The Sun.
London, England, 1869-03-12 00:00:00

THE HAUNTS OF CRIME IN LONDON.

" N. A. W.," whose recent contributions to the Times
on the thieves haunts' in the metropolis we have already
noticed, gives a second contribution eh see subject to the
leading journal. It is very long and very interesting,
dealing with "leaving shops," the beershops of ticket-of-
leave men, cheap lodging-houses, and private houses
dwelt in by thieves. The "leaving shops" "N. A. W."
especially donounces. Any errand boy or servant girl
may go to one of these places and sell any stolen goods ;
and when they are sold, they are lost for ever.
He bad the greatest difficulty in getting into one.
Several were visited without success ; but perseverance
had its reward at last. He and his friends watching one of
the houses, at last saw a woman enter, give 2d., and get back
from the " missus "of the place a parcel. Even then the
"missus " would not admit that she was carrying on any
business. At last, however, a child came in to redeem
her father's jacket. "The old woman could make no
further denials now, and, as our detective friend insisted,
she, with great trepidation, at last let us go over the
house. It would be impossible to describe what we saw in
the interior. The upper rooms were quite filled with rows
of wooden racks, on which were stacked articles of wear-
ing apparel of every kind, and ' left' for sums of every
denomination from three-halfpence up to fifteen shillings.
About two-thirds had evidently been worn before,
but the remaining third were entirely new, such
as new shoes and boots, new sailors' clothes, new com-
forters, crinolines, and pieces of calico prints, such as in
that poor neighbourhood competing tradesmen hang out-
side their shops with which to tempt customers, and which
certainly succeed in tempting the young thieves who filch
them away and take them at once to the leaving-shops.'
As I have said, at least one-third of the house we
examined was openly and almost confessedly filled with
stolen goods. How much of what remained was stolen I,
of course, cannot say, but my Sergeant assured me that
very few were, as far as his experienced eye could judge,
honestly come by. He further added that if he had
power to get a cart and take away the suspected property,
he would undertake, on risk of losing his place, to
find all the rightful owners within a week. Bat he had no
power, and if we, he said, came with a search-warrant the
day after our visit, we should not find a single question-
able article on the premises, from top to bottom. The
rapidity with which the office, i, e. the alarm, is given
from `leaving-shop' to leaving-shop' when the police
are suspected to be coming down was, even to
his experience, astonishing. On our descent to the
shop, after rummaging the house, we found, as
we expected, that the missus' had gone out.
Her deputy was a cheerful, healthy-looking young woman,
whom we saw in that nondescript place of business, some-
times called the Thieves' Exchange,' sometimes ' Rag
Fair,' where she sat in front of a great pile of leavings.'
After this on this night all other attempts to enter
leaving-shops' were useless, and it was evident from
what we heard that our first acquaintance, whose house
we had been over, had been round and warned them all."
" N.A.W." goes on to describe the beershop frequented
by ticket-of-leave men, which was much like the other,
already described. When they entered the landlady ex-
pressed a hope that the sergeant had brought an English
man this time ; alluding to an article on the notorious
house published in the Scotsman. The lodging-houses were
next visited. These the writer divides into three clsases :
first, there are those where the occupants pay fourpence a
night, where none but respectable artisans are admitted,
and where a thief or a bad woman would have as much
chance of being received as at the Clarendon or Mivart's.
These are literally the he tels of honest working men, and the
correspondent calls attention to the rules of one of these
places in proof of what he asserts. " Only a few yards further
from it we came upon one which is a notorious resort for
the most notorious thieves of the East-end. The price of
a night's lodging here is only a penny less than that for
which really comfortable beds can be got a few hundred
yards or so further on. But the class is quite different—
as distinct as black and white—and before descending into
the cellar, in which the occupants cook and live, our
Detective assures us that we shall meet nothing but con-
victed thieves or their constant associates and companions."
Describing this cellar, he says : " They were of
the sort of begging thieves, male and female,
about as numerous a class of depredators as
any that exist in London. There was no
trace of the water pirate, the swell mobsman,
the card sharper, or the burglar here. They were all what
I may call well-dressed mendicants—that is to say, well-
dressed mendicants for the parts they had to play. Osten-
sibly they gained their livings by begging. In reality
they were, as the occasion offered, either prostitutes or
thieves. They were all assembled in a low cavernous-
looking cellar under ground, seated round a huge fire
cooking their food, talking and laughing. There were
flower girls, cigar-light girls, street tumblers, professional
blind men, roughs of the lowest description, and ragged
girls—children, I should have said, who lived infamous
lives among the bargemen on the river side. One thing
that struck me more than anything else was the utter
absence of concealment among either the men or women as
to who or what they were. Of course neither men nor women
confessed to robberies or petty thefts, but virtually the
men made very little secret ; nor even the little girls,
almost children, shrunk from saying, in Shakespeare's
words, how stinkingly dependent were their lives.' Igo
upstairs to the dormitory, which is foul and very ill-
smelling, not because the ventilation is in itself defective
—the police who have charge of these lodging-houses look
to that—but because the vagrants and thieves who use
these houses choke up the ventilators with their clothes
before they go to bed. There arc an ill-looking set of
roughs of the worst and most forbidding kind in the room.
Some in bed smoking, some going to bed, some lounging
about in little groups of two or three, talking together
almost silently, if I may use such an expression, but very
earnestly." "N. A. W." tried to get a confession out of
one of the men in this place, but found it impossible ; the
man, it would appear from the conversation recorded, not
answering some questions, and telling lies to others. He
said very plainly, however, that be had no work, and did
not want to get any.

