A Tollesbury relative of mine was charged with piracy in 1894

Daniel Thomas has been charged with criminal damage and failing to disclose the PIN for his phone, so far, at least, disappointing those who hoped he would be charged with piracy.

I take an interest in such matters because a relative of mine was one of five men charged with piracy in 1894.

These was not, as I have been given to claiming, the last prosecutions for piracy in Britain, because five Grimsby trawlermen were convicted under the Piracy Act as recently as 1966.

Still, the story of the five Tollesbury men charged with piracy, my relative Stephen Appleton among men, is worth telling, and Helen Matten told it in issue 172 (December 2020) of The Essex Family Historian.

The great rivals of the Tollesbury fishermen were their counterparts from Burnham-on-Crouch. And a particular grievance among the Tollesbury men was that the Burnham fishermen would take the culch – broken shells, stones and gravel which formed the surface of an oyster bed – from their beds at Brightlingsea.

Helen Matten writes:

Many threats to stop them had been issued, but one day in 1894 things came to a head and this instance of ‘Piracy on the High Seas’ was reported; "In the assizes in Witham on Tuesday twelve fishermen of Tollesbury were charged with acts of Piracy, and with assaulting two Burnham mariners, putting them in fear of their lives, and of stealing their 'ships’ cargo' of culch, 'the goods and chattels of our Lady the Queen'. Two hundred men from Tollesbury turned up at the court, along with 100 from Mersea and ‘several’ from Burnham.

The prosecution admitted that the Tollesbury ‘pirates’ were not of the general idea of pirates seeking ships to plunder, but nonetheless who, disputing the right of the Burnhamites to plunder their culch, had boarded the boats armed with sticks and shovels, thrown the ‘cargo’ back into the river and threatened the men to go in after it if they did it again”.

The judge, to put it mildly was not sympathetic to the prosecution. Matten quotes the Essex County Standard:

The Judge opened the trial by stating "a charge of piracy on the high seas … one might suppose it was a charge of a very serious character … and I was very surprised to find in this County of Essex five persons committed for trial on such a charge." He went on to say "it seems to me a very great waste of time."

And in his summing up he said he had never known an English jury to be asked to find a man guilty of felony on such evidence as this.

Not surprisingly, the jury acquitted the fiver Tollesbury men.

Matten says the result was received by applause in court. Reading contemporary newspaper reports, an atmosphere of hilarity seems to have reigned in court because of the presence of so many supportive spectators and the attitude of the judge.

I also liked the authentic Essex reply of one of the Burnham skippers when he was asked if the Tollesbury men boarding his craft looked like pirates: "I thought they looked a rum lot."

My mother's mother's family came from Tollesbury, and my Tollesbury great grandparents were a Carter and a Gurton. The Appletons married into both families, and I remember I remember paying a visit to Stephen Appleton's granddaughter in the village with my mother when I was a little boy in the Sixties.

Tollesbury was my mother's happy place. She went to stay with relations as a girl during the war because London was being bombed, and my head is full of the sayings and characters she spoke of ever afterwards.

One thing she said was that, if all else failed, the fishermen would "goo five-fingering" – that is, catch starfish that they could sell to farmers as fertiliser. So I'm pleased that Helen Matten mentions this.

As well as a Tollesbury pirate, I may also be related to a 19th-century Tollesbury cannibal as his mother was a Carter from the village. (Content warning: gnawing.)