Hawkers Horse Theft and Travellers in Late 19th Century Northumberland part2 (Twixt Thistle & Rose)

By 1881, Shadrach, now nearing age 20, and his family are living in Gateshead at 13 Union Place, part of the deprived Windmill Hill area. Much like his father and brother, he too is listed as a ‘hawker’. As the Nelsons are not referred to by the term ‘Pedlar’, it seems likely they would have a horse in their usage, although the vagueness around the differences between the various branches of street-sellers and/or travelling salespeople makes it difficult to claim certainty on this. The 1888
Hawkers Act clarifies this confusion of definition by describing the specification of ‘hawker’ as ‘any one [sic] who travels with a horse or other beast of burden, selling goods’. Certainly, as his thieving indicates, Shadrack seemed to have a familiarity with horses, both in terms of handling and riding them and of the potential market value they would hold.

The family’s move to Gateshead from the kind of rural villages and towns that we find them in prior to the 1881 census is in many ways typical of the urban migration many people undertook during the latter half of the 19th century. The strain of piecemeal income generated from the hawking trade, evidently pushed the Nelsons closer towards the urban centre of Tyneside in order to maximise their customer-base. Henry Mayhew describes how, even though the pedlar or hawker is
generally by 1861 ‘confined to the poorer districts’ of cities, the opportunity to be ‘the purveyor in general to the poor’ (5) resulted in a dependent relationship within working- class communities upon hawkers and their wares.

By the following year Shadrach had departed from the rest of his family and begun his year or two of horse stealing. Returning to where we first met Shadrach in 1882 in the Hawick area, research shows that from the start of the year he is away from the Gateshead area where we last left his family, suggesting he left home sometime after 3 rd April 1881 when census was recorded. Commencing on the 11th of January in Horton, Northumberland, Shadrach would go to steal horses from Blyth on the 8th of February; Barnard Castle, Winlaton, and Marwood in April; Billingham,
County Durham on 15th of May; and Alston in Cumbria on the 8th of July. As these are only the recorded due to his having been caught, it is likely that he committed more thefts of this nature throughout the year also. Several newspaper reports give us little clues as to how Shadrach operated during these crimes: Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail (27th Jul 1883) tells us that during the theft at Billingham, Shadrach had befriended the son of Mr Robert Thompson, the horse-owner that he would go on to steal from. It describes how Shadrach had watched Mr Thompson’s son ‘put the
horse into field’ before ‘walking back towards Billingham with him’, later returning that night to take the horse. With all of his thefts, he would go on to try and sell these horses, which was often how he was apprehended. He would usually try to either ‘swop’ (Cumberland and Westmoreland Herald, 8 July 1882) the stolen horses or sell them for anywhere between £5 – £15, which today ranges from about £600 – £1770. Many of the newspaper articles refer to Nelson as a ‘Notorious Horse Stealer’ and also note several of the aliases he used to go undetected, such as John Robinson, John Stewart, and Watson.

After having been caught a total of 7 times through 1882, Shadrach is sentenced in several different trials the following year to 3 different 6-month prisons sentences. He is sentenced to hard labour, which often meant performing such tasks as quarrying or rock-breaking, building roads, treadmill-walking, and/or crank-pulling. These would usually be undertaken in silence and in isolation. Whilst by no means would any of these punishments be considered easy or desirable, it is worth noting
that for some, the reality of prison life at this time was in some ways more agreeable than their alternative option of staying in a poor house/workhouse.

Commencing with the Poor Law in 1834, the ‘policy toward vagrants combined a legal recognition of their right to relief with a determination to award this relief under intensely disagreeable conditions.’ (6) These disagreeable conditions in some instances were taken to such an extremity that at ‘The [sic] vast majority of homeless wayfarers preferred to take refuge in dosshouses, charitable shelters, the streets, or even the prisons rather than in the casual wards’ as ‘The prisons were generally held to be less punitive than the casual wards; they offered a better diet and lighter labour tasks than the workhouses’ (7) . This is not to say that Shadrach had an intention of being caught and arrested, but it perhaps throws into relief the kind of options he faced as a young man who had grown up in poverty, likely with no education (illiteracy among Travellers and Gypsies was almost uniform (8 ), and whose alternative for some form security was a workhouse, an option most Gypsies and Travellers rarely partook of (9) , it is perhaps more understandable as to why for Shadrach, he so often relied on theft throughout this period of his life.

