Breaking Bad — RUMMAGE

A Silver Heist in Scarborough

Philip James Luntley, a fifty-year-old supplier of aerated water and ginger beer based in Scarborough in Yorkshire, was found guilty of stealing diverse items warehoused in the town in 1884. Luntley’s haul included 44 ounces of silver, which he melted and sold to the Sheffield Smelting Company, after unsuccessfully trying to palm it off on a local jeweller. Giving evidence in court, Luntley claimed that the metal came from ‘musical boxes’ that he had saved up over a number of years. In my forthcoming book, Rummage, I discuss several other cases in which it was similarly difficult to ascertain the origins of melted metals.

Luntley passed ‘miscellaneous articles’ to his brother, Washington, an auctioneer based at Newborough Street in Scarborough. His involvement in the crime was uncovered via tickets for items he had pawned (Yorkshire Gazette, 25 November 1884; Edinburgh Evening News, 9 December 1884; Yorkshire Gazette, 13 December 1884; Yorkshire Evening Post, 3 January 1885).

This image, and the portrait below, were posted by Celia Millington, Ancestry.co.uk.

Luntley already had a lively history by 1884, having been fined for assaulting James Riley, a painter and patron of his North Street shop, in 1875. After ‘they had some words, arising out of chaff’, Luntley kicked Riley into the street and ‘rubbed his face with white lead’ (York Herald, 13 July 1875).

A couple of years later Luntley was struggling with packaging, having been let down by a bottle supplier who provided him with ill-fitting stoppers. An ensuing legal case reveals that Luntley did most of his trade during ‘the season’, and had a slack time during winter (Leeds Mercury, 23 March 1877). The bottling glitch appears to have pushed Luntley into liquidation by the end of the year (Huddersfield Chronicle, 15 November 1877). By 1882 Luntley was operating as a ‘musical instrument dealer and manager to an aerated water manufacturer’, but he was struggling with his business again.

Probably this was the reason he turned to large scale theft. In planning the extensive robbery of 1884, Luntley acquired a set of skeleton keys for the warehouse (owned by Rowntree and Sons in Westborough), and encouraged others to assist him (Shields Daily Gazette, 9 September 1882; Yorkshire Gazette, 25 November 1884).

Luntley was sentenced to six months’ hard labour for his crime: a light sentence for theft in those days, and possibly a reflection of his civic status. Thereafter he concentrated on his musical dealership. In 1894, two years before he died, Luntley’s music warehouse burned down. The fire destroyed instruments, and rabbits, pigeons and ‘a valuable collie dog’.