When “poverty busied itself”....... a little bit of the grim side of Manchester & Salford in the 19th century, tonight at the Post Box Cafe, with historian Andrew Davies

Angel Street, Manchester,1900

"In no city have I ever witnessed a scene of more open, brutal and general intemperance.  

The public houses and gin shops were roaring full.  Rows, and fights and scuffles were every moment taking place within the doors and in the streets."

So wrote Angus Reach in the Morning Chronicle  after a trip through Ancoats on a Saturday night in 1849.

I suspect his readers reacted with that mix of moral indignation and smug satisfaction which comes of living in another place.

Safe in their large well appointed villas in Whalley Range and Rusholme, looked after by cooks, and maids, and footman, Ancoats with all its noise, dirt and overcrowding was to be both pitied and feared.

Flat Iron market, Salford, 1894

Sunday sermons might reflect on the plight of the poor, but from those run down areas came a perceived danger.

This was after all just three decades since Peterloo,  just seven years since the General Strike and still we were in the midst of Chartist agitation.

And from those dark unsanitary streets and courts there was always the abiding danger of typhus, typhoid and above all Cholera, infectious diseases which knew no barrier of class or gated community.

In the 1830s and 40s no one was safe.  It mattered not if you were clean, ate the right food drank the purest water and lived in the gentle suburbs.

Deadly Cholera was always  just a servants visit away to family in Ancoats or an omnibus ride through town.

Nor did it matter that by the late 19th century public health had improved, some of the worst excesses of factory conditions had been curbed and some at least of the working class had the vote.

Life was still uncertain, the workhouse still a possibility through sickness, unemployment or just bad luck and the closed airless courts and mean streets a reality for many people.

Poor diet, little of it and still long hours of hard labour took their toll.

As late as the 1930s photographs rarely show women smiling for to do so would reveal the poor state of their teeth.

All of which is a trailer for the talk  by Andrew Davies on the Social Conditions of Victorian Manchester & Salford at the Post Box Cafe.*

Mr Davies is the author of The Gangs of Manchester which 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 the twin cities.**

The gangs were known as Scuttlers and most inhabited the warren of streets in places like Ancoats, Hulme, and Bradford and some atleast might just have been born soon after  Angus Reach's walk through Ancoats on a Saturday night

I have not only read the book but heard Mr Davies talk on the Scuttlers and the conditions which gave rise to the gangs and came away from both with a better understanding of the period.

So I shall be ther tonight.

Pictures; Angel Street, 1900, Samuel Coulhurst, m08978 and Flatiron market Salford, Samuel Coulhurst, 1894, m59569 courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, and the cover from the original edition of The Gangs of Manchester, Andrew Davies



* The Post Box  http://www.thepostboxchorlton.co.uk/  0161 881 4853
** The Gangs of Manchester, Andrew Davies, Milo Books, 2008