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Victorian Boys, We Are Here!

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Hooligan

Abstract

The word ‘hooligan’ made an abrupt entrance into common English usage, as a term to describe gangs of rowdy youths, during the hot summer of 1898. ‘Hooligans’ and ‘Hooliganism’ were thrust into the headlines in the wake of a turbulent August Bank Holiday celebration in London which had resulted in unusually large numbers of people being brought before the courts for disorderly behaviour, drunkenness, assaults on police, street robberies and fighting. One of the more alarming aspects of these Bank Holiday disturbances was that they highlighted fierce traditions of resistance to the police in working-class neighbourhoods, so that not uncommonly policemen attempting to make street arrests would be set upon by large crowds — sometimes numbering two or three hundred people — shouting ‘Rescue! Rescue!’ and ‘Boot him!’1

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Notes and References

  1. South London Chronicle, 15 October 1898; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 2 October 1898; and notes 22 to 33 below.

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  2. Music Hall and Theatre Review, 26 August 1898.

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  3. Clarence Rook tells us in The Hooligan Nights (Grant Richards, 1899) that the gangs took their name from Patrick Hooligan who lived in ‘Irish Court’ in the Elephant and Castle, ‘a leader among men’ who ‘established a cult’. Earning his living as a chucker-out, and famed for his lawless daring, Mr Hooligan is said to have died in prison after killing a policeman. Rook likens his career to ‘the lives of Buddha and Mahomet’ (pp. 23–4). The Hooligan Nights is a skilful journalistic portrayal of the life and times of the original Hooligans, but if ‘Patrick Hooligan’ was a legend in his own time, then it is odd that no one other than Clarence Rook seemed to have heard of him. The press, for example, while using the word ‘Hooligan’ freely enough, were totally bemused about its origins. Other stories in circulation suggested that the name had been taken from a comic character in Nuggets’, or from a music hall turn called ‘Brother Hooligan’ or ‘The Hooligans’, although the music hall trade magazine had never heard of any acts by these names. ‘Like many other things,’ it said, ‘the word comes from America.’ The word’s similarity to the American ‘hoodlum’ was noted elsewhere, and Australia was also mentioned as its birth-place. Yet another story said that the word had been derived from two brothers named Hoolehan who were prize-fighters, and that in a court case involving them a foolish policeman had mispronounced their name as ‘Hooligan’. The policeman’s famous mispronunciation also figured in accounts which gave it as a corruption of ‘Hooly’s gang’ or ‘Hooley’s gang’ which is the version accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary. Cf. Music Hall and Theatre Review, 26 August 1898; The Daily Mail, 18 August 1898; South London Chronicle, 20 August 1898; J. Trevarthan, ‘Hooliganism’, Nineteenth Century, January 1901, p. 84; E.J. Urwick, Studies of Boy Life in Our Cities (Dent, 1904) p. 300; Notes and Queries, 9th Series, no. 2, 17 September 1898, p. 227 and 15 October 1898, p. 316; 9th Series, no. 7, 19 January 1901, p. 48. There was indeed a Mr Hooley in the headlines at the same time as the Hooligans in August 1898, but he was not a ‘Hooligan’. Mr Edward Terah Hooley was a high-class villain and bankrupt who had been paying’ slush money’ to bicycle manufacturers, and in the course of an absorbing corruption scandal he seemed hell-bent on implicating almost the entire ruling class of England as beneficiaries in his schemes. Mr Hooley’s enterprise earned him even more column inches in the press than the terrible Hooligans, and numerous jokes contrived to link the two news stories. So that we hear of ‘Hooleyans’, ‘Hooleyism’, ‘Hooleybaloo’ and ‘Hooleyiana’, with ‘Mr. Terah Boom-de-Ay Hooley’ himself described by Punch as a ‘Hooley-gan’. Cf. Bicycling News, 3 August 1898 and 24 August 1898; The Daily Mail, 18 August 189&;Punch, 6 August 1898 and 12 November 1898; and zNews of the World (7 August 1898) cartoon, ‘Hooley’s Game of Skittles’, which shows him bowling down the House of Lords with his evidence in the bankruptcy hearing. It is a fair guess that it was these long-forgotten jokes which helped to secure the authority of ‘Hooley’s gang’ as the origins of ‘Hooligan’. There certainly were street gangs who took their name from a local hard man in such a way, but the Hooligans were not a local gang. Rather, as I will show, they were a well established ‘youth culture’ in working-class London, with affinities with similar subcultures in other cities, and we find youths from many parts of London adopting the title of ‘Hooligans’. If it had not been for the energies of the press in promoting the new word, however, then no doubt ‘Hooligan’ would have passed into obscurity along with the unfortunate Mr Hooley and much else of late nineteenth-century London slang.

