Cat Burglars during the Regency?
Were There Cat Burglars in Regency London?
Cassandra Sinatore, the heroine of Stealing Time, is a cat burglar accidently thrust back in time to the year 1815. The term Cat Burglar calls up images of athletic, skilled and clever thieves, who make breaking and entering inaccessible places an art form. Would Cassandra find similar thieves operating in England during the Regency?
Origins of the Cat Burglar
The first time such a thief was called a ‘cat burglar’ was in 1907. [For stealing something other than cats…] Caught and tried in London, Arthur Edward Young, only twenty-three, was called ‘The Cat Burglar,’ and it is his cleverness at climbing that won for him the sobriquet in England and the United States. The moniker began to be applied to many skillful burglars.
The character of the ‘gentleman thief’, was literally invented a decade earlier, in 1898 and only later blended with the skills of the cat burglar. The brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung, was the author of the ‘Amateur Cracksman’, the premier gentleman thief, A. J. Raffles. Envisioned as the opposite of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, he is called an ‘amateur’ because being a gentleman among the upper classes, he eschewed being a ‘professional’ in trade. While not as well-known a literary character as Sherlock Holmes, Raffles remains very popular. David Nivens starred in the 1939 movie ‘Raffles’ and the BBC produced a 2011 series of the same name.
Probably the most famous Cat Burglar, Peter Scott (born Peter Craig Gulston) (18 February 1931 – 17 March 2013) was an Irish burglar and thief who was variously described as the "King of the Cat Burglars", "Burglar to the Stars" and the "Human Fly". Like most cat burglars, including the fictional Raffles, the rich were the target where the thefts were out of the ordinary in difficulty and treasure. However, Scott called himself a ‘Robin Hood’, though there is little evidence that he gave to the poor other than himself.
If there were no cat burglars during the Regency, what kinds of thieves prayed on society and how skilled were they?
Types and Numbers of Criminals and Police in Regency London.
Most all crime in 1815 London was committed by the very poor and the average claims for theft of all kinds amounted to £4 or less. More often than not, the thieves were what were commonly called “Ragged School Boys”, the type you see Fagan organizing in Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist. Magistrate Sir Robert Peel estimated that there were 300 resident thieves in the London area served by the Union Hall Police Court of 150,000 residents and 12 police officers. Writer John Wade stated in 1829, in the periodical The Spectator that the Bow Street Day Patrol had 24 men for over 10,000 London streets.
The estimates of the number of first-class thieves in all of London, most known by name by the authorities, came to less than 200 in a population of 1.4 million and most were not burglars. First-class professional criminals included forgers, swindlers, but most were found where the real money lay: Fencing the goods stolen by others. For the most part, the entire criminal community came to the ones who could pay for stolen items. There was also the “Swell Mob,” a small numbers of posers who could infiltrated the edges of the upper class, but they tended to be the swindlers and ‘inside men’ of other thieves rather than simply burglars.
Those who broke into the homes and offices of the wealthy were called ‘Cracksmen’ because they entered by breaking windows. The top-class burglars were said to be able to open Chubb and Hannah locks in 3 minutes or on occasion put a hole in a brick wall in 2 hours. It was rare for thieves to scale walls or enter through upper stories. Along with the chimney sweeps, these few climbers were called “Roof Dancers.” One can see that even the best operators were crude by modern standards, where a modern thief being unable to open a simple lock in less than 1 minute would be laughable. This lack of skill isn’t surprising because most all Regency criminals came from the lower and for the most part, uneducated classes. Only 50% of London inhabitants were literate. Any felonious sophistication was learned on the streets.
That arena for learning includes law enforcement. In London, besides the Union Hall Police Court and the Bow Street Runners, there were other police groups: Beadles, parish constables and street watchmen. These different law enforcement efforts were of mixed quality and numbers, not coordinated at all. There were only 427 full-time policemen for all of London in 1829 when Sir Robert Peel created the Metropolitan Police Force of more than 1,000 ‘Bobbies’ and ‘Peelers’, named after Sir Robert. Crime declined as the century wore on, not least because the criminal areas, the ‘Rookeries’ were slowly cleared out.
