Manley Street today is very close to the newly developed centre of Scunthorpe, close to The Parishes and the library and film theatre. To walk there today is to see only buses and asphalt parking. It is hard to imagine what this part of town was like in the early years of the twentieth century, but one thing is certain: it was a cramped place, with working families living on top of each other. Work was long and hard and took its toll on men and women then. Many men who wandered onto the wrong side of the law might give excuses about their bad tempers and exhaustion after a long shift, but nothing can excuse the savagery of William Rylatt.
Worse still, the brute turned his rancour and violence on his young wife. Not that he was one of the men working hard at any trade; he didn’t do much at all except drink and use his fists. He was in the habit of hitting Sarah, and seems to have built this habit into their lifestyle for a while, until one day it all got out of hand.
One morning, she prepared her brother’s breakfast and then felt faint, so she went back to bed. Her daughter very kindly brought her some tea, but from that point, Rylatt snapped: he spat in the tea after following the girl upstairs, clearly on the edge. His nerves frayed. The next stage was to grab his wife by the hair and shove her hard against the bedroom wall. As if this was not enough suffering for the poor woman, he then dragged her around the house, holding her roughly by her hair. She screamed in pain. The noise was so extreme that a neighbour came in to intervene, and luckily a builder called Charles Lockwood, who later testified that these kinds of things had been happening for some time, took control of the situation at the time, and eventually, on recovery, Sarah went to the police station.