Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (5 page)

The Government was determined to make an example of the prisoners. They established a special commission, led by the Lord Chancellor, Justice Blackburn, to try them in Manchester. The court room and the whole city bristled with armed military. There was no proof that any of the accused fired the shot that killed Brett, yet the jury convicted all five of murder and the judge sentenced them to hang. Though each swore he had not fired the shot, they all accepted their fate with such heartbreaking courage and dignity that it is impossible to read the court records without being moved. They proudly affirmed their part in Kelly’s escape. All except one.

Among this heroism and valour, there was the hapless Maguire. He stood in the dock because of his striking resemblance to an unknown participant in the rescue. Witness after witness picked him out. But he had an alibi. His innocence was so obvious that the journalists who reported the case sent a petition to the Home Secretary, Gaythorne Hardy, who granted a free pardon.

Condon also escaped the gallows. His American citizenship saved him. But for Allen, only nineteen years old, Larkin, a married man with four children and O’Brien, a veteran of the American Civil War, there was no reprieve, despite protests from Europe, America and many liberal and socialist groups in Britain, including radical MPs and the thousands of English working men who gathered at Clerkenwell, a centre of working class radicalism, to sign a petition for clemency.

During the weeks between the rescue and the execution, Manchester was under martial law. Such was the resentment against the Irish that none was safe outside his own locality. The authorities expected another rescue bid and the city became an armed camp. In the days before the execution bosses put their workers to defending mills and warehouses and the government stationed field guns in Stanley Street, and blocked all roads leading to the New Bailey prison, the place of execution. A detachment of infantry looked out from the railway bridge abutting the prison and the prison walls bristled with cannon muzzles. Shortly before the executioner brought the three condemned men from their cells, a company of 72 Highlanders, stationed inside the prison, marched to the temporary platform that had been built inside the wall of the gaol. There was to be no rescue.

Instead the executions spurred a great upsurge of nationalistic and anti-English feeling. This showed itself in massive demonstrations or commemorations not only in Manchester but everywhere in the world where there was an Irish community. No action of the British authorities in the nineteenth century deepened the bitterness between Ireland and England more than the hanging of Allen, Larkin and O’Brien.
The Freeman’s Journal
expressed the opinion of the Irish community when it said Britain had executed them because they were Irish and had totally overlooked the political nature of their crime.

Brett’s death also had reverberations. It gave rise to an upsurge in anti-Irish feeling, expressed in the way the English press depicted the Irish as ape-like brutes, slaves to irrational anger and savage passions. Every significant Fenian outrage, particularly the Clerkenwell explosion of 1867, a botched prison-break that left twelve dead and 126 seriously injured, further inflamed anti-Irish sentiment. Fourteen years later, an explosion at the Salford barracks killed a child and maimed her mother, and again raised the spectre of the murderous Fenian.

The tragic case of nine-year-old Ellen Higgins illustrates the extent of anti-Irish feeling. In June 1869, Ellen and several other children were walking along Little Peter Street in Manchester when a group of youths, identifying them as Catholics, stopped them and told them to take the green ribbons from their hair. The boys attacked them and kicked Ellen so brutally about the body and head that she sustained severe injury to her internal organs, though it was brain damage that actually killed her. The incident attracted very little media attention and no expression of official outrage. The death of a child was by no means unusual at the time and the press had no interest in stressing the sectarian dimensions of the murder.

Part of this anti-Irish sentiment was due to the anti-Catholic bigotry, which ran through every facet of Victorian society. In addition there was a great deal of racial bigotry – as displayed in the many anti-Irish cartoons which depicted the Irish as barely human. This anti-Irish feeling, however, declined in the 1880s. Other groups, particularly the Jews, became the object of popular resentment. There were still isolated attacks on Catholic churches – as late as 1902 a Gorton mob tried to burn down a Catholic church. The absence of a strong Orange presence, however, meant that full-scale confrontations were infrequent. The events of 12 July 1888, when 100 Orangemen attacked the Canal Street area of Miles Platting, a well-known Irish area, were unusual. It took forty peelers almost an hour to quell the disorder.

