Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (35 page)

The 1860s were a difficult time for the police generally and not only in Manchester. National commentators questioned their honesty and the integrity of the courts. The most prominent of these critics was Serjeant William Ballantine, a senior barrister, who found expression for his concerns in papers such as the
Daily Telegraph
. He maintained the police routinely gave perjured evidence to the courts, which readily conspired with them. W.T. Stead in the
Pall Mall Gazette
and the
Review of Reviews
threw his considerable weight behind these complaints. William Morris’s famous socialist journal,
The Commonweal
, regularly criticised court decisions.

Worst of all in its effect on public regard for the police was the ‘Trial of the Detectives’ of 1877. Three of Scotland Yard’s most senior detectives stood in the Old Bailey dock accused of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The Court sentenced two of them – together with a corrupt solicitor – to lengthy terms of hard labour.

Cases such as this and changing public expectations increased the pressure on the police. Like every aspect of society, policing is affected by fashions. The fashion in the 1870s was for detection. The master detective, the intuitive and ingenious guardian of society, a match for any evil machinations, was the order of the day. In this, as in so much else, life mirrored art. This was the time when Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was at the height of his popularity and the public’s confidence in the capacity of detectives to solve crime was boundless. The detective became a key feature of law enforcement. The peeler on the beat deterred criminals. The detective uncovered the hidden criminal and brought him to justice. By the 1880s, this emphasis on detection was clear. The slow erosion of crime that continued until the end of the century had begun. Yet criticism of the Manchester police hardly abated.

No police force is without its critics. The Manchester Constabulary of this period was no exception. During 1865 the city’s letter-writing citizens were outraged at the force’s inactivity in response to the goings-on around Deansgate. In particular, the Rector of St. John’s complained of half-naked women cavorting around the Deansgate area, to the apparent indifference of the police. He maintained that on another occasion, when a crowd of over 100 gathered to watch two men fighting, the police did not intervene. Chief Constable Palin, with his customary vigour, refuted allegations of police inertia. In a six-week period, he said, the police arrested over 400 people in the area.

Publicans were particularly critical of the police, maintaining they were being persecuted. Their sense of being under siege was such that they formed the Publicans and Beersellers’ Protection Society. At their meeting of 18 January 1866, they expressed a complaint which they were to repeat over the following decades, decrying ‘the objectionable practices resorted to by detectives in entrapping beer-sellers to infringe the law’. The cases they cite seem to justify their indignation. In particular, one Manchester licensee told of how a detective dressed as a labourer, with a trowel stuck in his belt and a feigned limp, had duped him by claiming he had walked from Rochdale and implored a drink. On getting it he immediately charged the landlord with serving after hours. A more serious case against the police arose in August 1870, when Patrick Nolan, a forty-six-year-old coach painter, died in the street. Subsequently, PC George Johnston appeared in court charged with using unnecessary violence against Nolan.

There is no doubt that the force was keenly sensitive to anything that besmirched its good name. This is clearly shown by an exchange of letters in the
Manchester Guardian
during November 1871. On 4 November a correspondent signing herself ‘A Young Lady’ complained of the ‘disgusting conversation’ of a policeman while on a tram travelling down Oxford Road. ‘We suppose policemen to be the guardians of decency,’ she bemoaned. Clearly, the Chief Constable was of a similar opinion for a week later his letter appeared in the same newspaper assuring readers that after a full investigation he had dismissed the culprit. In a final paragraph that sent a shudder down every policeman’s spine, Palin welcomed complaints and assured the public of a full investigation in all instances.

The morale of the force improved during the 1860s. In 1860-61, Palin dismissed forty-one officers, whereas a decade later it was only seven. The evidence also suggests their status in the community was growing. Yet although the conduct of officers certainly improved, other problems proved intractable. Though the average length of service was six years and nine months, the majority of men were both young and inexperienced. Of 737 officers, a third had less than two years’ experience.

Alfred Aspland blamed the extent of crime in the city on the weaknesses of the Manchester force. His analysis showed that a third of the men at any one time were raw recruits. On average, 150 men resigned each year – more than one in five of the total force – and eleven were dismissed. This problem was by no means confined to Manchester. At the same time one quarter of the Liverpool force resigned each year.

Despite the problems with manpower the number of arrests increased enormously, and the number of prosecutions increased by 260 per cent between 1860 and 1870. Yet Aspland maintained that conviction figures in the late 1860s were depressingly low, no more than six per cent. For the same period, the figure for Salford was seventy-eight per cent. The national figure at the time was about thirty per cent.

Aspland claimed that the number of major crimes was far greater in Manchester than Liverpool. Burglary and breaking into shops were four times more frequent in Manchester, highway robbery, larceny and forging coins three times. Manchester, with one-sixtieth of the population of England and Wales, had between a sixth and a seventh of all burglaries, a fifth of shop-breaking, a third of highway robberies and one fifth of all the cases of passing base coin. What made matters worse was that in Manchester fifteen per cent of all the crimes committed were those most dangerous to society – burglary, house breaking and highway robbery. These were only ten per cent of crime nationally.

Aspland went on to look at the percentage of crimes that resulted in committals. Again, Manchester was bottom of the table. In Birmingham the figure was forty-eight per cent, in Leeds sixty per cent, and in Sheffield sixty-five per cent of crimes led to a committal. For Manchester the figure was just 7.8 per cent.

Aspland saw no alternative explanation other than that the Manchester force was inefficient.

His Head in the Kitchen Chair

It’s impossible to examine the effectiveness of the police without looking at its organisation. As with many other forces, military thinking had a considerable impact on the running of the Manchester constabulary. Generally ex-military men filled the senior positions in the country’s forces. Such experience, it was assumed, provided the necessary administrative and disciplinary expertise.

