The Jewel of Knightsbridge

by Harrod, Robin;

  That evidence having been taken, Warner, the carman, was removed from the bar and sworn.

  He said he had been in the employ of Messrs. Booth, Ingledew and Knott for five years. Moran had lived with them eight or nine months. Moran had not been there long before they began robbing their employers. Moran first said, ‘Take this,’ and gave him a bag of sugar, but he refused to do so. He was afterwards induced to take away property, which was sold to Mr Harrod. He had been in Harrod’s shop several times. Moran generally dealt with him. He remembered the Saturday before Easter Monday. They stole a bag containing 112lbs of currants [50kg]. Moran took it out of the cellar, and he, the approver, put it into the cart. They took it to Harrod’s shop. Harrod was there, and he told him that was all he had. After he had put up his cart, he went home; and next day Moran called upon him, and said he had been to Harrod and got the money for the currants. Moran paid him his share of the money; he could not tell the exact amount he received, because there were some other matters settles at the same time. The price paid for the currants was 45s. The same price had been paid for currants before that. He believed George, who was dead, had done the same as he and Moran had done.

  Mr Preston, in an answer to a question from Mr Clarkson, said the wholesale price of currants was 65s.

  The prisoners were then called upon for their defence, and, by advice of Mr Wooler, declined making any: but Harrod said the conversation related by Fogg was correct, but what he said was in the irritation of the moment.

  Mr Wooler – I have advised you to reserve your defence.

  Mr Clarkson then committed Moran for trial for stealing the property; Harrod as the receiver; and ordered Warner to be detained to give evidence.

  The inquiry excited great interest.

  Justice proceeded rapidly in those days. The offence with which they had been charged had been committed on 2 April, Warner and Moran were taken into custody and examined by the lord mayor, remanded twice and then discharged. Charles Harrod had ‘done a runner’ when they were arrested, and reappeared upon their discharge. They were all taken before the Recorder on 3 May, then again on 8 May before being committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court, or Old Bailey, on 17 May. That is just over six weeks from offence to final trial and sentencing:

  17th May 1836, Central Criminal Court, before the Recorder

  Messrs. Bodkin and Ballantine conducted the case for the prosecution, and Mr Phillips appeared for the defence.

  Moran denied all knowledge of the robbery. Harrod denied saying anything in his defence.

  Selwood, a confectioner, and a brother of Harrod, deposed hearing Fogg say to Mrs Warner that if she would not induce her husband to make a confession, he [Fogg] would convict him; this was previous to the final examination at the Thames Police office.

  Fogg was recalled and said there was not a word of truth in the statement made by Selwood and Harrod. There were two females talking to Warner’s wife, and he said to them, go away, or else you will get your husband transported.

  A great number of witnesses gave Harrod an excellent character for honesty.

  The Recorder summed up the evidence, observing, that if the jury were satisfied that the evidence of the accomplice was confirmed by other witnesses for the prosecution, there could be little doubt of the guilt of both prisoners.

  The Jury returned a verdict of Guilty against both prisoners.

  The Recorder ordered them to be called up for judgement, observing that if the Court should allow itself to be influenced by feelings of compassion, the wretchedness and misery which the conduct of the prisoner Harrod had entailed upon his wife and children might have some weight in mitigating the sentence about to be passed upon him. But, as the object of all punishment was example, private feeling could not be allowed to interfere with the duty which a Judge owed to the public welfare. With regard to the prisoner Moran, the fact could not be lost sight of that he was a servant in the confidence of the prosecutors, and, taking advantage of that confidence, he had been guilty of robbing his employers from time to time to a considerable extent. The sentence of the Court was that they should be severally transported for seven years.

  This looked like the end of Harrod’s career as a grocer – and strange to think that Harrods may never have existed.

  There is a long list of those people who gave ‘the prisoner Harrod’ a good character. They were:

  James Baker, a surgeon, of Dorchester Place, New North Road, in the Shoreditch area.

  William Mason, a draper, of Fore Street, in the Barbican/Moorgate area.

