Press reports of late 1857 told of ‘two remarkably good-looking young coloured girls’ who had been arrested in London for begging. Holding a sign stating they were fugitive slaves they had collected from people in the street. They told the magistrate at Southwark that they had been slaves in Kentucky and had escaped to Philadelphia where they had their fares paid to Greenock (Glasgow’s port). Unable to obtain work they came to London but failed to find employment as servants. They said that they thought they could earn a living through knitting, so the magistrate gave them money from the court’s poor box. Charitable people made donations, and the pair returned to show what they had made with the wool purchased with the gifts. The magistrate had received offers of help from distinguished people: and one letter suggesting they were low characters. Told they were living in Wentworth Street, Whitechapel the court’s clerk said this was ‘full of low lodging-houses’. The girls said a coloured man and his large family lived in the same court. Responding to questions the magistrate was told that their fares had been paid by free blacks and their ship to Scotland was the Jane. Investigation had not been completed but the tale seemed sound, another five shillings was provided from the poor box and the pair were to reappear a week later. Named Rose and Minnie Avery when the Standard of 2 December reported a donation of five shillings for their support, The Times of 9 December named them Rose and Minnie Avon.

Falsehoods were revealed when Mendacity Society officials reported days later. The elder girl was living with a black man at 1 Crown Court, Wentworth Street and the younger with her mother ‘an Irish woman’ and visiting her father in St Luke’s workhouse in Chelsea on the other side of London. Greenock port authorities said no ship named Jane had called there in the last eighteen months. An elderly black man from the workhouse said the girls were not his although he had two daughters. The woman who claimed to be his wife said neither was her child. The workhouse porter said the younger one visited the old man, which she denied but the assistant porter was emphatic that she had been there often, leaving coins. The wife of the black man said she had a daughter named Besse Richards or as The Times had it, Becca Richards (the name on a letter seen by workhouse staff) who was married to a man named Sylvester who lived in the same court but she was not one of the Avery girls. The magistrate thought there was deception. The younger Avery said she had not written that letter as she could not write. Fabrications were mixed with truths: the older girl seeming to have solid knowledge of America for example. The younger girl was an impostor, the older one probably so and the woman lived on their collections. Those who had donated funds to help the pair should tell the court how they wanted the money disbursed if it was not to be placed in the poor box. ‘The girls then left the court very much dejected’ having been warned against begging.

The above appears in chapter 5 of my Black Americans in Victorian Britain (Pen and Sword Books, 2018) in ‘Frauds and Impostors’. More small details emerge in Oskar Jensen’s Vagabonds: Life on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century London (Duckworth, 2022, pp 101-108). It also sets the scene for well-meaning (?) charitable individuals and groups in Victorian London.