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  4. The Daily Graphic, 31 August 1898; The Sun, 7 August 1898; South London Chronicle, 27 August 1898, 3 September 1898 and 15 October 1898;News of the World, 2 October 1898.

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  5. Hansard, 8 August 1898; South London Chronicle, 6 August 1898; ‘The Police Court and its Problems: An Interview with Mr. Thomas Holmes’, The Young Man, vol. 15, 1901, p. 327. Charles Booth’s survey found agreement: ‘Hooliganism has been exaggerated by the Press... So say our witnesses.’ Life and Labour of the People in London: Notes on Social Influences (Macmillan, 1903) p. 139.

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  6. Manchester Evening News, 18 August 1898; The Echo, 11 August 1898; The Sun, 3 August 1898.

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  7. Quoted in The Daily Graphic, 22 August 1898.

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  8. The Sun, 3 August 1898 and 6 August 1898; The Lancet, 20 August 1989; The Daily Mail, 11 August 1898; News of the World, 7 August 1898.

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  9. South London Chronicle, 13 August 1898; The Sun,3 August 1898 and 11 August 1898; The Daily Graphic, 6 October 1898.

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  10. The Clarion, 20 August 1898.

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  11. So, Robert Blatchford’s view on the frequently condemned drunkenness of the poor was that it was a consequence of their low state of physical health, and not excessive drinking. ‘I have seen a journalist, and one very severe upon the vices of the poor, drink eight shillings worth of whiskey and soda in an evening, and do his work correctly... But the average poor labourer of the slums would be mad on a quarter of the liquor.’ Merrie England (Journeyman, 1976 edn) pp. 72–3. Jack London agreed: ‘Not only is this beer unfit for people to drink, but too often the men and women are unfit to drink it.’ The People of the Abyss (Arco, 1963 edn) p. 176.

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  12. The Times, 2 August 1898.

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  13. The Times, 16 August 1898; Reynolds’s News, 2 October 1898; Manchester Evening News, 15 August 1898.

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  14. ‘HOOLIGANS: Street Fights in Chelsea’, The Daily Graphic, 18 August 1898.

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  15. The Times, 16 August 1898; News of the World, 21 August 1898.

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  16. The Daily Graphic, 23 August 1898, 26 August 1898, 27 August 1898, 26 September 1898; The Daily Mail, 1 August 1898 and 15 August 1898; The Sun, 6 August 1898; News of the World, 25 September 1898.

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  17. South London Chronicle, 24 September 1898.

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  18. W. Besant, East London (Chatto & Windus, 1901) p. 177.

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  19. Reynolds’s News, 7 August 1898; South London Chronicle, 20 August 1898.

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  20. South London Chronicle, 20 August 1898; Reynolds’s News, 7 August 1898.

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  21. South London Chronicle, 27 August 1898.

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  22. The Daily Graphic, 6 October 1898; South London Chronicle, 1 October 1898 and 8 October 1898.

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  23. Illustrated Police News, 9 July 1898.

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  24. South London Chronicle, 15 October 1898\Illustrated Police News, 1 October 1898; Reynolds’s News, 2 October 1898.

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  25. News of the World, 9 October 1898. This is probably the killing remembered by Arthur Harding in R. Samuel, East End Underworld (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) pp. 13, 292.

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  26. The Daily Mail, 15 August 1898; News of the World, 14 August 1898; The Evening News, 13 August 1898.

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  27. R. Blatchford, Dismal England (Walter Scott, 1899) p. 37.

