The Italian Boy (12 page)

Those in even higher positions of authority frequently belittled Thomas and lost no opportunity to trip him up—a task he made much easier for them by his habit of speaking before thinking. The 1828 Select Committee had quite a bit of fun questioning him, playing on his moral certainty, which combined rather disastrously with his lack of knowledge of basic law. Thus Thomas asserted to the committee that it was well known that the two pubs that stood opposite the Bow Street police office—the Brown Bear and the Marquis of Anglesey—were flash houses. When pressed, he backed down, saying that they probably weren’t flash houses after all but that they certainly didn’t keep to their licensing hours.
²²
At a later Select Committee hearing, Thomas was accused of relying on “defective evidence,” showing “weak and childish conduct,” and being “weak and pusillanimous and childish.… For in fact, he shed tears,” sneered Middlesex magistrate Sir John Scott Lillie.
²³
Even Commissioners Rowan and Mayne wrote him frequent reprimands when he failed to adhere to the new, post-1829 way of doing things: “The Commissioners of Police notice in
The Times
of this morning that Mr Thomas asked advice from the magistrates at Bow Street, respecting the state of dogs in the street. The Commissioners have more than once had occasion to notice the irregularity of such a course, and acquainted Mr Thomas that he was to apply to them in all cases when he required any advice for the guidance of the police. The Commissioners now desire Mr Thomas to understand that if they find him again repeating this practice they will consider it a wilful disobedience of their orders.”
²⁴
And so on.

But Thomas had two well-placed allies: the first, George Rowland Minshull, seems to have been cut from similar cloth. The magistrate was often derided for being unworldly, and the phrase he frequently let slip when hearing evidence—“Oh! How shocking!”—was a source of fun to his detractors.
²⁵
He was one of the few London magistrates who wanted the New Police to succeed, and he saw that Thomas was, apart from anything else, an effective officer. Shortly after the New Police were formed, the new superintendent had marshaled forty Division F officers and broken up a mass brawl in the Seven Dials district of Covent Garden, arresting thirty drunken, fighting men.
²⁶
Then, on Wednesday, 27 April 1831, in the Strand, Thomas had walked into the middle of a crowd of two to three thousand angry Londoners—including many women and children—who were protesting the defeat of the Reform Bill and persuaded them not to riot as they marched through the West End. The bill was intended to widen male suffrage by lowering the property-value threshold, thereby enfranchising certain sections of the merchant class for the first time; many (perhaps most) workingmen believed this step would bring them the vote too. The bill was also intended to put an end to the phenomenon of “rotten,” or “pocket,” boroughs—districts with few constituents, which were under the control of wealthy landowners and enjoyed a representation in Parliament that was disproportionate to their small populations. The bill had been defeated on the twentieth, and on the twenty-second Parliament had been “prorogued” (suspended), which meant the measure would not be debated again for months. In response, Wednesday, 27 April, was designated the night of the General Illumination, on which Londoners were to light lamps or candles and place them in their windows to show their support for parliamentary reform. The instructions to carry out this dramatic but nonviolent form of civil protest had been spread by street criers, by handbills, and in the Radical press. In addition to homes, shops, and pubs, the boats and barges on the Thames, theaters, banks, and newspaper offices were all ablaze with light. Many protesters had also decided to march through town, and, although most were peaceful (some even sang “God Save the King”), a number had stoned darkened windows, and missiles were thrown at Thomas and his men in the Strand. He was struck twice by wooden staves, but he stood his ground, and some in the crowd even shouted, “Bravo, Police!” By the end of the protest, at four o’clock in the morning, 168 stone throwers had been arrested; almost all were later acquitted, released on bail, or lightly fined, which seems to indicate either the lack of seriousness of the offenses or the tacit sympathy of the magistrates.
²⁷

