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

gather grim details with which to regale readers. As expected, he encountered all the shocking details he sought. Lodgers needed only 3d for a bed for the night, very often sleeping in buildings which had previously been pubs that had lost their licence. The pub landlord was now the landlord of the lodging house, often with the same clients. Some landlords displayed remarkable ingenuity in their efforts to maximise profits. One even removed the roof so as to cram in more lodgers.
    The Irish, of course, were not the only significant minority group in the city. There was also a large community of Eastern European Jews. Fleeing pogroms and persecution, Jews from Russia, Austria and Romania fled to Manchester in the 1880s. In 1880 they numbered 10,000 rising to 35,000 just before the outbreak of the Great War, when they became the largest Jewish community in England outside London. The first Jews to settle in Manchester settled in Cheetham, then a village a short distance from the city centre. The great building boom of the 1850s transformed the area, but the Jews stayed and adapted. Many were tailors and craftsmen who welcomed the growing population as potential customers. In 1858 they built their first synagogue and in 1874 the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue – which now houses the country’s first Jewish museum – and then a school on Torah Street.
    As in London, most of the Manchester Jews found work in the cheap clothing and household furniture trades, centred on Red Bank, Strangeways and Lower Broughton. Like the areas settled by the Irish, these were places with plenty of cheap housing, many lodging houses and a long-standing reputation for crime and disorder. The successful and ambitious soon made enough to move out to Hightown and Higher Broughton. Also, like the Irish, the Jews attracted hostility from their hosts. Manchester’s middle-class Jewish community, predating the influx of the 1880s, was less than enthusiastic about the arrival of its coreligionists. Having achieved acceptance and become an assimilated part of the business and professional community, they feared these newcomers, these ‘pedlar Jews’, might stir up an indiscriminate anti-Semitism.
    Local newspapers complained of ‘an invading force, foreign in race, speech, dress, ideas and religion’. It was common for letters and editorials to complain of ‘Yids’ and ‘sheeneymen’, who were nothing less than ‘the cancer of foreign Jewry, eating away at all that is noble in our national character’. One, in a rallying cry to all who abhorred this alien influx, declared, ‘We do not want them at any price. We want England for the English.’ Like anti-Irish sentiment, anti-Semitism found open expression right up to the end of the nineteenth century. Spy, a short-lived Manchester magazine, took up the theme in 1893, bemoaning the fact that, ‘Weekly fresh cargoes of penniless people are landed up on our shores… with the renewed persecution of Jews in Russia, the human rubbish heap is likely to increase.’ In terms identical to those once applied to the Irish, the editorial goes on to bemoan the danger these immigrants pose to English labourers whose jobs and standard of living they threaten by working for less and enduring more.
    Despite their diverse backgrounds, all the inhabitants of the poorer areas of the city had one thing in common: they lacked the traditional crafts. Many contemporaries believed this was a major cause of the crime that plagued the cities. F. Hill, in his Crime, its Amount, Causes and Remedies , put it down to the self-respect and sense of worth lost to unskilled men living in industrial society. Hill was a prison inspector and he maintained, ‘A really good carpenter, shoemaker or blacksmith is seldom found in prison… and rarely indeed is a member of the highly-respected class of skilled agricultural labourers.’
    Many also agreed that the gulf between the rich and poor which was greater in Manchester than