A story that starts with a silver spoon, stolen 181 years ago
UoN history lecturer Dr Drew Gray takes documents from Victorian police courts and discovers the true story behind the official records… Read on for the astounding story of Elizabeth Avery and a single spoon
By the middle of the 1800s London had 13 Police Courts served by 23 stipendiary magistrates.
The courts dealt with a tremendous variety of crimes and incidents, and the London press soon found them to be a rich source of news for their growing readership.
Sound familiar?
Dr Drew Grey is Senior Lecturer in History with a specialism in history of crime and punishment. Read more on Drew’s blog: https://thepolicemagistrate.blog/
Elizabeth Avery had committed a very common crime in early Victorian London and received a very usual sentence for it. When she was brought before the Queen’s Square Police court on 25 June 1837 (just five days after the queen acceded to the throne) she was accused of stealing a silver spoon.
The theft was discovered when Elizabeth had attempted to pawn the item and the ‘broker’ had become suspicious.
The spoon belonged to Philip John Miles, the sitting Conservative MP for Bristol, who kept a house in London as many provincial members did.
Miles owed his position to wealth and his money derived from banking and his family’s sugar plantations in Jamaica. Until 1833, Miles, like many rich and powerful men in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century England, was a slave owner.
The honourable member for Bristol (who had previously held seats at Westbury and Corfe Castle) was a millionaire in his day and had acquired the slaves he had owned indirectly, as his bank took possession of them when their owners defaulted on their mortgages.
Slavery had been finally abolished in 1833, after a long campaign and owning slaves was now illegal (the trade itself had been banned in 1808). But it left the thorny question of compensation. Not for the enslaved of course, but for the men that would have to give up their ‘property’, such was early nineteenth-century logic. A project at University College London reveals that around 10–20 of Britain’s wealthy elite have links to slavery in the past; ours was an economy built on the forced labour of millions of African slaves — something we might remember more often.
Philip John Miles did very well out of the compensation scheme that was enshrined in law in 1837 (by a parliament in which he sat of course). His son became a baronet who also sat as a Tory at Westminster. Throughout his political career he never once had to contest an election and only resigned his seat so his son could ‘inherit’ it.
This son, Sir Philip Miles (2nd baronet), also pursued a career in politics and was a little more active than his father or grandfather. He was more ‘liberal’ than either, even supporting votes for some women in 1884.
The Miles’ then were a wealthy, privileged family who handed that wealth and influence down to their children so they could enjoy the benefits that it brought.
Contrast this then with Elizabeth Avery, who stole a spoon from John Miles’ dinner table. She was the daughter of a charwoman — a lowly servant who had worked for the family for 14 years, doing their laundry.
Avery regularly went to see Mr Harding, a pawnbroker on York Street, Westminster, sent by her mother to pledge things so they could pay their rent and feed themselves.
On the night the spoon was lifted John Miles had thrown a lavish party and the Averys had come round to clear away the linen to wash.
Elizabeth must have been tempted by the huge array of silver on show and, having seen such things in the pawnbrokers and knowing they could be transformed into money, pocketed it.
She was only seven years old after all.
In court Mr White the sitting magistrate, having heard the case against Elizabeth (presented by Miles’ butler and the pawnbroker’s assistant), called for the girl’s mother. He admonished her for sending her daughter to a pawnshop, saying that she ‘most probably would not have stolen the spoon had she not known a method of disposing of it’.
In order to emphasise his message and the lesson he wanted Mrs Avery to learn he sent Elizabeth to prison for seven days.
So, for taking a spoon from the table of a man who owed his possession of it to a trade in human beings a little girl of seven, raised in poverty, was condemned to spend a week away from her mother in the squalid conditions of the Westminster House of Correction.
While the Miles family prospered I wonder what happened to the Averys?
I suspect that Mrs Avery may have lost her job cleaning linen for the Miles household. That would have thrown a poor family into crisis and Elizabeth may have been forced to turn to some form of crime to survive thereafter.
Many of London’s prostitutes started that way, and in 1842 a teenager called Elizabeth Avern, alias Avery, was convicted of stealing a boot valued at 2s 9d.
Of course it may have been a different Elizabeth Avery, but the court noted she had a previous conviction and as a result they threw the book at her.
She was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Australia. Transportation was a form of forced migration, which effectively enslaved those condemned to work for the British state as it built its empire ‘down under’.
I suppose that is what we might call poetic ‘injustice’.
[from The Morning Post, Monday, June 26, 1837]
