Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (9 page)

Finally, it is important to point out that there was very little thought given to the prevention of crime. As late as 1886 few builders fitted reliable locks to the houses they built. The practice of shopkeepers displaying their wares in front of the shop actually increased during the nineteenth century and provided both an inducement to and an opportunity for crime. Not that any inducement was necessary. Criminals, it was said, were organised and equipped for crime and pursued their vocation with the single-mindedness of the fanatic.

A Class Separate And Distinct

Whether it’s speculation over the assassination of John F. Kennedy or Dan Brown’s page-turner
The Da Vinci Code
, plots are irresistible. There is nothing so enthralling as a conspiracy, an intrigue or a scheme. The more audacious and dire its consequences, the more we like it.

What could be more fascinating then than a conspiracy by society’s most evil elements to make money by undermining the foundations of civilisation? The idea of the underworld, a counterculture in which crime is the only industry and all its adherents criminals, was already part of popular imagination by the 1830s. The highbrow
Fraser’s Magazine
told its readers of an organised business in which recruitment and the dispersal of profits was in the hands of a controlling clique as professional as the captains of industry. Like the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs, criminals exploited new technology. Burglars and pickpockets used the new network of trains to criss-cross the country in pursuit of their trade and to avoid detection. One day they were lifting watches at the Manchester races, the next palming forged notes in Birmingham.

In 1891 W. D. Morrison, the renowned Preston prison chaplain who was an authority on the penal system wrote, ‘There is a population of habitual criminals, which forms a class by itself. They are a set of persons who make crime the object and business of their lives; to commit crime is their trade; they scoff at honest ways of earning a living. They are a class separate and distinct from the rest of the community.’ The Victorian philanthropist Charles Booth, in his famous survey
Life and Labour of the People of London,
sought to make a distinction between ‘the lowest class of occasional labourers, loafers and semi-criminals’ and ‘the criminal class’. He accepted that they mixed and that the distinction is a fine one. Criminals often lived in criminal areas – the ‘rookeries’. The police in Manchester called them ‘rabbit warrens’. This environment was peculiarly helpful to the criminal and created considerable problems for the police. With their interlinking back yards and low boundary walls it was easy for a fleeing criminal to melt into his surroundings. Houses in one narrow street merged with those in an adjacent court, interwoven by connecting yards, cellars and lofts.

Whether concentrated in their rookeries or distributed throughout the city, the underworld exercised a powerful hold on the Victorian imagination. Fear of crime is not, despite what we may think, a product of the late-twentieth century. When in 1853 a letter-writer to
The Times
asked the rhetorical questions, ‘Why do I keep loaded firearms in my home; why do most people do the like?’ he was expressing not an individual’s paranoia but the concerns of respectable society. When such people spoke of the ‘dangerous classes’ they had in mind a specific group – those who were a threat to ordered society and the ‘law, moralities and taboos holding it together’. The ‘dangerous classes’ were ‘professional parasites’ and delinquents plus those who generally worked but who also supplemented their income through crime. They also had in mind those who had no fixed home.

However, the popular image of the underworld and its reality are two different things. One major difference is the degree of organisation said to characterise criminal activity. There is no evidence that Manchester criminals were in any way organised. True, there was a loose system of mutual support operating in certain areas of the city. Criminals looked out for each other. The swell mob sent as much money as possible to their imprisoned fellows and supported them immediately after their release by having a whip-round and, if they were unable to do so from their own means, organised a collection or raffle. Criminals helped those in the same line of business. As we shall see, beggars exchanged useful information about sources of charity and passed on the lore of their profession.

This system of support extended beyond what we would normally consider the frontiers of the criminal fraternity. There were in Manchester, for instance, some attorneys who provided their services to penniless prostitutes for payment in kind.

Additionally, criminals generally shared certain values, which governed their behaviour. For instance, giving information to the police was taboo. Anyone who did faced ostracism, not of the cold shoulder type but of the clenched fist and hobnailed boot variety. But this is all a long way from an organised criminal fraternity, masterminded by super criminals. No such structure existed. Manchester’s nineteenth century slums were not New York in the 1950s. There was no godfather, no capos, bosses, under bosses or soldiers. There was no master plan. Instead there were thousands of individuals, each operating according to his own whims, each ploughing his own furrow oblivious to the rest. The rivalry between criminals is more striking than any cooperation. The Manchester underworld was like the wider Victorian world: there was merciless competition, on and between every level. Surviving as a criminal meant undercutting the competition – stealing more, selling for less. This applied to every aspect of the underworld.

The competition among prostitutes, for instance, was so intense that it was impossible for most of them to make a living solely by selling their bodies. Having reached what they thought was the bottom of the moral trough, they found there was no easy life. To compete most had to sell themselves for a few coppers and then either find work to supplement their income or turn to robbing customers. This is one way in which criminal life was not always an easy alternative to working for a living. This is why so many criminals did not conform to the popular stereotype of the professional malefactor – crime alone seldom provided a living.

Consequently, many criminals were amateurs, in the derogatory sense that the hardened professional used the word. They lived on the fringes of the underworld by menace of muscle or excellence of information. Those who were full-time criminals were of two types: the ones who enjoyed a reasonable degree of success and those who were incapable of honest labour, either because of physical limitations – often the result of drink – or an indelible aversion to work. Neither was guaranteed a comfortable life and certainly not in Manchester, where crime was rife and competition intense. Besides, there was the ever-present possibility of imprisonment, though as I shall show later, this was a feeble deterrent.

