Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (12 page)

Horridge was outraged. He blamed Caminada and swore he’d kill him. Yet on his release he set himself up as a smith on Style Street, Rochdale Road, where his skills made the new business a success. However, his release coincided with a rash of burglaries. In rapid succession the stock of a furrier, a silk merchant and a jeweller’s all disappeared. Other burglaries in nearby towns also bore Horridge’s trademark lack of subtlety. His reputation for violence was such that thirty policemen took part in the operation to arrest him. They surrounded his house in Gould Street but not before Horridge realised what was happening. As the police entered the house, he broke through the ceiling plaster and laths, climbed out onto the roof and made his way to an adjoining street, Ludgate Hill. There he stripped the slates from the roof, got into the loft and then burrowed his way through the bedroom ceiling – much to the alarm of four agricultural labourers, back from the country and enjoying a well-earned sleep. Without explanation, Horridge took the stairs like a triple-jumper and threw open the front door, where four constables confronted him. Three small steps rose from the street to the front door and, without breaking stride, he leapt from the threshold, over the heads of the peelers and sprinted into the distance. Though barefoot and wearing only trousers and a shirt, he outran his pursuers and got safely away.

Any ordinary criminal would have laid low for a time but Horridge was an adrenaline addict. He loved the thrill of the chase and got immense satisfaction from outwitting the police. Shortly after his spectacular escape from Gould Street, he and his associate, Long Dick, burgled a fancy goods shop on Thomas Street. A passing constable spotted a light and decided to investigate. The instant he put his foot inside the shop, Horridge floored him with a blow in the face. The constable recovered sufficiently to grab Dick and wrestle him to the ground. Dick got five years’ penal servitude but Horridge remained at liberty.

After a time Horridge thought it safe to return to Gould Street. The police suspected this and searched the house. First they searched upstairs and having found nothing started on the ground floor. After ten minutes of fruitlessly scrutinising floorboards and walls they heard Horridge’s voice from upstairs.

‘Have they gone?’ he asked.

Before the policemen could mount the stairs, he scrambled through the trapdoor to the loft that ran the entire length of the row of houses. Though the police sent for reinforcements and searched every house in the row, they found no trace of him.

Horridge’s next job was perhaps his most audacious. After watching a mill in Bradford, near Manchester, he was confident he could get away with the entire payroll.

Every Friday night a freestanding 450lb safe housed the mill’s entire payroll. A watchman guarded it until 4.30am when he left the office, locked it and went to stoke the boiler. Horridge had got a key to the office. And, provided the watchman did not return before workers started arriving, he was confident he could get the £600 in gold and silver the mill paid out every Saturday. Two of his associates staged a fight outside the mill, within earshot of the boiler house. The caretaker intervened and by the time he had pacified the warring parties and sent them on their way, Horridge had completed his work. When the caretaker returned to the office, he found the door ajar and the safe gone. Horridge and another man had loaded it onto a cart. The audacity of the robbery ensured a great deal of media coverage and there was tremendous pressure on the police to make an arrest. Unfortunately, neither the bewildered watchman nor anyone else could describe the robbers. Even when the police found the safe in an old mill reservoir, it told them nothing. He had cut out its back.

The proceeds of the robbery were enough to keep Horridge in luxury for some considerable time. He disappeared until July 1880, when he carried out his most spectacular escape of all. An officer making his rounds in Redfern Street tried the door of a warehouse. Horridge was inside and characteristically floored the policeman as he stepped through the door before making off down Mayes Street and Long Millgate, where another officer and a civilian tried to grab him. He made short shrift of these two.

By now, however, the first policeman, aided by civilians, was giving chase, intent on giving him a good kicking. Horridge hurtled down a footbridge on Victoria Station approach and dived over the parapet into the filthy waters of the River Irwell and made his most spectacular escape.

His arrest, when it happened, came as an anticlimax to all those who had been breathlessly following his exploits in the newspapers. He continued his smithy business in Style Street, apparently under the impression that the police could not link him to any of his recent crimes. A plain-clothes policeman strolled into the smithy and told him he would appreciate a word.

‘The Prince’s Feathers. Seven tonight?’ the policeman asked.

Horridge nodded. But what he was thinking no one will ever know. There are several possible explanations. Perhaps he had no idea who he was agreeing to meet and assumed it was a criminal with a proposition. It is also possible that he had started to believe his own public image and thought he was fireproof as the police had no one to identify him. Whatever the reason, he turned up for the rendezvous and went meekly into custody. The man who made more near-death escapes than 007 walked to the police station as sedately as a maiden aunt claiming her lost umbrella.

Perhaps he would have been less cooperative had he known what the judge at the Assize Court had in store for him. He handed down a sentence of seven years’ penal servitude followed by another seven under police supervision. Horridge winced when he heard it. His beleaguered wife wept as she prepared herself for a long separation. But he had no intention of serving his time quietly. Within weeks of his conviction he tried to stir up a prison riot, grappling with two warders even after they shot him twice. It took a third bullet to stop him. He spent the rest of his sentence under close supervision, much of it in solitary confinement. During those empty days his resentment festered against those prisoners who hadn’t backed him during the prison riot. On his release in April 1887 he sought out those who had betrayed him and took his revenge by thrashing them unconscious. Then he resumed where he had left off seven years earlier.

