Unearth the Past: A family history & genealogy podcast
Step into the fascinating world of genealogy and family history with Unearth the Past, a podcast hosted by the charismatic Dr. Michala Hulme. This show masterfully blends riveting discussions, deep dives into historical contexts, and practical tips for uncovering your ancestral roots. Each week, Dr Hulme welcomes an eclectic mix of guests—musicians, actors, sports stars, and public figures—unravelling the remarkable and often surprising stories hidden within their family trees.
Beyond these compelling narratives, the podcast serves as a treasure trove for genealogy enthusiasts, spotlighting essential tools and resources for research. It also paints a vivid picture of the social and cultural landscapes that shaped family histories, exploring powerful themes like immigration, industrial revolutions, and the resilience of past generations.
If you would like to get in touch with Michala, you can do so via her website, www.michalahulme.com
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Unearth the Past: A family history & genealogy podcast
Ep 11: Underworld Unveiled: A Dive into the British 19th-Century Criminal Archive
Welcome back, fellow history enthusiasts, to another captivating journey through the mystifying remnants of our ancestral past. This time, we traipse down the darker alleys of history, unearthing tales of mischief, misdeeds, and the evolution of the criminal justice system from the 18th to the 20th century. Joining Michala on this thrilling expedition is Paul McNeil, lending his expertise to shed light on the shadowy corners of our genealogical archives.
From the audacious 1860's femme fatale who conned jewellers with a crafty gold-for-brass scam, to the enigma of the 'Cockney Golden Highlander,' we unravel stories that blur the line between fiction and truth. We also delve into the labyrinth of the 19th-century court system, giving you a glimpse into the struggles faced by the working-class in initiating a prosecution. Deciphering the nuances of petty sessions, quarter sessions, and assized courts, we explore how the 19th-century police system evolved and what it meant for our forebears.
Our expedition takes a deeper turn as we sift through the UK prison records of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. From the social histories of those behind bars to the profound insights mugshots offer into the lives of our ancestors, we navigate through this trove of information. As we wrap up this journey, we bring to life the cunning exploits of William Redknapp, who manipulated the wage system of the 19th-century ship workers, and Walter Alfred Hargan, an ex-soldier caught in a deadly face-off with a local gang. So, prepare for a gripping tour through our shared criminal past, and get ready to uncover the clandestine world of aliases and the secrets to tracking criminals through Army and Navy records.
Hello and welcome back to Unearth the Past, a brand new family history and genealogy podcast brought to you by me, dr Michaela Hume Seen. As this will be our eleventh episode, I'm not quite sure I can keep saying brand new genealogy podcast. I might milk it for another couple and then I shall. I promise you I shall drop it and just say it's a genealogy podcast. So, folks, this week, do you remember? In week one I said to you that if you see this man loitering around you in a Macintosh coat, you've probably got dodgy ancestors. Yeah well, this week I am back with Paul McNeil and we are doing what he does best, and that is we are going to be going through our dodgy pasts. So this week we're going to be sharing with you our favourite stories from the criminal archive. Paul McNeil, thank you so much for coming on again. Have you had a good week? Have you been doing any research, anything interesting?
Speaker 2:Yeah, funny enough, I did find a couple of criminal ancestors for a client. I'm at that point in doing their tree where I've almost finished it and I'm writing it up and it's going to be like 150 pages long or whatever, and I find it's good. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I can see what we're getting to and what I generally do is go back through it and look at some of the side branches of the family just to see if there's anything interesting in there, before we finish it off and guess what? There was something interesting. So this is going back to the 1860s and I found a very well dressed, very well presented young lady who was going into jewellery shops and asking to see items of jewellery, generally gold chains. So bring me up to her.
Speaker 2:She would look at the gold chain. She would say she liked it or didn't like it. Anyway, send it back, and she said I might come back for that later and she'd go off and then later on they'd find that what she's done is swapped it for a brass chain or something like that and she went on from that. She graduated from that to doing coin-in. She took up with a guy from an ex-soldier and he had a little coin-in set up where he just did like fulcane pieces and things like that small amounts. And they were sending her sister out to pass these coins and the sister made the mistake of admitting she'd done it. They all denied it. They got away with it. The sister got sentenced for it. So all this came out of nowhere, all from the back streets of Woolworth somewhere, and there's no history in the family of any real wrongdoing before that.
Speaker 2:And it's the women which is unusual so it was fascinating, but it was written up in the newspaper. She did at least free jewellery shops that we know of, possibly a lot more, and she was basically a professional criminal one way or another.
