The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  Only May’s nerve appeared to hold, though he was noticeably quieter than before and listened intently to all that was said. May and Bishop had had a fight. May blamed Bishop bitterly for getting him “into this scrape” (according to Dodd, a jailer who listened in on conversations and reported them to Superintendent Thomas).2 May had shouted to Bishop, “You’re a bloody murdering bastard—you should have been topped years ago.” The signs were that May would, at any moment, turn king’s evidence. What was he waiting for?

  After the neighbors had had their say, the summing up began, and all the evidence that had been gathered during the inquiry was read out in court: everything that had been told at the coroner’s inquest, all the witness statements given at Bow Street, all Thomas’s tip-offs and “information received.” Then James Corder revealed that proceedings against Michael Shields were being dropped, no evidence having been found against him. Shields was now officially discharged but was called to stand in front of the bench. Minshull told Shields that he was now a witness—what did he have to say for himself? Shields repeated once again the story that had been prised from him at the coroner’s inquest: that he had met Bishop on the morning of Saturday the fifth at the Fortune of War, had agreed to carry a large hamper—taken from just inside St. Bartholomew’s railings by Bishop—from Guy’s to King’s, a job for which, Shields pointed out to Minshull, he had still not been paid his promised half crown.

  Minshull said: “Do you still persist in saying that you were not aware of what the hamper contained?” and Shields replied, “Upon my word, your worship, I knew nothing about what the hamper contained. I carried it as I would any other job.”

  “Did you ever carry any load for Bishop or May before?”

  “No, your honour, never.”

  A clerk warned him: “You know, Shields, you have carried bodies repeatedly to the hospitals. You should remember you are now on your oath.”

  “I mean to say that I did not know what the hamper contained that May and Bishop hired me to carry. I never saw Bishop and Williams at my house. I never gave them my address.” At this point, James Corder produced a piece of paper that had been found at No. 3 Nova Scotia Gardens. “Is this paper, on which is written ‘Number 6 Eagle Street, Red Lion Square,’ in your handwriting?” Corder asked.

  Shields studied the scrap for some time before saying, “Yes, sir, it is.”

  Corder turned to Minshull: “It is quite clear that this man cannot be believed upon his oath, and therefore it would be useless to make a witness of him. I think I should be acting wrong if I did not state that I would not believe anything he could say on oath.”

  Minshull agreed: “Every word he has spoken goes for nothing.”

  Though extremely annoyed with Shields for failing to be prosecution-witness material, Minshull couldn’t quite let go of the idea of wringing from the man something that would incriminate May, Bishop, and Williams, since the case against them still appeared worryingly slender. “Can you produce any security for your appearance at trial?” asked Minshull, wondering about the chances of binding Shields over to appear at the Old Bailey.

  “I cannot,” said Shields. “No one would be answerable for me.”

  Then Minshull changed his mind again and decided to let Shields go, warning him to keep Superintendent Thomas informed of his whereabouts—partly for Shields’s own protection. He knew how the crowd could vent its ill-feeling toward resurrectionists.

  Minshull now turned to the three men remaining in the dock and said: “If you wish to say anything, now is your time, as this is the last opportunity you will have of appearing before me.”

  Bishop: “No, sir. I have nothing to say at present. I will reserve what I have got to say for another place.”

  Williams: “Nothing, sir, but what I have already said.”

  But James May had plenty to say: “This man, Bishop, can clear me of every thing, if he likes to speak the truth. He knows I am innocent of the charge. The man says he got the body from the ground, but that he doesn’t like to say where because he is loath to injure the two watchmen left to guard it. Things, however, have come to such a crisis now that he ought to speak the truth, for I defy him to say anything to implicate me.” He turned to Bishop: “I knew nothing of the body until I went to take it from your house!”

  “I have said nothing against you. It’s true what you say—you knew nothing of it until then.”

  “That is the truth. I did not. I know that nothing you can say—if you will only tell the truth—can implicate me.”

