15 July 1843 Remarkable Documents - Cumberland and Westmorland Newspaper Transcriptions

15 July 1843 Remarkable Documents

REMARKABLE DOCUMENTS SEIZED BY THE POLICE.

A day or two since Mr. Edward John Brierley, son of the chief-constable, with Carter, his assistant, in searching the notorious lodging-house kept by a person named Mitchell, in Wrengate, Wakefield, found concealed there an immense number of documents, which tend to show the means by which the begging-letters, petitions, and memorials have been manufactured, with which not only Yorkshire, but the whole kingdom, has been supplied, by a gang of ingenious and persevering swindlers. The most remarkable of the manuscripts are many hundreds of genuine signatures of the nobility, clergy, and gentry residing in different counties of England and Ireland, cut from letters and other papers, and stuck in rows upon pasteboard, for the purpose of being imitated in duplicate sham petitions.

Amongst these signatures are those of many respectable inhabitants of
Wakefield, Heath, York, Halifax, Leeds, besides those of persons in the counties of Lincoln, Norfolk, Nottingham, Lancashire, Cumberland, &c. How some of these signatures have been obtained it is difficult to conjecture; some of them have, there is no doubt, been attached to subscription lists of the impostors in the course of their perambulation; others probably have been cut from letters in answer to such applications to the charitable gentry as were lately exposed in the Courant, in the account of the committal of an impostor at Wakefield. Another set of documents consists of models of petitions and memorials for persons pretending to want funds to emigrate to New Zealand; to make up losses of fires and shipwrecks; to raise funds for those pretending to be afflicted with blindness, lameness, &c. A third set of documents were routes in England and Ireland for persons travelling with the petitions, giving the names and residences of persons on
the roads likely to be called upon, and pointing out where the petitioners should not call for fear of being detected. Some of the descriptions of
parties are curious and instructive; such a person is described as "a giver to all callers;" another will give if "stuck to and talked well to;" a
third is "drunken and the dodge may be well played;" a fourth "must be seen at breakfast time;" a fifth "must be avoided any time just before or after dinner; " and so on through an amazing long list of the nobility and
gentry, Besides these, some letters were found from some of these
systematic impostors, describing their success or otherwise. One of these is dated from Tickhill, in May of the present year, signed "Thomas and Harriet Monks," and directed "To the care of Mr. John Jackson, for John Clarke, Newgate, Pontefract." It begins, "Dear Father and Mother," and goes on to state that they had failed of late in every place they had tried, and complained that they were now in a "dead country," or they would have sent some money. In short, it is plain that the police of Wakefield have broken into the main manufacture of the begging petitions. No person in the lodging-house would own the bundle of papers, which Mr. Brierley has kindly put into the hands of our reporter for the purpose of exposure; and the magistrates of the district have expressed their wish that editors of other journals would assist in breaking up this extensive system of fraud.

York Herald.