Together Trust Archive

  Admission records we hold relating to the Gordon Boys’ Home in Manchester held in the Together Trust Archive have recently been digitised by the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society to help make these more accessible. It’s timely then to shed some light on the home’s very brief existence and explore how the Manchester and Salford Refuges (as the Together Trust was then known) came to take over after the home ran into difficulties. Established in 1888 by Alexander Devine, the Gordon Boys’ Home came about the year after a new piece of legislation known as The First Offender’s Act was established. This meant first offenders for minor crimes could avoid a prison sentence if they had fixed accommodation, which the Gordon Boys Home provided, first located off Rusholme Road and later at Cornbrook Abbey, Chester Road, Manchester. From a Sept 1890 entry of the Gordon Boy’s Home register showing a boy charged with stealing cloth and opera glasses from his employer being disch...

I was lent a book recently entitled, ' The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of The Scuttlers' by Andrew Davies . The book revolves around Manchester at the end of the nineteenth century and the turf wars which existed between groups of teenagers. Scuttlers belonged to their own distinct group; the Bengal Tigers, the Meadow Lads and the Pollard Street Scuttlers, to name a few, fiercely defended their own patch. Weapons included belt buckles and knives as well as the boy’s fists and feet. From 1870 the industrial slums of Manchester and Salford saw the emergence of a brutal gang culture that lasted for 30 years.  Strangeways Prison – A common sight to many a scuttler “A scuttler is a lad, usually between the ages of 14 and 18, or even 19, and scuttling consists of the fighting of two opposed bands of youths, who are armed with various weapons”. — Alexander Devine , Scuttlers and Scuttling: Their Prevention and Cure. (Manchester, 1890)  So how is this book relevan...