“The Queen told me I had a really colourful background”

Fifty years ago, working class London was a cluster of self-contained villages boasting their own distinct occupations, football teams, and skulduggery. Indeed, every neighbourhood had its own villains and theft, robbery and a little light extortion were their crimes of choice. On a rainy day on the South Bank, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I met a friend of mine who was an enthusiastic and prominent player in that world.

By the late sixties, most of the big names of London’s underworld were buried deep in the prison system and any neighbourhood crime firm raising its head above the parapet was quickly crushed by a police force fearing attempts to fill the vacuum left by the Krays and the Richardsons. The days of the high profile self-congratulatory London gangster were over and anybody serious about a career in crime learnt the hard way to keep a low profile. Consequently, for a non-insider to hear about villains from another manor was most unusual. However, the name ‘Bobby Cummines’ was increasingly being mentioned in somewhat hushed tones in pub conversations across London.

Brought up as part of a big law-abiding family in King’s Cross, by the time Bobby Cummines left school at the age of sixteen he was already honing his reputation through a range of scams and schemes. But with a recently-acquired job in a shipping office and the prospect of a career in Customs & Excise ahead of him, Bobby’s life took a turn for the worse upon his first serious encounter with the police. “I was in a park with my mates when somebody let off a starting pistol. The police were called and began bullying these younger kids. They were aggressive and shouldn’t have been talking to these kids without an adult present, so I stood up to them.” The police left and returned soon after. “They pointed to a cut-throat razor that was on the ground and claimed it was mine that I had took it out of my pocket and threw it on the floor. It was a fit-up. My dad was a straight-goer and thought the police were like Dixon of Dock Green. He said the police would never plant evidence. He told me to plead guilty and that I’d  get a fine and it’ll be forgotten about in a few years.”

Bobby did as he was told and his dad paid the ten shilling fine. However, Bobby’s  bosses at the shipping office found out about the case and sacked him. “I was gutted, I thought, if you want me to be bad, ‘I’ll show you how bad I can be.'” Within a year, he was in the Old Bailey charged with possession of a shotgun and armed robbery. While he waited for his case to come up, he met the Kray Twins who were about to be tried for murder. The twins were sentenced to life imprisonment and Bobby  was sent to a Detention Centre for the possession of a sawn off shotgun. “It was supposed to be a short sharp shock, but it was just violence practised against vulnerable kids. I came out of there tougher and angrier than ever.”

Bobby became a committed and violent professional criminal. “We used to give local kids a few bob to chuck a brick through the window of some business. They would claim on the insurance, but if they made three claims their premium would go up. So after two bricks we would move in and for a few quid no more bricks and no upping of the premium.” Bobby and his crew were soon “minding” a wide range of businesses in a territory “that stretched from Highbury Corner to the Archway, across to Finsbury Park, and the edge of Caledonian Rd.” But this territory was fiercely contested with other groups of violent predators, and Bobby led a tight-knit group of co-offenders  through several years of violent confrontation. At five foot six inches tall, Bobby learnt early on that he had to be more violent than the opposition, and his weapon of choice was a sawn-off shotgun.  “When people ask why I used guns, I always tell them I was sick of getting my nice suits messed up. Anyway guns save time.”

Quickly, Bobby became a highly dangerous offender prepared to use violence to obtain money. However, he stood trial for murder when a robbery went wrong and a man that he tied up choked to death. Bobby was found not guilty of murder, but served five years of a seven and a half year sentence for manslaughter. “Over the years that unnecessary death has haunted me.”

On his release ,Bobby continued in his chosen career, showing considerable ability as an organiser, and becoming deadly serious about the crime business. “I made sure that there was never any photos of us floating about, and  I didn’t drink, I always had bitter lemon. I needed to stay sharp.” But while he eschewed alcohol, Bobby did develop a  penchant for armed robbery. At this time, bandits were pillaging large bundles of cash from banks, building societies and security vans, and Bobby and his crew were particularly successful.

Inevitably, Bobby was arrested by armed police and sentenced to twelve years in prison – “In the end it was almost a relief. I’ve done some horrendous things – extreme violence – I never deny that. I deserved every day I got in prison because it was lunacy. If I had carried on, I would either have been shot dead by the police or innocent members of the public could have been shot.”

In prison, he enhanced an already formidable reputation for violence and confrontation, and at one time held the governor of a maximum security prison as a hostage. “Well, they said that but he was on his rounds and I knew they was taking prisoners down the wing and giving out beatings. So I pulled him about it and he screamed that he was being taken hostage.” This incident added  considerably to his reputation.

In Parkhurst Prison, Bobby negotiated a truce between Reggie Kray and Charlie Richardson in order to prevent serious violence between members of the two gangs who had been imprisoned over a decade earlier. He achieved this by carrying the blade from a pair of garden shears up his sleeve. “Everybody was walking around tooled up. It was a brutal place, one of my friends was killed over an onion. There was another bloke who had murdered his child as he felt the world was too cruel and nasty for his beautiful son to live in. Others reckoned they were being visited by angels. We had IRA, UDA, allsorts, Colonel Gaddafi’s top man in the Libyan army. The ‘p’ in prison stands for paranoia. Some of the people in there are pathetic. You have 50/60 year old men doing a ten stretch strutting about in boxer shorts and trainers trying to look nineteen, talking about jobs they are going to do when they get out. I’ve never understood why they do that. I never saw a lot of rehabilitation going on”.

Charlie Richardson had a huge impact on Bobby. “He told me I had a good brain but if I carried on I would end up dead or on a life sentence. He told me to get into education – it would earn me money without hurting anyone. Charlie got me reading. Education was my liberation. Prison brutalises people. When you’re inside, you don’t serve a sentence—you survive a sentence.  I’m grateful that education humanised me.” Bobby successfully lobbied for a transfer to Maidstone Prison which had an education unit. Here he became education orderly, and with the support of his Probation Officer and a sympathetic Prison Governor, enrolled on an Open University course and started to think about the future.

On leaving prison, Bobby at first struggled to make a living, finding potential employers reluctant to take on an ex-con. “To live an honest life, I had to be dishonest about my past.” He persevered,  taking a £100-a-week job stacking shelves and dealing with hostage negotiations and suicide management as a volunteer with the Kent Probation Service. Bobby went on to hold responsible  positions in various companies and gained a degree in Housing from Greenwich University.

However, his initial struggles to gain employment inspired Bobby to join Mark Leach, the founder of Unlock,  the National Association of Reformed Offenders, becoming CEO when Mark stood down. Initially operating  from Bobby’s garage, and boasting  Sir Stephen Tumim, a former judge and Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons as its  founding President, Unlock became a powerful force in the rehabilitation of offenders, and when Bobby teamed up with the ex-Chief Inspector of Prisons Sir David Ramsbottom who succeeded Tumin, the pair provided an effective  authoritative political voice. “I became media savvy. Few people seemed to know what they was talking about when it came to the needs of somebody coming out of prison. How to get a job, insurance, a bank account. Employers were saying that they couldn’t employ ex offenders as staff were paid through the BACS system  and former offenders didn’t have bank accounts.”

Unlock provided practical support and advice and developed a particular expertise in tackling the financial exclusion of ex-offenders. Bobby is a very persuasive man, and gradually the banks and insurance industry – sectors not renowned for their social awareness – came on board, and the lives of some of the most excluded were materially changed for the better, largely as the result of the energy and intellect of an ex-offender who left school at the age of sixteen. The one time violent dynamo of pre-gentrified seventies Islington had become an eloquent advocate of social reform.

Bobby was invited to sit upon numerous government committees and policy reviews. For instance, he was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the Rehabilitation of Offenders’ Act, becoming an expert witness to  the Home Affairs Select Committee on prisoner education, and a specialist adviser in the 2004 public inquiry into murder of Zahid Mubarek in Feltham Young Offenders’ Institution. He also served on the board of HM Inspector of Prisons and advised the Irish government on their Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. In 2006, Bobby travelled to South Africa on a fact-finding mission to look at how their prisons were run, as part of a trip sponsored by a firm of solicitors.

Bobby liked to speak to groups of young people in schools and colleges and, at these events, this ex-violent criminal does not pull his punches. “Tools (weapons) are for fools, drugs are for mugs,” he assured them. A regular speaker at conferences and events, when Coutts Bank awarded £10,000 to Unlock, Bobby revealed, “one of the directors said he was pleased to see me in his bank without a crash helmet and a gun.”

