I received an email today from FMP tempting me to look at their extensive criminal records. I have known for years that a family within my ancestry - a father and his two sons - all went to prison at various times in the mid-1800s for criminal activity, mostly petty theft but in the father's case for an assault too. I didn't expect to find anything to throw new light on their crimes but I did find one new record from something called "Habitual Criminals Register" that included detailed physical information about the prisoners, including one of the sons.
What struck me was their heights. I did a quick summary and found that the average height of 12 male prisoners was around 5'6". The tallest was 5'10" and the shortest 5'0". On the same page were three women whose average height was 5'1". These were not juveniles. The male age range was 19-68.
I've been around HMS Victory, Admiral Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, two or three times and had to stoop considerably from my height of 6'2" to avoid banging my head on the deck timbers above at about 5'6". We were told by the sailors who show you round that Nelson's sailors would have been able to stand up straight because they were much smaller than we are today.
Height and diet are related and I know that my 19-year old 5'4" ancestor had already suffered an impoverished life which undoubtedly was the cause of much of his petty criminality. I had never previously wondered, as I do now, whether the Victorian criminal class, as evidenced by such detailed record taking, was unusually short even by contemporary standards, or whether the additional evidence of HMS Victory's lower decks shows that people were shorter than we tend to be across the entire spectrum?
There may be another thought in there however and that is that there was very little difference in the class of men who went to prison or who served below decks in the Royal Navy.
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Thread: Criminally brief
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30-03-2021, 8:53 PM #1
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Criminally brief
"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.” Edmund Burke
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31-03-2021, 12:03 PM #2
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During my family history research and my research into a number of medal recipients ( I am a collector) I have the military records of several dozen men who joined the armed services between 1860 and 1914. Without exception they are all shorter than recruits would be today. They are also of small stature weighing 8 or 9 stone. I think you are right. They are mostly men from poor backgrounds who could have gone either way. Military or the criminal path. Most of my ancestors who enlisted were from the poorer parts of inner London.
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