Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (14 page)

George Nevin also had a religious bent. His clerical attire disarmed his victims. After he’d left, the goods the perplexed shopkeeper missed were concealed under Nevin’s cassock.

Thomas Pickford also targeted shops. Posing as a detective investigating the passing of forged banknotes, he asked to see those in the till and, issuing a receipt, left to have them examined at the station. Likewise, John William Marsland never left the undertaker without both his sympathy and his cash – borrowed so he could remove the body of his dear wife prior to interment. Elizabeth Hodgson’s interest was based not on a sorrowful past but the happy future she guaranteed all who took her advice. She was one of the many fortune-tellers of the 1870s who, by squeezing money from gullible clients, gave her profession a bad name. Similarly, Cockney Jim gave some an aversion to wedding rings.

The Wedding Ring Scam

One of the failsafe scams of the nineteenth century worked by crooks the length and breadth of the country was the ring scam. Cockney Jim was the most renowned of its Manchester exponents. Like all the best scams, it was very simple. It depended on the ability of the con man to convince the victim of his good faith. The key was to appear naïve, even simple, and to convince the victim that he was the one who was taking advantage of another’s folly. The only prop was a fake gold ring, complete with a bogus hallmark, worth only a few coppers. The crooks operated in pairs, both respectably dressed, usually in the style of petty clerks.

They went to a prosperous part of town where one of them made a great display of finding a gold ring on the footpath. He then hailed the victim, who had witnessed this stroke of good fortune, and asked his opinion of the ring’s value. At this stage the accomplice, posing as a curious passer-by, appeared on the scene, announcing that the ring was worth between £10 and £20 and offering to buy it. The sharp agreed, but when it emerged that his accomplice did not have the ready cash, he reluctantly offered it to the victim for less. Cockney Jim invariably got a bite.

A woman who was clearly pregnant worked a clever variation on the ring scam. She approached a respectable person in the street, or ideally a group of domestics on their afternoon off. With tears running down her pale face, she told them of a faithless husband, hungry children at home and another on the way. Nothing, she said, stands between them and the street except her one possession – a wedding ring she would gladly sell for a fraction of its worth. The dupe who fell for this immediately made his way to the nearest pawnshop to convert his good fortune into money.

Uncle’s Pop Shop

Today’s Britain, we are told, is drowning in a sea of debt. A flimsy raft of credit cards, overdrafts, hire purchase agreements, deferred repayments and secured loans sustains our continental holidays and luxury cars. Debt allows us all to enjoy what none of us can afford. In fact debt is less important today than it was in Manchester during the second half of the nineteenth century. Today it means extravagant leisure. Then it meant people could eat. And in place of today’s elaborate financial arrangements there was, every couple of streets, a shop – ‘uncle’s’, ‘the pop shop’, ‘the pawn’ – and a constant stream of customers, entering with newspaper-wrapped parcels under their arms and downcast eyes.

The pawnbroker, who has made a comeback in recent years, is a moneylender and in the nineteenth century he enabled the poor to keep a roof over their heads, feed their children and put clothes on their backs. In 1874 there were almost 300 pawnshops in Manchester and Salford and the poorer the area the greater their density. Charter Street, for instance, had three, Lombard Street four and Angel Street two. The poor, who made up a substantial proportion of the population, lived their lives on the verge of destitution. In good times they could pay the rent, feed themselves and clothe their children. In bad, they faced hunger, eviction and the workhouse.

In our day of high wages and ready credit, when every post brings offers of store cards and cheap money, it is impossible to appreciate the pawnbroker’s importance. He was the poor man’s banker. In times of crisis he was a godsend, the only source of ready money. Without the pawn a large section of the population would not have survived.

What’s more, the pawn would take virtually anything as security on a loan. Valuables, such as rings and watches, were often unknown to the poor. But when a working man bought a major item of clothing, such as boots or an overcoat, he used up all his available cash. In the event of a financial crisis he pawned these prize possessions. Even if he had nothing as valuable as a decent item of clothing he could pawn pots and pans.