Speaker 1:So I have been researching. This week. I've been focusing on genetic genealogy. Wow, yeah, it's a week in my life I can't get back. I've been learning about different theories and you know how you can figure out using these different theories. It can give you maybe slightly more accurate results. You know when we're looking at DNA matches and how people are related to you, so I've been doing that all week. I'd like to say it's been really exciting. It's not. It's been one of the driest things I've ever done in genealogy. However, it's now done. I have enough knowledge that I'm going to try it out next week on a tree that I've been working on which I have DNA for, so I'm going to cross reference it. So I'm going to try it out next week. But it's been a very long research week for me. Because of that pull, it's felt like this week has gone on forever. I can't wait to see the back of it and do something fun next week. Anyway, is it this week?
Speaker 2:It's your own fault, it's your own fault for the particular job. You should be like a person of leisure. Don't do it.
Speaker 1:I know, I know, and normally like whenever we do these podcasts, because the weather's been nice, paul's been outside, bit of chest on show, normally, a wine glass in his hand, living the dream on the south coast where I've been cooped up in my office. I do like my office, it's a nice office, but nevertheless I've been cooped up in my office and Paul's been outside sunning himself looking all bronzed. Anyway, this week we're both inside because the weather's took a turn. So let's start, then, with thinking about our criminal ancestors, and we are going to share some of our favourite stories that we have researched and discovered from the past. But before we do that, it's probably worth talking a bit about the criminal justice system and how it looked in the 18th, 19th and into the 20th century, and also a bit about the criminal records that you can get online and also in the records office. So, to start with, then, folks, if you committed a crime in the 18th century, and it was a fairly minor offence, you wouldn't have been taken to some formal courtroom and tried in front of a judge and a jury. You would have been in the parlor room of the local magistrate, or even maybe in a side room off a pub. You would go in there and you would stand in front of the magistrate and you would hear your charges and then he would pass sentence and that is how most of the cases happened in the 18th century, especially for those minor cases.
Speaker 1:As we, as a century, progress and we move into the 19th century, we do start to get formal courts and they're known as the petty sessions, but these are small crimes. I would say, paul, and you will probably agree with me, that if you have a look in the newspaper at the petty sessions and what is going on in these smaller courtrooms, you get really interesting and sometimes slightly obscure cases that are heard at these petty sessions and the early court system. It was chaos. It wasn't this sort of real strict, regimented system that we have in play today. The courtroom, honestly, was bonkers. It would have been crammed full of people. It would have just been chaos. Have you enjoyed looking at the petty sessions, paul? You know in the newspapers and no, I have. And, as I say, it's often where the minor offenses are heard.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean, you never know what you're going to find and you get weird stuff in there. You get people cross-examining each other, so you get you know the defendant arguing with someone that's brought evidence against him and things like this and questioning each other. You get some amazing stuff. You get things like you know someone will be taken by the local policeman and taken to a magistrate because he's been found driving a sheep down the street and he doesn't think it's his. And when they go back to his house he's got free sheep in the back bedroom hidden because he's been wrestling the sheep one at a time and this kind of thing. So you just never know what you're going to find.
Speaker 2:He finds some tragic things in there as well, but some of the things are just hilarious. I mean, we'll talk about the red naps later on, but they were so litigious and they were in cults so much over hundreds, literally, of years and they got so accustomed to it that they were having the cult in fits. And when you see it reported in the papers, they say you know whether jury are laughing or whether magistrate are laughing because of what's been said. So I think they're a minor information.
Speaker 1:So we have the petty sessions. That is where the minor offenses are heard and that is where there's no jury needed and they dealt with the most number of cases. So Clive Emsley, who is a fabulous historian, and if you are interested in looking at the court system in the 19th century, do check out his work but he said that in 1857, the justices in the petty sessions had to deal with 20 times the number of cases dealt by all the other courts combined. So they were dealing with 20 times more cases than by the other courts. Now, the other court systems that were in play during the 19th century were the quarter sessions and they are exactly what they say on the tin. So they were held every quarter and these were for more major cases and this is where people were prosecuted on indictment. So that is a document which contained the charge. Now, if it was a really serious offense the quarter sessions a bit like our magistrates, that's the best way to think about it the quarter sessions could refer the perpetrators straight over to the assized courts, which is like our crown court, and the assized courts is where the big cases were heard. So these are things like you know, like your murder charges, and that's where you would be in front of a jury and the judges who actually presided at these assized courts were on a circuit. For example, there was a Lancashire circuit, a South Eastern circuit, you know, a North Wales circuit. There were only two assized courts in the year, so there wasn't an opportunity for people to be tried in the assized courts throughout the year.
Speaker 1:And for a lot of people especially, you know, if you were working class, it was actually very difficult for you to try somebody at court Because don't forget at this time, a lot of people who went to court, they were not being taken to court by the police, it was private prosecution. But if you were a working class person, you had to basically take the time off work. You had to because you didn't know, by the way, when your case was going to come up at the assized courts and the assized courts could last for a few days. You would just have to turn up and wait. You would also have to hope that your witnesses could afford to take the time off work Because at this point nobody's paying them for their time, they're not getting paid as a witness. So, and also, I think you probably couldn't afford somebody to represent you, solicitor, barrister, whatever. So you're going to represent yourself. So for working class people to actually bring prosecutions was very, very difficult.
