Edward Jones: “The First Celebrity Stalker”

Edward Jones (1824-1893) as a teenager became best known for stalking Britain’s Queen Victoria during the 1800s. “The boy Jones” made numerous (successful) attempts at sneaking into the official residency of the Queen. Though each of the teen’s “visits” turned out to be harmless, overtime, the monarchy was not amused.

Executive Producers: Maria Trimarchi and Holly Frey

Producer & Editor: Casby Bias

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda land Audio in
partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the
second season of Criminalia. This season, we're exploring the lives
and motivations of some of the most notorious stalkers throughout history.

(00:22):
I'm Maria Trumarqui and I'm Holly Fry. And while our
first season was all about women poisoner, season two all
about stalkers. And today we're going to talk about a
teenage stalker who stole the young Queen Victoria's underwear. And
as that intro suggests, especially because we're laughing about it,
this particular stalker story has the distinction of being definitely

(00:44):
more odd than it does scary. Absolutely So first let's
set our scene. So this is nineteen century England during
the Victorian Era, which is generally considered to be about
eighteen thirty seven to nineteen o one, which is the
life of Queen Victoria. Um but give or take a
few years uneat end. It was a period of time

(01:06):
when there was rapid development and change happening. Victoria came
to the throne in eighteen thirty seven at the age
of eighteen as Queen of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland. All accounts say that she was stout
and considered dowdy, and although she wasn't actually even five
ft tall, she succeeded in projecting herself to be much larger.

(01:28):
Her reign lasted sixty three years and seven months. She
was the record holder until current Queen Elizabeth seconds and
Victoria's reign began at a time of the world's first
Industrial Revolution. This was a time of great change for
obviously the industrial but also the political, scientific, and military
sectors within the United Kingdom. This is also a time

(01:51):
when the British Empire became the first global industrial power
and produced much of the world's coal, iron, steel, and textiles.
During this time, the UK changed from an agricultural country
to an industrialized one, and while that was good for
the middle class, a lot of people continued to suffer
from deep poverty. This is also a time that gets

(02:12):
a lot of valid discussion about colonization and the expanding
of empire by taking over other people's lands. It's a
strange time where development is going on and a lot
of bad things are happening in the name of that development.
There were harsh factory conditions. There was unsafe housing, there

(02:33):
was really bad sanitation, and along with all of this,
of course, where's excessive drinking. Women were also in the workplace,
which some people saw as a moral problem. This was
a problem. There was also a decline in religious fervor
at this time, right. So, in eighteen forty, two to
three years after her reign began, Victoria married Prince Albert,

(02:55):
who happened to be her first cousin. Uh, I'm gonna
leave it at that. Victoria, who was deeply in love,
was the one who proposed to Albert, and during their
seventeen years of marriage they had nine children. Um In fact,
also at this time in Great Britain as well as
elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, the idea

(03:16):
that marriage should be based in romantic love rather than
for money or another strategic reason that you can come
up with romantic love was gaining popularity. Victoria also helped
cement that idea, right. She was in many ways a
trend setter, right. The idea of the white wedding dress
kind of goes back to her. We should also point
out that she, in terms of social and Royal Moray's

(03:41):
at the time, she had to be the one to propose.
Albert could not propose to her because she was a
higher station than him, which would have been just not
okay at all. So it was the time of things
that were more exciting than marrying for money in Royal
Bay Bees though. It was also the time of Charles

(04:02):
Dickens and Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale and the steam
powered locomotive and the first telegraph and telephone. This was
a really exciting time to be alive. We talked about
our technological age and things moving so quickly that felt
like this to a lot of people where they were
just like, do you mean I can talk to somebody

(04:23):
who was far away? Absolutely? Absolutely, I mean like I think,
what was it? The penny black? Is that what it
was called? The very first black penny postage stamp also
happened during Victoria's reign, like you could, you could connect
with people in ways that you could never have connected before.
And it's in this time period that Edward Jones, or
as the newspapers nicknamed him, the Boy Jones, was born

