Liverpool Gangs

THE TITHEBARN STREET OUTRAGE

‘My husband was murdered for sixpence’

Alice Morgan

t was an August Bank holiday in 1874. Robert Morgan and his wife, Alice, spent the day on a trip to Birkenhead. They then caught the ferry back across the river. At around 9pm, the couple met up with Robert’s brother, Samuel, at the docks. The three walked up Tithebarn Street and on their way home, popped into a pub in Chapel Street for a nightcap.

As they departed at around 9:30pm, it was still light. They were surrounded by Cornermen. One asked Robert if he had six pence for a quarter pint. Perhaps because they were on one of the major seven streets of Liverpool, Robert, felt safe enough to goad them. He said they wouldn’t need to beg if they had a job? Even less wisely, Robert then turned his back on them.

Within a few steps, one of the Cornermen delivered a punch to the back of his head. It sent Robert sprawling across the street. Samuel retaliated. He knocked one of the assailants down. The gang whistled for back up. Campbell and Mullen attacked Samuel.

A third man began kicking Robert. When he started trying to choke him, Robert’s wife jumped on him. So someone took a running kick at her. She was hit in the ear so hard that she went deaf - the kick to her head was the last thing she ever heard as she would never regain her hearing.

The noise of the fighting drew crowds out of the pubs and families from their homes. But instead of protecting Robert and his family, some encouraged the beating. One woman shouted, “Give him it! Give him it!” Some men decided to join in the activity of kicking a human being like a football. Approximately seven men kicked Robert’s increasingly lifeless body for about 40ft down the street.

When Robert stopped moving, the gang fled down one of these side streets. Samuel tackled one but then McCrave pulled a knife. Distracted, and then attacked from behind, Samuel couldn’t stop the gang’s escape.

It was said that the police tried to intervene but too late. Robert bled out on the steps of a warehouse. Samuel returned to find an onlooker trying to revive Robert with brandy. But it was all too late.

Finally, at 9.50pm, the police took control. A PC Adam Green arrived and escorted Robert to the North Dispensary in Vauxhall Road. The coroner found his body shockingly cut and bruised. What appeared to be a stab wound was identified on the left side of his neck. Samuel set off to capture the assailants.

Later that night, McCrave felt drawn to return to the scene of his crime to see the subsequent spectacle. But he was recognised and identified to Samuel. Samuel sought out a policeman who arrested the surprised onlooker.McCrave protested his innocence saying he had witnesses who would prove he wasn’t the murderer. Questioned further, he pointed the finger at two of his gang, Campbell and Mullen.

Mullen had fled the scene and returned to his and his brother’s lodgings. He’d woken up his brother Thomas and said they needed to immediately stow away on a ship to America. They were later discovered and arrested aboard a ship on the river.To catch Campbell, the police followed his sister. She boarded a train and was trailed to Bolton. Campbell was found to be hiding with relatives there.

The senseless savagery of the beating; the lack of intervention by the onlookers; the innocence and respectability of the victim; and the fact that his criminal killers seemed to be part of a new type of gang, ‘The Cornermen’, all combined to keep the nation gripped to the proceedings.

There were three suspects in the dock, McCrave, Mullen and Campbell. At the trial, it was suggested that it was Campbell’s sister who had encouraged the beating by shouting “Give him it! Give him it!”

The men stood emotionless in the dock. Some have suggested they didn’t want to show weakness and undermine their reputations. If that was so, it was a suicidal strategy. All three were convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged.

The jury recommended mercy for Campbell. He came from a respectable family and they petitioned the Home Secretary to take account of his previous good behaviour. They also organised a petition asking for him to escape the death penalty. Campbell escaped the hangman. Instead, he was sentenced to 20 years jail.

There were petitions for McGrave and Mullen to also be reprieved. But at the same time there was a petition for them to be flogged to death.

In January 1875, McGrave and Mullen climbed the scaffolding at Kirkdale prison. McGrave, the alleged ringleader, is reported to have been reduced to a babbling wreck by the sight of the hangman’s noose. Mullen remained calm and indifferent. For both men, there was no last minute reprieve. On a cold winter’s morning, the lives of a teenager and a young man ended at the end of a rope. In the same jail, Campbell continued his 20 years sentence.

PROSTITUTES, PENNY DREADFULS AND LOLLIPOPS

The Tithebarn Outrage sparked a public debate about gangs and street violence that pinpointed unemployment, housing conditions, punishment, police inefficiency and lack of political will as possible causes. Newspapers stoked the fury, realising that crime sold more copies. And even the cheap magazines, ‘the penny dreadfuls’ that specialised in salacious stories were blamed for declining standards.

Concern extended to prostitutes and then to children playing in the street. Confectionary, and in particular lollipops were suggested as causes for moral decline. The police responded by arresting loiterers and people obstructing footpaths. So overzealous did the police become that as Dr Michael Macilwee notes, in one case, a judge had to tell police to calm down after they arrested four men waiting outside a church for their Bible class.

