Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (4 page)

Relations with the police were also poor. Analysis of court records shows that Irish immigrants committed a disproportionate number of minor offences. In 1836 there was much evidence of the production and drinking of illicit alcohol, though the extent to which the Irish were more given to drink than the host community is hard to decide. Drinking on a Saturday night was common among the Irish, but not on other nights.

Hostility to the police also united them. The 1840 Little Ireland riot was only one extreme example of antagonism flaring into violence. When the police entered the area to stop the customary Sunday morning gambling and arrested two young boys – William Donnelly and Patrick Connelly – for playing pitch and toss, they set off what the newspapers described as ‘a most desperate battle between nine policemen and scores of Irish’. Two officers suffered serious injuries.

The Irish saw the police as enemies and regarded any who entered Little Ireland as fair game. The Irish had a reputation for resisting arrest as a matter of principle and would, in the words of one peeler, ‘struggle until the shirt had been torn from their backs’ – by which time a crowd of locals would have gathered to help their countryman.

The influx of impoverished Irish in the early 1840s further strained relations with the host community and confirmed the popular belief that the Irish were parasites. Between 1841 and 1843 Manchester poor law unions removed 2,647 Irish from the township on the grounds that they had no right of settlement and therefore no right to relief.

The Irish formed a large proportion of the poor. Poor relief figures suggest they also made up a high proportion of the city’s paupers. Half of those seeking relief from the New Bridge Workhouse were Irish, mostly from Ancoats. They formed the bulk of Smithfield Market’s workforce and most of the street sellers, hawkers and domestic servants in the area. Poverty bound the Irish together, as did their powerful sense of kinship, but starvation put great strain on this loyalty in the mid-1840s.

As conditions in Ireland deteriorated, culminating in the Famine of 1847, the pressure to emigrate became irresistible. The influx of destitute, disease-ridden spectres during the 1840s heightened the hostility of the host community and confirmed their belief that the Irish were a threat. In the short-term they threatened to overwhelm the city’s poor relief provision. In 1847 Manchester Poor Law Union reported that 1,500 Irish had arrived over a few weeks. This was at a time when droves of immigrants from surrounding Lancashire were also descending on the city. Of Manchester’s population of 400,000 in 1851, fifty-five per cent were born elsewhere and seventy-two per cent of those were twenty or under. Of these, 52,500 were Irish-born. This made the Irish by far the largest group of newcomers. In 1851 Lancashire had the highest proportion of Irish-born people of any mainland county, about thirteen per cent. Almost eight out of every ten Irish in the North West lived in Manchester and Liverpool.

Those who came in the 1847-51 period were largely rural and destitute. Half a million of those who arrived from Dublin from 1847-53 were paupers. This put an extra poor rate burden on those with a £12 house and posed a threat to the labourers at the bottom of the economic pile, for the Irish worked for less than a subsistence wage. A report to the Manchester Board of Guardians for May 1847 blamed Irish immigrants for the introduction of typhus, scarlet fever, smallpox and measles. The same applied to Salford. In 1800, the old Salford had a population of a mere 7,000. By 1900 it had soared to 220,000, an increase unmatched anywhere in the country. The result was cramped back-to-back houses. By the late Victorian period the Irish formed one third of the population and were a major source of cheap labour.

From the 1850s Manchester was an enclave of Irish political separatism second only to London. In addition to the settled Irish community there was a constant flow of ‘harvestmen’ who passed through every year on their way to Cheshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the east of England. The Famine influx coincided with a general influx from rural areas and economic distress in the textile industry. The new arrivals crammed into Ancoats and Irishtown. The 1851 census shows that forty-two per cent (fifty if their children are counted) of the Angel Meadow population were Irish-born. Once there they generally married their own: four-fifths of marriages were between two Irish people. By 1861 the Irish-born made up one in five of the city’s population. They sought to solve the housing problem that resulted from their poverty by multiple occupancy. On average the density of population in all-Irish or mainly-Irish houses in Angel Meadow was ten persons compared to 6.4 for non-Irish households. It was common for as many as thirty people to occupy a single house.

