Bernhard (also Bernard, occasionally Bernhardo) Piepho was a Prussian musician who spent the mid-1880s drifting through Devon, Worcestershire, Somerset and Herefordshire, surviving on casual work, street music, and increasingly on theft. In 1886 he stole a coachman’s coat and hammer from a country house near Teignmouth, selling the coat in a local pub after telling a painter he was a deserter from the Prussian army on his way to Aldershot. Within a year he’d been arrested again in Worcester for stealing a bicycle, and then in Yeovil for walking off with a pair of brewery hand trucks, usually turning up in court in some version of military dress and claiming service in the Franco-Prussian War.

His final known offence in Britain came in 1888, when he broke into a Nonconformist chapel at Stoke Prior, Herefordshire, and was sentenced at the Quarter Sessions to twelve months’ hard labour. On his discharge from Hereford Prison in 1889, officials entered him in the Habitual Criminals Register in microscopic physical detail and added one stark line under “Destination on discharge”: “Germany.” Piepho’s story is a small but revealing case of how late-Victorian Britain dealt with poor, mobile foreign workers – not as tragic heroes or master criminals, but as inconvenient administrative problems to be fined, catalogued, and quietly sent out of the country.