Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (10 page)

The respectable public viewed all travellers – whether they were swallowing a sword or selling a safety pin – as wasters, thieves, cadgers and rogues. Part of the reason for this was that wherever a circus pitched its big top, it was never long before it attracted a host of scoundrels. Pickpockets and con men of all kinds followed the crowds, their natural milieu. As the century progressed, this mobile population declined and the British became a more settled people. The number of tramps went up and down with the state of the economy, but never disappeared. As the importance of the horse declined and the number of retail outlets increased, gypsies and pedlars declined. Yet the ebb and flow of population in and out of the cities never dried up. London, with its many refuges and workhouses, exercised a powerful pull on criminals during the winter months. In April and May, however, criminals drifted to the provinces and Manchester was one of the chief destinations in the 1850s because its guardians distributed poor relief in cash.

Professional criminals had a regular circuit. The best pickpockets, the swell mob, regularly converged on the Manchester Exchange in December, when it was packed with commercial men. Similarly, race meetings exerted an irresistible pull not only on pickpockets but on crooks of every kind. These peripatetic criminals were usually seasoned practitioners, unlike the large number of young criminals who made up a significant proportion of those who came before the Manchester courts.

Star-glazing and the Shallow Lay

Life was neither easy nor long for Manchester children born in the slums and rookeries. In the 1860s one in four died before reaching their first birthday. Even this grisly statistic is a vast improvement on the situation in the 1840s when half the children born in the city died before their fifth birthday. Like most averages, these figures conceal enormous discrepancies. Those living in the poor areas of the city were twice as likely as those in the better areas to die in their early days. Approximately one in five of the cases that came before the coroner involved children under the age of five and the bulk of these were children of the poor; children born out of wedlock were twice as likely to meet an early death.

Many reluctant parents treated their children as impediments, unwelcome burdens they shook off at the first opportunity. One Salford child summed up the position of many when he said of his mother, ‘I don’t think she wanted me. I don’t think she did. Well, she’d had four boys and they weren’t well off.’ The experience of rejection was common among illegitimate children. The mother of such a child had lost every shred of respectability. The sooner she could unburden herself of the proof of her shame the better. Similarly, parents whose children got into trouble with the police or failed to get work often turned them out to fend for themselves. This is one of the reasons why children made up the majority of those who stole food, especially from stalls and displays outside shops. This was a dangerous undertaking as a thief caught in the act could expect the irate stallholder to mete out summary punishment. Unless the aggrieved grocer inflicted life-threatening injuries, he was certain to hear nothing more of the matter and would undoubtedly feel he had acted leniently in not giving the thief over to the police. Certainly no sane person would consider his actions unreasonable.

Stealing from behind a shop window, however, required more subtlety than snatching something from a stall. Thieves who went in for this often targeted tobacconists. The commonest method involved removing the glass by ‘star-glazing’. To provide cover for this a group gathered in front of the window, feigning interest in a display while one of them inserted a blade between the edge of the frame and the glass. By slowly twisting the blade, he cracked the glass. Over the crack the thief attached a large brown paper plaster which he then pulled away, together with shards of glass, creating a hole big enough for a child to slip his hand through.

Children were often the victims as well as the perpetrators of crime. The most despised criminals were those who specialised in stealing from children. Mainly women, they generally operated in middle class areas, targeting well-dressed children they ‘skinned’ – stripped of clothes and shoes. Others specialised in shop messengers or children running errands. But it is also true that juvenile criminals often preyed on younger children, stealing parcels, food and money. Henry Wilson, for instance, who was renowned for preying on messenger boys and girls running errands, robbed at least 127 children during the early stages of his career.

A survey of Manchester in the 1840s found juvenile delinquents concentrated in the worst parts of the city. Most were petty criminals cum street vendors. The latter was often no more than a front for picking pockets and pilfering, the usual apprenticeship before graduating to more serious crimes. Ninety per cent of these children came from what the surveyor called ‘dishonest and profligate’ parents. Large numbers of children, then as now, were totally neglected. The major difference was that then they grew up not only without adult supervision but in abject poverty. Prior to 1870 they had little chance of any education and small hope of gaining honest employment. Those fortunate enough to find legitimate work ended up in sweatshops or as street sweepers, hawkers of cheap articles – matches and newspapers – or gathering a few coppers for holding horses. And most of these were soon sucked into a life of crime.

Prior to the last decades of the nineteenth century, childhood as we know it today hardly existed. The harsh realities of adult life – particularly the need to make a living – impinged on children at a very early age. Nor were they shielded from the reality of death. Infant mortality was so high that most children suffered the death of a brother or sister. Even children fortunate enough to get an apprenticeship were subject to the rigorous enforcement of the terms of their indenture. In 1873, for instance, one Manchester apprentice, fifteen-year-old Henry Hunter, received seven days imprisonment for not turning up for work. His case was common. Master beggars hired young children to beg for them. They pestered their victims with all the persistence of a child in Delhi or Cairo today. Scantily clad, their flesh raw in the harsh winter wind, their eyes wide with want, few could resist the pleading hands of a hungry child. Many were controlled by con men operating this ‘shallow-lay’ – taking advantage of people’s kindness.

It is estimated that in 1850 there were 100,000 such street urchins roaming the streets of London. Several thousands roamed the streets of Manchester and the authorities were seriously worried about the scale of the problem. As late as 1889 a Manchester survey found 700 street children roaming around the city. A combination of the deserted, the orphaned and the runaway, the vast majority were illegitimate offspring whose parents drove them out to beg and steal. Some had absconded from refuges for homeless children, such as Barnes’ House in Salford. Once on the streets they relied on the common lodging house, whose keeper was often a receiver of the goods these children stole. Children made up a large proportion of the occupants of lodging houses. Like all criminals, they were constantly on the move. They loved the anonymity of the big cities. Some were the children of lodgers. Resident beggars and thief masters kept others they were training up for criminal gain. But many were alone. Their attitude to making a living was just what we would expect of a child. They were concerned with making enough for today, for their immediate needs, with little thought for tomorrow.

