Category: Crime and Punishment

Law Enforcement in Hanley

Between 1842 and 1870, law and order in Hanley was maintained by Staffordshire’s county police force.

Although Hanley and Shelton, the two largest townships in the Potteries, amalgamated in 1857 to form the Borough of Hanley, the borough did not obtain its own police force until 1870.

Stanford Alexander was appointed chief constable. He had 35 police officers to maintain law and order in a town that had a population of 41,000. His officers worked three overlapping shifts – two 12-hour shifts during the day and one nine-hour shift at night. Despite the long hours worked, pay was low. Constables earned 21 shillings a week. Sergeants were paid 25 shillings, and inspectors received 30 shillings.

When Alexander retired in 1875, Herbert Windle was made chief constable. Windle improved pay and working conditions for his officers. He persuaded the town’s Watch Committee to give them a library and a recreation room, with a billiard table, where they could relax when they came off duty.

By the late 1870s, Hanley had become the Potteries’ commercial and cultural centre. Trains and trams brought people from neighbouring towns to its shops and markets, music halls and theatres.

On Saturday nights, Hanley’s criminal fraternity went to the town centre. Children begged outside shops or stole from market stalls. Drunken brawls broke out in public houses. Gangs roamed the streets looking for a fight. Prostitutes accosted men in Piccadilly. Pickpockets mingled with the crowds in Fountain Square, and robbers lurked in dark alleys waiting to pounce on their victims.

Robbery and theft were indictable offences. They had to be tried in Stafford before the Assize Court or by Quarter Sessions.

Police officers and witnesses were forced to travel to Stafford, where they had to wait outside the courtrooms in the Shire Hall until called to give evidence. Unwilling to make the journey, many victims of crime refused to prosecute offenders. Law and order in Hanley was breaking down. The borough council asked Queen Victoria to give the town its own Quarter Sessions. She granted the council’s request, and the borough’s Quarter Sessions held its first sitting on January 19, 1881. There were eight defendants, three of whom could neither read nor write.

The Stocks

The Stocks and Whipping Post

On October 6, 1680, Tunstall Court Leet ordered the High Constable of the Manor of Tunstall to repair the socks in Burslem within six weeks or pay a penalty of six shillings and eight pence. 

From Anglo-Saxon times until the middle of the 19th century, stocks were used to punish minor offences. 

Stocks were placed on village greens, in market squares and at crossroads. Offenders placed in them sat on a wooden bench, with their ankles and sometimes their wrists put through holes in moveable boards.  

This penalty was intended to humiliate and degrade petty criminals by putting them on display in public places and letting the community punish them.  

In 1350, the Second Statute of Labourers compelled every town and village to erect stocks in public places and gave courts the power to place workers who disobeyed their employers in them.  

A set of stocks outside the church or on the village green conferred status on a small community. Any settlement too small to have its own stocks was regarded as a hamlet and could not call itself a village. 

Stocks were used to punish a wide range of minor offences, including drunkenness, failure to attend church, fortune telling, drinking during the hours of divine service and swearing in a public place. 

Offenders sitting in the stocks were abused by the crowds that came to laugh and jeer or to throw stones, broken pottery, dead rats, cats and dogs, rotten fruit and bad eggs, mud and excrement at them. 

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, gangs of rogues and vagabonds made their way from town-to-town begging, robbing and stealing. To deal with them, the government made new laws imposing draconian penalties.  

In 1388, an Act of Parliament made it illegal for labourers to give up their jobs and leave the hundred where they were born without the King’s permission. The Act gave borough mayors, manor stewards and constables power to put labourers who had run away in the stocks and keep them there until they found sureties to guarantee they would return home and work. 

A later Statute passed during the reign of Henry VII allowed constables to put vagrants in the stocks.

In 1494, Parliament passed the Vagrants and Beggars Act which punished “Vagabonds, idle and suspected persons” by putting them in the stocks “for three days and three nights” with nothing to eat or drink except bread and water. When released, the offenders were “put out of town”.  

In 1530, a statute gave magistrates the power to grant licences to “impotent beggars”, permitting them to beg at specified places in the town where they lived. Men and women with licenses found begging in another part of town were put in the stocks for two days and nights. While in the stocks, they were given bread to eat and water to drink. Unlicensed beggars were tied to the whipping post and publicly whipped until their backs were bloody. 

© Copyright David Martin 2023  

William Frederick Horry

The condemned cell at Lincoln Castle Prison where William Horry spent his last days.

Despite his superficial charismatic charm, William Frederick Horry, the landlord of Burslem’s George Hotel, was a cold-blooded, ruthless killer.

Born on November 17 1843, in Boston, Lincolnshire, he was the son of William Horry, senior, a successful brewer.

When he left school, young William became a trainee manager at Parker’s Brewery in Zion Street, Burslem. He lived at the George Hotel in Nile Street, where he fell in love with Jane Wright, the hotel’s barmaid.

When she left the George Hotel and went to work at the Sneyd Arms Hotel in Tunstall, William realised he could not live without her and asked her to marry him. She consented, and William’s father gave them £800 to buy the George Hotel. The couple married in 1867 and had three children.

William was a heavy drinker and convinced himself that Jane was flirting with male customers. At night, he walked the streets looking for prostitutes or drinking with criminals in back street beer houses.

William’s father and Jane’s brother Thomas, a solicitors clerk, came to Burslem to find out why the marriage had failed. William told them Jane had committed adultery with three of the town’s leading citizens and that witnesses would confirm it. When the two men investigated these allegations, they discovered that William had lied to them.

William and Jane separated in March 1871. She took the children and went to live with his father in Boston. William sold the George Hotel and went to Nottingham.

He visited Boston and asked Jane to take him back. She refused, and William started divorce proceedings, claiming she had committed adultery with five men.

While waiting for the case to be heard, William bought expensive clothes and visited the Potteries frequently. Early in January 1872, he stayed a week visiting brothels in Hanley and drinking with friends in Burslem.

On Saturday, January 13, William returned to Nottingham, where he bought a revolver and a hundred cartridges, telling the gunsmith they were for his brother who was going to Australia.

William left Nottingham and went to Boston, where he visited Jane’s home. She invited him into the house, and he followed her along the passage to the breakfast room. As Jane entered the room, William pulled out the gun and shot her in the back. The bullet passed through her left rib and penetrated her lung. She died a few minutes later. William was detained by her relatives, who called the police. He was arrested and charged with murder.

William’s friends in Burslem launched a public appeal to pay for his defence.

He was tried at Lincoln Assizes on March 13 and pleaded “Not Guilty”. His trial lasted three hours. The jury took 15 minutes to convict him.

William stood in the dock and watched Mr Justice Quain don the Black Cap, a square of black cloth worn by judges when passing the death sentence. The court fell silent as the judge passed the sentence, saying:

“William Frederick Horry, the sentence of this court is that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison and then to a place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck until you are dead and that your body be afterwards cut down and buried within the precincts of the prison in which you were last confined before execution. And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”

William was taken to Lincoln Castle Prison and hanged on Easter Monday, April 1, 1872.

Post: Copyright © Betty and David Martin, 2023

Photograph: © Copyright Dave Hitchborne, licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.