CROOKS OF HIGH BEGREE

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 150, 21 December 1929, Page 23

CROOKS OF HIGH BEGREE

A CELEBRATED CASE

"The Bank of England Forgery'" Edited by George Dilnot. London: Geoffrey Bles.

To have defrauded the Bank of England of £102,000 by forged bills of exchange was the exploit of a quartette of clever American crooks of high degree. The case is one of the most famous in the annals of English crime, and that the £100,000 was not a million was due to carelessness on the part of one of the gang rather than to the vigilance of tho bank's officers. All this happened in the year 1873, when, of course, there was no Bertillon system of identification, and no wireless, no telephone in general use. George Bidwell, one of the principals, was, according to his autobiography, brought up in a puritan atmosphere in Toledo, Ohio, and, he had a turn for business. At 12 years of age he was proprietor of a street refreshment stall in Toledo, at 16 he had a fancy goods store at Grand Rapids, and he had much business experience after that in -New York and later in business in Liverpool, and yet he was only 34 years of age when he was sentenced to imprisonment for life for the great bank forgery. He was joined by his brother Austin, 27, by George MacDonnell, 28, a graduate of Harvard, a handsome man with great intellectual gifts, and a brilliant linguist; also by Edwin Noyes, 29, a New York clerk. The four of them by sheer audacity, in which George Bidwell shone, finding New York too hot for them, aimed high and went to London. Using that city as their base of operations, they, or rather George Bidwell, opened an account at the West End office of the Bank of England with a deposit of £2000 and an introduction by a Savill Eow tailor. George Bidwell thus obtained a standing, giving out that he was an American business man beginning construction of Pullman ears at Birmingham for English and Continental railways. An account open with the greatest bank in tho world, the gang got to work at once, obtained genuine bills from London and Continental financial houses, forged them, and succeeded in imposing on the Bank of England. They worked together with remarkable precision until Noyes made a slight blunder arousing suspicion, and when ho was detained at a bank the game was up. George Bidwell fled to Ireland. . There he hoped to take a passage at Queenstown for New York, but he failed to join the ship which on that voyago was wrecked and 560 out of 1002 persons aboard her were arowned. Austin Bidwell got away, as far as Havana, but he was arrested there by the Captain-General of Cuba and handed over to the British authorities and sent back to England for trial. MacDonnell, loaded with loot, fled to New York, and was arrested in the harbour there, when his vessel came to an anchor.

The late Lord Halsbury, then Mr. Hardinge Gifford, Q.C., was counsel for the prosecution. It was an intricate case, but the issue was made as simple as possible. There were women concerned in it, and all four of the crooks (as they would be called to-day) were partial to the ladies and very generous to them in the matter of presents. From some of these ladies the police derived considerable assistance in the matter of evidence. The Judge was Mr. Justice Archibald, and the trial took place at the Old Bailey, the preliminary proceedings being taken before the Lord Mayor of London. The indictment was for forging and uttering a bill of exchange for £1000, but this was only one of the steps taken in the execution of the design to defraud the Bank of England. In passing sentence the Judge said he could see no palliating or mitigating circumstances in the offence. He added: "It is not the least atrocious part of your crime that you have given a severe blow to that confidence "which has been so long maintained and protected in this country." Penal servitude for life ■ was the sentence passed on each of the four. George Bidwell served 14 years, and during his time in prison he carried oyt to the letter his threat when he went in that he would not do a day's work for the British Government; and he never did. He was a prince of malingerers, according to Dr. Quinton, prison medical officer; ho took to his bed and stayed there until his muscles wasted and his hip and knee joints contracted, and the medical examiners during nine years' close scrutiny could find nothing wrong with him. Yet he left prison almost a cripple. Austin BidweH, MaeDonnell, and Noyes served 20 years, and for the first of these three strenuous efforts were made from time to time to have his term reduced, among the petitioners being John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, the Marquess of Hartington,,- Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, John Morley, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Mr. Dilnot's able introduction1 makes nearly half the book, the almost verbatim report of the trial, with the lucid addresses of counsel and the severe and impressive summing up by the Judge complete it. Several illustrations help the reader to reconstruct the scenes of the four clever. New York swindlers who had the undoubted right to boast that they had been able to get the better of the Bank of England for over £100,000 by forging nearly one hundred bills of exchange.