CHAPTER FIVE
Criminal Cousins:Economic Survival and Social Capital
ANCOATS
— 1875–1880 —
Blood is thicker than water, and when one’s in trouble best to seek out a relative’s open arms.
On 18 February 1878, Jack McLoughlin, going on 20, made his criminal debut in the Magistrate’s Court. It was unlikely to have been his first encounter with the law even if it was the first recorded. He was found guilty of having stolen a pair of boots belonging to 16-year-old James Jarrett, a stoker, and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.1 It was a harsh sentence for the midwinter theft of a pair of boots by a first offender. But McLoughlin’s friends probably knew that he had long been a gang member and took a more sanguine view of proceedings. Three months in Belle Vue may have given him the chance to reflect on the company he was keeping because the excursions that followed relied far more heavily, though never exclusively, on extended family members.
The Ancoats underworld McLoughlin operated in centred on what, at first glance, appeared to be an unlikely socio-economic stratum. It was not one that contemporary observers, interested in understanding the emergence of mid-Victorian rookeries, would have focused on. For the most part its members were not drawn from the chronically unemployed, the hopelessly alienated, or the poorest of the poor. Most were nominally ‘Irish’ and Catholic, born between 1855 and 1865. They formed part of a cohort raised just as the first round of educational, sanitary and social reforms in Manchester were starting to have a discernable impact on the quality of working-class life. Some came from families in which the parents had separated, or a spouse had died. Most were in their late teens or early twenties when first convicted of serious offences. Many were sons of craftsmen or small shopkeepers – the offspring of members of the ‘labour aristocracy’ or the so-called ‘petit bourgeoisie’.
As small children they received a rudimentary education in church schools, but that did not allow religion to influence their later choice of criminal gangs, which were overwhelmingly secular. Literate almost without exception, they seem to have retained a passing interest in books and reading even after leaving school, one or two going so far as to work for printers. Most, however, had their first real taste of work at a tender age in the closely supervised surroundings of factory or mill. Judging from their later choice of occupations they almost all left industry with a strong dislike of routine, machine-paced and manual labour, preferring instead to find positions as clerks, hawkers, porters or warehousemen, positions that were physically demanding in other ways.
Strong enough to have fought their corner as ‘scuttlers’ in their mid-teens, they later chose, for the most part, to avoid unnecessary physical violence and the use of guns or knives. Their primary interest lay in acquiring property, equipment, goods or materials, which relied on good intelligence systems and stealth rather than raw muscle-power. Most of their targets were decided on with the help of disaffected insiders, employees willing to steal from their masters or the proprietors of shops. In many cases the quantity of goods stolen pointed to a distinct entrepreneurial streak in thieves who enjoyed easy access to illegal distribution networks that included pawnbrokers, professional fences, rival shopkeepers or the many hawkers around Smithfield Market.
Unwilling to be consumed as so much working-class fodder, McLoughlin’s cohort bent skills lifted from the factories and mills to shape for themselves a lifestyle and sub-culture reminiscent of other pre-industrial criminal fraternities, and, much later, exported them to the frontiers of an expanding world.2 Dressing with care, they maintained their identity as individuals, but because of their need to sell-on stolen goods, they were forced to shy away from unnecessary exposure and therefore also placed considerable store on security, privacy and trust. Like scuttlers who lurked in the social waters beneath them, or the craftsmen in Friendly Societies who floated above, they maintained their own codes of honour with oaths and other secret practices.3 The underlying problem they faced was how best to maintain their individual identities without revealing fully their collective enterprise.
Antisocial scuttlers were all too visible on the streets – indeed, their raison d’être was to be a public rather than a private menace. Manchester’s Masons and Oddfellows, quintessentially convivial, respectable social groupings, held street parades or wore insignia displayed on jacket lapels. Criminal fraternities, by contrast, could not parade their members publicly. What was needed was a sign that could simultaneously indicate their exclusion from mainstream society, yet mark their inclusion in part of the underworld. The solution lay in a system of partially concealed tattoos; markings plain enough to be without obvious meaning to outsiders, yet visible and distinctive enough to be recognised by insiders within the wider criminal fraternity.
