Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (2 page)

The spectacular ugliness of the place struck them all. Manchester was not just ugly – it was extravagantly repulsive, an affront to the senses, an assault on nature. As early as 1808 one visitor found this ‘abnormally filthy’ city violated his senses. Looking down into the stinking Irwell, he remarked that ‘the water of the river is as black as ink’.

Writing in the
Manchester Guardian
of the Ancoats of 1849, Angus Bethune Reach speaks of ‘dingy streets, unsunned courts and gloomy culs de sac’ with open gutters. He tells of the mills, each with its cinder-paved courtyard and steaming engine house. Even the chapels were shabby. And cutting through it all, like frenzied slashes through flesh, are railway viaducts and canals, with their sprawling wharves, coal yards and stagnant barges.

Fifteen years earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville, the great political thinker and one of the shrewdest observers of American and European society, spoke of the same area as if it were some strip of murdered nature: ‘A thick black smoke covered the city. The sun appears like a disc without any rays.’ He saw men toiling in a permanent ‘semi-daylight’. And Dickens used Manchester as a source for Coketown in
Hard Times
. ‘It was a town of red brick… machines and serpents of smoke, a black canal, a river that ran purple with dye, buildings that rattled and trembled all day.’

It is hardly surprising that the city was so ugly. Unloved, thrown together without foresight or care, grimly practical, brutally functional, once its buildings served their purpose they were discarded and left to moulder. Its attraction was severely practical. Like its people, it had no truck with the superfluous.

It existed for work. It provided jobs for each wave of immigrants washed up on its grim streets. For Irish and Jews, Germans and Italians it was only a means to an end, a refuge from poverty or persecution. Many of its blow-ins resented being there, cursing the colonial power that had driven them from home or enticed them with empty promises.

Many regarded the city as no more than a staging post. They hoped to fill their pockets and return home. Nowhere is this more evident than in the city’s old cemeteries. As you amble between the florid headstones, the lettering obscured by lichen, their inscriptions and memorials tell us that though the bodies of these exiles lie in Manchester clay, their hearts are in Sicily, Connemara and Cracow. But observers sensed that Manchester was more than a tangle of offensive sounds, rank smells and distorted images. They agreed on a second characteristic of the city. It was evil. In creating Manchester, man had lifted the lid on hell and called up a devil.

Alexis de Tocqueville realised the city had a malevolent life of its own, beyond human control. ‘A thousand noises rise… the footsteps of a busy crowd, the crunching wheels of machines, the shrieks of steam from the boilers, the regular beat of looms, the heavy rumble of carts – these are the noises from which you can never escape in these half-lit streets.’

This new force was the source of countless evils, the most obvious of which was the disintegration of social cohesion. This separation of the classes was greater in Manchester than anywhere else. The propertied classes, the purveyors of culture, religion and responsibility – civilisation – had no influence over the slum-dwellers.

Disraeli spoke of the two classes. ‘How,’ he asked, ‘are manners to influence men if they are divided into two classes – if the population of a country becomes a group of hostile garrisons?’ This cultural and social apartheid began long before anyone deplored its effects.

The flight to the city’s suburbs had started by 1795. By the 1830s Manchester’s warehouses were far more impressive than her mills and by the beginning of the 1840s the city centre’s substantial middle class dwellings had all given way to commercial buildings. When Leon Faucher, a French economist and later government minister, visited the city in 1844, he wrote his famous
Manchester in 1844: its present condition and future prospects
. He found that Manchester was divided into two separate parts – one which was healthy and attractive, where the respectable lived and another that was vile and poisonous, where the poor and dangerous existed. This divide increased in the following years with the result that by the 1860s hardly any wealthy people lived in the city.

Writing in the
Manchester Guardian
in 1864 Edward Brotherton, the Victorian philanthropist, was merely repeating what many others had said before. ‘The intelligent classes,’ he said, ‘know nothing of the poor parts of the city.’ If they did, ‘they would find thousands of children who must almost of necessity grow up idle, reckless and many of them criminal.’