But their priests and not the cramped housing held the Irish together. Invariably Irish and Irish-speakers, like most of their parishioners, they were the exile’s last link with home. They had much in common with their congregation and identified with them against English employers and authorities.

The priests frequently visited Ireland and returned with news of home. Father Daniel Hearne, a renowned Irish Town priest, incensed by the deterioration of conditions in Ireland and the onset of the Famine, became progressively more radical in his politics. The ideas of the Young Irelanders captivated him and in expressing his support for them he aroused opposition from other clergy and even sections of his congregation, eventually forcing him to withdraw from Irish Town and then Manchester, returning to Ireland.

Yet this did nothing to reduce the role of the church and its ancillary institutions as the focus of the Irish community’s life in the city. Between 1832 and 1860 nine new churches opened in Manchester. In the 1750s an old dye house near the River Irwell, just off Parsonage Street, served as the city’s only Catholic church. For fear of a raid, sentinels stood at the top of the steps leading to the building. In 1753 services moved to a room just off High Street – Roman Entry. In 1762 the first Catholic baptismal register opened.

St. Chad’s became Manchester’s first post-Reformation church. It opened in Rook Street, behind Mosley Street, in 1774. The priest was Fr. John Orrell and ten years later its congregation numbered over 500. St. Mary’s Mulberry Street opened in 1794 by public subscription, which also paid for it to be rebuilt in 1848 after the roof collapsed.

St. Augustine’s in Granby Row served Little Ireland. It opened in October 1820 at a cost of £10,000. St. Patrick’s in Livesey Street appeared in 1832 to serve Irish Town. Appropriately it was built in the shape of a T (cruciform) after the style so often found in Ireland. The belfry was the first erected in a Catholic church in Manchester since the Reformation. In erecting a belfry it became the first Catholic church to break the law, its congregation the first to carry the crucifix in public procession through the streets of the city. It soon had a convent, the first in the city since the Reformation, and its school was the first Catholic school for girls in Manchester.

The Church consolidated and extended the Irish character of the area. St. Patrick’s served the Catholics of Angel’s Meadow which soon sprouted other institutions: a Convent of the Presentation Order, St. Patrick’s Boys’ School, St. Bridget’s Orphanage and, in 1845, a community of Christian Brothers. Partly because the Irish were putting down roots, large scale anti-Irish disturbances diminished after 1855. The Irish were winning a grudging acceptance. Yet competition in the workplace between unskilled workers and the Irish remained intense.

This competition was nowhere more acute than in the building trade. It was the one key industry that remained almost untouched by mechanisation and mass production methods. Apart from the introduction of the machine-made brick, it remained as labour intensive as ever. It employed almost three-quarters of a million workers in 1871 and was the fourth biggest employer of labour in the country. It was a magnet for Irish immigrants. It provided work for the unskilled, offered an outdoor life to farm boys, allowed them to work with family and fellow countrymen and gave those with a background in the Irish building trade the opportunity to exploit their experience. In 1851 there were about 20,000 building workers in Manchester and Salford and a very large percentage were Irish. The qualities that endeared Irish workers to their employers were precisely those that antagonised indigenous workers competing with them for employment. Among employers they had a reputation for hard work and it was said that they could toil at a pace that no Englishman could sustain. John Wallis, a prominent London master builder, told a Royal Commission he preferred Irish workers because of their conscientious attitude and their courteous manner. His only complaint was that many of them went home to Ireland at harvest time.

The findings of the 1836 Royal Commission suggest that the Irish were in the forefront of trade union activity and conspicuously active in all the major building disputes in Manchester from 1833 to 1870. The records of the Manchester Bricklayers Labourers’ Union confirm this. In 1856 it had 900 members, organised into nine lodges. All the officials were Irish, as were the great majority of members. The Union was part of community life, for its trustee and treasurer was Canon Toole, parish priest of St. Wilfred’s, Hulme, an area with a sizeable Irish community.