The use of tattoos harked back to the dawn of humanity but received an enormous fillip in the British Isles after the eighteenth-century voyages of exploration. On his return, Captain Cook reported on the exotic body-markings that he and his crew had encountered in the societies of the South Seas. After that tattoos became a ‘travelling sign’ on ‘homeless bodies’. They were favoured by those who had voluntarily undertaken long journeys – including pilgrims, soldiers and sailors – or by those who had been moved involuntarily, such as slaves or transported convicts.4
Tattoos were acceptable in many circles of Victorian society. Sailors often had markings on their arms, and given the appeal that the senior service held for scuttlers, it was perhaps predictable that they, too, would sport prominent body-markings. Many teenagers used tattoos to proclaim personalised declarations of love. Others chose objects with wider meanings to be recognised by – such as anchors, which had biblical roots and symbolised hope. The members of McLoughlin’s gang, however, took a small blue dot as their imprimatur. It will be recalled that Jack’s father, William, sported a similar mark above his right eyebrow.
Seemingly meaningless, the blue dot was said to refer to Ali Baba’s ‘Forty Thieves’ and had first been noted in London’s Millbank Penitentiary by Henry Mayhew, in the late 1850s.5 In Ancoats, 20 years later, less prominent marks included a dot on the forearm, concealed by shirtsleeves, or on the webbing between the thumb and the index fingers, and in one case on the eyelid, where it was briefly visible only when the eye was closed.6 Remarkably, such tattooed blue dots continued to be displayed by male members of the English underclass well into the late twentieth century.7
The name – if it had one – of the brotherhood McLoughlin belonged to remained a secret and was never recorded. Its core, consisting of between six and a dozen members spread across Ancoats, all bore the mark of Ali Baba – Jack’s was a blue dot on his left forearm – an exotic touch Captain Dangerous would have approved of. Blue Dots operated in pairs, but when necessary were willing to draw in selected outsiders without markings. In two instances that we know of their numbers were bolstered by drawing in members of the extended McLoughlin family. Likewise, the name of the leader of the gang was never revealed – but it was almost certainly Jack McLoughlin. The leading members of the original Blue Dot gang remained closely associated long after their Ancoats exploits were done, and, over a decade later, continued to work together abroad. Manchester, like other northern cities, exported not only finished goods but criminal networks too.
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Jack’s friend John William (JW) Brown, born in 1858, was the youngest of three sons bearing the first name of their father.8 The patriarch, John James Brown, born in London, came from a Catholic family in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, but in 1850 married Ann Cooney, an Irish lass from Castlebar, County Mayo. A self-made as well as a self-centred man, Brown senior started out as a confectioner on Union Street, but his ambition led him elsewhere. At some point during the small window of opportunity that presented itself between 1852, when the state compiled its first register of chemists, and 1868, by which time entry into the profession was governed by examination, Brown set himself up as a pharmacist. After 1861 his chemist’s shop at 187 Mill Street, where it stood for over 30 years conveniently close by the hospital, became an institution in Ancoats.9
But if Brown’s chemist’s business was steady, then the lives of his nearest were anything but. When his first wife, Ann, died unexpectedly – seemingly during childbirth, in 1862 – three boys and a baby daughter were left without a mother.10 Within weeks of the bereavement he married Margaret Cooney, Ann’s older sister. This meant that by the time that JW was five years old, he had lost his mother only to discover that his aunt had become his stepmother. This may have affected John William more than it did his older brothers, both of whom went on to hold down steady jobs in the mill. The little fellow, however, was sent to a Catholic school where he learnt to read and write, but at home his space was cluttered by two younger sisters; one, a step-sister, the daughter of Margaret Cooney. The Brown household, once dominated by a narcissistic patriarch, suddenly became more female-orientated.
Precisely how the new Mrs Brown ran her home, or how it may have shaped JW, is unknown, but a few things stand out from his adult life. First, like his friend Jack McLoughlin, he never had a long-term relationship with a woman and was still unmarried in his mid-thirties. Secondly, if JW had reservations about women in general, then his attitude to prostitutes – as expressed at the time of the infamous Whitechapel slayings, in 1888 – spoke of misogyny.11 His views may not have been helped by the fact that, at about the same time, his father, who by then was close to 80 and had outlived Margaret, got married for a third time, this time to a woman about 25 years his junior.12
In keeping with his father’s own ambitions, JW never laboured in the cotton mills or signed up for a workshop-based trade. In 1871, aged 14, he was an unskilled assistant – a ‘helper’ – in the Percival Vickers British and Foreign Flint Glass Works on Union Street, hard by the Rochdale Canal. At the same time his close friend Jack McLoughlin, two years his junior, was working in the nearby cotton mills.