His imprisonment had done nothing for his technique as a burglar. He had always been careless about showing a light and was noisy. This proved his undoing when he burgled a shop on Angus Road, off Rochdale Road, only months after his release. On this occasion he and his female accomplice used skeleton keys to enter but nevertheless managed to attract the attention of a passing constable, who enlisted the support of a colleague and three civilians. Displaying no gallantry, Horridge abandoned his accomplice and tried to escape through the back door – only to be confronted, as so many times before, by two constables. This time, however, he was not prepared to rely on his athleticism. He fired two shots – one causing a glancing neck wound, the other punching a hole in the centre of the peeler’s chest. Only the skill of the surgeons at the Manchester Royal Infirmary saved the life of the second officer, who suffered permanent injury. While the officer’s life hung in the balance, the newspapers kept Horridge’s exploits before the public. The result was a city-wide panic. Everyone went in dread of murderous Bob Horridge.

The citizens of Manchester were worrying needlessly for he had gone into hiding in Liverpool. No doubt the hue and cry would have died down enabling him to start a new phase of his criminal career in Liverpool. But his wife, Little Ada, who was under police surveillance, was careless. Horridge remained in contact with his wife and when she took the train to Liverpool, they followed her and brought her raging husband back to Manchester. This time there was no escape. The outcome of the trial was never in doubt. On 2 November 1887, the Assize Court sentenced thirty-seven-year-old Horridge to penal servitude for life. He died in prison.

More typical of the city’s cracksmen was John Connolly, a professional housebreaker. He is remembered for his charm, which enabled him to recruit an army of young girls to dispose of stolen good through pawnbrokers they dazzled with their alluring smiles. Without outlets for the goods they stole neither Horridge nor Connolly would have prospered as burglars. Every cracksman needed a reliable fence.

Fences

The jury had delivered its verdict. All that remained was the sentence. In such cases the words of the judge were always the same. Only the name differed – Joe Hyde, Bob Macfarlane, Patsy Riordan or another of Manchester’s notorious fences.

‘Without the likes of you,’ the judge invariably said, looking over his half-moon lenses, his eyes as cold as a cod’s, ‘there would be little theft in this city.’ Everyone agreed with the judge and fully supported him in dealing out condign sentences. Thieves without fences are like beer without alcohol – largely pointless.

The market for stolen goods was far more extensive throughout the nineteenth century than today. To a great extent this was because of the scale of payment used by most fences, said to have been developed by the famous London fence, the ‘great Ikey Solomons’, Dickens’s model for Fagin. Ikey pioneered a system of standard payments for each item, regardless of its quality. Under this system the amount paid for a gold breastpin, for instance, was the same as that paid for a silver or brass one. No doubt the result of this was to the fence’s benefit. But from the point of view of the thief it meant that he could sell anything he stole.

Fences, like the thieves who supplied them, came in all shapes and sizes. In particular they varied greatly in their commitment to criminal activity. At one extreme, the fence was the leader of a criminal gang, the ‘putter-up’, who planned and financed everything while keeping a safe distance from the actual crime. Usually he had an alternative source of income, which served as a front for his main business. A pawnshop, pub or lodging house provided a means of maintaining criminal contacts without immediately attracting the attention of the police.

Such was One-armed Dick, a famed Manchester fence of the mid-nineteenth century. Two of his clients told a prison chaplain how he used to run a card school plying his guests with drink on credit. He set those who lost to thieving in order to repay their debt. At the other extreme was the shopkeeper who, under certain circumstances, might buy stolen goods. In between there was every shade of doubtful dealer. What they all had in common, however, was that they were in a very vulnerable position. Somehow or other they had to get stolen goods back into circulation without attracting attention. Once they bought them, they knew that if they came to the attention of the police the trail would lead back to them and not the original thief.

There were always petty criminals in the lodging houses who were prepared to act as intermediaries or fences on a small scale. They bought items of little value, often from children, and sold them to an established fence or disposed of them personally at a small profit. The best fences, of course, were those who never came to the attention of the police and therefore left no record of their activities. These tended to be the ones who flourished and eventually operated on a large scale. They worked exclusively through dependable contacts acting on behalf of novice crooks and all those outside the closed circle of trusted associates. This was, from the police point of view, the worst of all possible worlds as it meant that stolen goods disappeared without trace. Far better that they pass through the hands of pawnbrokers who, though not scrupulously honest, might on occasion help them.

There is no doubt that many pawnbrokers found themselves in this position. When the police suspected a pawnbroker, they watched his shop until they had evidence he was handling stolen goods. He then had little choice but to become an informer or a double agent. Many small second-hand shops bought stolen jewellery and watches and immediately ‘christened’ them by removing identifying marks and substituting new ones or by resetting or even recutting precious stones. Experienced fences immediately melted down precious metals. Watches were disguised by putting the works into another case and melting down the original. The fences who dealt with jewellery and other valuables were near the top of their trade. The majority dealt in more mundane fare, items of little value indistinguishable from their second-hand stock.

There was hardly a dealer in second-hand goods who didn’t at some time handle stolen goods. The majority of people went through their entire lives without owning a single new item. Most of those who volunteered for the Great War in 1914 received new clothes for the first time in their lives when the sergeant handed them their uniforms. Consequently, clothes made up an enormous proportion of all stolen goods. It is hardly surprising that the theft of clothes was by far the most common crime of the period.

Second-hand clothes were better value for the poor than the cheap and shoddy, mass-produced garments which were their only alternative. Everyone from the lower middle class and above sold their clothes to a second-hand dealer once they started to show signs of wear. Well made from sturdy materials, these were a good buy for working men and women. They did, however, have one major disadvantage. Clothes that had been lying in a second-hand shop acquired an indelible odour. Just as George Orwell maintained that the poor of the 1930s carried a unique odour, like cold bacon, many nineteenth century commentators maintained that the Victorian poor also had a distinctive odour: the distinctive smell of damp fustian. When mingled with the aroma of herring – toasted herring was a staple of the poor man’s diet – it marked a person as poor as clearly as a workhouse uniform.