Free Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld by Joseph O'Neill

underestimate the number of people actually unemployed as ‘idleness’ carried a powerful stigma at this time – those who had no work were lacking in character or were in some other way deficient. Many in fact were strangers to the city, travellers drifting from place to place in search of work. The cotton industry was renowned for its use of casual labour – hiring in busy times and firing with every downturn in trade. Almost a third of those arrested were illiterate. Many were immigrants.
    New arrivals in the city were mainly young people between the ages of fifteen and thirty. They sought steady, prestigious employment, such as work in the growing number of cotton mills. Even the few lucky enough to find it lived a Spartan existence, hovering just above the poverty line. In the 1870s, for instance, a man working in a cotton mill in the Manchester area might expect to earn between sixteen and twenty-eight shillings a week. A woman, girl or boy would earn between seven and twelve ‘bob’. The poverty line for a man with a wife and two children was around thirty bob a week. In good times, these people just about made ends meet without falling into debt. When they were out of work or when prices rose they slid into need. Old age, bereavement, desertion, illness and injury all carried the additional dread of destitution.
    The largest single occupational group of those arrested was common labourers – one in six – followed by factory hands and hawkers. Together these three groups made up almost half of all those arrested who were in employment. These figures reflect the situation in most industrial towns. Manchester, however, had far more of these people than most similar towns. It also had a bigger pool of seasonal workers than most places, many of whom worked in transport and storage, and the city teemed with carmen, porters, messengers, warehousemen and those working in the building trade, especially labourers. The casual worker was in many ways the most adaptable of workers. He tried his hand at whatever came along. He had to if he was to earn a living.
    Many young men worked as navvies. There was plenty of temporary work in the mills, especially in areas like Openshaw and Gorton. The need to live near these employment opportunities forced the poor into the run-down city areas. These were the people who, in an economic world that was always precarious, suffered most in hard times. In the hungry winter of 1878 and 1879, for instance, most of those who applied for parish relief were casual labourers. Years later, during the depressed winter of 1896 and 1897, seven out of ten of those who applied for relief to Manchester’s Poor Law Guardians were the casually and seasonally employed. By this time half of all the people living in the centre of Manchester were casual or part-time workers.
    It is hardly surprising the centre of the city had a reputation for poverty and the percentage of paupers living there was as high as anywhere in the country. A survey of May 1889 showed that twenty-one per cent of men in Ancoats and forty per cent of those in Salford did not have regular employment. At this time half the population of Ancoats and sixty-one per cent of that of Salford were classed as ‘very poor’, which meant they had a weekly income of less than four shillings per adult. This is reflected in the infant mortality rate: only one in three children born in Ancoats survived to the age of five.
    And Ancoats was by no means the worst area in Manchester. Most of its occupants were at least workers, either in employment or scratching a living by means which were generally honest. It was, however, the part of the city that attracted the poorest of the city’s newcomers. By the 1870s it had a diverse and sizeable immigrant population. One observer remarked, with only a little exaggeration, that as he walked through Ancoats he saw ‘Chinese, Lascars, Negroes, Germans, Frenchmen and … representatives of almost every