Courtroom Ghosts

William Cuffey, National Portrait Gallery Justice Huddleston, the judge who presided over the original trial of the cabin boy case last week, had a long career spanning the greater part of the 19th century. Before he was a judge, Huddleston worked as a barrister and in 1848 he defended a man named William Cuffey. Cuffey was born aboard a ship in the West Indies in 1788, and his family went on to settle in Chatham in Kent, where William Cuffey trained as a tailor. He was of mixed heritage, his father being a formerly-enslaved man from the Caribbean, and his paternal grandfather having been kidnapped from Africa. In the mid 1830s, Cuffey became politically radicalised when he lost his job and eventually moved up within the ranks of the Chartist Movement to become president of the London Chartists. Chartism was the first truly working-class movement for political change that the country had seen. The 1832 Reform Act had extended voting rights, but still only gave political franchise to ab...

The Illustrated Police News , 15th November 1884 Imagine this. It is 1884 and your name is Edwin Stephens. You are an experienced seaman, with a wife and children. You join the small crew of a yacht called Mignonette , which the captain, Tom Dudley, is transporting from Southampton to Sydney on behalf of a wealthy Australian lawyer. Alongside yourself and Captain Dudley, the crew consists of another seaman, Edmund Brooks, and an orphaned cabin boy named Richard Parker. On 19th May, you set off. Everything goes splendidly until the weather turns in the middle of June. The weather eases off at the beginning of July, but then by the 3rd, as you approach the Cape of Good Hope, a storm kicks up. The storm gets worse and worse until eventually, on the 5th, Mignonette is overwhelmed and terribly damaged and you cry out "My God, her side is knocked in!" With only a few moments notice, the four of you pile into a 13 feet long lifeboat, made of quarter-inch-thick boards. The Captain gr...

January 1804. Hammersmith, London. A group of young men had begun patrolling the streets, in search of a ghost that had been terrorising the local population for the past five weeks; a locksmith had already died of fright after seeing the ghost and two more witnesses were  reportedly at death's door . In one newspaper report, it was alleged that an elderly woman had been so terrified by the sight that it brought on "a dejection of mind" from which she did not recover. A brewers' servant named Thomas Groom later testified that "I was going through the church yard between eight and nine o'clock, with my jacket under my arm, and my hands in my pocket, when some person came from behind a tomb-stone, which there are four square in the yard, behind me, and caught me fast by the throat with both hands, and held me fast; my fellow-servant, who was going on before, hearing me scuffling, asked what was the matter; then, whatever it was, gave me a twist round, and I saw...

In 2017, England and Wales celebrated fifty years since the passing of the Sexual Offences Act 1967. The Act brought in a change to the law which had, according to many media reports, decriminalised male homosexuality, and brought in a new era of freedom in which gay men no longer had to fear arrest and prosecution. That is a lie. The decriminalisation was partial, stating that both parties had to be be over the age of twenty-one (the age of consent for heterosexual sex was sixteen), and that all sexual activity had to be conducted in private. I say 'both parties' because the law also stated that "(2) an act which would otherwise be treated for the purposes of this Act as being done in private shall not be so treated if done - (a) when more than two persons take part or are present". This notion of 'in private' was interpreted extremely narrowly, so that two men could also be prosecuted if they had sex in a locked room in a house where other people were prese...

  This week's post is a short one, mainly because the archives have reopened and I have been out and about more. Last week I looked briefly at a pair of men who were executed for sodomy. But during the 20th century the justice system's persecution of gay men was wide ranging and attempted to control far more than what happened in the bedroom. This is one such case. Born in 1910, Mary Whitehouse married, had five sons, and worked as an art and sex education teacher. In 1963, she became concerned about the behaviour and attitudes that her students exhibited in relation to sex and believed that the root cause of it was a general moral decline, precipitated by the media (specifically, the BBC). Despite a meeting with the deputy director-general of the BBC, Whitehouse became increasingly alarmed by the output of television programming and, in 1964, she founded the Clean Up TV Campaign. Clearly, there was something about Mary - thousands of people attended the first public meeting th...