At about that time JW embarked on a criminal apprenticeship, binding himself to a Blue Dot a year older than himself, Charles Beswick. In autumn 1872, amidst a buoyant local economy, there was a rash of attacks on errand boys delivering cash, messages and small articles between businesses and warehouses. One of the pair’s victims, Robert Seddon, was relieved of sixpence and items worth a few shillings. The Magistrate, responding to a ‘moral panic’ about assaults on errand boys, or detecting unusual menace in lads who could do with immediate checking, took a very dim view of the crime. Despite having taken the precaution of lying about their ages so as to avoid the full wrath of the law, the adolescents were sentenced to four days’ hard labour each and, thereafter, 10 strokes each to be inflicted, ‘in private’, with a birch rod.13
The experience may have discouraged the chemist’s son for a time, but proved ineffectual in the long run. JW spent most of his free time with the Mackey boys, who, like their immigrant Irish father, worked in the nearby mills. In June 1876, 18-year-old JW and Joseph Mackey were sentenced to a month’s hard labour each for theft. Months later, in spring 1877, John William and John Mackey stole two books from one JH Wells. Mackey was acquitted but JW was sent down for two months, with hard labour.
When autumn set in that year, JW got himself a position as a stoker with the Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway Company. It put him in the ideal position to perform the classic Blue Dot manoeuvre of stealing from an employer. In January 1878, he and a new partner, Francis Howell, were convicted for stealing two hundredweight of coal destined for onward selling to a third party and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment each with hard labour. Just four months later, in June 1878, JW was put away for another month’s hard labour for stealing eight shillings and eight pence from yet another employer.14 Ancoats and Manchester were becoming too small to easily accommodate JW.
In the interim, Charles Beswick, who had got a reasonably good Church of England school education before going on to work half-days in the mills, had not been idle. The son of a self-employed carter, he aspired to better things in life and had found himself a position as a clerk in a small local business. The proprietor either did not see, or did not understand, the significance of the blue dot tucked into the webbing between the thumb and first finger of the left hand of the new employee. In mid-1877, Beswick was sentenced to two months’ hard labour in Strangeways Prison for having stolen £10 from ‘his master’.15
In terms of age and fighting prowess, if not in underworld status, the most senior member of the Blue Dots was Joseph Wild. Wild, whose surname evokes the image of Jonathan Wild, the gang leader and highwayman in Fielding’s eponymous satire, did come from Ancoats’ lowest socio-economic stratum, but, perhaps significantly, was not a local. Born in Oldham, in 1850, from a broken home and possibly illegitimate, Wild, too, had acquired basic literacy in a Church of England school. In Manchester his career as a scuttler, like that of many in his cohort, was not recorded, but a legacy of street-fighting was there for all to see – two missing front teeth, scars between the fingers of the right hand and scars on the lower back consonant with belt-and-buckle attacks. His primary training may have been as a pickpocket, and for many years he eluded the law. But, in 1876, at the ripe old age of 26, he and a partner were sentenced to three months in Strangeways for the theft of three handkerchiefs. It may have been meetings with fences dealing in second-hand clothing – possibly even with Eliza McLoughlin – that first brought him to the attention of JW Brown and Jack McLoughlin. Twelve months later, in 1877, he was locked up again – for a week, for drunken and riotous behaviour.16
By the late 1870s and approaching age 20, McLoughlin’s world was becoming more centred on the Blue Dots, many of whom, like him, were still struggling to master their criminal craft. He did not, however, want for other friends who, although not identifiable as Blue Dots, later went on to become successful professional criminals. Among those whom he knew and trusted while still in Ancoats, and who later worked closely with him abroad, three in particular are worthy of note.
