Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (38 page)

The new Strangeways was really two separate gaols, the men in one tantalisingly close to the women in the other. It had accommodation for 744 men and 315 women.

Each cell was six short strides long and seven feet wide. Though the ceiling was nine feet from the tiled floor, the cell was both warm and well ventilated. The plank bed folded into a table while a gas jet provided good lighting. Every cell had a water tap and a WC.

A table and artificial light were essential for what was intended to be an individual workshop, giving men the opportunity to work at carpentry, cobbling, tailoring or mat weaving. The women worked sewing, laundering and cleaning the building. This gave them the chance to do something more rewarding than turning the crank, a soul-destroying punishment which involved labouring for eight hours a day turning a large handle a set number of times in order to earn meals.

On average during the 1870s there were 629 inmates, about half involved in profitable labour; 129 others worked around the prison and 114 climbed the endless staircase of the treadmill or turned the crank. Despite the central role of labour in the new penal regime, eighty-four were in effect idle. Women enjoyed far better conditions than men. Their cells were similar: whitewashed, they had a gas jet and a chimney, shelves, a small table and a stool, a clothes box and a hammock. A rectangular strip of glass near the ceiling provided the only natural light. The workhouse took the young children of convicted Strangeways women. By the 1860s the courts no longer imprisoned young children, though they did still remand fifteen-year-olds.

The guiding principles of both male and female sections were separation, religious instruction and hard labour. Many condemned the system as cruel. Even in the 1860s there were those who objected to punishing criminals. One of the new system’s many proponents, however, was Joseph Kingsmill, the Pentonville chaplain. Its great strength, he maintained, was that it made ‘the propagation of crime impossible – the continuity of vicious habits is broken off – the mind is driven to reflection – and the conscience resumes her sway’.

The other aspect of the system, silence, was supposed to prevail on all occasions. In practice it was impossible to enforce. Kingsmill complained that because prisoners spent so much time picking oakum with their heads bowed it was easy for them to carry on a conversation without detection. It was precisely to avoid this that the first stage of the sentence was separation, designed to break the convict’s will and prevent the contagion that made prisons finishing schools for criminals. The Surveyor-General of Prisons, Sir Joshua Jebb, described it as a system ‘in which each individual prisoner is confined in a cell which becomes his workplace by day and his bedroom by night, so as to be effectually prevented from holding communication with or even being seen sufficiently to be recognised by other prisoners’.

When he left his cell, the prisoner wore a large Scotch cap, with a peak that came down to his chin like a mask, with holes for the eyes. The numbers sewn onto each prisoner’s uniform were the only means of identification. He spent at least nine months in separate confinement and received neither visits nor letters. He took his exercise in a yard, with a separate area for dangerous criminals. Each man held one of the knots in a rope and walked in circles, ensuring that at all times the rope remained taut. The knots were five yards apart. In the centre, perched on his platform, a vigilant warder maintained silence, ensuring that the only sound was the crunch of gravel under the prisoners’ feet.

Privileges improved as the convict’s sentence progressed so that eventually he enjoyed a letter and a visit every quarter, up to thirty shillings of gratuities a year and three exercise periods on a Sunday. He might also earn minor improvements in diet and uniform. The only way to earn remission was through hard work and good conduct. A prisoner’s sentence consisted of a number of marks, which he earned by his labour. He received a maximum of eight marks for a day’s hard labour.

All instruction was in the cell – not in classes – and those who did not master reading and writing according to a set schedule lost their gratuity. This system lasted until the 1890s. The regime kept inmates gainfully employed to protect them from the temptations of idleness. They rose at 6am and immediately set about cleaning their cells before starting on the corridors. Cooks and bakers reported to the kitchens. At 6.30am work began in the cells. The bright, spacious blocks echoed to the clatter of looms and the incessant tapping of cobblers at their lasts. At 7.30am prisoners breakfasted in their cells. The iron steps vibrated to the tread of the prisoners’ boots as they filed down to chapel at 8am. Once there each man sat in his own individual three-sided cubicle that ensured he could see only directly in front and prevented any eye contact with fellow prisoners.