Later, when he got paid, he redeemed his valuables by repaying the loan and the interest on it. Poor families often pawned their best items of clothing early in the week and redeemed them on pay day for Sunday wear. The longer an item remained in the pawn, the greater the interest on the loan secured on it. Eventually, when the pawnbroker despaired of being repaid, he recouped his losses by selling the item.

For many homes this to-ing and fro-ing of the family’s valuables underpinned the whole domestic economy. Yet, the nineteenth century pawnbroker has a poor reputation, similar in many ways to that of the present-day moneylender. This negative image, however, does not stand scrutiny. Just as today the moneylender’s rates are often less than those charged by more reputable financial institutions, so it was with the much-maligned pawnbroker. He charged less than the tallyman, who sold clothes and household goods on hire purchase while some pawnbrokers advanced as much as two-thirds of the value of the pledge.

Unlike others’, the pawnbrokers’ rates were regulated. There were, of course, ways of side-stepping these regulations but there was also a limit to the amount of fancy footwork a pawnbroker might practise. He could not operate without a licence and the authorities would not renew it if he repeatedly breached its conditions. This is why many experienced policemen, like James Bent, maintained that the vast majority of pawned goods were not stolen.

Bent was a staunch defender of pawnbrokers. He claimed that in his long experience they often gave invaluable help to the police and were particularly useful in securing larceny convictions. He never knew one who did not give all possible help to the police and on countless occasions they reported their suspicions even when they had no evidence of crime. Even Bent, however, accepted there were dishonest pawnbrokers. But he also realised that without their help the police would have had no idea where to look for stolen goods. Most pawnbrokers were willing to help the police. After all, they were the most obvious outlets for stolen goods and any who got a reputation for dishonesty was totally at the police’s mercy. Besides, a relatively small number of professional criminals controlled the market in receiving stolen goods. Only amateurs resorted to the pawn and their business was generally more trouble than it was worth. This is what made the pawnbroker such a danger to the thief with stolen goods he wanted to convert to cash. He had to know his pawnbroker.

In reality, pawnbrokers were on both sides of the law as shown by the events of 1878. A deputation from the Manchester and Salford Association of Pawnbrokers complained to the Chief Constable of a scam that was undermining public confidence in the integrity of its members. The moving force behind the scam was Diamond Sam, whose nickname had nothing to do with ostentatious displays of expensive jewellery. In fact Sam was never seen in possession of a diamond. What he was never without, however, were pawn tickets purporting to relate to diamonds of great value, which he sold for a fraction of their putative value. For the purposes of this particular scam, however, he was offering the tickets as security for loans. To allay his victims’ suspicions he enlisted the help of several pawnbrokers who undertook to assure the wary victim that the tickets they were about to accept were indeed of great value. The Chief Constable, Captain Palin, put Caminada on the case. As usual, he adopted a direct approach: he answered the newspaper advertisement and thereby met the principal rogues and three of the pawnbrokers. He promptly arrested all six. Among those swindled was a civil engineer, a man of sixty-five, who lost over £176 – worth today about £23,000.

Of those arrested, the courts convicted five. One got off lightly with eighteen months but the others got five years’ penal servitude.

Besides the genuine pawnshops, there were also many ‘putty shops’ or marine stores, which served the same function as pawnbrokers. The difference was they were less scrupulous about what they took and many readily dealt in stolen goods. They did not have the status or offer the security of the pawn and of course they charged higher interest on their loans. Their customers were the poorest of the poor and the possessions on which they hoped to raise a few shillings were too threadbare for even the poorest pawnbroker. The interest on a shilling was 2d or 3d a week, that is between seventeen and twenty-five per cent and no legal framework governed these transactions. The dolly shops, the hundreds of second-hand clothes dealers and the army of rag and bone men who trundled through the streets of the city, all provided means of disposing of stolen goods. Their customers were tramps, beggars and sneak thieves, the dregs of the criminal world.

