Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (8 page)

An abundance of opportunities for theft made the city a magnet for thieves. Manchester’s Chief Constable, Palin, writing in the middle of the century, was convinced that the concentration of warehouses in the city was a major reason why there was so much theft in Manchester. Each building – unlike many factories – contained great quantities of attractive and portable property that was, in his words, ‘prolific of theft’. Furthermore, the city was packed with the sort of people who were most likely to commit crime: the young, the poor, the unemployed, the unskilled and foreign immigrants.

The population of Manchester was disproportionately young and poor and its economic structure ensured that a large number of people were in unstable employment. Even when in work they were unable to lift themselves out of poverty. Of those the Manchester police arrested in 1868, about half were between the ages of fifteen and thirty years old. However, criminal activity was never exclusively a young person’s activity, as almost 1,600 of those arrested were over fifty; 8,000 admitted to being unemployed, as to 11,300 in employment. These figures certainly underestimate the number of people actually unemployed as ‘idleness’ carried a powerful stigma at this time – those who had no work were lacking in character or were in some other way deficient. Many in fact were strangers to the city, travellers drifting from place to place in search of work. The cotton industry was renowned for its use of casual labour – hiring in busy times and firing with every downturn in trade. Almost a third of those arrested were illiterate. Many were immigrants.

New arrivals in the city were mainly young people between the ages of fifteen and thirty. They sought steady, prestigious employment, such as work in the growing number of cotton mills. Even the few lucky enough to find it lived a Spartan existence, hovering just above the poverty line. In the 1870s, for instance, a man working in a cotton mill in the Manchester area might expect to earn between sixteen and twenty-eight shillings a week. A woman, girl or boy would earn between seven and twelve ‘bob’. The poverty line for a man with a wife and two children was around thirty bob a week. In good times, these people just about made ends meet without falling into debt. When they were out of work or when prices rose they slid into need. Old age, bereavement, desertion, illness and injury all carried the additional dread of destitution.

The largest single occupational group of those arrested was common labourers – one in six – followed by factory hands and hawkers. Together these three groups made up almost half of all those arrested who were in employment. These figures reflect the situation in most industrial towns. Manchester, however, had far more of these people than most similar towns. It also had a bigger pool of seasonal workers than most places, many of whom worked in transport and storage, and the city teemed with carmen, porters, messengers, warehousemen and those working in the building trade, especially labourers. The casual worker was in many ways the most adaptable of workers. He tried his hand at whatever came along. He had to if he was to earn a living.

Many young men worked as navvies. There was plenty of temporary work in the mills, especially in areas like Openshaw and Gorton. The need to live near these employment opportunities forced the poor into the run-down city areas. These were the people who, in an economic world that was always precarious, suffered most in hard times. In the hungry winter of 1878 and 1879, for instance, most of those who applied for parish relief were casual labourers. Years later, during the depressed winter of 1896 and 1897, seven out of ten of those who applied for relief to Manchester’s Poor Law Guardians were the casually and seasonally employed. By this time half of all the people living in the centre of Manchester were casual or part-time workers.

It is hardly surprising the centre of the city had a reputation for poverty and the percentage of paupers living there was as high as anywhere in the country. A survey of May 1889 showed that twenty-one per cent of men in Ancoats and forty per cent of those in Salford did not have regular employment. At this time half the population of Ancoats and sixty-one per cent of that of Salford were classed as ‘very poor’, which meant they had a weekly income of less than four shillings per adult. This is reflected in the infant mortality rate: only one in three children born in Ancoats survived to the age of five.

