At the age of 14, Joseph Hipkiss, was living in his birthplace at Rowley Regis together with his father, George Henry Hipkiss, his stepmother Eliza and three younger siblings, Daniel, John and Kate. It was 1891. Joseph’s mother, Phoebe (Priest), had died five years previously when he was nine and his father had married Phoebe’s sister a couple of years later. He and his father were both coal miners.
THEFT & VAGRANCY
Just over a year later, Joseph ran into trouble with the police and the severity of his criminal offences and prison sentences spiralled during the course of the next 21 years.
12 October 1892
bound over to be of good behaviour at Old Hill Police Court after stealing 3s 1d
24 March 1893
21 days with hard labour at Dudley police station for stealing two pork pies
1 February 1894
14 days with hard labour at West Bromwich Police Court on for stealing 5s as a bailee
7 August 1894
one calendar month with hard labour at Bilston on for stealing 2s 6d as a bailee
24 December 1895
one calendar month with hard labour at Wednesbury police station for stealing 2s 6d while a bailee
30 June 1896
three calendar months at Salop Sessions for stealing a suit of clothes, released 29 September 1896 his intended address Old Hill
4 March 1897
three calendar months at Stafford Sessions for stealing a jacket, the property of William Bissell at Wednesbury on 6 January, released 3 June, intended address Wolverhampton
17 October 1899
one calendar month at Stafford Adjourned Sessions for stealing 16s from Rose Burford at Wednesbury whilst a servant to Rose Burford, released 16 November his intended address New Street in Old Hill, the home of his Priest grandparents
27 December 1899
one calendar month with hard labour at Birmingham Police Court for stealing 18s
27 December 1899
three calendar months at Birmingham Petty Sessions for (1) stealing 1s 2d from Bernard Stokes at West Bromwich on 12 February 1901 (2) receiving (3) previous conviction for felony
31 March 1901
1901 census records Joseph in prison at All Saints (Winson Green) in Birmingham
1 May 1901
three calendar months with hard labour at West Bromwich for larceny
1892 -1903
8 convictions for vagrancy.
A TRAVELLING SHOWMAN
Joseph was photographed at Stafford Prison on 19 May 1897 whilst serving a three-month sentence.
He was 5 foot 4½ inches tall with a fair complexion, black/brown hair and hazel eyes. He had two boil scars on his left forearm and scars on his right cheek, left side of his chin and back of his neck. There was a large burn on the small of his back as well as burns on each knee and left foot. These burns suggest that Joseph had suffered some kind of accident before this photograph was taken at Stafford Prison in 1897 when he was about 20 years old.
Photograph of Joseph Hipkiss 1897 in Stafford gaol prisoner photograph album
Joseph’s convictions for vagrancy indicate he was wandering from place to place without work or a permanent home. Although his occupation was consistently given on various records as a coal miner or collier, he had begun to work for travelling fairs. When he was convicted at Wednesbury for stealing clothes from another lodger at a lodging house in 1895, the Walsall Advertiser described him as a travelling showman.
INTENT TO MURDER
This lifestyle would explain Joseph’s presence at the Willenhall Wakes in 1903. Wakes were originally religious festivals when a feast of dedication of a local parish church was celebrated. During the Industrial Revolution, wakes became a holiday and the centre of entertainment with stalls, shows and opportunities to eat and drink when factories, collieries and other industries closed.
Willenhall, to the east of Wolverhampton and the centre of lock making in the Industrial Revolution, had annual wakes with a long tradition that took place after the feast of St. Giles on 11 September.
In 1903, Joseph was living with a woman from Birmingham named Emily Haywood and they either visited or most probably worked at the Willenhall Wakes. On Saturday 12 September, the couple quarrelled and then proceeded to the Wakes Ground.
Early in the afternoon, Joseph knocked Emily to the ground threatening to murder her. Later in the evening, Joseph told Emily to give up another woman’s baby she was holding. Emily refused, saying that she no longer wanted to associate with Joseph. He then took a knife out of his pocket and stabbed Emily three times in the neck so that she lost consciousness. The attack was attributed to Joseph’s jealously of another man.
Joseph was arrested and transported to Stafford when he reportedly told police, “I ought to have finished her. If I get near her, I will give her another jab. When I get out, I will treat her to a glass of beer and put a dose of poison in it. She is not going to have that man.”
He was found guilty of wounding with intent to murder at Stafford Assizes on 7 December and sentenced to seven years in prison.
Joseph served the large part of this sentence at Portland Prison, located in Dorset on the Isle of Portland, five miles south of Weymouth. Convicts at Portland were employed at various trades such as a blacksmith or electrician, but as a miner, Joseph may have been set to work at Portland’s stone quarries. Portland stone was used in the construction of many national landmark buildings such as the Bank of England and National Gallery in London as well as the Cunard and Port of Liverpool buildings in Liverpool.
