Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (3 page)

A Rogue’s Paradise

Today reality comes a poor second to image. Every city and town council employs public relations consultants to generate a distinctive and positive aura. Manchester’s image in the 1870s was certainly distinctive, though entirely negative.

No doubt a large part of this was the result of the popular stereotype, the caricature of the northern industrial town. But a caricature is the pearl that forms around a grain of truth. An American visitor in 1825 found Mancunians gruff and charmless. They lacked courtesy to strangers and ‘cared little for the civilities which others expect and which produce a favourable impression’. This ‘up yours’ attitude has persisted to our own day, when Oasis’ Liam Gallagher is a famous exponent of the city’s characteristically belligerent approach to social interaction. In some circles it carries a certain macho kudos.

In the nineteenth century, however, this indifference to social niceties was seen as a part of Manchester’s obsession with money. ‘Money seems to be their idol – the god they adore and in worshipping this their deity they devote but a small portion of their time to those pursuits which expand the mind,’ observed another American. There is something vividly contemporary about this – the author could be describing the population of any city or town in Britain today.

Other facets of the popular image have endured too. Then as now, Manchester was the rainy city, set in a sodden, inhospitable landscape in an uninviting part of the world. Its people were said to be aggressively practical, adamantly non-intellectual – people of concrete action, hostile to abstract ideas. These traits sit well with the Mancunian man’s lack of sentimentality, his aversion to things of the imagination, his grim pragmatism.

The Mancunian was a pallid little person wearing a dirty brown shop-coat, the smell of engine oil on his breath, feathers of cotton and calico in his hair. Capable of neither poetry nor oratory, his attempt at a love letter came out as, ‘Your of the 11th ult. duly came to hand, in which per advice…’ At best, he was a grubby factory foreman or a low commercial type. And his city, lacking in grace and dignity, crass and boorish, vulgar and seedy, was a reflection of him.

Unflattering as this is, it was not the most disparaging aspect of the popular image of the Manchester man. At worst, he was a slum-dweller. He was a subterranean creature, shut off from nature by a cocoon of filth. The air that enveloped him was grey with grit and smoke. Noxious fumes and toxic gases obscured his sky. The rivers that ran under his streets were poisonous effluent, reeking heavens high. A carrier of disease, a threat to order, he was also a criminal.

Strangely, the Irish did not feature in the popular image of Manchester. Though Mancunians blamed them for all the city’s problems – particularly crime – and they formed one of the largest concentrations of Irish people in the country, to the outsider the Manchester-Irish were invisible.

2

The Irish

A Very Picture of Loathsomeness

The Irish have been in England since the early fifteenth century. Right from the start their hosts despised them as parasites: the original spongers. This image as an unwelcome burden stuck and was complemented by an array of equally unfavourable attributes until the Irish came to represent every problem that beset nineteenth century Britain.

From the early eighteenth century many came to England and Scotland to labour on the grain and hay harvest. But from the early nineteenth century many stayed and found permanent work in the burgeoning towns around Manchester. By the early 1800s there were about 5,000 in the area and, contrary to the popular image of the Irish as mindless brawn, most were skilled weavers. As the Irish cotton industry expired under English competition, destitute weavers from Cork, Belfast and Dublin brought their skills to Manchester.

Improvements in travel boosted the number of Manchester Irish. In 1818 the first steamer,
Rob Roy,
linked Belfast and Glasgow and by the 1820s there were frequent, regular and cheap services from Cork, Belfast and Dublin to Liverpool and the west coast ports. Those prepared to travel on deck could cross for 3d., a sum within the means of even a pauper. By the 1850s they were an established community and their children, though born in England, regarded themselves as Irish.

Many served as officers and men in the armed forces. By the 1870s one in three regular army soldiers was Irish-born and in 1871 95 per cent of the York garrison was Irish.

The first Irish to settle in Manchester made their home in the north east of the city, Newton, later known as Irish Town, and Angel Meadow. Situated between the River Irk and St. George’s Road (later Rochdale Road), over 20,000 people huddled in cramped houses and cellars. Wherever the Irish settled they marked their territory by building a church and in 1829 they built St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, Livesey Street. Soon they spread to nearby Ancoats.

