Songs of Innocence Read Online Free Page B

years, and not enough
time spent beating the devil out of the young.
    Violent youth cultures had, in reality, been a fact of life for years in the industrial cities. In Manchester, the gangs were known as Scuttlers; in Birmingham existed the Peaky Blinders. The
ChelseaBoys and the Battersea Boys also cropped up regularly, indulging in street robberies, assaults on the police and pitched battles among themselves.
    Reports of casual violence were widespread throughout the Victorian period, and it was considered quite normal to settle a dispute outside a public house with fists. But these newly discovered
teenage gangs had their own distinctive styles, and a recognized hierarchy. Industrialization had brought huge numbers of people together in crowded conditions – and that led to children
being on the streets together. Now the adult world began to fear the young were developing their own cultures, and that those cultures could be a threat to traditional orthodoxies.
    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