The Criminal Classes: Who Does Society Fear and Why?

By Barry Godfrey and Alexandra Godfrey

We explore why the idea of the criminal class came into being. Starting with garrotters lurking in dark Victorian alleyways, the fiend Jack the Ripper stalking London’s streets to the menace of violent gangs, the ‘Scuttlers’, Peaky Blinders, and Liverpool’s High Rip, all the way through to 1970s joyriders, 1990s ravers, and the modern drug trade that brings guns and knives to our streets. It describes the actions taken to control the hard-core group – increasingly harsh punishments, executions, floggings, long prison sentences and the ways that society learns about crime, dangerous areas, and the people who habitually offend against society. How do we know what dangers apparently lurk in the inner cities? What part did the newspapers, authors and social investigators play in sensationalising some crimes, and were they right to do so? The book compares real-life criminals (and their lives) with fictional accounts, such as the Artful Dodger, Pinkie in Brighton Rock, and the scenes that social investigators such as Henry Mayhew dragged back from the criminal rookeries to entertain and frighten respectable people. Perhaps most importantly, the book shows which groups have been targeted as the criminal classes, particularly the young, as well as ethnic and racial minorities, and concludes by asking, “Who are the new criminal classes likely to be?“

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Apr 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781399067126

Barry Godfrey

Professor Barry Godfrey is Professor of Social Justice at the University of Liverpool and Honorary Professor of Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University, China. Among his many publications are _Crime, Wartime and Control: Protecting the Population of a Blitzed City, 1939-1945_ (with P. Adey and David Cox), _Victorian Convicts: 100 Criminal Lives_ (with Helen Johnston and David Cox) and _Crime and Justice Since 1750_ (with Paul Lawrence).

Book preview

Introduction: Looking for the Criminal Classes

Most of the people who pick up this book will not be criminals. You will not have been convicted of criminal offences. You may have sat next to someone who has on the bus or the train, you may walk past them in the street, but it is unlikely that you will be one of the people who wreaks havoc in your neighbourhood or are chased down the street by police cars with blue lights and sirens blazing.

However, most of the people who pick up this book will technically have committed a crime. If you count speeding and other traffic offences, then a large number will have convictions already. But these are not the sort of people that are generally considered to be criminals. Not ‘proper’ criminals, the violent robbers and burglars who should be pursued by the police and dealt with by the courts. Who are those people? Is there a large number of people who infrequently carry out a bit of small-scale shoplifting, or is there a small number of people who repeatedly and regularly commit very serious offences, burglaries and robberies and suchlike?

Does crime emanate from where respectable people do not live, which is why many people do not spot criminal types slouching around clutching holdalls, with balaclavas stuffed in their pockets; or are all the kids seen hanging around on many normal street corners, ours or our neighbour’s children usually, paused to strike, scheming criminal acts beneath their identity-protecting hoodies?

Both scenarios are very unsettling; which scenario is more accurate and how can we possibly know?

Learning about crime is an everyday act; crime stories are everywhere. Very few of us will have personal experiences of being a victim of crime, yet every newspaper you pick up, every TV channel, detective novels, many websites, and an increasing number of ‘true crime’ podcasts, all tell us something about crime. This has been the case for a long time now, and what have we learned? Where does crime come from? Who are the criminals? How do they act, what do they look like, how do we recognise them, control them, keep away from them?

The media, academics, the government, and the bloke down the pub have rushed to answer these questions. However, the story has changed many times and the explanations are often contradictory. Was crime simply what the poor did to survive; was it a lack of morality that provoked people to commit offences; or was there some hereditary impulse hidden in their psychological make-up? Did criminals band together to live in the same areas, wear the same clothes, drink in the same pubs? Can we think of them as a class of people? Who were the criminal classes, where did they come from, and where have they gone?

