Songs of Innocence Read online

  A particularly harrowing case had taken place in Manchester in August 1890:10 a gang of teenage Scuttlers from Harpurhey, in the north of the city, had taken on the Bengal Tigers from Ancoats. Having hunted down their prey, they took off their heavy-buckled belts and used them to beat a boy named John Connor to within inches of his life. Then they plunged their knives into his neck, shoulders and back. One of the Tigers was blinded by a blow to the right eye – he had already lost the left in an earlier fight – and three more received knife wounds. No one called the police, and they found out about the incident only from the staff at the infirmary in which the injured were treated. Two of the perpetrators were sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.

  The incident was not the first that summer, but it did lead to a growing public outcry. The recorder in the case, Henry West, called for a public debate on the introduction of flogging. A special magistrates’ meeting was held, a resolution in favour of the cat-o’-nine-tails passed, and a deputation sent to the Home Secretary.

  Alexander Devine, a court reporter for the Manchester Guardian and also a founder of the lads’ club movement, had chronicled the various Scuttler gangs of Manchester, which were very territorial: the Grey Mare Boys from Grey Mare Lane in the city’s Bradford district, the Holland Street gang from Miles Platting, the Alum Street gang from Ancoats, the Little Forty from Hyde Road in Ardwick, the Buffalo Bill gang from the colliery district of Whit Lane in Salford – the list went on.

  Scuttlers were very style conscious, and the belts which were their lethal weapons were also used as style statements, Devine wrote: ‘These designs include figures of serpents, a heart pierced with an arrow . . . Prince of Wales feathers, clogs, animals, stars, and often either the name of the wearer of the belt or that of some woman.’ As well as a belt, a Scuttler would wear narrow-toed, brass-tipped clogs. The Ancoats Scuttlers wore bell-bottomed trousers measuring fourteen inches around the knee and twenty-one inches around the foot. The flaps of their coats were cut into little peaks and buttoned down, and they wore flashy silk scarves. Their hair was cut short at the back and sides, and they grew long fringes, plastered down over the left eye.

  According to Devine, the gang phenomenon could be put down to a lack of parental control, poor discipline in schools, slum evenings spent in ‘listless idleness’ on the street, and ‘penny dreadful’ literature, which told tales of highwaymen and brigands and which ‘openly defied authority and revelled in bloodshed’.

  This concern that melodramatic cheap reading material could be a cause of youth crime was a common one of the day. Samuel Smith, MP for Flintshire, told the House of Commons that he had made a study of its effects, reading for his research no fewer than forty penny papers with a circulation of more than a million each week.

  ‘Our children feasted upon these stories, and all their moral ideas were confused and drugged by this education. Could it be wondered at that we had such a large proportion of our nation who were degraded and morally unfit for the duty of citizenship?’ he asked.11 ‘The poorer classes between 12 and 16 or 17 years of age . . . were laying the foundations of a wasted and ruined life. They were found by tens of thousands in gin palaces, in low music halls, and in the low theatres. They were getting the education of the streets, an education in every respect vicious and low, and that was the reason why this country, beyond any civilized country in Europe, had to contend with a degraded residuum of population which constituted a great national danger.’

  There were girl gangs, too, although they tended to be ancillary to the boys’ gangs, knitting coloured socks and collecting stones for the menfolk to throw. Nonetheless, in March 1893 the residents of Clopton Street in Hulme sent a petition to the Watch Committee of the city council, complaining of ‘disorderly young women’ who had supplied missiles from their aprons ‘while lads and lasses alike had “bonneted” the terrified residents’ – that is, they had knocked their hats off. In February 1890, a seventeen-year-old girl named Lizzie Gordon was accused by a John Green of an assault in Salford, in which she had allegedly threatened to knife him, ‘Same as I have done Paddy Melling.’ Two of Lizzie’s companions were alleged to have taken off their clogs and assaulted Green with them. Several witnesses testified that Gordon was among a gang of girls who had been terrorizing the residents of Gun Street.

