sheet at another court. I did, however, stuff a number of papers into my pockets, and when I reached home and examined them, I found that they were also historical documents of great interest.