Chapter One

BEFORE THE PEAKY BLINDERS: THE SLOGGING GANGS

A grim and terrifying picture of Birmingham in 1919 was revealed by BBC News on 12 September 2013 when publicising the first episode of Peaky Blinders. Under the headline ‘Birmingham’s Real Peaky Blinders’, the city’s ‘dank, slum streets’ were depicted as ruled by gangs made up of hundreds of youths armed with knives, razor blades and hammers. Murders were rife and ‘robberies, thefts and riots were a daily occurrence at the hands of young gang members who hold the entire city in a fearful, bloody grip’. The police did their best to control the daily nightmare but were vastly outnumbered. This gang violence had erupted in the 1870s, the article explained, when hundreds of youths fought ‘sometimes to the death in mass brawls that lasted for hours’ so as to ‘own’ areas like Small Heath and Cheapside. The most prominent and ruthless of these early gangs were the Sloggers or the Cheapside Slogging Gang, which for 30 years had ruled with protection rackets and violence. Many rival gangs arose, but the most fearful force on the city’s streets a century ago was, it was claimed, the Peaky Blinders. As deliberately stylish as they were violent, their chilling nickname was ‘derived from the razor blades carefully stitched into the front of their caps which could be used to blind their victims’.16

The reality was very different. In 1919, Birmingham was not terrorised by gang warfare. Murder was not rife. There were no riots. And there was no Peaky Blinder Gang. Amongst contemporaries, the best gauge of ruffianism was regarded as the return of assaults on the police. That year, there were 134 convictions for this offence, relating to a police force of 1,341 and a population of around 900,000. This compared to 557 convictions in 1899 for 685 officers in a smaller population of just over 500,000.¹⁷ The fall was remarkable. In fact, so much had violent crime dropped that it did not even warrant a mention in the 1919 annual report of the Chief Constable of Birmingham. He did, though, comment on the increase in street betting, suicides and street vehicular accidents as well as on the marked decline in juvenile crime, especially in serious classes.¹⁸

Whilst not noted in the report, there was a total of 18 offences of murder and manslaughter over the three years between 1918 and 1920. That averages at six a year. And although the Riot Act was read in Glasgow and Birkenhead in 1919, and there were also riots in the Midlands in Coventry, Bilston and Wolverhampton, among others, there were none in Birmingham.¹⁹ This was despite the turmoil of immediate post-war Britain which was wracked with disorder associated with angry soldiers, widespread strikes, sectarianism in Northern Ireland, and racist attacks in Cardiff, Hull and other ports.20

Yet Birmingham did see gang-related battles, riots and murders, but before the First World War, and not after it. In fact, before the war Birmingham had a persistent, longstanding notoriety, so much so that in 1901 the Birmingham Mail carried the headline ‘Hooliganism Reborn’ and bemoaned that the city was:

. . . rapidly earning the distinction of being one the rowdiest cities in the Kingdom! Admittedly. we had this reputation one time, but since some flattering writer conferred upon us the title of the best governed city in the world we have either improved, or have failed to recognise our faults. Certain it is that the rowdyism of Birmingham nowadays, instead of being chronic, is endemic. It breaks out occasionally in particular neighbourhoods the same way as does smallpox and scarlet fever.²¹

SLOGGING GANGS

Birmingham’s bad reputation for violence had arisen from its slogging gangs. Their name came from the word ‘slogger’ – someone who struck heavy blows. Originally a pugilistic term from the 1820s, its use soon spread outside the ring.²² And within a generation, the term ‘sloggers’ would raise up fearful images of Birmingham’s back street ruffians, who first came to notice in April 1872.

It was reported that, on Sunday, 7 April, a large body of roughs had gathered in the neighbourhood of Cheapside to the great consternation of the inhabitants. Numbering 400 strong, they termed themselves ‘the Slogging Gang’. After creating a great disturbance and smashing several windows, they moved towards the Hill Street area where ‘they threw brick bats and stones at the windows of the hucksters (general stores) and confectioners that were open’. The shopkeepers had to put up their shutters to protect their premises, whilst one of them was hit by a brick and had to be taken to hospital. For some time, the rioters terrorised passers-by, whom they stopped and insulted. Finally, they took to their heels when approached by a small body of police. Running back towards Cheapside, the sloggers were dispersed by another detachment of the police.23

This outbreak of violence was the culmination of weeks of unrest, during which the police had received ‘great complaints’ about the large number of boys who had gathered to break windows in and around Cheapside and Barford Street, close to the Bull Ring.²⁴ These disturbances continued after the first slogging gang outbreak. Three days later, on Wednesday, 10 April, between 70 and 80 youths collected across the town in Northwood Street and Constitution Hill. Armed with sticks and well supplied with large stones, they stoned a police constable and then ran into Cox Street. Two of them were arrested. John Gibbon was an engine driver aged thirteen who lived in Water Street, near to the disturbance. Michael Lowry, a filer aged fourteen, lived not far away on Hospital Street. Both were sentenced to 14 days’ imprisonment. Those apprehended from the Sunday riot were also young teenagers.

One of the magistrates before whom they appeared was Alderman Melson, who had himself suffered on the Sunday when some sloggers had met outside his house. He had gone outside and thrashed one of them with an ash stick. His son then followed the gang and grabbed hold of their leader but was set upon and returned home covered in blood and with his lip and ears cut. Melson pronounced that ‘this stone throwing nuisance was becoming perfectly intolerable, and the dangerous state of the streets of the town was fast becoming a proverb’. He was determined that when any of these boys were brought before him, whether they had actually been seen to throw stones or not, he should ‘deal severely with them’.25

Despite these admonitions, stone throwing by gangs was not stopped. On a Friday night in June 1872, about twenty youths on the corner of Great Barr Street and Watery Lane in Bordesley pelted passers-by with stones. As they did so, they shouted, ‘We are the slogging band.’²⁶ As for the stones thrown, there was a plentiful supply of them. The footpaths of many back streets were paved with what were called ‘petrified kidneys’ – stones that were about as big as a good-sized potato. They were very durable but extremely unpleasant to walk upon and because they came loose they could be lifted up easily.

Stone throwing by gangs was not unique to Birmingham, given that stones were a readily and freely available weapon. However, from the later 1860s it developed into local but widespread disorder within the city, caused by frightening crowds of young men milling around and attacking property, other gang members, innocent bystanders and the police.27 In May 1871, a possible explanation for this escalation was put forward at a meeting of the Watch Committee, the body of councillors which oversaw policing. Large numbers of boys were brought before the magistrates each Monday morning for stone throwing and gambling on Sunday. Councillor Lewis believed that one cause of the nuisance was the lack of proper recreation grounds. Because of the Factory Act, ‘the lads were not allowed to work after six o’clock, and as there was no place for recreation they turned into the street and commenced stone throwing or playing at bandy’ (a game like hockey played with a small ball and, in the case of working-class youngsters, sticks).²⁸

There was some justification to this opinion. Birmingham had no recreation grounds at all. Its only public open space was Calthorpe Park in Edgbaston on the south-west outskirts of the city in a middle-class area. This was distant from the densely populated central parts of the town, as was Adderley Park in Saltley to the east, which then lay outside Birmingham’s boundaries.