In 2011, Unlock won The Guardian’s  Charity of the Year Award and the same year Bobby received the OBE. “The Queen told me I had a really colourful background and she was pleased to award me the OBE. That’s the nicest way I can think of someone telling me I’ve got a lot of form.” From working class King’s Cross to Buckingham Palace via a solitary cell had been quite a journey. Bobby had proved to be a more successful campaigner, fund raiser and government advisor than he ever was a criminal.

Just before we parted, I asked Bobby if he had time for a drink, but he declined by explaining, “I need to be back, I agreed to meet up with a young boy who is going off the rails a bit. I know what he is doing, what he is up to. I told him bring his little firm with him. I will sort them out.” I have no doubt he did just that.

Bobby Cummines in the seventies – “When I was well at it”

Bobby receiving the OBE in 2011 – “She was pleased to award me the OBE”

Bobby Cummines OBE

Portraits copyright © Sarah Ainslie

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I am giving an illustrated lecture of Spitalfields & Whitechapel in Old Photographs this Thursday 16th October at 7pm at the Hanbury Hall in Hanbury St, E1 6QR. CLICK HERE TO BOOK TICKETS

Roy looking sharp in the fifties – “I class myself as an Hoxtonite”

The great goodsyard in Bishopsgate is an empty place these days, home to a pop-up shopping mall of sea containers and temporary football pitches, but Roy Wild knew it in its heyday as a busy rail depot teeming with life and he still keeps a model of the Scammell Scarab that he once drove there as a talisman of those lost times.

A vast nineteenth century construction of brick and stone, the old goodsyard housed railway lines on multiple levels and was a major staging point for freight, with deliveries of fresh agricultural produce coming in from East Anglia to be sold in the London wholesale markets and sent out again across the country. Today only the fragmentary Braithwaite arches of 1839 and the exterior wall of the former Bishopsgate Station remain as the hint of the wonders that once were there.

Roy knew it not as the Bishopsgate Goodsyard but in the familiar parlance of railway workers as ‘B Gate,’ and B Gate remains a fabled place for him. By their very nature, railways are places of transition and, for Roy Wild, B Gate won a permanent place in his affections as the location of formative experiences which became his rite of passage into adulthood.

“At first, after I left school at fifteen, I went to work for City Electrical in Hoxton and I was put as mate with a fitter named Sid Greenhill. One of the jobs they took on was helping to build the Crawley new town. We had to get the bus to London Bridge, take the train to East Croydon and change to another near Gatwick Airport – which didn’t really exist yet. It was a schlep at seven o’clock in the morning all through the winter, but I stuck it for eighteen months.

My dad, Andy, was a capstan operator for the London & North Eastern Railway at the Spitalfields Empty Yard in Pedley St off Vallance Rd, so I said to him, ‘Can’t you get a job for me where you work?’ He said, ‘There’s nothing going at the moment but I can get you a place at B Gate.’

In 1953, at sixteen and a half, I started as van boy for Dick Wiley in the cartage department at B Gate. The old drivers had worked with horses, they were known as ‘pair-horse carmen’ or ‘single-horse carmen’ and, in the late forties when the horses were done away with and the depot became mechanised, the men were all called in and given three-wheeled Scammell Scarabs and licences, no driving tests in those days. There was a fleet of two hundred of them at B Gate and although strictly, as van boys, we weren’t allowed to drive, we flew around the depot in them.

Our round was Stoke Newington and we’d be given a ticket which was the number of your container and a delivery note of anything up to twenty-five destinations. Then we’d have lunch at a small goods yard at Manor Rd, Stoke Newington, and in the afternoon we’d do collections, picking up parcels and taking them back to B Gate, from where they’d be delivered by rail around the country.

I decided I wanted to work with George Holman, a driver who was known as ‘Cisco’ on account of his swarthy features which made him look Mexican. He was an East Ender like me, rough and ready, and always larking about. His round was Rotherhithe which meant driving through the tunnel and he was a bit of a lunatic behind the wheel. Each morning after the round, he would drop me off at my mum’s in Northport St for lunch and pick me up again at 2pm. One day, we had to go back through ‘the pipe’ as they called the tunnel in Mile End and he said to me, ‘You take it through the tunnel, you know how it works.’ I was only seventeen but I drove that great big truck through the tunnel without any harm whatsoever.

Next I went to work with Bill Scola, a driver from Bethnal Green – the deep East End. He used to do Billingsgate, Spitalfields, Borough, Covent Garden, Brentford and Nine Elms Markets. Bill was a rascal and I was nineteen by then. We were doing a bit of skullduggery and I was told that the British Transport Police were watching me, so I said to Bill, ‘Things are getting too hot,” and I left it alone completely.

Then, one day we were having breakfast with at least a dozen others at the table, including Sid Green who was  in charge of Bishopsgate football team, in the new canteen at B Gate when the British Transport Police came in, pinned my arms against my side and lifted me out of the chair. I was taken across to Commercial St Police Station and charged with larceny. They told me I had been seen lifting goods into the van that weren’t on the parcels sheet, with the intention of taking and selling them. I said I didn’t know what they were talking about. What were they were alleging was a complete fabrication and I had witnesses. What they were accusing me of was impossible because I had just clocked in – my clocking in number was 1917 – and there was a least a dozen witnesses on my side, but nevertheless I was convicted. I look back on it with great regret even now.

I was taken to Newington Butts Quarter Sessions which was the nearest Crown Court and I received six months sentence, even though I had first class character witnesses. I was taken straight to Wormwood Scrubs but kept apart from the inmates as a Young Prisoner. I couldn’t believe it, this was a for a first offence. I was sent to East Church open prison on the Isle of Sheppey and given a third remission off my sentence for good behaviour. It was like a Butlins Holiday Camp and I came home after four months. After that I did a couple of odd jobs, but I was full of regret – because I loved the railway so much and I made so many friends there, and particularly because I had disappointed my dad. That was the end of me and the LNER.

Then I met this guy, Billy Davis, he and Patsy (Patrick) Murphy held up Luton Post Office, but the postmaster grabbed hold of the gun and they shot and killed him, and they both got twenty-five years. He told me he worked for the railway and I asked, ‘Which depot?’ He said, ‘London, Midlands & Scottish Railway in Camden, why don’t you apply?’ So I did, I went along to Camden Town and was interviewed and told them I’d never worked on the railway before. When I started there as a driver, they gave me a brand new Bantam Carrier with a trailer and my round was Spitalfields Market, and I was paid by tonnage. The more weight you pulled onto the weighbridge at the Camden Town LMS depot, the more you earned.

I did it for some time and I always had plenty of fruit to take home to my mum. I got together with the Goods Agent’s secretary, he was the top man in the depot and I was on good terms with him too. I got very friendly, taking her out for more than a year, until one day she told me her boss wanted to see me in his office. He said to me, ‘I’ve got bad news – you never declared you were dismissed by LNER. Our security have run a check and they found it out. It’s gone above my head and I have to let you go. It’s all out of my hands.’ He told me he was sorry to see me go because of the amount of tonnage I brought in which was  more than other driver.

I was only there eighteen months. It was the finest time of my life because of the camaraderie with all the other drivers. It was a lovely, lovely job and I made friends that I still have to this day.”

Roy Wild with a model of his beloved Scammell Scarab

Roy with a Scammell Scarab in British Rail livery

Colin O’Brien’s photograph of a Scammell Scarab tipped over on the Clerkenwell Rd, 1953

Roy gets into the cabin of a Scamell Scarab of the kind he used to drive at Bishopsgate Goodsyard

Roy’s father Andy worked as a Capstan Operator at Spitalfields Empty Yard at Pedley St off Vallance Rd

Roy Wild & lifelong pal Derrick Porter, the poet – “I came from Hoxton but he came from Old St”

Bishopsgate Station c. 1900

In its heyday the area of tracks at the goodsyard was known as ‘the field’

Looking west, the abandoned goodsyard after the fire of 1964

Looking east, the abandoned goodsyard after the fire

The kitchens of the canteen at the goodsyard

The space of the former canteen where Roy was arrested  by the British Transport Police

Abandoned hydraulic lift for lifting vehicles at Bishopsgate goodsyard

The remains of the records at the Bishopsgate goodsyard

When Roy saw this photograph of the demolished goodsyard, he said, “I wish I could have gone and taken one of those bricks as a souvenir.”

The arch beneath the white tarpaulin was where Roy once drove in and out as a van boy

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A Brief History of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard

Only three tours left this year – Saturday 12th October, Saturday 20th November and Saturday 21st December.

