AN ANTI-GARROTTING PISTOL

THE formation of the London Metropolitan police in 1839 occasioned a general fall in crime in the capital over the following two decades. But the fear of crime persisted, thanks to instances of murder, robbery and violence, and their lurid reporting by the newspapers. In particular, the so-called ‘garrotting’ cases, where a robber strangles his victim, often using their arm or a length of wire, cord or cloth, seemed to touch the rawest of nerves among London’s middle class. The fear of garrotting reached a fever-pitch in the early 1860s, particularly after the earlier ‘London Garrotting Panic of 1856’.

Indeed, the newspapers loved to report many of these murders as garrottings even if it was not the case and Londoners lapped it up. But the odd thing about garrotting and how widely it was reported in Victorian London is that it did not actually appear to have been all that common, even during the supposed height of the subsequent ‘Garrotting Panic of 1862’. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan police observed that the 27 garrotters who were tried in November 1862 “probably accounted for nearly all the 82 robberies with violence which had occurred in the metropolis in the last six months of the year”. Nonetheless, the people of London took note and began to seek some means of protection from this perceived threat.

There were many ingenious and imaginative products suggested, some fanciful, to combat garrotting, such as hulking neck-collars with large spikes, the anti-garrotte glove or a cravat with a blade sewn into the hem, but the subject of this piece is a genuine offering: the ‘Antigarrotter Belt Pistol’, examples of which are held in the Royal Armouries collection.

This device, now rare, was designed probably in response to the 1856 Panic by Birmingham gunmaker Henry Ball (working 1849-68) and patented by him in 1858 (patent No 235, 8 February). The patent application describes it as, “for use by people afraid of being garrotted”. The .36 in calibre percussion belt-gun was designed to be worn at the rear, in the small of the back. The short, 2in barrel is mounted at 90 degrees on an oval steel plate attached to a leather belt. Sewn to the belt was a leather tube running from the trigger to the belt-buckle containing the cord that fired the pistol and which, if attacked, the wearer could pull. The idea being that if someone was trying to strangle you from behind, you’d discharge the weapon into either the attacker’s sensitive mid-section or his groin, ruining his opportunity to have children.

The media coverage of garrotting exploded in 1862, when the Blackburn MP Sir Hugh Pilkington was strangled and robbed of his watch at 1am outside the Reform Club on his way home from the House of Commons, the salacious reporting of which was the main cause of the resulting ‘Garrotting Panic’. Indeed, the press began suggesting London had become ‘as unsafe as Naples’.

Pilkington survived but the blanket coverage of the incident was such that Parliament felt compelled to push through the Security from Violence Act in 1863, commonly known as the ‘Garrotting Act’. The new Act stated that criminals convicted of any violent theft could be punished with “up to 50 lashes” along with a hefty prison sentence.

By 1863, the panic had run its course, with magazines such as Punch already lampooning the craze. The sort of fear created by the ‘Garrotting Panic of 1862’ would not be repeated again in London until 1888 and Jack the Ripper. This belt pistol in many ways is the only tangible evidence remaining of that Panic.

The Anti-garrotting Pistol can be viewed in the Self-defence Gallery and by appointment at the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds, the national museum of arms and armour. The museum is open daily from 10am to 5pm. Entry is free. Visit: royalarmouries.org