This book was not written with the intent of providing the truth about crime and criminality. It will not provide the reasons why some people might get into offending, the reasons why some people might stop, or the underlying root causes of crime. Nor will the book be telling people how they have got things wrong. It is not intended to put the record straight. The book will not be explaining why people are right or wrong to think the way that they do about crime. The book will also not aim to play the game of social policy bingo, identifying problems when they crop up, and attempting to fix them. Politicians and social policy makers today have to pick where they choose to put their money and resources, in order to eradicate, or at least reduce, crime and the fear of crime. This book does not have that responsibility. It is not going to tell you what is ‘true’ according to the latest criminological research. It will not point out what fools our forefathers and mothers were to believe what they did. Instead, it starts with the idea that people have long been curious, frightened, or alarmed about where crime ‘comes from’. The idea of criminality and the criminal classes is charted in this book from the eighteenth century to today so as to describe how, and possibly some of the reasons why, crime and criminality has been thought about in these ways. The first five chapters are organised virtually chronologically from the eighteenth to the twentieth century because that is the way that the history of ideas about crime seemed to run. There seemed to be a commonly and widely held set of beliefs about criminality from around the 1850s to the twentieth century. The second half of the book deals with the more fractured picture that emerged around the start of the twentieth century. From the First World War onwards, the idea of the criminal classes, or theories about where crime came from, are a jumble of concerns about ‘unrestrained and undisciplined youth’, race and ‘others’, and the ‘criminal poor’. Since the eighteenth century, society seems to have identified groups who were singled out as the criminal group, the criminal type, the people who either preyed on their neighbours, or who drained the nation’s resources. This book will take us on a journey through all of the various guises and forms the criminal classes were supposed to have taken: the revolutionary brigands, the shady garrotters hiding in Victorian alleys, the kids hanging around the street corners, the joyriders, drug takers, robbers, blaggers, hoodies and gangsters. In terms of the groups that are thought to be responsible for crime, the book simply asks ‘who has been before’, but also gives us a clue as to ‘who is next’?

But let us start in the eighteenth century, with the guillotine. This device was introduced by French revolutionaries in 1789 as a modern form of execution, but for the British ruling classes in the early nineteenth century it was a dramatic symbol of the fate that might befall respectable society if ‘the mob’ ever gained power. This chapter explains how the ‘dangerous classes’ were watched and suppressed, from the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 to the Swing riots of the 1830s, all under the guillotine’s shadow. Using dramatic newspaper reports and excerpts from threatening letters sent to landowners, this chapter describes the tumultuous riots and protests that characterised the early nineteenth century. Riots and political demonstrations were illegal but were not the sort of events that we would describe as ‘crime’. What were the main crimes at this time? The chapter examines trial reports from the Old Bailey to see who was appearing before the courts, and for what. Who were the poor people who found themselves first in the dock, and then on their way to the American or Australian penal colonies, or even worse, to be brought to the gallows?

When industrialisation made Victorian Britain the ‘workshop of the world’, and fears of revolution faded, people grew both anxious and fascinated by the rapidly growing towns and cities, and the people who lived in them. The middle classes thirsted for knowledge about the terrible and terrifying conditions at the dark hearts of Britain’s cities. In the 1850s social investigators and journalists like Henry Mayhew brought back information in the same way as did missionaries to Africa. He and others revealed that the ‘dangerous classes’ were now divided into the respectable hard-working poor and a new ‘criminal class’, or ‘people who will not work’ who lived a life of criminality. He described the rookeries where these hardened offenders lived, how they looked, acted, spoke, and the specialist tools he thought they used to commit their crimes. One of those, the garotte, and the panic it caused, is the focus of Chapter Three.

In the 1860s, London was gripped in a panic about a spate of violent garrotting robberies. Shadowy figures seemed to lurk in every alley and doorway to prey on unwitting passers-by. Popular magazines lampooned the crisis, publishing cartoons of anti-garrotting devices to deter attacks. Politicians called for offenders to be flogged, in addition to being given long prison sentences. Respectable citizens kept away from the criminal ‘rookeries’ in Britain’s major cities. This chapter looks at trial reports of robberies and burglaries in London to give a glimpse of real offences, and how they were committed. The chapter then explores the reality of the garrotting episodes, why it erupted at this time, and how the authorities reacted to the panic. It concludes by showing how and why tougher prison conditions were seen as the answer to a perceived rising wave of violent crime.