The Irish in England had a strong tradition of cooperation. Their suspicion of the British government, which regarded them as aliens in their own land, gave rise to a culture of cooperative self-reliance. Then, just as the Irish were putting down roots and winning a degree of acceptance in Manchester, the city was the scene of events that cast them in the role of murderous aliens.

The Boys Who Broke the Van

The Irish Republican Brotherhood – the Fenians – a secret revolutionary organisation sworn to establishing an Irish republic by force of arms, was, in the view of one historian, ‘probably the most powerful and far reaching conspiracy the world has ever known’. It became a real threat to Britain in the years after 1865 when Irish Americans with military experience in the American Civil War stiffened its ranks. These, together with others who had been driven from home and forced to settle in Britain and America, provided leadership for the movement both in Ireland and in areas with a large Irish population such as Manchester. In 1867 the Irish community in Manchester was in the vanguard of the struggle for Irish independence.

The Fenian rising of 1867 petered out in Ireland almost before it began. John Joseph Corydon, the informer, foiled a bold Fenian plan to capture Chester Castle.

Colonel Kelly, the driving force behind the Fenians’ struggle for Irish independence, and his aide-de-camp, Captain Deasy, escaped to England. They were determined to continue the rising and planned to bring together the Fenian leaders in a council of war. Manchester was their first port of call. It was there that misfortune befell them, the first in a chain of events which led William Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O’Brien to the scaffold.

As they left a meeting in Shudehill, near the city centre, Kelly and Deasy realised that a group of policemen were watching them. They stepped into the shadows of a doorway, waiting for them to pass. But the police cornered them and, after a fierce struggle, captured them both. The British authorities couldn’t believe their luck. The Fenian leader had fallen into their hands and the movement was about to be smashed. But they reckoned without Edward O’Meagher Condon, Kelly’s comrade from the American Civil War. He sped to Manchester to mastermind a rescue.

The British government didn’t appreciate the strength of Fenianism. Its leaders may have lacked political sophistication but there was no shortage of courage and audacity. And among the population of Manchester there were many prepared to risk everything for their leader. On Wednesday 18 September 1867, two warders pushed Kelly and Deasy into a Black Maria parked outside the magistrate’s court, ready to return them to Bellevue prison. Just before leaving the court, the authorities changed the arrangements for the transportation of the prisoners. Instead of one of the policemen riding on top taking the keys to the Black Maria, they gave them to the sergeant inside the van. This was the tragic Sergeant Charlie Brett.

The van left the centre of the city by Hyde Road, a long, straight highway with a scattering of houses interspersed by open land. When Condon planned the rescue, he had immediately seen the potential of the spot where the railway crossed the road: it was perfect for an ambush. As soon as the van entered the bridge arch, pistol shots exploded. Shrieks filled the air. The police scattered under a torrent of stones. An iron bar, hammers and a sabre pounded the van. A rock thudded against the roof. A shot pinged off the door lock and there was a scream. Sergeant Brett clasped his face, but the blood spurted through his fingers. A prisoner stuffed the keys through a ventilator and Kelly and Deasy, their hands manacled, leapt from the van.

A roar went up as the warders from Bellevue prison appeared. A horde of hostile civilians hurtled round the arch after Kelly. The mob caught O’Brien, who had the job of covering Kelly’s retreat, and kicked him senseless. They also took Larkin, Allen and Condon. Later police arrested the unfortunate Michael Maguire at home. Though he was not a Fenian and had nothing to do with the rescue he was to become the final member of the group of ‘principal offenders’.

The effrontery of the rescue outraged the Manchester authorities. Fenian fever swept the country. The mayor armed the police and swore in thousands of special constables. Kelly had a price on his head and the police, fired with anti-Irish feeling, combed out the Irish areas of the city and arrested hundreds of suspects. But Kelly remained free. On one occasion he dressed as a priest and walked through a troop of armed policemen heading for the house he had just left. He then escaped to New York where, in 1908, he died in his sleep.