Authors: Sarah Wise
To give some weight to the findings of the unillustrious Beaman (he was just a parish surgeon) and the young Partridge, Frederick Tyrrell, a nephew of Sir Astley Cooper, was called. He backed up Partridge and Beaman, stressing that the child had certainly not died from a stroke; the injuries could have been caused “only by violence.”
That ended the medical evidence. Next, PC John Wilson of F Division told of the violent struggle that James May had put up as he was being taken into custody: “He struck me because I would not let Bishop and him talk together.” Superintendent Thomas took up the story, saying, “I should observe that the prisoners were under the effects of liquor, in my judgement—May and Bishop more particularly so. May was carried in on all fours and his frock over his face. He was scuffling.” The noose was tightening.
May, for reasons the prosecution could not fathom, had refused to secure immunity for himself by revealing when, where, and how the child in the trunk had met his death. This was unforgivable: he was going to be made to pay.
Two of the more foggy, fluid parts of the story were next recounted by Henry Lock, barman at the Fortune of War, and Thomas Wigley, beer drinker at the same—with new emphases on May and the other prisoners acting in concert. It had been May and Bishop’s claim that their meeting at the Fortune of War that Friday morning had been a chance encounter, that they had arrived separately, though neither had been able to give specific times. May had remembered being there already, sometime after eleven or twelve, when Bishop and Williams walked in. Lock now pinned the time to “about eleven o’clock.… I remember seeing them all three at the Fortune of War, they had some drink there and stayed till about twelve.” Lock claimed that Bishop, May, and Williams were accompanied by another man, “a stranger to me.” (Shields would not meet them at the Fortune of War for another whole day; even Superintendent Thomas had given up the goose chase of trying to place the four original prisoners together in the pub on the Friday morning.) Lock told the Old Bailey that Bishop, Williams, May, and the stranger all left the Fortune of War “together”—“together” now being the motif of his evidence. He said that Bishop, Williams, and May came back at around three o’clock, left at dusk, returning at about eight o’clock with a different fourth man, “who appeared to be a coachman.” The three prisoners were in the taproom for quite a while, said Lock, and then a little before nine, May came to the bar, rubbing a set of teeth with his handkerchief. “They all left together, some short time after this,” said Lock. At around eight o’clock the next morning, Lock saw Bishop and Williams with Michael Shields at the Fortune of War; the latter was heard to refuse to go across the road and take a hamper from just inside the railings of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, so Bishop went and collected it himself.
Thomas Wigley gave the gist of his former evidence, and the prosecution attempted to show that May—aware that his conversation with Bishop was being overheard by Wigley, sitting at the same table at the Fortune of War—had tried to make out that he did not understand Bishop’s resurrection slang. Wigley said that Bishop had asked May, “Did not he go up to him well and collar him—was he not a game one?” to which May had said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Next, May’s role in procuring a cab was highlighted by the drivers he and Bishop had approached. Then the eyewitness accounts were heard from the neighbors who had seen Bishop, Williams, and May arrive at Nova Scotia Gardens in a yellow chariot, then carry something away in a sack; though twelve-year-old George Gissing inconveniently said that “the strange man” in the smock frock he had seen that evening with Bishop and Williams was not the third man in the dock, and neighbor Ann Cannell—who had failed to pick out Bishop at Bow Street when taken there to do so—now maintained that she hadn’t seen enough of any of the three to recognize them at the time or on any subsequent occasion.
* * *
When Robert Mortimer,
the elderly tailor who lived near the Bishops and who had cut Williams a coat for his wedding day just ten weeks earlier, was not found to be among the prosecution witnesses at the Old Bailey, two sheriff’s officers were dispatched to Nova Scotia Gardens to collect him. Mortimer welcomed the men into his cottage, apologized for having forgotten the day of the trial, and asked them to excuse him while he shaved. He picked up his razor and, in front of the officers, drew the blade across his throat.