Charles Harding was the son of a tailor and may have been yet another of the hidden threads that linked the Blue Dots and junior associates to the wider clothing trade around the Smithfield Market. Like the others, Harding avoided heavy manual labour and, by his late teens and early twenties, was working as a clerk in an office. His paperwork, however, was surpassed by an interest in burglary, office and store-breaking, and years later, half-way across the world, he went on to become one of Jack McLoughlin’s most loyal and trusted lieutenants.17
McLoughlin may have met Tommy Whelan, a man who in later years brought raw muscle-power to his safe-lifting operations on the frontier, via his young brother. Whelan, like Tommy McLoughlin, had been sentenced to a month’s imprisonment for larceny in 1872 and gone on to serve a full five-year stint in industrial school. In 1877, Whelan and his father celebrated his release by assaulting a police constable, for which they received four and three months’ imprisonment respectively.18
The third man, a specialist of sorts – George Fisher – was never as close to McLoughlin as were Harding and Whelan. Born in 1858, George was the son of a foundry worker who died young. As a boy he was sent out to work in an Ancoats baking powder manufactory, where he went on to become a semi-skilled worker with an interest in chemical reactions. In later years he was more interested in illegal gold-refining.19
Looking back it is difficult to arrive at an accurate assessment of the successes and failures of these Blue Dots and their associates. The archival record – comprising police and prison registers – is stacked against them. The files list only criminal failures, leaving no clue as to hidden successes. Even so the failures – low points, where a lack of professionalism intersected with reasonably competent policing – may have left the gang feeling slightly insecure at a time when the authorities had their hands full. In the late 1860s Manchester had a crime rate of 1.86 – nearly two crimes for every citizen – ‘around six times the rate in Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield and over four times the rate in London’.20 But, even with statistics that seem to have been rather inadequate for the task in hand, the police, who made widespread use of informers, seem to have made a fairly reasonable fist of fighting crime.21
It is from the latter perspective that one needs to understand certain gang practices in Ancoats. Codes, oaths and tattoos were designed not only to bind members into antisocial organisations, but also to keep out informers at a time when forensic evidence was at a premium. Just as inexplicable instances of misfortune in traditional societies are sometimes attributed to witchcraft, so the real fear in many criminal organisations stemmed from the hidden enemy within. For ‘Irish’ adolescents, raised by parents drawn directly from a peasant society where chants and charms were used to ward off the evil eye, ‘bad luck’ was an omnipresent danger. So, too, was the threat posed by informers. The Royal Ulster Constabulary had never hesitated to use informers. Fear of betrayal rendered the search for trustworthy allies never-ending.
It is within that context too – the need to guard against potentially malign outsiders – that one needs to understand why it was that the Blue Dots sought to bolster their numbers for criminal projects by turning inwards, to their kith and kin. But, while recruiting from within the family might have limited the need for oaths and tattoos, it did not necessarily guarantee success. The problem with using family members in criminal operations was that, while the levels of trust usually went up, they were not necessarily matched by increases in levels of competence or skill.
The McLoughlin boys never wanted for cousins or more distant relatives drawn from their father’s side of the family. The Burns, Lyons, Ogden and Scott lads were all locally based and sufficiently closely related to be considered part of an extended family. Some, like the Scotts, were even less economically and socially secure than the McLoughlins and appear to have been in awe of their formidable cousins. Tommy McLoughlin’s exploits with the Burns boys illustrate some of the advantages and several of the problems of doing criminal business with young kinsmen.
After an early release from the industrial school, possibly because of a heart condition, Tommy, in the thrall of his oldest race-going brother, began working with horses. It became a passion that later led him to taking on a position as a groom and, again like brother Jack, developing a liking for the great outdoors. However, shortly after his release, at age 14, Tommy linked up with his cousin, James Burns. In February 1878, he laid into Burns with a poker, beating him about the head so severely that his cousin lay ‘in a somewhat dangerous condition’ in the infirmary for several days. When the pair appeared in court, Jimmy Burns declined to prosecute because, or so he claimed, he was intoxicated at the time and ‘knew very little about the affair’.22 It was probably a wise choice.
A year later Tommy linked up with another of the Burns boys, John, who was working for Edward Cockshoot, a coach proprietor on Blossom Street, in New Cross. With cousin John acting as the insider enjoying privileged access to the premises, they stole eight bags of horse provender valued at £4 for onward sale. The Magistrate, taking the view that the crime had been instigated by Tommy, sentenced him to six months with hard labour and Burns, the lesser party, to four months’ hard labour.23
By the late 1870s all three McLoughlin brothers – Jack, William and Tommy – were semi-professional criminals operating within and beyond the Blue Dot gang and disposing of stolen goods on the black market. In better times, discretionary criminal activities supplemented small incomes earned from part-time employment. But when the textile industry went into full recession, in autumn 1878, and lingered in a depressed state for more than a year, waged employment became harder to find and the tables turned.24 A steady income from crime became central to economic survival and casual employment a mere occasional bonus.
