A GLARING SOURCE OF CORRUPTION, EXETER, 1844

"John Wotton the landlord of the Mermaid Inn, Exeter, was summoned for allowing Card playing on his premises.  

A lad named Davey aged 14 stated that on Tuesday 5th  Nov. inst, he and several boys spent several hours  at the defendant's house playing at bagatelle and cards.  Witness was also there on the next night playing at cards in the tap room with several other lads.  The landlord himself played with them. - Witness brought the cards with him in his pocket, they played for beer.

His Worship the Mayor, after consulting with his brother magistrates, addressed the defendant in very strong terms upon the immorality (as well as illegality) of his conduct in encouraging youths to gamble.  The Bench were determined to stop the card playing in public houses which had now become a great and glaring source of corruption to the boys of the city of Exeter, the robberies so frequently committed upon masters and employers were solely the result of public house gambling.  The defendant was fined 50s. for each offence and 12s. expenses.  ordered to pay within a week, or distrained upon for the amount."

Card-playing was  seen as a prevalent offence.  Five pounds, twelve shillings was a hefty fine in 1844.  It would buy four donkeys!  I hope John Wotton found the cash.

The Mermaid was a famous, ancient, Exeter hostelry between Combe Street and Preston Street.

Bagatelle canot have been illegal per se because the tables were installed in many public-houses but it seems card-playing was - and you needed to bring your own cards in your pocket.  The gambling for beer though was certainly deemed not only illegal but a great and glaring source of corruption. Of course the age lacked social scientists to test such assertions.

The lad named Davey was fourteen, some of the other boys were perhaps younger. I imagine them with little old men's faces sitting round the pub-table knocking back the beer, smoking and gambling, - a hand of cards with the landlord, -  laughing and joking and thinking themselves very grown up. 

Nowadays, as perhaps an equivalent,  one can see, behind the plate-glass, alarmingly young-looking cocktail-sippers sitting around tables in the  Queen Street gin-palaces, each one intent on his or her own mobile-phone,  -  privately playing online poker perhaps! 

Source: The Exeter Flying Post, 21st November, 1844.

THE IDENTITY OF THE CABBAGES, EXETER, 1844.

At the Castle of Exeter on Friday 15th November 1844, a man named Dinham, who five months before had been taken up by the constable of the parish of St Thomas, Ratcliffe for stealing cabbage plants at Alphington, came to court accusing the constable of malpractice.  

Dinham swore that the day after he was arrested....

"....Ratcliffe came to him in the lock-up house and offered to cut off the ends of the stumps so as to destroy the identity of the cabbages, if Dinham would give him 5s.  This he could not do; but he said his wife should bring him a pawn-ticket for a watch, which was done the following morning before he went to the Magistrates at the Castle.

"The tale was to be corroborated by the evidence of Dinham's wife, but she was contradicted.  Ratcliffe did not deny he had the ticket,  but he proved that he took it honestly for his expenses after this case was dismissed, as it was from not one of the stumps fitting.  Who cut the stumps, however, remans a mystery.  The bench dismissed this complaint," 

This altogether bizarre case defeats me.  Here was Dinham, virtually admitting to the Great Cabbage Robbery by saying he had bribed the constable with a pawn-ticket to cut the stumps off the 'evidence.'  This, presumably, because the prosecutor in the cabbage-case depended on evidence collected in the cabbage-field by trying to match the cut cabbage stumps to the stumps still in the ground. (an interesting image!)   

The constable, Ratcliffe, still held the pawn-ticket and Dinham's watch was still in the pawn -shop.  Dinham's alleged cabbage-stealing had been dismissed for lack of stump-evidence.  Ratcliffe somehow convinced the Magistrates that the pawn-ticket came his way legitimately.   It is hard to imagine how.  

The Gazette avers that the stumps had been cut but that who had cut them remained a mystery.  The bench dismissed the complaint.  

Curiouser and curiouser!  

Source:  The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette,  16th November, 1844.

A SHIP-BOY, EXETER, 1844.

"On Tuesday, Frederick Bodley, the master of a trading vessel lying in the basin was summoned to the Guildhall by the mother of a boy whom he had taken from Exeter as a ship-boy on his last voyage  (but who had been left at Dover), for payment of a sum of money, as wages for one month and twenty-eight days, the period the lad was on board the ship, in order to get him home.

"It appeared that the defendant took the lad on board, having agreed to give him what he was worth at the conclusion of the voyage;  but the youth was ill from sea-sickness all the while, it being his first trip out to sea.  His shoes being worn out, he applied to the defendant to buy him a new pair; but he replied he had no money.  It was not clear whether the boy absented himself from the ship at Dover, or was unable to continue on board.

