Case Six
Clowns and Robbers
1797
Suspect:
Robert Goodwin & Dennis Green
Age:
20 & 19
Charge:
Housebreaking
Sentence:
Execution, commuted to transportation for life
In a small public park just off the Pentonville Road there is a gravestone surrounded by black railings decorated with the masks of Comedy and Tragedy. A plaque set into the ground reveals that it is the resting place of Joseph Grimaldi, the greatest clown that ever lived and a genuine Clerkenwell celebrity. From his first performance at Sadler’s Wells at the age of three, to his retirement at forty-six, he could ‘fill a theatre anywhere’ with physical comedy, costume changes, pantomime dames and songs that had the audience rolling in the aisles. Grimaldi, or just plain ‘Joey’, was also a master of the anecdote. Many of his tales can be found in his memoirs, edited by none other than Charles Dickens and published in 1838, a year after Grimaldi’s death.
Joseph Grimaldi’s gravestone at Joseph Grimaldi Park off Pentonville Road. (Author)
One of these stories involves his encounter with a notorious gang of thieves he called the ‘Pentonville Robbers’. At the end of the eighteenth century, Pentonville was a small, pleasant suburb set in the fields of Islington, bounded by White Conduit House and Sadler’s Wells Theatre. It made an attractive target for burglars and the Pentonville Robbers had at one point been twenty strong. By 1797 most of the gang had been captured and executed or transported to Australia, but three or four of them remained at large. Grimaldi, aged eighteen and yet to make his name, was living with his mother in Penton Place, now Penton Rise, opposite the old burial ground which later became the public park that bears his name. It was August and the clown was rehearsing his latest show. On his return home, his mother noticed the garden gate was open. ‘Oh dear me!’ she exclaimed. ‘How careless this is?’ Approaching the house, she noticed that the front door was also ajar and caught a reflection of light at the end of the passage. After screaming for help, she bravely went down the stairs and found her home had been ransacked of almost everything of value.
Grimaldi’s debut at Sadler’s Wells in 1782 ‘in the arduous character of a monkey’, drawn by George Cruickshank for Grimaldi, edited by Boz.
‘The house was in a state of great disorder and confusion, but no thieves were to be seen,’ remembered Grimaldi. ‘The cupboards were forced, the drawers had been broken open, and every article they contained had been removed.’ Grabbing an old broadsword hung from a peg, he crept into the darkness of the back garden and climbed the wall to try and intercept the robbers as they made their escape. Grimaldi spotted one of the gang about to climb down into the pasture behind the house. ‘Hush, hush, is that you?’ asked the robber, mistaking the clown for one of his colleagues.
‘Yes,’ Grimaldi replied, moving closer before swinging his mighty weapon. Yelping in pain, the thief fell to the ground, blood oozing from his leg, before jumping up and limping away. Determined to apprehend the criminal, Grimaldi leapt down after him and gave chase, only to tumble acrobatically over a cow lying on the ground. He would later boast that he might have cut his own head off with the sword had it not been for his theatrical training as a fencer. Giving up the pursuit, Grimaldi returned to the house to work out what had been stolen.
The most heartbreaking loss was his treasured insect collection, including a cabinet of Adonis blue butterflies which he had gathered during night-time flits to Dartford in Kent. It now lay smashed upon the floor, irreparably damaged. Grimaldi was so devastated that he gave up the hobby and turned to pigeon fancying instead.
He was to have his revenge on the Pentonville Robbers two weeks later, after the gang made a second unsuccessful attempt to raid the house. With the help of a local parish constable named Trott, he laid a trap to catch them when they returned for a third time in search of even more loot. Sure enough, two men picked the lock and entered the house while the clown and his family were out at the theatre.
‘Wouldn’t you like to know who it was as struck you with the sword, Tom?’ one of them asked.
‘I wish I did, I’d put a knife in him before many days was over.’
Trott then sprang the trap, locking the front door and firing a pistol down the stairs to signal to his two colleagues to come out and arrest the thieves. Their fate was to be transported for life, while Grimaldi moved to a safer location in Penton Street.