Speaker 1:But that is just a sort of an overview of the court system in the 18th and the 19th century. So by the end of the 19th century we do see more prosecutions being brought by the police force, because by the end of the 19th century the police force pardon, the pun is more uniformed and more professional and more organized and they are bringing a lot more prosecutions. But if we move to the beginning of the 19th century, most prosecutions were brought by individuals, mostly men. By the way, it didn't really favour women at this time. Paul, criminal records where is the best place to go to get criminal records? Or where would you say if you had a criminal ancestor? What records have been most useful in your research?
Speaker 2:Well, funnily enough, it's often easiest to find a record of someone that's broken the law by searching the newspapers. If you start with that, there's so many of them that are still around. It's so easy to search on the names etc. In an area and things like petty sessions. You know all the records for those might not have survived, but the newspaper records probably have. So if they've done anything serious it'll be in a newspaper. Even if they've done something fairly minor it might be in the newspaper. If they're funny when they're before a magistrate, it will probably be in the newspaper. So there's all kind of things that you can find in the newspapers to get you started, once you've found that, you'll know the date of when they were tried. You'll probably know the date of the magistrate sorry, the name of the magistrate that tried them and you know the location. So then you start to be able to get into other records and you know you go into an ancestry, you go into a fine mark past and you know you get various archives online and there's an absolute ton of different indices that you can use to find it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uk calendar of prisoners. If they're committed to prison, you can find that 1848 to 1902. Things like England and Wales criminal registers. So if they haven't gone to prison but they haven't had a fine or something like that, you can find their name, age, date of birth, the location of the trial and sentence and you can see original scans of it. You can then use that to move down into the UK prisons commission.
Speaker 2:So if they did get a custodial sentence and you can look at their birth or occupation the usual stuff, charge and sentence you can also see when they were admitted to jail and which jail they went to, and then you can then go back into the newspapers and try and find out about the case. So you can do it either way, but the easiest way to find a name is to go through the newspaper, as I would say that's generally the easiest way of finding someone. If you want more detail of what happened subsequently, then you go into an ancestry or a fine mark past, something like that, and you start looking through their criminal registers, and there's lots on there.
Speaker 1:As well. If we think about the records that they have, some of them have been really good. I mean, I looked at the women's prison records on I think it was on ancestry and it was great because it gave you so much social history and also it gave you you learnt so much about the prisoner. I mean these, the female convict records I think that's their official title. I'll put a link in the description below. But not only do you get the name of your ancestor, you get a description of the person who you are looking for. You learn about their character, or their perceived character, in prison. You find out what they were up to while they were in prison, who wrote them, and often the letters are in there as well. And I think the saddest thing for me was when I was reading about one of the women was that she was from, she was from Manchester and I was reading about it and she was getting regular letters from home and they were. They were quite, you know, they were quite constant getting letters from her husband and then he just stopped writing to her and I didn't find any evidence that he had died. He just stopped writing to her and I don't know what had happened in terms of I'm presuming you know he had had enough. She was a repeat offender and then when she came out, she came out and stayed in basically a women's institute in London.
Speaker 1:Not only do you get all this sort of descriptive stuff, you also get a photograph. Now, I love a good mugshot. I love a good mugshot. Honestly. You know, paul, I've written two books about crimes, crime and there's just something fascinating about a Victorian police mugshot. I don't know what it is. I just, if ever I see it in a newspaper or on the internet, I have to stop and I always want to read the story. I want to know who is this person that has been in trouble. And I think especially because if you have working class ancestors, the chances are you know you're not going to see them. If they're in the Victorian period, you're not going to see them because they probably couldn't afford to have their portrait taken. So the fact that we get pictures of normal people, of working class people, is fascinating for me, and I love the mugshots.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the thing I mean. Most people, working class people, wouldn't have owned a camera before, probably the late 30s or the early 50s even. And the first photograph you find in most trees of a working class family is when the guy was sent to the Western front, for example in the First World War, and he'd have his picture taken before he went because he didn't know if he was coming back or not. So that tends to be it. But if you've got the mugshots, it's interesting because they're very clear. Usually they're a big format when they were originally taken. They're very clear, and you can look into the eyes of one of your own ancestors and think, okay, do.
Speaker 1:I resemble them.
Speaker 2:Is that like me? How would I have felt? And a lot of my young kids a lot of them are 12 or 14 years old, and to see that you see what they're wearing when they were arrested, this kind of thing Do they look like a hardened criminal? Or is this someone that is so poor that they've gone out and started nicking to make ends meet, kind of thing? So I think the other thing you get with some of these records, especially the prison records, is you get physical description.