And Ancoats was by no means the worst area in Manchester. Most of its occupants were at least workers, either in employment or scratching a living by means which were generally honest. It was, however, the part of the city that attracted the poorest of the city’s newcomers. By the 1870s it had a diverse and sizeable immigrant population. One observer remarked, with only a little exaggeration, that as he walked through Ancoats he saw ‘Chinese, Lascars, Negroes, Germans, Frenchmen and … representatives of almost every nation on the face of the earth’. In fact, Manchester was one of the few cities where the proportion of foreigners to natives was very high. Many of these were unfortunates – people escaping persecution, disgrace or the law. Others were political exiles and deserters from foreign armies. They included the German bandsmen – who hoped for work in pubs and music halls and played in the streets when times were hard – Tyrolese minstrels, Negro serenaders, pipers and flautists from Dublin, jugglers and Italian organ grinders who filled the city’s drab streets with an exotic cacophony. Adding to this spectacle were indigenous elements – dog and bird fanciers, clarinettists, Lancashire bell-ringers and itinerant preachers. Many of those thronging the city streets were merely passing through. Local farmers, for instance, drove their sheep, oxen and pigs to the abattoirs on Salford’s Water Street and the Cattle Market on Cross Lane.

Occasionally it is possible to get a detailed description of one of these areas as it was late in the century. A police inquiry into the London Road area provides such an account. Shepley Street, just off London Road, was typical. Numbers eight and ten were brothels. Numbers twenty-two and twenty-six were common lodging houses, separated by the Rose and Crown, the haunt of prostitutes. Yet on streets like this there also lived many respectable labourers, skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers. Invariably these people were struggling to live honest and useful lives, seeking to distance themselves from known criminals.

Mixed up with the honest workers, professional criminals and the recent immigrants trying to scrape a living in an alien environment, were the large numbers of people who lived in a twilight zone between legitimate society and the underworld. They drifted between these two worlds, never sure where one began and the other ended. Most of this amorphous group consisted of those who never enjoyed the benefits of regular employment but survived only because they were able to pick up occasional jobs. Many sometimes worked as hawkers, knife-grinders, ballad-singers and sellers of broadsheets. At other times they used the information they had gathered while shovelling coal or digging a garden to plan a robbery. While these groups languished in poverty, factory workers’ incomes were generally improving. Whole leisure and consumer industries – notably the pub and the music hall – grew up to meet the needs of working men with money. And where there is money there are always those anxious to get it by illegal means.

The Irish, in this as so much else, were different. They did not share the rising income of factory workers. Few were employed in cotton mills. Many of the Ancoats Irish were day labourers in the building trade. But the single biggest employer by far was Smithfield Market. One in four of all the stallholders was Irish, as were many of the porters, labourers and the hordes of street sellers and hawkers who operated on the fringes of the market. At the best of times they were one meal away from hunger. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century a quarter of the paupers in New Bridge workhouse were Roman Catholics. During this period Irish-born offenders likewise comprised a significant fraction of Manchester’s prison inmates – on average about one in three. Indeed, there were many in the final decades of the century still happy to blame the Irish for the city’s crime. Among these was that bastion of liberal opinion, the
Manchester Guardian.
According to many editorials, the extent of a city’s crime problem was in proportion to its Irish population. So, though the Irish-born population of England was only three per cent of the total, they made up fifteen per cent of prison inmates.

The
Manchester Guardian
again reminded its readers of the Irish peril several years later. On this occasion their reporter visited a lodging house on Charter Street, in Angel Meadow, to gather grim details with which to regale readers. As expected, he encountered all the shocking details he sought. Lodgers needed only 3d for a bed for the night, very often sleeping in buildings which had previously been pubs that had lost their licence. The pub landlord was now the landlord of the lodging house, often with the same clients. Some landlords displayed remarkable ingenuity in their efforts to maximise profits. One even removed the roof so as to cram in more lodgers.

The Irish, of course, were not the only significant minority group in the city. There was also a large community of Eastern European Jews. Fleeing pogroms and persecution, Jews from Russia, Austria and Romania fled to Manchester in the 1880s. In 1880 they numbered 10,000 rising to 35,000 just before the outbreak of the Great War, when they became the largest Jewish community in England outside London. The first Jews to settle in Manchester settled in Cheetham, then a village a short distance from the city centre. The great building boom of the 1850s transformed the area, but the Jews stayed and adapted. Many were tailors and craftsmen who welcomed the growing population as potential customers. In 1858 they built their first synagogue and in 1874 the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue – which now houses the country’s first Jewish museum – and then a school on Torah Street.