STREET LOYALTY

But the street gangs of early 1870s Birmingham had not suddenly emerged from a void, and there were other reasons for the escalation in violence other than a lack of recreation grounds. These stretched back to the 1840s and included antagonism towards the newly-formed police force and its attempts to control public behaviour, and, in poorer neighbourhoods, the phenomenon of loyalty to the street. The street was the living room and playground of the poor and its people were bound together by kinship networks, communal living and shared experiences. In a nation where so much was denied to the poor, the street belonged to them.

Although it refers to the inter-war years, Jerry White’s study of Campbell Bunk, the toughest street in North London, provides an insight into the emotion of ‘street belonging’ that is suggestive for the nineteenth century. He perceived that in ‘The Bunk’, the most important collective experience was centred on the street itself, through ‘its popular culture, relations between neighbours, its self-identity in the face of a more or less hostile world’. That collective experience was expressed in thought, through shared values, world views, and action.29

Poor families inhered to their street: they came from it and it belonged to them, whilst they also belonged to it. The streets in poor quarters became almost living entities, embodying the qualities which the poor themselves lauded: hardness, an ability to fight and a character which was rough and ready and, above all, plain-spoken and down-to-earth. Outsiders amongst the working class did not talk of the residents and the street separately; rather they were one, a unity indivisible and frightening to those who did not belong. Thus, it was not the people of Garrison Lane who were tough, but rather Garrison Lane itself. That loyalty to the street was enhanced by endogamy and matrilocality. In other words, the poor were more likely to marry someone from the same street or nearby, and the wife usually preferred to live close to her mother. These phenomena strengthened kinship networks, to such an extent that in the Bordesley area of Birmingham it was said of the people of St Andrew’s Road that ‘kick one and they all get a limp’.

For many young men, that sense of belonging to the street stimulated a pride in their own physical prowess and masculinity and through that the toughness of their street. This could and did lead to fights with those from other ‘hard’ streets, evidence for which emerges in the 1840s from the intriguing memories of Dyke Wilkinson. Born about 1835, he lived from the age of nine at the Dog and Partridge in Kenyon Street, Hockley – a tavern kept by his father. Writing in 1912, he remembered:

My only playground was the public street. Hundreds of times, I and a gang of lads have played ‘pitch back’, ‘fox and dowdy’, ‘bear and tender’, and other rough games in the middle of the roadway at the junction of Constitution Hill and Livery Street, a spot now crowded with electric tramway cars, cabs and vehicles of all sorts with scores of people – the policeman among them – looking on. These comparatively innocent games were often diversified by street fights; that is one set of lads would make a raid on those of another locality, often with quite serious results. I suppose there never were such inveterate fighters as the Birmingham lads of those days.30

Loyalty to the street among teenaged boys remained a strong feature of poorer working-class life well into the twentieth century. Until he was eight, Donald Phillips lived in a street in the Bull Ring, an area associated with street gangs from the mid-nineteenth century, and he remembered that:

All kids from about six years old to adults (which in the 1920s meant around fourteen) had to belong to the street gang. The warfare between rival streets had to be experienced to be believed. The routine was that one street would gang up, armed with sticks, stones, bottles and any other material ready to hand, and then make a foray into enemy territory. The alarm would go up and every single kid in the home street would rush out, desperately grabbing at any means of retaliation. I’ve seen props taken from clothes lines, building rubble, cobble stones, anything snatched up for fighting equipment.

The pitched battles that ensued must have frightened many adults and parents. They invariably culminated in much damage to property and person. I still bear some scars from those days including a split eyebrow from a piece of glass. The lump on my forehead from a large stone hurled at short-range is gone – but maybe the results remain! Usually, the skirmish ended when the police arrived on the scene. And, of course, afterwards the kids got it in the neck from the parents although often the fracas led to adult fights if some unfortunate had suffered serious damage and the parents, men and women, went looking for retribution.31

My great-uncle, George Wood, was a hard man who would become a sergeant in the 2nd Battalion SAS in the Second World War. Born in 1915, he grew up in Whitehouse Street, Aston – which had been notorious for its slogging gang in the 1880s. He told me that:

We used to fight as kids with other streets. Avenue Road, Chester Street, Holland Road, Rocky Lane. Oh, we was cock o’ the f— north, Whitehouse Street. There was me, Dougie Ayres, Jackie Hunt, Herbert Mortiboy, Bobby Steel and another lot. People used to watch us fight. Fists. Knew you worn’t hurting each other. Once you was on your arse you was out the fight. Never seen any kicking. If you was fighting then, you fought with a ring round you, copper’d only muck in if there was somebody getting hurt.³²

Across the city in Sparkbrook, Fred Franklin had similar recollections: ‘The kids used to fight one another with bleeding sticks, props and all sorts. One street against another. We used to have battles.’ He came from Chesterton Road but, ‘The Studs, Studley Street, they used to come armed with line props, garden forks. They used to meet in combat. Studs, undoubtedly, were the king pins.’33 My dad, Alfred ‘Buck’ Chinn, was a child in Studley Street in the 1930s and emphasised that it was ‘very, very hard, very hard and you’d always got to be proving yourself’. Dad recalled that as a youngster of seven or eight just before the Second World War:

A big battle took place, and it looked very big for me as a kid, between Studley Street and Queen Street and I’ll always remember the one feller in Queen Street, who was a big lad ’cause I was only a small kid, and they’d got props and brooms and the props of course were these square props and a battle took place and there was dustbin lids. Something had happened where it sparked off and this big battle took place.³⁴

It was the only such battle that Dad remembered, although as he got older he was involved in fights on a one-to-one basis with other youngsters: ‘But when we fought we fought and that was the finish and we always fought with our fists.’ Such fair fighting, which was regarded as the norm by the inter-war years, was a major difference to the fighting with weapons of the sloggers and peaky blinders. So too was the less aggressive attitude of working-class teenagers towards the police. This is manifested by the dramatic drop in the number of assaults on the police between 1915 and 1934, which revealed ‘a substantial decline in ruffianism’. In particular, they fell from 240 convictions in 1920 to just 96 in 1934 in a population of one million.³⁵

The less belligerent attitude of many young working-class males to the police was encapsulated by Syd Hetherington. Born in 1919, he grew up in poverty in a back-to-back in Holborn Hill, Nechells, and made it plain that:

There was a curious morality among those communities of the very poor. To cheat authority in the shape of government or a large company was acceptable within limits but robbing or distressing one’s peers was beneath contempt. Hence it was an unwritten law among children playing that damage to a neighbour’s property had to be made good. A window in a house broken during a game would be replaced immediately, funded by a whip-round among the players, whereas a broken glass in street-lamp would just result in a temporary halt to the game and a quick look around to ensure that no one, especially the local constabulary, had noticed. Our relations with the police were generally as friendly antagonists in that it was their job to stop us playing cricket and football in the streets and our job not to be caught. It was almost a game with justice meted out on the spot by a sharp clip behind the ear. Worse was when the constable decided to take the offender back to his parents for, while the parent would normally berate the policemen for bothering with such trivial offences, immediately he left the offending child would be beaten for bringing the police to the door.36

THE PITCH-AND-TOSS NUISANCE

Matters were very different in the mid to late-nineteenth century when the police were regarded by many working-class youths as enemies because they were enforcing laws which attacked popular culture and which had been passed on behalf of the middle class. Burgeoning and overcrowded, the urban centres of industrial Britain like Birmingham were often seen as a fearful place for the middling orders. Locally, the population rose from almost 178,000 in 1841 to just over 400,000 in 1881. Throughout most of that period, around 35 per cent were under fifteen, with a majority younger than 30. Many of these people were crammed into a collar of poorer working-class neighbourhoods encircling the town centre and from which the middle class increasingly took flight to salubrious suburbs like Edgbaston. Untrammelled by the rules and order of the old paternalistic society that had been swept away by the surge of industrialisation, urbanisation and class consciousness, much of this young population was boisterous, raucous, less deferential and fond of rough sports and illegal amusements.