(04:47):
in London some time around eighteen four. His father was
a tailor and his family was very poor but by
the time that Edward Jones was fourteen years old, he
had become the first celebrity stalker. So this all started
in eighteen thirty eight when Jones was overheard bragging to
his employer about walking through Buckingham Palace. But no one

(05:11):
believed that he had done this or that he would
do this. The very thought of a commoner just strolling
through the palace was absolutely absurd. It would be like
me going Maria yesterday I was on the moon like.
It was that level of just ridiculous to the hearer, Right,
I'm going to go back this weekend, like, oh my

(05:32):
gonna all the time about you. But here's the thing,
as absurd as it sounded, between eighteen thirty eight and
eighteen forty one, Jones did break into Buckingham Palace way
more than once. He was good at it more than once.
It was like he just walked in the front door.

(05:52):
At the end of it, he's like, hey, I'm here.
Oh that kid's back right right, we know him. He's
been here a hundred and two times. So or to
start at the beginning, the story of the boy Jones
has been over the years basically pieced together using newspaper
reports from the first years of Victoria's reign and the

(06:13):
first time that he entered Buckingham Palace in he did
it with a disguise. He disguised himself as a chimney sweeper.
In History tells us that Jones was not a particularly
good looking gent. He's described as having a wide mouth
and a low brow and not really um super good

(06:33):
about bathing regularly. Not some good higien there, right. So
word is that he thought he wouldn't stand out dressed
as a chimney sweep, and that apparently worked because he
got in. But the visit ended for the fictitious chimney
sweep when he was seen by a porter and chased
out and then was captured by the authorities. And when

(06:54):
they captured him, they found that he had the Queen's
underwear hidden in his pants. I have questions because if
you look at pantalets from this era, right, it's not
like a pair of underwear today. Right, It's like he
had like bloomers shot. It's like fabric. Even the way
they're cut is not straight cut the way we would
have pants today. They had a lot of extra fabric

(07:17):
at the back to allow movement, but it would have
been probably a very very delicate, thin, really beautiful material.
So he may have been able to watt it up
quite tiny. But could it have been like a silk
or something. No, not for her, probably not. It probably
would have been a really really nice, high grade cotton
or even maybe linen. Don't quote me on this. I

(07:40):
didn't prep And maybe they knew that he had them
in his pants because there was a large bulge from
like around his knees. But I mean, keep in mind,
the whole reason for undergarments. It was to keep your
clothes from getting soiled and to keep them beautiful. So
they had to be things that could be washed. That's
why something like a silk would probably not have been it. Right,
So this trial, the after the Debacle of the underpants

(08:04):
was kind of treated like a joke, because it is
as silly as it sounds, the Debacle of the underpand
that's going to be the movie that we've made about.
And his defense referred to the event as quote youthful
folly and not for any felonious purpose, and it was

(08:25):
kind of laughed at, just as we are. And so
Jones was ultimately acquitted because no one took it seriously. Sure,
they had a fourteen year old boy who scaled the
ball and came into the palace for one time. That
single time, I can see taking it as a joke.
But the problem became that Jones kept going back to

(08:45):
the palace. Uh. He stole food from the kitchen, he
was caught sitting on the throne twice, he slept in
the servants bed. He read the Queen's private letters, and
at some point Jones also managed to make with a
portrait of the queen, regimental sword, a letter, three pairs
of trousers, and a collection of linen's does he have

(09:08):
big pants? Like, maybe this is the answer to prob
A portrait, a portrait of the He was actually a tiny,
tiny person that was disguised as a six foot tall person.
So we had lots of actor room and some skilts
with some space. Right, he just walked out with it

(09:29):
over his own face. He's like, this is my face portrait. Yeah. Sure.
But with all of these amazing feats of break ins
and theft, the boy Jones became a media celebrity. So
with that, we're going to take a quick break for
a word from our sponsor. And when we come back,
we're going to talk about what was up with palace

(09:50):
security at this time. Welcome to Criminalia, all right, let's
get to talking about just how easy it was to

