When you hear the word Victorian, the words “moral panic” are seldom far behind and
today is no exception.
I’m talking, this week, about the London Garrotting Panic of 1862.
Not heard of it?
Well that’s probably because like all good Victorian scandals it was a load of hysteria
about something that wasn’t really happening.
Thanks to the introduction of the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1839, crime in London was
on the decline, but with a greater number of arrests and actions comes a greater number
of reports of crime and as a result the fear of crime in London was really quite on the
increase, and nothing got the paranoia flowing like a street garrotting.
This was a street robbery that would be carried out by a gang of three.
One of the reasons we know in detail how this is performed is that a journalist from the
Cornhill magazine actually visited a criminal in jail to get a first-hand demonstration
of what the victim goes through.
The three robbers are “front-stall”, the “back stall” and the “nasty man” and
they would be placed along the street as the map shows here.
The back stall is basically a lookout and it was often a woman that would be used for
this role as she would attract less suspicion from the mark.
A well to do gentleman would walk down the street, past the “nasty-man” and once
he was past, the ruffian strikes him on the forehead from behind throwing the head back
and then grabs him around the throat with the other hand, holding the bone of the wrist
against the Adam’s apple.
With the victim pretty much prone and breathless in this state, the “front-stall” runs
up from the front and removes all the valuables he can strip from the victim, usually money,
wallets, watches, handkerchiefs, glasses – completely emptying all the pockets before the three
of them melt away back into the slums.
Impressively efficient don’t you think?
Sometimes a cord or a wire was used but the effect remans pretty much the same.
Nobody really knows when and where the trend for this sort of robbery started.
It is often said to have been learned by convicts while being held on prison hulks or being
transported.
It is rumoured to have been the method deployed by jailers and guards to restrain difficult
prisoners.
This then gets, classically recycled into criminal life when they are released back
into the community and this knowledge then spreads around the criminal fraternity.
At one point in 1860, the Cornhill Magazine estimated that 1 in every 115 people in the
country had a record for stealing.
What’s really weird about this whole crime though is that it doesn’t really seem to
happen that often.
We know it occurred but to look at the responses to it you’d think there were garrotting
gangs lurking round every street corner.
The scare comes about from two particular groups that are well versed in spreading fear
throughout the general populace.
I’m talking about politicians and newspapers.
Like most Victorian petty crimes and robberies this sort of thing went broadly ignored until
it happened to an MP.
Hugh Pilkington was attacked from behind by a gang of muggers on his way home from the
House of Commons.
Well….
Now something had to be done and the newspapers, magazines and periodicals just couldn’t
get enough of it.
Every case, and several that just hadn’t happened, got blown out of proportion.
The Daily News described London as a “lair for footpads and assassins by night”, the
Quarterly Review claimed that “the streets of London are not safe even in the daytime”
and the typical Victorian values of a fear of the lower classes and the base racism of
the time were never that far away.
The public clamoured to insist that the treatment of criminals in prison was just not harsh
enough, and that this was a typically un-British sort of crime which could be fixed if we got
rid of all those pesky immigrants.
Even Charles Dickens got in on the scene stating in an essay that the streets of London were
as dangerous as the Italian mountains.
Other press outlets blamed everything from French Revolutionaries which was impressive
given that there had been 80 years since the French Revolution, they even blamed Indian
Thugee.
But the fear was there which combined with a belief that the police were ineffective
against such crime.
How could the police cope when 1 in 115 people is a robber and 1 in 870 is a policeman?
The public would have to take matters into their own hands.
The media was not short of recommendations of how to safeguard yourself.
Punch magazine, as an opportunity to poke at the inefficiencies of the police posted
plenty of cartoons about gadgets you could use to prevent a garrotting.
The famous Mr. Tremble overcoat pictured here or the over the top spikes of the anti-garrotte
collar is often cited as being patented but they really aren’t.
They are just over the top lampoons from the pen of Punch magazine.
But there were protections that did get patented and produced.
These stiff leather collars were an easily produced defence against a wire round the
neck, or for 7 shillings you could purchase White, Choker and Co’s patented anti garrotte
collar, or this American patent for a steel collar with a wire-cutting knife embedded
in the front….
And if that’s not crazy enough for you then how about the “Henry Ball’s Patented Anti-Garrotting
Belt Pistol”?
This attaches to the back of the belt and is fired by a string at the front, thus delivering
a reasonable calibre bullet directly to the abdomen of your attacker.
Think I’m making this up?
They’ve actually got one in the Self-Defence Gallery of the Royal Armouries in Leeds.
To give you an idea of just how hysterical the London middle classes could get in this
time, two men attacked each other in self defence.
After the fight both men insisted that they thought they were going to be garrotted by
the other.
In amongst all this the public demanded action, and they demanded the government do something.
This rarely works out well, and like many other cases this would have far reaching consequences
to combat a problem that was mostly in people’s heads.
In fact the Shoreditch Advertiser had investigated all the cases in the district of Shoreditch
and found all of them to be “utterly fictitious or drunken squabbles”.
But in fearful response to increasing public demand, Parliament passed the 1863 Security
From Violence Act by 131 votes to 68, even though by this time actually verifiable reports
of garrotting were pretty much non-existent.
This Act of Parliament reintroduced flogging as a judicial punishment, it also helped return
prisons to being the harsher environment of “hard fare, hard bed and hard work” undoing
many of the early Victorian reforms.
These changes would stay in place until the Prisons Act of 1898.
In fact flogging remained on the statute books until the Criminal justice Act of 1948.
So, as a result of clear hysteria, hundreds of thousands prisoners experienced harsh,
degrading and brutal conditions for decades afterwards.
The legislation has been described by reformers as “panic legislation passed after the panic
has gone” – isn’t that just the Victorian way?
Thanks for watching.