Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (34 page)

A man with the face of a third-rate solicitor, the executioner, offers his hand. The prisoner touches it as if it is a gift. In a second they slip the harness around him and fasten his crossed arms, straitjacket style. Now he believes it. He really is going to plunge into the abyss. Lashing serpents take possession of his legs and intense pins and needles muffle the sensation in his feet.

They steer him to the open door and the crowded corridor. A column of men stand with their eyes to the floor. The executioner places him between two lines of four warders and the hangman and his assistant take up their position at the head of the procession. A few yards along the corridor and then a door opens. The noose hangs from a beam. They manoeuvre him under it, onto the trapdoors, on each side of which there is a plank – one for each of the warders. The hangman ties his ankles. His knees are about to buckle. The priest’s constant, steady voice is stifled by the whoosh of the trapdoors and the rope snaps taut. The rope sways. The beam creaks. The body must hang for an hour.

The rope, believed to possess curative powers, is of finest Italian hemp, thirteen feet long and five-eighths of an inch thick. The man who has not cried or pleaded has passed the ultimate test of courage. He becomes the hero and role model of every scuttler, his exploits told and retold on every street corner and in every pub in the city. In dying with indifference he proves that he is hard.

A few privileged journalists witnessed the hanging. By convention their report merely recorded that the execution was carried out humanely and, where appropriate, that the condemned man died with fortitude. But infamous criminals had a capacity for generating legends about the manner in which they faced their death.

12

Police

On Twenty-five Bob a Week

In 1866, two policemen came across fourteen-year-old Edward Ward swimming in the canal in Canal Street. When he ignored their orders to get out one of them pelted him with stones, cutting and bruising him. A hostile crowd soon gathered and put the police to flight. The boy suffered a fit. Subsequently a sergeant and two constables stood in the dock, accused of assaulting Edward. This incident illustrates the problems facing the Manchester police during this period. Many peelers lacked the training and temperament essential to the efficient discharge of their duties. Their reaction to a defiant child who was larking about served only to antagonise the community.

Public attitudes also added to the difficulties of the police. In particular the alacrity with which people resorted to violence against them was underpinned by a deep-rooted antagonism that affected not only the criminals of the rookeries but also a significant section of the working class. Yet few of these problems were evident at the force’s first scrutiny by the Inspectorate of Constabulary in 1857, when Lieutenant Colonel Woodford found a force composed of 522 officers and constables. He was impressed by the quality of ‘a remarkably fine and effective body of men, most of them in the prime of life and health’. The force was also generously staffed, with one constable for every 540 of the population.

The new police force Woodford complimented was definitely a step forward in the fight against crime. But criminals were not standing still, they were more mobile. The professional criminal, like the craftsman in search of work, had to go on the tramp to avoid detection. This is why the workhouse and the lodging house were such an important part of the infrastructure of crime. Despite the Inspectorate’s optimistic report the force was not equipped to meet the challenge of this new, mobile criminal. One reason for this was inadequate pay.

In 1851 an ordinary constable earned between 21s 6d and 25s 1d a week, while a probationary constable had to survive for the first two years on less than a pound. This rate of pay, poor as it was, nevertheless put the Manchester men in the top ten per cent of the fifty-two forces in the Northern Division. They also enjoyed other benefits not shared by their colleagues everywhere. In return for a weekly contribution of 5d they entered a superannuation scheme which entitled them to a pension after twenty years’ service and one-third of their salary if invalided out of the force after fifteen years. Yet for any advantages they enjoyed over peelers in other parts of the country, their pay was barely adequate. It was only slightly better than the wage of an unskilled labourer, though it had the great advantage of being regular. Unskilled labourers were in erratic employment and had to tolerate periods of unemployment when they earned nothing. Even so the peeler’s wage was little more than subsistence level and, despite lengthy negotiations with employers in 1853, they secured improved pay only after 250 constables gave notice.

This threatened mass resignation is instructive. Given the widespread disapproval of industrial action among the middle class and the press, it is remarkable that local newspapers supported their action and agreed their claim was justified. This was one of the rare occasions when a local newspaper
The Manchester Guardians
supported increasing the wages of municipal employees. Usually journalists backed the instinct of taxpayers to resist any increase in council spending.

Throughout the 1850s James Taylor, Chief Constable of Manchester, repeatedly referred to the problem of poor pay. He had great difficulty in recruiting the number of suitable candidates required to maintain the strength of the force. Salford – where pay was lower than in Manchester – had an even greater problem. The slightest upturn in trade led officers to desert for work as labourers or in mills where pay was better. But pay was not the only problem. The requirements recruits had to meet reduced the number of candidates. After 1839, candidates had to be under thirty-five years old, over 5ft 8in tall, of stout build, in good health and able to read and write. In 1865, because of the lack of recruits, the chief constable reduced the height requirement. Even then many were critical of the selection criteria.
The Manchester Examiner
, for instance, bemoaned the practice of selecting men ‘for their height and bulk rather than for their handiness and acuteness’ . The height requirement was often a problem in an age when many started life malnourished. It is hardly surprising that at certain times it was necessary to relax these qualifications in order to fill posts.

Even so, in 1865 the Manchester force had 272 vacancies, 128 due to the resignation of men with less than a year’s service. Despite a national advertising campaign in 1875, the watch committee found it necessary to send the Chief Constable to Scotland on a recruitment mission. The situation in Salford was again even worse. By 1870 there were 151 policemen of all grades in the Salford force, that is, one for every 1,048 of the population. This was far worse than the ratio for Manchester, where the force was proportionately more than twice as big, having one officer for every 452 citizens.

