Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (17 page)

Pubs often staged more sombre business. Traditionally, they provided the venue for coroner’s inquests. In May 1874, the Bull’s Head, in Greengate, held an inquest. What came to light provides a clearer insight into Salford life than volumes of statistics.

The coroner was investigating the death of Robert Haslam, 52, who, for half his lifetime, eked out a living as a comic singer and clog-dancer. At the pinnacle of his fame he performed at that Manchester institution, Ben Lang’s Music Hall, but for many years Haslam was locked into a downward trajectory that saw him performing in pubs for a few drinks and a couple of shillings. The coroner found that he died of natural causes ‘accelerated by want of medical attention and the proper necessities of life’. In other words, he had starved to death. The jury was so moved by the case and the condition of Robert Haslam’s family that, to save them from going the same way, they raised a ten-shilling donation.

Most of the business of another Greengate pub, the Waterloo, was far different from the formalities of a coroner’s proceedings. In fact, most of its business was in breach of the conditions of its licence. The landlord, Richard Gordon, admitted as much when summoned in 1869. The police had not, until then, posed a problem as lookouts ringed the pub. Dog-fighting was also illegal, though that only served to sharpen the enjoyment of the punters who gathered at the Rose and Shamrock in Chapel Street. In November 1861 the police ruined their night by swooping in great numbers, arresting fifty spectators and hauling the licensee before the magistrates, who gave him a month in Strangeways.

Neither press condemnation nor police raids could suppress popular entertainment. On Tib Street, a few doors from the corner with Whittle Street, there was the Black Boy beerhouse. In 1896, the magistrates convicted the tenant of organising a cockfight. Such was the interest generated that in addition to the drinkers – each with money on his fancy – hordes of by-passers, many patrons of local betting shops, thronged the doorway and blocked the street in their anxiety to place a bet.

On the same street, where it met Thomas Street, stood the Manchester Arms, which was the subject of so many complaints in 1896 that the police started watching it. In the course of a single hour 200 people passed in and out. It was not the excellence of the Arms’ brew that was the attraction but the opportunity for a flutter. The licensee sat at a table in the front room with lists of the runners and riders spread out around him. When the police descended on him, he was unable to offer any plausible explanation and the court subsequently imposed the enormous fine of £100. Undeterred, he immediately resumed business and though the court fined him a second time six months later, there is no reason to believe this made a significant dent in his profits. The courts did nothing to curtail the city’s appetite for gambling. Despite the hefty fines imposed on most of the list shops in the area, several opponents of gambling complained to the local papers that the droves of punters thronging Thomas Street continued to make the thoroughfare impassable.

The Three Legs of Man was far worse. It stood opposite a cluster of houses known as Birtles Square. Throughout the 1870s both the pub and the area were the scene of daily violence. When the
Salford Chronicle
applauded its demolition in March 1880, it reminded its readers that for thirty years it had been a ‘den of sin and infamy’. The British Queen on the corner of Queen Street, one of the most squalid areas of the city, also gloried in its notoriety. In 1869 the court sentenced its landlord, Cooper, a notorious fence, to transportation to Australia. For many years the pub had been a haven for thieves, prostitutes and every other species of Salford crook. For over thirty years the police battled to close it. That it survived into the twentieth century is amazing in view of their allegation that it was ‘the most disorderly and disgraceful house in all Salford’. When the magistrates eventually refused its licence in 1904 it was because by then its only customers were prostitutes.

The Ship Inn, Deansgate was also run by a series of shady characters, each of whom tried to outdo his predecessor in infamy. Harry Snowden was a notorious receiver of stolen goods. John Northern, formerly the keeper of a beerhouse, was a thief and a fraud who specialised in card sharping. Archibald Coyles, a former boxer, was also implicated in a number of card-sharping swindles, as was Mark Hampson, who kept a beerhouse, the Brown Cow in Irwell Street. Hampson later became well known as a trainer of racing and fighting dogs. He was equally renowned as the husband of one of the city’s most notorious pickpockets.

