CHAPTER FOUR
The Makings of the Man
AN ANCOATS YOUTH
— 1850–1880 —
All civilisation has from time to time becomes a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
Like most mill workers, William McLoughlin spent much of his ‘free time’ – after work, on weekends, and especially in the winter months – in the warmth of public houses.1 With every fifth person in the neighbourhood Irish, the pubs were prime sites for immigrants to explore their origins and ideas about the Old Country, contemplate their current circumstances or wonder where they were all bound for. Back at home, in cellars and rooms, fathers built on pub talk, fostering ethnic camaraderie or stoking old clan rivalries, to convey their own childhood experiences to any visitors or their wide-eyed offspring.
Given a willingness to present himself as Irish later in life, young Jack McLoughlin must have been reasonably acquainted with the family history as relayed through anecdote, folk myth or personal experience. It would have been unusual for the son of a first-generation immigrant not to have been briefed about perfidious Albion, or why it was that so many Irish laymen and priests had been forced into exile in Catholic Belgium, France and Spain, or sought economic refuge in America or elsewhere. The good life, it seemed, always had to be sought abroad, far away from England on remote frontiers. Irish history, as absorbed by a boy born ‘English’ by circumstance, raised doubts about the role of Britain and empire and divided his primary political loyalties.2
Unless William McLoughlin had led an unimaginably sheltered life back in Inishowen, his reservations about Britain’s role in the wider world, and celebration of republican America’s support for radical Irish nationalism, would have been illustrated with personalised and localised accounts of ‘English’ oppression in Donegal. So, too, would stories about customs and excise men and police in search of agrarian secret societies, smugglers, pirates and poteen distillers. Dark tales about informers and spies would have retained a certain relevance even when transposed into the context of contemporary Manchester.3
In an era when it was assumed, sometimes incorrectly, that to be Irish was to be Catholic, Jack was moulded into both. The boy was packed off to the denominational school, at St Anne’s, at an early age. There, under the guidance of Father Peter Liptrott, nuns and priests, quick to resort to physical punishment, ensured that their charges attended mass and mastered the three Rs that formed the basis of a rudimentary education. The lad’s earliest school experiences may have contributed to his insistence later in life on maintaining a distinction between messengers and messages. An almost visceral dislike of priests and an unusual sensitivity in the presence of nuns was offset by an underlying acceptance of Catholicism. His readiness to accept formal instruction while entertaining misgivings about the teachers was reinforced by the times. Most of his primary education took place during the decade in which post-famine, anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejudices peaked in Lancashire.4 Any positive shaping of a composite Catholic and Irish identity at school would have been reinforced negatively by external forces out on the local streets before he was 10 years old.
In late 1867 – when he was eight years old – three members of the radical Irish Republican Brotherhood, recently returned from the American Civil War and suspected of furthering the nationalist cause, were arrested in Manchester. The following day the police van in which they were being transported was attacked by enraged Irishmen, an officer killed, and a couple of the detainees set free. Three of those responsible for the rescue of the Fenians were arrested, convicted and publicly hanged. The Irish community was in uproar and, each year thereafter, the ‘Manchester Martyrs’ were honoured with a street parade. If these events did not register in the young McLoughlin’s mind at the time, he would have been reminded of them as an adult by an anti-clerical friend, John O’Brien, who claimed to have been the brother of one of the martyrs.5
Anger about the martyrs was compounded by developments pre-dating the hangings. In 1850, outraged Protestants cast England as a victim of ‘papal aggression’ when the Church of Rome restored its religious hierarchy in a realm cleansed of Catholics by Henry VIII. Resentment about an initiative from the Vatican festered among religious fanatics. Within months of the ‘martyrs’ being hanged, a ‘no popery’ Protestant demagogue, William Murphy, passed through Manchester and neighbouring centres, giving rise to violent street protests.6 These and other, similar, events could not have failed to imprint themselves on the minds of youngsters in and around Ancoats. In later life McLoughlin often cast himself as Catholic even when it may not have benefited him directly.
