Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (6 page)

The Birmingham riot was one of the most violent. His meetings there attracted crowds of up to 100,000 which he incited to attack Catholic churches, schools, convents and homes throughout the city. A crowd of between 50,000 and 100,000 people gathered, causing considerable damage to property. Overwhelmed, the Mayor had to reinforce the police with 400 soldiers, including 100 cavalry together with 600 special constables. Far more important, however, was the new intolerant atmosphere these incidents created and the accompanying inter-communal violence. This soon reached Manchester and its environs, the centre of Catholicism in the north of England. In January 1868 it took the authorities two days to quell an anti-Catholic riot in Stalybridge.

In March 1868 a crowd of 6,000 gathered on Rochdale’s Cronkeyshaw Common to hear Murphy’s tirade. The authorities, however, arrested him and thereby prevented the planned series of lectures in the town. However, this did nothing to stop religious violence in Rochdale. A Protestant mob attacked St. John’s Church and the parochial house, the home of Fr. John Dowling, in Ann Street, where a force of Catholics had gathered to repulse them. On release from prison Murphy set up camp at railway sidings on Milkstone Road, where he continued to inflame his followers. It wasn’t long before the mob, brandishing burning crosses, descended on The Mount (Mount Pleasant) and other Catholic areas. Again St. John’s was the focus of the assault.

Inevitably Murphy’s visit to Ashton-under-Lyne in 1868 resulted in disorder. Two hundred Irishmen took pre-emptive action: they attacked a meeting of Murphyites and Orangemen. Not to be outdone in violence, Murphy gathered a counter-mob of 500, armed with scythes, pokers, swords, bayonets and revolvers. As they descended on the town’s Irish quarter, over 100 Irish Orangemen, many from Ashton, swelled their ranks. They swept aside the police barrier and as they stormed the rows of terraced houses, women filled their aprons with stones as they prepared to defend their homes. But they were no match for the rabid hordes who smashed windows and kicked in doors, before making bonfires of the contents of the houses. They gutted 111 homes, destroying every stick of furniture.

Sectarian hatred did not inspire all the rioters. According to newspaper reports, many were local ‘layabouts’ and ‘bullyboys’, delighted to take advantage of the opportunity to give vent to their resentment against Paddies and Popery. When they reached St. Anne’s they broke into Fr. Crumbleholme’s presbytery and wrecked it. The church was next. They smashed the altar, stripped the building of statues and paintings and destroyed them all. They then smashed the windows and the contents of the parish school. From there they marched on St. Mary’s, where the parish priest, Monsignor James Provost Beesley was saying evening Mass. When he heard of the advancing mob, he sent the women home while he and twenty parishioners prepared to defend the church by barricading themselves in. Though they withstood the siege for two hours, the church suffered such extensive damage that it was later demolished. The damage to houses, shops, church and the parish school was such that many years later one observer likened it to the devastation on parts of the Western Front during the Great War.

The bitterness of the riots lingered long after the event. Catholics were indignant that, according to them, the police made no attempt to quell the mob and seemed to be concerned only to restrict them to their part of the town. When the police, aided by troops, eventually restored order, the anti-Catholic elements felt aggrieved. They alleged that a Father Daley of Rochdale shot and wounded one of the leaders of the riot, Rueben Bailey. The Assize Court jury acquitted the priest by the narrowest of margins, but Bailey’s supporters used the case to fuel anti-Catholic feeling.

When Murphy announced his intention to visit Manchester, Irishmen organised to protect Catholic buildings. The violence he sparked in Ashton, Bury, Blackburn and Rochdale had already led the Bolton authorities to ban him. St. Francis’ monastery in West Gorton, in the process of construction, had recently attracted local hostility and was clearly a target for Murphy’s hordes. The extent of the fear Murphy inspired is shown by the decision of Manchester’s Chief Constable, Captain William Palin, to meet him at the railway station on his arrival in Manchester. He asked the rabble-rouser not to deliver his planned speech. But Murphy had more in common with Ian Paisley than his inveterate hatred of Catholics. He adamantly asserted his right to free speech, insisting that no Papist savages would prevent him alerting the British people to the dangers of Popery. Chief Constable Palin, however, was intent on making Murphy’s stay as uncomfortable as possible. He searched him and found a ten-chamber revolver and a knuckle-duster, which he described as ‘one of the most formidable weapons I have seen for some time’.

