ChaoticMusings

We tend to look back to Victorian times with rosy nostalgia, particularly at Christmas.   But for many the reality was really harsh, the poverty crashing and the violence as harsh, if not worse, than we see today.

'Life in parts of Manchester is as unsafe and uncertain as it is amongst a race of savages." With these words, Mr Justice Wills jailed 19-year-old Owen Callaghan for 20 years for the manslaughter of Joe Brady during a late night "scuttle", or gang fight, on the streets of Manchester.

Callaghan was one of a band of scuttlers from Angel Meadow, a notorious slum packed with beerhouses, dosshouses and brothels, five minutes' walk from Victoria Station. Brady, aged 18, belonged to the Bengal Tigers, a youthful yet already legendary mob from the courts and alleys off Bengal Street in nearby Ancoats. The two gangs clashed with knives and the buckle ends of their heavy leather belts in seemingly endless raids on street corners and pubs.

This was Manchester in 1887. Along with the neighbouring borough of Salford, the city was gripped by recurring panics over youth gangs and knife-crime during the late 19th century. Scuttling gangs were seldom associated with crimes against property, but for three decades from the early 1870s the police and courts struggled to contain a bewildering spiral of violence. Fatalities among scuttlers were relatively rare – Victorian gang members generally sought to maim and scar, rather than kill – but serious woundings were commonplace and doctors at Ancoats Hospital complained of having to stitch up dozens of scuttlers per month when the Bengal Tigers were doing their worst.

In a week when the prime minister has declared "all-out-war on gangs and gang culture", it is worth reminding ourselves that we have been here before. In the 1880s – as today – gangs were clustered in areas of chronic poverty, unemployment and ill-health. Neighbourhoods renowned for their gangs, such as Ancoats and the Greengate quarter of Salford, were hotbeds of tuberculosis too: a map compiled by a Manchester physician to show the districts worst affected in 1887 might have served equally well as a map of gangland. Fifty per cent of families in a sample district in Ancoats were classified as "very poor" in 1889. With household incomes of less than four shillings per adult per week, they were "always face to face with want". For many young men growing up in Bengal Street, gang membership offered one of the few available sources of status, excitement and – in the eyes of their peers, at least – respect.

In a stark parallel with present-day responses to gangs, scuttlers were routinely demonised by politicians and sections of the press. Victorian gang members were derided as ruffians, brutes, barbarians, savages and "juvenile terrorists". To Justice Wills, pronouncing sentence on Owen Callaghan in 1887, they were "like different tribes of wild Indians … with apparently no other motive than a ferocious love of fighting".

Opinion among readers of the Manchester Guardian was keenly divided. The judge's comments prompted a flurry of letters to the editor. Some attributed gang violence to the squalid conditions of life in "outcast" Manchester, but others were rabid in tone: "If the bloodthirsty ruffians who perpetrate these outrages were to be shot down like mad-dogs when caught red-handed, the law would only be doing a swift duty to all whose lives are [worth more] than those of cats and dogs."

These supposedly feral youths were seldom invited to speak for themselves. Four members of an Ancoats gang were interviewed by a Guardian journalist in 1898. The reporter found them funny, articulate and surprisingly polite. They sported a uniform of pointed clogs, "bells", or bell-bottomed trousers, measuring 14 inches round the knee and 21 round the foot, and "flashy" silk scarves. Their hair was cut short at the back and sides, but they had grown long fringes which were plastered down on the forehead over the left eye. Their peaked caps were angled to display the fringe. They were wary of leaving the safety of their own neighbourhood, and only ventured into the city-centre in groups. Asked how they would go about provoking a fight, one of the youths replied: "You just soap your hair over your left eye and put on a pigeon-board cap. Then you walk into Salford."