In 1871, at age 12, when the family was living in Willoughby’s Court and beginning to unravel, the lad was still dividing his day between school and work in the mills. Despite his father’s laxness in ensuring school attendance, Jack seems to have been a reasonably conscientious pupil and enjoyed reading if not writing.7 Indeed, some of his later anti-imperialist bravado, rebelliousness and cussedness may have been pollinated via self-directed reading during early adolescence.
Much of the schoolboy literature of the time centred on heroic tales of eighteenth-century brigands, highwaymen and pirates.8 Even in deprived Ancoats the youthful imagination could be fired by weighty historical and fictional figures. In 1864, the most frequently borrowed books in the local library included Sir Walter Scott’s tale of the ‘Scottish Robin Hood’, Rob Roy, and GA Sala’s Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous. The latter, an English super-hero of his time, was ‘a soldier, a sailor, a merchant, a spy, a slave among the Moors, and a Bashaw in the service of the Grand Turk’ whose life – like those of the emigrating Irish – played itself out on a global stage.9 Like Jack Dangerous, whose first name he shared albeit for a different reason, Jack McLoughlin was raised to take matters of honour seriously, travelled extensively and lived in a world boasting many real-life brigands, poachers and highwaymen.
Romanticised accounts of deeds of derring-do in far-off places may have offset the grim reality of shuffling between a rudimentary schooling and the awfulness of labour in the mills. Only rarely is a child incapable of forging a connection between an exciting, imaginary, world and the harshness of the ‘here and now’. Even grimy Ancoats, locked into the ever-expanding empire, could raise questions about what was happening at the far ends of the earth. The very fluff that littered the mill floor – cotton – was imported from Egypt, India and the United States. Warehouses filled with finished goods were linked by canal to Liverpool and every ocean across the globe. Even Lancashire lads could dream.
But for boys living on the streets, waiting to be admitted to the murky interior of the public house, coupling the imagination to slum realities was not always easy or socially desirable. In July 1870, when Jack was 11, France declared war on Prussia following a disputed claim as to who should occupy the Spanish throne. Great continental battles fought by rival armies, ended in the defeat of France and the collapse of the Second Empire. But, during the 10 months the conflict endured, the war inflamed religious tensions in the city’s working-class neighbourhoods. In Angel Meadow, Ancoats and New Cross, where the McLoughlins lived in Willoughby’s Court, street battles erupted between Protestant schoolboys – self-styled ‘Germans’ – and Catholic rivals presenting themselves as ‘Frenchmen’. The resulting ‘Rochdale Road War’ raged for months with boys between 10 and 18 using boots, fists, knives, pistols, swords, sticks and stones to procure what they thought of as lasting victories.10
This displaced religious rivalry was a precursor to the more serious, longer-lived and largely secular street battles that raged in Ancoats and elsewhere between 1870 and the mid-1880s. Antisocial ‘scuttlers’ composed largely, but not exclusively, of adolescent males formed part of a city-wide, pan-tribal youth cult centred on a so-called ‘Kingdom of the Rough’. Elements of old rural English and Celtic cultures including faction-fighting, notions of honour, oath-taking and secret societies blended seamlessly into features of new urban life. Flashy attire, distinctive hairstyles, sexual precociousness and the use of knives or buckles at the end of leather belts were the hallmarks of groupings enforcing territorial integrity. Many of the most feared gangs took their names from streets they lived on – Alum, Bengal, Pollard and Prussia.