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  28. News of the World, 24 July 1898; Illustrated Police News, 30 July 1898.

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  29. South London Chronicle, 5 November 1898. News of the World (30 October 1898) described the convicted murderer as ‘a youth of the Hooligan type’; but The Evening News (21 July 1898 and 26 July 1898) thought the incident arose out of gang rivalries and reprisals against a ‘copper’s nark’.

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  30. R. Samuel, ‘East End Crime’, Conference on Sociology and History, University of Essex, December 1979.

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  31. Report of the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis 1899, Cd. 399 (HMSO, 1900); Royal Commission on the Duties of the Metropolitan Police, vol. 2, Cd. 4260 (HMSO, 1908) qu. 79; Public Record Office, MEPO 2/531 and MEPO 2/570.

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  32. The Sun, 3 August 1898.

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  33. The Daily Mail, 13 August 1898.

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  34. News of the World, 9 October 1898; The Daily Mail, 19 August 1898; Bicycling News, 10 August 1898.

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  35. Reynolds’s News, 9 October 1898; Manchester Evening News 10 September 1898 and 13 September 1898; and ‘RAILWAY OUTRAGES... WHO IS THE WRECKER?’, News of the World 11 September 1898.

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  36. Public Record Office, Metropolitan Police, MEPO 2/362.

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  37. South London Chronicle, 13 August 1898 and 15 October 1898; Public Record Office, MEPO 2/467.

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  38. Illustrated Police News, 16 July 1898.

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  39. South London Chronicle, 13 August 1898 and 3 September 1898.

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  40. South London Chronicle, 27 August 1898; Illustrated Police News, 20 August 1898; The Evening News, 26 July 1898.

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  41. South London Chronicle, 6 August 1898.

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  42. The singing seems no more than a harmless jest about Miss Powers walking out with her young man. But the insult may have been more pointed if, as seems likely, the chant had been adapted from a current Music Hall number that described another ‘lydy’who also worked at bottling ginger-beer and who had been ‘doing some overtime’ with the foreman: Woa, Charlotte! aint yer goin’ strong, What with your dress and yer fancy bonnet And all yer stylish ribbons upon it. I can’t make out why you look so sublime, But she can’t kid me she’s been doin’ some overtime. Quoted in ‘Hooliganism and the Halls’, The Times, 26 September 1898.

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  43. Public Record Office, Home Office Papers, HO 45/9723/A51956.

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  44. C. E. B. Russell, Manchester Boys (Manchester University Press, 1905) p. 51.

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  45. A. Devine, Scuttlers and Scuttling (Guardian Printing Works, 1890) p. 7.

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  46. R. Roberts, The Classic Slum (Penguin, 1973) p. 155.

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  47. J. Wright, English Dialect Dictionary, vol. 4 (Frowde, 1903).

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  48. Cf. Comic Cuts, 2 July 1898 where, as the police are sighted, Chokee Bill remarks, ‘I would ‘ave given worlds for an ‘arf-brick, Mr. Edditer, when I saw them two blues.’ Comic Cuts was making its contribution to law enforcement at this time by awarding ‘Chokee Bill Medals’ to regular readers. D. Gifford (ed.), Victorian Comics (Allen & Unwin, 1976) collects together some of Area Sneaker’s contemporaries: the Terrible Twins, the Big Budget Kid, the Three Beery Bounders, the Ball’s Pond Banditti, Orfis Boy and other Victorian precursors to Denis the Menace, Billy Whizz et al.

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  49. H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 1 (Dover, 1968) p. 51.

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  50. A.Morrison, Childofthe Jago (Penguin, 1946edn)pp.37,105,123.

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  51. The Sun, 6 August 1898; The Echo, 6 August 1898; The Times, 16 August 1989; The Spectator, 27 August 1898; The Daily Mail, 16 August 1898; News of the World, 14 August 1898; Illustrated Police News, 13 August 1898.

