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Author: Saunders, Henry Martin

Biography:

SAUNDERS, Henry Martin (fl 1794)

“Crimp” was a slang term for someone who unlawfully entrapped a man to serve in the army or navy, specifically someone who kept a lodging house for that purpose (OED). A “tragedy in one act,” The Crimps dramatizes a recent event, when on 15 Aug. 1794 a young clerk in the excise office named W. or (in modern accounts) George Howe had been lured into a brothel in Johnson’s Court, near Charing Cross, London. He was robbed, stripped to his shirt, beaten, and left in an attic room with his hands tied behind him, to be held for the crimps to pick up. Despite warnings from people in neighbouring houses who could hear his cries for help, he threw himself out of the window. A detailed account appeared in the newspapers. As Saunders notes in an indignant “Postscript,” the coroner’s verdict was “Death in attempting to escape from a house of ill fame”; no charges were laid, so “the principal offenders have got off!!!” Riots followed in the district Aug. 20-23. Saunders was perhaps the author also of a knowledgeable but anonymous pamphlet issued by the same publisher in the following year, Reflections on the Pernicious Custom of Recruiting by Crimps; and on Various Other Modes Now Practised in the British Army. He is not known to have published anything else under his own name, however, and since there are no matching public records for Henry Martin Saunders and all too many for Henry Saunders, no further information about him has come to light. (findmypast.com 19 Sept. 2024; ancestry.com 21 Sept. 2024; Derby Mercury 21 Aug. 1794; J. Stevenson, “The London ‘Crimp’ Riots of 1794,” International Review of Social History 16:1 [1971], 40-58)

 

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