The Real Sherlock Holmes

by Angela Buckley

  One evening there was a party in the garden of the house and, seeking an opportunity to gain entry, Caminada instructed the boy to kick a ball over the wall and then to knock at the door to retrieve it. The lad undertook the task, but it was still not possible to identify the absconded man, so Caminada decided it was time for another ‘romantic episode’ with one of the servants. When a couple of serving girls left the house to deposit some refuse, Caminada followed them, taking the boy with him so as not to arouse suspicion. Despite the initial reluctance of the young women to speak to him, the detective persevered: ‘But I was not to be thrown off thus. I knew sufficiently the inquisitiveness and contrariness of lovely women’.

  Discovering their plan to visit the wakes, a festival in a nearby village, he arranged to attend the fair with them. The following Saturday, amongst the roundabouts, side stalls and strolling musicians, Caminada solicited vital information as to the whereabouts of his missing man. One of the maids was originally from Prestwich in Manchester, where she had been in the employ of the suspect, but she had been warned not to mention him to anyone. Keen to find out more, Caminada invited her to Leeds on a pleasure trip. They hired a rowing boat on the lake in Roundhey Park and the detective, who was masquerading as an engineer, bought her a handsome umbrella as a gift.

  His lavish attentions eventually paid off and after a short correspondence and another weekend in Harrogate, where they stayed in a hotel and enjoyed a dinner together, Caminada finally obtained the businessman’s address. He fled straight back to Manchester and gave the details to the creditors. The case resolved, that left the delicate issue of disappointing the young maid: ‘She was informed that her lover had become suddenly indisposed, and the news soon followed that he had departed to the land “where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest”. Very much alive and still at the height of his career, Detective Chief Inspector Caminada was awarded an increase in his salary of 10 shillings per week by the watch committee on 18 June 1891 for ‘meritorious conduct’.

  Despite ‘romancing’ women in a professional capacity, by 1891 Jerome Caminada had been married for 10 years. After the tragic early years of his marriage, life had improved for the couple. His son, Charles Bernard was now a healthy three-year-old and on New Year’s Eve 1890 his wife Amelia had given birth to their final child, a daughter, whom they named Mary. Both children, unlike their older siblings, would live long and healthy lives. During this time, the Caminadas had moved from Old Trafford to Chorlton-on-Medlock, not far from Amelia’s family. Originally a small rural village, by the early 1890s it had been incorporated into Manchester’s sprawling suburbs. The inner quarters were dominated by the Chorlton Mills complex and the sodden hovels of Little Ireland but further out, where the Caminada family lived, the area had remained gentrified with refined streets and spacious houses, which were home to prominent public figures such as the Gaskells and the Pankhursts. Caminada would live in this quarter for the rest of his life.

  The other members of his family had not been so successful. His mother, aged 72, was an inmate of Barton-upon-Irwell Workhouse on the other side of the city. A retired tassel-maker, she had been blind for eight years and lived away from her family in the workhouse, where she was probably being cared for in the infirmary. She remained there until her death in 1895. It seems shocking that Caminada’s mother ended her days in this way and it is impossible to understand why she was admitted to the workhouse in the first place. Unfortunately, no records of her time there have survived, so the full details of her circumstances remain unknown.

  Mary Caminada’s sad, difficult life in Manchester was the harsh reality for many women in the Victorian era. Towards the end of his career Caminada recalled visiting the City Gaol in 1870, when he was shocked to see the plight of female convicts as they were being unloaded from the prison van:

  Out of the twenty-seven women and a child that alighted, there was not one that had a whole garment or a clean article about her, and misery of the deepest kind was to be seen in their pinched faces.

  Resorting to crime, many impoverished young girls joined gangs of scuttlers, or street fighters, which were a menace to society and a real challenge for police officers. However, Detective Caminada would go to considerable lengths to save the life of one scuttler.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Scuttlers and the Art of Gang Warfare

  (1892)

  Many a good tussle have I had with other classes of criminals, but I would rather face the worst of these than a scuttler.

