Angel Meadow, page 23
A month later on 11 December, a gang of 14 teenage scuttlers from the Meadow launched an invasion of Salford armed with knives, pokers and belts. They chased a man named Preston to the home of his associate Edward Barry and then began beating on the door, shouting their war cry, “The Meadow!” When bricks crashed through the window, Barry stormed outside.
A scuttler named Edward White felled Barry, striking him on the head with a poker. James Martin, a labourer from the Meadow, struck a policeman who came to arrest them. When White, Martin and two other teenagers were found guilty of malicious wounding, the presiding magistrate warned that scuttlers would ‘find the law too strong for them.’
Journalists claimed prison posed no deterrent to scuttlers and jail-time only added to their cult status. A missionary who offered help to convicts as they left Strangeways told how scuttlers were met at the prison door by crowds of lads and girls, who hailed them as heroes. Alexander Devine felt the only remedy was to give them a flogging, as at heart the scuttler was a coward. Detective Caminada agreed: ‘The howl of the cowardly scuttler as the lash descended upon his shoulders would strike terror into the hearts of his associates and do more to free the streets of this pestilence than all the warnings and sentences of the bench.’
In 1890, a deputation of Manchester MPs and magistrates including the Lord Mayor Sir John Mark travelled to London for crisis talks with Home Secretary Henry Matthews. They told him that the magistrates’ sentencing guidelines had failed to put down the scuttling epidemic and gangs were now ordering shopkeepers to pay them protection money. They wanted to give scuttlers a good flogging.
Matthews still had his hands full with the fallout from the Jack the Ripper murders in the East End and dismissed them, saying the House of Commons was ‘extremely averse’ to flogging. Sir Robert Rawlinson MP later wrote to the Manchester Times protesting that flogging was ‘degrading, repulsive and abominable’. ‘Let the Lancashire mayors and magistrates employ sufficient police to maintain order, and cease thinking about brutal and brutalising flogging,’ he protested. If Rawlinson had dared to visit Angel Meadow, he would have seen how insulting his comments were to the city’s embattled police force.
In October, 1891, a scuttler named James Gallagher was charged with attacking a police constable named McDermott in Style Street. McDermott was marching a prisoner to the police station one Saturday night when Gallagher, who was known as the Red King because of his ‘remarkably sandy-coloured hair’, gave him a ‘terrible blow’ on the head with an iron bar. McDermott was knocked unconscious and was carried into a beer house by some men who came to his aid. He was laid up in hospital for three weeks.
When Gallagher was arrested, he said: “I did it on account of my pals, and now they are laughing at me.” He was jailed for six months with hard labour. Five months later, another ‘rough looking’ scuttler named George Cooper kicked a police officer in the legs and bit another’s hand while he was being arrested. It took four officers to drag him to the station. Cooper, who had already had several convictions for scuttling, was jailed for three months.
The worst attack of all took place on a Saturday night in May, 1894. Constable Stanilous Brierley was on duty in plain clothes in Sharp Street when he was spotted and attacked by five thugs, including Thomas Mulroy, 23, and his sister Jane. The group began kicking and punching Brierley until he was unconscious. Jane Mulroy, 17, then threw a china teacup at the officer’s head.
Brierley was picked up by a hawker who found him slumped against a hoarding. Brierley somehow staggered to his feet and chased Mulroy into an alley near St Michael’s Church, where a yob named Edward Riley was waiting. Riley tripped Brierley, who fell to the ground. Mulroy then kicked Brierley so hard with his brass-tipped clog that the officer’s eye was scooped clean out of his face. Riley, 19, then knelt on Brierley’s chest to remove his watch and chain.
Brierley was carried to the infirmary on a stretcher and was still in hospital when the case went to court. Thomas Mulroy was jailed for nine months and Jane Mulroy for two weeks. Riley was acquitted because of a lack of evidence, even though the magistrates were shown the result of the gang’s handiwork: Brierley’s squashed and lifeless eye.