The third area they colonised was Chorlton-on-Medlock, where they opened St. Augustine’s Church in 1820 and in 1832 the
Manchester Guardian
first referred to it as Little Ireland. It wasn’t long before this obscure area of Manchester gained an international reputation and became a magnet for every social commentator of the day. By then the cholera outbreak of 1832 – significantly called ‘Irish fever’ – branded Little Ireland as the centre of a plague that decimated the population.

Though Little Ireland was to shape the image of the Irish slum, it was the smallest Irish settlement in the city and the shortest-lived. The houses dated from the 1820s and by the late 1840s the development of the railway had swept them away. Dr James Phillips Kay was the first to investigate the conditions there, where the plague had begun. What he discovered horrified the middle classes, who had no knowledge of the life of the poor. Kay discovered one-room cellars, home to sixteen people and a host of animals. He saw rooms so small that it was impossible to stand upright, the ceilings black with cockroaches and every inch of the floor covered with bodies huddled on beds of fetid straw. He found hordes of people living without water, ventilation, sanitation or light. Filthy water from the River Medlock frequently flooded these houses and factory smoke choked off the light and poisoned the air. Average life expectancy was fifteen years.

Kay came to the conclusion that all this was the fault of the Irish immigrants. They had brought ‘their debased habits with them’ and ‘infected’ the host community. They were a tribe of savages. Worse, they led their neighbours astray, encouraging them to squander their money on drink and become a burden on society. From this time the image of the Irish as ignorant, unskilled and idle paupers wallowing in filth, crime and drink who, nevertheless, also managed to depress wages and corrupt the health and morals of the native workers, became a fixed part of the English mindset.

Engels, the author of
The Condition of the Working Classes in England
, in 1844, married Mary Kelly, a Manchester Irish woman and a Fenian (see The Boys Who Broke the Van, below), yet this did nothing to soften his opinion of the Manchester Irish and his description of Angel’s Meadow reinforced the image of the Irish as a tumour in the body of the city. ‘It is not surprising,’ Engels wrote, ‘that a social class already degraded by industrialisation should be still further degraded by having to live alongside and compete with the uncivilised Irish.’ Idle and lacking in character, they were incapable of undertaking any task that involved ‘regular apprenticeship and unremitting labour’.

Faucher agreed. When he visited the Irish settlements in the mid-nineteenth century, he noted that the people there were the poorest in the city. Their homes were dirty and derelict. They distilled illicit spirits in their cellars. When Leon Faucher’s
Manchester in 1844
was published, it repeated the charge that the Irish brought down the rest of the community. He criticised them for their idleness and lack of ambition, yet, paradoxically, he also accused them of taking the jobs of English workers.

When Reach visited Angel Meadow in 1847 it was densely populated with hovels pressed up against factories and warehouses. He further strengthened the hostile image of the Irish. He described the Irish colony as ‘the lowest, most filthy and most wicked locality in Manchester … inhabited by prostitutes, their bullies, thieves, cadgers, vagrants, tramps and, in the very worst sties of filth and darkness, those unhappy wretches, the low Irish.’ Visiting a cellar that was home to Irish immigrants he noted that the room measured only twelve feet by eight and the ceiling was so low that all the occupants permanently stooped. In a corner, a dozen famished figures huddled round a fire. The family made matches and piled the shavings in a corner where two children used them for their bed. A further twelve people lived in the cellar. More than anything else the cellars fascinated and horrified the public: 18,000 people lived in Manchester cellars in the 1830s and about a third were Irish. The more gruesome the accounts of their lives, the greater the public interest.

In 1836 a visitor to Manchester described the cellars as ‘the very picture of loathsomeness, receptacles of every species of vermin which can infest the human body’. Most were dark, damp, ill ventilated and dirty. And newly arrived Irish immigrants, the poorest of the poor, occupied the worst. The most squalid cellars were in closed courts or under back-to-back houses. Many were single rooms, between six and nine feet square. They had no lighting, water or sanitation. Many of the streets had no drainage or sewage with the result that the cellars were often ankle deep in human waste. Often the bare earth formed a floor.

