Detective Caminada retained his mixed cultural heritage throughout his life: ‘He was in appearance a typical Italian with very strongly marked features, but he never lost his native Lancashire speech, and was in many ways very much a Lancashire man until the end of his days’ (Daily Mail). Caminada’s mother, Mary Boyle, although born in Glasgow, had Irish roots and her father, Cornelius Boyle, was a mechanic. Mary was also from an impoverished background and, like many others before the Education Act of 1870 introduced compulsory schooling, she had never learned to read or write.
Francis and Mary Caminada’s first child was born in 1837. By the early 1840s, the couple had settled in Deansgate, central Manchester. Luxurious shops, magnificent hotels and bustling streets dominated the city’s commercial district, but close by the grand façades were smoking factories, grimy warehouses and tenements. The journalist Angus Bethune Reach gave a description of the area in the Morning Chronicle: ‘between the dull stacks of warehouses and the snug and airy dwellings of the suburbs – lies the great mass of smoky, dingy, sweltering and toiling Manchester’.
The major thoroughfare of Deansgate, which ran through the heart of the city, was lined with mills and warehouses, but as the road left the business district, second-rate shops, alehouses and gin palaces soon replaced them. On both sides of Deansgate were the inner-city slums, where poverty was endemic and crime rife. Caminada later recalled the streets of his childhood: ‘The neighbourhood of Deansgate also was the rendezvous of thieves and was a very hot-bed of social iniquity and vice’.
The 1841 census records Francis and Mary Caminada, aged 30 and 25 respectively, living with their three young children: Francis, aged three; John Baptiste, two; and Hannah, one, in a house shared with four other families. There would have been no running water and the 13 inhabitants of the house shared an outside privy with the other residents of the street. The couple were unmarried, but later that year, they finally tied the knot at St Augustine’s Roman Catholic Church, in nearby Granby Row. By this time they had moved around the corner to 33 Peter Street, opposite the Free Trade Hall, which commemorates the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when the Manchester Yeomanry fired on innocent protestors, killing at least 11 and injuring more than 600.
Peter Street was a mixed area, with two-storey terrace houses sitting shoulder to shoulder with public buildings. There were warehouses, timber yards and smaller dwellings, as well as theatres, concert halls and the original Manchester Museum. It was also well known for brothels and illegal drinking dens. The Manchester Evening News stated that, ‘The Peter-street side of Deansgate once shared with the Wood-street neighbourhood the questionable notoriety of being the most dangerous district in the city’, with ‘beerhouses in which nightly assembled lawless characters of the worst type’. Despite this reputation, Francis and Mary stayed there for the births of their three younger children, Louis in 1842, followed by Jerome in 1844 and Teresa in 1846.
In the first of a series of tragic events for the Caminada family, baby Louis died aged nine months, of ‘hydrocephalus acutus’, a disease of the brain. Then four years later, three-year-old Jerome’s eldest brother, Francis, aged nine, died of enteritis. The health of children growing up in industrial Manchester at that time was notoriously poor. Overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and contaminated water contributed to the shockingly high infant mortality rate: in the 1840s, 48 per cent of all recorded deaths in Manchester were of children under five years old, with the majority dying before their first birthday. Many of these untimely deaths were attributed to childhood diseases like small pox and scarlet fever, as well as diarrhoea from infected water supplies.
Adults too were at risk of disease due to the appalling conditions and a lack of basic medical care. Just two months after the death of his eldest brother, Jerome Caminada’s fragile childhood was completely shattered when his father, Francis, died of heart disease at the age of 37. Some time after Francis’s death, the remaining members of the Caminada family moved to Quay Street, on the other side of Deansgate. Tucked away behind the main road, this area of atrocious slums was a warren of dirty tenements and disreputable lodging-houses. Friedrich Engels depicted the streets around Quay Street in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844:
Here are long, narrow lanes between which run contracted, crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps…the most demoralised class in all Manchester lived in these ruinous and filthy districts, people whose occupations are thieving and prostitution.