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Peter Parker came across the remarkable figure of Judith Piepe (1920-2003) while researching ‘male vice’ in the East End for the second volume of his anthology Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-1967

Judith Piepe, 1966

In 1963, Stepney councillor and social worker Edith Ramsay was corresponding with a young priest called Kenneth Leech about her difficulties dealing with immigrants and homosexual men in the borough. He recommended that she get in touch with Judith Piepe, who lived in Dellow House just off Cable St, but had for many years worked with ‘male prostitutes in Soho’.

Judith was a well-known figure, not just for her social work but also because she befriended leading folk singers, including Bert Jansch, Al Stewart, Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, Peter Bellamy, and Simon & Garfunkel. She took her surname from her second husband, whom she married in England in 1951, but the details of her early life remain unclear, perhaps because it contained a good deal she wanted to forget.

She was born in Silesia (then part of Prussia, now in Poland). Her paternal grandfather was a wealthy Jewish financier, but her father, Fritz Sternberg, became a well-known Marxist economist. She was an only child, and 1926 moved with her father to Berlin, her mother – who may or not have been a French gypsy – having committed suicide three years earlier. When the Nazis came to power, Sternberg fled to Czechoslovakia, presumably leaving his thirteen-year-old daughter behind in someone’s care.

Judith was nevertheless taken hostage by the Gestapo, who imprisoned her for three months and tortured her in an attempt to find her father’s whereabouts. Yet Fritz seems to have taken little interest in his daughter, and after her release, she married briefly, then left Germany on her own, wandering around Europe without home or money for several years until she came to Switzerland where she studied for a doctorate in philology.

Shortly before the outbreak of war, Judith moved to the East End of London and found a job teaching at a girl’s school. She had been brought up an atheist but in 1946 she became a Christian and her faith guided the social work she had taken up. The church of St Anne’s, Soho, became her centre of operations, and it was here in 1967 that Kenneth Leech became an assistant priest and co-founded Centrepoint, the charity for the homeless.

Judith’s work revolved around ‘kids on the loose around Soho with nowhere to go, homosexual boys, kids on drugs’, all of whom she got to know by visiting the places where they congregated. In training she had been warned against becoming too involved with those she was trying to help, but she dismissed this as ‘a poisonous piece of teaching – complete rubbish’. ‘If I sat in an office looking respectable behind a desk they couldn’t come to me when they’re in difficulties,’ she said. ‘But because I spend my nights hanging about the clubs whether they are, they can talk to me. It is easier to help one’s friends than to help strangers. The kids know that I am fond of them – and they’re fond of me.’

Asked how young people recognized her as someone who could help them, she replied that it was a question of her past. ‘When one has been a refugee, knocking around Europe without a valid passport, without the right to stand on the ground where one stands or breathe the air one breathes, one is an outcast,’ she said. ‘When somebody has TB, after it has healed there are scars left which are visible to the x-ray machine. I’m no longer a refugee or an outcast, but the scars are there and outcasts have x-ray eyes.’ Young people, she believed, recognized something in her that made them feel she was one of them.

Recommending Judith to Edith Ramsay because of her counselling of rent boys, Leech had added that ‘her success and knowledge of this type of work is quite remarkable’. Indeed it was. Dismayed that many youths ‘had to prostitute themselves to airforce officers just to get a meal and shelter from the rain for the night’, she provided some of them with temporary accommodation in her spacious flat at 6 Dellow House. Here they might find themselves in the company of the famous folk singers for whom Piepe also provided beds when they were visiting London. It seems likely that it was staying in this mixed household that inspired the nineteen-year-old Al Stewart to write his song ‘Pretty Golden Hair’, which describes how a teenager drifts into homosexual prostitution.

Judith was drawn to folk music because she felt that it addressed the same social problems. She also realised that folk music was a way of reaching young people who would never ordinarily go to church, and she arranged for concerts to be held in the crypt of St Anne’s. ‘These troubadours of the 1960s sing to win your love for the unloved, the despised, the rejected,’ she said; their songs ‘are not particularly pretty, nor are they intended to be. But they are true, and the truth sets us free’.

Her suggestion that these songs ‘arose out of the situation in which I work’ was taken up in a 1966 episode of Meeting Point, BBC television’s series of documentaries on broadly religious themes. An interview with Judith about her work was juxtaposed with performances of such songs as Stewart’s ‘Pretty Golden Hair’ and Bert Jansch’s ‘Needle of Death’, which described heroin addiction.

Also featured was Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Blessed’, the lyrics of which – ‘Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on’ – echoed Judith’s beliefs. Paul Simon was a particular favourite, and in 1965 she was instrumental in his recording his first solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook – perhaps through her partner Stephen Delft, a highly regarded maker and repairer of guitars, who was also a talented sound technician frequently employed at Abbey Rd studios. She also wrote the liner notes for the album, and the introduction and notes to the book of the same name.

She claimed that when Simon & Garfunkel became famous and were put up by their record company at a grand London hotel, they still preferred to stay with her in Dellow St. Judith tried her hand at writing lyrics herself, providing the words of ‘The Hungry Child’ a song for Peter Bellamy’s band The Young Tradition that appeared on their 1967 album So Cheerfully Round

She described Simon’s ‘I am a Rock’ as ‘an almost clinical description of isolation’, the kind of isolation from which she hoped to rescue young people. Particularly isolated, she felt, were homosexuals, who were ‘very much a despised and an outcast minority – probably the only minority in this country that are not yet equal before the law’.

That those who administered the law were not always as objective as they should be was demonstrated when two plain-clothes policemen asked her what she was doing in a café much frequented by rent boys. When she explained her mission, one policeman said: ‘Well, I suppose you mean well, but you’re wasting your time with this lot. These queers are nothing but animals and ought to be exterminated.’ She ‘blew up at him’, and after he had departed, ‘very red in the face’, his colleague said to her: ‘I don’t think you’re wasting your time. I think if there were more of you there’d be need for fewer of us.’ This was in 1966, and the law would change the following year.

Meeting Point ends with film of Judith striding though the dark streets in her stylish cloak and thigh-length boots to the accompaniment of Stephen Delft performing ‘Come Down Lord from Your Heaven’, a ‘Soho De Profundis’ they had composed together. The couple would eventually marry in 1981, after which they bade farewell to Soho and the East End and emigrated to New Zealand. Now chiefly remembered for her connections to the world of folk music, Judith Piepe should also be celebrated for her social work, particularly with young rent boys. So many were helped by this remarkable woman.

Dellow House, Cable St where Judith Piepe lived

St Anne’s, Soho, which was Judith Piepe’s centre of operations

Blessed

By Paul Simon

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
Blessed is the lamb whose blood flows
Blessed are the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?

I got no place to go
I’ve walked around Soho for the last night or so
Ah, but it doesn’t matter, no

Blessed is the land and the kingdom
Blessed is the man whose soul belongs to
Blessed are the meth drinkers, pot sellers, illusion dwellers
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?

My words trickle down
From a wound that I have no intention to heal

Blessed are the stained glass, windowpane glass
Blessed is the church service, makes me nervous
Blessed are the penny rookers, cheap hookers, groovy lookers
O Lord, why have you forsaken me?

You may also like to read this earlier story by Peter Parker

The War on ‘Vice’ in the East End

Taking advantage of the early summer sunshine, Lew Tassell and I enjoyed a recent stroll through the City as he regaled me with tales of yesteryear.

PC Lewis Tassell on the beat in the seventies

‘Over my thirty years in the City of London Police I spent a lot of time engaged in duties other than walking the beat – security assignments, interviews, meetings and conferences in different locations in the Square Mile. Here are a few places of which I have fond memories and one in particular that was tragically sad.’

Pump Court

‘Working for twenty years in the Fraud Squad and a further sixteen years at the Serious Fraud Office, I spent a lot of time at case conferences in barristers’ chambers at 4 Pump Court off Middle Temple Lane where Henry Fielding lived in the eighteenth century.

The original buildings dated back to 1625 but many were destroyed during World War II and 4 Pump Court was rebuilt in 1952. The case in question took a number of years and led to the successful conviction of two fraudsters after a long trial at the Old Bailey in which the prosecution was led by a senior barrister from 4 Pump Court.

Walking through the Temple Estate is like stepping back in time, a haven in the centre of the metropolis. There are still gas lamps in Middle Temple Lane which in the eighties they were being switched on and off manually each day, although they are automatic today. ‘

Middle Temple Lane

Royal Courts of Justice

‘The Royal Courts of Justice house the High Court and Court of Appeal of England & Wales. During the seventies whilst working in the CID at Bishopsgate Police Station, I had a case of theft that went to trial at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey. All cases where the defendant elected to go to trial ended up at the Bailey no matter how trivial. This used to annoy some judges who were more used to dealing with high profile cases of murder, rape, robbery or fraud, rather than simple theft.

