World war crime- the broad-stare burglar

Transcript

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World War Crime. This is a short little snippet of a podcast, a little series I fancy doing for a little while, to tell you some of the crimes that occurred during the First World War, how it affected soldiers on the Western Front, and what happened to them afterwards. I'd like to thank the British Newspaper Archives, Ancestry.com, the Commonwealth War Graves, and several other platforms to do so. So this will be a little podcast on a Friday afternoon you might want to listen to on the way home. The short, sharp, sweet stories about soldiers during the Great War, and possibly might get some to go for the second. The Broadstairs burglar Henry Claire Delaire, born in Montevideo in Uruguay in 1888. By 1904 he's living in the United Kingdom, and he's started his crime spree. In the areas from 1904 up until 1913, he's been arrested some eight times, mostly for theft of bikes, clothes, and other burglaries. During the First World War, he'd be a member of the Machine Gun Corps, a newly formed regiment, and he was made his way up to Corporal. He was training in Gramtham. However, in 1916, he's been arrested in Broadstairs in Kent after a burglary, Swater burglaries they committed round by Ramsgate. He'd stolen items to the value of eight pounds, tins of boot polish, pairs of boots, a silver cigarette case and other several cigarette boxes that were found on his person and they'd come from that particular school. When we look deeper into his crime records, we can see he had several aliases Thomas Pilgrim, Thomas William, Clarence Pilgrim, John Sando, and Harry MacDonald, but his true name was Clarence Henry Delaire. He has served eighteen months of hard labour, even though he was in the army, and sometimes what would happen is that their charges would be saved until after the war, and many times their sentences were never carried out. However, in this case the judge has not allowed him to go back to the army. He would rejoin the army in May 1918. He was demobbled from the army in January 1919, and by the looks of it he may have just gone to the straight and narrow, as in 1919 he would marry his wife, Edith Lewis, in Torquay, in Devon. He died in 1974 in Plymouth, Devon, had one son, and for the rest of his life, by the looks of it, he was a painter and decorator. These are just short sharp podcasts to give you a little bit of insight to some of the crimes that have been committed by soldiers from the Western Front. It's not an extensive list, and I'm sure there are many more crimes that were committed, and some which are probably higher, which were never reported, but this is just what we see from the British newspaper archives. Hope you're enjoying these, and please, if you can spare us a coffee, that'd be absolutely amazing. Otherwise, if you follow us on TikTok or Facebook, it'll all be grand. And if you have any crimes you want investigated from the First World War, please send them through. Otherwise, take care and I'll see you soon.