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Victorian Cities, Glasgow and Crime

When the English gentleman Edmund Burt visited Glasgow in 1730 he thought it ‘the prettiest and most uniform town that I ever saw and I believe there is nothing like it in Britain’. In 1772 the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant thought Glasgow ‘the best built of any second-rate city I ever saw’. These were only two of the travellers who gave favourable comments on Glasgow when the town had not yet mushroomed. Glasgow had been a quiet city that languished on the banks of the Clyde, always important but never quite central until eighteenth-century trade and nineteenth-century industry catapulted it into Scotland’s largest city, the second largest city in Great Britain, the Second City of the Empire and the greatest shipbuilding centre the world had ever seen.

Glasgow’s position on the West Coast of Scotland gave certain advantages with trade to North America during the troubled eighteenth century. It was distant from the main bases of the French privateers that wreaked havoc with English and East Coast Scottish shipping, and it was free of the tides and winds of what was then termed the British Channel, thus making the transatlantic passage less hazardous. Geography ensured the passage would take less time from the Clyde than either the Thames or the Severn. When the Glasgow merchants used these advantages and added kinship connections with the smaller tobacco plantations in North America, they began to create vast commercial fortunes; history remembers them as the Tobacco Lords.

The tobacco trade between Scotland and the North American colonies had begun in the seventeenth century but escalated after 1707 when Scotland united her parliament with that of England to form Great Britain. Within a few decades Glasgow overtook Bristol and Liverpool in the transatlantic trade and used the wealth to create industries and deepen the Clyde so shipping could penetrate upriver as far as the Broomielaw. Although the American War of Independence severely damaged the tobacco trade, by then Glasgow’s industry was well established and the city grew year on year. Glasgow was Scotland’s boom town.

Of course, raw human material was required to fuel the constant expansion, and in the nineteenth century there was massive immigration into the city. Improvements to agriculture saw thousands of small farmers evicted throughout the country, to be replaced by modern techniques. Unemployed countrymen drifted to the new mills and factories of the towns. First from the Lowlands and then from the Highlands, where the Clearances destroyed a people in what was as sordid a display of cultural genocide as any in history, the dispossessed and unwanted found new homes and a new way of life in Glasgow. Then the Irish arrived. From at least the 1820s and perhaps particularly in the 1840s, so many Irish people immigrated into Glasgow that it had the second largest expatriate Irish community in the world, with only New York’s being greater. In 1848 1,000 Irish arrived a week. They added to the cultural mix in Glasgow – not always amicably, as religious differences and poor housing combined to create tensions that could explode into violence. Glasgow became nearly ghettoised as different religions, backgrounds and levels of employment drove people into separate areas of the city.

These incomers were housed in hastily erected tenements containing houses of one and two rooms, and frequently lacking sanitation. The middle-class speculators minted money by cramming families into these hovels and charging rents that could sometimes only be afforded by sub-letting, leading to unhealthy overcrowding. In many ways, Glasgow was a microcosm of a procedure that occurred throughout the industrialising world as the land drained its people into the towns. The nineteenth century saw perhaps the greatest population shift in history, and Glasgow was a part of this phenomenon that created a plethora of new opportunities but also a raft of new difficulties and a greater awareness of crime and criminality than ever before.

As Asa Briggs stated in his Victorian Cities, the vast expansion of urban areas created a perception that industrial cities held new problems and a different lifestyle from older urban centres. This assumption may have owed its origin to the speed of growth, as the population of cities increased year on year, far more than their administrative or housing capacity to cope. Perhaps it was not surprising that this large influx of strangers into what had been relatively small and stable communities created insecurity, with some inhabitants of the towns scared of a perceived increase of crime. They were not alone.