In fact my case was moved at the last minute from the Old Bailey, where they had no court available, to the Law Courts. So I ended up giving evidence here and it was all over in about two days with the defendant was found guilty.’

Micks Cafe

‘This was a Fleet St institution in the seventies when it was open twenty-four hours and seven days a week. It was constantly busy during the day but even busier at night when it was frequented by the print workers, drunks on their way home and homeless people who went there to keep warm, especially in winter.

On night duty in the seventies, we carried out a plain clothes observation in the cafe. It was suggested that the place was a location for dealing stolen gear and whatever was wanted by print workers could be sourced at Micks, though not – I should add – from those that ran it.

Needless to say the observations were fruitless since we stuck out like sore thumbs, sitting at cramped grimy tables sipping stewed tea all night. The establishment later acquired a apostrophe and became Mick’s Cafe before it closed in the nineties.’

St Paul’s Cathedral

‘I had many security duties at St Paul’s and I have had the good fortune to visit every part, from the crypt beneath to the cross on the top. One night when the cathedral was closed and sealed, I was tasked with patrolling the crypt alone in the dim light of the early hours of the morning. It was one of the few times that I have been truly spooked. I stood before the sarcophagus of the Duke of Wellington and immediately behind me was the tomb of Admiral Horatio Nelson. For some reason I started to shiver. Perhaps it was just the weight of history coupled with the fact it was in the middle of the night and I was on my own in the dark?

In 1982 I was on a security detail for a Service of Celebration & Thanksgiving to mark 60 years of the BBC in the presence of Her Majesty The Queen & His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh, as well as many other VIPs. Sir Charles Groves was conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra with members of the Scottish, Welsh & Northern Symphony Orchestras. It was by ticket only and there were no exceptions. When I checked in Sir Charles, he was followed by a woman who I stopped because she did not have a ticket. Sir Charles turned and exclaimed ‘That’s my wife, if you don’t let her in there will be no bloody music’. Today here is a memorial stone to him in the cathedral.’

Wood St Police Station

‘My base in the Fraud Squad for twenty years was Wood St Police Station. It was built in 1965 to house the communications department, the stables and garage as well as accommodation in the tower block, mainly for single men and women who were serving in the force.

When I joined the Squad in 1979, they occupied what was the former living accommodation. It was a fine building but not really conducive for use as a police station. The garage was underground with low ceilings that had exposed pipes and ductwork, making it unsuitable for many police vehicles and the canteen was directly above the stables which made it unpleasant in hot weather. In later years much of the building fell into disrepair because alterations could not be made to bring it up to the standard required for a modern police station since it was a Grade II* listed building. The building is now to be converted to a luxury hotel.’

Guildhall 

‘This is a fifteenth century Grade I listed building with a stunning medieval Great Hall where I fulfilled security duties at many functions over the years – banquets for visiting heads of state and Lord Mayor’s banquets. On two occasions, I even attended banquets myself as a guest at celebrations of the achievements of the Fraud Squad.’

Moorgate Station

‘As a police officer there are many tragic events that you have to deal with as best you can. On 28th February 1975 I was on early duty when I went into the front office at Bishopsgate Police Station. The phone rang and was answered by the sergeant. He asked me to walk around to Moorgate tube before my break as a train had run into the buffers. At the time, it was the worst peacetime accident on the London Underground that had happened. Forty-three people died and seventy-four others were injured. I still use Moorgate tube and I am always reminded of that dreadful day. There is a plaque at the station and a memorial in Finsbury Sq listing the names of those who died.’

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On the Beat with PC Lew Tassell

On the Beat with PC Lew Tassell again

The Brown Bear, Leman St

‘well known as being frequented almost exclusively by homos’

Peter Parker, editor of SOME MEN IN LONDON, Queer Life, 1945-1959 published today by Penguin, explores the roles of Edith Ramsay and Father Joe Williamson who made it their mission to clean up ‘vice’ in the East End.

Introducing a debate in the House of Lords on ‘Magistrates’ Powers and Control of Clubs’ in June 1960, the Labour peer Lord Stonham stated that he wished ‘to draw attention to the sudden growth in London, and other large towns, in the number of so-called ‘clubs’  at which, at great profit to themselves, vicious men exploit with impunity almost every known vice, and, in the process, break almost every legal and social law, written and unwritten.’

Having been born in Whitechapel, Stonham was particularly concerned about the clubs of the East End, a number of which had ‘become notorious for prostitution, homosexuality and drug-trafficking’. Among those supplying Stonham with information about the area’s social problems were Edith Ramsay, a long-serving member of Stepney Council whom he dubbed ‘a Florence Nightingale of the brothels’, and Father Joe Williamson, the well-known High Anglican vicar of St Paul’s Church, Dock St, who was known as ‘the prostitute’s padre’.

The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Ramsay was born in Highgate in 1895, but moved to Stepney as a young woman to teach vocational skills to young people (from the ages of fourteen to sixteen) at the Day Continuation School in Old Castle St. Her principal career was in education, and in 1931 she became head of the Stepney Women’s Evening Institute, a post she held until she retired in 1960. When she first came to Stepney she also spent time in local women’s hostels in order to understand conditions among the poor, and this led to her volunteering to do social work in the area, particularly among prostitutes,  immigrants and homosexual men.

Among Ramsay’s papers in Tower Hamlets’ Bancroft Library are a number of documents relating to the prevalence of ‘male vice’ in Stepney in the late fifties and early sixties. These give a frank and fascinating insight into a queer underworld far removed from that of the rather more soigné clubs and pubs of the West End.

The Wolfenden Report of 1957 is chiefly remembered for its recommendation that homosexuality should, with certain provisos, be decriminalised, but the Wolfenden Committee had been additionally appointed by the government to investigate prostitution. Both ‘vices’ were thought to have grown exponentially in the wake of the Second World War and were widely believed to be threatening the moral fabric of the nation.

As legal and social outcasts, some prostitutes and gay men had a kind of camaraderie, frequenting the same areas and patronising the same pubs, clubs and cafés. This was certainly true of the East End, though some venues gained a particular reputation as homosexual meeting places, as Ramsay explained. ‘There is the clear distinction in Stepney between ‘common pouffes’ and ‘select pouffes’,’ she wrote. ‘They have their own assembly points, and these change. For instance, the Cockney Cafe and the Brown Bear pub were well known as being frequented almost exclusively by homos. But this suddenly changed.’ Such changes were often a result of police raids, after which the clientele simply took their custom elsewhere.

Like pubs, clubs had to be licensed, and until 1954 there were a mere eighteen of them in Stepney, some attached to churches, others catering for medical students, sailors and those employed by breweries or the docks, and all of them ‘respectable’. By 1960 the number of clubs had risen to eighty, twenty-four of which had had their licences revoked – mostly for serving drinks outside licensing hours, though the New Life Club at 102 Commercial Rd was ‘struck off’ for a ‘deplorable record’ that included regular fights, broken windows and organized prostitution. Once a venue had been removed from the register, no new club could be  established on the premises for a stipulated period, usually twelve months.

Another infamous establishment was the Creole Club at 72 Cable St, which the Observer journalist Godfrey Hodgson had visited. According to one of Ramsay’s informants, Hodgson was greeted there by a white man, drunk, who apologised for leaving but said he must get back to his wife. (The men in the Club believed this man to be an MP but there is no proof of that.) The man introduced Hodgson to an African who was obviously his ‘boy-friend’, and charged the African to look after Hodgson. The African offered him ‘Men, boys, women, drink after hours, minor and major drugs’.

Some politicians could in fact to be found ‘slumming it’ in the East End, among them the Conservative’s Lord Boothby and Labour’s Tom Driberg, two men who may have been separated by party allegiances but were united in their taste for East End boys.

In 1959 an unidentified social worker was recruited by Ramsay to accompany Father Joe on several guided tours of the East End’s most disreputable haunts and to make written reports. Their first stop on a Saturday night was the aforementioned Brown Bear pub in Leman St, which Williamson declared ‘especially rough’, patronised by female prostitutes but also known as ‘a homosexual rendezvous’.