  (Jerome Caminada Twenty-Five Years of Detective Life, 1901)

  During the final three decades of the nineteenth century, gangs of ‘scuttlers’ or street fighters plagued the city of Manchester. As Detective Caminada experienced for the first time when still a young police officer, these groups of violent and ruthless youths would ‘stand at nothing when their blood is up’. They were well-organised, fearless and, above all, highly dangerous. The usual deterrents of fines and prison sentences did not work on the scuttlers and the authorities were at a loss for effective methods to deal with them.

  Scuttler gangs were territorial, taking their names from the streets where they lived. Andrew Davies in The Gangs of Manchester, gives examples including the Ordsall Lane and Hope Street gangs from Ordsall, Salford; the Clock Alley gang, which was named after an alleyway near Shudehill in the city centre; and the fearsome Bengal Tigers from Bengal Street in Ancoats. There were many others and each gang had their own ‘patch’, which they would defend to the death. Rival groups entered at their peril.

  Journalist Alexander Devine wrote in the Manchester Guardian in 1890 that ‘scuttlers’ were young men (and often women too) between the ages of 14 and 19. Employed in factories, mills and foundries, they joined a gang after leaving school. The youths were highly style-conscious with a distinctive appearance; the boys dressed in flared trousers, known locally as ‘narrow-go-wides’, scarves and cloth caps. On their feet they wore narrowtoed, brass-tipped clogs, which doubled as vicious weapons, capable of inflicting bruises and fractures on their enemies. Their ‘uniform’ not only gave them status, but also acted as an invitation to incite rival gangs to try their luck against them.

  Scuttlers were armed to the teeth with pokers, cutlasses, leather straps studded with iron bolts, bricks, bottles and knives – anything that could inflict harm on their enemies. The weapons of choice were stones (they would even use the cobbles from the streets) and belts. Their belt was the scuttlers’ most treasured possession and their deadliest weapon. Made of leather, the belts were one to two inches wide and two or three feet long, with a large brass buckle at the end. In battle the fighters would swing the buckle around, inflicting cuts and lacerations to the head and face of an opponent. Often they drove nails through the end of the belt to make it even more lethal: a scuttler’s belt could fracture skulls. The more important members and leaders of the gangs decorated their belts with brass pins in distinctive patterns and shapes, to reflect their lofty position in the hierarchy.

  ‘Scuttles’ took place throughout the city, on crofts, rough ground and even in the streets of busy neighbourhoods. A feud would spark between rival gangs and the resulting ‘war’ could continue for months with attacks and counterattacks, the violence spreading out into the local community. Terrified shopkeepers and café owners closed their businesses as soon as fights broke out. Passersby and shoppers scurried to safety. Sometimes two key members of rival gangs would engage in hand-to-hand combat and on other occasions, large-scale fights were organised, involving hundreds of youths. The timing and location of such battles were chalked on pavements in advance. Gangs would also invade the territory of others, inciting violent backlashes and calls for revenge. Girls were by no means excluded from the action and they would egg on their male companions, by handing them weapons and inciting them to fight harder.

  As the objective of ‘scuttling’ was to maim and disfigure, there were very few deaths linked to the fighting. However, for
some 30 years the local papers printed graphic accounts of gang warfare, and the hard-faced street fighters of Victorian Manchester posed a significant threat to the inhabitants of the city and not least of all to the police, as Detective Caminada discovered to his cost, in his early days as a constable.

  During his first year on the beat there was an ongoing feud between the Clock Alley lads, from the back streets around Manchester Cathedral, and a gang from Greengate, just over the River Irwell in Salford. One night the Clock Alley gang entered enemy territory, but after a fierce battle they were defeated and repelled. The victors chased their foes over Victoria Bridge and back onto their own turf, where the battle recommenced. Constable Caminada happened to be passing at the time and, as he recalled later, ‘having, perhaps, too exalted an opinion of the powers of a police officer and the majesty of the law’, he pitched straight into the mêlée.

