Together Trust Archive

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...

Going through some photographs today I came across this image in the archives. It shows men leaving Strangeways prison around the turn of the twentieth century. At the gates of Strangeways prison

An account of a four year old boy admitted to the Refuge in 1889: “The boy reeled on the floor and had to be assisted to a seat. We thought it advisable to have him examined by a doctor who pronounced the poor little baby-boy to be drunk and ordered an emetic to be administered and the child to be put to bed, as otherwise it might prove fatal. It may not generally be known that making children drunk is at present no offence under the English law.” The Together Trust receives regular enquiries about the young people who have been in its care. Most are people researching their family history, trying to get some semblance of how their ancestors lived. Many are from Canada or America tracing those young children who were emigrated across the seas in search of a better life away from the slums of Manchester. A ragged child