Speaker 2:So you start to get things like scars mentioned. Yeah, if the guy's got a lot of scars on his knuckles, on his head and this sort of thing some of the scars they describe you can tell a razor cat's from when criminals would carry a razor rather than a knife, because you could cut someone with a razor and put them out of action without the risk of killing them. And professional criminals didn't want to kill people. That was going too far, it was too serious, so they would carry a razor. So you hear records of people with razor cuts on it. It's like, okay, he may well have been in the gang because that's how they would fight each other.
Speaker 2:And the other thing is they tell you about tattoos. And that's interesting because if you look at Victorian London in particular, quite often you'll find people with tattoos and they have five dots on their arm especially the men, but some of the women as well and it'd be a sign you're in one of the South London gangs and just five dots, like on a playing card, would be a sign that you're a gang member or we're aspiring to be a gang member. So all of a sudden you start to see okay, is he just this poor innocent, or is he is there a bit more to him and he's, you know, maybe this is how he lives now. So I love those kind of records. Yeah, putting a face to it is is like gold dust, isn't it.
Speaker 1:So I want to take you back, paul, to June 1828. Okay, and this was this was the first story that I researched when I was writing my grim Almanac of Manchester book. And there was a group of children and they were playing on the streets of Angcoats. Now, if you go to Manchester now, you'll know that Angcoats is quite like a trendy place. You know it's one of them where you've got to. You know you've got to be cool and not drink dairy products. You know, like a pizza's, like they quid, and you know the houses that were once like slum terraces and a fortune back in the day it was. It was a really poverish place to live and the houses were terraces. Often you would get two or three families living in a house. Anyway, these group of children are playing in the streets.
Speaker 1:When a woman approaches one of the children and she says to the child look, I've baked a cake. I am paraphrasing slightly, I don't quite know what she said Look, I've baked a cake. I'll give you two sixpences If you go and deliver this cake to Mr Drummond, and Mr Drummond was the local flower seller. Obviously the lad can't believe his luck. So he went and knocked on to the house, the Drummond house and Mrs Drummond answered the door and he handed over the cake and he said you know, I've been given this cake, I've been told to pass it on to you and it's come from a lady called Mrs McCann. Anyway, mrs Drummond clearly thought this lad was being a bit dodgy and she said look, we don't know. Mrs McCann, thank you very much, and but we don't want your cake. So the lad went home with this cake. I don't quite know what cake it was, but it was by. You know, it sounds like a big cake. Let's go for a fruit cake.
Speaker 2:I can't imagine being a.
Speaker 1:Victoria's son, yeah. So he takes the cake home and his mum thinks he's absolutely just made this story up. But she can't figure out where he's got the cake from. So she marches him round to Mrs Drummond's house to check the story. Mrs Drummond says look, we don't know, mrs McCann, we're not quite sure anything. You know where this case come from. So the young lad and his mum go off and take the cake, and his mum is a kind hearted woman. So she cuts the cake up into pieces and starts handing it out to all the kids on the street and the neighbors.
Speaker 1:The cake is laced with arsenic. As soon as people start to swallow this cake they start to become ill. Unfortunately, one of the children died because as a result of arsenic poisoning, because he swallowed the cake. So the hunt was on to find this mysterious Mrs McCann. But all he had to go off was this young lad's description and he said she was wearing a grey pinny, she was carrying a young baby, she had a hair tied up and she had sticky out front teeth. That's all we've got to go on. And she was never found. Paul Paul said I dare to say I'm a cultur, did they?
Speaker 1:Never caught her and never knew why she wanted to poison the Drummond family. The local flower sellers Don't know to this day.
Speaker 2:I bet someone in the Drummond family knew at the time.
Speaker 1:Possibly, yeah, possibly, yeah, I don't know, but never caught her. She is on my unsolved crimes list. There's quite a few on that list.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:She's on the unsolved crimes list.
Speaker 2:Back in the day, trying to solve crimes, if you didn't catch them in the act or they weren't witnessed by several people. People just disappeared. So many serial killers must have been roaming the streets that just got away with it because the technology wasn't there to track them down.
Speaker 1:So out of all the stories, you've the criminal stories you've researched. What do you tell people if anybody asks you for a criminal story?
Speaker 2:The obvious one that I'm always talking about is the one with the red naps, the one we did on DNA journey, where you know you got away with the equivalent of £2.5 million. You know it was an excised man and worked in London, never had a criminal record, came from a respectable family, was posted up to Liverpool and basically was working with the crews that would go on the ships before they docked. So they'd be waiting on the tides waiting for a birth and they could be on the ships for days. So these guys were going out to the ships and they were gambling, they were drinking, they were womanising, they were doing everything on these ships, but they were officially there to safeguard the taxes. So they had to safeguard the cargo that was on the ship to make sure nothing went on or off that ship before the government had had their bite of the taxes from it. So that's what they meant to do. But while they were there they'd get bored, they'd gamble, they would do this, they would do that, and what?