  The London press took up the issue of youth violence with gusto, and the word ‘hooligan’ soon passed into common parlance. The Daily Mail, which first hit the streets in 1896, reported four years later12 that 300 extra police were being drafted in to cope with the problem of gangs on the streets of the capital. ‘Is the Hooligan a product of the School Board system?’ the paper asked, quoting a School Board member who opined that extension classes for those who had left school at twelve or thirteen were to blame: ‘Our evening continuation classes, which cost £100,000 a year, are a field for Hooligans. They are mixed classes of boys and girls, who in thousands of cases join for the novelty of the thing and degenerate into skylarkers . . . There is something wrong in the system. We are producing young people in whom chivalry, gallantry and respect are non-existent.’

  The following year, 1901, the President of the National Union of Teachers was firing up the debate at the union’s annual conference: ‘The Hooligan or street blackguard is not a sudden growth; he is the result of street education. The thoughtful student of modern life sees nothing sadder than the crowds of boys and girls in the streets late at night, exposed to many and serious dangers, acquiring evil habits, and generally laying the foundation of a life of idleness, vice, or crime. Even the little ones, who ought to be at home in the care of their parents, are found in the streets in charge of those scarcely older than themselves.’

  Whether or not the education system was to blame, there seemed to be a growing sense that the state should do something about the problem. Yet the more liberal elements in the press, including many correspondents to The Times and a large number of MPs, still tended to see the problem of street children – ‘Street Arabs’, as they were known – in a different, perhaps more Dickensian, light.

  ‘All over London girls and boys roamed the streets day after day, selling matches, flowers, newspapers,’ the Chairman of the Bedford Quarter Sessions, W. Francis Higgins, wrote to The Times in 1893. ‘And, though of school age, no one looked after them. There were thousands of them every day around the railway stations of London, and in the natural course of things they grew up to be thieves and prostitutes. Education was now free, but the Arab was the last and the least cared for, because he was difficult to teach, and the teachers could not get brilliant results out of him. It was time something was done for such neglected children.’

  Indeed, there had long been concern that the children of the poor were not attending school, and were continuing to do menial work on the streets for whatever few pennies they could gather. These, of course, were often the same children who were accused of being violent gangsters, threatening passers-by. But in liberal middle-class folklore, they were quite different.

  A Leeds MP, Robert Armitage, raised the issue in a parliamentary debate, describing the children not as villains but as victims – often, he felt, of their own parents’ cupidity.13 The Manchester School Board had investigated the backgrounds of a large number of these children, he said, and only one third of them were from the poorest families: ‘That proved that two-thirds of the parents of these children were comparatively independent, and were, therefore, unnecessarily subjecting their children to this very great hardship . . . Surrounded as they were by evil associations, they were acquiring habits which would, in all probability, bring them ultimately into the hands of the magistrate and the gaoler.’

  Armitage may well have been right to blame the parents. A standard job handed out to children in poorer areas at the time was the fetching of beer from the local alehouse. Seebohm Rowntree, during the research for his famous study of poverty, which would be published in 1901,14 asked his investigators to spend a Saturday watching a
‘dingy-looking house situated in a narrow street in the heart of a slum district’. In seventeen hours, they saw 258 men, 179 women and 113 children enter the premises. Lunch and supper times were busy ones for the children, but the busiest time of all was between ten and eleven at night. Alice Foley, growing up in Bolton with a father who was often violent when drunk, dreaded the order to fetch a gill of beer from the White Hart down the street: ‘I conjured up the odd idea that if I dawdled there and back, the one jug of ale might last Father until he staggered off to bed. On arriving home with a jug of flat beer, I was greeted with: “Where the hell have you been?” and a volley of oaths. Sometimes I dodged out of the back door, but more frequently mooned around sacrificially in the hope of coaxing Father to go to bed and so leave the family in peace.’