The local constabulary struggled to deal with assaults arising from spontaneous clashes, or to prevent pre-arranged battles replete with set pieces that gave rise to horrendous wounds and, sometimes, fatal injuries. In court ‘scuttlers’ convicted of felonies ranging from assault and murder through to robbery and theft underscored their disdain for officialdom by hurling invective at Magistrates. It was as if entire sections of the city were caught up in a generation-bound, testosterone-fuelled, civil war without end in which the marginal and the poor battled one another to a standstill in order to discover an elusive collective, usually masculine, dignity.11
Joining a gang of scuttlers was not optional; in Ancoats it ensured everyday survival on the streets. Only by becoming gang members could young males, with or without escorted females, be guaranteed safe passage through the pathways of an urban jungle. Like wary animals, they had to display distinctive apparel, pace, posture and menace when moving about and, when challenged, had to respond in the dialect manifesting appropriate attitude and accent. Scuttling was, in part, a generational, militaristic adaptation to alienated industrial life in the age of imperialism. And, as with Captain Dangerous, it helped to reconcile the squalid here-and-now with the far-off kingdoms of the imagination. Male camaraderie forged in street battles prepared young men for life in the armed forces and contemporary observers noted how scuttlers who joined the army often became excellent soldiers. What they failed to notice, because it was not immediately visible, was how scuttling could also prepare boys for a far-off life of brigandage, highway robbery or piracy.12
Scuttling drew out the identities-in-the-making and sexual preferences of young adults; most of it unequivocally heterosexual in nature. Flashily dressed ‘roughs’ formed an integral part of ‘monkey parades’ along the Oldham Road where it was hoped that sexual partners could be procured through ‘clicking’ during chance encounters. Although largely good-natured, such promenading occasionally gave rise to vulgar behaviour characterised by lewd and obscene exchanges.13 Unbridled aggression of this sort led one feminist critic of the day to speculate how scuttling could be linked back to a culture of male domination and wife-beating in working-class homes, if not outright misogyny.14
There may have been a further, hidden dimension to scuttling and sexuality that could not be explored publicly at a time when the trial of the most notorious Irishman of the epoch, Oscar Wilde, had not yet rendered such speculation unavoidable.15 At the height of empire and its attendant militarism, Victorian society sought simultaneously to prescribe intense male bonding and proscribe homosexuality.16 Ferociously masculine in their public displays of bonding and sexuality, it is possible that some scuttlers may have seen excessive celebrations of manliness give way to affections that culminated in the ultimate horror of Victorian society – homosexuality of the sort associated with the navy.17
Far-fetched enough to appear ridiculous at first glance, this possibility nevertheless deserves closer examination. The word ‘scuttle’ – to sink one’s own ship by deliberately holing it, or opening the seacocks to let in salt water – was unambiguously naval in origin. The term, used literally, had obviously positive connotations for bands of young men who went about ‘sinking’ opponents so close in social terms that they could have been ‘one’s own’. Indeed, that was precisely the point, to draw a sharp distinction between social elements that poverty otherwise rendered indistinguishable. But admiration for the men of the fleet went further.
Young scuttlers adopted bell-bottom trousers as part of their uniforms and the standard greeting or challenge put to male rivals about to be engaged in street battle was: ‘Are you a sailor?’ Being asked whether or not you were a ‘sailor’ was perhaps not as unproblematic as it seems. The salutation ‘Hello Sailor!’ may already have been acquiring the first tinge of ambiguity that saw it more clearly linked to camp or homosexual behaviour in the twentieth century.18 Joseph Hillyard, perhaps the most notorious scuttler of the day, sang out ‘Hello sailor!’ before plunging his knife between the shoulder blades of an already retreating adversary. It is difficult to reconcile this greeting or his subsequent action – clearly fuelled by pure rage – with a ‘respectful’ greeting for a ‘naval’ rival.19
Jack McLoughlin, who could no more have avoided Ancoats’ scuttling sub-culture than he could breathing, retained a preference for male company, and especially that of younger men, throughout his life. There is no record of his ever having had a noteworthy, loving, female relationship either as an adolescent, as a young adult during his time in the armed forces, or in any of the many other male-only settings he sought out.
The hyper-masculinity of scuttling was of a piece with blood-letting in other elements of Mancunian working-class culture. Fighting in public among adult men outside pubs and in the streets may have differed in scale from that of the scuttlers – being, besides, linked to alcohol consumption. But it, too, was often bound up in real or imaginary notions of ‘honour’ and ‘manliness’.20 The English and Irish both had a liking for hand-to-hand combat which had served them well in faction fights and the Napoleonic Wars. In urban industrial Lancashire, where to fight with bared knuckles was to ‘mill’, fisticuffs was the poor man’s version of duelling.21
The informal grinding of opponents into submission fed into and off other, more carefully staged, formal contests. The latter emerged when bare-knuckle ‘prize fighting’ under the London Rules of 1839 and 1853 eventually gave way to ‘boxing’, but it took a long time. The Marquess of Queensberry’s Rules, devised in the 1860s, were only widely employed in the final decade of the nineteenth century. In Manchester, where ‘hard men’ were much admired, there was an upsurge in prize fighting in the 1860s, at a time when young Jack was most impressionable. To add to the excitement, many of these illegal contests were staged in secret, behind closed doors in Deansgate, or beyond the city limits.22 As an adult, Jack McLoughlin retained his interest in a sport which, besides having a powerful Irish component to its history, frequently appealed to more charismatic underworld elements who were involved in organised crime.
