Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (19 page)

Occasional or full-time recourse to prostitution was not confined to domestics but was also associated with women in particular luxury trades. Shop assistants, particularly girls working in gloves, leather goods, confectionery, milliners’, dressmakers’ and tobacconists’ shops were called ‘dollymops’. These girls, notoriously badly paid, were in daily contact with rich customers and commercial travellers and many found it difficult to resist the temptation to exploit their sole asset. This scenario was so common that it even appeared in a comic song of the period:

Many women, such as those employed in making and selling fancy goods, haberdashery, dressmaking, as milliners, furriers, hat-binders, shoe-stitchers and piecework seamstresses, were badly paid when employed and regularly unemployed during seasonal downturns. Many resorted to prostitution. Every prostitute dreamt of hooking a toff and becoming a society lady. The fortunate whore sometimes found a wealthy client and became his mistress. Sometimes he even set her up in private accommodation. But marriage to a man of social standing was as rare as the industrial town without soot. To reach the pinnacle of her profession required a rare combination of qualities apart from good looks. She had to be courteous, charming, an accomplished musician and a welcoming hostess. Even then, disease or pregnancy might destroy her career as a kept woman. The encumbrance of an unwanted child would certainly ruin her prospects.

In 1851 there were 42,000 illegitimate births in Britain, about seven per cent of the total. This represented a major increase in the century since 1750, when the figure had been far lower – certainly no more than one per cent. Illegitimacy was then, as today, associated with rank. About two-thirds of the women with an illegitimate child applying for support were former servants and a large percentage of prostitutes applying to rescues were ex-servants. Realistically, the best a prostitute could aspire to was what one writer called the ‘seclusive’ status. These were the prima donnas of prostitution enjoying the patronage of a few very wealthy men and thus able to live alone in a private house or a superior apartment.

The most famous Manchester example was Polly Evans, who later ran her own exclusive brothel. In her memoirs she spoke of sumptuous gentleman’s club surroundings where the wealthy came to enjoy the company of beautiful women confident of their discretion. The police were perfectly aware of the nature of this establishment. Perhaps one of the reasons why they never troubled Polly was that the Manchester MP and city mayor, Sir John Potter, was her long-term companion. In a night she earned what it took a working man a month to amass. The professional whore working the toffs from the best Manchester hotels around the Piccadilly area might earn in twenty minutes what cost a labourer a day of backbreaking work. The semi-professional dollymop, plying her trade in Deansgate, might scrape a wage comparable to that of the unskilled labourer.

The third tier in the hierarchy of prostitutes, below the kept woman and the ‘seclusive’ was the ‘board-lodger’ who enjoyed the relative security of having a place in a brothel. In return for board, lodgings and, in particular, protection against disgruntled clients, she paid the mistress of the house a share of her earnings. Next came the well-dressed prostitute who walked the streets. She generally restricted herself to an established patch where the police knew and tolerated her.

The Manchester police had a live-and-let-live attitude to prostitutes and usually turned a blind eye. Unlike many social reformers, they entertained no illusions about suppressing prostitution. Their concern was to confine the most blatant prostitutes to the rookeries, prevent them from becoming a flagrant nuisance and restrict the number of robberies they committed.

Next in the pecking order came those who regarded prostitution as a stopgap measure, a means of feeding themselves when times were bad. When there was an upturn in trade they went back to making a living by honest labour. The mill girls who thronged the city centre in times of slack trade fell into this category. At the base of the pyramid was the ‘low prostitute’ who infested the poorest neighbourhoods and, at the weekend, the city centre. She sold herself to the first man she could entice and generally consummated the deal in a back alley or squalid lodging house. She generally had no experience of prolonged work and knew no other trade.

