Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (22 page)

Feigning a medical condition allowed beggars to use their acting talents. Most of those with dramatic tendencies went in for fit-throwing. Some alcoholics feigned collapse near a pub in the hope that a compassionate soul would fetch 6d worth of brandy. The beggar who went in for fit-throwing was altogether more calculating. He was neat and clean and convincingly respectable in every way. Furthermore, he chose his time and location carefully. Outside a church just as the congregation was leaving was ideal. By the time he told his sad story – often supported by a written testimonial from a clergyman – his concerned helpers were pressing on him the proceeds of an impromptu collection.

Beggars of this sort were well informed as they often used events in the news to give their sorry tale a veneer of credibility. So, a man crippled in a recent pit disaster or bereft of his family and possessions in a much-publicised shipwreck was sure to get sympathy.

Despite all appearances to the contrary, beggars were far from the pathetic, isolated individuals they presented to the public. The professional beggar was part of a fellowship that shared best practice. It is no coincidence that accounts of beggars in different parts of the country are remarkably similar. The same characters appear in Manchester and Newcastle as in London and Bristol, always applying tried and tested methods. With such ingenuity in their ranks, it is hardly surprising that beggars seemed to clog all Manchester’s major thoroughfares. The extent of begging was such in 1818 that concerned citizens established the Society for the Suppression of Mendacity. Though later characterised as hardhearted and callous, its members were invariably active in charitable work and the Society itself provided much help for the genuinely needy.

Its view was that those who gave to beggars had no way of distinguishing the genuine from the bogus. As most beggars were professional scroungers, giving money did nothing for the deserving and rewarded idleness and dishonesty. ‘If you wish to relieve genuine poverty,’ it told the public, ‘you will find the means through the clergyman, the Little Sisters of the Poor or the relieving officer. In the streets you will find nothing but the professional toll takers, levying dues on personal weakness.’ The Society encouraged the public to issue street beggars with tickets, which they were to present at its offices. There the deserving got aid in the form of money, blankets and clothing. They also claimed to offer suitable employment to every able-bodied beggar. Yet even if the Society had eradicated adult beggars, there would still have been a grave problem.

Child beggars outnumbered adults. They enjoyed a degree of impunity not shared by adults. The police were loath to arrest them, as the magistrates were often at a loss how to treat them and usually sent them away with a warning, knowing full well that they would immediately resume begging. If a child’s parents were imprisoned for sending him begging, then the court sent the child to the workhouse. But the workhouse master was reluctant to take young children and had the magistrates committed every beggar to his care they would have swamped the poor law system.

The commonest form of begging in Manchester at this time involved a woman latching onto a victim and wailing a pitiable tale. So persistent was she that her actions amounted to blackmail. This aggressive begging was a major problem when Caminada tackled it. Shortly before eleven at night, the city’s most famous detective was walking along Oxford Street, when he encountered Mary Ann, universally known as ‘Soldier’ because of her legion tales of being abandoned by a faithless soldier, who appeared to be comforting a child swathed in her shawl. Unaware of Caminada, she latched onto a couple emerging from the Prince’s Theatre and immediately launched into her patter. She recounted the pitiful tale of a deserted wife who had walked all the way from Liverpool to find her wayward husband and now had no means of feeding or sheltering her hungry child. At this point Caminada intervened. The baby turned out to be a boy – and immediately took to his heels. His parents hired him out as a heart-rending prop for three pence a night. Mary Ann had so many previous convictions that the judge sentenced her to twelve months hard labour.

Mary Ann deserves more detailed consideration, as she is typical of many of Manchester’s habitual criminals of the period. She was a woman of many aliases. This, of course, was common among criminals of all sorts, who hoped to avoid the heavier penalties imposed on habitual offenders by changing their names. Mary Ann’s real name was Ann Ryan. Her offences included theft. When threatened with arrest she often resorted to violent resistance. On one occasion, when arrested for stealing corsets, she tried to fight off the police. Between 1873 and 1889 she accumulated convictions for begging, drunkenness, breach of the peace and being drunk and disorderly. One of the many professional beggars who hired children as a prop, she was in every respect the typical street beggar of the time.