The Blue Dots avoided any brushes with the law during late 1878 and over the sluggish summer months of 1879 when there was an uptick in seasonal work. If they did enjoy unrecorded criminal successes it could have been because the police were more stretched than usual, or because the members of the gang were becoming more professional, or both.
But by autumn 1879 casual employment was again at a premium. With cash for clothing, food and fuel almost impossible to come by, most working-class families were in distress and those that were economically dysfunctional even more so. It was at this juncture that Jack McLoughlin and JW Brown set about planning their most ambitious project yet, a series of break-ins on a scale that, if successful, would meet their needs and those of their dependants for weeks to come. They set their eyes on the ‘Uncles’ to be found throughout working-class Manchester.
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Pawnshops – marked by three golden balls suspended from an iron bar outside the premises – developed as an offshoot of commercial banking in medieval Italy, but spread to industrialising England where they were first licensed in the eighteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, counties with large working-class populations, such as Lancashire and Warwickshire, saw a rapid growth in numbers of pawnshops. Workers in search of money for anything from food, clothing and rent, through to quick cash for alcohol or gambling, pledged items of personal property up to the value of £10 – ranging from clothing to jewellery – as collateral in return for interest-bearing loans. If the goods were not redeemed, the ‘Uncle’, effectively insured against serious loss, sold the items by public auction.
By 1870, Manchester had 248 licensed pawnshop operators. Many of them were shady practitioners with contacts in the underworld looking for outlets for stolen goods that included heavy-duty winter clothing. For most of the century pawnbrokers had been entitled to charge 20 per cent interest on sums under two guineas, but in 1872, a new act had effectively increased the rate to a punishing 25 per cent. The new provision meant that ‘the smaller the loan the higher the interest’, and that the heaviest rate fell on people who were least able to bear it.25
As bankers to the poor, many pawnshop owners occupied morally ambiguous positions and seldom endeared themselves to ordinary working men and women. Richard Roberts, raised in a ‘classic slum’ in neighbouring Salford, saw their ‘Uncle’ as a cold-eyed, tight-lipped man with a ‘heart of stone’. In Manchester, pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers, including those specialising in cheap clothing, were closely watched by the police precisely because so many of them dealt in stolen goods. Unscrupulous pawnbrokers often knowingly provided criminals with the chance of converting purloined articles into cash.26
But professional thieves, too, had a love-hate relationship with profiteering or unreliable Uncles who, put under pressure, might talk to the police. In the absence of detailed evidence, it is impossible to know why the Blue Dots singled out pawnbrokers as targets. It may have been that, over the years, the experiences of poverty and pledging had fostered a dislike of extortionate lenders-of-the-last-resort. As likely, the gang may have been the victim of professional sharp practice as its members attempted to unload stolen goods in return for cash. Either way, pawnbrokers – objects of derision at the best of times – would have been seen as legitimate targets in the deepening recession of 1878–79.
McLoughlin and JW Brown had no difficulty in finding an insider for their first job. The Pughs, who for many years had run an eating house, lived on Great Ancoats, where the street crossed the Rochdale Canal. The Pugh boys did reasonably well at school but were sent out to work when the family business collapsed in the mid-1870s.27 The oldest boy got a job as a manual labourer at the market and the younger, William, was taken on as a clerical assistant by Joseph Oldham, the pawnbroker, just a few houses away. William Pugh was soon in trouble. In summer 1877, he had his first brush with the law when he was hauled in as a witness after Brown and Mackey stole some books from an employer.28
A good deal younger than his new Blue Dot friends, Pugh may have been keen to impress, but he was out of his depth. He told Jack McLoughlin about the seasonal increase in coats and handkerchiefs being pledged and how, where and when to get into the premises. The idea was that the gang would remove the articles, split the goods and place the stolen items with other brokers to raise cash, or pass the remainder of the apparel on to second-hand dealers to dispose of as best they saw fit.
McLoughlin recruited his 17-year-old cousin, Dennis Scott, to help with the burglary and his mother, Eliza, to hold the bulk of the stolen clothing until such time as it could be split up. The pawnshop was broken into on Sunday night, 15 November 1878, and 13 coats and nine handkerchiefs removed. In the week that followed the items were distributed among a half-dozen insiders, including another cousin, William Ogden, and two young associates, Patrick Denash and Henry Johnson. William Pugh was relieved the burglary went smoothly, but funds raised effortlessly only whetted the Blue Dots’ appetite for more.