The fear he voiced was stoked by growing concern about the garrotting epidemic of 1862 and 1863. Again the local press sent its intrepid reporters into the depths of the slums, seeking the source of this latest threat – and once more they lighted on the low lodging house. The
Manchester City News
of 12 March 1864 found there were 472 lodging houses in the city; of these 147 were the resort of known thieves, 244 were occupied by vagrants and ‘poor travellers’ and seventy-two by hawkers, foreigners and the Irish.

Little had changed in the fourteen years since Reach had investigated the lodging houses of Angel Meadow. The same ragbag of fallen humanity lived there. According to Reach, prostitutes, their bullies, vagrants, cadgers, tramps, thieves and the low Irish huddled together in moral and physical squalor. Contemporary observers were unanimous in their belief that there was a close link between living conditions and sexual immorality. In particular, they had in mind the overcrowding that forced whole families to sleep in a single room. Sharing beds remained a part of working class life for a long time after the middle class came to believe that separate rooms were vital to maintain the privacy and delicacy essential to decency.

The city also led to the breakdown of the family on which a healthy society depended. When Hippolyte Taine, the French philosopher and one of the most distinguished intellectuals of his day, visited Manchester in 1872, he saw a mass of workers, most of whom ‘married young, had six children, drank and saved nothing. The wife was a bad housekeeper in becoming a good factory hand.’

This disjunction of family relationships led to a coarsening of human instincts. Engels was not the last to comment on the appalling neglect of children, which was a feature of Manchester life. Though the overall death rate among children was staggering, that for illegitimate children was eight times higher. The death rate was high in all cities, yet many observers commented on the callous indifference that marked Mancunians’ attitude to the suffering of children, especially their own. This is to some extent reflected in the 1868 figures for missing children. That year 5,410 were reported lost. Of these 3,247 were found and restored to their parents.

But what of the rest? In many ways Manchester was a frontier town, where all the old certainties died and restraints were thrown off. By the 1850s the city had a reputation for its raucous nightlife, a tumult of drink, violence and vice. The streets hummed with industry during the day and at night with the throng of drunks, thieves, gangs and tarts. Finally, visitors agreed the city was dangerous. In 1843 when Carlyle was mesmerised by Manchester, he summed up the threat it represented by saying it was ‘built on the infinite abyss’.

The first to describe this threat was Dr James Phillips Kay. He was a leading member of the Manchester Statistical Society, a group of prominent citizens who sought to apply scientific developments ‘to promote the progress of social improvement’. He was Senior Physician to the Ardwick and Ancoats Dispensary. In his famous 1832 account of the Deansgate area he chiefly addressed the conditions which threatened the lives of the poor. But he also spoke of ‘a mass of buildings, inhabited by prostitutes and thieves’. Moral and physical squalor were mixed, like shades of filth in a midden. In Parliament Street, almost 400 people shared a single privy. Salford’s equivalent was the area around Gathorn Street. Almost fifty years later, Alfred Alsop, another middle class explorer who sometimes ventured into ‘unknown Manchester’ – of which his class were as ignorant as of darkest Africa or the Amazon rainforests – found a city that had changed little from Kay’s time.

Despite the vogue for slum exploration, it was not necessary to enter these places in order to know what they were like. All you had to do was inhale. They exuded an overpowering stench of refuse and human waste. This was more than a matter of offended sensibilities, though. Squalor killed. In the 1840s there was one death in every thirty-two of the Manchester population, compared to one in fifty-five in Sussex and Cornwall. What this means is that average life expectancy in Manchester was twenty-four years at a time when the national average was forty.

For most of the nineteenth century, Ancoats was the death black spot of Manchester. It had its own poisoned microclimate: a pall of smoke glowered over its grey streets, acid rain fell on the soot-streaked walls and a plague of disease choked off the breath of its people: bronchitis, influenza, pneumonia and asthma hovered in the damp air. It is hardly surprising that by the 1870s life expectancy had dropped to less than twenty. And as if all this were not bad enough, the city decided to dump all its shit on Ancoats.

