A man who stole his workmate’s bicycle, painted it green and then rode it back to work has been hailed one of Patricroft’s dumbest ever criminals.
Sound familiar? It may shock you to know that it happened 100 years ago this week.
The Eccles and Patricroft Journal records that in early October 1915 a chap named Henry Flawith had been working nights at The British Westinghouse Works in Trafford Park.
The heavy engineering works would in 1919 become Metropolitan-Vickers, builders of the first ever commercial transistor computer, the Metrovick 950, and the first British axial-flow jet engine, the Metrovick F2.
Their factory was for most of the 20th century one of the biggest and most important heavy engineering facilities in the world.
During the Second World War it was given licence to build wartime aircraft, including AV Roe’s famed twin-engined Avro Manchester bombers.
On a Friday evening Mr Flawith, of Atherton Steet, Patricroft, parked his black bicycle in the work’s sheds, returning the following morning only to find it had been half-inched by some cad.
Just two weeks later he spotted a bicycle in the works shed which looked suspiciously like his own, with the same handlebars and bell. The only difference was that it appeared to have been covered in green paint.
Flawith told the company nightwatchman, Mr William Grainger, of his suspicions.
The quick-thinking Grainger produced a tin of turpentine which washed off the green paint to reveal not only black paint underneath, but also the name of an Eccles bicycle manufacturer.
This damning evidence led Grainger to sit in wait for the ‘new owner’ to return.
After a short while a crane driver from Patricroft called William Winter pitched up to take the green bike home, but was apprehended on the spot by the nightwatchman.
Winter protested strongly that the bike was his own, and he had bought it for 10 shillings from an unknown man in Stretford.
The police were called in and a search of Mr Winter’s property uncovered five rolls of binding tape belonging to the engineering works, which was co-incidentally worth 10 shillings.
A 1906 British Westinghouse locomotive
He was arrested and taken to the nearby police station for further questioning, where he still denied stealing the bicycle and blamed the mystery man in Stretford.
Things took a turn for the worse for Mr Winter when police uncovered an empty green paint tin in his dustbin and in his bedroom drawer more rolls of stolen binding tape.
He appeared at Manchester County Police Court charged with the double theft.
Detective Superintendent Gregson told the court that there had been a spate of bicycle thefts from British Westinghouse and that it was very hard for a workman to be robbed, when he had worked hard to buy a machine.
It would have cost almost a full week’s wages to purchase such a bicycle.
Winter finally admitted his guilt and said that he had finished work one evening and didn’t fancy walking home, so he took the bicycle, decided to paint it green, and to cycle to work everyday since then.
The Stipendary wasn’t impressed with Winter’s admission of guilt and sentenced him to six months imprisonment with hard labour!
We still have the regular problem of bicycle thefts in Eccles and Patricroft 100 years later, but can you image a local Magistrate today handing out six-month prison sentences for this crime?
Prison in 1915 would have been bad enough, but hard labour meant that you were forced to do menial chores all day and be fed only bread and water as an extra punishment.
History does not record whether Winter learned his lesson, but one thing is for sure: he’ll go down in history as one of Patricroft’s dumbest ever criminals.