(10:10):
scale the walls of Buckingham Palace in the nineteenth century. Today,
the Queen's Guard is responsible for guarding Buckingham Palace and
St James Palace in London. There are heat sensors that
surround the palace as well as CCTV. The grounds are
patrolled twenty four hours a day by armed guards, and
yet people still attempt to break in or scale the gates,

(10:32):
and occasionally they do. But security at the time we're
talking about was nothing like it is now. It was
not at that level. It was notoriously loose and unorganized.
During Victoria's reign, she was the first royal to live
in Buckingham Palace and no one headed up palace security
at the time. Part of the problem was that in

(10:53):
many cases, each task of the household was managed by
a separate entity, and in cases where those tas overlapped,
they were not always under the same supervisory umbrella. Marie
and I had been talking earlier about sort of the
infamous problem of the people who watched the outside of
the windows and the people who watched the inside of
the windows would not coordinate their schedules, so there was

(11:14):
never really a clean window. So it wasn't just security,
but it was a lot of things in the palace
that were operating in this sort of strange, genteel sort
of chaos, and anyone and everyone, from vagrants to the
casually curious, were known to jump the walls in the
Victorian era, and pretty easily so, And there was a

(11:37):
great deal of fascination when it came to the new queen.
When her uncle, King William the Fourth died, he left
her as a new monarch, and she was less than
a month past her eighteenth birthday. She had been raised
in a very very sheltered and protective manner by her mother,
the Duchess Kent, and her mother's adviser, Sir John Conroy.

(11:58):
Victoria's entire childithood and the years leading up to her
reign were spent under Conroy and the Duchess's system of
very strict rules, which they called the Kensington System. Public
appearances of the princess had been carefully managed by the
adult duo, and as a consequence, the general excitement over
a new monarch was overlaid with intense curiosity about the

(12:20):
teenager who was on the throne. Yeah, people really didn't
feel like they knew that much about her, because even
though there had been things published about her, she was
still this sort of weird enigma that had been kept
away from them. Right now you could see her. Yes,
she is real. Um. She was described as being frightened
as a young queen because of Jones, and Victoria actually

(12:43):
wrote in her journal after the time that the boy
Jones was removed from underneath the piece of furniture. Quote,
if he had come into my bedroom, how frightened I
would have been. But honestly, with the number of times
that he got in, it kind of doesn't necessarily seem
like he was stocked the queen, but more like he
was stalking the palace. But then he kept taking her stuff,

(13:06):
So yeah, you know, there's that. And we should also
point out like he was not the only one. Throughout
Victoria's reign. There were, of course more stalkers. We don't
know a certain number, there have been various ones bandied about.
There were also attempts on her life. It was kind
of all of the unfortunate side of what it meant
to be a monarch. Also, it wasn't the missing Linen's

(13:29):
that the Palace was so worried about. Initially they were.
They were more fearful that Jones might hurt or even
assassinate the Queen or maybe kidnapped the Princess Royal. The
monarchy wanted to get rid of Jones at any cost.
So what the Palace was really really worried about was
that the boy Jones may have seen things when he

(13:51):
roamed the halls, and he may have overheard things. They
weren't sure if he was privy to the secrets of
the throne or the government. They were determined to keep
him quiet and to create a large distance between him
and the Palace. Yet still he kept coming, and he
became a little bit of a folk hero. His palace

(14:13):
capers became the subject of songs and poems. They were
also written up all the time in silicious newspapers. There
was so much speculation about what he had really seen
inside the palace, and exactly what the Palace was trying
to avoid was all of this. Whether those stories were
true or not, they did not want it to be

(14:34):
in the press. They did not want speculation about what
might be going on. Here's the thing. It does not
appear that the boy Jones ever gossiped about what he
saw on these little escapades, even though he claimed early
on during his break ins when he would be taken
into custody, that he had intended to tell the world
what he saw, But he never really did. He just

