Joseph Merceron (1764–1839) was a British businessman, property developer, parochial politician and magistrate notorious for his corrupt practices.

Early life and family

Joseph Merceron was born and raised in

Brick Lane Brick Lane () is a street in the East End of London, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, borough of Tower Hamlets. It runs from Swanfield Street in Bethnal Green in the north, crosses the Bethnal Green Road before reaching the busiest, mo ...

Bethnal Green Bethnal Green is an area in London, England, and is located in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is in east London and part of the East End of London, East End. The area emerged from the small settlement which developed around the common la ...

in the East End of London. His family were of prominent

Huguenot The Huguenots ( , ; ) are a Religious denomination, religious group of French people, French Protestants who held to the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss political leader, ...

stock; his grandfather was a refugee who migrated to London following the

Revocation of the Edict of Nantes The Edict of Fontainebleau (18 October 1685, published 22 October 1685) was an edict issued by French King Louis XIV and is also known as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Edict of Nantes (1598) had granted Huguenots the right to pra ...

. His father James Merceron (1723–1780) was a former silk-weaver turned

pawnbroker A pawnbroker is an individual that offers secured loans to people, with items of personal property used as Collateral (finance), collateral. A pawnbrokering business is called a pawnshop, and while many items can be pawned, pawnshops typic ...

and slum landlord who held various offices in the then-new parish of St. Matthew's, Bethnal Green. Bethnal Green was run by an ‘open' (i.e. elected)

vestry A vestry was a committee for the local secular and ecclesiastical government of a parish in England, Wales and some English colony, English colonies. At their height, the vestries were the only form of local government in many places and spen ...

, which offered opportunities for political manipulation. Merceron was educated at Merchant Taylors' School in the City of London, following which he spent time working in his father's pawnshop and in a local lottery office.

Career

After the death of his father in 1780 Merceron became rent-collector for the family properties, subsequently extending his portfolio to include the estates of two local gentlemen, such that by age 20 he was rent-collector for 500 properties. This led him to become influential in the Bethnal Green vestry; by 1787 he had become a Commissioner of Land Tax for

Middlesex Middlesex (; abbreviation: Middx) is a Historic counties of England, former county in South East England, now mainly within Greater London. Its boundaries largely followed three rivers: the River Thames, Thames in the south, the River Lea, Le ...

and the Bethnal Green parish treasurer. Further positions of responsibility followed and by 1795 Merceron became a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex, where he joined a corrupt clique including the magistrates' Chairman and Middlesex MP

William Mainwaring William Henry Mainwaring (1884 – 18 May 1971) was a Welsh coal miner, lecturer and trade unionist, who became a long-serving Labour Party Member of Parliament. Both as a trade unionist and a politician he struggled, largely successfully to co ...

. By this time Merceron was demonstrating an appetite for corruption and local power that saw almost every elected office in Bethnal Green in the hands of a small party of his followers. Supporters were rewarded with favourable tax or poor's rate assessments or the renewal of public-house licences. According to Sidney and

Beatrice Webb Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, (née Potter; 22 January 1858 – 30 April 1943) was an English sociology, sociologist, economist, feminism, feminist and reformism (historical), social reformer. She was among the founders of the Lo ...

, Merceron "amassed a considerable fortune, which he invested in public houses and cottage property within the parish, thus adding the power of the landlord to that of the parish officer and licensing justice". During this period he committed a series of frauds against the parish, including the misappropriation of a government grant awarded to relieve the parish poor, and against private individuals including a vulnerable orphan heiress and his own half-sister, whom he had detained in an insane asylum. Since 1793 Britain had been at war with France, and William Pitt's government became increasingly drawn into attempts to restrain the growth of radical republican societies, such as the

London Corresponding Society The London Corresponding Society (LCS) was a federation of local reading and debating clubs that in the decade following the French Revolution agitated for the democratic reform of the British Parliament. In contrast to other reform associatio ...

