Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (26 page)

Melville placed an advertisement in the local papers: ‘Wanted £16 for two months. £2 interest will be paid; good security. No loan co. need apply.’ Attracted by the generous rate of interest, many people responded. Having met Melville, any reservations they may have had evaporated. The epitome of the substantial businessman, he seemed a model of integrity and was also witty, charming and patently honest. Besides, he was offering excellent security – a warrant on a case of cigars deposited with a bonded warehouse in Salford. Beck’s involvement came later, when the disgruntled lender, having been repeatedly fobbed off, finally sought to realise his security. At this point Beck offered to buy the warrant. This, of course, was merely a delaying tactic, which ended when the lender was totally entangled in a web of warrants, promissory notes and solemn undertakings that never materialised. Beck seems to have convinced himself that he could string along his victims indefinitely. When one called upon him, embarrassed at having to ask for his money, Beck greeted him like an old friend. Clasping his hand in both his, he smiled and joked, asked about the family and soon had the victim feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself.

Eventually though even their charm ceased to work. They stood in the dock, unlikely looking criminals, charged with conspiracy to defraud. Beck had orders against him going back over a decade and had never paid a single penny. This time they both paid with two years’ hard labour.

Just as Melville and Beck depended on charm, Reynor & Co. relied on effrontery. When Caminada investigated them, in response to the complaints of unpaid clients, it was immediately apparent they were operating a variation of the long-firm scam. They rented offices all over the city in different names. Each office provided another with references, on the basis of which they opened bank accounts. At their Watling Street office they received goods from Italy – oil, leather strapping, lace and fancy goods – for which they never paid. When their creditors began to close in, they abandoned this office, moved to another and continued the scam from there.

When Caminada visited one of their many offices, he met only affronted innocence – quickly followed by a solicitor’s letter informing him that he had no right to harass his clients. This solicitor was in fact one of the team operating the scam. But it wasn’t only their suppliers they didn’t pay. When a disgruntled landlord tried to evict them from their prestigious offices in Silver Street, off Portland Street, they barricaded the doors against him. Later they forestalled the bailiffs by the same means. This method did not work against Inspector Caminada, nor did it prevent him from gathering sufficient evidence to convict them at Manchester Assizes on 28 February 1890. The judge sentenced each of those involved to fifteen months’ hard labour.

After a long period of trouble-free swindling, they thought they were fireproof. It was as if they believed they really were operating a legitimate business. Yet these were not the most sophisticated of Manchester’s white-collar crooks. That accolade belongs to card sharps.

The Magsman

Many of the magsman frauds sound totally unconvincing. We find it difficult to believe that anyone but an imbecile would fall for them. This is because no account can convey the key element common to all of these scams – the psychological subtlety that draws the victim into a relationship of trust with the man who is about to fleece him.

Central to this is the con man’s approval of his victim, expressed in an ingenuous smile, a pat on the back or a word of praise as the dupe wins during the build-up to his inevitable ruin. When the venue is a pub, the trickster buys all the drink, insisting his new friend must not put his hand in his pocket. How could anyone distrust such a generous, friendly person? Besides, the dupe owes it to this man to try his luck – it’s the least he can do. What harm is there in a friendly bet? he reasons. Things are going well and he is winning. It wouldn’t be sporting to stop while ahead and walk away with his winnings without giving his friend a chance to win back some of his money. Later, when he is losing, the trickster offers the dupe such favourable opportunities to get back all he has lost that he cannot resist. After all, he surmises, with double-or-quits odds he can’t possibly lose indefinitely.

But he does.

More difficult to spot were the sharpers who operated a variety of racecourse scams. One of the most common involved a team of three or four, one posing as an unofficial bookie – offering better odds than the legitimate bookies – the others as punters. They usually latched onto their dupe at the bar. At first he wins. Then, of course, he suffers a major setback and the bookie and the punters turn nasty. The magsman’s skill is not so much in his sleight of hand but in his disarming smile, the inept way he shuffles the cards, his ponderous movements, his generosity, the little confidences he shares, the way he makes his victim feel a shrewd man of the world whose company and opinions he values. He operated wherever there was a crowd to work. A race meeting, fair or carnival guaranteed a large number of punters in a frivolous mood and game for a wager.

At its most basic this scam required only a folding table, three thimbles and a dried pea, which the magsman was able to pick up under his thumbnail. The three-card trick and loaded dice are variations. A second man, working with the magsman, betting heavily and winning, adds greatly to the credibility. Ideally, however, the sharps work in a group of four. One throws a blanket down on the footpath and his two companions, posing as by-passers, attract attention to the game. Another accomplice, pretending not to know the others, draws the dupe into the game. In one case Caminada recounts the dupe lost his gold watch and the magsman told him he could get it back for £20. He gave the Millstone Hotel on Thomas Street as his address. The dupe went to the police and Caminada watched the hotel from the cellar of an unoccupied house opposite. It wasn’t long before he spotted characters who had been involved in this sort of fraud before. Eventually, having established they were the villains, Caminada swooped and after a struggle arrested all four.

The subsequent court case made it clear why the four fought so fiercely against arrest. The Manchester Assize Court took a dim view of what was a widespread type of fraud and sentenced each man to five years’ penal servitude. Their previous convictions amounted to what the court regarded as damning form. They had served time for conspiring together to defraud a gentleman of his gold watch and chain guard worth £30. For this they each got five years’ penal servitude. Individually, one had eight previous convictions, two others seven, and the fourth four, all for similar forms of dishonesty.

Does the number of their convictions suggest that they were inept? Or was it that the proceeds were so great in Manchester that they could not resist staying too long? Either way they came to regret the time they spent in the city, unlike those who operated a more lucrative scam and escaped unscathed.

