BLEWING A YACK, EXETER, 1850.

 C. Cross, Junior was walking up Fore Street Exeter on his way home at two o'clock of a Sunday morning (3rd February,1850) when Harriet Salter and Elizabeth Wilkie came out from King Street and caught hold of him and asked him to give them a cup of coffee.  He told them he could not because he had only a halfpenny in his pocket.  Harriet held him by the waist and pulled at his waistcoat and found his halfpenny and his watch and passed them to Elizabeth.  He discovered his loss and held onto Harriet and called a policeman and Policeman Bray was there like a shot.  (Try that nowadays!)  Bray charged Harriet with the theft, took her to the station, came back with his colleague Policeman Guppy (whose name was so often in the Exeter papers that I wonder if Dickens  (Bleak House 1852/53) found it there.) and apprehended Elizabeth coming up the Stepcott steps.

Later, the two girls were together in the cells and the redoubtable  Guppy was eavesdropping at the door of their cell.   This is what he said he heard: 

"Wilkie said, - 'All I fear is, that the yack will be blewed before we get turned up on Monday morning.  I had only just blewed it when I saw them coming.'

"Salter replied, -  'Oh never mind , not now, we shall sure to be together to-morrow, over at Gully's (the Keeper of the City Gaol).  Is it all right?'

"Wilkie - 'What did the splodger say? Did he find the yack blewed before you were gone?'

"Salter replied - 'Yes.'

"Wilkie again said - 'What did he say, then?'

"Salter - 'The B---- said 'you have robbed me' ; I said 'robbed you!' and he said 'yes, you have stolen my watch from my right hand waistcoat pocket.'  He then gave me in charge of a Peeler,'

"Wilkie - ' I was a b.....  fool to get pinched tonight.'

"They were both committed for trial."

To blew a yack from a splodger is, of course, to relieve a sucker of his watch.  To blew is also to get rid of, to sell, a Romany word (?).  This is a rare, genuine (but only if Policeman Guppy was reliable in his evidence) report of a conversation between these two feral girls who roamed the wintery streets of Exeter at night looking for splodgers. 

At a distance of 173 years, I find myself feeling sorry for Harriet and Elizabeth.  They never had a chance!

 Where would one expect to fnd a coffee that time of night?

Source The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 9th February 1850.