Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (27 page)

The Herefordshire farmer was not the only countryman to discover Manchester was full of crooks and no place for an honest person. Many like him concluded there wasn’t an honest man in the city. In March 1884 a Cheshire farmer, having just arrived by train, was walking down Market Street, when someone asked him for directions.

‘No matter,’ said the inquirer, when the farmer explained he was a stranger in the city. ‘It’s my first time here, too.’

The two repaired to the nearest bar, where they fell into conversation with a third man, who mentioned that his father, recently dead, had left £400 for distribution among the poor of his native Cheshire. Before long, the recently bereaved son asks a favour: would his two new friends be prepared to distribute the money for him? He would be greatly indebted if each of them would distribute £200 to Cheshire’s deserving poor. He would, of course, recompense them for their trouble. Would £20 each be acceptable?

It went without saying that he would require securities, but that was a mere formality they could sort out later. They agreed to meet the following day in a pub on Oxford Road.

The next day the farmer arrived with his security – two Bank of England £100 notes in an envelope. The benefactor examined them, deftly switching them for two sheets of paper and then repaired to the toilet. After ten minutes his accomplice went to check what was amiss. By the time the farmer had realised what had happened the sharpers had cashed one of the notes for gold and smaller notes. Unfortunately for them, as was normal practice then, the cashier recorded the serial numbers of the notes and was able to give a good description of the men. One of them had signed his name Henry Johnson on the back of the note and Caminada recognised him from the cashier’s description. Though the Manchester police searched all Johnson’s haunts, they found no trace of him. Later some of the money turned up in London and detectives traced the second £100 note to a notorious fence based in Boulogne whose clients were English and French railway and steamboat thieves.

Some time later, Caminada spotted Johnson in Manchester. Wisely the con man had changed his appearance, in particular shaving off his distinctive whiskers. This presented a major problem, as the detective feared the witnesses might not identify him. He decided to wait and watch.

His opportunity came in an unexpected fashion. Caminada was in Oak Street, near Smithfield Market close to the Old Fleece Inn, a haunt of thieves. A fight broke out and when the detective intervened, Johnson, now looking more like his old self, fled. Caminada chased and caught him. Subsequently witnesses identified him and despite his forceful denials the Assize Court sentenced him to ten years’ penal servitude. Johnson deserved his fate. How much more deserving of prison were those who systematically robbed the kindly and the generous?

Helping the Ragged School

Whereas there is something distasteful about cheating the gullible, cheating the charitable is despicable. Criminals, however, exploit every situation in which their victim is likely to be off guard. Who is more worthy of our trust than someone who devotes himself to helping those in need? How could anyone doubt the purity of his intentions?

Bogus charities were a rich source of income for swindlers. In an age when Christian generosity was an esteemed quality, when those not in need felt a moral obligation to help the poor, when many wealthy people actively sought worthy outlets for their charitable impulses, the callous swindler had access to untold riches. By the standards of our cynical world, late nineteenth century people seem naïve. But there was no government regulation of charities then and the only safeguard against malpractice was the integrity of the organisers. When this was absent there was endless scope for abuse.

One particularly despicable case of 1888 illustrates this. James W. Barlow’s (real name Chadwick) request for subscriptions to a ragged school and mission in Canning Street resulted in many generous subscriptions. One family gave £30. Caminada traced Chadwick to his correspondence address only to find he had fled. An informant then told the detective he was in Fallowfield. When Caminada swooped, he captured not only his quarry but also incriminating documents. Chadwick had prepared an elaborate account of the mission’s activities for distribution to current and prospective donors. He was also in the process of compiling the charity’s balance sheet. In the Manchester Assize Court it came out that Chadwick had lived very comfortably for many years on the proceeds of charity. To lend the scam further credibility he had even persuaded one of its most prominent benefactors to accept the position of honorary president. Without having seen the school, he agreed.

Chadwick got nine months with hard labour. There is no doubt the courts treated him and his like with remarkable leniency. Anyone convicted of producing counterfeit money, however, could expect a long sentence.

Coining

By the 1850s coining was a growing underworld industry. No longer a capital offence, its appeal was greater than ever. Coining was seldom a full-time job, usually just one of many strings to the resourceful crook’s bow.

The coiner seldom tried anything as adventurous as making gold sovereigns as they were valuable enough to attract scrutiny and would pass muster only if they contained a high percentage of gold. The production of silver coins, however, was something of a cottage industry in the rookeries. Sensible coiners used women to pass their wares in city centre shops while they peddled their handiwork at fairs, race meetings, markets and above all pubs in the slums.

In 1869 there was a spate of arrests in Manchester for passing base coins. The police sent Caminada in search of the coiner. At this stage all the detective knew was that a shadowy character, Brocky Dave, was keeping company with a renowned coiner. Caminada followed his normal procedure – shadowing the suspect to discover his associates. What he discovered seemed to confirm his suspicions. However, in order to secure a conviction for coining it was usually necessary to capture the suspect either in the act or on premises with the means of producing the counterfeit. This is exactly what he did when he arrested Brocky Dave, Raggey Burke and Scotch Jimmy. All three appeared before the Manchester Assizes on 15 January 1870 and were duly convicted. As always the court took a dim view of anything that might undermine confidence in the currency. Jimmy’s sentence of seven years’ penal servitude seemed moderate in comparison with the fourteen years dished out to his partners.

Brocky was an incorrigible counterfeiter, with convictions going back over twenty years. Raggey, too, was no stranger to the treadmill. His previous sentences included both a four- and a ten-year stretch, during one of which he orchestrated a riot in Dartmoor. His punishment on that occasion was a flogging.

Far more ambitious, however, were those who produced paper money. Forgery was in fashion in the 1880s and Manchester was at the centre of it.