Passing the pub again on their way home at closing time, they observed a gang of fifteen or so youths ‘larking about outside, breaking milk bottles, very drunk and probably homosexuals from the look of them’. Quite what it was about these youths that identified them as homosexual is not revealed. Apparently bypassing East End Passage, which ran off Leman St and had been reported to Ramsay as the haunt of homosexual prostitutes, Father Joe also called at Wellclose Sq, where in Church House he had set up a rehabilitation hostel for ‘fallen women’. Williamson reported that on the corner of the square he had recently seen ‘four or five men, two of them with their trousers down and the others “driving up them like dogs”’ – not the kind of homosexual act ‘in private’ that the Wolfenden Committee had recommended should be legalised.  Not everyone approved of Father Joe’s social work, and some of the East End’s homosexual prostitutes resented what they saw as mere interference. Williamson related how one of them, accompanied by ‘two clients’ had knocked on his door and threatened him.

[Williamson] ‘went outside the door and locked it behind him and said what he says he always says ‘I’m too busy to be frightened of you. Now what have you got to tell me.’ He was really badly cussed; but later the publican from across the road said that he had been waiting in the shadows and that if there had been any trouble he and his friends would have given them a beating up they wouldn’t recover from.’

It is unclear which pub this was, but evidently not one where homosexual patrons would be as welcome as they were at the Brown Bear.

The second tour took place a week later and lasted from 9 to 11.30 pm. It was a Thursday, and so things were quieter than on the previous Saturday, but there were still some awkward encounters. ‘A new feature was a constant hanging-about on the corner of Leman and Dock St, shifting groups of three to six men, white. One as I passed, Irish, delivering a vehement harangue about something. W[illiamson] said he was homosexual, one of the ones who had threatened him the night the publican intervened.’ They then visited Cable St, where there was a ‘gambling joint’ called the Valletta where drugs were peddled. (The club’s name suggests that, like many such places in the East End, it was run by Maltese.) Father Joe said that he thought that ‘some doctors in the district give coloured men drugs, and one good young doctor admits that he has a patient who takes [i.e. steals] them.’

Another patient named in the report was Tony Hyndman, the former boyfriend of Stephen Spender, who appears as ‘Jimmy Younger’ in Spender’s 1951 autobiography World Within World. The report tactfully refers to Spender only as ‘a very famous writer’, adding that he ‘later married and ditched’ Hyndman, who was now living in the area and hopelessly addicted to drugs. ‘He was at one time given to ringing up very early in the morning to get money out of the writer’s wife, who gave it to him, but W claims to have stopped him doing that. He was left alone in the doctor’s surgery by a locum and stole a large amount of narcotics. Most of which he took until he was in a really serious state.’

By 1963, Edith Ramsay felt  that there had been ‘a remarkable decrease’ in the homosexual population of Stepney – or at any rate in the area’s visible homosexual activity. She added that ‘both “Maralyn” and “Jezebal”, two famous figures in that underworld, have both married and had children’. This did not lessen her concern for what she always saw as a social problem. Unlike many devout Christians, she believed that the church and society needed to reach out to homosexual men rather than ostracize them. ‘Of course homosexuals need special consideration, and parish priests should be given help to enable them to help the homos,’ she wrote to Kenneth Leech, a Stepney resident who was training for the ministry at Oxford and would become a curate at Holy Trinity, Hoxton. Leech had suggested founding a ‘special ministry’ for gay men, but Ramsay replied that ‘a “special ministry” implies segregating them, when what they need is to be brought into the normal community and helped – those who want help must have it by medical and, psychological experts.’

Of course, many homosexual men didn’t want this kind of help, preferring to be left to lead their lives as they saw fit. Within four years, a step in this direction took place when the Sexual Offences Act, 1967 was finally passed, meaning that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private’ was no longer be a criminal offence.

Father Joe Williamson

‘the prostitute’s padre’

St Paul’s, Dock St

Daily Mail feature of 1961, with Father Joe praying in thanks for the destruction of local housing with the caption, ‘Vice takes a knock – an old man thanks God.’

Church House, Wellclose Sq

Father Joe’s rehabilitation hostel for ‘fallen women’

Councillor Edith Ramsay MBE

‘There is the clear distinction in Stepney between ‘common pouffes’ and ‘select pouffes’

102 Commercial Rd, site of the New Life Club which was ‘struck off’ for a ‘deplorable record’

‘A new feature was a constant hanging-about on the corner of Leman and Dock St, shifting groups of three to six men…’

Williamson reported that on the corner of Wellclose Sq he had recently seen ‘four or five men, two of them with their trousers down…’

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PC Lew Tassell in 1969

My pal Lew Tassell and I decided to take advantage of the October sunlight to enjoy a gentle perambulation around Lew’s old stomping ground from the days when he was an officer in the City of London Police, and he told me stories of his time in the constabulary.

“Until recently Liverpool Street Arcade was a busy cut-through between Old Broad St and Liverpool St but now it is closed for redevelopment. The Arcade sits directly over the Metropolitan line which was originally a steam railway. Once the line switched to electric trains, they built over the station and the Arcade was opened on 11th March 1912. In the eighties, the Arcade was due to be demolished but, due to a petition of over 6,000 people, it was saved.

When I joined the City of London Police in 1969, and throughout my uniform years, one of my duties when working a night duty shift at Bishopsgate Police Station was to inspect the Arcade and it’s glazed roof.

The Arcade was locked from early evening until early morning. At about 2.00am every morning, a pair of officers collected a set of keys at Bishopsgate to open the Liverpool Street entrance, then we unlocked a door halfway down the Arcade with stairs that led to the roof. Next, we searched the whole of the roof above the shops to see if there was anything untoward, not that there ever was.”

“The church hall for St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate is a nineteenth century school room and former livery hall of the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers. At the front, there are two niches containing painted figures of charity children made of Coade stone.

When I was a detective at Bishopsgate Police Station in the early seventies, I was called to the church hall. The two figures had been stolen. They had been removed from the niches but were fortunately recovered nearby. As the figures had some value, I completed a crime report and the niches remained empty whilst the recovered figures were stripped of paint, cleaned and placed inside the hall. Replicas now stand in the niches at the front.

My other association with St Botolph’s is that my marriage banns were read here since I was living in Bishopsgate Police Station at the time.”

“Quite often when working a night shift at Bishopsgate in the seventies I would be assigned to place ‘cotton marks’ inside the entrance to a courtyard or alleyway that led to a dead end.

I stretched the cotton across the entrance about a couple of feet off the ground and checked later to see if it had been broken during the early hours, before any deliveries were made.

Many burglaries during this period were committed by ‘climbers’ who clamberd up drainpipes to enter buildings at night. They gaind access to all buildings from the roofs in the block by jumping across the narrow gaps between the buildings.

The picture here is of Brabant Court where I remember laying cotton marks. This courtyard houses an old building at no.4 which was built in 1710.”

“Walking the beat alone at night can be quite lonely especially in the early hours. I found you make quite a bit of noise in the stillness as you stroll through the empty streets. So I would often find an out of the way spot on my beat to sit and listen.

My favourite spot was the churchyard of St Olave’s where the gateway was usually left unlocked.

The church has a fascinating history. It’s most famous worshipper being Samuel Pepys whose tomb is inside the church. The Great Plague of 1665 is said to have broken out close by and 300 victims were buried in the churchyard, including Mary Ramsay who was widely blamed for bringing the disease to London.

I cannot help thinking that the reason the churchyard is raised, to the degree that you have to walk down steps to enter the church, is due to what lies beneath. Yet I never found it spooky, just peaceful and beautiful.

The church was hit by an incendiary bomb in 1941 and the heat from the fire melted the bells. In the early fifties, this metal was recast into new bells by the same foundry that created the originals, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.”

“Charles Dickens in ‘The Uncommercial Traveller’ refers to the gateway and churchyard of St Olave’s as ‘one of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of Saint Ghastly Grim.’

He recalls visiting the churchyard after midnight during a thunderstorm and seeing the skulls on the gateway ‘having the air of a public execution.'”

“Close to Tower Hill station stands quite a large section of Roman Wall, although the higher parts were added during medieval times.

In the seventies, the wall was not as appreciated as it is today. Whilst patrolling I often walked through or past it and it was surrounded with what I recall was nothing more than wasteland.

Today it is well preserved with raised walkways and has become a feature of the City of London. But the downside is that it is now surrounded by large buildings, some built within inches of the wall itself.”

“The Still & Star is boarded up and remains one of the last undeveloped plots in Aldgate. Its future is uncertain. Tucked away from the hustle and bustle, Little Somerset St leads from Aldgate to Mansell St which is the boundary of the City of London. This was where I used to patrol when walking to Tower Bridge or Shorter Street, a traffic control point at the end of the Minories.

I always felt I was in the proper East End when taking this route past the pub and just around the corner was a seedy snooker hall that always seemed to be busy. Both gone now.”