Speaker 2:This guy's name? William Redknap. What he did was he was a link between the men on the ships and the Cussent House in Liverpool and he worked out that these guys are only being paid quarterly. So they had three months before they got any money through and they were just spending it on and going through it. So he was lending them money and he worked out that if they gave him their wage cheats, he could go and collect their wages on their behalf, keep what they owed him, give the rest back to them. Then he found another angle to it and he found a guy that used to run one of the parishes up there and was making lots of money from being a parish officer, basically with building roads, looking after work houses, you know, crooning a little bit off the top, and basically he was Redknap, was going to him, borrowing money, lending it to these guys, getting their pay cheats, then paying everybody off. So he was the man in the middle and he waited till he had a really big payment coming through, so the end of the quarter they were going to get their wages.
Speaker 2:He then went to the money lender as well, borrowed a huge amount of money off of him. So he'd been spending, you know, months doing this very, very effectively and very honestly, always paying out what he had to pay out. But this one time he took both, lots of money, took his six kids, his wife and their remarkably small black dog, according to the newspaper jumped on a train, disappeared down to London. Now it's a long story and he got away with it basically, and if you watch the DNA journey episode with Flint off and Redknap you'll see what happened. But he lived happily ever after with all this money. But the interesting thing was from the point of view of tracing him. If you try to trace it in the normal records, you wouldn't find him.
Speaker 2:You wouldn't know it happened because he was never caught and the way I came so there was nothing to report other than the fact he was in the newspapers and it was the newspapers that let me find out what he'd done and there were mistranscriptions. So he did appear in a court case but his name was mistranscribed. So he was in a court case between the money lender and the guys he had lent money to who had gone after him to try and find him. And then the money lender tried to sue the inland revenue guys to get the money back off of them and he was mentioned in it but his name was wrong and again, I only found it because it was in the newspapers. So it shows you, even if you do go for all the correct, you know court records and all this, if the guy got away with it, if he was never actually tried, there was no record. So that's a brilliant one and in fact he got away with it.
Speaker 2:I just thought it was very funny and it's very funny in the actual. You know the episode as well because of the reactions from the Redknaps. The beauty of the.
Speaker 1:Redknaps. Well, I was going to say if you've not seen it, if you've not seen the episode, paul, up to this point, if we just give people a bit of context, am I right by saying it was Flintoff? I appear right at the end of this episode, by the way, literally just as the credits are about to go. But it was Flintoff who, all the way through, has had a like brushes. You know his ancestors had brushes with the law. Is that right? So if you've watched the show, you'll you know you don't want to work, the end away, but yeah.
Speaker 2:All sorts. And then when he saw this, he was quite made up. At first, freddie will. But then then he realised it actually made Jamie's ancestors slightly more effective as criminals than his, and he said you wouldn't even let me out there, would you?
Speaker 1:Have you got another story for us that is stuck in your memory bank?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean obviously a few of them are in DNA journey, but I'll tell one that isn't. And there was a bloke called Alfred Walter Hargan and that sounds a very exotic name.
Speaker 2:Well it does. Yeah, it was probably a fairly normal name. It probably came from Ohargan, it's probably an Irish name originally and this guy was a soldier. His family were all soldiers. His father was a soldier. His mother obviously married his father, who then dumped her and she went off with another soldier. So he had a, you know, a sort of a fairly not harsh upbringing, but a hard upbringing, and he naturally went into the army with his brothers and their mother for part of their lives, brought him up on their own and he was a really, really good soldier. He was a sergeant. He was posted out to India and to Burma, took part in a number of campaigns out there.
Speaker 2:This is in the 18, about the 1880s, around about that time anyway. Eventually left the army about 1890, came back to London and was on a bit of a loose end and he worked as a like a commissionaire, a dormant, for a while and then decided that wasn't for him. So he went off to America to try and find his you know, find a better life out there. And he did exactly find a better life out there, but he'd learn the value of applied violence and when he came back to England a few years later, so this is about 1890 there was a pub in the Kingsland Road and the Kingsland Road is near to where the Craigs used to live, so it's over in the east end, great big long commercial row kind of thing.