  Minshull told them: “Prisoners, you will all be committed to Newgate to take your trial at the ensuing Sessions at the Old Bailey, commencing on 1st December, for the wilful murder of Carlo Ferrari, and there will be another count in the indictment, charging you with the wilful murder of a person unknown.”

  * * *

  Downstairs in the lockup room, May burst into tears, swearing to Dodd the jailer that he had had nothing to do with the boy’s death, that the first he had seen of the lad was when he lay curled up dead in the trunk in Bishop’s washhouse. Even if he were to be acquitted, wailed May, how would he ever be able to find work again? He beat his breast and railed at Bishop and Williams, who both appeared to have rallied a little. But when the door was opened to take them to the prison van that would carry them to Newgate, they shrank down behind the double row of police officers who stood between them and the huge crowd that surged forward, screaming insults; someone broke through and Bishop’s left shoulder was injured. May, though, insisted on walking tall, as he followed the other two into the van amid the jostling and shouting.

  Around three hundred people chased the vehicle as it turned down into the Strand, along Fleet Street, and up Chancery Lane, the commotion startling horses on the roadway and causing numerous accidents; but in Chancery Lane, the van was held up by traffic and the crowd caught up and began to pelt it with mud and stones. At Coldbath Fields Prison, just to the north of Saffron Hill, the van dropped off two prisoners, and then it was on to Newgate with Bishop, May, and Williams, arriving at a quarter past five. It took a great deal of effort to move the three into the prison without letting the crowd seize them.

  * * *

  Back at Bow Street, Sarah and Rhoda were called from their cells to appear before Minshull immediately after the committal of their husbands to be told that they would not face any charges. They were too cold to speak—their teeth were chattering—but they curtsied to the bench to show their gratitude. Superintendent Thomas, it seems, had for the time being given up hope of building a case against them; similarly, it had now been decided, probably by Minshull and Corder, that the Bishop children were too young to be given the burden of incriminating their parents, and so they too were set free. Minshull was concerned for the women’s well-being and insisted that they not leave until it was quiet in the streets outside. Bishop, told by Thomas of his wife’s imminent release, replied, “I thank you, sir, and I hope you will look to her and see that she is not insulted by the mob.”

  * * *

  Michael Shields was allowed out of the Bow Street office close to midnight. Though Minshull had decided not to pursue a case against him for his lies, he had advised Dodd to hold him as late as possible, for his own safety. The hearing had ended before four in the afternoon, but Shields found himself confronted by a large group still waiting in the street, who hissed, hooted, and groaned at him. He walked briskly northward and turned into Long Acre, heading east toward home in Eagle Street, but the crowd followed him. He dodged right into Drury Lane, hoping to throw them off, then ran into Vinegar Yard, a tiny thoroughfare alongside the Drury Lane Theatre. Still they gave chase, and, terrified, the old man ran round to Bow Street, where the officers took him back into custody, for his own protection. Here he stayed for hours, cowering in a corner of the office, gibbering and sobbing.