The attitudes and worries of the middle class were captured in November 1839 by a writer to the Birmingham Journal, a few days before Birmingham’s police force was inaugurated. The correspondent strongly objected to ‘the constant practice of a set of disorderly boys to congregate in groups on the “Waste Ground” adjoining St. Thomas’s Church, (more particularly on the Sabbath Day), to the very great annoyance of every inhabitant in that vicinity’.37 The annoyances included gambling at pitch-and-toss as well as games like backjumping, racing and tip-cat. This latter was an ancient game played across the world. Basically, the game required a bat (the tip) of about three feet long and a piece of wood (the cat) of about four inches long and tapered at each end. The cat was put on the ground and tipped (struck) at one end to send it upward. In mid-air, the cat was slammed with the tip as far as possible.

As for pitch-and-toss, it was regarded as a problem nationwide. It involved groups of youths and men who threw pennies to a mark. The one whose coin was the closest won the right to toss all the coins into the air, keeping those which landed heads up. If any were left, they were thrown up by the man who had come second closest. This process continued until all the money had been won.

In Birmingham, because of the rapidly growing population, most of the land in the older parts was built upon, whilst the back-to-back houses that predominated in these districts had no gardens. This left only street corners or small plots of waste land for young men to meet. As they worked six days a week, they mostly came together late on a Saturday afternoon or on a Sunday and their favourite pastime was pitch and toss.

Despite the call for the interference of the authorities to stop the gathering of youths by St Thomas’s Church, nothing was done. As Geoffrey Floy has indicated in his study on Birmingham’s police before the First World War, the force was initiated in 1839 and in its early years its leadership adopted a sensitive attitude towards the enforcement of legislation against street activities.38 But over the next few years, the police were increasingly encouraged to take an interventionist approach towards ‘nuisances’, such as boys swimming in the canal and the obstruction of the public way by pigeon flyers, ‘black your boot’ boys and street traders.³⁹ This sterner form of policing was accompanied by the stricter enforcement of the law against street gambling. Between 1820 and 1849 there were just six mentions of pitch and toss in the local newspapers – and only one relating to convictions. But from the later 1850s, there was a marked increase in notices on arrests for pitch and toss.

Nationally, there was a growing middle-class concern over activities that were not deemed rational recreation and that attracted large and potentially unruly crowds of working-class youths, particularly on a day meant for worship. In Birmingham, the call for action for action against pitch and toss gatherings was sounded in March 1856, when the influential Reverend G. S. Bull of St Thomas’s Church claimed at the annual Church Pastoral Society meeting that no encouragement was given to the police to stop this practice.⁴⁰ That situation soon changed and, on 27 September 1857, the Birmingham Journal announced a ‘Crusade against Street Gambling’.

It was explained that several cases had been brought before the magistrates and that the stipendiary, Mr Kynnersley, had remarked that the game of pitch and toss ‘in the public streets, especially on the Sunday, had become prevalent, and was the cause of great public annoyance’. This necessitated making examples of offenders caught transgressing. A man of a very indifferent character was fined 10 shillings. He had been caught with another who was provided with a good character by his employers. 41 Having such a positive reference found some favour with the magistrates and this offender was therefore fined the lesser sum of two shillings. Still he was convicted, and in such a way, otherwise ‘respectable’ working men could be alienated from the police.

Indeed, it seems that the attempted repression of street gambling was the catalyst for increasing assaults against the police and for the emergence of the street gangs which led to the slogging gangs and peaky blinders. In 1853, only one arrest for causing an obstruction of the thoroughfare through pitch and toss was noted in the Birmingham newspapers. On a Saturday in November, Detective Officer Palmer came upon a crowd of 30 or 40 ‘thieves’, as they were described, playing the game in Thomas Street, a very poor part of the town. After watching them unseen for a minute or two, he went towards them but ‘they all scampered off as though there had been a posse of police in pursuit, instead of a solitary detective’. In a smart chase, Palmer managed to capture Joseph Ranford, ‘a man nearly six feet high, and strong in proportion’.⁴² Yet no attack was made upon the detective.

By contrast, four years later on a Sunday in late April 1857, when Police Constable O’Hara was taking two ‘pitch and toss fellows’ to the station, an attempt was made to rescue them. James Jennings, a striker from Well Lane, threw a stone at the officer, ‘which took violent effect on his head’; Jennings urged his companions to follow his example. Although the prisoner’s employer gave him a fair character, he was fined 20 shillings and the costs owing to the serious nature of the assault. If he did not pay, he would face 21 days’ imprisonment.43

The next year, on 28 April 1858, a headline in the Birmingham Daily Post directly connected gambling on the streets with assaults on the police. When two police officers had sought to arrest men playing pitch and toss again in Thomas Street ‘volleys of stones, thick as hail, came from the gang of about thirty or forty fellows’. One constable appeared in court with his head bound up as a result of the injuries he had received. Three men were fined, whilst it was observed that the offences of street gambling and throwing stones at the police were almost daily occurrences.⁴⁴

The ‘Police Crusade against Pitch and Toss in the Streets’ gathered force, and in September 1860 it was pronounced that, for some time past, as many as sixteen lads and youths had been brought before the magistrates in one day charged with the ‘evil’ that was of ‘a very mischievous character in many ways’. ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, throughout the 1860s, writers to local newspapers continued to complain of the inaction of the police. One such was the Reverend H. H. Horton. In 1861, he was so aggrieved at the most disgraceful acts of Sabbath breaking on the waste ground opposite the end of Dartmouth Street that he called at the Duke Street police station to demand action. Despite assurances that the problem would be remedied, it was not, and the Reverend declared himself to have no faith in the police force, having observed continued pitch and toss games, and confronted individual officers about their lack of action.⁴⁶

It is unsurprising that some, if not many, police officers were loath to take on gangs playing pitch and toss, given the violence they often faced. Floy emphasised that the most turbulent period for street disorder was between 1867 and 1880. During this period, the police, perhaps understandably, were slow in their response to such outbreaks because of the attacks on them when they sought to make arrests.47 Moreover, in this mid-Victorian battle for the streets, in which the police were entrusted to enforce laws predicated upon middle-class attitudes, they were badly outnumbered. In 1867, the authorised police strength of Birmingham was 400, giving one officer for 813 people. That year there were 465 assaults on constables.⁴⁸

Of course, not all such attacks were connected to pitch and toss gangs. In her important study of law breakers and law enforcers in Birmingham between 1867 and 1877, Barbara Weinberger has shown that in the 1870s ‘much of the hostility to the police arose through their attempts to enforce the licensing laws, from their presence around the pubs and from their interference in the drinking habits and drinking places of the working class’.⁴⁹ Still, the gathering of crowds of young men playing pitch and toss was intimidating and potentially dangerous as they were prepared to attack the police if attempts were made to stop the gambling.