Police officers began fighting fire with fire. Henry Burgess, who in the hot summer of 1893 had turned Thomas Matthews into a human fireball, was the most feared of all Manchester’s scuttlers. At 11pm on 27 July 1894, just over a year after Matthews’ death, he shouted without provocation to a police officer named William Corns in Angel Street that ‘his days were numbered’ and that he would be ‘put out’ that very night. Burgess disappeared and then sneaked up on Corns armed with a ‘formidable’ knife and a poker. He told Corns: “Your time has come. I am going to settle you.” Corns took a swing at Burgess with his staff, but missed. Burgess hit Corns with the poker and ran off.
Corns called for reinforcements and together the officers went in search of Burgess. They found him crouching in ambush in an alley off Old Mount Street at 12.30am. He had removed his heavy clogs so that he could run through the streets in silence. Burgess jumped up and hit Corns again with the poker, but this time Corns had a better aim. He smashed Burgess on the head with his staff and arrested him following a struggle.
Police described Burgess as one of the worst thugs in Manchester, while newspaper reports called him ‘a desperate character’. By then, he had been convicted of manslaughter, burglary, police assaults and scuttling. He was jailed for six months with hard labour for this latest outrage. Robert Armitage, the chairman of the bench, said a longer criminal record had never been read out in his courtroom. He added: “It is the intention of the bench to show the lawless characters of Angel Meadow that their punishment for offences would not only be heavy but speedy.” He told Corns he had ‘nobly done his duty’ and was an ‘honour to the force’.
Just two months later, Corns was involved in another fracas in Angel Meadow. At 7pm on 5 September, he and a second officer were asked to turn James Heaton and two other men out of a lodging house in Crown Street. Heaton picked up a piece of iron and struck Corns on the head with a crashing blow. Bleeding heavily, Corns arrested Heaton after a struggle in which his hand was shattered with the iron bar. Corns and his colleague faced a battle to get the trio to the police station as a ‘very bad character’ named Eunice Birtwell made a ‘desperate’ rescue attempt. Heaton who had already served two terms of six months for scuttling and police assault, was jailed for another six months.
The Meadow’s scuttlers would all end up behind bars as magistrates imposed a crackdown. In February 1896, Joseph Wood, now 22, was working as a hawker. He and other members of the gang went through the streets looking for two brothers, John and Peter Durkin. A fight broke out and John Durkin was stabbed in the face with a clasp knife, while his brother was stabbed in the neck. Wood was jailed for 18 months.
Wood’s arch enemy Anthony Gibson and the thugs Henry Burgess and Thomas Cunningham also ended up in the dock charged with stabbing a hawker named Joseph Metcalf. Burgess, Cunningham and Gibson ran towards Metcalf and a man named Michael Callighan armed with pocket knives after spotting them in a street near the Meadow. Cunningham shouted: “Go for them.” Metcalf and Callighan began to flee, but Metcalf fell. Burgess, Cunningham and Gibson stabbed him repeatedly.
Chapter 22
Saviours
It was a cold, wet night when the two brothers arrived at the boys’ refuge in Strangeways, across the Irk from Angel Meadow. The youngest, aged nine, was weak and starving. The eldest was a tall and haggard 16-year-old with wild eyes and his hair plastered into a thick mop pointing five inches above his head. “I’ve come to see if you’ll take my little brother,” he told the two inspectors who met them at the door. They noticed immediately that the two ‘street arabs’ were covered in lice.
“Where have you been sleeping, my poor lads?” one of the inspectors asked. They had been living in the back yard of one of the worst lodging houses in Charter Street. Their father was dead and their mother was serving her fifth prison sentence for fencing stolen goods. Tears rolled down the eldest boy’s blackened face. “We’ll not only take your little brother,” the inspector said. “We’ll take you as well.” Every stitch of their clothing had to be burned and their hair was closely cropped that night. “Thank you, sir,” was all the boys could offer in return.