After chapel the men took exercise until 9am. From then until it was time for dinner at 1pm they worked in their cells. Supper was at 5.30pm and from then until 7pm the instructors distributed materials for the following day’s work. The only period of recreation was from 7-9pm when the men read in their cells. After that the warders quenched the lights and the building fell into a profound silence. Warders glided about noiselessly in their felt slippers throughout the night.

What fascinated outsiders and deflated inmates was the treadmill, or the ‘cockchafer’ as old lags graphically called it. The thinking behind it is totally alien to the twenty-first century liberal penologist. Its purpose was to inflict physical and psychological pain, to exhaust the convict while depriving him of any sense of achievement. It was torture. Those condemned to it found their lungs bursting and their legs turned to mush as they tried to keep up with the ‘everlasting staircase’. Its sixteen-foot circumference was like the wheel of a great paddle steamer. It had twenty-four steps, each eight inches apart and the convict, his arms balanced on a stationary bar, had to keep stepping up as the weight of his body caused the wheel to drop away. The men worked a ‘fifteen minutes on, fifteen minutes rest’ routine and completed fifteen sessions a day. By then they had climbed more than twice the height of Snowdon. One hundred and fourteen short-term or summary offenders drove the treadmill that pumped the prison’s water from a deep well. Those sentenced to hard labour spent part of every day on it.

The equivalent in-cell punishment was the crank, a large handle like that on an old-fashioned mangle that required considerable effort to turn. A day’s labour consisted of turning it 10,000 times. Given average strength and reasonable application a man could achieve this total in about eight-and-a-half hours. The far more famous treadmill was not quite as bad. It was infinitely preferable to the solitude of the cell-based crank. Each man occupied a small compartment, which on a warm day became so hot that it was difficult to breathe.

Corporal punishment, reduced food and the punishment cells were common sanctions against those who refused to conform. The most dreaded punishment was the cat o’nine tails, which had such a profound impact on those who received it that they produced many accounts of the experience. The turnkeys frogmarched the prisoner to the exercise yard and stripped him to his trousers. They tied each wrist to a metal ring set into the wall at shoulder height and clamped his feet into a box. Then they strapped him by a belt around the chest to a timber frame that made it impossible for him to move any part of his body.

Each lash of the whip with its nine leather strips was like a red-hot iron laid across the flesh. After a few stripes the whole back felt puffy and sensitive, like a septic finger. At each lash the victim felt the blood running down his trousers onto his buttocks. Worst of all was the sensation when the cat lapped around the chest and crushed the breath from his lungs. Regulations permitted a maximum of thirty-six lashes, for weeks after which the prisoner was unable to button his trousers or wear braces. Old lags advocated shouting in response to each lash in the hope that the watching doctor might shorten the ordeal. Psychological agony was added to the physical pain. There was a gap of a count of thirty between each lash. The doctor pointed out where each lash was to fall and the turnkey aimed for the spot. All who endured the cat agreed: there was no other punishment that came near it.

Apart from corporal punishment there were the punishment cells in the basement. There inmates squatted in total darkness, something city dwellers had never experienced. With nothing to do they contemplated the gnawing hunger that several days on bread and water ensured.

Charlie Parton left an account of his nine months in solitary confinement under the Silent System (reproduced in the 2005 book
Strange Tales from Strangeways
by Sara Lee). He got out of the cell for one hour in every twenty-four. For the rest he was alone and not allowed any books. The only break was when the warders brought his food. During the day he was kept working making slippers. For his first six months he got neither letters nor visitors.

Many penologists agreed with the Pentonville cook who said, ‘There are few who can hold out against short commons. The belly can tame every man.’ By the 1860s corporal punishment was rare and the only Holloway prisoners flogged during the decade after 1852 were those sentenced to it by the courts. Reducing rations was far easier and when a bread and water diet was combined with being locked in a cell without light it became a powerful deterrent.