The rise of industrial urbanism was a phenomenon that shook much of the nineteenth century establishment. These new types of towns seemed to be creating a sub-society about which they knew little and which they found hard to regulate. Large industrial cities were outwith the accepted social strata, which was still largely based on rural paternalism. Observers toured impoverished urban areas and created reports that castigated the poor as an inferior race with criminal habits. For example, in 1839 J. C. Symonds, Assistant Handloom Weaving Commissioner, wrote of Glasgow: ‘I did not believe, until I visited the wynds of Glasgow, that so large amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed on one spot in any civilised country.’ Symonds reported twenty people, male and female, clothed and unclothed, sleeping in a single room in a Glasgow lodging house, which suggested immorality to him.

As people crammed into the city, certain areas became notorious for congestion, disease and pestilence: the area south of the Trongate, Calton, the area west of the Saltmarket and the region near the old High Street contained housing that was amongst the worst in Europe. Here there were numbers of wynds and alleys, unlit, unventilated and occupied by the hopeless, the destitute and often the criminal.

For example, in 1871 the Laigh Kirk Close at 59 Trongate housed twenty brothels and three shebeens, illegal and unlicensed drinking houses. According to the Glasgow author and historian Jack House in his book The Heart of Glasgow, inside one-sixteenth of a square mile of central Glasgow there were 150 shebeens and 200 brothels. The best of the shebeens could hold up to forty dedicated drinkers; the worst saw the near destitute rub shoulders with prostitutes and thieves as they shared a dram of kill-me-deadly in some festering slum.

Arguably the best-known account of British poverty is Frederick Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1844. Engels’ description of conditions in the poorer quarters of industrial cities include mind-shuddering gems, such as ‘the streets are generally unpaved … filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters … filth and tottering ruin … foul liquids emptied before the doors …’ Even allowing for Engels’ socialist agenda, the description argues for poor living conditions in industrial towns; this way of life both appalled and frightened observers from more favoured areas. In his London Labour and the London Poor, the journalist Henry Mayhew wrote of ‘a prostitute … with her eye blackened, [who] stood by the bar. She was also well-attired, and ready to accompany them. Burglars of this class often have a woman to go before them, to carry their housebreaking tools …’ Mayhew’s description is a microcosm of contemporary observers who presented the life of the urban poor as intertwined with vice and crime; the worst areas were seen as a breeding ground of criminality, with drink a principal cause. Glasgow was no different from other large cities.

Although the middle and upper classes enjoyed their tipples as much as anybody, the temperance movement was still viewed as the engine of social advancement with tracts such as Moral Statistics of Glasgow (1849) and Facts and Observations of the Sanitary State of Glasgow (1844) intending to prove the connection between vice, drink and morality. These reports helped formulate perceptions of Glasgow and other cities as places where drink fed poverty, crime, begging and prostitution. Although most published comments were from middle-class observers with different backgrounds and values from their subjects, their judgements shared a general perception that reducing the alcohol consumption and raising the moral standards of the poor would reduce the crime rate. Crime, drink and poverty were seen as synonymous, and for much of the period the poor were blamed for their own misfortune.

In common with other Scottish urban centres, from 1833 in Glasgow, £10 householders, which meant those whose annual rent was woth £10 or more, elected councils, magistrates and the Commissioners of Police, who were responsible for much more than just the control of crime. They also governed water hygiene and public health. The town councils controlled much of the trade and used local Police Acts to regulate the conduct of the inhabitants and improve the physical environment. Therefore, although the bulk of the urban population were from the working classes, the middle classes ran the administration and created the townscape. Glasgow Police also gained the power to regulate lodging houses, so the poorest people were subject to some rigid social control with their homes liable to be legally raided and inspected at any hour of the day or night. It was understandable that the police were not always the most popular people in the world.

