416 Crime and the State
when men are referred to apparently quite neutrally as ‘Mr. So-and-So, the
thief-taker’.^148 Or when one finds victims of offences enquiring for the services
of a thief-taker, as in 1720 , when a woman whose pocket had been picked as she
crossed the Thames in a waterman’s boat, enquired of another waterman when
she discovered her loss ‘if he knew any Thief Taker’ living in the neighbour-
hood. He did, and took her to Mr Murrel’s in Black and White Court in the Old
Bailey. Hearing her story and her description of the man and woman she sus-
pected of taking her purse, Murrel declared he knew who they were, and that as
a result ‘there was no Occasion for a Thief-Taker, he would be the Thief-Taker
himself, for he would send for them to his House, whither he was sure they
would come, and then have a Constable and secure them’.^149
When Edward Sutton, describing at the Old Bailey how he had apprehended
a street-robber, said that he was ‘no Thief-Taker by Profession’, he was making
a distinction that he must have assumed the judges and jurors would have un-
derstood.^150 He was also almost certainly trying to shield himself from the dis-
approval of his neighbours or the spectators in the gallery. For while thief-takers
may have been accepted by the authorities and perhaps more widely as men
performing a necesary if distasteful job, they were hated by a large part of the
population, perhaps especially those who took up thief-taking after having
turned king’s evidence and convicted their former companions. A man who
said at the Old Bailey in 1729 that ‘it having been his Practice for some Time to
catch Thieves’, added (as a way of explaining why he had been charged with
shoplifting) that ‘having been formerly an Evidence, and hang’d a great many
Men, People had an ill Opinion ofhim’.^151 Another common view of such men
was expressed by a witness in a burglary case who said of the prisoner that ‘he
was a scandalous person, a Thief-Taker, that his House was a common
Receptacle for Thieves and Pick-pockets.. .’.^152
Defendants often appealed to the popular distaste for the activity of thief-
taking. Having been arrested by Samuel Unwin and charged with burglary,
John Read attempted to cast doubt on Unwin’s motives and thus on his claim
that Read had confessed, by saying at his trial that ‘I desire to know what he gets
his Living by, whether it is not by Thief-taking, for the Sake of the Reward’. The
owner of the public house in which Read had been arrested, and who clearly
knew him well, confirmed the ambivalence of attitudes towards men like Unwin
when he gave his own testimony. His main evidence was confirmation ofRead’s
confession at his arrest. But having said that, the publican was very anxious to
clear himself of the suspicion among his neighbours and customers that he had
(^148) Ordinary’s Account, 21 June 1704 , p. 2 , where a condemned man refers to ‘Sommers [i.e. Robert
Summers] the Thief-taker’.
(^149) OBSP, October 1720 , p. 2 (Thomas and Ann Thompson).
(^150) OBSP, February 1733 , p. 71 (No. 57 , Chamberlain).
(^151) OBSP, January 1729 , p. 3 (Durham). (^152) OBSP, December 1717 , p. 3 (Holmes).