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  52. Quoted in N. D. McLachlan, Larrikinism (Melbourne University MA thesis, n.d.) p. 18. Cf. Ajax, ‘Larrikinism’, Sydney Quarterly Magazine, January 1884; A. Pratt, ‘“Push” Larrikinism in Australia’, Blackwood’s Magazine, vol. MXXIX, July 1901; N. Gould, Town and Bush (Routledge, 1896) pp. 99–117; W. Tallack, Penological and Preventive Principles (Wertheimer, 1896) p. 114; C. M. H. Clark (ed.), Select Documents in Australian History 1851–1900 (Angus & Robertson, 1955).

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  53. Devine, Scuttlers and Scuttling, p. 2.

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  54. Besant, East London, pp. 176–7.

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  55. Samuel, East End Underworld, pp. 116–23, 151–2, 190.

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  56. The Daily Graphic, 7 June 1897 and 6 July 1897; Reynolds’s News, bjwne 1897.

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  57. News of the World, 16 October 1898; Illustrated Police News, 5 November 1898.

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  58. Public Record Office, MEPO 2/1162. The police had been tipped off by an anonymous letter, written in a wobbly hand and signed ‘From one who is affraid’.

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  59. Hansard, 14 September 1893.

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  60. Public Record Office, MEPO 2/1044.

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  61. Rudyard Kipling, Selected Verse (Penguin, 1977 edn) pp. 160–1.

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  62. The Clarion, 12 November 1898.

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  63. N. B. Weissman, ‘Rural Crime in Tsarist Russia: The Question of Hooliganism, 1905–1914’, Slavic Review, vol. 37, no. 2, 1978, pp. 228–9. ‘Hooligan’ was already said to be ‘part and parcel of the Russian language’ in Notes and Queries, 10th Series, no. 1, 13 February 1904, p. 125. The confusion with redskins probably stems from the ‘Apache’ gangs of Paris, said to be ‘more violent than the Hooligans over here owing to the lamentable custom of carrying a pistol or a dagger’ by someone who clearly did not believe that Hooligans were armed. Royal Commission on the Metropolitan Police, qu. 45779.

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  64. Urwick, Studies of Boy Life, p. 295.

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  65. A. Freeman, Boy Life and Labour (King, 1914) p. 88.

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  66. Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 2, Cd. 2210 (HMSO, 1904) qu. 3665.

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  68. Opening remarks to R. Baden-Powell, ‘“Boy Scouts” in connection with National Training and National Service’, Royal United Services Institute, vol. LV, 1911, p. 584.

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  69. R. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (Horace Cox, 1908) pp. 339–40.

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  70. The Pall Mall Gazette, 12 February 1901.

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  71. R. Buchanan, ‘The Voice of the Hooligan’, Contemporary Review, vol. 76, December 1899, pp. 774–89.

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  73. Urwick, Studies of Boy Life, p. 265.

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  77. Ibid, pp. 446–7.

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  82. Ibid, p. 138.

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  84. Boy Scouts Association, Our Aims, Methods and Needs, 1920, p. 3. Cf. the fierce attack in a penny pamphlet, Baden-Powell Exposed! (Young Communist League, 1927).

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  92. From 1900 to 1914 birchings ran at around 2,000 per year. In 1915 there were 3,514 ordered in the courts, rising to 4,864 in 1916, reaching a peak in 1917 of 5,210. From thereon, accompanying disenchantment with the war, birchings began to fall away rapidly. In 1921 only 661 were ordered, in 1927 the figure was 247, and with the exception of 1935 birchings never again rose above the 200 mark in peacetime. In 1938, when the Cadogan committee recommended that judicial corporal punishment should be totally abolished, there were a mere 48 birchings ordered in magistrates’ courts. With the outbreak of the Second World War a similar, although much less pronounced, increase in birchings occurred. Criminal Statistics for England and Wales, Cmd. 5520 (HMSO, 1936); Report of the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment, Cmd. 5684 (HMSO, 1938); Corporal Punishment, Cmnd. 1213 (HMSO, 1960).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Applied Social Studies, University of Bradford, UK

    Geoffrey Pearson (Senior Lecturer)

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  1. Geoffrey Pearson
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© 1983 Geoffrey Pearson

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Pearson, G. (1983). Victorian Boys, We Are Here!. In: Hooligan. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17076-0_5

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