(14:55):
kind of mucked about quietly and often dozed off again.
And this time in December, the boy Jones was discovered
in the palace um. This time he was discovered underneath
the sofa in the room that was adjacent to the
Queen's private bedroom. And this time he was arrested, and

(15:15):
this time he was sentenced to three months in a
house of correction. Here's the thing about Jones and the palace.
Just ten days after he was released, he went back
to the palace and he was found wandering in one
of the royal apartments. He was eventually caught by palace
guards and found himself back in front of the jury,

(15:37):
and this time he was sentenced to three months of
hard labor at Tothill Fields Prison. The Leicester Harold reported quote,
it would appear that there is now no doubt, but
the account given by Jones difficult as it is to
believe anything he says as to his having effected his
entrance into the palace by scaling the garden wall from

(15:58):
Constitution Hill and then passing through one of the French
windows which opens onto the lawn is correct. It is
said that some of the windows were broken, and that
other marks of suspicious nature were observable near the spot.
Having once gained the inside of the building, the lad
from his recollection of the various staircases and passages, would

(16:19):
find perhaps but little difficulty in reaching the apartment in
which he was afterwards arrested. So, after his release from
hard labor in prison, Jones was yet again caught wandering
around Buckingham Palace. Um, I feel like every paragraph from

(16:43):
now on just to just start with that. Uh so
this time back at the palace. Actually, instead of a
charge or trial, he was sent to do duty as
a sailor in the Royal Navy, which, if he did
for they say more than five years. Jones served on
the HMS worst By, the h M S Inconstant and
the h M S Harlequin. A year later, he finally

(17:05):
got a chance to escape from his ship in Portsmouth
and got himself to London. However, no longer to anyone's surprise.
You can guess where he was caught loitering in the
vicinity of Buckingham Palace and he was immediately sent back
to his ship. The last mention of the boy Jones

(17:25):
in the media was in eight four, and that was
when he was rescued after going overboard, presumably to swim
back to London and get to the palace in the
waters between Tunis and Algiers. You know, I wouldn't be
surprised if he was planning to swim, because there was
one account that said that he walked himself to London

(17:46):
after he got off the ship. Now it was not
a good source, you know, but still the idea of
the walking in the swimming to get back to it
fits ragul fence. So there's actually another version that we
should talk about. Um. The second version of this story
regarding Jones's time in the navy actually doesn't have the

(18:08):
Navy in it whatsoever. There's a version of this story
that suggests he was invited to join the Royal Navy
in an effort to get him at sea and far
away from the Palace, and in this version, Jones refused
to deploy, so the monarchy kidnapped him and deported him
to Brazil. And in this scenario he was kept on

(18:29):
board a prison ship for about five to six years,
without any official charge or trial, and never getting close
enough to the shore to plan an escape. We're gonna
have a quick break now, and whenn't we get back,
we're going to talk about how Jones ended up in Australia.

(18:53):
Welcome back to Criminalia. So now let's talk about Edward
Jones in Australia. Yeah, so during this time in the
Victorian era, I think it's fairly common knowledge that convicts
and other people deemed unsavory were frequently deported from Great

(19:15):
Britain to the penal colony that was then Australia. And
after his time in the navy or aboard that prison ship,
whichever you believe, Jones was deported to Australia and there
he is said to have sold pies and generally kind
of just tried to keep a low profile and lead
something akin to a normal life. And for years in

(19:36):
both the UK and Australia, people are said to have
followed him around shouting there's the boy who went to
visit the queen. Well he did, It's a true statement.
So in the eighteen eighties, as a grown man who
wished to return to being an unknown man, Edward Jones

(19:56):
changed his name to Thomas Jones. Jones did have truly
become an alcoholic and possibly also a burglar. When he
decided he returned to England. His brother persuaded him to
go back to Australia, which he did and he became
the town crier in Perth. He died in Australia um
when he was drunk and he had fallen off the

(20:18):
Mitchell River Bridge and he landed unfortunately on his head.
So unlike what the stalker profile that today's FBI suggests,
Jones never thought that he and the Queen were destined
to be together. He didn't want to kill her. He's
been described by modern historians as a quote very weird