James Bent, a policeman rightly renowned for his work for the poor, tells of a professional beggar operating in Davyhulme. He pretended to be a mute miner. The magistrate sentenced him to three months imprisonment. Another professional beggar posed as an invalid – he wore shoes on his hands and dragged himself along on his hands and knees. His punishment was six weeks. When Bent first started working in Pendleton he was amazed at the great number of beggars, many going from door to door. In middle class areas a servant invariably opened the door and usually offered food and drink.

Many beggars combined importuning with hawking or street entertainment as a pretext for hanging about while looking for the opportunity to steal from a passing cart or a shop’s footpath display. A great deal of this sort of petty crime was the work of beggars. The police estimated that two-thirds of all crime was down to vagrants.

In fact, many of these so-called vagrants were not homeless wanderers with no fixed abode. They lived and operated from one of the city’s countless lodging houses.

Flash Houses

The boy lay across a bench. Dirt smeared his face, exposed above the coat that covered him. The face of the girl who slept beside him stuck out from a bundle of rags. Upstairs, four beds completely filled one room. Couples occupied three of them and two criminals the fourth. Above them, clothes, like dead bats, hung from a line, choking the space above the sleepers. Damp had eaten the plaster from the walls, exposing the laths like a skeleton’s ribs, and patches of mildew blackened the ceiling.

In another room, fourteen people were sleeping on ‘filthy beds, heaped-up rags and mattress stuffing’, alive with horrors. ‘Pestilential vapours’ poisoned the room.

This is what Joseph Johnson found when he ventured into one of Manchester’s lodging houses. What was more appalling than the squalor, however, was the degeneracy of those who wallowed in such filth. When Johnson’s guide shone a torch on the sleepers, they opened their eyes to reveal ‘that snake-glitter, that oblique evidence of cunning’ that marks out the prostitutes, the convicts, the thieves and even ‘the children of tender years, old in crime’. And among all these were working men and women, people of good character. And their children.

Many of those who were not respectable sought to appear so. Prostitutes, for instance, claimed to be factory girls and dressed in what was almost a uniform – a blue Chambery gown, a red print jacket and a loose slip. The police called them ‘gow-girls’. Invariably they slept with their ‘fellows’ and often brought drunken swells back to the lodging house.

The convicts, according to Johnson, were ‘ticket of leave’ men, released early from penal servitude. According to Manchester’s Chief Constable, Palin, Manchester was a magnet for these criminals who were responsible for a great deal of the city’s crime.

All the commentators agreed: ‘low lodging houses’, as the newspapers liked to call them, or ‘flash houses’ as the public called them, generated crime. In our age of owner-occupiers, it is difficult to grasp the importance of the lodging house in the life of the city. The statistics for 1870 emphasise their role in working-class life. Manchester, with a population of 173,000 and Salford, with 83,000, had 214 lodging houses. At this time about one in every fourteen people living in the rookeries lived in a lodging house. Their number had declined from 472 in the previous decade as the authorities closed the worst.

At this time the council carried out a detailed survey of streets that made up a part of the Deansgate area, bordered by Peter Street, Deansgate, Great Bridgewater Street and Lower Mosley Street. An area of nineteen acres, this rectangle contained 853 houses, 713 of which were occupied. In sixty-eight of these houses, families lived in the cellars.

Of the families living there, one in three lived in a single room, sometimes home to seven people. The whole area was liberally sprinkled with lodging houses. Fleet Street and Lombard Street, in the centre, thronged with prostitutes during all the hours after dark and for a good part of the day. One of these streets housed 142 families, only thirty-six of which were classified as ‘clean’.

