With the release of Shane Meadows’ three part adaptation of Ben Myers’ novel The Gallows Pole on 31st May clipping, coining and the forgery of money is on everybody’s lips.
And of course in the novel (I am yet to see the TV adaptation so cannot confirm), David Hartley the law abiding sheep farmer-cum-weaver from the Pennine moors high above the Upper Calder Valley, is first corrupted and taught how to forge coins in the lawless hinterland between Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire we now call Birmingham and the Black Country.
Given the area’s metalworking prowesses stretching back to time immemorial, and it’s somewhat hazy jurisdictional position split between numerous counties’ legal authorities prior to local government rationalisation in the late Victorian era it is perhaps unsurprising that Birmingham and the Black Country gained a reputation for the production of “yellow money”.
By the time David Hartley and the Cragg Vale coiners were active in the 1760s and 1770s forging coins had come to be seen as a very serious offence. What was considered legal tender (the Cragg Vale Coiners were sharp enough to sometimes try and get around the problem of fakes not looking like the King’s money by forging foreign issues then accepted as valid payment by many traders) was still quite fuzzy in this period. However, as the economy became increasingly sophisticated and lines of credit and payment obligation grew becoming more and more knotted, emeshing more and more people, so coning became a very serious offence.
It was this, rather than his and his gang’s numerous other crimes which could not be proven, which eventually cost David Hartley his life at York Tyburn.
In the decades after David Hartley’s execution the government’s desire to protect the emerging capitalist economy by regularising the coins and banknotes in circulation and cracking down harshly on those who sought to produce their own, intensified.
These efforts were blown off course from time-to-time by the government’s own sudden demands for more money. The late 18th and early 19th Century were generations before the national government began taking any serious responsibility for public infrastructure and social welfare spending, so the business the state usually required large quantities of money for was typically war. Which generally speaking during this time period Britain was constantly embroiled in. The biggest war during this period was Britain’s armed intervention against Republican France after the French Revolution in 1789, which after Napoleon Bonapart was crowned Emperor in 1804 seamlessly merged into the Napoleonic Wars.
The demands for cash to fund military spending was so great that in addition to raising taxes and borrowing heavily the government began issuing more paper money, often hastily and cheaply printed, and greater tolerance was extended to business owners and localities that wanted to mint their own local “token” currencies. The intention being that these would enable the continuation of everyday local commerce while official money was used to pay the government’s bills. Given Birmingham and its hinterland’s small metalworking prowess many of these tokens were manufactured in and around the town, quite legitimately in early 19th Century eyes.
One of the local small-time manufacturers who got work producing these tokens was a gentleman farmer from Perry Barr just over the county boundary from Birmingham in Staffordshire. His name was William Booth and the farm which he had taken out a lease on in 1799 at the young age of 23 bore his name (photographs of Booth Farm House taken in the early 20th Century when it was little changed from William Booth’s time can be seen here).
William Booth was not a local man, he had moved to Staffordshire from Beaudesert in Warwickshire near Henley-in-Arden, presumably because an elder brother stood to inherit the family farm. By 1812 when he entered the history books William Booth was married with two daughters one in her mid-teens the other still a toddler.
The historical record suggests that all was not well in William Booth’s wider family, however. In 1808 he had been accused of murdering his brother during a visit to the family farm in Beaudesert. He was charged with the crime and arraigned to appear at Warwick Assizes. Here he was acquitted for lack of evidence allowing him to return to Perry Barr. Perhaps this experience – whether he committed the murder he was accused of or not – made him feel invulnerable?
It was some time after this incident that William Booth gained contract work producing tokens. At the time in Birmingham and the Black Country it was quite usual, even for “yeoman” farmers, that is to say relatively large scale successful ones, like William Booth, to set up small scale manufacturing works and take on subcontracts. So to his contemporaries William Booth having a sideline in making metal goods what not have seemed strange.
