Songs of Innocence (3 page)

Yet while the public appetite for stories of child prostitution was great, and while there was a growing clamour for retribution against those parents who neglected or beat their children, there
was still little or no acceptance of the idea that parents might actually sexually abuse their own children. A recent study on the sexual abuse of children between 1870 and 1914
⁶
looked at hundreds of cases, but found that in just 4 per cent were the perpetrators’ family members. This was partly because until the Children’s
Charter became law, wives were prevented from giving evidence against their husbands. In one case, in Lambeth in 1880, a woman had brought her friends and neighbours into the house so that they
could witness her husband abusing their seven-year-old daughter. Incest was known about and was widely condemned – the perpetrator often becoming a ‘marked man’ in his
neighbourhood, the author concluded. Yet in this area, as in many others, the family still remained largely a private domain, outside the purlieu of the state.

Beyond the front door

The public perception of family life in the poorer homes of late-Victorian times was riddled with contradictions. On the one hand, there was a growing awareness of the poverty
and the squalor that so many children experienced – along with an uneasy feeling that there was some uncharted sea of depravity on which few had yet dared even to set sail. On the other,
there was the belief that the family was the legitimate, the most wholesome and the most righteous social unit – a contradiction which persists, of course, in the
modern day. And even the most chaotic and disrupted homes often had a curious veneer of respectability about them. Alice Foley, growing up in a poor home in Bolton, had a particular
job to do every Friday morning: to take the family aspidistra carefully from its place of honour on top of the sewing machine. ‘The ritual was . . . first to place the giant plant pot in
water in the kitchen sink. Even today I can hear the eager bubbling and gurgling of those thirsty roots sucking in the refreshing draught. Then the single leaves were carefully sponged with a
wash-leather, cracked portions and faded tips nipped off to make room for younger shoots, and finally polished off with a spot of milk.’

In Alice’s case, the lacquer was a very thin one. In her biography, she described ‘an era of privy middens . . . each summer brought an appalling plague of house-flies. Most houses
had long, sticky papers hanging from gas-brackets; these trapped unwary insects who writhed until they expired. One of our street visitors was the “fly catcher man” who wore a tall hat
exhibiting a broad, sticky band, black with captive flies, and called out vigorously: “Catch’em, catch’em alive-oh.”’
⁷

Childhood in this era was a great deal more red in tooth and claw – perhaps more similar to adult life – than the popular imagination would have had it. Alice described her family
life as often impoverished, sometimes violent, but overwhelmingly tainted by a humdrum, everyday neglect. Her mother was kindly but undemonstrative, she said; her father, a firebrand and a drinker
who put his Irish political obsessions before his children – even storing ammunition in the bedroom he shared with his sons.

‘He worked in fits and starts, punctuated by bouts of heavy drinking and gambling. During these years mother plodded gamely on, battling with a feckless husband whom she neither loved nor
understood, and succouring her six children whom she never really wanted,’ Alice explained.
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‘Poignant memories remain of a
particular afternoon with mother bent wearily over the dolly-tub with her small child at her feet in a fidgety and peevish mood. Suddenly, she said quite sternly: “Now if
you’re not a good girl, I shall run away with a black man” . . . For days and weeks I moved around in terror and heaviness at the threat of desertion. If a coloured person came in sight
I wondered dumbly if that was the man mother had in mind. Pathetically, I tried to find ways of pleasing mother in the hope that she would not leave us, and on quiet evenings by the fire when we
played Ludo or Snakes and Ladders, I cheerfully manoeuvred to send my counter down a long snake so that mother’s could reach “home” safely.’

Yet to the modern reader it is not her father’s drinking, nor even her mother’s offhand cruelty, that are thrown into the sharpest relief by her account: it is the Foleys’
casually neglectful attitudes to the nurturing of their children that now strike the harshest note: ‘At tea time our parents shared a savoury tit-bit from one plate, Father getting the lions
share, for Mother doled out tiny morsels from her portion to the younger children. At supper time Father drank beer, Mother relished a piece of bread spread with slices of raw onion, and we
youngsters went to bed on a “butty” and a drink of cold water.’

