13 June 1876: Christopher Jackman (sculptor) and Charles Barrett (tailor) deny having been in enclosed premises – at the home of the Bradford MP, Henry Ripley – for an unlawful purpose
Leeds Mercury. 1876/06/17. A Caution to Young Men. Leeds. Get it:
.Unedited excerpt
If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.
A CAUTION TO YOUNG MEN.-At the West Riding Police-court, Leeds, on Tuesday, before Dr. Heaton, Mr. Ikin, and Mr. Joseph Lupton, two young men, Chas. Barrett, tailor and draper, Yeadon, and Christopher Jackman, sculptor, (the latter in the employ of Mr. Charles Abbey, sculptor, Bradford,) were charged with being in enclosed premises for an unlawful purpose. The defendants, who were fashionably dressed and wore each an imposing bunch of “lilies of the valley” in the button-hole of their coats, had been found under somewhat suspicious circumstances on the premises of Mr. H. W. Ripley, M.P. (Bradford), Acacia, Rawdon, on Friday afternoon last. Mr. Granger appeared for the defendants. William Henry Thorp, a man-servant in the service of Mr. Ripley, stated that he found the defendants half dressed in bed in the laundry-maids’ bedroom. The laundry-maids were at their work in the laundry. When he accosted the defendants, they said they had been walking and had asked to lie down. In reply to Mr. Granger, Thorp said he did not know that the defendants were engaged to two of the laundry-maids. Mr. Granger, addressing the Bench, said he was in a position to prove that the defendants, who had been locked up over Friday night and brought before Mr. Ikin on Saturday and remanded on bail until to-day, were most respectable men. They had, in fact, obtained the permission of Mrs. Sunderland (Mr. Ripley’s daughter) to visit their sweethearts in the laundry, and in the case of Jackman the ring had been already purchased, and the banns put up at Halifax. (Laughter.) They had certainly been indiscreet, but when in the laundry, seeing that some one was likely to come in from whose observation they wished to escape, they had run upstairs and secreted themselves in the bedroom. Mr. T. Greenwood Teale (magistrates’ clerk) said it should be explained, in justice to Mr. Ripley, M.P., that he had recently lost several articles of linen, and that he was therefore naturally suspicious when two young men were found on the premises under such circumstances.-Mr. Granger then called Alice Bernard and Mary Halliday, laundry-maids, the former engaged to Barrett, and the last-named to Jackman. Bernard stated that she had requested the defendants to go into the bedroom to get out of the way whilst some one was looking about the laundry. Halliday said that she was engaged to Jackman, and proffered to exhibit the wedding-ring, which had been already purchased. Mr. Abbey, sculptor, gave Jackman an excellent character, and was satisfied that the defendants were not on Mr. Ripley’s premises for any felonious purposes.-The defendants were discharged.
Comment
Comment
I doubt you will find record of marriages between Alice Bernard and Charles Barrett, or Mary Halliday and Christopher Jackman, for this is a mock trial: not of Barrett and Jackman, but of the English legal system, and conducted by the West Riding Liberal establishment. Everyone knows that the men are guilty according to laws made in Westminster, but no one cares to convict them. (Perhaps someone will explain to me why the Crown went with the Vagrancy Act 1824.) Immediate precedent can be found in Gilbert and Sullivan’s satirical Trial by Jury, premiered the year before, but there is material a-plenty here for a Loiner Lorenzo da Ponte to give us an Airedale Così fan tutte. I’ll take care of the music if someone will write me a libretto.
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Tags
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- Abbey, Charles (ca 1836-1901) (1), Hull-born sculptor W/G ·
- 📌Bradford (73) W/G ·
- Comedy (drama) (9) W/G ·
- Comedy (7) W/G ·
- Comic opera (2) W/G ·
- Cottaging (1) W/G ·
- Cover-up (1) W/G ·
- Gilbert, W.S. (1) W/G ·
- 📌Halifax (43) W/G ·
- Homosexuality (3) W/G ·
- Human sexual activity (5) W/G ·
- 📌Leeds (248) W/G ·
- Liberal Party (UK) (11) W/G ·
- Lupton, Joseph (1816-94) (1), one of the Leeds Luptons, Liberal and Unitarian, campaigner against slavery and for female suffrage W/G ·
- Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (2) W/G ·
- Perjury (4) W/G ·
- Ponte, Lorenzo da (1) W/G ·
- Rawdon, West Yorkshire (4) W/G ·
- Ripley, Henry William (1813-82) (1), Bradford-based businessman, philanthropist and Liberal Party politician who switched to the Conservative Party W/G ·
- Sexual intercourse (6) W/G ·
- Sullivan, Arthur (1) W/G ·
- Teale, Thomas Greenwood (1827-93) (1) W/G ·
- Trial by Jury (2) W/G ·
- Vagrancy Act 1824 (3) W/G ·
Comment
Comment
I doubt you will find record of marriages between Alice Bernard and Charles Barrett, or Mary Halliday and Christopher Jackman, for this is a mock trial: not of Barrett and Jackman, but of the English legal system, and conducted by the West Riding Liberal establishment. Everyone knows that the men are guilty according to laws made in Westminster, but no one cares to convict them. (Perhaps someone will explain to me why the Crown went with the Vagrancy Act 1824.) Immediate precedent can be found in Gilbert and Sullivan’s satirical Trial by Jury, premiered the year before, but there is material a-plenty here for a Loiner Lorenzo da Ponte to give us an Airedale Così fan tutte. I’ll take care of the music if someone will write me a libretto.