Generally the rent for a cellar was half that of the house above. Many Irish cellar dwellers worked in the worst paid jobs and could afford nothing else. Many were casual labourers, hawkers and street vendors. Large numbers worked as porters in Manchester’s Smithfield Market or as dealers in second-hand clothes. However, half the Ancoats Irish cellar-dwellers worked in the cotton mills. This type of work required good time-keeping, manual dexterity, regular attendance and good concentration – all the things the Irish reputedly lacked. But the fact that the Irish cellar-dwellers were much like their English neighbours did not stop their hosts seeing them as a threat. They were not regarded as a settled part of society but as dangerous outsiders.

In fact, the Irish were in many ways no different from other newcomers. They were mainly young. The census of 1841 highlighted a feature of the city that was to remain constant until the end of the century: over forty per cent of the population and more than fifty per cent of Salford’s were under twenty. Most were previously ‘farm servants’ – agricultural labourers who depended on seasonal farm work. Most of these were not Irish but came from the surrounding counties of Lancashire and Cheshire. No matter where they came from, they needed shelter and this stimulated growth in the building trade. The city was desperately short of housing and this resulted in overcrowding and homelessness. To make matters worse, much of the new housing was substandard – prone to dampness, with insufficient privies and lacking light and ventilation. None of the houses of this type had running water. After 1850, however, the housing situation began to improve. Fewer of the new houses were back-to-back and the number of people living in cellars fell.

About this time a survey of the cellars around Oldham Road in the St. George’s (Angel Meadow) area revealed many cases of overcrowding. One cellar housed nine people, another ten – seven slept on the floor. Many of the cellars in these houses were filthy and without furniture. Cesspits and middens were overflowing and many streets had only two sets of privies. Lots of these houses had pigsties at the front door and sometimes the occupants brought their precious animals – their most valuable possessions – into the house at night. Though there were several slaughterhouses in the area, the inhabitants often slaughtered pigs and cattle for their own consumption in the alleys.

The majority of the Irish living in this area were what today we call economic migrants: they came to improve their lives, or in the words of one, ‘to get a meal every day’. But many were escaping a previous life. Women with bastards, petty criminals, those who had disgraced their families and those fleeing the police embraced the city’s anonymity. Others hoped to find seasonal work in England. For these, Manchester was supposed to be a temporary base, a stopover with a relation or a neighbour from home. But having arrived, something deflected them from their plan. Perhaps they chanced upon a job and stayed. Or the large and established Irish community may have been more appealing than journeying on alone to where they knew no one. Many navvies, who moved around the country in search of large construction projects, fell into this category.

Once an Irish family settled in Manchester they often became the focal point for further immigration – their family and neighbours moving from Ireland to join them. They provided a welcoming smile, accommodation and help to find a job. Yet they never lost the sense that they were outcasts and this created strong communal ties that bound the Irish together. Nor was it only their hosts who drove them together in shared opprobrium. There were those who, though strangers themselves, sought to subject them to the oppression they had hoped to escape.

Orangemen set up England’s first County Grand Lodge in Manchester early in the nineteenth century. The country’s first anti-Catholic riot of the nineteenth century, directed at the Manchester Irish, followed in 1807 with subsequent attacks in 1830 and 1834 further heightening tension. Prejudice also afflicted the Irish in a less spectacular manner. It confined them to the worst jobs and kept them poor. The 1836 commission into the state of the Irish Poor in Great Britain heard that they were ‘prevented from advancing from feelings of jealousy. A manufacturer would prefer employing English to Irish simply on the grounds of they being Irish and not being worse workmen.’ A host of witnesses testified that the Irish were more industrious and showed a far greater capacity for sustained labour than their English counterparts. Their critics were on firm ground when they complained that the Irish forced their competitors onto poor relief by working for less.