‘Obliged in self-defence to retaliate’. Violent sailors in nineteenth-century Bristol

Abstract

This article is a study of merchant sailors in Bristol between 1850–1914. There is a stereotypical perception of the sailor as being a drunken, promiscuous, violent nuisance on the streets of a port town. This perception has been fashioned through popular imagery and imagination but also through an historiography that has largely investigated sailors in maritime and nautical contexts. Here I take a different approach and investigate one aspect of working-class culture, namely a man’s propensity for violence, in the context of Bristol’s urban, working-class culture. It will be argued that in their use of violence sailors were not the perceived breed apart but were an integrated presence in Bristol’s wider working-class culture. The reasons for violence, the methods used and the chosen victims of it were not the product of any maritime identity but were constructed from an urban one. Naturally, many sailors continued to display the stereotypical behavioural traits of sailors but there were also those who were aligned to a more respectable way of living. Cultural forces towards masculine respectability tempered some of sailors’ violent behaviours, as did the space available for violence, and consequently places sailors firmly within working-class culture.

Introduction

The long held stereotype of the nineteenth century British sailor is uncomplimentary, ¹ given, as he was, to rushing headlong towards a ‘world of sordid pleasure, unlimited vice and lashings of booze,’ as soon as he got on to dry land. ² Stereotypically, he would arrive in a port city and make his way to ‘sailortown’, packed waterside streets of merchant and naval port towns, teeming with brothels, public houses, low lodging houses and the paraphernalia of maritime culture. There, with money to spend and having been separated from land-based pleasures, he was unrestrained in his drinking, fighting, using prostitutes and general excessive and conspicuous debauched behaviour. ³

One of these less than respectable types of behaviour has been relatively overlooked in the historiography of maritime studies, a sailor’s perceived propensity for violence. When a ship full of sailors arrived in port, it was only too likely that the streets would soon be littered with inebriated sailors falling out of pubs looking for a fight. The aim of this article is to redress this through a discussion of sailors’ violent behaviour on the streets of Bristol in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period which witnessed very little change in such behaviour. It will contend that as far as this relatively small port city was concerned, it cannot be said that sailors were worse than any other occupational group in their anti-social behaviours, including their use of violence. Instead, their violence and other criminal activity illustrates that they were very much a part of the city’s urban, streetwise culture and of working-class communities.

The first part of this article considers the factors that helped to integrate sailors into working-class communities and into the canonicity of urban culture, as opposed to sailors maintaining a distinct maritime identity. The term ‘working-class’ is open to interpretation, of course, but for the present purposes it represents the Thompsonian sense of people having a commonality of interests. ⁴ The relatively small numbers of sailors on Bristol’s streets compared to other Atlantic cities like Cardiff and Liverpool is a factor in this. It was also because of the peculiarities of space that moderated the behaviour of sailors on shore. Spatial factors had the potential to facilitate the integration of sailors into the fabric of Bristol and as a consequence, sailors did not disproportionately worry the authorities. Furthermore, many sailors in the city were inclined towards behaving better. Developments in steam technology on ships made getting a berth more certain which facilitated sailors having a more settled, regular home based lifestyle. ⁵ Consequently, sailors could be typical of the men that Michael Roper and John Tosh say increasingly equated manliness with family life. ⁶ Whilst there were casual sailors, frolickers, adventurers and escapers ⁷ whose ideas of masculinity still lay in drinking, using prostitutes and fighting, there were also those who had done with all that, who took their career seriously, sought promotion, looked for on-shore work, went to church, aspired to live in better houses and wanted to provide for their families. ⁸

It is not the intention to suggest that Bristol’s sailors were either on the one hand respectable, peaceful family men and on the other debauched, violent wasters; such a binary categorisation misses the nuances of identity formation. Sailors, like anybody else, had multiple identities and no doubt could be happy reading the paper in the afternoon but could get into a fight in the pub in the evening. Having said that, it is likely that a sailor who was a resident of the city, was older, in steady employment and in settled family circumstances was likely to trouble the authorities less than the stereotypical transient, jobbing, younger and possibly foreign sailor. In what follows, obvious differences will be evident but it is not the intention to construct a ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ type of sailor. Instead it will be argued that sailors’ behaviours and indeed lifestyles were congruent with that of other working-class people in the city, which also applies to when they experienced adverse circumstances and personal misfortunes.