Time and again, the children of the Victorian era describe their relationships with their parents as more remote, perhaps more wary, than the children of later years would do. A typical family
had more children, of course, and it was usual – particularly in poorer areas – for some of them to die without reaching adulthood. Parents simply could not – or at least did not
– make the same emotional investment that they do today. ‘No jubilation sounded on this occasion,’ Alice wrote of her birth. ‘Only the dull acceptance of another hungry
mouth to feed.’

Nor was it only the impoverished working classes who took this more relaxed attitude to child-rearing. Morrice Man was born into
a middle-class family from Kent –
his father was a barrister in Burma and the family also lived for a time in France. He described being put on a ferry alone, aged nine, to travel to school in England. A random passenger was asked
to keep an eye on him: ‘Nobody spoke to me, so far as I remember; the aforesaid passenger forgot all about me. I never saw him (or her) again. It was a rough passage. I was homesick and very
seasick. On reaching Newhaven I got ashore somehow – I had a through ticket to Lewes where I was to be met.’
⁹

While Morrice described his family life – he was one of nine children – as warm and loving, and his mother as devoted, he spent much of his time with a nurse. From the age of nine,
he was away at boarding school. Yet, despite the rather buttoned-up sensibilities of the era, the childhood he described was one into which the less respectable aspects of the adult world would
quite often intrude. ‘Uncle Bill . . . taught me the Charge of the Light Brigade and often he would take me, when he lived at Hythe, to the White Hart, and stand me on the bar . . . and make
me recite to the assembled company,’ he recalled.

But the great incident of his childhood, long remembered, occurred during an election while the family were living at Croydon. Morrice’s father went out to support the Tory candidate:
‘The excitement was terrific and the night when the result was declared we children were as a treat allowed to be present at the town hall. I shall never forget the scene that night, the
raging crowds. Our house was put under police protection as some of the Liberal mob considered my father mainly responsible for their defeat. We boys knew this and went to bed armed to the teeth
(we slept three in a room) with sticks and toy pistols . . . The only incident that occurred that night was the temporary arrest of a great friend of father’s who came to congratulate him in
a state of some inebriation. We were allowed to speak our minds and father always enjoyed a joke.’

While the popular imagination, fired by the works of Dickens, saw the child as a vulnerable innocent, in need of protection from the vicissitudes of adult life, parents,
it seemed, took a very different view.

Out on the streets

While most families seemed to accept a certain amount of rough-and-tumble in their own lives, such behaviour was a very different matter when it was happening elsewhere –
particularly in the over-crowded alleys of Britain’s industrial cities. While Morrice Man was revelling in high jinks on election night, there was growing concern about the levels of violence
in other quarters.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the abolition of stamp duties on newspapers had allowed the popular press to proliferate. And by the end of Victoria’s reign, there was a
plethora of publications eager to catch the mood of the times – not least, to tap into the age-old feeling that society was in a state of terminal decline. In the hot summer of 1898, the
Hooligan burst on to the pages of the national press after an exceptionally rowdy August bank holiday weekend. In the following weeks and months, a fully-formed youth culture solidified in print
form, wearing a uniform of bell-bottom trousers, peaked caps and neck scarves, heavily ornamented leather belts and a shaved tuft at the crown. The English fair play tradition of fighting with
fists and not with feet, it was reported, was in eclipse. The issue played into the hands of those who believed there had been too much romanticism about children in recent years, and not enough
time spent beating the devil out of the young.

Violent youth cultures had, in reality, been a fact of life for years in the industrial cities. In Manchester, the gangs were known as Scuttlers; in Birmingham existed the Peaky Blinders. The
Chelsea
Boys and the Battersea Boys also cropped up regularly, indulging in street robberies, assaults on the police and pitched battles among themselves.

Reports of casual violence were widespread throughout the Victorian period, and it was considered quite normal to settle a dispute outside a public house with fists. But these newly discovered
teenage gangs had their own distinctive styles, and a recognized hierarchy. Industrialization had brought huge numbers of people together in crowded conditions – and that led to children
being on the streets together. Now the adult world began to fear the young were developing their own cultures, and that those cultures could be a threat to traditional orthodoxies.