STREET RUFFIANISM

The increased attention on ‘roughs’ was associated with the use of a new description for their activities: street ruffianism. Previously, this was associated with gangs in London and it was apparently first used locally in June 1864, when three young men were charged with causing an obstruction and using obscene language on the corner of Cottage Lane and Nelson Street West in Ladywood.50 They were Matthew Boyle, aged eighteen and a gas fitter; Alfred Ellis, twenty-six and a shoemaker, and John Sheridan, twenty-two and a caster. The chief officer of the borough’s police stated that ‘not a day passed but that he received four or five letters complaining of the disgraceful conduct of such ruffians’, whilst stipendiary magistrate Kynnersley said that the prisoners belonged to ‘a set of fellows who were an intolerable nuisance’. Sheridan and Ellis were each sent to jail for fourteen days with hard labour, but Boyle was discharged as he had been given a good character.⁵¹

These sentences did not act as a deterrent, and in July 1866 ‘a gang of roughs’ was said to still infest Cottage Lane and Nelson Street, to the danger and annoyance of the peaceable inhabitants.⁵² There were similar territorial gangs elsewhere. In March 1868, the attention of the police was called to one which assembled daily on the corner of Loveday Street and Princip Street in the Gun Quarter, where they disturbed the neighbourhood by gambling and using bad language.

In striving to enact the law against such crowds, with the potential to react violently, the police now adopted a different tactic. They sent in larger detachments of men, including those in plain clothes, to certain pitch and toss sites. In one week in 1868, ‘about fifty of the street and bye-way pests who amuse and delight themselves to the annoyance of the public in all parts of the town by their pitching and tossing’ were brought before the court. They were quickly followed by another fifteen, who were each fined 2s 6d. Aged between twelve and twenty-two, they came from streets across working-class Birmingham, including Bordesley, Hockley, Highgate, the Gun Quarter, Ladywood, Ashted, the town centre and St Bartholomew’s (Digbeth).53

Pitch and toss locations that drew in gamblers from a wide area were in the town centre. One such was Edmund Street, but as this area was transformed into the civic and business district, these sites were lost. However, spots within working-class neighbourhoods were unaffected and they pulled in a local crowd. It is probable that it was from such gatherings that the street gangs of Birmingham emerged.⁵⁴ One such was active in 1870. In April, twenty to thirty youths from Barford Street and Bissell Street were stopped by a policeman because they were shouting and swearing. Armed with sticks and stones, they told him that they were on their way to fight a gang from Sun Street with which they had clashed the previous night. More police officers came to keep the sides apart.⁵⁵

This Barford Street Gang was associated with a pitch and toss site. In 1871, a correspondent complained of ‘the disgraceful scenes enacted in Barford Street, more especially on Sundays’. A policeman on the beat was very rarely met with thereabouts, and ‘not only are gangs of rough fellows found playing at ‘pitch-and-toss’ on the Sabbath, but windows are broken and other acts of violence committed by missiles thrown by lawless ruffians, who well know there is no fear of a visit from the gentlemen in blue’.56

The gang problem was escalating and it was widespread across working-class Birmingham. In 1870, the roughs who gathered in Islington (by Five Ways) were dubbed ‘Mohawks’ in a local newspaper, whilst a few miles to the east, a gang in the vicinity of Henrietta Street in the Summer Lane district was damned as a terror to the inhabitants.⁵⁷ In September that year, a letter was read out at a meeting of the Birmingham Watch Committee, the group of councillors who supervised the police. The writer complained of the street ruffians who blocked the thoroughfares on the corners of the streets around the Sandpits. They used language so foul that it was unbearable for people to have any comfort in their houses. A surgeon from Exeter Row off Smallbrook Street was also aggrieved at the dangerous stone-throwing by boys on an unfenced piece of ground near to his home, and Alderman Manton observed that on the previous day, sixteen boys had been brought before the magistrates for stone throwing to the annoyance of the inhabitants.⁵⁸

A few months later, on Sunday, 30 April 1871, a gang rioted in the Gun Quarter. Again, the trouble was connected with pitch-and-toss. That evening, police officers Falvey and Palmer were on duty in Weaman Street where they saw a number of roughs gambling. The offenders ran into an entry leading into Slaney Street, and ‘stood at the end with bricks in their hands, threatening to throw at the constables if they attempted to touch them’. As the officers rushed at the gang, one of the youths threw a half-brick at PC Palmer. Fortunately, it missed him. PC Falvey managed to catch hold of Edward Lundy, ‘who was very violent and endeavoured to get out of his custody’. Walter Joyce then threw a missile, which struck the officer on the forehead and knocked him down senseless. It was a severe wound, and whilst the constable was ‘lying in a state of unconsciousness, Lundy threw several stones at him’. Aged seventeen, Joyce was sentenced to three months’ hard labour for violent assault, whilst Lundy was remanded.59

The disturbances of the next year brought the term ‘slogging gangs’ into use. Probably in response to their rise, in 1873, the number of police officers in Birmingham was increased by fifty to a total of 450. Still, this was merely one per 778 residents, and that year there were 473 assaults on constables.⁶⁰ On 30 March, there was ‘a catalogue of riotous outrages in various parts of Birmingham’. In Rea Street South, a mob attempted to rescue a prisoner from the police and attacked them with stones. Across the town in Great Hampton Street, officers as well as passengers on an omnibus were assailed with mud and stones. The offending youths then climbed onto the roofs of houses and from which they threw slates at the pursuing constables. Nearby in Newtown Row, policemen were injured with stones when a crowd tried to rescue a prisoner and others were stoned in the town centre in Great Queen Street. Trouble was also reported in Aston where a gang of sixty ruffians was ‘in the habit of breaking windows and beating passengers in the streets’ and on 25 March they had attacked fifteen policemen with stones.⁶¹ These were from the Warwickshire police force as back then Aston lay outside Birmingham. A favoured place for these Aston sloggers to gather and fight others was by the canal bridge in Avenue Road.62

On 1 April, the Birmingham Daily Post regretted that serious assaults on the police while in the execution of their duty were becoming uncommonly rife in Birmingham. This was especially so on a Sunday, when the pitch and toss gatherings were at their greatest and when ‘brutal cowards could give their ruffianism full vent’.⁶³ Ten days later, the newspaper bemoaned ‘eleven weeks of ruffianism in Birmingham’ when listing a series of crimes. Damned as a ‘melancholy record of the unprecedented ruffianism that has characterised Birmingham for some time past’, it included a disgraceful scene in Livery Street, which again took place on a Sunday. The police had sought to disperse some boys assembled in a dilapidated house but were pelted with brickbats (part of a brick). Fourteen of the offenders were taken into custody but ‘a large crowd followed them to the station, hooting, and throwing mud and stones’. When the police van came to take the prisoners to the Moor Street public office and lock up, ‘a mob of about a hundred of both sexes followed it along Great Hampton Street, Constitution Hill, and Snow Hill pelting it with mud, stones, and other missiles’.⁶⁴

It was now clear that slogging gangs were increasingly associated with certain streets which had a reputation for their tough youths and that, as well as attacking the police and innocent bystanders, these loosely organised gangs were fighting each other. In March 1873, the Birmingham Daily Post noted that a number of youths from the Bradford Street Slogging Band had waylaid a member of the Park Street Gang. After hitting him with a stick, he was knocked down and then kicked.65 Later that year, a slogging gang in Little Francis Street, Duddeston was confronted by two police officers who stated that the youths were armed with guttapercha ‘neddies’ (coshes made of a rubber-like substance) and also sticks with iron at the ends. Another gang of roughs in Great Tindal Street, Ladywood, was described as ‘a terror to the neighbourhood’.⁶⁶

Loyalty to the street, police efforts to suppress Sunday gambling and the gathering of young men on corners were key factors in the rise of slogging and they were part of a wider trend identified by Weinberger, a pioneering historian of policing and crime. Her research emphasised that a growing hostility to the police among the working class was most directly expressed by the poorest and most unrepresented. This hostility was rooted in a resistance to new trends in central and local government directives. A passive style of policing, whereby public order was maintained simply by walking the beat, was giving way to a more coercive and punitive approach.