Because of the interrelationship between Travellers and hawking, often the profession had commonly been associated with thieving and other nefarious activities. Henry Mayhew expresses this prejudice when he describes costermongers (urban food vendors) as ‘slippery customers’ and later lumps all kinds of itinerant working-class trades together when he writes that ‘beggars, patterers, hawkers, tramps, and vendors of their own manufacture, are mingled with thieves, women of easy virtue, and men of no virtue at all’. The confluence between hawkers/pedlars and criminal activities such as poaching and theft were certainly at times a warranted association. For example, poaching gangs frequently ‘had informal contracts with itinerant vendors or with tradesmen who sold their catch over the counter in shops, stalls and public houses.’ (10) Therefore, it is not unlikely that Shadrach would fall in to this kind of enterprise, in that proximity to criminal activity would oftentimes be a commonplace occurrence for him both as a child and as a young man. Furthermore,
his frequency in returning to horse-stealing throughout this year implies that his position within rural society is one of such precarity and suspicion that he regularly would have had no other option in gaining money or food. Interestingly, one article mentions that he was also wanted for desertion of the 3rd Battalion Durham Light Infantry, which indicates that he had dipped his toe in a different stream of employment, though clearly without much commitment or success.

After serving his time for these horse-thefts, Shadrach gets married in the December quarter of 1884 to Charlotte Maria Drummond, born in the Ford area and similarly hailing from a family of hawkers. The marriage record lists the couple as living in Newcastle with two other people, Bridget Horan and James Croney, likely sharing a single room. Though he does return to stealing, at least as far as the records show, he is indicted and fined £2 11s for resisting police arrest in June of 1886 in Berwick, along with 3 others, one of which is likely to be his wife. Though the incident is not described, it is worth noting that the relationship between Travellers and the rural police force was a long one of tension and, at times, harassment on the behalf of the police. (11)

By the time we find him at the next census, aged 29, the couple were living in the Freeholders Quarter in present day Longhorsley with their two-year-old son, Shadrach jnr., born in Wooler. By this time, both Shadrach and Mary are listed as a ‘licenced hawker’ on the census records. With his history of convictions earlier in the decade, it is notable that Shadrach is evidently working within the requisite legal framework for a hawker. As required, a licenced hawker was expected to be of ‘of
good character and a proper person’ as judged by a local constabulary’s inspector, clergy, or justice. We can somewhat assume, then, that family life had made Shadrach a little bit more law-abiding, if only on paper.

Nonetheless, life would remain challenging for the family and they found themselves living in slum accommodation at 16 Liverpool Street in Newcastle by 1901.

By this time, Charlotte had given birth to Anne and Margaret and the family were once again inhabiting a single room. Life in Newcastle evidently proved somewhat stable for the Nelsons as they are found 10 years later living in the same street, this time at number 7, indicating a pattern of
movement that often saw them returning to the city. This is typical of the kind of routes that Traveller and Gypsy communities operated within at this period, usually drifting back into urban areas during the winter months before moving back through the countryside as the weather improved and seasonal work began to pick up again in the spring. (12) In the 1911 census, Shadrach and Mary’s daughter Ann, now 17 is recorded as assisting in the business of her parents, although it is assumed that Margaret, 16, is similarly involved in the business, as no other profession is otherwise listed. By this time, Shadrach jnr. had left the family environment and simply recorded as absent.

Shadrach jnr.’s own relationship to the law is similarly as fraught as his father’s was in the 1880’s. An article in the Jedburgh Gazette, 23 Feb. 1907, describes how Shadrach jnr., now aged 18, was ‘sentenced to seven days imprisonment for stealing seven sheepskins and nine lbs of wool from the premises of Elliot, Taggart & Company’, of which he shortly ‘brought them back and sold them
to the same firm.’ Clearly, the brazenness of some of his father’s earlier exploits had been passed on to his son. He would go on to be fined in 1922 for poaching salmon in Kelso, arrested for a burglary at Norham in 1924, and in 1929, would be sentenced to six months imprisonment for theft of ‘a quantity of horse hair, an overcoat, and seventy empty sacks’ from a farm in Earlston, Berwickshire. His name would further come up in association with the theft of some wool in 1930 in Ancrum.

Records suggest that he was married in 1915 to a Sarah Anderson in Hawick, who would go on to give birth to another Shadrach in the September quarter of that same year in Newcastle. Shadrach III would also have several brushes with the law, including burglary in Wark-on-Tweed in 1931, an assault on a policeman in Alnwick in 1939, and a further assault on a policeman and car theft in 1955. What happened to Sarah is unclear; whether Shadrach jnr. and herself separated, divorced, or
whether she died, it is unknown. Regardless, he remarried in 1948, after having cohabited in Alnwick with Eva Mills since at least 1939. Perhaps the most startling crime in Shadrach jnr.’s lifetime is his accidental murder of Eva in 1950. Evidently, Shadrach jnr. was playing target practice with his nephew when the gun misfired and fatally hit Eva in neck. He was cleared of intent by a jury, though the judge did admonish him for his senselessness and negligence at firing a shotgun indoors. Sharach jnr. would die 6 years later at the age of 67.