By the middle of the century, the middle classes generally regarded society as split between the respectable and the residuum. The respectable included that section of the working class who shared middle-class morality; the residuum was those who did not. The unemployed and unemployable, the drunken, the petty and not-so-petty criminals, the destitute, the vagrants, the travelling folk and anybody else who could not be adequately controlled, categorised or pigeonholed were not considered respectable. Living alongside these, mingling with them and often hiding in their ranks were what were thought of as an entire underclass: the criminal class. The perceptions of increasing crime in the early nineteenth century encouraged the growth of criminology, so in The Criminal Man Cesare Lombroso propounded the theory of this class of born criminals, and in 1851 Thomas Plint stated in his Crime in England that the criminal class were found amidst the ‘operative class’. This perceived class apparently lived entirely from crime, and occupied a distinct society that lived alongside the respectable, but in what became known as ‘the slums’, which was originally a slang word for a room. Contemporary theories argued that crime could be eradicated if this class was either bred out of society or reformed by punishment or improved morality.

The judge Lord Cockburn was a believer in a criminal class. In Circuit Journeys he mentions the case of Mary Boyle, who was released from a long spell in Perth Penitentiary in November 1843, but in spring 1844 was back in the circuit court. Cockburn termed Perth Penitentiary the ‘very school of penal virtue’. Boyle was believed to be reformed but after a few weeks she joined a group of men in a burglary at the house of Alexander Alison, an ironmaster of Sauchiehall Street. Immediately Cockburn sentenced her to ten years’ transportation; she dropped her humble air that had nearly fooled the jury and, according to Cockburn, began ‘cursing prosecutor, judges, jury, her own counsel and all concerned in the coarsest terms’. She gripped the iron bars that penned her in the dock and held on until she was literally dragged away. Mary Boyle was no older than sixteen and looked very gentle and demure. Cockburn gave the comment that ‘crime … runs in families … and this lady belongs to a race of thieves. She has a father and mother and two brothers or sisters already in Australia.’ Her two remaining siblings were also convicted thieves with one, John Boyle, being a member of an active criminal gang. Perhaps there was something to be said for the theory of criminal families, if not a criminal class.

Although the slums in Victorian Britain were probably larger than and just as repugnant as their Georgian counterparts, progress through the century diminished the fear of the mob erupting from the morass and overturning established order. Rather than the casual brutality of eighteenth-century justice, nineteenth-century authority was visible in the tall figure of the uniformed police, backed by an acceptance of discipline that started in the schoolroom and was reinforced by the churches. Yet although the possibility of revolution was virtually extinguished after the failure of the 1848 Chartist outbreak, the fear of crime persisted as the respectable Victorians shunned the areas where the poorest people lived. As with most ancient cities, many of Glasgow’s worst slums were near the centre of town in areas that had once contained the elite.

As the towns became more industrialised, so the centre of population shifted as those who could afford it moved to spacious suburbs such as the fine terraces in Kelvinside and the villas south of the Clyde. The poor remained in the older parts or were confined in hastily constructed areas often surrounding the mills or factories where they worked. This vertical segregation often destroyed the old harmony of the towns and helped create a new consciousness of class. However, class in Glasgow was not a uniform concept; the time-served skilled workers of the shipyards were as proud of their status as any entrepreneur, and would look down on the unskilled labourers as an inferior breed. Although there was a general perception of urban degradation in many towns, there was no uniform acceptance of the cause, although many blamed industrialisation as the root of social, criminal and moral evil. The Dublin Penny Journal of 6 July 1833 put its case succinctly: ‘The vice and misery which is the fearful accompaniment of the introduction of manufactures … a process of physical and moral deterioration is continually going forward.’ From these areas, the criminals or the desperate slithered into the more fortunate quarters of Glasgow to see what they could steal.

Such was the fascination of the perception of a criminal class that police detectives published their memoirs, and authors such as Dickens introduced criminals as characters in their novels. During the course of the century a new genre of literature – the detective novel – appeared and became firmly ensconced as a favourite in libraries and bookshops. The forerunners of these books – chapbooks, broadsheets and accounts such as the Newgate Calendar – had often been produced to show the degradation and immorality of crime, but in some cases there grew a sneaking admiration for the clever thief, such as the Viscount Georges de Fontenoy, who operated in Glasgow in the 1870s. For the respectable, however, the thief was beyond the pale and was literally kept at bay by barred windows, high stone walls topped with broken glass and an array of laws with sometimes brutal punishments.

