On Wednesday the 8^th of February, 1882 a telegram was sent to John Garden, the superintendent of the Berwick Constabulary from Andrew Rutherford, an inspector of the Blyth police.

The telegram told of a man called Shadrach Nelson, who had been arrested in the town of Hawick in Roxburghshire for a ‘Pony stealing’ charge in the Blyth area and had subsequently escaped custody. A newspaper article from the following week (14^th February, 1882) in the Southern Reporter describes Shadrach’s flee from imprisonment. It tells that Shadrach was left alone with a Mrs. Chapman, the wife of the Constable left in charge of his detention. Having noticed his opportunity, he managed to persuade Mrs. Chapman to release him for a few moments respite. The newspaper goes on to describe how Shadrach ‘bolted to the door and made his way up the Loan’ (a street in Hawick), after which he managed to evade recapture despite the attempts to apprehend him from ‘four or five constables’ and ‘a very large crowd’.

The following two years for Shadrach Nelson would be spent in and out of court for similar crimes of horse theft across the north-east region. In total, research suggests that Shadrach would spend much of 1882 on a crime-spree of horse thieving, of which he was caught, arrested, and later tried for 7 separate incidents.

On the surface, the evidence suggests that Nelson was a prolific criminal of seemingly ineffective capabilities but nonetheless possessed some form of persuasive or manipulative characteristics, as evidenced by his flee from jail. Whether committed through a kind of careless boldness, circumstantial desperation, or a likely combination of both, what Shadrach Nelson’s streak of horse stealing shows us is a somewhat archetypical story of a person on the fringes of rural poverty during the latter half of the 19^th century. How came to be that Nelson, at the age of 21, found himself in and out of prison for mid-level larceny is a story that reads like a window into Victorian destitution.

Shadrach McGregor Nelson was born on the 28^th of October, 1861 in the village of Chatton, near Wooler in Northumberland. He was the second son of James and Ann Nelson, born in to a family of first-generation Irish Travellers whose father had migrated from Ireland at some point in the 1810’s or 1820’s and had moved through the Scottish borders and northern England throughout the following decades.

At the time of the 1861 census, recorded before Shadrach was born later that year, James and Ann Nelson are documented as living with James’ father, also James, his mother, Catherine, and their other 7 children, whose ages ranged from 19 to 1 years old. Also, in residence at the property is James and Ann’s first child and Shadrach’s older brother, James (III) born in 1859/60. The census describes the family as being ‘Travellers’, with James snr. being born in Ireland in 1812. Shadrach’s father, James, was born in Scotland in 1831, so it is assumed that James snr. and Catherine, herself hailing from the Morpeth area, married somewhere near that date. The birth records of several of their children vary from up to Scotland (James jnr.) and west to Cumberland, demonstrating a wide area of movement covered by the Nelsons.

As their occupation is listed as ‘travellers’, it is clear that their accommodations in Chatton would not have been comfortable, spacious, or even permanent. Though no address is recorded, it is highly likely that a family of 12, existing within this incredibly low economic bracket, arguably outside even the poorest of those living in abject poverty at the time, would be occupying a single room dwelling or perhaps even little more than a stable or barn. As the 1861 census was taken on the 6^th of June, the likelihood that the family were sleeping in a farm building or even outdoors is increasingly likely due to the time of year.

By the taking of the next census on the 6^th of June 1871, James and Ann are no longer living with his parents and siblings, but are instead found encamped on Mattillees Hill, near the village of Duddo, Northumberland. This time, the fact of their temporary accommodation is confirmed. In addition to their sons James and Shadrach (now aged 9), they also have three daughters (Margaret, 1866; Ann, 1869; Catherine, 1870). The various different locations of their children’s births (Glanton, Eglingham, Norham, Nesbit, and Spittal) shows the iterant nature of the family. Noticeably, Shadrach’s birthplace is here recorded as Eglingham, Northumberland, instead of Chatton when his birth was registered. Throughout his life, various different censuses would note different and conflicting places of birth for most of the family members, showing that the relationship to place for the Nelsons was either misremembered or in some ways malleable – a phenomenon not unusual for families whose circumstances required regular upheaval.  