Chapter Four opens with a description of dark and forbidding Dartmoor Prison. It explains how a chain of convict prisons were built to cage hardened criminals from the 1850s. These castles of punishment were designed to deter crime and grind men into being good citizens, and the chapter delves inside individual prisoners’ files to reveal conditions inside Britain’s Victorian convict prisons. However, as soon as the government began to keep statistics on the number of times individuals had been in prison, they realised that imprisonment seemed to be ineffective. Prison conditions were already as harsh as they could make them, so now the authorities focused even more clearly on controlling the hard-core criminal classes. Repeat serious offenders who fell foul of three strikes legislation served increasingly longer sentences. Case studies show how habitual serious offenders were monitored and watched, even after they had been released from prison, in an attempt to curb recidivism. Rather than hardened criminals, robbers and burglars, most habitual recidivists appeared to have been poor and destitute petty criminals. They did not seem to be the epitome of the Victorian criminal class. As discussed in the next chapter, new ideas around the criminal classes emerged in the age of Jack the Ripper, which raised general anxieties, not just about a criminal group, but about the whole state of society.

Chapter Five begins with an excerpt from Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, published in 1886, and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, published in 1895. Stevenson and Wells both fed on ideas that some humans had evolved into civilised beings while some still bore the traces of their ape-like, violent ancestors. This might have explained mid-Victorian depictions of convicts like Dickens’ Magwitch (in Great Expectations, 1860). However late Victorian and Edwardian scientists and politicians took the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin into more alarming territory, suggesting that humanity as whole may have ceased to develop, and that it was at risk of degenerating back to an earlier state of evolution. Compulsive evidence for their views seemed to lie all around at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The problem was not only the brutal incorrigible convicts, but the vast ranks of the ‘workshy’, the vagrants, the alcoholics, habitual thieves, and ‘inherently weak minded’. These were the ‘residuum’, the left-behind, the poor, uneducated, and unemployed. While some advocated economic, social, and educational reforms to ‘lift’ people out of the residuum, others despaired, and suggested sterilisation and other, even bleaker, ways to strengthen the strain. Both reformers and eugenicists saw youth as the possible solution to society’s ills, but worried that the reckless and idle youths they saw lounging on street corners were a sign that the future looked bleak for respectable society.

Chapter Six describes how young adults became ‘Folk Devils’. In the late nineteenth century, the Manchester ‘scuttlers’ and Birmingham’s ‘Peaky Blinders’ strutted the streets with distinctive clothing and a reputation for serious violence. Stories about razor gangs filled the newspapers, and this chapter begins by describing the cut-throat razor and some of its vicious work as reported in the media. The archetypal gang members were young working-class men standing around on street corners, hassling passers-by, preying on vulnerable women, and making their living through extortion and violent crime. Graham Greene would portray their cruelty and popularise the idea of the British gangster in Brighton Rock (1938). Some of his ideas may have been influenced by American gangster movies of the time, but he may also have been influenced by newspaper reports of 1920s and ’30s Italian racecourse gangs. At the time Richard Attenborough was playing Pinkie in the 1948 popular film, the newspapers were also full of news about 1940s Maltese prostitution rings. However, the gang that has kept longest in the public mind was the group of London mobsters ruled over by the Krays. Ronnie and Reggie were always associated with the glamour of London’s nightlife, but they too were also devotees of the razor. They were familiar with guns too, and other tools that would help them to keep their fearsome reputation. They were eventually arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, however. The Krays and their ilk could not keep pace with the more professionalised gangs, firms and teams of blaggers who preyed on post offices and wages vans in the 1960s and ’70s. The chapter ends by looking at the type of people who made up this relatively small group who carried out these daring raids.

In the nineteenth century, newspapers screamed about ‘Irish rows’ and sectarian violence. Migrants who escaped starvation in their own land in the 1840s and ’50s were welcomed for their labour, but derided for their lack of culture, civilisation, and addiction to alcohol. The Irish Quarters in many towns and cities were associated with dirt, violence, and drunkenness. They were a ready-made deviant group who were highly visible in their host country and condemned as the ‘Irish Problem’. When migrants from the West Indies came to post-war Britain to fill labour shortages, they received a similarly frosty welcome. ‘No Blacks, No Irish’ signs signified where new migrants could and could not live. When vibrant communities grew up in Notting Hill, Toxteth and elsewhere, they attracted the attention of right-wing politicians and their young followers who wished to make life unpleasant for (what were becoming defined as) the black communities. The 1958 Notting Hill Riots started when Teddy Boys attacked black settlers and ended with black settlers being identified as the problem. This gave license to the police to harass young black men, especially after newspapers stoked the fire with dramatic reports of the ‘new’ crime of mugging in the 1970s and ’80s. British-born, second-generation migrants from the Caribbean were identified as running the streets, running riot, and assaulting police officers who tried to curb drug use or vandalism. Oral histories collected in the 1980s are used in this chapter to show how crime, disorder, and racism combined to portray ‘no-go’ areas in some British cities, and how conditions on the estates, and relationships between the police and young black men, led to the explosion of riots in the mid-1980s.