In a drive to enforce urban discipline, increasingly the police were interfering with people with whom they had not previously bothered. As a result, overall working-class tolerance of the police shrank, whilst new police initiatives against behavioural offences such as drunkenness and street gambling provoked resistance. In turn, this led to an upsurge of assaults on constables in towns throughout England in the 1870s. Most particularly, Weinberger argued that the street gangs rejected police claims that they had the right to maintain order in the territories under gang rule.67

Yet though changes in policing may have prompted the rise of Birmingham’s street gangs, many of the youths and men involved in them were unsavoury characters who blighted the lives of the hardworking and respectable folk amongst whom they lived. According to the Birmingham Daily Post on 24 June 1873, despite severe sentences passed by the magistrates, ‘ruffianism still prevails to a considerable extent in Birmingham’. In some parts of the town, Sundays were ‘monopolised by the roughs who amuse themselves with gambling, throwing brickends at houses, assaulting peaceably disposed foot passengers, and rescuing prisoners from the custody of the police’.

These areas were also given over to mob law on Saturday evenings. Edwin Cook of 40 Potter Street in the Gosta Green neighbourhood was amongst those peaceable citizens viciously assaulted by the sloggers. A gun barrel maker and filer, on the afternoon of Sunday, 8 June, he was taking tea with his family when he heard abusive language outside his house and someone throwing up coins. He went out and saw several roughs playing pitch and toss. Cook asked them to go away but they jeered at him, using bad language. Joseph French was the ringleader and he threatened that ‘if you come here I will put you through’. He then pulled out a heavy whip-stock with an iron rod attached to it and with this dangerous weapon, French viciously struck Cook on the forehead as he bravely approached the gang.

Although he had a large wound and his clothes were saturated with blood, Cook took hold of French who handed the whip-stock to another rough, ordering him to ‘Lay on the —’ (the dash in the newspaper report symbolised a profanity). This he did and then ran off. However, the plucky Cook managed to keep hold of French until a constable arrived, but as he sought to take his prisoner to the station he was rescued by the mob. The following Sunday, Cook saw his assailant in York Street. He told the police, and after a smart chase French was apprehended. As Sergeant Millard was escorting him towards the police station ‘a mob came unexpectedly and pelted him with stones’. Taking advantage of the disturbance, French slipped off his jacket and escaped. Finally brought before the magistrates, he was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment with hard labour for a very gross assault.68

IRISH AND ENGLISH GANGS

The attack on Cook led to increased activity by the police and, in early July 1873, the Birmingham Daily Post optimistically hoped that now that the authorities were aroused to ‘the gravity of the newly-developed evil of street ruffianism in Birmingham’ it would soon become a matter of history.⁶⁹ Such a hope was misplaced. In early February 1874, fifteen-year-old John ‘Jacky’ Joyce stabbed fifteen-year-old John Thomas Kirkham in the neck in what appeared to be a disturbance between the Park Street and Milk Street gangs. The victim died in hospital and, at the Warwick Assizes, Joyce was found guilty of wilful manslaughter and sentenced to a month’s imprisonment and five years in a reformatory.70

By now the Milk Street neighbourhood was feared as so ‘infested with “roughs” of both sexes that it is dangerous for a policemen to “work a beat” alone, the mob actually hunting and stoning him “off the streets”’.⁷¹ Nearby, the Barn Street sloggers were also gaining notoriety as was the Allison Street Slogging Gang.⁷² That latter street ran parallel with Park Street and it is likely that the gangs from the two streets were one and the same. The ‘captain’ of this Allison Street Slogging gang was Thomas Joyce, brother of John ‘Jacky’ Joyce.⁷³

Born in Birmingham to Irish parents, the Joyce brothers seem to have moved into the Park Street neighbourhood in the 1870s.⁷⁴ Certainly, by the 1881 census, Thomas Joyce was living in Park Lane, the continuation of Park Street. Aged twenty-six, he was a tinsmith.⁷⁵ Like his younger brother, Thomas Joyce was violent. On Friday, 23 September 1874, he and Andrew Toy, a tube drawer from Bordesley Street, were involved in a bloody fight with William Smallwood, an eighteen-year-old from River Street. They appeared in court with their heads in hospital bandages. Joyce explained that on returning home from work, he was near to Deritend Bridge when Smallwood and a gang of about twenty came up to him. They wanted to know what he and his friend were looking at. Joyce then accused Smallwood of hitting him and Toy over the head with a strap, attached to which was a buckle, thus inflicting severe injuries. Toy corroborated this evidence, adding that he was also struck with a knife which he took from Smallwood.

Police Constable Butler found no knife upon Toy, whilst Smallwood told the court that he had used his belt only when ‘the Allison Street lot tried to stab him’. This version was supported by an independent witness, the son of a local factory owner. He had seen Joyce and Toy wrestling with a youth near the bridge and had heard one of them using very filthy language towards Smallwood, who did not use his buckle until his attackers produced their knives. The magistrates decided that in self-defence, Smallwood had given Joyce and Toy ‘a good thrashing – a taste of their own medicine’. He was discharged.76

It seems that this fight and the earlier one between the Park Street and Milk Street gangs, when young Kirkham was killed, were heightened by ethnic animosity. Park Street and the adjacent Allison Street were regarded as an Irish area. Just five streets down Digbeth, Milk Street was seen as English. According to Weinberger ‘the street gangs of the 1870s came together on the basis of territory and ethnicity, rather than for robbery itself, with each gang staking out and defending its territorial claims against outsiders – whether these were the police or a rival gang’.⁷⁷ Philip Gooderson also proposed that ‘ethnicity seems to be one of the bases of the early 1870s, at least in the Digbeth area, although it receded as the Irish were assimilated’.⁷⁸ Whilst acknowledging that some of the early slogging gangs were associated with ethnicity, it is important not to regard their emergence as an Irish thing. It was not.

By 1871, the Irish-born population of Birmingham had dropped to 9,076 from its peak a decade before. This was just 2.64 per cent of the total of 343,787, although that proportion expanded if the English-born children of migrants were included. Irish people were found in all parts of the town but there were pronounced differences in their concentration. The poorer labouring families from Roscommon and Mayo settled in several streets spread across the older, most insanitary parts of Birmingham. This meant that there was no Irish ghetto as such, although Park Street was widely regarded as the Irish quarter. It was the Irish there who had suffered greatly in the Murphy Riots of 1867, when ethnic conflict convulsed parts of Birmingham, and it was Park Street that had one of the most notorious of the early slogging gangs. Its street gang, therefore, probably came together to protect the Irish from both the police and English roughs.

The Murphy Riots were triggered on 16 June 1867, when the Irish of Park Street gathered to hiss, groan and throw stones at a meeting arranged by William Murphy, a rabblerousing Protestant preacher infamous for his filthy and vile attacks on the Pope, nuns and the Catholic church. A brawl with the police broke out and the next day a massive English mob attacked Park Street. The Irish defended themselves against this band of roughs, described by a more sympathetic observer to the Irish as made up ‘principally of pugilists, pick-pockets, garrotters, and that grade in social life termed the “dangerous classes””. Helped by the police, this misnamed ‘party of order’ forced out the Irishmen who tried to protect the street and gutted their houses.