Prostitutes, who were invariably thieves, also played a key role in disposing of stolen goods. They, like most petty thieves, preferred to sell their ill-gotten goods to members of the public, always offering them as ‘special bargains’. The appeal of selling goods this way was that even though the thief received only a fraction of their value, he or she got more than from a fence. And there was nowhere better to meet potential buyers, all the more amenable for a few pints, than in one of the city’s many pubs.

6

Pubs

An Oasis in a Brick Desert

Its amber lights softened the chill. Hovering in the misty dankness, it floated like an ocean liner, the hum of conversation like the purr of engines. Then the door opened, splashing light on the paving flags and exhaling the aroma of beer and tobacco, the musk of warm bodies, the bray of laughter and the promise of women.

The pub and the gin palace were the perfect antidote to the dark and dreary slums. Any man looking for brightness and splendour to lift his spirits above the squalor of his home, who craved extravagance and luxury to counter the grim pragmatism of the industrial town, found them all there. With the warm glow of gaslight, an elaborately carved bar of sumptuous mahogany, high ceilings, an illuminated clock, plate glass windows and elaborate plaster cornices and friezes, it was a palace. Only a remarkable man could resist the lure of the pub.

Jerome Caminada, no liberal apologist for criminals and certainly fully aware of the pub’s role in crime, nevertheless said, ‘Drink is responsible for many people making their appearance in gaol; but, surrounded as they are by a vast desert of bricks and mortar, with nothing except the public house in their midst to enliven them, or to arouse pleasurable emotions, is it to be wondered that women become drunken and untidy and that men desert their homes for the public house?’

To understand the importance of pubs in working class life at this time it is necessary to go back to the situation in the 1820s, when the chattering classes were agog with stories of a sodden nation adrift on a sea of cheap spirits. The purpose of the 1830 Beer Act was to encourage people to forsake spirits in favour of beer by making the healthier drink readily available. The Act allowed anyone to open a beerhouse and sell from 4am until 10pm, without the need for a justice’s licence. Most of those who took advantage of this change in the law merely turned their house into a bar – the barrel stood in the corner and people sat around in a room hardly distinguishable from their own front room. It wasn’t long before many commentators were deploring the effects of the Act, just as they had once deplored the previous situation. One complained that beer was now sold ‘at every baker’s and chandler’s shop; regular drinking places opened in cellars and back premises in every alley in the town slums.’ The result was an inevitable increase in drunkenness. By the 1840s, Manchester had a reputation for depravity, which all assumed was the result of its renown as the home of prodigious drinkers. Part of this insatiable capacity for drink was due to the poor quality of the city’s drinking water.

Commenting on the situation in the 1840s, Friedrich Engels, who could drink and womanise with the best, was nevertheless shocked by Manchester streets on a Saturday night. ‘Intemperance may be seen in all its brutality.’ These scenes were repeated on Sunday night – though, Engels had to admit, with slightly less noise.

In the early Victorian period the alehouse or beerhouse sold only beer. It had neither cellar nor bar – the casks lined the wall. Customers drank at simple tables, sitting on benches or forms. Larger pubs might have a ‘parlour’ with chairs and pictures for the discerning customer who wanted surroundings infinitely plusher than his home. As Queen Victoria’s reign progressed, pubs became more impressive and more alluring to those who lived in the dingy houses surrounding them. The saloon and the public bar – the vault – replaced the taproom. The bar appeared, replacing the serving hatch. In many Manchester pubs a number of small rooms branched off a narrow corridor.

By the 1860s these places offered food. The normal fare was fried fish and bread, sometimes supplemented by the pie-seller’s offerings. Even those workmen who could not afford these small luxuries brought in their lunch to be cooked. Spartan as this sounds, it exercised a great pull, especially for those right at the bottom of the social scale. For tramps and beggars it was somewhere out of the cold when they had a few coppers. For most of the nineteenth century beer remained remarkably cheap at about fourpence a quart. For navvies and those who couldn’t afford to rent or live in digs it was the only alternative to the squalor of the lodging house. For the off-duty domestic it was a place where she could meet her own. For migrant workers it was a source of information about jobs and places to stay. For street vendors and stallholders it was somewhere to take the weight off their feet.