Another tale of burglary in the City, this time at the Aquascutum shop on the corner of Gracechurch St and Leadenhall Market. In the seventies I was called to the shop when there was a break-in.

Whilst examining the crime scene, I noticed a pile of brick foundations in the basement which was being used as a storeroom. Piles of boxes were scattered all around the brickwork.

‘Oh that’s part of the Roman Wall’ I was informed. At the time, I did not know the Wall existed here and it was fascinating to see it. Today the shop is a hair salon.”

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On the Beat with PC Lew Tassell

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Any readers from out of town who are preparing a visit to the capital this summer might like to read these excerpts from The Stranger’s Guide, exposing all the frauds of London, that I found in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute.

The Countryman arrived in London.

Beaten by bullies & robbed.

Escaped & chased by watchmen.

Returned home gives a queer account of London.

BAWDS – Beware, young women, of those who, without any knowledge, pretend to be acquainted with you, your families and friends. This is an old bait to entice young women to their den to be devoured by the ravenous wolves to whom the bawd is a provider. Beware, ye unthinking young men, of receiving letters of assignation to meet at her house, for such letters are calculated to ensnare you and bring you to misery and destroy your health, fame and fortune. Avoid, ye countrymen and women, the pretended friendships of strangers that welcome you to town upon the arrival of the coach and that accost you at the inns, as they generally attend there for that purpose. If you once permit them to converse with you, they will by their artful  speeches, so far ingratiate themselves into your good graces as the engage your belief, get the better of your resolutions  and at length bring  you, by listening to their stories, to ruin and destruction.

BULLIES – Are dependent upon bawds & whores, sometimes the bully pretends to be the husband of the whore, whose bread he eats, whose quarrel he fights, and at whose call he is ready to do as commanded. It is very common for these women to bring home a gentleman and on entering the house ask the maid in a whisper if her master is at home. The maid according to former instructions replies, “No, he is gone out of town and will not return until tomorrow.” Upon which the gentleman is invited in and entertained with a story of the bully’s jealousy and the whore’s constancy. When the gentleman expresses a desire to leave and the bill being called for, he finds fault with the change, then the maid enters and says her master is below and immediately the bully appears and demands to know the gentleman’s business there – if means to debauch his wife? He then blusters and talks about bringing an action but at length is pacified by the bill being discharged.

DUFFERS –  These are a set of men that play upon the credulity of both sexes, by plying at the corner of streets, courts and alleys, their contraband wares, which generally consist of silk handkerchiefs made in Spitalfields, remnants of silk purchased at the piece brokers, which they tell you are true India, and stockings from Rag Fair or Field Lane, sometimes stolen, sometimes bought at very low prices, which they declare are just smuggled in from France, and therefore can afford to give you a bargain, if you will become the purchaser. On the other hand, should you not purchase, you will get abused and your pocket picked, at which they are very dexterous. Or, should you give them money to change, they tell you they will step to the public house to get it changed and come again in an instant. Then you see them enter the house and discover later, upon enquiry, they have escaped by the back door, to your great loss and mortification.

FORTUNE TELLERS & CONJURERS –  Almost all countries abound with these vermin. In London, we have several very famous in the Astrological Science, who pretend to a knowledge of future events by observations of the celestial signs of the zodiac. The better to carry on their delusions, they can tell you whether your life will be happy or miserable, rich or poor, fruitful or barren, and thousand incidents to please your fancy and raise your curiosity, insinuating at the same time (if they think you have money about you) that much good awaits you, therefore they must have a greater price for their intelligence. Who would not give or guinea, nay two – say they for the completion of their wishes, be it wisdom or wealth,  rather than a half a crown to learn that they might live in folly and poverty the rest of their lives?

FOOTPADS –  Are so numerous and so often described in the public papers that little new light can be thrown upon them and their practices. Daring insolence and known-down arguments are generally their first salute, after which they rifle your pockets and, if you have but little of value about you, they often maim or violently bruise you for want of that you are not in possession of. These shocking acts of these rapacious sons of plunder call for the interference of the magistracy to put a stop to their daring and consummate impudence as they exhibit, in and about the metropolis, skulking in bye-lanes, desolate places, hedges and commons, in order to waylay the unsuspecting stranger or countryman.

GAMBLERS – There are so many methods of gambling as there are trades and they move in so many spheres, from the most noble dukes and duchesses to the most abandoned chimney-sweeper, pretenders to honour and honesty, versed in various tricks and arts, by which many among the nobility and the gentry have squandered away their fortunes for the occupation of a Complete Gambler or in the true sense of the word, an Expert Gambler. The better to put you on guard against this villainy, I will mention several of the most fashionable and alluring passtimes at which various methods of deluding and cheating are practiced with some success, viz. gaming houses and horse races, cock-fighting, bowling, billiards, tennis, pharo, rouge et noir, hazard &c. together with routs, assemblies, masquerades and concerts, of a particular or private nature. In the latter of these, you will find notorious gamblers of the female sex, who deal in art and deception, as well as some more notorious male cheats who barter one commodity for another without a reference of credit or making it a debt of honour.

HANGERS-ON – These are a set of men of an indolent life, who rather than labour to gain a livelihood, will submit to any meanness that they may eat the bread of idleness. There are many kinds, some pretending to understand the sciences, others the arts, some set up for authors, others wits and the like. Hangers-on will eat or drink with you wherever you stay but will never offer to pay a farthing, however in lieu thereof, they will tell you an indecent story or sing you the latest lewd song. These you will easily find out and may easily get rid of by not treating or encouraging them upon your arrival.

HIGHWAYMEN – Are desperate and resolute persons who having spent their patrimony or lavished their substance upon whores and gamesters, take to the road, in order to retrieve their broken fortunes and either recoup them by meeting with good booty or end their lives in Newgate. The best means to avoid highwaymen is not to travel by night and in be cautious in displaying money, banknotes or other valuables at the inns you put up at, and be careful what company you join for fear they learn of whither you are going and for what purpose – if to pay or receive money, they will almost certainly waylay and rob, if not murder you.

JILTS – Are ladies of easy virtue, who, through an hypocritical sanctity of manners, and pretensions to virtue and religion, draw the countryman and inexperienced cit into their clutches. Of all whores, the jilt is the most to be avoided – for knowing more than others, she is capable of doing more mischief.

KIDNAPPERS or CRIMPS –  A set of men of abandoned principles, who having lavished away their fortunes enter into the pay of the East India Company, in order to recruit their army – and, in time of war, when a guinea or two is advertised to be given to any person that brings a proper man, of five feet eight or nine inches high, these kidnappers lie in wait in different places of rendezvous, in order to entrap men for money.

RING-DROPPERS – These are a set of cheats, who frequently cheat simple people, both from the country and in London, out of their money, but most commonly practice their villainous arts upon young women. Their method is to drop a ring just before such persons come up, when they accost them thus, “Young woman, I have found a ring and I believe it is gold for it has a stamp upon it.” Immediately, an accomplice joins in, who being asked the question replies, “It is gold.” “Well” says the formers, “As this young woman saw me pick it up, she has the right to half of it.” As it often happens that the young person has but a few shillings in her pocket,  the dropper says, “If you have a mind for the ring, you shall have it for what you have got in your pocket and whatever else you can give me,” which sometimes turns out to be a good handkerchief, cloak or other article. The deluded creature then shows the ring to another person in the street who informs her she is cheated by sharpers and the ring is not worth tuppence, being only brass gilt with a false stamp put on the deceive the unwary.

PICK-POCKETS – There are more pick-pockets in and about London than in all Europe besides, that make a trade and what they call a good living by their employment. The opera, playhouses, capital auctions, public gardens &c swarm with them. And, of late years, they have introduced themselves into our very churches and more particularly Methodist meetings. Therefore it would be prudent, when in a crowd, to keep one hand on your money and the other on your watch, when you find anyone push against you. Pocket books are only secure in the inside pocket with the coat buttoned and watch chains should be run through a small loop contrived for the purpose of securing the watch in the fob.

QUACKS – These  are a set of vile wretches who pretend to be versed in physic and surgery, without education, or even knowledge of a common recipe. If they think the patient is able to pay handsomely, they make them believe their case is desperate and generally turn them out worse than they find them.

SETTERS – These are a dangerous set of wretches who are capable of committing any villainy, as well by trapping a rich heir into matrimony with a cast-off mistress as by coupling a young heiress to a notorious sharper, down to the lowest scene of setting debtors for the bailiff and his followers. Smitten at the first glance of a lady, you resign your heart and hand at discretion, which she immediately accepts, on a presumption that delays are dangerous. The conjugal knot being tied, you find the promised and wished-for land, houses and furniture, the property of another and not of yourself.

