The Thieves' Opera: The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-taker and Jack Sheppard, House-breaker

by Lucy Moore

  In any case, the increasingly autocratic commissioner, at sixty-nine almost worn out by a lifetime’s often unappreciated toil, forming and sustaining his force, had many more things to worry about than just one persistent nutter among many. Children throwing snowballs or bowling hoops to the annoyance of pedestrians, for example. He was becoming something of a figure of fun and exasperation due, partly, to his increasing tendency to concern himself with all such matters, though these were not always as trivial as they seemed. The children’s hoops, for example, were large and made of iron. But one of his problems was his inability to delegate — even the approving of detective’s expenses and the direct control of their cases.

  It was, perhaps, fortunate for him that he was away in Portsmouth when the dreadful news came in. On 10 August 1865, Superintendent Searle of E Division reported that a triple murder had been committed at the Star Coffee House, 21 Red Lion Street, Holborn. The victims were three little boys aged ten, eight, and six years, who had been found dead in bed — apparently poisoned. Two nights previously, a man, about thirty-five years old, had brought them to the coffee house and stayed there with them. On the second night, however, he had merely seen them to bed, promising to return the following morning. He did not appear and neither did the boys for their breakfast. When their rooms were unlocked they were found dead but, ‘very placid as if they had not struggled’. The youngest, reported Superintendent Searle, had a penny between his groins ‘no doubt given him by his murderer’.

  At first, the police had no clue as to the identity of either the victims or the murderer. They circulated the man’s description: five foot seven inches, with dark complexion and hair, dark grey eyes, no whiskers but a beard of several days growth. He had been wearing dark clothes ‘much worn’, a buttoned-up waistcoat and a ‘scarf, black and shabby (no pin)’. They also initiated enquiries at coffee and lodging houses, and boats leaving for America — a favourite bolthole.

  Detective Inspector Tanner was sent post-haste from the Yard by cab and was busy with the grisly business of taking a description of the boys when a 64-year-old Mr Saltwood White appeared and saved him the trouble. They were his sons, he said, or at least he was ‘the reputed father’. His second and much younger wife had left him several years earlier to go off with her paramour, Ernest Southey, ‘a Billiard Marker’. The boys had later been returned to him but his school hadn’t been doing too well lately, so, when Southey offered to take them off his hands so that they could go to a new life in Australia with their mother, he had consented. They had been handed over to Southey two days earlier, just around the corner — by White’s eldest son from his first large family because he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Unfortunately for the boys, Mrs White had left Southey six weeks earlier, taking her daughter, Annie, with her, an event which, Tanner learned, had badly affected him. When last seen, he had been ‘in great distress of mind’. Tanner hastened back to the Yard to fetch Detective Inspector Williamson who could identify Southey and give further descriptive details. They arranged for the printing of £100 Reward notices. Superintendent Searle admitted to Assistant Commissioner Captain Hayes, that they had no clue as to Southey’s whereabouts, but added, ‘I fancy he cannot get away, every precaution has been taken to guard against his doing so.’

  Alas, a man who had so easily tricked his way into the unguarded presence of the country’s leading statesman was to find no difficulty in leaving London. Consequently, when Tanner filed an update detective officer’s special report the following day, he was obliged to add a melancholy postscript: ‘A telegram has just been received stating that “Southey” is in custody at Ramsgate having murdered Mrs White and the little girl alluded to.’

  Tanner caught the first available train to Ramsgate where he discovered that, as well as altering his appearance with the aid of a false beard and moustache, Southey had drastically altered his modus operandi. No gentle poison for the females but sudden and violent death at close range with bullets to the head from a new, five-barrelled, revolver.

  There was to be one final twist to this terrible tale. The Yard received a report that a few weeks earlier, a woman by the name of White whose husband was a schoolmaster in Holborn, had left a little girl in the care of a Mrs Petty at 2 Cornelia Cottages, Lavender Road, Battersea — before leaving for Australia.

  It was Inspector Thomson, in at the start of the affair six months earlier, to whom the final surprise was first revealed. He hurried over the river to Battersea where he saw Mrs Petty and Annie Elizabeth White, ‘an exceedingly intelligent little girl of about 7 years of age’. Her mother, Mrs White, had indeed left for Melbourne more than two weeks earlier, sending lots of loving messages to her daughter promising an early reunion. Southey had turned up ten days later, enquired of the whereabouts of Mrs White, and tried to take Annie Elizabeth away with him. Fortunately, he was resisted on both counts by Mrs Petty and went away ‘saying something very dreadful would shortly happen’.

