Curing hooliganism: moral panic, juvenile delinquency, and the political culture of moral reform in Britain, 1898-1908

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Content CURING HOOLIGANISM: MORAL PANIC, JUVENILE DELINQUENCY, AND
THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF MORAL REFORM IN BRITAIN, 1898-1908

by

Ian Michael Livie

______________________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

May 2010

Copyright 2010 Ian Michael Livie
ii
Dedication

To Marvin and Mary Lynne Livie

iii
Acknowledgements
This dissertation is the product of several years of work while a doctoral student
in the History department at the University of Southern California. I wish to thank the
department for its financial support during much of my time as a student and its help in
developing my studies. More specifically, this work would not have been possible
without the help and support of Professor Paul Lerner, Professor Claudio Fogu, and
Professor James Kincaid, as well as the entire office staff of the History department. In
particular, I am forever indebted to my advisor, Professor Philippa Levine, for her
patience, effort, and constant support.
This dissertation would not been completed without the help of the librarians
and archivists who made it possible for me to conduct my research. I wish to thank
archivists, librarians, and staff of the USC Doheny Library, the London Metropolitan
Archives, the British Library, and the National Archives for their help in conducting my
research.
In addition to those named above, this work would not have been possible
without the help and support of the following individuals in no particular order: Marvin
Livie, Mary Lynne Livie, Kyle Livie, Benjamin Schott, Matthew Newsom Kerr, Tom
Chin, Vanessa Chin, Katherine Gaidos, Abby Daane, Garrick Yan, Whitney Udwin,
Samuel Beltran, J.R. Eppler, Michael Gadeberg, James Clemons, Jamie Strefeler,
LaMar Medeiros, Lisa Spirakes, Maren Anderson, Matthew Zealand, Bram Dragos,
Matthew O’Shea, Katherine Bratina, Mandy Davey, Rachel Foster, Steve Kinsey, Laura
Kalba, and Stephanie Clayton. Through their constant and unwavering support, these
people made what was a challenging journey seem bearable. I am forever in their debt.
iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures v
Abstract vi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 13
Chapter 2 56
Chapter 3 97
Chapter 4 141
Chapter 5 176
Chapter 6 214
Conclusion 248
Bibliography 255

v
List of Figures

Image 1.1: Daily Graphic, 5 December 1900. 55

Image 2.1: Map, Coroner’s Inquest for Henry Mappin 95

Image 2.2: Etching, Coroner’s Inquest for Elizabeth Lofthouse 96

vi
Abstract

The purpose and central question of my dissertation is to explain how the moral
panic surrounding “hooliganism” affected social and political change in Britain in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My dissertation is an attempt to explain
how and why movements, such as the Salvation Army, became increasingly interested
in the manifestation and regulation of “deviant” behavior among working class
juveniles in the wake of the “Hooligan craze," and how these movements came to have
an impact on state policy. Beginning with the media outcry that surrounded a minor
uptick in juvenile criminal activity in South London in the summer of 1898, and
culminating with the creation of the juvenile court system with the Children’s Act of
1908, my dissertation explores how violent juvenile crime was cast by the popular print
media as a distinct threat to British civility, cultural and racial integrity, and the power
of the state and local authorities to regulate public behavior. My research explores how
the moral panic over hooliganism functioned as a crucial catalyst for moral reform
movements, who used their considerable leverage in the civic arena to force change in
the education, reform, and treatment of juvenile offenders, culminating in the 1908
Children’s Act.

1

Introduction
The purpose and central question of this dissertation is to explain how the moral
panic surrounding “hooliganism” affected social and political change in Britain in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This dissertation is an attempt to explain
how and why moral reform movements, such as the Salvation Army, became
increasingly interested in the manifestation and regulation of “deviant” behavior among
working-class juveniles in the wake of the “Hooligan craze," and how these
organizations came to have an impact on state policy. Beginning with the media outcry
over juvenile criminal activity in South London in the summer of 1898, and culminating
in the creation of the juvenile court system by the Children’s Act of 1908, this
dissertation explores how violent juvenile crime was cast by the popular print media as
a distinct threat to British civility, morality, and the power of the state and local
authorities to regulate public behavior. It explores how the moral panic over
hooliganism functioned as a crucial catalyst for moral reform movements, which used
their considerable leverage in the civic arena to push for change in the education,
reform, and treatment of juveniles.
Through the development of an exaggerated, if not entirely fabricated,
“Hooligan type,” the British press effectively invented a deviant sub-culture that
represented a threat to the fabric of civility in British society. Through accounts of
violent crime among working-class juveniles in South London, such as the John D’Arcy
murder case, the popular press promoted the “Hooligan” as the newest threat to British
civil society. What emerged from the summer of 1898 was the construction of a new
2
deviant cultural identity, but also a phenomenon that moral reformers used to
effectively promote their campaigns for changes in British criminal and educational
policy towards juveniles. Ideologically, many moral reformers viewed “hooliganism” as
a symptom of physical and moral degeneration and sought new—or renewed—forms of
Christian-based moral education, increased regulation of specific behaviors such as
alcohol and tobacco use, and the creation and/or expansion of institutions specifically
designed to serve children and juveniles.
This dissertation addresses the nature and extent of the relationship between the
response of moral reformers to “Hooliganism” and the development of state policies
towards juveniles by exploring the records and publications of moral reform movements
and the internal documents from the Home Office dealing with juvenile justice reform.
While aspects of this line of inquiry are certainly not new, what distinguishes my work
is its demonstration of how the state was often overwhelmed by the social pressure
exerted by these groups, as well as how the language of moral reform permeated
internal policy discussions in the Home Office during this period. In this way, it is a
history of the political culture of reform in early twentieth century Britain that uses the
issue of juvenile delinquency to explore the culture of reform both within government
and outside of it.
At the heart of this study is the history of criminality and the regulation of
deviant behavior in Britain. Much historical research on British crime has hitherto
focused on the development of penal institutions and policy, but recently the figure of
3

the criminal has come to play a central role in such studies.
1
Following the lead of
V.A.C Gatrell and T.B. Hadden, historians have examined how, in the late Victorian
period, crime came to be viewed as a social malady, noting the increased concern with
criminality, or the specific set of behaviors associated with crime, rather than simply
accounts of criminal acts.
2
Wiener points to “anxieties over moral disorder that shaped
images of criminality,” observing that even in early Victorian social and psychological
discourse, a polarity existed between behavioral “restraint” and “instincts or impulses,”
commonly associated with a model of criminality as a form of savagery or barbarism.
3

Historians of Victorian criminality have recently begun to address how the
restraint versus impulse polarity precipitated increased interest on the part of moral
reformers, who increasingly viewed criminality as a social illness that could be cured
through training in moral restraint. The target of these moral reformers was often
children and juveniles who were regarded as vulnerable to criminal influences. In
particular, historians like Heather Shore have focused more on how reformers and
social commentators constructed the model of the juvenile criminal as the victim of a
moral disorder, but also how the nineteenth century marked an important turning point

1
See David M. Anderson and David Killingray, eds., Policing the Empire. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1991; Michael Brogden, On Mersey Beat. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; Neil
Davies, “Criminal Man Revisited? Continuity and Change in British Criminology, 1865-1918,” Journal
of Victorian Culture, 8 (2003), 1-32; David Jones, Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth
Century Britain. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982; David Jones, Crime and Policing in the
Twentieth Century: The South Wales Experience. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996; and Stefan
Petrow, Policing Morals: the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, 1870-1914. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994.
2
See especially Martin Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830-
1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 and V.A.C Gatrell and T.B. Hadden, “Criminal
Statistics and Their Interpretation,” in E.A. Wrigley, Ed., Nineteenth Century Society. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1972, 372-4.
3
Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 26.
4

in how juveniles were recognized by the justice system.
4
Specifically, Shore notes that
the juvenile came to be a recognized subsection of the criminal population in the
nineteenth century, although the ways in which juveniles were treated by courts and the
police differed significantly from place to place.
As both Wiener and Marie-Christine Leps have argued, the production and
dissemination of knowledge about the “criminal” as a deviant identity is tied largely to
the increased intensity of governmental efforts to regulate immoral and uncivil behavior
that intensified during the last decade of the nineteenth century.
5
Both authors correctly
assert that the rise of scientific studies of crime, crowd behavior, and human
development have led to the redefinition of the criminal as a social actor. I contend,
however, that the popular press played the most significant role in this period in
defining and redefining crime and criminality. While the new “science” of criminology
significantly affected the way society-at-large understood law enforcement, the popular
press was crucial to the way in which Britons understood the “criminal world.” As
Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson correctly contend, Victorian Britons “regarded
the role of print, especially newsprint, as crucial in promoting and mediating mass
consent to the operation of the legal system and the accompanying socio-cultural
processes of identifying and punishing transgressors.”
6

4
For more on nineteenth century criminal children, see Heather Shore, Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime
in Early Nineteenth-Century London. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1999 and Jeannie Duckworth,
Fagin’s Children: Criminal Children in Victorian England. London: Hambledon and London, 2002.
Shore’s conclusions regarding the nineteenth century as a turning point in the state’s recognition of
juvenile criminality seem dubious, as up to the beginning of the twentieth century, many police courts
failed to enter the age of prisoners unless they were under 14.
5
Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth Century
Discourse. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992, 8.
6
Rowbotham and Stevenson, Introduction, Criminal Conversations, xxiii.
5

The press played an important role in mediating the distance between its
readership and the criminal world, which for its readership resembled an alternate
universe. The effect of press accounts was largely a product of each outlets readership.
In the case of smaller circulation papers that targeted a particular space or
neighborhood, such as the South London Chronicle, the intent and nature of coverage
focused on eyewitness accounts and detailed depictions of victims, while larger papers,
such as the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, attempted to create stories for
audiences that might not have had much firsthand knowledge of day-to-day existence in
South London.
Historians of British crime and criminality have, until recently, privileged
criminal statistics, using arrest records and demographic correlations to discuss the
nature and extent of crime and the ways in which it was enforced and perceived by the
public. In his critique of David Jones’ Crime, Protest, Community, and Police in
Nineteenth Century Britain, Victor Bailey claims that in the case of research on social
crime and public violence, examples of crime—and reactions to crime in the press—
without a statistical analysis lead to “impressionism.”
7
Where Bailey is in error in both
Jones’ case, and the history of crime as a whole, is that public perception cannot be
assessed by the statistical models traditionally utilized by historians of crime. Bailey’s
model is ill-equipped to explain the spike in public concern over criminal activity in the
last years of the nineteenth century even while the reporting of such activity was in

7
Victor Bailey, review of Crime, Protest, Community, and Police in Nineteenth Century Britain in
Economic History Review, 35, no. 4 (1982), 629.
6

steady decline.
8
This is where we need to be open to widening our explanatory models
to examine social interaction with press accounts as well as alternate power structures
that influenced public opinion and perception. What makes more sense is to view
Hooliganism as the product of a moral panic, where the popular press facilitated rising
concern with working-class criminality by taking advantage of a decline in social
tolerance of public criminal behavior.
9
Stanley Cohen’s moral panic model, couched in
a notion that perceptions of criminality managed to override the reality of criminal
behavior, helps to explain the disparity between the reality of declining arrests and
convictions and increased concern over juvenile criminal activity.
10
There is no data to
suggest that crime actually spiked in a significant way, even during the “Hooligan”
summer of 1898, among juveniles in London.
11

The underlying question for this dissertation remains tied to the nature and
significance of the Hooligan crisis and its meaning for moral reform culture in Britain.
As V.A.C Gatrell, Rob Sindall, and others suggest, the reporting of violent crime was
largely on the decline in Britain in the late nineteenth century.
12
Indeed, even during

8
Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century, 5. In chapter 2, I assert that the late nineteenth
century decline in the reporting of criminal activity was due to urban Britons becoming more acclimated
to the realities of urban life.
9
The reason for diminishing social tolerance for a particular behavior is complicated and not the focus of
this examination. In the case of Hooliganism, it was likely factors such as pre-existing concerns over
moral health, the popularization of criminology, and concerns over the problem of overcrowding in
London’s working-class neighborhoods that helped produce the conditions for a moral panic.
10
For more on how Cohen’s moral panic model has been used by historians of juvenile criminality, see
Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993. Neuberger applies Cohen’s moral panic model to another incidence
of “Hooliganism” in Russia, where the cultural construction of the Hooligan was literally imported and
used by the St. Petersburg press. Neuberger focuses on how Hooliganism came to encapsulate a broad
swath of anxieties over the nature and stability of urban life in Russia including class animosity and
political tensions.
11
Indeed, no data exists because much of the police court records, including those for Southwark, from
this period are missing or destroyed.
12
See V.A.C. Gatrell, “The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England and
Wales” in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500. V.A.C.
7

the height of Hooliganism in the summer of 1898, the only evidence of a major increase
in crime, violent or otherwise, comes from press accounts.
13
Where, then, did press
interest in street crime come from? I maintain that the most effective and reasonable
explanation for the emergence and rise of “Hooliganism” as an object of urban fear is
that the publicity and excitement surrounding lad ruffianism constitutes a moral panic. I
define the moral panic in similar terms to Cohen, who in Folk Devils and Moral Panics
lays out a clear way to understand a phenomenon like the Hooligan crisis. According to
Cohen, moral panics represent “symbolic crusade(s)” in which “publicity and the
actions of certain interest groups” result in the formulation of a “moral enterprise.”
14

Within Cohen’s moral enterprise model, Hooligans serve the role of “social villains”
who terrorize and threaten the well-being of civil society.
15
Under Cohen’s scheme, the
media—in this case, the print media of late nineteenth century London—define and
shape social problems.
16
According to Cohen, this directive was not necessarily a
conscious decision of the popular print media. Instead, Cohen maintains that such
phenomenon are the result of a “self-feeding cycle” that results in the promotion of
stories that are often off-topic or tangential.

Gatrell, B. Lenman, and G. Parker, eds., London: Europa, 1980, 238-370 and V.A.C Gatrell and T.B.
Hadden, “Nineteenth-Century Criminal Statistics and their Interpretation,” 336-396.
13
While many of the police court records from this period are missing, the arrest log books suggest that
there is little to substantiate the accounts presented in the popular press. At times, the arrest numbers
differ wildly from those reported in the daily press. It is entirely possible that there was a spike in
criminal activity during this period, but it would be difficult to prove that such a shift was anything more
than a temporary up-tick in arrests rather than a rise in criminal behavior itself.
14
Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 11.
15
Ibid. See also Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press,
1963 and Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade. Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 1986.
16
Ibid., 12.
8

Moral panics arise not from a specific catalyst or stimulus, but from a
“degrading of tolerance” for deviant behavior.
17
This means simply that moral panics
are based less on the occurrence and more on a shift in social attitudes toward a
particular behavior.
18
As John Springhall argues, “Moral panics occur when the official
or press reaction to a cultural phenomenon is ‘out of proportion’ with the actual
threat.”
19
The Hooligan type serves this role for the moral panic that struck London in
the summer of 1898 because of its connection, both implied and real, to pre-existing
concerns about juvenile delinquency and, in a more general sense, working-class
criminality. Delinquency, according to Cohen, is merely a code word for deviance,
where deviance is defined not as acts, but as an interaction between the actor and those
who respond.
20
Following Cohen’s work on juvenile delinquency among groups such
as football hooligans, mods, and rockers in 1960s Britain, it is the interaction between
working-class juveniles and the general public that generated the Hooligan crisis in
1898. Thus, while there was no increase in actual criminal activity, there was a
substantial decrease in tolerance of what was considered Hooligan anti-social behavior,
such as “loafing” and “larking.”
21

17
Ibid., 13.
18
Ibid. Cohen argues that this shift is cyclical and based on a variety of cultural factors that collude to
erode cultural tolerance. In the case of Hooliganism, the erosion of tolerance could be a product of a
variety of factors, including rising anxiety over the status of the educational system to fears over physical
health of children.
19
Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture, and Moral Panics, 4.
20
Stanley Cohen, “Hooligans, Vandals, and the Community: A Study of the Social Reaction to Juvenile
Delinquency,” PhD Thesis, London University, 1969. Cohen’s work on 1960s football hooliganism
follows the interactionist perspective, focusing on the causes and consequences of social behavior, based
on the importance of assigning symbolic meaning to appearance, behavior, and experience. The concept
of bipolarization is derived from those interactions.
21
For more on these behaviors, see Michael MacIlwee, The Gangs of Liverpool. London: Milo Books,
2006.
9

The resulting “bipolarization” between the designated deviants and the
community at large functioned to segregate those who fit the within the Hooligan
matrix and to isolate and congeal their collective identity, setting up a social binary
between “respectable people” and “Hooligans.”
22
Deviance, as Howard Becker
suggests, is the product of social groups who “make rules whose infraction constitutes
deviance, and by applying these rules and making them ‘outsiders.”
23
The deviant
identity that was ascribed to Hooliganism was, by this definition, “not a quality of the
act a person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and
sanctions to the offender.”
24
This is, of course, not unique to Hooligans. What is
important here is how Hooliganism functions as a particular form of this phenomenon
and the social meaning it acquires through this process.
Following its concern with moral reform agents, this dissertation also engages
the history of the social politics of late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain. Most
notable among the work in this field is that of Seth Koven, whose book, Slumming,
examines activism and the nature of social reform politics in Britain.
25
In this and other
work, Koven’s examination of the men’s settlement movement sheds light on the
complex dynamics of cross-class social engagement by reform-minded men and
women.
26
What makes Koven’s work so important is its concern with social and moral

22
Ibid. See also Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1947.
Durkheim refers to the positive functions of crime in drawing the community together in a common state
of indignation and against “the criminal.”
23
Becker, Outsiders, 9.
24
Ibid., 9-10.
25
See Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004.
26
See Seth Koven, “From Rough Lads to Hooligans: Boy Life, National Culture, and Social Reform” in
Andrew Parker, et. al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1992, 365-391. Koven’s
argument has little to do with the Hooligan as a contrived social actor, but rather looks at how social
10

reformers as agents of civilization, national belonging, and citizenship, as well as how
the work of groups, such as the men’s settlement homes movement, sought to mitigate
the negative conditions of working-class spaces.
Koven’s concern with the way in which social reformers “classed” space is
significant to the way the popular press depicted south London as the origin point of
Hooliganism. What Koven’s work misses is the role played by reformers in reinforcing
constructions of deviance—such as the Hooligan—in their efforts to bring “rough lads”
into line with notions of civic belonging and responsibility.
27
Moreover, Koven’s work
looks at groups that sought social reform, which concerns itself with regulating
behavior rather than simply creating social connections. As we will see, moral
reformers played a crucial role in reinforcing cultural beliefs about working-class
juvenile culture and its connection to delinquency and criminality.
The dissertation is divided into six chapters. Chapter 1 addresses the emergence
of the Hooligan moral panic, including an examination of the cultural associations made
by the popular press that served as the basis for its construction of Hooliganism as a
deviant cultural identity and a distinct social actor. The goal of this chapter is to
demonstrate how the Hooligan was a manifestation of cultural anxieties regarding moral
and physical degeneration as well as the failure of the existing penal system and other
forms of social regulation and instruction, all issues that would become significant to
the moral reform campaigns of the early twentieth century. Chapter 2 explores in detail
the two most significant cases associated with Hooliganism; the Oakley Street Murder

reform agents engaged “rough lads” in an effort to create “vertical bonds of comradeship across class
lines.”
27
Ibid., 366.
11
and the Red Cross Court tragedy. Each case illustrates how Hooliganism was coded as
a specific form of juvenile delinquency that challenged the most essential notions of
British civility and morality.
Chapter 3 moves from accounts of Hooliganism to the reactions of moral reform
organizations and the state to concerns over juvenile delinquency. It explores the first
responses by moral reformers—in the form of the Salvation Army’s Hooligan
suppers—as well as the state—through to the passage of the 1901 Youth Offenders Act.
Chapter 4 explores the ideology of moral reform, looking specifically at the points of
connection and departure between groups such as the Salvation Army and British
governmental policy. Particular emphasis is placed on the efforts of single-issue
organizations, such as the juvenile temperance and anti-tobacco movements and their
ideological connections to larger moral reform organizations, such as the Salvation
Army and the Howard Association. Chapter 5 looks at proposed institutional reforms,
including the renewal of the club movement and the advancement of voluntary
organizations, such as the Boy Scouts and the Boys’ Brigade. Of prime importance is
the increased interest on the part of government in crafting ways to better serve juvenile
offenders by creating new schemes designed to “reform” youthful offenders, epitomized
in the advancement of the Borstal system. The realization of substantial systems of
separation for children and juveniles would not occur until 1906, with the Liberal
party’s takeover of the government. Chapter 6 discusses the significance of the new
Liberal majority and the Home Office’s role in prioritizing a new wave of reforms
designed to further protect children and juveniles and create a system that fosters a spirit
of personal reform for juvenile delinquents. This final chapter illustrates how these
12
threads within the moral reform movement informed by “New Liberal” efforts to
institute wide-ranging reforms in the relationship between juveniles and the state,
culminating in the 1908 Children’s Act.

13

Chapter 1

Reign of Terror: Hooligans in South London, July-October, 1898

William Powers, 18, a typical Bermondsey rough, was charged at Southwark
Police court with disorderly conduct—P.C. Blake, 164 M claimed that the
prisoner and number of other youths were “larking” in Long Lane, pushing
people off the pavement and using obscene language. Witness saw prisoner
assault several persons, but none of them would attend the court. Prisoner
belonged to a gang of “Hooligans”. They were a terror to the neighbourhood,
and complaints were constantly being received at one station. No PRISON, 40/
fine.

“Warning to the Hooligans,” South London Chronicle, 9 August 1898

The case of William Powers is one of dozens of similar cases that appeared in the pages
of the British popular press during the summer of 1898.
28
That summer was
characterized by a wave of stories that announced the arrival of a new criminal outcast,
the “Hooligan.”
29
Powers was identified as a “Hooligan” by the police court reporter
of the South London Chronicle, but what was a “Hooligan?” How could one tell
Powers was a Hooligan?
This chapter explores the origins of the Hooligan crisis beginning in June 1898.
The intent of this chapter is to uncover the details surrounding the construction and
refinement of the “Hooligan” as a social actor.
30
In this discussion, I will illustrate

28
During the height of the Hooligan crisis, several newspapers, including the Sun, the Daily Telegraph
and the Daily Mail, routinely included lists of criminal offenses by juveniles and children.
29
I choose to capitalize the word “Hooligan” as it was the common practice to do so between 1898 and
1905. After 1907, the ‘h’ is left in lower case letters as the word became less a proper name and more
commonly used as a descriptive term related to a type of behavior.
30
The term “social actor” is used here to identify the Hooligan as a socially-constructed identity that
functioned to alter the social and cultural meaning of a particular group while maintaining a degree of
social agency. Hooligans, as a social construction, managed to have a significant impact on the social
and cultural definition of working-class juveniles and young adults. For more on the use and application
of this concept, Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Routledge, 2002 and Judith
14

how “Hooligan” came to be coded as a signifier for working-class children and
juveniles across gender lines, as well as for how Hooliganism materialized as a
distinctly “un-English” phenomenon that challenged popular notions of civility and
morality.
31
My general concern here is to demonstrate not only how the Hooligan
epitomized a deviant model of public behavior, but also how the Hooligan was a
manifestation of cultural anxieties regarding moral and physical degeneration as well as
the failure of the existing penal system and other forms of social regulation and
instruction.
32
To this end, I am also concerned with the ways in which the popular press
described and defined the “Hooligan type” through modes of dress, style, and
language.
33
The goal here is to explore how the Hooligan identity was constructed by
the popular print media for its primarily bourgeois audience in order to demonstrate
how that construction served as a powerful symbol of criminality and deviance for
moral reformers during the first decade of the twentieth century.
The development and proliferation of the Hooligan type was the central force
behind a moral panic over violent crime among juveniles that gripped London during
the summer of 1898. The popular print media helped designate the term “Hooligan” as

Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson, eds., Criminal Conversations: Victorian Crimes, Social Panic, and
Moral Outrage. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005.
31
It is important to note that while the social construction of the “Hooligan” was predominantly a male-
centered phenomenon, it also offered some descriptions of female juvenile criminality. The ramifications
of how the concept is gendered are developed in the second chapter.
32
See Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. London: Macmillan, 1983. Pearson’s
work is among the few works to address the Hooligan as a distinctive social actor in twentieth century
British history, although Pearson casts Hooliganism as merely a renaming of earlier modes of juvenile
delinquency.
33
I define the” popular press” broadly as any print outlet that maintained a regular publishing schedule
and was not a trade publication. This broad definition is deliberate and not intended to dismiss the idea
that differing political affiliations, audience, and circulation numbers each had an impact on how the
newspapers presented themselves but rather to assert that by the late nineteenth century, the British press
was less a series of independent voices and more a system of different outlets that often took their cues
from one another.
15

a cohesive cultural identity. Hooliganism came to represent a symptom of urban decay
that worked to create a climate of fear in London. This press construction reciprocally
worked to reify the “Hooligan” as a deviant cultural classification, complete with a style
of dress, typical appearance, and belief structure. It must be understood that while
many of the characteristics applied to the Hooligan type were indeed aspects of young
working-class criminals, I maintain that the Hooligan was essentially an artificial
identity based on a synthesis of generalized descriptions rather than a realistic depiction
of any substantial youth sub-culture.
34
By applying this construction and occasionally
stretching it to fit a larger survey of cases, the popular press reinforced the Hooligan as
a real cultural category that epitomized concerns over juvenile delinquency and urban
decay.
The most glaring question around the emergence of “Hooligans” and
“Hooliganism” in 1898 is to what extent this was a real, tangible phenomenon? While
there is little doubt that working-class south London was prone to varying levels of
street crime, the Hooligan model that developed in the pages of the popular press was a
constructed identity. As we will see by examining press accounts, there is little
difference between what was regarded as unique to Hooliganism, from attire to physical
appearance, and those traits common to descriptions of street criminals—and
particularly gang-affiliated juvenile street criminals—dating back to the nineteenth
century. Journalistic discourse that popularized the Hooligan type contributed to the

34
The term “Hooligan” was originally used in the July 21, 1898 story in the Sun and was initially related
to a specific south London gang called the Hooligans. This is contrary to the Oxford English Dictionary
citation, which places its first usage on July 24, 1898. Many of the descriptors applied to Hooligans can
be traced back to specific gangs. For example, the wearing of velvet caps, a symbol of the Velvet Cap
gang, is often associated as a general identifier for Hooligans in etchings and drawings. Elements of style
that signified belonging to a particular street gang were conflated as a way to create cultural shorthand for
a popular press readership that had little exposure to the individuals who would have fit these depictions.
16

self-appropriation of that label, and the broadening of its definition to include a wider
variety of criminal and social behaviors and identities.
35
My interest is with how the
Hooligan label was used, first by the press, then by moral reformers and the state, to
diagnose social problems and suggest various institutional solutions to problems such as
juvenile delinquency.
If Hooliganism was largely—if not entirely—a social construction based on a
moral panic, why is it historically significant? The Hooligan became the symbol of
moral decay that energized social and moral reformers to seek substantial changes in the
treatment of children and juveniles. As David Taylor notes, the late Victorian and
Edwardian discourse on juvenile criminality shifted toward a concern over the
prevention of crime—and more precisely countering recidivism through the application
of new scientific explanations of criminality and social deviance. By the end of the first
decade of the twentieth century, schemes of “preventive detention” privileged
rehabilitation over punishment.
36
Concern over hooliganism served as a catalyst for this
development.
DEFINING THE HOOLIGAN: CRIMINALITY IN SOUTH LONDON
The term “Hooligan” first appeared on July 21, 1898 in a brief story in the Sun
and quickly came into common use in Britain.
37
The term originally referred to a South

35
This closely follows Cohen’s concept of labeling, where the object of a moral panic comes to
appropriate the terminology and traits initially imposed upon Hooligans.
36
David Taylor, “Beyond the Bounds of Respectable Society: The ‘Dangerous Classes’ in Victorian and
Edwardian England” in Rowbotham and Stevenson, eds., Criminal Conversations, 11. Taylor argues that
the passage of the Prevention of Crime Act of 1908 represented the culmination of this shift to preventive
detention. I argue that the Children’s Act of 1908 similarly represents a capstone in the debate over how
to deal with children and juveniles.
37
Sun, 21 July 1898.
17

London street gang of probable Irish origin.
38
The moniker quickly transformed into a
term of general notoriety, so that “Hooligans” and “Hooliganism” became the
controlling words to describe not only juvenile criminals and criminality, but more
generally “troublesome youths.”
39
What differentiated this new classification from
prior descriptive terms, such as “street Arab,” “ruffian,” or “rough” was the popular
response to the emergence of the “Hooligan type.”
40

The problem of juvenile crime became more pronounced in popular press
accounts beginning in early 1898, months before the “Hooligan crisis.” The Echo
reports “No one can have read the London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds papers
and not know that the young street ruffian and prowler, with his heavy belt, treacherous
knife, and dangerous pistol is among us.”
41
In this account, some of the trademark
coded signs of the Hooligan—the “heavy belt” being the most obvious—suggest that
the Hooligan type was, to some extent, a known commodity in the months and years
prior to the summer of 1898. William Douglas Morrison’s 1896 text Juvenile Offenders
contends that “habitual offenders” were the most significant problem plaguing British
society and that the problem of habitual crime would best be dealt with by substantially
reforming the ways in which the state approached juvenile crime.
42
Morrison separated
criminals into two classes: the habitual and the occasional. He argued that among

38
A discussion of the specific origin point of the term and its first use will come in Chapter 2 in the
discussion of the Darcy murder case.
39
Daily Mail, 26 July 1898.
40
Much of the press seems to suggest at times that Hooliganism emerged from nowhere, while some
commentators, such as those in the Daily Telegraph, often compare it to prior forms of juvenile
criminality.
41
Echo, 7 February 1898.
42
W. Douglas Morrison, Juvenile Offenders. London: Fisher Unwin, 1896, v-vii. Morrison’s model for
penal reform was later popularized by a number of moral reform organizations, including the Howard
Association, who undertook a tour of the United States to examine how children were treated by the
American justice system (see chapter 5).
18

children and juveniles, the latter category had the potential to “degenerate” into the
former without proper moral instruction.
43
Morrison was particularly concerned with
the connection between environment and the physical and moral health of children,
noting that “juvenile crime arises out the adverse individual or social conditions of the
juvenile offender.”
44
By the 1890s, criminality was increasingly tied to environmental
causes—an explanation that proved significant to later attempts to explain and “cure”
Hooliganism in Britain.
Juvenile criminals were also an object of press interest before the Hooligan
crisis. The late Victorian press used a variety of monikers for juvenile criminals,
including “young roughs,” “scuttlers” or the Australian term “Larrikins.”
45
The
emergence of interest in identifying juvenile deviant identities with a specific behavior,
such as “scuttling,” or the act of wandering about in a sinister or devious way, would
later prove to be significant to the way the popular press defined and differentiated the
Hooligan type. The idle “loafers,” “larking” lads, and Scuttlers of pre-Hooligan Britain
were seen as “intolerable nuisances,” but were not cast as violent criminals or as a
significant threat to the stability and health of British society.
46
In some cases, the
commentary on these pre-Hooligan juvenile offenders is simply that parents of youthful

43
The application of “degeneration” by social critics and observers in the context of Hooliganism is often
sloppy and lacking a connection to the specific notion of racial degeneration. What is interesting here is
how vague allusions to racial degeneracy permeate discussions of the “Hooligan-type” without being
followed up by a connection to some other purported example of the phenomenon. The issue of
degeneration is dealt with in chapters 2-4.
44
Ibid., ix.
45
“Juvenile Offenders: A Report Based on the Inquiry Instituted by the Committee of the Howard
Association.” London: Howard Association, 1898, HO 45/10503/125632, The National Archives
(hereafter TNA),10. The term “larrikins” became an auxiliary term for Hooliganism and was used
frequently from the summer of 1898 through the early twentieth century, often in the form “the Larrikin
type.” It was also in common use in the decade prior to the Hooligan crisis.
46
Ibid., 15.
19

offenders must take more responsibility for the activities and public behavior of their
children.
In these early accounts, coverage of specific crimes is usually eschewed in
favor of vague statements about the threat that youthful offenders pose to the general
public. Moreover, these accounts stress that knowledge of the nature and extent of
criminal activity among juveniles is elusive. The Echo reports “Not one-tenth of the
doings of these young rascals get into the press; not one-half is known by the police.”
47

Pre-Hooligan accounts of juvenile criminality share a common theme that the “ruffian”
remains mysterious even to those who encounter him regularly. At no time in these
early accounts are there specific claims about the nature of the threat posed by these
individuals.
The cultural entomology of the word “Hooligan” itself reveals much about late
Victorian concepts of criminality and deviance. The name “Hooligan,” often used for
Irish characters and modified as “O’Hooligan,” also appeared in several music hall
songs during the 1880s and 1890s.
48
The popularity of Irish names as a descriptor of
English criminality relates back to long-standing tensions between the English in
London and Irish immigrants.
49
The coding of English juvenile criminality within a
scale of alien and/or foreign values and temperaments branded the phenomenon as
foreign and thoroughly “un-English.”

47
Ibid.
48
Once such song, “The Hooligans are Hooli-Hooli-Mad,” by Ballard MacDonald and James F. Henley
tells the story of the Hooligan family, who spend their days “living like Hawaiians.” After the Hooligan
crisis, some songs attempted to explain Hooliganism, including Pat Rafferty’s popular song “Why Do
They Call Them Hooligans? An Irishman’s Protest”
49
I am not sure that any conclusions about the Anglo-Irish background of the “Hooligan” can be drawn
without significant additional research.
20

One crucial characteristic of the Hooligan type that was clear even in the earliest
accounts was the association between the Hooligan phenomenon and gang activity.
Street gangs had long been an issue in the urban centers of Britain. The most notable
example was Liverpool’s battle with the “High Rip gang” in the 1870s, which was often
a point of comparison in discussions of the effectiveness of corporal punishment.
50

Press portrayals of London gangs were often associated with pitched battles over
particular neighborhoods and streets. Chelsea Boys fought against Fulham Boys while
Chapel Street battled against Margaret Street.
51
The significance of the association of
Hooligans with gang affiliation was that these gangs represented alternate sites of power
and allegiances that ran contrary to civic or even national affiliation. Hooligans were,
in this sense, subject to their own value structures and culture in a way entirely
dissimilar to previous models of juvenile delinquents.
In the summer of 1898, working-class districts of London, and particularly south
London, were plagued by a multitude of serious problems, most dealing with the failure
of the basic infrastructure aggravated by a heat wave that stretched from late July
through August.
52
The potable water shortage, inefficient and often dangerous public
transport, and the long-term implications of the working-class housing crisis were
viewed by some elements in the press and moral reformers alike as the most salient and
critical causes for the Hooligan “uprising.”
53
The housing crisis only aggravated
concerns over the apparent lack of clean water for London’s fastest growing areas.

50
Macilwee, Gangs of Liverpool, 143.
51
Daily Mail, 1 August 1898.
52
Indeed, accounts of Hooligan activity were sometimes attached to stories about record heat in London.
53
The housing crisis was a central theme in the work of the Salvation Army in the 1880s.
21

The coverage of the water crisis epitomizes an important intersection of
commentary on Hooliganism and the failure of the government to regulate access to
clean water. For example, in the August 28, 1898 issue of News of the World, “larking”
youths are blamed for wasting water from public street taps while on the same day
Reynold’s Newspaper urged its readers to stop paying the East End Water company,
which it portrayed as negligent and corrupt.
54
In the latter example, the writers at
Reynold’s Newspaper invoked the image of the Hooligan as a possible savior for
“horrible London.”
If they would only attack the present cabinet, we should feel inclined to be more
lenient…if Chamberlain, or Chaplin, or Balfour, or Goschen were knocked
down in the Old Kent Road by a Hooligan gang, we should soon hear of some
scheme to improve London life.
55

The message was clear. If crime and violence brought attention to neglected areas of
London, then hooliganism was worth it. The focus on the material conditions of
working-class London was a deliberate attempt by the press to shift emphasis towards
understanding crime, real or perceived, as a product of social conditions. The larger
significance of this tactic as at least a half-hearted condemnation of the Hooligan moral
panic cannot be overlooked. In particular, it implies that the exploitation of the
“Hooligan type” in the popular press signifies anxieties over the state of London, both
in terms of class relations and of the material conditions of daily life.
While “larking” about public fountains was certainly entertaining, the most
common crimes, aside from being drunk and disorderly, associated with Hooliganism

54
News of the World, 28 August 1898; Reynold’s Newspaper, 28 August 1898.
55
Reynold’s Newspaper, 28 August 1898.
22

were assault and robbery. In many cases, these robberies were carried out in broad
daylight in front of multiple witnesses and on-lookers.
William Linker, said to be a “Hooligan,” was charged…with violently assaulting
Charles Morris. He struck the prosecutor with some instrument, which inflicted
a small puncture wound under the right eye. The prosecutor’s story was that the
prisoner came up to him in the street and demanded money. Witness replying
he had none, prisoner knocked him down. Since the affair, his life has been
threatened by two women, friends of the prisoner. The police said prisoner had
previously been in trouble. The prosecutor, trembling with fear, says the
reporter, again entered the witness box and told the Court the prisoner’s friends
had apologised, and he wished to withdraw the charge. Witnesses were stated to
be afraid to come forward, and, the prosecutor’s story, being uncorroborated,
Mr. Slade ordered the accused one day in prison.
56

The Linker case above is a typical example of a Hooligan attack, from the use of an
improvised weapon to the account of witness intimidation. Accounts of Hooligan
robberies routinely stressed the boldness of the crime and lack of finesse on the part of
the criminal. The focus of this portrayal is less about the alleged offense and more about
the fearful response of the victim and potential witnesses. Popular press accounts of
Hooliganism stressed the response of the community as a central story element, often
noting that witnesses were “afraid to come forward” and that the victims were
overcome with fear of their assailant.
57

While the vast majority of stories during the first months of the Hooligan craze
dealt exclusively with young men, women were also identified as Hooligans. Indeed,
so-called “girl Hooligans,” were often portrayed by the press in a more sensationalist
manner. One example of this is Hannah Kelleher, a “brawny dame” who was charged
with assaulting a “puny little woman” named Margaret Fleming, by scoring her with a

56
The Sun, 6 August 1898.
57
Ibid.
23

door key.
58
Kelleher’s defense was that she was first attacked by the defendant and her
friends, who “tore her hair and beat her with a poker.”
59
The report in the South London
Chronicle suggests that the events were a result of a “free fight” between most of the
female residents of George Row, Bermondsey. Out of a crowd of 400 women and
children, 40 had “blackened eyes” or other injuries.
60

In another case, “a respectably dressed young girl was set upon by four factory
girls and unmercifully beaten at the Blackfriars road west of Stamford Street.”
61

According to her statement to the police, she brushed against one of the girls, who beat
her in a “savage manner, using fearful language.”
62
Both of these cases illustrate an
unusual occurrence in Hooligan accounts: woman-on-woman violence. Indeed, it is
difficult—outside of the D’Arcy murder case—to find examples where women
identified as “girl Hooligans” attack male victims.
63
These cases, while not unknown,
are dealt with more as a curiosity by the popular press, although the “Hooligan” label
seems out of place, since there is no clear evidence of gang activity. This is not to say
that young women were not members of gangs, but rather that gang activity tended to
be dominated by males.
64

LOOKING THE PART: CONSTRUCTING THE HOOLIGAN AESTHETIC
On August 19, 1898, the Daily Telegraph printed a story entitled “A Hooligan
Hunt” which explored the process of identifying a Hooligan by sight.

58
South London Chronicle, 6 August 1898.
59
South London Chronicle, 13 August 1898.
60
Daily Mail, 13 August 1898.
61
South London Chronicle, 27 August 1898.
62
Ibid.
63
While there are some isolated cases of violence across lines of gender, the nature of Hooligan crime
coverage focuses almost entirely on male-on-male crime.
64
This raises the question of whether the notion of gang activity was read by the press as exclusively
male.
24

Considering the increasing probability of the most unprepared person being
suddenly confronted with him, it cannot be too generally known that the
hooligan savage may be identified by a distinguishing badge adopted by the
tribe—by the real and original tribe that is to say.
65

For the readers of this article, this was the first time anyone had attempted to create a
template so one could physically identify a Hooligan through distinctive dress, style,
and attire. The author is quick to advise readers about the differences between ‘real’
Hooligans and simple “roughs.” The author warns that “There are ruffians of an inferior
breed, who, envious of the renown achieved by bona-fide Hooligans, resort to similar
tactics in making war against law and order.”
66
The author identifies gangs including
the “black caps,” the “white stripes,” and the “bucklers” whose weapon of choice “is a
ponderous buckle attached to a substantial leather waist strap” all as “presumptuous
pretenders.”
67

The development of a “bona fide” Hooligan type detailed in the example from
the Daily Telegraph provides an excellent beginning to discuss the distinctive visual
construction of the Hooligan subculture. From modes of dress to grooming to slang,
accounts in the popular press developed and reified the Hooligan type as a distinctive
sub-culture, cobbling together signifiers utilized by several London street gangs into a
singular model of youthful defiance.
68
The significance of this construct is difficult to
overstate, both in terms of its endurance in the visual portrayal of Hooligans, but also in

65
Daily Telegraph, 19 August 1898.
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.
68
Pearson, Hooligans, 83. Pearson argues that Hooliganism was—and is—a real deviant subculture that
he links with later subcultures, including Teddy Boys and contemporary football Hooligans. Pearson
contends that these groups all expressed themselves through particular modes of style and dress. While
Pearson’s argument is largely about the fallacy of the “Law and Order” myth in British culture, he
contributes some important research to the history of Hooliganism, including how Hooligans represented
Victorian fears of working-class criminality.
25

the way the Hooligan came to be understood as a singular cultural entity. It is the
development of this model—the Hooligan type—that allowed the Hooligan to remain
firmly entrenched in the discourse on juvenile delinquency and criminality.
How did one identify a “real” Hooligan? What differentiated the “Hooligan”
from a “rough lad” or “larrikin?”
The hooligan savage may be known by the peculiar way in which he crops his
cranium. How the operation is performed is a puzzle. The shears of an ordinary
barber could not be made to bite so close to the scalp, but the whole of the head
is not shorn. At the front, just above the forehead, a tuft of hair is left, three
inches wide, and maybe two long, and which, brought forward, forms a hanging
tassel between the hooligan’s eyebrows. And when the eyes are close set, and
the forehead is aslant, and the cheek bones prominent, the general effect is
something for the beholder to remember.
69

In the passage above, the Hooligan can be recognized by a distinctive hair style. What
makes the style distinctive is not necessarily its appearance as much as it was a look that
was apparently difficult to achieve with standard equipment. Moreover, the author
seems to suggest that the Hooligan type has a particular exterior make-up which,
combined with other constructed attributes leads to a visual identity that is as
frightening as it is unique. While much of this description seems to be in jest, the
impression provided by the above passage falls in line with early depictions of a
distinctive Hooligan style which, artificial or not, came to be disseminated widely in the
etchings and drawings of Hooligans that appeared with some frequency in the popular
press.
Stories like these also provided valuable information on how to detect the
authenticity of an individual’s identity as a Hooligan.

69
Daily Telegraph, 19 August 1898.
26

By the absence of the flap in the front of the sconce of the young man placed in
the dock at Worship-street, it was at once apparent that in publicly proclaiming
himself a Hooligan he was an imposter, not that the unfortunate prosecutor had
found himself light let off on that account.
70

What is interesting here is the separation between the true hooligan and the imposter.
The notion that there was by August 1898 an “authentic” Hooligan type, identified by a
series of signifiers, is noteworthy because it suggests that the Hooligan identity had
become a generalized social type within two months of its fabrication. The
development of a singular Hooligan type is largely a product of a merging of various
gang signs and signifiers during the last years of the Victorian period. Juvenile and
young adult gang affiliations were subsumed under the Hooligan type assembled from
observations of various street gangs. What little distinctiveness remained among street
gang members in London was applied as emblematic of regional variations in the
Hooligan identity rather than as substantive differences between different gangs and
associations.
The appearance of many gang members in this period of London history was
remarkably similar. It is reasonable to assume that the standard street attire of many
gang members in late nineteenth-century London was influenced by the clothes worn by
costermongers since many of the gang members claimed to be costermongers when
brought to trial. Henry Mayhew states that costermongers preferred “cable cord”
trousers “made to fit tightly at the knee and swell gradually until they reached the
boot.”
71
The outfit was rounded out with a small, soft cap and a scarf. The point of
pride, according to Mayhew, was the boots, which were often decorated with

70
Ibid.
71
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor. London: Griffin, Bohn & Co., 1868, 51.
27

ornaments. These elements, while customized or altered depending on the identity of
the gang, seem to make up the crux of standard gang attire. An account from the Daily
Graphic goes further, maintaining that gang members wore a “uniform” that was
duplicated around the city, stating that “All of them have a peculiar muffler around the
neck, a cap set rakishly forward, well over the eyes.”
72

By the end of the nineteenth century, many of London’s gangs had adopted
similar styles of dress to one another, although many gangs maintained an emblem,
often in the form of clothing, to differentiate their identity from that of a rival gang.
Perhaps the most distinctive fashion statement made by a London street gang during
this period was that adopted by the Velvet Cap gang. Lloyd's Illustrated London
Newspaper from August 14, 1898 presents the story of the arrest of Frederick Dockrell,
18, of Battersea, charged at South Western police court for disorderly conduct and using
obscene language. According to the account, a constable saw him and a dozen other
“lads with sticks and belts, all wearing velvet caps, and, known as the ‘Velvet Cap
gang,’ walking along Plough and York-roads, Battersea, pushing people off the
pavement, knocking at shop doors, and using filthy language.”
73
The constable
“pounced on the gang” but due to the fact that the gang fled in all directions “down side
lanes and though houses” he managed to capture only Dockrell, who had ducked into a
fried fish shop. The constable stated that “for the past three months he had seen the

72
Daily Graphic, 16 November 1900. See also Image 1.1
73
Lloyd's Illustrated London Newspaper, 14 August 1898.
28

prisoner (Dockrell) with the gang” and that “many complaints had been made” against
the Velvet Cap gang.
74

The Velvet Cap gang’s distinctive appearance only served to amplify the
transgressive meaning of their socially-deviant behavior by associating criminality with
specific visual signifiers which readers could recognize and associate with criminality.
Other gangs applied subtle points of fashion to their appearance designed to celebrate
and accentuate their aggressiveness and their proclivity for violence. One of the
hallmarks of the Clerkenwell War gang was the large, sharp belt buckles worn by its
members.
75
Large, heavy belt buckles had long been a fashion statement common to
London’s street gangs for their utility as a weapon. The gang also brandished “bolts”
and other bits of metal, often affixed to the outside of their clothing, for similar
reasons.
76
In the case of the Clerkenwell War gang, the ominous meaning attached to
their clothing served a double purpose: to differentiate their appearance from rival
gangs and to communicate a dangerous and violent image.
THE SILLY SEASON: CASTING DOUBT ON HOOLIGANISM
The very notion that there was a crisis at all was questioned both the government
and by many South Londoners who saw the notion of a “reign of terror” in South
Londoner as an utter fallacy and slander foisted upon the public by the press. In the
case of the government, doubts existed early on that the “Hooligan crisis” represented a
significant threat to the peace. When a question was asked in Parliament in August 1898

74
Ibid. Dockrell’s father, William Dockrell, had been charged with being drunk and disorderly on the
same day as his son’s arrest. When he heard of his son’s arrest “he rushed about the street, struck a man
whom he accused of “putting his son away” and generally behaved like a madman. He was fined 10s.”
75
Daily Mail, 1 August 1898. The Clerkenwell War gang, which was notable for its constant battles with
rival gangs in the years prior to 1898, came to be identified with Hooliganism during the crisis in summer
1898.
76
Ibid.
29

regarding the perceived rise in criminal activity among juveniles in London and the
threat it posed to the well-being of the city, the Home Secretary was “not satisfied that
there was any such insecurity as was alleged.”
77

Patrick McIntyre, a South London pub owner, former Scotland Yard detective,
and an occasional columnist for the South London Chronicle, regularly cast doubt on
the reality of Hooliganism, accusing newspapers of being in their “silly season” and of
focusing on Hooligans “as a suitable and sensational means of filling their columns at
the present moment.”
78
McIntyre, an out-spoken commentator on the conditions of life
in South London, saw little evidence to suggest that the popular press had even visited
South London. The interview with the South London Chronicle goes on to state
He claims that in the 20 years he has known south London, it is now better
policed and better administered, and as well conducted as any part of London.
He agrees that a ‘peculiar class of people’ inhabit places like Red Cross Street,
but he claims he could conduct any West End lady through the streets with no
trouble at all.
79

McIntyre was one of the several commentators to cast doubt on the very idea of
Hooliganism, basing his conclusions on his experience with the community.
McIntyre’s accusations of sensationalism matched the data uncovered by Charles
Booth, who suggested that “Hooliganism has been exaggerated by the press…so say our
witnesses.”
80
Even Thomas Holmes, famous as a police court “missionary” and writer
who would later grow to prominence in the moral reform community as secretary of the

77
Hansard, 8 August 1898.
78
South London Chronicle, 27 August 1898.
79
Ibid.
80
Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London: Notes on Social Influence. London:
MacMillan, 1903, 139.
30

Howard Association, referred to the Hooligan crisis on one occasion as “press
manufactured.”
81

Holmes’ commentary on the role of the press alludes to doubts over whether or
not Hooliganism was a crisis, but not whether Hooliganism was real. While papers
such as the Times give Hooliganism relatively short shrift in their daily news coverage,
smaller circulation press outlets raised further doubts about the feeling that there had
been a sudden eruption of violence in South London. Describing London as a “city of
illusions, subject every now and then to a series of harsh awakenings,” The Echo
claimed the stories of the sudden rise of South London violence were undoubtedly
exaggerated.
82

We steadily shut our eyes to the submerged lawlessness of less fortunate
districts until a series of Whitechapel outrages, or Hooligan exploits, make us
not only aware of what is going on, but actually afraid for our lives.”
83

Reynold’s Newspaper viewed the Hooligan panic as a definitive indictment of a
dominant culture that took “so painful an interest about moral handkerchiefs and hymn
books for the barbarians of the wild Soudan while turning a blind eye to the far wilder
barbarians they may find a few paces from their own street-doors.”
84
The attack on the
perceived moral hypocrisy of British bourgeois culture failed to fully undermine the
dominant Hooligan narrative, but it did occasionally manage to redirect discourse away
from the “Hooligan as degenerate” motif and to conditions in London.