The next morning, and the two inspectors decided to investigate their story, they went to the house the boys had made their home. As they knocked on the door, a terrifying scream from within made them shrink in fear. They retreated to the street corner, where they were relieved to see a policeman. “Do you know No. 11?” one of the inspectors asked breathlessly. “We’ve been to the door, but dare not venture in.” The policeman’s answer was sharp: “You’d better not, Sir. You’ll find none but thieves there.”
But the next night, the inspectors returned and managed to get a quiet word with the landlady. Although at first she denied knowing the boys, she finally confirmed that their mother was in prison and led the men through the house to the stinking yard where the boys had been sleeping. One of the inspectors later wrote:
In the yard at the back of this wretched house these two lads had been sleeping in such a condition that the wonder was they were alive. The mother was in for nine months and her term expired the first week in May. We felt that the only hope for the lads was that they should be placed out of her reach before then.
Life was all but impossible for many of Angel Meadow’s children. Those without a home slipped between lodging houses or slept anywhere they could find. A few flagstones warmed by a baker’s oven represented luxury for those sleeping on the streets. Two boys died one December night after crawling into a brick kiln – they were still asleep when the workmen arrived in the morning and fired up the kilns.
Many of these street arabs were pressed by their parents into selling matches or flowers, while others trained themselves in the art of ‘breach buzzing’ or picking pockets. One worker who visited Angel Meadow revealed: ‘As you pass along our streets you see groups of idle vagrants from about 16 to 18. From these our criminal ranks are being daily fed. It is already too late. Their characters are stamped. They will spend a few more years in our streets and then one by one they will drop into the workhouse or the gaol.’
A band of Christian missionaries stepped into Angel Meadow in 1853, led by a man named James Rutter. They aimed to rescue feral children from poverty and crime – and save their souls from hell. The group planned to ‘civilise’ the slum and ‘excavate the heathen’ by offering charity and education. They created a school for the slum’s ‘uncivilised and thoroughly ignorant lads’ within an empty tenement building.
But the heathens fought against this attempt to civilise them. They threw stones through the school’s windows, dumped dead cats and dogs on the doorstep and made teaching night classes impossible with their ‘discordant noises’ in the street. It took the missionaries five years to win over hearts and minds in the slum. One later wrote: ‘The men resolved not to be angry. They entered the dwellings of the most determined of their disturbers and gradually succeeded in converting the stoutest opponents into the warmest supporters.’
The institution was known as the Sharp Street Ragged School. It was a single room of 13 yards by 6 yards, in which up to 400 children soon gathered for classes each week. The missionaries pressed boys into selling newspapers and formed a parcel-carrying brigade at Victoria Station to keep them out of trouble. They claimed the school did have a ‘civilising effect’ on the neighbourhood, but admitted they had many ‘narrow escapes’ as they walked through the slum beneath a hail of stones. ‘In those days it was scarcely safe to walk along the streets to the school without protection,’ one missionary said. James Ward, one of school’s first teachers, wrote:
In 1855 when I entered Sharp Street Ragged School there were no windows or window frames, but a coarse canvas nailed over to keep out the cold. Our scholars did not come to us. We had to go out to fetch them, aiming always for the lowest and poorest we could find. Our next effort was to find employment for boys who otherwise would have been trained as pickpockets.
The teachers arrived one Sunday evening to find a pale and sickly boy aged nine dressed in ‘miserable clothes’ hugging his little brother, who looked a ‘picture of death’. They recalled in a report aimed at likely benefactors: ‘His arms were placed around the child as though he would shield him from all ill. We shall never forget the sight we saw that night.’ They taught the children to sing hymns at Sunday school in return for coffee and cake, and handed out more than 19,000 dinners in one year.
But conditions in the Sharp Street building were so bad that 18 teachers felt compelled to leave in 1860. They set up a new school in Nelson Street, off Charter Street, at the foot of Angel Meadow, naming it the Angel Meadow Ragged School. (Sharp Street would also be resurrected in a new building in 1869.) The Angel Meadow Ragged School stood in an abandoned workroom which had recently been used as a dancing saloon for ‘immoral and degrading purposes’. It was a former meeting house of thieves, a rendezvous of prostitutes and a ‘free and easy’. One of their first annual reports stated: ‘The very Sunday night before we entered into possession it was used as a dancing saloon, and for some weeks, our services were carried on with flimsy and gaudy decorations still decking its walls.’