Generally, however, animosity was less overt. Whit – with its tradition of Catholic and Anglican walks – was a time of friction, when the Rochdale Road area, from Oldham Road to Collyhurst Road, was frequently the scene of pitched battles. The opposing sides were boys from the Lancastrian School, Marshall Street, Rochdale Road and those from St. Joseph’s Catholic School in the same area.

As the century progressed, and the percentage of Irish-born people in the city declined, there nevertheless remained an enduring Irish subculture. Partly this was due to religion. Nearly all working class Catholics were Irish or of Irish descent. Second and even third generation Irish remained strongly tied to their culture and their faith. They also continued to figure prominently among the city’s criminal class. Of those arrested in 1870, 9,000 were English and 3,500 Irish – a disproportionate number of Irish, who made up one in ten of the population but almost four out of ten of those arrested.

By the 1880s the city’s Irish were no longer concentrated in a few areas but spread throughout all the poorer areas, which they shared with the indigenous population and other immigrants. It is true that Hulme had a distinctively Irish flavour, but the real focus of Irish Manchester was in the north, especially Ancoats, Collyhurst, Angel Meadow and, to a lesser extent, Miles Platting.

St. Michael’s ward, in the centre of Ancoats, was one of the most Irish areas in Manchester. A contemporary account describes it as ‘a district of dull, depressing streets in which are crowded together the houses of market porters and other labouring men’. In sharp contrast the suburban areas of Withington and Chorlton-cum-Hardy – areas which eighty years later were to become centres of the Manchester Irish community – had fewer than one in twenty Catholic residents. The majority of these were Irish domestics.

Economically, the Irish remained at the bottom of the heap. For most of the nineteenth century few obtained the relatively secure work offered by the mills. The general feeling among employers was that the Irish lacked the discipline, regular habits and intelligence required of a good factory worker. Consequently, NINA – No Irish Need Apply – attached to job advertisements, was common. Most Irishmen still found work in unskilled, insecure and badly paid labouring jobs. This is reflected in the large number who ended up in the city’s workhouses and prisons. The single most important employer of the Irish was Smithfield Market in Ancoats.

There were some Irish merchants and stallholders in Smithfield but most of those who worked there were porters and labourers. There was also an army of Irish street traders and hawkers of all kinds who relied on the market for a precarious livelihood. As late as 1900 about one in five of those living in St. Michael’s ward depended on the market. As hawkers and street traders the Irish replaced the Jews. Contemporaries maintained they achieved this because they were the only people prepared to work longer and accept a lower profit margin than the thrifty Jews. None but the Irish, it was said, could live on the meagre pittance they eked out.

The nucleus of the Irish community was the church. The majority of Irish Catholics were practising – they went to church every week. This marked them off from the rest of the working class community. Among Anglicans living in Ancoats church attendance was almost an eccentricity. One of the things that bound the Irish to the Church was its links with home. The vast majority of Manchester priests were both Irish and nationalists. This was evident in the North East Manchester by-election of 1891 when only one of the constituency’s Catholic priests failed to campaign for the Home Rule candidate.

The Church in Manchester celebrated its links with Ireland. It commemorated the feast of St. Patrick with Masses, entertainment in the church hall, the blessing of shamrock and, until the 1890s, a Catholic rally held in the Free Trade Hall. In all this the parish school was an adjunct of the Church. Until the Great War virtually all Catholic children received their education in Catholic schools. And it was this combination of faith and national identity that made the city’s reaction to the Irish so ambivalent.

The Most Formidable Weapon

Manchester held out its hand to greet the Irish. Then it hit them in the face. Anti-Catholic bigotry was endemic in every level of British society and for most of the nineteenth century Irish and Catholic were synonymous. Manchester and Salford were deeply imbued with anti-Popish venom.

There were very few indigenous Catholics in Manchester. With the exception of a few Eccles families, the famed Lancashire Catholics of the sixteenth century, who remained committed to the faith despite state persecution, were not Mancunians. The city was a centre of Protestantism until the Irish influx of the nineteenth century diluted its Reformation zeal. Their hosts attributed many of the reputed faults of the Irish to their pernicious faith, to which they were uncritical adherents. However, this was not their only deficiency. The English also dismissed them as racially and intellectually inferior to the Anglo-Saxons and claimed they were totally incapable of governing themselves. They represented a lower form of civilisation. There were many in the great conurbation who were ready to put up a fight against these pernicious invaders.

