CRIME IN PAST TIMES

Breaking the bank

The banking scandals of recent years have shocked the world yet nothing is done and financial misconduct continues. Money has become so important to government that those who administer its worth and distribution are considered to be too big to prosecute and so few people come before the courts even when offences are obvious and the effects on the populace severe, even disastrous.

The gravity of these misdeeds appears to know no bounds, from the Libor scandal in which banks falsely inflated and deflated their interest rates in order to profit from trading to the more recent sale of payment protection insurance (PPI) in which it was revealed that Britain’s banks had been aggressively selling ineffective and inefficient but highly profitable policies for more than a decade.

Today the fraud is often less apparent to the public gaze yet the prospect of gaining easy money dishonestly has always been with us although methods in past times were usually more noticeable and one case in particular is remembered because it was perpetrated by a man who came from this town.

His name was Thomas Silvester, aged 40, who had worked in Bourne as a schoolmaster, perhaps as an assistant at the Old Grammar School or even at one of the private academies in the town of which there were many in the early 19th century. He left to pursue a career in banking, joining the Lincoln and Lindsey Banking Company where he prospered and was eventually promoted to manager of their branch at Brigg. But the sight of all that money passing through every day was too much of a temptation and eventually he could resist it no longer and in the spring of 1848 he succumbed.

“We regret to state that the manager of the Brigg branch has decamped, taking away with him, it is said, about £8,000 of bank capital”, reported the Stamford Mercury on Friday 5th May. “Dabbling in railway shares is said to have been the ruin of Mr Silvester and we much fear that hundreds of men occupying respectable stations will be obliged to give way to the same cause.”

The sum of £8,000 in 1848 was big money, £¾ million by today’s values, and the theft had repercussions. “Five individuals in Boston gave security to Silvester to the amount of £5,000”, said the newspaper, “which some of them will have to pay, under circumstances of peculiar hardship, if not utter ruin.”

A reward of £200 was offered immediately for his apprehension and a description circulated to the newspapers, five feet six inches tall, broad shouldered, gait erect and strutting, sandy complexion slightly pitted from smallpox, light hair and grey eyes, dirty yellow teeth, short sighted and frequently wearing spectacles and dressed in a black surtout [frock] coat, waistcoat, trousers, cravat and a red and white cotton shawl handkerchief.

Two aspects of the description were particularly interesting in that he was known to be carrying a black leather portmanteau and a carpet bag, necessary containers for his spare clothes and, more importantly, the money he had stolen which was in gold sovereigns and banknotes. The other factors were that he was not only “well informed with a warm and pleasing address but could also speak the French language” and he also appears to have had a streak of arrogance because it was observed that he had the habit of placing the thumb of one or both hands in the armholes of his waistcoat.

Silvester was obviously well equipped for a channel ferry crossing from England to France, the first of which had just been established, perhaps heading for sunnier climes with his booty, never to be heard of again. Today the bankers responsible for our ills use less obvious methods when taking money from customers and after the deed is done they stay put to await promotion and even get paid a bonus.

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