Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (33 page)

Drink was a major factor in the case of Thomas Leatherbarrow, a forty-seven-year-old unemployed labourer, who shared his Pendleton home with a Mrs Kate Quinn. One Saturday night in January 1887 they went to the pub where Mrs Quinn bought drink all night. As the night wore on Leatherbarrow became more and more belligerent and by the time they reached home his rage was such that he kicked Mrs Quinn to death. He could offer no explanation for his actions and went to the gallows without a word of protest.

The case of Walter Wood in 1887, though outwardly identical to that of many other men hanged for murdering their wives, was unique in one respect. Wood was a former school friend of his executioner, James Berry. This is why the two sat together for several hours in the condemned cell.

John Gell’s case was similar to that of Leatherbarrow. Gell lodged with Mrs Mary Miller and her daughter, Isabella, in Moston. By the end of February 1888 Mary’s patience was exhausted. Gell had been out of work for some time and was making no contribution to the household. On 1 March she gave him an ultimatum: find a job or get out. Gell responded by attacking the two women with an axe. Though he fled the police he later surrendered and confessed. Yet he went to the scaffold an aggrieved man. Just before Berry pulled the trapdoor lever, Gell shrieked, ‘Isabella Miller, I hope you have your revenge!’

The murder charges that resulted from the Shudehill stabbing deserve a more detailed examination. They tell us a great deal about the culture of violence in one of Manchester’s most infamous rookeries. On Sunday, the last day of January 1869, just before midnight, the streets around Shudehill thronged with revellers squeezing the last drop out of the weekend. Three young men – John Oldham, James McIntyre and James Burns – lounged on the corner of Copperas Street, waiting to see what the ebb and flow of the street might cast up. They didn’t have long to wait. Coming down the street towards them were three Italians – John Bernadotti, Joseph Retson and Bartholomew Galgani – their arms linked, scattering pedestrians from the pavement before them. But Oldham, McIntyre and Burns were not planning to move and as the Italians approached they fixed them with the look.

‘Wops!’ ‘Greaseballs!’ ‘Spics!’

There followed a flurry of fists, the flash of a blade in the streetlight, blood on the grey paving flags. Women shrieked. Oldham fell to the ground, scarlet seeping between the fingers clasped to his throat. McIntryre pressed his flat hand to his side as if stopping his organs from escaping and walked like a zombie across the road. Boots scraped on the flags, men pulled and hauled. Women clasped their mouths to stifle screams. There were more shouts and scuffles.

When PC Ashton arrived on the scene by-passers had disarmed Bernadotti and Galgani. Retson had fled but helpfully left his cap behind. A passing doctor attended the wounded men and took them to the Royal Infirmary. The police caught Bernadotti and Galgani literally red-handed. PC Ashton said they looked as if they had been butchering a pig. Worse still, from their point of view, Oldham hung on to life until 19 February, by which time he had made a statement before a local magistrate in the presence of the accused, clearing Retson but identifying Bernadotti and Galgani as the men who stabbed him.

Nevertheless, the police charged all three with wilful murder. They pleaded not guilty but the jury convicted them of manslaughter. In his summing up, Chief Justice Brett concurred with the finding, accepting that there had been some degree of provocation, without which the charge would have been murder. Yet if this gave the Italians hope, the judge soon dashed it. There was far too much of this casual violence, the judge pronounced, and unless the courts made a stand against those involved some might think such behaviour acceptable. Brett gave all three twenty years’ hard labour.

This was the typical crime that resulted from the hard man culture that dominated working class areas of the city. Men with no aspirations to respectability prided themselves on being hard. They could hold their own in a scrap, take and give punishment without complaint or remorse and never backed down from a challenge.

This was especially important when confronted by foreigners, like the Italian youths, who sought to assert their superiority.

Chief Justice Brett made it clear in his summing up that the use of knives in street fights was commonplace and was not restricted to ‘foreigners’. Yet this case served only to reinforce British stereotypes of the period: Italians were cowardly foreigners who didn’t know the meaning of a fair fistfight and resorted to knives, while English lads fought fairly and never used weapons.