Big Jim

Note forgers were at the very top of their profession and generally went for the £5 and £10 notes. Yet even with these smaller denominations few attained the degree of competence needed to produce facsimiles good enough to deceive a bank. The major problem was the watermark. Even the best forgeries were not proof against a drop of water, which dissolved the fake watermark. Besides, the smallest denomination in circulation was the £5 note, sufficiently uncommon to attract scrutiny.

Large-scale production of notes required machinery weighing over a ton and almost impossible to install and operate secretly. For this reason most of the best notes were the work of small businesses that also produced legitimate printing. Most of those who made a success of this were based in London and Birmingham. In 1861 they went a long way towards swamping the country with forged notes. They managed to get a considerable amount of paper from the Laverstoke Paper Mill, the supplier of paper to the Bank of England since the mid-eighteenth century. The moving force behind the conspiracy was James Griffiths, a master forger who had made a very comfortable living from his craft for seventeen years. Just as he was in a position to make himself fabulously rich, the police swooped. The court dished out sentences of twenty and twenty-five years to William Burnett. The severest penalty they reserved for Griffiths – penal servitude for life.

In 1887 Caminada dealt with a case of banknote forgery, which is worth recounting because it tells us a great deal about the characters who peopled the Manchester underworld, how they operated and their links with other parts of the country. Reports of forged notes reached Manchester from all over the country. A number of banks offered large rewards for the arrest of those responsible.

At the time Johnny the Lawyer, known for the legal advice he gave fellow criminals, was in Manchester, often in the company of Big Jim. Jim had a rich and singularly unsuccessful criminal past which had taken him all over the country to many of Britain’s prisons. He paid for a Christmas hamper swindle he ran in Birmingham with five years’ penal servitude. Later he served ten years for forgery and two months for receiving stolen goods. None of this deterred him for he subsequently served five years for obtaining £5,000 by means of a forged letter of credit. Once more at liberty, he was ostensibly making a living as a shopkeeper. He and Johnny the Lawyer spent a great deal of time in the company of another shopkeeper, a man who had served fourteen years’ penal servitude.

Reading between the lines of Caminada’s account and the newspaper reports, it is obvious that the detective knew, through his informants, that the trio was responsible for forged notes currently in circulation. Proving it, however, was an entirely different matter. Even when a man matching Big Jim’s description passed a forged cheque at a Manchester bank, Caminada was unable to hold him for lack of evidence. The detective was reduced to impotent fuming. Passing forged cheques was a highly specialised field. No scruffy thug with a cauliflower ear and a nasal mumble could hope to pull it off. It needed a presentable fraud who exuded integrity. It also required careful planning.

At this time cheques were in the form of blank sheets and it was impossible to work this fraud without the details of someone with an active and substantial bank account. The easiest way to get this was to engage an attorney to recover a small debt. The attorney invariably passed on the money to his client in the form of a cheque, thereby providing the forger with a sample of his signature and details of his account.

One of Caminada’s more successful drives against forgers occurred on another occasion when he heard that Johnny the Lawyer, Bottle Wilson, Charlie the Barman, Jack the Carpenter and Starve were drinking together in Harpurhey. All had convictions for serious commercial scams. Their common interest on this occasion, however, was forged notes, many of which were surfacing in the Wakefield area. This time when Caminada swooped, he found the necessary evidence to sentence Johnny to seven years, the Barman to ten and Bottle to fourteen. His disappointment that Jack and Starve went free was tempered by the two rewards he received.

A more direct way to get money from a bank is to walk in and rob it, a crime for which the USA is famous.

Dithering Yanks

Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 attracted many American and continental con men who saw in the British mood of celebration an opportunity. Manchester, as one of the country’s great commercial centres and host to a celebratory exhibition, attracted more than its fair share.

Two New York gangsters, both with convictions for robbery and burglary, robbed banks in London and Liverpool before arriving in Manchester. They fixed on the King Street branch of the Manchester and Liverpool District Bank as their next target. Despite their wide-ranging criminal experience, they proved singularly inept bank robbers. They spent so much time dithering near the bank and aroused so much suspicion that before they got round to robbing it the manager summoned Caminada who promptly arrested them. As with many criminals, looking suspicious proved the downfall of the American bank robbers. A small number of crooks, however, depended for their success on looking seedy. Among these were the phantom pornographers.

The street trade in pornography was a common scam in the Manchester of the 1870s. A sealed envelope and the promise of salacious pleasure for only 6d was difficult to resist. The more reluctant the buyer, the greater the depravity promised. When the purchaser returned home and with trembling hands tore open the envelope, he found only a missionary tract or the pages of an old newspaper. This only worked when the goods were sold in the street, where the buyer was too ashamed to open them and check the nature of the contents.

Ringing the Changes

In any scam effrontery is everything. This was particularly so with the ‘ringing the changes’ fiddle, the beauty of which was its simplicity. Audacity was all that was required. Working as a team, two men went into a shop where one bought something for less than a shilling and proffered a sovereign in payment. On receiving the change, his companion said, ‘Give him that back. Take it out of this,’ offering a half sovereign to the shop assistant. As the assistant gave the second man his change, the first said, ‘Here, I have a shilling. Give him back his half sovereign and take it out of this.’ In most cases the assistant returns both the sovereign and the half sovereign without claiming the change for either.

Simple as this sounds, this scam invariably succeeded when worked by skilled operators. One team of particularly slick swindlers pulled it off forty times in a single week in 1884, often six times in a single day. They were a perfect team, both well-dressed gentlemen outwardly respectable. One was slow talking and easy-going. The other claimed to be a dealer in antiquities. Both got nine months.