The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1886-06-12 00:00:00

THE GREAT MAIL ROBBERY.

The remarkable case of robbery which Mr. Justice
Hawkins and a jury tried last week at the Old Bailey,
London, was concluded late on Friday night. The
pris )ner, Henry Andrews, was found guilty of re-
ceiving stolen notes, and the judge sentenced him to
eight years' penal servitude. The robbery was of a
daring character, and it cannot but leave in all who
read the case a sense of insecurity of which the
Post Office authorities will do well to take note.
The full history of it is not yet clear; the
verdict which convicts the prisoner of feloniously
receiving, leaves it uncertain who was the
actual thief. In the chain of evidence which con-
nected the prisoner with the stolen property no link
was wanting. Some of tho notes were found in his
possession, and he failed to give any satisfactory
account as to how he got them. But how they were
actually stolen can only be conjectured. On April 8
last a clerk of Messrs. Blydenstein and Co., foreign
bankers, enclosed 20 Russian 100 rouble notes in an
envelope and addressed it to Mr. Lowenberg, of
Berlin. The letter was posted at the Cornhill Post-
office and there registered in the usual manner.
With other registered letters it was placed in
a bag and taken to the General Post Office.
Thera the registered letters were counted and
put into a special bag, which was enclosed in
a larger bag containing general correspondence. At
Cannon-street Station this bag and others were placed
in a luggage van which, as the train was made up, was
situated between three sorting mail carriages and a
first-class carriage. The arrangements seem to have
been somewhat slipshod and loose; and not the least
interest of the story is the light which it throws on
the efficiency of the Post Office. The van was in
temporary use, and singularly little pains were taken
to protect the valuable contents. No one travelled
in the van; the doors were secured by a hasp and
pin, but they were not locked; and for the hour and
46 minutes of the journey from London to Dover
the bags were left to take care of themselves, and
there was nothing to prevent anyone passing to
the van from the adjoining first-class carriage. There
was only too much point in the observation of Sir
John Gorst, the counsel for the prisoner, that if he
had valuables to send to Berlin, the evidence in. the
case would convince him that it would be safer to
send them by an unregistered letter. In the ordinary
course of things the bags, on arriving at Dover, were
put on trollies, which were run alongside the Ostend
boat, the Marie Louise. They were then sent down
a shoot to her deck, and conveyed to the second-
class cabin, and thence into a room specially used for
them. No one, it was proved, could have got into
this room, the hatches of which were secured and
locked, and persons were always about. On reach-
ing Ostend, the mails, sealed with leaden seals,
were placed in a post-office van. At the German fron-
tier the seals were examined and found intact. At
Cologne the bags were transferred to another van.
At Elberfeld, which was reached at 7.32 on the even-
ing of April 9, the officials as usual examined the
bags. That which contained the registered letters
had, they found, been tampered with. A slit had been
made in the seam of the external bag, and the inner
one had been drawn out. Envelopes had been cut open,
and, their contents having been abstracted, were left
in the bag. Thus rifled, the registered bag was re-
placed in the external one, and the slit was neatly
stitched up with English twine. To found the juris-
diction of the Court, it was important to prove that
the robbery had not been committed on the Continent
in the journey between Ostend and Elberfeld ; and Sir
John Gorst contended that the Court would be in-
competent to try the case if the crime were com-
mitted on the Belgian mail packet. An interesting
point of criminal law, almost as abstruse as that
which exercised a dozen judges in the " Franconia"
case. might have been left for the Court for Crown
Cases Reserved but for the explicit finding of the
jury, who declared that they were satisfied that the
robbery took place before the bags were put on board
the Marie Louise.

Stich a conclusion was not unreasonable. It was
possible, though dangerous, for a person to get out
of the first-class carriage during the journey of
nearly two hours to Dover and to make his way
unseen along the footboard to the van. The train
slackened speed near Chiselhurst, which made the
task somewhat easier; and there was an over-
whelming amount of evidence to show that it was
practically impossible for the robbery to have been
committed on the crowded mail packet or while the
bags proceeded by way of Ostend, Bruges, Ghent,
Brussels, Verviers, Cologne, and Hanover to Elberfeld,
where the marks of the crime were first discovered.
The triumphs of technical objections to jurisdiction
are rarely tolerable. It is always to be lamented that
it should still be possible for criminals to escape
justice because they do wrong on this or that side of
an artificial boundary. Here, fortunately, that has
been avoided. The technical objections failed, arid
we see no reason for doubting that the jury were right
in thinking that the crime was committed on English
soil. We only wish that their verdict or the evidence
had helped to explain the curious fact that the notes
having been stolen on Thursday, the Bth, or Friday,
the 9th of April, from an envelope with the name of
Messrs. B ydenstein and Co- on it, some of them were
presented to them on the following Monday, the 12th,
by the prisoner, who asked for change. This boldness
or temerity far exceeded that of walking along the
footboard of a train travelling at express speed.
Convicting a felonious receiver, says the Times, is
the least part of the duty of the Post Office in the
matter. The robbery discloses so much laxity and
want of care in the conveyance of valuables that there
seems need of an overhauling of some parts of the
system. Can it be that the Post Office undertakes
FO many alien or extra duties that it is neglecting
or despising the primary one of carrying letters ?
That department having become bankers and
carriers of parcels must we look to bankers and
carriers to convey letters for us? The official regu-
lations about registration, especially of letters going
abroad are strict. There are fees to be paid, and each
article must be enclosed in a strong envelope securely
fastened. Of what avail are any precautions if a bag
of registered letters is put, as if so many returned
"empties," into an unlocked van in charge of no
official? Apart from the new regulations as to
compensation for loss of or damage to registered
letters and packets, the Post Office incur no liability,
no matter how careless they may be. They
enjoy unequalled immunity for non-delivery or mis-
delivery. It is abusing such a position of privilege
to convey letters, registered or unregistered, in
the manner in which a portion of the Continental
mail was conveyed from Cannon-street to Dover on
the night of the Bth of April. And it is a serious
reflection on the Post Office Department that the
Attorney-General was able to bring home guilt to the
prisoner by contrasting the laxity tolerated here with
the strictness enforced on the Continent, and by
proving that the moment the mails left English
hands they were so jealously guarded that tampering
with them was impracticable. The Judge's observa-
tions to the jury on the subject ought to be carefully
noted at St. Martin's-le-Grand.