Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (7 page)

This sort of thing, together with street gambling and loitering on corners after dark, became a focus of police activity during the 1890s. The result was violence against the police. Those involved in this war of attrition with the police were at the bottom end of the social ladder, where the ‘common’ verged on the underworld. There was no clear-cut dividing line where one started and the other ended. One shaded into the other as imperceptibly as autumn into winter.

But regardless of their position in the social hierarchy they all shared an insatiable passion for the same thing – the spectacle of death.

Be It On Your Head

He smashed her skull like a Fabergé egg under a boot. He clubbed her with a poker – solid iron, a yard long and an inch thick – with such force that it buckled in his hand.

Sentenced to hang, Tim Flaherty plunged to his death outside Salford’s New Bailey prison in the mild spring air of an April Saturday in 1868. The pushing, clawing crowd, many who had been there since the night before, were not disappointed. A fifty-strong gang of youths jeered Flaherty when he appeared on the scaffold.

‘Where’s your poker, Tim?’ they called. ‘You’ll need it to poke the fires of hell.’

Throughout the night as they marched up and down singing ‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ and an obscene version of ‘Glory Hallelujah’, their shrill voices bounced off the prison walls. This incident captures many of the characteristics of Mancunians at this time. They were adamantly unsentimental to the extent of lacking basic human compassion. The death of a criminal was not an occasion for empathy – it was a time to delight in the prospect of a bad lot getting what he deserved. There was a great deal of bravado in this display, yet it announced to the world that they held nothing sacred and feared nothing, not even death.

This combination of callous indifference, cocky defiance and calculated disregard for the opinions of their betters sums up the spirit of Mancunians in the second half of the nineteenth century. These characteristics have endured to the present day. Yet when we look back on Victorian England, we tend to see not this brutality but stability, security and good order. Despite all the evidence to the contrary we imagine a world in which faith and morality ruled, in which people knew their place. We see the family as the centre of a well-ordered society bolstered by decency, decorum and patriotism, leavened by pride in a great Empire and a navy that ruled the waves. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. For all their smug self-satisfaction and moral certainties, the Victorians were profoundly insecure. They felt they were sitting on a volcano that might erupt at any time. They saw themselves as living through a time of perilous change and uncertainty.

Communists, anarchists and socialists were at large in every country of the world, threatening kings and governments. Nowhere were they more audacious than in Ireland, at the heart of the Empire. In Manchester itself, in broad daylight, Fenians murdered a policeman and snatched their leader from the grasp of the authorities. Then there were the terrible uncertainties of trade recessions that struck the country with sickening regularity. They plunged millions into desperation and threatened the fabric of society. The cotton famine of the 1860s was only the most extreme of many, including those of 1867-1870 and 1878-1880.

And death stood at everyone’s shoulder. It was ever present: the death of children, of mothers in childbirth, of great swathes of the city when typhus struck. Contagious disease was no respecter of persons. It even claimed Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort. A man who tore his finger on a rose bush might die of septicaemia.

Then, of course, there was crime. Crime was such an intrinsic part of Victorian life that people took it for granted. It was something people had to tolerate. For the most part they regarded it as unchangeable, like the climate. This, however, does not mean that people did not worry about it. The letters pages of local newspapers demonstrate that crime was a cause of serious concern during the whole of this period. This was particularly so in Manchester, which was widely regarded as the crime capital of Britain.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that crime was worse in Manchester than in any comparable city. This evidence is of two types. First there are the crime statistics.

Crime statistics are notoriously difficult to interpret. When Disraeli said, ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics,’ he could well have been thinking of crime statistics. Faced with damning statistics in 1868, Manchester’s Chief Constable William Palin made a valiant attempt to counter the unfavourable interpretation put on these figures and the resulting criticism of the efficiency of the city force. Yet the figures prove crime was a major problem and show why the city was a criminal’s paradise.

