In British social history, particularly since the early years of the nineteenth century, there has been, until the first decades of the twentieth century, a degree of antipathy between the police and Irish immigrants. A public house in Leeds in the 1840s had a notice over a table saying, ‘No swaddy Irish or soldiers wanted here.’ After the Famine, in 1847, around a quarter of a million Irish people came to Britain via Liverpool. Many of these people went to the Midlands, and of course, to Lincolnshire, a place known for potato crops.
In the Punch cartoons of Victorian England, and in the writings of Henry Mayhew in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the popular stereotype of the brawling Irishman on the wrong side of the law is everywhere. Mayhew talks about them in this way: ‘I’ve known wild Irishmen get into the wards with knives and sticks hidden about their persons, to be ready for a fight.’ The fact is that there is a massive body of writing about what Friedrich Engels called ‘the volatile, dissolute and drunken Irish’ and it has to be remembered that there was a considerable amount of xenophobia in the English working man at that time – and some anti-Catholic feeling.
But the occasion of a violent confrontation involving Irish workers has always made the news pages, and Scunthorpe has had its share. In 1938 there was one cluster of street violence involving Irish workers and drink that ended with a prison sentence. The inter-war years had been a period of expansion for the town, and two new blast furnaces had been built, and Appleby steelworks came into operation in 1927. All this needed cheap labour. The chain of working shifts, heavy drinking and crime shifted into top gear. There was clearly a large problem with violent street crime in the 1930s.
The main culprit in this case was Dennis Kelly, a homeless man who was very drunk and aggressive in Morley Street after a Saturday night binge. He found his way to a fish shop, and there he was so out of control that the police were sent for and Inspector Cook arrived to bring him out of the premises. Then the attack began. Kelly struck and kicked the Inspector, and eventually threw himself on the ground. The only statement he was able to make was that he had drunk several whiskies.
The second Irish fighter was Daniel Doherty, a man who foolishly mixed medicines with spirit-drinking and went out looking for trouble. He chose Brigg Road as his arena and after provoking a brawl, was taken into custody. A cell would have been welcome; like Kelly, he had no fixed abode. But we are not finished yet.