Chapter Eight takes us from the joyriding, hoody-wearing, foul-mouthed unreformable teenagers to the drug-taking culture of the 1990s. Youth unemployment, concern that ‘slap on the wrist’ punishments were ineffective, and a general perceived lack of discipline in society all fed into a crisis about young people in the 1970s and ’80s. Young working-class men standing around on street corners wearing distinctive black hoodies, reminiscent of the 1890s razor gangs in some ways, were bad enough. But this time, in the 1970s and ’80s, the media focus was on out-of-control teenagers screaming round the streets in stolen cars. And then they were gone. As car manufacturers increased the security of vehicles to combat theft, and as drugs such as ecstasy became readily available, joyriding was replaced by new fears. The rave culture came complete with photographs of young people dancing in illegal gatherings under the influence of drugs. The fear that middle-class children might suffer adverse health effects was quickly replaced by concerns that working-class neighbourhoods were littered with young boys and girls who had replaced the relatively weak cannabis of the hippy 1960s with a type considered to be much more potent – hardcore skunk. Worse, the violence that came with the supply and transfer of drugs from ports to cities to communities across the country was spilling out into the streets. Manchester became ‘Gunchester’ as gangs sought to control their territories and, just as gangs had done previously, to enhance their reputation. Carrying a strap or Glock was considered fashionable in some areas in the 1990s. But gun crime, and knife crime, was lethal, caused immeasurable misery and, not surprisingly, it came to dominate the media. Again, race, violence, and youth were never far from the surface of those debates. It is easy enough to dismiss some of the views on youth crime, gangs, and drugs as moral panics, but equally as easy to forget the damage they did to people’s lives, and also to the reputations of groups of people in society.

As economic conditions for many worsened at the end of the twentieth century, fears grew that society was becoming more undisciplined and that certain groups were essentially living their lives sponging and preying on respectable society. By the 2000s this fear had grown from a worry about youth, to a focus on ‘criminal families’ living their whole lives in high-crime estates. The TV show Shameless, which ran from 2004 to 2013, portrayed a northern ‘sink estate’, whose residents were idle, immoral, and who made extra money through thieving and selling drugs – very similar in fact to Mayhew’s descriptions of Victorian criminal rookeries. Indeed, the common portrayal of the inadequate and undeserving poor prompts Chapter Nine to examine whether the Underclass, as they were termed by some, were actually the old residuum in a new guise. Single mothers, the long-term unemployed, the chronically ill or disabled were all seen as problematic in the late twentieth century. But they were the petty thieves, the swindlers, and drug users. They were perceived to be ‘low-life scroungers’ rather than hard-core criminals. However, these were the offenders that government had in their sights. New Labour were determined to again draw a line between the respectable poor who needed support and the small minority who committed nine out of every ten crimes. Chapter Nine therefore follows the ‘shameless generation’ through to the debates around ‘chavs’, the relinking of poverty to crime, and the seemingly never-ending search to find the criminal class, or criminal classes, or the underclass, or whoever society considers lies at the root of the problem of crime.

And that search has not yet concluded, maybe it never will, for, as, the last chapter concludes, there seems to be an inclination for society to want to find some group – the young, the poor, strangers, people on the margins – who are responsible for crime. Following through the history of ideas since the eighteenth century helps to focus down on the qualities of each identified problem group, and therefore help us to predict who will form the next problem group. Chapter Ten takes us through the runners and riders for the next crisis and panic about crime, and ends the book by asking, what is it about us that makes us think this way?