When sailors did resort to violence it will be shown that this was a typical working-class and personal revengeful response to having their honour and integrity traduced and anything less was neglecting to exhibit true masculine virtues of toughness. If, as Peter Burke suggests, culture embodies the symbolic forms of demonstrating shared values, then violence was a necessary and suitable reaction to the long established understanding of what it meant to be a man. ⁹ The type of violence is also important here and as John Carter-Wood among others has shown, the fist fight, the established, traditional and honourable pugilistic way of meting out violence, was also a long established tenet of working-class culture, even if, as shown below, this method was not always reverted to. ¹⁰ As sailors were just another type of labourer, albeit with an unconventional workplace, it was just as normal for them, whether British, Bristolian, foreign, resident or transient to have a punch up when slighted, especially when drunk. Drinking itself, as many historians have argued, was integral to working-class identity and given alcohol’s distorting and illusionary properties, being drunk served only to make a violent response more likely. ¹¹

Violence was also the outcome of umbrage taken when those in authority, namely the police, prevented what a sailor or anybody else wanted to do. Those whose duty it was to curtail the worst excesses of engrained working-class culture, especially the right to drink oneself into oblivion or just loiter about on street corners, were met with violence from sailors and non-sailors alike. More unsavoury and a further unfortunate synchronicity with others of the working class is sailors’ violence against women and children. Some of the violence in this respect was horrific and the roots can again be located in challenges to a sailor’s sense of masculinity and patriarchy. The most violent acts of all, stabbings and murders, further situates sailors in the norms of urban society. Rather than using fists in the traditional English pugilistic manner, knives were also commonly used by the working class to settle scores. ¹² This was once deemed to be the preserve of foreigners but when English sailors and others used knives in fights they were in fact appropriating to British culture the behavioural norms of foreign working-class people.

Working-class violence

There has been extensive research in recent years into why the working class had a propensity towards violent crime. A broad conclusion on why such violence occurred has emerged; that working-class violence was used to uphold perceived strong masculine characteristics. It was a culturally entrenched display of hardness and an acceptable streetwise response to perceived injustice. ¹³ This was despite the fact that violent crime was decreasing from the 1850s onwards and historians such as Martin Wiener and John Carter-Wood among others have argued that the acceptability of fighting had substantially reduced by the end of the nineteenth century due to the civilising drive of the middle classes. ¹⁴ They suggest that working-class people were increasingly rejecting violence because there was a new mentality of violence, spearheaded by a less tolerant judicial system, that questioned its acceptable use in the contexts of gender, national identity and imaginations of public space. ¹⁵ Such behaviour was seen as uncivilised and showing a lack of restraint, whereas to be civilised was to aspire to the virtues of respectability, forbearance, civility and politeness of the middle classes. Nonetheless, not all working-class people were susceptible or amenable to civilising forces and violence, contrary to evolving cultural attitudes proposed by John Carter-Wood, was accepted behaviour and continued to be committed by working-class males to settle grievances. ¹⁶ Ideally, this aggression was to be kept in rational check but naturally elements of the working class, especially the least educated and most economically precarious, had no intention of doing such a thing. ¹⁷ Notwithstanding the hierarchies inherent in merchant shipping and the very many different roles to be performed on ship, sailors fitted this demographic and as such their violence did not set them apart from other workers.

Maritime Bristol

This is not to say that working-class men were free to have a fight whenever or wherever they liked and as far as sailors in Bristol were concerned, the city had the potential to provide checks to the violent and other anti-social behaviours of sailors. These included the size of Bristol, its topography, the location of its docks, its ‘sailortown’ being located right in the city centre, the number of men working as sailors, their family situations and where they chose to live. The consequences of these factors were on the one hand to place sailors amongst other city dwellers in the central, civic and commercial area of the city, and on the other to disperse them to working-class areas elsewhere in the city. These factors could mitigate against the worst excesses of sailors’ anti-social behaviours including his opportunity to commit acts of violence. The incidents of sailors’ revenge violence, drunken violence, attacks on the police, violence against women and children, stabbings and murders that are discussed later in this article had the potential to be conditioned and curtailed by having to share civic space.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, when steam propulsion was finally exceeding sail propelled shipping, compared to other Atlantic ports Bristol was a relatively small mercantile port. This was partly to do with the city and its docks being situated inland seven miles up the serpentine River Avon. Despite Avonmouth and Portishead docks being built on the River Severn in 1877 and 1879 respectively, ships continued to deliver sailors to the city centre docks until their closure in 1977. The relatively inconvenient location of the docks affected the types of cargo that was transported, the size, type and propulsion of ships, their trading routes and consequently the number and type of sailor on the streets. Compared to other ports, the numbers were not large which obviously had an impact on the amount of criminal activity that can be attributed to this part of the work force. Alston Kennerley calculates that the number of ships and sailors coming into Bristol daily in 1865 was 20.4 ships and 76 men ¹⁸ and in 1861, 1871 and 1891, merchant sailors only constituted 3.6%, 3.1%, and 1.9% of the total male population of Bristol respectively. ¹⁹ Therefore, although sailors were obviously a presence on Bristol’s streets, compared with other ports they were not the overbearing mass of potential troublemakers that other ports had to deal with. ²⁰

