In August 1878, the Summer Assizes began at Gloucester, and separate county and city grand juries were sworn in to consider all the cases waiting to be tried. The judge, Mr Justice Manisty, addressed the County Grand Jury first, and commented on the large number of county prisoners (35) on the calendar. The City Grand Jury, on the other hand, had only one criminal case to consider. The judge congratulated the jury members on the absence of serious crime in the city. This was not an isolated case, as newspaper reports on the Assizes frequently mentioned the paucity of cases for the city. It was not uncommon for the city to present no prisoners for trial at all; on such occasions the City Sheriff would present the judge with a pair of white kid gloves, to commemorate the happy event.
In truth, Gloucester did see its fair share of crime and disorder. The local newspapers of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries contained frequent reports on the proceedings of the city's courts of petty sessions, where magistrates faced an almost daily procession of miscreants charged with assault, theft, disorderly behaviour and drunkenness. When it came to the most serious of crimes, however, Gloucester did not experience an extensive amount of violent crime, especially when compared with the number of offences which took place in other parts of the county.
Murder was, of course, the most serious crime for which a person could stand trial, and the only offence by the mid-nineteenth century which could result in a death sentence. Between 1872 and 1939, seventeen people were hanged at Gloucester Prison after being found guilty of committing murder, but only one of these prisoners was tried at the City Assizes. This did not mean that only one person stood trial for murder in the city, though. Some defendants were found not guilty; others were charged with committing murder but were found guilty of manslaughter instead. Some were charged with manslaughter in the first place, if it was thought that the defendant had not intended to kill, or with attempted murder, when the victim of the crime did not die. Finally, there were those most unfortunate cases which never got as far as a criminal court, where a dead body was found, apparently a victim of violence, but with no obvious culprit, a coroner’s inquest would return a verdict of `murdered by a person or persons unknown’.
Gloucester Murder & Crime by Jill Evans is available here from The History Press