Criminals looked on imprisonment much as a joiner regards splinters – an irritating occupational hazard. On average, Manchester’s professional criminals went to prison every two years. In between they lived off their neighbours. During the 1960s and 1970s it was fashionable among certain historians and sociologists to view the nineteenth century criminal as nothing less than the authentic voice of working class rebellion. According to this view the criminal was simply reacting against oppressive capitalism which reduced him to factory fodder. What those who expound this view conveniently overlook is that the victims of crime were generally the poor. The idea that criminals in some way redistributed wealth is ludicrous. The reality in nineteenth century Manchester was that criminals preyed on those who had least and made the lives of the poor even poorer. Working people were the ones who suffered most from crime. Most criminals operated in the areas in which they lived. Criminals were the scourge of honest people and the poor felt that the little they owned might at any moment disappear. Like hoodies on today’s council estates they were a torture to those they preyed on, a major hardship in lives that were always difficult.

This applied to all nineteenth century cities and towns but what was different about Manchester, in contrast to London, for instance, was the large number of criminals who both worked and stole. The capital’s convicts tended to be dependent on crime for their livelihood to a greater extent than their Manchester counterparts. Though there were fewer hardened professional criminals than in London or Liverpool, a larger percentage of Manchester’s working population committed crime and hovered in the twilight between normal working class life and criminality, stepping imperceptibly from one to the other. This seems to have been particularly the case with juvenile offenders, who were responsible for a great deal of this extraneous crime.

This is a major reason why crime in Manchester proved so intractable. The criminal fraternity was not merely a stain on the fabric of the city. It was, to a greater extent than elsewhere, part of its warp and weft and therefore all the more difficult to eradicate. This is not to deny that a nucleus of hardened miscreants were responsible for most of the town’s serious and skilled crime, such as the theft of lead from the new buildings springing up all over the city during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. One of Manchester’s most notorious fences, One-armed Dick, operating out of his shop on Oldham Road, orchestrated a gang of youngsters who stole lead and other saleable metals from virtually every building site in the city. Jerome Caminada, Manchester’s renowned nineteenth century detective, agreed. ‘A great many of these [criminals] are fixed constantly in this great city. Some others come only like birds of passage – at the approach of great occasions, or during the racing or other busy season.’

According to the report of the Chief Constable for that year, 1870, there were 710 reputed thieves and 322 known to occasionally steal. In light of the poor detection rate of the Manchester police it is certain there were far more unknown thieves who ‘occasionally steal’.

In terms of the nature of the crimes committed in the city, it helps to see the criminal community as a dartboard with a number of concentric rings. The outer ring consisted of those who were routinely dishonest in small matters – petty pilferers, opportunist thieves – and who dealt in insignificant amounts of money and goods of little value. Most of these worked and regarded making money on the side by stealth as acceptable. In this world there was no moral censure for crime. When a convict returned to this community it was as if nothing had happened. Most people in this group were between fifteen and twenty-five years old and made up about fifty per cent of those who came before the courts. At the centre of the dartboard, the bull’s eye, were burglars and the superior pickpockets, who enjoyed an affluent lifestyle. Outside these were the sneak thieves and further out still the ‘pudding-snatchers’ who stole food from those leaving cook-shops, where the poor paid a few coppers to heat their food. Out towards the periphery were those who were in prison for begging.

Regardless of their criminal specialism or the extent of their entanglement in crime, criminals were far more mobile than the general population. Though initially most preyed on their neighbours, they found it advantageous to move from one place to another. The thieves of Manchester and Liverpool, in particular, frequently transferred their operations from one town to the other. One female prisoner told the prison chaplain that she had left her Manchester haunts, where she was well known to the police, for Liverpool. She returned home after a few years when she hoped they had forgotten her. Moving around the country was part of criminal life.

The poor in general were far more mobile at this time than we might imagine. In fact, the ebb and flow of population from Manchester to the surrounding countryside was an accepted feature of the period. Farmers drove horses, cattle and pigs to the city’s livestock markets on a daily basis and many city dwellers had family links with the surrounding countryside. Much of this movement was seasonal, people moving to work on the harvest. In good times the news of work in the factories, mills and warehouses sucked the poor into the city, just as changes in poor law regulations might later spit them out. The Irish and Highland crofters were always trickling into the city and many returned home periodically or permanently. There were also droves of travelling entertainers who were always on the move – street acrobats, fire-eaters, sword-swallowers, strongmen, jugglers, rope-wallahs, contortionists, stilt-dancers and the owners of performing dogs, mice and fleas. In addition there were mobile musicians, who were extremely common during the nineteenth century. Prominent among these were German bands – usually Bavarians who returned home to their farms in the autumn. The Italian organ-grinders and hurdy-gurdy men were a feature of every town and city, as were the travelling circuses – the biggest those of George Sanger and the Wombwell Company – and stage companies. In addition there were traders with covered wagons that served as accommodation and a place of business. Generally they dealt in dry goods, crockery and trinkets, all of an inferior quality. Then there were the droves of pedlars, selling everything from needles to booklets and tracts. The more dubious peddled quack remedies.

Unlike these, the Romany gypsies had genuine expertise. Renowned for their mastery of horse rearing, so long as the horse remained central to British life, their position was secure. They appeared at every fair, circus and show ground where fortune-telling, lucky dips and shies supplemented their income. Gypsies had a key role in horse racing and prizefighting, both shady activities. With their knowledge of horseflesh it is hardly surprising that they played a big part in what was an ill-regulated though increasingly popular sport. Their presence at race meetings and fairs gave them many opportunities to pass counterfeit money, while their mobility laid them open to charges of stealing animals – particularly horses – and poaching. Tinkers were a separate group. In dress and general appearance they were similar to gypsies but their lifestyle was regarded as more squalid. Their skill was in rough metalwork, such as repairing pots and pans. The gypsies looked down on them, partly because many were Irish.