Where the Criminals Resided
Most criminals resided in ‘Rookeries’ throughout London. The term rookery originated because of the perceived similarities between a city slum and the nesting habits of the rook, a bird in the crow family. Rooks nest in large, noisy colonies consisting of multiple nests, often untidily crammed into a close group of treetops called a rookery.
The word might also be linked to the expression to rook (meaning to cheat or steal), a verb well established in the 16th century and associated with the supposedly thieving nature of the rook bird. The term was first used in print by the poet George Galloway in 1792 to describe "a cluster of mean tenements densely populated by people of the lowest class."
Oliver Twist (1838) features the rookery at Jacob's Island, a notorious slum in Bermondsey, London, which Dickens visited. It was located on the south bank of the River Thames, approximately delineated by the modern streets of Mill Street, Bermondsey Wall West, George Row and Wolseley Street. It was cleared away in 1860.
“ ... crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob's Island.”
In Sketches by Boz (1839), Dickens described a rookery:
“Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper: every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three... filth everywhere—a gutter before the houses and a drain behind—clothes drying and slops emptying, from the windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, walking about barefoot, and in white great-coats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.”
Thomas Beame's The Rookeries of London (1850) also described them:
The Rookery... was like an honeycomb, perforated by a number of courts and blind alleys, cul de sac, without any outlet other than the entrance. Here were the lowest lodging houses in London, inhabited by the various classes of thieves common to large cities… were banded together… Because all are taken in who can pay their footing, the thief and the prostitute are harboured among those whose only crime is poverty, and there is thus always a comparatively secure retreat for him who has outraged his country's laws. Sums here are paid, a tithe of which, if well laid out, would provide at once a decent and an ample lodging for the deserving poor; and that surplus, which might add to the comfort and better the condition of the industrious, finds its way into the pocket of the middleman....”
What is truly bizarre are the locations of the Rookeries scattered throughout London. They were often crowded streets only a block from the most affluent neighborhoods. Berwick Street was next to St. James. A historic Rookery, Alsatia in Whitefriars was yards from the Inns of Court. Golden Lane squatted next the Wealthy Square Mile. There was Westminster situated very near the Orchard street slums. The Devil’s Acre was near salvation, Westminster Abby and the law, Parliament. The crowded, low rent housing was found on Dorset St., Flower Street, Union St., Market Street, and Dean Street. One of the Rookeries receiving the most complaints was Field Lane, known as the ‘Thieves Republic.’ St Giles and even worse slums, were in the Old Mint, along the Ratcliffe Highway and Petticoat Lane.
One of the areas shown here in Charles Booth’s 1889 Life and Labour of the People of London was ‘the Old Nichol.’
The red and light red areas show the wealthy and middle-class streets.
The light blue/gray are the ‘poor, the 18 to 20 shillings a week for a moderate family.
The dark blue/black are the ‘very poor, casual, chronic want, the lowest class…occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals.”
This situation invited a great deal of street crime, muggings and pickpocket activity. The London authorities worked to clear out these slum areas, but obviously, even by 1889, a number of rookeries still existed.
To be a cat burglar in Regency London would have required access to equipment and information only available to the professional and upper classes, severely limiting the chances any intelligent thief being able to develop their craft to the required degree. Regency London was a century away from the culture which would create the Cat Burglar.
REFERENCES:
Criminal and Judicial Statistics: 1800 to present day: Statistics/research guides: England and Wales 1800-1999
https://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/crimstats/1800-1999
The History of Crime in England, 1550-1914
https://www.ehs.org.uk/dotAsset/afd80919-6736-4af1-bb24-2a1cebb45a28.pdf
Beattie, J. M., Policing and Punishment in London, 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), Part I
Cox, David J. Crime in England, 1688-1815 (Routledge, Oxon 2014)
Emsley, C., The English Police: A Political and Social History (2nd edn. Harlow, Essex, 1996)
Harris, A. T. Policing the City: Crime and Legal Authority in London, 1780-1840 (Columbus, Ohio, 2004)
Johnston, Helen, Crime in England 1815-1880, Experiencing the criminal justice system. (Routledge, NY 2015)
Radzinowicz, Leon LL.D “The Study of Criminology in Cambridge” 1961 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002581726102900303