The Dog and Duck in Charter Street was for decades the watering hole of the swell mobsmen. Dressed in all their finery they set out to fleece the gentlemen of the Cotton Exchange and pass the forged money, which was their speciality. Many of the Deansgate pubs were among the most notorious in the city. As early as the 1840s, the Bull’s Head on the corner of Deansgate and Wood Street was described by the police as ‘the worst in town’. The licensee’s convictions equalled those of most of his customers, ‘thieves and prostitutes of the very worst description’. Though pubs near the market opened early in the morning on market days, the Bull’s Head stayed open during the night to satisfy its clientele, none of whom had any reason to rise early. Nevertheless, it retained its licence and after a change of licensee was advertising ‘gentlemen only’ concerts and boasting of its shooting gallery. Together with The Bull in the first rank of infamy were the Dog and Rat, the Red White and Blue, the Old Ship, the Pat M’Carthy and the Green Man. No honest man used them as they were widely known as covens of thieves and prostitutes.

Many beerhouses had no licence and were fronts for prostitution and fencing. Others provided venues for dog-fights and ratting. Many in the Smithfield market area had their licences suspended as licensees were, in the words of the police, ‘running them in a disgraceful manner’.

On Chapel Street, the Butcher’s Arms was a brothel. The magistrates fined the licensee, Samuel Hancock, £5 for keeping a disorderly house. A number of the rooms were crowded with couches and cushions and three notorious prostitutes were in permanent residence. In the same area, Wood Street, Calhoun Street and Richmond Street were also infamous dens of vice. Another Chapel Street pub, the Lord Nelson, boasted some tasty customers. As William McDonald was leaving on a Saturday night in January 1875, Michael Gorman jumped him and tried to bite off his nose. Not surprisingly, McDonald took exception to this and rammed his finger into Gorman’s mouth in an attempt to prise his jaws apart. Gorman, not content with biting the offending digit, then tore off a piece of McDonald’s lip before returning his powerful jaws to his nose. Satisfied at last, Gorman fed. When the police caught up with him, he was calmly cooking his supper: presumably McDonald’s lip and nose weren’t very filling. In court, Gorman showed no remorse. In fact, he could not stop laughing at the spectacle of McDonald’s nose swathed in an enormous bandage. The judge failed to see the funny side and gave him six months.

Many outraged members of the public asked: How do these places, where violence is an everyday occurrence, keep their licences? The police, at all levels, often had an accommodating relationship with the licensees. This is understandable, as each needed the other. The peeler on the beat needed his easing spots, where he could rest his legs for a few minutes and get out of the cold; the licensee needed his help with drunks and troublemakers. Sometimes this relationship was a little too cosy. In April 1897 the Manchester Watch Committee felt it necessary to remind every licensee in the city that under the 1872 Licensing Act it was an offence to provide drink to a constable on duty. Bribery, it also reminded landlords, was an offence. There is no evidence to suggest that blatant bribery was a major concern. But it is equally clear that the practice of giving officers free drinks and perhaps a ‘Christmas box’ was commonplace.

The answer to the public’s question was one the police would never publicly admit, though it was well understood among all those charged with controlling crime. The police view was that crime, and especially prostitution, were as inevitable as rain in Manchester. Confining them to pubs in certain areas of the city meant that the police could exercise a degree of control that would otherwise be impossible. Even so, there were many pubs that created a public outcry that forced the authorities to take action. Magistrates closed the Old Cat’s Face on Market Street as most of its customers were thieves.

At the licensing session of August 1869 magistrates refused to renew the licences of the following: James Bradley, of The Church Tavern, Green Street; George Hardy, of The Dog Inn, Deansgate; Thomas Rigby, of The Railway Inn, Deansgate; Mary Abrahams, of The Soho Foundry, Ancoats; Matthias Mather, of The Victoria Tavern, Angel Street, and John Bennett, of The Grecian Head, Deansgate. In 1870, John Ashton, landlord of the Ducie Bridge Inn, Long Millgate, on the corner of Miller Street, stood accused of allowing thieves to meet and assemble in his house. This is in the area of the infamous Charter Street and Angel Street, described in the local press as a ‘low area’ and the haunt of prostitutes and thieves.

