Another case
from the files of my great grandfather's cousin, Talfourd Salter QC. Several of his appearances
at the Old Bailey are on record, a snapshot of the lives and crimes of ordinary
people in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1855, Hammersmith (now swallowed up by west central
London) was still semi-rural. His uncle the horticulturalist John Salter was
able to open a plant nursery on open fields there when he fled the French coup
d’état in 1848. (Long story! See elsewhere in these pages.) As evidence of its
still-rustic nature, witness this case of sheep-rustling in the borough.
Sheep and a London policeman, 1931. In the 1930s sheep-rusting was less of a problem in the capital.
On 19th
March 1855 Henry Fowkes, a butcher in Hammersmith, bought some sheep in a field
at Brook Green. He planned to keep them there, opposite his shop, and slaughter
them as required. At 9.30 in the morning of Thursday 5th April, he discovered
that nineteen of his new sheep were missing from the Brook Green field.
Worse still, his
tame sheep had also gone, which he had put in with the new animals. This was
not a pet, and Fowkes was unusual in keeping such an animal. Because it knew
its way around, it acted as a leader so that, as Fowkes testified in court, “when
sheep came home from market, it used to run in [to his abattoir] first and they
followed instantly.” As Hammersmith faced up to the advance of London’s urban
sprawl, Fowkes was dealing with a new problem – traffic. “I keep this [leader],”
he stated, “to run across the road, so that the sheep should not be run over by
the omnibuses.”
Sheep and London omnibuses, 1926. This is what happens if you don't have a leader.
Two days later,
acting on a tip-off, Fowkes saw what he thought were the carcasses of his sheep
in the shop of another butcher, William Paulin of Marylebone Lane. Paulin was
arrested, and stood in the dock of the Old Bailey on 9th April, accused
of either stealing the sheep or feloniously receiving the stolen goods. Talfourd
Salter QC acted for the defence.
The prosecution
produced a string of witnesses to establish the last journey of the stolen
animals and the distribution of their skins and carcasses. A toll collector saw twenty sheep being
driven towards London from Hammersmith at 7.30pm on 20th March, and
a fishmonger saw them arrive at
Paulin’s shop in Marylebone at 9pm. A slaughterman
testified that he had been having a drink in the Sawyer’s Arms (still in
Marylebone Lane today) when Paulin hired him to help kill the sheep, which took
from 11pm until 5am on 21st March.
Later on that
morning a butcher in Oxford Street bought
twenty “recently killed” sheep’s heads from Paulin. Two days later, reported a tallow chandler (candle-maker), Paulin’s
assistant arrived with an unusually large consignment of mutton fat (used to
make candles) which – the candlemaker could tell from the condition and the smell
– had been killed a couple of days earlier. Another butcher in Marylebone Lane bought carcasses from his neighbor Paulin
on 24th March.
So much for the
disposal of the inner sheep. A carter
reported being hired at 7am on Wednesday 21st March to carry twenty sheepskins
from Paulin’s shop to another butcher,
in Warwick Lane, who confirmed that he was told they came from Paulin. This butcher
sold them on to a Bermondsey fellmonger
(skin and hide dealer) on 22nd March, who on 24th March sold
them on to a fellow Bermondsey fellmonger
– in whose premises the following Tuesday 27th March Henry Fowkes
thought he recognised the pelts of his sheep.
A nineteenth century butcher’s panel
The marks found on
the skins were the same as those made by Fowkes and by previous owners of the
missing sheep. As for the meat, Fowkes had butchered some of his remaining
sheep by the time the case came to trial. He was therefore in a position to say
that the stolen carcasses found in both the Marylebone Lane butchers’ shops
were from the same flock. Hidden behind the hanging joints in Paulin’s shop,
Fowkes also spotted the hind quarters of his tame leader.
So there was no doubt
that Paulin had received the stolen sheep. But did he steal them? It was a dark
night early in the year: the toll collector said that, of the two men driving
the sheep to Marylebone “the prisoner very much resembles one;” but the
fishmonger thought he saw Paulin not arriving with the stolen sheep but coming
out of his shop to meet them. The doubt was enough for Talfourd to
get Paulin of the theft charge; but he could do nothing about the evident
receiving of stolen goods, and Paulin was sentenced in that respect to eighteen
months in prison.
A mysterious
second sheep rustler remained unidentified and at large, a tall, slim man who
was described by several witnesses on the road to Marylebone and around Paulin’s
shop, when the sheep arrived and when they were killed. This mystery presence
throughout the night of 20th March does seem to compromise Talfourd’s
client. But I’m no lawyer.