Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (30 page)

From the police point of view there were no criminals worse than scuttlers. They not only attacked the police but encouraged others to do likewise, with chants of ‘Boot ’em! Boot ’em!’ As they operated in gangs, arresting them required both courage and strength in numbers. Attacking a ‘blue bag’ was the quickest way for a scuttler to win status. A court conviction was a badge of honour, the equivalent of today’s ASBO on certain council estates.

The scuttlers, however, did not create working class antagonism to the police. It was already an established part of the culture in certain areas. What intensified it in the 1890s was the police campaign against street gambling, loitering and football. To many adolescents and young men this was a frontal attack on harmless recreation. This resentment often showed itself when the police tried to make an arrest in a working class area. Frequently a mob gathered and setting up a chant of ‘Rescue! Rescue!’ attacked the police and released anyone they had arrested. This collective action against the police was commonplace in Irish areas of the city from the early nineteenth century. These battles soon became the stuff of lore and a means of lionising those who took part. The scuttlers loved these tales and gloried in their part in them. They told and retold the stories of battles in their area with the emphasis on violent injuries and especially murders.

The growing popularity of professional football provided a perfect outlet for local chauvinism. From the formation of the Football League in 1888 crowds were large, loud and violent. Pitch invasions and fighting between fans were commonplace. The increasing number of violent incidents at matches during the last years of the century was closely linked to the presence of scuttlers in the crowd. They hadn’t come to watch the action. They created it.

Most scuttlers joined a gang soon after leaving school. This was a crucial stage in their lives as they now had money of their own and were no longer under the same sort of control they experienced at school. Now they spent their time hanging around on street corners. Most lads started work between twelve and fourteen and earned about ten shillings a week. Even though they were expected to contribute to the household they nevertheless had more spending money than at any time in their lives.

Many held onto legitimate work like someone holding on to the tailboard of a van. In particular, those who had street jobs – messengers and street traders – were said to make easy money and to be totally beyond adult authority. Many lived in the common lodging houses in the slum areas, rubbing shoulders with those on the fringes of society: tramps, drunks, drifters and beggars. There was an enormous demand for boy workers and because they were cheaper to employ bosses found them a better prospect than adults. There were also numerous street jobs. Invariably they lost these jobs when they reached their late teens.

During the 1890s the national press was full of accounts of the activities of these ‘street Arabs’ or hooligans marauding round Manchester terrorising the population. Local newspapers spoke of the scuttlers reducing the streets of the slums to a state of anarchy, where law-abiding citizens went in fear of their lives. There is no doubt the scuttlers got a great thrill from the fear they induced in others. They thrived on the buzz of the chase and the high of an adrenaline rush. They regarded sweethearts as their property and used them as a means to demonstrate their hardness, usually when avenging slights, often entirely imaginary.

‘Who you looking at?’ the scuttler says, eyeballing a passer-by.

‘Nothing,’ protests the pedestrian.

‘You were looking at my girl,’ replies the scuttler, as he knocks the passer-by to the ground.

This scene was acted out dozens of times in the city’s pubs and music halls every weekend. Yet, remarkably, given the level of violence and the sinister weapons used, there were only five scuttler deaths.

One of these reveals the reality of the scuttlers. In 1892 William Willan and two other members of the Lime Street Gang murdered a member of a rival gang. They intended to kill him and spent some time working out how they would do it. When they isolated their victim, they repeatedly stabbed him in the back. As the judge donned his black cap, Willan, looking a lot younger than his years, clasped the bar, his bare feet scratching the timber of the dock. As the judge began to pronounce sentence of death, Willan’s high-pitched shriek filled the courtroom.

‘Oh, master, don’t!’ Willan cried. ‘Have mercy on me, I’m only sixteen. I’m dying.’

Unlike Willan there were Manchester criminals who murdered entirely for gain. William Chadwick was one such.