(20:40):
character and a very solitary man who, apart from his
visits to Queen Victoria's palace, wasn't particularly interested in women.
But what he did want to do was he wanted
to sit on the throne. He wanted to read her books,
he wanted to go through her things, and in general,
he wanted to enter the palace, but really not to
see the Victoria or her new baby or anyone who

(21:03):
worked or lived there, and that's what he did mostly.
Um he gained access through some pretty simple methods, including
security breaches like unlocked doors or unshuttered windows on the
ground floor, and once he got inside, he did things
like sit on the throne, he hit under the Queen's sofa,
and he stole her underwear. I would give a jillion

(21:24):
dollars to just find out what he was thinking during
any of this. As he's laying under the sofa, He's like,
how am I going to get out of here? Right?
Like is he like yeah, I'm in the palace, or
like why do I keep doing this? He was caught
on the premises three times, and he admitted that he
had been in the palace a fourth time, and today

(21:46):
historians believe that he likely entered Buckingham Palace many other
times that he just never got caught. And the thing is,
he didn't always feel compelled to steal things every time
he made a visit, so it's really hard to track
him because the records of like, oh something's missing might
not always reflect whether or not he had been there. Right,
sometimes you just need to sit on the throne, Like,

(22:07):
what are you doing this afternoon, I'm going to sit
on the throne. I'm going to the moon on the moon.
So this all makes the Boy Jones the first celebrity
stalker on record, um, but he was certainly not the
only potential threat to Queen Victoria at this time, and
certainly not the only intruder to Buckingham Palace. In fact,

(22:27):
unwelcome guests still to this day try to break into
the palace, probably on a daily basis. I would say,
I mean they've got a lot of security during the
summer of eight for example. To look at some of
these historical other instances that puts this right. At the
same time as when the Boy Jones started his series
of fourays into the Palace, there was a silversmith named
Thomas Flower who was found sleeping in a chair outside

(22:51):
Queen Victoria's bedroom. He was known about Buckingham Palace as
one of the Queen's unrelenting admirers, and he ended up
being sent to prison for gaining entry into the palace.
See the Boy Jones doesn't know how good he has it,
so there's one more interesting Buckingham Palace intrusion story, but

(23:11):
it's not during the Victorian period. It's during a more
modern era. It's it's two. In fact, there was a
man named Michael Fagan who was found inside Buckingham Palace,
and like the boy Jones, the visits happened on more
than one occasion. He roamed rooms that were used by
Princess Diana as well as the Queen. He looked around

(23:33):
the palace. Allegedly he sat on the throne for a bit.
I think if you break into Buckingham Palace though against like,
aren't you committed to sitting on the throne? Like I'm
already you know these days it's self beyond the throne? Yeah,
not man. But in two breaking into Buckingham Palace was

(23:55):
actually a civil rather than a criminal offense, so he
was actually charged with something rather hilarious. Rather than being
in the palace, he was charged with the theft of
a snack of cheese and crackers and the wine he
had drunk while he was in the palace, which I love.

(24:16):
He's like, how much for a square cheese? Okay? I
got it, so holly. Speaking of drinking at the palace. Yes,
I hear you have some drinks for us? Is that
we won't be drinking at the palace. No, you're wherever
you are as a palace. Um. Yes, let's think of it. This.

(24:37):
It is time for the chaser. So one of the
things I wanted to do, since we were talking about
the Victorian era, one of my very favorites, was actually
to look up and make a cocktail from that era.
And so what I ended up finding was the cocktail,
which was a drink that was written down in three

(25:00):
Let me tell you a thing about this. I read
this and I said, this is gonna be foul. I'll
tell you what actually happened. So it's a really simple recipe.
I mean you can see that this is like where
it starts where people start mixing things. This recipe is
a teaspoon of fine sugar or simple syrup, two ounces
of rye whiskey, rum gin or brandy, your choice. I