If we compare Manchester with its nearest equivalent city, Liverpool, we find that in every respect the great port was better than Manchester. Manchester had four times Liverpool’s number of receivers of stolen goods and five times the number of houses used by them. In tramps’ lodging houses – ‘a fertile source of crime’ – Manchester far exceeded her neighbour. Similarly, Manchester had two-and-a-half times as many vagrants as Liverpool.

During this period only five per cent of crimes committed in Manchester resulted in conviction, whereas for the whole of England and Wales the figure was twenty-nine per cent and for Liverpool it was fourteen per cent. As for serious crime, the situation was even worse. In Manchester only six per cent resulted in conviction, compared with thirty-six in Birmingham, forty-five in Leeds, fifty-three in Sheffield and twenty-two per cent in London. Yet the Manchester force should have done better than that of other forces because its ratio of police to citizens was more generous and pay and conditions of service – though poor and a cause of ineffectiveness – were better than those in nearly all the northern authority forces.

In Manchester the crime rate was 1.86 per cent of the population: in other words, there were almost two crimes a year for every citizen. This was around six times the rate in Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield and over four times the rate in London. With one-sixtieth of the population of England and Wales, Manchester had one-sixth of all the burglaries, a fifth of the shop breakings, a third of the highway robberies and a fifth of all cases of passing counterfeit money. During the course of 1868, the year to which these statistics apply, 34,562 people passed through the hands of the police. The total number of larcenies from the person was 2,274. There were 1,074 burglaries, two murders, one attempted murder, forty-one shootings, stabbings and woundings and eleven manslaughters. During the same period, the courts heard 9,540 cases of drunk and disorderly, of which almost 7,000 resulted in conviction. Of the nearly 2,000 charged with common assault, just over half resulted in conviction. Of the 655 charges of assault on a police officer, 569 led to convictions, though the penalties imposed are amazingly lenient.

Drink-driving is not a phenomenon of the era of the internal combustion engine: in 1868 police charged 3,379 individuals in a single year, securing convictions in 2,665 cases. The courts convicted 1,000 prostitutes for being drunk and disorderly, yet only ninety-two for ‘accosting wayfarers’. There were ‘325 houses of ill-fame’, as the report puts it. This coy term refers to houses from which prostitutes operated, as opposed to brothels.

These are the facts. But why was crime such a problem in Manchester? Several commentators gave a very simple answer: the incompetence of the Manchester police. Elsewhere I shall look at the city’s police force and the difficulties it encountered. For the time being it is sufficient to say that throughout most of this period several factors impeded their efficiency. Manchester also had a number of unique characteristics that made crime a particular problem. Nineteenth century criminologists agreed that density of population and high death rate – both characteristic of Manchester – went with a high level of crime. With almost eighty-four people per square acre, only Liverpool was more densely packed.

Widespread criminal activity was itself a product of cities. When people moved from settled rural communities where a web of relationships tied them to their neighbours they suddenly became isolated. Without the traditional constraints on their behaviour, in a new and hostile environment where they knew nobody cared about them, they easily fell into criminal ways. With the breakdown of the social cohesion that was so much a part of rural life came alienation. Now no one felt he had a place or a role but was cast adrift in the great impersonal city.

All those drawn into the new industrial towns felt this and not just Manchester’s newcomers. What was unique to Manchester, however, was the unprecedented growth of the city and the unbridgeable gulf between rich and poor that many commentators remarked on and which gave rise to ‘alarming social relationships’. Every commentator agreed: Manchester was unique. It is entirely wrong to say that what they are talking about is the beginnings of modern industrial society and that these things were true of every emerging centre of production. According to this latter view, Manchester and Birmingham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and all the other centres of industrial society were the same. This is not so. Each had its own face, its own unique history and a distinctive personality. These differences are more interesting than the similarities.

Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the shrewdest and most widely travelled observers of the nineteenth century world, said that in Manchester ‘humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage’. It is impossible to understand what de Tocqueville and others meant when they spoke of civilisation breaking down without describing life in the worst parts of the city.