81
“Interview with Mr. Thomas Holmes,” The Young Man, 15 (1901), 327.
82
The Echo, 11 August 1898.
83
Ibid.
84
Reynold’s Newspaper, 14 August 1898.
31

THE “SAVAGE” HOOLIGAN: RACE, CLASS, AND IDENTITY
The Times finally turned its attention to Hooliganism on August 17, 1898, by
describing the condition of South London as “something like organized terrorism in the
streets.” In an editorial entitled “The Weather and the Streets,” the Times addressed the
rise of deviant juvenile behavior by exploring the relationship between the summer heat
wave and the temperature of Hooligan blood and its connection to constructions of
racial identity.
It is curious that simultaneously with reports of excessive heat should come the
record of an unusual number of crimes of lawless violence…Does the great heat
fire the blood of the London Hooligan with an effect analogous to that of a
southern climate upon the hot-blooded Italian or Provencal, or is the connexion
between heat and lawlessness not so much one of cause and effect as coincident
circumstances.
85

Two years later, asking “What are we to do with the ‘Hooligan?’ Who or what is
responsible for his growth?” The Times continued with a similar theme, declaring that
“every week some incident shows that certain parts of London are more perilous for the
peaceable wayfarer than the remote districts of Calabria, Sicily, or Greece, once the
classic haunts of brigands.” Brigands or not, Hooligans were viewed by some in the
popular print media—particularly in more prominent papers—as an alien presence and
force that was distinctively un-English.
In the heat of the immediate events of 1898, however, while attacking the
excessive leniency of the law, The Times floated the idea that “un-English” violence
might need to be addressed with un-English methods of control, stating, “In Continental
cities, or in the free republic of America, they have little scruple about calling out troops

85
Times, 17 August 1898.
32
d
means.

and shooting down organized disturbances of the peace.”
86
While the issue of the
failure of the punishment regime becomes crucial to the discourse on the Hooligan
crisis, what is significant here is how the Times views the problem of Hooliganism as
something that is dealt with elsewhere and something that might only be remedie
through ‘foreign’
These examples bring about a crucial point regarding how the Hooligan was first
defined, designed, and depicted as a deviant identity. The construction of the
Hooligan—particularly in earlier accounts—remains irregular and shows nuances
depending on the media outlet in question. One consistent theme in many of the early
accounts was the antagonistic relationship between Hooligans and the police. The case
of Albert Crispin, a 16 year-old gang member who assaulted a constable, highlights the
theme of brutality towards authority that was present in many Hooligan press accounts.
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reports that “the prisoner bore a very bad character with
assaults on the police and with felony.” He was “well-known in Bromley as the head of
a gang of young roughs who infested the neighbourhood of the St. Leonard’s-road.”
87

Apparently owing to his fair hair, he was known as “whiteknob.” The evidence of the
constable who was assaulted was straight-forward. On July 23, 1898,

he saw Crispin
with a number of companions in Devons Road, Bromley. He witnessed Crispin push a
woman down, and when the officer spoke to him, Crispin turned and attacked the
officer “in a savage fashion.”
88

86
Ibid.
87
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 1 August 1898.
88
Ibid.
33

According to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Crispin’s gang joined the assault in
the course of which the constable was severely kicked about the body. Another youth
who “drew his belt and joined into the fray,” was also arrested.
89
Crispin managed to
get away and ran River Street, where another woman, a Mrs. Bovington, was standing
at her front door. He tried to pass her into the house, and when she attempted to stop
him he “punched her in the stomach and knocked her down.”
90
Before his eventual
capture, Crispin enlisted in the Army Service Corps in an unsuccessful attempt to evade
capture.
91

The portrayal of Crispin’s attacks on the constable and Mrs. Bovington are
emblematic of the type of crimes that became the stock and trade of reporters covering
the police courts. This case is an excellent example of how crimes cast as part of the
Hooligan crisis was represented as transgressing boundaries of civil behavior that even
many traditional criminals would have respected, which is physical attacks on a woman
and an officer of the law. The Crispin case was not, however, unique. In Lambeth,
James Nixon, described as a “tall young labourer,” was charged with behaving in a
disorderly manner and “assaulting police constables Carter and Bowerman, who had
been placed in plain clothes duty for dealing with cases of street ruffianism.”
92
The
constables were on Sayern Street, Walworth, when they noticed the prisoner behaving
in a disorderly manner. He entered a fried fish shop and got into a dispute with the
owner of the shop, a man named Brown, “whom he assaulted.”
93
Carter and Bowerman

89
Ibid. The account states that Crispin’s associate “is now undergoing 14 days imprisonment.”
90
Ibid.
91
The idea of escaping criminal punishment through enlisting in the military appears in a few other
accounts of Hooligan criminal activity.
92
Daily Telegraph, 2 August 1898.
93
Ibid.
34
ior.

attempted to arrest him, but he fought back after a few minutes, “making a violent kick
at police-constable Bowerman, and caught him on the ankle.”
94
The officer exclaimed
“I’m done; he’s broken my leg,” and fell to the ground.
95
“A large and disorderly
crowd” assembled around the action as Nixon struggled so violently that Carter “had to
use his truncheon in order to secure him.” When the prisoner was finally brought to the
station, Constable Carter was “in such an exhausted state that he fell to the ground.”
96

Stories like those of Nixon and Crispin were not extraordinary by early August
1898. Despite the fact that most of the arrest records from the months of July and
August suggest that assault cases were rare compared to drunk and disorderly charges,
the press seized on the most extreme cases, such as those where constables were
attacked, to illustrate the “vile nature” of the “Hooligan menace.”
97
Hooligans were
thus cast as indifferent to the most essential notions of civil behav
Other cases depicting violence against the police suggest a certain senseless
nature to portrayals of Hooligan violence. One example from the Daily Telegraph from
the same day as the Nixon case illustrates this point:
In North London, before Mr. Dickenson, Henry Johnson, 19, labourer, was
charged with disorderly conduct and assaulting the police. The Constable came
across prisoner in a disorderly crowd at Carpenter road Victoria Park, and when
the constable tried to disperse the crowd, the prisoner gave a swinging blow with
the buckle end of a heavy belt and struck him on the left eye. The constable
seized the prisoner, when the latter kicked out savagely with his heavy boots,
one kick seriously injuring his left hand (which was bandaged) another bruising
his knee-cap, and another bruising his thigh. The prisoner also kicked another
constable and exclaimed “I’ll do time for this, and then I will hang for you.”
Sentenced to two months hard labour.
98

94
Ibid.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid. Mr. Hopkins, the magistrate on duty at the Police Court, sentenced Nixon to six months hard
labor.
97
Daily Mail, 29 July 1898.
98
Daily Telegraph, 2 August 1898.
35

What makes this case an interesting example of the transgressive social behavior
commonly attached to Hooligan activity is the statement Johnson makes as he is
apprehended, which suggests a self-destructive recklessness. Johnson is literally taken
in kicking and screaming. In other accounts, the press suggests that such behavior was
emblematic of the Hooligan mentality that valued brash acts of defiance against
“constables and magistrates.”
99

The act of kicking a constable was a common feature of “Hooligan” crime
accounts by the beginning of August 1898. In one case reported by the Standard, a man
named John Gould was arrested for public drunkenness and attacking a police
constable. “On Saturday night Gould was found in St. Peters-street, Islington, stripped
to the waist, and fighting with another man. The officer requested him to go away,
when Gould struck him with several blows in the face and kicked him.”
100
Gould was
eventually taken in with the aid of another constable.
101
The act of one man kicking
another, even in a fight, was regarded as reprehensible and dishonorable.
102
One of the
most remarkable headlines from the initial months of the Hooligan crisis came at the
end of August in the South London Chronicle, which simply stated “Kick a man like a
football” along with the secondary headline “They played football with a man.”
103
The
sense of childish play attached to these acts of violence helps us to understand that
while they remained an object of fear, Hooligans were also viewed as childlike.

99
South London Chronicle, 27 August 1898.
100
Standard, 16 August 1898.
101
Ibid.
102
Pearson, Hooligan, 83.
103
Ibid.
36

On July 30, 1898 in the South London Chronicle alone, there are several
accounts of kicking as a form of assault on both police constables and women. “William
Daniel Warren, postman, was fined 10s or 7 days hard labour for his disorderly antics in
Belvedere-road, also for kicking a constable. He was one of a gang of men and lads
who were insulting a woman.” Another example states that “Henry Smith, 20,
sentenced 14 days hard labour for brutally kicking a woman in Red Cross Street. The
woman said “he was always doing it” and a doctor said she had 17 bruises on her lower
limbs and body. When arrested, he said it was a pity he had not killed her.”
104
The
press itself was quick to comment on this fact, suggesting that kicking, as a violent
behavior, demonstrated the Hooligan’s uncivilized and “savage” nature.
105

More than any other noun, the word “savage” was used as a descriptor of
Hooligan activity. Hooligan gangs were routinely referred to as “savage mobs.” In some
cases, the “savage” nature of the Hooligan masks his true identity as an “Englishman.”
In an argument for corporal punishment, a writer for the Saturday Review writes “it is to
the Englishman in these unbroken savages that we are asked to apply the cat!”
106
While
the article praises the elements of aggressive Hooligan instinct as something that, with
refinement, could lead to a productive life, it laments the idea that the savage nature of
the Hooligan obscures the values and character of a “true” Englishman. What is crucial
to understand here is how Hooliganism was defined by the press as standing outside the
bounds of civil society.

104
South London Chronicle, 30 July 1898.
105
For an example of this concept, see Clive Emsley, Hard Men: The English and Violence since 1750,
London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005, 131. In this period, “kicking” was viewed as an uncivil form of
violence and was frowned upon even when used by constables.
106
“What Shall We Do With Our Hooligans?” Saturday Review, 29 October 1898.
37

Among the greatest challenges discussed by the popular press was how to
manage the Hooligan’s “savage” nature. Some argued that their savagery was due to
the lack of adequate recreational facilities in the densest parts of London.
Undoubtedly they would be less likely to indulge their savage and their criminal
instincts if they had more opportunity for healthy recreation. But will the
persons who suggest this remedy kindly explain how cricket and football
grounds are to be established in the heart of London. The real trouble is that we
have allowed our town population to grow beyond the possibility of proper
control, and unless the mass of people can get back to a more spacious life, both
moral and physical degeneracy are inevitable.
107

This passage suggests that the quality of savagery found in the Hooligan type was a
product of the restricted space that, as we will see later, factors heavily into the origins
of the Hooligan as a product of the physical environment of south London.
Additionally, the language of moral and physical degeneracy, which was already a
significant theme in the literature of moral reform movements, alludes to savage
qualities of working-class criminals as an illness that has the potential to spread
throughout the city if unchecked.
Another aspect of Hooligan behavior that was frequently reported in the press
was the use of tactics of intimidation and coercion rather than outright violence. A
story entitled “Hooliganiana” that ran in the August 17, 1898 Daily Mail details the
account of Mr. Abraham Smith, auctioneer and collector for the city corporation. Smith
had recently “prosecuted a ruffian named Nutkins at Southwark for assault.” His
testimony was instrumental in receiving a sentence of six months hard labor.
108
Smith
reported to Southwark magistrate Mr. Fenwick that he received “an anonymous letter
threatening him with death” for his actions in assault case. Cases of witness intimidation

107
Daily Graphic, 2 October 1900.
108
Ibid.
38

were common among early accounts of Hooligan behavior. This was particularly true
in some of the major cases of the day, including the trial of the Girdle gang, where
several witnesses disappeared over the course of two months.
109

According to the press, gangs did not limit their threats to witnesses. In the case
of John Gould, charged with public drunkenness in Islington in August 1898, gang
members who witnessed the fight between Gould and Police Constable Webb
reportedly threatened Webb with death.
110
Indeed, as Gould was brought in on the
evening of his arrest, the Standard reported that “a hostile crowd followed the prisoner
to the station and stones were thrown.”
111
At trial before the magistrate, Webb testified
that “he had been threatened by the gang of which Gould was a member.”
112
The
account in the Standard serves to accentuate how criminal gangs attempted to subvert
even the police, threatening the authority of the justice system.
IMAGINING AND MAPPING “HOOLIGAN” LONDON
In Clarence Rook’s fictitious portrayal of Hooligan gang life, The Hooligan
Nights, the crowded streets of south London figure prominently in the story of young
Alf.
113
South London’s social and cultural geography facilitated and served as a
common point of reference for accounts of Hooliganism in the popular press.
They appear to be the exclusive product of large towns. The young country lad
may slough in his aimless way—especially on Sundays, when there is no
football or cricket—but he is not a Hooligan. It requires the stimulating air of a
back court in the south London slum to produce the semi-savagery that
Hooligans probably mistake for manliness.
114

109
Pearson, Hooligan, 82.
110
Standard, 16 August 1898.
111
Ibid.
112
Ibid.
113
Clarence Rook, Hooligan Nights. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1899.
114
Daily Graphic, 2 November 1900.
39

The Hooligan was, then, a distinctly metropolitan creature. As we have already seen,
the development of the Hooligan identity, from notions of savagery to the ways in
which Hooligans were visually represented, was largely contingent on a critical
commentary on the state of the working classes in London. As the example above
states, the Hooligan identity was—at least at first— inextricably tied to the geography
of London’s working-class neighborhoods.
115

Recent research on London’s cultural geography has developed the historical
understanding of the urban space as a venue for the production of cultural meaning.
116

As Judith Walkowitz notes, London existed both as a site of terror and as a site of
wonder.
117
Works such as this have paved the way for scholars of Victorian London to
explore the world constructed by representations in urban print culture that emphasized
fear and danger as central elements of working-class districts. My concern here is the
way the Hooligan crisis developed aspects of the cultural meaning associated with
South London for readers of the popular press. South London came to represent a
murky site of danger which was, at times, portrayed as exotic and morally
ambiguous.
118
I contend that the development of Hooligan crisis effectively forced

115
For example, see Manchester Guardian, 11 November 1898. While “Hooligan” eventually becomes
used outside the context of South London, it only spreads after October 1898. One story mentions a “boy
of the Hooligan-type” in police custody in Manchester.
116
See Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000.
117
The idea of London as a “contested space” appears in Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight:
Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 11.
118
See especially Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.
London: Methuen, 1981; Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991;
and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. Much of the explanatory model for
this section of the chapter originates from Jameson’s notion of the “spatial turn” and Said’s ideas on the
historicization of geography from his undervalued work Culture and Imperialism. While these two
contributions to theories of space and history are vastly different, they both maintain that space, as a
conceptual model, must be pursued to complement other forms of cultural studies.
40

south London into the urban periphery in the same way that sections of the city—most
notably the East End—had been culturally severed during the 1870s and 1880s.
By the 1890s, south London was the fastest growing portion of the metropolis,
adding roughly 26,000 residents every year compared to the rest of the city, which
averaged 14,000 new residents.
119
At approximately 12 miles by 6 miles, south
London’s population at the end of the nineteenth century was nearly 2 million people,
making it a relatively dense city within the city.
120
According to the published annual
of Rev. W.J. Sommerville, rector of St. George the Martyr, there were 6,003 houses in
Southwark alone.
121
Each house in Southwark averaged eleven residents. The per acre
population of Southwark at two hundred and twelve, was over four times as dense as
any in London. The birthrate in Southwark was thirty-six per one thousand residents, as
opposed to the rest of London, which averaged thirty births per one thousand residents.
The death rate was 23.2 deaths per one thousand residents per year as opposed to the
London average of eighteen per one thousand residents.
122
Southwark and, by
extension, south London, was statistically a far different region of the city, in terms of
its size, population density, and its birth and death rates.

119
South London Chronicle, 29 May 1899.
120
South London Chronicle, 27 May 1899. This is according to the testimony of Walter Besant reprinted
in the paper.
121
South London Chronicle, 8 April 1899.
122
Ibid. The statistics are quoted by Sommerville as part of the annual he issued as rector of St. George
the Martyr and republished by the South London Chronicle. The census data for 1901 suggest that
Sommerville was more or less accurate in his findings, although it is impossible to verify his exact
numbers without additional data from 1898.
41

South London, despite its size, density, and population, was regarded by some
contemporary scholars of London such as author Sir Walter Besant as lacking a
coherent cultural identity.
123
Besant writes:
It is a city with a municipality, without a city centre, without a civic history. It
has no university. It has no colleges apart from medicine. Its residents have no
local patriotism. It has no clubs. It has no public buildings. It has no west end.
124

While some of Besant’s claims seem dubious, the point of emphasis here is not in
doubt. South London was perceived by many as a working-class wasteland by the end
of the nineteenth century, joining East London as a site prominently associated with the
problems of over-crowding and criminal danger.
125

2 millions of people—most of whom are from the working-class. The brain reels
at the teeming multitudinous life—armies of men, women, and children living in
the slums in huge, unlovely barracks. The very number makes it impossible to
grasp the enormity of the mass. The vastness of the population makes one feel
as if individual effort would be absolutely useless.
126

Besant’s commentary on the nature of south London—a commentary that echoes the
ways in which east London was portrayed during the second half of the nineteenth
century—was a response to the perceived problems of crime that plagued the city in the
previous year, but reveals much about how certain segments of the city represented
almost foreign or colonial spaces. Besant remarks that the problems faced by south
London are not unlike those experienced in some of the territories of the British Empire.

123
While his fame came from his fiction writing, Besant spent the last two decades of his life writing
about London for the Pall Mall Gazette. Even in his fiction, London was featured as a prominent
character, in All Sorts and Conditions of Men, he deals with the founding of a People's Palace in Stepney.
Besant later helped to organize donations for the setting up of a real “People's Palace” in 1887 for the
recreation and cultivation of residents of East London in 1887.
124
Ibid.
125
South London did not displace the East End as a space associated with working class criminality.
Instead, it might be argued that South London came to be understood in the same terms as Victorian East
London.
126
South London Chronicle, 8 April 1899.
42

Besant, who had worked as a social reformer in the East End in the 1880s, evokes the
“Christian mission” of the imperial enterprise to suggest that the most successful course
of action for addressing the problems of south London should be based in church
philanthropy, casting south London as a site simultaneously within the metropole and
on the periphery.
127
More to the point, Besant’s portrayal of South London evoked an
image of it as a storehouse for the teeming masses, mirroring what he no doubt
encountered in East London two decades earlier.
Another prominent Londoner with more direct experience working in South
London through St. George’s Vestry, Rev. W.J. Sommerville, offered his own take on
the spiritual state of south London by admitting that the church had little influence
there.
There is no question that in Southwark, the church has lost its hold on the
people, if indeed we ever had a hold at all. Thousands are living lives of
practical heathenism, never entering a place of worship, never thinking of the
necessity of training their children in the fear and love of God, never thinking of
anything higher than the dull round of monotonous toil, varied by an evening
spent in the public-house.
128

Sommerville’s admission of the church’s helplessness in Southwark dovetails nicely
with Besant’s portrait of the foreignness of south London’s culture. Sommerville’s
condemnation of the “heathenism” that pervaded Southwark furthers the idea that south
London was viewed as a distinctly foreign zone dominated by vice and amorality. I
want to distinguish the perceived amorality—as opposed to immorality—of south
London’s spatial identity from a discourse on the immorality of its residents. South
London is depicted as a space devoid of a moral presence and, Sommerville hints, might

127
I will demonstrate in chapters 4 and 5 that this course of action becomes a common response to the
Hooligan crisis in the early twentieth century.
128
Daily Chronicle, 11 April 1899.
43

never have had such an influence in the past through the church. Just as with Besant,
Sommerville’s designation of “pagan” Southwark shapes the spatial identity of south
London as similar to a colonial space, an ultimately peripheral and dangerous zone.
Other portrayals affirm Besant and Sommerville’s view of south London as an
amoral space distant from English civil society. In the Salvation Army’s Social Gazette,
the plight of south London had become a common theme even before the Hooligan
crisis. South London is referred to as “a colony of bullies,” full of “horrible smells,”
dilapidated housing structures, and older children caring for younger children,
resembling “tribes of a crawling size.”
129
Both Besant’s work and the language of The
Social Gazette cast south London as a space absent normative behavioral and moral
boundaries. Filled with abundant public-houses and cheap, crowded lodging with little
access to religious or cultural uplift, south London represented the conception of
“darkest England” that propelled the moral reform agenda of the Salvation Army in the
late nineteenth century. The combination of these factors, according to The Social
Gazette, was that south London was a breeding ground for criminality and, in a more
general way, for physical danger. The Daily Graphic claimed in a report on August 22,
1898 that “The avalanche of brutality…under the name of ‘Hooliganism’ has cast such
a dire slur on the social records of South London.”
130

Both these examples depict south London as an unstable space burdened by
violent criminality and an absence of what the authors would have recognized as
“Christian values.” As one short story from The Social Gazette entitled “The British
Barbarian” states, “in the slums of south London, a dog is more value in the estimation

129
Social Gazette, 3 September 1898.
130
Daily Graphic, 22 August 1898.
44

of the barbarians than many children, and as for a wife, she seldom counts as an object
to be considered.”
131
This story exemplifies the extent to which many social
commentators stretched the metaphor of south London as a foreign, dangerous, and
thoroughly uncivilized space. One might venture to argue that this production of
difference is evidence of a culture anxious about definitions of civility and civilization.
As I will argue later in this dissertation, those fears are strongly tied to the motivations
of the moral reformers who sought to “convert” or “cure” Hooliganism.
While the observations of outsiders placed a great deal of emphasis on the
environmental flaws of south London, other observers placed more emphasis on the
social culture that built the environment of fear south of the Thames. Nowhere were
these observations more poignant than in the Southwark police court. As we have seen,
the police court, as a magistrate’s court, was the primary venue for the performance of
the Hooligan identity as it was relayed to the public. The culture of the police court also
conveyed to contemporary observers important clues about the nature of the working-
class environment. James Greenwood’s The Prisoner in the Dock provides a
compelling account of the police court system taken from his days covering the police
courts for the Daily Telegraph from 1897 to1901. Greenwood’s accounts of the police
courts in south London argue for a direct connection between the material existence of
London’s poor and criminal behavior.
132
Far from a flâneur, Greenwood presents
himself in his writing as crime journalist and amateur criminologist with privileged
knowledge of criminal culture. His text attempts to recount a world almost entirely

131
Social Gazette, 24 February 1900.
132
James Greenwood, The Prisoner in the Dock: My Four Years of Daily Experiences in the London
Police Courts. London: Chatto and Windus, 1902, v.
45

foreign to his readers. In this effort, he serves as an interpreter of the inner workings of
both police courts and the relationship between the criminal justice system and
London’s poor. Greenwood’s account highlights the failures of the state to reform the
culture of the “dangerous classes,” suggesting that “compulsory education has not done
as much as expected towards improving the morals of the children of the lower
classes.”
133

Similar to Greenwood, police court reporter Thomas Holmes’ work on the plight
of working-class Londoners served to create lasting images of London’s criminal
classes designed both to shock and caution its readers. Holmes, who referred to himself
first and foremost as a “police court missionary” was a constant presence in the
Lambeth and Southwark police courts from 1887. Like Greenwood’s text, Holmes’
writing is largely an attempt at illustrating ‘how the other half lived’ through personal
anecdotes. Holmes’ writing highlights the plight of working-class families and the
prevalence of vice-related criminality among them. Holmes notes that most of the cases
in the police courts involved drink, mentioning on one occasion that “50 out of 60”
were drunk and disorderly cases.
134
The prevalence of vice crimes among Hooligans is
also of particular interest to Holmes.
135
Holmes’ accounts, while consistent with the
efforts of moral reformers dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, are significant for
their focus on the institution of the police court as the only arena in which the state
consistently engaged working-class petty criminals. Holmes’s work made the case for

133
Ibid.
134
Thomas Holmes, Pictures and Problems from London’s Police Courts. London: Edward Arnold,
1902, 15.
135
Ibid.
46

increased state intervention in the lives of working-class men and women by
demonstrating the need for more venues of moral rescue for London’s working classes.
In his book London’s Underworld, Holmes attempts to relate to his audience the
secret world of London’s criminal culture. He refers to impoverished and crime-ridden
regions of south London as an “undiscovered country,” an environment of “fear, deceit
and treachery” of which he holds specialized knowledge.
136
London’s Underworld acts
as a map of regions of London, such as Southwark, Lambeth and portions of the east
end, where no respectable person would travel without purpose. By penetrating the
boundaries of respectability, Holmes’ text is able to communicate a social and cultural
geography that celebrates the values of his readers while physically and socially
distancing his subjects. Without attempting to read too much into the spatial metaphors
applied by Holmes, his accounts provide a window into bourgeois conceptions of
London’s urban geography.
The summation of these and other accounts helped to forge a mental map of
south London for popular press audiences. It is this cultural knowledge that provided
the basis for the formulation of the Hooligan identity and the moral panic which it
spurred. The built environment of south London, while not the only venue for Hooligan
activity, remained closely associated with the phenomenon long after the end of the
summer of 1898.
HOOLIGANISM AND EXTRA-LEGAL JUSTICE
Stories detailing gang attempts to coerce witnesses and even the police were
sometimes met with accounts that depicted individuals taking the law into their own

136
Thomas Holmes, London’s Underworld. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1912, 24.
47

hands out of fear and frustration. This motif was evident in the case of George Clamp.
Clamp was a Lambeth marble mason accused of stabbing a “notorious Hooligan”
named Samuel Owen with a pen knife.
137
According to press accounts, Clamp acted in
self-defense after having been “followed around and pestered for money in Westminster
Bridge-road.”
138
During the first appearance at the magistrate’s court, Owen did not
appear and Clamp was thus released. He was almost immediately re-arrested by order of
the presiding magistrate, Mr. Fenwick, when the “gravity of the charges were taken into
account.”
139
Attempts at a preliminary trial proved elusive because Owen, who was
reportedly a member of the “New Cut gang,” did not show up.
Beard said the injured “Hooligan” was keeping out of the way and was not seen
at any of his usual haunts since Monday. “He is well-known” the detective said
significantly.
140

Twice, Clamp was remanded on bail. Clamp was said to be “unhappy that some papers
labeled him a Hooligan (or a member of a disreputable gang),” but was appeased by the
magistrate, who said the truth would come out in due time.
141
After Owen failed to
show for a third time, Clamp was finally set free, although he was never afforded the
opportunity to confront his accuser.
What made the Clamp case unique was that it was the first example of a
Londoner attacking an alleged Hooligan. The press coverage of the case painted Clamp
as a “respectable” working man who had no prior criminal convictions.
142
Letters in
both the Daily Mail and the South London Chronicle portray Clamp in heroic terms.

137
Daily Mail, 15 August 1898.
138
South London Chronicle, 6 August 1898.
139
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 7 August 1898.
140
Daily Mail, 7 August 1898.
141
South London Chronicle, 30 July 1898.
142
Ibid.
48

Owen, the victim in the case, is described conversely as “cowardly” and “notorious,”
although no substantial information on his criminal pedigree exists to confirm any gang
affiliation. Given the testimony of Clamp in the Lambeth magistrate’s court as reported
by the press, Clamp’s use of a pen knife to stab Owen was justified, if not honorable.
Even in the remarks of the magistrate Fenwick, the notion that Clamp was wronged by
the trial seems fairly clear.
A distinctly middle-class response that attempted to apply extra-legal pressure to
the threat of Hooliganism was the emergence of groups of businessmen who set out to
fight juvenile criminality in what could only be described as vigilance committees. The
story begins in early August 1898. In some of the smaller circulation newspapers, and
attached to stories about Hooligan activity, there are brief mentions of a “ratepayers
association” meeting to discuss tactics to combat the “Hooligan menace.”
143
On August
5, 1898, the Daily Telegraph claims that a “tradesmen meeting” was to be held at
Blackfriars that evening. The intent of the tradesmen was “to form a league to help the
police to end the ‘reign of terror’ in south London.”
144
Presided over by Mr. Frederick
Dale of Blackfriars, the group, calling itself the “South London Ratepayers Protection
Association” passed two resolutions:
1. It is resolved to appeal to all tradesmen and residents in the neighbourhoods
disturbed to form themselves into a league, the endeavours of all members being
the stamping out of this pest, which has now assumed alarming proportions.

2. That this meeting call upon the vestry of St. George the Martyr to at once
commence a further conference of delegates at various local bodies with a view

143
There are mentions of the Ratepayer’s Protection Association in the South London Chronicle, the Sun,
and the Daily Mail.
144
Daily Telegraph, 5 August 1898.
49
orts
y

to approaching without delay both the Home Secretary and the Chief
Commissioner of the police on the subject.
145

What is peculiar about the South London Ratepayers Protection Association is that as
quickly as it was announced, the press denied that it even existed. Reports from the Sun
state simply that the rumored meeting never took place and that the owner of the alleged
meeting place explained that no one was authorized to use his hall for any meeting
whatsoever.
146
Accompanying some of the denials were claims that St. George’s
Vestry was concerned that the formation of the association would undermine its eff
to pressure the Home Office to act on their behalf to address the Hooligan crisis. The
were specifically concerned that the activities of a vigilance committee might result in
an increase in street violence rather than a logical solution to it.
The mystery surrounding the South London Ratepayers Protection Association
raises questions about whether press accounts offer accurate reflections of day-to-day
activity in south London. Indeed, while there are mentions of the Ratepayer’s
Protection Association in the South London Chronicle, the Sun, and the Daily Mail, I
have found no references to the ratepayers independent of press reports. The accounts in
each paper differ in details of the meeting, as well as about the date of the meeting
itself. The Sun’s denial that the Association even existed further muddies the waters.
Importantly, what the stories suggest for the readers of the press was that the
community was not only aware of the Hooligan problem, but was acting on its own to
address the problem outside the bounds of law enforcement and the courts. This latter
point itself might also have inspired fear in the readers of papers like the Daily

145
Ibid.
146
Sun, 6 August 1898.
50

Telegraph and the Sun, as it suggested that the conditions of south London were outside
the influence of government authority.
On the same day that the first wave of the South London Ratepayers Protection
Association denials hit the press, the South London Chronicle reported that a meeting
had occurred and that more would be scheduled at a secret location.
147
By August 17,
1898, several stories suggested that the organization had, in fact, existed but was
disbanded after pressure from local authorities over the fear of violence. Another, less
credible rumor suggested that the Ratepayers Protection Association met in secret for
fear of Hooligan reprisals.
148
This point was made in the last stanza of a poem entitled
“Mob Rule in London:”
They’re conspirators, perchance
Anarchists, maybe, from France
Shunting public observation?
Criminals, perhaps by awe
Moved to meet in secret places
With sleuth hounds of the law
Sniffing close upon their paces
Oh dear no! Each place is wrong;
Such as seldom now invades men
Are, you’ll be surprised to hear,
Well-know South London tradesmen!
South of London tradesmen, they
Living in a fear so thorough
Of the roughs who night and day
Spread black terror in the borough
That, deprived of peace and health
And environed by disasters
They dare only meet by stealth
To denounce their ruthless masters!
149

147
Daily Chronicle, 6 August 1898.
148
Daily Graphic, 22 August 1898.
149
South London Chronicle, 13 August 1898.
51

The poem’s attack on the apparent cowardly behavior of the association masks its
attempt to affirm the cohesive nature of the Hooligan threat, the “ruthless masters” of
south London. “Mob Rule in London,” as a piece published on the same page as news
accounts of juvenile criminality, represents more than anything else the sense expressed
by the press that south London was a space where boundaries of law, civility, and
authority had eroded beyond recognition. The behavior of the Ratepayer’s Association
is cast as one more symptom of this phenomenon.
The confusion surrounding the development of the association illustrates an
important point. The problem of crime in south London was real and substantial.
However, what motivated the formation of extra-legal societies, similar to the
circumstances surrounding the Clamp case, was the fear aroused by popular press
accounts of Hooligan violence. The emergence of extra-legal responses to Hooligan
violence—a strategy that emerged as one of the many solutions suggested by the press
in July 1898—as evidence of both the reality that south Londoners had firsthand
experience with street crime, but also that their concerns with crime prompted action
only after Hooliganism helped to target their fears and concerns.
CONCLUSION
Like other moral panics, the lifespan of the Hooligan crisis was brief.
150
Popular
interest in the “Hooligan” waned by late autumn 1898, but the Hooligan did not
disappear entirely from the consciousness of the British popular press. Due in no small
part to the efforts of the writers and reformers who were initially drawn to the danger
posed by the image of the Hooligan, the discourse shifted from one of outrage to a

150
Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 12-13.
52

critique of the failure of British society and of the British government in hindering the
growth of Hooliganism.
The Hooligan pest shows no sign of abating. These unrestrained young ruffians
are still in several districts a real terror to peaceful citizens, and the police seem
to find extreme difficulty in dealing with them. That a severe scale of
punishment, whether by flogging or otherwise, would diminish the evil is
possible. It would not cure it. The young savage of modern life would still be
free to make himself a nuisance, if not a positive danger, whenever the
policeman’s back was turned. What is really wrong is the social carelessness
which permits such types to exist and to increase.
151

By 1902, writers like William Douglas Morrison were condemning Britain for failing to
deal with the persistent problem of juvenile criminality epitomized by Hooliganism.
152

Oddly enough, while many of the men and women labeled as “Hooligans” were not
children or even young, Hooliganism came to be associated with juvenile criminality
and deviance. Morrison’s concern with the over-crowding of reformatories and
industrial schools, and the inadequate facilities to deal with the perceived rise in
juvenile criminality, exposed a common fear: that the failure of social institutions to
deal with deviant children ran the risk of overwhelming Britain with adult criminals.
The number of juveniles in these institutions has more than trebled since 1868,
and it is unquestionable that if these youthful offenders were not confined there,
a large proportion of them would immediately begin to swell the ranks of crime.
That crime in England is not making more rapid strides than the growth of
population, is almost entirely to be attributed to the action of these schools.
153

Morrison’s concerns were not unique, but they expressed the lasting impact of the
Hooligan crisis on debates over how to deal with juvenile delinquency and criminality
among Britain’s working class. More importantly, the Hooligan served as a new model

151
Daily Graphic, 2 November 1900.
152
W. Douglas Morrison, Crime and its Causes. London, Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1902, 12.
153
Ibid.
53
of social deviance for Britain’s moral reformers. Hooliganism, from its connection to
various vices including alcohol and tobacco, to other forms of public immorality, such
as street betting, symbolized definitive symptoms of physical and moral degeneration
for many moral reform agents, including the Salvation Army and the Howard
Association.
This chapter has explored how the development of a distinctive Hooligan
identity by the popular print media fostered a moral panic over criminal violence in
working-class districts of London. The development of the “Hooligan type” was the
central force behind the moral panic that gripped London during the summer of 1898,
facilitating the development and refinement of the Hooligan as a deviant cultural figure,
defined both by a specific set of signifiers and its association with the space of south
London. The emergence of the Hooligan as a deviant social actor and as a symbol of
moral decay among working-class British juveniles is significant because it served to
empower the efforts of moral reformers concerned with the physical and moral health of
children and juveniles. By associating the emergence of Hooliganism with the space of
south London, the press coded the Hooligan as a product of environmental forces which
contributed to physical and moral decay.
While the press relied on a wide variety of accounts to develop the image and
traits of the Hooligan, the most revealing accounts were two cases of murder which
came to be associated with the Hooligan crisis—the Oakley Street Murder and the Red
Cross Court Tragedy. Each case provides important key points for examining how the
press developed—and then corrupted—the Hooligan type and how the Hooligan
became an object of moral panic. It is this latter point of understanding how and why
54
the popular press and subsequently the public was swept up in the Hooligan crisis that is
so crucial for understanding why moral reformers took an interest in working-class
juvenile criminality and deviance. The cases illuminate how Hooliganism, as well as
more general concerns over moral decay and degeneracy, took a more prominent social
meaning in the late nineteenth century and how the Hooliganism shaped the goals and
aspirations of moral reformers in the early twentieth century.

Image 1.1: Daily Graphic, 5 December 1900.

55
56

Chapter 2

“Murder is always a Mistake:” The Oakley Street Murder,
the Red Cross Court Tragedy, and the End of the 1898 Moral
Panic

“Western Societies have long retained a horror and fascination with the lethal. For, no
matter how repetitively narrated, murders continue to traumatize the national psyche,
never assimilated, never entirely understood….murders traumatize, then, not only in
their persistent reminders that non-being is the ultimate and inevitable end for all
beings, but also in their uncomfortable confirmation of every individual’s power to
force others to undergo the terror of non-being, the appalling transformation from
person to expellable detritus, waste, corpse.”
Belinda Morrissey from When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and
Subjectivity
154

While the emergence of the “Hooligan” as a social actor in the summer of 1898
was precipitated by a moral panic over juvenile crime in South London during a period
of decline in committals for indictable offenses, some of the events central to the media
firestorm were based on actual events.
155
Among the most prominent cases were real
instances of violent crime and murder that came to be associated with Hooliganism.
156

Labeled by the press as the Oakley Street Murder and the Red Cross Court tragedy, both
cases involved a young working-class male from south London accused of murder.
Through a detailed examination of these two cases, I will offer a comprehensive
understanding of how the popular press developed the idea of the Hooligan as a real and

154
Belinda Morrissey, When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity. London: Routledge,
2003, 4.
155
Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century, 5.
156
These instances represent part of the basis for the moral panic. As Stanley Cohen and Howard Becker
contend, moral panics are based in some sense of reality. I am not concerned with what was real and
what was fabricated, but rather how real cases came to be applied to Hooligan model. In these cases,
Hooliganism was used by the press as the rubric for interpreting the nature and meaning of the crime.
57

tangible threat to British civility, but also as a commentary on how the Hooligan was
seen as an indicator of moral decay.
In this chapter, I will explore how the cases of John D’Arcy and William Gould
came to symbolize the progression of the Hooligan crisis and served as the most
prominent examples of Hooligan crime in the summer of 1898. As I have already
demonstrated, the notion of the Hooligan was, to a significant extent, a fabrication of
the popular print media. This chapter deals with how the application of the Hooligan
type was imposed on significant criminal activity and how that construction shaped the
way in which people understood and interpreted the nature and extent of urban criminal
deviance. These cases represent part of the basis for the moral panic. As Stanley Cohen
and Howard Becker argue, moral panics are not fictional, but rather are processes of
creating associations that are fictive.
157
In both the case of D’Arcy and Gould, the
notion that violent crime among juveniles represented what noted anthropologist Arthur
MacDonald regarded as serious “social disease” comes into sharp focus.
158
In these
cases, Hooliganism was used by the press to interpret the nature of juvenile delinquency
in Britain, contributing to an existing discourse on the moral and physical health of
British youth.
PUBLIC REACTIONS TO HOMICIDE AND THE BRITISH PRESS
My argument about the role the popular press played in these cases hinges on
the authority of the press as an arbiter of “truth” in the daily life of Britons as well as an
engine of public opinion. In 1886, W.T. Stead described the ability of an editor not only

157
See especially Howard Becker, Outsiders and Stanly Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics.
158
Arthur MacDonald, “The Reform of Juvenile Criminals,” The Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. XIV, 1908,
497.
58

to influence public opinion, but also to generate it.
159
The editor, according to Stead,
had risen to the role of the “greatest force of politics.” Stead implied that editors had
ultimate say in what readers would know and understand about their world.
160
The
press came to have a powerful influence, not only in what was reported, but also in how
its readership constructed their understanding of their particular space and their
expectations of behavior.
161

The press played a particularly powerful role in depictions of crime and the
criminal. It was through newspapers that Victorian Britons formulated their ideas of a
criminal world that “surrounded them, but they rarely encountered.”
162
In particular,
the experience of street violence was more a part of an imagined urban landscape than a
substantial or tangible threat to the physical well-being of most middle-class Britons.
163

As Angus McLaren and others have observed, the late nineteenth century witnessed a
rise in the demand for new strategies, such as corporal punishment in the form of
flogging, for dealing with violent street crimes and “moral crimes.”
164

The focus of middle-class concern shifted in the late nineteenth century away
from fears of robbery and property loss towards interpersonal violence.
165
I contend
that this shift in fears was due in no small part to the prevalence of willful murder in the

159
Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century, 37.
160
Ibid.
161
Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 17. This contention is based to some extent on the
observations made by Cohen regarding the power of the press in helping its readership to create
expectations about behavior.
162
Ibid, 29.
163
As I have already noted, the focus of the moral panic was the largely bourgeois readership of the
popular press.
164
Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999, 15.
165
Ibid., 15-16.
59

public imagination.
166
The press, and particularly smaller-to-medium circulation
papers, played a significant role in developing these ideas and in “raising the fear of
street violence among the middles classes.”
167
The press, as we have already seen, was
a source for both criminal statistics and narratives of criminality and criminal culture.
The question under consideration in this chapter is how the press shaped the popular
understanding of the “Hooligan” as a criminal agent and how the most extreme cases of
criminal deviance attributed to Hooligans set the tone and the boundaries for the moral
panic of 1898.
In the last years of the nineteenth century, murder captured the popular
imagination of the British public.
168
Homicide was celebrated in “gallows literature,”
the subject of early sociological articles that permeated periodicals, and appeared in
great frequency in popular short fiction, crime melodramas, and novels.
169
As Beth
Kalikoff and Garrett Stewart have both observed, the act of homicide itself was often
slowed down and examined in detail in these texts to a greater degree than in prior
periods as well as subsequent writings, suggesting that the Britons in the Victorian

166
“Willful murder” refers to the intentional killing of another human being, thus excluding instances of
accidental killing and manslaughter.
167
Andrew Davies “Youth Gangs, Gender and Violence, 1870-1900” in Shani D’Cruze, ed. Everyday
Violence in Britain, 1850-1950. Harlow: Pearson, 2000, 71. See also Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or
Rebels? An Oral History of Working-class Childhood and Youth, 1889-1939. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991. Again, it is important to note that the focus of this study does not exclude older, more
established press outlets such as the Times, but emphasizes the importance of the new cheap press of the
Victorian and Edwardian period.
168
Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century, 5. As I have argued previously, the reporting of
criminal activity in Britain in the last decade of the nineteenth century went into sharp decline, but
interest in crime and criminality remained significant among Britons. It should also be noted that the
decline in reported crime does not nullify the argument that concern with crime remained high.
169
See especially Beth Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay in Victorian Popular Literature. Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1986 and Garrett Stewart, Death Sentences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1984.
60

period—particularly the late Victorian period—held murder with a sense of fascination
and curiosity.
The crime of willful murder held a special status in late nineteenth-century
Britain as the act of homicide became increasing mythologized. By 1887, the
emergence of modern detective fiction in the form of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes series exposed the British public to a particular model of discourse on
homicide that focused on looking at murder as a “transgressive” act experienced, or
“witnessed” from a variety of angles and perspectives.
170
Accounts of murder in the
popular press began to emphasize witness accounts as part of the recounting of specific
crimes.
171
It was also during this period that the notion of the serial killer emerged as a
popularly understood criminal type in the form of Thomas Neill Cream and, most
notably, Jack the Ripper.
172
These examples contributed to the evolution of the
murderer as a cultural type.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, one of the key factors that contributed to
changes in the cultural meaning of murder and the murderer was the development and
evolution of Britain’s urban landscape. As Rob Sindall asserts, Britain was
“undergoing a unique experience in leading the world in the space of four or five
decades in the process of urbanization.”
173
As I have noted previously, urbanization in
nineteenth century Britain produced myriad schemes and strategies designed to address

170
For more on “witness perspective,” see Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay.
171
This is particularly apparent in regional press outlets, many of which would base entire stories on a
single witnesses’ testimony in order to stretch out a murder story.
172
See especially Angus McLaren, A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr.
Thomas Neill Cream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, and Judith Walkowitz, City of
Dreadful Delight.
173
Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century, 2. Sindall argues that the political and social
reaction to the stresses of this urbanization process was first and foremost an urge toward paternalism.
61

the conditions of urban life, such as the rise in the experience of criminal deviance for
middle-class Britons.
The focus of later nineteenth-century discourse on homicide was increasingly on
the figure of the killer.
174
The murderer was held separate from other criminals because
the act of willful murder was not merely a significant violation of the most basic moral
code, but also because of what it said about the perpetrator and his or her relationship to
society. The act of unlawful killing requires a combination of actus reus (guilty act)
with men rea (guilty mind).
175
It was the notion of men rea that inspired the most
interest in the murderer.
176
The crucial issue here is intent. Concern shifted to what
motivated criminally-deviant behavior and what produced what was regarded as the
“criminal mind.” The shift away from the transgressive act and towards the transgressor
is fascinating as it seems to suggest increased public interest in what produced crime
rather than the criminal act itself.
The shift in attention from the act to the actor is even more acute in cases of
juvenile murderers.
177
Homicides committed by juveniles had often been seen in terms
of a mistake or accident “youthful high jinks,” but by the late Victorian period, children
and adolescents involved in homicide began to be treated differently.
178
Murder by
children became increasingly pathologized under new schemes of analysis that differed

174
See Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay and J.J. Tobias, Crime and Police in England. Kalikoff notes
that popular fascination with murder in the late Victorian period was increasingly about trying to
understand murder through examining the murderer. I would further speculate that this process was a
product of the influence of late nineteenth-century popular crime fiction, which often emphasized the
character of the criminal over the other actors or even the details of the plot. It is reasonable to assert that
this was at least partially due to the influence of Victorian liberal individualism.
175
Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay, 3.
176
The rise in interest in the mind of the murderer could be seen as a product of the development and
popularization of criminology—epitomized by the work of Cesar Lombroso—as a field of study in the
second half of the nineteenth century. This was also true in the developing field of psychology.
177
Kalikoff, Murder and Moral Decay, 73.
178
Ibid., 97.
62

significantly from the ways in which adult murderers were defined and understood.
179

As Alan Hunt suggests, incidents involving a murderous juvenile call into question not
just the character of the offender, but also the character of all children, thus what he
calls “eviction tactics,” or the process of isolating deviant influences to preserve order,
may be used to maintain the status quo.
180
In the case of the moral panic over
Hooliganism, those individuals and groups who undertook the task of responding to the
crisis, believed that criminality among working-class juveniles was a symptom of moral
failure, and of the conditions of working-class London, making the problem one of
mitigating the adverse effects of environment.
181

As we have seen in the previous chapter, by 1898 public interest was focused
squarely on the development of deviant identities to explain and cope with criminal
behavior.
182
In the case of juvenile delinquency, the creation of the “Hooligan” by the
popular press allowed the public an opportunity to distance itself from the
circumstances of criminality both spatially and culturally by asserting that working-
class juvenile criminals belonged to a separate, foreign culture. In this chapter, I will
explore how some specific cases of serious criminal activity that came to be associated
with Hooliganism served to accentuate fears of urban moral decay and draw attention to
a crisis of values in Britain.