Interestingly, at the time of this census, the legislative attempts to reckon with the sizable itinerant population (in 1909 the Salvation Army estimated upwards of 60,000 people were homeless[1]) were struggling to be met. The 1824 Vagrant Act had bestowed upon local law enforcement the powers of prosecution for the homeless population, but in practice it was often hard to prove specifically that the accused had no means of support and therefore should face some form of local intervention, or in reality, retribution.

The Victorian relationship to Gypsy and Traveller communities was a complex one. On the one hand, there was a cult of Romanticisation by some in the urban middle-class over the direct relationship to the landscape and nature that Gypsies seemed to demonstrate, developed much in light of the rapid urbanisation occurring throughout the country; on the other hand they were continually ostracised as racially other, morally degenerate, and therefore criminally dangerous. Furthermore, their lifestyle in general posed a point of frustration for a society that was increasingly reliant upon fixed notions of property and location: ‘Victorian “travelers” were […] part of a shifting population whose contours left a society enamoured of statistical precision frankly baffled.’[2]

In the case of the Nelsons, it is evident that this kind of living was not an unusual circumstance for the family. When Shadrach would later become involved in horse-stealing, one of the newspaper reports states that his ‘uncle and other relatives slept in a loose box at the prosecutor’s farm’[3] (a loose box referring to a stable or enclosed area to keep horses). These sorts of sleeping arrangements would continue through the family into James and Ann’s grandson, Shadrach Jr.’s, lifetime, as evidenced when he was fined in 1946 for trespassing after camping outside of Hawick[4]. It seems clear that the Nelsons, like many families, of both Traveller and non-Traveller lineage, had a complicated and precarious relationship to property and shelter throughout their lives and that their frequent movement both determined and was a product of their operating one the edges of wider working-class life.

In the case of the Nelsons, James is listed on this census as being a ‘Hawker of Earthenware’, an occupation typical of Traveller and Gypsy communities during this period. As of the year of this census, 1871, it would be expected of James to have paid the local police for the right to trade as laid out by the 1871 Pedlar’s Act, though as this restricted itinerant pedlars and hawker’s movements to a specific locality and would require the acquisition of a new licence for every new local authority, it could be assumed that someone such as James Nelson would not be in full complicity with the law. Perhaps because of this inefficiency of the legislation’s breadth, this law was amended in 1881 to allow licenced hawkers to trade within any locality without risk of fine. As is demonstrated here by their temporary setup on Mattillees Hill, the nature of hawking typically resulted in precarious living situations that required a flexible relationship to where one resided. As is pertinent to this case, the Nelsons were likely en route to their next market, village, or town to try to sell some of their earthenware pottery when the census was recorded.  

By the time of the next census in 1881, his youngest sister Catherine is no longer listed, suggesting she had died; when and where is unknown. Although obviously tragic, what is perhaps more remarkable is that James, Shadrach, Margaret, Ann, and later three more daughters (Charlotte, Catherine, Jane), all seemingly reached adulthood in spite of these arduous circumstances of poverty. The difficulty of looking after, what would-be eventually, 8 children without any security of shelter, income, food, and physical safety shows us the trying circumstances that helped to produce Shadrach’s later complicated relationship with authority.

[1] It should be noted that this was not contemporaneously verified and therefore could be inflationary; nonetheless, the likely number of homeless or ‘vagrant’ people during the second half of the 19^th century was probably well within the tens of thousands so the figure serves as a useful illustration of the contemporary anxieties regarding the homeless or itinerant population.

George K. Behlmer, ‘The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 231-253, p. 233.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Reported in ‘Pony Stealing at Horton’, Morpeth Herald, 20 Jan 1883.

[4] Jedburgh Gazette, 20 Jun 1946.