Thomas also had the support of influential London Radical and political reformer Francis Place (1771–1854), who often consulted the superintendent on policing matters. Place thought Thomas “very useful and intelligent,” and the two men together worked out a theory of crowd control—the baton charge—to deal with the frequent expressions of popular unrest. Eager to stop the government from finding excuses to deploy troops on the streets, Place and Thomas decided that if an unruly mob should assemble in London and appear intent on looting and damage to property, sound thrashings would be meted out, but not until the police were certain that they were about to be attacked. Only “sufficient” violence, as Place termed it, was to be used—just enough to disperse the large groups that Place believed had no interest in political or social issues, merely “a vague hope of plunder.” These London mobs, he wrote, had no genuine “bond of union” and “were composed of idle and miscreant people” and were “remarkably cowardly.”
²⁸

The baton-charge theory was put into practice on 9 November 1830. Reform Bill unrest had been fomenting for some time; the Radical, pro-Reform press were accused of stirring it up and of encouraging anti–New Police sentiment. But the behavior of King William IV, his courtiers, and other aristocratic Londoners—apparently flaunting their wealth by riding through town, gorgeously dressed, in fine carriages—was also cited as incendiary. A magnificent procession, with the king riding in state to a fete hosted by the lord mayor, was due to take place on 9 November; it was postponed amid fears that it would provoke popular unrest and result in “mobbing.” Despite the cancelation, a crowd—an unknown contingent of which had apparently been taking part in a march in the East End in support of the unemployed Spitalfields weavers—came across the City boundary at Temple Bar in Fleet Street, armed with staves (in fact, pieces of wood stolen from a building site in Chancery Lane) and shouting “Down with the police.” Thomas and a large body of policemen were waiting in Catherine Street, close to Drury Lane, and fanned out across the Strand to block the crowd’s progress. The police, brandishing their batons, rushed toward the crowd, who scattered instantly. Place claimed that this rout marked the end of that particular type of mobbing in London.

Thrashings and military-style maneuvers aside, Superintendent Thomas was also capable of kindness and empathy. He often returned runaway children to their parents when he came across them sleeping in Covent Garden market. One of these was the son of a surveyor from Marylebone whom Thomas had found at three o’clock in the morning asleep under a market stall; the child had taken his father’s watch and said he was planning to stow away on board a ship when dawn came.
²⁹
Although Thomas was compelled under threat of a fine to arrest anyone sleeping in the open air, he had admitted to the 1828 Police Select Committee that he never arrested the dozen or so paupers who bedded down every night at the king’s entrance to the Drury Lane Theatre when the actors and audience had departed. As he put it, “in many of those instances, they are very unfortunate people who have seen better days.”

FOUR

Houseless Wretches

The number of anxious parents who had come to see the young boy’s body in the Covent Garden watch house, and the tales of loss they told, had amazed the coroner, his jury, the magistrates, and the parish authorities of St. Paul’s. It had also surprised the home secretary; Lord Melbourne was indolent and indecisive, where his predecessor, Robert Peel, had had a horrified curiosity about the new urban society that was emerging and had effected measures to confront it. (Typical of Melbourne’s effete manner was his response on being offered the role of prime minister, later, in 1834: “He thought it was a damned bore and he was half inclined to turn it down.”)
¹
But James Corder’s letter accompanying the report of the coroner’s findings had elicited an uncharacteristically vigorous reply from Melbourne in which he asked Corder to see if he could find out why it was that so many young people appeared to have gone missing in the city.
²

In addition to the various Italians who had come forward, eight sets of parents had notified the Bow Street magistrates of their sons’ disappearance and had asked to see the dead child. The mother and father of a deaf-mute boy told Bow Street magistrate George Rowland Minshull that they feared their child had been abducted, killed, and sold to surgeons for dissection, since they had heard that the men being held in custody were known resurrectionists. A Mr. Hart, the owner of a linen shop in Oxford Street, “a most respectable tradesman, in affluent circumstances,” according to the
Morning Advertiser,
wept as he told Minshull that his fourteen-year-old son had gone missing on Tuesday, 1 November, and that he had placed a notice, with a full description of the boy, in the newspapers; it may have been this advertisement that Richard Partridge’s pupils had read when their suspicions were aroused about the corpse delivered to King’s. According to local solicitor James Isaacs, Hart’s son “was well-educated, of moral pursuits, and could not be suspected of a roving inclination, and yet he had disappeared all at once, and no trace could be obtained of him.”
³
(The body of Hart’s son was pulled from the Regent’s Canal at Lisson Grove one week later, fully clothed and decomposing. The cause of his death was never to be established, but the newspapers nevertheless decided that it was likely he had been “burked.”)