  By the turn of the century, the poor little ‘Street Arab’ was indelibly imprinted on the public imagination, notably through the description of Tom, the chimney sweep in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies. Indeed, the ‘Street Arab tale’ had become a popular literary genre, sparking numerous publications in the last half of the nineteenth century. Most had a Romantic edge, and ended with the protagonist being rescued by a wealthy benefactor. Typically, Froggy’s Little Brother, by ‘Brenda’,15 tells the tale of two little boys left to fend for themselves in a Shoreditch attic after their parents’ deaths, and despite the efforts of the older, Froggy, his little brother, Benny, eventually dies. The story ends happily, when Froggy is helped by a philanthropic doctor. These tales leaned on an age-old theme – stretching back to Romulus and Remus – of lost children abandoned by the adult world and in desperate need of protection and salvation. In an age when infant mortality was still very high, particularly in crowded urban areas, the notion of the child as a delicate, Romantic figure remained an enticing one.

  Into the schools

  Perhaps it might be said that in this era – maybe in every era? – the voluntary sector tended to intervene to temper the violation and neglect of children perceived as innocent victims, while the state preferred to use its powers to stamp out evil which was perceived as innate. Certainly, the rise of universal schooling, ushered in by William Forster’s 1870 Elementary Education Act, could be seen in that light.

  The ‘Ragged Schools’ which had for some time had the task of educating the inner-city poor had done great service, the Earl of Shaftesbury had remarked during the House of Lords’ debate on the Bill: ‘The plan . . . is to catch a child as he flies rapidly by . . . the teachers rejoice to have the opportunity, during the short time, a few weeks, perhaps, the children are with them, of imparting to them some of the saving truths of the Gospel.’ Such children could later be shipped to the colonies without the risk that they might then fall into ‘evil courses’, he explained.

  The Act, which set up a system of school boards to ensure there was educational provision in all areas, was swiftly followed by another which made school compulsory for children aged between five and ten. Yet the desired effect was not instant. ‘Opened school. Children backward, neglected, but seem to have fairly good capacities,’ wrote one young schoolmaster, Atkinson Skinner, as he opened his doors for the first time at Huggate, in the East Riding of Yorkshire.16 Daily, he was to record his fluctuating attendance figures with a sense of anxiety and an awareness that an inspector might call at any time. All ‘board schools’ taught the same subjects, by and large: the three Rs, along with drawing for boys and needlework for girls. Singing, recitation, English literature, geography, science, history and – for girls – domestic economy were all optional. Every morning the children would march into daily assembly to their own band and would salute the headmaster before singing a hymn, saying a prayer and repairing to their classroom for half an hour’s Bible study.

  ‘The greatest importance will be attached by the board to the moral and religious teaching and training,’ ran the instructions of the York school board. ‘In all departments the teachers are expected to bring up the children in habits of punctuality, of good manners and language, of cleanliness and neatness, and also to impress upon the children the importance of cheerful obedience to duty, of consideration and respect for others, and of honour and truthfulness in word and act. Teachers are expected to use the Bible for illustrations whereby to teach these duties, for sanctions by which what is taught may be practised and for instruction concerning the help given by God to lead a sober, righteous and godly life.’17

  In the early 1890s, Morrice Man was sent to public school. By many accounts, Rugby in this period aimed to produce a class of colonial servants – yet it was also something more. Under Thomas Arnold, who had been its headmaster from 1828 until 1841, it had flourished. Immortalized in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, it became the model for what is today thought of as the typical public school. It typified the ‘muscular Christianity’ which was meant to help drive the British imperial expansion, but also to turn the sons of the new industrialist class into what Arnold described as ‘gentleman scholars’.

  ‘What shall I say of Rugby?’ Man wrote later. ‘The hardest-working, hardest-playing school in the world. It was pre-eminently the school to which the hard-headed businessmen of the Midlands sent their sons.’ Man quoted from a book by Lord Elton about Rugby: ‘The public schools had no difficulty in transferring to the new class of gentlemen (i.e. the commercial classes) the old soldiers’ ideas of courage in service which the feudal aristocracy (i.e. Eton) had developed during the centuries in which they led their men into battle. “Loyalty, courage, endurance, discipline.” The ideal was vindicated in 1914–18 in Ypres, Jutland, Gallipoli . . . when a whole generation of public school boys gave their lives leading the men of England through “firewater” to victory.’