Although Scotland had a Poor Law, able-bodied men were ineligible for relief and after the 1845 Poor Law Amendment (Scotland) Act, any claimant required five years’ residency. This stipulation was probably intended to relieve the parish of the burden of providing for a host of unemployed incomers, but it also ensured that, without any safety net, the desperate had little choice but to turn criminal merely to eat. And many of the people who crowded into Glasgow were very desperate indeed; there are tales of men selling their only shirt to feed their family, so petty theft to fend off starvation was only a small step.

By the end of the nineteenth century, habitual criminals were regarded as products of racial decline created by industrialised urban life. To some, the perception of a criminal class was akin to Darwinian racism: the habitual criminal was a person from a lower species of humanity and therefore could be treated differently. There were theories that repeat offenders suffered from an innate condition and they were termed ‘degenerate’ or ‘incorrigible’. Some blamed the demise of transportation in the 1860s for an apparent surge in violent crimes, and Hugh Miller spoke of ‘a formidable class of wild beasts – the incorrigible criminals’. Today many criminologists agree that crime and poverty are linked, although others think an unbalanced society where great wealth exists side by side with real destitution is an even more important key. Nineteenth-century Glasgow was home to both extremes.

Before the advent of uniformed police, towns were regulated in a variety of ways, but in the event of serious disorder the army was called in. This fallback was understandable in the case of riots or civil unrest, but the army was not an option in the case of the much more common theft or assault. As the population of cities expanded, the authorities sought more efficient ways to control crime. Edinburgh had a uniformed City Guard but in 1779 it was Glasgow that was first to create a professional uniformed body of civilian police under Inspector James Buchanan. Although originally there were only eight men to control crime in the entire city, within two years lack of money led to the disbandment of the force. It was established again in 1788, but without a parliamentary bill to support it, there was a second collapse within two years. However, Glasgow is a persistent city, and tried a third time. In 1800 the Glasgow Police Act was passed. Funded by local taxes, the Act led to the formation of the City of Glasgow Police, the oldest in Great Britain and the forerunner of all other British uniformed police forces.

In common with the other Scottish forces, the Glasgow Police Force was only part of a holistic community, a force intended more to prevent crime than to enforce the law, although eventually it managed to do the latter very well indeed. David Barrie, in his Police in the Age of Improvement: Police Development and the Civic Tradition in Scotland, 1775–1865, suggests that the Scottish police were a development of the Scottish Enlightenment, created to secure the new wealth of the nation and voted for by a representative civic government. Nevertheless, as late as 1857 Glasgow dismissed 100 police officers out of a force of 700 men.

Glasgow was the most important Scottish port as well as a city of heavy industry. Trade increased exponentially after 1815 and shipbuilding, made easier by the coal and iron of Ayrshire, Stirlingshire and Lanarkshire, erupted. Native genius and skilled men ensured Glasgow became a world leader in engineering – ship, locomotive and civil. While work made it a magnet for inward migration, shipping ensured there was also a mobile population, both of seamen and people using Glasgow as a port of embarkation for further emigration. Many stayed – not always by choice, but steady immigration ensured a city whose population rose constantly throughout the century, while the shipping was also a magnet for crime.

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By mid-century there were between 500 and 1,000 people to the acre in central Glasgow, with dilapidated housing and narrow streets. The middle classes and artisans had moved west so only the poorest remained, but because of the density of population, the accumulated rents made retention of run-down property profitable. Life in the worst areas was a lottery; if the population escaped crime, they still faced the probability of early death by disease. Cholera ravaged the city in 1832, and during the hungry 1840s the death rate reached an appalling annual 39.9 per 1,000. It fell thereafter, only to rise with a typhus epidemic in the early 1860s. Crime, naturally, continued throughout the period, with peaks and troughs that were of interest only to the statistician or the academic, the ordinary person who had to live with the reality rather than assess the theories.

The following chapters will look at some of these crimes that blighted what was undoubtedly one of the greatest cities of the nineteenth century.