What he began doing however, was making extra tokens to spend himself. Then he started forging other forms of money, and given that this seemed to be going well, he bought a small printing press, paper and ink and began knocking out fake Bank of England promissory notes into the bargain.
To disguise what he was doing William Booth fortified his farmhouse. In the record of his eventual trial it is described how Booth Farm’s interior was secured by three sets of iron bound oak doors with the windows secured by thick oak shutters hiding iron bars making the building essentially impregnable.
In a manner not dissimilar to Cragg Vale a wider network, a gang of sorts, supported William Booth’s forging activities by passing the forged tokens, coins and promissory notes out into the wider community. Reputedly they met at the long vanished Hare and Hounds pub in West Bromwich. When the scam was eventually rumbled those caught were transported to Australia, typically for 14 years, though it is doubtful if they survived that stretch that they ever alighted upon the lands between the Trent and the Severn again. Many of William’s Booth’s staff were found with forged money in their possession, whether they were involved with the counterfeiting or had just been paid with it, which meant that they were amongst those transported.
It was doubtful that a scam striking at the heart of the very basis of the economic order like William Booth’s did, could survive undetected at the scale it grew to. Eventually like David Hartley nearly 50 years earlier, it was pretty nailed on that the forces of law and order would come for him.
On 16th March John Linwood the constable of Birmingham having been tipped off by an informer about what William Booth was up to out in Perry Barr set out to apprehend him, accompanied by 10 special constables and 7 dragoons, presumably there in case anybody tried to fight back. Reputedly they stopped off at the Boar’s Head pub in Perry Barr on the way, allowing the wife of one of William Booth’s former employees to guess where they were headed and hurry to warn one of his servants what was happening.
When they arrived at Booth’s Farm the constables and their mounted back-up found it fully locked up. There was no easy way that they could break in. At this point according to the court papers one of the constables scaled a ladder to peer in through an upper window. Inside they saw William Booth stained with printer’s ink hurriedly pulling papers out of a printing press and hurling them into a fire. He was ordered to stop and open the door, but initially refused to.
Once the constables got access to the building and arrested William Booth they searched the fireplace and amidst the ashes they found a few notes that were still legible. These were seized as evidence and produced in court when William Booth was tried at Stafford Assizes on 31st July and 1st August 1812. He was found guilty of all charges and scheduled for execution on 15th August.
The execution did not go well. The first drop from the scaffold failed to kill him, because the trapdoor had not been secured properly, meaning that William Booth fell through as soon as he stood on it prior to the rope being fastened around his neck. A second drop two hours later worked as intended and William Booth’s body was interred in a family plot in the churchyard of St. Mary’s Church Handsworth. It is reputed that Handsworth’s incorporation into Birmingham in 1894 and its reallocation from Staffordshire to Warwickshire led to William Booth’s remains being exhumed and reburied, however, this seems bizarre and unlikely. Although it did give rise to a song about him Twice Tried, Twice Hung, Twice Buried, which has a neatness to it and may explain the legend.
After William Booth’s execution the farm that continued to bear his name was worked for many more generations. As Birmingham and the Black Country expanded around it, however, clamour grew for its land to be expropriated for building and other purposes. In the mid-20th Century William Booth’s former holdings were bisected by the M6 motorway and one part was excavated as gravel workings. Then in 1974 the farmhouse itself – despite a clamour for preservation – was demolished.
Today, the foundations, having been archaeologically investigated, stand exposed on some grassy land at the centre of a modern housing estate where many of the roads have suitably Booth’s Farm or forging related names. A little reminder of Birmingham and the Black Country’s outlaw past in suburban, outer north Birmingham. Some of William Booth’s tokens legitimate, and not legitimate, as well as a couple of his printing plates are preserved in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery where they are exhibited from time-to-time.
The header image on this post is a contemporary sketch of William Booth By Unlnown – http://www.search.digitalhandsworth.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=5072, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17281563