One night early in 1904, a printed card went round the pubs of Birmingham. On it were two photographs of a man in a bowler hat and a warning: serving him so much as a pint was now a criminal offence. He was the forty-ninth name on the city's black list - and the copy that survives is addressed, by hand, to his own local.

His name was James Doyle, the man with the crossed right eye. The records catch him being run to ground in an ashpit, breaking a constable's ribs, cheering his own prison sentence from the dock - and slipping out of the city under a false name, leaving his five-year-old daughter in the workhouse.

This is his story, told through the records he left behind.