Gizza Job

Most of us have reluctant admiration for rogues. While not approving of what they do, we can’t help but admire their skill and audacity. However, those who worked the employment scam don’t enjoy this indulgent attitude. Theirs was a particularly despicable racket because it exploited people who were seeking work and prepared to spend the little money they had to find it. The victims in this 1887 case were domestic servants, many young country girls, away from home for the first time.

This scam robbed both the domestic in search of work and the prospective employer. Like so many of these ruses, it started with an advert in a local newspaper.

Replies went to a prestigious address in Piccadilly, where two outwardly respectable ladies carried on their business with a combination of effrontery and blind optimism. Despite mounting complaints as they failed to arrange any employment, they carried on taking fees. Caminada’s enquiries showed that these demure ladies had fooled at least 100 people, extorting from each a £1 registration fee – a month’s wages for a domestic. Each served four months’ hard labour.

A similar scam used a house in Chorlton-on-Medlock to which respondents sent 5s to prove they were genuinely interested in a position as a farm bailiff. After a number of complaints the police watched the house and eventually arrested a woman who called twice daily to collect the post. When arrested she had £11 in letters on her. The organiser, however, got away with £700.

The lottery scam is similar to the employment scam in that it takes advantage of people’s implicit trust in anything that appears in a newspaper and uses the post as a means of distancing the swindler from his victims. Lots of shops ran lotteries which promised substantial prizes, often as much as £100. Many were fraudulent and the only winner was the organiser, who often made vast sums.

After receiving a number of complaints about one particular lottery, Caminada traced the organisers to a postal address in Toxteth Park, Liverpool. He hid in the house for three days and when eventually someone came to collect the post he followed him to his home, a sumptuous residence, proof that the owner was living in what Caminada describes as ‘magnificent style’. It subsequently came to light that the occupier, a clerk on a weekly wage of £1.10s, had recently spent over £3,000 furnishing his home. The large prizes promised to punters were bogus – he gave a few small ones to shops that were doing well.

As despicable as the operator of an employment scam was Walter Hamilton, another exploiter of those decent poor people anxious to improve their lot by spending their hard-earned coppers. When it comes to unprincipled dishonesty, Hamilton is right up there among the worst scoundrels who ever trod the streets of Manchester. During 1884 he delivered a number of public lectures, advocating emigration as a guaranteed way for the poor to improve their lot. He placed advertisements for the British Employment, Emigration and Aid Society, an organisation which, he claimed, provided all its subscribers with employment or the means to emigrate and set themselves up in business. It operated from an impressive address on Princess Street. To verify its bona fides the Society claimed testimonials from prominent clergymen, including the Bishop of Manchester. Of course, none of this was true. What is true, however, is that emigration was in vogue at this time and many legitimate societies did help poor people to make a better life abroad. All sorts of organisations supported emigrants – even trade unions helped to pay their members’ costs. It is understandable that Hamilton’s scam deceived many people. He even interviewed and appointed a number of agents who went about the city recruiting members and collecting subscriptions. He paid none of them and while they were busy taking money from the unsuspecting, Hamilton simultaneously ran three other scams, posing as an employment agent, an insurance agent and an investment consultant. In the former capacity he targeted vulnerable women, promising marriage. None of these romantic entanglements, however, prevented him from absconding with his landlady’s daughter and setting up home with her in lodgings on Denmark Road, Moss Side.

When Caminada investigated complaints about Hamilton he soon discovered the charming philanderer and compulsive liar had appeared in court on similar charges in 1883. On that occasion he escaped conviction, even though he had an 1882 conviction for obtaining money by false pretences. In 1884, however, his luck ran out. Manchester October Assizes gave him five years’ penal servitude and three years’ police supervision.

No sooner had he served this sentence than he resumed his career as a financial adviser with a special interest in his female clients. On this occasion, however, it was not his financial dishonesty that proved his undoing. When he began a sentence of six years’ penal servitude in 1894 it was for bigamy.

Ironically, Hamilton, one of the most repugnant of Manchester scoundrels, remained irresistible to the women he duped.

Kiss and Tell

Not that women were always the victims of criminal deception. A number of Manchester ladies were as bad as any of their male counterparts.

As with their male equivalents, it is difficult for us to feel anything but contempt for them as they happily destroyed men’s lives in order to line their own pockets. A young man complained to Bent of a woman extorting money from him. He’d had a liaison with the wife of a sea captain who was away from home for between three and six months at a time. When the relationship ended the man married. Now the captain’s wife – currently shacked up with a released prisoner – claimed the young man had fathered her child. She demanded maintenance, threatening to reveal all to his new bride.

Bent came across many varieties of this scam. Any young man who made a good marriage was vulnerable – even when the allegations were totally false. One woman made an excellent living out of it. She usually waited until a man was about to marry. Many men, though totally blameless, nevertheless made payments for many years.

Bumpkin Scam

Some criminals were so prolific that they constituted their own crime wave. One such was Jimmy Gayner from Failsworth, who in a long and unsuccessful career served 100 prison sentences. Though a failure, no one could accuse him of lacking originality. In one scam he operated he swindled a Herefordshire farmer out of three Ayrshire cows – without leaving Manchester.

Posing as a big landowner he wrote to the farmer, claiming his bailiff assured him that a large quantity of grass on his estate would benefit from the farmer’s Ayrshires grazing on it. Each animal was worth £30. The gullible farmer supplied the cattle, only later realising his mistake. When he sought Bent’s help, the policeman gave him advice, which was hardly legal even in the 1870s: he told him to break into the thief’s barn and retrieve his cattle.