McLoughlin’s adult interest went beyond betting on the outcome of fights. Like many others, he was fascinated by the social grammar of manly conduct when questions of honour and reputation were at stake. The notion of competing forces being equally balanced, of the need for a fight to be ‘fair’, was ingrained in him from an early age. Some of the groundwork for this may have derived from scuttling. Street battles throughout Manchester had their own rituals and unwritten rules, among them the idea that – other than the ubiquitous belts and buckles – weapons, including blades and pistols, did not make for ‘fair’ contests.
In practice, rivals seldom hesitated to take unfair advantage of an opponent. ‘Time and again, coroners, magistrates, judges complained that the use of knives in fights was “cowardly” and simply not English.’23 Thus, at the high tide of British imperialism, when firearms were freely employed in mowing down ‘the natives’ in huge numbers at a safe distance, the use of the blade at close quarters was associated with supposedly backward ‘Mediterranean’ cultures. In Athens and in Naples, peasants newly off the land and excluded from an aristocratic duelling culture that employed expensive rapiers to settle questions of honour used knives to settle personal disputes or reputational issues.24 McLoughlin, who was briefly exposed to urban life around Mediterranean ports as a young sailor, eschewed the use of a knife in personal conflict.
In the Ancoats of his youth the use of firearms was also frowned upon by those entrusted with governing the unruly underclasses. But here, too, everyday realities were already overtaking values handed down from the age of duelling, when settling matters of honour through personal confrontation was de rigueur among members of the upper classes. Locally, pistols had already been used during the Rochdale Road War between the ‘French’ and the ‘Germans’ in 1870.25 In an age marked by imperial expansion and techniques of mass production, it was difficult to keep revolvers and, to a lesser extent, rifles from militant nationalists, including the Irish, or any violently inclined working-class criminals.
* * *
In 1867, when McLoughlin was eight years old, Irish men and women with nationalist sympathies were excited to hear about a series of bold Fenian initiatives taking place across the country. At Chester Castle, 20 miles south of Liverpool, the army had to be called out to prevent Irish radicals from seizing an arsenal of 30 000 rifles while, in London, 12 residents were killed by an explosion triggered at Clerkenwell Prison.26 Guns and dynamite figured prominently in the dreams and imagination of the Irish community as well as in the mind of McLoughlin, who, as an adult, was always fascinated by the destructive power of both. In Ancoats, at the time, a five or 10-minute walk was all that separated the heart of the slum he lived in from any number of ‘rifle-ranges’ and ‘shooting galleries’ around the Smithfield Market on Shude Hill.27 Captain Dangerous, man of fiction, could be linked to real, live weapons.
For those recently off the land, or those so inclined by personality – and there were many of both – there was also plenty of animal blood on show in the backrooms of pubs or at other, nearby, secret locations. Despite disapproval from on high, badger-baiting, cock- and dog-fighting were standard offerings at venues disclosed only by word of mouth and at the last moment so as to avoid police attention. Wily publicans sought to attract the drinking and betting populace through carefully staged ‘ratting’ contests. Set against a stopwatch, dogs, matched by weight, were released into pits swarming with rodents and encouraged to kill as many rats as possible in the time nominated.28 A taste for these working-class pastimes proved enduring for many men in McLoughlin’s cohort.