Yet amid all this squalor and defeat, there were decent people struggling to live honest and productive lives. In Swan Court, Wood’s Buildings, Walker’s Court, Cooper’s Row, Hamilton Place, Clay Street, McGinn’s Court, Hall’s Buildings and Allport Street almost all the families were clean and respectable. This is a testimony to all those whose everyday courage allowed them to live unremarkable lives in the most difficult of circumstances without ever coming to the notice of the authorities.

The situation was similar in Salford, though generally conditions there were better. There were, of course, black spots every bit as bad as the worst parts of Manchester. At one house in Silk Street, for instance, ten people lived in a cellar room. At a hovel in Barrow Court, eighteen people of various ages shared two beds. The focus of the house, as of all lodging houses, was the kitchen, where people cooked, warmed themselves and gossiped. A bench and a few tables were the only furniture.

Often children, many coaxing a mean existence from begging and street trading, shared these houses with hardened adult criminals and prostitutes. When they had money, they drank and gambled with the adults. In many cases they shared their beds with girls of their own age, who were their mistresses.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the lodging house was a symbol of everything that threatened respectability. It was a seedbed of crime, sin and disorder. It embodied the breakdown of the stable family, composed as it was of rootless individuals often living in defiance of every accepted standard of decency and morality.

It is impossible to exaggerate its importance in maintaining and driving crime in Manchester. It was the criminal’s abode, his labour exchange and the place where he converted his goods into cash. It acted as gang headquarters, a resort for wandering criminals, where they could be sure of a welcome, companionship, information about local conditions and help when released from prison.

All this was common knowledge with the result that complaints about the failure of the police to close lodging houses are standard fare in the letters pages of the city’s newspapers. The police response was twofold: they denied that they were failing to control these places and they tried to explain to the public that they were valuable sources of information.

Neither argument was convincing. Many informed members of the public still complained that the police were ‘tolerating’ these places, which were no less than academies of vice. Perhaps it was true the police did occasionally seize thieves there – but for every one it yielded, it trained 100. As early as 1851 the Common Lodging House Act tried to bring them under control. The police henceforward had powers of inspection and the authority to close those that fell below basic standards of decency and cleanliness. In Macclesfield alone the police closed 150.

In the euphoria that followed the Act the police turned out the occupants of many lodgings, dumping them on the city streets and immediately overwhelming the poor law authorities. The result was more people sleeping rough and an immediate change of police policy.

During the nineteenth century the ragbag of people who could not afford weekly rent – poor families, solitary women, abandoned children, and those too old to work – inevitably drifted to the lodging house. They were just one step above the workhouse. The unemployed labourers, the sacked domestics, beggars, jailbirds and tarts represented the full spectrum of this rainbow of misfortune. They were the abodes of the occasionally homeless, but also the rootless, the wanderers, the unattached, those without responsibilities or ties and those with nothing to lose.

Though in many ways conditions in the lodging house were more Spartan than in the workhouse, lodgers were free to come and go as they liked and behave more or less as they chose. The atmosphere was open and frank and the kitchen fire warm and gossipy. Yet it’s doubtful if the 1851 Act did much to improve the standard of the common lodging house. Accounts by journalists and social reformers in the 1870s and 1880s are almost identical to those before 1851. An investigation by the
Manchester Evening News
in the 1870s found that most of the poor still rented rooms in slums or lived in common lodging houses and that criminals of all sort, especially fences, still infested the latter. Fences ran many of these houses simply because they provided a perfect cover for the comings and goings of thieves. Lodging houses were the most important means of disposing of stolen goods – especially clothes and household goods – far more important than pubs or pawnshops. Though the individual items fenced may have been of little value, their aggregate value was considerable. Despite the obsession of the local press with the evils of these houses, the police were often loath to close them, as they were valuable sources of information. As many a hoary detective explained, at least with the boarding houses they knew exactly where to find their criminals.