Dennis Williams
Gone but not forgotten
Of course, not all great men were honest.....you know about Governmant Forgery (Quantitative Easing), but there was a famous Brummie who did it without being licensed to fiddle expenses, and do as you please with public money, and he was named William Booth. No, no, not the Salvation Army bloke, the other one....from Perry Barr.
William Booth (forger)
William Booth (born Hall End Farm near Beaudesert, Warwickshire, England in 1776; hanged 12 August 1812), one of eight children of a farmer and church warden, John Booth, and his wife Mary, was a farmer and forger, who lived at Great Barr, Birmingham. On 28 February 1799, Booth signed a 25-year lease for what became known (by 1821 if not earlier) as ‘Booth’s Farm’, including a farmhouse and 200 acres of land, part of the Perry Hall estate. and then in Staffordshire.
He was accused of murdering his brother John while revisiting Hall End on 19 February 1808, but was acquitted for lack of evidence.
He converted the top floor of the farmhouse into a workshop where he produced forgeries of coins and banknotes. He was caught, tried at Stafford Assizes and sentenced to hang. His accomplices were sentenced to transportation to Australia.
Here's a quote from that American bloke I liked in the posts about Taylor who wrote about Money:
"Just up the street from Samuel Lloyd's old address, at 20 Upper Priory, lived and worked another person with a connection — this time a substantial one — to token coinage. Benjamin Patrick sank dies for several commercial tokens in the '90s, having taken over his father's toy business several years before. In 1811, when he'd relocated north of here to Bath Street, Patrick sank some dies for Thomas Halliday. He also engraved a private penny token for one William Booth of Perry Barr, which was part of Handsworth parish."
Although Patrick may not have noticed it at the time, Booth's pennies were exactly the same size as three-shilling Bank of England tokens, and for good reason: Booth made them to cover his primary coining activity, which was counterfeiting.
Booths Penny Token
Not being content to fake the small stuff, Booth also took to forging banknotes, including Bank of England notes, on a large scale. That proved his undoing, for when some constables, responding to a tip, smashed through the roof of his specially modified farmhouse, they caught him in the act of burning a stack of phony fivers. The survival of a bunch of half-charred Anthony Newlands (whose face was on the notes at the time), was all it took to convict Booth at Stafford Assize and to get him stretched there on August 15th, 1812.
As Paul and Bente Withers observed in 1999 - "Things happened to Booth in twos." Having been twice tried for his life (the first time having been for the 1808 murder of his brother), he was also to be twice hanged and twice buried. According to the London Star for August 20th, 1812, the first attempt to hang Booth earlier that week failed when the rope slipped. Booth, finding himself on the ground yet very much alive, fell to his knees and begged for mercy, only to be returned to the scaffold. On the second try the drop refused to budge when poor Booth gave the signal for it to be let loose, and it took two strong men several minutes of hard tugging to finally deliver the felon to his maker. He was one of, if not the, last people to be sentenced to death in England for forgery.
He is the subject of the song "Twice Tried, Twice Hung, Twice Buried" by John Raven.
At West Brom's Hare & Hounds they say,
William Booth his men did meet,
In counterfeit and forgery pay,
To the Walsall bank's defeat, me lads,
To the Walsall bank's defeat.
Twice tried, twice hung, twice buried,
Was Booth of Perry Barr…
At Stafford court he was arraigned
And there condemned on high,
The noose around his neck was ranged,
But Booth refused to die, me lads,
But Booth refused to die.
Some years after Booth's original burial the Staffordshire-Warwickshire county line was shifted north. That put the felon's grave in the wrong county, so his remains were removed to the graveyard of Handsworth's St. Mary's Church.
The inscription on his gravestone reads:
Sacred to the memory of William Booth who departed this life August 12th 1812 aged 33 years. Also Charlotte daughter of William and Mary Booth who died August 13th 5 months.
Following a change of county boundary, his body was disinterred and reburied.
Thus did Great Britain's most notorious counterfeiter end up resting in peace just yards from that great anticounterfeiting crusader, Matthew Boulton. Such is the effrontery of which the Great Leveler is capable.
Booth also minted genuine tokens, as a cover for his forging activities. Several of his tokens, forgeries and printing plates are in the collection of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.