* * *
Guy’s Hospital porter James Davis
and his assistant, James Weeks, repeated that they had bought two bodies from May earlier in the week of the arrests, that they knew both Bishop and May well; that the two had delivered to them a sack from which protruded the foot of what they took to be a woman or a child; that Guy’s had stored it overnight and delivered it up safely to the resurrectionists on Saturday morning. Like William Hill, Davis said that Williams had taken no part in the brokering of the body on the Friday night—it had all been done by Bishop and May; Davis hadn’t even seen Williams until the latter’s appearance at Bow Street. John Appleton of Grainger’s school hadn’t seen Williams either—he had dealt with only Bishop and May. And May’s apparently detailed knowledge of the boy’s corpse was reiterated by dentist Thomas Mills. May, said Mills, had called between nine and ten o’clock on the Saturday morning and, when challenged about whether the teeth were in fact a set, said “upon his soul to God, they all belonged to one head, and not long since, and that the body had never been buried. He said, ‘The fact is, they belong to a boy between fourteen and fifteen years old.’” In Mills’s opinion, great violence must have been used to get the teeth out of the head, since part of the jaw socket was still attached; he said that the brad awl found in May’s room in Dorset Street, and produced in court, was exactly the sort of implement that would have been used to extract the teeth.
Augustine Brun, the Birmingham padrone, was interpreted to the court by Joseph Paragalli. According to the
Times,
this was not a satisfactory arrangement, and the judge reprimanded Paragalli for appearing to alter the questions and Brun’s answers and for “impertinence and frivolity not at all in character with the solemn investigation which was then pending.” There was laughter when Brun said that he had not seen the boy alive since July 1830 and, presumably in reply to a clumsily worded question, said that he couldn’t have seen the boy alive after he was dead. That aside, it is difficult to make out, in the official transcript of the trial and the various newspaper reports, where Paragalli would have been criticized for levity, and how much of the following testimony represents what Brun really meant to say cannot be known: “I knew an Italian boy named Carlo Ferrier. I brought him over from Italy about two years ago, he was then about fourteen years old. He lived with me for about six weeks. I saw him alive on 28th July 1830. The last place I knew him to lodge at was Mr Elliott’s, No 2 Charles Street, Drury Lane. On 19th November I saw the body of a boy at the burial ground near Covent Garden. I can only say that I suppose it to be the boy of whom I have spoken, by his size and hair, but the face I cannot give an opinion upon, from the state it was in, and the teeth were taken out. The size and the hair were exactly the same as Ferrier’s. I have not seen that boy alive since.”
Brun said that he could perceive no trace of resemblance to Carlo in the corpse’s face, which, in any case, he had not had the heart to look at for very long.
Curwood asked him: “Supposing you had heard nothing about Carlo Ferrier, and had looked at that body. Should you at all have known it?”
“Yes, I should, from the hair and size. If I had known nothing about this occurrence and had seen the body, I should be of the opinion that he was ‘my own.’”
Curwood wanted Brun to confirm that he was completely sure, and Brun said: “At first sight, if anybody had asked me who the body was, the face was so disfigured, I could not tell.”
“Have you seen him since July twelve months?”
“No. He might grow a little in fifteen months, but not much.”
It is difficult to guess how much a poor boy, aged around fourteen, would have grown in fifteen months; malnourishment meant that in the early part of the nineteenth century, the poorest London fourteen-year-olds were, on average, between four and six inches shorter than the fourteen-year-old sons of the gentry.
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But George Beaman had found this child to be healthy, even slightly “stout.”
Giving his own testimony, Joseph Paragalli said: “I play an organ and pandean pipes about the streets, with my wife and three children. I knew Carlo Ferrier. I saw him every morning at Mr Elliott’s. I knew he was once in Brun’s service. I have known the boy from 22nd May 1830. I saw him alive in the Quadrant, Regent Street, at half-past two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, four weeks before I saw him at the station house. He was then dead. When I saw him in the Quadrant he had a little cage round his neck, and two white mice in it. He was the same boy as I saw dead at the station house, undoubtedly.”
Paragalli also revealed that Carlo had been brought to England with his sister, who had died in Scotland. Extraordinarily, he offered the information that Carlo was the only Italian boy who made money exhibiting animals in the streets of London. The boy he had seen in the Quadrant could only have been Carlo.