Speaker 2:There's been markets down, there are lots of shops and that, and pubs, and the owner of one of these pubs was basically the local gangs were coming in, smashing up the place, hitting his wife, trying to attack him, all sorts were going on. I mean, you know he was quite a tough guy, the pub owner bloke, and but there was too much of this going on and it wasn't even like a protection racket where they were trying to have money and then we'll go away. They just wanted to go in there drink, smash the plate up, place up, start fights and all this. So he got harganin. How he met him we don't know and there's some suspicion on my part that someone in the police that might have been an ex-soldier may have known him because right okay the police knew that this pub was a problem pub, not because of the owner but because of where it was and the people that are going in there.
Speaker 2:And there are a couple of boys in particular, called, I think, wheeler and Lambert, that were going there. They were the gang leaders. And so pub owner gets harganin and it's very, very well presented little guy, five foot seven, so he wasn't that small for the time, but he wasn't huge and then what? Him in the back room. The idea was if this gang started up he would go in and help set it down. So the pub owner going upstairs to do something, his wife's at the bar they kick off the gang start throwing things at her. She screams out who's going to help me? Obviously the sneak more for harganin. He comes out from the back, pushes the gang back to the other side of the bar as a confrontation to him. They kind of back down, but they're still there. Then he gets a pistol out and shows them the pistol and it's like okay, if you want some more, you can have some more the. The landlady gets cold feet at that time. She pushes him back into the back room.
Speaker 1:So he's out the way and starts to get worried.
Speaker 2:She didn't know his arm. Anyway, it all starts up again with With the guys at the front. She's hurried Hargon out. She's got him out through a back window because she thinks they're gonna come after him and that's gonna cause more trouble. They try and get in the pub. The pub Landl comes down, knocks one of them backwards, throws them out the pub.
Speaker 2:They go out the front door. He's going out the back window. He's walking up the street. They see him walking up the street so they gang go for him, run up the street after him. He turns around, pulls his pistol out, points it out and tells him to stop. They don't stop. So he flies twice. Two of them go down. One of them shot, cleaning the head. The other one just goes down pretending to be dead because he is out of his depth. Gangs still come on, so fires off another shot, shoots another one through the head this is all about 30 feet, so it's a crap shot then goes off up the road.
Speaker 2:By this time all Chaos has broken out. Loads of people have come out and all they know is there's a gunman on the loose and there's various Members of this gang that will whipping up these people to try and get him. So they run after him and they corner him, so he whips the gun out again. They've gotten cornered but he's saying okay, if you want to take this further, we'll settle it now. And Guy walks up who's an RSPCA inspector inspector, and he tries to reason with Harvey and the gunman and said look, you know, come on, this is, this, is mad to get, get you away from here. You know you got to put the gun down, you got a hand yourself in and he doesn't really want to know. But what he doesn't know is this RSPCA inspector is Is the brother of a bare knuckle boxing champion called Jack Nifton, who's?
Speaker 2:It was called the 81 tonner. He was six foot two and two hundred and thirty pounds, so he was a monster. So the RSPCA guy obviously wasn't as big as his brother, but he was a fair old unit. So he manages to try and get the gun off him and Grab old of him and he's gonna try and get into a police station. In the meantime One of the gangs jumped in and the three of them are wrestling on the floor trying to get the gun. A policeman, if any comes up, separates them all. I mean this, this guy Hargan because the crowd set on him is half naked by now is that half his clothes pulled off. One of them's got a rope to hang him with, is also so the RSPCA inspector and the copper. The RSPCA inspector probably saved his life Holding them off. Yeah, him and the copper, get him in a handsome cab, get him down the police station and he says yeah, I've got them you know they were coming after me self-defense.
Speaker 2:He said I just did what any self-respecting person in America would have done. I dealt them the way they they should have been dealt out and there was literally was a crack shot. So there wasn't chance that he killed them through the need to of them. No, no problem. Anyway, he goes on trial. He gets found guilty. But all these people come forward given him character references. So he's old, you know, the colonel that ran the, that ran his regiment, comes forward and said how wonderful he was as a soldier. Even the police are kind of sticking up for him, because I had so much trouble at this pub and they said in cult once he'd done this, we've had no trouble since. So it's almost like there's a little bit of collusion going on. Anyway, yeah, he goes to jail, but he only gets a year. So it's a year in jail. I think we think he went to Mason jail.
Speaker 2:There's a massive right case at the time and when he comes out he's interviewed in the newspapers and he publicly banks the jailers and the governor of the prison for treating him so well, why he's been in prison, because most of them were ex-falsies, so they were ex-army their selves. They thought he'd done a good thing by breaking up this game and he kind of he would have gone into obscurity. But I I tracked him after this and what he did. He went back to America and he said he was an Irish minor, as in a coal miner, which he wasn't. He went after America and he ends up in I think was Baltimore, where there's an Irish politician, a guy called Martin Lamasny, who was an ex-gang member who was running for like governor and this kind of thing.