Almost every house in Park Street was then broken into and devastated by the mob. With no protection, Irish women and children huddled in corners, mourning over the wreck of their little homes. They did so ‘all in a silence only interrupted by some half frantic wail of lamentation or the bursts of crying from the children’.79 Eventually, the mayor called out the military from the barracks in Ashted and magistrates read the Riot Act. This legislation authorised local officials to make a proclamation ordering the dispersal of any group of twelve or more people who were unlawfully, riotously, and tumultuously assembled. If they failed to do so within an hour of the proclamation, the authorities could use force to disperse them.

During the Murphy Riots, the Birmingham police had been massively outnumbered but were accused of siding with the English mob and of targeting Irishmen for arrest. In her detailed study of this riot, Patsy Davis revealed that the 450 special constables who were sworn in to support the police became subordinate to the English mob. Furthermore, Birmingham’s chief of police, George Glossop, recounted how the Monday riot ended when the ‘respectable’ portion of the English mob ‘formed up in front of the police and stoned the Irish with such force that the police became entire masters of the street’.⁸⁰ Having seen their property mangled, the Irish were then made culpable for the riots and punished for them.

Disturbances continued throughout 1867, and in October, an English mob marched on St Alban’s, an Anglo-Catholic Church, and tried to attack Irish areas and the Catholic churches of St Chad’s, St Peter’s and St Michael’s. They were defended by the Irish. Tensions remained high over the next few years, and on 28 April 1872, three weeks after the first mention of the slogging gangs, several police constables came upon ‘about 400 roughs, divided into two “gangs” Irish and English’. John Morris was arrested for creating a disturbance and throwing stones, which he also incited others to do. Aged thirty-four, he was a bricklayer from Galway living with his parents in Barford Street. Interestingly, this was an overwhelmingly English street.81

Gooderson found more evidence of ethnic antagonism in 1874, when Chief Superintendent Glossop showed the Watch Committee a black and green paper flag upon which was a skull and crossbones and a shamrock. It had been found stuck on to the railway viaduct in Allison Street after a fight between rival bands.⁸² Still, the localised enmity between English and Irish gangs living close to each other in and around Digbeth faded away as the Irish-born population declined and as intermarriage increased. Moreover, whilst the animosity of the young second generation Irish of Park Street and Allison Street to the police was intensified by the force’s complicity in the sack of Park Street during the Murphy Riots, that antipathy was shared by the street gangs in the many areas in which the English poor predominated. It was a hatred that extended towards those who bore witness against sloggers and who were seen as ‘coppers’ –police informants.⁸³

This was made clear in a riot in the summer of 1874, said to involve between 500 and 600 people in the Digbeth area. A few days previously, a local man had come forward as a witness for an attack on the police. The culprit was apprehended and sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment. Then, on the night of 13 July, the witness was sighted locally and chased. Desperately seeking refuge, he ran into a house in Bordesley Street that was stoned. A force of fifteen constables and a sergeant traced the rioters to Allison Street but when they reached Coventry Street ‘they were brought to a stand by the stones hurled by the mob and resembling a hail storm’.

The police charged and arrested four ringleaders, aged from twenty to sixty-four. A number of others were charged with riotous conduct, including the fifteen-year-old Julia Giblin, an umbrella maker from New Canal Street. This is a rare case of a young woman in a slogging gang disturbance in the 1870s, although there is a little more evidence of female involvement with sloggers and peaky blinders later in the century. Giblin was of Irish descent as were some of the others arrested – but their number also included those of English heritage. Councillor Arthur Chamberlain, the younger brother of the mayor Joseph Chamberlain, had his factory in the area where the riot had taken place. As a witness of the fracas, he spoke of the frequency of these riots in the district and mention was also made of the Park Street and Milk Street gangs.84

THE NAVIGATION STREET RIOT

Assaults on the police continued, as did fighting between street gangs. In March 1875, it was reported that on one Sunday afternoon, between 100 and 200 youths were throwing stones and brick bats at each other in Hall Street, Ashted, whilst two young men were each fined two shillings and sixpence for throwing stones in Coleshill Street and assaulting a PC Morley.85 That month, on 7 March 1875, a violent disorder took place in Navigation Street after two detectives arrested William Downes, a man suspected of involvement in a robbery. He was apprehended in the Bull’s Head Inn, Wharf Street, which was crowded with his friends. As Downes was marched along Navigation Street, the officers were ‘pelted by a party of roughs with stones and mud, and very soon an immense mob assembled’. They were in great danger of being hurt and having their prisoner rescued when Sergeant Fletcher came to their assistance and tried to hold the mob back. He was surrounded and assailed by twenty to thirty ruffians who knocked him down and beat him with bludgeons and stones and jumped upon him.

By now, the detectives had managed to reach the corner of Suffolk Street, where they saw PC Lines coming. One of them exclaimed, ‘For God’s sake, go to Sergeant Fletcher, they are murdering him!’ The gutsy officer immediately ran up the street, drew his staff and rushed to the rescue of Sergeant Fletcher, who had been stabbed in the face and received several scalp wounds. Fletcher succeeded in getting away, however PC Lines was beset by the roughs and, as a witness graphically described it, ‘They clung to him like rats, and tried to get him down but failed.’ He beat them off, but, ‘In the heat of the affray one of the ruffians plunged his knife into his neck, near the left ear, and then Lines fell.’ His assailants now kicked and beat him until a cry was raised that more police were coming and they dispersed. PC Lines was taken to Queen’s Hospital in Bath Row, where he died on 25 March.

Twelve men were arrested for their part in the Navigation Street Riot. Aged between seventeen and twenty-three, it was stated that all of them were convicted thieves who had given the police a great deal of trouble, whilst several of them had been convicted several times of assaulting the police.86 One of them, Jeremiah Corkery alias Corcoran, was found guilty of the murder of PC Lines and was hanged. Four other men were convicted of unlawful assault and sentenced to life imprisonment. They were John Creswell, Thomas Whalin, Thomas Leonard and Charles Mee.⁸⁷ According to a correspondent to the Birmingham Weekly News in 1955, Creswell was released after twenty years, and in the 1890s was living near Broad Street, a respectable working man.⁸⁸

Will Thorne, founder of the Gasworkers’ Union, was born in 1857 and grew up in Farm Street, Hockley, and in his life story he wrote that there was ‘a very tough gang of roughs who were always looking for trouble’ in the Navigation Street locality. It seems that as well as thieving and assaulting the police, they carried out a crude form of protectionism. However, after the murder of PC Lines:

The action of the police resulted in the final clearing up of the neighbourhood. It was a relief, especially for the patrons of the Birmingham Theatre Royal that was adjacent to Navigation Street. This was a favourite place for the gang to operate.

One of their games was to come along when the people were lined up to go into the theatre. I was often in the crowd, and just as the doors were open they would leap-frog over the waiting crowd, run to the gallery and take charge of all the best centre seats. Later they would sell some of these seats, after keeping a number for themselves. Up to the time of the riots neither the police nor the theatre authorities were able to prevent these raids.