4

Squalor

The Very Essence Of Hell

The shadowlands of hidden Manchester exercised a morbid fascination over the minds of the city’s middle class – and there was no shortage of intrepid reporters prepared to explore what the respectable citizen shunned. Deansgate was the worst of the city’s criminal enclaves. It was one of Manchester’s rookeries. The core of this criminal area lay between Bridge Street and St. John’s Street but this was by no means the full extent of it. To the south was a warren of interlocking streets comprising Wood Street, Spinningfield, Dolefield, Willmott Street, Hardman Street, Royton Street and Thompson Street. Deansgate was such a mixture of sin, shamelessness, squalor and depravity that it attracted the curious as well as the socially aware.

Alfred Alsop was the ideal man to tell people about the reality of Manchester’s most notorious district. By 1876 he had already spent several years as the superintendent of the area’s boys’ home. He was no sensation-seeking journalist, hoodwinked by inhabitants putting on a show for the man from the London newspaper. He lived there and daily experienced the life of its streets. Yet his familiarity with Deansgate did not reduce its impact. Alsop never became inured to its horrors. The place, he writes, was full of ‘convicts, smashers, harlots, jailbirds, fortune-tellers and unlicensed sellers of beer’. He had no illusions about his neighbours who were ‘the very scum of the city, the very essence of hell’. Their breath ‘is blasphemy, and their presence contaminating’.

From his home in Wood Street, where the Mission Hall and Boys’ Home floated on ‘an ocean of sin, a sink of iniquity’ he witnessed five or six fights every day. The creatures who clawed each other in their drunken stupor were hardly human but ‘more like demons let loose, as though hell had vomited its vilest refuse upon earth’. The scenes that make up the weave and weft of Deansgate life are tableaux of depraved humanity. One minute Alsop hears a cattle dealer thrashing a prostitute, tearing clumps of hair from her head as she tries to brain him with a roofing slate. Next he sees a young man from Worsley, robbed in a brothel, his head split open with a jug, lying supine in the gutter. Then there are two drunken girls, fighting like starving mongrels, one biting off the other’s ear.

In the middle of the night there is hysterical screaming from the window of a brothel: a prostitute has slashed her throat. In the early hours of the morning, shrieks and cries fill the air. ‘A score of men and women, eyes blazing with passion, are fighting furiously.’ Stones and bricks fly; fists, belts and clogs pummel flesh. The gutters run with blood and hair ripped from the roots. And every Sunday morning, when the last unlicensed bar has closed and the last reveller gone home, when the streets are empty and silent, several men in dark suits make their way to the only piece of open ground. They open their Bibles and each in turn preaches to the empty footpaths.

While Deansgate was at the centre of Manchester’s criminal axis, it was by no means the whole of it. Off lower Deansgate, the area around Lombard Street and the Gaythorn Street district, bordered by Albion Street, Hewitt Street, Gaythorn Street and Deansgate, were notorious. Charter Street, in Angel Meadow, had a fearsome reputation as did the Canal Street area. In Salford, New Bailey Street, Bloom Street and the Chapel Street areas were known for prostitution and robbery.

What all these places had in common was that they were the oldest parts of the city, with the worst housing pushed right up against factories and mills. Pubs, beerhouses and lodging houses shouldered each other in this tangle of streets and courtyards. Charter Street, in Angel Meadow, was within spitting distance of the sprawling Manchester cotton mills. Over half the people there in 1851 lived in lodging houses and were professional or occasional criminals. Fifteen years later the area was swarming with crowds of known thieves, sometimes up to 100 strong, who gathered during the middle of the day. A number of individuals who were the focus of a great deal of criminal activity dominated the area. One such was Joe Hyde, who ran the notorious London Tavern, a meeting place for criminals from all over the country. Nearby Teddy Bob Butterworth provided accommodation in his lodging houses for professional rogues of every description. Within easy reach of the London Road lived a number of fences whose reputation was citywide. Bob Macfarlane, One-armed Kitty and Cabbage Ann were the means by which thieves disposed of much of the swag that sloshed around the rookeries.