A minority of commentators believed that the normal prison diet was itself a deterrent to crime. The Strangeways diet of the 1870s was three-quarters of a pint of cocoa and eight ounces of bread for breakfast; a dinner of five ounces of meat, one pound of potatoes and six ounces of bread and a supper of eight ounces of bread and a pint of oatmeal gruel. The punishment diet reduced food to one pound of bread a day.

Even when in the punishment cell the convict knew his position was not the worst. The man in the basement cell in B wing, who was awaiting execution, held that distinction. For a short time he enjoyed the luxury of a cell twice the normal size. It had two doors. One led to the visiting area where the condemned man, forbidden to touch his family, stood separated from them by bars. As for the other, he knew that those who passed through it never returned.

Epilogue: Bang! Bang!

The sunlight glistened on his perfect incisors. He drew his thumb up to his nose and aimed along the barrel of his forefinger. His eyebrows were white bristles of perished fuse wire but there were still daubs of ginger in his hair.

‘Bang! Gotcha! Bang!’ He laughed through his vulpine mouth, the laugh of a diesel engine catching on a winter’s morning.

‘Where’s yer bullet-proof vest, man?’ he demanded.

What’s he on about? I wondered. Are these the ramblings of the geriatric mind?

Then the penny dropped. The uncle I had come to visit in this retirement home in Durham had told the other residents I lived in Manchester. And when people think of Manchester they, like my uncle’s friend, think of gun crime. Crime and Manchester, it seems, are destined to be for ever linked.

The roots of lawlessness go deep into the red sandstone on which Manchester rests. Yet between 1870 and 1900 Manchester’s most conspicuous crime diminished. The families unable to support their children, the beggars clogging the city streets, the impenetrable Deansgate rookeries, the droves of itinerant workers – all disappeared. Redevelopment, especially that which swept away the worst of the Deansgate rookeries, revolutionised the appearance of the city centre. Changes in the way courts treated juveniles greatly reduced the number of young beggars. The improvement in the working man’s living standards did away with many of the outward signs of crime. It was not because of any improvement in the efficiency of those forces working against the criminal.

The criminal justice system of the second half of the nineteenth century was by no means as brutal as many people believe. In many ways it was extremely lenient, particularly in its indulgence to those who attacked the police. Nor was it only violent thugs who escaped with derisory sentences. Frauds such as William Chadwick, who made a career of systematically cheating generous people, also enjoyed the leniency of judges. Chadwick and his sort were as despicable as any modern shysters operating a fraudulent cancer charity. It is easy to romanticise our ancestors, to attribute to them a decency they didn’t have. As far as Manchester’s nineteenth century criminals are concerned there is no evidence for this idealised view. There is no depravity, no cowardly or contemptible act they didn’t commit. There is no area in which the modern sociopath outdoes them in infamy.

The vast majority of Manchester criminals, however, did not require the mercy of the courts to protect them from the force of the law because the police failed to catch them. In the battle between the criminal and the police all the advantages lay with the former. So many obstacles handicapped the efficient operation of the police during this period that it was usually only the inept and the outrageous who appeared before a court.

Even then, if the worst came to the worst and a criminal faced prison, he had little to fear. Unless sentenced to flogging he was unlikely to be dismayed by a short sentence. Despite all the best efforts of penology, prison conditions remained better than those in the slums and rookeries of Manchester and Salford. The worst thing about prison was the shame it brought on a respectable man. Those who had no aspirations to respectability were immune to prison’s deterrent effect.

Underpinning and sustaining crime were the great pillars on which it rested: the pub, the pawnshop, the lodging house, the workhouse and most of the rookeries. They nourished criminals as the sun and rain of the Amazon jungle nurture a venomous plant. The forces ranged against them were no match. The gallows remained hidden in the bowels of Strangeways and the lash gathered dust. Though corporal punishment in prisons was not formally abolished until 1964 its use became progressively less frequent from the 1870s.