After that the attack became relentless, brutal and vicious. Michael Mullen, only seventeen years old, joined in with enthusiasm, and soon the two principal assailants were kicking Morgan along the pavement like a football. After a while, police officers arrived, but by that time, the young doctor was dead.

Morgan’s brother came after them, and police were close behind. Later that night, the main culprit, McGrave, was apprehended, and the rest of the High Rip villains taken in the next few days. The whole bunch of thugs were teenagers; Mullen had tried to run away to sea. But they were taken into custody and faced a murder charge.

In court, the jury found them guilty of wilful murder, but recommended clemency for a man called Campbell. Justice Mellor indeed passed the death sentence, but Campbell was reprieved a few days later. He had a certain record of good behaviour, and that saved his neck. Even that was no easy task, however, a petition had to be signed, collected and sent to the Home Secretary. But the public sense of outrage was not only in the columns of The Times; Liverpool families insisted on the young men being flogged to death, as hanging would have been too sudden and merciful. Obviously, that was not widely supported, and expressed a gut-reaction to the sheer heinous nature of this killing.

McGrave and Mullen were hanged at Kirkdale on 3 January 1875. The violent leader of the High Rip Gang was terrified of the noose. Young Mullen was, apparently, much firmer and resolute in the face of eternity. A reporter at the time noted that a point had to be made about the manner in which these young men had killed their victim:

Three executions in one day will excite, it may be hoped, a salutary terror among the roughs, not only of Liverpool, but of the country at large. Of late they have learnt by an inaccurate but not unnatural induction to regard murder by kicking as different in kind from murder done by other means. They have learnt also to regard murders in slow time as different in kind from murders done at a blow …

The 1870s were a particularly busy time for the two Liverpool gaols, Kirkdale and Walton. The latter had started operations in 1854 as a panopticon or radial idea. But the two gaols shared their execution shed for some years, the gallows being taken from one to the other. Kirkdale did not close until 1892. These young cornermen would have found the Kirkdale hospitality markedly stern, miserable and tough.

This particular gang, though, were not finished yet. In September 1877, Thomas Mullen and Mary McGrave, brother and sister of the two hanged men, kicked a man to death, only for the fact that he was trying to intervene in a quarrel involving his wife. Cornermen took a long time to die down, as the finger of blame was pointed at the police, and they eventually scaled up the street patrols. The cornermen episode provides significant evidence of the absolute terror created by youth gangs in an age of packed streets, dark alleys and ‘no-go’ areas for the bobbies on the beat.