Notwithstanding the relatively small numbers, other factors limited the opportunities sailors had for violence. One of these was the physical space available for sailors to let off steam in when they got off their ships. For those who did make it up river, their playground of Bacchanalian pleasure was not as extensive as elsewhere, largely because of where its sailortown was situated. It is more accurate to term this potential Fiddlers’ Green as a number of ‘sailor streets’, rather than a whole ‘sailortown’; streets that had the trappings of a sailortown but far fewer of them. Because Bristol’s docks were situated topographically and geographically in the city centre, there was no room for a large sailortown amongst the architecture of civic, industrial, commercial and residential space. Bristol’s sailors were therefore forced to play out the reality of their existence alongside the activity of non-sailors in waterside areas which also constituted Bristol’s city centre. Sailors’ ships advanced right into the centre of the city, a place where land and water merged, and this located sailors amongst other working-class and middle-class residents. Their ships were similarly forced to integrate with stone and brick in a central area framed by the rivers Frome and Avon. Indeed, Bristol had long developed an identity of a city built on water. Alexander Pope visited in 1739 and wrote about being amazed at seeing ships apparently in the middle of the street ²¹ and a correspondent to the Morning Leader nearly two hundred years later in March 1911 would have agreed, opining that,

There is no other port in the kingdom, not even London, in which ships and buildings, the municipal offices, and the sailors’ grog shops, land and water, are so intimately mingled. Bristol is, in fact, afloat. ²²

If scholars of the spatial turn are correct in arguing the cruciality of space in influencing behaviours, then sailors’ behaviours, including violent ones, had the potential to be modified by the physical man-made structures of the city and the natural limitations of a city centre shaped by water. ²³ Further comparative studies are necessary to conclusively establish space as a factor in the context of violence in other port cities, but Bristol’s actual structure was more conducive to the integration of sailors with people of different classes and occupations, rather than creating divisions between them. Its quaysides were spaces that contained a ‘multiplicity of heterogeneous influences and forces, relations, negotiations, practices of engagement and power in all its forms’. ²⁴ The location of the Bristol Sailors’ Home typifies this: its back door might have faced the water but its front door led out onto Queen’s Square, the grandest square in the city. Even if it was not as salubrious as it once was, it was still an imposing quadrangle of magnificent Georgian buildings. ²⁵ In the space of fifty paces a sailor could disembark from his ship, walk in the back door on the quay, cross the tiled floor and exit through the front door into Georgian splendour. This may well have induced some self-attention on how to behave and it also provoked some sailors to go elsewhere in the city with their unfortunate behaviours (Figure 1 and 2).

Figure 1.

Ships, rail and city meet. Source: Port of Bristol Handbook, 1886, p. 68.

Figure 2.

Contested space c.1870. Source: Bristol Harbour side, Paul Townend Collection. https://www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/albums.

Because of these spatial factors Bristol did not have the violent character of a sailor-soaked Cardiff Tiger Bay, for example (see below), where ‘every night … a body of a sailor, robbed and beaten to death [would be] be found in the gutter’. ²⁶ Obviously, Bristol was not sufficiently unique to have no problems with sailors using the businesses of sailor streets and in common with other ports Bristol had its dangers. In the eighteenth century, according to a contemporary writer, Bristol’s sailortown was,

Emphatically not for the landsman, for it was the scene of frequent drunken brawls and the unwary landlubber, or even the outlandish seaman, stood a good chance of being knocked on the head and robbed. ²⁷

But more recent opinion suggests that Bristol’s sailortown, especially in the nineteenth century, had become a gentler place. Stan Hugill, even if he was writing later from the experience of a twentieth century sailor, describes Bristol as a romantic Bristol Channel port and that by the mid nineteenth century, when other sailortowns were only coming of age, it had become almost as safe a place as the rest of the city. ²⁸ Bristol’s declining share of sea going trade from the 1850s onwards, and the resulting fewer sailors on the streets, was a factor in this but other port cities had their own histories, demographics, topographies and spatial characteristics that had the potential to influence sailors’ behaviour. For example, a port that had a very different maritime culture and subsequent experience of sailor integration was Cardiff. Cardiff was a much bigger port than Bristol, its docks were more accessible than Bristol’s and they were not centred in civic space. It also had different trading patterns, dominated as it was by the export trade in coal. The demand for sailors to man coal ships was such that more sailors came to Cardiff to sign on to a ship than at any other port in the United Kingdom. To cater for them, Cardiff’s sailortown, known as Tiger Bay, was extensive and was centred on a Bute street that was packed with ‘the seedier end of the leisure market’. ²⁹ For example, in the 1860s there were about 150 boarding houses for sailors, with their associated crimping and desertion, and in 1911 there were 181. ³⁰ In contrast, the 1891 Mathews Directory for Bristol lists only four lodging houses on Bristol’s sailor streets, all being on Queen’s Square itself. ³¹ A woman reminiscing on her life as a child in Bristol recalls that the worst streets for lodging houses that sailors used were Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Wade Streets, not therefore typical sailor streets. ³²

Cardiff was also known as a’ hard-up’ port with ‘hard-up’ houses and with ‘hard-up’ sailors, 33,928 of them engaged on foreign going ships in 1892. ³³ These sailors stayed in close proximity to the services of the crimps and other sailortown amusements in segregated areas demarcated along ethnic lines, with separate Chinese, Arab, Greek, Norwegian and other areas. Naturally, a proportion of these sailors were passing through and were returning home, just as Bristol’s sailors were. But the transient sailors, attracted by the ease of getting a job on a coal ship, were happy to stay a while and squander their money in the boarding houses, shops, photographers, amusements, pubs, beer houses and brothels. ³⁴ Facilitating factors towards dissipation and integration were therefore few and although the notoriety of Cardiff improved over the time, in 1909, Havelock Wilson still could voice his opinion that Cardiff was ‘the most undesirable port in the United Kingdom, the dumping ground of Europe’. ³⁵

Bristol’s problems were few in comparison, partly explained by the relatively small numbers of sailors on its sailor streets, but also its topography. Bristol’s sailor streets were at the same time civic streets in the city centre, but Cardiff’s sailortown by comparison had the form of a cut off peninsular, hemmed in by its own water front, a canal and two railways. ³⁶ This separateness gave Cardiff an atmosphere of menace and danger which Bristol did not have, facilitated by the limited space available for the existence of a distinct culture of sailor only pubs and their associated drunkenness, violence and prostitution. As is further shown below, being drunk was very often a lubricant to violent behaviour but there were no seriously notorious sailors’ pubs to compare with the Prussian Eagle on London’s Ratcliffe Highway, the House of Blazes in Cardiff or Tom’s Hall in Liverpool. ³⁷ Some pubs, such as the Wheelwrights and Millwrights Arms on Welsh Back, were more associated with foreign sailors than were other pubs. ³⁸ But others, such as the Hole in the Wall on the Grove and Llandoger Trow on King Street, still remaining but now catering more for gullible tourists than gullible sailors, ³⁹ were not just the preserve of sailors. Integration of sailors with other working-class people occurred in them and in other pubs across the city. ⁴⁰ According to Bristol’s Police Public and Beerhouse Complaints Books from 1889–1910 and violence reports in the Bristol Mercury from 1850–1900, sailors’ drink related violence happened in or outside 40 non-river-side pubs, which suggests a dilution of incidences of sailors’ criminal tendencies. Sailors’ excesses were therefore played out in urban as well as maritime space and alongside other working-class people, which, as James Kneale says, fostered neighbourliness, generosity and egalitarianism, the idealized qualities of working-class society. ⁴¹ Similarly, the most notorious streets for prostitution were not sailor streets. The five most problematic streets were Bond Street, Park Row, Host Street, James Street and Clarence Street. ⁴² Letters to the press and Vigilance Association records also indicate the main areas being around Park Row and Bond Street. ⁴³