  EIGHT

  Meat—An Interlude

  The Fortune of War stood in Smithfield, where Giltspur Street meets Cock Lane
, a spot known as Pye Corner. Here, in 1666, the Fire of London was stopped in its westward tracks after having destroyed four-fifths of the City. Smithfield, the Smoothe Field of twelfth-century descriptions, was largely undamaged by the flames, with the consequence that by the early part of the nineteenth century, some of London’s oldest buildings were to be found surrounding the large open space that was given over to the meat market. In the 1820s some one and a half million sheep, 150,000 cattle and 60,000 pigs were driven to Smithfield every year to be sold and slaughtered, even though meat consumption had been in slow decline since the final decade of the last century. Smithfield was the “live” market; Newgate Shambles, half a mile away and just north of St. Paul’s Cathedral, was the main dead-meat market. “Prime,” the best meat, cost between eight and nine pence a pound in the late 1820s, while “seconds” sold for five to seven pence. At Pye Corner, the poorest-quality dead meat was sold off; “cag-mag” could cost as little as two pence a pound and supplemented the diets of the desperately poor, along with condemned fish from Billingsgate, damaged and withered fruit and vegetables, and cheap starch in the form of potatoes. Cag-mag was often meat that had simply been around too long (in summer, freshness was limited to just twenty-four hours after a kill); but often it was the flesh of recently killed but worn-out, old, thin, or diseased beasts. Cag-mag’s etymology is uncertain, though “cag” is likely to be derived from “cack,” meaning excrement; and a “mag” was slang for a farthing—so, “cheap crap” is a reasonable guess. Just how bad the quality of food sold at Smithfield could be was shown by a witness to the 1828 Parliamentary Select Committee on the State of Smithfield who had entered the Bear and Ragged Staff inn on the northeast side of the marketplace, close to where, today, Charterhouse Street forks left into Charterhouse Square; the inn also did duty as a slaughterhouse. The witness, Adam Armstrong, told the committee he had seen hanging up in the pub a cow’s carcass that was so rancid the fat was no more than dripping yellow slime. On questioning the slaughterman, Armstrong was told that this was cag-mag that was to be sent to a nearby sausage factory, for two pence a pound.1 Other campaigners claimed that the most rotten cag-mag was fed to beasts awaiting slaughter: “Let the reader reflect on the bare possibility of having partaken of the flesh of an animal fed, perhaps, on the fetid refuse of a diseased or glandered horse,” ran one warning about feeding meat to herbivores.2

  Beasts came to Smithfield from all over Great Britain, with drovers walking the animals in their charge for fifteen to twenty miles a day. It was a skilled job to maneuver herds of up to a thousand animals across the country, and drovers would frequently sleep out in the open in order to keep watch for rustlers; animal theft was common, despite still being a capital offense (in London, four rustlers were executed in 1825, one in 1826, and three in 1827).3 An ox lost around twenty pounds in weight for every one hundred miles it walked to market; and if the creature came from the Scottish Highlands, and many did, the three-week journey could affect the quality of its flesh unless it had had time to put weight back on. The cattle that were driven to the capital from the north were pastured in the “grazing counties” of Norfolk, Lincolnshire, and Leicestershire to fatten them; the last stopping place was the meadows of Islington before the final thrust down St. John Street and into Smithfield. At Islington, the rural drover handed his charges over to London drovers, of whom there were around a hundred, appointed by the City of London and required by law to wear numbered badges on their arms. In reality, these badges were often not worn, or were pawned, or were lent out by master drovers to their apprentices for a daily fee; fake badges were regularly seized. After a sale was made, a butcher’s drover would drive a beast to its place of slaughter, which was usually in Smithfield, in Whitechapel and Shoreditch in east London, or at Leadenhall Market in the heart of the City.

  A view of Smithfield Market, sketched from the Bear and Ragged Staff pub-cum-slaughterhouse, looking south to the top of Giltspur Street, home to the Fortune of War. St. Bartholomew’s Hospital is the large building to the left of center.

  Country drovers avoided towns and turnpikes by using “drovers’ roads,” grassy tracks where hooves would be less likely to be damaged; but in London there came a point where no roads could be given over to animals alone, and beasts had to share city space, often with calamitous consequences. In the summer of 1828, a bullock went berserk in Hatton Garden and killed a woman who was looking in a jewelry shop window; three other people were knocked unconscious. The beast was being pursued by a gang of boys, though whether they were trying to stop it or had caused the stampede in the first place was never established. (One method of ensuring a richer haul when stealing from a person or a shop was for a gang of boys to select an ox from a passing herd, goad or terrify it into charging, then, when there was uproar, to pick pockets or snatch from window displays. Sometimes, a panic was caused simply for fun, not for gain.)4 Around the same time, a woman who sold oranges in the streets was knocked down and badly wounded when an ox charged in Lad Lane, near Guildhall.5 Many less serious injuries were the result of kicks by frightened or furious animals. Beasts that became separated from their herd would often panic and charge up the narrow courts and alleys of Smithfield, terrorizing pedestrians, disrupting sleep and work, even entering homes and harming the inhabitants.

