CHAPTER TWO
The Codes Adapted: Field to Factory
MANCHESTER
— 1850 —
From this filthy sewer [Manchester] pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracle, and civilised man is turned back into a savage.
The Manchester that confronted the McLoughlin brothers fleeing Ireland’s great hunger was both older and considerably younger than they or most in their cohort appreciated. Originally a Roman frontier fort dating to AD 77–78, the surrounding settlement had sprouted naturally between the River Irwell and two small, adjacent streams, the Irk and Medlock. Benefiting from a favourable position in south-east Lancashire that provided easy access to nearby ports and towns including Liverpool, Preston, Salford and Wigan on the one hand, and trans-Pennine traffic on the other, the town made steady progress and was already of some significance in late medieval times. By the middle of the seventeenth century it was set to become one of the region’s more important centres for the production, distribution and trade in linen and woollen cloth.1
Manchester’s pre-eminence as a capital of global significance for the cotton trade, however, was of comparatively recent vintage, dating back only to the mid-eighteenth century. There had been a shift from a reliance on local materials that could be obtained from within the British Isles – such as flax from Ireland or wool from Yorkshire – first to linen and cotton mixtures and later to the mass importation of raw cotton used in the production of finished goods. Indirectly, that shift could be traced back to the voyages of discovery, a steady growth in intercontinental trade and the development of Liverpool as a port. By 1750, cotton was already displacing linen and wool in the manufacture of cloth. The original importance of the town as a centre for the retail and wholesale trade in textiles, however, provided it with an underlying economic logic that persisted into and beyond the age of machine production. As the most perspicacious historian of the emerging city puts it: ‘Industrial Manchester was not a factory town which became a commercial centre; from the beginnings of industrialisation it had been a warehouse town with factories.’2
The transformation in the popular imagination of Manchester from a ‘warehouse town with factories’ to something that was understandably, but erroneously, equated to cotton mills, factories and slums was a by-product of the early Victorian era. It was a perception which, building on the advances that had come with inventions such as the cotton gin, the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny, harked back to the 1780s when, for the first time in history, the large-scale utilisation of steam-power in purpose-built brick factories eclipsed older cottage-based industries and ushered in mass production techniques on an unprecedented scale. It was a view propounded by public servants, travellers from abroad, novelists and political activists who, confronted for the first time by the full social impact of an Industrial Revolution, were shocked by the sudden eruption of huge, festering, rapidly urbanising carbuncles.3
Despite this growing importance as a multi-faceted local, national and international market, there was no denying the underlying centrality of cotton mills to first the town’s and, after 1853, the city’s still expanding factory system. It was largely Manchester that underpinned the increased British appetite for raw cotton, which rose from around 5 million pounds in 1781 to an annual average of about 82 million in the early 1820s, and then 94 million pounds by 1860. Twelve months after the defeat of Napoleon, in 1816, there were 86 steam-powered spinning factories in Manchester and neighbouring Salford; by 1830, there were already well over 500. Britain’s mastery of the seas facilitated not only the importing of raw cotton but also allowed it to export finished cloth to expanding imperial markets spread across the world. In 1785 Britain exported cotton yarns and goods worth about £1 million; by 1816, that figure had reached £16 million and, by 1851, it stood at over £30 million. The quasi-magical process of transforming raw cotton into textiles for foreign exchange was a Mancunian triumph.4