The case of Michael Johnson also indicates the importance men attached to hardness. In particular, it highlights the lengths to which many went in avenging a slight, real or imaginary. Dick McDemott was hoping for a good night. It was Boxing Day 1867 and he’d hired a band. He and Patrick Nurney had moved the tables of the saloon bar against the walls, clearing a space for dancing. With any luck the Cambridge Inn on Regent Road, Salford, would soon be bouncing and the sweating dancers drinking plenty of ale to slake their thirst. Patrick was a man of many parts. The barman at the Cambridge was lively and affable, quick, alert and witty. He had a smile for every customer, a quip for every situation. He was also a gifted musician. He had only to hear a tune once before he was able to play it from memory.

It was Patrick who had organised the band, in which he took a leading part. Between dances he scurried around, collecting pots and pulling pints, calling every customer by his name, producing each man’s tipple at a nod of the head. The night had hardly started when Michael Johnson lurched in. The nineteen-year-old dyer fancied himself as a hard man. He traded on a reputation he didn’t really have. His stare fixed on first one and then another before settling on the landlord. Dick McDermott held Johnson’s stare. Then he made a mistake.

He looked away, deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt. He served him a glass of porter.

He soon realised his error. Johnson was sizing up the dancers, pointing and jeering. McDermott asked him to leave. Johnson looked at him with incredulous scorn.

McDermott fetched the police.’ Come along now, Mickey,’ said Sergeant Toole, flanked by two constables. All eyes were on the three peelers. Patrick Nurney struck up The Star of the County Down. Johnson feigned deafness. He lifted the porter to his lips and took a slow draught. Again he lifted it to his lips and all but drained it. Then with a third slug he emptied it.

‘That’s a sound lad,’ said Sergeant Toole. ‘Go home to your bed, now, like a good man,’ he added as he pointed Johnson away from the pub.

No sooner had Patrick Nurney finished the tune, than Johnson was back in the bar. This time McDermott didn’t hesitate. He grabbed two handfuls of Johnson’s collar and frog-marched him to the door.

‘Get out to hell,’ he shouted as he pushed Johnson backward through the front doors. That seemed to be the end of it. But after Nurney played four or five more tunes and was outside the bar collecting pots, Johnson reappeared.

‘Come out, you bloody sod,’ said Johnson. ‘Come outside and fight like a man.’

‘By God, I’ll teach you this time,’ said McDermott, reaching for a hawthorn stick he kept under the counter.

‘Now,’ said Nurney, extending his splayed hands as Johnson drew a knife from his jacket. ‘Take a good man’s advice, Michael, and go away.’

Before McDermott could lift the bar flap, Johnson lunged. Nurney leapt back, hit the bar and crumpled to the floor. The blood coursed through his shirt and spread around his body like oil from a burst engine.

It took the jury twenty-five minutes to find Johnson guilty of wilful murder. Mr Justice Brett concurred in their judgement. ‘The crime of stabbing is a frequent crime in this city and this district,’ he intoned. ‘It is well that many in this country should know that if a man stabs another with a knife, and a man dies in consequence, the result to him who stabs is also death.’

On 29 March 1869, Johnson became the first occupant of Strangeways’ condemned cell. For the first time the black flag fluttered over the prison, indicating that an execution had taken place and the victim’s body was still hanging for the prescribed hour. It was seventeen days after Johnson’s twentieth birthday. Johnson himself provided a link with the old days of public executions. As a Detective Williams took him into custody, the cab passed the spot where in 1867 William Calcraft had hanged the Manchester Martyrs, three Fenians, in Britain’s final multiple public execution. Johnson pointed it out to Williams, recounting how he had risen early that November morning and walked across the dark city to get a good view of the execution. Johnson shared more than their fate. His final resting-place was beside the Martyrs, in the burial plot against the prison wall.