Joseph was transferred with a number of other prisoners from Portland to Wakefield Prison in Yorkshire on 23 April 1908. He was discharged on licence conditions to Dudley care of the Church Army on 6 April 1909.
A SOCIETY PEST
Resuming his former life, Joseph was employed at a travelling fair in Worcester in June 1911 where he met ‘a slight dark woman’ from South Wales, Elizabeth Ann Jones, fourteen years his junior.
Elizabeth had gone into service when her parents died and had come to Worcester seeking employment. Joseph persuaded her to try to get work together with him and they began to live as husband and wife travelling and following the fair from town to town – Worcester, Droitwich, Bromsgrove, Dudley, West Bromwich, Smethwick, Tipton, Nuneaton, Walsall, Wednesbury, Lichfield, Burton and Chesterfield.
Joseph periodically hawked and begged to earn money. In the summer of 1912, he returned from working on a fair in Dudley and told Elizabeth he was tired of working. He wanted her to go out on the streets and get them some money or ‘look out for a good punching’. She earned eighteen pence that night and started to earn money for the both of them by ‘following an immoral mode of life’, i.e. from prostitution.
From that time on, Joseph worked on just two or three days with the couple living on Elizabeth’s earnings. At one stage he was offered a job whitewashing but refused this insisting Elizabeth earn the money for him. In Oldbury one night, she objected to giving him money and he kicked her in the face. On another occasion, he threatened to punch her head off so that she went out and brought him back a shilling.
The couple arrived in Sheffield on 21 December. On 27 December, a police constable found Elizabeth together with a man in Mill Lane. PC Watts convinced Elizabeth to go with him to the House of Help for Friendless Girls and Young Women on Paradise Square, an institution that took in poor, neglected and abandoned women and girls to save them from ‘moral danger … to create new minds and character’.
Watts then went back to Elizabeth’s lodging house to fetch her some clothes when he encountered Joseph who challenged him wanting to know Elizabeth’s whereabouts. The policeman replied that she was somewhere where Joseph couldn’t get to her.
Watts later took a statement from Elizabeth. Joseph was subsequently arrested and charged, unable to give proof of how he earned a living.
Portrayed in the local press as a ‘society pest’ and a ‘swarthy native of Staffordshire’, Joseph was tried at the Quarter Sessions in Sheffield. He was the first person in Sheffield to be charged under new legislation, the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1912) or ‘White Slave’ legislation, viewed as England’s first law against sex trafficking. The 1912 Act had tightened laws around prostitution making it easier to prosecute brothel keepers, procurers, bullies and pimps.
At the trial, Elizabeth stated that she had only adopted the way of life she had been leading because of Joseph and that she wanted to leave this life to go back into service. The prosecution said she had been ‘guided, controlled and compelled’ for eighteen months.
Joseph denied all the charges against him telling the jury that Elizabeth had told him her name was Frances and that she was 27. He maintained that he hadn’t known what Elizabeth had been doing and remarked to the recorder that he was ‘as innocent as the pencil you have got in your hands.’
The jury nevertheless found him guilty of unlawfully living on the earnings of the prostitution of Elizabeth Ann Jones and he was sentenced to eighteen months with hard labour. When he left the dock, he threatened Elizabeth pointing at her and clutching his throat. He returned as a prisoner to Wakefield prison and was released on 6 April 1914.
A SOLDIER
Great Britain declared war on Germany just under four months later on 4 August 1914. It does not appear that Joseph served in the British forces in 1914 or 1915 as he was not awarded a medal for those years. Conscription was imposed in January 1916 on all single men between the ages of 18 and 41 when Joseph was 39.
As Joseph Priest Hipkiss, he joined the Worcestershire Regiment (Private 29751) and transferred to Royal Berkshire Battalion (Private 36755) serving in the 8th Battalion and finally 1/4 Battalion. Wounded in 1917, he was transferred to the Ist Southern General Military Hospital located in the Great Hall at the University of Birmingham where he died of his wounds on 18 December 1917 aged 41.
Joseph had given his residence as Widnes in Lancashire, probably the address of his sister Kate, then Kate Smout. He was awarded the British War Medal and Victory Medal, the standard medals for those serving overseas after 1916. These were returned to the issuing office.
499 First Word War soldiers who mostly died from their wounds, particularly those from 1st Southern & General Military Hospital, were buried at Lodge Hill Cemetery close to the university in Birmingham. Joseph Priest Hipkiss was one of these soldiers and is buried in a well-maintained walled Commonwealth War Graves plot at the cemetery.
