The coroner, T E Sampson, at the Dale Street enquiry, insisted that there was no certainty that the body was that of Annie Smith, in spite of Agnes’s testimony. He directed some officers to go to Manchester to collect details of the woman’s life there. After one previous visit to Manchester, Detective Duckworth had gathered some information: he had found that Agnes (who only had one eye and was therefore memorable) was known by the fraternity of street entertainers, but that no-one said they knew Annie, from the description given. All Duckworth could say was that describing the dead woman as ‘a Jewess’ was the only way to convey her features.

All this seems to indicate that the girl had died in suspicious circumstances, and one telling detail is that a man called Horace Dunnett, who lived in Spring Place, stated that he had heard a voice shouting: ‘Murder!’ and ‘Police!’ from an empty house in that area. As the journalist on the Mercury reported though: ‘… such cries are frequently heard in the neighbourhood and little importance is taken of them..’ He goes on to give a horrific statement about the lifestyles of the labouring classes of that part of the city at the time:

‘… it was a neighbourhood in which many drunken women were thrashed by their husbands.’

Whether Annie Smith was indeed the person Agnes said she was, or some other unfortunate, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the evidence points towards some foul play – she was naked and had been dumped in a hovel; she was also starved and had most likely been attacked with some kind of weapon. But she was just one of many, a statistic at a time of frequent deaths among the street urchins and homeless wanderers. The interest in the story lies in what it tells us about the city at the time, and what horrendous problems it was having, trying to cope with the expanding population and with coping with the poor, who of course, are ‘always with us.’

The social history behind this story makes it clear that the travelling poor in the county of Lancashire and throughout the North West at that time were often ‘on a circuit’ looking for places where word had got around that crowds were receptive and the wealthier classes were, maybe, a little more generous than elsewhere. The Manchester travellers were expected to know the Liverpool counterparts, and so on. This tendency for individuals to drift from town to town, just like the girls on the train who met Kilvert, could entertain and even entrance; but the tale of Annie Smith highlights the dark story behind this often popular culture of street singers.