These women made up the great bulk of the profession and attracted the attention of police and commentators. What attracted more attention, however, were the brothels that were the basis for prostitution. The majority of houses described as brothels in police returns were lodging houses where prostitutes took their clients. Few were enclosed brothels, providing a base for full-time prostitutes and regular clients. Most catered for casual prostitutes who picked up men in pubs, music halls and pleasure gardens. The police attitude to these establishments was generally tolerant, provided they gave rise to few complaints of violence and robbery. After 1885, however, their attitude became more complex as the Criminal Law Amendment Act made every form of whoremongering illegal. Those who ran a brothel were now liable to a fine and three months hard labour for a first and four months for each subsequent offence. The penalties for inducing girls into prostitution were far heavier.

Most streetwalkers lived with a bully or an owner who proved his worth when an irate punter returned in search of his wallet. It is from this occurrence that the common name for a brothel – a ‘disorderly house’ – arose. Despite a protector, the prostitute was sometimes the victim of violence, though judging from newspaper reports of the time this was unusual. When violence arose, it was usually the prostitute in the process of robbing a client who initiated it. Many prostitutes without protectors relied on the support of the whores they lived with, usually in a lodging house. These prostitutes’ lodging houses were as corrupting an influence as their trade. The prostitutes slopped about during the day, squatting in front of the kitchen fire, gossiping and generally, in the opinion of one observer, eroding all decency, modesty, propriety and conscience. The one advantage was the women developed a camaraderie that often resulted in a belligerent client getting a good hiding and finding himself kicked out onto the street.

Manchester brothels run by madams were unusual. Mrs Matthews was a successful madam of the period. She ran a house used by Jane Doyle, a renowned prostitute, and thirty other women, mostly casual prostitutes. In Deansgate there were forty-six brothels. In the area between Peter Street, Great Bridgewater Street, Lower Mosley Street and Deansgate alone there were twenty-two known brothels and nine other suspected houses. In Salford at this time there were twenty-six. Shops, usually selling luxury goods, fronted some of the better class brothels. The Cheshire Cheese in Newton Street and Mrs Buckley’s house in Ashley Lane, off the infamous Blakeley Street, were among the city’s most wretched houses of ill repute. Few brothels were without the front of a lodging house or a pub. These pubs were typical working class dancing pubs. The brothel was above the pub or taproom. Benches ran along the walls, by tables, around a small space for dancing in the middle of the floor. At the end was a small dais, where myopic musicians played shrill, fast music on cornets and fiddles accompanying a singing comic with an array of risqué songs. The whores’ faces were chalk white with livid circles of rouge on their cheeks. Their bright flaring dresses fanned out as they span round in polkas and waltzes.

Despite the attractions of the brothel, the alley was less dangerous for the punter than going back to a room in a house of ill repute where it was easier for the prostitute to rob him. Accounts of gullible clients being beaten and robbed are legion. In fact, many commentators believed that prostitutes were often primarily thieves masquerading as whores in order to get men into situations in which they could fleece them with impunity. A respectable man robbed in a house of ill repute was unlikely to draw the attention of the police to something he would prefer to shrug off as an unfortunate incident.

Robbery, however, was not the client’s worst fear. Prostitutes and their bullies seldom robbed a punter without also giving him a severe beating. Country yokels, visiting the big city for the first time, often found that its reputation for wickedness was justified. They were the favourite targets of prostitutes. It was common for Manchester prostitutes to rob their clients of their clothes, sometimes leaving them in the buff and considerably adding to their embarrassment. Jerome Caminada tells of an interesting variation on this, worked by the Baron and Red Peggy operating on London Road station approach. The Baron dressed as a clergyman and Peggy in the height of fashion. The third member of the team, dressed to emphasise her physical assets, propositioned men as they left the station. Usually she took her client to a house where all three robbed him. On other occasions they blackmailed him. With very little concrete evidence – victims being understandably reluctant to bring charges – Caminada arrested all three. The judge sentenced the Baron to twelve months hard labour while his associates each had three months to contemplate the error of their ways.

Prostitutes were generally peripatetic. It was dangerous to stay in one place; clients who woke up without their valuables might return seeking vengeance. This is why they often worked in pairs, for protection and to make it easier to rob clients. Ellen Reece, a twenty-four-year-old Salford prostitute, confided in her chaplain while she was in prison in the 1850s. She confirmed the link between prostitution and robbery. ‘None of the girls think so much of prostitution but it furnishes opportunities for robbing men. Most girls will rob by violence and especially drunken men… They will not go to a house if they can help it, but to some back street.’ She explained that she worked with an accomplice who would rob the client as soon as he dropped his trousers.

Prostitutes also supplemented their income by shoplifting, even though this was far more hazardous than robbing punters and a great deal more likely to result in a court appearance. If successful, they took the spoils to Butterworth’s and Porter’s, on Newton Lane, two of the many pawnshops in the area where prostitutes could dispose of their spoils. Many prostitutes lived with criminals and got involved in their nefarious activities. Provided they looked respectable, they attracted less unwelcome attention than men. This is why they often worked as lookouts for burglars or carried their tools to a job and went away with the proceeds.

Some prostitutes adopted the flimsy disguise of a hawker, perhaps carrying a basket of fruit. During the day they went from pub to pub and in the evening worked the theatres. For the poorer prostitutes concealing their earnings was a problem. Many claimed the police robbed them and one way of proving to a court that a girl was living by prostitution was to show that she had more money than she could earn honestly. A policeman’s search was not usually a problem. Prostitutes hid sovereigns in concealed pockets in undergarments, on the inside of garters or the underside of corset stays. There were also areas which decency protected and where as many as thirty sovereigns might be concealed. Manchester police matrons, however, posed an altogether greater threat. They were less restrained in carrying out a search and it was mainly to forestall their efforts that Manchester prostitutes took to swallowing the sovereigns they earned. A Deansgate prostitute of the time said she had never heard of this harming anyone. Despite the rigours of the matron’s search, the Manchester police treated prostitutes leniently. In 1866 only one in every twelve arrests was of a prostitute and then generally for robbing or assaulting a client.

As the century progressed this live-and-let-live accommodation became the norm. Prostitutes realised that if they refrained from aggressive soliciting and dressed in a clean and tidy way they were less likely to incur the attention of the police. Consequently, by the 1870s the average Manchester whore had abandoned the pestering approach. Instead she might first ask a prospective client for his arm while she crossed the road. Otherwise, she conveyed her meaning by smiles, looks and winks. Similarly she reduced the likelihood of arrest by moving from the worst parts of town to those areas where there were legitimate forms of entertainment such as pubs, music halls, pleasure gardens and dance halls.

Generally the prostitutes who ended up in court were the dregs – drunkards who assaulted and robbed their clients, loudmouthed, dirty harridans who harassed the public and gave the police no choice but to arrest them. In other ways these were the most vulnerable. Often semi-professional whores who had neither pimp nor protector and living in lodging houses without a husband, they were at the mercy of the sadist and the sexual murderer. It was from this group that in 1888 London’s Jack the Ripper chose his victims. The Ripper, however, was only the most infamous prostitute murderer. Thomas Neil Cream, having been convicted of murder in Canada, arrived in Britain in 1891 and immediately targeted prostitutes. Within a year he poisoned four of them before Lou Harvey, an intended victim, recognised him and alerted the police.

Many believed that murder at the hands of a sexual psychopath was only the greatest of the hazards facing a prostitute. It was widely assumed that such a degenerate life set a woman on a downward spiral inexorably leading to a squalid death. Many of the myriad nineteenth century experts on prostitution confirmed this view. One such, Dr Michael Ryan, maintained that the average life expectancy of a woman after she became a prostitute was four years. Evidence from the Lock Hospital in Edinburgh seems to confirm this view. Doctors there maintained that nine out of ten prostitutes disappeared by the time they reached thirty.