Though childish in some ways, they were worldly in others. Promiscuity was common among criminal children. A parliamentary inquiry of 1852 found many lived with prostitutes and had venereal disease by the age of twelve. Nevertheless, as far as the law was concerned, children were treated differently from adults. Despite the harshness of the early-nineteenth century penal code, the courts condemned to death very few juveniles. Children were, in theory, presumed incapable of criminal intent up to the age of seven and between the ages of seven and fourteen were presumed innocent unless the prosecution could prove their ability to distinguish between good and evil. Children over the age of fourteen were fully responsible for all their actions.

Yet from the 1850s the courts abandoned the punishment of young criminals in favour of trying to divert them from a life of crime. The Juvenile Offenders Act of 1853 and subsequent Acts in 1854 and 1857 empowered courts to send offenders under the age of sixteen to reformatories, as opposed to prison. This took them out of the criminal environment for two years. It cut their criminal contacts, led to a significant reduction in the number of children imprisoned and a sharp decline in juvenile crime. With the reduction in juvenile crime the number of children sleeping rough and wandering the country also fell. In 1886 one journalist wrote, ‘It is almost impossible in these days to realise the extent to which juvenile crime prevailed forty years ago.’ The ‘steady, regular training’ of the reformatory made the young person attractive to prospective employers. Even the most cynical members of the public, who rejected the possibility of reforming the young criminal, had to accept that the hard work of the reformatory ruined forever the delicacy of touch essential to a pickpocket.

In 1874 the training ships came into existence. Those sentenced to them got three years’ disciplined training, which equipped them for life at sea.

Whereas reformatories provided an alternative to prison for juvenile criminals, industrial schools dealt with those who had committed less serious or even no offences. They were simply living in conditions that put them in imminent danger of becoming criminals. It is an indication of the number of children living without any positive parental influence that the courts sent 5,000 neglected Manchester and Salford children to industrial schools in the period 1870 to 1891. From 1856 it was standard procedure to commit virtually all second offenders to reformatory school, regardless of their offence. By the end of the decade all commentators agreed that the number of juvenile thieves who were hardened criminals had shrunk. The 1884 Royal Commission on the Reformatories and Industrial Schools accepted that the training of boys as professional criminals that had taken place in prisons was now a thing of the past.

Education also had a key responsibility for saving the young from a life of crime. This was an ambitious task. The Education Aid Society, in its report of 1870, spoke of the need for schools to ‘civilise and humanise the great masses that have sunk so low’. Many children were no more than savages, totally lacking in any sense of right and wrong. Another report from the same period states clearly that the children it seeks to help are often ‘as wild as ostriches of the desert’.

The Society was in no doubt how this came about. ‘When for the first ten or twelve years of their life there has been no discipline – when cleanliness and comfort have been unknown – when no law of God or man has been considered sacred, and no power recognised but physical force, it is impossible these children should settle down to work. They seek satisfaction in the lowest sensual enjoyments. It is the story of the lives of tens of thousands.’ It is hardly surprising that young criminals regarded a court appearance as a badge of honour, much as their twenty-first century counterparts regard an ASBO as a rite of passage. Imprisonment guaranteed status, especially when it merited newspaper coverage.

Dick Turpin, Jack Sheppard and other legendary desperados were young criminals’ heroes. They swapped tales of their audacity round the lodging house fires and in prison cells and sang about them in the pubs, beerhouses and the penny gaffs frequented by criminals. From the mid-century hawkers sold written accounts of their exploits. And there were plenty of older criminals who regarded themselves as craftsmen, passing on their lore to the next generation, enabling them to make a living. Often, however, this was more self-interest than philanthropy. In many cases the mentor ran a lodging house and provided his charges with pencils, oranges, notebooks or other items they might peddle as a front for stealing.

Writing in 1895, Caminada tells of professional thieves who attended race meetings, not only to rob, but in the hope of ‘plucking greenhorns’ – recruiting accomplices from the gutter children selling newspapers and matches. An apprentice thief was totally dependent on his mentor, as no fence would accept stolen goods from anyone unknown to him. In return for this service, the boy, who often did the actual stealing, was generally well looked after – for so long as he remained a valuable asset.

Girls made up about twenty per cent of young convicts. Apart from prostitution, begging and pickpocketing, they often acted as look-outs for burglars and served as their ‘canaries’ – carrying tools to and from the burglary. In Manchester as elsewhere, children often provided information about targets for robbery and were essential for entering houses through small windows and apertures. Forgers and coiners used them as go-betweens. But the use of children in crime declined greatly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet there were still many who graduated into adolescent and young adult criminals. Then, as now, a great deal of crime was the work of young men and Manchester was a young man’s city. In the middle of the century half the population was under twenty-three. They often organised themselves into groups specialising in one or two types of theft. Most attacks on the person were the work of such gangs. The very young thieves tended to be opportunists, snatching whatever they could when the opportunity arose.

The practice of juveniles preying on young children was common early in the nineteenth century and, according to the
Manchester City News,
during the economic downturn of 1864 reemerged with such force that children went in terror of being left naked in the streets. A variation on this was robbing children of the meals they were taking to a working parent. In certain parts of the city it was quite common for gangs of youths to rob working men of their sandwiches. Additionally, many of those employees who stole from their bosses were young men.