Although once a fashionable quarter, the area had deteriorated and the two-storey houses, now sheltering the city’s poorest residents, were dilapidated and shabby. Behind Quay Street were rows of poorly ventilated and tightly packed back-to-back houses, which shared water pumps and privies between at least 20 households. The dense black smoke of the factory chimneys and the stench of rotting refuse permeated the unpaved streets, full of stagnant cesspools and open pigsties.
The soot-blackened terrace houses were made of crumbling brick, their broken windows stuffed with rags and paper in a vain attempt to keep out the driving rain and cold wind. The worst type of housing was the ‘one-up-one-down’. Each room housed at least one family but, more often than not, several families were living cramped together in the confined space. The most unfortunate were forced to live underground in the cellars.
Inside these ramshackle dwellings were minimal amenities: a fireplace for cooking and maybe a few sticks of cheap furniture. Some slept on thin mattresses, but others had to make do with rags or straw. The walls were damp and often bare. No stranger to these surroundings, Caminada gave a detailed description of the conditions in his memoirs: ‘the atmosphere being nothing but a fetid composition of pestilential vapour emitted from filthy beds, dirty clothing, foul breath, and, worse than all, the presence of offensive matter in the room’.
Many workers in Manchester’s mills and factories lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Average weekly wages in the early 1840s were around 10 shillings, half of which would be needed for the rent. Some operatives, such as spinners, earned higher wages and enjoyed better living conditions, but most families relied on the income of several members. The situation was particularly precarious for those affected by illness or the loss of the male provider and the poorest workers wore threadbare clothing and rarely had enough food to eat. Engels recounted how those who did not even possess a hat, would fold a piece of paper into a makeshift cap. Starvation and cold were constant threats to survival.
Despite such gruelling circumstances, the Caminadas fared relatively well, at first. In 1851, just four years after the death of her husband, Mary was letting out rooms in the lodging-house where she also lived with her four surviving children. The going rate for a bed for the night in 1849 was four pence and she had three lodgers. The young family was quite settled, with Jerome, aged six, and his siblings all attending St Mary’s Roman Catholic School, just a few streets away from their home. It was a small school run by nuns and most of the children were of Irish descent. In a rare reference to his childhood, Caminada later reminisced: ‘I remember, when a youth, writing in my copy book “Evil companions corrupt morals,” and there is no doubt about the truth of it’.
The family worshipped at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, Mulberry Street, where Jerome had been baptised. Still known today as the Hidden Gem, the city centre church, with its beautiful white marble altar, is concealed by office blocks and commercial buildings. As a police detective, Caminada allegedly used to meet his informers on the back pew, giving the impression that he was praying, whilst discussing his business quietly in the silence of the church.
However, by 1853 the family had lost their battle to escape the worst of the slums and were living in Little Quay Street. A reporter for the Manchester Evening News described the quarter some 20 years later:
In Little Quay-street the class of persons also appeared to be of the lowest of the hard-working populatio
n, and in some of the courts the scanty furniture and the squalid appearance of the kitchens showed how hard was the struggle for existence. Being Saturday night many of the women were washing linen for the Sabbath, and across the rooms were stretched clothes-lines, on which ragged shirts and well-worn underclothing were slowly drying.
That winter Mary gave birth to a boy named Lewis and this event may have accounted for the family’s move. His father’s name was not recorded. On Christmas Day the infant died of unknown causes, aged just five weeks.
Five years on the family had fallen even further into chaos. In 1858 Mary had another son, also called Lewis. This time the father was registered as John Boyd, a stonemason. When the baby died three months later, his death certificate revealed a shocking truth: the cause of death was ‘congenital syphilis’. Syphilis was rife in Victorian England and, as it was difficult to diagnose, it is not known how many victims this devastating disease claimed. Entering into the bloodstream through sexual contact, the infection was also passed from a mother to her unborn child, resulting in stillbirth, birth defects and early death. Infants with congenital syphilis suffered damage to their bones, teeth, ears, eyes and worst of all, to the developing brain. Even if syphilitic children survived early infancy, symptoms could appear at any time, affecting their neurological and cardiovascular systems and often resulting in blindness, deafness or mental illness. Before the advent of antibiotics, the situation was hopeless.