  Who, then, were the dead woman and child at Ramsgate? They were his real wife, Mary Forward (Forward being Southey’s real name), and 8-year-old daughter Emily, whom he had left several years earlier to go off with Mrs White.

  The Ramsgate coroner refused to release the prisoner to Scotland Yard and he was committed for trial for the murder of his wife and daughter only — despite many costly messages by electric telegraph back and forth between a beleaguered Tanner and the Yard. ‘One of police to be at the trial and, if acquitted, apprehend Southey’, noted Mayne on the papers. The privilege went to Tanner, who had no need to fulfil those instructions. Southey was found guilty of the murder of his wife and child and was duly hanged at Maidstone gaol shortly before midday on 11 January 1866. By then, Palmerston was dead, Earl Russell was Prime Minister again, Lord Dudley had a new bride, and war was once again looming over the Schleswig-Holstein Question.

  A rather curious incident occurred at the moment of execution [The Times reported]. At the very instant the snow, which was falling in large flakes, had arrested the minute hand of the clock, and the execution consequently took place before the appointed hour had struck. By rather curious coincidence the town clock outside the courthouse, in the High-street, also stopped at the same time, and from the same cause.

  The Saffron Hill Affair, played out between the Yard’s initial contacts with Southey and his final descent into madness and murder, began with a pub brawl between English and Italian workmen on Boxing Night, 1864. During the affray, at the Golden Anchor in Saffron Hill, general dealer, Michael Harrington, received terrible knife wounds to his abdomen from which he later died. On his death bed he identified his assailant as glass-silverer Serafini Pelizzoni. The identification was confirmed by several eyewitnesses who had seen the incident at close quarters in a room unusually well-lit for the time, illuminated as it was by gaslight.

  A straightforward affair. No need even to call in the detectives. Violent pub brawls were commonplace, particularly in Clerkenwell’s Saffron Hill, considered one of the worst areas in London. (Oliver Twist, who followed the Artful Dodger down Saffron Hill to reach Fagin’s den, thought he had never seen a dirtier nor more wretched place). On 3 February 1865, Pelizzoni, was found guilty of the murder and duly sentenced to death. An open and shut case.

  But Italian/English businessman, Henry Negretti (co-founder of the optical firm, Negretti and Zambra), did not see it that way. Some disturbing rumours had been circulating among Cler-kenwell’s Italian community to the effect that police had arrested the wrong man and Negretti began a campaign to throw doubt on the verdict. More than that, he tracked down the alleged right man, the accused’s cousin, Gregorio Mogni, in Birmingham and prevailed upon him to confess.

  A weird train of events was thus set in motion. Pelizzoni was granted a stay of execution which enabled him to give evidence at the trial of Mogni, who was found guilty of manslaughter of the same victim and sentenced to five years penal servitude (he had pleaded self-defence). This resulted not
in an acquittal for Pelizzoni, only a continuing stay of execution. Two other men had been knifed that night and as both factions agreed that there had been only one knifeman, it followed that he must have committed all three acts. The police, convinced that they had arrested the right man in the first place, now charged Pelizzoni with the attempted murder of one of the other victims, the potboy, Alfred Rebbeck. He had been stabbed in the side but, after giving his dying declaration and identification of Pelizzoni, had recovered.

  Among accusations that the police had been withholding evidence was a claim that the third stabbed man (injured only in the hand) had, at one point, expressed some doubts about Pelizzoni being the attacker. In the event, the accused (who had requested a mixed jury but settled for British only after being told that no foreigners had been called for service but he could have one if he was prepared to wait) was found not guilty of the attempted murder and released.

  Not surprisingly, this succession of events caused a sensation. The outcome of what was now popularly known as The Saffron Hill Affair shared the leader columns on an equal basis with the latest news from America — the fall of Richmond, the confederate capital, after the long siege. This, together with the surrender of General Lee just before the start of the trial and the assassination of President Lincoln as it progressed, heralded the end of the American Civil War.