A particularly harrowing case had taken place in Manchester in August 1890:
¹⁰
a gang of teenage Scuttlers from Harpurhey, in the north of the
city, had taken on the Bengal Tigers from Ancoats. Having hunted down their prey, they took off their heavy-buckled belts and used them to beat a boy named John Connor to within inches of his life.
Then they plunged their knives into his neck, shoulders and back. One of the Tigers was blinded by a blow to the right eye – he had already lost the left in an earlier fight – and three
more received knife wounds. No one called the police, and they found out about the incident only from the staff at the infirmary in which the injured were treated. Two of the perpetrators were
sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.

The incident was not the first that summer, but it did lead to a growing public outcry. The recorder in the case, Henry West, called for a public debate on the introduction of flogging. A
special magistrates’ meeting was held, a resolution in favour of the cat-o’-nine-tails passed, and a deputation sent to the Home Secretary.

Alexander Devine, a court reporter for the
Manchester Guardian
and also a founder of the lads’ club movement, had chronicled the various Scuttler gangs of Manchester, which were
very territorial:
the Grey Mare Boys from Grey Mare Lane in the city’s Bradford district, the Holland Street gang from Miles Platting, the Alum Street gang from
Ancoats, the Little Forty from Hyde Road in Ardwick, the Buffalo Bill gang from the colliery district of Whit Lane in Salford – the list went on.

Scuttlers were very style conscious, and the belts which were their lethal weapons were also used as style statements, Devine wrote: ‘These designs include figures of serpents, a heart
pierced with an arrow . . . Prince of Wales feathers, clogs, animals, stars, and often either the name of the wearer of the belt or that of some woman.’ As well as a belt, a Scuttler would
wear narrow-toed, brass-tipped clogs. The Ancoats Scuttlers wore bell-bottomed trousers measuring fourteen inches around the knee and twenty-one inches around the foot. The flaps of their coats
were cut into little peaks and buttoned down, and they wore flashy silk scarves. Their hair was cut short at the back and sides, and they grew long fringes, plastered down over the left eye.

According to Devine, the gang phenomenon could be put down to a lack of parental control, poor discipline in schools, slum evenings spent in ‘listless idleness’ on the street, and
‘penny dreadful’ literature, which told tales of highwaymen and brigands and which ‘openly defied authority and revelled in bloodshed’.

This concern that melodramatic cheap reading material could be a cause of youth crime was a common one of the day. Samuel Smith, MP for Flintshire, told the House of Commons that he had made a
study of its effects, reading for his research no fewer than forty penny papers with a circulation of more than a million each week.

‘Our children feasted upon these stories, and all their moral ideas were confused and drugged by this education. Could it be wondered at that we had such a large proportion of our nation
who were degraded and morally unfit for the duty of citizenship?’ he asked.
¹¹
‘The poorer classes between 12 and 16 or 17 years of
age . . . were
laying the foundations of a wasted and ruined life. They were found by tens of thousands in gin palaces, in low music halls, and in the low theatres. They were
getting the education of the streets, an education in every respect vicious and low, and that was the reason why this country, beyond any civilized country in Europe, had to contend with a degraded
residuum of population which constituted a great national danger.’

There were girl gangs, too, although they tended to be ancillary to the boys’ gangs, knitting coloured socks and collecting stones for the menfolk to throw. Nonetheless, in March 1893 the
residents of Clopton Street in Hulme sent a petition to the Watch Committee of the city council, complaining of ‘disorderly young women’ who had supplied missiles from their aprons
‘while lads and lasses alike had “bonneted” the terrified residents’ – that is, they had knocked their hats off. In February 1890, a seventeen-year-old girl named
Lizzie Gordon was accused by a John Green of an assault in Salford, in which she had allegedly threatened to knife him, ‘Same as I have done Paddy Melling.’ Two of Lizzie’s
companions were alleged to have taken off their clogs and assaulted Green with them. Several witnesses testified that Gordon was among a gang of girls who had been terrorizing the residents of Gun
Street.