Returning finally, to his father’s life, Shadrach would manage to survive into his early 80’s. This is remarkable when considering the way in which his life was spent in between many places, devoid of much comfort. Henry Mayhew, although steeped in class-prejudice, describes hawkers of the mid-1800’s as living roughly to the point of eventual collapse: ‘Many of these hawkers drink hard, and, being often men of robust constitution, until the approach of age, can live “hard,”—as regards
lodging, especially. One hawker I heard of slept in a slaughter-house, on the bare but clean floor, for nearly two years.’ Clearly the hardship of hawking manifested in a life always at the edge of deprivation. Charlotte dies in Kelso in 1927 from a cerebral haemorrhage; on her death certificate, we find an ‘X’ in place of where Shadrach’s signature would be, confirming that he, like many of his socioeconomic background, was indeed illiterate. After Charlotte’s death, Shadrach seems to continue to drift around as before. In 1935, now aged 73, he is accused of having received stolen goods in Alnwick. He is described as having ‘no fixed abode’ and having knowingly received a stolen
harness and pony (horses are certainly a theme throughout his life). Luckily for Shadrach, the charges are dismissed when he agrees to return the pony to the owner, a Mr. Laidler. Despite his avoidance of reprimand, the article states that the Chairman of the proceedings held ‘grave suspicions against the accused.’ Evidently, Shadrach is still operating with a kind of precariousness that results in ostracism from local communities and despite his age, he continues to drift from place to place.

He seemingly continues to wander about for the next 7 years before his death in 1942. His death certificate records him as having died from ‘carcinoma of the oesophagus’ at 2.55am on the 27 th of January, 1942, aged 81 in Birgham, Eccles. His death was registered by his daughter Margaret Souther in Eccles, so it is assumed that he was staying with her at the time of his death. Both Shadrach and his wife Charlotte are buried in Kelso, along with their son Shadrach jnr.

What Shadrach Nelson’s life shows us is that the life of a hawker and his family was certainly one of strife and uncertainty. As is evident with Shadrach, hawking required a lifestyle that is prepared to be constantly uprooted, living with a lack of security, and often receiving little material return. In many ways, it is the stuff of popular lore when thinking about the 19th century’s relationship to wealth, poverty, and those who battled to survive within it.

Certainly, Shadrach Nelson and his namesakes were no angels, and the reliance upon theft showed a disconnect between himself and the communities he moved through. Yet, or rather, because of this somewhat archetypal narrative of economic struggle and social exclusion, Shadrach Nelson’s story reveals an incredibly lucid portrait of life lived in penury in the Victorian north-east, one in which
the impulse to dismiss certain actions as merely criminal is perhaps too simple a charge to level him and those like him. And if his resilience has shown us anything, those charges will probably never stick anyway.

Shadrach Nelson, 28 October 1861 – 27 January 1942.

5 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1851.

6 Rachel Vorspan. ‘Vagrancy and the New Poor Law in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England’,
The English Historical Review, Vol. 92, No. 362 (Jan, 1977), pp. 59-81, p. 60.

7 Ibid, p. 64.

8 the 1967 Plowden Report found that almost all Gypsy or Traveller adults ‘were completely
illiterate’, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/22/gypsies-lagging-education-
gypsies-travellers.

9 ‘Gypsies rarely haunted either casual wards or common lodging houses’: Behlmer, ‘Gypsy
Problem in Victorian England’, p. 234.

10 D. J. V. Jones, ‘The Poacher: A Study in Crime and Protest’, The Historical Journal, 22.4 (Dec.,
1979), Cambridge University Press, pp. 825-860, p. 850.

11 Behlmer, ‘Gypsy Problem’, p. 235.

12 ‘it seemed unlikely that even they [gypsies] could resist the onslaught of urban civilization.
Already by mid-century, small bands were finding city homes during the winter months.’ George
K. Behlmer, ‘The Gypsy Problem’, p. 240.
See also https://www.historytoday.com/archive/britains-gypsy-travellers-people-outside

N.B.: Throughout much of the recorded material (i.e. censuses, birth, death, marriage certificates, and newspaper articles) there are many variations in the spelling of ‘Shadrach’ (such as ‘Shadrack’, ‘Shaderick’, and ‘Shadrick’). For the sake of clarity, ‘Shadrach’ has been chosen as the catch-all version.