  Richard Burton, a silk manufacturer, of Wood Street, Cheapside.

  Charles Edward Walker, of London Road, Southwark, a tea dealer.

  James Bateman, a carpenter and builder, of Dorchester Place, New North Road.

  William Carter, a wholesale coffee dealer, of the Barbican.

  James Bower, a linen draper.

  John P. Searle, a tailor, of Tabernacle Row, City Road, north of Liverpool Street.

  John Hewett, a druggist, of Well Street, Well Close Square. He lived three doors away from Harrod in Rosemary Lane.

  Henry Cowley, a tea dealer, of New Road in the Whitechapel area.

  Mr Bacon and Alice Bacon.

  He seemed to have a lot of loyal friends, none of whom had previously featured in the research. They all lived at addresses in a small local area, on just a single page of the present-day London A–Z.

  The mention of Harrod’s brother was, at that time, the first I had heard of him – it became apparent that Charles Henry had a brother called William Frederick Harrod. In the full transcription of the trial, one of the witnesses stated, ‘Harrod’s brother was with me at the time’, and ‘I know Harrod’s brother, but not the prisoner’, and later, William Frederick Harrod spoke on his brother’s behalf:

  I am the prisoner’s brother, and am a working jeweller, living at No. 129, Tooley Street. Mr Selwood and I have been intimate some time – I was with him at the Thames police-office, on Saturday, 7th of May, when my brother was there, under charge – I heard Fogg say …

  James Fogg, the police officer, was later re-examined and gave evidence that, ‘the witness Harrod asked me to be as lenient with his brother as I could and asked me to take something to drink …’

  So, where did this William Frederick Harrod come from? The reader will remember he was found earlier in the research and at that stage his existence had been discounted as an error. His discovery was a surprise, and it was initially difficult to get any information about him. I already knew that Charles Henry had a brother William, born and christened in Hartest in Suffolk in 1797. The baptism records of this William make no mention of the other Christian name, Frederick. It would have been common at the time that his parents would name their firstborn son William.

  A burial record had been found for an infant William Harrod, of the right age, in Clerkenwell in 1798, in a Nonconformist cemetery, and the assumption was that this was the same William. But he probably wasn’t, and he lived on to be William Frederick, the jeweller. The only other explanation is that the original son, William, had died and that the parents later had another son they also called William. However, there has been no further birth or baptism found.

  Frederick William was found listed in the 1839 Pigot’s Directory at Cable Street as a grocer, and an assumption had been made that this was a clerical error, as I had already found a William Frederick Harrod, working as a jeweller in Tooley Street, Southwark.

  Quite a lot has since been found out about William Frederick. From the information on his marriage and death certificates and in censuses, it looks as though he was born in about 1797 or 1798, which tended to confirm the idea that he might have been the William born in Suffolk in 1797. However, calculating age from these sources is notoriously inaccurate. William Frederick worked as a jeweller from about 1826 onwards, and was by 1839 working in Southwark, quite close to the area where Charles Henry had his draper’s shop in the previous decade. He wa
s, intriguingly, working in the same street, Tooley Street, where the Lincolnshire family of Harrods had lived a couple of decades later.

  William Frederick and his wife, Nancy, who had married in 1822, had four children and a lot of misfortune. Their first child, William Thomas, was born in 1823, but died in 1824, aged 19 months. Charles Thomas was born in 1825, and died after three days. William Frederick was born in 1826 whilst the family were living in Regent Street, London. He also died early, in 1853 aged 27, of a fistula (a fistula is an abnormal track from the inside to the outside of the body, often in those days the result of untreated abdominal infections, such as appendicitis). Emma was born in 1829 in Clerkenwell, and died aged 8 weeks. His wife Nancy died seven days after Emma was born, aged 34.

  So tragically, by 1836 when William was involved in Charles Henry’s story, he was already a widower with a single remaining 9-year-old son. In 1836 Charles Henry and Elizabeth would have had two children, aged 4 and 1. They were about to suffer from their own share of misfortune.