A Lavish Tipper

William Chadwick came early to murder. When he was only seventeen he smashed the skull of an unfortunate clerk who tried to stop him robbing an office. Largely because of his youth he escaped with seven years’ penal servitude.

Chadwick’s good fortune, however, did nothing to deflect him from a life of crime. It merely taught him that violence was best avoided. Consequently, he developed a clever operation, which yielded a good living without the unpleasant necessity of having to work. He posed as a commercial traveller and spent his days travelling on the London and North Western Railway, alighting at Manchester, Preston, Carlisle and Crewe, but always returning to his home in Eccles. Equipped with a number of labels each bearing one of his many pseudonyms, he brazenly plastered one over the name of the owner of an expensive piece of luggage and then, before leaving the train, collected it from the baggage van. So confident was he in his deception that on at least one occasion he had a porter carry a stolen trunk to a nearby hotel. On arrival he announced he had lost his keys. The obliging porter fetched a locksmith.

His veneer of respectability enabled him to steal from guests at the hotels on his route. Polite and personable, a lavish tipper, he was a familiar and welcome figure along the Manchester to Carlisle line. Chadwick’s mistake was that too many of his victims were from Eccles. It didn’t take many days of watching the station before the police had their man.

Chadwick’s house was an Aladdin’s cave of stolen goods. To make matters worse he had carelessly retained pawn tickets from Liverpool, Salford, Preston and Manchester. In all he had the proceeds of thirty different robberies to the value of about £1,000. All this was bad enough, but it did nothing to suggest that Chadwick had returned to his murderous ways. It was Chadwick himself who did that. Soon after his arrest he told a warder that he expected Bent to charge him with the Atherton murder, for which the courts had already tried and acquitted a man. Someone murdered Walter Davies on 22 July 1889. Davies worked for the pawnbroker John Lowe and on that morning he opened the Liverpool shop at 8.50am. Before nine he had his first customer of the day – a man seeking an excessive loan on some silk handkerchiefs. Other customers saw Davies bargaining with the disgruntled customer. Twenty minutes later someone found Davies dead at the foot of the cellar steps, his head swathed in blood. The murderer had stolen his watch, chain and money and then helped himself to other watches in the shop. It was these watches that put the noose around the killer’s neck.

Bent traced Davies’ watch to a Manchester pawnbroker, who had taken it from a customer using the name Fred Smith. There the trail went cold. Now Bent went through the goods found in Chadwick’s house to see if they tied him to the Atherton murder. Bent was able to prove that silk handkerchiefs, a coat and a vest found in Chadwick’s house came from Davies’ shop. First a pawnbroker picked out Chadwick as the man who had pawned several of the watches from the same place. Finally, a host of witnesses put him in Atherton at the time of the murder.

This time Chadwick did not escape the hangman. After his conviction at Liverpool Assizes the trapdoor fell away under him at Kirkdale Gaol on 15 April 1890.

Chadwick had got away with a life of crime for so long because he continually altered his appearance by the use of hair dyes and cosmetics. In his day he enjoyed a brief celebrity. Far more infamous, however, was Charlie Peace, one of the most fascinating criminals of the nineteenth century.

Charlie Peace

Of all the Manchester criminals of this period none compares in notoriety with Charlie Peace. He was the talk of the country, attaining cult status in the underworld and becoming a northern folk hero. According to many he was Britain’s Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. He was an expert burglar, a master of disguise and a psychopathic murderer.

Yet Peace’s self-image centred on none of these. He saw himself as a sophisticated man of culture, a lover of the good life and a suave seducer, irresistible to women. The reality, of course, is at odds with all of this. Peace was a singularly unsuccessful criminal, arrested on several occasions and locked up for eighteen years before his murder conviction. He was also vicious, ruthless, vindictive and hot-headed. When his blood was up he was anything but the calculating master criminal of popular myth, but acted with all the foresight of a drunk on a stag night. He was as savage as the best gutter scrapper and regardless of the consequences he would have his revenge on those who thwarted him. And it was this lunatic rage that was his undoing.