The teachers began canvassing the slum for fresh scholars, who they taught basic skills such as reading, spelling and arithmetic. Their Sunday school soon drew more than 350 boys and girls, but attendances slipped in the summer when long evenings and scuttling proved ‘too tempting’ for the boys. Around 70 infants were also taught in a cramped cottage next to the school. At Whit Week, the scholars were taken to a park on the outskirts of the city, where they feasted on currant bread and coffee.
Soon the school needed more teachers. At a meeting on 6 April 1861, new master Thomas Johnson was given a three month trial. He would later become the school’s best known superintendent. The increase from 18 to 24 teachers meant the school could also offer lessons to the children’s parents. The idea was simple. ‘If we can reclaim the parents, and make them honest, sober, and industrious,’ the teachers said in one of their reports, ‘we do much towards removing the evil influences exercised upon our children at their too often miserable homes.’
Around 12 mothers and 16 fathers began trooping through the school’s doors each week. The men gathered in a narrow space at the top of the school for lessons in history and book-keeping. The mothers occupied a corner of the schoolroom, where the children fought constantly for their attention. The men had access to a newsroom, where they could read daily newspapers. The women formed a sewing class and were soon making around 150 garments a year, including petticoats, pinafores and shirts.
As well as educating the slum dwellers, the teachers also tried to provide moral guidance, setting up a temperance society after seeing ‘the evil effects of drink and the dram-shop’. Nearly 150 people took the pledge, some perhaps tempted by the Saturday night magic lantern displays the teachers provided as an alternative to the dancing saloons.
Suddenly the school was booming. Nearly 40 men were attending classes. Donations from local garment firms of cast-off clothing and clogs from local shoemakers allowed them to help clothe the children. The teachers felt confident enough to try to form a cricket club and to set up a library with 400 books including volumes on theology, history and biography. The poor of Angel Meadow were also given access to a savings bank – the first time they had ever saved. They deposited more than £10 in the first year and withdrew half of it again to buy food and clothing. By 1867, they were making 1,289 deposits totalling £66. One boy withdrew five shillings to buy his parents their Christmas dinner.
The teachers were presently surprised by the attitude of the adults towards the school. A woman who ran a brothel in Charter Street was induced to give up prostitution and earn a living washing clothes instead. When one teetotaller pointed out one of his classmates as a drunken gambling addict, the whole class confronted the drunkard and made him take the temperance pledge. His wife later called the teacher to her house and pointed to a bundle of new clothes lying on the table. “There’s teetotalism,” she said.
The children who attended the school also began behaving better. A young thief returned to school after his jail term and vowed to lead a better life. Two others were saved from prison thanks to their teachers, who begged magistrates to give them a second chance. But one boy who fought to support a drunken mother was found by teachers lying sick on the bare floor of his home after all the furniture had been sold. The teachers provided him with a straw bed and then sent him to the workhouse hospital until he was fit enough to return to school.
The scholars soon outgrew their dingy schoolroom and the teachers campaigned for funds for a new building, which was erected in Charter Street in 1866. The new Charter Street Ragged School had three storeys and was one of the largest buildings in Angel Meadow. Infants had the lower floor, juniors occupied the middle and parents and senior children the upper floor. The building had room for 600 scholars, but every Sunday in winter an average of 2,000 men, women, and children passed through the doors.
The teachers also set up a hostel for working girls, where they could rent a bedroom for a small fee, and a nursery for infants of working mothers. The aim was to keep young girls from falling into prostitution in the lodging houses and to stop those with young children from leaving them uncared for while they went to work. The inhabitants of the home had use of a laundry and a large sitting room overlooking the Old Burying Ground. The home was opened on a warm July day by the Duchess of Sutherland – Angel Meadow’s first Royal visitor.