But beneath the aggression and horror of industrialising Lancashire, one or two of the comparatively gentle streams that would eventually flow freely into Edwardian culture were already becoming evident. By the 1860s, athletics and foot racing were beginning to attract a limited following among some of the genteel youth, while some elderly workers engaged in even more innocuous pastimes such as pigeon racing.29
The large-scale shift in working-class culture, from following ‘blood sports’ to participating in or watching organised team sport, only manifested itself much later. The rules for rugby and football were codified in the 1860s and 1870s, laying the foundations for the mass followings that emerged with the launching of organised professional sport in the 1880s and 1890s. It was also only around then that working lads’ clubs, led by community activists, helped deflect street aggression and scuttling into socially acceptable channels.30 For Jack McLoughlin’s cohort, however, it was too little, too late. They were part of a lost generation doomed to experience the worst brutalities of the older order and few of the benefits of the coming dispensation. They had to dream of getting out of crushing poverty via other distractions.
Saturday night in the music halls, including in Ancoats, offered a half-way house between the realities of everyday life and a romanticised idea of what a better life might be. ‘Exotic’ dances provided glimpses of attractive women who, by prevailing standards, were scantily dressed and capable of attracting scuttlers and working men who dreamt of closing the gap between the fantasy world on stage and the street outside. Twilight visions, conjured up for the young, the single or the intoxicated, competed with more numerous acts of humour, resignation and self-mockery. Miming, music and lyrics held a mirror to everyday life, deflecting the inescapable cruelties of the here-and-now.31
Like most slum-dwellers, the men and women of Ancoats were not easily deluded. They knew only too well that it was money, rather than the meanderings of the mind, that offered them their best chance of shaking off the monster of poverty that was dogging them. More than almost anything else, it was cash that they yearned for. The working classes invaded and occupied every space where chance intersected with human design in an attempt to bend fortune to their will. Despite their own historical misfortunes the Irish, peasants-turned-workers, were among the greatest believers in luck – ‘the ever-present, glittering possibility of unearned or undeserved benefit’. It was, they thought, ‘the natural coefficient of social and economic limitations’.32
The luck of the Irish was proverbial precisely because they had had so little of it. For them the surest way of short-circuiting luck and money was through gambling. For the Irish immigrants coming from a tradition of country fairs and outdoor sport, the Industrial Revolution and urban Lancashire became bound together in ways that shaped the broader-based, emerging ‘English’ working-class culture for decades to come.
Irish workers – mostly Catholic and largely free of the strictures deriving from the Protestant ethic – would willingly bet on just about anything, including the outcomes of blood sports held in secret settings. But it was the outdoor relief that came with attendance at horse-races that appealed most to those who spent their days trapped in factories and mills.33 Liverpool, Manchester and nearby Salford, where meetings at Kersal Moor pre-dated the industrial age, saw an upsurge in commercial betting and horse-racing in the late 1840s. A new course laid out at Castle Irwell in 1847 lasted only two decades, until 1867, when racing moved to Weaste.34 But the growing popularity of horse-racing troubled Britain’s reforming middle classes who sought to regulate it through new legislation. The Betting Houses Act of 1853 aimed to prevent proprietors from taking wagers in public houses and from bookmakers and runners operating within the mills. In 1879, a new challenge arose with the transmission of race results via the telegraph.35
Liverpool and Aintree, famously, became home to the Grand National and steeplechasing. But it was Manchester, overseen by a ‘racecourse company’ and an even larger number of race-goers, that dominated flat racing. The high point in the year, the ‘Manchester Races’, coincided with the old English pagan celebration of Summer’s Day, which was extended to incorporate ‘Whitsun Week’. For three days each year, seven weeks after Easter, Manchester emptied as a ‘canvas city’ arose on a loop in the River Irwell two miles north of the city and unrestrained celebration supplanted industrial routine. By the late 1860s, horse-racing was replacing blood sports and prize fighting as a focal point in working-class culture. In the 1870s there were constant complaints about the throngs of people hanging about bookmakers’ premises, and by 1883 a Manchester daily, The Sporting Chronicle, boasted 30 000 readers.36
Whitsun week presented the police with problems that went beyond illicit gambling centred on the Smithfield Market.37 As at most other places and occasions where the privileged found themselves within arm’s length of the poor, alcohol and cash contributed to a more relaxed carnival-like atmosphere at the races. Mildly mocking behaviour by elements of the so-called ‘respectable’ working class hinted at a brief inversion of the social order, but out on the margins could give way to outright criminality and immorality. Flashily dressed bookmakers and their flaunting wives were a subject of wonderment for those with modest winnings and of outright derision among losing punters. Pickpockets, petty thieves and prostitutes often engaged in predatory behaviour of an amateurish sort and, by the turn of the century, racecourses were being frequented by gangs of professional criminals.38
At some point in his mid-teens, and cash-strapped, the oldest McLoughlin son developed a passion for gambling, horses and racecourses that lasted a lifetime. Unlike many of his peers, however, he was never under the illusion that luck alone would provide him with a windfall. A hard-headed pragmatist, he visited betting shops only after he had raised cash through other means and never saw bookmakers – whom he viewed as parasites and legitimate targets – as a way of making money.