SMUGGLERS – These are a numerous race of people that have no other way of living than following the illegal practice of smuggling. Two different gangs are concerted in carrying on this wicked business, the first to import the goods from abroad and the other to dispose of them when landed, but if the first were taken and punished as they deserve, the latter would fall of course.

WAGON HUNTERS – These are errant thieves, that ply in the dusk of the evening to rob the wagons upon their arrival. They are equally skillful in cutting away portmanteaus, trunks and boxes from behind chaises &c, if not thoroughly watched, which is the duty of every driver to take care of, by attending to the vehicle under his charge and giving a good look-out.

Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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On the morning of 4th September 1724, an inconsequential thief named Jack Sheppard was to be hung at Tyburn for stealing three rolls of cloth, two silver spoons and a silk handkerchief. But instead of the routine execution of another worthless felon, London awoke to the astonishing news that he had escaped from the death cell at Newgate.

With the revelation that this was the third prison break in months by the handsome boyish twenty-two year old Jack Sheppard, he flamed like a comet into the stratosphere of criminality – embodying the role of the charismatic desperado to such superlative effect that his colourful reputation for youthful defiance gleams in the popular imagination two centuries later.

In the spring, he broke out through the roof of St Giles Roundhouse, tossing tiles at his guards. In the summer, with his attractive companion Elizabeth Lyon, he climbed through a barred window twenty-five feet above the ground to escape from New Bridewell Prison, Clerkenwell. And now he had absconded from Newgate too, using a metal file smuggled in by Elizabeth and fleeing in one of her dresses as disguise. Sheppard was a popular sensation, and everyone was fascinated by the inexplicable mystery of his unique talent for escapology.

Spitalfields’ most notorious son, Jack Sheppard, was born in Whites Row on 4th March 1702 and christened the very next day at St Dunstan’s in Stepney, just in case his infant soul fled this earth as quickly as it arrived. Unexceptionally for his circumstances and his time, death surrounded him – named for an elder brother that died before his birth, he lost his father and his sister in infancy. When his mother could not feed him, she gave him to the workhouse in Bishopsgate at the age of six, from where he was indentured to a cane chair maker, until he died too. Eventually at fifteen years old, he was apprenticed to a carpenter in Covent Garden, following his father’s trade, but at age twenty he met Elizabeth Lyon, his partner in crime, at the Black Lion in Drury Lane, a public house frequented by criminals and the infamous Jonathan Wild, known as the “Thief-taker General.”

On 10th September 1724, Sheppard was rearrested after his break-out from Newgate and returned there to a high security cell in the Stone Castle, where he was handcuffed and fettered, then padlocked in shackles and chained down in a chamber that was barred and locked. Yet with apparent superhuman ability – inspiring the notion that the devil himself came to Sheppard’s assistance – he escaped again a month later and enjoyed a very public fortnight of liberty In London, eluding the authorities in disguise as a dandy and carousing flamboyantly with Elizabeth Lyon, until arrested by Jonathan Wild,  buying everyone drinks at midnight at a tavern in Clare Market, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Back in Newgate – now the most celebrated criminal in history – hundreds daily paid four shillings to visit Sheppard in his cell, where he enjoyed a drinking match with Figg the prizefighter and Sir Henry Thornhill painted his execution portrait.

Two hundred thousand people turned out for Jack Sheppard’s hanging on 16th November, just two months since he came to prominence, and copies of his autobiography ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe were sold. Four years later, John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera,” with the character of Macheath modelled upon Sheppard and Peachum based upon his nemesis Jonathan Wild, premiered with spectacular success. Biographical pamphlets and dramas proliferated, with Henry Ainsworth’s bestseller of 1839 “Jack Sheppard” – for which George Cruikshank drew these pictures – outselling “Oliver Twist.” Taking my cue from William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote that, “George Cruikshank really created the tale and Mr Ainsworth, as it were, merely put words to it,” I have published these masterly  illustrations here as the quintessential visual account of the life of Spitalfields’ greatest rogue.

And what was the secret of his multiple prison breaks?

There was no supernatural intervention. Sheppard had outstanding talent as a carpenter and builder, inherited from his father and grandfather who were both carpenters before him and developed during the six years of his apprenticeship. With great physical strength and a natural mastery of building materials, he possessed an intimate understanding of the means of construction of every type of lock, bar, window, floor, ceiling and wall – and, in addition to this, twenty-two year old Jack Sheppard had a burning appetite to wrestle whatever joy he could from his time of splendour in the Summer of 1724.

Mrs Sheppard refuses the adoption of her little son Jack

Jack Sheppard exhibits a vindinctive character.

Jack Sheppard committing the robbery in Willesden church.

Jack Sheppard gets drunk and orders his mother off.

Jack Sheppard’s escape from the cage at Willesden.

Mrs Sheppard expostulates with her son.

Jack Sheppard and Blueskin in Mr Wood’s bedroom.

Jack Sheppard in company with Elizabeth Lyon escapes from Clerkenwell Prison.

The audacity of Jack Sheppard.

Jack Sheppard visits his mother in Bedlam.

Jack Sheppard escaping from the condemned cell in Newgate.

The first escape.

Jack Sheppard tricking Shortbolt, the gaoler.

The second escape.

Jonathan Wild seizing Jack Sheppard at his mother’s grave in Willesden.

Jack Sheppard sits for his execution portrait in oils by Sir James Thornhill  – accompanied by  Figg the prizefighter (to Jack’s right), John Gay, the playwright (to Jacks’s left), while William Hogarth sketches him on the right.

Jack Sheppard’s irons knocked off in the stone hall in Newgate.

Jack Sheppard  of Spitalfields (Mezzotint after the Newgate portrait by Sir James Thornhill, 1724) – “Yes sir, I am The Sheppard, and all the gaolers in the town are my flocks, and I cannot stir into the country but they are at my heels baaing after me…”

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Click to enlarge this print, reproduced courtesy of V&A Museum

Biographer Julian Woodford, author of ‘The Boss of Bethnal Green’, will be telling the breathtakingly appalling story of Joseph Merceron on Tuesday 2nd May 6pm at the Hanbury Hall in Hanbury St where Merceron was baptised in 1764.

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Merceron was the East End’s first corrupt politician and also the East End’s first gangster, ruling Spitalfields and Bethnal Green for fifty years through the end of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century.

Today Julian Woodford outlines the tale of James Hadfield, mysterious would-be assassin of George III, revealing how his pistol found its way into the hands of Merceron and where it is today.

When I talk about how Joseph Merceron ruled the East End for half a century, I am often asked ‘How did he get away with it?’ It is a question I could not answer until I discovered that he owned a gun which almost changed English history.

In 1795, Merceron used his position of influence in Bethnal Green to become a magistrate. Just weeks afterwards, King George III’s carriage windows were shattered by an angry mob as he travelled to open Parliament and Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger launched a ‘reign of terror’ with laws forbidding public assembly or publication of ‘seditious writings.’ Secretly, the Home Office also set up an extensive spy network in the East End administered by the local magistrates and their clerks.

During the early seventeen-nineties, in the wake of the French Revolution, radical societies sprang up across London – especially in the East End. Their members agitated for universal suffrage or, in more extreme, cases a revolution of their own. Over the next few years, Pitt’s ‘Gagging Acts’ were applied with increasing severity and the Home Office spies busied themselves in infiltrating radical societies. Democratic activists and mutineering sailors were rounded up and incarcerated without trial at Coldbath Fields Prison in Clerkenwell.

The ritual abuse they suffered at the hands of the Prison Governor, Thomas Aris, was ignored or even encouraged by Merceron and his fellow magistrates. But when the prisoners’ plight was raised in Parliament by the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett, it became the subject of a national scandal that rocked the Pitt government and damaged the credibility of the Middlesex magistrates.

Then, in the spring of 1800, came an act of terror that appeared to justify Pitt’s harsh conservatism. James Hadfield was a British soldier who had suffered horrendous head wounds in the Napoleonic Wars, and been captured and tortured by the French. Released in a prisoner exchange but traumatised to the point of insanity and unfit for further service, Hadfield was simply turned onto the London streets. Here he encountered an itinerant preacher named Bannister Truelock, who persuaded Hadfield he could trigger the Second Coming of Christ – he just needed to shoot the King and die in the attempt.

