Read about the history of Britain’s street gangs,
British cities are in the midst of a crime epidemic. Or are they? Two experts consider the precedents for the moral panics over knife-crime and moped robberies that have swept the nation over the past 12 months
Current concerns about gangs and knife-crime are not new – far from it. Similar anxieties were voiced across England’s major cities during the latter decades of the 19th century. Then, as now, most gang members were young men, and gangs were overwhelmingly concentrated in districts already blighted by poverty, ill-health and unemployment.
Like their modern counterparts, the ‘Scuttlers’ or gang fighters of Victorian Manchester and Salford fought with knives, although they also used the buckle ends of their heavy leather belts. Scuttlers, like Birmingham’s ‘Sloggers’ and ‘Peaky Blinders’ (who emerged during the 1890s) were fiercely territorial. Encroachment into a district colonised by a rival gang was the surest way to spark a fight. In Birmingham, as in Manchester, members of rival gangs also sought each other in city-centre music halls and nearby beerhouses. Considerable kudos was at stake.
Young men who courted women from rival districts also found themselves at risk. Male gang members regarded local women as their property – and viewed a youth from a rival district walking his ‘sweetheart’ home from a music hall as an affront. Retribution might be meted out on the spot, or a battle with the gang from the offending youth’s district might be arranged.
Today, these confrontations arise out of infringements of ‘respect’. Victorians didn’t use that word as we use it, but the sparks that ignited fights, leading to countless stabbings, are startlingly similar. That said, the two eras diverge in one key respect: Manchester’s scuttlers and Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders seldom killed one another. They set out to scar and maim opponents. They fought for status, not profit, and most of them grew out of gang-fighting by their early twenties.
Scuttlers and Peaky Blinders attracted extensive newspaper coverage, but only made headline news in the local press. London’s street gangs of the time, by contrast, attracted national – even international – notoriety following disturbances over the bank holiday weekend in August 1898. The ‘Hooligans’, originally a south London gang, became infamous overnight. It’s no accident that the London term ‘ hooligan’ became the generic label for a disorderly youth. The national press tends to pay much more attention to offences committed in the capital, and it’s easier to persuade governments to attend to law and order problems close to the seat of government.
Official responses to gangs and knifecrime have tended to be highly punitive, egged on by the media. In Manchester and Salford, Scuttlers were jailed in their hundreds. But even exemplary sentences of penal servitude for life imposed in the 1880s and 1890s had no visible deterrent effect.
The most successful interventions were those by the ‘working lads’ club’ movement. Lads’ clubs, established in the poorer districts of England’s cities during the 1890s, provided alternative outlets for youths, effectively cutting off the supply of recruits into gangs. They owed much of their success to their promotion of sports – football, but also athletics, gymnastics and boxing.
In the decade prior to the First World War, Manchester’s Scuttlers and Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders effectively disappeared. By the 1920s and 1930s, they were recalled – sometimes almost nostalgically – as belonging to an older, more turbulent age.
The most successful interventions in the Victorian era were from ‘working lads’ clubs’, which cut off the supply of recruits into gangs DR ANDREW DAVIES