Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (20 page)

Yet there was plenty of evidence in Manchester to contradict this. For many decades in the second half of the century the area behind Piccadilly was infamous as the stamping ground of old, broken down prostitutes. These women, repellent and pathetic, confirmed the widely held opinion that women were far more difficult to reform than men and that female criminals were more depraved than their male equivalent. The hardened prostitute, without any sense of shame, was one of the most depressing underworld figures.

Yet some did change. There was a reformatory in Manchester, which took girls from prison, chiefly prostitutes. They learnt to read and write and later went into service.

The most forceful and influential proponent of the view that prostitutes were redeemable was William Acton, one of the foremost Victorian experts on prostitution. Acton’s book
Prostitution, considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects
, published in 1857, coincided with a surge of public interest in the subject. He contradicted the standard Victorian view of the prostitute as a fatally flawed individual whose immoral life inevitably set her on a downward spiral of ever increasing degradation, ending in a squalid death. Instead he maintained that most prostitutes were no more than temporary outcasts who re-entered society through marriage. Nor did he believe the life of a prostitute led to any physical damage. Quite the contrary, he maintained, ‘If we compare the prostitute at thirty-five with her sister… a married mother of a family who has been a toiling slave for years we seldom find the constitutional ravages often thought to be the necessary consequences of prostitution exceed those attributed to the cares of a family and the heart-wearing struggles of virtuous labour.’ In other words, whoring was less harmful than honest labour.

Acton believed that the small number of old prostitutes walking the streets of Manchester was proof that most women went back to normal life. He was also convinced that the number of prostitutes suffering from the most frightening effects of syphilis – the collapsed nose, the rotted palate and nodes on the shin – had declined. Yet though the number of people suffering from advanced forms of the disease was on the decline, the frequency of the disease remained steady. Acton maintained that an unwanted baby was the commonest route into prostitution. Similarly, marriage was the means by which prostitutes returned to normal life. Some did become madams but more emigrated and put their old life behind them.

It is difficult, however, to take the same sanguine view of those who became prostitutes before they were able to make a conscious decision.

White Slavery

Child prostitution was an important part of the nineteenth century criminal scene. One contemporary estimate reckoned that in Manchester in the 1870s there were 500 prostitutes under the age of thirteen. The extent of child prostitution was something that greatly troubled the Victorian conscience and appalled foreign visitors. Yet the demand for children for the purpose of sexual gratification was so great that by 1875 it was common for mature prostitutes to dress like children. Oscar Wilde, who regularly holidayed with his coterie in the Middle East so that they might abuse little boys, regarded the matter as frivolous. Speaking of the publisher Leonard Smithers, he said, ‘He loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his passion.’

Though the 1871 Royal Commission concluded, ‘The traffic in children for infamous purposes is notoriously considerable in London and other large towns,’ it was only in 1885 that the matter came to national prominence. W. T. Stead was a pioneering journalist and publicity addict who did as much as anyone to create the media obsession with the pseudo-event. The pseudo-event has now displaced reality as the focus of many newspapers. It is something that has no intrinsic importance other than that created by the media. To take but two common examples: ‘Colleen seen shopping in Manchester’ and ‘Jade on Keep Fat Diet’.

When Stead ran his famous series of articles in 1885 the age of consent was thirteen, having been raised from twelve in 1875. Prostitution fascinated Stead. In particular he regarded the evils of the white slavery in children as a national disgrace and felt it his duty to expose it to a docile public. As editor of the prestigious
Pall Mall Gazette
he believed he was in a perfect position to focus the full glare of publicity on this shameful trade in innocent children. First he enlisted the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and the Roman Catholic Cardinal Manning. On a more practical level he made contact with Rebecca Jarrett, a reformed prostitute. His strategy was to show the ease with which anyone might acquire a child virgin, transport her to Belgium – the reputed centre of child prostitution – deposit her in a brothel and thereby consign her to a life of abuse.

The plan went without a hitch. Stead got the child, Eliza Armstrong, from a Mrs Broughton for the sum of £5. His account of the transaction created a sensation and sales of the
Gazette
rocketed. However, Mrs Armstrong, the child’s mother, unhappy at the hostile way Stead had depicted her, undid him. She teamed up with a rival publication which discovered that Stead had not sought permission from the child’s father and had misled the mother by telling her he was placing the girl in service. Soon Stead found himself in the dock of the Old Bailey with two of his accomplices accused of fraudulently taking the child. Two of the women who helped him each got six months. Stead, glorying in the role of martyr, got three, which he spent in considerable comfort in Holloway where he continued to edit the
Gazette
. He remembered his Holloway days as the happiest time in his life. Imprisonment gave him the martyrdom and public attention he craved.

Apart from Stead’s self-promotion, the incident had practical results. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 raised the age of consent to sixteen. It made the procurement of a girl for prostitution a criminal offence and the penalty for assaulting a child under thirteen either whipping or penal servitude.

Stead’s instinct for publicity stayed with him to the very end. He went down with the
Titanic
in 1912. His campaign of 1885, however, struck a cord with the chattering classes, harmonising perfectly with the impulse for moral reform sweeping the country. Consequently, the Criminal Law Amendment Act made every form of whoremongering illegal. Sex with a child under sixteen was punishable by two years’ imprisonment and by penal servitude for life if she was under thirteen. To further protect respectable women from the ordure of prostitution, the Slander of Women Act, 1891, made ‘words which impute unchastity or adultery to any woman or girl’ actionable, even where there was no proof of damage.