Speaker 2:He was very powerful in the area and there've been a couple of attempts on his life and Hargan was living in in his world and was meant to be a machinist I you know, working with metal on that, so perhaps manufacturing firearms or whatever.
Speaker 2:And it seemed to me every time there was a big shootout in Baltimore, hargan would get on a ship and come back over to London and visit his, his brother, who lived, I think was in Barry Road, in Dalyge or somewhere like that, and then he'd go back again and he did this right up until the war. He was meant to be a clerk, he was meant to be a machinist, he was meant to be a miner all these different things and he was soon and thrown across the Atlantic. None of these jobs were well-paid jobs. Soon a friend across at the Atlantic and eventually the gangs were all broken up after the 20s and at that point he came home permanently to England and died peacefully in South London. So I think he was being used as a professional bodyguard by a forerunner of what would become like the Irish mafia on the East Coast out Absolutely fascinating, but the Kingsland.
Speaker 2:Road murder was a very serious crime. But the Kingsland Road murder made every newspaper all over the world. It was massive news and people were applauding this guy for shooting these two, these two gang members. So to me that's I mean, it's not a funny story, but it's. It's an intriguing story because of the bits we can't prove, the bits that you can kind of Speculate on he's always there. When, when there's trouble, he's always gone. When the trouble breaks, this kind of thing, who knows?
Speaker 1:Well, I was asked by a friend of mine who is part of the traveling community If I would research his family tree. Now, if you ever have researched Anybody from the traveling community's family tree, you'll know it's somewhat difficult because Often well as in the case in this family they didn't like to fill in official records, so you won't find them at all on a census record. However, newspapers were great for me. So this family was based in Chester in the middle of the, the Victorian period, and the family owned like a cab company in Chester and this gentleman he was called William, he was married and had quite quite few children. But as well as being involved in the family business, he also had his own caravan where he would go touring with various different fares and he had like his own sort of shooting Gallery. So he'd open his car and it like turn into a shooting gallery and he spent more and more time away from his family and eventually him and his wife became estranged.
Speaker 1:But what was Interesting for me again, don't forget I'm struggling there for records, I've got a newspaper, but that's about it. I managed to track him because every time he was Baptising his new child that's right he met another woman while on the road right would coincide to him being pulled up in the local court for for basically, dessert in his first wife. So the two records of baptisms and the court records were always in the same place. And At one point he actually goes back to Chester I Don't know where his new partner is and his new children, but he's a strange wife and her sister are waiting for him to come Trundling down with his cat, with his horse and his caravan attached and they jump out and they've got what we would think is like a baseball bat and they break all the windows on in caravan and smashes caravan up. Don't know what quite happened after that. I think he obviously he left, probably pretty sharpish, and he did actually remain with his second partner and they did go on to marry.
Speaker 1:I suppose Lucy speaking was probably a bit of a bigger mist. I can't imagine he divorced his first wife knowing how difficult it was and expensive was to get a divorce at that time. So yeah, but for me the reason I've shared this story is not because it's a fantastic story. It was an interesting story that the fact that these two women were not going to take this sort of desertion lying down and she was tracking him and pulling him in at every court she could, and also she decided her and her sister were going to smash the windows in of his caravan, but because of a struggle to records. However, thinking a bit outside the box, court records working in conjunction with baptism records, helped me solve this case. But yeah, it was a really sort of fascinating case, but it was. There was a point where I thought I just don't think I'm going to find anything on that side of the family. The other family, the other side of his traveling family, was a bit more straightforward, but that one was really, really difficult.
Speaker 2:And that's the thing, isn't it? Well, the other thing is, you know people change their names. I did some work with a guy recently. I won't go into the names, but basically he was trying to track down his father and basically was born in the 1920s and we know, we know he had a criminal record. So he knew quite he'd done a really good job himself in tracing this and I got involved just to see if I could add anything to it, and it wasn't a lot I could add to it. He'd done such a good job.
Speaker 2:But this guy had so many aliases. I did manage to find at least one other alias that we didn't know he had. But he was turning up and we had to go through so many different records. A lot of it was newspapers obviously always a good one, but you would find an alias in an official record. So there's, there's a police Gazette records and they're. They could be hard to get or they could be easy to get. To get police Gazette records you can't get them all in one place. It's really hard and not all of them are digitized. You can get some at the you know, the British Library. You can get some in Ancestry. You can get them up, find them up, ask them other places, but they're really difficult and it's potluck. If you find them, it's great because they give you a description of habitual criminals. So he was down as a habitual criminal and it gave us an alias for him.
Speaker 2:And once we found that alias, I started putting things together. Say, okay, so where was he coming up in court on that alias? Then you find all of that and then all of a sudden you find another court record. Just at the bottom of it it says presenting as so and so and so and so, with a different name, so the whole. If you just read the main record it looks like it's usually one of these known aliases. Then you get right to the bottom and it's almost off the page. It gives a third alias that he was working on that. And once we got there it's like, oh okay, so now we can find more stuff about him.