  The leader writers tried to be diplomatically even-handed about the Civil War but there was no hiding the fact that we were inclined to be pro-South. One leader excused us in this by saying that we always tended to side with the underdog. Similarly, it was claimed, this explained the British jury’s final treatment of Pelizzoni. There was, however, a general rounding on the police, whose behaviour had been consistently attacked by the defence, in spite of the judge having stated that he saw no evidence of deliberate police wrong-doing in any of the proceedings. Only The Times came up with what, at this distance, looks like a healthy scepticism. As that paper pointed out, it was clear that one side was lying, hugely. The question was, which one? It was by no means certain. Indeed, it was perfectly possible that the Italian community had merely thought up a clever ruse to save one of its own — there had been similar doubts in the case of a German, Carl Franz, accused of murder a couple of years earlier.

  But the most interesting aspect of the case from the point of view of this book is that the landlord of the Golden Anchor was Frederick Shaw, previously a Metropolitan Police detective. Shaw was held to have been in dispute with the Italians over unpaid bills and was said to have injured their pride by having them ejected. It had been admitted that in the opening stages of the fracas he was slapped in the face by an Italian. (One contemporary anonymous letter to Scotland Yard even claimed that Shaw’s wife had previously been Pelizzoni’s fiancée — but when the Italian was visiting his homeland Shaw had stepped in, married the girl, left the police, and taken over the pub which had been run by her parents. But I have been unable, thus far, to find proof of this.) But, certainly, one recurring premise was that, on the fatal night, it had been ex-detective Shaw, not Harrington, who had been the intended victim.

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  [1] C. de Saussure, A Foreign View of England, 1725 (translated by Van Muyden, 1902), p. 36.

  [2] J. Addison in the Spectator, 1711. From a collected edition of essays from the Spectator, 1712.

  [3] H. Misson, Memoirs and Observations of his Travels over England, 1719, p. 302.

  [4] Quoted in R. Porter, London: A Social History, 1994, p. 183.

  [5] Quoted in P. Earle, A City Full of People, 1994, p. 224.

  [6] I. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 1963, p. 179.

  [7] R. Porter, London, p. 162.

  [8] R. W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1800, 1981, p. 110.

  [9] R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 1982, p. 273.

  [10] Mrs Trimmer quoted in C. Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, 1969, p. 229.

  [11] Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, p. 157.

  [12] Captain A. Smith, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Jonathan Wild, 1726, p. 2.

  [13] Victoria County History of Staffordshire, 1970 edition, Vol. 3, p. 109.

  [14] Anon., An Authentic History of the Parentage, Birth, Education, Marriages, Issue and Practices of the Famous Jonathan Wild, 1725, p. 3.

  [15] J. Wild, ‘An Answer to a Late Insolent Libel’, 1718, Appendix II in F. J. Lyons, Jonathan Wild, Prince of Robbers, 1936, p. 249.

  [16] Both quotations taken from Sheehan’s essay in J. S. Cockburn (ed. ), Crime in England, 1977, p. 239.

  [17] J. Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in the Eighteenth Century, 1987, p. 14.

  [18] B. de Mandeville, An Inquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn, 1725, p. 17.

  [19] Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, p. 45.

  [20] D. Defoe, The Life of Jonathan Wild from his Birth to his Death, 1725 (p. xvi in an 1840 edition of Fielding’s Jonathan Wild the Great).

  [21] C. Hill, Liberty Against the Law, 1996, p. 230.

  [22] W. Speck, Stability and Strife, England 1714-1760, 1977, p. 58.

  [23] E. P. Thompson quoted in J. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modem England, 1984, p. 117.

  [24] C. Hibbert, Highwaymen, 1967, p. 92.

  [25] M. Bakhtin quoted in R. W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1800, 1981, p. 73.

  [26] J. H. Plumb, ‘The New World of Children in Eighteenth Century England’, Past and Present, 67, 1975, p. 65.

  [27] M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, 1925, p. 228.

  [28] Ibid.

  [29] Captain C. Walker, Life of Sally Salisbury, 1723, p. 10.

  [30] J. Villette, The Annals of Newgate, 1776, Vol. 1-2, p. 255.

  [31] D. Defoe, The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of Jonathan Wild, 1725 (reprinted in Penguin Classics, 1986), p. 231.

