Good read here:
Meet the historical hoodies
New book by academic shows Manchester's historical precedent for knife crime and gangs, and may have some lessons for similar problems today
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/oct/22/hoodies-victorian-manchester-gangs
Martin Wainwright
Guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 October 2008
William Henry Brooks, Victorian Manchester street fighter
You could tell them by their bell-bottomed trousers, fringes and jauntily-tilted caps - and if you saw them, you were advised to cut and run.
They ran the grimy streets of Manchester and filled the city's courts and police cells, while the media described their codes and gang names in lurid detail - the Bengal Tigers, the Meadow Lads and the She Battery Mob.
But this wasn't another outbreak of modern gun crime, teenage stabbings or hoodie trouble-making. The 'scuttlers', as the whole of Britain learned to know and detest them, were a serious social problem in the 1870s and 80s.
Influenced by an empire almost permanently at war, from the Sudan to Afghanistan, they took over music halls, openly paraded with home-made weapons and staged fights where more than 500 young people took part.
Their history has now been chronicled by a Liverpool university academic, Dr Andrew Davies, after years in their company in the peaceful reading rooms of archives from Manchester to London. His research uncovers all the features of 21st-century concern about youth crime, but on a larger scale, and 140 years ago.
"There are so many records that it has taken me 15 years to pull all the material together," says Davies, whose book, The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, is published this month with public readings in the city and plans for a future play.
"Matching press reports with police, court and prison records gives a picture of relentless urban violence by young men going through the new, compulsory school system and out into the mills and factories of Manchester."
The staged fights also involved "scuttlerettes", girls as young as 14 who were accused of raising the level of violence by flirting with rival youths and egging them on. In Liverpool, according to Davies' researches, gangs were often motivated by robbery, carried out by way of a more vicious version of Fagin's pickpockets in Oliver Twist. But in Manchester, the motive was testosterone-fuelled excitement and a hunt for status.
"Each gang wanted to be recognised as the toughest in the city, and scuttlers would walk as far as five miles to take on rivals," says Davies. "Groups took possession of their favourite music halls and attacked any members of other gangs who came in, using sharpened belt buckles or knives as weapons."
Some example police mugshots of
Manchester gangsters, including
identifying features such as "left leg
much thinner than right"
Then as now, individuals were singled out by both police and media. One reprobate was John-Joseph Hillier, the Irish-born leader of the Deansgate Mob, who joined the gang when he was 14. He was repeatedly jailed for slashing members of the rival Casino gang with a butcher's knife and was nicknamed "King of the Scuttlers" by reporters.
Delighted with the notoriety, he had the name sewn on to the front of the trademark jersey he wore with his bell-bottoms and cap. The word 'scuttle' was coined by the boys as a term for street-fighting.
Davies says that one major difference from today's youth violence was that deaths were very rare. But the level of serious woundings - and the sheer number of young teenagers filling the newly-built Strangeways prison and other jails - led Manchester city council to petition the then home secretary for the return of flogging to punish violent crime.
In the end, with the authorities acknowledging the effect of the 19th century's catalogue of international violence - gangs in battles such as the Rochdale Road War called themselves either 'Russians' or 'Turks' - the answer was more thoughtful. A philanthropic movement to set up Lads Clubs took root in the worst-affected areas, including the core of Salford, which Friedrich Engels had described several decades earlier as the world's classic urban slum.
Church leaders and others, including the Manchester Guardian, recognised the role of status and competition in scuttler society and diverted it into boxing and sporting competitions, especially football. Davies says: "They were very successful in working with younger boys who might have been expected to form the next cohort of the gangs."
The book dwells on the parallels with today, and Davies says that he was fascinated by the unchanging role of dress and personal appearance as a sign of belonging to a gang. He details scuttler hairstyle, known in the 1870s as a "donkey fringe", which required close cropping at the back but an angled fringe at the front, with the hair longer on the right.
Differently-coloured scarves completed the uniform. Most scuttlers added brass tips to their clogs to add an intimidating rattle to the normal clatter of the footwear on the city's cobbles. Davies says: "You could well imagine a scuttler finding himself at a concert a hundred years later and blending right in."
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Shocking images of Manchester riots, August 2011.NSFW/NSFC
[video=youtube;0cbVW_QS2eE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cbVW_QS2eE&feature=player_embedded[/video]