Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (37 page)

There were many conscientious and public-spirited men who did their duty to the best of their ability. They held back and even reduced the advance of crime. But the insurmountable obstacles confronting the Manchester peeler were such that crime retained its special significance in the life of the city.

For this the ineffectiveness of the courts must take a large share of the blame.

13

Punishment

More Than the General Mass of Labourers

One of the major reasons for the high level of crime in Manchester was the failure of the courts to impose deterrent sentences. A court appearance held no terrors. This was partly because the living conditions of most of those imprisoned were so poor. Inside they ate well, washed and were better clothed than many could afford when free. The average convicted criminal had already served eight previous terms of imprisonment – which suggests that a stint inside was no more than a minor irritant.

The belief that courts are too soft on criminals is nothing new. People have been saying this for the best part of two centuries. Unless a convict faced the possibility of execution or whipping, he stood before the courts with equanimity, certain that any sentence was no more than a minor inconvenience and unlikely to make him turn away from crime. Then, as now, the legal system was stacked in favour of the accused. The police frequently failed to get a conviction because witnesses who were prepared to appear at a magistrate’s court refused to appear at Quarter Sessions or Assizes as it frequently involved loss of pay because of days off work. Remuneration for travel and loss of pay was miserly.

Interference with witnesses was common in Manchester at this time. The Hebron brothers clearly threatened witnesses when they were charged with drunkenness. A number of frightened witnesses went to the police and the Hebrons were warned that they would be held responsible if any harm came to those who had given evidence against them. It is clear from reading the evidence that the Hebrons persuaded people to give false testimony on their behalf. Under cross-examination several admitted as much. Besides, many witnesses were quite happy to be bought off and no one thought any the worse of them. Lots of witnesses made a poor showing when questioned by a competent defence solicitor. Often ill educated and overwhelmed by the court, for many it was a daunting experience. If neighbours were involved, they often found it difficult to deliver what they had earlier promised the police. When prosecution witnesses were convincing, juries were often reluctant to convict children and other sympathetic defendants, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Even when convicted, many criminals showed their contempt for the court by swearing vengeance against the police officers involved. Many of the Manchester crooks who threatened retribution were hardened criminals whose habitual criminality was a key factor in their conviction. This was largely due to the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act, which established the practice of compiling files with photographs and descriptions of offenders. It led to a national register of all those with more than a single criminal offence. Aliases were no longer enough to avoid punishment as a repeat offender. Police now targeted known criminals in the hope of linking them to stolen goods.

The problem was that when police brought them before the court, criminals often received derisory penalties. This trend of ever more lenient penalties started in the 1830s.

In 1800 there were more than 160 death penalty offences and even children faced execution for minor thefts. In practice, however, the main sanctions against serious crime were transportation and imprisonment. Until 1868 there were still public executions.

Changes in the law, which reduced the number of capital crimes, were merely reflecting what had long been the case. Between 1828 and 1834 only 355 of the 8,483 people sentenced to death in England and Wales were actually hanged – less than five per cent. And even this small percentage decreased as the century progressed. By 1837 murder was in practice the only crime that incurred the death penalty. Many crimes that had previously carried it such as most forms of theft were now punishable by transportation and, after 1857, when transportation was in decline, penal servitude.

Despite all the mythology surrounding transportation, both criminals and the honest poor regarded it as a soft option. The transported convict got the opportunity to start a new life in a country where he had every hope of becoming a free labourer and a landowner. This was beyond the wildest dreams of most of the honest poor who could not afford the cost of emigration. Most criminals, however, received lesser sentences. Eight out of ten criminals who came before the Manchester courts in the second half of the nineteenth century received terms of imprisonment of six months or less. By 1860, however, most of those who went to prison were habitual criminals who accepted short periods of imprisonment as an unavoidable part of life. Such was the middle-aged Annie Turner. When she appeared in court on 8 November 1889 charged with being drunk and disorderly, it was hardly necessary for her to give her name as she was a frequent visitor. In fact, it was her sixty-first appearance. With a weary sigh the magistrate gave her seven days.

By then there was a great change in the criminal justice system, a turning away from hanging, whipping and transportation towards a new approach – reforming the criminal. For young offenders the key institution was now the reformatory, its very name redolent of the optimism of the age. For adult prisoners there was a new prison regime – the solitary and silent system.

In 1853 the government introduced penal servitude, designed to replace transportation. The Australian government was no longer prepared to act as Britain’s dumping ground for an average of 2,500 undesirables every year. The key institution for bringing about this transformation in adults was the penitentiary. Again this term, with its religious connotations of acknowledging and rejecting one’s sins, reflected this new idealistic approach to the remaking of criminals. Many conservative politicians and newspapers saw this new liberal approach as surrendering to the criminal. They made dire prognostications, predicting a great increase in crime.

The separate and silent system, designed to stop mutual corruption and put an end to prisons as universities of crime, was the key to the new convict prisons. The Prison Act of 1865 required all local prisons to provide each prisoner with a separate cell. It was only in 1879, however, that prisoners actually received rigorous treatment in accordance with current penal philosophy. Prison Commissioners prescribed ‘a uniform application of cellular isolation, absolute non-intercourse among prisoners, the rule of silence, oakum picking and the tread wheel’. The separate provision soon became the rule, though other aspects of the regime varied from prison to prison. By 1900, however, all prisons came under the control of the Prison Commissioner and became institutions of unbending severity.

