This scheme had been introduced by the Penal Servitude Act 1853 to relieve prison overcrowding. The press reports laid the blame at a supposedly "soft" penal system and for the increasing numbers of prisoners released on parole under the ticket of leave scheme. A convict is released by a friendly jailer upon having attained a suitable weight. Īn 1862 Punch cartoon satirising the ticket of leave scheme. Subsequent reports in the press claimed that garrotting was on the rise and led to a panic among the middle classes. The editor claimed that areas of the city were no-go areas for respectable people who were at "imminent danger of being throttled, robbed, and if not actually murdered, at least kicked and pommelled within an inch of his life". A November speech by the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston announcing that Britons would feel safe to travel the world led to an editorial in the Times that stated "it is of far more moment to a Londoner that he should be able at all hours of the day or night to walk safely in the streets of London". Despite this, in 1856 the British public regarded the streets of London as dangerous. 1856 Īlthough difficult to measure at a time when most crime went unrecorded it is thought that crime in London had generally been reducing since the 1829 establishment of the Metropolitan Police. The phrase "putting the hug on" was also used in the mid-Victorian era. This was a similar use to the modern term mugging and prior to the 1850s, the Indian term thugee had carried a similar meaning. The term later developed into a wider use to cover all forms of street robbery in which violence was used. The Metropolitan Police had, since their founding, worn 4-inch (100 mm) high leather collars as a protection against strangulation. Contemporary reports claimed that the technique was learnt by convicts on prison hulks where it was used by jailers to subdue troublesome convicts. It came to refer to a particular type of street robbery in which the victim was strangled with a cord or by the attacker's arm to incapacitate them, often whilst an accomplice relieved them of their valuables. The term came into common use in Britain after widespread coverage of the execution of General Narciso López in Havana in September 1851. Garrotting is a term for strangulation that came into English from the garrotte, an execution device commonly used in Spain and its former colonies. The panic petered out by the start of 1863 with reduced press coverage as other stories took over the headlines.Ī Metropolitan Police constable in the 1850s, showing high anti-strangulation collar These measures affected criminals throughout the late Victorian era and reversed previous measures to move the prison system from punishment towards rehabilitation.
Prison sentences lengthened and flogging returned for violent street robberies.
The panic led to new legislation on prison conditions, which were made substantially more harsh. The panic saw some Londoners wearing anti-garrotting clothing such as studded leather collars and cravats with razor blades sewn in, a move which was parodied by Punch. Again the penal system was criticised for its supposed softness and the police for their inefficiency. The July 1862 garrotting of Member of Parliament James Pilkington, widely covered in the press, led to a renewed panic. The panic led to the Penal Servitude Act 1857, which increased the minimal prison sentence for offences previously punished by transportation. The reported rise in street robbery is considered to have largely been an invention of the press fears subsided when press coverage petered out at the end of the year. They laid the blame at the recent cessation of transportation to Australia as a punishment for offenders and the subsequent adoption of the ticket of leave system of release on licence. An 1880 newspaper depiction of a garrotte robberyĭespite a general fall in crime following the 1829 establishment of the Metropolitan Police, the press reported in 1856 that garrotting was on the rise.
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