In the Caminada family, it is impossible to say conclusively how many of Jerome’s siblings may have contracted syphilis through their mother. Eight months after the death of baby Lewis, and once again on Christmas Day, 15-year-old Hannah Caminada died in Crumpsall Workhouse. The recorded causes of death were ‘idiocy’, tuberculosis and diarrhoea. The reference to her mental deterioration makes it likely that the disease had affected her too. The informant on Hannah’s death certificate was her younger brother, Jerome, aged just 14.
By his early teens Jerome Caminada had witnessed the deaths of five close relatives. Although unimaginable today, such a high death rate in one family was almost to be expected in the Victorian era, especially with the recurrent epidemics of contagious diseases, such as cholera and typhoid, which swept through communities. Nevertheless, the strain on Mary Caminada and her three surviving children must have been considerable. Despite these tragic setbacks, they managed to salvage what they could from their meagre existence and in 1861 they were still living in a shared household, but now with only one other family. Their circumstances had improved because the children were all working. Mary was now 48 and Jerome 17. Teresa, aged 14, was employed as a silk weaver, probably in a local factory and Mary’s eldest living son, John Baptiste, 20, was lodging in Newcastle upon Lyme, where he was working as a letter carrier.
After leaving school, Jerome spent six years in the Royal Lancashire Militia, before finding work as a brass-fitter. In the 1860s he was employed by two manufacturing companies. The first was Messrs Sharp and Stewart, a steam locomotive manufacturer responsible for building one of the first locomotives to travel on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. He then worked for Messrs Mather and Platt, a large engineering firm which owned the Salford Ironworks. Work in a foundry was dirty, hot and noisy. Beating hammers, roaring furnaces and dense smoke would have made the conditions almost unbearable for the workers, who were engaged in backbreaking physical labour. Endless days of toiling in the sweltering heat of the ironworks may have been one of the factors that influenced Caminada in his momentous decision to become a police officer. On 20 February 1868, at the age of 23, Jerome Caminada joined the Manchester City Police Force as a police constable.
Detective Caminada’s first-hand knowledge of the city’s back streets and the people who lived there, would be an effective weapon in his daily battle against crime. ‘The rookeries of the city had no terrors for him’, declared the Manchester Courier years later, ‘although, on many occasions, he deliberately ran grave risks in order to accomplish his object – the arrest of criminals’. His training in the militia and the physical nature of his work in the foundry had given him stamina, strength and a sense of discipline. Furthermore, his early experiences of poverty and hardship had instilled in him a deep sense of justice and a heartfelt compassion for others.
Jerome Caminada had served his ‘apprenticeship’ in the seedy and violent slums of his childhood. In 1868, as his life of fighting crime began, young PC Caminada would need all his faith, courage and determination to face the challenges that awaited him on the streets of Manchester’s dark underworld.
Chapter Two
‘A “Lively” Beat’
(1868–1871)
A policeman seldom forgets his first nights on duty. If he be an intelligent officer he feels that he is a person of some importance, that a large responsibility is placed upon his shoulders in looking after the safety of the lives and property of the Queen’s subjects on his beat, and in vindicating the laws of his country. He has visions of future promotion, and being anxious to distinguish himself, his eyes and ears are on the alert to everything that passes around, for he is in search of his first case. Thus his novitiate is full of excitement, especially if he be on a “lively” beat.
(Jerome Caminada, Twenty-Five Years of Detective Life, 1901)
These were Police Constable Caminada’s noble sentiments as he prepared to patrol the streets of his neighbourhood for the very first time. By the end of the week, he had been ridiculed, insulted and assaulted. With dented pride, but unabated enthusiasm, he later conceded that ‘a policeman’s life is not altogether a bed of roses’.