But how did the police actually police the city?

Before going on duty all officers presented themselves at the Watch Office – their station – where the duty sergeant inspected them for fitness to go on duty. They had to be sober, clean and fully equipped. Each man reported to his corporal, who issued him with a lantern, a rick (a rattle for summoning help) and a padlock and marched him to the starting point of his beat. While walking his beat he checked all doors and windows. He had to complete his assigned circuit at least twice every hour. Any officer who deserted his beat – other than to frog-march a prisoner to the lockup or to go to the assistance of another officer – committed a serious breach of discipline.

While on his beat the peeler concentrated on drunks, vagrants, prostitutes and brawlers. These were the most obvious criminals, the ones who, left unchecked, would provoke a public outcry. Their approach was standard. The police tracked ‘suspicious persons’ and ‘known offenders’, in the hope of catching them in the act. They focussed their attention on fairs, race meetings, shady pubs and the other places where criminals gathered. This was a sensible thing to do as both Manchester and Salford figures show that known thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, habitual drunkards and ‘suspicious characters’ accounted for the vast majority of crime. In what would today be labelled ‘harassment’, the police deliberately badgered known criminals by adopting a ‘zero tolerance’ policy, arresting them for the slightest infringement.

As today, the success of the police was then largely dependent on the support and cooperation of the public. Without their information and willingness to give evidence, and in some cases their readiness to wade in to help an officer under attack, the policeman’s task would have been impossible. Many examples have been quoted to show that the majority of people were prepared to help the police, even at the risk of their own safety. True, there were many attacks on the police and certain areas of the city were hostile territory, whose residents were more likely to assault than assist a peeler. But these were not the rule. A surprising number of civilians were prepared to do even more than this. Throughout this period, members of the public handed over many wrongdoers to the police.

In the 1870s Mancunians had a strong sense of civic pride. They believed their city and the local community were worth standing up for. Just like today’s courageous few who stand up against ‘hoodies’ and others who make life on council estates intolerable, they put themselves on the line. In many ways it was easier back then because most people had a clear sense of right and wrong and neither the press nor the courts were likely to regard criminals as victims. Respectable working people were hostile to crime and what they called ‘loafers’, those who lived without working, at the expense of the industrious.

But having said all this there was a hard core working class antagonism towards the police, especially among the Irish and especially among men involved in industrial disputes. They referred to the police as ‘blue bottles’ and ‘blue bags’. This reflects something of their hostility. The clearest reflection of this, however, are the figures for assaults on the police. In the 1860s and 1870s, over 100 people appeared before the courts every year charged with assaulting a policeman. Contrary to what we would expect, the majority of these were not individuals trying to resist arrest. Most often the aggressors were in gangs with the officer severely outnumbered.

One of countless such cases occurred one Saturday night in April 1864, on Fawcett Street, off Great Ancoats Street. The constable on his beat came across several men abusing a woman. He intervened and ordered the men on their way. One of them responded by kicking the constable and when the limping peeler tried to arrest his assailant, the man’s friends, helped by a crowd of onlookers, set upon him. The arrival of several other policemen only served to incense the growing crowd who laid into the peelers with such ferocity that they were in fear of their lives. Only the intervention of two riflemen saved the lives of the police.

Yet for all the severity of the peelers’ injuries the court took its customary lenient view of the incident, sentencing two men to a fine of forty shillings or one month in prison and requiring the others to find securities of £20 to keep the peace for three months. This indulgent attitude to those who assaulted the police is typical of the courts. It seems the magistrates believed peelers should accept attacks and beatings as an occupational hazard.

There is no doubt that the twenty-first century policeman’s lament that courts deal inadequately with violent offenders is nothing new. His nineteenth century predecessor felt the same and perhaps with more justification.

Among the Irish, resisting arrest was a matter of honour. Many Irish families felt it was a personal disgrace to allow the police to arrest one of their neighbours without going to his assistance. This attitude was also common in many non-Irish sections of the city. Nor was resisting arrest and helping others to do so confined to adults. Among the many adolescents who sought to emulate their elders was thirteen-year-old James McCoy. In October 1870 he stood charged with assaulting PC Henry, as he was taking a prisoner to the Bridewell. Young McCoy then went to ground but Henry was not a man to forget a face and several months later his assailant appeared in court and got two months’ hard labour.

In the same month, John Clancy of the Bowling Green, Salford, showed McCoy how it should be done. One Saturday night as he walked down Chapel Street, he spotted two constables on their beat. Clancy obviously saw something provocative in the way they were walking and, incensed, attacked them. James Bent tells the story of how, while he was in the process of arresting a man for beating his wife, the assailant almost bit off his thumb. Understandably, the policeman was indignant when the culprit, in Bent’s words, ‘got off with the reward rather than the punishment of one month’s imprisonment’. On another occasion a suspect he was pursuing hit him on the thigh with a brick. He was unable to work for three months and suffered the effects of the injury to the end of his days. Once again, the culprit got off with a derisory sentence.

As for the respectable Manchester public they too posed problems. They were neither deferential nor uncritical in their attitude to the police. Both the Watch Committee and the local newspapers received almost daily complaints about policemen neglecting their duties, with the alleged result that people were living in fear of crime and faced by intolerable nuisances.

Then, as now, the police response to a complaint depended to a large extent on who was complaining. When, for instance, McConnel & Co. complained of disturbances near their mills in Ancoats, the Chief Constable himself Captain Palin ordered an immediate response. A similar complaint from the residents of Collyhurst elicited a more leisurely reaction. After all, the Mc-Connel mills were among the city’s largest employers and the owners were influential citizens whose good opinion was valuable to anyone in public office.