William Newton of Hoxton: Arrested for Throwing a Snowball

There was a time when snow fell on the capital at Christmas as a matter of routine, and the year 1853, when our story takes place, was just such a time. The setting was Singleton Street, which is now Haberdasher Street, and ran from East Road in the direction of Pitfield Street in Hoxton New Town. The residents were of the hard-working and productive variety, and the Post Office directory for the year in question identifies a carpenter and a bricklayer, a letter cutter worker who carved metal punches for the printing industry, a surveyor, and a writer on morals and religious matters.

Also among the residents of Singleton Street was one William Field Mourgue, who was a near neighbour of the high-minded writer, and would appear to have been cut from a very different cloth as the proprietor of a tavern, the Monmouth Arms. And it is not impossible that the Monmouth Arms had its part to play in our story, which took place one night a week or so before Christmas and began at one o’clock in the morning when eight fellows, evidently in high spirits and probably well-lubricated courtesy of Mr Mourgue, were spotted by a keen-eyed police sergeant, William Collard, who was attached to the Islington constabulary.

Now, it was a bitterly cold night, with the temperature struggling to stay above freezing, and snow lay on the ground, although it would be more accurate to say that most of the snow lay on the ground, as the high-spirited fellows who were being carefully observed by Sergeant Collard were scooping it up in generous handfuls. These they patted into snowballs, which they then hurled at one another, each man giving as good as he got. Sergeant Collard, who was in his early forties, probably considered himself above such boyish behaviour, and no doubt he took a dim view of the matter.

Not amused

The air rang with squealing and laughter, until, that is, a new sound, altogether more musical, floated into Singleton Street from some unseen source. The music grew louder and louder. Suddenly a group of Christmas waits appeared from around a corner and tramped through the snow in the direction of the snowballers, playing their instruments all the while. What these instruments were we cannot know for certain, although a picture of waits in Seven Dials, which had been published in the Illustrated London News only a couple of weeks previously, suggests that these festive musicians would have been making quite a racket.

The waits wanted to serenade the residents of Singleton Street, but they succeeded only in making themselves a target for the eight boisterous gentlemen, some of whom began pelting them with snowballs. Sergeant Collard’s every instinct was to intervene, but as the musicians seemed to be taking the assault in good part, and played on undeterred, he held back. A second barrage of snowballs, flying through the frosty air, would have been equally ineffectual had it not been that one well-aimed missile found its way into the bell of a trombone.

This was too much for Collard, who took the silencing of the trombone as a crime against a man’s property, and promptly stepped up to make an arrest. Seven of the snowballers ran off. The eighth tried to persuade the sergeant that he had had no part in the pelting of the waits, and the trombonist himself could not swear to his involvement and declined to press charges. However, Collard was convinced that he had identified the guilty party, and took the man, whose name was William Newton, into custody on his own responsibility.

An enormous offence

The story, which you will see has an amusing twist, was reported by Bell’s New Weekly Messenger. We may well wonder how newsworthy the events in Singleton Street really were, but the fact is that large-scale snowball fights were a common feature of London winters and were regarded with disapproval by the more sober members of society. Frequently the perpetrators ended up in court. So, on a Monday in the 1854-55 snowball season, the Bow Street magistrate, David Jardine, spent an entire morning handing out punishments to rapscallions guilty of riotous behaviour and assaults on members of the public. The choice of targets seems to have been quite arbitrary, and Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper noted that persons ‘of all classes’ and ‘of both sexes’ were subjected to unreasonable levels of annoyance.

As an example of the incidents Jardine was dealing with, it was reported that on the previous afternoon ‘some hundreds’ of boys had been pelting visitors to St James’s Park, and that when the keepers intervened, they pelted them too. It took a posse of constables from the Whitehall division, under the command of a redoubtable Inspector Durkin, to sort the miscreants out, who evidently refused to go quietly as a number of them were fined £1 by the magistrate, and five were even sent to prison for eight days.

In a not dissimilar incident, which had taken place a short while previously, four young men were charged with causing mayhem in Trafalgar Square. They had begun in time-honoured fashion by lobbing snowballs at omnibuses, cabs and pedestrians, but soon went on to assault the local coppers and even a detachment of soldiers who were marching across the square in the direction of their barracks. By all accounts the affair was quite nasty. About 1,500 people were caught up in the rioting, and when the four ringleaders were being hauled away, the arresting officers were surrounded and had to fight off attempts to rescue the prisoners. The service in St Martin-in-the-Fields was disrupted by the noise and had to be abandoned, and the magistrate, Thomas James Hall, as well as imposing hefty fines on the guilty parties, ‘descanted upon the enormity of the offence’ — in the words of the St James’s Chronicle — ‘especially upon the Sabbath-day and within hearing of the congregation assembled for Divine worship’.