The third class of lodging-house is that to which profes-
tional beggars and occasional thieves resort. A visit to
these places convinced the writer of these letters of the
evil of giving money to beggars in the streets. He gives
an instance or two. In the cellar of one of the houses
"we found a young, melancholy-looking girl, carrying a
fine child of about ten months old, which was what is
called `dead asleep' in her arms. We asked her some
questions, and she told us a piteous tale of how she sold
matches, bow she owed money for her lodging, and how
she did not know where to get a breakfast next day.
In the temporary absence of our invaluable guide, the
sergeant of detectives, we each gave her some small
donations towards paying her lodgings. On our Sergeant's
return he at once told us that we were little better than
fools to part with our money to one among the worst of
the street beggars in London. We of course were for a
short time incredulous, and thought we had done a charit-
able act, till, on the very next night of our explorations,
we saw the same girl sitting by the fire, in one of the most
dangerous and most notorious of all the thieves' haunts in
London, in a low lodging-house on the south side of the
water, frequented only by convicted thieves. She was
then without the child, and to our utter amazement, when
we spoke to her, she actually, with the utmost coolness,
brazened out to our faces that she bad never seen us before,
and had never carried a child in her life. A South
London Detective, however, soon explained the
matter, and told us that lie had known her for some
years past as borrowing children by the day—at the rate of
id. or sd.—and with them going begging, and earning a
a very good living. She was, in plain terms, a beggar
with borrowed children by day, and during the night
the temporary consort of the lowest thieves."
In another case the correspondent goes on to say:—
"We met with an old man with a long red beard,
very like Garibaldi—so like, indeed, that but for his
strong Irish accent one might really have mistaken
him for the great Italian patriot. He told us a. piteous
tale about his hunger and his wanderings in search
of food. Of course, again, we were weak enough to give
him something. Five minutes after this most foolish act
we turned into another thieves' lodging-house, and found
our Garibaldian prototype quietly seated by the fire, with
his pot of tea on the bob, his bread and butter ready, and
his rasher of bacon going to be cooked. This was the
starving beggar's supper, for the landlord told me he had
dined there as late as five o'c]oock that afternoon. In
the long explorations which our party made we came
across many terrible scenes of real misery and poverty,
but then in no one single case did we ever see any that be-
longed, or even appeared to belong, to the professional
class of mendicants that beg in the streets."

THE APPROACHING VISIT OF LORD STANLEY TO
GLAsGow.—Lord Stanley will arrive in Glasgow or
Wednesday, the 31st instant, and during his visit he will
be the guest, we understand, at Pollok House, of
Sir William Stirling-Maxwell. On the forenoon of
Thursday, the lit April, his lordship will be installed
as Lord Rector in the Common Hall of the university,
and thereafter, in the City Hall, he will deliver
his inaugural address. In the evening the Lord Rector
will be entertained at a dinner by the college authorities
in the old Fore Hall of the University, when the Very
Rev. Principal Barclay will preside. It is also propoftql,
we learn,. by a number of influential citizens, to invite
Lord Stanley to a public - banquet ; and in order that
it may be attended by gentlemen of all shades of poli-
tics, it is intended that the demonstration shall not be
political, but an occasion of testifying respect for his lord-
ship's attainments and high personal character.7G/aegoe
QOM.