As in London, most of the Manchester Jews found work in the cheap clothing and household furniture trades, centred on Red Bank, Strangeways and Lower Broughton. Like the areas settled by the Irish, these were places with plenty of cheap housing, many lodging houses and a long-standing reputation for crime and disorder. The successful and ambitious soon made enough to move out to Hightown and Higher Broughton. Also, like the Irish, the Jews attracted hostility from their hosts. Manchester’s middle-class Jewish community, predating the influx of the 1880s, was less than enthusiastic about the arrival of its coreligionists. Having achieved acceptance and become an assimilated part of the business and professional community, they feared these newcomers, these ‘pedlar Jews’, might stir up an indiscriminate anti-Semitism.

Local newspapers complained of ‘an invading force, foreign in race, speech, dress, ideas and religion’. It was common for letters and editorials to complain of ‘Yids’ and ‘sheeneymen’, who were nothing less than ‘the cancer of foreign Jewry, eating away at all that is noble in our national character’. One, in a rallying cry to all who abhorred this alien influx, declared, ‘We do not want them at any price. We want England for the English.’ Like anti-Irish sentiment, anti-Semitism found open expression right up to the end of the nineteenth century.
Spy,
a short-lived Manchester magazine, took up the theme in 1893, bemoaning the fact that, ‘Weekly fresh cargoes of penniless people are landed up on our shores… with the renewed persecution of Jews in Russia, the human rubbish heap is likely to increase.’ In terms identical to those once applied to the Irish, the editorial goes on to bemoan the danger these immigrants pose to English labourers whose jobs and standard of living they threaten by working for less and enduring more.

Despite their diverse backgrounds, all the inhabitants of the poorer areas of the city had one thing in common: they lacked the traditional crafts. Many contemporaries believed this was a major cause of the crime that plagued the cities. F. Hill, in his
Crime, its Amount, Causes and Remedies
, put it down to the self-respect and sense of worth lost to unskilled men living in industrial society. Hill was a prison inspector and he maintained, ‘A really good carpenter, shoemaker or blacksmith is seldom found in prison… and rarely indeed is a member of the highly-respected class of skilled agricultural labourers.’

Many also agreed that the gulf between the rich and poor which was greater in Manchester than elsewhere was a major cause of crime. The prison chaplain, W. L. Clay, an authority on all aspects of the penal system, was one of the first to point out that ‘the heartless selfishness of the upper classes, their disgraceful ignorance of and indifference to the brutal degradation in which they suffer the poor to lie is the primary cause of all the crime in the country’. Others deplored the example set by the self-indulgent and sometimes dishonest rich and the way in which those on small incomes were led into crime by the temptation to ape the habits of their employers. J. Wade, a social commentator who wrote widely on many aspects of Victorian society, explained crime in terms of ‘the avarice of trade… In no country are there so many worshippers of the golden calf as in England, where virtue and worth of every kind is measured by the standard of wealth.’

Captain Palin, one of the city’s most renowned police chiefs, believed that the city’s reputation for helping prisoners was a cause of its problems. There is no doubt that former prisoners posed a major problem. Once an offender left prison, he often had little choice but to return to crime. Few people were prepared to employ him and even if any boss was prepared to give him a chance, his workmates seldom were. In response to this problem a group of concerned citizens set up the Manchester and Salford Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society. Their findings, however, served only to fuel the dread that was sweeping through middle class society. According to the Society’s research, the twin cities were home to an army of 3,000 members of the ‘dangerous classes’ who formed a constantly shifting mass of criminals, posing a permanent threat to property and personal safety. They were responsible for the insecurity that pervaded the city. Palin argued that the Society’s hospitality attracted hordes of ne’er-do-wells. Once here, they immediately gravitated to one of the city’s many pubs and beerhouses. The beerhouse was central to Manchester’s popular image and large sections of the middle class blamed it for the city’s high crime rate. As one visitor wrote in
The Times
in 1900, when the number of drinking establishments had been shrinking for almost thirty years, the slum districts of Manchester were ‘simply flooded with beerhouses’.