Salford’s anti-Catholic organisations tell us a lot about the conurbation’s attitudes. Hugh Stowell, Vicar of Christ Church, Acton Square, was typical of the paranoid anti-Catholicism common in the mid-nineteenth century. Nothing alarmed him more than the re-emergence of Catholicism in the twin cities, making the area a principal centre of the faith in England. The new Catholic pro-cathedral of St. John’s, on Chapel Street, symbolised this threat. Built on a grand scale, with the tallest steeple in Lancashire, it was an affront to the good Protestant people of the city. Stowell’s anti-Catholic rants appeared in widely circulated penny leaflets. His arguments became the accepted wisdom among large sections of the working class and spawned a number of anti-Catholic organisations, including branches of the Auxiliary Irish Society of London and the British Reformation Society.

In the 1830s militant anti-Catholics formed the Salford Operative Protestant Society to spread their ideas among workers. The Manchester equivalent was the Protestant Tradesmen’s and Operatives’ Association. Both organisations were extremely voluble and the local press provided sympathetic coverage. Dr Giacento Achilli, a renegade Dominican friar and one of the first anti-Catholic rabble-rousers, was an avid proponent of these societies’ efforts to impregnate popular culture with anti-Popery. He often attracted large crowds, which he regaled with tales of virtuous Protestants rotting in Papal dungeons.

The Famine of 1848 saw an influx of starving Irish paupers choke off the city’s charity and gave a great boost to anti-Irish hatred. Verminous, plague-ridden and prepared to work for starvation wages, they were a threat to the poor of Manchester with whom they were in competition for unskilled work and cheap housing. For those at the bottom of the economic pile, life was already a hand-to-mouth affair. Now these newcomers threatened to snatch the bread from their hand.

Others ploughing the same furrow of bigotry in the 1850s were Signor Alessandro Garazzi, the Reverend Count Wlodarski and Baron and Baroness de Camin, all of whom had the background and aura of third-rate music hall acts. Many of their meetings sparked violence and, in the 1850s, a number of anti-Catholic riots – in Stockport and Hulme in 1852 and Wigan in 1859.

The ranks of the militant anti-Catholics contained a number of national figures. Thomas Hughes, author of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, and Charles Kingsley, one of the most prolific of Victorian writers, played a role in promoting anti-Catholicism nationally. All this trickled down to the English poor, drove a wedge between them and the Irish and by the 1860s created a strong anti-Irish tradition in parts of Manchester and Salford. Many blamed the Irish for the cotton famine of the 1860s that plunged Lancashire into destitution, forcing hundreds of thousands of people onto poor relief. Extreme anti-Irish, anti-Catholic bigotry showed itself most blatantly in violent attacks on the Irish population. Resentment and rivalry were there from the start. Isolated instances of small-scale violence occurred throughout this period.

The most infamous instance, however, was in 1868 when William Murphy brought his anti-Catholicism circus to Manchester. Murphy was the son of an Irish schoolmaster from Kilrush, County Clare. Soon after joining the Protestant Electoral Union he became its star turn, promoting its militant anti-Catholic agenda. Its aim was to create religious violence. His strategy was always the same. He hired a hall as near to the heart of the Catholic community as possible and delivered a series of inflammatory lectures. These culminated in a no-women, no under-twenty-ones diatribe on the supposed secrets of the confessional. This gave Murphy an opportunity to deliver a pornographic harangue on the iniquities of the Catholic clergy, who allegedly used the confessional to corrupt girls and young women by asking intimate questions in order to put obscene ideas into their heads. Now a member of the Orange Order and the Protestant Evangelical Mission, he sparked violence wherever he went. Riots in Plymouth, Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Rochdale made him front page news. To quell the disorder in Wolverhampton the authorities called out the military and thereby ensured Murphy an enthusiastic reception wherever he spoke.