, particularly in the East End of London. The Middlesex magistrates and police offices were a key part of this strategy, which may have influenced the government to turn a blind eye to Merceron's corrupt activities. In 1798 Merceron became embroiled in a scandal over the conditions at

Coldbath Fields Prison Coldbath Fields Prison, also formerly known as the Middlesex House of Correction and Clerkenwell Gaol and informally known as the Steel, was a prison in the Mount Pleasant area of Clerkenwell, London. Founded in the reign of James I (1603–16 ...

in Clerkenwell, where several radical sympathisers, including Colonel Edward Despard, were being held without trial. The scandal was exposed in Parliament by the young radical MP

Sir Francis Burdett Sir Francis Burdett, 5th Baronet (25 January 1770 – 23 January 1844) was a British politician and Member of Parliament who gained notoriety as a proponent (in advance of the Chartists) of universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, ...

, who used it as the basis of his campaign against the Mainwaring family in the 1802 and 1804 Middlesex parliamentary elections. Merceron's position was briefly threatened in 1804, when the Bethnal Green vestry instigated an audit of the parish accounts. Merceron promptly resigned as treasurer; but was re-elected in 1805. Bethnal Green continued to suffer violent disorder, with Merceron's regime encouraging

bull-baiting Bull-baiting (or bullbaiting) is a blood sport involving pitting a bull against dogs with the aim of attacking and subduing the bull by biting and holding onto its nose or neck, which often resulted in the death of the bull. History England ...

and dog fighting, even while church services were taking place. Merceron's wealth and influence continued to grow, as he became a director of a number of important businesses including the East London Water Works Company and the Hand-in-Hand Fire Office. Eventually a lengthy and more serious challenge began in 1809, led by a local distiller John Liptrap and Bethnal Green's new rector, Joshua King. In 1813 a prosecution for altering the poor's rate assessments failed, seemingly as a result of Merceron bribing the prosecution to drop the case, and the vestry not only passed a vote of confidence in Merceron but paid his expenses out of parish funds. After several years of often violent disorder in Bethnal Green, a turning-point came when King was supported by a local businessman and philanthropist John Barber Beaumont and by Merceron's long-serving vestry clerk, who gave evidence against Merceron before a House of Commons select committee led by Whig MP

Henry Grey Bennet The Honourable Henry Grey Bennet Royal Society, FRS (2 December 1777 – 29 May 1836) was a British politician. Life Bennet was the second of three sons and fourth of eight children of Charles Bennet, 4th Earl of Tankerville, and his wife, Em ...

in 1816, and then instigated a prosecution for the appropriation of £925 of parish funds and partiality in the renewal of public house licences. At the Easter vestry in 1818 Merceron was voted out of all parish offices, and shortly afterwards, amid great scandal, he was convicted of the charges against him. Despite further attempts to bribe his prosecutors, he was imprisoned in the

King's Bench Prison The King's Bench Prison was a prison in Southwark, south London, England, from the Middle Ages until it closed in 1880. It took its name from the King's Bench court of law in which cases of defamation, bankruptcy and other misdemeanours were he ...

for eighteen months. However, the succeeding parochial regime in Bethnal Green was insufficiently strong to retain power against the Merceron faction and within a month of his release from prison he had regained control of the vestry. With the help of his son-in-law, by now vestry clerk, he consolidated his power through the abolition of the open vestry in 1823 and for the next decade or so his control of the parish was again absolute, despite worsening social conditions that led to a spiralling in the numbers of indoor and outdoor poor and to repeated outbreaks of typhus and cholera in the parish.

