Offering help at the prison gates, stories from the Manchester and Salford Boys and Girls Refuges at Strangeways in 1900

This is one of those photographs that will have many stories but most will never be revealed.

It comes from the collection of the Together Trust and featured in their most recent blog post*

And this provides a clue to unlocking one of the stories.

We are at the gate of Strangeways prison on a morning sometime at the beginning of the last century.

The men filing out are being released and the two in the smart hats and coats are representatives of the Trust which was then known as the Manchester and Salford Boys and Girls Refuges.

It had begun in 1870 with a mission of helping the destitute children of the city by offering a bed and a morning meal for boys found on the streets.  From there it expanded into caring for girls as well as boys providing homes, training and annual holidays.

Always a pro active organisation it was also involved in using the law to protect children from parental abuse and neglect and campaigned to make illegal the use of young children as street sellers.

From them it was a small step to an involvement with those who had been arrested and held for the night as vagrants.  As the archivist of the Together Trust writes, “before 1901 children were often sent to adult prisons for misdemeanours. Sleeping rough was a crime during the nineteenth century and any children found outside at night by a policeman were taken to the courts. Many found themselves behind bars for short periods of time. 

This fact, along with the charity’s proximity to Strangeways prison, resulted in the Refuges starting a new service in 1887, the Prison Gate Mission. Every morning, as the gate opened to discharged prisoners, a simple breakfast was provided of coffee and bread and butter at a Mission Room. 

Here advice was given and note taken of the children. In the 23 years of its existence 265,959 men, women and children were helped.”

Looking at these men as they walk free I wonder how many had a place to go, a family to stay with or any clear idea of the future ahead.

But this is not the end of the story, for 1901 the Youthful Offenders Act extended the use of alternatives to prison for young offenders.

The charity already used the Children’s Shelter on Chatham Street, as an alternative to prison, where young people accused of a crime could be taken.

And there is no doubt that banging young people up with adults did little for children and may well have made it easier for some to fall down the path of further offending.  Not least because of the absence of a real programme of training along with that most of all important belief that within the supportive environment of of the Refuges there was the chance that they would develop into upstanding citizens.

But that takes us away from our picture and into new stories which can be read in this edition of the Trust's post, Prison Gate Mission.

Pictures; courtesy of the Together Trust

*http://togethertrustarchive.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/prison-gate-mission.html