The insertion of Manchester, 30 miles inland, as a value-adding centre astride expanding import and export shipping routes was made possible by the supplementary economic arteries. New conduits facilitated the movement of coal, finished goods, cotton and various other raw materials into, and out of, its open-mouthed factories. Besides a developing national road network that pointed to the town on the Irwell as England’s second city – and one growing more rapidly than London for much of the nineteenth century – transport in Manchester was ever better served by a set of sub-systems that formed part of an integrating whole. A modest, early navigable link to Liverpool was supplemented by an extensive system of larger canals leading to and from the coast. Yet others, including the Bridgewater and Rochdale Canal (1804), enabled the movement of coal from areas further inland.5 Goods and passenger transport received a fillip when, in 1830, Manchester was linked to Liverpool by rail. The city’s integration into an emerging global economic intelligence network was complete by 1871, when the trans-oceanic telegraphic system provided for the previously inconceivable world-wide transmission and receipt of trade data.6
Many of these developments, primed by the demand for textiles, fed into a self-sustaining logic of growth that facilitated further diversification of the local economy. A growing demand for semi-skilled manual labour fuelled rapid demographic expansion. Larger factories and mills – dependent on continuous machine production served by a rotating shift system staffed by men, women and children working long hours under extreme conditions – stimulated the secondary demand for capital goods ranging from carpentry shops, engineering and metal works to iron foundries. Printed cloth depended on chemicals and dyes, which spawned a need for yet more chemicals, giving rise to related activities including the production of glass.7 But it was not only factories and machines that required feeding and renewal. With an insatiable lust for cheap labour, the city’s new, predominantly working-class population grew from about 75 000 in 1801 to over 350 000 by 1861. This in turn underwrote the development of a range of burgeoning food markets – including Smithfield, on Shudehill, and the nearby wholesale potato market on Oldham Road, as well as countless other small retail outlets.8
Viewed in the round, Manchester always offered a labour market that was more diverse and segmented than outsiders assumed. In the early 1840s, only 18 per cent – about one in five – of the town’s labour force was directly engaged in the mills, while the comparable figures for nearby towns such as Ashton and Oldham was closer to 40 per cent.9 These proportions could also vary with changes in the trade cycle. Thus the buoyant 1850s gave way to ‘cotton famine’ and large-scale lay-offs between 1861 and 1865 when the Union blockaded the Confederate south during the American Civil War. The subsequent recovery was halted by downturns in 1877–79 and 1884. Despite the sluggish trade that characterised the Long Depression, dragging on into the 1890s, the number of cotton operatives in Lancashire doubled between 1850 and 1914; but there again, Manchester proved to be an exception, with the number of its mill workers declining.10
Despite the economic ‘ups and downs’, for many males, some women and even a few children, semi-skilled work in the mills constituted the apex of the Manchester labour market during much of the nineteenth century. Cotton spinners, in particular, constituted what later analysts characterised as a ‘labour aristocracy’. The weekly wages of spinners, piecers and card-room workers all rose for most of the period between 1850 and 1875. The average earnings of spinners, for example, increased from about 21 to 35 shillings per week over the same 25-year period. It was barely above subsistence level, but there were often other benefits – and hidden perils.
One of the advantages for a hard-working and reliable cotton spinner was that, if fortunate enough, he could secure waged employment in the same mill for his wife and children, albeit under unpleasant and humid conditions that imperilled the health and education of the younger members of the family. This maximisation of income through closely supervised and collectivised labour remained a hallmark of the industry for several decades, even after slow-in-arriving ‘progressive’ factory legislation in the 1830s and 1840s sought to regulate the conditions under which labour, including child labour, could be employed. Age-diverse, mixed-gender labour units in the mills – sometimes built around nuclear families or looser family-like structures, or drawing on other elements of social solidarity such as ethnicity and regionalism – became a notable feature of the mid-nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.11