  Despite his uniform Caminada had no impact whatsoever on the frenzied fighting and was rewarded for his attempt at bravery with bruises from cobblestones that the scuttlers pulled up from the street. Before long Caminada was laid out flat by a large stone, which hit him on the spine. Fortunately, when he went down the youths fled and he hobbled to the Dog and Partridge Public House nearby to recover from his wounds. The young police officer had learnt a valuable lesson.

  A short while later, however, Caminada succeeded in exacting a small revenge. In a local neighbourhood he was struck on the back of the head by a missile thrown by a member of a gang. By this time he had acquired a thick ash walking stick with a heavy knot at one end and rushed into the group, striking them with it on all sides. His violent foray claimed two or three victims who fell dazed to the ground and before they had a chance to retaliate, he jumped onto a passing tramcar and made his escape.

  Nevertheless, almost 25 years later, after many experiences of dealing with gang warfare, Caminada would undergo a major change of heart and find himself campaigning for the reprieve of a young scuttler convicted of murder. In the summer of 1890, gang fights and violence intensified on the streets of Manchester, with a series of long-running feuds all over the city. This ‘epidemic’ initiated heated debates on the subject amongst the authorities and in the press. On 12 December a deputation from the justices of Manchester and Salford went to London to meet with the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, to request that power be granted to magistrates to sentence scuttlers to corporal punishment, specifically flogging. They recounted the terror being wrought on the community: ‘the whole neighbourhood is in a state of great alarm, great damage being done to property and persons’.

  The only recourse to justice then within their power was to levy fines on the culprits, ranging from 40 shillings to £20, or to give out short prison sentences of up to six months. In practice gangs simply rallied round to pay any fines incurred by their members and if a scuttler went to prison, he was hailed as a hero and promoted to a higher rank within the gang on his release. In the light of their experience, the delegates advocated an extension to the use of flogging, which was then used solely for juvenile offenders (under the age of 14) and for adult male serving prisoners, in cases of insubordination.

  During the second half of the nineteenth century only higher courts could mete out corporal punishment for adults, and just for specific crimes such as robbery with violence. They had to stipulate whether the birch or the cat-o’-nine-tails was to be used and how many strokes were to be inflicted. Flogging would usually be combined with a custodial sentence, and in practice it was rare. However, for young offenders corporal punishment was much more common and those under 14 were often sentenced to birching or flogging, as well as short prison sentences.

  Although Detective Caminada did not join the official debate, he advocated the use of physical punishment for young street fighters instead of custodial sentences, after witnessing at first-hand how incarceration was failing to work as a deterrent for offenders of all ages. In his memoirs he recollected standing by a spiral staircase in Strangeways Prison, watching prisoners return to the cells after their daily exercise. Five lads ranging from 12 to 14 years walked by in single file, supervised by a warder and they made faces at the police officer as they passed him. Caminada’s instant reaction was to laugh at their antics, but he reflected later that:

  The prison evidently had no terrors for them – a birch rod would have been far more effective. Prison discipline and its associations were evidently going to make them pests to society.

  This would have been a fairly standard view amongst nineteenth century law enforcers and in Caminada’s opinion it would have been better to spare youngsters the corruptive influence of prison.

  In the case of the scuttlers, they were mostly exempt from corporal punishment because they were usually older than the legal age of 14 and therefore were not classed as ‘juvenile offenders’. The deputation from Manchester and Salford argued that the use of flogging had been so successful in eradicating garrotters, that it would also be an effective discouragement for street fighters. But the Home Secretary was reluctant to endorse their views. He explained that the House of Commons and the general public were increasingly averse to the use of corporal punishment, especially for older boys and men. He also expressed the difficulty in distinguishing between ‘scuttlers’ and other individuals engaged in riots, brawls and fist fights, and was quoted in the Manchester Courier:

  There were multitudes in Trafalgar-square armed with gaspipes, sticks and stones. Your definition of scuttling would include this. Just imagine whether public feeling would allow the rioters of Trafalgar-square to be flogged.

