On the morning of 28 November 1834, the iron chest in the Fines and Forfeitures Office was discovered open. On the preceding evening, the office of Frederick Thomas Walsh had been secured according to established custom. Now, a sum reckoned at £4,824 had vanished. The chest was fitted with two distinct locks, requiring two keys kept in separate hands to open them. Nothing in the initial inspections betrayed how an intruder could have reached the money during the night. The chronicle compiled by Camden Pelham unravels the mystery through a belated disclosure: William Huey, a customs officer who had taken part in the venture, ultimately gave a full account of the planning of the robbery.
Huey had been employed at the Custom House since 1827 as a landing-waiter. He was acquainted with William Seale, who filled a similar station. Having fallen out, they were reconciled in 1834, frequenting the same taverns after their hours of service. According to Huey, Seale first broached to him a scheme for breaking into the Custom House; Henry Mott, a clerk in the King’s Warehouse, soon joined their discussions. Mott advised waiting for a more propitious occasion. The three men fixed upon no date as yet, but the building, its staff, and its daily routines were already entering into their calculations.
Huey further related that he met William Jourdan and Thomas Sullivan in Dublin. They inquired whether he could assist in robbing the customs houses at Drogheda or Dublin; he replied that he could not. Upon his return to London, he renewed his intercourse with Mott and Seale. Together they visited Jourdan at his lodgings in Walworth, whereupon Jourdan and Sullivan surveyed the intended room: the office of Walsh, receiver of fines and forfeitures. The several roles were taking shape. The two confederates from without reconnoitred the means of entry, while the officers within were in a position to supply intelligence regarding the keys, the desks, and the hours when the clerks assembled.
The initial plan turned entirely upon the keys. According to Huey, Sullivan sought to fabricate skeleton keys; Mott succeeded in obtaining one of the outer keys, taken from the desk of an absent officer. Sullivan took an impression of it in wax, from which a key was forged. It fitted the lock, but proved insufficiently stout for service. Seale likewise produced padlock keys, none of which availed. The confederacy therefore shifted its ground: rather than forcing the outer doors from the street, a man was to be secreted within, remaining concealed until the offices reopened on the morrow.
May, a former associate of Jourdan and Sullivan, consented to conceal himself in the office. It remained for the conspirators to ascertain the sum likely to be found in the chest. Jourdan repaired to the King’s sale and purchased a quantity of rum for eleven pounds. By way of payment, he tendered a fifty-pound note. On 26 November, he related to his associates how Walsh, wanting change, had been obliged to open the chest. According to Huey, Walsh searched his pockets and drawers for coin. He could not perform the operation alone: a second key was held by another officer. Huey recounts that when the iron safe was opened, it appeared to contain not less than five thousand pounds. Jourdan had thus secured the very intelligence he sought.
On the eve of the theft, the plot was definitively arranged. Shortly before four o’clock, Jourdan and Sullivan were to escort May to the Custom House. In the bustle attendent upon the closing of the offices, May was to slip inside under an umbrella and conceal himself behind the door of Walsh’s room. Mott, for his part, was to detain the clerks in his office while they attended to sign the appearance book. In the morning, the two confederates were to wait until the watchmen opened the building and signal May to walk out. Seale was to receive the confederates at his dwelling in Peckham.
Huey asserted that he remained at home under a plea of indisposition. Subsequently, Jourdan, Sullivan, and Seale informed him that they had conducted May into the passage, leaving the building only after satisfying themselves that the doors were secured. On 28 November, Huey and Seale waited in a tavern commanding a view of the road. When Jourdan and Sullivan arrived, they repaired together to Seale’s house. May produced the treasure from his pockets: Huey recorded that there were £4,700 in banknotes, £122 in gold, and about fifty shillings in silver. He stated that the plunder was divided into six parcels, Jourdan and Sullivan claiming an additional allowance for their expenses. Mott was absent from this gathering. The narrative does not explicitly detail who received each of the six portions.
According to Huey, May had opened one lock of the chest with a key discovered within the room, and forced the other. He took the notes and coin, tore from the cash-book the leaves bearing the name of Leary—Jourdan’s alias—and carried them off. These leaves he produced at Seale’s house, where they were committed to the flames during the division of the spoils. A fifty-pound note inscribed with that name was handed to Jourdan. Thus, the missing articles were not confined to treasure alone: an official register threatened to link the purchase of rum to the very man who had sought to sound the depth of the chest.
The disappearance was not cleared up in a matter of days. For upwards of twelve months, Jourdan and Sullivan eluded every pursuit. Officer Lea, of Lambeth Street, had long entertained suspicions against them, but lacked sufficient legal evidence. On 2 December 1835, an assistant shadowed an associate to the Red Lion in Holborn. There the two men had taken up their quarters under the guise of merchants, possessing trunks, apparel of the best quality, and abundant funds. Their apprehension brought to light housebreaking implements and weighing instruments. A trunk previously entrusted by Mrs. Jourdan to one Brace, a baker and committee member of an Irish school, was found to contain letters, memoranda, and documents that materially assisted in tracing certain of the notes.
The narrative also connects the renewed vigour of the inquiry to a chance discovery at the Red Lion: an officer named Hanson caught the glitter, in the bedroom hearth, of articles of jewellery which the investigation traced to the robbery at Hall & Co. That burglary, perpetrated in February 1835, was an entirely distinct affair; the recovered property prompted the officers to conduct a fresh search of the chamber, suspecting that Jourdan and Sullivan had concealed part of the Custom House booty there as well. In the matter of the customs robbery, notes were traced and various connections between the men established, yet the most circumstantial revelations flowed from Huey. In his first examination before the Surveyor-General of Customs, Huey claimed to have won the notes found upon him in a gaming house. Later, he delivered a more elaborate account—characterised in the source as more truthful—of the preparation and the subsequent division of the spoil.
At the trial, which opened at the Central Criminal Court on 2 March 1836, Huey detailed the confederates’ meetings, the stratagem of the fifty-pound note, and the part played by May. The four prisoners at the bar—Jourdan, Sullivan, Mott, and Seale—denounced his deposition as a tissue of falsehoods, asserting that he sought their ruin solely to shield his own head. They likewise brought forward testimony to establish alibis, while witnesses of respectability deposed to the prior good character of Mott and Seale. Under cross-examination by the defence, Huey maintained that he sought not to evade his own guilt, but rather to make such reparation as lay in his power for the wrong he had committed. Circulated notes and demonstrable links between the prisoners corroborated his testimony, though Pelham does not reproduce the cross-examination in its entirety.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty against all four prisoners, accompanying it with a recommendation to mercy on behalf of Mott and Seale. Nevertheless, on 8 March, all four received sentence of transportation for the term of their natural lives. May nowhere appears among the prisoners named in the recorded verdict, notwithstanding the paramount part assigned to him by Huey in the nocturnal trespass. Beside the judicial sentence, Seale’s fate was darkened by a domestic calamity: his wife expired shortly after visiting him in Newgate. Sullivan subsequently attempted an escape upon his arrival in the penal colony, but was recaptured after secreting himself aboard a Dutch vessel.
The chest had yielded to two distinct locks, yet the trial rested upon far more than a key. Huey stood at once as an accomplice and as the principal witness; the remaining prisoners contested his narrative; while notes, implements, and recovered documents furnished the material proofs which the jury weighed in balance with his word. Pelham conducts them to a common condemnation, while leaving a singular discrepancy plain to the reader: the man whose confession laid bare the entire design of the robbery is not among the four convicts named in the final sentence. It is within this unresolved distance between the confederate’s deposition and the formal decree of the court that the affair retains its singular, enduring tension.