On 15th May 1800, Hadfield bought an old flintlock pistol from a pawnbroker and made his way to Drury Lane Theatre, where George III was due to attend a Royal Command Performance. As the King took a bow from the Royal Box, Hadfield pulled out his pistol and fired, narrowly missing his Majesty. Despite a lengthy investigation and an apparemt attempt by the government to rig the jury, Hadfield was acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity, setting an important legal precedent. Instead of being executed, he was committed to the Bethlehem hospital in Moorfields where he spent the next forty-one years writing poems to his pet squirrels.

You might wonder what the connection is to The Boss of Bethnal Green? In 2006, when I started researching my book, I traced Joseph Merceron’s descendants and met his great-great-great grandson Daniel, who showed me an ancient tin box full of Merceron’s papers. This was enough to make my journey worthwhile, but I was dumbstruck when Daniel walked back into the room brandishing an old flintlock pistol and casually announced that – according to family lore – it had once belonged to The Boss and was used in an assassination attempt on George III at Drury Lane in 1800.

That was all Daniel knew and, although I remembered James Hadfield’s story, I could not think how Joseph Merceron could possibly have been involved. Just an hour’s research on the internet uncovered the answer. The transcript of Hadfield’s trial revealed the key prosecution witness was Major Wright, a solicitor of Wellclose Sq and clerk to the Tower Hamlets magistrates. He was a significant figure in Merceron’s circle and closely linked to the Home Office spy network. At Drury Lane, the Major had been sitting within arm’s reach of Hadfield and collared him with his weapon after the event. Among the trial papers are letters from Home Office spies claiming that Hadfield and Truelock were members of the London Corresponding Society which had infiltrated army regiments, including Hadfield’s 15th Light Dragoons.

Remarkably, Major Wright was allowed to keep the pistol as a souvenir. Yet his will lists a print of the assassination attempt among his effects not the gun, which had given to his master – Joseph Merceron. Based on the evidence, I believe Major Wright was secretly tailing James Hadfield on behalf of the Home Office, but it did not suit the government to blow his cover at Hadfield’s trial.

This anecdote offers the explanation for the astonishing longevity of Joseph Merceron’s career as the Godfather of Regency London. Despite being responsible for appalling corruption on a vast scale, he was the devil-the-government-knew, manning the front line in the East End for William Pitt’s ‘war on sedition.’ Merceron owned and licensed many of the pubs where the radical societies met. Merceron’s clerks were actively involved in running spies and, despite repeated attempts to prosecute him during his first three decades in power, the government repeatedly refused to do so and it was only in 1818 – well after the end of the Napoleonic Wars – that he was finally brought to trial and jailed briefly.

James Hadfield’s pistol – the gun that nearly changed history

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The Boss of Bethnal Green

In Search of The Boss of Bethnal Green

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Joseph Merceron was the East End’s first corrupt politician and also the East End’s first gangster, ruling Spitalfields and Bethnal Green for fifty years through the end of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Yet he was also an exploitative developer who built swathes of substandard housing, which ultimately led to cholera outbreaks and contributed to the human catastrophe of poverty and overcrowding in the nineteenth century East End.

Birthplace of Joseph Merceron “On Sunday 29th January 1764, Joseph Merceron was born on Brick Lane, which formed the boundary between the parishes of Spitalfields and its eastward neighbour Bethnal Green. His parents were James Merceron, a Huguenot pawnbroker and former silk weaver, and his second wife Ann. The Mercerons had three other children: Annie, Joseph’s two-year-old sister, John, almost thirteen, and Catherine, eight, the latter two being the surviving offspring from James’s first marriage.”

“Joseph was christened at the local Huguenot church known as La Patente, in Brown’s Lane (the building and lane are now known as Hanbury Hall and Hanbury Street) just a short walk from his parents’ house. The Mercerons, like other Huguenot families in the area, clung tightly to their nationality. Joseph’s details in the register of baptisms – the first recorded at La Patente for 1764 – were entered in French, which many families still insisted on speaking out of respect for their ancestors.”

“On the corner of Fournier Street stands the Jamme Masjid, since 1976 one of London’s largest mosques. For much of the twentieth century it was a synagogue, and before that it spent a decade as a Methodist chapel. Originally, before a brief occupation by the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, it was a Huguenot church. High on a wall is the date of its completion, 1743, and a sundial with its motto: Umbra Sumus (‘we are shadows’).”

“The Merceron pawnshop at 77 Brick Lane was at the epicentre of this district, among a row of ramshackle buildings directly opposite Sir Benjamin Truman’s imposing and famous Black Eagle brewery. The Black Eagle was one of the largest breweries in the world. To those living opposite, the mingled odours of yeast, malt and spilt beer – not to mention the steaming output of the many dray horses – must have been overpowering, even by the pungent standards of the times. The noise, too, was tremendous, as the shouts of draymen punctuated the rumble of horse-drawn carriages and carts up and down the lane.”

“The judge had ordered the execution to take place several miles away at Tyburn, the usual site of such events in London, but the master weavers – keen to dispose of Valline and Doyle in front of their own community to discourage further loom cutting – lobbied successfully to change the location to ‘the most convenient place near Bethnal Green church’. Several thousand people assembled outside The Salmon & Ball to see Valline and Doyle hang. Bricks and stones were thrown during the assembly of the gallows. They protested their innocence to the end, but to no effect. Doyle’s last words were enough to ignite an already explosive situation. As soon as the hanging was over, the crowd tore down the gallows and surged back to Spitalfields…”

“On 26th October 1795, Joseph Merceron donned his magistrate’s wig and robes and climbed the steps of the imposing Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green for his first Middlesex Sessions meeting. This was a world away from Brick Lane. The Sessions House, built in the aftermath of the Gordon Riots, was awe-inspiring and was said to rival any courthouse in England.”

“St John on Bethnal Green was built by the eminent architect Sir John Soane but budgetary constraints led to his grand design for a steeple being aborted, replaced with a stunted tower of particularly phallic design that rapidly became a source of bawdy amusement throughout the neighbourhood. Merceron was outraged. Announcing that the design had ‘mortified and disappointed the expectations of almost every individual’, he ordered Brutton to write to complain. The task put Brutton in an acutely awkward position: how to explain the exact nature of the problem? The vestry clerk’s literary skills were tested to the limit as he described the tower’s ‘abrupt termination in point of altitude’ that made it ‘an object of low wit and vulgar abuse’.”

“All the great and good of London’s East End were there. Twenty thousand people, packed six deep in places along the Bethnal Green Road, had turned out to see the cortège on its way to St Matthew’s church. Just before one o’clock the procession arrived, at a sedate walking pace. The jet-black horses, with their sable plumes, were blinkered to prevent anything from distracting the stately progress of the hearse. Merceron was the original ‘Boss’ of Bethnal Green, the Godfather of Regency London, controlling its East End underworld long before celebrity mobsters such as the infamous Kray twins made it their territory. His funeral at the church of St Matthew, Bethnal Green – the very same church where the Krays’ funerals would be held more than 150 years later – reflected his importance: it was by far the biggest event to take place at the church since it was established in the 1740s.”

Tomb of Peter Renvoize “His closest ally and childhood friend, Peter Renvoize, was repeatedly elected as churchwarden for much of this period, from which position he helped Merceron pull off his most audacious financial coup yet. Bethnal Green’s share of the government relief grant was £12,200, equivalent to almost three times the annual poor’s rates raised by the parish. Having obtained the money, Merceron appointed himself chairman of a committee, with four of his closest associates, including Renvoize, to manage its distribution. What happened next is difficult to determine. But it is clear that, five months after the government had advanced the funds, there were several thousand pounds sitting in Merceron’s own account.”

“As for Joseph Merceron, lying buried in the shadow of the vestry room he dominated for half a century, there is one last strange episode to recount. In the afternoon sunshine of Saturday 7th September, 1940, as millions of Londoners sat down to their tea, the ‘Blitz’ began. Bethnal Green suffered terribly, and in the carnage St Matthew’s church took a direct hit from an incendiary bomb. Next morning it was a roofless, burnt out shell, but two gravestones survived the bombing intact. The first, outside the main entrance to the church, is that of Merceron’s old friend Peter Renvoize. About twenty paces away, a large pink granite slab, surrounded by a low iron rail in the shelter of the south wall of the church, is the grave of Joseph Merceron and his family. He spent a lifetime cheating the law, somehow it is fitting that he should have cheated the Luftwaffe too.”

“Merceron Houses, erected in 1901 by the East End Dwellings Company on land formerly part of Joseph Merceron’s garden in Bethnal Green.”

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The Boss of Bethnal Green