Taking Nellie Johnson’s Fingerprints: Prostitutes and Legal Identity in Early Twentieth-Century London

An offender who was committed for twelve months as an incorrigible rogue asked:

‘What in the world have I got all this time for? I’ve done it (the offence) dozens of times before. And what’s an ‘incorrigible rogue’ anyway?’

Inspector: ‘A rogue is a person who has not the least intention of trying to live honestly or respectably. That’s you – isn’t it?’

Prisoner: ‘Oh yes.’

Inspector: ‘Incorrigible means un-correctable. You are a person on whom short punishment has no effect. Before you were punished to try to stop you from doing as you did. Now you are being punished for being what

you are. Understand?’

Prisoner: ‘Yes – and (with a beaming smile) perfectly right.’

Mary Gordon, Penal Discipline, 1922

At ten-thirty on the cold and drizzly evening of the eighteenth of December 1920, D Division police constables James Bull and Willie Watson were patrolling their familiar beat along the Tottenham Court Road. At that hour the shops and offices had long since closed, but along the streets light spilled from the cafés, hotels and restaurants of early twentieth-century North Soho, an area rivalled only by C Division – Soho, Piccadilly and Mayfair – for having the highest concentration in the metropolis of both on and off-street prostitution.¹ Amongst those frequenting the area that night was Nellie Johnson, whom Bull and Watson subsequently arrested for being a ‘prostitute behaving in a riotous or indecent manner’.

After the arrest, the three made the short walk back to Tottenham Court Road Station and the constables wrote Johnson’s name up in the charge book. It was in this warmer, drier, and brighter room that Watson recognized her as the same woman who had been previously convicted for a prostitution offence, around three years prior, under the name of Lily Johnson. PC Frederick Walker, a younger and less experienced constable, soon joined them, telling his colleagues that he recognized the woman as Nellie O’Keefe, whom he knew to have been sentenced in May 1920 to ten weeks hard labour as a disorderly prostitute.² Inspector Bradshaw, the Night Superintendent, followed police orders and denied Johnson bail on these grounds, detaining her in the police-station cell for the remainder of the cold and drizzly weekend. After two uncomfortable nights, she appeared, along with the usual crowd of colourful petty-criminals and petitioning poor, before the aging magistrate G. L. Denman Esq. on Monday morning at the Marlborough Street police court.³ Watson and Bull, acting as prosecutors, told Denman of their discoveries and he subsequently referred Johnson’s case to a higher court. She was to be tried as an ‘incorrigible rogue’, as allowed for after repeated convictions under the Vagrancy Act.⁴ Prisoners who had been remanded to Quarter Sessions, and who were denied bail or could not post it, were taken into custody to await trial.⁵ To her probable chagrin, Nellie Johnson spent Christmas in Holloway Prison.

Constable Watson, for his part, spent some time that Christmas preparing for Johnson’s County of London Sessions trial. At the Criminal Record Office in Scotland Yard (CRO) he asked for her file by name, and was given one which listed a criminal record of six convictions for prostitution and one for larceny.⁶ On the eleventh of January, he attended Sessions alongside the other two constables, the file in hand. When the young constable Walker stood up to give evidence of Johnson’s previous conviction for ten weeks hard labour, he was instructed by the older officers to read from the file to inform the court of her other five convictions as well.⁷

What Bull, Walker and Watson did not realize at the time was that the CRO had handed Watson the wrong file, and that the criminal record they represented in court as Nellie Johnson’s was actually the record of another woman whose name was Agnes Johnson. Both women had numerous convictions for prostitution and one conviction for minor property crime, and both had been convicted under the name of...