Speaker 2:So sometimes you have to jump from place to place and if people want to use an alias, if the two things aren't brought together so if they've never tried for anything and the alias doesn't come up or it's not in the police records, there could be anyone. You just don't know. But if you can tie it together. So things like the police cassette are great for tracking that habitual criminals. They'll give a description because the idea was this would be for other policemen to read, so they could see it and they would know what these guys, these mangy men, looked like, what their habits were, what they did for a living and all that kind of stuff. And we used that to piece together this fantastic life story this guy had, which was it was so dysfunctional, but he lived his whole life through criminality and we don't know if he had other, if he had other aliases as well, there's no way of telling. And he had full papers. It's literally trying to go from one little hint to another to pull it all together, but fascinating if you can find a source.
Speaker 1:That has been one of the biggest problems. I think I've mentioned Tucker to you, boromio, this guy that I've been researching for ages and I've got a timeline. I've got him in Italy between 1822 to 1840, wait for this timeline. Then I've got him in London in 1842. Sheffield, 1847. Preston, belfast, dublin, sligo, kear-curney, london, newgate Prison, 1858. Lambeth Police Court, 1865. No idea from 1869. I've been tracking this guy over all from all these different places. I think I'm on about five wives. Definitely must be at least six aliases. And because I've got no idea what he came out, I know he, I know it's a prison in 1865 and he came out in 1869. Because I've got no idea of his alias after that time. I know he wasn't using any, using any of the ones he'd used before. I've got no idea what happened to him and I can't finish the book ball until I know how it ends. I just don't know how it ends.
Speaker 2:The only charge you've got is DNA and see if there's a problem with it somewhere. But even then you're relying on his particular descendants to have taken a DNA test, and if they didn't, that's that.
Speaker 1:You know doing wrong. He's an absolute scoundrel. But I'm just wondering like, did he ever, in the end, fall in love? Because he clearly didn't love these women. I think that's pretty obvious from reading between the lines. And he took them for every penny they owned. And there's just a bit of me that thinks how did this end? Did he fall in love and have children, or did he die alone? I just don't know how it ends.
Speaker 2:The other sources or sources I think are really useful are Army and Navy records, because they're all in one place and if your ancestor broke the law or went AWOL or ran, as they say in the Navy, didn't get back on his ship in time, then that's all in one place and you can find it all, which is great. So you can go down, you can find people in Stockade, what they did, what they said to the sergeant, what they called him, whether they're using profanity, all sorts of things, whether they were verminous, if they had a sexually transmitted disease and were therefore put on a charge for making their cells unable to fight this kind of thing, all sorts of stuff all in one place. So that's great, you can find it in there. But there is one exception I found, and that exception is my uncle Stan. So I've mentioned me, uncle Stan, before. He was the Cockney Golden Highlander, or Seafall Highlander, I should say so.
Speaker 2:He was from Burmansey and he ended up in Seafall Highlanders, was shipped out to Java to disarm the Japanese right at the end of the war.
Speaker 2:He ended up in that regiment because he'd gone AWOL and then managed to turn back up again after driving all the way down from Scotland to London to see his mum because he got bored, went back up again, they put him in Stockade, stuck him in a kilt because the sergeant said he had nice legs shipped him out to Java. The mistake they made was they gave him guard duty over the records office in Java. So he got all his records San Egon, awol, etc and destroyed a lot of them. So his records would never be found. And what happened? Years and years later, probably in about the 60s, after the war? He said he was owned a pension from his war service and went to get his pension and they said we can't give you a pension because we don't have any of your records. And he said he was going to sue him, not the ever was, he was going to sue him because they had lost his records in the full war.
Speaker 1:I love this. I love it.
Speaker 2:He burnt him when he was in Java. So that was Uncle Stan.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness, uncle Stan, you rogue. Thank you so much for being on the podcast again. The McNeil Fan Club will be very happy and we shall see Paul again in another couple of weeks. I always let him have a week off because I know he's got a very busy schedule. He is giving talks all over the place at the moment. If you want to book Paul for a talk because he is, let me tell you folks, very funny, it's not just genealogy, you get a bit of stand up as well. You can do so via his website, which is timedetectiveswordpresscom.
Speaker 2:That's it.
Speaker 1:Yep timedetectiveswordpresscom. Go and check out his website and show him some love. Paul, thank you very much for coming on. We shall see you again in a couple of weeks. Thank you to all our listeners. We have made a chart, one of those podcast charts. So thank you very, very much. Honestly, I really appreciate you listening, Paul. Thank you, See you again in a couple of weeks. Cheers, mate.
Speaker 2:Okay, love, bye.