179
Ibid., 99.
180
Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999, 8. “Eviction tactics” here refers to the idea of isolating deviant influences to
maintain order.
181
As we will see in the next chapter, the enterprise of moral rescue was not merely about helping
children who had already engaged in deviant activity, but also attempting to change the circumstances
that seemingly caused that behavior through various efforts to foster institutional change.
182
Stanley Cohen, “Hooligans, Vandals, and the Community: A Study of the Social Reaction to Juvenile
Delinquency,” PhD. Thesis, London University, 1969, 4.
63

WILLFUL MURDER AND THE CREATION OF THE MORAL PANIC
The act of willful murder was the most serious crime attributed to Hooligans
during the summer of 1898 and drew the most initial interest from the popular press. It
was seen by the press and the public as the most egregious violation of moral behavior.
Even in the cases of murder, the press couched their contempt for murderers in terms of
the threat the murderer posed to the moral well-being of the community. As historian
Stefan Petrow notes, questions of morality and moral health were particularly pervasive
in discourse on the state of British society.
183
Willful murder represented the supreme
violation of Victorian morality, and thus amplified the threat Hooliganism posed to the
moral fabric of British society. As we will see later, moral discourse often took on
“apocalyptic language” in an effort to awaken society at large to the dangers posed by
what British moral critics and moral reformers believed was a “persistent indulgence in
immorality.”
184
As Petrow and others have observed, moral rhetoric influenced not only
the administration of justice through increasing application of the metropolitan police to
enforce “common morality,” but also the ways in which the very notion of crime was
perceived and understood by the public.
The types of crime that inspired the most fear or concern over the state of
morality were those that reflected the most direct disregard for this notion of common
morality. Indeed, while much of the concern over Hooliganism focused on behaviors
such as alcohol abuse, smoking, and gambling, what made Hooliganism a culture that
inspired fear was its connection to violence. The Oakley Street and Red Cross Court
murder cases developed and maintained the idea of the Hooligan threat, but also show

183
Petrow, Policing Morals, 3.
184
Ibid.
64

how the press promoted the environment of south London as a factor of homicide.
These two cases represent the acts of initial deviance which precipitated the moral
panic.
185
It was the Oakley Street Murder that provoked the media’s interest in criminal
activity among juveniles. The story of the unprovoked killing of a middle-aged
working-class man by a juvenile in broad daylight was the first account of serious
violent crime to be attributed to a “Hooligan” and the first crime in which the press
attempted to expose the culture of Hooliganism in any detail.
In Cohen’s “flow model,” what follows is the development of the inventory,
which is the process of identifying the deviant and amplifying deviance and sensation,
creating what I see as a labeling regime.
186
By the end of the Hooligan moral panic, this
process of labeling was applied far more broadly, as seen in the example of the
“Hooligan” Girdle gang, eclipsing the prior definitions of Hooliganism. The case of the
Girdle gang, where a group of adult criminals are subsumed under the tide of
Hooliganism due to their proximity in time and space to the crisis, points to the
substantive end to the moral panic.
THE OAKLEY STREET MURDER: THE FIRST “HOOLIGAN” HOMICIDE
Of all the cases attributed to “Hooliganism,” none was more notorious in the
British press than the Oakley Street murder. The press seized on the story as a prime
example of the Hooligan underworld’s grip on South London. Witnesses were
intimidated, and, in one notable case, disappeared entirely. The crime itself was an
example of random and meaningless violence perpetrated by a habitual criminal whose
own mother was known to the police and notorious in Lambeth.

185
Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 9.
186
Ibid.
65

The story of the actual crime as detailed in the coroner’s inquest is, by
comparison, mundane. On July 20, 1898, an inquest was held by A. Braxton Hicks,
Coroner for Southwestern London, to account for the death of Henry Mappin on July
15, 1898. Mappin, 47, was a blacksmith by trade, but had recently worked as a
roadman for the vestry of St. George.
187
Mappin lived with his wife Ann in Friar’s
court.
188
On July 15, 1898, Mappin died of puncture wounds to the neck on Oakley
Street in South London.
At the inquest, his wife, Ann Mappin, contradicted press accounts that he had
recently been released from prison, but confirmed that he was a convicted criminal who
had last been released from prison in 1889. According to the inquest records, the
rumors about Mappin’s criminal past came from Mappin himself. William Lockyer, a
Covent Garden porter, one of the key witnesses of the attack on Mappin, claimed that
Mappin approached him and asked for money to purchase a drink, claiming he had just
been released from a 20-month prison sentence.
189
Most of the witnesses who appeared
at the first inquest commented on Mappin’s disheveled appearance and his apparent
“drunkenness” as he wandered down Oakley Street.
The next witness was a 14 year-old printer’s reading boy named, Henry
Williams. On July 15
th
around 1 pm, Williams was walking southwest on Oakley Street
towards Westminster Road. At the corner of Oakley Street and Coral Street, Williams
encountered a young man with “dark hair and dark features.” As Williams approached

187
Coroner’s Inquest for Henry Mappin, 20 July 1898, CRIM 1/52/9, TNA. In his wife’s testimony, she
contradicts press reports that he had recently been released from prison and that his most recent
occupation was “hawking bootlaces.”
188
See Image 2.1.
189
Coroner’s Inquest for Henry Mappin, 20 July 1898, CRIM 1/52/9, TNA. Lockyer’s statements in the
inquest mirror earlier press accounts, which suggest that he might have been the source of much of the
information about the crime that appeared in the popular press prior to the initial inquest.
66
him, the young man tripped him, causing him to fall to the ground. As Williams got up
and attempted to turn away, the young man preceded to “wack” him in the jaw.
Williams fled down Oakley Street. He described his assailant as 5’4”, wearing a dark
cap which was either red or brown in color, and a tie with a “cheap pin” in it. At the
end of his testimony, Williams identified his assailant in court as the prisoner, John
D’Arcy. Mary Taylor, a dressmaker who resided on 32 Oakley Street, witnessed
Williams being chased and struck by a boy she identified as D’Arcy.
William Lockyer claimed that he had seen and recognized D’Arcy in Lambeth
during the week leading up to the death of Mappin. According to Lockyer’s initial
testimony, he and a group of “roughs” were assembled at The Duke of Sussex, a pub on
Oakley Street on July 15
th
. According to the testimony of another witness, New Cut
resident William Cooper, D’Arcy frequented the Victoria Music Hall. Cooper, a
greengrocer’s assistant, was the only witness to have interacted with D’Arcy prior to
July 15
th
. He stated that he had conversed with D’Arcy at a music hall, but claimed that
he did not know him by name. Cooper described D’Arcy’s appearance similarly to
Williams, adding that he wore “a white sweater” and a “little scarf.” The coroner’s
records note that Cooper, unlike Williams, had identified D’Arcy out of a group of ten
young men held by the police on the day of his arrest as well as at the inquest following
his testimony. Cooper saw D’Arcy on the corner of Oakley Street and Coral Street as
he stood outside Reading’s boot shop. Cooper claimed that D’Arcy approached an
older man on the street and said something to him. In less than a minute, the older man,
whom Cooper identified as Henry Mappin, pushed out at D’Arcy and shouted “go
away” twice. Then, according to Cooper’s testimony, D’Arcy struck Mappin in the
67

neck. Cooper saw blood come from Mappin’s neck, but saw no knife in D’Arcy’s hand.
As Mappin fell to the ground, D’Arcy lingered for a moment and then rushed down
Coral Street.
In Mary Taylor’s testimony, D’Arcy advanced on Mappin who, she claims, was
talking to another unidentified man almost immediately after chasing down Henry
Williams. Like Cooper, Taylor witnessed D’Arcy “hit the deceased in the neck and
then blood poured out.”
190
Taylor claims that she screamed “lay him on the pavement”
and that someone, who would later be identified as Benjamin Sexton, a local leather
finisher, immediately came to Mappin’s aid. Taylor also claims to have identified
D’Arcy at the Kennington Road Police station the following day.
What makes Taylor’s testimony interesting is the final statement she makes
before being examined by Mr. Sydney, the representative for the defense. She claims
that “I have been threatened not to give evidence against D’Arcy—Liz D’Arcy’s
son.”
191
As we will see later, this small note became crucial in the D’Arcy story in the
press. While being cross examined, Taylor noted that D’Arcy wore a cap on the back of
his head, in the style of “some lads and men (that) hang about Oakley Street.” This
detail would be a focal point of several press accounts of the murder, identifying his
attire with clothes commonly worn by south London gang members.
192

Mappin was taken by cab to St Thomas’s Hospital where he was admitted at
1:30 pm. He was accompanied by Benjamin Sexton, the man who had answered Mary
Taylor’s plea for help. At St. Thomas’s, Mappin was examined by John Spencer Hall,

190
Testimony of Mary Taylor, Coroner’s Inquest for Henry Mappin, 20 July 1898, CRIM 1/52/9, TNA.
191
Coroner’s Inquest for Henry Mappin, 20 July 1898, CRIM 1/52/9, TNA.
192
See especially The Sun and the Daily Mail for examples of press coverage of Hooligan attire.
68

the house surgeon. Hall pronounced Mappin dead at 3:30 pm. In his testimony, Hall
stated that Mappin died of multiple wounds to the neck, one that completely divided the
carotid artery and a longitudinal wound that damaged the jugular vein.
193

D’Arcy was found the next day near the corner of King William Street and
Strand at noon. According to the arresting officer, Detective Constable Edward Darby,
D’Arcy was with two other men. Darby, along with Sergeant Perret, approached the
men and stated, “We are both police officers and are going to arrest you on suspicion of
being John D’Arcy, wanted for the willful murder of a man named Mappin by cutting
his throat in Oakley Street about 1:15 pm yesterday.”
194
According to Darby’s
testimony, D’Arcy claimed that his name was “Jack Smith,” denying three times that he
was D’Arcy. Darby noted that he warned the man that while he was under no obligation
to make any additional statements until they reached the station, everything he did say
would be “carefully noted.” Darby and Perret escorted D’Arcy to the Kennington Road
Police Station where he was processed. On the next day, Darby went to the D’Arcy
residence at 15 Waterloo Road. In D’Arcy’s room he discovered a white sweater that
matched the description of the garment he had worn on the day of the crime.
Based on the inquest testimony, the coroner remanded John D’Arcy to custody
to stand trial at the central court. D’Arcy’s trial would not occur until late October.
D’Arcy’s trial was almost a non-event compared to how much time and energy was
directed toward it by the popular press in the weeks leading up to it. The evidence
against D’Arcy was overwhelming and fairly conclusive. As with the inquest, the
witnesses offered testimony that left little doubt about the events of July 15, 1898.

193
Coroner’s Inquest for Henry Mappin, 20 July 1898,CRIM 1/52/9, TNA.
194
Testimony of Edward Darby, Coroner’s Inquest for Henry Mappin, 20 July 1898, CRIM 1/52/9, TNA.
69

D’Arcy was found guilty and sentenced to death, and executed in the first week of
January 1899.
195

The Oakley Street Murder was a major story in the popular press. The Sun ran
the first story about the murder on July 16, 1898 just days before the term “Hooligan”
was applied to the apparent rash of crime plaguing south London. Referring to the
murder as “The Lambeth Tragedy,” the account, appearing before the coroner’s inquest,
described D’Arcy as “about 16” and included testimony from a “ticket of leave man”
who had been with D’Arcy immediately before Mappin’s death. That testimony stated,

The man who did the job was a young fellow, nineteen or twenty years of age.
He was drinking with some pals in the Duke of Somerset when he saw a man
walking slowly along the pavement opposite. He said ‘I’ll go over to that man
and demand a pound from him.’ I said ‘You had better not do that; he’s a good
sort, and if you ask him to lend you money I dare say he will.’ The man then
went out, and accosted the deceased. There seemed to be a sharp struggle and I
saw the young chap whip out a knife, and strike the other man in the neck. The
assailant turned sharp, and made off as fast as he could, and the wounded man
fell with a scream on to the pavement.
196

The account in the Sun, based entirely on an unnamed witness, includes a narrative from
within the pub in which D’Arcy and his associates were drinking, suggesting the
witness was inside the pub with him. This specific account of D’Arcy’s motive is
noticeably absent in all of the witness testimony presented in the inquest, which casts
some doubt on its accuracy and authenticity. As we have already seen, the way in
which the press presented D’Arcy’s story before and during the inquest had a
significant impact on the course of the investigation. In this instance, the impact of
offering alleged eye-witness testimony about the apparently senseless nature of the

195
Central Court Proceedings, 24 October 1898, CRIM 1/52/9, TNA.
196
Sun, 16 July 1898.
70

crime helped create a notion of south London’s criminals as immune to moral
considerations and prone to senseless violence against innocent victims.
The suggestions made by the first accounts of the murder were echoed in the
reports that were printed during and after the coroner’s inquest. Some papers, such as
the Westminster Gazette suggested that the murder epitomized the criminal culture that
controlled South London. In a July 22, 1898 story entitled “The Lambeth Reign of
Terror: How the Gang Works,” the Westminster Gazette used the environment of
Lambeth as its central point of inquiry. Relying heavily on statements made by Coroner
Braxton Hicks, the story discussed the “un-healthy” environs of the Victoria and
Canterbury music halls which were infested with “a gang of the fiercest ruffians that for
some time have ventured to ‘work’ London.”
197
The paper used an interview with an
unnamed inspector to discuss the activities of the gang, which counted the alleged
murderer D’Arcy among its ranks. The inspector states that the gang operated “Chiefly
by night, say from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., though recently they have played their games in
broad daylight.”
198
He goes on comment on the gang’s style of “play,” stating
Their method is briefly this; eight or nine young ruffians will decide on a field
of operation—generally a poorly-populated street, with plenty of by-ways and
turnings leading out of it. Then they will select a customer, anybody who
chances to pass by, and who looks workable and unarmed; one of the gang will
meet him and apparently accidentally trip the victim up; then his colleagues
appear on the scene and the poor unoffending man is kicked and robbed. But
this is not the case always—sheer devilry sometimes being the sole motive of
the desperadoes, who give no quarter whatever. They are armed in many ways,
though usually with pistols, knives, bludgeons and stones—the last is a terrible
weapon when sharp-pointed and held right in the hand.
199

197
Westminster Gazette, 22 July 1898.
198
Ibid.
199
Ibid.
71

When asked if there was any way to prevent more crimes like the Oakley Street murder,
the inspector claims “the only method would be to root them out once and for all by
combined police or even military effort against the whole gang, and this will have to be
done very soon; things can’t go on as they are. Why, many residents actually go in fear
of their lives, even in the daytime.”
200

The coverage of the Oakley Street murder was obsessed with casting the murder
as a gang-related crime, even though D’Arcy, by all accounts, acted alone and even the
most extreme guesses at his motive had nothing to do with gang activity. The Daily
News argued that
We are not surprised that South London groans under the terrorists and cries
aloud for protection from the lawless gangs of roughs which the police force is
hopelessly inadequate to deal with. The Oakley Street murder is but one
example of this reign of terror. We vote millions a minute for new ships, and
grudge a few hundreds for policing the overcrowded Alsatias (sic) across the
water, whose foul courts and alleys would disgrace even a Chinese city.
201

As we have seen before, the press seemed intent on linking the D’Arcy case to gang-
related street violence in an effort to suggest that Londoners were under an immediate
threat of death from street gangs. It is important to note that the D’Arcy case and the
Gould case (to be discussed next) were the only homicides ever linked to alleged
juvenile offenders during the Hooligan crisis.
202
What is more striking about this
passage from the Daily News is the immediacy of the prose. South London is not
merely in a state of decline, it has already reached the point of being unrecognizable as
a British community.

200
Ibid.
201
Daily News, 21 July 1898.
202
In both cases, the issue of age as it is depicted in the press is inconsistent. In the case of D’Arcy,
accounts of his age range from 16 to 18 without a definitive figure given even in his eventual trial at Old
Bailey.
72

While D’Arcy’s trial and conviction were anti-climatic, his case remained a
constant feature in the pages of the popular press in the months between the inquest and
the trial. The public disappearance of William Lockyer, a key witness to the murder,
who went missing during the coroner’s inquest only to return to testify later under
apparent duress proved to be enough for the press, particularly the Daily Mail and the
more locally-focused South London Chronicle, to spend column space rehashing the
details of the Oakley Street Murder.
203
In one example, the South London Chronicle
simply ran a transcript of the exchange between Justice Darling and the prosecutor,
William Bodkin, regarding Lockyer’s disappearance.
204
According to the article, the
Metropolitan Police made special inquiries on behalf of the relatives of the witness in
all the hospitals and infirmaries in the metropolis, but no one had seen him for 6 days,
noting that Lockyer’s parents believed his disappearance was due to fear.
205

By the time D’Arcy stood trial one month later, Lockyer had reappeared and
explained that he was “afraid” of testifying against D’Arcy. While this dispelled the
accounts of possible foul play, Lockyer’s apparent panic echoed the fears of the public
over figures like D’Arcy. In the trial coverage, Lockyer’s disappearance and
reappearance was linked to previous accounts of witness intimidation and D’Arcy’s
gang connections.
206

The story of Lockyer’s disappearance highlights how the press covered the
D’Arcy case. The first mention of the murder in the Daily Mail was presented under

203
Lockyer’s disappearance was treated as prominently as the D’Arcy inquest itself in the Daily Mail,
which highlighted the story offered by his parents that he had left London for fear of reprisal from
D’Arcy’s associates.
204
South London Chronicle, 23 September 1898.
205
Ibid.
206
Daily Telegraph, 21 October 1898.
73

pictions

ferent

the headline “Lambeth Assassination.”
207
D’Arcy was depicted as “a youth of
sixteen…short, dark and malignant-looking.”
208
The subject of D’Arcy’s physical
description was a significant aspect of the early stories, often casting D’Arcy’s face or
body as ‘dark’ or various synonyms for ‘evil.’ His body size is also highlighted in the
press accounts. The South London Chronicle described him as an “undersized lad of
sinister appearance.”
209
D’Arcy’s appearance is often linked to illness or feebleness.
One account states that he was a “youth of about eighteen years, ill-looking, and having
thick curly black hair.”
210
A week later, by the end of the inquest, D’Arcy was
described as looking “pale and ill” noting that “he is of such slight stature that when he
is seated in the dock, his head hardly reached above the rail.”
211
D’Arcy is uniformly
depicted as being physically weak or feeble, which was the hallmark for later de
of Hooligan-types in London later in the summer. These depictions of D’Arcy’s
physical appearance were often coupled with subjective accounts of his manners in
court. During the inquest, D’Arcy was described as having a “callous and indif
demeanour” which was characteristic of “the Hooligan way.”
212

D’Arcy, who was never linked to specific gang activity or affiliation in any of
the arrest, inquest, or trial records, was referred to by the Daily Mail two weeks after the
murder as “the leader of a gang known as the ‘Junior Hooligans’ in South London.
213

207
Daily Mail, 18 July 1898.
208
Ibid.
209
South London Chronicle, 23 July 1898. Other stories stressed that D’Arcy was “thick-set,” which
seems to suggest that he might have been short but not thin. Given their apparent inconsistency, the
accounts regarding D’Arcy’s physical appearance might have been fabricated or exaggerated.
210
Sun, 20 July 1898.
211
Sun, 27 July 1898.
212
Daily Mail, 21 July 1898.
213
Daily Mail, 4 August 1898. The name “Junior Hooligans” appears only once in the press, which
suggests that the name itself is perhaps a creation of the Daily Mail. Other accounts simply call the gang
“the Hooligan gang.”
74

Indeed, the first instance of the term “Hooligan” I have found comes as a description of
D’Arcy’s apparent gang affiliation in a story about crime in South London from the July
21, 1898 edition of the Sun.
214
Given this connection, John D’Arcy could be considered
to be the “first” Hooligan.
The press seized on D’Arcy’s apparent connection with gang activity. The
Evening News reported on June 30, 1898 that the D’Arcy case is evidence that,
Terrorism reigns supreme in Lambeth. For years, organised gangs of young
ruffians who inhabit the neighbourhood have been getting worse and worse.
Now it is no exaggeration to say the more respectable portion of the community
go in fear for their lives.
215

D’Arcy was seen, often with no evidence cited, as the leader of the “Hooligan gang” of
Lambeth. According to the first account of the case in the Daily Mail, “Darcy is stated
to belong to a family well-known to the police, and including at least one member of the
notorious “Hooligan gang” a band of young ruffians who have long terrorized the
Borough.”
216
The significance of connecting D’Arcy to a larger criminal movement—
in this case, in the form of a gang—is significant to understanding how D’Arcy’s case
represented an act of initial deviance that helped to spur the Hooligan moral panic.
Just as D’Arcy’s apparent connection to gang activity in south London allowed
his case to be understood as more than merely an isolated incident, criminality in
D’Arcy’s family was also an early focal point of the press accounts. The most
notorious members of D’Arcy’s family were his mother, Liz, who had been associated

214
This citation comes a full five days before the previously recognized origin point of the term
“Hooligan” in the Oxford English dictionary. This finding suggests that the origin and initial meaning of
the term need to be revised to reflect that “Hooligan” was most likely a proper name for a South London
street gang.
215
Evening News, 30 July 1898.
216
Daily Mail, 18 July 1898.
75

with witness intimidation during the trial, and his putative brother Thomas, who was
reportedly arrested only days after his brother on a charge of assault.
217
The press
claimed that Thomas D’Arcy was charged with assault on a butcher’s assistant named
George Fish, “whom the gang had set upon in a beerhouse in Blackfriars.”
218

According to reports in the Daily Mail, “Darcy (sic) was drunk when arrested.”
219
This
story also mentioned that “One of the gang” offered 10 shillings “to square it,” which
was presumably an attempt at bribery. Since there were no other witnesses to the
alleged assault, and conflicting testimony suggested that Thomas D’Arcy was not
present at the time of the attack, he was only fined for drunkenness.
220

D’Arcy’s mother, Elizabeth “Liz” D’Arcy, is portrayed in early accounts as a
“notorious” resident of South London. Since January 1887, Liz D’Arcy had been
charged twenty-seven times with seventeen convictions. For her initial infraction of
keeping a disorderly house, she had been fined ₤20, plus ₤6 for willful damage, and
20/- for assaulting the police. She had served fourteen days for disorderly conduct and
one year for robbery.
221
In a story about the D’Arcy case, the Evening News claimed
that Liz D’Arcy had recently been convicted again of running a disorderly home.
222

The publication of her past offenses resulted in complaints from Liz D’Arcy’s legal
representative, Mr. Overland, who argued that the publication of her seventeen prior

217
There is no tangible evidence that D’Arcy even had a brother. The stories of Thomas D’Arcy are not
corroborated by any government records. There is also no record of anyone named Thomas D’Arcy
being arrested for assault during July 1898.
218
Daily Mail, 23 July 1898.
219
South London Chronicle, 23 July 1898.
220
Daily Mail, 23 July 1898.
221
Daily Mail, 30 August 1898. On the charge of robbery, her male companion was given 18 months
hard labor and 25 strokes of the cat.
222
Evening News, 24 August 1898.
76

convictions had prejudiced her defense case for charges of witness intimidation,
amounting to contempt of court by the papers involved.
The source of Liz D’Arcy’s criminal record was the court reporter, who was
granted permission by the magistrate, Paul Taylor, to state that he was responsible for
the report of “the career of this notorious and dangerous woman.”
223
According to the
unnamed court reporter, “he had been repeatedly threatened by her and her associates,
and had been actually assaulted by her paramour, a man called Devancy, who was
convicted of assault by Mr. Fenwick.”
224
The account in the Daily Mail continued,
Moreover, the reporter was credibly informed that since her release on appeal,
Darcy had threatened that if her son were hung, she would herself kill two or
three of the witnesses, and would “swing” for them.
225

Liz D’Arcy’s male companion is mentioned in passing in other accounts as her
companion, but little else is known about him. Liz D’Arcy’s notoriety as a “Hooligan
mother” added to the press intrigue over the Oakley Street murder case, but it also
shaped how the public defined and understood the Hooligan type. The press used Liz
D’Arcy to promote the Hooligan as more than a gang or even a criminal subculture. By
stressing familial connections to habitual criminality, the press helped to create an
image of south London as a place where criminality was the norm.
226
Indeed, in this
case, Hooliganism was cast in similar ways in prior models of working-class criminal

223
Ibid.
224
Ibid. Fenwick was another magistrate who presided over the Lambeth Police Court.
225
Ibid. More mysterious is D’Arcy’s biological father. The press made repeated attempts to determine
who he was and where he was located with no success. According to South London Chronicle, 23 July
1898, this fact did not stop one reporter, keen on meeting with John D’Arcy and interviewing him, from
posing as D’Arcy’s long-lost father in order to get access to him in gaol.
226
It is interesting to note that in the case of the D’Arcy family and depiction of Liz D’Arcy as the
“Hooligan mother,” criminal deviance is seen in biological terms rather than via the standard emphasis on
environmental forces.
77

deviance that stressed the influence of family—or lack thereof—in the development of
habitual offenders.
One of the more sinister aspects of the Oakley Street murder and subsequent
trial was the apparent threatening of witnesses. A printer’s laborer named Morris, who
was employed in a printer’s shop on Oakley Street near the scene of the murder,
complained to Mr. Slade, a local magistrate, that “two women had threatened to “put his
light out” if he appeared against the man now under remand for stabbing him in the
face. His assailants were members of the “Hooligan gang.”
227
Morris never appeared as
a witness against D’Arcy. It is unclear whether or not he even witnessed the murder.
Mary Taylor, the elderly dressmaker who was an important witness in the
prosecution case, also reported being threatened with physical harm if she testified.
According to the Sun, Taylor claimed in court that an unnamed assailant “told me I had
better not give evidence against Liz D’Arcy’s son.”
228
Taylor’s inquest testimony
reveals this account to be consistent. The threat against Taylor was repeated in multiple
papers as well. Reportedly D’Arcy’s legal representative, Mr. Sydney, attacked the
claims that D’Arcy was somehow behind the intimidation, stating that “Surely a lad in
gaol cannot be held responsible for those things, and should not have his case
prejudiced by having those threats turned into a disadvantage.” Coroner Hicks requested
and received a police guard for Taylor, who was commended by Hicks for her bravery
on multiple occasions during her appearances for the inquest.
229

227
Daily Mail, 28 July 1898.
228
Sun, 20 July 1898.
229
Sun, 21 July 1898.
78

While the circumstances of the Lockyer disappearance and the testimony of
Mary Taylor and others suggest that witness intimidation was a problem during the
D’Arcy inquest and trial, the connection of witness intimidation and gang affiliation is
tenuous at best. The press never substantiated the claim that D’Arcy was affiliated with
a street gang. There is little doubt that gangs operated in Lambeth and that they were a
long-term part of the cultural landscape of South London. Yet D’Arcy is never linked in
a substantial way to a gang by the police or the justice system. Even the arresting
officers seem to distance D’Arcy from such an affiliation.
On July 21, 1898, the Daly Mail reported that the inquest had ended with a long
statement by coroner Hicks regarding the problem of witness intimidation in which he
revealed that he too had been targeted during the course of the inquest. The report
states:
There was another point which should not be overlooked, that was that people
had been threatened. Even he (the coroner) had been threatened; but he thought
that the more men were threatened, the greater zest it gave them to come
forward and do their duty. But it was gross scandal for public officials to be
threatened.
230

The Westminster Gazette added

He (Hicks) then observed…that he himself had been threatened by ruffians, that
this also had been done to a magistrate and to several police officers, and that
the continual assaults were a thorough disgrace to London, and some means
ought to be adopted to punish the offenders.
231

The Sun added

These different gangs are connected one to the other, and it seems that one
protects the other as far as it is possible. I consider something should be done to
try to break them up. We cannot shut our eyes as public men to the facts around
us. They go as far as to threaten me. That I do not care for. Threatened men

230
Daily Mail, 21 July 1898.
231
Westminster Gazette, 21 July 1898.
79

live long (applause). I think the more a man is threatened, the more determined
he becomes to his duty. (Hear, hear, and applause). I have been told that upon
being seen in a certain district, I shall be done for. A magistrate, whose name I
shall not give, told me he has been threatened, and endeavours have been made
to intimidate jurymen. It is getting an absolute scandal that a neighbourhood
should be entirely upset and reasonable enjoyment of one’s existence destroyed
by a class of men who go about blackmailing shopkeepers. I should take this
matter into account, and consider whether you should make representations to
authorities.” (applause).
232

Despite being a significant part of many of the stories of the inquest, the statement made
by Hicks was not added into the minutes of the inquest. While it is probable that Hicks
made the statements, it is difficult to verify what was actually said since there is some
disparity between the accounts. He is not directly quoted by any newspaper except the
Sun. The first portion of the statement is particularly confusing, especially since much
of the story on the Oakley Street murder up to that point had stressed how extraordinary
it was for London. The Westminster Gazette’s mention that police officers were also
targets of intimidation is interesting since only one officer testified against D’Arcy and
no other sources mention intimidation of the police. Hicks, however, took the
extraordinary step of suppressing the addresses of the witnesses, which he had never
before done in his fifteen-year career.
233

The events surrounding the D’Arcy murder trial, both the circumstances of the
homicide and the way in which the press portrayed the crime, provide an important
window into the construction of juvenile deviance in late Victorian London. What
made the D’Arcy case extraordinary compared to other cases involving ‘murderous
children’ was how the press, from the earliest accounts of the case, linked D’Arcy to the

232
Sun, 21 July 1898.
233
South London Chronicle, 21 July 1898.
80

Hooligan phenomenon, often referring to the case as the ‘Hooligan murder’ and D’Arcy
himself as the “Hooligan killer.”
234

As Shani D’Cruze and others have argued, “Once a death is catalogued as a
murder, how the murderer is understood and what happens to them needs to be placed
in the context of how they are brought into being in the course of their trial.”
235
In the
case of D’Arcy, the accounts of the various hearings leading to his trial at the Central
Criminal Court were cast as part of the drama of the Hooligan crisis.

WILLIAM GOULD: THE UNWITTING HOOLIGAN

Just one day before the death of Henry Mappin at the hands of John D’Arcy, a
young man named William Gould was arrested for the killing of Alice Lofthouse just
blocks from the Oakley Street murder. On the evening of July 14, 1898, Gould was
taken into custody and brought to Southwark police station. According to his own
statement, he had been out all day selling flowers and had returned to his home at 3 Red
Cross Place just after 8 p.m.
236
Upon his arrival home, Gould noticed that Lofthouse
had consumed a large amount of ale. Lofthouse asked Gould to pour her another glass
of ale. When he refused, she began “nagging” him.
237
He left the parlor and retired to
the bedroom. She following, continuing to complain. Gould then claimed that he
shoved her and she fell down over a table. According to Gould, the injuries that resulted
in her death occurred with her fall.

234
Sun, 24 October 1898.
235
D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, 21.
236
Metropolitan Police Report, 16 July 1898, CRIM 1/52/9, TNA.
237
Ibid.
81

On the surface, the facts of the Gould case are more complicated than those of
the D’Arcy case. At the coroner’s inquest for Henry Mappin, there was very little in the
way of conflicting testimony and the cause of Mappin’s death was readily apparent.
The crime took place in public—on a busy street in broad daylight—with several
witnesses offering testimony that placed D’Arcy at the scene of the crime. At best,
there was some debate over D’Arcy’s motive. At the coroner’s inquest to investigate
the death of Alice Lofthouse, however, the facts of her death were rather murkier. Still,
the press was quick to cast Gould in the same mold as D’Arcy. Gould was, by all
accounts, a young man with no criminal past and no tangible similarities to D’Arcy
beyond his age, area of residence, and his apparent involvement in the death of another
human being. Yet Gould is labeled—at least at first—as a “Hooligan” in the first press
accounts of the crime.
238
This labeling process seems consistent with the idea that the
Gould case was interpreted by the press through the lens of the moral panic over the
“Hooligan menace.”
The accounts of the Gould case that surfaced in the criminal reports of the case
are relatively straightforward and suggest that what happened was likely an accident.
Gould was charged with murder, but was eventually convicted of the lesser charge of
manslaughter, which is entirely consistent with the records of witness testimony. Still,
the story was presented in a vastly different way in the popular press, Gould comes to
be inexplicably labeled as a Hooligan and his crime is portrayed as willful murder rather

238
Gould is referred to as a “Hooligan” in multiple accounts of the crime. See especially Daily Mail, 20
July 1898; Sun, 18 July 1898; South London Chronicle, 21 July 1898. After the first week of coverage,
Gould is no longer referred to as a Hooligan.
82

than a case of accidental death. The July 20, 1898 edition of the Daily Mail calls the
crime a murder and links Gould to the gangs that “control Red-cross court.”
239

The coroner’s inquest took place at Southwark Coroner’s Court on July 19, 1898
under the supervision of Coroner Samuel Frederick Langham Esq. The first person to
testify was Eliza Jane Bailey. She stated that on the evening of July 16th, between 8 and
8:30 pm, she went to the lodging house in Red-Cross Court, to inquire about a possible
place of lodging for her brother. In the kitchen, she saw a number of people including
Gould and a woman called Mrs. Lofthouse—she and Gould were “quarrelling
dreadfully.”
240
Lofthouse attempted to pick up a glass bottle; “she picked it up from the
table and attempted to throw it, but did not do so.” According to Bailey, “the prisoner
then got on the table, and kicked her several times on the left side of the face and ribs.”
241
Lofthouse ran to another table, doing nothing to protect herself. The layout of the
room was entered into evidence as a sketch.
242
Gould then came to the other table and
picked up an iron-bar or poker from the fire-place and “hit her twice across the back of
the neck, and once across the back” Lofthouse tilted forward onto the table. Gould said,
"Oh, what have I done? Have I killed her?"
243

According to Bailey’s testimony, this is when Gould left the lodging house, only
to return shortly thereafter. He asked, "Is she all right?"
244
Someone in the room said,
"Yes, she is only in a dead faint." Bailey left the room soon after. Under cross-
examination, Bailey stated that Gould had left and returned with another young man

239
Daily Mail, 20 July 1898.
240
First Coroner’s Inquest, 19 July 1898, CRIM 153/1, TNA.
241
Ibid.
242
See Image 2.2.
243
First Coroner’s Inquest, 19 July 1898, CRIM 153/1, TNA
244
Ibid.
83

named Ford. It would only be later in the Central Court proceedings that Bailey would
affirmatively testify that Lofthouse did not faint or fall at all. All of her wounds were
produced by Gould’s aggression.
245

The arresting officer was Inspector Samuel Denham. According to his
testimony, on July 17th, after midnight, the prisoner came to the police station stating
that he was “living with a woman, I am not married to her, we have had a quarrel, I
pushed her over a table and she is dead.”
246
According to Denham, Gould was
instructed by Dr. Burt to approach the authorities and make a statement. Denham
informed Gould it might be given in evidence against him and Gould said, "All
right."
247

In the next hearing on July 26, 1898, the most striking testimony is from a co-
tenant, Alfred Ford, who claimed to overhear the argument between Gould and
Lofthouse and witness much of the argument. Ford claimed that the argument was over
money and that Lofthouse screamed out “Where’s my money you bastard!” within
minutes of Gould arriving home.
248
Ford also claimed to have seen Lofthouse
physically threaten Gould. He stated that Lofthouse held an empty bottle of ale “as if to
throw it, but it did not leave her hand.”
249
He then claims that Gould “hit her” but
remembered little else from the evening since he himself was “drunk” at the time, as
well as when he made his statement to the police
250
Much of Ford’s statement revolves

245
Central Court Proceedings, 13 September 1898, CRIM 153/1, TNA.
246
First Coroner’s Inquest, 26 July 1898, CRIM 153/1, TNA.
247
Ibid.
248
Ibid.
249
Ibid.
250
Ibid.
84

around the repetition of the phrase “She kept abusing him.” Ford says that Gould left
the lodging house with him and went across the street to the Red Cross public house.
Gould and Ford returned fifteen minutes later to find Lofthouse in the kitchen.
She called Gould a “bastard” and a “ponce,” although in his central court testimony, he
claims “she called him an f—g ponce.”
251
Gould responded by saying “a bastard, am
I?” and picking up a poker from the fireplace, swung at her, and struck her in the back.
She stumbled back and fell over a table, landing on her head. Ford’s testimony goes on
from there to state that he had worked next door to the lodging house for three years and
had witnessed many fights between Gould and Lofthouse. He also contradicts his own
testimony when he states that he was unsure if Lofthouse threw a bottle at Gould. He
does claim that Gould had never harmed Lofthouse in the past and that Lofthouse was
often violent towards Gould.
Eliza Bailey’s testimony stood in stark contrast, then, to the testimony of other
witnesses, including Ford. No one else mentioned Gould kicking Lofthouse in any way.
Yet, on the strength of Bailey’s testimony, Gould was charged with willful murder
rather than manslaughter despite the fact that most of the evidence stood in opposition
to such a conclusion. It is possible that the connection drawn by the press to other
violent crimes in south London under the Hooligan rubric had an effect on the way the
magistrate and coroner saw the case. Based purely on examining the proceedings, the
idea that the Alice Lofthouse’s death represented a willful murder is dubious. Unlike the
D’Arcy case, where there was little doubt about how the victim died, Lofthouse’s death

251
Ibid.
85

remains mysterious. This mystery likely helped to maintain press interest in the case.
At the end of the coroner’s inquest, Gould was charged with willful murder, with the
caveat that the murder was committed with serious provocation.
The charge changed from manslaughter to murder only after rumors that
Lofthouse died of a head wound from “an iron bar” (presumably the poker that Gould
took from the fireplace) rather than from a fall appeared in several press accounts.
252

Evidence of the head wound appears only in the testimony of Dr. Burt, who had
responded to the call for a doctor and who had declared Lofthouse dead.
253
His
testimony clearly states that the marks on her neck were consistent with blows from a
blunt object, but they were not the cause of death. In his testimony in the Central Court,
Burt claims that Lofthouse died from “a comminuted depressed fracture—the bone was
broken into several pieces—the part of the brain which rest on the bone was lacerated,
and contained the broken bone forced into it.” All of the witnesses claim that Gould did
not strike her in the head and that the head injury was caused when she fell over the
table. Why, then, is there this disparity? Is this evidence of conjecture or wishful
thinking on the part of the press?
Just as with the D’Arcy case, the focal point of the first newspaper accounts was
the character of the accused. Some of the first stories about the “Red-cross Court
Tragedy” cast Gould as “prone to anger” and a “violent” young man, contrary to the
testimony at the Coroner’s inquest and Central Court proceedings.
254
In one account,

252
Sources for press accounts include the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph.
253
On two separate occasions, Dr. Burt is referred to in the press as Dr. Burke.
254
Sun, 18 July 1898.
86

Gould is even called a member of the “Hooligan class.”
255
The application of the
Hooligan label to Gould suggests that the meaning of the term “Hooligan” was still
malleable and the violent nature of Lofthouse’s death, as well as the setting of the crime
and the “savage mobs” that accompanied Gould’s trial might have factored into its
application. It is, however, crucial to note the conflation of Gould and other featured
players in the Hooligan crisis—most notably John D’Arcy—despite the fact that these
cases differed in significant ways.
256

Despite the apparent disparity between Gould and D’Arcy, the press was
persistent in its efforts to link the cases, often displacing the narrative of the court
proceedings and onto surrounding demonstrations outside, where members of the
community assembled during the inquest to voice their support—or disdain—for Gould.
Indeed, many of the press accounts used the majority of their column space to discuss
the “mobs” that inhabited South London and that seemed to surround not only the
events of the crime, but also the trial itself.
257
The subject of much of the coverage of
the coroner’s inquest highlighted the crowds that came to voice their opinions about the
case. The crowds reportedly called out to Gould “Cheer up, Fatty!” and “You’ll be
alright, Bill” as he entered and exited the inquest.
258
The crowd soon attempted to grab
Gould from custody and turned violent. According to the Daily Mail, “A constable was
assailed by a savage mob, evidently bent on rescuing the prisoner.”
259
The “mob” was
apparently made up, in part, of a group of Gould’s compatriots who sought to rescue

255
Daily Mail 23 July 1898.
256
It is likely that the press initially connected Gould to Hooliganism due to his age and the location of
the crime. There is no other basis for the connection.
257
Daily Mail, 20 July 1898.
258
Ibid. “Fatty” was apparently Gould’s nickname. From what I can determine from the accounts
available, this name was not used as an insult but rather as a term of endearment.
259
Ibid.
87

him from custody. At the center of the mob was Thomas Edwards, a “hulking match-
seller,” who was “charged with savagely assaulting two constables who were on special
duty in Red-cross court for protection of witnesses.”
260
The “Hooligan” Edwards was
convicted of assault and sentenced to two months hard labor.
261

Much of the witness testimony dealt with by the press also focused on
presenting Gould as violent and the death of Lofthouse as premeditated, representing a
willful murder.
Important evidence was given by the next witness, Eliza Bailey, of Devonshire-
street, who said the woman “nagged” her paramour, who ultimately got on a
table, kicked her repeatedly in the face and body, and finally picked up an iron
bar and struck her with all his force on her neck and back. He seemed to repent
of his action immediately. The witness said she had been threatened with death
if she said anything.
262

The account of Bailey’s testimony is unusual as it is an attempt at a direct account of
the inquest proceeding. It includes the oft-repeated motive of the death; that Lofthouse
“nagged” Gould and that inspired his anger. One aspect of Bailey’s testimony was the
last note about being threatened not to testify. There is no evidence to suggest that such
a statement was ever made. The press’ application of the theme of witness
intimidation creates a significant parallel to the D’Arcy case.
Another aspect of the case prominent in the popular press accounts was the story
of Lofthouse’s estranged husband, William Lofthouse. Lofthouse was a private in the
rifle brigade and was featured as a “victim” of the Red Cross Court tragedy. Lofthouse
said very little in his testimony other than to state that he was indeed married to the

260
Ibid.
261
Daily News, 23 July 1898.
262
Ibid.
88

deceased and that she had left him. According to his testimony, he initially “came to
court to ‘have a look at the chap’ but was too upset to stay.”
263
According to later press
accounts, Lofthouse claimed that “she had left him 3 times, but he took her back each
time, telling her often that he did not care who she had been with.”
264
He also claimed
that “she was a most violent woman who would often throw things at him.”
265

The story of Private Lofthouse offers an interesting counter-point to the cast of
characters that inhabit the Gould case. He was cast as a respectable, “honorable” man
who was the true victim of the tragedy. He was contrasted to some of the witnesses who
appear in defense of Gould, whose criminal record or slovenly appearance was
highlighted by the press. Albert Ford, Gould’s associate on the night of Lofthouse’s
death, was “sentenced to a month’s imprisonment for disorderly conduct” soon after he
offered his testimony.
266
While there is no evidence of what he actually did to be
convicted of disorderly conduct—a charge that was often synonymous with public
drunkenness—his conviction is mentioned prominently in several accounts of the trial.
The South London Chronicle goes so far as to label him “a lad of the Hooligan type.”
267

As we have seen, the press suggests that Lofthouse herself is immoral, both in
her relationship with her husband and her abuse of alcohol, but also as a woman who is
overbearing and shiftless, violating dominant models of feminine behavior. This is
particularly apparent in the coverage of Private Lofthouse’s testimony. The press
implied this deviant behavior as part of the tapestry of everyday life in south London in
an attempt to arouse the ire and shock the sensibilities of its readership. Just as the

263
Daily Mail, 27 July 1898.
264
Daily Mail, 6 August 1898.
265
Ibid.
266
South London Chronicle, 14 August 1898.
267
Daily Mail, 14 August 1898.
89

randomness of the Oakley Street murder needed some form of explanation, the rumors
that surrounded the Gould case serve as evidence of the press as agents of
sensationalism, promoting a moral panic not only over criminal behavior among young
working-class inhabitants of south London, but also suggesting that both the
environment and the moral health of Britons had eroded to a point of instability and
chaos.
Yet what did the press gain by perpetuating the moral panic? Moral panics
function based on the notion that the press depictions are not based on an empirical
representation of reality, but rather on the wants, desires, and beliefs of its presumed
audience.
268
On a fundamental level, moral panics function by exploiting the gulf
between the prejudices of an audience and reality. Thus, in the case of the Hooligan
crisis, while there is no doubt that there was criminal activity in south London, what is
in question is the nature and meaning of criminal behavior.
The disparity between the accounts of the Gould case in the press and in the trial
records also offers a more nuanced commentary on the nature of the Hooligan moral
panic that struck London in 1898 than is readily apparent in the D’Arcy case. The press
coverage uses the motif of tragedy—as seen in the common title “The Red Cross-Court
Tragedy—to suggest that the events and circumstances of Lofthouse’s death were a
tragic consequence of daily life in south London. This point is apparent in many of the
accounts that portrayed Gould himself as a victim of violence, and the environment in
which he lived as producing his response. This is a vastly different perspective from the
portrayals of D’Arcy, who was depicted—perhaps accurately—as a cold-blooded killer

268
Bernard Schissel, Blaming Children: Youth Crime, Moral Panics and the Politics of Hate. Halifax:
Fernwood Publishing, 1997, 11.
90

and as a moral defective. What is at stake with D’Arcy was not whether he was a
criminal, but rather that his criminality represented something more than a willful
murder. Taken together, these two cases show, if anything, that the early discourse on
the Hooligan crisis was not exclusively focused on the criminal deviant as an individual,
but on the community as an environment in which moral deviance was the norm. Just
as the press created “folk devils” in the form of Hooligans who committed willful
murder in broad daylight with little or no provocation, the press also lauded the efforts
of “folk heroes” in the form of the witnesses, officers, and investigators of the
Metropolitan police who engaged and challenged the threat posed by Hooligans. As we
will see later, the press placed moral reformers in this role, allocating to them ‘hero’
status as agents of Christian morality and middle-class civility.
CONCLUSION
The coverage of the Oakley Street Murder and the Red Cross Court tragedy
reflect the power of moral rhetoric to shape, and in some cases, alter and accentuate
accounts of criminal activity. These two cases—and particularly the D’Arcy case—
represent the most notable form of initial deviance in the Hooligan moral panic.
269
In
comparing the trial records of each case with a survey of press coverage, it becomes
clear that the details of each case were blurred, and, at times, fictionalized by the
popular press to accentuate the prevalence of deviant criminality among juveniles in
south London as well as to introduce a discussion of the moral health of London’s
youth.

269
It is coverage of the D’Arcy case where the term ‘Hooligan’ is first used by the press.
91
The Oakley Street murder epitomized the press frenzy over the perceived threat of the
Hooligan in South London. The inquest and trial records of the Oakley Street murder
provide a glimpse of both the random nature of violence attribute to the ‘Hooligans” of
South London. What captured the imagination of the popular press was not the murder
itself, but the events and cast of characters that surrounded the murder.
The case of William Gould provides a much more complicated picture of
attitudes toward interpersonal violence. Despite failing to fit the model of the Hooligan
in any tangible way, the Red-cross Court Tragedy came to be associated with the
Hooligan moral panic largely due to its temporal and spatial proximity to such events as
the Oakley Street Murder, and because it was cast by the press as a product of south
London’s dangerous and immoral environment. Gould was charged with killing his
“paramour” Alice Lofthouse, with whom he lived despite the fact that Lofthouse was
married to another man.
Just as in the Oakley Street murder, there is some evidence of a disparity
between press coverage and the actual events as presented in trial transcripts, but the
most significant departure is the focus of the press coverage, which is brought to bear
on the moral state of the community of south London. The Gould case differs from the
D’Arcy case in that there is some degree of doubt from the beginning as to whether
Gould had committed willful murder. The case highlights both the pervasiveness and
power of the Hooligan panic, but also the fears of moral decay that surrounded
depictions of south London in the last years of the nineteenth century.