Charles Dickens saw this episode as:
… a striking and curious picture of the state of society in and about London, in this respect, at the very close of the last century. The bold and daring highwaymen … had ceased to canter their blood-horses over heath and road in search of plunder, but there still existed in the capital and its environs, common and poorer gangs of thieves, whose depredations were conducted with a daring and disregard of consequences which to the citizens of this age is wholly extraordinary.
Dickens also suggested that if this episode had taken place in 1838 instead of 1797, it would have ‘set all London, and all the country for thirty miles round to boot, in a ferment of wonder and indignation’.
It seems likely the story of the Pentonville Robbers is either vastly exaggerated or entirely made up, because it is difficult to find any references to the Pentonville Robbers in contemporary reports, despite claims to their notoriety. It is possible he was basing his account on a burglary of No. 58 Penton Street in the early hours of 21 May 1792, when John Ball and his brother Joshua broke into the home of Ann Farrer through the back kitchen window. They snatched not only the silver spoons and sugar tongs but also boots, shoes, stockings, aprons, sheets, tablecloths and a ¼lb of tea. Fortunately for Mrs Farrer, the burglars were spotted running across the field with their loot by a watchman and were arrested near Tottenham Court Road. Both were found guilty and transported to Australia for seven years. Perhaps the closest real-life matches to the ‘Pentonville Robbers’ are Robert Goodwin and Dennis Green, who lived in Dobney’s (or Daubigney’s) Place off Penton Street in 1800. At two o’clock in the morning on 22 February, they broke into the home of a local gentleman, Benjamin Holdsworth, and stole 45s worth of silver cutlery as well as various pieces of clothing, linen cloths and napkins, and 3lb of bacon. The crime was only discovered by a servant the next morning. Goodwin and Green might have got away with it had it not been for an honest pawnbroker, William Crouch of Ray Street, Clerkenwell. After being offered a silver toast rack and a pair of silver sugar tongs for 14s, Mr Crouch became suspicious when he spotted the owner’s crest. Goodwin, aged twenty, and Green, aged nineteen, were arrested, and the stolen silver was discovered in a hole in the wall of their room. Both were found guilty of burglary and condemned to death, although their sentences were reduced to transportation for life. Green ended up as a successful farmer in New South Wales, Australia, and had seven children before passing away in 1855.
Joseph Grimaldi the clown performing in the pantomime Harlequin and Friar Bacon, from Pinks’ History of Clerkenwell.
As for Joseph Grimaldi, he left Penton Street following the death of his wife in October 1799 and moved to Baynes Row, Clerkenwell. He found fame in 1806 with his performance in the play Mother Goose and established the archetype of the ‘white-faced clown’.
His career finally came to an end with a ‘farewell benefit’ at Drury Lane theatre in 1828. Seven years later, after spending several years living in Woolwich, he returned to Pentonville to spend the last two years of his life at No. 33 Southampton Street (now renamed Calshot Street). Grimaldi did not mention it in his memoirs, but this road had only a few months earlier been the scene of the horrific murder of a young mother and her four young children.
Case Seven
The House of Blood
1834
Suspect:
Mr John Steinberg
Age:
45
Charge:
Infanticide, Filici
de & Murder
Sentence:
Felo de se
At six o’clock in the morning on Tuesday 9 September 1834, a fifteen-year-old servant girl walked up Southampton Street in Pentonville and knocked on the front door of No. 17. Harriet Pearson had arrived on time, just as Mr and Mrs Steinberg had requested, but there was no answer. She knocked again. All was quiet. She could not even hear the cries of the couple’s baby son, or their three other children. Uncertain what to do next, Harriet hung about the house for nigh on three hours in case they did not want to be disturbed at such an early hour after all. Finally, at nine o’clock, with the house remaining unusually quiet for such a young family, she decided to return to her mother’s home in Edmond Street in Battle Bridge. It was autumn and the leaves on the trees were turning red and brown and falling mournfully into the streets.
