Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (29 page)

The case also caused a stir in medical circles. No less a publication than the
British Medical Journal
published an article by a Dr Gumbert in which the Manchester doctor attacked the findings of the city’s analyst, Charles Escourt. According to Gumbert the amount of chloral found in Fletcher’s body was not enough to kill him or to have contributed to his death in any way. The most likely cause of Fletcher’s death was, according to Gumbert, alcohol poisoning.

All this added to the doubts surrounding the verdict and fuelled the campaign for a reprieve. Several politicians supported the reprieve petition, signed by over 3,000 in Manchester and Liverpool and personally presented by Parton’s solicitor, William Burton. What gave Charlie’s case real hope, however, was the backing of the trial judge.

On the other hand, powerful forces opposed a reprieve. Certain sections of the press argued that to reprieve Charlie was tantamount to telling every thief intending to use drugs that he need not worry about his victim dying as he would not hang. Many felt the courts had to send a clear message to the likes of Parton.

For a while Charlie’s life hung in the balance.

On appeal the court reduced his sentence to penal servitude for life. When he heard, Charlie, who throughout had made a great display of his cool detachment, burst into tears. In fact Charlie served only eleven years. After spells in Portland and Dartmoor he became the first convicted murderer released on a ticket-of-leave after less than twelve years. Later he made a career of his notoriety. He claimed that, contrary to what the police believed, he had robbed Fletcher not only of a watch and £5 but of £500 in cash. It was through his interest in horse racing that he came into contact with hardened criminals and he was with such a group of men when he met Fletcher that February night and decided to drug and rob him.

After his release Charlie travelled the world but returned to enlist on the outbreak of war in 1914. His luck held and he survived the holocaust of the Western Front. But neither trench warfare nor hard labour changed him. Shortly after the War he received a six-month sentence for stealing a bag from Euston Station. While in prison he went into a decline so alarming that he secured an early release on medical grounds. Once more he travelled the country trading on his infamy. But his criminal tendencies resulted in a string of convictions and a further ten years inside – always, in his opinion, for trivial offences.

Jerome Caminada, however, shed no tears for Parton. In his view, the fighter got away with murder. Shortly after Parton’s reprieve, John Parky died after an illness of several months. He was another of Charlie’s victims who never recovered from the effects of the drugs.

The case of John Parky aroused great interest though in many ways it was commonplace. Like him, many died from substances administered to them for gain.

Gangs

‘Hello, sailor,’ said Joseph Hillyard, jiggling the blade in his right hand. ‘What say I carve you up?’ As Peter McLaughlin turned to run, Hillyard drove the knife between his shoulder blades.

This was only one of the thousands of acts of gang violence played out on the streets of Manchester and Salford during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The perpetrators were happy to use belts, blades and boots to slash flesh and smash skulls – just to show they were hard. Within their subculture brutality was a quality, savagery guaranteed esteem and total disregard for one’s personal safety in the pursuit of injuring others was the highest ideal. They were called the ‘scuttlers’.

The scuttlers were caricatures of the working class hard man. They distorted and magnified the importance of being able to ‘look after yourself’ to such an extent that they sought out their rivals so that they could ‘carve them up’. As vicious as the Teddy Boys, Rockers and Skins who succeeded them, they made the pubs, music halls and streets of Manchester their battleground. For many years their exploits filled the pages of the local newspapers, evoking the envy of their peers and the fear of respectable people.

Just as the cut-throat and bicycle chain distinguished Teddy Boys, the scuttlers’ weapon of choice was the belt. Thick leather, decorated with metal pins in the shape of serpents, arrow-pierced hearts, feathers, clogs, animals, stars, the owner’s name or that of a girlfriend, it was both a means of identification and a fearsome weapon. Wrapped around the owner’s hand, the buckle on the end of a length of leather broke bones, tore flesh and split skulls. Not that the scuttlers confined themselves to the use of belt and clogs. Among weapons the police confiscated from Manchester scuttlers were cutlasses, pokers, lengths of strap with iron bolts fixed to the end, knives and loaded sticks.