Murphy had hired a lecture room on Cooke Street, off Stretford Road, not 300 yards from St. Winifred’s Catholic Church, but his arrest prevented him from lecturing. On 1 September 1868, William Murphy appeared before the Manchester city magistrates charged with inciting a breach of the peace. On this occasion the actions of the police prevented disorder but its anticipation heightened tensions and once more accentuated the difference between the Irish and their neighbours.

Yet for all this it is wrong to think that the Irish lived in isolated, embattled enclaves surrounded by hostility. In many ways they were distinctive and inward-looking, bound together by values not shared by their neighbours. Yet even the most Irish sections of the city were never homogeneous ghettos and their occupants were always part of a wider working class community and shared many of its values.

In particular they shared the fierce loyalty to the street and neighbourhood that was common to Mancunians. And when it came to ideas of masculinity, they subscribed fully to the belief that a man had to be hard and had to show his hardness in combat.

It’s not surprising the Irish played a big part in scuttling – the violent street disorder that marked much of this period. Some of the era’s most notable thugs were Irish. Among the most notorious were Broughton’s Jimmy O’Neill, Red Shelley from the Adelphi, Jerry Hoddy in Greengate and Thomas Calligan, the king of the Hulme scuttlers. Apart from being Irish, there was nothing to distinguish them from their English counterparts. They shared the same fierce loyalty to the streets in which they grew up and were neither more nor less brutal than other scuttlers – and no less committed to ‘hardness’ as the measure of a man’s worth.

The Irish gave and received the customary kindnesses that came under the umbrella of ‘neighbourliness’. Yet there was a limit to this. Like stones in mortar, the Irish were part of the mix of working class culture, yet always distinguishable. The Church discouraged ‘mixed marriages’, between a Catholic and a non-Catholic, which in practice meant between an Irish person and a non-Irish. Irish antipathy to the English also meant that most preferred to marry ‘one of their own’. But more than anything else it was the stigma of marrying an Irish Catholic that greatly reduced the frequency of such marriages. Even in the meanest Manchester and Salford slum, when overt anti-Irish violence had virtually disappeared, marrying an Irish Catholic involved a great loss of status. Nor did the absence of violence mean that the Irish lost their aura of criminality. Figures for both arrests and imprisonment show that they still played a big part in crime.

3

Crime

Looking After Yourself

No description of Manchester’s image is complete without mentioning its reputation for crime. From the 1840s onwards people assumed that everyone from Manchester was a thief. It was a city of rogues, prostitutes, con men, thieves, professional beggars, frauds, charlatans, hucksters, spivs, burglars, quacks, pickpockets, counterfeiters and card sharps. There was no dishonesty, no depravity, no form of violence known to man, that was not practised on Manchester’s streets.

Yet even the most prejudiced observer had to admit that not every Mancunian was an inveterate rogue. In reality there were as many fine gradations in working class society as there were pubs in Manchester.

In 1851 Victoria visited Manchester. In her journal she expressed her satisfaction with the visit. She was delighted with ‘the order and good behaviour of the people’, the most impressive she had seen in her ‘many progressions through the capitals and cities’ of her kingdom. This favourable impression echoed the mid-century optimism of middle class Manchester. The respectable working man was subscribing to the self-help philosophy and the cooperative movement and not the revolutionary societies that terrified Europe’s propertied classes and threatened to undermine social order.