  Charles Henry had obviously been involved in receiving stolen goods for some while, and had been given the standard sentence for such crimes, transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, or Tasmania as we know it. He would be leaving England for a stay of seven years, and most convicts did not return. Tasmania had been discovered by Abel Tasman, a Dutch explorer in 1642. He named the island after the governor general of the Dutch East Indies, Anthoonij van Diemenslandt.

  In 1803, a small British force was sent to establish a military post and prevent the French, who had been sniffing around the island for some time, from making any claims. A colony was eventually proclaimed in 1825. Tasmania became the principal destination for transported criminals after the early 1800s; 75,000 were sent there altogether. Two more convicts were soon to join them.

  Considering that Charles Henry appears in the 1841 census, and accepting that he was the father of Charles Digby Harrod, born in January 1841, it looks as though he was definitely ‘in circulation’ in the spring of 1840, four years after his sentence. So, what had happened? Though the exact details of what happened to him are unclear, some facts are known and Charles Henry certainly disappeared from the scene after his sentence in 1836. It appears that in his absence, his brother William Frederick ran both his own jewellery business in Southwark and the grocery business in Rosemary Lane/Cable Street, where he was listed in an 1839 directory. He would have had his son with him and probably joined Elizabeth and her two children.

  The Prison Hulk Registers and Letter Books for 1836, now available online, show that Charles Henry Harrod was taken to the prison ship Leviathan, moored in Portsmouth, and arrived there on 30 May 1836, three weeks after his trial. This is confirmed by the Newgate Prison records held at Kew. Newgate is next door to the Old Bailey, and Charles was incarcerated there between 7 May (the day of his arrest and two days before his trial) until 30 May.

  Several prison hulks served as holding stations for prisoners, often for several weeks prior to transfer to other boats for the long journey to Australia. Most of them were literally hulks, usually old warships that were no longer seaworthy. The Leviathan was a third-rate ship of the line and in her prime was armed with seventy-four guns. She was built in 1790, based on a French design, and was probably larger than most third-rate ships. She had served at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In the Royal Navy, a third-rate ship of the line had between sixty-four and eighty guns, usually with two gun decks (a ‘two-decker’). Whilst first rates and second rates were larger and more powerful, these third-rate ships were the best compromise between agility and speed, firepower and cost. After active service, the Leviathan was de-masted and laid up in Portsmouth as a prison hulk. She was later to be broken up in 1848.

  Between 1788 and 1868, over 160,000 prisoners were transported to Australia and Tasmania. The conditions on board would have been horrendous. An account was given by John Frederick Mortlock in his Experiences of a Convict, where he describes his time in Leviathan in 1843:

  They conveyed me (chained hand and foot to a man now driving a cab in Tasmania) by railroad to the hulk Leviathan at Portsmouth [the first railway route from London to Portsmouth was via Eastleigh, Fareham and Gosport. The station at Gosport was opened on 29 November 1841 and passengers had to use the ferry to get to Portsmouth. Charles Henry must therefore have travelled by road or boat. Though the dates suggest he arrived in Portsmouth on the same day that he left Newgate, this which would have been quite a feat in 1836] … and quickly transmogrified me into a strange-looking object, whom no one could recognise … At any rate I was no longer shut up in gaol, to me the most dreadful of punishments, now, I hoped, done with for ever. This, however, as will be seen, turned out to be a mistaken expectation. The hulk, an old [Trafalgar] ninety-gun ship, being very full, contained more than six hundred convicts (from starvation and discipline, tame as rabbits), housed on the three decks, which were divided into compartments, separated from each other by bulkheads, and from the gangway down the centre, by iron bars, giving the appearance of a menagerie. Owing to the height of the wharf, alongside of which she lay, the larboard row of cells, on the lower deck, was nearly in darkness, and insufficiently ventilated. ‘New chums’, therefore, in their location down below, breathed very foul air … A pernicious habit also existed of sluicing out all the decks every morning, with salt water … The chilly dampness arising from this, proved a fertile source of sickness.

