Of Scuttlers, and street violence

I am re reading The Gangs of Manchester.*

It is a powerful description of the gang culture of the city in the late 19th century and along the way gives a vivid description of the poorer parts of Manchester.

The gangs were known as Scuttlers and most inhabited the warren of streets in places like Ancoats, Hulme, and Bradford.

Now there is nothing new about disaffected young people taking to the streets, fighting with each other and attacking innocent passersby.

They were there in ancient Rome and in all the centuries that followed.  In the 1920s and 30s it was the Razor gangs** and when I was growing up there were the Teddy Boys, the Mods and Rockers and later still the skinheads.

Some were more violent than others and as usual the extreme behaviour of the few were elevated by the media into something much bigger and made to seem more dangerous.

There were the stories of innocent young lads being slashed with knives and you knew where you could go and places especially at night to avoid.  Not that my streets were violent places but sometimes it proved prudent to be careful.

Having said all that, the worst I remember were the slashed seats at the cinema, which gave out a quick rush of air when you sat down on them, victims of a flick knife during a slow point in the film.

Now in the great sweep of disorders ours is very small beer and is nothing when compared to the gangs of Andrew Davies’s book.  They operated against a backdrop of mean and often appalling housing in streets hard by noisy smoky mills and factories with the ever present threat of unemployment and hard times.

Like gangs all through history they had their own territory which they fiercely guarded, wore distinctive clothes and revelled in a culture of violence and street fighting.

They had names like the Meadow Lads, Bengal Tigers, and the Bungal Boys, but most drew their names from the streets they inhabited, like the Prussia Street Gang, the Pollard Street and Bradford Street Gangs, while others were known by the district.

These included Deansgate, Gorton, Openshaw and Harpuerhey.

Opposite, Gun Street part of the territory of the Bengal Tigers.

South of the city between Chester Road and City Road was the Silver Street Gang and off Stretford Road in Hulme the Clopton Street Gang.

They engaged in vicious street fighting, maimed and murdered and as a matter of course intimidated their neighbourhoods.

The parallels with today are striking, and then as now the media made much of the deaths, gang fights and township wars, no doubt motivated as much by a “good” sensational story as a record of shocking events.

And as you read the contemporary accounts and follow as Davies explores the culture you are drawn back into the Manchester of the late 19th century.

This in itself is a valuable history lesson and seeks to remind us that sections of our city could still be mean and dangerous places.

Opposite; Angel Street, home to the Meadow Lads.

True they were perhaps not as awful as they had been during the early decades of that century but they were still pretty bad.

* The Gangs of Manchester, Andrew Davies, Milo Books, 2008

** The Glasgow razor gangs existed in the South Side of Glasgow in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Pictures; cover from the original edition of The Gangs of Manchester, Andrew Davies, , Gun Street, 1901, A Bradburn, m11341, and Angel Street, 1900, Samuel Coulhurst, m08978 courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council