"The Bench suggested that Bodley should give ten shillings to the mother; but this he refused, saying it was much more than the boy was worth, and the summons was enlarged until the boy came back, which the mother said should be next week, if she "distressed herself of the last thing to do it.""

As so often, I find myself wishing for more information than is given by the report  (The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 2nd November, 1844).  How old was this boy?  What was his name?  &c.  Nevertheless I blog him as an example of  ship's boys of the mid-Victorian age and  of the notorious mistreatment of them by "cruel" skippers.  There must have been responsible, even generous, masters of trading vessels but Frederick  Bodley was clearly not one of them.   By the sound of it he took this 'boy' to sea for two months and then stranded him in Dover with no money and no shoes to his feet and was not prepared to give the 'distressed' mother any help to recover her child.  The Exeter magistrates seem not to have remonstrated with him!

LIKE THE SKINNED EELS, EXETER, 1844.

 "Yesterday morning, as the Half Moon Railway Omnibus was standing in front of the Star Inn, the horses started off, and galloped at a furious rate down Fore-street Hill, across Exe Bridge and into the shop of Mr Bond, cooper, at the corner of  Okehampton-street, St. Thomas.

"As the accident occured so early as four o'clock, it may naturally be supposed that the happy inmates must have been rocked, not only out of their slumbers but absolutely out of their beds,

"Let it not surprise our readers that such was not the case;  in fact the worthy cooper, like the skinned eels, has become so used to such occurences, that although he thought them cruel in the first place, he is now quite quiescent under the infliction -with the proviso, of course, that the damaged glass be replaced.

"The horses, as well as the shop windows, received but little injury; and what renders the incident more interesting, is the fact that a lady and a gentleman were inside the "buss," and they also came off unharmed." 

This report of little import, from The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette  of 26th October, 1844, is another example of how the 'new' omnibuses were perceived to be monsters causing havoc in Exeter.

The Half Moon Hotel was a prestigious coaching-inn on Exeter High Street.  The Star Inn was on Fore Street, opposite the Tuckers Hall.  

The reference to skinned eels is from a popular book, Thoughts upon Hunting, written by Sir Peter Beckford, and published in 1781.   Beckford meets a girl skinning live eels.  He asks her if she does not think this cruel.  She replies:  "O, not at all, sir, they be used to it."  Clearly his skinned eels had become idiomatic by 1844.   Later, Winston Churchill uses the phrase idiomatically at least twice.  Lost now?  Bring it back!

It is interesting to see the diminuative "buss" already in use.  Soon to become bus. perhaps to distinguish it from buss meaning kiss.  (My father could not resist writing 'bus with the apostrophe.)

I can imagine the lady and gentleman hurtling down Fore Street Hill in an empty bus.  I dare say they were clinging to each other -  but not bussing I think!

, 

THAT WOSH LIKELY!, EXETER, 1844.

"On Tuesday, at the Guildhall, two girls in the employ of Lewis Barnett, a Jew slop-seller residing in Goldsmith-street, were charged by their master with appropriating money realised by selling goods in his shop.

"He stated that on Friday he was out of town and whilst his wife was at market the girls sold a "Jim Crow" cap for 7d, and a boy's cloth cap for 1s. 4d. to a person who had come from the country.  They informed Mrs. Barnett when she returned that they had sold a "Jim-crow" for sixpence for which she blamed them, as it was not the proper price.

"On Tuesday, however, the purchaser of the articles brought back the cloth cap to be exchanged for a smaller one, and the transaction was discovered.  The cap cost Barnett two shillings, and his anger and astonishment at the wrong which had been done him may be readily conceived; nor was his desire expressed during his immediate interview with the magistrates "to sharve them out" any more than natural.

"The mistress of the girls stated, that when she went to market on Friday, she said to them "Now girls, don't refuse any money."  The girls in their defence, said that she added,- "and keep it for yourselves;"  to which Barnett replied with a sneer, "That wosh likely!"  It did transpire, however that the complainant owed them ten shilling for wages......

....The complainant was advised to discharge his girls without a character; and in case they sued him in the Courts of Requests for the wages, to set up the transaction of the caps in answer to the action:  to which the Jew, with a keeness that could only be imitated not felt in the enactment of Shylock, promised faithfully - "Yes, your vorship, I vill,- I vill, immediately." 

This report, from The Exeter and Plymouth Gazetter  of 12th October, 1844, gives us a glimpse of how, I imagine, most citizens of Exeter saw their Jewish neighbours at the time.  Not surprisingly Shylock is the model, wanting his pound of flesh.  Jews are essentially money-grubbing and mean but also they are 'funny'.  They are comic characters with their strange speech and foreign ways.