  [32] R. Porter, London: A Social History, 1994, p. 171.

  [33] R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 1982, p. 278.

  [34] Captain C. Walker, Authentic Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury, 1723, p. 12.

  [35] Walker, Sally Salisbury, p. 126.

  [36] Ibid., p. xiv.

  [37] R. Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art in the Eighteenth Century, 1975, p. 40.

  [38] Daily Courant, 1 May 1731.

  [39] R. Paulson, Hogarth: The Modem Moral Subject, 1697-1732, 1992, p. 243.

  [40] H. B. Wheatley, Hogarth’s London, 1909, p. 274.

  [41] F. Forrest, A Peregrination, 1732 (ed. C. Morgan, 1952), p. 7.

  [42] J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1986, pp. 92-3.

  [43] London News, 18 February 1719.

  [44] R. Steele essay in the Spectator, 1712.

  [45] E. J. Burford, Wits, Wenchers and Wantons, 1992, p. 35.

  [46] P. Wagner, Eros Revived, 1988, p. 49.

  [47] H. Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, 1751, p. 1.

  [48] D. Defoe quoted in P. Earle, The World of Defoe, 1976, p. 37.

  [49] G. Howson, Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild, 1970, p. 4.

  [50] Captain C. Johnson, Lives of the Highwaymen, 1734, p. 192.

  [51] Howson, Thief-Taker General, p. 40.

  [52] G. Howson, Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild, 1970, p. 69; and H. Bleackley, Jack Sheppard, 1933, p. 201.

  [53] D. Defoe, Moll Flanders, 1722 (Penguin Classics edition, 1989), p. 274.

  [54] G. Salgado (ed.), Cog Catchers and Bawdy Baskets, 1972, p. 18.

  [55] Quoted in J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1986, p. 150.

  [56] H. Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, 1751, p. 76.

  [57] P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 1992, p. 204; C. Hibbert, Highwaymen,
1967, p. 51.

  [58] J. Villette, The Annals of Newgate, 1776, Vol. 1-2, p. 42.

  [59] D. Defoe, The Life of Jonathan Wild from his Birth to his Death, 1725 (p. xviii in an 1840 edition of Fielding’s Jonathan Wild the Great).

  [60] Howson, Thief-Taker General, p. 116.

  [61] Villette, Annals of Newgate, p. 324.

  [62] Anon., An Authentic History of the Parentage, Birth, Education, Marriages, Issue and Practices of the Famous Jonathan Wild, 1725, p. 11.

  [63] Ibid., p. 9.

  [64] Select Trials at the Old Bailey, 1734, Vol. 1, p. 269.

  [65] J. Wild, ‘An Answer to a Late Insolent Libel’, 1718, Appendix II in F. J. Lyons, Jonathan Wild, Prince of Robbers, 1936, p. 249 (Hitchin’s pamphlet is the first appendix).

  [66] P. C. Quennell, Hogarth’s Progress, 1955, p. 134.

  [67] Anon., The Whole Life and History of Benjamin Child, 1722, p. 8.

  [68] D. Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth, 1974, p. 204.

  [69] R. Paulson, Hogarth: High Art and Low 1732-1750, 1992, p. 28.

  [70] A. Murphy quoted in H. B. Wheatley, Hogarth’s London, 1909, p. 287.

  [71] H. B. Wheatley, Hogarth’s London, 1909, p. 134.

  [72] R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 1982, p. 33.

  [73] C. Hibbert, The Road to Tyburn, 1957, p. 36.

  [74] D. Defoe, The History of the Remarkable Life of Jack Sheppard, 1725, reprinted in H. Bleackley, Jack Sheppard, 1933, p. 139.

  [75] Captain C. Johnson, Lives of the Highwaymen, 1734, p. 461.

  [76] Defoe, Jack Sheppard, reprinted in Bleackley, Jack Sheppard, p. 139.

  [77] D. Defoe, A Narrative of all the Robberies etc., of Jack Sheppard, 1724, reprinted in H. Bleackley, Jack Sheppard, 1933, p. 164.

  [78] Ibid.

  [79] H. Misson, Memoirs and Observations of his Travels over England, 1719, p. 307.

  [80] Baron Muralt, Letters Describing the Characters and Customs of the English and French Nations, 1726, p. 38.