An hour later, accompanied by her mother, Harriet returned. Again there was no answer. Mrs Pearson adventurously clambered over the wall into the yard to try the back door, but it was locked. It was only at eleven o’clock that the landlord, Lewis Cuthbert, arrived, alerted by a neighbour who suspected that the Steinbergs had fled without paying the rent. He forced open the door and gazed in horror at the scene within. ‘I saw Mr Steinberg lying at full length on the kitchen floor. There was a great deal of blood about his clothes and the place, and his throat was horribly cut.’ Mr Cuthbert immediately called in the police.
Upstairs, the first floor was even more hellish. In the main bedroom they found a woman they believed to be Mrs Steinberg lying face down on the floor in her nightdress. Her head was nearly severed from her body, so deep was the gash to her throat. At her feet was her youngest, Philip, eight months old, decapitated. The bed, bedclothes, and the pillow, were all stained red with blood. The second floor was a fresh nightmare. By the side of a cot lay Ellen, two years old, with her throat cut from ear to ear. Her five-year-old brother Henry had been just as cruelly dispatched in his own bed. In the next room, four-year-old John had obviously put up a fight. One of the fingers on his left hand had been cut off and there was a deep gash in his right shoulder. But John too had succumbed to the same cruel end as the rest of his family.
The Metropolitan Police, only five years old itself, did not take long to conclude that there was no homicidal maniac loose on the streets. All the evidence pointed to the dead father – John Nicholas Steinberg, a forty-five-year-old whip maker from Germany. The doors of the house were all locked, there were no signs of a robbery and the murder weapon lay by his side. According to a local tradesman, he had bought the white-handled butcher’s knife on Monday 8th. On the kitchen table lay a blank piece of paper, a pen and ink, as if Steinberg had intended to write a note explaining his actions, only to be overwhelmed by the horror of what he had just done.
Word swept the neighbourhood and by the afternoon ‘the crowd was so dense and anxious that the street was rendered impassable’ and the police struggled to keep the masses away from the house. Another report claimed: ‘the interest was so great that persons of the utmost respectability, amongst whom were many eminent surgeons, attended at the house begging for admission, but they were denied.’ The throng were horrified, excited, tearful and angry as they heard descriptions of the attractive twenty-five-year-old mother and her children lying in a house so stained and spattered it resembled ‘one mass of human blood’.
The crowds were still there when the sixteen members of the jury hearing the inquest were taken to view the scene at five o’clock in the afternoon the next day. As The Times newspaper put it: ‘the appearance of the mutilated bodies created a painful sensation in the breast of the jury and every person present.’ One of the jurors was so distressed that they had to retire before hearing further evidence at the Vernon Arms pub in Pentonville Road. As witness after witness told of their dealings with Mr Steinberg, a picture emerged of a troubled man driven to the depths of despair.
The main revelation was that the dead young woman at No. 17 Southampton Street was not Mrs Steinberg at all – her name was Ellen Lefevre, and the real Mrs Steinberg was living with her husband’s nineteen-year-old son, Nicholas, at a house in Leigh Street, Burton Crescent, St Pancras. It appeared that ten years earlier, John Steinberg and his wife had taken pity on fifteen-year-old Ellen, the daughter of a failed bookseller who hanged himself on Primrose Hill, and offered her a job as their servant girl. It was rumoured that Steinberg had seduced the teenager during regular outings to see his son at a boarding school in Hampstead. When Mrs Steinberg found out, she threw Ellen out of the house and tried to stop the lovers from seeing each other. It did not work. John Steinberg walked out on his existing family to start a new one with his teenage mistress at an ironmonger’s home in Hampstead Road. After the birth of their first child, Henry, they moved first to Chelsea, and finally to Southampton Street in the summer of 1833.
