CRIMINALLY BAD
JAN BONDESON looks back at the short history of the Illustrated Police Budget, a British weekly paper whose sleazy and salacious approach to news reporting made the notorious Illustrated Police News look like a model of good journalistic practice.
JAN BONDESON looks back at the short history of the Illustrated Police Budget, a British weekly paper whose sleazy and salacious approach to news reporting made the notorious Illustrated Police News look like a model of good journalistic practice.
Whereas there has been a good deal written about the Illustrated Police News, here in Fortean Times and elsewhere, the down-market rival of this curious old newspaper remains comparatively little-known. But the Illustrated Police Budget competed with its larger and more prosperous rival for decades, and in its early Edwardian heyday it spawned another curious magazine, Famous Crimes Past & Present, devoted solely to criminal history.
The Illustrated Police Budget was founded in June 1893. From its inauguration, it was edited by the penny-a-line journalist Harold Furniss. He cheekily described it as “The Leading Illustrated Police Journal in Britain”, but initial sales were far from brilliant. In 1894, when a naughty illustration in the Budget caught the attention of a police inspector, Harold had to give evidence in court, claiming that the illustration was not indecent. Sir John Bridge, the Bow Street magistrate, sternly pointed at the offending image, showing a ‘lady’ with her dress up around her knees, and a ‘gentleman’ singing ‘I long to linger, linger long with you!’ and asked “Is this not indecent?”
“I think it is a charming scene, and worth illustrating,” Harold replied, as cool as a cucumber. Mr Charles Schurey, the proprietor of the Illustrated Police Budget, testified that he was most careful about what appeared in his paper, and that he regularly turned down advertisements for ‘rubber goods’ and other dubious merchandise. Nevertheless, he was fined £2 and two shillings costs, and sternly admonished by the fierce Bow Street magistrate. Sir John Bridge added that the proper object of the press was to improve, instruct, and elevate the people; indecent publications like the
Budget instead had the tendency to lower, to degrade and to demoralise.
But in spite of this angry tirade from the forthright magistrate, the circulation of the
Illustrated Police Budget steadily increased. It gradually managed to establish itself as Britain’s second ‘Illustrated Police’ newspaper. Its sleazy journalism and alternately gory and semi-pornographic illustrations appealed to a large, predominantly male and working-class, readership. The lads who read such magazines
did not care much for æsthetes such as Oscar Wilde, whose work they could not understand, and with blameworthy cowardice the Budget published a series of ribald and homophobic cartoons depicting the great artist’s downfall. Its vigorous anti-Wilde campaign of 1895 would remain the paper’s sole contribution to the contemporary cultural debate.
The advertisements in the Illustrated Police Budget are quite hilarious in their own right. The presumed intellectual level of its readership attracted quacks from near and far, offering various interesting patent medicines for sale. Not only were there ‘Dr Boyd’s Obesity Pills’ and ‘Hare’s Invaluable Pills for Gout & Rheumatism’, but also cures for blushing, red noses, and female complaints. Ladies who wanted ‘A Lovely Figure’ and ‘A Full Natural Bust’ were not referred to the plastic surgeon in those days; there were instead some remarkable medicines supposed to make the female body develop, as well as corsets for those who had no benefit from the quack’s nostrums. Finally, short-statured gentlemen should purchase the ‘A.D. Invisible Elevators’ for their shoes, to increase their height by up to four inches.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
As its very name suggests, the Budget did everything on the cheap. Whereas the Illustrated Police News prided itself on the quality and accuracy of its illustrations, the images of famous crimes and criminals executed by the Budget’s draughtsmen were often based on imagination alone. The paper was strong on boxing, and also on stage and music-hall news. Drawings of lantern-jawed bruisers and scantily clad, buxom female performers abound in its pages. Images of women fighting or getting drunk appear
with a frequency indicating a pathological fixation. The Illustrated Police News was well known for its lurid drawings of females in various stages of undress, but the Budget’s bawdy-minded draughtsmen did their best to outdo their rival newspaper. Images of flagellation were another recurrent theme: a well-dressed female shoplifter is birched by the shop manageress, and naughty schoolgirls wearing gymnastic attire receive chastisement from a sturdy schoolmistress. Thus, the Budget had all the faults of the
Illustrated Police News, but none of its merits: its crime reporting was plagiarised and low-quality, its illustrations shoddy and inaccurate, and its lurid sensationalism unbridled. It was printed on very brittle, lowquality paper, meaning that few intact copies have survived in private hands.
Nevertheless, the Illustrated Police Budget continued to flourish: it achieved its greatest circulation in early Edwardian times. In 1901, Harold Furniss added to his publishing empire by founding Famous Fights Past and
Present, an illustrated weekly for the boxing fraternity. In early 1903, he introduced yet another 16-page weekly magazine, Famous
Crimes Past and Present, for aficionados of criminal history. He recruited a team of journalists to write for it, a certain Guy
A well-dressed female shoplifter is birched by the manageress
Logan (see FT310:36-39) prominent among them. Logan took a vigorous interest in criminal history, and delighted in visiting houses where famous murders had taken place. He worked for various London newspapers, writing features about crime and criminals, a serialised novel about the South African war, and overblown poetry in the manner of George R Sims. With his near-encyclopedic knowledge of Britain’s criminal history, Guy was a very valuable recruit to Famous Crimes, particularly since there is nothing to suggest that Harold Furniss himself possessed any specialist knowledge in this area.