Chapter 1

Terror

(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Story_of_Mankind_-_The_Guillotine.png)

The Guillotine would strike off her husband’s head next day. Every day, through the stony streets, the tumbrils now jolted heavily, filled with Condemned. Lovely girls; bright women, brown-haired, black-haired, and grey; youths; stalwart men and old; gentle born and peasant born; all red wine for La Guillotine, all daily brought into light from the dark cellars of the loathsome prisons, and carried to her through the streets to slake her devouring thirst … Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine … La, la, la; La, la, la! And off his head comes! (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859)

The guillotine was introduced by French revolutionaries in 1789 as a modern form of execution, replacing the barbaric tortures of the ancien regime with a modern, calibrated, clean form of justice. However, for the British ruling classes in the early nineteenth century it was a dramatic symbol of the fate that might befall respectable society if ‘the mob’ ever gained power. The French Revolution was a dreadful example of what happened if people born to work for others began to think they were born to rule. Mobs, crowds, political activists came to be seen as part of a disorderly and dangerous revolutionary movement that could overturn the established order. Their shadowy influence was seen everywhere, and the reigning social and political elites marshalled their forces. The government prepared for war not simply to defeat the revolutionary ‘menace’ that came from France, but also to destroy support for a similar revolution in Britain. From the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, the ‘dangerous classes’ were feared, watched and suppressed. From the Luddite attacks to the food riots of the 1840s, British society fell under the guillotine’s shadow.

Revolution

The first challenge to the established order came from the countryside. Around the time of the French Revolution, Britain was largely rural and overwhelmingly agricultural. The vast bulk of the population were poor, uneducated, countryside dwellers who laboured or who worked in the fields or in their cottages on piecework (where they were paid for the goods they produced). However, during the reign of George III (1760–1820), the woollen, cotton and stockings trade was undergoing a technological revolution.

Machines were replacing handloom frames, and workers were being centralised in manufactories. The machines increased profits and the speed of production, but also reduced wages and made workers redundant. The modernisation left many handloom weavers and workers destitute. In reaction to the destruction of their trades and livelihood, groups of countryside workers took to breaking the machines that had led to their downfall.

Under the leadership or flag of the mythical ‘Ned Lud’, men dressed in dark clothes with blackened faces led assaults on mills in Nottinghamshire in 1811, and Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire in 1812. Fearing social destabilisation at a time when the army were overseas fighting Napoleonic Wars, the government passed the Frame-Breaking Bill (1812), which introduced the death penalty for those found guilty of machine breaking. Mass arrests, trials and harsh sentencing did not deter the ‘Luddites’.

The Act had just been passed when there was an attack on a mill in Dewsbury, Yorkshire. The millowner told of the night’s events to the local parson, Patrick Brontë, who presumably recounted the event to his daughter, Charlotte, as an account of the assault found its way into her novel, Shirley:

A roll was called over, in which the men answered to figures instead of names … Shots were discharged by the rioters. Had the defenders waited for this signal? It seemed so. The hitherto inert and passive mill woke; fire flashed from its empty window-frames; a volley of musketry pealed sharp through the Hollow … It seemed difficult, in the darkness, to distinguish; but something terrible, a still-renewing tumult, was obvious – fierce attacks, desperate repulses. The millyard, the mill itself, was full of battle movement. There was scarcely any cessation now of the discharge of firearms; and there was struggling, rushing, trampling, and shouting … Discord, broken loose in the night from control, had beaten the ground with his stamping hoofs, and left it waste and pulverized. The mill yawned all ruinous with unglazed frames; the yard was thickly bestrewn with stones and brickbats; and close under the mill, with the glittering fragments of the shattered windows, muskets and other weapons lay here and there. More than one deep crimson stain was visible on the gravel, a human body lay quiet on its face near the gates, and five or six wounded men writhed and moaned in the bloody dust (Bronte, 1849).

As that description intimates, encounters could be violent and even murderous.

Yorkshire millowner William Horsfall, pictured below, was shot and killed on his way home from Huddersfield, for which three men were hanged at York. Hanging was often used as a punishment for the most serious crimes (although convict transportation was the most common punishment by far), but in order to deter threats to authority and the state, ruling governments favoured extraordinary punishments. Following the execution of Mr Horsfall’s assassins, it was ordered that their bodies be taken down from the gallows and given to the surgeons for dissection. This benefited medical science and surgical training but, as would have been well known to all Christians, it would eradicate the chance of salvation in the afterlife. The common belief was that only those who were whole in body would be resurrected. Luddites were killed in this life and prevented from everlasting salvation; a terrible warning to those who challenged the established hierarchy:

The Assassination of Mr William Horsfall. (Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne, Chronicles of Crime, 1886)

The Execution of these unhappy men took place yesterday, at nine o’clock, at the usual place behind the Castle, at York. Every precaution had been taken to render any idea of a rescue impracticable. Two troops of cavalry were drawn