If Johnson’s case illustrates one major characteristic of working class culture that has endured into the twenty-first century, the case of the Gorton abortionist highlights another that has changed. For thousands of British women today, abortion has become almost another form of contraception. Medically it is a simple routine and for many – though not all – the idea that it might have moral implications is alien to the twenty-first century British mindset. Not so in the nineteenth century. Then the public viewed the killing of an unborn child as a uniquely evil act. It struck at the base of society by introducing murder into the heart of the most intimate of human relationships, the bond between mother and child.

For a woman to abort her child was to make a decisive step beyond the world of respectability into the underworld. Some, like Margaret McKivett, never returned.

When Margaret’s parents summoned the surgeon, Mr J.L. Fletcher, to their twenty-six-year-old daughter one Monday night in March 1875, they didn’t tell him the truth. When he arrived at the confectionery shop at Hyde Road, he quickly realised the woman was beyond help. On his return the next morning the McKivetts told him Margaret had died at 5am. The surgeon wanted a post mortem but the couple pleaded, imploring him to spare them the ordeal. Fletcher relented and made out a death certificate, attributing death to ‘derangement of a portion of the kidneys’.

The matter would have rested there but for an anonymous informant telling the police that Margaret had miscarried on the morning of her death. Police inquiries led them to Alfred Thomas Heap’s chemist’s shop on Gorton Lane, where the sign over the door declared the proprietor was a surgeon. Though Heap’s qualifications were unknown, the man himself was no stranger to the police. They had first charged him with the murder of a woman in 1867, under circumstances very similar to those surrounding Margaret McKivett’s death. In both cases his botched abortion killed a young woman. On the first occasion he was acquitted by the jury. The next year he got five years’ hard labour for carrying out an abortion. Charged again with murder, Heap had little chance of escaping death. The jury at Liverpool Assizes found him guilty and the judge despatched him to Strangeways to await execution.

The case attracted nationwide publicity. As Heap sat in the condemned cell sympathisers organised petitions for his reprieve. Part of the fascination with the case was the build-up to the execution, the prospect of a reprieve heightening the tension. There was only one thing the Manchester public found more interesting than murder – execution. The reading public demanded to know every detail of the procedure that swept the convicted murderer from the bar of the court to the end of a rope.

On the Other Side

In particular, the Manchester public were fascinated by the reactions of the condemned man as he confronted his death. Once condemned the prisoner was taken to the condemned cell. In the New Bailey this was a dungeon with no natural light. The prisoner was never left alone for fear he might commit suicide and thus cheat the crowd of the spectacle of his execution. There was nothing to give him temporary respite from what awaited, not even the food. He ate normal prison fare – usually gruel and water. If he was lucky he might get meat and potatoes.

For many, the anticipation was more excruciating than death. During the 1870s it lasted a fortnight. After that it was ‘three clear Sundays’, during which the prisoner hovered between irrational hope and profound despair, enduring wild shifts of emotion, lurching from the heights to grim depths and back again. It left him emotionally shredded. He was on the verge of tears and mania. Every minute he lived out his execution. Over and over he asked the same questions: Will my nerve hold? Will I break down, crying, screaming for mercy, though I know the judge’s words have put an end to mercy? Will I wet myself or soil my pants?

Eventually the day arrives. He wakes after dozing a few fitful hours plagued by the loop running in his head. He has seen it a million times and now he is to act it out for real. But which version? The one where he goes to his death with a quiet dignity? Or the other one? Now events take on their own momentum. The prisoner finds it hard to engage with what is happening. It’s as if he is outside himself, looking down on the scene.

He sees the chaplain enter the cell and wake him. His voice is soft, his face compassionate. He leaves when the breakfast arrives and the prisoner feels the bile churning in his guts. He eats a few bites to quell the quaking in his stomach. Then they take him out, to the holding cell. As soon as he enters by the door from the corridor, his eyes fasten on the far door. He knows what is on the other side. No one has told him but he knows with absolute certainty. His stomach churns. His pulse is racing and his limbs are screaming for him to run, flee from this. The priest returns, makes the sign of the cross over him and starts reciting from the book he holds open on the flat of his hand. The lock on the door clatters and the priest raises his voice. The executioner, a tangle of leather straps and buckles across his arm, and his assistant, enter.