CHAPTER 7

Murders in the Mean Streets

1873–74

After a drunken row on Boxing Day, he kicked his wife to death …

iverpool in the mid-Victorian years was a place of dark and very mean streets. Even indoors, a defenceless person was not at all safe: there were attacks brought on by drunkenness, as well as by desperation and sheer devilment.

Not long before these years, a man was hanged at Kirkdale Gaol, and his dying statement contains some words which typify much of the domestic and street turmoil of a drink-fused working class community at the time:

There is not one but knows that when I had drink I did not know what I was doing. They told me that Tommy McCarty was beating my wife, and they pulled me up by my whiskers … But I must suffer.

This appears to be a crazy mixture of self-defence, rage, drunken violence, and then a murder. Over three years in the mid-seventies of Victoria’s reign, there was a steady flow of such horrors. People were living on the edge in the new cities.

In 1873 James Connor, a Londoner, went to a music hall in Liverpool, and after that he started talking to Mary Shears, a ship’s steward’s wife, and invited her for a drink. She rebuffed him and Connor grew violent. This escalated when two men who were walking on the street saw this struggle: they were called Gaffrey and Metcalfe, and as they walked on Mill Street, they heard Connor shout that the woman had been stealing from him. They intervened, and Connor hit Gaffrey in the face. When the man fought back, Connor stabbed him in the neck, and from the wounds he died. His friend was also cut, but not fatally. Connor was unlucky, as he had William Calcraft as his executioner – a man always likely to make a mess of things.

Calcraft pulled the lever but the rope pinioning Connor in position then snapped. Connor was in agony on the floor, but not dropping to his doom. It took a second attempt to achieve that.