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Similar
23 January 1643: Thomas Fairfax, the Rider of the White Horse, captures Leeds from the Beast with the help of Psalm 68
Reproduction by kind permission of Michael Paraskos.20 December 1966: Greek-Cypriot cook and artist Stass Paraskos appears before Leeds magistrates charged with obscenity under the Vagrancy Act 1838
Comment
Comment
The Times establishes the date, but curiously doesn’t mention the better-known experts:
Mr John Edward Jones, a lecturer in painting in the fine art department of Leeds University, giving evidence at Leeds Magistrates’ Court yesterday in the case in which two pictures were alleged by the prosecution to be obscene, said that the work of the artist was “gentle, tender, honest, poetic and lyrical.” He was a witness called on behalf of the artist, Stassinos Paraskos, aged 33, of Lucas Street, Leeds, who had pleaded Not Guilty to two summonses. The first alleged that on April 28 last he wilfully exposed to view in a public place, the Leeds Institute of Art, an obscene picture, a coloured picture entitled “Lost Love”, under section four of the Vagrancy Act 1824 as amended. The second summons alleged that on the same date he exposed to view in the same place an obscene picture, a drawing signed “Stass” dated July 2, 1965. Paraskos was found Guilty on both counts. He was fined £5 on each and was ordered to pay costs not exceeding 10 guineas on each [total ca. £320 in December 2023]. An appeal is being considered (Times 1966/12/21).
Bruce Douglas-Mann in The Spectator, focussing on two contemporary London cases, agrees with The Times that the hearing only took place on one day and mentions nine expert witnesses:
It is not commercialised sex, however, which seems to get prosecuted, but works by serious artists and by writers who are trying to communicate something of significance… It would not be too difficult for those who want to tell us what we may be allowed to read to find magistrates who are known to have little sympathy with modern trends in literature and art, and to ensure that the right to trial by jury is excluded. With books there is at least the right to call evidence of literary merit; when pictures are attacked, despite the intentions of Parliament expressed in the Obscene Publications Act, the defence of artistic merit may be dismissed as irrelevant. Eight distinguished art critics had voluntarily agreed to give evidence of artistic merit in the Robert Fraser case. Six of them spent a fruitless afternoon in court. As the prosecution had chosen to proceed under the Vagrancy Act, the defence of artistic merit was excluded…
Each of these cases shows some disturbing and unsatisfactory features of the law on censorship and the manner of prosecution. Taken together they must cause serious concern, not just to the few who are upset by any individual case, but to anyone who does not wish all his art and literature sifted with every ‘distasteful’ feature of life as it is removed before it reaches us.
A private group of censors with money behind them already exists, as the Last Exit case showed. Sir Cyril was not acting alone. At least one other Tory MP successfully claimed the right to sit behind counsel on the ground that he was ‘behind the prosecution.’ If such a group is allowed loose in our libraries and galleries, and, by operating under antique laws, to exclude the defences that Parliament intended, we may come to recognise Dr Bowdler as an amateur (Douglas-Mann 1966/12/30).
The Vagrancy Act 1838 (1 & 2 Vict. c. 38) was an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom. It amended the Vagrancy Act 1824 to provide that any person discharged from custody pending an appeal against a conviction under that Act who did not then reappear to prosecute the appeal could be recommitted. It also provided that the penalty established by that Act for exposing indecent prints in a street or highway would extend to those who exposed the same material in any part of a shop or house.[2]
This latter part of the Act was to prove significant in a number of prosecutions of artists for allegedly exhibiting obscene works of art, even when those exhibitions took place in a private space such as an art gallery. One of the most notorious successful prosecutions of an artist under the act was in 1929, when thirteen paintings by D. H. Lawrence at the Warren Gallery, London, were seized by the police. A ban was placed on the paintings being shown in England, which is technically still in force, but they were shown again in London in December 2003.[3]
The last artist to be successfully prosecuted under the 1838 Act was Stass Paraskos in 1966, following a police raid on an exhibition of Paraskos’s work at Leeds College of Art. Again a ban was placed on showing the offending paintings and drawings in England, which is also still legally valid. However one of the paintings was shown at Leeds City Art Gallery in 1993,[4] and again at Scarborough Art Gallery in 2000, and several others are now owned by the Tate Gallery, London.[5] In 1969 a total of 35 people were prosecuted under section 2 of the Act and section 4 of the 1824 Act for acts of public display of obscene images in shop windows and exhibitionism.
Although aspects of the Act had been repealed in a piecemeal fashion by subsequent legislation, the full Act was formally repealed in 1981 by the Indecent Displays (Control) Act 1981 (c. 42), partly due to the lack of clarity in distinguishing between indecency and obscenity. [6] For example the advertising of contraceptives was considered obscene from 1857, but fell under the ambit of the new act of 1981.
A great introduction to the man by his son, Michael Paraskos:
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