The indictment of south London as a place that fostered deviance is readily
apparent in the press coverage of the so-called “savage mob” that appeared to support
92

Gould—and which attempted to “rescue” him—at the onset of his trial. The subject of
the trial stories in newspapers such as the Daily News, the Daily Mail, the South London
Chronicle, and the Daily Telegraph, was less the events of the day in court and more the
cast of characters who showed up both to the inquest and the trial a month later. The
“savage mob” was the story, and the Hooligan was its central agent and instigator. It
was this mob—the Hooligan polity—that inspired the first action of moral reform
movements. By the time that Gould had been convicted of manslaughter, the Salvation
Army had already organized two “Hooligan suppers,” which were events that included
a free meal, a performance from the Salvation Army band, and testimonials from
“saved” members of the community designed to “cure” the Hooligan. By the time John
D’Arcy was sentenced to death, the Salvation Army was holding events on a weekly
basis in south London designed specifically to combat Hooliganism.
270
Hooliganism
helped to spur—and in some cases, renew—calls for institutional reform in Britain.
The popular print media endorsed a vision of the criminal culture of South
London that empowered concerned citizens to respond, and respond they did. As
Cohen and others argue, through the selective reinforcement of the qualities of the
initial deviance through its portrayal in the press, its readership—and, in turn, the
community at large—responds and reacts, creating a new regime of social labeling and
new attitudes toward collective morality. Moral panics do more than simply highlight a
perceived social problem; they serve to alter how an affected community defines its
morality and its social priorities. It is this process that is the subject of the next three

270
While groups like the Salvation Army were active throughout Britain in organizing various outreach
events, the so-called “Hooligan suppers” were specific weekly events in south London in late 1898 that
sought to engage Hooligans
93

chapters. As we will see, their responses varied from a comprehensive attempt to isolate
working-class boys and girls from the contagion of immorality through a variety of
initiatives that sought to define and separate the child as a distinct identity, and to foster
environments that emphasized the development of “positive” morals and Christian
virtue.
Moral reformers applied the language of the Hooligan crisis to a larger
discussion of the moral and physical welfare of children and juveniles, maintaining that
such groups constituted the most likely Britons to benefit from reform schemes. The
focus on children in criminal moral panics, which sociologist Bernard Schissel links to
the tendency for crime panics to target the most marginal and vulnerable groups within
a given society, turns children and juveniles into “scapegoats” for political or social
gain. Indeed, while many of the cases attributed to Hooliganism involved adults, the
eventual focus of anti-Hooligan reform efforts—including early state action drafted to
respond to the crisis—targeted youthful offenders. As we will see, in the case of the
Hooligan crisis, this process allowed moral reformers to apply the concerns aroused by
popular press portrayal in order to gain political traction for their reform efforts.
271

By applying the fear of crime and moral decay, moral reformers applied
pressure to the state within the civic arena to promote their agenda. Thus, the cases of
D’Arcy and Gould, which each came to be labeled as prominent examples of Hooligan
criminality, helped to focus the agenda of moral and social reformers toward the
problem of juvenile delinquency, perhaps in spite of the fact that neither man was a

271
Schissel, Blaming Children, 10-11.
94

juvenile according to contemporary definitions.
272
Just as the force of the Hooligan
moral panic blurred the lines between various working-class identities to fit the
Hooligan construct, each case was applied to the rubric of Hooliganism. The press
representations of D’Arcy and Gould helped to refine what Hooliganism meant and how
it represented a moral threat. These cases were significant as they led in more
substantial ways to the development of a nationally-accepted ‘inventory’ in Cohen’s
terms, because accounts of each case aroused public interest. More to the point, they
allowed the press to make real the threat they perceived in the streets of south London.
As we can see with the disparity between the court proceedings and the accounts
of those proceedings in the press, newspapers seized on the popular fascination with
murder and used it to further the notion that south London was in a state of chaos due to
criminal activity among juveniles. This established the condition of crisis that inspired
moral reformers, and eventually the state, to re-examine the condition of working-class
juveniles and the treatment of “youthful offenders.” The Oakley Street Murder and the
Red Cross Court tragedy represented the gravest breaches, and thus, were catalysts for
the campaigns that followed. They gave moral reformers ammunition to redefine what
they regarded as the most serious crises facing working-class British children and
juveniles: the decay of moral and physical health.

272
This quality of applying Hooliganism broadly despite its definition as a juvenile sub-culture is most
evident in the case of the Girdle gang, who were depicted as Hooligans despite the fact that their leader,
“Tuxy” Girdle, was in his thirties. The apparent contradiction is significant, but as the concept of
Hooliganism is refined and redefined by moral reformers, its use becomes more commonly associated
with children and juveniles.
Image 2.1: Map, Coroner’s Inquest for Henry Mappin

95
Image 2.2: Etching from Coroner’s Inquest for Elizabeth Lofthouse

96
97

Chapter 3

From Moral Panic to Moral Reform: The Hooligan Suppers
and the Youthful Offenders Act of 1901

The popular press played a significant role in the construction and fabrication of
the Hooligan type as an object of fear and a representative of moral decay. Moral
reform organizations of the period placed Hooligans in a privileged place, exploiting the
image of the Hooligan as an avatar of cultural failure. Those who participated in
discussions on the nature and extent of juvenile delinquency at this time, from agents of
the state to journalists, to patrons of social and moral reform organizations, were not
only trying to explain what was regarded as a significant and growing problem, but also
to prescribe a solution.
This chapter will explore the first responses to Hooliganism by social and moral
reform organizations to early action by the British government. The connection between
extra-parliamentary campaigns and government action is crucial, as it demonstrates how
the Hooligan moral panic informed and shaped the way moral reformers and the state
understood the issue of juvenile delinquency, in turn altering the ideological and
institutional responses to the social problem of deviant juveniles. This chapter will
introduce the roots of the ideological underpinnings of juvenile moral reformers as well
as their first efforts at campaigning for institutional solutions.
273
I maintain that
organizations such as the Salvation Army acted to redirect discourse on Hooliganism
toward a more specific examination of working-class juvenile deviance, fitting it within
their evangelical rhetoric concerning moral failure. In effect, Hooliganism was cast as

273
The ideological aspects of moral reform and the proposed institutional responses to juvenile
immorality are the topics of chapters 4 and 5 respectively.
98

another symptom of the decline of Christian morality and civility. Evangelical moral
reform groups like the Salvation Army turned the Hooligan crisis into a crisis of faith
and of moral health by linking the Hooligan to vices such as smoking, gambling, and
excessive alcohol consumption, all of which they viewed as significant threats to the
physical and spiritual health of the British public. In effect, the Salvation Army
“christianized” the discourse on juvenile deviance and criminality by maintaining that
the ultimate solution to Hooliganism was for children and juveniles to embrace the
Salvation Army’s brand of Christianity.
The Salvation Army was a popular and persistent agent for social reform that
often focused its efforts to aid in the betterment of the moral health of the community
through the application of Christianity, which valued rigid military discipline and prized
adherence to a strict evangelical construction of Christian doctrine.
274
What is crucial
here is the extent to which the Salvation Army’s rhetoric penetrated and influenced
governmental discourse on the problem of youthful offenders, as evidenced in the
deliberations over the Youthful Offenders Act of 1901. The early efforts of the
Salvation Army and other moral reform groups, such as the Howard Association, to
bring the Hooligan to the forefront of domestic justice policy discussions were initially
met by a largely indifferent government. The Conservative government, which was
reluctant to force local authorities to alter the nature of juvenile justice, came to be
drawn into a fight with the Salvation Army over the extent and nature of juvenile
reform. As we will see, what eventually forced the hand of the Home Office was the
efforts of the Salvation Army, beginning with its high profile public campaign to

274
For more on the Salvation Army’s religious identity, see Roy Hattersley, Blood and Fire: William and
Catherine Booth and the Salvation Army. New York: Abacus, 2000.
99
engage Hooliganism through a series of “Hooligan Suppers” and extending through its
powerful press apparatus, which vigorously attacked the government’s lack of action in
reforming youthful offenders and preventing the spread of criminality among young
working-class Britons.
Introduced early in 1899 by Lord James, it would take nearly two years for the
1901 Youthful Offenders Act to pass through the House of Commons. The bill set new
guidelines for the treatment of juveniles under remand and restated some of the powers
of magistrates to enforce legal statutes violated by juveniles through summary
judgment. The debates over the bill and, in particular, a clause in the first reading that
provided for the expansion of corporal punishment, captured both the state’s desire to
address the concerns raised by the Hooligan moral panic and the influence of moral
reform movements in shaping legislation.
The version of the Bill that passed in 1901 redirected the problem of juvenile
criminality from the penal system to other institutions such as reformatories and
industrial schools that were ill-prepared for their new responsibilities. Rather than
creating a new system with which to target juvenile deviance and criminality, the
Youthful Offenders Act of 1901 merely relocated some juvenile criminals from prisons
to other sites without regard to the purpose served for the juvenile. While the intent of
the bill was to reform juvenile justice, it did little to enact substantive change in the
areas of juvenile criminal and penal policy. Specifically, it failed to force local
governments to provide separate facilities and procedures for children and juveniles
100

under remand, as well as separate prisons for juvenile offenders.
275
The act placed
greater emphasis on “parental responsibility,” redirecting the concerns epitomized by
the Hooligan panic from an emphasis on rescuing children towards a policy of juvenile
criminal management.
Ridley, who became Home Secretary after a failed bid for the speakership of
the House of Commons in April 1895, served in a period that witnessed increased
interest in reforming Britain’s penal system, even before the concern spurred by the
Hooligan moral panic. Indeed, Ridley’s first year as Home Secretary was notable in this
regard, both for the 1895 Gladstone committee’s proposal for a new system of prisons
for young adults—the Borstal system—and the report of the 1895 House of Commons
Prison Committee, which debated the problem of where children were being held on
remand.
276
Interest in juvenile criminality was certainly not new, but I will demonstrate
that the early efforts of moral reformers to respond to Hooliganism created a climate
within the civic arena that demanded acceleration in governmental action.
277
That
action was the 1901 Youthful Offender’s Act.
As I will demonstrate, the introduction and eventual passage of the Youthful
Offender’s Act sharply contrasted the goals of moral reformers, who sought direct

275
As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, most calls for reform from the press and from moral reformers
were based on ideas of juvenile criminality derived from environmental stimuli. These individuals and
groups were interested in creating systems of isolation for juvenile offenders.
276
In both cases, recommendations for large scale reform of juvenile and young adult penal conditions
were dismissed, or, in the case of what would become the Borstal system, scaled down to include only a
single prison as a test case. Ridley’s Home Office was cautious about instituting any sweeping reform of
the penal system, preferring instead to highlight the role of parents and schools in regulating juvenile
behavior.
277
I use the term “civic arena” to refer to the space in which social and political actors—including moral
reformers—acted and communicated, including the press and popular demonstrations. Rather than a
purely governmental space, the civic arena allowed for political activism both within and without the
structure of government. This concept is crucial to understanding how groups like the Salvation Army
were able to shape elements of the debate on juvenile delinquency in this period.
101

intervention on the part of the state to “save” youthful offenders from lives of crime and
depravity. For those moral reformers concerned with the well-being of working-class
children and juveniles, the issue was not to change the ways in which youthful
offenders could be punished through reforming penal statutes, but rather to create and
use public and private means to create a safety net for Britain’s at-risk youth, ideally
shielding them from the various environmental forces seen as the central causes of
youthful criminality. Yet, rather than settling the growing ‘crisis’ which was placed at
the feet of the government by the pleas of the popular press and moral reform groups, I
contend that this legislation prompted individuals and groups to push for more radical
solutions to the problem of juvenile delinquency. Indeed, rather than ending the career
of the Hooligan as a social actor, it managed to extend it well beyond the summer of
1898.
The immediate responses of moral reform movements and the British state to
Hooliganism were intensely different in their scope and character. The dominant
question at stake in the moral reform movement that differentiated it from prior efforts
to reform deviant behavior was how to assess when a juvenile was no longer amenable
to reform efforts. Groups like the Salvation Army and the Howard Association had a
significant impact on the form and nature of governmental action—and, in some
instances, inaction—by exploiting the images of rampant crime perpetuated in the
popular print media.
278
In turn, the emergence of a legal structure that sought to limit

278
While I have found no specific evidence of the Salvation Army attempting to influence the popular
press discussions on juvenile criminality directly, agents of other moral reform movements, such as the
Howard Association, were prominent journalist, as seen in the example of Thomas Holmes, who took
leadership of the organization in 1907.
102

juvenile exposure to the adult penal system pushed moral reformers in the direction of a
true separation regime for juveniles.
279

SALVATIONISTS LEAD THE CHARGE: “REFORMING” THE HOOLIGAN

The Salvation Army was already deeply involved in what it saw as a “crusade”
to reform British culture and society long before the emergence of the Hooligan. Under
the leadership of its founder, General William Booth, the Salvation Army was a
powerful and undeniably high-profile force among the various reform movements that
had gained popularity in the late Victorian period. In some respects, the Salvation
Army was at the peak of its political and social influence in this period, which is evident
in its success as an agent for change in a variety of causes, ranging from the increased
regulation of alcohol to the eventual shift in policy towards criminals and the
constitution of the prison system.
The Salvation Army began its quest to heal the moral ills of Great Britain in the
latter stages of the life of its founder, William Booth.
280
Booth, who had grown up in
poverty, campaigned feverishly for the “unreached and unchurched” of Britain.
281

What made Booth a controversial figure was his militancy and his adherence to
militaristic rhetoric and symbolism.
282
From his departure from the orthodox Methodist
pulpit in 1861, Booth was a figure who was viewed with some degree of suspicion,

279
This call for separate courts would later become the central feature of moral reform movement efforts
to create a new justice system for juveniles.
280
Clark C. Spence, Salvation Army Farm Colonies. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1985, 9.
Spence notes “General William Booth was a controversial figure in a nineteenth-century England known
for its controversial figures.”
281
Charles Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out. London: The Salvation Army, 1890, 45.
282
Ibid.
103

even by like-minded social reformers.
283
With the formal founding of the Salvation
Army in 1878, Booth continued to construct a public profile that shunned more reserved
modes of proselytizing in favor of bringing a loud, aggressive version of Christianity to
the street corners of Britain’s poorest areas.
284
By the 1890s, the Salvation Army had a
dedicated base of followers and benefactors who created a formidable network with
significant connections to other groups associated with social reform.
Under Booth’s leadership, Salvationists developed a movement based on social
uplift and moral rescue. Much of the Salvation Army’s early social work involved
buying property and establishing halfway houses for recently released prisoners. The
houses were developed to inspire a sense of “brotherhood” among the primarily male
residents.
285
These spaces were designed specifically to create a community bond
between the residents and provide an appropriate venue to introduce the men to the
Salvationist message. These homes for men were distinctly masculine spaces that
would provide the model for later efforts by the Salvation Army to “remake” young
men by controlling the environment in which their message was presented. The
Salvation Army’s efforts to create institutions of uplift for convicts were neither unique
nor original, but what distinguished their efforts was the military discipline that made
up the organizational structure of the Salvation Army and which served as the
overriding metaphor for their brand of moral reform and spiritual uplift. Homes for

283
Spence, Salvation Army Farm Colonies, 10. Booth’s appropriation of militaristic symbolism was the
object of ire for many middle-class critics, who viewed Salvationists “as fanatics whose approach was
both crude and inflammatory.”
284
The organization that would become the Salvation Army was founded in London’s East End and was
originally called simply the “Christian Mission.”
285
Hattersley, Blood and Fire, 43. Women were housed in separate facilities, although there is far less
information about homes for women.
104

recently released convicts were “barracks” where men were conscripted into the service
of the moral army.
Booth saw environment as the most powerful factor in the moral development
of individuals. The Salvation Army’s manifesto, In Darkest England and the Way Out,
was dreamed up by Booth as both an assessment of the crisis of urban poverty and a
prescription for its cure.
286
The book offered a detailed description of the darkness of
the “submerged tenth” who toiled in the miserable conditions of Britain’s slums.
287
The
book proposed various solutions to the problems associated with Britain’s slums, such
as over-crowding, immorality, and poor health. The text was critical of the environment
produced by modernization and urbanization in Britain and claimed the need to remake
space in order to remake people.
At the heart of Booth’s concerns was the fate of Britain’s working-class and
impoverished children, who were cast as the victims of British modernity. In particular,
children were seen as victims of urban Britain’s housing crisis. The concern of Booth,
and his ghost writer Stead, was the problem of population density in places such as east
and south London.
288
Booth suggested, among other things, that the Salvation Army
should construct “harbours of refuge for all that have been shipwrecked in life,
character, or circumstances” in what he colorfully described as an “ocean of misery.”

286
William T. Stead helped Booth complete the book when his wife was struck down by cancer. Stead
was a prolific writer who had come to prominence with his exploration of the white slave trade, and
would later write exhaustive biographies of Booth and his wife.
287
Ibid., 211-13.
288
Indeed, concerns over the problem of population density appear in the work of another although
unrelated Booth, in Charles Booth, Life and Labour in of the People of London: Notes on Social
Influences. London: MacMillan, 1903. The topic of urban density as a root of criminality and other social
ills was, of course, nothing new in the late Victorian period. My concern here is not how this argument
was developed by the British intelligentsia, but rather how these ideas came to be a crucial aspect of
Salvationist rhetoric.
105

These spaces would supply immediate relief, employment, and the ability for people to
commence a course of regeneration by moral and religious influences.”
289

While the purpose of Booth and Stead’s work was to link the state of working-
class Britain metaphorically with “pagan” Africa, the central importance of the text is
its critique of the impact of industrialization on the moral health of Great Britain. In this
way, it attempts to engage urban spaces—and particularly working-class urban
spaces—as areas at risk for moral decay.
290
While the Salvation Army did not originate
these ideas, what makes its contribution significant was the size and scope of their
movement, which combined a wildly popular aggressive model of evangelical
Christianity with social reform efforts.
THE FIRST “HOOLIGAN SUPPER”
The apparatus of “regeneration” first described by Booth in 1890 had begun to
take a more refined form by the late 1890s. In addition to the Salvation Army-operated
safe houses for recently released convicts in London, Salvationists operated Sunday
services on London’s street corners, often beginning their operations at 6 a.m. alongside
the coffee carts that they regarded as a haven for youthful offenders and habitual
drunkards. While the publication of Booth’s Salvationist manifesto created a “mild
sensation,” critics of the text claimed that it was a sensationalist piece of simplistic
utopianism that represented a “fatal blunder” in its conclusions.
291
Despite these
critiques, the book and the movement were popular among many Britons and facilitated

289
Booth, In Darkest England, 94.
290
For more on the history of these ideas, see Seth Koven. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in
Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
291
Spence, 18. In Thomas Huxley, Social Diseases and Worse Remedies (New York: Macmillan & Co.,
1891) Huxley called Booth’s plans a “fatal blunder.”
106

ever-increasing membership rolls for the Salvation Army. By the summer of 1898, the
Salvation Army was prepared to mobilize its ‘soldiers’ to address Hooliganism
The press construction of the Hooligan as an uncivilized working-class juvenile
prone to criminality and anti-social behavior presented the Salvation Army with a
nearly perfect object of reform. The first “Hooligan Supper,” a meeting hastily arranged
by the Salvation Army, happened on a Wednesday night, September 28, 1898 in the
waning days of the Hooligan crisis. One hundred tickets were issued by Salvation Army
slum officers for a supper and musical service. The event was preceded by “early
evening meetings held in the open at Hail-street, Lambeth-walk, and Elephant and
Castle” that attempted to arouse interest in the event. The Daily Mail described the
procession that followed almost as a parade, with a procession “headed by brass bands,
the members of the army who conducted the meetings marched to the hall in
Kennington-lane, with invited Hooligans in their midst.”
292
When the march ended
“they were seated in their tables in the big hall, [where] the Hooligans received a short
address from Brigadier Hoggard.”
293

Robert Hoggard, who worked as part of the Salvation Army’s mission in south
London, spearheaded the efforts to direct the Salvation Army’s efforts toward
combating Hooliganism. In an interview published in War Cry! the week before the
first supper, Hoggard announced his intention to set up the supper meeting as a “jolly
Salvation evening and blow-out” to combat “the spread of Hooliganism.”
294
His goal

292
Daily Mail, 28 September 1898.
293
Ibid.
294
War Cry!, 24 September 1898. War Cry! was one of the two newspapers published by the Salvation
Army during this period. War Cry! was a general focus paper, while its counterpart, the Social Gazette,
focused on stories about the Salvationist Army’s social and moral reform agenda.
107

was “to get some of them to Christ, and show all of them that the Salvation Army
believes that these are a better cure for them than prison.”
295

Hoggard’s desire to keep Hooligans from dangerous criminal influences within
Britain’s prisons was matched with his belief that within the structure of the Salvation
Army, Hooligans could be reformed “if those Hooligan chaps would only get saved
they’d make some of the finest warriors for God and fighters against the devil that we
have ever had.”
296
Hoggard’s belief that Hooligans would make excellent foot-soldiers
for the Salvation Army was based on his experience working with adult ex-convicts in
the Army’s halfway homes. Since Hooligans theoretically knew and understood
immorality, they stood a better chance of helping to reach others who existed in a
similar state. The key for the Salvationists was to displace Hooligans from their
‘natural’ environment, create a bond of trust with them, and demonstrate the
transformative power of the Salvation Army’s message.
The Supper, like most everything else that linked itself to the “Hooligan,”
appeared as a featured story in several popular papers. According to press accounts,
Hoggard stood before the crowd and announced
I have given you an invitation in the name of our General to have a little supper
here this evening, and a little talk. We believe there is something in you we can
appeal to. We don’t want to sneer at you; we want to help you. This is a
beginning, and we hope it is the beginning of better days. My heart is too full to
say more, and I will ask the officers to bring in the food. I should first of all like
you to sing grace.
297

The introduction was short, but it managed to communicate a great deal about the event.
It was an experiment that engaged those who had been so intensely vilified by the press

295
Ibid.
296
Ibid.
297
Ibid.
108
1

during the summer. The subjects, Hooligans or not, responded and according to one
account “grasped the situation, and rose to a man.”
298
To stress the generosity of the
Salvation Army, the Daily Mail account included an inventory of what each participant
received at the supper, which included “half a pork pie and a sausage, followed by
pudding and cake.”
299

Following the meal, those who remained were met with more singing and
speeches on the themes of Christian duty, purity, and the importance of community.
One account by the Daily Telegraph suggests that these activities worked for one of the
guests. “In the midst of one of the speeches one Hooligan, overcome by his feelings,
and covering his face with his hands, burst into tears. He was led away by sympathetic
officers.”
300
The Daily Mail account suggests that more than one Hooligan confessed
to his sins and joined the Salvation Army during the proceedings.
30
While spontaneous conversion was not the stated intent of the meeting, it was
part of the larger goal of community engagement. The supper was about bringing the
message of the Salvation Army’s version of Christianity to Britain’s impoverished. As
we will see, it also served to connect the Salvation Army’s outreach efforts in South
London with its social issues campaigns, including its efforts to regulate juvenile
alcohol consumption and tobacco use.
The Salvation Army desire was not only to keep Hooligans from committing
crimes and going to prison, but also to reform their very nature, including ridding
“converted” Hooligans of street attire in favor of Salvation Army uniforms, intended to

298
Ibid.
299
Daily Mail, 28 September 1898.
300
Daily Telegraph, 28 September 1898.
301
Daily Mail, 28 September 1898.
109

institute a sense of military order and conformity. The Salvation Army applied a
strategy of rigid discipline as its primary weapon to reform children. An essay entitled
“What About the Children?” that appeared in the September 24, 1898 issue of War Cry!
stressed the importance of such things as “uniform-wearing,” which filled the child with
a sense of duty to God and the civilizing mission of the Salvation Army. The uniform,
according to the article, reinforced for children the importance of “wholesomeness” and
civil behavior, such as using proper language free of obscenities, taking care of “queer
animals” and pets, and being ambitious in one’s daily pursuits.
302

The significance of eliminating the visual traces of Hooligan identity went
beyond the superficial signs of allegiance to the Salvation Army. It was an integral part
of the Salvationist strategy to undermine Hooligan culture and replace it with their
model of Christian civility. The Suppers were more than meals and speeches; they were
elaborate theatrical public spectacles designed to inspire the participants, but also to
isolate them from their environment. This desire to dramatize its Christianizing mission
was the well-known style of the Salvation Army and was meant to strike a bold contrast
between the environs of its subjects and the profound nature of its message. The
religious message of the suppers was paramount for the Salvation Army. Its dedication
to the notion that anyone could be redeemed informed every aspect of the supper. The
idea of offering a meal—the breaking of bread—as a gesture of outreach and friendship
was matched by the desire of Salvationists to use the suppers as a way to proselytize
and induce Hooligans into the Army. This message was communicated in all of the
presentations offered by the Salvationists who addressed the assembled crowds.

302
War Cry!, 24 September 1898.
110

The attention received by the first Hooligan supper made it a success and
precipitated a second event one week later. The character of this event was somewhat
different, as many residents of the area massed at the Kennington Lane Barracks in
advance of the food service. There was no need for a procession by the Salvation Army
band. The Daily Mail reported that “Half a dozen red jerseyed soldiers of the army
were holding the door outside against dozens of listless loafers.”
303
Upon the opening of
the doors,
They came in—the Hooligans. About one hundred and fifty of them
altogether—only almost distressingly unlike the lurid imagination had pictured
them. Close-cropped hair, low down on the forehead, handkerchief around the
throat, generally a loose morning coat, obviously made for someone else—they
stumped a little sheepishly, London unskilled labour, London loafers all over.
They ran mostly between fifteen and twenty-five; they moved awkwardly; it is
the unhappiest age to see that class.
304

Just as before, the Hooligans came and did the unthinkable: they sat politely, listened to
the speeches and music, and ate. They defied the conventional understanding of the
“Hooligan type” that was, by October, a commonly understood cultural type through its
exploitation in the popular press.
If you expected something peculiarly brutal about these Hooligans, there was
nothing of the kind. They did not look intelligent—straight brows over small
eyes—nor very refined; but there was just as much honesty and good-nature in
these Hooligans’ faces as in the pit of any theatre or the nave of St. Paul’s. As an
exhibition of brutality, the Hooligan supper was a failure, that was plain .
305

Press accounts stressed the civil behavior of Hooligans under the influence of the
Salvation Army during the suppers. The participants sat “very quiet and patient along

303
Daily Mail, 6 October 1898.
304
Ibid.
305
Ibid.
111

the table cloth, waiting.”
306
In much the same manner as the week before, the
“Hooligans” listened to the sermons, applauded frequently, and, most of all “ate hard”
when the food was served.
The men and women who attended the suppers were not all children or even all
young people, but what came from these engagements was a commitment by the
Salvation Army to the fate of young people who were deemed to be recoverable souls.
This was partially an answer to the question that appeared in the Salvation Army’s
Social Gazette “who is too old to be helped?”
307

At the center of the event was the production of numerous testimonials of
Salvation Army veterans. As the account in the Daily Telegraph put it;
Without going into any religious question, it was plain that hundreds of
Hooligans will this morning be better for a good meal, a night outside the
public-house, and the knowledge that there are a lot of men and women about
them that wish them well. The Salvation Army knows its business.
308

The business of the Salvation Army at the Hooligan suppers was simple and clear: to
reach out to the Hooligan and to express its desire to convert Britain’s urban working-
class to its vision of Christianity. It could also be seen as an attempt to buttress its
credibility as an organization committed as much to social reform as to religious
revelation. The Salvation Army had battled critiques of its sincerity, its methods, and
its intentions during its first decades. The praise the press lavished on the Hooligan
suppers stood in contrast to some of the critiques launched at the organization’s prior
moral uplift efforts. The press regarded the “Hooligan suppers” as a public service.

306
Ibid.
307
Social Gazette, 9 October 1898.
308
Daily Telegraph, 6 October 1898.
112

After a few minutes bombardment, it was easy to understand why the eccentric
charlatanry everybody used to laugh at a few years ago has become one of the
social factors of the world. It was religion for the millions—as much a piece of
this new age as universal suffrage or halfpenny papers. The soldiers of the army
talked the same language as the souls they attacked. There was no drop of
unctuousness about them; they laughed freely, exchanged jokes with the
Hooligans, applauded with a thunder. The band and choir talked to them in the
cadences of their native music-hall.
309

The Hooligan suppers helped to further a shift in public perception about the Salvation
Army that had begun in the previous decade. As Pamela Walker suggests, the Salvation
Army was interested in converting working-class culture, not just working-class
people.
310
The Salvation Army was indeed a “neighborhood religion” insofar as it
stressed the need for community building to expand its influence.
311

The suppers continued into February 1899 as a weekly event. While coverage
of the events by the mainstream press diminished following the second supper, the
suppers continued to be featured in the pages of the War Cry! and most prominently in
the Social Gazette, which offered etchings of the event to dramatize the characters in
attendance. The etchings show a crowd that is a mixture of young and old men dressed
in ragged clothing. Sometimes, the etchings that accompanied the supper stories were
simply depictions of men fighting the police, suggesting that the crowds attending the
events were dangerous and of Hooligan stock.
While the suppers ended in February 1899, the Salvation Army’s interest in the
moral welfare of working-class juveniles did not disappear. The reasons for the end of
the Hooligan suppers are never stated specifically in the Salvation Army documents I

309
Daily Mail, 6 October 1898.
310
Pamela Walker, Pulling Down the Devil’s Kingdom: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 176.
311
Ibid., 205.
113

uncovered, but I speculate that dwindling attendance in December 1898 convinced the
Salvationists to put a formal end to the events.
312
Just as with the sermons offered up at
the supper, the focus of the continuing efforts of the Salvation Army was on moral
uplift through the regulation of vice by changing the environment in which many
working-class and impoverished Britons lived and worked. It was more than simply
introducing suffering humanity to the Christ of the Gospels,” it was about the idea of
remaking human—and not just British—society through a Christian moral code and
military organization.
What also made the Salvation Army’s Hooligan Suppers significant was the
sheer amount of press coverage afforded them. Stories about the events appeared in
major publications such as the Daily Mail, the Daily News, the Daily Telegraph, the
Pall Mall Gazette, and the Times as well as local newspapers and papers of smaller
circulation such as the South London Chronicle, Lloyd’s News, and the Sun. The
language of the accounts likened the event to a missionary expedition and imbued its
subjects, the working-class residents of South London, with a sense of mystery. The
Hooligan had been depicted in the press as “savage” and “un-English” and now that
subject was brought into the context of the Salvation Army, which was cast as a
civilizing force. In the same way that the press helped to construct the Hooligan identity
months before, the coverage of the suppers served to reinforce Salvationist propaganda
about its role within the community and the need to promote some system of
institutional reform to meet the challenge presented by Hooliganism. This would prove

312
Social Gazette, 18 December 1898. The story appearing in the Social Gazette on the topic of the
Hooligan suppers notes that only fifty men attended the final event. I don’t have enough specific data to
make any assumptions about why attendance declined other than to suggest that the community that
Salvationists hoped to reach lost interest in the events over time.
114

to be the ultimate significance of the suppers—as the first demonstrations to promote
not only individual social rescue, but also the benefit of institutional responses to
juvenile criminality. Thus, the Hooligan suppers were both the first statements of a
renewed ideology of juvenile reform and the first substantial call for new methods of
institutional outreach.
A more radical collaboration between the Salvation Army and the British
Government was proposed by Booth in the midst of the Hooligan suppers.
313
At the
height of the Hooligan Supper efforts in 1898, Booth re-introduced the notion of forced
relocation of juvenile criminals—a plan that had been featured in In Darkest England
two decades earlier.
314
According to this plan, young men and women would be sent off
to farm colonies to escape the criminal temptations of urban life.
315
While it failed to
receive much attention, this idea would have resonance in the next decade as
governmental policy became increasingly directed toward isolating juveniles and using
environmental tools, such as work camps, as a means of reform. Booth called upon the
British government to fund and administer the plan. While it quickly evaporated into
the ether of the Salvation Army’s social reform apparatus, it was a hint at future
collaboration with the state on the issues of child welfare and regulation of juvenile
deviance.
PENAL REFORM AND THE 1899 YOUTHFUL OFFENDERS BILL

While the Salvation Army made a splash with its spectacle-driven engagement
with Hooliganism, the British government had also begun quiet deliberations over how

313
The first mention of this alternative in the context of the Hooligan crisis is made by Booth in War
Cry!, 24 September 1898.
314
The “farm colony” plan is laid out in Booth’s In Darkest England Booth envisioned such colonies for
juvenile criminals and other at-risk youths.
315
Booth, In Darkest England, 92.
115

best to address concerns over public safety, perhaps reacting to the calls for increased
and more severe regimes of punishment that had become commonplace at the height of
the Hooligan crisis, The Home Office’s answer was to focus on reforming the way in
which youthful offenders were dealt with after conviction.
Just as with the Salvation Army’s efforts in south London, the British
Government’s interest in the issue of penal reform for juveniles did not appear out of
thin air. The Prison Commission had addressed the problem of children on remand
prior to the Hooligan crisis. The Prison Commission and the Home Secretary seemed
most concerned with the reluctance of magistrates to “impose punishment on
juveniles.”
316
The Home Office believed even before the rise in interest in the form
and function of the juvenile justice system that there were indications that a problem
existed in the way juveniles were treated in police courts. In the eyes of the Home
Office, the issue at stake was not whether juveniles should be remanded in a different
way, but rather a concern that magistrates were not dealing with juvenile offenders in
accordance with the strictest meaning of the law.
The law in question was the 1866 Industrial Schools Act, under which the state
could “remand a juvenile offender” to a workhouse.
317
The Home Office suggested that
the 1865 Prison Act, which prohibited any part of a prison to be used as a reformatory
or a school for children, be amended to allow space dedicated exclusively for juveniles
on remand, thus circumventing workhouses all together. The intent of this was to
prevent criminal children from mixing with children in workhouses. “A pickpocket of

316
Prison Commission, Imprisonment of Juveniles Before Conviction, 15 February 1897, HO
45/10335/13792, TNA. The Prison Commission would be crucial in evaluating the level of moral
instruction in prisons, the importance of which is dealt with in Chapter 4.
317
Industrial Schools Act of 1866, Section 14.
116

14 or 15 would not be a desirable companion for the pauper children whom the poor
law authorities have to look after.”
318

The internal debate over what powers the magistrate had to enact such a scheme
is largely immaterial here. What is compelling is the level of concern about separating
children from the influence of adult criminality. At issue in the case of the treatment of
children on remand is an idea that would become central in later discourse on juvenile
justice: a renewed concern with contamination. As we have seen in various campaigns
launched by the Salvation Army, there was significant concern over where children
stayed and with whom children interacted while in the custody of the state. In all these
examples, the emphasis of the Home Office is placed on the welfare of the “innocent”
children rather than the fate of the juvenile offender. Concerns over the condition of
juveniles, both in the places in which they lived and in the spaces allocated to them
while in custody, came to the forefront only after moral reformers shifted their focus to
the idea that juvenile offenders could be effectively reformed.
Perhaps the most notable proponent for the reform of conditions for juvenile
prisoners was Britain’s most infamous prisoner during the last years of the nineteenth
century, Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s letter to the editors of the Daily Chronicle regarding the
condition of juvenile prisoners provides an account of the polluting aspects of the prison
environment, but also the plight of young children. The letter, prompted by the
dismissal of a prison warder named Martin for giving a child prisoner some biscuits,

318
Prison Commission, “Imprisonment of Juveniles Before Conviction,” 15 February 1897, HO
45/10335/13792, TNA.
117

offers an account of cruelty toward juveniles in British prisons.
319
As Wilde notes,
during his stay, there were “always a large number of children” at Wandsworth prison.
He goes on to state that “the present treatment of children is terrible, primarily from
people not understanding the peculiar psychology of a child’s nature.”
320
Wilde was
particularly horrified that children were confined to their cells 23 out of 24 hours a day,
a policy he regarded as inimical to their development. The letter went on to rail against
the deliberate and indiscriminate use of force against children and the failure to protect
children in prison from the “contaminating influence” of adult criminals.
321

The concerns expressed by Wilde were not new; they had been a part of the
prison reforms suggested by groups such as the National Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) during the previous decade. What was different was that
while the NSPCC’s efforts in the 1890s were seemingly dismissed by the Home Office,
Wilde’s letter was taken seriously in the Home Office according to Home Office
records despite the fact that he was a disgraced convict.
322

The Home Office began to search for ways to shift children into alternate sites
of remand through existing legislation. In one case, the Home Office suggested that
section 2 of the 1892 Reformatory Schools Act could be used as a way to direct juvenile

319
The story of Wilde’s account became an international press item, as it was reprinted in the pages of the
New York Sun on May 29, 1897 as part of a piece on juvenile detention. The story states, “whatever may
be the truth in regard to the personal morals of Oscar Wilde who was released from prison May 19 after
serving two years for a heinous crime, he has done a service to humanity by writing a remarkable letter
about the almost fiendish cruelty of English prison system and the treatment of child prisoners.”
320
Oscar Wilde, Letter to Daily Chronicle, 27 May 1897.
321
Ibid.
322
Home Office notes on Oscar Wilde’s letter to the Daily Chronicle, HO 144/271/A58947, TNA. Even
in prison, Wilde was still a well-known figure, which might have led to his letter having such an impact
both within and outside of government. I am not suggesting that one individual was wholly responsible
for setting Home Office juvenile penal policy, but rather that it had some impact on thinking within the
Home Office. There is no evidence to suggest that Wilde’s interest in child welfare is unrelated to any of
the popular moral reform organizations of the period. The letter itself seems to be an isolated expression
of concern in this period of Wilde’s life.
118

offenders to “any other place, not being a prison, which the court thinks fit, and [where]
the occupier is willing to receive him (the juvenile offender).”
323
This was, in no
uncertain terms, a weakness in the existing law that the Home Office could exploit to
give magistrates more latitude to direct juveniles under remand to reformatory schools
and other locations that would better serve them. To be sure, reformatory schools were
not ideal locations for holding juveniles on remand, but they were seen as a more
appropriate location to send children who had not yet faced trial. The use of this clause
allowed magistrates to avoid previous legal statutes that restricted children under the
age of twelve from being admitted to a reformatory without some sort of prior
conviction that included a sentence of penal servitude or simple imprisonment. Such
cases were rare, so the opening of reformatories to children without prior convictions
was a subtle yet substantial shift in policy.
The Home Office was not indifferent to the special needs and conditions of
juveniles in custody. The efforts of the Home Office were, however, confined to
manipulating the existing legal structure rather than attempting to overhaul or reform
the justice system. This preference was likely due to the lack of a clear mandate to enact
overarching reform. It is arguable to what extent the British government was willing to
engage in any meaningful reform for the benefit of children. What was clear was that
the issue had been engaged by the government in the months and years prior to the
moral panic over Hooliganism. What changed after the emergence of the Hooligan was
the tone and urgency of the discourse regarding juvenile offenders—and juveniles in
general.

323
Memo from Godfrey Livingston to the Clerk of the Petty Sessional Division, HO 45/10332/136572,
TNA.
119

The first evidence that the British government had taken notice of the Hooligan
crisis began in the autumn of 1898. Prompted by the “action of the Salvation Army in
South London,” the British government began to explore new ways to deal with the
crisis of juvenile offenders. The initial response was the Youthful Offenders Bill,
which was introduced in November 1898. The Youthful Offenders Bill came at a time
when their rate of imprisonment was in steep decline from its peak in 1893, according
to statistics compiled by the Home Office.
324
Only 42 boys and one girl under the age
of 12 were imprisoned in Britain in 1898-9, down from 134 boys and 16 girls in 1893.
1,586 boys between the ages of 12 and 16 were imprisoned in 1898-9, down from the
historic high of 2,512 in 1893.
The decline in committals to prison reflects, to some extent, the general decline
in criminal activity during the 1890s.
325
However, I contend that it would be more
accurate to assert here that the significant decline in the imprisonment rate, particularly
for children under the age of 12, relates to a change in sensibility among magistrates
and judges regarding the utility of prison as the best location for children convicted of
criminal activity. Indeed, while there is a slight decline in juvenile criminal indictments
during this period, the imprisonment rate for juveniles declined far more dramatically in
the 1890s, suggesting juvenile offenders were increasingly likely to be given alternate
punishments in lieu of time in general population prisons.
326
The number of children
under 12 years old sent to prison declined from 150 in 1893 to 19 in 1900 while the

324
Home Office notes on the Youthful Offenders Bill, HO 45/10158/B23010D, TNA. These statistics
were reprinted in the Times, 20 June 1899.
325
Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century, 5.
326
The disparity in the Home Office records between criminal indictments and the number of children
sent to prison does not account for regional disparities. Instead, the data presented in the records is
national.
120

overall conviction rate for juveniles declined only slightly.
327
S.J. Barrows notes that
beginning in the 1890s, while there was more rigid enforcement of “moral crimes” and
vagrancy laws, the overall conviction rate was in decline in the 1890s.
328
The desire to
keep children out of prison was not a new idea or radical idea.
329
The popularity and
push for reform of the juvenile punishment regime, as evidenced in the interest in and
the push for the Youthful Offenders Bill by moral reformers and elements within the
Home Office, reflects this shift in Britain’s penal culture.
THE YOUTHFUL OFFENDERS ACT OF 1901
The Youthful Offenders Bill was presented by Lord James of Hereford in late
February 1899. Its central purpose was to keep children out of gaol and prison.
330
It was
initially a response to the “difficulty (of) dealing satisfactorily with youthful offenders
under the existing law.”
331
The Bill sought to allow magistrates and other officers of the
court to whip or birch youthful offenders with a wider degree of latitude.
332
This clause
effectively allowed magistrates to “deal summarily with youthful offenders.”
333
In
essence, these elements were similar to a bill presented earlier in the decade by Lord
Llandaff that had failed to become law.
334
The 1899 bill enhanced the ways in which
youthful offenders were recognized and punished by the justice system by providing

327
See Samuel .J. Barrows, “Crime in England,” International Journal of Ethics, XIV, 1904, 181, and
Home Office notes on the Youthful Offenders Bill, HO 45/10158/B23010D, TNA for a statistical
comparison of imprisonment rates. It is difficult to confirm the assertions made in the Home Office
records about the decline of juvenile conviction rates since many of the records are missing or destroyed.
328
Barrows, “Crime in England,” 183. Barrows interestingly concludes that the nature of crime in
England should not “furnish any grounds for alarm as to moral and social decline.”
329
This idea is developed further in Chapter 4.
330
Times, 20 June 1899.
331
Draft Letter to Justices clerks Office, Guildhall, Northampton, 7 February 1899, HO
45/10157/B23010C, TNA.
332
The practice was prescribed only in certain circumstances and rarely applied during the late 1890s.
333
Draft Letter to the Justice clerk’s Office, Guildhall, Northampton, 7 February 1899, HO
45/10157/B23010C, TNA.
334
Ibid.
121

magistrates with expanded powers to interpret the best interests of the youthful offender
through a variety of means. The structure of the first draft of the bill was fairly simple
and straightforward.
The first draft of the bill included ten clauses, all of which dealt in some way or
another with the punishment or committal of youthful offenders. The first clause
extended the power “to deal summarily with youthful offenders” as an amendment to
the 1879 Summary Jurisdiction Act, which gave the power to officers of the court “to
deal with young persons summarily by consent” of the government
335
It was seen to act
in the interest of youthful offenders by quickly dealing with criminal activity in a
manner that best served their interests.
The second clause of the bill advocated an extension of the power of magistrates
to order the whipping of male youthful offenders “with a birch rod.”
336
According to
this clause, such a punishment was to be applied in private with “the presence of an
inspector or other officer of higher rank than a constable.”
337
The clause allowed for a
parent or guardian to be present during the birching and stipulates that the lashes should
not exceed six for a “child,” and twelve for a boy who appears to the court to be under
the age of fourteen. This was no doubt included to reinforce the notion of parental
responsibility that was such a crucial part of state discourse on juvenile criminality. In
all other cases, the limit of lashes was set at eighteen following a graduated leveling of
punishment. The bill also stated in another clause that flogging would stand in place of

335
Ibid.
336
Ibid. The fact that boys were singled out as potential targets for birching is reflective of a typical
gender separation common in Victorian and Edwardian penal culture.
337
Ibid.
122
fear.

The article goes on to cite the efforts of Justice Day of the Northern Circuit, who
reportedly “went in company with several detectives, and surveyed those who were still
at large at their work.”
341
According to this account, Justice Day held over all the cases
involving the gang until the end of the Assize, brought the boys together and stated:

a felony conviction on the record of youthful offenders. The intent here is obvious, as
this clause sought to clear children and young people of the burden of a felony record.
The issue of flogging was the most contentious of the clauses of the Youthful
Offenders Bill during its initial readings. Flogging had been seen as the most effective
solution in previous instances of popular concern over criminality such as the Garroting
crisis of the 1860s and the problem of criminal gangs in Liverpool in the 1870s.
338
At
the height of the Hooligan crisis, the press published numerous calls for the expansion
of birching, evoking the example of Liverpool’s battle with the “High-Rip Gang” as
evidence of the effectiveness of birching youthful offenders.
339
One editorial entitled
“Is Flogging Effectual? How Justice Day Stamped Out the ‘High Rip’ Gang,” stated:
Some ten or twelve years ago, Liverpool was terrorized by a gang of “corner
boys” known as the “high rip gang.” These entertaining gentlemen had a
Gilbertian humour in the way in which they went about. Their mode of
procedure was one in which a certain number would stand outside, say, a
butcher’s shop with drawn knives, while others would go inside and help
themselves to what they wanted, in the meantime, holding the butcher at bay
with interesting weapons of various characters. The police were for a time
rendered helpless, and the whole of the district was in a state of continual
340

338
For more on the garroting crisis, see Jennifer Davis, “The London Garroting Panic of 1862: A Moral
Panic in Mid-Victorian England,” in Gatrell et al., Crime and the Law, 190-213. The 1863 Garrotters Act
is one of only three acts in which the punishment of flogging is prescribed for adults.
339
The most authoritative account of Liverpool’s battle with street gangs during this period is Michael
MacIlwee, The Gangs of Liverpool. New York: Milo, 2006.
340
Sun, 1 July 1898.
341
Ibid.
123

He was not going to give them long terms of imprisonment, but when you go in
you get 20 lashes of the cat, when you have been in for nine months you get 20
lashes of the cat, and before you come out you get 20 lashes of the cat. And then
you can show that to your friends.
342

Justice Day’s use of “the cat” and its apparent effectiveness became a commonly-told
tale during the height of the Hooligan Crisis. As the end of the Sun’s editorial states
Mr. Justice Day’s name has only to be mentioned in the district even now, and it
savours of the Mohammedan mother’s threat to her child about Richard Coeur
de Lion. The High Rip gang ceased to exist after Mr. Justice paid two visits to
Liverpool, and has not been heard of since.
343

The legendary status of the High Rip gang and Justice Day’s use of “the cat,” despite
their ubiquitous nature in news accounts and letters to the editor, are more important as
evidence of the endurance of corporal punishment as an element of Britain’s penal
culture.
The hope that the Youthful Offenders Bill would “prevent children (from) being
sent to prison” was the intent of the Home Secretary.
344
Yet the central legal device
used for this aim, the corporal punishment or “whipping clause,” was what ultimately
held up the Bill in the Commons. The House of Commons had already rejected a much
more specific bill involving birching for juvenile prisoners in the form of the 1900
Corporal Punishment Bill due to the wide disagreement over the utility of birching as an
effective form of punishment.
345

At the heart of the debate over the Youthful Offenders Bill was oversight. In his
rebuttal of the Home Secretary’s reintroduction of the bill, MP Carvell Williams argued

342
Ibid.
343
Ibid. Mentions of Justice Day also appear in account in the South London Chronicle, Times, Daily
Mail, and Daily News.
344
Ibid.
345
Hansard, 29 March 1900.
124

that the corporal punishment clause of the bill was too vague.
346
He argued that without
specific guidelines, magistrates and judges, who “differed very much in what was
proper punishment for a particular offence”, would apply such punishment in a manner
that was unequal and unfair.
347
He maintained that the bill allowed magistrates and
judges to apply corporal punishment when parents could not or would not pay a fine
incurred by the criminal activity of their child, thus disproportionately punishing the
children of the very poor. He also argued that the bill would put a significant burden on
the police by forcing them to participate in corporal punishment. Williams argued that
such punishment would fall to “the most hardened members of the force, who if not
already brutalized would soon become so.”
348
Thomas O’Connor, MP from Liverpool
agreed with Carvell that the whipping clause “only applied to the children of the poor”
and the bill would allow “any magistrate, learned or unlearned, merciful or
unmerciful…the power to order a child to be whipped, often for offences which were
only the outcome of ignorance.”
349

Opposition to the bill’s whipping clause also centered on a moral argument. In
M.P. James Samuel argued that “statistical returns of crime as showing that the growth
of education, together with more humane treatment of criminals by the Judges, were
having their effect in the way of reducing crime.”
350
He noted that magistrates already
had the power to send children and youthful offenders to reformatory schools instead of
prison and that “the effect of this bill would be that many of the boys who would

346
Ibid.
347
Ibid.
348
Ibid. The police, and often the arresting officer, were charged with administering whippings during
this period.
349
Ibid.
350
Ibid.
125
low.

otherwise come under the influence of reformatories would be whipped and set free”
and called the bill a “retrograde step.” He was skeptical that birching would limit the
expansion of “the criminal class.”
351

The Home Office received letters and telegraphs from moral reform
organizations urging the passage of the Youthful Offenders Bill, yet all these groups
opposed the inclusion of corporal punishment in the bill.
352
In particular, groups such
as the Philanthropic Reform Association, the Howard Association, and the Salvation
Army expressed the hope that the bill would eventually pass in some form. Charles
Eason, the Secretary of the Philanthropic Reform Association, a reform organization
based in Dublin, sent a letter to the Home Secretary, the chief proponent of the bill,
expressing hope that despite the controversy surrounding the whipping clause, the
Home Office would continue to “press the rest of the bill” and exclude any provision
for the expansion of corporal punishment
353
While the bill failed to do what many
moral reformers hoped it would, it perhaps represented the first substantial sign that
more meaningful changes could fol
Messages of support for the bill also came from within the justice system. In a
June 26, 1899 note in the Assizes column of the Times, Justice Mathews of the South-
Eastern circuit in Chelmsford stated his support for the new law
Every magistrate must at some time or other have experienced great difficulty in
dealing with prisoners under the age of 15 years. The proposed measure would
terminate the most unhappy measure of imprisonment, and was a very good

351
Ibid. The comment that the whipping clause would shrink the ranks of the “criminal class” came from
W. Anson, the Member of Parliament representing Oxford University.
352
See especially the notes included in HO 45/10411/B13664, TNA. Home Office records from this
period are also littered with letters from regional law enforcement organizations asking for reform even as
the bill seemed to be dead.
353
Letter to Sir Matthew White Ridley, M.P. from Philanthropic Reform Association, 24 May 1900, HO
45/10182/B30306, TNA.
126

illustration of the more humane feelings which prevailed in these days in regard
to the treatment of prisoners. In the bad old days a prisoner was often treated
with inhuman severity and the man in the dock was too often forgotten in the
interests of the community. Fortunately in these days the law was administered
in a different spirit, and the prevention of crime instead of revenge on the
criminal was the maxim of law.
354

The allusion made to the “different spirit” of criminal administration serves as an
expression of a sense that the justice system had already moved toward a more reform-
oriented model.
355
Yet what is most telling about Mathews’ message of support is how
directly it echoes the concerns of the moral reform movement and its condemnation of
prison for youthful offenders. Prison was not seen as a site of reform, but rather a
holding space for those who could no longer be reformed. A Resolution sent by the
Michaelmas Quarter Sessions of the East Riding of Yorkshire October 17, 1899 offered
similar support, noting that “it is very desirable to authorise the substitution of corporal
punishment for imprisonment for offences by boys as proposed in the Youthful
Offenders Bill.”
356
Similar resolutions in support of the bill and its intent to limit
juvenile exposure to prison were passed throughout England.
Other correspondence was not as supportive. Groups such as the Criminal Law
and Prison Department of the Humanitarian League and the NSPCC vehemently
opposed the bill’s preference for flogging in the place of more conventional
punishment, and opposed the bill in its entirety. The NSPCC, which had prominently
advocated for prison reform for children in the early 1890s, viewed the bill as

354
Times 26 June 1899. The Mathews piece was included in a clipping saved by the Home Office,
presumably because it represented support for the bill within the rank and file of the judicial system.
355
Much of the work on the British administration of justice alludes to a similar notion. See especially
Stefan Petrow, Policing Morals: the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, 1870-1914. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1994, and Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson, Criminal Conversations.
356
Resolution of the Michaelmas Quarter Sessions for the East Riding of Yorkshire, 17 October 1899,
HO 45/10050/A62846, TNA.
127

“reactionary” while the Criminal Law and Prison Department of the Humanitarian
League forwarded to the Home Secretary a resolution passed by its membership that
“view(ed) with great alarm the extension of flogging as proposed in the Youthful
Offenders Bill now before parliament and earnestly hopes that the government will not
give any further countenance to a cruel and discredited form of punishment.”
357

The Glasgow-based Society for the Reformation of School Discipline (SRSD)
argued that the bill itself was sound, but the whipping clause needed to be eliminated.