It is difficult to exaggerate the allure of respectability in the nineteenth century. It was the chief aspiration of all those outside the solid middle class and the aristocracy whose claim to respectability was unquestionable. Within the working class there were distinctions – as clear as the distinction between the rag picker and royalty – separating the ‘respectable’ working family from the ‘rough’ and the ‘common’. The extent to which one was clean, honest, industrious, sober and chaste was the measure of respectability. These were the traditional working class values. Being feckless, idle, improvident and self-indulgent led to the loss of respectability and a downward slide into ostracism. Those who were not respectable merged into the criminal underworld. This is one of the reasons why many commentators saw crime as a moral problem.

The respectable man believed education was the way to improve himself and his family. The focus of his life outside work was the home – not the pub. He believed in moderation, especially in drink. Abstemiousness was an aspect of his commitment to thrift and self-sufficiency. He was courteous and polite, quiet and self-effacing. Yet working people were proud it was they who had made Britain the greatest industrial power in the world and built the foundations of the British Empire. Similarly, they took pride in their work and the skills it required – especially if they were craftsmen.

Respectable working people were sober and clean. They dressed modestly, went to church and restricted their sexual activity to the confines of marriage. They worked hard and their recreations were worthy – they pursued improving and healthy hobbies and didn’t confine themselves to the frivolous. The respectable had proper regard for morals and morality. They were self-sufficient and independent, relying on their own resources. The respectable paid their own way, looked after themselves and their families. The philosophy of self-help was a version of respectability. The respectable did not get drunk, did not resort to obscenities, dressed tidily and kept themselves and their homes clean and neat. Most of all, they were law-abiding.

The rough or common were the opposite of all these things. Thrift and foresight were alien to them – they lived for the here and now, for drink and gambling, for a ‘sing-song’ and a ‘bit of a do’. They squandered their money and lived a hand to mouth existence. They fought and cursed. They rejected authority and fell out with the foreman and the employer and had no respect for the police or the minister. But what most separated them from their respectable neighbours was their excessive concern with proving their masculinity. Status within their section of the working class was very much tied up with being ‘hard’. This more than anything was the measure of masculinity. A man who could hold his own in a scrap and take a beating when outnumbered, while giving a good account of himself, merited respect. He would, of course, reap vengeance and thereby retain his honour and his status. He stood for no slight on his masculinity and was quick to avenge affronts. Closely allied to this was the importance of holding one’s ale. A man who could drink a large quantity of beer without showing any ill effects thereby affirmed his masculinity.

The respectable maintained his status by fulfilling his role as a breadwinner. His status lay in providing for his family by his own honest endeavours. He prided himself on never having to depend on charity and on being financially self-sufficient, just as those who were not respectable prided themselves on being physically self-sufficient. Those who measured themselves by their ability to scrap were by no means eccentric. Fighting was an everyday part of working class life. A man who was challenged had to accept the challenge or else lose face and put up with relentless taunting and mockery. The fight was in public – usually the street – and watched by a large crowd.

The street was important to all working people. They were people of the streets, especially the poor and less respectable. The respectable used the streets only for travelling to and from work, church and the shops. Working people’s children played there but anyone loitering in the streets, especially at night, was suspect. The noise, bustle and dirt amazed visitors to working class areas. The street was the workplace of the pedlar, the knife-grinder, the tumbler, the dustman, the sweep, the carter and the prostitute. The street was the slum-dweller’s village green, the child’s playground and an extension to his cramped home. How a person appeared on the street was an infallible guide to respectability. Flashy or scanty clothes, too much exposed breast, the absence of corsets, untidy hair, dirty linen – all spoke of being common.

As for boys and young men, the extent to which they went in for ‘larking about’ or kidding was a measure of their respectability. This took many forms but generally it involved aggressive repartee, practical jokes, illicit smoking, drinking and raucous singing and horseplay. It was a hazardous activity. Every week during the 19th century foremen in Manchester engineering works sacked an average of three apprentices for larking about. Larking about on the streets was designed to make something happen – to create excitement. It gave rise to crazes and fads, as short-lived as they were dangerous. So at one time a common lark was to push one of your mates through a shop window.