On the streets of Manchester with child street sellers in 1878

I do not choose to be on a Manchester street on a cold morning at 2 am any more.

There was a time when I did, and we have all done it.  Pick any one of a number of scenarios from that late night city club, to the evening that began sedately enough with a meal and a theatre visit but just ran on into the early hours.

And then it’s that hard choice, pick up a cab in Albert Square and spend the last of your money or walk through the streets and settle on an all night bus, full of happy drunks with just the chance of trouble?

And either way it’s those shadowy figures you see huddled in doorways, lying across entrances to expensive shop fronts trying to get a few hours of sleep as the night becomes just that colder and there is the ever present threat of danger from some unthinking violent gang. We all know about them, and sometimes the remnants of the soiled and dirty sleeping bags, bin bags and other personal possessions are still there when the city becomes a place of work again reclaimed by office workers and shop assistants.

All of which is an introduction to a story which I posted earlier but deserves a second airing.
I could have done a similar walk back in the 1870s and amongst the happy crowds making their way home I would have encountered plenty of young children out on the streets of the city attempting to make a little money.

It was as one historian wrote “a scandal and disgrace to our city”* and continued until 1901 when the Corporation obtained the power to regulate street trading by children under the age of 16.
Nor was it  confined to Manchester and Salford but some places like Liverpool had been quicker to act.

And in an effort to highlight the “scandal” ten members of the Manchester and Salford Refuge went out on the streets on a Monday night in 1878 to “systematically investigate the condition of all children found hawking within a certain radius between the hours of 9pm and midnight.  The plan pursued was to enter into conversation with the children; if their little remaining stock of paper or matches was an obstacle to their returning home, to purchase it and then accompany them to where they lived, thus obtaining correct information not only of the children themselves but of their surroundings; and how far the circumstances of their families afforded any excuse for their being there upon the streets at such an unseemly hour.”**

Now it was only one night, the number interviewed ran to just 50 and the number of streets covered is not clear but the findings do not make for easy reading.  Over two thirds of the children were under 13, just under a third was from single parent families and only nine of the fifty “out owed to the poverty of the deserving parents.  The balance of 41 were either out to help support drunken parents or owing to the neglect of careless parents.”

Of course there may be a degree of subjectivity here and I want to go back to the original detailed reports which should be available.  But they are confirmed by contemporary newspaper reports.  The Manchester Guardian wrote that “the great majority of children in the streets late at night were there to find money for drunken, vicious or careless parents.”  While letters to the press highlighted similar examples.  In 1885 the secretary of the Refuge wrote that on one Saturday night with “a bitter wind driving the sleet like fire along the streets; many of the poor little wretches who crowded Market Street and Blackfriars had scarves tied round their hats to keep them on their heads; even as we , well clad as we were, got wet.”

The children were selling the early editions of the Sunday papers and might be expected to continue till one in the morning.

“Two little chaps under ten years of age told us they had to stop out all night selling; another had the key to of the house in his pocket and quietly let himself in at 2 a.m. dreading to disturb those who should have been themselves the brad winners.”

Now we can play the numbers game and reflect that this might be just a small sample and yes more research needs to be done, but even so it is something of an insight into the plight of children on our streets and helps understand the motives of those engaged in the rescue work.

Of course this does not ignore the fact that such activities should not have had to go on in one of the greatest cities in the country, where the wealth of the few was paraded for all to see in the fine Exchanges, and well to do homes.  Nor should we forget the resistance from many MPs to moves to regulate child street trading.

But here we have the start of a detailed analysis of the problem which I hope allows up to step away from statistics to appreciate the awful picture of child neglect in one city during the 19th century.
In the July of 1888 the Secretary of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children asserted that 200,000 young people made a living on the streets of our towns and cities.

“The majority of street children maintain their parents in whole or part, and to his parents such a child is a valuable slave. Before he is fully grown even while still suffering from child ailments, when the stones under his feet are frozen he is sent out to wander, to plead, to pester, to get thrust out of the way and cursed by some, to get his match box the penny for which all the joy and health of his childhood are being sold”***
All of which is pretty emotive stuff and the cautious objective side of me wonders at the degree of exaggeration, but similar reports can be read in the Manchester Guardian, the Manchester Evening News and the archives of the Manchester & Salford Refuges.

And the evidence is there in the number of cases reported to the courts and the level of prosecutions.  In the ten years from 1885 the society dealt with 9,922 cases of mistreatment.  In 1892 alone “375 cases involving the welfare of 1,324 children were reported, investigated and dealt with.  Of these 375 cases 40 were carried to court and convictions obtained in 37.”  Two years later “out of 705 cases 100 were taken to court, resulting in 94 convictions.”

These stories appeared earlier in http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Manchester%20and%20Salford%20Boys%20and%20Girls%20Refuges

Pictures; Courtesy the Together Trust