They now planned a second, more ambitious raid on a pawnbroker, one on a scale that was wholesale rather than retail. The new job, which must once again have drawn on some insider’s knowledge of the trade, required more professional assistance; also, given the projected volume of clothing to be removed and placed with brokers or dealers in second-hand clothing, a much longer chain of potential primary distributors.
The new endeavour – thought through over a few days if not hours by McLoughlin and JW Brown – included Dennis Scott and 16-year-old William McLoughlin, as break-and-entry men. Tommy, in prison for the poker attack, was unavailable. Charles Beswick and Joseph Wild, experienced Blue Dots, were brought into a distribution network which, although extended from six to nine in number, was still overseen by Eliza McLoughlin. Also in the know were Pugh, Denash and Johnson, the youngsters who had done well on the job at Oldham’s, which was still under investigation. This time the target was William Chorlton’s pawnshop – which, like Aladdin’s cave, promised unimaginable treasures.
Chorlton’s business on Portland Street, Newtown, was so large and successful that its proprietor could afford to live in more desirable residential premises some distance away.29 The intruders chose the following Sunday, 22 November, for their operations and soon found themselves in a city-centre second-hand paradise. Even then, away from densely populated Ancoats, the job required considerable cunning, muscle-power and organisation. Without being caught either in the act itself or discovered on the streets outside, they removed:
Ten vests, six pairs of trousers, four dresses, three skirts, four shawls, two pairs of boots, one other boot, twenty shirts, one piece of sheeting, one piece of shirting, one concertina, one jacket, twenty handkerchiefs, two quilts and five pounds in money.30
Two pawnshops broken into over successive weekends were impossible to ignore even for a hard-pressed city police force. Jerome Caminada, the city’s legendary chief detective, prided himself on a network of informants that he looked after ‘long after their usefulness and into his retirement’.31 But managing a network of professional informers was never easy. In mid-Victorian Britain, a reliance on face-to-face interactions sometimes made it difficult to tell where the police ended and underworld elements began. There were also connections between informers, those receiving stolen goods and the second-hand trade.32
Constables cultivated criminals, but criminals also groomed constables, with the result that justice sometimes not only seemed arbitrary and open to bargaining and negotiation but also highly personalised. McLoughlin and JW Brown, graduates of this street-law academy, had mastered these lessons and later applied them, with considerable success, in southern Africa. Back in Ancoats, however, it was not long before Detective Caminada had the lead he needed. He pressed hard on the least-experienced gang members, Denash and Johnson, and persuaded them to give evidence for the Crown. Officers went out and arrested the McLoughlins, their mother Eliza, cousin Dennis Scott, and JW Brown.
The accused were tried at the City’s Quarter Sessions on 12 December 1878, and for the second time that year the doings of one or more members of the McLoughlin clan were drawn to the attention of the readers of the Manchester Evening News.33 For the burglary at Oldham’s, Jack, Eliza and Scott were charged on two counts – breaking and entering the premises and/or receiving stolen goods. It was a potentially messy business, with William Pugh, the insider-employee, listed only as a witness. Pugh, however, survived the ordeal and, magically, kept his job at Oldham’s.
For the second burglary – at Chorlton’s – the McLoughlin brothers and Scott, along with JW Brown, were charged with breaking and entering and/or receiving stolen property. Making allowances for the boys’ obviously decrepit mother, Eliza was charged separately and only with receiving stolen goods. The Magistrate found the three oldest males guilty of breaking and entering and sentenced each to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour; William, in consideration of his youth, received three months with hard labour. Eliza was found guilty of receiving and despite being in poor health got six months with hard labour.34
As noted earlier, the imprisonment of three McLoughlins marked the collapse of a family that had more-or-less cohered for nearly three decades under the most adverse urban conditions. The collateral damage, however, extended beyond the nuclear family. The Scotts, angered by their son Dennis’s involvement in the burglaries, shunned the McLoughlins after the pawnshop break-ins. When Eliza McLoughlin entered the women’s section of Belle Vue prison in December 1878, her sister, Bridget Ann, refused to take her two youngest daughters into care, leaving Mary (12) and Elizabeth (8) more vulnerable than ever. Six months after Eliza was released from prison, in the summer of 1879, she was committed to the workhouse at Chorlton. By the time of her lonely death, the girls had been placed with other kin.35
The McLoughlin brothers were better placed to survive the rigours of a prison in which, at night, they could hear the sound of fireworks and music drifting in from the festivities of nearby Belle Vue Gardens, which they had invaded as children. A hard winter may have prompted them to rethink the wisdom of Blue Dot organised crime, since for some time thereafter they appear to have kept largely to themselves. The recession was still being felt in Ancoats when they were released in June 1879 and a little seasonal work helped see them through the summer.