Elements of Peace’s story are so improbable they might be lifted from a comical recitation. A small, insipid man, with white hair and monkey-like features, his father was a one-legged lion tamer. Charlie was the classic slum kid, marked out for crime from the start. He was born in one of the poorest parts of Sheffield, Angel Court, and left school at twelve, the year before his father died. He went to work in a steel mill and it was there that he suffered the gruesome injury that made him instantly recognisable for the rest of his life. A red-hot metal shard shot through his thigh and came out behind his knee, shattering his kneecap. He spent eighteen months in hospital and the doctors told him he would never walk without a limp. Charlie had other ideas.

He spent months developing a walk that disguised his disability. The result was that for the rest of his life he moved on tiptoes, like a man stalking a bird. But even this remarkable achievement was not enough for Peace. He taught himself gymnastics, developed a tumbling act and made a living entertaining drinkers in pubs and gin palaces. To complement this he learnt the violin from an itinerant musician. He became a successful and versatile pub entertainer who sang, gave recitations, played the fiddle and even acted out scenes from popular melodramas. He loved being the focus of attention. This shady world of bars in the poorer areas of the city was only a short step from crime.

As an intermediate step, Charlie became a hawker – which provided plenty of opportunities for weighing up buildings he later burgled. His early criminal career was far from promising. At the age of nineteen he unwisely burgled the home of the mother of the mayor of Sheffield, John Carr, with the result that he immediately became the sole focus of police activity. As with so many novices, it was the disposal of the proceeds that led to his arrest. The police traced him through a pawnshop where he had deposited the mayor’s pistol.

On release he teamed up with Emma James and Mary Neild, also professional burglars. Their relationship violated every convention of the day as all three shared the same bed. This cosy arrangement was disturbed only when the police caught them in 1854. Once more police traced him through the pawnshop he used to dispose of the proceeds of a burglary. By now the courts regarded Peace as an incorrigible criminal and sentenced him to four years’ penal servitude in Wakefield gaol.

After a failed escape bid, the governor slapped him in solitary. His resolve broke. He cut his throat with a rusty nail, narrowly escaping death. Yet this brush with death did nothing to reform him. On his release in 1858 he decided to exploit the anonymity he would enjoy away from the Sheffield constabulary, who were obviously too familiar with his ways. He moved to Manchester.

Charlie’s imprisonment had tested his endurance to the limit but it did nothing to diminish his appeal to women. On release he immediately moved in with a widow, Hannah Ward, and her son Willie. She was unable to wean Charlie away from his criminal ways. He teamed up with Alfred Newton and resumed his career as a burglar.

Their first target was a mansion in Rusholme. They stowed some of the proceeds in a sewer near Brighton’s Green. Unfortunately, police discovered their cache and lay in wait for them. When the unsuspecting Charlie returned he revealed the vicious side of his personality. Perhaps it was the memory of his last stretch that drove him to punch and kick a policeman unconscious. Whatever the reason, his actions did him no good at his trial. Though he gave his name as George Parker and his mother obligingly provided an alibi, the judge was unimpressed. This time it was six years’ penal servitude.

Charlie was no sooner out on ticket of leave in 1866, halfway through his six-year term, than police arrested him while he was burgling a house in Victoria Park – one of at least two houses he burgled that night. This time he got seven years, enough to break the most hardened jailbird. But Peace had no intention of doing his time quietly. In Portland he organised a riot for which a warder strapped his hands above his head on a timber frame and flogged him with a cat o’nine tails. Then they transported him to the penal colony on Gibraltar.

Despite his appalling record and the trouble he caused in Portland, the authorities nevertheless released him on ticket of leave in August 1872. Perhaps it was Charlie’s pathetic appearance that made them take pity on him. Though only forty, his hair was white. He looked a broken man. Never was appearance so misleading. Charlie was as agile as a lizard, able to scale walls and squeeze through tiny openings. What’s more, he was determined never to go back to prison.