Slops are ready-made clothes.  Respectable people visit tailors and hatters but the humbler classes use slopshops.  Victorian sweatshops, where cross-legged tailors sewed their lives away, produced the goods.  Many of Exeter's Jewish community were slopsellers.

To (sharve) serve somebody out,  meaning, says Dr. Brewer, to punish, to get revenge, to get one's own back, is hardly to be found these days.   

The girls were probably younger than 16, otherwise they would have been young women.  The fair sex had to grow up quickly in an age where 12 was the age of consent.

Jim Crow had the popular meaning, a black man.   Clearly, everybody knew what a Jim Crow cap looked like.  I don't. 

The Court ruling might seem severe but at least the girls escaped prison.  

There is a sentence omitted which I considered to be of little interest.  

SPLASH TUMBLER PIGEONS, EXETER, 1844.

"At the Guildhall yesterday, George Brannen, 17 years of age, and presenting an appearance of great emaciation, was committed for trial at the Exeter Michaelmas Sessions, for stealing two splash tumbler-pigeons from the dwelling of Charles Wills in Quay Lane.

"The prisoner had been shown the pigeons in an excess of innocent vanity, and must have watched him afterwards, as ingress had been obtained to the pigeons by unlocking the house-door with a key. which had been secreted by the prosecutor about the window when he went out.

"The prisoner sold the pigeons to Mr. Ford  (Jennings and Ford) of this city for 2s.6d. The prisoner said he had been induced to steal the pigeons from hunger, having had nothing to eat for four days, and that his father, who resided in Magdalen-street, had turned him out of door necessitous, and he was not allowed to return.  He had been formerly apprenticed to a tailor, form whose service he had run away."

Here is more evidence, if it were needed, of poverty in mid-Victorian Exeter.  A poor teenager, the emaciated, necessitous runaway-apprentice, George Brannen, had been in Quay Lane.  He had not eaten for days.  He was probably thinking only of food.  His father had kicked him out from the family home.  Charles Wills invited him in to admire his splash tumbler-pigeons. Young George stole them and sold them to Mr. Ford for half-a-crown.  He must have known that Mr. Ford was something of a pigeon fancier.  Now he was facing, at the least, a prison sentence.    

Jennings and Ford  was an estabished firm of carriers in South-street, Exeter.

Splash is still in use to describe a form of colouring in tumbler pigeons.  As far as I can make out they can be either splash or grizzle but not necessarily exclusively. 

For once a Gazette reporter, here in the second paragraph, is having trouble with his style.  These days,  O tempora O mores!, newspaper journalists abuse the English language as a matter of course.

Source:  The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette,  5th October, 1844.

 

THEM POACHIN CHAPS, AXMINSTER, 1844.

 "I wish ked stap them poachin chaps, they've bin out gen ta night:

With theck ther nit that they've a got, an they've catch'd sich a zight.

Why dont 'em tek a rod and line an try ta git a dish,

But not ta g'out wi nits an traps an distroy all tha vish.

"We've tried ta stap et times enough, bit all that ther's na good:

If constabels did g'oot by night, wy than ya noo they cood.

Bit ther' I don't think voks da kear if they da git a dish,

How they w's cotch'd er wot becoms ov al the tother vish.

 

"Th' ginlmin wot coms bout here, ta vish in our river,

Da mek complaints all bout th' town, that they can't ketch noan niver.

No moore I don't spose that they can, wheniver they mid g'out;

The reysn's clare ver they ther' chaps da burk maust all the trout

"An all th' vish them chaps da git they zulls 'em by the poun,

An what they cant they drows away, zoonder than they'd be vound.

But now I think tis maust a time ta zee ta that ther's work,

Er els' wi all the vish bout here, they'l  play the vurry turk"

'Clericus'  was, one might guess, an Anglican clergyman ministering in Axminster.  According to The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette he was the author of a work entitled Rural Sketches in the Dialect of.East Devon   Of him and his book(?) I can not yet find any further trace.  The newspaper published the above sample of his dialect verses under the title Lines to Mr. Piscator in its poetry-corner on  28th September, 1844.

It's pretty crude writing (not very consistent) and how reliable an idea it gives as to how East Devonian countryfolk spoke in the middle of the nineteenth century is hard to say but 'Clericus' was clearly making an effort.

It would have been the salmon that the poachers were principally after but it's easier to find a rhyme for trout.

It's interesting that the word burk turns up, here perhaps meaning quietly to put out of existence .  It had only entered the language fifteen years before when William Burke was executed in Edinburgh.  He had made a business of suffocating people and then selling their bodies for dissection by surgeons.

I remember there was still much mutual ill-feeling with the licenced net fishermen and the line fishermen of the Exe in the nineteen-seventies.  

The Axe fishing would appear to have been an attraction to piscatorial ginlmin.  I don't believe they ketched noan niver.