Perhaps most startling was the nature of the families reporting lost children—ordinary working people, many of them in trade, whose predicament presented an unsettling glimpse of the fragility of family life in the world’s largest, wealthiest city. If children from settled, reasonably well-off families could simply disappear, what chance the orphans or the offspring of the desperately poor or imprisoned? “I know that I have lounged about the streets insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond.… It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age”: this was Charles Dickens, toward the end of his life. At twelve years old, Dickens had found himself living alone in a boardinghouse in Camden Town and working in a small factory just off the Strand when the rest of his family moved into the debtors’ prison, the Marshalsea, following his father’s bankruptcy. Dickens earned six or seven shillings a week, but he felt that shockingly little separated him from the fate of the vagrant children he saw all about him in the streets around Covent Garden; and he never forgot the vulnerable condition into which he had been plunged.
⁴
Dickens’s parents teetered in and out of genteelly distressed circumstances; the step into destitution was a short one. Only the intervention of family connections, who gave Dickens’s father the chance to make a living as a journalist, rescued them. In households less blessed with skills and contacts, even contentedly married couples could find themselves with little time to devote to their children, since many families were able to subsist only if both parents worked virtually every hour they were awake. Other parents, though, may have been too attentive: the governor of Newgate Prison claimed that many of the child thieves in his care were the children of “decent working tradesmen” but had fled their homes because parental discipline was too harsh.
⁵

A thirteen-year-old boy called Williams was found starving, diseased, and fast asleep in a doorway in Bedford Street, Covent Garden, by a parish constable in March 1826. Though he claimed he was an orphan from Devizes in Wiltshire, come to town to seek his fortune, it transpired that Williams’s parents lived just a mile away, in a street off Fitzroy Square, and that the boy had run away from them at least twenty times. The magistrates ordered Williams to be looked after at the St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields watch house until an apprenticeship could be arranged for him.
⁶

The ten-year-old son of an army surgeon named Macher was inveigled away from the family home in Knightsbridge in 1824 by a former shoemaker turned vagrant variously known as Thomas Wood, Thomas Buxton, or Thomas Cox, whose speciality was to chalk poems on the pavement and await contributions from passersby. Seven months after the boy’s disappearance, constables spotted Wood/ Buxton/Cox sitting begging in Keppel Street, off Gower Street in Bloomsbury, with an “attractive little boy” alongside him—this was Master Macher. The boy “strenuously denied” that he was Macher and was seen waiting patiently for hours for his abductor to be released from police questioning; however, he eventually and reluctantly admitted his identity “and he was, to the utmost joy of his disconsolate parents, delivered over to them.” It’s not quite the picture of happy family life that this newspaper report wished to convey.
⁷

Police and magistrates also heard many stories of parents who would send their children into the streets, telling them not to come home until they had earned a certain sum, through either begging or theft; those children who were too afraid to return empty-handed were frequently reported to be among those found sleeping in London’s more secluded spots—under the stalls of the various markets, in the shrubs of Hyde Park, in the shells of houses under construction, curled up in the haystacks of Marylebone, in the coopers’ barrels of Whitechapel, among the warm kilns of East End brickyards.
⁸
Some vagrant children took it upon themselves to live entirely outside the realm of adult supervision. One gang of Covent Garden vagabond boys formed the Forty Thieves, and its members identified themselves by a primitive form of tattoo: a needle dipped in gunpowder pricked the gang-membership number into the skin of the palm. In September 1828, Nos. 5 and 8, both around the age of twelve, were arrested by the parish constable, possibly Joseph Sadler Thomas, and brought to trial on theft charges.
⁹