For most of the nineteenth century Manchester had no sewage policy. Ashpits and communal cesspits were the city’s only provision for human waste and the city council decided their contents should be hauled to Ancoats. Heavy or prolonged rainfall, a common occurrence, meant these pits overflowed into the cellars that still housed large numbers of families. What was even worse was that until 1870 much human waste ended up in the River Irwell, for many still a source of drinking water.

Even when street cleaning was introduced the best streets were cleaned once a week and the alleys, courts and narrow streets where the poor huddled, once a month. No wonder cholera was a regular summer visitor to the city. Though it cut great swathes through the population, it was not the main killer. Consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis) – the hacking cough, breathlessness and the clot of blood vivid on a white handkerchief – was the main killer. It culled most of its victims from the inner city of Ancoats, Hulme, Chorlton-on-Medlock and Ardwick. It was only the piping of fresh water from the Longdendale Reservoir in the 1850s and Thirlemere in the 1890s that wiped out cholera and typhoid.

Manchester’s death pallor was obvious to all. When Queen Victoria visited in 1851, she had no need to consult mortality data. ‘What a painfully unhealthy-looking population! Men as well as women,’ she exclaimed.

Yet the filth of the city was only its most obvious threat. Poverty was equally dangerous. In an age beset with fear of revolution, this concentration of destitute wretches was a ticking time-bomb.

The Essence of Hell

In the 1840s Manchester was the poorest place in Britain, worse than the much documented East End of London which drew gasps of indignation from the social investigators who witnessed the destitution of its residents. Throughout the nineteenth century the average wage in Manchester was well below subsistence level.

When in 1888 the
Lancet
sent an investigator to study the conditions of Manchester tailors, he found that their pay was 6d an hour – as it had been for the previous twenty years. A report of 1889 found that forty per cent of working men in Salford were in ‘irregular employment’. Clinging to a precarious existence on a weekly income of less than four shillings, their poverty was a result of the erratic nature of casual labour, the only work available to many. During the winter of 1878 and 1879 most of those receiving poor relief were casual or seasonal workers, such as warehousemen, builders and general labourers, storemen and carters. Many were Irish or of Irish descent.

Life was precarious in other ways. Of the inquests held by the Manchester coroner in 1868, 266 returned a verdict of accidental death. Some of these were the result of the general use of open fires for warmth and cooking and candles and oil lamps for light. But many were simply the occupational hazards stalking all those working in pits and factories.

The city’s industry had an insatiable appetite for labour. It vacuumed up people. First it drew them from the surrounding countryside. In the early nineteenth century it pulled in the first of the Jews who were to settle in the city, cotton merchants, who wanted to be at the heart of the industry that was driving the revolution. They congregated around Cheetham Hill. However, this rural idyll, barely a mile from the city’s commercial centre, was soon a victim of the demand for labour. The grass of Cheetham’s meadows was soon buried under thousands of jerry-built hovels, slums before the mortar was dry.

This was the real threat of Manchester: would it poison the surrounding countryside as it had Cheetham’s meadows? Would she export her filth and disorder the way she exported her cotton? And what about those sinister aliens, especially the Irish and the Jews, who infested the bowels of the city? What would check their evil influence?

From the 1840s parts of the city were no-go areas, totally out of bounds for anyone who valued his life. The very fact that a person frequented such places was proof of criminality. According to Alsop, ‘returned convicts, sharpers, smashers, thieves, harlots, gaolbirds, fortune-tellers and unlicensed sellers of beer’ infested its streets. This place consisted of ‘the very scum of the city, the essence of hell’. Little wonder that squalor and crime figured large in the reputation of Manchester. The city’s image was so powerful that at times it seemed to take on a life of its own, attracting every type of crook and shyster because they really believed that Manchester was a rogue’s paradise.

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