Opinions of John Steinberg varied wildly, depending on who you talked to and on what particular subject. Neighbours knew him as ‘a man of very retired habits’, and a ‘highly respectable tradesman’, who was said to own a patent on a whip ‘of peculiar construction’. His estranged wife, when contacted by reporters, spoke highly of her husband and the maintenance he paid of £2 10s a quarter. His teenage son, on the other hand, believed him to be insane. ‘My father was of a very irritable and passionate disposition, and every circumstance agitated and affected his mind,’ Nicholas Steinberg told the inquest. ‘My father used me severely and beat me often. He used my mother very ill, struck her, and beat her once almost to death.’
According to the servant girl, Harriet Pearson, Steinberg behaved very affectionately towards his new partner but did not always treat their young children so tenderly. Harriet told the jury that:
My master was a very passionate man. When he was in a passion I have seen him pull his children up by the hair of their heads and ears and throw them down. My mistress used to pull him away mildly, and remonstrate with him, and say if they deserved beating, it should be elsewhere.
One of Steinberg’s employees defended his master by saying that he only beat the children with a whip when they deserved it.
A few months before the murders, on 21 May, Steinberg took his family and their servant girl to Germany to visit an ill relative and to collect a debt he believed was owed him for a number of whips. During their journey back to England, he complained to a fellow passenger, Fritz Langar, about losing a law suit, which cost him £200. On top of that, his sister had charged him for board and lodging during their stay. Langar described him as appearing ‘almost insane’. Steinberg’s mood didn’t improve when he returned home on Saturday 6 September to find that his business had been neglected by the young whip maker he had left in charge, Brockhart Brunish. Mr Brunish was so fearful of arrest that he did not even dare to visit the house to collect the two sovereigns that he was owed for his work. Then on Monday evening, Steinberg met Fritz Langar for a drink at the King of Prussia pub in Lambeth Street in Whitechapel. Mr Langar told the inquest: ‘He threw himself in all sorts of attitudes and said he was ruined. He pulled out some papers, and in his side pocket I perceived a long parcel, which I have no doubt was a knife.’
The last person to see the family alive was Harriet Pearson on the Monday night at half eight. After fetching a pint of beer and a quartern of gin for supper, and seeing the children to bed, she overheard Steinberg asking Ellen Lefevre if she wanted to retire for the night. Ellen replied that it was too early. Steinberg told her to give Harriet a raspberry cake. The servant girl was paid her wages and sent home on the promise that she would be back at six o’clock the next morning. ‘I saw no difference in his manner on the evening that I last saw him,’ she said. Perhaps he had already decided on the crime.
Journalists reported that the jury room was ‘literally besieged’ by the curious and excitable crowds hoping to discover what had caused Steinberg to murder his partner and children in cold blood. At half past eleven, the jury returned a verdict of felo de se, a legal term
for suicide which translates as ‘felon of himself’. Steinberg’s property was to be forfeited to the Crown and his body buried according to custom – usually at a crossroads with a stake driven through the heart.
On the night of Thursday 11 September, Steinberg’s body was taken to the paupers’ burial ground in Ray Street, Clerkenwell. Attempts to keep the funeral a secret were unsuccessful, and a crowd quickly gathered to shout insults at the dead man.
According to one account:
A party of men with lighted flambeaux led the officers and bearers of the deceased’s body to a deep hole about eighteen or twenty feet deep. After exhibiting it to the public view it was taken out of the shell and pitched headlong into it, and the hollow sound of the body when it went to the bottom was shocking, and excited a feeling of horror; but in the grave the men with the links shook them over the body, and made contemptuous remarks with the greatest levity. The windows looking into the churchyard were crowded by persons, who cried out ‘Why don’t you burn him?’ and ‘hang him up to a signpost’. Several persons secured bits of the trowsers [sic] in which the murderer was buried, and one regretted that he had not cut off part of his ear to preserve in spirits.
After shallowly covering the body with soil, a member of the burial party beat the earth above Steinberg’s skull with an iron mallet until it was smashed to pieces.
View of the south and west sides of St James’ Church, with the gravestone to the right of the steps. (Author)
Murder & Crime Page 3