Famous Crimes Past and Present is a surprisingly high-quality production, given the resources available to Furniss and his team, and this is largely due to the influence of Logan. He wrote many full-length features on famous crimes, like the unsolved Cannon Street and Hoxton murders, and the railway murder of Elizabeth Camp. Some of these features, like those on the Denham massacre of 1870 and the Gleeson Wilson murders of 1849, have tell-tale resemblances to Guy’s later published writings. Although the articles were all unsigned, Guy’s elegant, rather prolix style of writing stands out compared to the laboured offerings of his fellow penny-a-liners. Each issue of Famous
Crimes contained a longer illustrated feature about some famous case like Mrs Maybrick, the Ratcliffe Highway murders or Charles Peace the burglar. Sometime, these lengthy features stretched over three, or even four, issues. Each issue also had a number of illustrated shorter articles and features, nearly all about (mainly British) historical crimes. The frontispiece of each number, sometimes drawn by Harold Furniss himself, often had a graphic, penny-dreadful character: the uxoricidal Catherine Hayes being burnt alive at Tyburn, James Blomfield Rush shooting Mr Jermy at Stanfield Hall, and the brutal-looking Richmond murderess Kate Webster advancing on her terrified victim Mrs Thomas, chopper in hand.
Each 16-page issue of Famous Crimes cost just a penny, which was cheap even by the
standards of the time, but then it was printed on the same kind of low-quality paper as the Budget itself. Considering the number of illustrations in each issue, and the cost of printing, it must have been a struggle for Furniss to make any profit at all. Famous
Crimes struggled on throughout 1903 and 1904, but it lasted for only 125 issues. A note in the Budget of 1 July 1905 declared that
Famous Crimes was ‘Now Incorporated with This Paper’. This rump of Famous Crimes would continue, with full-page spreads in most issues of the Budget, many of them written by Guy Logan, until 23 May 1908, when it disappeared for good, being replaced by Major Arthur Griffiths’ ‘All About Our Police’. The Budget itself would not last much longer: it changed its name to the Illustrated
Sporting Budget and Boxing Record in April 1910, and ceased to exist altogether in early August 1912, after not less than 1,001 weekly penny issues had been published.
COCK AND BULL
As readers of FT over the last few years will know (see FT274–351), the Illustrated Police
News is a valuable repository of vintage forteana. Is the Budget another treasuretrove ofVictorian and Edwardian weirdness? The answer must be – unfortunately not! Firstly, the magazine cared more for boxers and music-hall performers than for weird happenings from around the world, and it shared neither the IPN’s fondness for ghosts and ghost stories, nor its commendable diligence in seeking out interesting news from around the globe. Secondly, its bawdy draughtsmen lacked the skill of their IPN colleagues, and the poor-quality paper the magazine was printed on made the images yellow and spotted. Thirdly, the Budget’s illustrations, often drawn from imagination alone, are often too inaccurate to be of much use. Take the example reproduced on p45: the uniformed soldier Charles Wooldridge murders his wife in front of No 20 Alma Terrace, Eton, a large house with an impressive-looking garden. This was the crime that inspired the aforementioned Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, since Wilde shared his prison with the young soldier awaiting execution. But in real life, the house in Alma Terrace was a humble terraced dwelling, with a minuscule front garden, and Charles Wooldridge was wearing civilian attire at the time of the murder. The
IPN got all of these things right, as you can see from the adjoining image.
But the Illustrated Police Budget is not entirely devoid of forteana. The 1904 volume has a cock-and-bull story of an old man in Colchester vomiting a lizard which had lived and thrived within his intestinal tract for many months. Jack the Clipper, the London hair despoiler, makes an appearance, as does his perverted colleague Jack the Inkman, who made use of his trusty fountain pen to squirt ink over the backsides of ladies’ dresses. Tales of premature burials, and lastminute rescues from this dire fate, occur at regular intervals. The best of them is the story of a young Italian Countess who is presumed to have expired from ‘catalepsy’. But just before she is to be interred in the family vault, her lover demands to see her corpse one more time. This favour is granted him, but as soon as the coffin lid is unscrewed, the lady leaps out with alacrity. ‘United in the Tomb! A Narrow Escape from Premature Burial!’ exclaimed the Budget’s headline. ‘Gorblimey!’ its 1894 readers must have exclaimed in return, on reading this improbable (and almost certainly invented) story. NOTE: The British Library has complete runs of both Illustrated Police Budget and Famous
Crimes. There are healthy runs of these two weekly magazines in several transatlantic repositories: the Hasburgh Library of Notre Dame University has a complete run of the
Illustrated Police Budget, whereas the New York Public Library and the Yale University Library have complete runs of Famous
Crimes. The Albert Borowitz collection at Kent State University Library has 130 issues of the Budget, as well as two bound volumes and various loose issues of Famous Crimes.