Scuttlers' parents were castigated too. "It was high time that parents should be taught their duty; at present they seem either regardless of this or utterly afraid of correcting their children," lamented the Guardian in 1890. The city's magistrates turned to ever-stiffer sentences in a desperate attempt to deter as well as punish. Early batches of scuttlers were rounded up and fined by the dozen. Most came from families too poor to pay fines of 20 or even 40 shillings (more than two weeks' income for most households in Ancoats or Angel Meadow) and they flooded the city jail at Belle Vue as a result. The governor's annual report revealed that 406 juveniles – 374 of them boys – were admitted to Belle Vue in 1871 alone. Most of the boys had been convicted of scuttling. Local councillors grew concerned at the number of 12- and 13-year-olds languishing in the cells because their parents could not afford to pay their fines. The boys themselves saw their plight differently: one signed a letter home, "the Hero of Belle Vue Gaol".

Prison did not deter scuttlers. Quite the reverse: as jail terms were scaled up from weeks to months to years during the 1870s, gangs continued to take root throughout the factory districts that ringed the city-centre. The civic authorities resorted to desperate measures: notices were fixed to lamp-posts detailing the exemplary prison sentences meted out in 1884; six years later, the mayors of Manchester and Salford appealed in vain to the home secretary for a bill to introduce flogging for scuttlers. The "cat" was reserved for those convicted of robbery with violence – a clue to Victorian values. Even when it was wielded, as in Liverpool, where youthful "high rippers" were sentenced to as many as 60 lashes by the formidable Mr Justice Day following a spate of street robberies during the mid-1880s, its deterrent effect was difficult to discern. Anger at the failure of deterrence was exacerbated by young people's demeanour in court. In Manchester and Salford, reporters watched gang members smirk as doctors detailed the wounds they had inflicted. Some scuttlers threatened to "swing" (hang) for those who testified against them. "Five stretches for nothing! Wait till I come out," warned Alexander Pearson, jailed for five years for unlawful wounding in 1892.

Pearson's offence was committed just days after 16-year-old Billy Willan from Ancoats had been sentenced to hang for the murder of rival scuttler Peter Kennedy. With Willan confined to the condemned cell in Strangeways, his sweetheart, Hannah Robin, was among those who went looking for revenge. She was one of four girls arrested for scuttling with belts outside a music hall at 11 o'clock on a Friday night. When she appeared before the magistrates, she was ordered to pull up her sleeve to reveal her latest tattoo. It read: "IN LOVING REMEMBRANCE OF WILLIAM WILLAN." This was a devoted gesture, but it was premature: Willan was reprieved on account of his age, police in Ancoats having confirmed that he had been a good boy until led astray by his companions.

A judge suggested that Manchester's gang districts should be flooded with police until scuttling was suppressed. The police themselves were less confident in their powers: experience had taught them that as soon as they managed to quieten one district, fighting broke out in another. Henry Matthews, home secretary in the Conservative government headed by Lord Salisbury, had another idea. He proposed that local employers should "make it a fixed rule of their establishments that any youth, whether boy or girl, discovered to belong to a scuttling gang will be immediately dismissed." Quite how the hundreds – if not thousands – of young people liable to be affected were to earn a living thereafter was not clear. (The idea was quietly dropped as the furore over Kennedy's death subsided.)

Scuttling in Manchester and Salford declined in the late 1890s. The demise of the gangs owed less to draconian policing and punishment than to a more forward-thinking response pioneered by former Guardian journalist Alexander Devine, a police court missionary (an early form of probation officer). His "working lads' club" for Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock, opened in 1887, inspired a generation of Mancunians and Salfordians to invest substantial amounts of both time and money in new facilities for education, training and recreation for youths in some of the poorest neighbourhoods in Britain. Sport was key to the clubs' appeal and, within a generation, lads from Ancoats, Salford and Hulme were more likely to take each other on at football, athletics or boxing than scuttling.

The clubs that flourished most and lasted longest were those that involved local people in their day-to-day running. One such club – Salford Lads' and Girls' Club – survives today as testament to Devine's faith in working with, rather than against, young people. Older residents elsewhere in Manchester point with regret to the closure of their local clubs when they talk about the lack of comparable facilities for their grandchildren. "There's nothing round here for kids today," one man told me recently as he showed me the sites of two former clubs each within 10 minutes' walk of his home in Ancoats. A police surveillance van passed by as we walked. I couldn't help but think that was the one thing targeted at young people in the streets once walked by scuttlers.

Andrew Davies is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Gangs of Manchester (Milo Books, 2008).