After the Tithebarn Outrage, crime topped the political agenda. On the streets it was said some citizens took to taking Shillelagh (walking sticks that doubled as clubs) with them. But the next major fatality of the gangs wouldn’t be a native citizen. It would be a visitor.

THE HIGH RIP

“The crimes of the High Rip fell into three categories known as the wrongdoers’ three Rs – random violence, robbery and revenge attacks.”

Dr Michael Macilwee

The ‘heirs’ of the Cornermen terrorised everyone from shopkeepers to seamen between 1884 and 1888. The ‘High Rip’ or ‘High Rippers’ weapons of choice were knives. These, for obvious reasons, they called ‘bleeders’. Extremely violent, their main targets were lone Dockers and sailors.

They sported a uniform of sorts, a tight fitting jacket and bell bottomed trousers held up by a thick leather belt. Like their predecessors, they could use their belts to lethal effect. A quiff of hair would protrude from underneath their muffler caps which were set at a ‘jaunty’ angle. Their sworn gang rivals were the Logwood Gang but there were also juvenile gangs such as the Lemon Street Gang.

The gang’s new nemesis was a tough policeman known as ‘Pins’. The myth goes that he picked up a gang leader by the ankles and swung him around the surrounding gang, knocking them down like skittles. His methodology was blunt:

“I grabs ‘em, I pins ‘em against the wall and I slaps ‘em a bit.”

BLACKSTONE ST MURDER

“The condemned youths walked jauntily from the bar of the dock, and disappeared with a callous smile upon their faces.”

Court report of the Blackstone Street Murder, 25 February 1884

The murder that gave the High Rip infamy took place in January 1884. Five young men, aged between 18 and 20, were alleged to have assaulted two Spanish seamen shortly before 10pm on a Saturday night. One sailor was able to escape but the other, Exequiel Rodriguez Nunuiez, was said to have been repeatedly beaten with belt buckles, kicked and then knifed. One of the men identified as using a knife was 18 year old Michael M’Lean.

Unlike the Tithebarn Outrage, no one encouraged the assault and many witnesses came forward. One woman identified one assailant, a Patrick Duggan, as having asked to use her apron to clean his bloody hands. Another, William Dempsey asked for a brush to wipe the blood off his trousers.

The defence would later draw attention to the age of the witnesses, many of who were just children.

A police constable, Evans 343, took the sailor in an ambulance to hospital. He was dead on arrival. The attending doctor said that because of his death came so quickly after the beating, there were no bruises on his body. He had died before they could form.

Of course, there is another explanation. There were no bruises as he was not beaten. There seemed to be no motive for the crime apart from, as court papers suggested,

‘wanton brutality’.

Five men were arrested and each individual protested their innocence while naming others in the gang as guilty of the murder. During the arrests and investigation, various blood stained knives and items of clothing were found. At first, the men suggested the blood came from a nose bleed, then from sparring with each other. Finally, at the trial, it was suggested the five were acting in self defence against the Spanish sailors.

The judge was very sceptical of this in his summation to the jury. He pointed out that they each had admitted to taking part in the beating, if not the killing. It took exactly an hour for the jury to return to find M’Lean and Duggan guilty of ‘wilful murder ‘. Due to the age of the accused, they requested mercy.

But the Judge assumed the black cap and said they had been found guilty of “a murder of a very savage character”. He passed a sentence of death.

Duggan was reprieved and sentenced to ‘penal servitude for life’. M’Lean, aged just 18, protested his innocence one last Monday morning at Kirkdale Jail. He was then hanged. His death was mercifully quick considering the hangman later admitted to being drunk.

The Police Inspector involved in the case was later demoted to Police sergeant. He had withheld vital evidence until late in the trial that the Spanish sailor had had a knife on him. His death may have been an accident in a genuine case of self-defence.

The public hysteria over gangs may have helped give a death sentence to an 18 year old who if not an innocent, may have been innocent of the charge of ‘wilful murder’.

Increasingly, religious and philanthropic groups sought to use charity, education, and better housing, rather than the law, to address the problem of gangs. There was a growing sense that the troublemakers were in a sense victims of their environment

Such solutions are, however, long term. In 1888, it was reported in a Liverpool weekly papers that on a Monday night, a ‘murderous attack’ was made on a police constable by a gang of “high-rippers”. When they emerged drunk from a pub and fought among themselves over a watch, the policeman had tried to intervene. So they turned on him. The policeman survived.

Fast forward to the 1950s and the gang problem caused The Daily Herald to ask of Liverpool, ‘What makes it our wickedest city?’

And then in the 1980s drugs, and the millions they could earn criminals, entered the world of gangs. No longer would young men risk their lives for sixpence. Now they could make untold wealth. Men like Curtis Warren...