Though the problem of poor pay affected the force throughout this period it was not the sole cause of dissatisfaction. Long, unsociable working hours, harsh, pseudo-military discipline – which involved a great deal of marching and drilling – and the suspicion, if not the hostility, of neighbours made the job unappealing to many. The policeman enjoyed the benefit of a free uniform and one day off a fortnight. But he did not get Sunday rest and was, of course, expected to patrol his beat in all weathers. His annual holiday quota was four days leave with pay. Promotion depended entirely on the whim of the constable’s superiors. There were no clear-cut criteria for promotion. Seniority and good conduct were essential but the circumstances that brought a man to the attention of senior officers depended almost entirely on good luck. Nor was there a rising pay scale for superintendents. The holders of these posts in 1871 had all served between twenty and thirty years.

Public and press attitudes certainly deterred many prospective constables.
The Manchester City News
repeatedly complained that the rising cost of policing the city resulted in no improvement in efficiency. The paper maintained that the streets were awash with thieves and prostitutes and that robberies were constantly increasing. No man with any hope of getting skilled manual or clerical work would put up with such poor conditions. Consequently the force recruited entirely from the unskilled labouring class.

The high expectations of employers and the respectable middle classes also weighed heavy on the shoulders of many. This and the paternalistic attitude of the police authorities showed themselves in 1855 when the Manchester Watch Committee ruled that all constables must attend church or chapel regularly.

At least by 1866 a Manchester constable’s weekly pay had improved a little. Over 100 of the rank and file were earning £1 1s 6d. At the top of the hierarchy a superintendent was earning almost £5, an inspector about £3, station and detective sergeants about £2 and sergeants about £1 12s. By 1870 the average Manchester peeler could expect to take home £1 10s – the minimum required for a man to support a wife and two children. His Salford counterpart, however, was still lagging behind and as late as 1875 most constables were earning only twenty-five to thirty-two ‘bob’ a week – slightly more than subsistence level.

There were ways in which a peeler might supplement his income. It was common for victims of theft whose goods were restored by the police to give the officer involved a monetary reward. Jerome Caminada won many such rewards. The public, however, had doubts about this system of rewards. Cynics maintained the police only sought goods for which there was a reward.

A Plasterer from Rochdale

What manner of man joined the force? Given pay, conditions and the nature of the job it is amazing there were any recruits. Most were working men, generally labourers or ‘operatives’, in the parlance of the day. A small number were artisans or clerks. In the 1850s most came from the poorer parts of the city, many from Ancoats. The prospect of a regular wage was for these men the major attraction. In some ways a number of them were on the periphery of society. Many were Irish – seventy-one out of 671 in 1865 – but whereas most Irish in Manchester were Catholics, many Irish peelers were Protestants.

Those who weren’t outcasts when they joined the force soon found that their position in working class society was no longer that of an ordinary working man. The uniform and the exacting standards imposed by the job made them different. Within a short time they developed their own police subculture. Without this subculture few would have survived the hostility of the 1840s. For most of this decade the police adopted an aggressive strategy of harassing known offenders: a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy. They drove thieves and bogus beggars from the streets – but at a cost. Saturation policing and a high profile in the rookeries, especially in the notorious Deansgate area, met with hostility, not only because of its effect on criminals but because it interfered with all aspects of street life. The result was a sharp increase in assaults on the police and widespread anti-police disorder in 1843.

Not surprisingly, the next decade saw a change. The police adopted a less abrasive approach and as the number of arrests fell so did assaults. However, this policy was unpopular with the city’s influential middle class. The police ‘strike’ of 1853 tainted relations between the police and ratepayer, who begrudged paying more for what they saw as a deteriorating service. They resented what they perceived as the new laissez-faire attitude to street nuisances and demanded a return to a muscular approach to beggars, prostitutes and drunkards, especially those of the Irish variety. The public believed that their presence, their vigilance, their oversight of an area, were deterrents to criminals and the measure of their efficiency. If they were doing their job properly, the argument went, criminals would not have the opportunity to commit crime.

Sometimes public resentment at the perceived failures of the police found expression in the columns of the local press, much to the embarrassment of the constabulary. In December 1857, William Connell of Union Street, Ancoats, complained of three houses in the area which were openly used by ‘prostitutes and bad characters’. In April 1859, Mr Kawson, with a prestigious address on Ardwick Green, bemoaned police indifference to the gangs of youths who brought ‘annoyance and indecency’ to the area every Sunday evening. Such goings-on were proof to many that the Manchester police were idle and incompetent. This pressure from the suburbs resulted in a return to the policies of the 1840s. During the 1860s prosecutions tripled from 10,000 to almost 30,000. The emphasis was on drunks and prostitutes.

But this policy was costly. Assaults on police soared to an extent unique to Manchester. There was a city-wide crime wave. For many the cause was obvious: the Irish. The police didn’t disagree. In the last three decades of the century, police activity pinpointed what they saw as a major source of crime – those who worked on the streets. The Irish were strongly represented among the hawkers, beggars, street musicians and the flotsam of the city and for many the two groups were indistinguishable.

What was different about this drive of the 1860s was the emphasis on reforming and reclaiming outcasts by removing the founts of sin. Public houses, brothels and gambling dens were the objects of police attention as much as drunks and prostitutes.

A number of crime panics, such as the nationwide garrotting panic of 1862-3, drove the purge of the 1860s. The press also stirred up hysteria about the number of ‘ticket of leave’ men descending on the city. The Chief Constable latched on to this and blamed it for Manchester’s soaring crime figures. It is hardly a coincidence that Alfred Aspland, one of the most outspoken critics of the city police, was a prominent figure in the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society.