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

nation on the face of the earth’. In fact, Manchester was one of the few cities where the proportion of foreigners to natives was very high. Many of these were unfortunates – people escaping persecution, disgrace or the law. Others were political exiles and deserters from foreign armies. They included the German bandsmen – who hoped for work in pubs and music halls and played in the streets when times were hard – Tyrolese minstrels, Negro serenaders, pipers and flautists from Dublin, jugglers and Italian organ grinders who filled the city’s drab streets with an exotic cacophony. Adding to this spectacle were indigenous elements – dog and bird fanciers, clarinettists, Lancashire bell-ringers and itinerant preachers. Many of those thronging the city streets were merely passing through. Local farmers, for instance, drove their sheep, oxen and pigs to the abattoirs on Salford’s Water Street and the Cattle Market on Cross Lane.
    Occasionally it is possible to get a detailed description of one of these areas as it was late in the century. A police inquiry into the London Road area provides such an account. Shepley Street, just off London Road, was typical. Numbers eight and ten were brothels. Numbers twenty-two and twenty-six were common lodging houses, separated by the Rose and Crown, the haunt of prostitutes. Yet on streets like this there also lived many respectable labourers, skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers. Invariably these people were struggling to live honest and useful lives, seeking to distance themselves from known criminals.
    Mixed up with the honest workers, professional criminals and the recent immigrants trying to scrape a living in an alien environment, were the large numbers of people who lived in a twilight zone between legitimate society and the underworld. They drifted between these two worlds, never sure where one began and the other ended. Most of this amorphous group consisted of those who never enjoyed the benefits of regular employment but survived only because they were able to pick up occasional jobs. Many sometimes worked as hawkers, knife-grinders, ballad-singers and sellers of broadsheets. At other times they used the information they had gathered while shovelling coal or digging a garden to plan a robbery. While these groups languished in poverty, factory workers’ incomes were generally improving. Whole leisure and consumer industries – notably the pub and the music hall – grew up to meet the needs of working men with money. And where there is money there are always those anxious to get it by illegal means.
    The Irish, in this as so much else, were different. They did not share the rising income of factory workers. Few were employed in cotton mills. Many of the Ancoats Irish were day labourers in the building trade. But the single biggest employer by far was Smithfield Market. One in four of all the stallholders was Irish, as were many of the porters, labourers and the hordes of street sellers and hawkers who operated on the fringes of the market. At the best of times they were one meal away from hunger. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century a quarter of the paupers in New Bridge workhouse were Roman Catholics. During this period Irish-born offenders likewise comprised a significant fraction of Manchester’s prison inmates – on average about one in three. Indeed, there were many in the final decades of the century still happy to blame the Irish for the city’s crime. Among these was that bastion of liberal opinion, the Manchester Guardian. According to many editorials, the extent of a city’s crime problem was in proportion to its Irish population. So, though the Irish-born population of England was only three per cent of the total, they made up fifteen per cent of prison inmates.
    The Manchester Guardian again reminded its readers of the Irish peril several years later. On this occasion their reporter visited a lodging house on Charter Street, in Angel Meadow, to