Maritime Misconduct at Swansea Docks

South Wales Daily Post

A Daft Act: Six Months for £11

The case of John William Bell, a seaman, came before Swansea Police Court in an incident reported in the South Wales Daily Post, June 1914. Bell stood charged with stealing £11 — equivalent to roughly £1,350 today — the property of Captain Ole Johannsen of the Norwegian vessel Venus, then lying at the Prince of Wales Dock. His task that day had been a simple and routine one: to clean the mat in the captain’s cabin. Yet a fellow seaman later observed him moving toward the cabin, changing his clothes, and leaving the ship without permission.

Bell’s disappearance triggered a wider search, and he was eventually located and arrested at Sale, Cheshire, by Detective Tucker, acting on a Swansea warrant. When confronted, Bell admitted the theft, remarking that it “must have been a daft” thing to take the money from the captain’s trousers pocket and squander it while “travelling the country for nothing.” In court he pleaded guilty, adding that he had been “a little bit wild at the time.”

The magistrates, noting Bell’s previous convictions, sentenced him to six months’ imprisonment, bringing a swift conclusion to a brief but telling episode of maritime misjudgment.