The racecourse may have provided him with his first glimpse of the industrial age’s new brand of urban desperadoes, some of whom might now be classified as psychopaths. In this respect, the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869, which allowed the police to take photographs and keep detailed descriptions of those who had been found guilty of more than one serious offence, formed something of a landmark.39 Around 1876, when McLoughlin was 17 and the likes of ‘Captain Dangerous’ had already been relegated to deeper memory, two criminals in particular seem to have imprinted themselves on his mind and those of many in his cohort.
Charlie Peace, son of a lion-tamer, a picaresque burglar and flawed folk hero, was born in nearby Sheffield. After an industrial accident in which a shard of metal shattered his kneecap, Peace took a year off to teach himself to walk in a manner that disguised his disability. But then he somehow also lost a finger. Damaged or lost limbs intrigued him and his injuries evoked sympathy among his many female conquests. He fashioned himself a false arm, with a hole running down the middle, that allowed him to perform various tricks, including manipulating a fork.
In 1876, Peace murdered a policeman during a botched burglary in Manchester and then returned to his home town where he murdered a lover’s husband. Suitably disguised, he moved to London, where in 1878 he was put on trial for burglary and the attempted murder of yet another policeman. Betrayed by a female consort, he was sent to Sheffield to stand trial for the earlier murder but, as the train neared Worksop, he persuaded the warders to open a carriage window and leapt from the moving train. Injured and quickly recaptured, he was made to stand trial, convicted and then executed in February 1879.40
Born on the Rochdale Road, Bob Horridge was as at home in Ancoats as the next man. In 1876, as an ambitious young burglar, he stripped the contents of shops belonging to a furrier, silk merchant and jeweller. Two years later he was ready for more ambitious projects and fixed on the weekly payroll stored in the safe of an office attached to a textile mill in nearby Bradford. At 4.30 am one Saturday, two associates staged a diversionary fight outside the factory gates when the caretaker did his rounds to stoke a boiler. During the caretaker’s absence the safe was hoisted onto a waiting cart and driven away. When the police eventually recovered it from a mill reservoir, they discovered that the back had been removed and the £600 it contained was missing.41
Bob Horridge and Charlie Peace both bore the imprimatur of the Industrial Revolution. An apprenticeship as a blacksmith helped Horridge in his safe-cracking exploits and Peace, initially trained in a rolling mill, remained fascinated by anything mechanical. Moreover, both moved through the Midlands at a time when special machine-made tools manufactured in Birmingham were used by professional burglars. Few of these lessons were lost on deprived slum-dwellers. But, as a young man with a romantic twist, McLoughlin was perhaps most taken with Peace’s train-jumping exploits and Horridge’s safe-lifting template. Like old Captain Dangerous, they embodied audacity.
There was no element of a childhood and adolescence spent in mid-Victorian Ancoats that led ineluctably to a life of crime. Indeed, a large number of youngsters appear, miraculously, to have avoided full-scale collisions with laws set on producing a new and disciplined working class fit to serve the empire. But there was also almost nothing in slum life that did not predispose a young man born into a poverty-stricken immigrant family to explore other, irregular, ways of supplementing family or personal income. In retrospect, it is hardly surprising that several in the McLoughlin family turned to crime. What does surprise is how long it took to manifest itself. It was the economic downturn of 1877–79 that destroyed the mould of a working family.