The ramifications of employing family-based labour units within strictly monitored confines sometimes went beyond the commonly recognised problems of education, gross economic exploitation or poor health. For those newly off the land – agricultural workers or peasants accustomed to working out in the open and having their work rhythms set by crop and season – the mills helped shape the emerging notions of urban discipline and industrial time along with patriarchal power and personal freedom.12 The formative context for these attitudes and values did not escape the notice of observers at the time, even if the behavioural sequels were not always fully understood. The closer interpersonal and more intimate social dynamics of small workshops found in nearby Birmingham were contrasted unfavourably with those to be found in the mighty mills of Manchester.13 Hippolyte Taine, the French historian who visited the city in 1859, the year of Jack McLoughlin’s birth, noted:
The factories extend their flanks of fouled brick one after another. They are, with shutterless windows, like economical and colossal prisons. The place [Manchester] is a great jerry-built barracks, a ‘work house’ for four hundred thousand people, a hard-labour penal establishment: such are the ideas it suggests to the mind. One of the factory blocks is a rectangle six storeys high, each storey having forty windows, and inside, lit by gas-jets and deafened by the uproar of their own labour, toil thousands of workmen, penned in, regimented, hands active, feet motionless, all day and every day, mechanically serving their machines. Could there be any kind of life more outraged, more opposed to man’s natural instincts?14
For fathers intent on commanding the lives of wives and children fully, the confined setting of the mill extended the reach of patriarchal power. It allowed them to control their families at work as well as at home. For those inclined towards benevolence by belief or personal disposition, it helped to maximise family income and strengthened kinship in circumstances that might otherwise have been even more alienating and fragmenting than they already were. But for those of a more authoritarian temperament, or those who revelled in domestic tyranny, it allowed for near total surveillance of the family and enabled a degree of intrusion into the lives of the vulnerable or the weak that could limit personal and sexual development.15 Patriarchal control in mill-based families helped shape the personalities and behaviour of wives and children at either end of a spectrum ranging from the accommodating, cowed, and disciplined through to the antisocial, ill-disciplined, rebellious and violent. More often than not, it accentuated elements of both patterns in ways that were not always predictable.
Since work-seekers in Manchester were less restricted to the cotton mills for choice than were their counterparts in other Lancashire towns, most contrived to avoid labour in the textile industry in its direct form. There were hundreds of other factories and industries in which semi-skilled males could find work of various sorts.
Shops, stores and warehouses were in need of assistants, messengers and porters when the economy was expanding, while young men with agility and physical strength – such as the navvies who built the infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution – found work on building sites or helped construct bridges, canals, railways and roads. Older women sometimes eked out a living dressmaking at home while many young girls tried to find positions as live-in domestic servants for a growing and increasingly well-off middle class. Many other men, women and children in search of relatively independent, less-regulated work environments gravitated towards the city’s markets where they earned their living as barrow-boys, costermongers, hawkers, porters or street-sellers dealing in the basics – food or second-hand clothing.16
But even those not wishing to be directly employed in the manufacture of cotton goods could not escape the new mills rising along the Rochdale Canal, along with the warehouses further west; not least of all because it was around them that the new residential enclaves arose. Industrial slums characterised by indescribable filth and poverty only gave way to more recognisable dimensions as working-class ‘suburbs’ after 1850, once urban improvements had gathered momentum.17 The old congested haunts of Angel Meadow and Little Ireland were gradually eclipsed by a new mill-and-wharf heartland comprising Ancoats, Chorlton-on-Medlock, New Cross and Holt Town, and, beyond them, Ardwick, Collyhurst and Hulme.
Viewed from the top of a multi-storeyed mill in Ancoats, where farmland started to give way to more planned development in the early 1770s, most of the canals and the grid of narrow roads below could be seen as part of a logic determined by the need to build around what had once been clear-running rivers and streams. Closer investigation of the residential cluster, however, revealed another logic at work. Amongst the houses, the street grid gave way to any number of twisting alleys, ‘back’ streets, courts, cul-de-sacs and lanes.18 On either side of these barely human rat-runs, constructed without sewers or proper toilets, were scores of cottages or houses that spoke of grossly inadequate accommodation hastily erected by contractor-speculators seeking to extract maximum income from minimal investment. Two-storey cottages and houses, built back-to-back so as to obviate the need for additional walls, squatted over unventilated cellars which, given the predominance of low-lying ground, were damp and easily flooded.19
A single door along with a pair of modest windows allowing in some light provided row upon row of bricked cubes with the faintest of street-front smiles. Inside, ‘one up one down’ rooms were sub-let to families comprising anything from seven to ten people. Below ground-level, huddled in cellars, could be found yet more families leading an even more marginal existence.20 In the 1830s, better-off mule-spinners, earning between 15 and 25 shillings a week, rented stand-alone cottages for five or six shillings a week. Other workers, those renting rooms or cellars, paid two to three shillings a week so as to put a roof over the heads of a few poverty-stricken souls.21
Several official reports in the 1830s and 1840s, along with those of other analysts – including Friedrich Engels, whose research was partially shaped by his Irish working-class partner, Mary Burns – drew attention to the conditions prevailing in Manchester and adjacent Salford. These initiatives helped lay the foundations for the progressive, albeit slow, improvements that gathered momentum after mid-century.22 In the interim, however, poor conditions in the factories, addressed by yet more reforming legislation, and squalid residential quarters continued to seriously undermine the health of labouring men, women and children between 1830 and 1880.23
In the mills, lint and dust suspended in pervasive humidity facilitated the spread of asthma, bronchitis and tuberculosis, diseases that thrived in the cold and damp of poorly ventilated rooms or cellars heated by coal fires. The absence of clean drinking water, adequate toilets and an extensive water-borne sewerage system meant that for many decades respiratory infections – at their worst in winter – were supplemented by other diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea and typhoid that favoured summer. Death and the seasons, a pair of hunters that had stalked humanity ever since people could remember, now invaded newly industrialising centres, felling infants at will in vulnerable areas such as Ancoats and picking off working men before they could complete two full decades of employment in the town’s factories, mills or warehouses.24
* * *
The arrival of Irish immigrants in Lancashire pre- and post-dated the most disease-ridden years of the Industrial Revolution. It was, however, a cruel irony that it was almost exactly in mid-century, when the worst of the old urban conditions in Manchester were yet to disappear and the best of the new yet to manifest themselves, that the Great Famine of 1847–52 drove unprecedented numbers of Irish country folk off the land. Barely surviving on grossly inadequate diets in squalid urban quarters, they were preyed upon anew by other bacteria and viruses that thrived amidst poverty. Drawn from a colonised and despised people overcome only after centuries of stubborn resistance, who retained a liking for alcohol, fairytales and myths, and who remained loyal to a church long since abandoned by their imperial overlords, the Irish were quintessential ‘outsiders’. Derided as ‘deckers’ who had ‘come across with the cattle’ destined for the local livestock markets, or as ‘micks’ and ‘paddies’ just ‘off the bogs’, refugees poured into Manchester and anti-Irish prejudice peaked in the 1860s.25
Carrying within them an uneven mixture of Catholic fatalism and secular hope, many post-famine immigrants moved into the long-established Hibernian haunts of the town. They clustered around the poles of an axis that ran roughly from Angel Meadow on the Irk, in the north, down to Little Ireland on the Medlock further south and west.26 There, they had access to a handful of priests – vectors of an on-going and mutating Irish identity-in-exile – attached to two of the older and smaller churches of the inner city, St Chad’s and St Mary’s. Many others, however, gravitated towards expanding residential areas that enjoyed relatively easy access to markets and the mills, such as Ardwick, Collyhurst, Hulme and New Cross. The latter refugees benefited from newer, larger, churches consecrated in the late 1840s, such as St Anne’s and St Wilfrid’s. But perhaps the most noteworthy and popular destination of all was hard by the Rochdale Canal, close to the Smithfield Market. Although, like most of the other suburbs, it was never a classic ‘ghetto’ housing people drawn exclusively from a single, easily identifiable group, Ancoats in the 1850s – and increasingly so as the century wore on – was the single most heavily ethnicised Irish neighbourhood in all of Manchester.27
In 1841, there were approximately 30 000 Irish-born inhabitants in Manchester, constituting roughly 12 per cent of the inhabitants. In 1851, with the famine in full swing, the number had risen to over 45 000, accounting for about 15 per cent of the town’s population. The latter percentage was never eclipsed and thereafter the number of native-born Irish citizens in Manchester continued to decline right up to the twentieth century. Rural identities, many forged in the impoverished western parts of Ireland such as Leitrim, Mayo and Roscommon, appear to have been supplemented by smaller numbers drawn from neighbouring counties such as Sligo and a few even further north-west. John Doherty, one of the first Irish organisers of cotton mill workers, almost certainly hailed from Donegal, perhaps from Inishowen itself. Like William McLoughlin, Doherty, too, may have had his first taste of mill-work in Buncrana, by the Swilly.28
The positive features of Irish rural culture transported into a modern English industrial town were there for all to see. Much of it centred on religion. By the mid-nineteenth century the Catholic Church was almost synonymous with things Irish, not excluding a changing repertoire of nationalist politics.29 Whereas in 1846 Manchester was served by 13 priests in five parishes, by 1870 the number had risen to 30 spread over 13 parishes. The ability of some of the priests to speak Gaelic – still frequently heard in city streets in the mid-1840s – provided them with easy access to the traditionalists in their flock. It also allowed them to mobilise and organise the members of their communities at moments of crisis, such as during epidemics, and for everyday activities ranging from running denominational schools through to temperance societies and voluntary structures that provided support for mothers and wives.30 These undoubted virtues had, however, to be offset against what many saw as other, more problematic, elements in ‘Irish’ culture.
Charles Rickards, mid-century Manchester’s Stipendiary Magistrate, thought that many if not most of the Irish in the city were ‘belligerent’ and ‘undisciplined’ and involved in cases of ‘aggravated assault’ far more frequently than those drawn from other ethnic groupings.31 It was a view shared by many citizens and may have had some basis in fact. Although the Irish accounted for only 15 per cent of the local population between 1845 and 1854, they figured disproportionately in the numbers arrested and prosecuted for attacks on police constables (34 per cent), in cases of common assault (28 per cent), or for breaches of the peace (47 per cent).32
If accurate, these numbers are hardly surprising. It is well known that those recently off the land, those least educated and semi-literate, are most prone to getting into trouble with the law in urban areas.33 There may also have been an element of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the figures insofar as policemen, taken in by the stereotype of the ‘micks’, may have been predisposed to arresting Irishmen even before encountering them on the streets. Moreover, if the Irish did resort to fisticuffs to settle real or imagined grievances in the new settings they found themselves in, they were hardly on their own. The English ruling and working classes, although increasingly taken with notions of honour and self-restraint as duelling gave way first to prize-fighting and then to boxing, had themselves long been famous for hand-to-hand combat and a willingness to settle differences through ‘fair fights’. Interpersonal violence, with or without restraint, was an important part of popular culture in Manchester and it was rooted in the behaviour of English ‘hosts’ and immigrants alike.34
More difficult for observers to comprehend were collective intra- and inter-communal clashes in which fists, stick-fighting or stone throwing were resorted to. ‘Faction fights’, familiar enough in the open fields of agricultural Ireland, were adapted to industrial neighbourhoods in Lancashire.35 Some of these bloody, occasionally fatal, clashes arose on the spur of the moment, spontaneous eruptions propelled by excesses of testosterone and whiskey. Many more, however, including some that were well-organised, could be traced to ancient clan antipathies or county and village rivalries that had their origin in the economics of the countryside but whose underlying causes now fed into the competition for accommodation, jobs or the sexual favours of females in new urban settings. Faction fights were not, and are not, peculiar to the Irish. They play an important role in the ways that peasants becoming workers adjust to huge socio-economic changes.36
It is possible that in post-famine working-class Manchester, where collective violence took place against the backdrop of an incomplete, but profound, cultural shift that accompanied the move from field to factory, there may also have been some ‘Irish’ inspiration for the adolescent gang-violence as expressed in the developing urban cult of ‘scuttling’. Like faction fighting, scuttling was informed by intense territoriality centred on the neighbourhood and the need to manifest masculinity.37
Speculation aside, what is clear is that alcohol was the trigger for much if not most of the collective, interpersonal or inter-spousal violence in the city. Like most manufacturing and mining towns on the frontiers of industrialisation, Manchester boasted enough alcohol to float a ship. The sea of beer and spirits was mostly legal in origin. It was produced, distributed and consumed under licence, in beer shops sanctioned to operate from homes occupied by ratepayers or in public houses selling malt and spirits. Liquor consumption was policed as a part of the great adjustment necessary for the emergence and entrenchment of industrial time and discipline. But the number of licensed outlets situated in poor working-class districts continued to exceed the growth of population even as, in other respects, Manchester assumed more ordered and settled proportions. In 1863, there was one licensed liquor outlet in the city for every 154 inhabitants, by 1871 it had grown to one for every 147 residents and, by 1873, it was one for every 139.38
With beer and spirits often more accessible than fish and chips, the Irish, recently off the land, once again occupied a difficult, perhaps distinctive, position. Drawn from a culture that tolerated drinking among young males, if it did not actively encourage it, some may already have had a genetic predisposition to alcohol dependence. This further complicated their adaptation to urban society and many had to be treated for ‘behavioural and mental problems’.39 Given their preference for spirits, most Irish men confined serious drinking to the weekends so as to fit in with the rhythm of the working week. But, given that those Irishmen who did not work in mills often earned less, on average, than their English counterparts, they had to find cheaper, illegally manufactured potato spirits – poteen. Thus, while accounting for only 15 per cent of the city’s population, close on 43 per cent of those arrested for ‘Illicit Distillation and Offences against the Excise’ between 1845 and 1854 were Irish.40 The ancient illicit stills of the caves and cottages back in Inishowen were linked, via the threads in Irish male culture, to the modern poteen cellars of Lancashire.
It was this same nexus of alcohol, imperialism and masculinity that underpinned much of the ‘belligerence’ Magistrate Rickards thought of as being quintessentially Irish. Drawn from an island forcibly occupied, where some English landlords lorded it over peasants who were humbled and powerless, from a colony where men and women had to pursue their religion in secret and were denied the vote, many Irish men and women saw the law itself as alien, as something foreign, an imposition. These realities helped shape a culture of contrariness that consistently reasserted the values of masculinity in settings where more conventional indicators of patriarchal power and manliness – such as property and wealth – had been severely eroded. ‘Irish’ bloody-mindedness increased when those struggling to make a living off the land supplemented their incomes through the production of poteen and were then informed on and subjected to raids by the British army, excise men or the police.
Seen from this perspective, the experience of many immigrant Irish did not change markedly when they moved from rural County Mayo to modern metropolitan Manchester. The continuities of conquest and the expectation of an attitude of acceptance or deference, if not outright gratitude, on the part of their all-powerful hosts, reinforced the antipathies of Irish fathers and their Lancashire-born sons to informers and what they saw as repressive ‘English’ courts, laws, police and prisons.
* * *
The use of informers was widely frowned upon in progressive political circles during much of the nineteenth century. Covert operations undertaken by police agents, characteristic of more repressive regimes such as those in France and Tsarist Russia, were seen as being at odds with ‘English’ notions of ‘fairness’ and the rights of individuals in liberalising democracies. In Ireland, the hatred of informers was born in the countryside but spread to the cities in mid-century as the Royal Ulster Constabulary sought to infiltrate the emerging nationalist opposition. In Lancashire the use of informers extended into criminal operations. The use of covert agents earned the condemnation not only of those engaged in nationalist politics, but of those English and Irish in the working classes who were involved in more conventional crimes against property. In Manchester, ‘giving information to the police was taboo’ and likely to be counteracted by ostracism or serious physical reprisals.41
With police intelligence and testimony alike considered suspect and the law an imposition from distant Westminster – an instrument lacking in popular sanction – it fell to a self-respecting man to challenge any attempt at apprehension. ‘Among the Irish resisting arrest was a matter of honour.’42 Indeed, not only should an Irishman resist arrest, but he was almost duty-bound to go to the rescue of any acquaintance or friend similarly threatened. The attempted arrest of Irishmen frequently resulted in brawls, in free-for-alls reminiscent of events at country fairs back in the Old Country. Rescue attempts became so commonplace in Manchester that they warranted separate reporting, and between 1845 and 1854 nearly half of those arrested for obstructing the constables in this way were Irish. In Ancoats, the most heavily populated Irish neighbourhood, an attempt to arrest a man at an illicit poteen still, in 1832, degenerated into extensive collective resistance and near riot.43
Once arraigned, Irishmen were notorious for manifesting their contempt of court and presiding officer alike either by hurling abuse at the Magistrate, or by making pointedly sarcastic interventions when sentenced. It was yet another sub-cultural trait of opposition that many Irish fathers passed down to their Lancashire-born ‘scuttling’ sons. By the same token, many former ‘scuttlers’, Irish emigrants who subsequently made their way out to the colonies and other far-flung outposts of empire, considered it their duty to attempt to escape from ‘English’ prisons.44
Most of this cult of masculinity played itself out in public; indeed, much of it was designed for popular consumption, sometimes assuming the proportions of street-theatre. There was, however, another and darker side to it. Drunk or sober, working men were poorly disposed to domestic dissent and questioning from their wives and children. If working-class patriarchs sensed that their dignity, roles within the family or social worth were being undermined during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, then women and children were left vulnerable in other ways. Domestic violence was sufficiently widespread to prompt an 1853 Act for the ‘Better Prevention of Aggravated Assaults on Women and Children’.45 And if this was true for the ‘English’, how much more threatening must this have been for women born in Ireland who were isolated from their kin, exposed to social deprivation and, if not wholly vulnerable economically, then dependent on a spouse living out his life in accord with the prescripts of masculinity in an unfamiliar environment?
An undercurrent of misogyny permeated most of Manchester’s dank cellars and dismal rooms. It was evident, not only from the beatings that men inflicted on their wives, but also in the adolescent male sub-culture of ‘scuttling’ which, despite the occasional presence of young women in supportive roles, was poorly disposed to females of all ages.46 Trapped behind the walls of a male-supremacist ideology, many Irish women looked around for any authority that could trump that of their husbands and sons. Some looked heavenwards, sneaking out of the back door to find solace in the church.47 It was a move that was not always cost-free. While Irish patriarchs were content to underwrite clerically endorsed nationalism that challenged English hegemony and fed into a broader culture of contrariness, they were less comfortable with priestly advice that sought to temper any excesses of masculinity in their own homes. The advice of frocked men of the cloth, some of whom were suspected of having an inappropriate liking for alcohol, small children and women, could therefore feed into longer-standing anti-clerical sentiments of fathers who may have passed them on to their sons.48
Irish women could not survive on a diet of hope and prayer alone. An industrial vortex of alcohol, desperation and poverty drew many into the streets and casual, or full-time, prostitution. Although drawn from only 15 per cent of the city’s population, Irish-born women regularly accounted for between 25 and 35 per cent of those arrested for prostitution in mid-Victorian Manchester.49 Confronted by a cohort of post-famine migrant males averse to marriage, and set against the backdrop of a religion that drew a sharp distinction between the ideal of the Madonna and ordinary mortals, the moral shortcomings of Irish female workers added to misogynistic perceptions and endless cycles of domestic violence.50
Seen by men and women who had only recently washed in on the tide from across the Irish Sea, mid-nineteenth-century Lancashire looked more like a rocky shoreline than a safe harbour. For those who adapted most readily to urban ways, those determined and hard-working, it offered a pathway to subsistence. Manchester gave one the chance to sit out a generation and wait on better things – or, if the opportunity arose, the chance of seeing one’s children escaping to greener pastures via onward migration. For those less sure-footed, those walking into the winds swirling with prejudice, a wrong step could be fatal. All that was required to fail was an indiscretion or two stemming from an old rural culture imperfectly aligned with the new ways of urban living. And, since most people needed a dream, William McLoughlin averted his eyes from the treacherous shore and saw only the promised land.