  Trades that had nothing to do with butchery intermingled with meat-market businesses in Smithfield and its immediate surrounds, and many shopkeepers complained that their revenues dropped on market days: it was said that women would not venture out to buy when beasts were being driven in town; that women would not shop where they had to pass by mounds of flesh lying on the pavement or in the gutters. (Women were frequently cited as potential or real victims of the herds, though it is quite possible that this appeal to chivalry was a calculated ploy by those who wanted to see the market reformed.) William Wilkinson, an upholsterer of Ludgate Hill, said that terrified women would often run into his shop to seek shelter from a passing herd and that his plateglass windows were frequently smashed when bullocks poked their heads through. Robert Padmore of Marriott’s ironmongery in Old Bailey saw a woman run down by a drove of panicking sheep, one of which ran into his shop and fell down into his cellar, on top of his workmen.6 Some animals simply wandered off: “Found, in Holborn, a black and white cow, which is dry, in very bad condition, and aged; she has long horns, and is supposed to be diseased. Apply at the Police Station, Covent Garden,” said a notice in the Daily Police Report of 16 November 1831.7

  Monday was the busiest day at Smithfield; it was the main beef-trading day, with two thousand cattle and fifteen thousand sheep changing hands. At eleven o’clock on Sunday night, the cattle that had been held at Islington were moved down into Smithfield, an operation that lasted until four or five in the morning. That Sundays should end with the most unholy noise of animals thundering along narrow residential streets, drovers cursing and their dogs barking, was felt by some to be an outrage: this was “a shocking conclusion of the Christian Sabbath,” fulminated an anonymous pamphlet of 1823, Cursory Remarks on the Evil Tendency of Unrestrained Cruelty, Particularly on That Practised at Smithfield Market.8 At Christmas 1827, the sheer volume of cattle coming to market meant that the streets to the east of Smithfield as far as Barbican were solid with a bovine traffic jam.9

  On Fridays there was a second cattle market and, from midafternoon, a horse market. Many believed that Friday’s horse trading attracted a large criminal population into the area because so many of the horses put up for sale were stolen—around eight thousand a year in London alone (“pladding a prig” and “prad-chewing” were slang phrases for stealing a horse)—earning the thief around twenty pounds a head. The Hue and Cry/Police Gazette was filled with advertisements for missing beasts: “A black gelding, from Mr Thomas, at Manor Place, Kennington, Middlesex, 21st ultimo, 5 years old, near 15 hands, star on his face, switch tail, hair rubbed off his back and legs”—this was a more detailed description than those of the missing citiz
ens who appeared in the paper’s columns.10 Horse thieves and their hangers-on, it was claimed, flooded into Smithfield—more particularly, to its fifty or sixty pubs and inns. Defenders of the market’s reputation and the integrity of its dealers and drovers pointed to “outsiders” as the source of much of the mischief. “There are a great many boys who are running about the market that come there for mere wantonness,” said one beef salesman. “Those are the persons they ought to punish.”11 As with all London markets, many vagrants, and vagrant children, slept the night in the straw of the pens, beneath the wooden stalls, or in the doorways of surrounding houses and shops. Just what the overlap was between these waifs and the “wanton boys” identified by the salesman cannot be known; one man’s juvenile delinquent is another man’s object of compassion.

  Another, more alarming market was held at Smithfield from time to time: making a “Smithfield bargain” referred to the sale by a husband of his wife and was believed in many working-class communities to be a perfectly valid form of divorce (it had its roots in Anglo-Saxon common law). The sale was usually prearranged, and the buyer was often a friend of the family or a neighbor who, motivated by pity, wanted to help bring an unhappy union to an end; the public nature of the sale was to validate for the community the ending of the marriage. At two o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, 20 February 1832, a man brought his twenty-five-year-old wife in a halter and tied her in the pens opposite the Half Moon pub, close to the gate of St. Bartholomew the Great. A crowd gathered and the auction began, with a “respectable-looking man” striking a deal for ten shillings; throughout, the woman made no complaint about her treatment.12 Some twenty cases of wife selling at Smithfield are on record between the 1790s and the 1830s, though the true figure is likely to be higher.

  Two contemporary views of the Friday horse market at Smithfield—one sedate, one wild