  … As a reward for three months of good behaviour, a light ring [called a basil] above the ankle, scarcely to be felt, succeeded the irons. Upon losing the weightier decorations, my foot in walking used to fly up in an odd manner for some time afterwards, till the muscles grew accustomed to their lighter load … I found the carrying of timber and other hard work very irksome at first, although labour is not severe punishment to a strong man well fed; but we suffered from a lack of sufficient food … Hence the mortality was great, it being whispered that the head doctor at the hospital ship, enjoyed a contract for supplying surgeons in town with bodies for dissection at six guineas a piece.

  The records confirm that the vast majority of the convicts on board were actually transported, there being an annotation in the ‘how disposed of’ column in the records, with the initials of the transport ship and the date. A few prisoners died, and a very few were pardoned.

  In the ‘how disposed of’ column opposite Charles Henry’s name, there is the annotation ‘Penit … y’, with the date 1 July, 1836. This indicates that he was sent to the Millbank Penitentiary Infirmary, presumably in poor health. There was an annotation stating he was not to go abroad until the case was decided.

  Richard Moran, his co-defendant, also held on Leviathan, was sent off in the transport ship Sarah on 29 November 1836, six months after his arrival on the hulk. He reached Van Diemen’s Land on 29 March 1837, accompanied on the voyage by 253 other convicts. The Tasmanian Records Office contains the records of each convict arriving there, and Moran’s behaviour on the hulk and during the transportation was good. He was listed as having gone absent without leave a year after arrival, in December 1837, but he later returned of his own will to the penal settlement. After six years he was pardoned and he was declared free in 1842. No further information about him is available, so the presumption must be that he remained in Tasmania.

  It was not clear initially why Charles was reprieved from his transportation. Perhaps he was too ill to transport. It is known that some captains of the transport ships were very reluctant to take on board prisoners who were ill, as there was an enormous amount of paperwork involved if any prisoner died during the voyage. In most cases, the convict transport ships were privately owned merchant ships that were chartered by the British government for one or more voyages to the Australian colonies. Following serious outbreaks of disease, with the heavy loss of life on board some early convict ship voyages suffered, later voyages were strictly regulated in terms of provisions and medical support. As a result, deaths on board ship during these long pas
sages were generally lower than on assisted immigrant ships on similar voyages, and many convicts actually arrived in a better state of health than they had enjoyed before leaving!

  More light was thrown on the whole episode with a further discovery early in 2013 of documents online relating to a ‘memorial’, or appeal, for Charles Henry Harrod, instigated in 1836. This consisted of thirteen original documents placed online, together with the original folder and the list of contents. I still find it amazing that documents such as these, so important to my understanding of my great-great-grandfather’s life, but relatively unimportant to the rest of the world, have not only survived intact, but were available for me to search online. Each document consisted of several pages of handwritten letters and reports. I have attempted to transcribe them and have unravelled the story of Charles Henry’s partial reprieve.

  I will paraphrase the documents in approximate date order. The outer folder was a summary of the events, headed ‘Petition of Charles Henry Harrod’. It was presented by George Grote, Esquire, the Liberal MP for the City of London, of 62 Threadneedle Street, and was addressed to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, Home Secretary since the previous year. It was dated 25 May 1836, five days before Charles Henry arrived on Leviathan. The petitioners had moved rapidly.

  Grote was from a successful banking family, and was renowned as a reformist and forward thinker. He spent much of his later life researching Greek history. His mother was the daughter of the minister at the Countess of Huntingdon’s Chapel in London, so perhaps there was some sympathy there for Harrod’s Nonconformist background. His portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

  The document listed the dates and sentence of his Charles Henry’s conviction, with a summary of his social status. It states that the surgeon, Mr Capper, had been asked for a report and that he had said, ‘His constitution is weakly and his health bad.’ The recipient enquires if this was true, asking for enquiry to be made by the police as to his character. Inside the folded document Charles starts his petition with his own personal statement: