Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (21 page)

The biggest halls appeared at the end of the period, such as the Hippodrome on Oxford Street and the Ardwick Empire, at Ardwick Green. The latter entertained an audience of 3,000 at a Saturday matinee and twice nightly. One of Manchester’s earliest halls was the People’s Music Hall, which opened in 1853 and ran until 1897, when it made way for another city landmark, the Midland Hotel. Other large halls were the Folly on Peter Street, renamed the Trivoli in 1897 and the London in Bridge Street, purpose built in 1862 and later renamed the Queen’s.

Performers who appeared regularly in Manchester included the Preston Handbell Ringers, the Milton Brothers, ‘the best song and dance artists in Lancashire’, and Mr Fred Edwards, the comic vocalist. A typical programme included a quartet of comic singers, child gymnasts and a tenor singing arias from Verdi’s operas. The price ranged from sixpence in the balconies to six shillings for a private box. Prices were as low as threepence in some halls. Many packed people in without any regard for health and safety regulations. The inevitable result was the sort of thing that happened in Ben Lang’s.

The Free Weekend

A long way behind the halls, but nevertheless one of the city’s great attractions, was the amusement park at Bellevue. The zoo opened in 1830 and after that the site was constantly expanding until eventually it offered exotic gardens, concert halls, rides and roller coasters to the growing number of workers anxious to enjoy their precious free time. Manchester workers were the first to enjoy some respite from the endless toil that made up the lives of working people.

It was in Manchester that employers first acquiesced to the novelty of a ‘free weekend’ – usually Saturday afternoon and Sunday. It became the norm in Lancashire during the 1840s and spread to London during the next decade and created a craving for pastimes. The opening of the first Boys’ Club, in Hulme in 1886, showed the demand for active recreation. When Lex Devine opened the doors of the disused factory in Mulberry Street, the road was heaving with 2,000 boys pushing and shoving to get in. No incident from this period better demonstrates the insatiable appetite for something to do during this newly won leisure time.

For most of these children the street was their only playground. The street has always been important to working class people. Looking back on his Salford childhood, folk singer Ewan Mc-Coll, the author of the city’s anthem, Dirty Old Town, remembered the street as his stage, his racetrack, his gym, his jungle, his prairie and his ocean. To those accustomed to the life of the slums, the result of this vivid street life was boisterous, harmless noise – the shrieks of those who won a game of pitch and toss, the squeals of girls being teased, the whoops of a goal scorer. But to those from more sedate neighbourhoods it was a menacing chaos that threatened good order.

A walk around the markets on a Saturday night was another Manchester institution. The strolling families and couples mingled with beggars and drunks. The roads around Oldham Street and Shudehill seethed with tightly packed humanity, oozing along the footpaths. Each stall had its spieler, enticing those who lingered to buy and filling the air with cries and patter, importuning and cajoling, appealing to common sense and an eye for a bargain. As midnight approached, the price of foodstuffs fell. The stallholders were anxious to get rid of anything that would spoil before Monday. By this time the pubs were emptying. Those who had spent their money and those who, compelled by some vague instinct, staggered for home, were out on the streets. Everywhere supine forms snared the gutters, some vomiting, some comatose, some sitting bewildered.

Among them, as among every gathering, were the beggars. Women, children, disabled men – they took every imaginable form and employed every conceivable method of evoking sympathy. Like the blackened buildings and the busy streets they were everywhere in the city.

8

Down and Out

Promoting the Sale of Gin

Beggars attracted as much debate as prostitutes in the nineteenth century. They ranked with prostitutes as a major social problem. All those who studied the problem concluded there was no such thing as a deserving beggar. Among those who took this view were many experienced policemen. Manchester’s Jerome Caminada, for instance, was emphatic: ‘No respectable person ever went begging on the street.’

‘A serious nuisance’ and ‘a national disgrace’ are just two of the ways in which contemporaries expressed their disapproval. Whatever terms they used they were united in their hostility to begging and beggars. Beggars were at the bottom of the criminal hierarchy, professional scroungers whose occupation was importuning, not men brought to desperation by sudden misfortune. They regarded begging as a craft and sought to improve their income by sharpening their skills. They had no intention of ever working and even when their income provided them with more than their needs, they continued to beg.

This is why Caminada regarded all beggars as criminals seeking to exploit the generosity of kindly people in order to avoid working for a living. Those who gave money to street beggars were ‘merely promoting the sale of gin’. This attitude may seem unduly harsh but one of the things that sustained it was the large number of professional beggars and the variety of ruses they employed to extort charity from the kind hearted. The pestering of professional beggars was more than a minor annoyance. Successive chief constables of Manchester regarded it as a major problem, so great that Jerome Caminada was deputed to tackle it.

This unanimity of condemnation is striking. Even the most compassionate philanthropists stress the viciousness and dishonesty of beggars. The deserving poor, they maintained – echoing Caminada – never resorted to begging, which was exclusively the vocation of idle rogues and vagabonds who abused Christian charity and discredited the worthy poor. Victorian Mancunians were vocal in their condemnation of beggars. If professional beggars benefited from charity, they reasoned, idleness and deceit were rewarded and the whole moral order perverted. Only those who were poor through no fault of their own deserved charity and even that was conditional. They had to earn it by their labour. If not, what incentive was there for the poor to work?

‘Cadging’ was the first resort of the criminal poor but it could be hard work. Such was the competition for the charity of the gullible that standing about with an open hand was not enough. Every beggar hoped for some accessory to give him an edge and the ingenuity of those who lived by duping others was equal to the creativity of the greatest minds of the time. The returned missionary was one of the more elaborate scams. The genius of this was that it exploited the public’s insatiable fascination with darkest Africa, missionaries and the exploration of Britain’s empire. The professional prater or bogus preacher needed a group of helpers to create the sort of heady atmosphere in which generosity overwhelmed prudence. Four or five enthusiastic helpers formed the nucleus of the audience, generated interest and together with a few banners and a couple of musicians soon attracted a large crowd. Then it was up to the prater to work his magic.

For the best effect a converted African would display his enthusiasm for Christianity by spitting on a pagan idol before leading the assembled throng in a stirring rendition of Onward Christian Soldiers. Almost as an afterthought, the preacher took a collection. The crowd dispersed, happy in the knowledge they were helping to shed the light of the Gospel on benighted pagans.

These gatherings and their legitimate counterparts attracted the fit-thrower and his accomplice, the Samaritan doctor. This scam was a variation on the fit-thrower, but it required two people working together. One, shabbily but respectably dressed, collapsed in the middle of a busy thoroughfare and immediately a crowd gathered round. His partner pushed his way through the crowd, claiming to be a doctor. After a cursory examination he announced that the man was suffering from starvation and pushed a few coins into his hand. As he left, clearly moved by the plight of the unfortunate, he announced that only a good meal could save the man from serious illness. Invariably several members of the crowd followed the medical man’s example and pressed money on the fainter. To work this scam successfully, respectable clothing was essential. A genuine destitute would not have been able to convince his audience that he was a doctor.

In fact the most successful beggars depended on a mien of respectability. This was particularly so for the writers of begging letters. Literate and capable of the research necessary to ensure that they targeted those likely to be most responsive, the letter writers were the aristocrats of begging. Many plagued prominent figures – renowned philanthropists, clergymen, public figures and lottery winners were all favoured targets. Charles Dickens was only one of the many celebrities they pestered on a daily basis. Like others in the same position, this assault on his sympathy made him cautious in distributing charity.

The more perceptive beggars, however, chose local philanthropists and those prominent in charitable organisations. Each presented a carefully developed persona. One was a distressed gentlewoman, another an officer’s widow. The shipwrecked mariner, the disabled miner – unable to work after an explosion at the coal face – and the impoverished gardener in winter, were standard characters. The more audacious followed up their letter with a visit. Many were so brazen that every refusal to give money resulted in tears, hysterics and tantrums calculated to create such embarrassment that the victim was willing to pay just to get rid of the beggar.

More despicable were those who targeted the recently bereaved. By trawling the obituary notices they found a suitable target, often a respectable woman who had recently lost her husband. The writer purported to be a former lover supported by the deceased. Implicit in the letter was a threat to make the matter public. In the majority of cases the family was glad to pay up in order to avoid scandal.

Many beggars accosted passers-by with letters of recommendation, usually from a notable public figure or clergyman. These testified to the bearer’s good character and commended him to the public’s charity. Such testimonials were much in demand and their production provided discredited lawyers and alcoholic clerks with a meagre income. Far subtler was the beggar who used neither the written nor the spoken word. He dressed in clothes that spoke of threadbare respectability. He entered a pub in a good working class area and, looking suitably doleful, made an inept attempt to sell something of little worth – a box of matches or some tobacco – maintaining it was his only hope of raising a few coppers. As soon as someone talked to him, he recounted his heart-rending tale of cruel misfortune. The astute practitioner of this ruse found it worked best on a Saturday evening when the pub was full of women having a drink after shopping. Generally they still had a few shillings left in their purses and were feeling, for the only occasion in the week, quite well off. This feeling of wellbeing was likely to overflow into generosity.

Another group of beggars held that a heart-rending appearance was far more effective than any testimonial. Disabled beggars did well but the most effective were the disfigured – the more shocking the wound, the greater the impact. Simulating wounds was an art as valuable as any trade or practical skill. A thick layer of soap plastered onto the arm or thigh needed only an application of vinegar to ensure that it blistered and gave the appearance of a running wound. Similarly, a piece of raw meat tied under a clotted dressing invariably melted the hardest heart. Healed amputations guaranteed a regular income. Soap, strong vinegar and blood squeezed from raw meat and applied to the stump created such a realistic weeping sore that most passers-by averted their eyes when dropping coins into the begging bowl. A brisk massage with gunpowder gave the skin the colour of decaying, inflamed flesh and was a great bonus to anyone whose living depended on arousing sympathy.

In fact, Victorian beggars showed keen insight. They knew that respectable people attached great importance to wearing sufficient clothing: apart from considerations of decency, many Victorians believed insufficient clothing was a major cause of ill health. One group of beggars sought to exploit this by calling door to door, while half-naked, asking for food and clothing. They realised people were more likely to give them old clothes – easily converted into cash – than money. Most of these beggars lived in Manchester and worked one prosperous suburb after another. Occasionally, they varied their approach, sometimes posing as travelling workmen who had the promise of a job but would not be taken on in rags.

But the most productive door-to-door beggars were women, ideally accompanied by respectably dressed children. Little lisping girls guaranteed a good haul. Beggars in the Strangeways area used little girls in a more sinister way for many years. The child accosted an adult and asked for money. Almost immediately the child’s irate parent appeared and began berating the victim for using foul language to the child. Soon the allegation was stepped up and the adult demanded a pound in return for not reporting the matter to the police.

Against all this competition, the static beggar, without something to make him particularly deserving, was unlikely to succeed. Consequently many carried a hawker’s tray, selling needles or matches, as a pretext for aggressive begging. A placard, setting out the heartbreaking circumstances under which the wearer suffered crippling injuries, was another favoured prop. A white stick rarely failed. Blindness was quite common among the poor, the result of industrial accidents, smallpox and untreated gonorrhoea. The obedient dog, lying by his master, was a common sight all over Manchester. But a far better prop was a child acting as a guide.