(25:23):
went with brandy for mine. Three ounces of water, four
dashes of bitters. You mix all that together and then
you sprinkle it with nutmeg on top. I was like,
this is just watered down booze. It's watered down booze.
That you've dressed up, you watered it down, and you
put some pants on it. But here's the thing. I

(25:46):
actually thought it was delightful. Um yeah, I mean I
I really I expected to be like that's of me
drinking water down booze and being chagrinned about it. But
in fact, just that little bit of syrup and nutmeg,
like you can see where someone was like, I want
to make someone a drink that they can actually drink

(26:07):
instead of just chugging straight alcohol. I will water it down,
but then we have to add some other things to
make it a little fancier. And you know what, it
was just fine. I would make it again, excellent. Is
it going to become my go to? It is not.
But because I was doing that one, I also had
this moment as I was making that one where I

(26:27):
was like, I have missed my opportunity. I want to
make another drink. Really though this is inspired by the
boy Jones and it's not a real recipe though it
is a d I y. It's like a mad lib
of a recipe. It's so simple. I love when you
do choose your own adventure beverages, Like it's my favorite thing.

(26:47):
When you're like this, this, or this, and I'm like,
I gotta make all those versions, try them all. This
is really like so simple and basic that it is
like a good way for people who have an experimented
much with making cocktails to start playing a little bit
in a really easy, hard to mess up way. It
is more of a category of cocktails that I call,

(27:10):
in honor of Boy Jones, mostly harmless. I can't I
can't recall a quote from the from the trial, like, no,
there's no felonious activity going on. It's mostly harmless. Five
ounces of any mixer, so a juice if you want it,

(27:32):
soda if you prefer it, and just one ounce of
a liqueur. That seems like a good match. I made
one that was orange juice with triple sex, so an
orange liqueur, and it kind of is a little just
a very orangey drink. It's not heavy. You're not gonna
be like stumbling a drunk by any means. I mean,
you can do at that point, like a pineapple juice
and a vanilla liqueur. You can do a lime juice

(27:55):
and a rose liquor. You can also do something like
a lemon lime soda, like a seven upper, a sprite
and then put something like a violet liqueur in there,
and it's pretty and it makes it like it feels
a little fancy, but it's also mostly harmless, so that
would be that would be fantastic. Yeah, you're like, of course, yeah,

(28:16):
And I specify liqueur because for the most part, it
is not true to say this, but most liquors are
a little bit lower in alcohol content than a than
other spirits than a liquor. Not always there are exceptions
to that rule, but it also just like it's the softest.
If you mess it up, it's no big deal. It's
mostly harmless. Have you tried this drink using any sort

(28:38):
of pumpkin spice flavor in anything? Yet? Sort of? I
found it is called pumpkin spice sipping cream. It's basically
a cream liqueur that's that has pumpkin flavor in it.
They also do a butter pecan one that's amazing. Those
are great in a little bit of coffee, right, I bet,

(28:59):
I bet? And it is like a nice especially as
we are currently in the Northern Hemisphere at least in winter,
so it's a nice little warm up to just put
a dash. You don't need much liqueur in there great
little warm coffee nummies, mostly harmless, mostly harmless. Don't drink
a million it stops being harmless, but mostly harmless. Just

(29:19):
like the Boy Jones. It's like the starter kit to
make you think about how to create cocktails that you
might enjoy. I think that's great. I think a lot
of people might want to, you know, do the kitchen
science experiments like you do, but but aren't necessary, especially
because you inspire them to do that, but aren't necessarily sure.
We're to try because I've never done that before. I'm
a big fan of like pick a liqueur that you

(29:40):
really like, and then play with it with a bunch
of different mixers and see what works and what does it.
Thank you again. Now I'm just gonna go make myself
a cocktail. Just sit here and talk about chasers all
day long, maybe, But instead what we will do is
let you go about your business and thank you so
much for joining us here in Criminalalia. We're Marianne. I

(30:00):
love to talk about not just the Chasers, but also
all of these strange criminals. We will see you back
here next week. Criminalia is a production of Shonda Land
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio for more podcasts
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