The Press: Rogues' Boswell

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The aged prisoner who stood briefly in the dock of London's Bow Street Court was just a routine offender, an habitual pickpocket. But the boys on the reporters' bench, watching the Evening News's bald-headed Jimmy Jones at his shorthand, knew that the old dip would soon look different. Next day, to the Evening News's 1,600,000 readers, he did:

In the nineties, when hansoms jingled along the streets of London and every City clerk wore a silk hat, John was picking pockets in the Strand. King Edward came to the throne, and motors began to splutter in Piccadilly, and John's hands went on sliding into pockets. He thieved all through the four years of the first world war. Dictators rose to power and maps were altered overnight: but John, white-haired and vener able, was still standing with his itch ing fingers among the noise and bustle of the Strand.

A detective who had not been born when John picked his first pocket saw that round old figure in the throng by a bus stop. He watched him for a while, and then tapped him on the shoulder.

"I'm arresting you," he said.

"All right," said John. . . .

"You are charged," said the clerk briskly, "with being a reputed thief, loitering to pick pockets in the street."

"Guilty," said John in a mild old voice, . . .

The detective unfolded a massive sheaf of documents. "He's been in and out of prison most of his life. He's an expert pickpocket, and has 34 convictions —

"Thirty-four?" echoed Mr. Fry dubiously. "You could hardly call him an expert, could you, if he's been caught 34 times."

The detective glanced at John's white hair. . . . "He's been picking pockets ever since 1896, sir," he explained. . . .

The Morning Catch. For 16 years, in his daily column, Courts Day by Day, quiet Jimmy (James A.) Jones has been looking at London's criminal small fry with just such romantic compassion. Last week his large, loyal following could get Courts Day by Day in book form, an anthology of what many newsmen think is the best reporting of its kind. It is the best-read feature in the otherwise undistinguished London Evening News, which has the world's largest evening newspaper circulation. Other London papers have tried to ape his column, but usually give up for lack of a Jones to write it. But Jimmy, who is 44, regards it as just a pleasant routine chore, and to the annoy ance of his wife, a onetime reporter, has no higher ambition.

Readers of Courts Day by Day find no breathless accounts of spectacular murders, shocking rape cases, big-time robberies. Jones has no front-page yearnings, plugs only one beat: the London police courts with their unvarying morning catch of drunks, prostitutes, petty thieves and disturbers of the public peace. Magistrates and constables are often surprised to find vicious repeaters showing up as misguided, well-meaning little folk, but they read his column devotedly. He frequently gives judges, lawyers, police and wrongdoers the same indiscriminate, kindly treatment in mellow pieces that read like lesser Dickens with a shot of O. Henry. (Jones is tired of being compared to Dickens, insists that he has read only the Pickwick Papers, and that at 14.)