That autumn Tommy, too, was out of prison and back on the streets. Jack continued to keep a close eye on his youngest brother; that winter, they and a few cousins drank heavily – much of it in the Seven Stars, a popular beerhouse with stables on Dixon Street, not far from the mill on Union Street and the Rochdale Canal where they had grown up.36
On Christmas Eve 1879, Jack and a few friends found themselves on the streets of nearby working-class Ardwick without funds, contemplating the prospect of more seasonal misery. Judging from the ensuing violence, Tommy, by then a Blue Dot in his own right, may have been party to a small family-based initiative.37 A combination of alcohol, desperation and the need to find a well-stuffed wallet forced open the door of recklessness. The footpads spotted a mark in a side-street – Humphrey Moore, a grocer’s apprentice. Three or four years older than Jack McLoughlin, Moore was reasonably well-heeled and unlikely to offer too much resistance. They tailed him to a suitable spot and grabbed hold of him. But the fellow was surprisingly strong and it took ‘considerable personal violence’ to wrestle him to the ground and remove his watch as well as seven shillings and sixpence.
The noise attracted the attention of passers-by and one of the assailants was arrested; the others had bolted. Fresh from six months in prison as a result of information supplied by youngsters who were so keen to save their own skins that they were willing to give evidence for the Crown, Jack was not about to break the underworld code of honour himself. The police probed for signs of weakness but he refused to reveal the names of two accomplices and so faced prosecution on his own.38 It was a straw in the wind – the first recorded indication, age 20, of just how seriously he disapproved of informing or co-operating with the police.
The holding cells were crammed with seasonal offenders – drunks, pickpockets, prostitutes and wife-beaters – in addition to a few professional criminals. Justice, which moved slowly at the best of times, almost ground to a halt over Christmas. It was New Year before he was told that his trial, for ‘robbery with violence’, was scheduled for 24 January. Sensing a stiff sentence, it may have been his accomplices who raised the money to retain counsel for the defence. The usual reporters were in attendance at Assizes Crown Court on the appointed day to record that the judge was not impressed by Mr Nash’s representations for the defence. He found the accused guilty and, taking McLoughlin’s previous record into account, sentenced him to a year’s imprisonment with hard labour at a prison in the far-off home counties.39
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By the time Jack was released, in November 1880, he had abandoned all thought of returning to Lancashire in the near future. Even though he still yearned to trace the Mersey all the way from Stockport to Liverpool, he never again set foot in Ancoats. It was where the foundations of his personality had been laid by his Irish refugee parents, the church and his slum cohort, but he had no wish to revisit it. Dystopian Manchester and its fiendish machinery spoke only of industrial discipline, compartmentalised time and gross urban poverty. It was a world devoid of excitement, of challenges, imagination and new frontiers. The ‘dark Satanic mills’ churned out only boredom, predictability and wage slavery.
For any man trapped on an island, the obvious way out is via the sea. The Merchant Navy was a possibility. London was the gateway to the empire and the rest of the world. But the agents of commercial shipping preferred their raw enthusiasm and strength to be balanced with dollops of experience and skill before they were willing to take on younger men.
The Royal Navy was different. With less money at its disposal than it would have liked, it always had less refined tastes. For hundreds of years men without hope or resources had either been impressed into it, or joined it voluntarily. The senior service embraced antisocial attitudes and strong muscles in the belief that, within the confines of an all-male environment, it could convert almost anything into loyalty and skill. In truth, a prison and a ship had much in common, even though some compared them unfavourably. Samuel Johnson argued that: ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’40
Cash was the mother of choice, but he had none. So he joined the navy, in London, and was sent to Plymouth where, after a short search, he was pointed in the direction of a three-masted sloop. It was mid-November and already growing chilly, but the vessel was bound for Gibraltar and warm waters, which was cheering. He was directed below, but with nothing of value to stow, returned to the deck. His pockets were empty but, aged 22, his mind was stuffed with ideas about opportunities for adventure in far-off corners of the world. It was a start of the sort that Captain Dangerous himself might have approved.