Belt apart, scuttler attire was as distinctive as that of today’s Grunge and Goth and appeared every bit as bizarre. Their hairstyle was short-back-and-sides with a foppish fringe plastered across the forehead in the manner later immortalised by Hitler. With their loose white scarf, worn muffler-style and a cloth cap with the peak pulled down over the right eye, they affected a menacing slouch. Their bell-bottom or flared trousers predated the 1960s by almost a century and had to conform to rigid criteria – fourteen inches round the knee and twenty-one round the foot. Narrow-tied brass tipped clogs were
de rigueur
as part of the uniform and as lethal weapons.

The uniform, however, was a double-edged sword. Wearing it gave them the kudos of belonging to a group both feared and envied. Young men and boys looked up to the scuttler – he was hard and not to be messed with. His bravado and recklessness attracted girls. But it was an invitation to other scuttlers, defying them to attack. A scuttler who ventured into alien territory was challenging his rivals. His presence said, ‘I’m in charge. What are you going to do about it? Beat me or else lose face.’

Scuttlers enjoyed far more newspaper coverage than the footballers and boxers who were the working class heroes of the day. For the last three decades of the century the local papers covered their exploits with a mixture of horror and disbelief. In working class Manchester and Salford they were the envy of the young. The more the newspapers insulted them, calling them ‘slum monkeys’, ‘savage hooligans’ and ‘street blackguards’, the greater the public fascination. They invested them with an aura of heroism, bestowing on them all the romance of the desperado who defied authority and damned the consequences.

They stood in the tradition of the popular heroes who took on authority and thereby evoked horror and awe. Such outlaws have always had a place in popular affections and during the nineteenth century they and the most notorious criminals captured the working class imagination.
The Penny Magazine
, the serialised novel and the Saturday newspaper glorified their exploits. Such was the public’s insatiable appetite for accounts of low life that many commentators believed that the obsession with violence and squalor was poisoning the minds of the young. During the last three decades of the century the scuttlers attracted immense interest and many blamed their mindless violence on the media which inflamed their imagination and stimulated a morbid love of horror and atrocities.

The broadsheet and the penny dreadful were popular among the Manchester poor. The ballads, which sold on single sheets, touched on every aspect of Victorian life. But of all the topics they covered none was so popular as crime. The street sellers advertised the most gruesome crimes with cries of ‘Horrible Murder’, ‘Dreadful Slaying’ and ‘Vile Seduction’. The titles of many of these make it clear that their appeal was pornographic and sadistic. Titles such as ‘Shocking Rape and Murder of Two Lovers’ guaranteed good sales. This particular title referred to the case of John Hodges, a farmer’s son, who raped Jane Williams and then murdered her and her lover, William Edwards.

Almost as popular were accounts of executions. Those embellished with a gruesome woodcut showing the victim in his death throes were particularly appealing. Verses frequently accompanied them, allegedly the work of the criminal in his death cell the night before his execution. As one seller of broadsheets said, ‘There’s nothing beats a stunning good murder.’ The Bebbingtons of Manchester and Preston’s Harkness family were among the biggest producers of these broadsheets. Many commentators abhorred the popular preoccupation with ‘the sensual, the violent and the horrible’. One feared it stimulated ‘the animal propensities of the young, the ardent and the sensual’. This public preoccupation with crime was most evident in the enduring popularity of
The Newgate Calendar
and the obsession with newspaper accounts of the Jack the Ripper murders.

As if to confirm the dire effects of the media on the young, Manchester’s local papers during the summer of 1870 were full of indignant citizens’ complaints about the street urchins, mainly youths and young men, who congregated in Oldham Street in the evenings, particularly on Sundays. The situation had been developing for some time. Oldham Street become an established rendezvous for young boys and girls who spent the hours between 8pm and 10pm there. Accounts of their antics bristled with indignation. ‘Urchins with bare heads,’ one report recounts, ‘sang vile comic songs.’ The banter between the assembled throngs consisted mainly of curses and crude suggestions. Lads entertained themselves by ‘rudely jostling’ girls of similar age who delighted in the attention. Worst of all, however, were the ‘fast young men’ distinguishable by the latest fashion accessory, the paper collar. This group contained a number of Jews.