He was now handed the brown furry cap, which had been sitting in court all morning alongside the sack, hamper, trunk, set of teeth, and all the articles of clothing exhumed at 3 Nova Scotia Gardens; the garments had been described in great detail in every national newspaper the day after Superintendent Thomas had brought them back in triumph to Bow Street. “I cannot swear to this cap,” said Paragalli. “He always wore a cap. I cannot say whether I ever saw him in one like this. He had one on in the Quadrant, but I cannot say whether it was cloth, leather or skin. I am sure the shade [visor] of this cap is of foreign manufacture.”
Barry asked: “Is it not eleven weeks since you saw him?”
“It was four weeks before I saw him a corpse. He lodged close to me. The rest of the Italian boys live by Saffron Hill. I have seen many about town. I do not keep company with my countrymen here.”
Paragalli’s wife, Mary, said, “I knew a boy who carried two white mice about. I do not know his name. I saw that boy on Tuesday 1st November in Oxford Street, near Hanover Square, exactly at a quarter past twelve o’clock. He had a little cage, like a squirrel’s cage, which turns round, with two little white mice in it. I did not speak to him. I do not recollect how he was dressed. He had a little cap on but it is impossible for me to say what color, or what it was made of. On Sunday morning, 6th November, about nine o’clock, I saw the dead body of the very same boy at the station house, Covent Garden. I had known him all the summer. I know Brun, but did not know him till the boy had left him. I do not know what name the boy went by. I never spoke to him much. I was with my husband when we saw him in the Quadrant. That was the same boy that I saw dead. I have a son eight years old, who knew the boy well. He went with me to the station house and knew him. He is not here.” Hearsay had not been allowed in an English court of law since the seventeenth century; Mary Paragalli should have been allowed to mention her son’s views only if he was there himself to be questioned on them.
A new Italian witness had come forward. Andrew Colla lived at 4 Saffron Hill and was a peripatetic seller of birdcages, which he constructed in his home. “I knew Carlo Ferrier by seeing him about the street,” he said, without an interpreter. “On Tuesday 1st November, I saw him in Oxford Street and spoke to him. I saw a dead body at the station house in Covent Garden on the following Monday—it was the body of the same person as I had seen in Oxford Street. He had a cage with white mice in it, and a tortoise.” The tortoise had absented itself from the story quite some time ago; now here was Colla resurrecting it. Asked to identify the cap and disinterred outfit as belonging to the victim, Colla continued: “He had a cap on his head, something like the one produced. It was torn on one side. I believe this to be the same cap. He had on a blue coat and grey trousers. I observed a large patch on the left knee and from the patch on the left knee of these trousers I believe them to be the same he had on. They are the same kind. I did not so particularly notice the color or patch as I did the stitches, being so great a distance from each other as these are. I do believe these to be the trousers. I have not seen them since I saw them on the boy in Oxford Street.”
Colla had taken in a great deal of detail that day in Oxford Street; Superintendent Thomas must have been extremely pleased. As he must have been with little John King. Children of any age could give evidence at the Old Bailey, provided the judge was satisfied that the child knew good from evil and understood the nature of an oath. John King was nine, old enough in their honors’ view to give testimony at a capital trial. “I live with my mother, who is now confined. I remember one day when my mother was washing seeing a foreign boy near Nova Scotia Gardens. I believe it was on the Thursday before Guy Fawkes day, and between one and two o’clock. I was looking down upon him from the loft window and could not see whether he had a cage or a box as my mother would not let me go down to him. I believe it was a cage for I saw some wire on the top of it. He was standing still, with the cage hanging around his neck by a string. He had a brown hairy cap on his head, the peak of it was lined with green. The cap produced looks exactly like it. I do not know how long he remained there. I was looking at him for a few minutes.”
Barry asked: “Were you in the first or second floor?”
“In the first, not very high from the ground. I was looking out at the loft door and could see the green of the peak.” The child must have realized the import of the question: how could he have seen the color of the cap’s visor but not the cage?
Martha King, aged eleven, said: “I remember seeing an Italian boy near the Birdcage public house. I was at the front part of the house. It was on the Wednesday or Thursday before Guy Fawkes day, and about twelve o’clock. I am sure it was either Wednesday or Thursday. He was standing still opposite the Birdcage with his box slung round his neck and a cap on his head. The cap was just like this. Bishop’s house is about a minute’s walk from our house. I have never seen the boy since.”