358
The SRSD’s letter concluded by stating that “Our great hope for the prevention of
crime, juvenile or otherwise, lies not in ancient flagellation, but in education—the
training of young Britons into self governing beings, not requesting to be governed by
others.”
359
The SRSD’s letter represented the popular sentiment among moral reformers
that children would not benefit from violent punishment and that criminal juveniles
could best be reformed through education. This notion would be the hallmark of some
of the more successful moral reform movements later in the decade, but the sentiment
also represents a clear split from the intent of the Home Secretary and Lord James, who
had introduced the bill in 1899. The Youthful Offenders Bill was, to some extent, a
relic of a particular set of Conservative attitudes toward the administration of justice
and the treatment of criminals. The issue of flogging represented a clear break for
advocates of juvenile justice reform. The nature and extent of the debate, however,
represents a substantial change in values regarding the treatment of children from earlier

357
Resolution of the Executive Council of the Humanitarian League, Criminal Law and Prison
Department, 26 May 1900, HO 45/10050/A62846, TNA. See also “The Child’s Guardian: The Official
Organ of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children” Vol. XIII, London, August
1899, HO 45/10050/A62846, TNA.
358
Letter to Home Secretary from Society for the Reform of School Discipline, 25 May 1900, HO
45/10050/A62846, TNA.
359
Ibid.
128

in the Victorian period, when the use of violent punishment was viewed as a more
acceptable mode of punishment.
360

The debate over flogging also appeared in periodicals and magazines with great
frequency, often linked to the theme of parental responsibility. Thomas Holmes, a
prominent member of the Howard Association who had been at the forefront of the
Hooligan crisis as a police court reporter, offered his opinion on youthful offenders and
parental responsibility in an essay published in the June 1900 edition of the
Contemporary Review. In “Youthful Offenders and Parental Responsibility,” Holmes
observed that the state had taken a more significant role in the development of children
during his lifetime, but that birching children did not represent a clear step forward.
Holmes complained that the state lacked the power to seek remuneration from parents
when their child was committed to a reformatory or industrial school.
361
For Holmes,
the issue of birching failed to deal with the more significant issues of parental
responsibility and the health and welfare of children.
In Holmes’ piece, like many others published in the wake of the debates over the
second reading of the Bill, the central concern is the health of young people where
health is defined in physical, mental, and moral terms. It is the latter point that was of
primary concern to many involved in the debate over the Youthful Offenders Bill.
While the whipping clause was often the catalyst for discourse on the moral state of

360
MacIlwee, Gangs of Liverpool, 144. MacIlwee’s account of the “Cornermen” phenomenon and the
High Rip gang of Liverpool illustrates that popular support for flogging waned between 1870s and the
turn of the century.
361
Thomas Holmes. “Youthful Offenders and Parental Responsibility” Contemporary Review. Vol. 16,
June 1900, 847. Holmes criticized parents in his observations on juvenile criminals.
129

youthful offenders, the bill itself was seen as absolutely necessary to “battle the street
Hooligan.”
362

While the bill passed easily through the House of Lords on its first reading
through the influence of Lord James, it failed to secure support in the House of
Commons. What was clear by the late spring of 1899, nearly a year removed from the
Hooligan crisis, was that the specter of juvenile criminality had not disappeared from
the popular press. The press maintained its focus on the state of Britain’s less affluent
neighborhoods and the plight of the poor who lived in overcrowded and ill-managed
housing. While the imagery in these accounts resembles that which appeared during the
Hooligan crisis, what changed was the wholesale appropriation of moral reform
rhetoric, most clearly seen in the adoption of Salvation Army terminology to describe
the plight of London’s working-class neighborhoods. One report of a speech given by
Reverend W.J. Sommerville, rector of the vestry of St. George the Martyr, was
suggestively titled “In Darkest Southwark,” a clear allusion to Booth’s Salvation Army
manifesto on the state of Britain’s poor. The speech focused on the state of South
London, where the average occupancy was eleven to a house was four times the average
for the rest of London.
363
The theme of poverty and overcrowding led to what
Sommerville saw as a crisis in the spiritual condition of England’s poor.
There can be no question that in Southwark the church has lost its hold on the
people, if it ever had a hold at all. Thousands are living lives of practical
heathenism never entering a place of worship, never thinking of the necessity of
training their children in the fear and love of God, never thinking of anything

362
Notes on Home Office memo regarding letter from Philanthropic Reform Association. 26 May 1900,
HO 45/10050/A62846, TNA.
363
South London Chronicle, 8 April 1899.
130

higher than a dull round of monotonous toil, varied with evenings spent at the
public-house.
364

Concern over the spiritual health of Britain’s working-class was an enduring theme
among church officials. In the 1890s, the church’s main concern was how the absence
of a positive spiritual life alongside over-crowding, lack of potable water, and the
absence of positive parental influence in the lives of working-class children led to the
spread of juvenile deviance and criminality.
Sommerville’s commentary on the absence of spiritual life for residents of
Southwark was echoed by Walter Besant, who made a similar speech on May 25, 1899
decrying the conditions of south London and the need to provide new opportunities to
separate children from the negative influences of poverty and criminality. Besant stated
that “South London is the swiftest growing portion of the metropolis” with an average
of 26,000 new residents every year, compared to an average of 14,000 in other parts of
the city.
365
Like Sommerville’s sermon, Besant’s speech focused on the physical
condition of South London and its relationship to crime, vice, and the decline of
spirituality. The underlying message of both speeches was the need for enhanced efforts
to “rescue” working-class populations in urban Britain, an idea which strongly
paralleled the campaign launched by the Salvation Army in the wake of the Hooligan
crisis. These speeches were directed not at the pulpit, but at the state. Just as with the
Salvation Army’s campaign in late 1898, they were attempts to alert the state to the
moral crisis that contaminated south London’s youth; a crisis evidenced by the rise and
persistence of youthful ruffianism and Hooliganism.

364
Ibid.
365
Times, 27 May 1899.
131

The response of the Home Office to the “calls for reform” was to redouble their
efforts to pass the Youthful Offenders Bill.
366
The Home Office reintroduced the bill,
despite the controversy surrounding the whipping clause, but it was this that doomed it
to failure in the House of Commons during its second reading. Although the bill failed,
elements of the proposed law remained popular and it remained on the agenda of the
Home Office. The Home Secretary’s efforts were aided by the contributions of moral
reform groups through continued agitation for some reform in the administration of
juvenile justice.
Gradually, changes in the Bill, such as the removal of the Summary Jurisdiction
clause (which had been rendered unnecessary by the passage of the Summary
Jurisdiction Act of 1899), made it more palatable. This small but significant
amendment was, in effect, the first legal change related to enhanced concerns about
juvenile criminality that arose from the Hooligan crisis. The original Bill allowed the
state “to deal summarily with young persons by consent.” The amendment allowed for
the extension of this provision to “all indictable offences other than homicide” for
juveniles.
367
The amendment to the Summary Jurisdiction Act was, in effect, a clever
maneuver by the Conservative government to streamline policy toward youthful
offenders. As we have seen, the government hoped to amend existing legal structure
wherever possible as a less difficult way to achieve its aims. The result was that one of
the two contentious clauses—the other being the whipping clause—was removed from
the Bill.

366
Home Office notes on copy, Youthful Offenders Bill, 1899, HO 45/10157/B23010C, TNA.
367
Amendment to Section 11, Summary Jurisdiction Bill (1879).
132

The slightly trimmed-down Bill remerged almost a year after it had passed
through the House of Lords, but some of the proposed revisions proved to be
unexpectedly controversial. One of the revisions that aroused interest was the change in
the definition of juvenile criminal statistics. Some suggested that the law should
substitute “order of detention” for “convicted” in the criminal records of juveniles found
guilty of crimes other than a capital offense. In the Home Office notes on the draft,
there was some debate over whether this would imply that youthful offenders were no
longer subject to “disqualifications arising from the conviction of a felony.”
368
It
follows that the lasting implication of the change was to give youthful offenders
effective immunity from the legal consequences of a felony conviction, thus legally
distinguishing people under the age of 16 from adults.
Despite the best efforts of Ridley’s Home Office, the Bill stalled again near the
end of May 1900. The most significant point of contention remained the whipping
clause. The desire to separate this clause from the rest of the bill appears in
correspondence from the Philanthropic Reform Association, among others.
369
In the
essay “Extract Relating to the Youthful Offenders Bill,” in the Fourth Annual report of
the Association, the group remained “strongly opposed” to the clauses dealing with
summary judgment and flogging of youthful offenders, but it strongly favored the
remaining clauses. In particular, they favored clause 3, which increased parental
liability for parents of youthful offenders, clause 4, which expanded the power of
magistrates to place children on remand in locations other than prison, and clause 12,

368
Draft copy, Youthful Offender Bill, 1900, HO 45/10157/B23010C, TNA.
369
Letters expressing similar sentiments were also directed to the Home Office by the Humanitarian
League, The Howard Association, and the Salvation Army, HO 45/10157/B23010C, TNA.
133

which expanded the power to deal summarily with youthful offenders in Ireland by
consent.
370

Much of the argument made in the extract regarding the importance of parental
responsibility and accountability for youthful offenders mirrors Thomas Holmes’
perspective. The consensus was that parents needed to be held legally accountable in a
more consistent way. This would become important as more specific forms of
protective legislation appeared in the early years of the twentieth century. The stress on
parental responsibility present in the Youthful Offender’s Bill was frequent in the
rhetoric of moral reform organizations. William Tallack, secretary of the Howard
Association and an associate of Thomas Holmes, sent the Home Secretary a copy of a
resolution passed by its executive committee that stated:
In view of the shameful manner in which many parents of juvenile offenders,
after neglecting their duties to their offspring, endeavour (and too often with
success) to thrust their children upon the taxpayers for maintenance in
reformatory and industrial schools, the Committee of the Howard Association
hopes that the Home Secretary will press forward Lord James’ “Youthful
Offenders Bill” for the better enforcement of parental responsibility in such
cases. The committee, however, venture to suggest that very young children,
under 10 years of age, be exempted from the birching contemplated in the
bill.
371

The importance of parental responsibility as a way to curtail the spread of criminality
and deviance among working-class children had been prominent in Howard Association
literature since the beginning of the debates on the Youthful Offenders Bill in 1899.
372

The Howard Association had argued in the past that government-run reformatories

370
Extract Relating to the Youthful Offenders Bill from the Fourth Annual Report of the Philanthropic
Reform Association. London, June 1900, HO 45/10157/B23010C, TNA. Their support of the clauses
dealing with Ireland is not surprising since the Philanthropic Reform Association was based in Dublin
and was concerned specifically with the legislation’s ramifications in Ireland.
371
Resolution of the Committee of the Howard Association, 29 June 1900, HO 45/10052/A63016, TNA.
372
See especially Annual Report of the Howard Association, October 1899, HO 45/10052/A63016, TNA.
134

actually fostered crime since they lacked any substantial attempt at Christian moral
reform. Moreover, the Howard Association argued that moral instruction would
effectively limit the extent of “juvenile ruffianism (or “Hooliganism”) which troubles
certain localities.”
373
A Resolution of the Michaelmas Quarter Sessions for the East
Riding of Yorkshire echoes the desire to hold parents accountable, stating that “this
court regards with great satisfaction the recognition in the Bill of the principle of
parental responsibility for the offences of their children.”
374

The argument presented by the Howard Association boiled down the problem of
Hooliganism to a crisis of parental failure. Parents who wished their “incorrigible child”
to be sent to a reformatory or industrial school would be better served by providing a
more stable home environment for their child. The central idea presented by the
Howard Association was a simple one: morally-stable parents raise morally-stable
children.
The Howard Association coupled their focus on familial responsibility with the
doctrine of separating children from environments that seemed to foster criminality and
deviance. The Howard Association, like the Salvation Army, was an advocate of
voluntary emigration of “destitute and neglected children” as a method of preventing
juvenile crime. While it critiqued emigration without parental consent—a strategy that
appeared in the more extreme letters to the editor of various publications during the
Hooligan crisis—it supported the efforts of MP Samuel Smith, who proposed a massive
emigration program in early 1899 modeled on a system used by city officials in

373
Ibid, 4.
374
Resolution of the Michaelmas Quarter Sessions for the East Riding of Yorkshire, 17 October 1899,
HO 45/10158/B23010D, TNA.
135

Liverpool, arguing that it would be far cheaper ( ₤20 per child as opposed to the average
₤200 cost of “pauper schools”) and more effective because it would isolate the children
of the very poor from negative influences found in the cities of Britain.
375

The Youthful Offenders Bill took nearly two years to pass through the House of
Commons. The first section, which was a major component of the Bill from its first
draft, stipulated that children could be placed on remand or committed for trial in the
custody of any person willing to receive him or her, rather than simply being sent to
prison.
376
As we have already seen, this was a point of debate even before the bill was
written, having been one of the central concerns of moral reformers who felt that
exposing children to adult prisons was a hazard to their moral health. The importance
of recognizing the need to separate children from adults within the justice system would
prove a crucial first step in the eventual development of a campaign to design and
implement a juvenile justice system. This clause provided the first hint of a legal
precedent for that argument.
Even with the failure to convince the House of Commons to expand the power
of the courts and the police to birch juvenile offenders, the Home Office continued to
explore increased use of corporal punishment to curtail juvenile delinquency. In the
months that followed the Hooligan crisis, the Home Office had received several letters
from magistrates asking for clarification on the application of corporal punishment for

375
Ibid. 5. The proposal did not mandate the location to which children would be sent. Similar plans
from this period usually proposed sending children to Canada.
376
Youthful Offenders Bill, Section IV, 1899.
136

juveniles. These requests often cited cases where birching was not legally warranted,
but was applied instead of imprisonment.
377

In some cases, requests to substitute birching for imprisonment made the
argument that prison would be harmful to youthful offenders who participated in crimes
such as “street gambling” and would contribute to recidivism.
378
As late as September
1903, there is significant internal debate over whether or not to propose legislation to
expand the power of magistrates to birch truants and other minor offenders. The intent
of birching by magistrates was often to avoid “at all costs” the need to send youthful
offenders to prison, even in cases where such punishment was not part of existing
statutes. The question posed in these debates was whether the court was acting on
behalf of the government or merely as agents for the parents in cases where birching
was authorized but not legally warranted.
379
The endurance of state support for
corporal punishment effectively ended with the Liberal landslide of 1906, but it did
much to delay efforts to reform more effectively not only the British penal system, but
the way in which children and juveniles were processed.
CONCLUSION
The efforts of the Salvation Army’s “Hooligan suppers” and the initial response
of the Home Office in crafting the Youthful Offenders Act of 1901 represented two
disparate attempts to address the same problem. They were connected by their shared
desire to prevent a repeat of the Hooligan crisis by eliminating—or at least changing—
some of the social forces they believed contributed to the crisis. Both responses were

377
Letters from Justices of the Peace on birching, HO 45/10158/B23010C, TNA.
378
Many of the requests expressed the desire to separate children from the “burden” of prison rather than
simple expediency.
379
Home Office notes on birching, 3 September 1903, HO 45/10158/B23010C, TNA.
137
born out of campaigns and ideas that stretched back decades. Perhaps most
importantly, neither did anything substantial to resolve the underlying concerns of
middle-class Britons about the Hooligan crisis. The moral panic over Hooliganism in
the summer of 1898 was the catalyst for the rise of moral reform efforts to address
juvenile delinquency and renewed calls to reform the juvenile justice system.
The campaign launched by the Salvation Army in 1898 did not call for any sort
of specific reform of the juvenile justice system at first. It was concerned less with
imprisonment and more with a vague campaign to alert its followers, and the whole of
Britain, to the plight of the juvenile. As we have seen, the first movements toward a
comprehensive campaign were tied to what the Salvation Army viewed as its causes—
most notably urban over-crowding in working-class districts—and not to a
comprehensive reformulation of the justice system. This mirrors other campaigns
launched by the Army in the pre-war period in its concern for the roots of “evil” that
corrupted Britain’s working-classes. Ultimately, this would not be enough. While I
contend that the Hooligan crisis of 1898 and the notion of a specific “Hooligan”
subculture were largely media constructions, the Hooligan suppers suggests that
working-class Britain and south London in particular, were suffering from joblessness,
overcrowding, lack of clean water, and street crime.
Another revelation from these first responses to Hooliganism were discussions
about which individuals would benefit from reform and at what age did community
intervention tactics become muted. The desire to define childhood that emerged in
discussions about juvenile moral reform was, in part, an endeavor to determine when an
individual was no longer able to be reformed. Hooliganism was seen as a symptom of a
138
larger, more insidious problem. The solution, as we will see in the next two chapters,
extended beyond moral reformers to voluntary associations and locally-based
community activism that made fresh, although not entirely original attempts, to combat
the problem of juvenile delinquency. In particular, there was a renewed commitment to
moral instruction in schools and curriculum reform, increased funding to clubs where
various forms of moral instructions and regulation could safely occur, and finally, a
restated desire to limit juvenile exposure to the contagion of adult deviance.
Action on the part of the state in the first years of the twentieth century was, by
comparison, muted. The Youthful Offenders Act of 1901 did not address the
commonly-believed causes of juvenile criminality that it sought to combat. It reflected a
conservative mindset which viewed the perceived problem of juvenile crime as an issue
of penal rather than cultural reform. Despite its shortcomings in the eyes of moral
reformers, the Youthful Offenders Act was significant because it was the first step in
the development of a truly separate system of juvenile justice. It reflected a common,
albeit muted belief that the imprisonment of children and young adults was not an
effective remedy for criminal behavior and was, in fact, detrimental to the moral health
of youthful offenders. The Act was a crucial step in that it implied that gaols and
prisons were spaces of moral contamination that did more to injure juveniles than
reform them.
What the 1901 Youthful Offenders Act did not accomplish was the very point
that social and moral reformers had hoped to move to the forefront of government
action: that reform should be central in any justice apparatus dealing with juveniles.
This need was apparent, both to the state and moral reformers, before 1898, but
139
remained politically elusive. The goal of social and moral reformers was to change the
material reality of the British experience of childhood in such a way as to isolate
children from negative stimuli, such as gambling, alcohol, and salacious literature and
direct them toward an environment that fostered the crucial moral lessons that were
seemingly antithetical to Hooliganism and youthful ruffianism.
The direction of moral reform for juveniles would be dictated by a commitment
to adding to, and, in some cases, building an apparatus that would provide young
Britons with exposure to moral values that were, more often than not, developed in
conjunction with Christian values. The power and extent of these movements was
emblematic of a political culture of reform that was conservative in its construction of
morality and civility, but progressive in its desire to overhaul Britain’s legal approach to
juvenile offenders in ways that were nothing short of radical in their openness to
experimentation. This political culture comprised what I consider to be an industry of
moral reform which sought a totalized scheme of social change.
For this industry of moral reform, the enemy was not the youthful offender, but
the deviant culture that produced the juvenile criminal. The next chapter focuses on the
intellectual culture of moral reformers and the ideological connections they forged. The
focus of these movements, as we will see, increasingly stressed isolation from the
contagion of criminality and immorality of modern Britain. This drive towards
separation and isolation, as well as the campaign for institutional responses to juvenile
delinquency, such as efforts to expand moral instruction in schools, clubs, and other
extracurricular organizations, such as the Boy Scouts and the Boys’ Brigade, would
characterize the general emphasis of juvenile policy reform movements and would have
140
a profound impact on the direction of state policy beginning in 1906 with the Liberal
landslide election and the emergence of a reform-friendly Home Office.

141
Chapter 4
Curing Hooliganism: Ideologies of Moral Reform and the
Campaign Against Juvenile Delinquency, 1898-1908

While popular concern over Hooliganism had subsided by the end of October
1898, the image of the Hooligan had not disappeared from public consciousness. The
idea of the Hooligan as a threat to British society remained a crucial part of social and
moral reform discourse into the early twentieth century. With prominent Christian
moral reform movements like the Salvation Army attempting to engage youthful
offenders in the streets of London’s working-class neighborhoods and the government
attempting to address juvenile delinquency through legislative action, the press and
moral reformers alike began to examine the implications of the perceived Hooligan
uprising of 1898 and what could be done to ‘cure’ juvenile delinquency and deviance.
The root cause of youthful ruffianism and criminal deviance was increasingly
associated with Britain’s poor urban spaces—the “stimulating air of a back court in a
London slum” or simply the pub that catered to children and juveniles. These sites
became the target for moral reformers.
Fears over juvenile criminality were coupled with concerns raised most
prominently by moral reformers over the moral and physical health of Britain’s youth
and how best to change the course of children and juveniles who had engaged in
behavior that was considered morally and socially deviant. The result was a period of
seven years, between late 1899 and 1908, when moral reform groups, ranging from
single-cause organizations that focused on regulating a particular behavior to groups
that focused more generally on the moral health and status of juveniles collaborated,
142

agitating for profound changes in how British society defined and understood
childhood.
This chapter examines the beliefs and values of some of the prominent moral
reform organizations interested in juvenile delinquency and criminality and shows how
shared elements of that ideology informed efforts for institutional change. While the
previous chapter was about the first attempts by both moral reformers and the state to
engage youthful offenders themselves in the wake of the Hooligan crisis, this chapter
will explore the impact of groups like the Salvation Army, the Howard Association, and
others on the intellectual culture of juvenile moral reform. The purpose of this chapter
is to explore the ideas advocated by these different organizations and how, despite
ideological and organizational differences, they constituted a cohesive social movement
with a shared ideology.
380
These groups comprised a loosely-knit movement with a
shared political culture that was directed at institutions, such as prisons, schools, and
reformatories, which they saw as potential sites of personal reform designed to direct
young people away from criminality and deviance.
381

I contend that the groups that comprised this movement helped to revive prior
modes of social intervention, such as the club movement, by drawing attention to the
problem of juvenile delinquency and inspiring public investment in potential solutions.
As I have already demonstrated, much of what constituted the initial reaction to
Hooliganism was about diagnosing the problem and identifying who was at risk. The

380
I do not argue here that these groups actively collaborated beyond referencing one another’s ideas and
rhetoric in their independent campaigns. Rather, I maintain that the aftermath of the Hooligan crisis gave
these groups a more significant voice within the civic arena.
381
The topic of institutional reform is the subject of chapter 5.
143

emphasis of moral reform organizations changed in the early twentieth century to focus
rather on the moral health of children and juveniles as a whole.
382

The early twentieth century witnessed a rash of new child protective legislation,
such as the Street Betting Act of 1906 and the Children’s Act of 1908, designed to limit
children’s exposure to the adult world. Rather than just spurring state activity, the
initiatives of moral reform groups, from the founding of clubs to local reform of school
standards for moral instruction, represented a significant shift in the importance placed
on the experience of childhood. Moral reformers emphasized the creation of a morally-
grounded civil society and aspired to protect children from what they regarded as
morally dangerous stimuli. I will argue in this chapter that the roots of much of the
reform in juvenile policy can be traced back to the efforts of the Salvation Army both to
direct discourse and to relay the concerns of smaller reform organizations and single-
issue groups through the application of its significant publicity machine.
This chapter will focus on the critical aspects of social and moral reform activity
by the Salvation Army, along with smaller, issue-specific organizations during the
period of 1898-1906. This activity was directed towards negative environmental forces,
from juvenile alcohol and tobacco consumption to street gambling, all of which were
seen as serious threats to the moral and physical health of children. It will also explore
the Salvation Army’s attempts to identify and mitigate the impact of negative
environmental forces, an intellectual culture that contributed to the development of
institutions that stressed moral training and isolation from the contagion of criminality
and immorality. The intellectual culture of reform helped efforts by other groups to

382
See especially Seth Koven’s Slumming for more on cultural constructions of childhood during this
period.
144
develop new youth clubs in impoverished and working-class neighborhoods, as well as
the emergence of new institutions dedicated to moral instruction. This activity
represented a significant move towards a new culture of childhood during this period.
At the heart of most prominent moral reform efforts directed towards children
and juveniles were groups such as the Salvation Army that continued to press the state
for increased regulation of vagrancy among children. The prominence of the Salvation
Army in this chapter relates to its power and popularity as an organization, but also the
way in which it allied and linked itself with other organizations and subsumed their
ideas into its social action networks. While many organizations played a prominent role
in agitating for the reform of particular behaviors or even state policies, what makes the
Salvation Army unique was its synthetic nature as a reform organization. It applied
statistics, rhetoric, and even individual narratives of personal reform, incorporating
them into its evangelical mission through its powerful media apparatus. From its
activity with anti-tobacco campaigns to its connections with the anti-street gambling
movement beginning in 1900, the Salvation Army worked as an emporium of moral
reform.
The response to the Hooligan crisis did not start the movement to reform
juvenile morality, but it served as a catalyst for increased public interest and concern
and redirected the movement’s discourse towards increased emphasis on a totalizing
model of moral instruction. The movement that developed out of the Hooligan crisis
was about both an attempt to reform youthful offenders and about creating a culture that
served to limit the incidence of juvenile delinquency through the application of a
distinctively Christian model of moral instruction. This drive towards a Christian model
145

of childhood was designed to conform not only to strict moral lines, but also served to
reify particular models of gender among boys and girls.
While the aims, methods, and means of moral reformers differed, they shared a
belief that environmental conditions were the primary source of moral decay and
degeneration. By the late 1890s, moral reformers in Britain appropriated degeneration
as an important intellectual framework to justify increased intervention in the nation’s
slums. Their fears came into greater focus with the publication of the 1904 Report of
the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, which reinforced exiting
concerns over social conditions in Britain and their impact on the physical and moral
health of the general population. Since reform groups saw the root of degeneration as
environmental in its nature, they also regarded the problem as reversible. As we have
already seen, spaces like south London were coded not only as dangerous, but also as
prone to moral deviance because of environmental factors such as poverty, poor
housing conditions, and over-crowding. Groups like the Salvation Army, the Howard
Association, and various smaller issue–based organizations saw such spaces as the root
cause of Hooliganism, so their approach to the problem of juvenile deviance was
directed towards mitigating the effects of environment.
383
Moral reformers’ belief in
environmental degeneration signaled an important shift away from the biological
notions of criminality that had generally dominated late nineteenth century thought.
More importantly, these ideas would emerge in 1906 as the ideological basis for
juvenile justice reform and would come to fruition in the Children’s Act of 1908.

383
For more on the importance of geography and geographical though on moral and social reform
movements of the nineteenth century, see Felix Driver “Moral Geographies: Social Science and the
Urban Environment in Mid-nineteenth Century England” Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers, n.s., 13, no. 3 (1988), 275-287.
146

THE SALVATIONIST CAMPAIGN AGAINST JUVENILE VAGRANCY
School reformers, club advocates, and boy’s organizations like the Boys’
Brigade, focused on institutional solutions to juvenile delinquency by combating
specific modes of anti-social behavior. The Boy Scouts, developed—and in the case of
the Boys’ Brigade, renewed—their campaigns against the various social vices that they
felt were at the heart of moral failure and deviance. From small campaigns against
juvenile smoking to more substantial calls for strict regulation of alcohol sales to
juveniles, moral reformers attacked what they saw as a central feature that produced and
perpetuated juvenile delinquency and criminal deviance in working-class Britain: vice.
At the forefront of the fight, acting as a binding polymer in the effort to stamp out vice,
was the Salvation Army. Subsumed under its long-running campaign against vagrancy,
the Salvation Army used its considerable voice to attack what it considered to be the
underpinning of juvenile delinquency: the conditions of life in the impoverished areas
of urban Britain. Vagrancy, also referred to colloquially as “idleness” or “loafing,” was
one of the central defining characteristics of Hooligan culture from its inception.
Juvenile vagrants were depicted as “moral lunatics” whose idleness was a symptom of
possible criminality.
384
The campaign against vagrancy provides an important window
into the values and beliefs that empowered the Salvation Army’s moral reform efforts.
The campaign against juvenile vagrancy launched by the Salvation Army in the
wake of the Hooligan crisis represented a significant attempt to stamp out juvenile
deviance.. It applied a different strategy from those who agitated for donations for
clubs or changes in the school curriculum by focusing instead on eliminating the

384
Social Gazette, 26 July 1902.
147

elements of modern British material culture that it saw as the most harmful and
disruptive. These “vices” were associated with the “crisis of habitual vagrancy” that
had been a central part of Salvation Army rhetoric since the early 1880s. What changed
in the early twentieth century was the shift in organizational focus from rehabilitating
adult criminals and towards rescuing children from the contagion of social and moral
deviance that pervaded poor, densely-populated urban areas in Britain. Just as with the
Hooligan suppers, the goal of Salvationists was to mitigate the influence of these spaces
and provide a venue for religious and moral uplift.
The work of the Salvation Army was, in effect, part of a continuing effort
among a variety of smaller organizations to stamp out vices associated with their idea of
modern Britain as a haven for spiritual bankruptcy. The Army’s campaigns against
juvenile alcohol sales and consumption, tobacco-use, street gambling, and penny
dreadfuls, were informed by the efforts of other organizations. However, the Salvation
Army was, in the first the decade of the twentieth century, the only non-governmental
organization that had the influence and sheer numbers to be able to mobilize such a
broad campaign.
The Salvation Army used its powerful press mechanism to disseminate its
beliefs and values about the problem of habitual vagrancy, often connecting the
problem of the child vagrant with Hooliganism. By late December 1898, the Salvation
Army was celebrating its victories over the Hooligan in south London’s “land of
bullies.”
385
In its review of the social campaigns of 1898, War Cry! notes its successes
in “fresh fights and victories against the Hooligans” through the expansion of a “rapidly

385
Social Gazette, 3 September 1898.
148

rising force of saved Hooligans.”
386
The portrayal of Hooligans in the pages of the War
Cry! and the Social Gazette, as I have already illustrated, was almost anthropological in
its nature. Stories like “Life among the Hooligans” and “All-Night Adventures in
Southwark” stressed the foreignness of Hooliganism to readers in ways similar to the
most vivid accounts of the popular press. The Social Gazette offered a significant
amount of attention to Hooligans during and after the moral panic, focusing on the
cultural organization of young men who populated the streets of south London. Stories
like the November 19, 1898 account called “How Hooligans Live” described in detail
the criminal activities, including “pushing the queer”—using bad money—as well
blackmailing local businesses.
387
At the heart of these accounts of deviance were
repeated references to the heavy drinking and gambling that accompanied all Salvation
Army representations of Hooligans.
The commitment to a concerted campaign against vice as a way to combat
Hooliganism is best summarized in Arnold White’s 1909 book, The Great Idea: Notes
by an Eye-witness on Some of the Social Work of the Salvation Army. White was a
social commentator, prominent member of the Salvation Army, and anti-vice crusader
perhaps best known for his work, Problems of a Great City. His writings encapsulated
the Salvation Army’s concern for social uplift as a product not necessarily of altruism or
duty to nation, but rather a commitment to “introduce suffering humanity to the Christ
of the Gospels, and to restate in language intelligible to the masses the offer of the water

386
War Cry!, 31 December 1898.
387
Social Gazette, 19 November 1898. The phrase “pushing the queer” is a colloquial expression for the
act of using counterfeit currency.
149

of life.”
388
According to White, this was the Salvation Army’s “great idea” and primary
mission. White’s conception of the “great idea” was nothing more than a creative re-
branding of Salvationist ideology dating back to the 1880s. What made it an important
element of the discourse of juvenile moral reform was its focus on the dangers of vice
for young children and the ability of the Salvation Army to serve as a force to mitigate
the adverse effects of urban life for working-class children. The Salvation Army’s
efforts in the wake of the Hooligan suppers were designed around this credo—to act as
a civilizing force, but only in terms congruent with its proselytizing mission.
The Salvation Army increasingly advocated for enhanced state involvement and
intervention in the lives of working-class and impoverished Britons through increased
regulation of public behavior, including more punitive regulation of vagrancy. This was,
of course, another point where Salvationist ideology linked itself to social reform
discourse that extended well back into the nineteenth century.
389
In 1901, the Social
Gazette called for the “compulsory detention of the vagrant.”
390
Vagrant children were
a particular object of concern for Salvationists. Child vagrants, “loafers,” “casuals,”
and “child tramps” were viewed by the Salvation Army as one of the most serious
threats faced by Britain.
391
They were, as one article argued, the “wellspring of the
Hooligan.”
392

388
Arnold White, The Great Idea. London: The Salvation Army, 1909, 3.
389
Vagrancy was a point of emphasis in the Salvation Army’s first efforts at social rescue. The campaign
is developed in detail in Booth’s In Darkest England.
390
Social Gazette, 8 August 1901.
391
Ibid., 36.
392
Ibid. 37 As early as 1902, the Salvation Army had “co-ordinated information” on the subject with the
Home Office, although much of the evidence of this correspondence seems to be uni-directional in its
nature
150

One of the Salvationist projects to combat child and juvenile vagrancy was the
expansion of men’s homeless and ex-convict shelters in London to serve younger men
and vagrant boys. While the intended purpose of these shelters in London and
elsewhere was to serve as “halfway houses” for recently released prisoners as well as
temporary housing for transients, in the wake of the Hooligan crisis, the shelters served
as an important venue for community outreach. At the Blackfriar’s shelter, for
example, free breakfast services were developed in the mold of the Hooligan suppers of
1898.
393

The Salvation Army also expanded its efforts to found and develop workshops
as a way to return vagrants to work. The Men’s Workshop on Hanbury Street in
Whitechapel paid union wages and allowed young men living in the shelters the
opportunity to return to work in controlled environments in which Salvationists served
as supervisors.
394
The type of work varied, but most of it was limited to semi-skilled
repair work and fabrication. The workshops, like the shelters, functioned as another
venue for Salvationists to disseminate their message and act as models for the rest of the
community, becoming part of the physical profile of the city and affirming the image of
the Salvation Army as an agent for social progress in the slums of Britain. These
efforts, similar to the work of the Charity Organization Society before and during this
period, offered men an opportunity to earn a regular wage and engage in personal
reform. The Salvationist effort was, however, unique in the way it linked the shelters
and the workplace as a part of a more extensive environment of reform. By opening

393
H.Rider Haggard, Regeneration: Being an Account of the Social Work of the Salvation Army. London,
Salvation Army, 1910, 41.
394
Ibid., 65
151

these opportunities and tailoring elements of shelter life to younger men beginning in
1901, the Salvation Army furthered its commitment to targeting younger men that it
regarded as the most vulnerable to negative environmental influences as well as those
most likely to be reformed.
Crucial to the Salvation Army’s anti-vagrancy campaign was the strategic use of
its press outlets to disseminate cautionary narratives that stressed both the dangers of
the urban environment for children and reformability for fallen men and women.
395

Indeed, just as the Salvation Army sought to enact moral reform through shelters and
rescue homes, it also attempted to create—and perhaps fabricate—models of reformed
behavior among the “fallen.” The Salvation Army used its press outlets and its various
publications and pamphlets to present models of personal reform that illustrated the
power of Christianity as a method of moral uplift. Narratives of moral recovery
reaffirmed the goals of the Salvation Army and served as an argument for more
aggressive tactics to reach those in need. Stories of redemption also offered a way for
the Salvation Army to argue for the need to engage the sources of moral decline and
rescue those it perceived to be helpless, such as children, juveniles, and women.
One of the first and most comprehensive models of redemption that appeared in
the pages of the Social Gazette appeared in the November 12, 1898 issue. “Crow-bar
Jim: The Life-Story of an Ex-Hooligan,” depicted the criminal life of a young man who
descended into a life of crime only to redeem himself through the Salvation Army. In
the story, Jim described Hooligans as a “vicious class” of people with no regard for

395
Interestingly, the Salvation Army applies “fallen” not to refer specifically to women who had engaged
in acts such as prostitution, but to both men and women who had removed themselves from the influence
of Christianity and moral purity.
152

their victims. He discussed his career as a burglar, starting at the age of ten. According
to Jim, both of his parents drank heavily. Upon his first conviction, he spent six years
in a reformatory to no effect. He spent several years in prison and was flogged twice.
He blamed the “bohemianism” he had acquired from his parents for his descent into
crime, but credited the Salvation Army for rescuing him from a life of crime and
bringing him a “contented spirit.”
396
The story was accompanied by an image of a
shallow-faced man—presumably Jim—and a small etching of the street where Jim grew
up and began his life of crime.
397

The account of Crow-Bar Jim, along with the accompanying image of a
shallow-cheeked man with awkward posture presents both a snapshot of the juvenile
criminal culture that was typical of Hooligan accounts in both the Salvation Army press
and the popular press and a story of redemption. The story, while largely a celebratory
account of redemption through the effort of the Salvation Army, demonstrates the
model of Salvationist redemption by stressing the powerful impact of a negative
environment on a young boy; even a hardened criminal could be saved by accepting the
Salvationist message. What is absent from the story is how Jim came to be saved. In
Salvationist literature, the actual process of conversion is rarely discussed explicitly,
leaving it shrouded in mystery.
While men, as seen in the narrative of Crow-bar Jim, were often the focus of the
anti-vagrancy campaign and its various physical manifestations, young women were
also targets for reform. As with various groups that targeted “friendless” or “fallen”

396
Ibid.
397
The images of Jim and Jim’s neighborhood were probably fabrications. The key is that the images
struck a chord with the reader and were believable representations.
153

girls, the Salvation Army sought to bring “stray girls” back to a model of respectability
in behavior. The women’s social work committee of the Salvation Army visited police
courts, brothels, and public houses in an effort to “bring the churchless religion in the
streets.”
398
While the stated mission of the committee echoes that of the central
authority of the Salvation Army, the strategy and implementation of policy for women
demonstrates the gendered space of moral reform movements in their attitudes toward
vagrancy.
The 1900 annual report of the Women’s Social Work Committee of the
Salvation Army focused on vagrant girls and the expansion of existing rescue homes for
young women. By September 30, 1899, there were ten rescue homes for women in
London alone.
399
Rather than serving merely as a place for vagrant girls and women to
restart their lives, these spaces were intended as sites of protection from negative moral
influence and interpersonal violence. These rescue homes did not offer the same
intensive programs of moral instruction and labor opportunities offered at men’s
shelters, however. The report of the Women’s Social Work committee mentions only
bible study in its description of house activities designed to help women choose a
morally acceptable path. The intent of the homes was directed more to separating at-
risk women from violent and potentially dangerous social interactions. The report
illustrates that in both its physical manifestations and its philosophy, the social reform
efforts of the Salvation Army were designed to solidify rigid gender roles that valued
chastity and respectability for young women.

398
See especially the Salvation Army pamphlet “Wounded in the Warfare of Life: Being a Report of the
Annual Meeting of the Women’s Social Work of the Salvation Army,” London: Salvation Army, 1900.
399
Ibid.
154

In Salvationist accounts of working-class immorality, women were often cast as
hapless victims of male depravity and unscrupulous behavior. In an account of a
women’s meeting in south London during the last month of the Hooligan crisis, the
women who attended were described within the trope of the “fallen” woman.
The class of women who came to this meeting constitute one of the saddest
features of Hooliganism, the districts around Waterloo-road, Oakley-street, the
New Cut, and Stamford-street are infested by detestable Hooligan bullies who
live on the immoral earnings of fallen women. These women are not Hooligans
in the understood vulgar sense though their lives are spent in the land of
Hooligans.
400

When women were discussed by the Salvation Army’s press in the context of
Hooliganism, it was often as victims of domestic abuse, sometimes including forced
prostitution.
Cases have been known where a drunken dissolute husband has lived on his
wife’s immoral earnings. Some of the so-called heathen tribes in foreign
countries have not yet sunk as low in moral scale as thousands of white, pagan
savages in the slums of our great capital.
401

Women’s moral health was often depicted as a product of male influence, with the
motif of “being led down the primrose path” epitomizing the normative narrative
structure in Salvationist accounts. Gender played a crucial role in the development of
the Hooligan type. The “fallen” woman motif served to arouse fear over the state of
feminine virtue in working-class Britain. More importantly, it allowed the Salvation
Army to illustrate the need for material intervention in the “land of the Hooligan” and
attack the source of the failing moral health of women, which was the same cause of
problems for men: vice. Gender also played a crucial role in the way the message of
reform was communicated and the form and space in which that activity took place.