Death and legacy

By the time of his death, from ‘suppressed gout' at aged 75 in 1839, the early Victorian social reformers had begun to expose the social conditions in Merceron's

as a national disgrace, with

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English novelist, journalist, short story writer and Social criticism, social critic. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by ...

having recently chosen it as the home of the murderer

Bill Sikes William Sikes is a fictional character and one of the main antagonists (alongside Monks) in the 1838 novel '' Oliver Twist'' by Charles Dickens. Sikes is a malicious criminal in Fagin's gang, and a vicious robber and murderer. Throughout much o ...

and his prostitute partner Nancy in ''

Oliver Twist ''Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress'', is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. It was originally published as a serial from 1837 to 1839 and as a three-volume book in 1838. The story follows the titular orphan, who, ...

''. In a long and corrupt career Merceron had amassed more than £300,000, by some calculations enough to make him a billionaire in today's money, "though he always appeared to be in poor circumstances". His funeral at St Matthew's, Bethnal Green was as well orchestrated as his political meetings had been, attracting 20,000 people and establishing a template for East End gangster funerals at St. Matthew's that would be followed by the

Kray twins Ronald Kray (24 October 193320 March 1995) and Reginald Kray (24 October 19331 October 2000) were English gangsters or organised crime figures and identical twin brothers from Haggerston who were prominent from the late 1950s until their arres ...

more than 150 years later. The Merceron family grave, together with that of his loyal henchman Peter Renvoize, are the only two graves still visible in the churchyard at St.Matthew's. Remarkably, both survived the devastation of church and churchyard that occurred on 7 September 1940 on the first day of the

London Blitz London is the capital and largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Western Europe, with a population of 14.9 million. London stands on the River Tha ...

. Merceron's name is commemorated in Bethnal Green in Merceron Houses, a 1901 development on part of Merceron's former gardens by the

East End Dwellings Company The East End Dwellings Company was a Victorian philanthropic model dwellings company, operating in the East End of London in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The company was founded in principle in 1882 by, among others, Samuel Augus ...

, and Merceron Street.

In popular culture

The majority of published records of Merceron's corrupt career and trial were alleged to have been destroyed by his family after his death. In 1906, his story was told as ''The Rule of the Boss'' by Sidney and

to illustrate the potential for parochial corruption in their treatise on English Local Government. The description of Merceron as a political ‘Boss' reflected comparisons drawn by the Webbs with

William Tweed William Magear "Boss" Tweed (April 3, 1823 – April 12, 1878) was an American politician most notable for being the political boss of Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party's political machine that played a major role in the politics of 19th ...

, the corrupt New York municipal politician and leader of

Tammany Hall Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was an American political organization founded in 1786 and incorporated on May 12, 1789, as the Tammany Society. It became the main local ...

in the 1860s. A full-length biography of Merceron, ''The Boss of Bethnal Green: Joseph Merceron, the Godfather of Regency London'' by Julian Woodford, was published by Spitalfields Life Books in 2016.Review: "The Boss of Bethnal Green &c", Peter Guillery, '' London Topographical Society Newsletter'', No. 87 (November 2018), pp. 18-19. In 2019, a partly fictitious version of Merceron, played by

Tim Dutton Tim Dutton (born 1967) is a British stage, film, and television actor. Dutton's films include '' Darkness Falls'' (1999), '' The Bourne Identity'' (2002), The Infiltrator (2016) and ''The Detonator''. He starred in the Academy Award and BAFTA n ...

and drawing on a number of incidents described in Woodford's biography, was written into Series 5 of ''Poldark'' by

Debbie Horsfield Debbie Horsfield (born 1955) is an English theatre and television writer and producer. Early life and career Horsfield was born in Urmston and she attended Eccles Grammar School and Eccles College before studying at Newcastle University, wh ...

References

External links

*https://londonhistorians.wordpress.com/tag/joseph-merceron/ *https://web.archive.org/web/20160512182500/http://eastlondonhistory.com/2011/06/16/joseph-merceron-of-brick-lane/ {{DEFAULTSORT:Merceron, Joseph 1764 births 1839 deaths Businesspeople from the London Borough of Tower Hamlets Corruption in England English justices of the peace English people of French descent People educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood People from Bethnal Green 19th-century British businesspeople