Prior to the formation of the Manchester Borough Watch Committee in 1839, each township was responsible for its own policing, which was mostly carried out by day and night watchmen and relied on military intervention when necessary. The new police force was established in Manchester in 1842, following the appointment of the city’s first chief commissioner three years earlier. Initially the force comprised 398 police officers, who served a population of 242,000. Most of the recruits were young and inexperienced like Caminada, and they received a salary of 17 shillings a week, which, although a regular wage at the time, was barely adequate to support a family. By the time Caminada joined the Manchester City Police Force in 1868, the salary of a police constable had increased to £1 1s 6d. The number of officers had also doubled and they were now separated into five divisions.
Caminada was attached to A Division under Chief Superintendent John Gee, known as the ‘Gentle Shepherd’ because of his ‘loud voice and boisterous manner’. A Division’s headquarters was at Knott Mill Police Station in Deansgate. PC Caminada was 5 feet 8 inches tall, just meeting the height entry requirements. He had a fresh complexion, grey eyes and brown hair and when he set out on his beat for the first time, he would have been wearing the official dark blue tunic with his service number A21 marked on his collar. The uniform was neither waterproof nor warm, and inadequate for the damp, freezing conditions in the northwest of England. He wore a helmet, which had replaced the distinctive ‘stovepipe’ top hat in 1865 and on his thick leather belt hung a pair of handcuffs, a wooden truncheon and rattle.
Caminada’s main duty was to ‘walk the beat’, patrolling a small area of the city for 14 hours a day, at the regulation pace of two-and-a-half miles an hour. He had to meet his sergeant at fixed points along the route to pass on information about incidents and public disturbances. He was also required to watch out for fires, check all doors and windows, and to help the general public when necessary. Caminada was allocated to No 7 Beat, covering the slums of Quay Street, Byrom Street, Cupid’s Alley and Hardman Street. This rookery had hardly changed since he had lived there as a child and, despite the best efforts of the local police force, violence and lawlessness reigned in the dingy labyrinthine streets.
In March 1869, the Reverend Alfred Alsop, founder of the Wood Street Mission in Deansgate, undertook a study of the locality and published a graphic description of the inhabitants
in his book, Ten Years in the Slums (1876):
The stamp of iniquity is impressed upon all, both young and old. It is all filth, dirt, rags, poverty, squalor, swearing, drunkenness, theft, broken windows, smashed doors, creaking stairs, bad smells, bare rooms, shattered furniture, black eyes, broken heads, bleeding faces, brutal fights, heathenish cruelty, unwashed children, wretched babies, besotted mothers, sluggish fathers, shameless sisters, and pocket-picking, shop-lifting brothers.
Even during the daytime the main thoroughfares of the city were populated by all manner of criminals – from gangs of thieves and professional beggars to ruthless con artists and nimble pickpockets. On street corners and in the doorways of public houses, were ‘sharps’ (swindlers) and ‘magsmen’ (cheats) waiting to accost innocent passersby and encourage them to part with their hard earned cash. Fake sailors, out-of-work colliers and crippled ex-soldiers, returning from foreign climes, reached out their arms to passing ‘swells’ (gentlemen), their pinched faces lined with pain and hardship, as they recounted their sorrowful tales. Few of them had ever seen the sea, fought on a battlefield or toiled down a mine, but all were adept at spinning a convincing story. Nearby, ragged women sat in huddles with ‘hired’ children wrapped in their threadbare skirts, as they implored shoppers to spare them a penny.
Skilled con artists operated all kinds of tricks and scams on the streets of the city. ‘Dry land’ sailors even sold ‘smuggled’ treasure from shipwrecks. In one popular con a man would fall to the ground in an epileptic fit, frothing at the mouth (a simple effect created by soap), until a sympathetic bystander handed him a coin for a drink to calm his twitching limbs. Well-dressed ‘mobsmen’ mingled with the unsuspecting crowd to relieve the wealthy of their wallets and watches. Amongst the thieves and cadgers, were multitudes of street tradespeople or ‘land-sharks’, plying their shoddy goods from the pavement – stolen clothing, fake jewellery and cheap merchandise – the smoky air ringing with their plaintive shouts for business.
The Real Sherlock Holmes Page 2