In a South London potato shop

The police, as conspicuous figures of authority,  were constantly targeted by snowballers, who were obviously a disrespectful lot. In January 1854 a burly young coal-porter by the name of Joseph Neville got into trouble when he struck a Superintendent John Lund on the left ear with what the London Evening Standard described as a ‘hard and well-made’ snowball. At the time of the disgraceful attack the superintendent was picking his way across the swampy Lock’s Fields lying off the New Kent Road, and it is an extraordinary fact that he was carrying upwards of £300 — a huge sum of money — with which to pay the officers of the South London divisions. In spite of the intense pain in his ear, Lund pursued Neville into a potato shop, where he attempted to take him into custody. The coal-porter protested his innocence, but having been grassed up by two boys who had witnessed the incident, he landed a second blow on the wretched superintendent, this time on the left cheek and not with a snowball but with his fist.

Chaos ensued. The coal-porter felled his victim with a neat tripping action, and as the two men grappled on the floor of the potato shop, the inevitable crowd of roughs assembled. Needing the boys to give evidence, Lund called out to them and urged them to stay where they were in exchange for 5s. each, but they had been spirited away by the roughs, who now set about him with hands and feet a-flying. Somehow he managed to escape, and he staggered off under an avalanche of snowballs, clutching the money.

Sunday afternoon in the park

Occasionally these local disturbances developed into outbreaks of serious disorder. On a Sunday afternoon in 1865 young trouble-makers began showering members of the public with snowballs in Victoria Park. What is remarkable about this incident is its sheer scale. There were apparently some 50,000 people in the park, strolling along its ornamental walks, or skating and sliding on frozen lakes. The snowballers themselves were not only very numerous but of bad character, or so said the Morning Mail, and bent on creating a riot, possibly in order to carry out robberies under cover of the confusion.

Very soon  the situation was out of hand. The snowballers lined the carriage road and took pot shots at the passing vehicles, breaking windows, frightening horses and injuring the passengers, who were variously ‘ladies and children’ or ‘tradesmen and their wives’. The park keepers tried to calm things down, but most were elderly and were laughed at by the rioters, while those few who were young and capable found themselves outnumbered and overpowered. Meanwhile the park had been effectively taken over by the rioters, some of whom turned snowballs into dangerous projectiles by loading them with stones or pieces of sharp ice, which ripped clothes and inflicted cuts on heads and faces.

The riot had started shortly after one in the afternoon and was still going strong at dusk when a particularly unpleasant incident occurred at the Cambridge Heath gate, where a single policeman, Constable Chadwick, was on duty. Chadwick took hold of one of the ringleaders and dragged him off with the assistance of some public-spirited bystanders, but was pursued by a mob of over a thousand rioters, who attacked him and his assistants with bits of flint and granite from the road surface. Eventually he had to let go of his quarry because he had been brought down by a stone and was being violently kicked. It was only when the Bethnal Green Road police arrived in force that the crowd dispersed, leaving behind them a trail of smashed windows and frightened members of the local community.

Once a year

In view of these accounts of violence and mayhem, it is perhaps understandable that Sergeant Collard, witnessing the assault on the Christmas waits in Singleton Street, was quick to make an arrest. No doubt he wanted to put a lid on matters before the flinging of snowballs went too far. With this in mind he marched William Newton over Pitfield Street to the police station in Robert Street.

Newton was incensed at the treatment he had received, which, he felt, was an insult to a man with a respectable business. He had premises in Curtain Road, where he sold confectionary and, rather oddly, items one would associate with furniture making, such as glue and glasspaper. A man in his position was not used to being roughly handled by law enforcement officers.

The irony is that when not selling pastries or pots of adhesive, Newton was himself a law enforcement officer, in that he was the parish constable of Shoreditch. To make his point clear he now waved his beadle’s staff above his head, and declared in high dudgeon that he had made more arrests than all the local coppers put together, and that his complaint should be dealt with by the authorities at Scotland Yard. In the end he got no further than the police court in Worship Street, where the magistrate, John Hammill, wondered if he was a bit old — like the arresting officer, he was in his early forties — to be making and throwing snowballs. Newton’s defence was the classic yes-I-was-there-but-no-I-did-not-take-part, and it must have done the trick as Hammill let him off with a friendly warning to keep the peace, whereupon the two men agreed that Christmas comes but once a year and parted on good terms.