Twenty Years' Recollections of an Irish Police Magistrate. Frank Thorpe Porter
searched at the station-house, the man was found to have £300 in his possession, and the woman had £180. I do not recollect what names they gave, but I am sure they were not the real ones. They were committed, each for a calendar month, with hard labor; but during the period of their imprisonment their subsistence was charged on the rates of the city of Dublin, and the £480 were returned to them at their discharge. I have been informed that the law of Scotland authorises the support of vagrants, when committed to gaol, to be defrayed from money found in their possession. If such be the case, I would suggest to our Irish Members to have the law of this country, in cases of vagrancy, assimilated to the Scotch system as quickly as possible.
Very soon after the occurence which I have mentioned, a gentleman who resided at Kingstown, arrived there by train between seven and eight o'clock, p.m. He was walking up the Forty-foot Road, when he was accosted by a man of humble but decent appearance, who kept by his side whilst addressing him. "I came out, sir," said this individual, "early in the day, on an appointment with Mr. Herbert, of Tivoli Terrace, as he promised to let me have a few pounds that he owes me; but I found that he had to start suddenly for Bray on some particular business, and he left word for me that he would be back about ten o'clock, so I have to wait: and I declare, sir, that I had only enough when I left home to get a return ticket, and I have not had a bit to eat since morning. Might I ask you for as much as would get me a crust of bread and a mug of milk." On reaching George's Street, the gentleman handed him a sixpence, and received the expression of an earnest prayer for his earthly prosperity and eternal happiness. On the following evening, the gentleman arrived at the same time, proceeded up the same road, and not being recognized, was accosted by the same person, who told the same tale, concluding with a wish for "the crust and mug of milk." A constable happened to be in view, and the hungry applicant was arrested and charged as a vagrant beggar. He had two ten-pound notes and three of five pounds, with eighteen shillings in silver and copper coin. The vagrant stated his name to be Richard Bryan, and a most extraordinary document was found on him. It was soiled and partly torn, but it was signed, "Your loving brother, John Bryan," was dated, "Borris, August 30th, 1843," and contained a suggestion which was fully acted on, and which I could not allow to escape my recollection. Here it is:—
"We have got in the barley all right, and we are going at the oats to-morrow. I had to lend the horses to-day to Mr. Kimmis. I couldn't refuse, for you know he is a good warrant to obleege us when we want a turn. Nolan is bothering about the rent. He is very cross. You must see and make it out for him, if you were even to beg for it."
One month's imprisonment, with hard labour, provided the mendicant with some "crusts" and "mugs of milk" at the cost of the county. The delinquent did not, I believe, resume his solicitations within our district. The office sergeant who escorted him, with some other prisoners, to Kilmainham, told the clerk at Kingstown on the following morning, that Mr. Bryan stigmatized my decision as "most uncharitable and disgusting."
I did not find mendicancy so persistent in any part of the police district as in Kingstown. If a vagrant was brought up and punished for begging in Rathmines or the Pembroke township, or if the detection occurred at Inchicore, or in the more respectable parts of the city, it was not at all probable that the beggar would be soon found again in the same locality. The Kingstown vagrants, as soon as they were discharged from Kilmainham, generally started off to return and resume their solicitations at the piers and jetty, or about the streets and terraces, which were more devoted to healthful recreation than to professional or commercial affairs. I have no doubt that mendicants from distant places receive more at Kingstown or Bray, from visitors whom they recognize, or who recognize them, than would be given to them if both parties were at home. A lady with whom I was personally acquainted, and whose family residence was near Carlow, has several times, in my presence, given sixpences to beggars who belonged to her own neighbourhood, and I have heard her tell them that Kingstown was a better and more lucky place for them than ever they would find Carlow to be. I shall close my observations on street begging, by deliberately stating from my personal and official experience, that not one penny can be given to any mendicant on our thoroughfares in real, efficient, and merited charity. I would now warn my readers against another kind of begging, which avails itself of very systematic and elaborate means, and sometimes displays considerable educational acquirements, namely, written applications to charitable individuals to alleviate dire distress or succour unmerited misfortune. I know that this system is extensively practised in London, and I have heard that it is reviving in Dublin. I use the term "reviving," because it was completely crushed here in 1844 by the intelligence and activity of the detective division. At that time it was discovered that a confederacy of impostors had been formed in Bridgefoot Street, and that the members of this nefarious association were levying contributions on all in whose dispositions they had ascertained charity and credulity to be united. Forty-one of them were arrested and brought before me, and I committed them for trial on charges of "conspiring to defraud, obtaining money under false pretences, and forgery at common law." They were, however, consigned to Newgate, exactly at the time when the State prosecutions against O'Connell had been commenced; and it was the received opinion in police quarters that they owed their escape—for they were not prosecuted—to a feeling on the part of the attorney-general of that period, that all his attention was demanded in bringing down the eagle, and that none of his energies could be spared to scatter a flock of kites. But they were not relinquished by the detectives, and were brought in detail under the castigation of the law until the confederacy was broken up. Their begging letters and petitions were addressed to all whom they considered likely to yield the slightest attention to their requests. These productions were termed in their slang "Slums." One impostor represented that she was a clergyman's widow, with four female children, the eldest only eleven years of age; that her pious, exemplary, and most affectionate partner had died of malignant fever, contracted whilst whispering the words of Christian consolation to the departing sinner, and imparting the joyful assurance, that the life flickering away, the socket glimmer of a mere earthly light, would be rekindled in a lamp of everlasting duration and unvarying brilliancy. That resigned to her suffering, and adoring the hand from which she had experienced chastening, she was not forbidden to hope that the blessed spirit of charity would be manifested in her relief, and in shielding her helpless, artless babes from the privations of distress in their infancy, and from the still more fearful danger of being, in advanced youth, exposed to the snares of sin and its depraving consequences. A contribution, however small, addressed to Mrs. ——, at No. — Bridgefoot Street, Dublin, would, it was respectfully hoped, be accorded by Lord——, or Mr. or Mrs. ——, whose well-known, though unostentatious benevolence, must plead the poor widow's apology for such an intrusion. Another was an unfortunate man, who for many years had earned a respectable livelihood as a commercial agent, and supported a numerous and interesting family by his industry and intelligence, but having unfortunately been in the County of Tipperary, when a contested election was in progress, he unguardedly expressed a wish for the success of the Conservative candidate, and although not a voter, he was set upon by a horde of savage ruffians, and beaten so as to produce paralysis of his lower extremities, and that now nothing remained for him but to entreat the humane consideration of one who could not, if the public testimony of his, or her generous disposition, was to be credited, refuse to sympathize with a parent whose helplessness compelled him to witness, with unavailing anguish, the poignant miseries of the offspring he had hoped, by his honest exertions, to have supported and reared, without submitting to the galling necessity of soliciting that aid which nothing but the most absolute destitution could reconcile him to implore. A military lady announced herself as the widow of color-sergeant Robert Maffett, who having served faithfully for twenty-three years, the four last having been in India, had been severely wounded in a decisive battle in Scinde, and when invalided and pensioned, was unfortunately drowned at Blackwall, in consequence of the boat which was conveying him ashore being accidentally upset. That she and her eight poor orphans had no resource on reaching her native city, where she found that all her relations had died or emigrated, and where she was friendless and alone, but to throw herself upon the charitable feelings of one whose character emboldened her to hope that the humble appeal of the soldier's widow, for herself and her poor orphans, would not be unavailing. These and a thousand other slums were manufactured in Bridgefoot Street, alias Dirty Lane, not an unsuitable name for the locale of such proceedings, and they were invariably accompanied by lists of subscriptions, and