  Man describes the Rugby of the 1890s with affection, but reading between the lines it must still have been a hard place for the non-sporting boy, a quarter-century after Tom Brown’s Schooldays was published. The whole house, young and old, was expected to go together on twelve-mile runs, he said. ‘This was far too great a strain on the youngsters to keep up, with their elders trying to tow them. The system received a shock when a boy coming in was seen to run in a circle for a moment or two and then fall down. He was picked up dead. Even then some foolish old Rugbeans said we of that generation were getting soft . . . It was certainly in those days a hard, not to say rough, experience.’

  It is not clear where Morrice Man’s father was educated – his mother consulted a likely looking vicar on a journey out to join his father in Burma, which suggests the family may not have had a tradition of sending its sons to a particular public school. But it is likely his sisters, Mary, Jo and Dorothy, would have been the first girls in their family to go to school. They went to Croydon High School, which had opened as a girls’ day school in 1874 and which still flourishes today in the independent sector. Its first headmistress, who retired in 1901, was an active supporter of the women’s suffrage movement and was arrested in 1909, aged seventy-three, with Emmeline Pankhurst while trying to present a petition to Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister.18

  Many of the women who forged ahead in providing education for girls were also supporters of the suffrage movement. In fact the 1870 Education Act, piloted through Parliament by W. E. Forster, the son-in-law of the Rugby Headmaster, Thomas Arnold, provided one of the earliest opportunities for women to vote. Under its auspices, women ratepayers – who had been given the vote in local elections in 1869 – were provided with their first opportunity to stand for election. Women activists including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, pioneer of women’s medical education and sister of the suffrage movement leader, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, seized this chance with gusto and were soon represented on school boards all over the country. The teaching of children in elementary schools – which hitherto had been run on a voluntary basis but which now came under the auspices of the state – gradually came to be seen as a respectable occupation for a woman, and so the education of girls was enabled to grow.19

&nb
sp; It would be wrong to suggest that all girls were instantly enabled to enter the world of education after 1870, though. In fact, only about 70 per cent went to school in the succeeding decades,20 and those who did often found themselves in private schools designed only to instil in them the correct ladylike qualities: ‘The dominant idea about girls’ education is that it should be as far as possible claustral, that girls should be kept from any contamination with people who drop their H’s or earn their salt. It is thought that careful seclusion is absolutely necessary for the development of that refinement which should characterise a lady,’ reported a correspondent from Devon to a commission on secondary education in the mid-1890s.21

  Indeed, there was a view at the time – presented to the Association of University Teachers in 1908 by a medical adviser, Janet Campbell, that girls’ brains could be damaged if they were expected to think too much after puberty: ‘As regards mental work, great care should be taken to avoid any undue strain,’ she said. ‘Lessons requiring much concentration and therefore using up a great deal of brain energy, mathematics for instance, should not be pushed. Such subjects as cookery, embroidery, or the handicrafts may well be introduced into the curriculum as they cause comparatively little mental strain.’22

  In general, though, the line of thinking on elementary education was similar to that which had driven the growth of public schools such as Rugby during the early nineteenth century. If Britain was to retain its technological and colonial edge, the reasoning ran, then its workers needed to be educated, and educated in a particular way: a way which would promote morality, upstanding virtues, a deep sense of Britishness which could be exported around the globe.

  The reality, of course, was somewhat different. In Bolton, Alice Foley, who started school aged five in 1896, described scenes of chaotic, childish joy: ‘The lessons were as dull as the surroundings, marked in memory only by some strange visits from a young priest or novice, who came most mornings to test our knowledge of the Catechism. After this devotional exercise he invariably invited our class to “come out and fight the teacher”. Immediately a mad rush of young savages were whooping, shoving and kicking the feet and shins off a pale, apprehensive teacher . . . just as suddenly the skirmishing would be called off; the priest departed, laughing heartily, leaving a distraught young person to regain order and to pick up the threads of an interrupted lesson.’23