The farmhouse was demolished in 1974, and the farm became a sand and gravel quarry, having given its name to the still-extant Booths Lane and Booths Farm Road. Until the late 1920s, it was occupied by the Foden Family, commemorated in Foden Road.
William Booth (forger)
William Booth (born Hall End Farm near Beaudesert, Warwickshire, England in 1776; hanged 12 August 1812), one of eight children of a farmer and church warden, John Booth, and his wife Mary, was a farmer and forger, who lived at Great Barr, Birmingham. On 28 February 1799, Booth signed a 25-year lease for what became known (by 1821 if not earlier) as ‘Booth’s Farm’, including a farmhouse and 200 acres of land, part of the Perry Hall estate. and then in Staffordshire.
He was accused of murdering his brother John while revisiting Hall End on 19 February 1808, but was acquitted for lack of evidence.
He converted the top floor of the farmhouse into a workshop where he produced forgeries of coins and banknotes. He was caught, tried at Stafford Assizes and sentenced to hang. His accomplices were sentenced to transportation to Australia.
Here's a quote from that American bloke I liked in the posts about Taylor who wrote about Money:
"Just up the street from Samuel Lloyd's old address, at 20 Upper Priory, lived and worked another person with a connection — this time a substantial one — to token coinage. Benjamin Patrick sank dies for several commercial tokens in the '90s, having taken over his father's toy business several years before. In 1811, when he'd relocated north of here to Bath Street, Patrick sank some dies for Thomas Halliday. He also engraved a private penny token for one William Booth of Perry Barr, which was part of Handsworth parish."
Although Patrick may not have noticed it at the time, Booth's pennies were exactly the same size as three-shilling Bank of England tokens, and for good reason: Booth made them to cover his primary coining activity, which was counterfeiting.
Booths Penny Token
Not being content to fake the small stuff, Booth also took to forging banknotes, including Bank of England notes, on a large scale. That proved his undoing, for when some constables, responding to a tip, smashed through the roof of his specially modified farmhouse, they caught him in the act of burning a stack of phony fivers. The survival of a bunch of half-charred Anthony Newlands (whose face was on the notes at the time), was all it took to convict Booth at Stafford Assize and to get him stretched there on August 15th, 1812.
As Paul and Bente Withers observed in 1999 - "Things happened to Booth in twos." Having been twice tried for his life (the first time having been for the 1808 murder of his brother), he was also to be twice hanged and twice buried. According to the London Star for August 20th, 1812, the first attempt to hang Booth earlier that week failed when the rope slipped. Booth, finding himself on the ground yet very much alive, fell to his knees and begged for mercy, only to be returned to the scaffold. On the second try the drop refused to budge when poor Booth gave the signal for it to be let loose, and it took two strong men several minutes of hard tugging to finally deliver the felon to his maker. He was one of, if not the, last people to be sentenced to death in England for forgery.
He is the subject of the song "Twice Tried, Twice Hung, Twice Buried" by John Raven.
At West Brom's Hare & Hounds they say,
William Booth his men did meet,
In counterfeit and forgery pay,
To the Walsall bank's defeat, me lads,
To the Walsall bank's defeat.
Twice tried, twice hung, twice buried,
Was Booth of Perry Barr…
At Stafford court he was arraigned
And there condemned on high,
The noose around his neck was ranged,
But Booth refused to die, me lads,
But Booth refused to die.
Some years after Booth's original burial the Staffordshire-Warwickshire county line was shifted north. That put the felon's grave in the wrong county, so his remains were removed to the graveyard of Handsworth's St. Mary's Church.
The inscription on his gravestone reads:
Sacred to the memory of William Booth who departed this life August 12th 1812 aged 33 years. Also Charlotte daughter of William and Mary Booth who died August 13th 5 months.
Following a change of county boundary, his body was disinterred and reburied.
Thus did Great Britain's most notorious counterfeiter end up resting in peace just yards from that great anticounterfeiting crusader, Matthew Boulton. Such is the effrontery of which the Great Leveler is capable.
Booth also minted genuine tokens, as a cover for his forging activities. Several of his tokens, forgeries and printing plates are in the collection of Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.
The farmhouse was demolished in 1974, and the farm became a sand and gravel quarry, having given its name to the still-extant Booths Lane and Booths Farm Road. Until the late 1920s, it was occupied by the Foden Family, commemorated in Foden Road.
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