The sinking of the Lusitania off the coast of County Cork with the loss of 1,906 British and American lives on 7 May was also extensively reported in local newspapers and was met with outrage throughout the city. It led to an immediate surge in recruitment and an outbreak of anti-German attacks, mainly on shops and business owned by Germans. Local newspapers described the attacks as the result of ‘indignation at coldblooded murder’. The news that the Germans had executed the British nurse, Edith Cavell, hit local newspapers on 18 October. The people of Manchester were more incensed than most as the martyred nurse, who was tending wounded soldiers in Belgium when sentenced to death, had worked for the Manchester and Salford Sick Poor and Private Nursing Institution in 1906 and the city had adopted her as one of its own.

The first protests were non violent: a factory in Trafford Park which employed Germans was forced to close when dockers threatened to blacklist it. The box manufacturer Messrs Hugh Stevenson, of Pollard Street, Ancoats, employed 600, mostly women and five men of German birth or ancestry. At 11 am on 11 May the women went on strike in protest against the employment of Germans. Resentment had been growing for some time. Though Mr Stevenson explained that the men had been at the factory for twenty years – one had a son in the Royal Marines and another was British-born – and were key workers as they alone could operate vital German machinery, the crowd outside the factory grew increasingly volatile. Some women became hysterical and the crowd was swelled by children waving Union Jacks. While the men were smuggled away in a canal boat, the workers agreed to return to work, though others remained outside.

But it wasn’t long before things turned nasty. The Oldham Road – New Cross area of the city centre was known for its pork butchers, many of whom were German. A gang of mill girls broke the windows and looted the produce of one such, a Mr Chris Samet, a naturalised British subject. Order was restored only with the intervention of a large body of police, including many special constables. Mr Samet was popular with locals, having lived in the area and had his shop there for twenty years and a number of soldiers on leave helped board up the shop and tidy up.

Yet one eye-witness felt no regrets: ‘There wasn’t much sympathy when their shops were looted and broken into. I didn’t blame the people what did it because I knew their bitterness was there and I knew the Germans had really asked for it this time.’