It is little wonder that John Clay, the influential prison chaplain, who ministered to the inmates at Preston for many years, maintained that the pubs, beerhouses and gin palaces of Manchester – and not the prisons – were the real schools of crime and vice. A great deal of the violence and theft of which Clay complained happened in city centre pubs, which were then, as now, the places to meet, especially for the young. Shudehill, the site of the famous Saturday market, provided free amusement.

Courting couples, boys and girls, alone or in clusters, pushed through the bustling crowds, usually between 15,000 and 20,000 strong. Between the gas-lit stalls a sea of faces, a great pulsing tide of humanity, ebbed and flowed. And every few yards there was a crowded pub. The Salford equivalent was between Salford Bridge and Blackfriars, a distance of no more than 150 yards, where there were ten pubs. The 600 yards of Chapel Street, from Greengate to New Bailey Street, boasted twenty-five pubs – some next-door to each other. As Salford’s main shopping area it provided everything anyone could want. There were saddlers and harness makers shops, but more revealing of working class life are the butchers and fishmongers. They suggest that the diet of the poor was more varied than today. The butchers sold bacon, hams, eggs, strings of sausages, rump stakes, sirloins, mutton chops, spare ribs, apple sauce, tripe, trotters, pigs’ cheek, cow heels and chitterlings. The fishmongers offered salmon, cod, flukes, flounders, sole, kippers and, one of the staples of the poor, red herrings. Lobsters, prawns, shrimps, periwinkles, whelks, oysters, mussels and cockles all glistened in the window. Yet among all this there were those who could not find a bite to eat. The nameless destitute that the landlady of Chapel Street’s Unicorn pub found lying in her doorway in 1874 was scarcely alive. He was in such an advanced state of starvation that though she fed him with bread and beef he died a few hours later.

Dry Salvation

He was, according to supporters of the temperance movement, just one of the countless victims of drink. Like Canute, they set themselves the hopeless task of holding back the tide of drink that threatened the city. Major Ballentine, master of the Crumpsall workhouse, one of those who saw at first hand the degradation and poverty caused by drink, had strong views on temperance. He was heavily involved in the Manchester and Salford Temperance Society, the Lancashire and Cheshire Band of Hope Union, the Church of England Temperance Society and the Manchester Scottish Temperance Association. He saw in Manchester’s squalor the evil hand of drink. Like many of the socially aware he believed that the greatest kindness anyone could bestow on the poor was to introduce them to the blessings of temperance.

Such was the effect of drink in Manchester that temperance societies came to regard the city as a sodden hotbed of iniquity, in greater need of abstinence than most cities and towns. By the 1860s there were three temperance societies with a total of fifty branches in Manchester and Salford. The conurbation’s response was emphatic – a rapid growth in the number of beerhouses. As well as advocating that individuals make a personal commitment to total abstinence, the societies lobbied for fewer pubs and beerhouses. The pleasure gardens, in particular, aroused their disapproval.

These gardens entertained hundreds of people, offering dancing, concerts, plays, bars and restaurants. Many commentators regarded them as squalid and there is no doubt they attracted large numbers of prostitutes. Though there is little evidence that the drinkers of Manchester were in any way deterred by abstentionist propaganda, the temperance movement retained a presence in working class life, much like the sandwich board proselyte proclaiming the evils of gambling to the crowds swarming past him into the Manchester races.

Drink and gambling were two of the unholy trinity that was poisoning society. The third could not be mentioned in mixed company.

7

Vice

Wretched Ruins

‘What is your name, child?’ asked the elderly clergyman.

‘That’s the only thing I won’t give you,’ she replied. ‘I’ll give you anything else,’ she said with a wink.

The elderly clergyman was one of an army of Victorians who set out to save the prostitute. Their fixation with prostitution resulted in a plethora of research, statistics and opinions. This concern for what many regarded as the country’s greatest social scandal went to the very pinnacle of British society. The leading politician of the era, William Gladstone, four times Prime Minister and leader of the opposition for many years, maintained a friendship with the intelligent ex-prostitute Mrs Thistlethwaite. Together they trawled the streets of London seeking prostitutes to redeem.