400
Social Gazette, 12 November 1898.
401
Ibid.
155

While women were active agents in the movement, their activity was funneled into
acting as models of feminine virtue rather than as active participants in moral uplift.
402

By 1904, the Salvation Army began to press the British government to establish,
staff, and maintain a central authority to combat vagrancy along the same lines as the
Lunacy Commission. They envisaged an agency that would treat vagrants in a similar
manner to those suffering from mental illness, including compulsory confinement and
imprisonment. The goal of this agency was simple: to stem the tide of vagrancy, but
more importantly, to prevent children from falling into vagrancy. Again, the possibility
of reforming children was crucial to the Salvation Army’s moral reform ideology.
Arnold White argued that “the Salvation Army has all the apparatus in readiness for
training the young trampling as a useful member of the community.”
403
White’s account
of the Salvation Army’s desire to collaborate with the police and the state to regulate
vagrancy formally was a plea to rescue children and reform them in a manner consistent
with the Salvationist’s great idea of evangelical uplift.
The material impact of the Salvation Army on the direction the state policy
towards vagrancy before 1906 is questionable. There is little evidence to suggest that
their campaign had any substantial impact on Conservative party attitudes towards
vagrancy. Still, the rhetoric employed in the Salvation Army’s early twentieth century
campaign against vagrancy—including references to vagrants as “primitives” and
“savages”—seems to be echoed in the internal discussions on vagrancy among Home
Office officials. This, of course, proves nothing other than to suggest that vagrancy—

402
The notable exception here is Catherine Booth, who privately wielded an exceptional amount of power
over the day to day operations of the Salvationist movement until her death.
403
Ibid, 45.
156
and particularly child and juvenile vagrancy—was an important social issue during this
period that was strongly tied to the language of degeneracy applied to Hooliganism.
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST DRINK

The Salvationist campaign against vagrancy was linked with its campaign
against juvenile alcohol consumption. The temperance movement had a long and
established history by the turn of the century. Indeed, the Salvation Army had been an
active campaigner for alcohol regulation from the inception of its social reform
activities in the 1880s. The Salvation Army had the most significant impact in the
juvenile temperance movement in its campaign to combat alcohol distribution and
consumption among children and juveniles. According to Arnold White’s account,
“15,000 Salvationists” carried the “great idea” into public houses on a weekly basis in
the early twentieth

century. While the temperance movement in Britain was, as a
whole, relatively unsuccessful in changing attitudes regarding drink, the Salvation
Army had a significant impact in affecting change by connecting the issue of alcohol
consumption with juvenile criminality.
The presence of the Salvation Army in the debate over juvenile alcohol
consumption was profound. The Salvation Army rarely did much to associate itself with
other movements, but it maintained some connection to the British temperance activists.
The London United Temperance Council, the NSPCC, and other such organizations,
shared the Army’s general attachment to social conservatism. Additionally, there was
some overlap of membership. Most importantly, there was a shared concern between
Salvationists and temperance activists over the role that distributors of alcohol—
publicans—played in the state of Britain’s children and juveniles, but that concern was
157

less directed towards juvenile consumption than to the effects of pub culture on children
and the impact of adult alcohol abuse on children.
Beginning in 1899, groups such as the NSPCC attacked intemperance as a root
cause of much of Britain’s child abuse, but did little to address alcohol abuse among
children.
404
The Church of England produced pamphlets on the evils of juvenile
drinking, but little beyond that to advocate for legal restrictions for juveniles. The
Salvation Army took a leadership role in the promotion of temperance among children
and juveniles. According to one report in the Social Gazette, on one Sunday in May
1900, “from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m., 237 children entered one public house for drink” in
south London.
405
The pub became a battleground for Salvationist in their efforts to
“rescue” working-class children. The Salvation Army proposed what it called “The
Children’s Charter.” The proposal demanded the increased regulation of alcohol sales as
well as penalizing public houses that sold alcohol to juveniles. The Charter argued
Every holder of a license who sells or delivers, or allows any person to sell or
deliver, any description of intoxicating liquors to any person apparently under
the age of sixteen years for consumption either on or of the premises shall be
liable for a penalty not exceeding forty shillings.
406

This was the basis of the Salvation Army’s preferred children’s temperance bill—a bill
that originated in the early 1890s but failed become law. The campaign included the
Army’s usual flair for the dramatic—cartoons depicting infants casually drinking at a
pub as if they were adults and long lists of why drink for children equated to one of the
great crises of the day.
407
The reasoning behind the need for legal regulation was

404
See especially R. Brimley Johnson, “The Child and Drink,” London: The London United Temperance
Council, 1901.
405
Social Gazette,10 May 1900.
406
Ibid.
407
Ibid. The cartoon might be the best example of the Salvation Army attempting to engage in social
satire.
158

simple. Time spent in public houses exposed children to drink and an adult culture that
endangered them. Aspects of pub culture, including “lewd profanity,” compromised the
innocence of the child. Allowing children to purchase alcohol for their parents—a
common practice at the time—exposed children to drink and made them more likely to
imbibe alcohol themselves.
The Social Gazette campaigned for the Children’s Temperance Bill through
allegorical tales of children’s lives destroyed by alcohol and pub culture. In a piece
titled “The Children of Rooks Court,” the story of Ben and his brother Jim’s
experiences in the public house with drink details the moral cost of juvenile alcohol
consumption. The boys frequent a pub and are “seldom at home,” choosing instead the
life of the “street Hooligan.”
408
The link between drink and Hooliganism—and
particularly Hooligans using pubs as bases of operation—were common tropes in the
first accounts of the Hooligan crisis, but now, the point of emphasis was reversed.
409

The stories of scandalous juvenile pub life that remained a regular feature of the Social
Gazette from the turn of the century through 1908 were appropriated by the larger
temperance movement. Groups like the London United Temperance Council
redistributed stories from the Social Gazette and War Cry! in an effort to keep their
membership tuned to the plight of juveniles.
410
While there is no evidence that the
Salvation Army approved of this tactic, what is significant here is the degree of

408
Social Gazette, 25 May 1900.
409
The link between pubs and Hooligans was also a commonplace element of popular press depictions of
Hooligan culture. It is also important to note that perhaps the most famous case of Hooligan violence—
the D’Arcy case—began when D’Arcy and his gang congregated in a pub.
410
The London United Temperance Council Minutes, August 1902, ACC/2201/M8/1, London
Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA)
159
am of
as “the nest.”
414

ideological overlap and collaboration among groups concerned with juvenile
temperance.
The images that came to be associated with the Salvation Army’s campaign
against child and juvenile alcohol distribution and consumption—toddlers carrying and
drinking from jugs of ale and beer from public houses—are immortalized in a series of
photographs that the Salvation Army published and sent to the Home Office.
411
The
images depict children—some little more than infants—carrying jugs of alcohol from
public houses along with bits of candy offered by publicans. These images were further
dramatized in stories and etchings in both the War Cry! and the Social Gazette.
The Salvation Army’s interest in the regulation of alcohol consumption also
extended to forms of recovery with the establishment of homes for inebriates, such as
the Hillsborough home in London, which was the first such Salvationist home.
412

These homes, run often in connection with the Army’s London Women’s institutions,
catered to both juveniles and adults, although facilities were carefully separated along
lines of age and gender.
413
H. Rider Haggard noted that these spaces allowed a safe
environment for individuals to recover and work within the Salvation Army progr
moral regeneration. Haggard also detailed plans for a new series of homes associated
with the Homes for inebriates that offered care and protection for the children of
alcoholics run on similar lines to orphanages. This proposed type of Salvation Army
home, which was planned but never built, was referred to simply

411
See HO 45/10114/B12127, TNA for the materials, including photos, sent by the Salvation Army to the
Home Office.
412
Haggard, 98. The Hillsborough home was able to house up to 30 patients.
413
Ibid., 72. While the Salvation Army was committed to separating juveniles from adults, I could find
no evidence that these homes specified an age at which children become adults.
414
Ibid., 110.
160

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST STREET GAMBLING
Another vice that was seen as a pervasive threat to the moral standing of
juveniles was street betting. As an institution, street betting was just as much a part of
working-class Victorian culture as public houses. Betting was “at the bottom of crime”
and betting inspired “fraud,” theft,” and “embezzlement.”
415
Betting—particularly
street betting—was regarded by moral reformers and government officials alike as a
crucial part of the environment that produced the Hooligan. Sir Albert DeRutzen,
Senior Magistrate at the Bow Street police court claimed “more mischief had been done
by betting—and by street-betting in particular—than by anything [else] he
remembered.”
416
Curtis Bennett, notable as one of the police court magistrates who
tried many of the cases of juvenile crime tied to the Hooligan crisis in 1898, thought
street betting encouraged “more crime than drink.”
417

According to anti-gambling crusaders, such as the Society for the Abolition of
Street Betting and Compulsory Registration of Bookmakers, one of the more serious
threats posed to children in urban Britain was the advent and proliferation of automatic
gambling machines.
418
The first automatic gambling machines were produced in San
Francisco in 1887 by Charles Fey as a novelty for saloons and taverns.
419
By the
beginning of the twentieth century, automated gambling machines to be found in a
variety of locations in Britain, including pubs and penny arcades. The April 28, 1902

415
Social Gazette, 8 March 1902. These are the terms used by the Gazette to describe the negative effects
of street gambling.
416
Social Gazette,11 January 1902.
417
Social Gazette, 26 October 1901.
418
Letter from Alfred Cox to Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 16 July 1906, HO
45/10302/117059, TNA. Automatic gambling machines would also be blamed for spikes in juvenile
crime during the First World War.
419
San Francisco Chronicle, 15 April 1887.
161
teacher.
n
alls,
th
oligan
om “s
d

edition of the Social Gazette saw automatic gambling machines as “a new social terror”
that victimized boys and led them to larceny and other criminal behavior.
420
These
“pernicious machines” with exotic names like “Tivoli” and “Five-Bar Gate” supposedly
targeted children “with rewards of sweets.”
421
The machines were seen as the cause of
one case involving three pre-teen boys accused of stealing ₤2/10 s. from their
422

The issue of automatic gambling machines was subsumed into a larger concern
about public forms of gambling. Just as with tobacco and alcohol, street gambling was
cast as a significant issue that had weight for juvenile moral health and was cited as a
adult cultural form that affected child development. The most significant danger to
children from gambling was its public nature; far from being isolated in gambling h
wagering and gambling existed in abundance in London’s working-class districts.
Accounts of Hooliganism from the summer of 1898 often associate gang activity wi
“street gambling” and “bookmaking” as a behavior that distinguished the Ho
fr treet Arabs” and other habitual criminals not associated with gangs.
The group that did the most to address the issue of juvenile street gambling was
the National Anti-Gambling League, which pressed Parliament to “suppress” the sprea
of street gambling.
423
As with many other types of criminal behavior, indictments for
offences related to gambling were in decline in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Street gambling was also associated with alcohol consumption and tobacco use among
juveniles. On May 10, 1904, Lord Davey introduced a Street Betting Bill which sought

420
Social Gazette, 28 April 1902.
421
Ibid.
422
Ibid.
423
Letter from the National Anti-gambling League to Lord Davey, 6 April 1904, HO 45/10302/117059,
TNA
162
ce the
uals

t was regarded as a negative moral influence.
THE A
to
of the

issue of juvenile tobacco use had become an important element of attempts to reform

to make illegal any and all betting “in any street, public park, or garden, or any pla
public have unrestricted access, or any house licensed for the sale of intoxicating
liquors” carrying a fine “not to exceed ten pounds” on the first offence.
424
The Bill
passed in 1906 after the Liberal Party came to power as part of the wave of reform
legislation between 1906 and 1909. While the Street Betting Act of 1906 did little to
address children explicitly other than recommending separate treatment of individ
under 16 caught in possession of gambling implements, the intent of the bill—to
regulate where and when gambling took place in Britain—was concerned with
protecting children from exposure to wha
NTI-TOBACCO CAMPAIGN
As early as 1901, the Salvation Army called for an “anti-smoking crusade”
stamp out youth smoking which they claimed “walks hand-in-hand with criminal
behaviour.”
425
Unlike the temperance movement, which had long been a force in British
politics, the anti-tobacco movement rose to prominence in the wake of the Report
Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904. Indeed, while
juvenile smoking had been condemned as a behavior “bordering on insanity” by moral
reform groups, it did not become part of the popular dialogue on juvenile delinquency
until 1904 with the findings of the committee were published.
426
The appointment in
1906 of the House of Lords Select Committee on Juvenile Smoking signaled that the

424
Draft Copy, Street Betting Bill, 10 May 1904, HO 45/10302/117059, TNA.
425
Social Gazette, 8 February 1901. Discourse on the medical dangers of smoking was extensive before
the twentieth century. Modern medical discourse on the dangers of smoking began with a piece titled
"The Great Tobacco Question" which appeared in the Lancet in 1857.
426
Social Gazette, 22 March 1902. Anti-smoking campaigns existed in the late nineteenth century as
well, but never achieved the same level of popular attention as the temperance movement.
163

juvenile behavior. The findings of the Select Committee would serve as the basis for
restrictions on tobacco use and sales incorporated into the Children’s Act of 1908.
Among the most active groups in the campaign against juvenile tobacco use was
the Humanitarian League, whose Criminal Law Prison Reform Committee advocated
for legal restrictions on juvenile smoking, and the International Anti-Cigarette League
(IACL) agitated for legal restrictions on tobacco use in Britain and abroad.
427
The
Howard Association, which had been an active advocate for prison reform for juveniles,
petitioned the Home Office to respond to the findings of the Inter-Departmental
Committee, citing juvenile smoking as one cause of physical deterioration. Much of the
campaign to limit or eliminate juvenile smoking was linked to physical rather than
moral health, representing a clear departure from other campaigns against juvenile vice.
Medical and pseudo-medical language formed the rhetorical base of the
campaign against juvenile smoking.
428
The National Hygienic League’s attack on
juvenile smoking offers a compelling example. The league used pamphlets written by
“prominent medical men.” Dr. J.Q.A. Henry’s “The Deadly Cigarette; or, the Perils of
Juvenile Smoking” linked the medical harm of child tobacco-use with commentary
written by Reverend F.B. Meyer which depicted smoking as evidence of moral
failure.
429
Other pamphlets offered commentary from noted doctors and academics,

427
Letter to Hebert Samuel from the Humanitarian League 4 November 1907, HO 45/10319/127693,
TNA. The Humanitarian League was also concerned that birching might be assigned to individuals who
were caught smoking in public. For the international campaign, see especially John Welshman, “Images
of Youth: The Issue of Juvenile Smoking, 1880-1914,” Addiction 91, no. 1 (2006), 1379-1386.
Welshman offers perhaps the best history of the International Anti-Tobacco League and its relationship to
the development of legal restrictions on juvenile tobacco use.
428
See especially Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830, 2
nd

Edition. London: Routledge, 2000.
429
“The Deadly Cigarette, or the Perils of Juvenile Smoking,” National Hygienic League, London, 1904,
HO 45/10319/127693, TNA.
164

such as Professor G. Sims Woodhead of Cambridge University to add legitimacy to
their claims that juvenile use of tobacco represented a grave health risk to Britain. The
Hygienic League found noted public figures and professionals—and in the case of
Woodhead, an important voice in campaigns for preventive medicine and mass
inoculation—to add scientific legitimacy to claims regarding the moral and physical
dangers of tobacco use among children and juveniles. The Hygienic League pamphlets
also offered various instructional supplies, including wall charts, to accompany its
pamphlets as demonstration tools to instruct juveniles on the evils of smoking and to
claim that its campaign was based in scientific certainty.
The pamphlets issued by the National Hygienic League were filled with etchings
that dramatized the effect of smoking on juvenile boys. As part of its “Applied
Physiology Series,” the League’s “Whiffs for Our Boys” pamphlet offered images of a
boy smoking “his first” cigarette on its cover alongside images of young boys finding a
careless parent’s tobacco, partaking in the “forbidden fruit,” and growing ill from the
tobacco. These images, presented as panels, develop a secondary narrative about the
dangers of having tobacco in the home. Another image shows the progression of a small
boy smoking and his transformation into a smoke stack with the title “Boys! Beware! A
Study in Evolution.” The pamphlets also often included songs and poems targeted at
young boys in an effort to dissuade them from smoking.
430
These pamphlets, almost
universally directed toward boys, linked physical health with national health and
strength. The problem of juvenile smoking, unlike alcohol, was seen as a problem
exclusive to young boys, so the materials were tilted towards a discussion of smoking as

430
“Whiffs for Our Boys,” National Hygienic League, London, 1905, HO 45/10319/127693, TNA. One
song included in “Whiffs for Our Boys” is called “A Boy is not a Chimney, Sir!”
165

an affliction that harmed normative masculinity by addressing the perception that
smoking weakened boys and threatened their progression toward manhood.
“Whiffs for Our Boys” also included quotations from prominent officers and
former officers of the army and navy attacking smoking as a danger to the health of the
nation and the ability of the nation to defend itself. One of the most prominent retired
military officers enlisted to support the National Hygienic League’s juvenile anti-
smoking campaign was Lord Roberts, who offered his own commentary on the fitness
of his troops in the Boer War.
431
Roberts, who was active in his later years in promoting
national physical fitness and the military training of civilians, notes that of 11,000 men
who volunteered in Manchester in 1901 for the war, only 1,000 were accepted into
service. According to Roberts, many of the men rejected as unfit for service suffered
from ailments attributed to “smoking while immature,” including “defective vision,
disease of heart, or loss or decay of teeth.”
432
Roberts claimed that average height in
Britain had decreased since the beginning of the nineteenth century by “3in. or 4in,” a
‘fact’ that he associated with youthful tobacco use.
433

In the same pamphlet, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford attacked juvenile
smoking as evidence of moral failure and as a contributor to the decline in the health of
British children, including ailments such as poor eyesight and lack of saliva.
Beresford’s commentary linked the health risks of juvenile smoking with moral decay
to suggest that Britain was weakened and substantially harmed by smoking. He cites an
undated passage from the Times that states,

431
Ibid.
432
Ibid.
433
Ibid.
166

Smoking leads to a lazy tolerance of evil, begetting a certain flabbiness of
character, a fear of responsibility, a shiftiness of purpose, characteristics which
have of late years come into unpleasant prominence in the arena of public life.
434

The National Hygienic League’s rhetoric, evident in commentaries by Lord Roberts and
Lord Beresford, attempted to create a substantive link between juvenile smoking and
the decline of moral and medical health.
Other groups, such as the British Anti-Tobacco and Anti-Narcotic League, made
direct appeals to the state to address the need for legislation to regulate tobacco use and
sale to juveniles. The British Anti-Tobacco and Anti-Narcotic League used its journal,
the Beacon Light and Anti-Tobacco Journal, to attack “the curse of the cigarette.”
435

With articles such as “Tobacco as Child Slaughterer,” the Beacon Light campaigned
against tobacco as a threat to the moral and physical health of the British public in a
way similar to the Salvation Army’s Social Gazette campaign against juvenile alcohol
abuse. Both hoped to spur governmental action and legislation to regulate juvenile
exposure to vice. The British Anti-Tobacco and Anti-Narcotic League came to be
closely tied to the 1906 Select Committee on Juvenile Smoking and actively petitioned
the Home Office for increased attention to the issue.
The British Anti-Tobacco and Anti-Narcotic League also organized rallies in
London. One such rally on July 16, 1906, included a 40 yard-long cigarette with the
word “graveyard” written along one side.
436
The gigantic cigarette was used to
represent “the total of 100,000,000 cigarettes sold in penny packets and smoked weekly
in the United Kingdom…very many of these, probably more than half, are purchased by

434
Ibid.
435
Beacon Light and Anti-Tobacco Journal, August 1906.
436
Ibid.
167

juvenile smokers.”
437
Penny packets were cited as one of the roots of the juvenile
smoking problem, as they allowed even poor juveniles ample opportunity to partake in
tobacco use. The British Lads Anti-smoking Union, a small organization based in
London, attacked the cigarette industry—and particularly the American cigarette
industry—for marketing its product directly to children in its testimony before the 1906
House of Lords Select Committee on Juvenile Smoking, which garnered significant
press attention in both Britain and the United States.
438

The British Lads Anti-smoking Union offered membership to young boys who
promised to “abstain from smoking, from intoxicating drink, from gambling, and from
bad language.”
439
The impact of these groups was minimal, but they represent a clear
overlap of various campaigns concerned with rescuing children from vice in first years
of the twentieth century. The British Lads Anti Smoking Union literature, like many
elements of the moral reform movement, focused on the impact of vice on the racial
health of Britain, emphasizing a definitive link between environmental stimuli—in this
case tobacco use—and changes in the nature of the “British race.”
While the appropriation of degeneration theory was certainly not a new
development for moral reformers, the focus on the “physiological action of nicotine”
offers a unique critique of vice not as evidence, but rather as a cause of degeneration.
440

This peculiar commentary applied ‘medical’ data, including sphygmographic tracings of
pulse rates to illustrate the ill effects of tobacco on the cardiovascular system,

437
Ibid.
438
New York Times, 3 July 1906. The story “Worse than Chicago Meat” provides an account of
committee testimony that includes some of the health claims made by moral reform organizations.
439
British Ant-Smoking Union, Letter to Herbert Gladstone, MP, 10 October 1908, HO
45/10319/127693, TNA
440
Tobacco and the Rising Race, British Lads Anti-smoking Union, London, 1905, HO
45/10319/127693, TNA.
168

dramatizing the long-term implications of tobacco use. Tobacco use was linked with
various forms of physical deterioration in ways similar to “improper feeding, unhealthy
housing, [and] insufficient parental care.”
441
What is apparent from these pamphlets is
that much, if not all of the data presented, were anecdotal in nature and often failed to
cite specific studies. The point of these publications was not to present scientific
studies, but rather to shock the reader and arouse concern over the status of racial
health.
442

By early 1906, the anti-tobacco movement finally saw some evidence of
governmental action with the introduction of the juvenile smoking bill based on the
findings of the House of Lords Select Committee. The Bill sought to regulate where and
how tobacco products were sold, including limiting tobacco sales and/or delineating a
legal age for distribution.
443
While the language of the bill was vague, its intent was to
eliminate the presence of tobacco in places like sweet shops frequented by children.
The bill’s introductory memorandum states that it was “designed to carry out the
unanimous recommendations of the Physical Deterioration Committee,” but Home
Office records suggest that the force behind the bill was the persistence of “one or two
of the anti-smoking leagues.”
444
The bill did not punish the child, as earlier proposed
legislation had done, but instead fined shops or individuals ₤1for the first offence of
selling to minors and ₤2 for the second offence. At the suggestion of the British Lads
Anti Smoking Union, the bill’s language and content closely mirrored legislation that

441
Ibid.
442
The ideas presented in these pamphlets were occasionally restated in press accounts, including one
notable example in the Glasgow Herald, which quotes the British Lads Anti-smoking Union that there
was definitive proof of physical deterioration due to juvenile tobacco use.
443
Draft, 1906 Juvenile Smoking Bill, HO 45/10319/127693, TNA.
444
Notes on Draft Copy, Juvenile Smoking Bill, 1906, HO 45/10319/127693, TNA.
169
.

had appeared in many states in America.
445
While the anti-smoking bill failed to pass
in 1906, elements of the legislation were part of the deliberations of the Children’s Act
of 1908
DEGENERATE CHIDLREN: DEGENERATION AND SALVATION
While the campaigns against drink, tobacco, and street gambling among
juveniles were different in their specific methodology and goals, they were linked
together in a tapestry of moral reforms that targeted the physical and moral health of
children and juveniles during the first years of the twentieth century. Indeed, while
many of the ideas they promoted were based in nineteenth century social theory, what
made their contribution unique was the synergy they achieved beginning in late 1890s.
The concern over moral and physical health was linked to fears that had been aroused
prominently during the Hooligan crisis—that many working-class British children
engaged in behavior that was “depraved” and existed without positive moral influences.
The groups that best represented this model were the press outlets of the Salvation
Army, whose sensational stories of out-of-control youth gambling, drinking, and
tobacco use were used to suggest that children from impoverished regions of urban
Britain were held captive by vice.
446

Of the stories of extreme juvenile violence and immoral—even amoral—
behavior, few were more horrific than the Stockton baby murder case. The case

445
Beacon Light and Anti-Tobacco Journal, January 1904. Notes and references to the Beacon Light and
Anti-Tobacco Journal are included in HO 45/10319/127693, TNA.
446
Social Gazette, 20 June 1903. The Social Gazette often used sensational stories to help demonstrate
how their various social policies would benefit the whole of British society. One story discusses a 10 year
old boy who buried his baby brother alive and attempted to “run away” with another baby a week later.
Another story in the same edition details a story of three boys, ages 5, 6, and 10, drowning a 3 year old.
These accounts, never substantiated in other press outlets, were representative of the Social Gazette’s
reporting on juvenile crime during the period.
170

centered on a boy named Patrick Knowles, 8, who was charged with murdering a baby
by burying her alive. Rather than stand trial, Knowles was sent to Broadmoor Criminal
Lunatic Asylum.
447
The Knowles case was by no means a representative case of child
crime, but for the Social Gazette, it proved that children remained in poor moral health
in Britain. The Social Gazette linked the Knowles case with concerns over home
background and joined it with stories about children’s physical health and the damage
caused by negative moral influences, including the “pernicious” threat of gambling, the
damage caused by youth use of tobacco, and the easy access children had to alcohol.
At the root of Salvationist concerns over the moral and physical health of British
children was the notion that such weaknesses equated to degeneration. The Salvation
Army reprinted a report by the School Board for London in July 1903 in the Social
Gazette suggesting that Britain “might be raising a race of degenerates.” According to
the report, ten percent of British children had defective eyesight, affecting their ability
to work. In addition, over one percent had infections of the ears severe enough to be
regarded as potentially life-threatening. Some children lived in “such a state of filth
that they could not be examined.”
448
According to the report, “there are so many feeble-
minded children that special classes have been opened for them in sixty-one centres.”
449

The Salvation Army’s concern over physical and moral degeneration was linked
to the conditions of the British family, which it regarded as an endangered institution.
The January 16, 1904 edition of the Social Gazette discussed the influence of family
size on the physical and moral health of working-class Britain, stating that “the poor

447
Social Gazette, 22 July 1903.
448
Report of the School Board for London, July 1903.
449
Ibid.
171

typically have families that are far too large” creating conditions where “the health and
morals of the children suffer, and the race degenerates.”
450
For the Army, the dire
condition of the British family—particularly among working-class Britons—was a
central factor in what it regarded as a decline in moral health precisely because the
family represented the best venue for moral and religious instruction and the first line of
defense against negative social and environmental stimuli. For Salvationists, it was not
that some families were providing inadequate moral instruction; it was that they were
providing no moral instruction, which amplified the negative effects of the working-
class environment.
By early 1907, the Salvation Army had incorporated concerns over physical
degeneration into its moral reform campaign. Beginning early in the decade, the
Salvation Army developed a plan to install “children’s institutes” in major population
centers designed to help develop positive moral and physical health in British children
and juveniles in response to concerns over physical and moral degeneration. At the
opening of the Young People’s Institution in Glasgow in 1907, the Salvation Army
released a statement that outlined this concern.
Nothing strikes a visitor to our shores as much as the painful signs of physical
degeneracy noticeable in many of young people of the working-class (sic) who
live in our largest centres of population. The unhealthy environment of the
factory and unhygienic conditions of so many homes invariably react upon the
children, stunting the growth of the body and mind. There is another class who,
while their surroundings are much better, are still subjected to special and subtle
temptations, and who have no opportunity either for healthy recreation or mental
culture. There is still a third class that are neglected by their parents, and
allowed to roam the streets, where they form habits that are ruinous to body and
mind alike.
451

450
Social Gazette, 16 January 1904.
451
Social Gazette, 11 May 1907.
172
CONCLUSION
This chapter has focused on the development of moral reform ideology
developed in response to a perceived crisis in the moral and physical health of Britain’s
youth beginning with the Hooligan crisis of 1898. Although moral reformers made
attempts to address juvenile delinquency and criminality through a variety of methods
outside the scope of the state, ultimately their focus fell upon changing the way in
which the government defined and understood who was a juvenile and who could be
“saved.” Determining and defining childhood—as well as who could be reformed and
who could not—became the most significant intellectual hurdle for these groups and for
the state as they sought to cast off the shackles of Victorian notions of a criminal class
and replace it with a model that stressed the influence of environment, shared
experience, and reformability for juveniles. This is not to say that there was any sort of
harmony in their beliefs or approaches in this period, but rather that both moral
reformers and the state shared the goal of addressing what was regarded as a significant
social problem.
This chapter has focused on the rhetoric and ideas of a variety of organizations
concerned with juvenile morality, but what remains clear is the significant role played
by the Salvation Army between 1898 and 1905. While a variety of groups worked on
particular issues involving juvenile delinquency, no one group had a greater impact on
the discourse of juvenile moral reform in this period than the Salvation Army. What
makes them important and distinctive was the sheer size and synthetic nature of their
rhetoric. Unlike groups that focused on a single issue, such as tobacco or gambling, the
Salvation Army took elements from other organizations and recast them through their
173
media apparatus. The Salvation Army also had a significant influence by helping to
“Christianize” the rhetoric of reform, a motif that would have a lasting impact on the
club movement in the early twentieth century. While a wide variety of groups
concerned themselves with “curing the Hooligan,” few encapsulated the culture of
moral reform in a totalizing mission more completely than the Salvation Army. Its
media organization served as an important source for smaller movements attacking
juvenile vice, and its ability to mobilize its membership was more effective in arousing
governmental interest than among smaller, more issue-specific movements.
The Army’s ability to direct publicity through their publications, and their
popularity in urban centers, made them the most effective vehicle for moral reform
discourse. From the moment of its intervention in the Hooligan crisis in 1898 up
through the emergence of the Liberal party’s reform agenda, The Salvation Army was
the dominant voice in moral reform discourse. Its access to a large constituency allowed
it to wield influence in both the civic arena and government itself. It was a political
actor in ways that smaller, single-issue groups were not. It could campaign more
effectively for reform at the state level than groups like the British Anti-tobacco and
Narcotics Association. It was, however, also the limit of the Army’s influence. The
Salvation Army failed to match its rhetoric with the same level of institutional efforts at
reform, thus limiting their impact on the development of institutional strategies for
individual reform.
The Salvation Army’s campaigns were certainly not the only ones to focus on
the moral and physical health of British children. Concerns about criminal deviance and
vice were part of a larger discourse by moral reformers in this period regarding
174
concerns over the physical and moral health of British children and juveniles. The
rhetoric of moral reformers in this period suggests that fears over the fate of Britain’s
juveniles, spurred at least in part by the Hooligan crisis, served as an important force for
change. Groups like the Howard Association also became notable in this period for their
advocacy of structural reform for juvenile justice institutions—a directive that would
prove significant later in the decade with the advancement of new protective juvenile
legislation. As we will see, the Howard Association, in addition to its support of club-
based community intervention, actively campaigned for juvenile prison reform and
separate courts for children, representing a central force for juvenile justice reform.
The rhetoric and style of its anti-vagrancy campaign in the early twentieth
century informed moral reform discourse in this period and provided the loudest voice
for action on behalf of and for children and juveniles. It was a logical extension of the
Hooligan moral panic as it connected the same fears aroused by Hooliganism to existing
concerns regarding the status of British youth. More importantly, its combination of
community outreach and self-funded media outlets helped to keep the image of the
Hooligan as an object of public concern and as a symbol of British degeneration. The
Hooligan remained an important symbol through the first years of the twentieth century
as a symbol of a broken system.
The importance of the campaigns against juvenile vagrancy and vice was that
they established the direction of material reform, from the growth of the club movement
and voluntary associations such as the Boy Scouts and the Boys’ Brigade, to efforts to
change the way prisons dealt with youthful offenders. These efforts helped to drive the
reform of school curricula to reflect a more dedicated form of moral instruction. The
175
Salvation Army played a crucial role, through the application of its media apparatus, in
fomenting these campaigns and helping to forge consensus that Britain was indeed
suffering from a moral crisis.
Where the influence of the Salvation Army was limited during this period was
the area of moral reform that proved to be the most significant in the development of
state strategies to engage juvenile delinquency: institutional reform. While the Salvation
Army made its own overtures in developing institutional responses to the problems it
identified, its efforts were largely irrelevant in this period. Thus, the narrative of the
Salvation Army’s role in moral reform campaigns is by-and-large a story of ideology
rather than institutional change.

176
Chapter 5

The Great Boy (and Girl) Question:
Institutions of Moral Reform, 1900-1908
This chapter addresses attempts by moral reform groups to use institutional
solutions to solve the perceived problem of juvenile delinquency in the first decade of
the twentieth century. On a fundamental level, these efforts amounted to an attempt to
change the culture of children and juveniles in Britain. This chapter will discuss
attempts at such reform, ranging from the development and expansion of voluntary
organizations for boys, such as the Boy Scouts and the Boys’ Brigade to the push for
working-class children’s clubs to take a more significant role in moral instruction
The most significant campaign for institutional reform of this period was
spearheaded by the Howard Association, which sought to change the culture and nature
of juvenile incarceration by fundamentally redefining the legal concept of childhood
and the value that designation held within penal culture. Following the model
established by several cities and states in the United States, the Howard Association
campaigned for a separate juvenile justice system and promoted a new scheme that
would recognize a significant difference between children, juveniles—known as
juvenile-adults—and adult offenders. The juvenile-adult designation, which would
factor most prominently in the development of the Borstal system, allowed for young
men and women no longer recognized as juveniles to receive special treatment and
opportunities to pursue a program of personal reform within the penal system. The
Howard Association’s campaign, which brought together many of the sentiments that
emerged after 1898, became the basis for governmental reform initiated by the Liberal
177

Party under Herbert Gladstone, Herbert Samuel, and Henry Campbell-Bannerman after
the Liberal victory of 1906.
The early twentieth century also saw a significant rise in the development of
clubs and voluntary extracurricular institutions to serve the juvenile community as
venues for moral instruction. The club movement, which was an important part of
nineteenth century efforts by social reformers, again came into vogue as a way to
engage children—particularly young boys—and offer a site where moral lessons could
be reinforced alongside games and athletic competitions, resembling Arnoldian notions
of raising affluent young men.. However, positive moral instruction in clubs addressed
only part of the agenda of moral reformers in the wake of the Hooligan crisis. The
concern shared by many moral reform groups and individual agents in the wake of the
Hooligan crisis was, as we have already seen, largely about the space working-class
juveniles inhabited.
While there was a significant decline after1898 in press accounts of juvenile
criminality, accounts of children—particularly male children—undermining moral and
civil codes of behavior remained common. Stories in newspapers like the Daily Mail
on the “Boy Pirates of Wapping” and “The Boy was Master” preserved and maintained
themes of moral deterioration and the undermining of basic codes of power and
authority within British society.
452
The solution offered by some moral reformers was a
commitment to reform such institutions as schools, courts, and prisons, to afford
juveniles exposure to positive models of moral behavior and protect them from

452
Daily Mail, 5 September 1901; 3 October 1901. Both stories involved crimes committed by children
where adults were victims. Stories like these, which were common during the Hooligan crisis, played
upon fears that child crime represented the most significant breakdown of authority in British society by
showing the failure of adults to contain the behavior of children. The latter story depicts a 10 year old
boy who was reportedly completely “incorrigible” and beyond the control of his parents.
178

influences widely seen to be deleterious. From 1900 to 1908, various groups and agents,
informed and empowered by the moral reform rhetoric of the period, developed specific
institutional responses to juvenile delinquency. These non-governmental institutional
responses, which combined civic and state-sponsored experiments in institutional
change, set the stage for meaningful changes in governmental policy.
453

MORAL INSTRUCTION AND PRISON REFORM
Schemes for institutional reform—and particularly the reform of children and
juveniles—were firmly entrenched in British social activism from the middle of the
nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, children and juveniles were
increasingly seen as a morally “at-risk” group. Institutional efforts explicitly stressed
morality over socialization as the goal of their efforts, often tailoring existing programs
to better suit this aim. This often took the form of classes, group meetings, and lectures
in closely-managed sites such as clubs that stressed adherence to moral codes and civil
behavior. The first and most apparent institutional target for moral reformers was the
development and expansion of various systems of moral instruction for children and
juveniles in schools, prisons, and clubs.
Why did British social and moral reformers look to extra-parliamentary
institutional reform as a solution to the problem of juvenile deviance? The most direct
answer can be seen in the failure of the Conservative government to design effective
legislation addressing the causes of juvenile delinquency. Such apparent failures, which

453
For more on the origins and role of local officials in the development of the special juvenile court in
Birmingham, see HO 45/10311/123946, TNA. The special juvenile offender’s court began in
Birmingham largely as an experiment fostered by enthusiastic local officials and spread to Manchester,
Cork, and Bury by 1905. While this dissertation is concerned with the origins of the national mandate for
such courts, their origin was restricted to local jurisdictions prior to 1908. It is important to note the
distinction made here between non-governmental action, local government action, and finally state action
and that non-governmental institutions prompted first local governments and finally the state into action.
179

stressed reforming regimes of punishment over establishing systems of personal reform
and prevention, compelled moral reformers to enhance their efforts for institutional
change outside of the state.
454
However, the issue is far more complicated. The agenda
that moral reformers pursued in the wake of the Hooligan crisis was largely a
continuation of policies developed in the late Victorian period that emphasized a rigid
model of Christian manliness as a template for individual development.
Calls for educational reform in the early twentieth century borrowed much from
late Victorian educational reform efforts, beginning with the passage of the 1870
Education Act. The Education Act was a crucial step in the history of compulsory and
standardized education in Britain, but it did little to resolve what role schools would
play in shaping moral standards. Furthermore, little was done after the passage of the
Act to encourage diligence in the continued evolution of the British educational system
in the area of moral instruction from1870 to 1903
455
The move to standardize and
Christianize moral instruction in schools, reformatories, and prisons would become a
central aspect of educational reform and would contribute to important developments in
the administration of juvenile justice, such as the formation and expansion of the
Borstal system after 1903.
Initially, moral instruction reform was focused on prison education and
reformatories. The movement to reform prisons itself has a long and complicated

454
See especially correspondence between the Howard Association and the Home Office regarding the
bill, HO 45/10503/125632, TNA. While much of the debate on the Act centered on the so-called
“whipping clause,” prison reform organizations such as the Howard Association remained concerned with
how children and juveniles were treated by the justice system while in custody and how their experience
would help them to avoid criminal behavior in the future.
455
This point is one of the more peculiar aspects of British educational history and demands further
research. The lack of continued educational reform on the state level might be simply a product of local
and regional authorities taking most of the initiative to tailor education to their local conditions.
180

history. What is crucial to delineate is when and how the prison reform movement of
the 1890s, following a Benthamite model, directed efforts to focus on moral instruction
as a means to personal reform. Much of the discourse on the utility of moral instruction
in the Victorian period saw prisons as the principal sites of personal reformation. This is
significant as post-1898 models for reform outside of prison sites applied much of the
rhetoric and strategies employed by prison reformers to agitate for change in British
juvenile institutions.
By the 1890s, there was increased governmental interest in which educational
tactics might be applied to help reform the moral stature of prisoners. As a whole,
British prisons offered little in the way of moral instruction. The 1896 report of the
Departmental Committee on the Education and Moral Instruction of Prisoners in Local
and Convict Prisons examined how moral reform was carried out in the prison system
and what could be done to aid reform efforts. In particular, the report was concerned
with the nature and extent of educational opportunities for juveniles and young adult
prisoners. The report, which was a response to the Prison Committee’s findings from
the previous year that educational opportunities in British prisons were plagued by
inadequate administration and irregular standards, did little to spur Ridley’s Home
Office into activity, but it did establish a great deal about the nature and effectiveness of
moral instruction in the British penal system.
456

The report examined the state of moral instruction for juvenile and young adult
prisoners, including the role played by prison schoolmasters. It also investigated the
availability of educational materials considered necessary for teaching moral standards.

456
Some of the ideological reasons for why Ridley’s Home Office failed to act effectively on the various
reports on prison conditions conducted during its tenure have already been examined in Chapter 3.
181

The report concluded that no substantial apparatus for moral instruction existed at the
majority of British prisons. The report reveals that the responsibility for moral
instruction fell mostly on each prison’s chaplain, who supervised the prison
schoolmaster—if one existed—and helped facilitate a collection development plan to
supply classes with appropriate educational material.
457
The report recommended that
prisons be mandated to offer a uniform system of moral education, although it failed to
establish guidelines for this mandate.
Opportunities for education in prison varied, but the report revealed that access
to educational opportunities—even in the best of circumstances—was severely limited.
In prisons with a schoolmaster, such as Pentonville Prison, his duties were confined to
distributing books and keeping the prison library in order.
458
Each cell was furnished
with a Bible and prayer book as part of the “cell equipment,” but prisoners rarely
enjoyed regular, dedicated instruction time.
459
Prisoners at prisons without a
schoolmaster, such as Oxford Prison, were supplied with standard moral instructional
texts, such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, as well as texts on hygiene and cleanliness.
These efforts were supervised by the prison chaplain, who was not required to offer any
instruction whatsoever beyond religious services. The report fails to mention how
prison officials measured prisoner literacy or if a system of testing even existed.
Based on the evidence provided in the report, the difficulties experienced in
providing moral instruction in British prisons were mostly logistical and financial.
Prison governors did not want their staff to incur additional duties. The ability to

457
Minutes of Evidence, Report of the Departmental Committee on the Education and Moral Instruction
of Prisoners in Local and Convict Prisons, 13 February 1896, HO 45/10026/A56902B, TNA, 4.
458
Ibid., 6. Of the prisons surveyed for the report, Oxford Prison had the largest library with 153 books.
459
Ibid., 13.
182

acquire appropriate materials for moral instruction was also limited. Finding space to
establish permanent classrooms, particularly in the older prisons, was difficult and often
regarded as a “nuisance” to the regular operation of the prison.
460
Some prisons, such
as Pentonville, had some form of instruction, but did not make improvements to the
system a priority, preferring instead “to deal with the men individually.”
461
Some prison
chaplains, such as O.F. Pigot of Wandsworth Prison, complained that while prisoners
benefited from instruction offered on alternating Saturdays, the overall religious
standard was “miserably low.”
462
This complaint was common in the report. The lack
of provisions for instruction at British prisons in the case of both juvenile and adult
prisoners was an important aspect of the prison reform campaign a decade later.
Equally troubling for prison reform groups such as the Howard Association was the
apparent lack of uniformity among prisons, in educational opportunities, but also more
generally in the allocation of space and staff for personal reform and education.
Offering educational opportunities—moral and otherwise—was fraught with
difficulties. One significant problem was a severe disparity of ability among prisoners.
According to a survey conducted in association with the Prison Commission’s report,
22.15 percent of the 151,462 prisoners surveyed lacked any reading or writing skills,
while 75.04 percent had limited literacy.
463
Only 2.78 percent of the prison population
could read and write well. This left the commission to question whether a standardized
plan for moral instruction could work given the lack of basic skills among the vast

460
Ibid.
461
Ibid.
462
Ibid., 36.
463
Ibid.
183

majority of prisoners.
464
The conclusion was to offer, where possible, individualized
instruction in the cells of prisoners tailored to the given abilities of each student. The
problems presented by existing penal institutions presented prison reform advocates
with a significant challenge, as most prisons were already limited by their physical plant
and their budget. More importantly, because the prison population was only marginally
literate, the problem of instituting a comprehensive system of moral instruction would
rely on developing a more hands-on approach to instruction beyond simply providing
for appropriate literature.
The 1896 Report of the Departmental committee on the Education and Moral
Instruction of Prisoners in Local and Convict Prisons had a significant impact as a
source of ammunition for penal reformers and as an important look into the state of
prisons in the late nineteenth century. While the report was not directed exclusively at
the problem of juveniles in prisons, many of the problems addressed directly referenced
the problems faced by children, juveniles, and young adults in prison. The report
highlights two important issues. The first was that there were already concerns about
the moral instruction of criminals as a means to achieve personal reform. The second,
and more important, problem was that there was no single standard of practice or policy
regarding moral instruction. Moral instruction was largely up to the initiative of the
prison chaplain and the ability of the prison to accommodate teaching sessions
physically and fiscally. As one member of the commission, William Tallack,
concluded, education was the “weakest part” of the prison system and the failure of

464
Ibid.
184

prisons to provide compulsory moral instruction hindered the effectiveness of prisons as
sites of reformation.
465

One important result of the findings of the report was the establishment of the
Prisoner’s Education Committee in 1897, which in later incarnations would create and
facilitate standardized testing for both short-term and long-term prisoners, and provide
specific resources for juveniles. By January 1898, the committee directed the Prison
Department to request from the Home Office funding for hiring additional
schoolmasters and warders to provide for daily instruction of juvenile prisoners in their
cells.
466

EDUCATIONAL REFORM: THE CASE OF LONDON
While moral instruction in prisons was a different matter than moral instruction
in schools, the system designed by the Prisoner’s Education Committee bore a striking
resemblance to reforms made in council schools beginning in 1903. Education was
viewed as a privilege by prisoners interviewed for the report in part because prisoners
during this period were required to dedicate much of their day to hard labor in
accordance with the Prison Act of 1865.
467
As we have already seen, the Prison
Commission, and its subcommittees had a powerful impact on Home Office policy both
in explicit and implicit ways. Educational reform efforts, both by moral reformers and
by the state, represented a significant part of institutional reform efforts in this period.
Education, like other institutional efforts, stressed preventative measures rather than

465
Ibid. Tallack was a prominent member of the Howard Association’s leadership structure during the
early twentieth century.
466
Letter to the Undersecretary of State from the Prison Commission, 10 January 1898, HO
45/10026/A56902B, TNA.
467
Prison Act (1865), Rule 53, Schedule I.
185

punitive strategies to promote moral behavior and ethical conduct among juvenile
Britons.
In the first years of the twentieth century, the administration of British education
outside prisons was also in a state of flux. The most prominent example was the decline
of the School Board and the rise of the London County Council (LCC) as the
authoritative body for educational matters.
468
Religious instruction had also become a
more significant aspect of moral instruction by the early 1900s. The Howard
Association, as part of its campaign for penal reform, argued that education and moral
instruction needed to be a crucial part of any rehabilitation program, and that moral
instruction, particularly for juveniles, should borrow heavily from Christian texts.
469

By 1907, plans for a new systematic plan for moral instruction in British
denominational and council schools became more directly connected to religious
instruction in a manner similar to the way in which moral instruction was implemented
in British prison and gaols. This direction is exemplified in E.R. Bernard’s A Scheme
for Moral Instruction, which lays out a plan for Britain’s schools that facilitated a
“systematic moral teaching during time set apart for religious instruction.”
470
In
Bernard’s plan, moral instruction would be an aspect of religious class work even in
council schools and would be “distinguished from the incidental moral teaching” that
happened throughout a given school day. Bernard argued that “to meet the dangers to
both morals and religious belief, it is necessary that the managers and teachers of
schools should be able to show that in their schools there is systematic moral teaching

468
Gretchen R. Galbraith, Reading Lives: Reconstructing Childhood, Books, and Schools in Britain,
1870-1920. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, 85.
469
Annual Report of the Howard Association, October 1904, 2. See also SC/PPS/057, LMA for more on
moral instruction curricula from 1870 to 1904.
470
E.R. Bernard, A Scheme for Moral Instruction, London: John Davis, 1908, 3.
186

which meets all the requirements, and is based on the essentials of the Christian
Creed.”
471
Bernard’s model was highly influential and was applied in a variety of ways
in various school settings, although it never became the dominant mode of British
school organization as he had hoped.
472
Among the important qualities stressed in
Bernard’s plan are obedience, love, truthfulness, courage, honesty, and purity. Each
quality was to be systematically taught through scripture.
Bernard’s plan was by no means groundbreaking, but it does represent a crucial
synthesis in the development of moral instruction curricula by stressing the importance
of a Christian value structure as the guiding principle for all moral lessons. It placed
increased emphasis on notions of Christian scripture as the sole authoritative source of
moral instruction, differing from the LCC’s earlier use of non-denominational
parables.
473
Religious-minded moral reformers regarded education as a significant site
for institutional change because it allowed for religious instruction as a crucial element
of moral instruction.
The state also took an interest in more sweeping educational reforms during the
early twentieth century. While the Education Act of 1870 created the first structure for
compulsory education in Britain, the relevant legislation for places like London was the
1902 Education Act, which created a comprehensive system for British education
governing primary, secondary, and technical instruction. The 1902 Act altered the
language of the 1899 Board of Education Act to create a new body designed to oversee
the short and long term affairs of educational institutions. The subsequent Education

471
Ibid., 5.
472
Galbraith, Reading Lives, 86.
473
This move was informed by Frank Howard, The Reform of Moral and Biblical Education on the Lines
of Herbertianism, Critical Thought, and the Ethical Needs of Today’s Boy. London: Swan Sonneschein,
1902.
187
ding to Webb,

Act (London) of 1903 shifted educational authority to the London County Council.
474

The example of London is crucial, as it would be the central target for and educational
practice for public institutions. London was also the center of many of the moral reform
campaigns that sought to change the nature of education in Britain.
The 1903 Education Act was a fairly simple piece of legislation with a profound
impact on early twentieth century educational debates by changing the structure of
education in the metropole. Before 1903, the School Board for London controlled
elementary education.
475
As Sidney Webb observed, “educational form and practice
had progressed mightily” with the passage of the 1870 Education Act.
476
Webb noted
that the Act was the first “systematic attempt to rescue the whole of London’s
children.”
477
Webb recalled that before 1870, “two-thirds of the whole child
population” came of age “practically without schooling or religious influences of any
kind.”
478
The conditions of life for London’s children—and particularly working-class
children—was, accor
brutal and immoral; living amid the unthinkable filth of vilely overcrowded
courts, unprovided either with water supply or sanitary conveniences, existing
always at the lowest level of physical health, and constantly decimated by
disease, incessantly under temptation by the flaring gin-palaces which alone
relieved the monotony of the mean streets and dark alleys to which they are
doomed; graduating almost inevitably to vice and crime amid the now incredible
street life of the unpoliced metropolis.
479

474
Montague Barlow, The London Education Act (1902), with Notes. London: Butterworth, 1903, 3.
475
Ibid.
476
Sidney Webb, London Education. London: Longman, Green, & Co.,1904, 4.
477
Ibid., 5.
478
Ibid., 4.
479
Ibid.
188

Webb’s depiction of London bore a striking resemblance to the stories of Britain’s
moral reformers—Britain as a land of inadequate infrastructure—but more importantly,
an area where positive moral influence was absent or muted.
Both the 1902 and 1903 Education Acts were opposed by the Liberal party,
which viewed them as “muddled” because they “compelled ratepayers to pay for
religious teaching much of which they regard as false and injurious to the welfare of the
State.”
480
Liberal Party opposition to altering the nature of educational structure would
change in 1906 with their ascent to power and their shift towards reform of much of the
structures governing juvenile institutions, such as schools and the court system.
481

The 1902 and 1903 Acts were supported by the Conservative party. Home
Secretary Akers-Douglas regarded them as powerful tools to better connect education to
other services offered by the LCC.
482
Just as with other governmental action directed
toward juveniles initiated by the Conservatives between 1898 and 1906, the Act did
little to change public-funded education at an institutional level. Both Acts represent a
point of ideological departure in pre-1906 state-initiated institutional reform. They did
much to expand government power over educational practice, but also created a venue
for more effective instructional standardization, which would prove to be crucial as the
state sought to further expand services offered to juveniles after 1906. Educational
reform efforts ultimately were the most wide-reaching attempts to create a system to
prevent juvenile delinquency through the reinforcement of moral lessons.

480
The Education Muddle: Why Liberals Object to the Act of 1902. London: Liberal League Publications,
1902, HO 45/10636/203019, TNA.
481
It is important to note that Liberal opposition to the Acts was not so much ideological as it was
methodological. Liberals did not approve of the way that power and authority was allocated by the new
board system.
482
Home Office notes on draft copy of the Education Act, 1903, HO 45/10636/203019, TNA.
189

THE BOY SCOUTS AND THE BOYS’ BRIGADE
Educational reform represented only one institutional approach to preventing
and/or combating juvenile delinquency and deviance. The movement that had the most
long-term success—or perhaps the most cultural endurance—as a mode of moral
instruction was the extracurricular moral instruction group. The early twentieth century
witnessed an explosion of activity groups aimed mostly at boys and young men and
designed to bolster their physical and moral health. The most successful of these
groups were the Boys’ Brigade and the Boy Scouts. While the Boy Scout movement
did not formally emerge until 1907, the structure of scouting as a juvenile moral reform
movement had begun nearly a decade earlier.
483
As Michael Rosenthal argues, the
Scouts “were born in the anxieties of an imperial power at the turn of the century that
was beginning to feel itself threatened both from without and from within.”
484
While
the catalyst of the Boy Scout movement was undoubtedly based on Baden-Powell’s
reaction to early British failures in the Boer War, scouting was “from the very
beginning conceived as a remedy to Britain’s moral, physical, and military
weakness.”
485
Scouting was designed as a preventive measure to rescue Britain from
moral and physical deterioration by emphasizing character and physical health among
children and juveniles.

483
For more on the origins and intent of the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and similar movements, see John
Springhall, Youth, Empire, and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883-1942, Beckenham, Croom Helm,
1977; Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, London, Routledge,
1981; and F. M. Brodhead, “Social Imperialism and the British Youth Movement, 1880-1914,” PhD
thesis, University of Birmingham, 1975.
484
Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden Powell’s Boy Scout and the Imperatives of Empire.
New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1986, 3.
485
Ibid.
190

From its very beginning, the scouting movement emphasized the development
of discipline and submission to authority.
486
Yet Baden-Powell’s concern was not
merely to train boys to be better soldiers, but also to rescue boys from the effects of ill-
health and moral decay. As we have seen with the campaigns to stamp out juvenile
smoking, Baden-Powell made concrete connections between the perceived physical
effects of certain behaviors and the racial health of Britain. Baden-Powell drew his
conclusions from his time in the British military, and particularly his experience with
troops during the Boer War. As with Lord Roberts, who associated the physical failings
of British recruits with tobacco abuse, Baden-Powell viewed the physical and moral
short-comings of the British military as a result of negative social influences such as
tobacco, alcohol, and most notably, cheap popular literature. In the mind of Baden-
Powell, these forces impaired not just the physical stature of young men, but also their
behavior. Just as we have seen with other moral reform agents, the issue of moral
health and physical health were inextricably linked for Baden-Powell, a connection that
played a crucial role in the development of Boy Scout structure and ideology.
The Scouts and the Girl Guides, the parallel scouting group directed towards
young girls, were organizations designed specifically to remedy perceived failings in
physical health and moral character and were seen by its advocates as a “guaranteed
shortcut to the goal of social regeneration.”
487
Scouting claimed to be a mission to
rescue the British Empire from collapsing in the same manner as the Roman Empire.
488

486
Ibid., 7.
487
Ibid., 132.
488
Ibid., 133. Rosenthal notes a pamphlet published in 1905 which included a fictional story that used an
imagined piece of Japanese educational literature from the year 2005 to describe a future marked by the
“fall of the British Empire.” The document is an appeal for National Service and intended to inspire fear
191

The goal of scouting was to combat the physical and moral degeneration of Britain’s
young boys through a variety of tactics designed to affirm Christian values, moral
purity, and physical strength.
The Boy Scouts dedicated significant time and energy to operate within schools,
often campaigning to have time set aside for meetings during school hours. The Scouts
offered instruction not only in moral behavior and civility, but also in hygiene and good
health, but remained too militaristic for many school officials in its first years.
489
Some
school officials were skeptical regarding the value of dedicating significant time to the
Scouts.
The Board has the greatest sympathy with the Boy Scout Movement as
stimulating boys to think and act for themselves. They do not however consider
that it would be a proper subject for ordinary school hours or in accordance with
the real spirit of the Boy Scout movement if it became part of the regular school
curriculum.
490

By attempting to bring its mission into schools, the Boy Scouts were making an attempt
to transcend the status of a merely voluntary organization and to become a significant
part of the way schools taught young boys. While their efforts failed, it represents a
significant way in which the Scouts engaged in aggressive juvenile community
outreach.
The ultimate goal of the Boy Scout movement was to create a new culture for
British boys. Part of that project was the fabrication of a popular culture that included
cheap popular literature designed to instill and reinforce the values of the Boy Scout

and uncertainty about Britain’s fate in the future by implying that Britain would be supplanted by Japan
as a significant imperial power.
489
Ibid. The file goes on to note that some school officials were concerned about the military message of
the Scouts.
490
Letter to the Boy Scouts from London County Council, 17 January 1908, ED 12/179, TNA.
192

movement and counter the effect of penny dreadfuls and other forms of media that were
seen as affirming deviant behavior and traits
491
Thus, in response to Jack Sheppard, the
central character of the “Penny dreadful,” Baden-Powell commissioned a series of
adventure books featuring new characters like Jack Archer, a young boy who learns the
meaning of honor and duty through service to the Empire. Rather than "good boys gone
bad," these stories were about boys of questionable moral character redeeming
themselves. The first in the series appeared in 1910. In the forward to G.A. Henty’s
Jack Archer: A Tale of the Crimea Baden-Powell states,
Boys read a great deal more nowadays then they used to, and they naturally like
something that will interest and grip them. Their appetite is for literature of an
exciting kind, and there is no reason why the food they are supplied with of this
kind should not be clean and wholesome.
492

The central characters in many of the books in the series were boys modeled after
characters like Henty’s Jack Archer. In the first installment of the series, Jack’s father,
Major Archer, is sent to the Crimea, accompanied by Jack. The book follows the
adventures of young Jack as he grows into manhood.
They found him wonderfully grown and aged during the two years of his
absence. Whereas before he promised to be short, he was now above average
height. His shoulders were broad and square, his face was bronzed by the sun
and the wind, and it was not until they heard his merry laugh that they quite
recognized the Jack who had left them.
493

The stories, like much of the rhetoric of the scouting movement, targeted the power of
positive influence on the physical and moral development of boys. Under the tutelage
of his many death-defying adventures with his father in the Crimea, Jack was

491
For more on concerns over the Penny Dreadful, see John Springhall. Youth, Popular Culture, and
Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830-1996. London: Macmillan, 1998.
492
G.A. Henty, Forward, Jack Archer: A Tale of the Crimea. London, 1909, 2-3. The novel was
originally published in 1883, but was repackaged and published by Baden-Powell in 1909.
493
Ibid. 189.
193

transformed from a boy with a “sunken-chest” to a robust young man. The story ends
with Jack becoming an officer in the army and setting sail for India during the “Indian
Mutiny.” Many, if not most of the novels are celebratory accounts of military service
that serve as the basis for narratives for young boys to face and conquer moral
quandaries.
The stories emphasized personal growth, adherence to civil behavior, the virtues
of military service, and respect for authority. The goal of the series was to be affordable
to the “ordinary boy.” Written by popular authors, the stories were composed to be
exciting while affirming traditional values. More importantly, these books were
designed to compete directly with the cheap popular literature that Baden-Powell
viewed as one of the central causes of juvenile delinquency and moral failure. In the
forward to the second installment of the series, Baden-Powell states that penny
dreadfuls were “responsible for half of the crime and brutality among young
offenders.”
494

The Boy Scouts were ultimately an attempt to craft a new alternative culture for
boys based on and driven towards “traditional” values and codes. This model was not
unique in Britain and was well established by the end of the nineteenth century in the
form of the Boys’ Brigade. The Boys’ Brigade, which was more than likely the
inspiration for Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts, sought to “advance Christ’s kingdom
among boys” through a military-like adherence to Christian codes of moral conduct.
495

Founded in 1885 as part of the Mission Sunday School of the College Church in
Glasgow by volunteer officer and Sunday school teacher W.A. Smith, the Boys’

494
Forward to George Manville, Cormorant Crag. London: 1910, 1.
495
“What is the Boys Brigade?” Boys’ Brigade Leaflet #1, 1908, HO 45/10798/3070258, TNA.
194
nliness.”
497

Brigade began as a way to keep older boys as participants in Sunday school
activities.
496
Smith used military drill activities as a way to “keep hold” of the boys and
to train them in the “habits of obedience, reverence, discipline, self-respect and all that
tends toward true Christian ma
The mission of instilling boys with the values of “true Christian manliness”
proved popular in Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century. By 1908, the
Boys’ Brigade included 1,200 companies, 5,000 officers, and 53,000 paying members.
The age range of members was typically twelve to seventeen years old, although
younger boys occasionally participated.
498
Just as with the Boy Scouts, the members
wore uniforms that included patches and badges to signify skills and
accomplishment.
499
The meeting halls included a games room open two nights a week
so that “instead of hanging about on street corners, (members) can together meet” and
“spend a sociable evening under the kindly supervision of their officers.”
500

The Boy Scouts and Boys’ Brigade were attempts to instill a particular version
of masculine civility and commitment to duty as a way to combat moral and physical
deterioration among juvenile boys. In particular, the program of the Boys’ Brigade
attacked what it perceived as a culture of deviance by creating a unique subculture with
a value structure intent on “restoring” its own conception of normative masculinity.
These voluntary organizations represent a significant way in which the agenda of the
juvenile moral reform movement extended itself into the everyday lives of boys and

496
Ibid.
497
Ibid.
498
Ibid.
499
Ibid. The Boys’ Brigade uniform was far less formal than the Boy Scouts, consisting of a cap, a
“special” belt, and a sash.
500
Ibid.
195

young men as a venue for children and juveniles to seek out and achieve a sense of
community and belonging absent from their lives.
Both groups represented a specific strategy of social rescue by emphasizing a
connection between moral and physical health.
501
More importantly, both groups
combined moral instruction, discipline, and a commitment to nation as a way to
displace criminal instincts. In a way more profound than that of other voluntary
organizations of the period, these groups offered a new identity for those boys who
participated. It was this transformative character that helped them flourish in this period
where concern over character was so crucial to moral reform discourse.
THE CLUB MOVEMENT, CONCERTS, AND “THE GREAT BOY QUESTION”

Groups like the Boys’ Brigade and the Boy Scouts grew substantially during the
early twentieth century by filling an important niche in juvenile culture. Another
institution affiliated with juvenile moral reform that used a similar structure was the
boy’s club movement. The first renewed call for clubs for boys during this period came
at the height of the Hooligan crisis. On August 12, 1898, the Daily News published a
column by J. Paul Newman entitled “The Great Boy Question” that argued that clubs
for boys were an ideal solution to the problems experienced in south London because
they offered boys a venue for moral instruction and vocational education that could not
be carried out in the schools. For Newman, the public response to the Hooligan crisis

501
The significance of these movements can be assessed by how many working-class boys joined during
this period. While there is no way to tell how many of the members of each organization were working-
class, in both cases, membership was based on paying regular dues. The ultimate effectiveness of
preaching the moral regeneration of working-class boys while restricting membership to those with
disposable income places the overall effectiveness of these groups in serious doubt.
196
vior.

was only the latest evidence that everyday Britons were interested in managing
“habitual criminals and attempting to reform juvenile offenders.”
502

Newman maintained that British society needed to “begin at the beginning” by
addressing criminality at a young age and by preventing it through boy’s clubs, which
would provide an environment outside of school for children to learn to be good people
and men.
503
Newman’s concern is a crisis of normative gender behavior tied to a
failure of young boys to aspire to models of morally-based masculine beha
Every year schools pour out a mighty stream of boys well grounded in the
elements of knowledge, and well trained in habits of discipline and order. Is it
not a matter of vital import to society whether those lads continue in the path
which they started, or choose instead, the downward slopes, and develop into
larrikins, at worst into professionals of crime?
504

Newman’s argument advocates for the positive influence club life has on young boys at
risk of falling into the ranks of the “criminal classes.”
505
Newman’s rather vague design
for an ideal club remained closely tied to his idea that such institutions were most
needed in impoverished and working-class neighborhoods. Newman stated that clubs
should be small in size—limited to 150 boys—and locally staffed and funded. Most
importantly, clubs should be affordable for all boys. This last point would prove to be
the most problematic for the club movement as it attempted to grow in the early
1900s.
506

Newman’s scheme was not without its critics. Social critic Ernest Morley’s
“Hooliganism and Working Boy’s Clubs” attacked the notion of boy’s clubs as a “cure”

502
Daily News, 12 August 1898.
503
Ibid.
504
Ibid.
505
Ibid.
506
Ibid. Newman decried the Boys’ Brigade and the Boy Scouts as “sham militarism” rather than as a
serious attempt at meaningful reform.
197
d that
t.”
510

for Hooliganism in general, and Newman’s plan in particular, as unrealistic.
507
Morley
dismissed the very idea that clubs would function as a “cure” for Hooliganism, claiming
that the problem of the Hooligan was simply too large to be addressed by promoting a
system of clubs. Morley defined Hooliganism as merely gang-based “faction fighting”
that would not be resolved in the club setting.
508
Instead, Morley argued that
Hooliganism would be better addressed by “less gentle means.” Morley cites the
difficulty in finding good instructors to fulfill Newman’s teaching mandate, as well as
stating that most young boys would not willingly attend courses, nor would they
abandon their gang affiliation to join clubs. Instead, Morley argues that while clubs
should offer some sort of instruction, it “should not be mandatory.”
509
Morley
concludes by stating that “hooligans are to some extent a creation of the state” an
the problem with juvenile offenders is a matter of not offering juveniles and young
adults “an opportunity to spend their time anywhere but the stree
Morley’s attack on Newman’s club scheme represented a larger split among
social critics over the nature of juvenile delinquency—here coded as Hooliganism—as
well as the effectiveness of voluntary organizations in such a combative environment.
For Morley, clubs offered a space for recreation, but were also sites where “the raw
material out of which Hooligans are made” could pursue “proper training” which would
allow them to “grow up to be self-respecting, honest, and useful members of

507
Ernest Morley, “Hooliganism and Working Boys Clubs,” Westminster Review, no. 156, 1901, 561.
560.
508
Ibid.,
509
Ibid.
510
Ibid.. 562.
198
society y to
ch was
e of
b

ss
nt activities and also acted in a
ited course
Stanley, and Thomas Pelham which formed the cultural basis for the club movements

.”
511
The central concern for Morley was finding a more comprehensive wa
regulate the space in which “the Hooligan” interacts and develops his adult identity.
Much of Morley’s criticism of clubs as an effective strategy for combating
juvenile delinquency was based on the recent history of the club movement, whi
based on a model of clubs as sites of recreational activity. The groundwork for som
the large club organizations that came to prominence in the first decades of the
twentieth century was laid down during the nineteenth century. The Federation of
London Working Boys' Clubs was founded in 1887 by a number of boys' clubs to
provide an organization which could formulate a unified policy and philosophy and
provide backup services for the Boys' Clubs movement.
512
These clubs based much of
their organizational structure, goals, and even activities on the guidelines set out by clu
movement pioneer Henry Solly. Solly saw clubs as sites for recreational activities, such
as games and sporting competitions for those with diminished access to playing fields
or recreational spaces.
513
Many of the clubs involved had been started by universities,
public schools, and public-spirited individuals to help underprivileged working-cla
boys in London. The clubs involved in the Federation followed a model consistent with
Solly’s model of recreation, providing entertainme
lim way as education and welfare institutions: the clubs were often the only re
boys had to medical attention, clothing, and food.
It was the work of nineteenth-century club activists such as Solly, Maude

511
Ibid., 560.
512
William Eagar, Making Men: The History of Boys’ Clubs and Related Movements in Great Britain.
London: University of London Press, 1953, 126.
513
Ibid., 127.
199

of
e
ry

in the Solly club
model,
n
r
g the

advocated by Newman and others as a “cure” for Hooliganism in the early twentieth
century.
514
In particular, Stanley and Pelham were among the most prominent club
organizers during this period, each helping to develop a more reform-centered notion of
the club that helped transfer it from an institution of leisure to a site of personal reform.
The crucial difference between the nineteenth-century club movement and the work
organizations like the Federation of London Working Boys’ Clubs was the latter’s
emphasis on training young boys—and in some cases, girls and young women—to b
not only better citizens, but also better equipped to survive. Clubs became sites not
only of entertainment for working-class juveniles, but also places of supplementa
learning and Christian moral instruction. Thus, the early twentieth-century club
movement was distinctive because it brought back an emphasis on moral instruction,
physical activity, and vocational training that had been diminished
which privileged recreation over classes and training.
515

While the focus of twentieth century club movement was more on male childre
than female children, some outreach activities engaged both young boys and girls. In
citing Newman’s renewed plan for clubs, activists such as J.A. Hammerton offered thei
own solution for the problem of Hooliganism and juvenile criminality in changin
nature of the “Hooligan” environment. Hammerton, in his essay “Refining the
Hooligan,” argued for the expansion of “slum concerts,” which were a series of music
performances and pageants “designed to uplift the poor in Slumland.”
516
The program

514
For more on the nineteenth-century history of clubs and the social settlement movement, see Peter
Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830-
1885, 2
nd
edition. London: Methuen, 1987.
515
See Henry Solly, Working-men's Social Clubs and Educational Institutes. London: Working Men's
Club and Institute Union, 1867.
516
J.A. Hammerton “Refining the Hooligan,” Sunday Strand, Vol. II (1900), 466.
200

end
in 1899
hey
ain’s
uitable concert locations and arranging for a raised
concert

ren, the
any
another type can be seen, yet the moment the concert commences, the
demeanour of the audience is excellent.
519

of “slum concerts,” similar to the club movement, was started as a way to combat the
environmental effects of urban working-class Britain through positive social and moral
uplift. Songs like “The Holy City,” “The Soldier’s Chorus,” and excerpts from Gilbert
and Sullivan were played to inspire audiences and turn their “excess energy” away from
criminality.
517
In one show in Liverpool in August 1900, over 800 people attended. In
London, Warren Owen organized a series of concerts in south London and the east
that drew “hundreds” of Londoners from “poverty stricken localities.”
518

The “slum concert” movement was less about moral training and more about
social uplift, which had been a crucial element of the early campaigns of the Salvation
Army, epitomized in the Hooligan suppers. Where these concerts differed was that t
were meant to be a permanent institutional response that sought to engage Brit
urban poor and provide what it regarded as positive messages of social uplift.
Hammerton outlined in detail the process of organizing a “slum concert” and
transforming the environment in which the event was staged, from making bunting out
of old pieces of cloth, to discussing s
platform to serve as a stage:
The scene is a truly unique one, and the student of physiognomy will find in it a
rich field of study, the contrasts amongst the faces being the most striking. The
pale, haggard widow, the bloated slattern, the man and youth with the mark of
crime deeply stamped on their brow, the drunken reprobate, the hard working
“horny handed son of toil,” the timid looking man “who has seen better days,”
and in his poverty still strives to appear respectable, the ill-kempt child
young rascal, the coarse young woman, in all her blatant effrontery, and m

517
Ibid.
518
Ibid, 467.
519
Ibid, 468.
201

Hammerton regarded the concert as a “musical mission” designed to “bring light to the
slums.”
520
Just as with the club movement, the concert movement was an enterprise that
borrowed heavily from the rhetoric and intent of other moral reform efforts—most
notably the Salvation Army, who had long used elaborate theatrical productions and
music to disseminate its message.
What made clubs and other forms of community outreach, like the “slum
concert” movement, important parts of the tapestry of juvenile reform efforts were the
ways they engaged the problem of juvenile criminality and delinquency as a local issue,
sometimes altering their approach to fit the wants and needs of the locale. As
Hammerton himself notes, concerts needed to be tailored to their audience. More
importantly, these forms of outreach were both implicitly, and at times, explicitly tied to
‘curing’ social ills by creating community bonds. Many clubs were connected to the
church, allowing for a more explicit connection with religious moral instruction, but
also allowing for community building by group affiliation. As the Church
Commissioners report from 1903-4 states, working-class boys’ clubs aspired to “cure”
Hooliganism by providing diversions, but also offering moral and vocational
instruction.
521

In a piece collected in the Church Commissioners report written by T. J. Parks
of St. Peter’s Vicarage titled “The Looseness, Roughness, Lawlessness and Lostness of
North and South London,” events such as “running matches” were combined with

520
Ibid, 469.
521
T.J. Parks, “The Looseness, Roughness, Lawlessness and Lostness of North and South London Life,”
Church Commissioners Report 1903-4. London: 1904, 6, 0/272/3, LMA.
202

weekly Bible classes in an effort to combat youthful ruffianism.
522
Parks describes the
site of the St. Peter’s Vicarage Club in Hoxton as the “cradle of gangs” that plagued
London. Located in the Maurice Hotel in Hoxton under the care of its proprietor, J. R.
Neal, Parks’ club held “special nights” that targeted the local gangs.
523
The club also
funded local sporting events for children and juveniles, including football and cricket
clubs. Parks’ report notes that while funding was tight—the club had expenditures
including rent and rates that exceeded ₤144 for 1903—the club’s discipline was
“gradually becoming stricter.”
524

Parks includes in his report his opinion on why Hoxton experienced such a
pronounced problem with gangs, blaming idleness as a key factor in juvenile deviance
and criminality. He also argued that the educational system was inadequate by failing to
offer effective moral instruction and instruction in manners. Parks was particularly
critical of the apparent absence of vocational instruction in local schools, stating that
“the lack of compulsory technical instruction weighs on this class more heavily than
others.
525

THE HOWARD ASSOCIATION AND THE CAMPAIGN FOR SEPARATE
COURTS AND PRISONS

The most significant ‘top-down’ positive juvenile moral reform campaign was
that which called for wholesale changes in the relationship between the state and
juveniles. The Howard Association’s efforts to change the juvenile justice system were
the most prominent efforts in this area. The campaign for separate courts, combined

522
Ibid.
523
Ibid., 8.
524
Ibid.
525
Ibid., 9.
203

with the proposed growth of the fledgling Borstal system, represented a fundamental
change in the way youthful offenders would be dealt with by the state. The Howard
Association’s work also had a significant impact on the cultural definition of childhood
in its attempt to formalize age boundaries based on an individual’s perceived
reformability. These campaigns also served as the forerunner for a new wave of
governmental reform associated with the Liberal party’s ascent to power in 1906.
The group that did the most to address juvenile justice and penal reform in this
period was the Howard Association. The association had generally worked as an
advocate for juvenile moral health, including educational reform, but directed most of
its energy towards the reform of British prisons. For the Howard Association, the best
model of juvenile penal administration was that of the United States.
526
The Howard
Association sent members to visit prisons throughout the United States in early 1904 in
an effort to understand how English prisons could be changed or improved. The tour
was covered extensively by the British press, which allowed the findings of the Howard
Association to be presented to the public-at-large through a variety of media, most
notably through accounts published in newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph, the
Daily Mail, and the Times as well as the Association’s own publications. The most
significant finding that emerged from the trip was the establishment of “children’s
courts.” The idea of separate courts for children was not entirely new in Britain, but had
only been tried in Birmingham before 1904.
527
In some US cities, such as Indianapolis
and Brooklyn, the Howard Association reported a juvenile court entirely separate from

526
Edward Grubb, Methods of Penal Administration in the United States. London: The Howard
Association, 1904, 30-32. While Grubb correctly claims that there is “no uniformity” in United States
prisons, the point made early in the pamphlet was that the relationship between prisoner and prison in the
United States was “more human (sic) than English prisons.”
527
Ibid, 33.
204

the adult justice system, with hearings held in a special courtroom by a juvenile court
judge who “took a fatherly interest” in the defendants.
528
In one incident at the
Indianapolis juvenile court reported by the Howard Associations’ Secretary Edward
Grubb,
On the day of my visit three coloured boys were separately charged with petty
offences. Each case was carefully inquired into, with the result that one was
discharged, the second was placed in charge of one of the lady probation
officers, and the third, who had a bad record, was sent to prison. The last course
was one that is but rarely taken.
529

Grubb’s account of the Indianapolis court highlights one of the chief concerns of the
Howard Association; that juveniles not be treated as hardened criminals. More
importantly, Grubb’s goal was to suggest that adult prisons should not be the common
destination for youthful offenders.
530
The children’s court offered a space free of the
contagion of adult criminality, administered by a staff dedicated primarily to child
welfare. This point would become a significant aspect of later Howard Association
campaigns for a separate British juvenile justice system.
The result of the prison tour was a flood of literature on the subject of prison
reform by the Association, much of it focused on creating separate courts for children
and juveniles. The central argument was that in the case of both juveniles and adults,
British prisons were equipped only to punish rather than return convicts to society as
productive, morally-centered citizens. This was seen by the Howard Association as a

528
Ibid., 34.
529
Ibid.
530
Not all of the US juvenile court models met with the approval of the Howard Association. The United
States model was not uniform, but differed from state to state. Some juvenile hearings were held in adult
courtrooms with the same judges or magistrates, as in the Boston juvenile court system. According to
Grubb’s account, the Boston system conducted itself with “unnecessary harshness” and “rather frightened
the children.” Still, Grubb regarded the Boston system as “undoubtedly an improvement on the open
court.”
205

significant danger to the health, welfare, and safety of British society.
531
British prisons
and gaols were depicted in their literature as unclean, fomenting “terrible epidemics of
fever which spread to the public outside.”
532
Prisons were institutions that served to
“harden” petty criminals into habitual offenders through the negative influence of other
criminals and the lack of an effective system of personal reform.
The Howard Association proposed a plan of systematic penal reform that would
affect both juveniles and adults. At the core of the proposed reforms was a system to
“grade” prisoners and create separations between different types of prisoners.
533
At the
heart of the plan was a system of “careful classification” that separated “women from
men, young from old, and first offenders from practiced hands, and so on.”
534
More
specifically, it prescribed complete “cellular separation” of prisoners from one another
during the evening, and, ideally, throughout the day, following a model used at Fresnes
Prison in Paris.
535
The intent of separation was to prevent, or at least limit, “mutual
contamination” as well as to limit “the concoction of designs for preying on society
after discharge.”
536
A policy of separation was in place already in Britain in 1904, but
only for the first few weeks, and then was largely dependent on the nature of each
prison’s population and its facilities.
537
For the Howard Association, separation did not
mean solitude, but allowed for supervised interaction during short periods.

531
“Methods of Prison Reform,” Annual Report of the Howard Association, October 1904, 1.
532
Ibid.
533
Ibid., 2.
534
Ibid., 2-3. This is listed as the first part of the Howard Association’s proposed seven-part plan.
535
Ibid.
536
Ibid., 3.
537
For more on the evolution of prison dynamics, see Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-
1900. London: Pearson Longman, 2005.
206
ns
mselves.

The penal reforms proposed by the Howard Association also borrowed heavily
from nineteenth-century ideas about using intense schemes of observation to help
diagnose criminal tendencies. The Howard Association suggested that prisons institute a
system of careful observation of individual prisoner behavior and grading of each
prisoner’s traits and activities by “carefully-trained officers. The grading system would
allow prisoners of higher grades certain privileges, including “differences in dress” and
special meals.
538
This system of grading was directed specifically at youthful
offenders, who would be divided “into three grades.”
539
The grading system allowed
for increased regimes of separation that further served the notion that British priso
needed to implement a directed approach to help individual inmates reform the
The Howard Association’s scheme sought to re-order the prison to create a type
of institution that created discrete environments for behavior modification and personal
reform. While the idea of prisons as discrete sites of reform was not new, implementing
such a system nationally for juveniles specifically was a significant development. This
system of separation would become a crucial element of the campaign to create new
designations of prisoners based on age and grading of behavior while imprisoned.
Despite the best efforts of Grubb and the rest of the Howard Association, the
Conservative Home Office was largely indifferent to the campaign. In response to a
formal request for a meeting by Grubb in 1905, Home Secretary Aretas Akers-Douglas
made a note on the Home Office file stating “Not much in this…do not think there is
any practical purpose by granting this interview.”
540
Grubb would try again later in the

538
Ibid. 2. This system of grading was a significant aspect of the Borstal system by 1904.
539
Ibid.
540
Notes on Letter from Edward Grubb to Home Office, 3 March 1905, HO 45/10503/125632, TNA.
207

year with the new Liberal Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone.
541
In reply, Gladstone’s
secretary politely declined, stating “At the present moment, the pressure of official work
and of necessary arrangements for the coming general election is so heavy that Mr.
Gladstone fears that he cannot accord to Mr. Holmes and yourself the interview you
request.”
542

. The Howard Association’s plan to create a separate juvenile justice system
would eventually be realized in some of its most significant elements in the Children’s
Act of 1908, although many of the mandates for penal reform, such as a new system for
grading and cataloging convicts, were abandoned or modified to better fit the existing
penal infrastructure. More immediately successful were the demands to create new
designations that allowed for the special treatment of older juveniles who were often
treated as adults. This reform in penal administration came to fruition in the
development of the Borstal System.
THE BORSTAL SYSTEM AND THE BIRTH OF THE “JUVENILE-ADULT”
One of the crucial elements of juvenile justice reform under the Liberal Party
was the expansion of the Borstal system. The system was originally suggested by the
Gladstone committee in 1895 in the interest of separating older juveniles—initially
including any offender under the age of twenty-one—from the general adult population
in prisons.
543
The name of the scheme was taken from the first prison to house the
project in the small town of Borstal, a satellite community of Rochester, Kent. Borstals

541
Holmes’ ascent in the Howard Association was due in no small part to the fame he acquired as “the
police court missionary” who focused much of his writing on the crisis of Hooliganism.
542
Home Office Letter to Edward Grubb, 18 December 1905, HO 45/10503/125632, TNA.
543
The term “general population” is used here and elsewhere to refer to the British adult penal system.
Before 1908, there were few avenues to escape placement in an adult prison, although some prisons
provided separate space for youthful offenders.
208

were designed to be sites of reform rather than punishment for those deemed by the
state to be good candidates for personal growth. They functioned to give young
convicts a second chance to pursue personal reform and avoid serving their sentence at
a general population prison. The initial philosophy of the Borstal system was to
rehabilitate juveniles who were deemed to be at risk of becoming adult habitual
offenders. They represented the type of specialization of penal culture that the Howard
Association had pursued from the 1890s, creating a new class of prisoner.
544
The
Borstal scheme used a new designation for its inmate class—the Juvenile adult—and
further divided inmates into three groups: penal, ordinary, and special.
545
These
groupings referred to the nature of conviction as designated by the court at the time of
sentencing. The designation was left to the magistrate or justice.
While the Borstal system would not become a formal part of the British justice
system until the 1908 Prevention of Crime Act, its first year as an experiment in 1902
came with much fanfare within the penal reform community and brought with it a
renewed interest in a separate justice system for children and juveniles. The program
was overseen from its inception by Prison Commissioner Sir Evelen Ruggle-Brise, who
would become one of the most ardent advocates of the system. The first Borstal
accepted juvenile prisoners from all over the United Kingdom upon the
recommendation of the warden of their prison provided that they fit the age requirement
and that their sentence was longer than twelve months.

544
The emergence of the idea for Borstal experiment in 1895 fails to undercut my contention that interest
in such a system became far more pronounced after 1898. The Borstal plan failed to become fully
realized until its expansion to other sites in 1908. My argument is not that schemes of separation and
reclassification emerged only after Hooliganism, but rather that their development, implementation, and
expansion was made possible because increased concerns about juvenile delinquency followed the
Hooligan crisis.
545
Social Gazette, 27 September 1902.
209

Rehabilitation, or in the language of moral reform, rescue, were the crucial goals
of the Borstal system, as these individuals were seen as the most likely to benefit from
the “reformer’s zeal” at an age before a “youth ripened into (a) hardened criminal” as
well as attempting to stem the tide of adult habitual criminality.
546
Many of the inmates
already had extensive criminal records, but were regarded as more likely to be reformed
based on their age. According to Ruggle-Brise’s letters to the Home Office in 1903,
nearly 85 percent of the Borstal’s population was made up of violent criminals guilty of
multiple offences.
547
The Borstal model was regarded by men like Ruggle-Brise as a
space where the most dangerous and troubled youthful offenders could experience
personal reformation from past instances of criminality.
The Borstal was seen by some groups, such as the Salvation Army, as a “rational
treatment for young criminals.”
548
It was a place for “aspiring Jack Sheppard’s whose
minds have been fed on penny ‘bloods’ and who bestride the streets with knife and
pistol.”
549
It was not a cure for parental neglect, according to the Salvation Army, but it
remained a crucial strategy to address the juvenile criminal population through the
application of personal reform by building up character and physical strength. The
Borstal movement prominently appropriated the connection between physical and moral
health promoted by many moral reform groups and applied that ideology to the way in
which its inmates spent each hour of each day. Just as with the Boys’ Brigade, the Boy
Scouts, and elements of the club movement, the Borstal was an environment that

546
Social Gazette, 8 June 1907. Habitual criminality, which was largely a nineteenth century
construction, remained a crucial part of discourse on juvenile delinquency through the early twentieth
century. Borstals intended to rid inmates of the traits that led to habitual criminality.
547
E. Ruggle-Brise, Letter to the Home Office, 30 June 1903, HO 45/10046/A62024, TNA.
548
Ibid.
549
Ibid.
210

pressed its participants to build their strength and their connection to labor as an
expression of healthy masculinity. It was the pursuit of this model of normative
masculinity—the notion that physical effort and moral behavior were constitutive
elements of manliness—that informed the day-to-day program of the Borstal.
Much of the Borstal system used symbolic cues as much as material training to
help its inmates. Inhabitants of the Borstal wore brown attire for their first five months.
After five months good conduct, the inhabitants were given blue clothing, symbolizing
a “special grade,” which also afforded them “a few games of draughts a week and a few
spoonfuls of golden syrup on Sundays.”
550
The act of differentiation, or ranking, served
a similar purpose to the system used by the Boy Scouts by recognizing achievement and
creating a model of self-worth through good works. The philosophy of the Borstal
system, just like much of the moral reform movement, was helping juvenile delinquents
transition from their previous lives and identities to new ones. The Borstal system used
rank among its inmates not only as scheme of differentiation, but also as a way for each
inmate to measure their level of achievement.
The Borstal system was, from its first year, regarded as a terrific success. It was
held up by penal reform groups as an example of the positive possibilities of targeted
moral reform systems with British prisons. In the Howard Association’s 1904 Annual
Report, Secretary Edward Grubb notes that out of the 122 juvenile-adults discharged
from Borstal prison, 54 “were known to be in employment.”
551
This was regarded as a
significant success as it suggested that those who were gainfully employed had

550
Ibid. See also Borstal Annual Report 1904-5, London, 1905, HO 45/10046/A62024, TNA.
551
Annual Report of the Howard Association, October 1904, 6-7.
211

managed to avoid a return to criminal activity.
552
The Howard Association was an early
advocate for extending the Borstal scheme and extending the system to “centres other
than the metropolis,” maintaining that it should be adopted as a “permanent part of the
English prison system.”
553
The Howard Association went further to suggest that
youthful offenders released from Borstals should be placed in a “labour home or farm
colony, under Government control to which these youths may be sent until suitable
employment is found for them,” noting that releasing convicts of this group without
employment “greatly jeopardize(s) the good effect of the training they receive.”
554

In a letter to the Times on October 5, 1904, outgoing Howard Association
secretary Edward Grubb cited the need to keep children out of courts, as “courts of
justice are not wholesome for children—the proximity of and language of dissolute
characters, the unsavoury details of many of the cases heard, the excitement and
temporary notoriety of appearing before a crowd of people, whether as offenders or
witnesses.”
555
Grubb’s depiction of courtrooms as sites of moral contagion is not
unique—as we have already seen, it was a commonly-held assumption by many moral
reformers. Grubb noted that “In Ireland, thanks largely to the efforts of the
Philanthropic Reform Association, a separate court for hearing charges against juveniles
has been set up in Dublin.”
556
Grubb noted the support of other reform groups, such as

552
It is difficult to judge to what extent this is a significant statistic since there is no data regarding
recidivism among juvenile criminals, petty or otherwise. It can be assumed from the response of the
Howard Association that this was a significant improvement compared to levels of recidivism among
prisoners of the same age group.
553
Ibid.
554
Ibid.
555
Edward Grubb, Letter to the Editor of the Times, 5 October 1904.
556
Ibid.
212
the Committee on Wage-earning Children, in setting up a system similar to the Dublin
Children’s Court.
CONCLUSION
The course of juvenile moral reform in the early twentieth century was not only
about the regulation of behavior, but also attempted to enact institutional change
through a variety of media. While groups like the Salvation Army spent much of their
energy combating vice, their campaign represented only one dimension of moral reform
that responded to the “specter” of the Hooligan. The campaigns that sought institutional
change, from clubs and other voluntary organizations to educational and justice reform,
all represented attempts to address the problem of juvenile delinquency by setting up
measures designed to protect children from the environmental stresses of modern urban
life.
The Boys’ Club movement, the Boy Scouts, and the Boys’ Brigade, educational
reform efforts, and the Howard Association campaign to create a new juvenile justice
system were all examples of efforts by moral and social reformers to apply institutional
solutions to working-class juvenile culture. They were all significant attempts to
respond to what they regarded as a crisis of juvenile deviance. They laid the
groundwork for more direct forms of state intervention, but perhaps more importantly,
they indirectly collaborated in creating new ideal models of boyhood and girlhood that
emphasized value structures based in Christian morality and civility that countered the
deviant identity epitomized by the Hooligan. These efforts attempted to rewrite the
narrative of the Hooligan crisis—both literally and figuratively—with new narratives
that emphasized traditional morality and commitment to God and country. These groups
213
also affirmed the importance of childhood in developing positive identity models, which
would prove to be a crucial motive for the reform of the legal understanding of
childhood beginning in the Borstal experiment and culminating in the passage of the
1908 Children’s Act.

214

Chapter 6

Re-creating Childhood: “New Liberalism,” Juvenile Justice
Reform and The Children’s Act of 1908

The moral and social reform campaigns that targeted children and juveniles in
the first years of the twentieth century experienced varying degrees of success in their
goal of creating new institutions to combat juvenile delinquency. In response to the
Hooligan crisis, these groups attempted to “cure” Hooliganism by attacking what were
regarded as the sources of juvenile deviance. Yet, while the impact of these groups as
social agents in the lives of children and juveniles in Britain is difficult to quantify, the
collective effect of these groups forced the state to respond. As we have already seen
with the 1901Youthful Offenders Act, the initial attempts at state action were largely
superficial and mired in internal squabbles over what the state could accomplish. Yet
attention to the issue of juvenile delinquency and the perception that British children
were physically and morally at risk, energized the incoming Liberal government in
1906.
557

This chapter will explore the role played by the state, and the Liberal party in
particular, between 1905 and 1908 in the development of new social, criminal, and
penal policies directed toward children and young persons. From the Probation of
Offenders Act of 1907 to the rapid speedy expansion of the Borstal system, the Liberal
government expressed a commitment to implementing significant changes in the way
the state dealt with children and juveniles. The 1908 Children’s Act stands out as the

557
See especially A.K. Russell, Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906. Newton Abbott: David
& Charles, 1973. Russell’s account of the election is still the best. -
215
supreme achievement of the “New Liberals” in their attempts to create a system
designed to protect children and young persons.
The Children’s Act was more than simply a piece of protective legislation for
juveniles; it was a series of statutes, incorporating legislation designed to protect infants
from parental abuse and laws that mandated the formation of a distinct and separate
juvenile justice system, that codified a new definition of childhood and instituted a
system of checks designed to isolate children and juveniles from the dangerous stimuli
and contagion of criminality. Borrowing heavily from moral reform campaigns earlier
in the decade, it defined childhood as a protected status by creating new barriers against
exploitation and by regulating exposure to what the state regarded as dangerous
influences. The language of the Act illustrates the influence of moral reform discourse
on state policy towards juveniles.
What made the Children’s Act extraordinary was its scope. While much of the
law broadened or restated previous statutes, it managed to do what moral and social
reformers had hoped for, creating special protections for children that isolated them
from dangerous behavior and morally-corrupt adult influences. It formed a latticework
of protections that emphasized the value of the childhood experience in shaping young
adults. These legal measures represented a clear response to the moral reform discourse
of the early twentieth century that cast juvenile delinquency, deviance, and even racial
degeneration as products of environmental forces. Furthermore, the Act emphasized a
culture of personal reform among juveniles, allowing children and young persons—with
the aid of the state—to correct anti-social behavior and develop into productive
members of British civil society.
216

The introduction of the Children’s Act represented a significant change in the
attitude of the British government toward the agenda of moral reformers. Crucial to the
change in government attitudes to comprehensive legislative reform targeting children
were Liberal party officials in the Home Office who were powerful advocates for a
legislative response to the perceived problems of juvenile delinquency and moral
failure. Yet, while the new Liberal Government enjoyed enough political capital to pass
legislation like the Children’s Act, the origins of the bill were based in attempts to
change the state’s relationship to children and juveniles in the first part of the decade.
What had changed was not the desire for reform, but rather the ability and desire to craft
comprehensive legislation.
At the heart of the Children’s Act was its redefinition of who was viewed by the
state as a child. Rather than regarding the Act as a transformative moment, the Act
should be understood as the result of a process that stretched back into the late
nineteenth century when the social and cultural meaning of childhood was changing.
By 1908, childhood represented a privileged state and children were regarded as more
vulnerable to environmental pressures. As Anna Davin’s study of coming of age in
working-class Victorian and Edwardian London suggests, the meaning of childhood
was profoundly tied to changes in class and gender definitions. According to historians
such as Davin and James Walvin, the evolution of childhood was matched by changes
in the cultural meaning of adulthood, which I would suggest, was more at stake in the
policy developments of the early twentieth century.
558

558
See especially Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870-1914.
London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996, and James Walvin,, A Child’s World: A Social History of English
Childhood, 1800-1914. London: Penguin, 1982.
217

THE LIBERAL LANDSLIDE OF 1906 AND THE “NEW LIBERALS”

In his essay “Lord Roseberry’s Escape from Houndsditch,” Sidney Webb
famously asked his audience:
What is the matter with Liberals? For fifty years, in the middle of the last
century, we may recognize their party as “a great instrument of progress,”
wrenching away the shackles—political, fiscal, legal, theological, and social—
that hindered individual advancement…of all of this the voting generations are
deadly tired. When they hear the Liberal debater shouting the Liberal war cry of
fifty years ago, “Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform,” they explain it as a claim
for absolute quiescence in Downing street.
559

Webb’s indictment of the Liberal Party’s political relevance in 1901 was, at least in
part, a fair and accurate assessment. In the wake of the Khaki election of 1900, the
Liberal Party seemed to be in complete disarray, tied to antiquated policies and ideas,
and no longer connected to the needs and desires of the electorate. In six short years, the
fortunes of the party changed radically under the banner of what some it the party
viewed as a new ideology and a new generation of reform-minded politicians.
Yet while the Liberal landslide of 1906 provided the political means for
instituting sweeping reforms, what remains more significant to the policy shifts of the
second half of the decade was a shift towards what its adherents referred to as “New
Liberalism” and a new generation of Liberal party politicians who stressed increased
state intervention in the lives of Britons.
560
New Liberalism was seen by its advocates
and supporters not as a new movement, but as the restoration of the values that
empowered Liberalism at its height during the nineteenth century.
561
It would be more

559
Sidney Webb, “Lord Rosebery’s Escape from Houndsditch,” Nineteenth Century, September 1901,
366.
560
Kenneth O. Morgan, The Age of Lloyd George. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975, 130.
561
“New Liberalism” was by no means an ideology held by the entire Liberal party. Some Liberals
regarded the nature and extent of reforms proposed by the “New Liberals” as unnecessary and
frightening.
218

correct to assert that New Liberalism did not represent a sea change in Liberal party
ideology, but rather openness to new interpretations of the role the state should play in
the lives of its citizens. While writers like George Dangerfield argue that 1906 actually
spelled the beginning of the end of the Liberal party as it was “no longer the left” with
the arrival of 53 Labour party Members of Parliament, it is likely more accurate to
dismiss such an argument, as Peter Clarke does, more as a product of its time than an
effective evaluation of political history.
562
It is best to look at the politics of the Liberal
party as a much more diverse landscape of ideas, loyalties, and goals.
563
The Liberals
who entered the Home Office in 1906 represented a subset of the party committed to
understanding the state as an instrument for social change. My argument is less
concerned with the party as a whole here, but rather with how Liberals between 1906
and 1908 interpreted their mandate. In the case of Home Office, Liberals like Herbert
Samuel, “New Liberalism” was not only a real ideological shift; it was the only logical
way for the victorious Liberal party to move forward. Samuel epitomized the desire of
“New Liberals” in the Home Office to implement state-based institutional reform in
ways proposed, but not realized under the previous Conservative majority.
While it is debatable whether the elections of 1906 represented an ideological
shift by the British public, the Liberal party, through its agents in the Home Office, used
their mandate to develop a new system of social reform legislation, including several

562
George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert
Haas, 1935, 22. The best recent work on “New Liberalism” is Peter Cain, Hobson and Imperialism:
Radicalism, New Liberalism and Finance, 1887-1938. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
563
Peter Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971, 6.
Clarke’s observations about the nature of Liberal politics focuses on electoral politics in northwest
England as a crucial factor in the perception—and reality—of Liberal political ideology. It is valuable for
understanding that Liberal party politics were more complicated in this period than merely a party in
decline whose ideology was under attack from both the left and the right.
219

pieces of landmark legislation designed to address the concerns expressed by social and
moral reformers in the wake of the Hooligan crisis, such as concern over access to
alcohol, tobacco and the dangers of gambling. In this way, Liberals that took office in
1906—and particularly those in the Home Office—appropriated a notion of Liberalism
similar to J.A. Hobson, supporting the idea that state intervention served all of society,
but affirming the role of the individual as a crucial part of what he regarded as the
“social organism.”
564
For Hobson and Samuel, the state had a definite interest in the
health and individual development of its citizens. This allowed some Liberals to
advocate for welfare reforms while maintaining a commitment to individualism. In this
way, Hobson’s interest was to create a basic structure in which the individual elements
of the social organism could survive and thrive. Care for the well-being of each part of
the social organism was the governing ideology that guided Liberal policy toward
juvenile issues in this period, from concern over specific behaviors to larger issues of
how to treat young people within the penal system. These and other concerns formed
the crux of Liberal party juvenile reform policy as it attempted to mitigate the impact of
negative environmental stimuli.
What made Liberals more open to fundamental policy shifts, particularly when
the movement that pushed for such changes was based in what must be regarded as a
socially-conservative political culture? The answer lies in the party’s desire to engage
the various crises of the period through institutional means, epitomized in the
development of a separate juvenile justice system. In the first year of Liberal rule in
1906, Parliament had passed legislation encouraging local authorities to provide free

564
J.A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism: New Issues of Democracy. London: P.S. King & Sons, 1909,
76.
220

school meals for poor children. A year later, the government set up a system that, for
the first time, offered free medical examinations for school children.
565
New Liberals
within the Home Office embraced a model of government that represented a direct
response to the concerns aired by social and moral reformers earlier in the decade by
attempting to address issues of physical and moral health through fundamental changes
at the state level.
566
Liberal Party reforms attempted to create a system of nation-wide
legal structures, such as age restrictions for pubs and tobacco purchase, that offered a
uniformity of policy absent in Conservative attempts at reform earlier in the decade.
New Liberalism also offered an answer to the question of the split over
imperialism within the party and provided what appeared to be a clear electoral
alternative. It shifted emphasis away from international policy and played on concerns
over domestic stability—the same concerns that empowered the social and moral
reform movements of the period. When the Pro-Boer Henry Campbell-Bannerman
ascended to the role of Prime Minister in 1906, he appointed a number of bona fide
“New Liberal” politicians to prominent roles in the cabinet. Of these men, none had
more influence on the development of government policy towards juveniles than Hebert
Samuel.
567
Samuel had risen to prominence after the publication of his widely-

565
While medical examinations began in 1907, it was not until 1912 that the state instituted a system of
medical treatment.
566
Morgan, The Age of Lloyd George, 123-4. Morgan argues that “New Liberalism” represented a
fundamental shift in the nature of Liberal politics. It might be more accurate to look at the rise of new
Liberalism as less a radical shift than a subtle evolution of party policy among some members of the party
with its embrace of elements of the welfare state model and its collaboration with the Labour Party
representing the two most substantial shifts in party mechanics. In this way, “New Liberals” represent a
less radical shift than historians like Morgan suggest. While Henry Campbell-Bannerman packed his
Cabinet with many “New Liberals,” the most important changes to the Liberal party were not ideological,
but generational, and would not emerge in their entirety until the ascent of Lloyd George to the Prime
Ministership in 1916.
567
Ibid., 124.
221

influential Liberalism in 1902.
568
He attacked the notion that Liberals needed to
privilege individualism and that “government action was anathema.”
569
Samuel
described the essential difference between “old” and “new” Liberalism as the belief that
“the state is not incompetent for the work of social reform.”
570
For Samuel, modern
conditions created a host of new social problems for the British people.
We have won through the horrors of the birth and establishment of the factory
system at the cost of physical deterioration. We have purchased a great
commerce at the price of crowding our population into the cities and robbing
millions of strength and beauty. We have given our people what we grimly call
elementary education and robbed them of the elements of a natural life.
571

Samuel depicted a world eerily similar to that presented in the pages of the Salvation
Army’s War Cry! and the reports published by the Howard Association. Samuel’s
construction of “New Liberalism” was not an indictment of modernity but rather a
declaration that the state had a responsibility to mitigate the negative outcomes
produced by unrestrained industrialism and urbanization. For Samuel, it was these
forces that produced environments that ultimately hindered the ability of individuals to
succeed and be productive members of society. Samuel’s notion of “New Liberalism”
was similar to moral reformers concerns about children, but he saw government rather
than charity and church associations and clubs as the most effective agents for social
welfare.
Samuel used his position to press for a new approach to criminal and moral
deviance, including the passage of landmark measures such as the Street Gambling Act
of 1906 and the Prevention of Crime Act of 1908. Samuel, like many of the moral

568
Ibid., 33. Morgan argues that Samuel’s work should be viewed as one of the cornerstones outlining
the ideology of New Liberalism.
569
Herbert Samuel, Liberalism. London: Grant Richards, 1902, 20.
570
Ibid., 28.
571
Ibid., 29-30.
222

reformers of the period, was interested in addressing the perceived causes of deviance
among children and young persons.
572
Samuel and others within the Home Office were
especially receptive to the arguments made by groups like the Salvation Army and the
Howard Association that environmental pressures were permanently harming British
children.
THE EVOLUTION OF BORSTALS AND THE “JUVENILE-ADULT”
One crucial element of the Liberal party’s program for juvenile justice reform
was a scheme that had begun and thrived under Conservative leadership—the Borstal
system. As we have already seen, the Borstal system was committed to a mission of
creating a distinct space for older juveniles and young adults to start new lives. In this
vein, the Borstal model was a philosophical descendant of the reformatory system rather
than a pure extension of the prison. Borstals were “reformatories for men” that
emphasized developing skills for young adults while attempting to erase the bonds to
criminality that conventional prisons were seen to nurture and maintain.
573
While it
implemented a system designed to regulate the behavior and limit the freedom of
prisoners, its mission was to help inmates the ability to build a productive life and
severe their ties to criminality.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, the objective of the Borstal was just as
much about physical transformation as it was about moral awakening. As the program
expanded beyond the original test site at Borstal prison, the system developed and
delineated a more complex curriculum of instruction that affirmed its goal as a

572
The phrase “children and young persons” is the legal term that would later be applied to individuals
under 16 years old. It is used here in lieu of “juveniles,” a term that would come to have additional
meaning with its modification by the Borstal system.
573
Social Gazette, 8 June 1907.
223

reformatory. Borstals accomplished this system of training through a variety of means,
ranging from the application of organized work assignments, including farming and
construction, to the use of lengthy, community-based physical fitness regime. This
system required inmates to perform physical activities, often centering on a basic
calisthenics routine, in groups. Additionally, these groups were also assigned
collaborative physical labor, although the specific form differed from site to site based
on local circumstances. In its first years, the Borstal System began to resemble the
Farm Colony program advocated by the Salvation Army in the immediate wake of the
Hooligan crisis with its emphasis on the value of physical labor combined with regimes
that emphasized a curriculum of moral training and instruction.
Moral instruction in the Borstal system was based largely on the text-based
system employed by LCC schools in which there were three categories of instructional
material: devotional books, school books, and books of moral instruction that used
religious parables to convey moral messages and lessons.
574
The first category based its
curriculum on religious identification, including Anglicans, Catholics, non-conformists,
and Jews.
575
Each selection included a sample list of books that applied religious
doctrine for the purpose of character development. For Anglicans, books included such
texts as the Narrow Way, while Catholics had The Roman Catholic Penny Catechism
and Non-conformists could read Pilgrim’s Progress.
576
Specific texts for Jewish
prisoners are not mentioned, the report noting simply that “there was also a considerable

574
Report of the Departmental Committee on the Supply of Books to the Prisoners in His Majesty’s
Prisons and His Majesty’s Borstal Institutions. London: Eyre and Spottswoode, 1911.
575
Ibid.
576
Ibid.
224

choice of suitable books of this character for Jewish prisoners.”
577
While prisoners
within the Borstal had significantly less free time than their adult counterparts—one to
two hours a day on average—many continued to read popular literature under the
supervision of the chaplain, who controlled access to the library.
578
The prison chaplain
served an important role not only as a censor for reading material, but also as a figure of
authority in charge of implementing the moral reform curriculum and helping to
evaluate the progress of each prisoner. In this respect, chaplains served as agents of
both the state and the church for issues of moral instruction and enforcement.
579

Politically, the Borstal model fit well with the Conservative Party’s attitude to
juvenile reform. It required little substantial change to the penal system and paid lip
service to the concerns of groups like the Howard Association and Salvation Army
without fundamentally changing the way courts and prison system actually worked.
Before 1909, it was still largely a test program that garnered support from both Liberals
and Conservatives as an effective model for penal reform. The expansion of the Borstal
System was consistent with what emerged from the Liberal party beginning in 1906 due
in no small part to its commitment to removing youthful offenders from the prison
environment and placing them in a space where they could receive age-appropriate
vocational training and moral instruction. The Borstal system became a keystone for
Liberal party proposals for justice reform, playing a prominent role in the development

577
Ibid.
578
Ibid. These figures, including the average amount of free time given to inmates, might not be accurate
for all prisons and Borstals. The point here is not to examine the exact differences in free time, but rather
to illustrate a difference in free time allotted to general population prisoners as opposed to those serving
in Borstal system.
579
Prison chaplains on the whole took their role as a representative of the church as their primary
function, but it would be difficult to argue that their role was not complicated by their obligations to
enforce prison rules and regulations.
225

of the Children’s Act.
580
Thus, the Liberal party appropriated what had been a central
element of Conservative juvenile policy and made it their own. The Borstal fit perfectly
with what the Liberal party hoped to achieve with their juvenile reform policies. It was
a site of reform for individuals who were too old to enter a reformatory but deemed too
vulnerable to enter prison. The Juvenile-Adult classification was a revolutionary
development in that it pushed back the limit on when a person could be reformed. This
had a powerful impact on the way childhood and the concept of the “juvenile” was
defined and understood by the state and by British culture.
581

SEPARATE COURTS FOR CHILDREN: THE 1908 CHILDREN’S ACT

Key to the new juvenile-focused legislation of late Victorian and early
Edwardian Britain was the question of where children should be held while on remand.
As we have already seen, many moral reformers—and some within the Home Office
itself—opposed children’s contact with the adult justice system.
582
The issue was cast
as one of contamination. Children exposed to adult courtrooms, either as witnesses or
defendants, were at risk of coming under the influence of adult criminality. Children
were viewed not merely as impressionable, but as susceptible to what was seen as the
illness of criminality.
The move towards a separate justice system for children and juveniles was in no
small part a response to concerns about the status of children held in custody that stretch
back into the nineteenth century. The first recognition of juveniles as a special status

580
Notes on draft copy of the Children’s Act, 1908, HO 45/10363/154821, TNA. In notes on the first
reading of the Children’s Bill, Herbert Samuel references the example of Borstals as a necessary
component of juvenile justice policy.
581
For more on the juvenile-adult classification, see chapter 5.
582
For more on fears of contagion in adult courts, see chapters 4 and 5. The most notable proponent for
total separation of the court system based on age was the Howard Association.
226

group within the penal system came with the 1865 Prison Act. As we have seen in the
case of prison reform movement, prison conditions for children and juveniles
represented a leading edge issue that, more than other social movement concerning
juveniles, easily gained political traction..
583
Indeed, while the notion that youthful
offenders represented a distinct group within the prison population was not uncommon
by late nineteenth century, there were few separate provisions for children and juveniles
across all British prisons. By the 1890s, the government had begun to address concerns
over the lack of such provisions particularly for prisoners under the age of 14. As we
have seen, these concerns were famously dramatized by Oscar Wilde in 1897 and led to
the crystallization of an effective prison reform movement in the early twentieth century
that focused on an ideology of total separation of juveniles and adults.
584

It is important here to look back to the report of the 1895 Prison Committee. The
1895 Prison Committee concluded, despite the testimony of several witnesses, from
prison officials to moral reform agents, who argued for a complete elimination of prison
sentences for juveniles, that such a policy was neither “practicable nor desirable.”
585

Instead, the Prison Committee offered up the suggestion that children should be kept
completely separate from adult offenders. Moreover, the Committee concluded that
“ordinary prison discipline and regulations should not be applied to juveniles, but rather
those governors and the visiting committees should be made responsible for their
treatment.”
586
The conclusions of the Prison Committee in 1895 illustrate the
endurance of the issue of juvenile penal reform, but they also demonstrate a period

583
See chapter 3.
584
See chapter 3 for more on the condition of children in prison.
585
Ibid.
586
Ibid.
227

between 1895 and 1906 where such reforms never developed into government-
mandated reform. Again, there was reluctance on the part of the Conservative party to
engage in a wholesale remaking of the penal system for juveniles under a single
standard. By 1896, a directive emerged from Home Secretary Matthew Ridley to begin
creating increased levels of separation that placed individuals under 16 years old in a
new class of prisoner. Applying the authority granted to him under the Prison Acts of
1865 and 1877, Ridley issued new rules for juveniles in prisons that emphasized a
separation of status based on age without creating strict mandates.
In his directive, Ridley also affirmed that those prisoners with sentences over
one month would be held, where possible, “in a district in which accommodation is set
apart for juvenile offenders.”
587
Juveniles with shorter sentences would be, where
possible, “completely separated from the adult prisoners.”
588
In addition to the space
that juveniles inhabited, the directive added that juveniles serving under “ordinary
prison discipline” would need to have certain provisions met. These provisions stated
that the juvenile prisoner “shall not be required to sleep on a plank bed” and, if
physically able, should “be exercised daily at physical drill in lieu of, or in addition to,
walking exercise, with a view to his physical development.”
589
Ridley also ordered that
juveniles have access to special materials, such as library books, as well as to training in
some sort of trade or craft.
Younger children were also to be given special status. Ridley asserted that
children under 14 were to be considered in separate terms to those under 16 and their

587
Home Office circular, “Juvenile Offenders in Prisons,” 1896, HO 45/10503/125632, TNA.
588
Ibid.
589
Ibid.
228

status upon entry and exit of a prison were to be “reported directly to the Under
Secretary of State, Home Office,” allowing for oversight of the treatment of younger
children in prisons.
590
At prison sites themselves, the chaplain was given the
responsibility to “devote individual attention to and care to juvenile offenders, and, in
co-operation with the Visiting Committee and the Discharged Prisoners Aid Society, to
make every possible provision for their protection and care upon discharge.”
591
Ridley’s
directive did not create a new penal structure, but rather amended the current system to
limit interference with the daily functions of prisons. Reform was not systemic and
would not be until after 1906.
While the origins of the separate court movement can be traced back to the
1880s as part of the debates over the 1889 Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act, the
movement gained its most significant political traction during the campaign launched
by the Howard Association in the years following the Hooligan crisis.
592
As we have
already seen, the Howard Association had experienced limited success in its attempts to
sway the Home Office to pursue separate courts prior to 1903. The efforts of the
Association, coupled with the experimental special juvenile courts in Birmingham,
brought the issue back into the discourse of criminal and penal reform. Moral reformers
concerned with penal reform in the early twentieth century seized on the public desire to
“cure” Hooliganism through systems within the prison system designed to reform the
character and enhance the physical and moral heath of youthful offenders. The post-

590
Ibid.
591
Ibid
592
The public campaign for the 1889 Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act was led by the National
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), spearheaded by Rev. Benjamin Waugh. Like
its work in the early twentieth century, it courted prominent members of government, including Queen
Victoria, to agitate for additional protections for children and juveniles.
229

Hooligan climate allowed the Howard Association and others to steer policy toward
viewing the penal system as an instrument for personal growth for youthful offenders.
The minor reforms that began in the mid-1890s were a product of practical need
rather than an expression of a particular set of moral concerns, unlike the penal and
justice reforms of the first decade of the twentieth century. The 1895 Prison Committee
report reveals a government that was less concerned with the nature of prison and more
concerned with simply creating what amounted to adult prisons for children. In this
case, the issue at stake was not how to treat and help child prisoners, but rather simply
how to keep them physically separate from adult prisoners. Yet while the motives and
manner that the mandate for creating and mandating separations between juveniles and
adults in the British penal system, the system that emerged in the legislation passed
between 1906-8 evolved from the ideas suggested by reformers in the late 1890s. They
advocated creating a completely separate justice system, arising from a desire by moral
reformers to create specialized systems to deal with youthful offenders that facilitated
personal reform.
593

In November 1903, the Committee on Wage-earning Children, a children’s labor
advocacy group, held a conference at the London County Council Education offices to
discuss the feasibility of separate courts for children.
594
At the conference,
representatives of the Howard Association presented the findings of their tour of the
United States. Among the other notable participants were representatives from the
National Union of Teachers, the Society for the Protection of Women and Children, the

593
One could argue that the doctrine of separation embraced by juvenile justice reformers in the early
twentieth century was much more an intellectual descendant of the reform legislation of the 1860s
through the passage of the 1870 Education Act.
594
Times, 3 November 3 1903.
230

e

Church of England Homes for Waifs and Strays, and the Salvation Army, and several
members of Parliament.
595
The conference concerned itself with the logistics of
creating separate courts, but also how provisions had been made in some cities to place
children in age-appropriate environments while on remand.
596

By 1904, there were substantial discussions within the Home Office regarding
the feasibility of separate courts. In London, the education offices of the London
County Council offered strong support for separate police courts for children under
16.
597
The LCC argued that such courts would limit how much children were “morally
contaminated when brought into contact with adult offenders.”
598
The LCC was not
just concerned with children on trial, but also witnesses who were unwitting victims of
the contagious nature of criminality. The LCC, which had injected itself into the issue
of child welfare with its takeover of London schools in the previous year, cast a larg
shadow over juvenile policy debates beginning in this period. It would play an
important role in the early Home Office discussions about what would become the 1908
Children’s Act.
Another prominent moral reform group that offered its perspective on the issue
was the Salvation Army. Salvationists saw separate courts as a way to inject a doctrine
of moral rescue into juvenile criminal proceedings. Following the lead of the Howard
Association, Salvationists began their own campaign in late 1904 to support the creation
of “a system similar to the U.S. system, with probation officers and separate

595
Ibid.
596
Of note in the discussion was the commentary by a few participants at the conference regarding
shortcomings of the remand provisions made by the Youthful Offenders Act of 1901.
597
Daily Telegraph, 12 November 1904. This was, of course, a somewhat ironic stance since most of the
police courts in London had made some accommodation for separate space for children.
598
Ibid.
231

magistrates.”
599
The proposals made in their print media were virtually
indistinguishable from those of the Howard Association. This movement was also
joined by the London-based Society for Juvenile Offenders, which pressed the Home
Secretary for increased attention to the “separate courts” proposal of the Howard
Association.
600

The British government’s move toward a truly separate justice system for
children and juveniles began before the Liberal party’s electoral ascent. The 1905
Summary Jurisdiction Bill proposed to “provide for detention of children before trial in
places other than ordinary police cells” and “separate the trials of young persons under
the age of 16 years of age from the trials of other accused persons.”
601
The bill also
sought to expand and develop the system of releasing youthful offenders on parole
previously established by the 1887 Probation of First Offenders Act. The bill proposed
that children be tried in some place other than “an ordinary courtroom,” but left the
details of that “other place” up to local authorities. The bill did not mandate the
establishment of a “complete system of separate courts” but rather focused on limiting
what had been the concern of moral reformers earlier in the decade, namely
contamination.
602
Yet, while there was some consensus about the undesirability of

599
Social Gazette, 25 February 1905.
600
Letter to the Home Secretary from the Secretary of the Society for Juvenile Offenders, 12 October
1904, HO 45/10362/154821, TNA.
601
Memorandum, Summary Jurisdiction Bill, 1905, HO 45/10311/123946, TNA.
602
Sir Howard Vincent to Home Secretary Akers-Douglas, 4 February 1905, HO 45/10311/123946,
TNA. Vincent stood for election to parliament initially because as a soldier, he had been so impressed by
the civilizing effects of British imperialism.
232

children being tried in the same room as adult offenders, the idea of creating a truly
separate juvenile justice system was seen as unrealistic and ultimately unnecessary.
603

The heart of the problem was the expense of altering, rebuilding, and, in some
cases, providing completely new facilities to meet the mandate, but also the uncertainty
that isolation would actually work. As Conservative MP Sir Howard Vincent noted,
there was no way to eliminate the risk of contamination as children were often needed
to testify in court in cases against adults—or even other children—on charges of
“carnal knowledge, indecent assault, indecent exposure, and cruelty.”
604
In these
scenarios, children would be exposed to “considerable” contamination. Instead of
creating a comprehensive system that protected children through a system that strictly
regulated where, when, and how children could appear in court, the bill offered a
system where children would, under most circumstances, be held, provide testimony,
and be tried in a separate space determined and provided for by local authorities.
While the bill effectively demanded little of the state, placing the burden of
establishment and administration of separate facilities on local magistrates in a way
typical of nineteenth century reforms, it represented the first significant change in the
way children and juveniles were treated while in custody. The bill was renamed the
Children’s Court Bill for its second reading in late February 1905. By that time, much
of what it demanded was already in place informally in many of the police courts in

603
The issue at stake here is not whether the movement to create separate courts was an unique part of
New Liberalism, but rather that individuals commonly identified as “New Liberals” played a prominent
role implementing ideas and proposals for state intervention that existed prior to 1906 and, in some cases,
originated from within the Conservative party.
604
Ibid.
233

London.
605
In the case of the Worship Street Police court, the magistrate felt that little
could be done to improve upon their system in which children were “not allowed under
any circumstances to be among adult criminals.”
606
In the case of the Metropolitan
Police Courts, uniformity in policy came later in 1905. In a memorandum issued on
June 30, 1905 from Home Secretary A. Akers-Douglas to the Metropolitan Police
Courts, the Home Office requested that a specific time and place be assigned where
children could be tried. He further demanded that charges against children “should be
given precedence, so far as practicable, over other business.
607

THE “AGE OF INFLUENCE” DEBATE
Another important element of the debate was how to define when a juvenile
become an adult and lost special status. Since the 1860s, the state had used 16 as the
age at which a person was regarded as an adult.
608
This had implications for who was
eligible for reform and who would be sent to a conventional prison environment. By
expanding the definition of the juvenile, many more individuals had the chance to avoid
imprisonment in an adult prison facility in favor of an alternate environment that
stressed vocational training and personal reform. The development of the juvenile-adult
category, while not an explicit part of the 1908 Children’s Act, contributed to a larger
governmental discourse on the nature of childhood.
Educators and some moral reformers applied the term “age of influence” to
connote that individuals had a specific time in which they were able to reform

605
Of note here was that by February 1905, children were kept in a separate space in the Marlborough,
Marylebone, North London, Lambeth, Thames, and Worship Street courts. In the case of Marylebone,
the report specifically notes that boys and girls were also held in separate spaces.
606
Report from London police courts, HO 45/10392/173729, TNA.
607
Ibid.
608
For a notable example of this definition, see “What Shall We Do with Our Hooligans?” Saturday
Review, 29 October 1898.
234

themselves.
609
This idea implied that young people passed through a period in their
young adult lives when they could still be affected by moral reform efforts. For one
speaker at a Salvation Army education forum in 1905, the outer limit of reformability
for young adults was more extensive than the traditional definition.
A girl who is a daughter of entirely worldly parents must have her fling in the
social world before she is open to reformation. The age which I would choose
for bringing all possible influence to bear is twenty-one, or even a year or so
later.
610

As we have already seen, in the eyes of many in the club movement, the crucial age
range was 16 to 18 years old. The absence of consensus on this matter suggests that
there was no commonly-understood age of adulthood in British legal and judicial
culture in this period.
With the passage of the 1908 Children’s Act, the notion of childhood was
further refined to include age-based sub-classifications. Following the lead of the
Borstal movement, the state created a bifurcated definition of juvenile that allowed for a
more refined approach to cases involving juveniles by implying a material difference
between children of certain ages. The law defined a “child” as a person under the age of
14 and a “young person” as someone between the ages of 14 and 16. The intent of this
split was allow for the separate treatment of younger offenders, recognizing for the first
time a difference between a child under 14 and a16 year old.
THE BIRMINGHAM MODEL AND THE 1908 CHILDREN’S ACT
The “age of influence” debate proved to be crucial to the development of the
Children’s Act of 1908. The Children’s Act began as a series of inquiries in March 1906

609
Social Gazette, 7 October 1905.
610
Ibid.
235

to determine the feasibility of creating and universally mandating a separate court
system for individuals under 16 years old. On April 2, 1906, Home Secretary Herbert
Gladstone sent a letter to the metropolitan police courts, the county courts, and the Petty
Sessional Divisions asking whether Aker-Douglas’s separate court initiative from the
previous year had worked and what further arrangements were needed to enhance it.
611

The results of Gladstone’s enquiry, detailed in a Home Office report in late April 1906,
reveal that the implementation had been inconsistent. While many of London’s police
courts had some form of separate accommodation for the detention of small numbers of
juveniles, few had separate spaces for trials.
612
In the case of Clerkenwell and
Woolwich, construction had begun on new buildings designed for the detention and trial
of juveniles. In others, such as the Greenwich police court, “plans for rebuilding” were
being prepared, and any activities involving children were held in the magistrate’s
chambers or an adjoining room “quite apart from the general court.”
613

Outside London, justice policy for juveniles was even less uniform. The reports
from the County Constabulary show that juvenile incarceration policy generally did not
follow a formal system and was contingent on the nature of the facilities and whims of
the magistrate. Many magistrates’ courts placed children under remand “in a charge
room or superintendent’s office, instead of cells or handed over to parents if
possible.”
614
In some counties, Akers-Douglas’ directive to place children in separate
spaces while on remand was not followed at all. In Lincolnshire, “when children are

611
Letter to Chief Constable, County Police from M.D. Chalmers, 2 April 1906, HO 45/10179/B29695,
TNA.
612
Home Office circular on separate courts, April 1906, HO 45/10311/123926, TNA. In some police
courts, the detention space was one small room rather than multiple cells. For example, in the
Westminster Police Court, there was only a single room measuring 16 feet by 12 feet.
613
Ibid.
614
Home Office circular on detention of children in custody, April 1906, HO 45/10179/B29695, TNA.
236

arrested…they are detained in Police cells,” noting that the only way to provide for a
separate space for juveniles would be to build a new structure. Some counties, such as
Nottinghamshire, Northumberland, and Northampton, placed children in a workhouse
while awaiting trial.
615

The initial response to a completely separate system of justice for juveniles
presented in Gladstone’s circular was not met with universal support from the legal
community. The circular notes that “several magistrates take the opportunity of
expressing again their views that the provision of separate courts for children’s cases
would serve no useful purpose” and that the number of cases involving children was
minimal. Paul Taylor, famous for his role in many of the notable trials during the
Hooligan crisis, correctly observed that “the number of juvenile offenders is almost
negligible.”
616
At Marlborough Street Police Court, there were only twenty-two
children under 12 years old and thirty-four individuals under 16 years old charged in the
first three months of the year.
617
Many of the Petty Sessional Divisions also expressed
doubts that such a system made sense given the lack of juvenile offenders. These
conclusions are consistent with all of the data available regarding juvenile crime rates
during this period and illustrate the pervasive nature of the moral panic over juvenile
delinquency from nearly a decade before. By 1906, the notion that juvenile criminality
was a serious problem was a foregone conclusion.
Of all the examples of juvenile justice practice examined by Gladstone’s Home
Office, the model that most closely resembled the goals of Liberal reformers was

615
Ibid.
616
Home Office circular on separate courts, April 1906, HO 45/10179/B29695, TNA.
617
Ibid.
237

Birmingham’s juvenile court, which from 1903 had utilized an “informal” court setting
for juvenile trials. The intent was to act in the best interest of the child and offer an
alternative setting free of the stigma of a criminal court where children and juveniles
could be steered in the direction of personal reform and away from criminality.
Children who served a prison term under the Birmingham model had no convictions
show up on their criminal record. Instead, a separate system of juvenile records tracked
juvenile offenses. This “clean slate” allowed children not to be marked as criminals on
reaching adulthood.
618
Herbert Samuel added in his notes that the Birmingham model
represented the “best model” for separate courts for Juveniles in Britain.
619

The question of whether the Birmingham model was worth the expense
remained the largest hurdle for Gladstone’s Home Office. In reply to a question in the
House of Commons on the effectiveness of the Birmingham system in keeping juveniles
out of prison and limiting recidivism among juveniles, Gladstone noted that the “results
of the working of the Children’s Court in Birmingham have been most satisfactory in
reducing the number of children committed to prison.”
620
According to Gladstone, the
number of children convicted decreased from eighty-four to only twenty-one during the
first year of service.
The question before the Home Office was not whether there was a benefit in
separating children from the general population both in courts and in prisons, but rather
how to accomplish this goal in a uniform manner within budgetary constraints. The
issue in many locations, as noted in Gladstone’s statement to Parliament on May 30,

618
J. Courtney Lord, City of Birmingham, Paper read at the International Congress at Guildhall, London,
22 May 1906, 11.
619
Notes on Home Office circular on separate courts, April 1906, HO 45/10179/B29695, TNA.
620
Times, 29 November 1906.
238

1906, was the cost of building new facilities as well as the cost of providing for the
hiring and payment of probation officers. Gladstone noted in his initial replies to
Parliament in late May 1906 that in the case of some courts, such as Barrow-in-Furness,
plans for new courts already included a separate children’s court, but could not be
implemented because of budgetary limits.
621

Another element essential to the establishment of a separate juvenile justice
system was a system of probation. The 1907 Probation of Offenders Act, under the
force of the Liberal majority, quickly passed into law within months of its introduction.
The Act was designed in conjunction with the campaign to create a uniform system of
juvenile justice in order to rid the system of trivial charges and focus the administration
of justice on more serious crimes. In particular, probation would apply to minor
criminals and first offenders and allow for such offenders to be released into parental
custody.
622
The development of a new universal probation system was seen as a
necessary step because it would limit the financial pressure placed on the courts and
help to manage the workload of a separate juvenile court system. The Act served to
allay the fears of some justice reform critics who argued that such a system was too
costly and unfeasible for some courts.
The intent of the Probation Bill in relation to what would eventually develop
into the 1908 Children’s Act was to create a new level of the justice apparatus that met
the practical needs of smaller courts as well as over-burdened courts in cities and larger
towns and counties. More importantly, it laid the groundwork for more extensive forms

621
Question and Answer Circulated with Votes, 30 May 1906, HO 45/10179/B29695, TNA. This is not to
say there were not opponents to separate holding areas and courts for children.
622
Probation of Offenders Act (1907).
239

of state intervention in matters of juvenile justice and further promoted the notion that
prisons and gaols were institutionally less able to aid in the reform of their inhabitants
than a positive, well-supervised environment. The Probation of Offenders Act also
strengthened the role played by the state by removing some elements of parental
accountability—elements that proved popular among reformers in the wake of the
Hooligan Crisis—in favor of placing accountability for released juveniles in the hands
of probation officers. Probation officers were not merely officers of the court assigned
to track and report on the behavior of their ward. They were asked to “befriend” and
“advise” those under their supervision.
623

On one level, the bill was effectively an expansion of the probation system
created in 1887 by the Probation of First Offenders Act and a modification of the
release terms stipulated in the Summary Jurisdiction Act and the 1901 Youthful
Offenders Act. Its modification of the 1877 Probation of First Offenders Act was
particular welcomed by magistrates, some of whom viewed the original law as a “cause
of crime” rather than a solution to criminality.
624
On another level, it helped the Home
Office to clear a crucial hurdle in promoting the Children’s Bill. The application of a
system of probation for minor offenses was a necessary development for Gladstone’s
Home Office and its efforts to reform juvenile justice because it would allow for smaller
Petty Sessional Courts—which had few actual cases of crime among children—to take
many cases of minor importance, thus avoiding the expense of building and maintaining

623
Ibid.
624
Daily News, 15 April 1907. Clerkenwell magistrate Mr. d’Eyncourt blasted the old law in the case of
a railway porter convicted of theft, arguing that the law encouraged recidivism. He stated with some
hyperbole that, “The First Offenders Act is a very dangerous Act—one that has produced more crime in
this country than anything else I know of.”
240

a separate courtroom.
625
Instead, children and juveniles could be given probation and
placed under the supervision of a probation officer.
THE CHILDREN’S CHARTER
While the 1907 Probation of Offenders Act did much to change how the state
treated children and juveniles, the legislation that represented the most fundamental
shift in the relationship between the state and the populace was the 1908 Children’s Act.
The Children’s Act, or as it was sometime called the “Children’s Charter,” represented
the most extensive effort to date to create a legal structure that defined and enunciated
the obligations of the state towards children and juveniles. At the heart of the Act were
new statutes designed and intended to “protect children”
626
Responding to the demands
of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children among others, the Bill
was also concerned generally with the issue of child welfare. To this end, the Act made
numerous provisions, from the first part of the Act dealing with the protection of
infants, creating new statutes to prevent acts of cruel treatment of children by adults.
The Act also created a legal barrier between the parent and the child by increasing the
importance of the state in determining child abuse and creating requirements for
protecting children from potentially dangerous conditions.
627

Part III of the Children’s Act was designed largely in response to calls for
tobacco regulation that had reached a fever pitch earlier in the decade due in no small
part to the activities of moral reformers and child health advocates. Tobacco, which had
been associated with juvenile delinquency and, more specifically Hooliganism during

625
Home Office Memorandum “Returns as to the Treatment of cases of Youthful Offenders in Courts of
Summary Jurisdiction in England and Wales,” HO 45/10340/139389, TNA.
626
Circular from Herbert Gladstone to H.M. Judges, 31 March 1909, HO 45/10396/176628, TNA.
627
This is developed in Part I of the Children’s Act, 1908.
241

the late 1890s, was seen as a health and safety risk, but also as an element of juvenile
deviant sub-culture. Clause 42 of the Act prohibited the sale of tobacco in all forms, as
well as cigarette papers, to persons under the age of 16.
628
Clause 43 further gave power
to agents of the state, such as constables, park keepers, or any other individuals
recognized to have the powers of constables, to seize and destroy any and all tobacco
found in the possession of children and young persons. Clause 44 prohibited smoking
in “a street or public place.”
629
The language of Part III closely resembled the demands
made by anti-smoking campaigners who sought to criminalize not only the sale of
tobacco to juveniles, but also the act of smoking in public by juveniles.
630

Another behavior associated with juvenile deviance was alcohol consumption
and the congregating of juveniles in places where alcohol was sold and distributed.
Section 120 of the Children’s Act prohibited children from entering pubs or any other
“licensed premises” under any circumstances.
631
This clause limited who could have
access to areas where alcohol was sold and consumed, representing to some degree a
connection to the arguments made by many moral reformers—and particularly
temperance campaigners—that alcohol and juvenile delinquency were inextricably

628
Children’s Act (1908) Part III, Section 42. Oddly, while Clause 42 of the 1908 Children’s Act
prohibited the sale of cigarette papers, it did not limit the sale of pipes or cigar holders. It explicitly
mentions that the sale of these items should remain legal. There is no evidence of a debate on the
elements of this clause, but it seems that the list of prohibited items might have been seen as an additional
threat to children as anti-tobacco campaigns focused almost exclusively on cigarettes rather than other
tobacco delivery methods.
629
Children’s Act (1908) Part III, Section 43.
630
See especially chapter 4 for more on the anti-tobacco movement. Many groups demanded that tobacco
be made illegal for those under 16 on health grounds.
631
Section 120 of the Act would prove to be controversial. Multiple accounts were presented before the
House of Commons noting that young children and occasionally infants were seen waiting in the cold for
one or both of their parents. By 1910, Winston Churchill, on behalf of the Home Office, launched an
investigation into section 120 and its impact on the welfare of children.
242

linked.
632
Just as with the regulation of tobacco, this clause of the law was intended
both as a law designed to protect children’s moral and physical health, but also to
regulate—at least to some degree—the stimuli experienced by children and young
persons. Pubs were regarded as one of the most significant spaces in which juvenile
delinquency was fostered and developed.
While pubs—and particularly pubs in urban working-class areas—had long been
viewed as sites of questionable morality, the explicit link made between pubs and the
development of Hooliganism had a significant impact on how they came to be regulated
in early twentieth-century juvenile justice legislation. Section 120 of the Children’s
Act, in its attempt to regulate licensed distributors of alcohol, represented another
example of how the assumptions about juvenile deviant culture and concerns over
physical health that came into focus with the press coverage translated into government
policy. To some extent this attitude relates to nineteenth-century “old” Liberal attitudes
towards pubs—and alcohol in general—but given the language and specific elements
regulated by the Act, a more precise connection seems to exist between these aspects of
the Act and juvenile temperance campaigns.
Of all the reforms made by the Children’s Act, the most profound changes were
to the treatment of juvenile offenders presented in Part V of the Act. Children and
young persons were now required to be housed in a “place of detention” rather than a
prison cell while under remand if release to parents was deemed inappropriate. These
places of detention had to be separate from any space of punishment, including existing

632
See especially chapter 4 on temperance movement claims regarding the connection between juvenile
delinquency and alcohol consumption. This claim was also made by the Salvation Army in its campaign
to regulate alcohol sales to children and juveniles.
243

police cells. Moreover, section 112 stipulated that in selecting places of detention, the
court “must have regard where practicable to the religious persuasion of the child or
young person.”
633
These clauses remained consistent with the demands made by the
Salvation Army early in the decade in their campaign to keep children away from prison
at all costs and to provide for the religious needs of juveniles while in custody.
634
Part
V, Section 102 of the Act prohibited sentences of penal servitude for individuals under
14 years old and stated that “a young person between the ages of 14 and 16 cannot be
sentenced to penal servitude and can be sentenced to imprisonment only in special
cases.”
635
According to a circular distributed to the courts following the passage of the
Act, the Home Office believed that the language of Part V, with emphasis on section 94,
in association with the Probation of Offenders Act of 1907 provided that “places of
detention should not be commonly used as places of punishment.”
636

Part V also created new limits on punishment of juvenile offenders, with an
emphasis on those convicted of “very serious crimes.”
637
Section 103 prohibited the
death penalty for anyone 16 years old or under, but permitted the court to place the
offender in holding “at His Majesty’s pleasure.
638
Section 104 provided for the judge’s
discretion in cases in which a child or young person was convicted of attempted murder,

633
Children’s Act (1908) Part V, Section 112.
634
In a letter to Gladstone, the Salvation Army congratulated Gladstone for these clauses. The Salvation
Army maintained correspondence with the Home Office during the drafting of the bill regarding such
provisions.
635
Children’s Act (1908) Part V, Section 102.
636
Home Office circular to H.M. Judges, 31 March 1909, HO 45/10401/181729, TNA.
637
Children’s Act (1908) Part V, Section 103. The phrase “very serious crimes” in clause 103 is not
defined in the Bill, but given the context of the discussion of section 104, it would be reasonable to
assume that it referred to capital crimes. Both clauses offer the presiding justice some degree of power to
interpret the law. This clause would theoretically have spared individuals like John D’Arcy, who was
executed after his murder conviction in 1898. D’Arcy’s actual age was never confirmed during his
various court appearances, but it is listed in his trial at the Old Bailey as 16 years old.
638
Ibid.
244

manslaughter, or wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm. The intent of this
provision was to allow judges to interpret and impose what punishment best fitted the
character of the crime when the “rare” case is of “so grave a character that a term of
Reformatory detention appears to be insufficient.”
639

The Children’s Act, in its design and intended function, was equally a product of
“New Liberalism” in its attempt to create new structures for vulnerable members of
society and the legacy of moral reform campaigns that sought to protect children from
stimuli that were seen as responsible for juvenile delinquency. It is significant not
simply because it changed the way Britain legally understood children, but how the
state came to see childhood as a significant and distinct part of life that needed to be
regulated and protected.
CONCLUSION
The 1908 Children’s Act represents the state’s most significant attempt to curtail
the circumstances that were seen by many as the root of what caused Hooliganism a
decade earlier and to restrict what were believed to be the sources of juvenile deviance
while instituting what was regarded as a system that would better insulate children and
juveniles from the contagion of adult criminality. The political history of the act is far
more complicated than simply understanding it as an expression of early twentieth-
century Liberal Party interventionism. The Children’s Act also clearly represents a
confluence of ideas between the values espoused by different moral reform agents
active during the first half of the decade, from its concern with the deleterious impact of
the adult justice system to concerns about specific behaviors, including tobacco and

639
Children’s Act (1908) Part V, Section 104.
245
alcohol consumption. Its desire to protect children from parental cruelty and
negligence, as well as its commitment to regulating access to dangerous products and
adult spaces represents a clear link to the efforts of groups who saw such places and
behaviors as the root causes of juvenile delinquency and deviance.
The 1908 Children’s Act was about more than simply providing for juvenile
justice and regulating deviance—it was the culmination of a decade of social agitation
and represents in some regard the final product of a political culture that sought to
rescue working-class children from the influences of criminality and immorality. The
impact of this movement is better understood however in its contribution to a
fundamental change in the definition of childhood not simply as a line of demarcation,
but as a series of sub-classifications. Shaped by the debate over when an individual
became unable to reform him or herself, the Act’s legal reclassification of what
constituted a child had a profound impact on British culture.
Linked to the age of influence debate, the expansion of the Borstal system as a
method of reforming juvenile-adult offender along with the changes in the legal
structure ushered in by the Liberal party from early 1906 culminating in the 1908
Children’s Act represent a new direction in the definition of what constituted a juvenile
and which individuals could be effectively reformed from deviant and/or criminal
behavior. By creating the juvenile-adult class, the Borstal movement effectively
expanded this group beyond traditional definitions of “juvenile” that reflected the
transient nature of the category. Not all—and in fact not most—of the individuals who
were understood and recognized as ‘Hooligans’ in 1898 were children, juveniles, or
juvenile-adults under the definitions embraced by the laws and programs that emerged
246
between 1898 and 1908. None of the members of the notorious Girdle Gang, a group
the press tied closely to the Hooligan phenomenon, was under 25. Yet, the term
‘Hooligan’ came to signify a distinct relationship with the cultural definition of the
juvenile. Part of that was due to the prominence of the D’Arcy case in which an alleged
16 year old was convicted of perhaps the most notorious example of Hooligan behavior.
Yet, it is clear that the cultural definition of the Hooligan as a juvenile—and more
precisely a juvenile who was still able to be saved through dedicated reform of various
types—was influenced by the campaigns of moral reformers who sought to save British
children from the evils of their environment. The definitions of childhood that were
codified by 1908, themselves the legacy of nearly fifty years of debate, represent more
than anything else a line in the sand that separated who could be reformed and who
could not.
The development of new governmental policies was spurred by a socially-
conservative moral reform community’s reaction to a moral panic and developed in its
initial stages by the Conservative Party. “New Liberals,” standard-bearers of a reformed
vision of Liberalism that embraced a philosophy of government that borrowed as much
from L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson as it did from Smith and Bentham, and
appropriated much of the rhetoric of politically-conservative moral reformers and some
of the initiative of the Conservative Party in crafting its policy. It would, however, be a
serious error to argue that the ideological basis of juvenile justice reform came from
some sort of revitalized version of Liberalism. The Children’s Act was ultimately as
much an expression of conservative fears of moral decay as it was a product of a
progressive agenda to create a new safety net for children and young persons and owes
247
at least some part of its conception to the fears and anxieties experienced by late
Victorian society and made apparent by the Hooligan moral panic. Those who
identified with the “New Liberal” movement played a crucial role not as the architects
of reform, but rather as the political muscle that allowed for its passage into law.
The Children’s Act, as well as the debates and the supporting legislation that
helped to produce it, offer an important window into the influence not only of the moral
reform campaigns of the decade, but also the importance of a shift in governmental
attitude towards its role in the lives of its citizens. It is an act that sought fundamentally
to define the role of the state in the welfare of children beyond those children in its care
by beginning the process of setting significant new boundaries of behavior for both
children and parents. It is a piece of legislation that sets the table for additional
protective legislation in the 1920s and 1930s. More importantly, the Children’s Act
demonstrated not only the influence of moral reform discourse on the development of
state policy towards juveniles, but also the lasting significance of the Hooligan moral
panic for British cultural constructions of childhood.

248

Conclusion
This dissertation has sought to explore the nature of juvenile policy reform in
early twentieth century Britain and the political culture that defined and informed its
progress. Through a detailed examination of the Hooligan moral panic and the way it
shaped attitudes about juvenile deviance, it addressed why and how reform efforts
changed in the first years of the twentieth century. Using Hooliganism as a rhetorical
rubric, moral reformers introduced—and, in some instances, reintroduced—plans and
policy suggestions for institutional reform that attempted to mitigate the perceived
negative effects of Britain’s working-class environments. By 1906, under the influence
of reform-minded members of the Liberal party within the Home Office, these plans
began to be realized, culminating in the 1908 Children’s Act.
Despite the fanfare that accompanied the passage of that Act, it was predictably
not a panacea for juvenile delinquency. Within eight years of its passage, concerns over
an apparent rise in juvenile criminality once again graced the pages of the popular press.
From 1914 to 1916, crime among children and young persons—particularly boys—
became a real and significant problem.
640
The common explanations offered for the rise
of crime was the absence of fathers on the western front and the influence of automatic
gambling machines and salacious cinema.
641

Borstals also experienced significant growing pains during their first years in
wide operation. By 1910, there was significant concern on the part of the Home Office

640
See especially HO 45/10790/301145, TNA for more on the increase in juvenile crime in 1915-16.
Unlike the Hooligan crisis, there is substantial data to suggest that juvenile crime did spike during this
period.
641
The language of these arguments closely mirrors the attacks on penny dreadfuls and street gambling
that came with the Hooligan crisis.
249

over how to deal with inmates exhibiting negative or destructive behavior. Concerns
over “incorrigible” or non-responsive, uncontrollable inmates were minimal during the
first years of the Borstal system. It was believed that the screening process set up in
1903 would virtually eliminate individuals prone to such behavior. The Home Office
conducted a detailed inquiry into misbehavior at Borstals and found the problem to be
widespread. The problem with incorrigible inmates at Borstals was that there was no
set protocol for dealing with them beyond expulsion, leaving those inmates to be
returned to adult prisons rather another reform-based institution. The central concern
posed by incorrigibles, according to the Borstal Association’s leadership in 1910, was
“the harm that might be done to the discipline of the institutions” as well as what would
happen to those inmates whose continued misbehavior made them candidates for
expulsion.
642

The concept of the “Hooligan” also underwent significant changes. By 1908, the
word “hooligan” was no longer commonly capitalized. It had been transformed from
proper noun to a commonly understood descriptor of primarily juvenile and young adult
anti-social behavior. The meaning of the term was further altered by the events
surrounding the 1909 Scottish Cup football tournament. A week earlier, the initial
match-up between Celtic and the Rangers ended in a tie. When the rematch at Hampden
Park ended in another tie, angry supporters from both sides rioted.
643
According to the
Glasgow Weekly News, the riot was started by a section of fans who mistakenly felt that

642
Letter from E. Rugles Brise to the Prison Commission, 29 March 1911, HO 144/1129/205843, TNA.
643
See especially Wray Vampler, “Sports Crowd Disorder in Britain 1870-1914: Causes and Controls,”
, Vol. 7 no. 1 (Spring 1980), 5-21. Journal of Sport History
250

if the game ended in another tie, extra time would be added.
644
Rioters stormed the
players’ quarter’s, took to the field and destroyed the pitch. According to the Glasgow
Weekly News,
A few policemen attempted to stem the flow but they were beaten savagely.
Police reinforcements were able to prevent the mob from reaching the dressing
rooms, but that was all they could accomplish. Rioters tore out the goalposts,
ripped up the nets, and smashed down fencing. Bonfires were made out of the
broken barricading and the uprooted goalposts were used as battering rams
against the turnstile entrances which were also set on fire. The arrival of the fire
brigade signaled further trouble and the firemen were attacked and their hoses
slashed.
645

The aftermath of the riot left Hampden Park in ruins.
Not till early evening, two and a half hours after the match ended, were the
rioters forced out of the ground and the fires brought under control. Much of the
stadium was damaged: five gates and payboxes with twenty two turnstiles had
been destroyed, a substantial proportion of fencing had been smashed and
burned, and a large part of the playing area had been scarred by fire and broken
glass; in all some £1000 worth of damage. Casualties were heavy: fifty eight
policemen and sixty others received hospital treatment; only by a miracle was
no-one killed.
646

The 1909 Scottish Cup riots at Hampden Park were not particularly unusual. Football
violence among supporters of rival teams, particular among Scottish supporters, was not
unknown in this period.
647
What was significant about the events of April 17, 1909 was
that the press accounts repeatedly labeled the rioters as “hooligans.”
648

In the years following the 1909 Scottish Cup debacle, the image of the hooligan
was increasingly linked with football-related violence, a cultural meaning that persists

644
Glasgow Weekly News, 24 April 1909.
645
Ibid.
646
Ibid.
647
What was unusual was the level and extent of the destruction. Indeed, while fighting was
commonplace among supporters of rival squads, the pitch and grandstands usually remained intact. In
1905, a match-up between Preston and Blackburn ended in significant violence and was cited as a
comparable event in the press.
648
Glasgow Weekly News, 24 April 1909.
251
to this day. The slow process that transformed “Hooligan” into “hooligan” began in the
last days of the Hooligan moral panic in the autumn of 1898. Just as hooliganism was
extended to football violence, the meaning of “Hooligan” was diluted and extended to
include any form of juvenile delinquency and eventually, any form of public anti-social
behavior. As early as October 1898, the term “Hooligan” came to be associated with
any organized violent and anti-social criminal activity performed by a group distinct
from its initial definition as a specific deviant sub-culture. By 1909, any exclusive
association between hooliganism and juvenile behavior completely disappeared.
Separated by ten years, the Hooligan crisis and the passage of the Children’s Act
represent important milestones in the way in which British society regarded juvenile
delinquency. The Hooligan crisis served as an important catalyst, not only empowering
moral reform rhetoric, but also informing the nature and intent of eventual legislative
action. The significance of Hooliganism on the development of state policy towards
juveniles was that it helped to focus the arguments of moral reform agents to play to the
fears aroused by the Hooligan crisis. Similarly, concern over moral failure, rampant
criminality, and degeneration did not magically appear with the Hooligan crisis, but
they were highlighted and brought into greater focus by the specter of the Hooligan. In
cases such as the Oakley Street Murder and the Red Cross Court Tragedy, late Victorian
concerns with the moral status of working-class boys were made real. In these cases, as
with other cases that came to be subsumed under the Hooligan label, the popular press
helped to develop an image of juvenile delinquency that enlivened debates about the
state of British youth and empowered demands from in and out of government for
increased effort to prevent the moral and physical decay of young Britons.
252
This dissertation has sought to explore the nature of juvenile policy reform in
Britain from 1898 to 1908. In chapters 1 and 2, it explored the nature and extent of the
Hooligan moral panic. These chapters illustrate how Hooliganism developed as a
cultural construction and how that construction renewed societal focus on the issue of
juvenile delinquency. Chapter 3 demonstrated the substantial link between the Hooligan
moral panic and early responses by the state and—most notably—by moral reform
agents. Chapter 4 further explored the rhetoric and ideologies of moral reform espoused
by groups such as the Salvation Army, who took a leading position in pursuing a wide
variety of schemes and policies designed to combat what it perceived as symptoms of
moral decay. Chapter 5 followed with a detailed examination of the institutional efforts
that targeted the moral reform of delinquent children and juveniles, from the revived
club movement to a number of schemes that sought to separate young people from the
deleterious impact of modern urban life. Among the suggested institutional efforts were
calls for the complete reorganization of the British justice system to provide boundaries
to separate and isolate children, juveniles, and even young adults from adult criminal
populations. Chapter 6 tracked the response of the reform-minded elements of “New
Liberal” movement within the Home Office beginning in 1906, which appropriated
many of the proposals, ideas, and rhetoric of moral reformers into its legislative agenda,
culminating in the 1908 Children’s Act.
Given that many of the ideas that shaped debate and discussions both in the
moral reform community and government were informed by discourse dating back to
the Victorian period, why is Hooliganism significant to this story? Hooliganism was a
crucial element in cultural circumstances that facilitated the rhetoric of moral reformers.
253
From its spatial and visual constructions to its association with existing fears of moral
and physical degeneration, Hooliganism served as an important element of the context
for moral reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many of
the concerns--and, indeed, many of the proposed solutions--existed well before the turn
of the century, the Hooligan provided reformers with a convenient target for their
efforts. The Hooligan served as an avatar for moral decay, creating an easy-to-consume
deviant identity for readers of the popular press and moral reform agents. I do not argue
that efforts toward reforming juvenile cultural institutions and policy were the exclusive
result of the Hooligan moral panic. Just the opposite, the Hooligan moral panic must be
seen as evidence of a culture that had built up significant anxieties about the moral and
physical health of its children. Following Cohen’s moral panic model, Hooliganism is
evidence of a culture whose tolerance for juvenile deviance had reached its nadir. The
various schemes, plans, and programs that emerged from 1898 to 1908 were products of
a culture attempting to reconcile anxieties over juvenile delinquency.
In sum, this dissertation has sought to explore how and why Britain, in the
period of a single decade, developed a myriad of institutional responses—both
governmental and social—to address the problem of juvenile delinquency. The passage
of the Children’s Act of 1908 represents a crucial milestone in state policy towards
juveniles and in the way British culture defined and understood childhood. It was
regarded by some within the Home Office as a law that did much to solve and prevent
the problems Britain had experienced in the previous decade with juvenile delinquency
and deviance. The results of the Act as a preventative measure, however, were in doubt
within a decade.
254
This dissertation has ultimately been a history of the political culture of reform
in early twentieth-century Britain. Informed by the threat presented by Hooliganism,
moral reformers reignited—and, in some cases, reorganized—their campaigns by
exploiting the Hooligan moral panic. The goals set out by the campaigns of the Howard
Association, the Salvation Army, and others were largely realized through the political
victory of the Liberal party in 1906. The Liberal party provided the political clout and
enthusiasm to press for reform in ways absent from Conservative party efforts. The
Liberals who took over the Home Office in 1906 provided the political muscle to pursue
these goals in a way that the Conservative government was unable to do.
The implementation of the Children’s Act of 1908 represented an important
transition in the way childhood was seen and understood in Britain. It was an important
declaration by the state that childhood needed to be protected and kept sacred, not only
for the welfare of the child, but for the welfare of society as a whole. In this way, this
dissertation has addressed how state policy towards juveniles developed from the late
Victorian period through World War I. What changed the course of the evolution of
children’s issues was the Hooligan crisis of 1898, where the question of the moral and
physical health of British children was recast in dire terms. Spurred by that moral panic,
moral reformers and the state acted to alter the nature of juvenile social policy.

255
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"Give us more music": women, musical culture, and work in wartime Britain, 1939-1946

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Creator Livie, Ian Michael (author)

Core Title Curing hooliganism: moral panic, juvenile delinquency, and the political culture of moral reform in Britain, 1898-1908

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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Publication Date 02/19/2010

Defense Date 01/11/2010

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