Whilst the theatre raids and the murder of a police officer differ greatly in the scale of violence, the testimony of Will Thorne shows the general unrest at the time, revealing an environment that leant itself to the escalation of such violence. This type of social unrest unfortunately was not limited to this area alone. Despite the breaking up of the Navigation Street Gang, elsewhere street gangs carried on blighting the lives of the hard-working and respectable poor as much as they tormented police constables on the beat. So bad was the problem that in May 1875 a deputation from Duddeston Ward met representatives of the borough magistrates to discuss their belief that violent offenders were not punished severely enough. Led by Councillor Derrington, they explained that a great many street rows had taken place in the Duddeston, Nechells and St Bartholomew’s wards. Many of these arose from drunkenness, but others seemed like faction fights with ‘the opposing forces being drawn up in the neighbourhood, and a general melee ensued’. The Birmingham Daily Post thought the deputation misguided, asserting that it had exalted every little street row into an outbreak of ruffianism and that its unfounded claims were refuted by the official criminal statistics.89

Such a dismissal would have been scant comfort to Margaret Moran. A steel-toy maker aged twenty-one from the Navigation Street neighbourhood, she was one of a number of witnesses against the rioters who had been persecuted and threatened. In her case, she was also stabbed by Corcoran’s sister and was ‘afraid of her life’.⁹⁰

By contrast, the magistrates themselves took the complaints of the deputation seriously. Alderman Manton pointed out that not one case in six was reported in the newspapers, whilst the stipendiary magistrate, Kynnersley, said that it was clear that ‘great outrages were committed, but those who were brought up had very little to do with the offence and were frequently brought up for refusing to help the police’. It would be a great injustice to punish those people as if they were the perpetrators, whilst the real ringleaders were seldom brought before the magistrates.⁹¹ Still, and perhaps prompted by the deputation and the murder of PC Lines, the Watch Committee increased the police force by 50 men so that double beats could be worked in the most dangerous areas.

It seemed that these actions and the severe sentences passed on the Navigation Street rioters had an effect as, in February 1876, the Birmingham Daily Post wrote that, ‘We have enjoyed such long immunity in Birmingham from street rows that we were beginning to hope the riotous spirit of the local “residuum” was at length fairly subdued, if not positively extinguished.’ Such hopes had been dashed, however, by a recent street fight between roughs and the police and by an organised disturbance.92

A year later, it was reported that for several months ‘a large number of rough youths had congregated at the corner of Great Charles Street, and indulged in what was vulgarly known as slogging’. They attacked each other with large sticks and pelted each other with stones and brickbats, whilst they watched out for the police and decamped when they were seen.⁹³

The ruffianism in Birmingham was now drawing unwelcome attention nationally. In 1877, at the Northampton Assizes, Justice Hawkins commented that ‘night after night the streets of Birmingham become the scene of an almost irrepressible violence and brutality’. This was followed by a letter to The Times, in which the writer sought an explanation for the discrepancy between the praise bestowed on Birmingham for the perfection of its municipal institutions and the large number of cases of violence in the town. This prompted ‘a warm discussion’ at a meeting of the Watch Committee. The councillors agreed that recent remarks were a stigma founded upon misrepresentations. Birmingham was being held up to ridicule and scorn not only in every corner of England, but also throughout the whole of the civilized world. Everywhere it would be asked, ‘What does The Times say?’ The answer would be that violent crimes were nightly occurrences in Birmingham. In response, it was resolved that Major Bond, the chief officer of the police, should write to the newspaper with statistics to refute the allegations.94

Birmingham’s leaders valued highly the recent reputation that they had won, nationally and internationally, for good governance, progressive policies and municipal socialism. Four years before, in 1873, the council had been taken over by young members of the Liberal Party. Under the dominating leadership of Joseph Chamberlain, important reforms were carried out, including the municipalisation of the private gas and water companies. Like Chamberlain, many of the councillors supporting him were Non-Conformists and represented the larger manufacturers. Though they had a connection with the more skilled and regularly employed of the working class, they were sharply separated from the poor in every way: residentially, economically, educationally, and aspirationally as much as by speech, attitudes and beliefs. Consequently, the poor were not embraced by the new civic concept of Birmingham.

As Weinberger has rightly emphasised, the denial of allegations of disorder by the council, together with the lack of decisive action on the part of the magistrates ‘points very strongly to an attitude on the part of the authorities that the rowdyism in certain areas of town was of concern to few people other than the local inhabitants’. Weinberger’s work focused on the perceived ‘criminal class’, towards which she concluded that a strategy of exclusion was implemented by the urban elite as it presented ‘no real political threat, while it came to serve a diminishing economic function’.⁹⁵ These insightful comments could be applied as much to poorer young men in general. Their exclusion from the civic entity was another contributory factor in the expansion of street gangs in 1870s Birmingham, a decade otherwise regarded as a positive period during which Birmingham modernised and went forward.

ASTON SLOGGERS

Street ruffianism was widespread across the working-class districts of Birmingham, and in 1878 there were 478 assaults on the police. Over the next few years that figure dropped noticeably, with only 279 in 1883.96 This may have been affected by a more cautious approach by constables on the beat towards Sunday gamblers. Certainly, prosecutions against them seem to have fallen and those who were arrested tended to be boys rather than older youths.⁹⁷ Such an attitude by the police was intimated by an inhabitant of Aston, who wrote that pitch and toss in the vicinity of Kensington Street was an intolerable nuisance because of a mob of roughs. Yet, whilst a police-officer was stationed to watch for attacks on Salvation Army members in Porchester Street, there was no such oversight of the gamblers.⁹⁸

The infilling of waste land in Birmingham may also have had a temporary effect on the decline in prosecutions for playing pitch and toss. With the loss of bigger spaces, those who threw coins now gathered on Sundays in smaller numbers in side streets in working-class districts.⁹⁹ This practice continued into the 1920s, and on a Sunday afternoon when the pubs closed my nan, Lil Perry, and other youngsters would watch the men who came out of the Albion on the corner of Whitehouse Street and Aston Road North ‘tossing the pennies till the police came and they would run’.100

It may be that the police were acting more warily not only with regard to pitch and toss gatherings but also to the slogging gangs as reports on them diminished in the early 1880s, but any hopes that they had disappeared were mistaken. In June 1882, the Harding Street and Whitehouse Street gangs fought near to Miller Street. The Birmingham Mail reported that, ‘The affair seems to have cropped up through the existence of a number of roughs who band themselves together and call themselves “slogging gangs”. The mission of these seems to be to bring together partisans from certain streets and engage in combats, which have several times resulted in considerable injury being done.’ Such was the case in this fight. Thomas Dan was hit by a brick in the head and knocked down and then kicked as he lay on the floor. The onslaught on him was finished with a blow from a piece of iron which broke his skull. Knocked insensible, he received a compound fracture of the skull, a broken arm and a broken thumb.¹⁰¹

Later that year, a gang was causing trouble by the corner of New Canal Street with Fazeley Street and the revival of the slogging gangs was announced in the press.¹⁰² The chief of police, Mr Farndale, reassured the Watch Committee that although there been some complaints of the prevalence of what were called slogging gangs, the majority of the stabbing cases occurred in courts of back-to-backs or private houses.¹⁰³ This dismissive observation gives weight to Weinberger’s belief that attacks on poorer people were of concern only to those in their neighbourhoods.

