Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

204 Legal History in the Making
Department that was already over 200 strong in 1860 and which, under
Howard Vincent's leadership, was to grow in the following decade to over
800 men. 8 In the office of the Treasury Solicitor it had by the 1870s not
only the energetic Stephenson but three experienced assistant-solicitors and
access to the agency services of Wontner's, a major London law firm.
Through its financial resources it was able to recruit the specialized forensic
services needed in difficult cases: medical advisers, scientific specialists and
even ballistic experts. 9 After committal, occasionally even at preliminary
proceedings, the services of experienced and competent treasury counsel were
available. There were only two in the 1870s, H.B. Polland and Montagu
Williams, but their number rose to six by the end of the century.
The major cities and large new boroughs of industrial England began to
follow this model in the early 1840s. Leeds, for example, was an innovator
in the prosecution of crime. Two 'respectable' prosecuting attorneys were
appointed to handle all criminal cases and an inspector of police invariably
bound over to prosecute on the understanding that he would employ one or
other of them. It had been a very successful experiment as the town clerk
reported to the criminal law commissioners in 1845. 10 In less prosperous and
go-ahead places the system did not work so well and continued to depend
on the efforts of a mixture of police and private individuals aided by local
attorneys, often 'in low practice and on the look-out for the expenses allowed
by the county'. 11
Mid Victorian England thus exhibited a patchwork of variations on the
traditional concept of private and personal prosecution. While for the most
part sufficient to deal with the mass of traditional felony, it could not keep
pace with the characteristic crimes of a rich new urban society; the society
which Trollope attacked in 1875 in The Way We Live Now. u
It was the emergence both of new forms of crime and new types of defence
which pointed up the inadequacies of the system. When the issue of a public
prosecutor for England and Wales was revived by a Conservative government
in 1879 it was in response to a series of complex banking and insurance
company frauds, not the least of which sprang from the failure of the City
of Glasgow Bank in 1878 and the subsequent and effective prosecution of its
directors initiated by that city's procurator fiscal and leading to their indictment
before the High Court of Justiciary. 13 The bankruptcy laws and even the
8
'Judicial Statistics for England & Wales', Part. Papers, Ivi (1862).
9
Purdy, the leading London gun-maker, appeared as a specialist prosecution witness in the trial of
Charles Pearce in 1878.
10
'The Commission ... on the Criminal Law', 8th Report (1847), appendix A, 221, Par/. Papers
(1847).
11
Ibid., appendix A, 330.
12
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875), which is built around the gigantic frauds of
Melmotte and Cohenlupe.
13 Mr. Mitchell Henry, Hansard (14 March 1879) at col. 988.