But what seems to have most worried those who complained to police and newspapers was the number of ‘respectable-looking’ young women taking part and who, instead of protesting against this affront to their sensitivities, delighted in finding themselves the object of such posturing. In their frenzy to get a partner, many of the lads were oblivious to older pedestrians – either that or they were trying to impress the girls – and drove them off the pavement into the road.

It seems the police were little concerned by all this. Many of their detractors complained that they took no action, simply walking by oblivious to the ‘tide of indecency’. Meanwhile, as the evening wore on, shrieks and yells filled the air as the bands in the bars along Oldham Street struck up. Many of the young men, having acquired a partner, retired to these boisterous places of entertainment. Eventually the adverse publicity prodded the police into action. They wanted to send out a warning to those concerned and they also wanted to show their critics that they were not ignoring the problem. Consequently on 20 August 1870 James Douglas, James MacDonald, Thomas Drury, William Rebers, Thomas Churchill and John Bater stood accused of disgraceful conduct, which the
Manchester City News
report goes on to specify as ‘disrespectful treatment of respectable young ladies passing through the street’, a reference to the lads amusing themselves by making suggestive remarks to any young woman who happened to pass. The magistrate was clearly incensed at this affront to decency. He fined each of the accused £2 with the alternative of a month’s imprisonment.

The scuttlers, who delighted in behaviour that affronted magistrates, first made the newspapers in October 1871, with fights between Catholics and Protestant gangs in Angel Meadow. In the following months street and locality based gangs spread throughout Salford and Manchester. The history of scuttling is the history of local rivalry perverted into a grotesque antagonism against all those outside one’s own patch.

In the 1890s, for instance, the Chapel Street gang and the Margaret Street boys marauded around Salford and Manchester in search of blood. They delighted in smashing up coffee stalls, pubs and cheap eating houses. They felt that staff in these places were fair game for a good hiding. They robbed and assaulted old ladies and attacked foreigners – the Italian ice-cream seller and café owner were common victims.

The Grey Mare Boys of Bradford, the Ordsall Lane Gang, the Terrace Lads, the Hope Street Gang, the Holland Street Boys, the Alum and Bengal Tigers from Ancoats, the Little Forty of Hyde Road and the Hanky Park gang from Hankinson Park in Salford were the most infamous gangs, each determined to uphold the honour of a few streets of terraced houses. The Bungall Boys from Fairfield Street area went in for full-scale pitched battles against their rivals, often prearranged and waged on open ground.

The most obvious expression of this obsession with dominating their own territory was ‘holding the street’, in which a gang closed off a street. The holding gang kicked and robbed anyone unwise enough to try to get through. Far more exciting than this passive display of ownership, however, was the invasion of another gang’s territory. On Sunday 20 October 1890 a gang from Bradford invaded Gorton. What the police described as ‘a pitched battle’ ensued in which both sides used belts, knives, stones and bricks. At the resulting trial magistrates sentenced eleven youths to nine months hard labour for causing a riot.

In the same year Holland Street, Newton Heath, came to resemble a war zone. Between 500 and 600 youths grappled with opponents, using belts, bottles and iron bars and throwing bricks. Terrified shoppers fled under a hail of missiles and shopkeepers, in fear of their lives, barricaded themselves inside their shops. During 1889 and 1890 the Ordsall and Hope Street gangs carried out a series of running attacks on each other which involved the use of knives and belts and resulted in several court cases. Once attacked and bested, scuttlers felt compelled to mete out vengeance. The result was that every fight had the potential to develop into a guerrilla war.

It is wrong to think that violence of this sort was unusual. The incident in Holland Street was unusual in scale, but as James Bent pointed out, not a day passed without at least one person being carried into Manchester Royal Infirmary injured as a result of a scuttler attack. It is also wrong to think that scuttlers attacked only other scuttlers. The thrill of violence was so addictive that they frequently directed their aggression at individuals totally innocent of any gang involvement, including the elderly. Nor did the scuttlers have any rudimentary sense of honour, or any concept of a fair fight. If a gang of thirty cornered a single rival, they kicked and punched him mercilessly. The scuttlers also went in for mindless vandalism of the type that not only destroyed property but also endangered life. They placed obstacles on railway lines and wrecked shops.