In the same spirit, concerned citizens – including the Quaker kings of chocolate, George and Richard Cadbury – formed the National Vigilance Association for the Repression of Criminal Vice and Immorality, to prevent the sort of behaviour that resulted in decent women being insulted. Their aims were nothing if not ambitious and included the suppression of child prostitution, the closure of houses of ill fame, an end to indecent performances in concert halls, obscene pictures on the doors of concert halls, quack advertisements and indecent literature. W. T. Stead, not to be outdone, urged his readers to thrash any man making unwelcome advances to a lady.

There is no evidence that any of this affected life in Manchester’s rookeries. Nor did it impinge on the music hall, where stories of sexual advances were staple fare and the chief delight of audiences.

With a Goose Under His Arm

Those worried about the moral welfare of the poor bemoaned the baleful influence of the pub. The music hall, they believed, was even more harmful to decency and propriety. And the more respectable people denounced its pernicious influence, the more clergymen castigated its smutty comics, the more reformers denounced its moral corruption – the more popular it became until it assumed its position as the working man’s entertainment, second only to the pub.

In the 1840s what was to become the distinctive life of the city was emerging as the new Mancunians created their popular culture. It had two major components – music and drink – and the music hall brought both together. The halls emerged from the many pubs with music. They gradually developed into music halls as the entertainment provided became as important as the drink and owners started to charge for it. Music halls were the most popular form of entertainment for working people in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s enterprising businessmen all over the country were building song and supper rooms onto pubs.

The penny gaff was the forerunner of the music hall. It was a sort of theatrical underworld, free of the decency restrictions imposed on the theatre. Many of the Manchester gaffs in working class areas were large, gutted shops fitted with a primitive stage and rows of benches, crammed together to hold the maximum number of customers. Singing and dancing were the staples. Sopranos in their early teens and comic singers, often wearing battered hats and gigantic bowed cravats, the attraction of whose acts depended entirely on a risqué phrase in the chorus, were universally popular. Audience participation was at the heart of the entertainment. Men stamped their feet, girls shrieked in delight and wide-boys heckled. And everyone sang along.

The penny gaff became fashionable in the 1860s. Open from 6pm-11pm it attracted the full spectrum of working class people: housewives with babes in arms, adolescents, cab drivers, dustmen, coachmen, sailors, prostitutes and a smattering of respectable people. The entertainers were often not the most respectable. ‘Actress’ was still sometimes used as a euphemism for prostitute. Many respectable people still assumed that all actresses were disreputable. One of the earliest big venues in Manchester was Ben Lang’s in Victoria Street, almost opposite the Cathedral by Victoria Bridge. During the 1840s it became the city’s most popular working class attraction, regularly drawing audiences of over 2,000 people. The ‘turns’ tell us a lot about a working-class night out. Singers of ballads, opera, sentimental and risqué ditties were always popular. Comics and freaks appeared between magicians and jugglers. Sack races across the stage and prizes for comic singers from the audience were a part of every show. To add to the spectacle those brave enough to go on stage had to perform with a wild goose under one arm. For this array of delights, they paid 2d for the galleries, 3d for the pit. Alcohol was available from the attached beerhouse and thirsty punters drank as fast as an army of waiters could ferry it.

For years it was a goldmine. Then, on 31 July 1868, it became a charnel house. When a small fire started a panic, the crowds rushed for the inadequate exits, crushing each other on the narrow stairs. The press showed little interest in the incident and less sympathy for the twenty-three victims, most of whom were young people, describing them as ‘street Arabs’. Local newspapers intimated that the hall was full of prostitutes and criminals, though subsequently it became clear that the majority of victims were employed. What is sure is that they were among the poorest in the city and the press was inured to their misfortunes. Despite this tragedy, music halls remained more popular in Manchester, where pubs offering music and singing were a key part of entertainment in working class areas from early in the nineteenth century, than anywhere else.

Consequently it was not long before farsighted entrepreneurs saw the potential for purpose-built halls, serving food and drink, with a chairman, who introduced the acts and kept order. Soon an array of stars and supporting acts circulated around the country entertaining the hordes who thronged to the twice-nightly shows. It is wrong to think that only working people went to the music halls. They attracted all sections of society. But they were particularly popular among young, employed, unmarried adults. The acts appealed to working class people and consequently reflected their outlook and values. Most of all, they provided people with the opportunity to take part, if only by singing the choruses. The audiences were never passive recipients of pre-packaged entertainment. A music hall show was what we would call today an interactive experience. The songs, which were the staples of every show, provided a shared experience, as the audience joined in heartily. Halls such as The Star, in Pollard Street, Ancoats, were so important to the social life of the area that one observer described it in the 1880s as ‘the sole bright spot in a place of terrible gloom’. The acts had no need to ask the manager how they were doing. The audience left them in no doubt. They sang, cheered, whistled, clapped, barracked, booed, stamped their feet and pelted the stage as they felt appropriate. This was an essential part of the experience and created a sense of community that most of us today encounter only when we’re part of a religious congregation or a large and partisan football crowd.

There were, of course, different types of halls, each with a unique audience. The better halls were spacious. The typical audience at the Wolverhampton, one of the larger Manchester venues, consisted of smartly dressed mechanics, commercial travellers, clerks, warehousemen and shop workers. One observer remarked that among the audience in the 1870s were ‘steady, sober-looking men, with their wives, sometimes their children’. Refreshment tables lined the stalls of the Wolverhampton and waiters formed a conveyor belt bringing drinks from the bars. The balcony provided the cheapest seats. In effect, segregation operated. The more affluent members of the community – shopkeepers and publicans – sat in the orchestra stalls and the dress circle. Craftsmen and those in regular work sat in the pit stalls, while, in a reversal of social status, the poorest patrons were on the ‘top shelf ’, the balcony. But most of Manchester’s music halls were not the spacious, gaudy mock-grand palaces of the purpose-built halls. In fact, they were little more than pubs with music licences, packing in about fifty people. By 1891 they numbered 400.