  Instead, the Home Secretary proposed raising the legal age of juvenile offenders to 16 and the debate raged for the rest of the century, as the criminal justice system continued to evolve. In Manchester, scuttling showed no signs of abating and the violence would reach new heights with the death of one teenager at the hands of another.

  On Thursday 21 April 1892, Billy Willan and his mates were returning home from work when they crossed the path of another group of youths. Willan, 16, was a cooper (barrel-maker), probably working with his uncle and cousins, who were wood turners. His three companions, also aged 16, were James Hand, a dyer’s labourer, Edward Fleming and Charles Davidson. All four formed part of the Bradford Street gang in Ancoats. The other lads were in a rival gang from Lime Street, headed by Peter Kennedy, 16, who worked at Crabtree’s dyeworks. The two gangs had been involved in an ongoing feud over girls.

  According to the Manchester Courier, when Willan challenged Kennedy to a decisive scuttle to end the argument, he was humiliated by his opponent’s flippant response and vowed revenge. Two days later about 1pm, after declaring he was going to ‘dose’ (stab) Kennedy, Willan gathered his supporters and, armed with a pocketknife, lay in wait for his rival. Davidson had a belt and Flemming, a stick. The two groups clashed and a fight broke out, resulting in Kennedy being stabbed in the back.

  Although the events surrounding the attack were unclear, all fingers pointed to Billy Willan as the perpetrator. James Hand, who had left the scene before the incident, said that he had seen Willan later with the open knife, its blade bloodied. Allegedly he had boasted of using it on Kennedy. Peter Kennedy suffered a two-inch knife wound between his ribs and was transported to the Royal Infirmary. He lingered between life and death until 8 May, when he died of internal bleeding despite the best efforts of the surgeons to save him. What had started as a street brawl had ended in murder.

  Billy Willan was arrested at his home and stood trial for the murder of Peter Kennedy on 20 May at the Manchester Assizes with his two companions. In court his friends testified against him, confirming that Billy was the one who struck the fatal blow with the knife. At the summing up, the Counsel for the Defence, Charles McKeand, appealed to the jury on Willan’s behalf stating that he was: ‘on the threshold of life, standing on the very brink of the awful abyss of death’. The young prisoners sobbed in the dock, as McKeand solemnly reminded the jurors that it was their duty
to decide if the ‘three little fellows’ should live or die.

  It took the jury just over an hour to reach their verdict: Willan was found guilty of wilful murder, with a strong recommendation for clemency due to his youth. Flemming and Davidson were acquitted. Following this grim pronouncement the judge donned the black cap and passed the death sentence. Terror-stricken, Willan cried out, ‘Oh, master, don’t: I’m only 16’. The Manchester Courier described the traumatic scene:

  He became so frantic that two policemen in the dock had to seize him and hold him by the arms until the sentence was completed. He was then removed. Several females in the gallery, among whom we believe was the mother of the prisoner, betrayed great agitation, screaming and uttering wild cries.

  As Willan was led away to Strangeways Prison, the campaign to save him from the gallows began in earnest. His solicitor initiated a petition for presentation to the Home Secretary, requesting a commutation of the death sentence to penal servitude for life. It outlined the case and stated that Willan had been of good character until he became involved with a gang of scuttlers. Although Caminada had not been involved directly in this case, he received a note from the governor of Strangeways, informing him that the condemned lad had asked to see him.

  Always ready to respond to a plea for help, he visited Willan in gaol. Even though he had been visiting the prison for some 20 years, this was the first time the detective had ever stepped into a condemned cell and the experience shook him to the core. The scene that unfolded would remain with him for the rest of his life:

  The poor lad put his arms through the bars which separated us, and, with tears streaming down his cheeks, implored me to save him. I was much affected, and promised that I would do all in my power towards this end.