Prior to this it is doubtful that prison served as an effective deterrent. What is certain is that during the nineteenth century prison food was a great deal better than that of the average working man. The new system only increased the extent to which the prisoner ate better than the honest workman. William Augustus Guy, an eminent pioneer of the science of medical statistics and Medical Superintendent of a new penitentiary at Millbank, writing in 1863 in the
British Medical Journal
, had no doubt that ‘prisoners in all categories receive more than the general mass of labourers throughout the country and those in convict establishments receive at least as much as the well-off labourers’. Not only were prisoners better fed than free labourers, they often did less work. Prisoners serving hard labour in Holloway in 1868 – which set the standard for other prisons – had to pick three pounds of oakum during a ten-hour working day. A woman working as an oakum-picker, however, had to pick twice that amount to earn a shilling – an extremely poor wage.

Prisoners were also better off than workhouse inmates. Many commentators believed that paupers deliberately committed crimes in order to access prison’s preferable conditions. An American visitor summed it up when he said, ‘In England, the pauper lives better than the free labourer; the thief better than the pauper and the transported felon better than the one under imprisonment.’

By the 1870s a Manchester criminal charged with a crime was likely to end up before a magistrate. This was certainly the case for children. The Petty Sessions dealt with minor criminals, such as most thieves, drunks, prostitutes, beggars and vagrants.

At this time Petty Sessions heard on average 10,000 cases a year, about 6,000 of which they referred to a higher court – the Assizes or the Quarter Sessions. In practical terms this meant that on an average day they dealt with about forty cases, more than enough to overwhelm all concerned. And contrary to the popular image of nineteenth century justice as harsh and heartless, the majority of Manchester magistrates were sensible and compassionate men. They were ready – far too ready in the eyes of the police and many members of the public – to take into consideration extenuating circumstances, particularly youth and previous good character.

Even if the police managed to pick their way through this minefield of obstacles and achieved a conviction, the result was often disappointing. The majority of sentences were short and acted as no deterrent – yet another perennial complaint against the criminal justice system. At the Manchester Assizes of 1875 half the sentences handed out were less than ten months and of 477 convictions, only eighty-nine led to terms of penal servitude. Most juveniles sentenced to prison were back on the streets within two months.

What happened to them during those two months and what was its effect?

Six Strides Long

He looked up the wall of the exercise yard, its sheer face broken only by the courtroom windows, protected by iron spikes. With the litheness of a rat, Braithwaite scuttled up the wall to the window and yanked himself precariously onto the spikes, swaying like a man on the high wire.

Stretching the full length of his lithe body he reached the top of the wall with his fingertips. Somehow he gained purchase, pulled himself up onto the wall, scrambled along until he was opposite the Bolton Arms on New Bailey Street and leapt to the street below, landing on flexed knees like a cat. No one had ever done it before. Braithwaite, famed for his ability to shatter any mantelpiece with his forehead, escaped from the New Bailey just before it closed in 1867.

Unfortunately for him his freedom was short-lived. A red-faced Chief Constable Captain Palin promised James Bent £5 reward for the capture of the acrobatic fugitive, which he duly achieved simply by watching Braithwaite’s usual haunts. On his return to the tender care of the New Bailey, a warder flayed Braithwaite’s back with thirty-six lashes.

For most of our history physical punishment, execution, public humiliation and transportation were the standard penalties for serious crime. Imprisonment was deemed both expensive and ineffective, a view regaining popularity today. The burgeoning industrial towns of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries generally had two prisons. In Manchester there was the House of Correction, known as the Bridewell – housing mainly paupers who refused to work – and the dungeon, known as the ‘Old Bridge’. Gradually the distinction blurred and all prisoners spent their days at the prison bars begging from by-passers. Inmates were debtors, those serving short sentences for minor crimes, remand prisoners and those awaiting transportation and execution. Conditions were appalling. Regardless of habeas corpus, the law that obliged police to present a suspect to the magistrates before imprisoning him for more than a day, the police locked up petty criminals for a short time without them ever appearing before a magistrate.

Transportation came to an end just as Strangeways first cast its shadow over the city. The final shipment of 800 felons landed at the Swan River in Western Australia in 1867, the last of approximately 150,000 transportees. Until 1867 the New Bailey in Salford provided for the needs of the two cities. Remodelled in 1790, the number of New Bailey inmates grew from fifty-one in 1823 to 8,407 in 1847. For most of the nineteenth century, women – often prostitutes and drunkards – were almost as likely to find themselves in prison as men. The prison was so overcrowded that conditions were life threatening. Behind its walls lunatics, debtors, prostitutes and thieves jostled for space. Such labour as they undertook produced little and discipline was insufficient to prevent prisoners preying on each other. Once the turnkeys locked the cell doors the weakest were at the mercy of the rest for the next seventeen hours.

The fabric of the prison was equally squalid. Cells had no lighting and were so cold that prisoners stuffed up the unglazed windows with rags. The food was poor. But worst of all was the systematic bullying of minority groups and the vulnerable – Catholics, Jews, the deformed, the feeble-minded, the Irish and foreigners. When things threatened to get out of hand, the overwhelmed staff – in 1847 there were thirty-seven for 700 inmates – resorted to whipping and solitary confinement. Solitary meant three days on bread and water locked in total darkness.

Strangeways was the city’s first recognisably modern prison. The great Victorian monolith embodied a new principle in criminology, the belief that given the correct environment and a rigorous regime, the wrongdoer would reform. It was designed to implement the new penal servitude regime. Since first closing her forbidding gates behind the first inmate, the stern stronghold has glowered over the city, its ventilation tower giving Manchester her distinctive skyline. Yet even when new, Strangeways’ bricks were never clean. Ever conscious of cost, the city fathers had recycled the scarred bricks of the recently demolished New Bailey. Appropriately, Strangeways’ first inmates were already dead. The builders dug up the remains of those hanged at Salford, including the Manchester Martyrs, and carried them across the city to Southall Street.