The ongoing problem of the sloggers was made plain in 1884 when sloggers were reported as throwing stones at each other in Summer Lane, and two years later the slogging gangs of Aston made the headlines.104 In July 1886, police constables Dawson and Houghton were taking Alfred Simpson from Whitehouse Street to the police station ‘when they were set upon by a gang of roughs, who stoned them, and otherwise behaved in a very violent manner’. The officers were compelled to seek protection in a shop. Simpson then came up to PC Houghton and said that ‘he would put it in for him, and immediately afterwards one of the stones which were flying about in all directions struck him on the back of the head’, whilst a passer-by was knocked down insensible by one of the stones and had to be conveyed home in a cab.

In court it was said that Simpson was a member of the slogging gang which infested Aston Road, Whitehouse Street and the surrounding neighbourhood. Indeed, ‘There was scarcely a day but when the Aston slogging gang met a Birmingham gang and held a pitched battle, the weapons used being stones and brickends.’ So serious was the problem that extra police had been put on duty. Simpson, who was from a notorious family, was sent to prison for 21 days with hard labour.¹⁰⁵

A month later, on Wednesday, 18 August, Superintendent Walker told the Aston police court that on the previous Sunday, ‘There was a severe fight between the Aston slogging gang and another gang, and the battle continued up Rocky Lane nearly to Aston Cross.’ By five o’clock, nearly 2,000 were involved. They included boys ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen and men of mature age, who were armed with heavy belts, sticks and brick-ends, which they freely used in all directions. So great was the disturbance that the Birmingham police had to send reinforcements to the borough boundary, while the whole of the available force in Aston was required to stop the fighting. Yet, only two men from the large number involved were arrested and charged.106

The nearest slogging gangs to Aston were those of Nechells, focused on Charles Arthur Street, and Duddeston, centred on Great Lister Street and Cromwell Street. Gangs also remained in the Digbeth area, such as that in Oxford Street, and, by October 1888, it was feared that ruffianism was increasing in severity both in Birmingham and Aston, whilst there was evidence of a rudimentary organisation to some gangs.¹⁰⁷ Charles Frith, a nineteen-year-old axle filer from Cromwell Street, was named as the ‘king’ of the Charles Arthur Street gang when he was charged with unlawful wounding, whilst the Aston Slogging Gang was involved in blackmail.¹⁰⁸

According to newspaper reports in September 1888, apparently the latter had a system of compulsory assurance against fines, whereby gang members made contributions to a common fund. This ‘insurance scheme’ was checked by the Aston magistrates by sending all convicted members of the gang to prison without allowing them the option of a fine. In response, another ploy was adopted, whereby money was raised for the benefit of any member newly released from jail. In pursuit of this, Simpson and others of the Aston Slogging Gang ‘called upon an Aston resident, and asked for a subscription to the fund, and, when they were refused, straightway commenced to beat the man about the head with their buckled belts’. Simpson was arrested and sent to prison for two months.109

The infamy of the Aston Sloggers was heightened in February 1889, when five of them were charged with assaulting the police in Birmingham. Named as members of the Whitehouse Street Slogging Gang, they had some grievance against a rough in Digbeth and on a Saturday night went with others to pay off old scores. Two police officers saw William Greening and Frederick Robinson take off their belts and run down Digbeth, where they assaulted an unknown man. As they did so, Greening shouted, ‘Whitehouse Street for them! Let them have it!’ One of the constables took him into custody, but he struggled so violently that the officer was forced to take his prisoner into a baker’s shop close by. From inside, Greening called out, ‘Now, lads, lay on; don’t give over. We can lick these — ’ (in these cases the dash symbolises a profanity). He struck the policeman several times on the head, who was also kicked by Robinson.

Several stones were thrown from the gang members outside. They included John Coley, who shouted, ‘Now, Aston boys, we can give it these —.’ Seven or eight of the gang took off their belts and struck several policemen. The stipendiary magistrate said the disturbances were a disgrace to a civilised city, and if the law could put them down it should do so. Coley and a Frederick Gibbs were sentenced to two months’ imprisonment with hard labour; a Peter Ridding was given six weeks; and Greening and Robinson were each fined 20 shillings and costs, or in default one month’s imprisonment with hard labour.110

Within Aston, it seemed that the sloggers were unbridled. In February 1889, James Casey and others violently assaulted three constables. He was sentenced to two months imprisonment with hard labour for each of the assaults, but as he was taken away from the dock he informed the magistrates that he would ‘make it hot for the “coppers” when he came out’. At that he was ordered back into the dock and sentenced to another month for making the threat. Casey was unperturbed, announcing ‘that only makes seven months and a fortnight, and I know you can’t give me more than twelve months, so I shall do what I say’.¹¹¹

The ferocity with which the sloggers attacked the police was made clear in July 1889. That month, the Aston Police Court was told that George Guy, a labourer, had attacked PC Payne, who was knocked down by a violent blow. Regaining his feet, Payne was then brutally kicked and beaten by Guy, Joseph English and William Perkins. While struggling on the ground, the constable was robbed of his whistle and armlet and had his helmet taken from him. Fortunately, police constables Lander and Griffiths came to his aid. By now, a vast crowd had collected, and a William Haywood went to help the police. He was a solitary figure. In evidence, he referred not only to Guy’s brutality but also to the indifference of the crowd, none of whom assisted the officers who were being ‘made footballs of’. Haywood helped the officers take the three prisoners to the police station. One of them was frog marched as he was so violent. Superintendent Walker said that the prisoners were the three biggest blackguards in Aston and that it was impossible to keep good men in the constabulary because of ‘the brutality of such roughs, who were prominent members of the slogging gang’.112

Only a few other towns had a gang problem like Birmingham and Aston. Liverpool had its corner men, and there were street gangs in London from at least the 1880s, whilst Manchester and Salford had scuttling gangs.¹¹³ The scuttlers have been regarded as Britain’s first youth cult, but that designation should be given to jointly to the sloggers. Both sets of youths joined territorial gangs. Both fought each other viciously. And both hurled stones at their enemies and then fought close up with belts. In his deeply researched book on the gangs of Manchester and Salford, Andrew Davies highlighted an article an article on ‘Scuttlers and Scuttling’ by Alexander Devine. Published in the Guardian in 1890, it explained the use of the belt as a weapon:

The most dangerous part of the belt is the buckle, and this is made of brass, and usually measures about three inches in diameter, though I have seen them both bigger and smaller. They are used by the ‘scuttler’ fastening one end of the strap into the buckle end, and then, winding his hand round the strap from the wrist, he grasps the leather, leaving about eight or ten inches of the belt to be used as a weapon, the winding of it round his arm preventing it from being readily dragged from him in a fight.

The only thing that differed between the scuttlers and the sloggers was that the former wore brass-tipped clogs whilst the latter favoured steel-tipped boots.114 By the late 1880s, slogging gangs were causing trouble across Birmingham as well as in Aston. Newspapers reported frequent stone throwing, assaults and attacks by named slogging gangs: Nechells,¹¹⁵ Floodgate Street,¹¹⁶ Allison Street, Milk Street and Charles Henry Street, as well as Blucher Street and Legge Street.¹¹⁷ Unsurprisingly, the slogging gangs of Aston and Birmingham were notorious locally but they had also gained ill-repute nationally. In 1882, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph noted, sarcastically: ‘The latest gift of Birmingham to the institutions of our country is the “slogging gang”. The name is not a pretty one but it is appropriately descriptive. Its members are roughs, probably so called because their manners lack the mildness engendered by a belief in the right of property and the sanctity of life.’¹¹⁸ From 1890, the sloggers and slogging gangs were also known by another name that would become even more infamous: peaky blinders.