Respectable sailors

Besides the push factors of congested streets, there were other ways that sailors were integrated into the fabric of Bristol. For many it was important to demonstrate their masculinity through redirecting their priorities towards their families, as R. W. Connell, Lynne Segal and Lesley Hall among others have shown was an increasing ambition for working-class people. ⁴⁴ Many working-class males wanted to be seen as respectable citizens and Michael Roper and John Tosh argue that by contextualising masculinity in gender studies it is possible to equate manliness with family and domestic life. ⁴⁵ Espousing domestication, providing for the family, going to church, showing respect for others, exercising self-discipline, being moderate in drinking and attending more civilised entertainments were the hallmarks of respectable masculinity. ⁴⁶

Many sailors would be in that number and sailors returning home might have been as likely to play with the children or dig the potato patch than cause trouble. Such activities were a part of the respectable masculinity of the working classes that at the very least meant rejecting what John Huggins calls the triumvirate of gambling, sex and alcohol. ⁴⁷ This did not apply to all sailors of course and not all of them would have the same opportunities to be so. For example, Valerie Burton suggests that this was most likely to be the preserve of those working on steam ships because of the increased regularity of time at home that this afforded. ⁴⁸ Other sailors such as casual, transient, low waged and ethnically separate ones, would have had no aspiration to, or chance of, bread winning masculinity. ⁴⁹ Ultimately it was down to the individual sailor and perhaps there were many more like the sailor that the Chairman of the West Bristol Gospel Temperance Society, Mr. W Padfield, met on a train who had given up drink, saved £500 because of it and had set up his own business. ⁵⁰ Likewise Robert Langden, who started out as a ship’s boy, apprenticed himself to a book binder in between his voyages and later set up his own book binding business. Langden is a picture of respectability – as well as setting up his own business, he remained ‘still sailing in happy content’ with his wife for 50 years, lived in a pleasant part of Bristol, Montpellier, and became a stalwart of the Bristol Ship Lovers Society! ⁵¹

An important indicator of the extent of a sailor’s expression of their masculinity through living a more domesticated and settled life is their choice of where to live and this shows their significant integration into local working-class communities. Unusually for port cities, investigating sailors’ residency in Bristol shows a marked preferment of sailors to reside at home and not at the alternatives found on sailor streets. For example, on census night in 1881, only 11 sailors were staying in pubs in the whole of the city, never mind on sailor streets. Four of these were transient foreign sailors, the vast majority of whom, 110 out of 147, slept on board their ships. Only 45 sailors of any type were in residence around the water on sailor streets in lodging houses, the Sailors’ Home and pubs, whereas 69% percent of sailors were married and returned home to live with their wives and children in their own accommodation or with other families in houses of co-residency. When combined with 12.4% of single sailors also living in some kind of house that had a family in it, over four-fifths of sailors lived with a family. The fact that the majority of Bristol’s sailors fell in to the 36–40 age bracket at the time of the 1881 census, with its associated responsibilities of fatherhood, further increases the likelihood of sailors exhibiting a more settled existence and being more family oriented. Even single sailors, or those without children might still wish to demonstrate their respectability. For example, Bristol seaman, Frank Mogg, in a letter to his parents in August 1892, clearly wanted to contribute to his birth family’s income and gave exact instructions of how he wanted his allotment dividing up per month: 30 shillings for father, 20 for mother, 10 for his sister Flory and five each for sister Milly and brother Tony. ⁵²

With families to support, many returning sailors will have sought alternative employment which again places them among other working class-people. Finding evidence for this is extremely difficult, but when sailors came home they had an advantage in that Bristol’s small scale, diverse local industry had the potential to provide opportunities for sailors to find work. A gazetteer of Bristol in 1900 named 255 separate industries, from custard powder to cycle tyres, hams to hammers, manure to mattresses and tents to tinned sweets. ⁵³ By 1906, there were over a hundred factories and the census of 1901 shows 4388 males in factory work. ⁵⁴ Alston Kennerley makes the point that there had always been a myriad of jobs available connected to shipping such as blacksmithing, gunnery, cooperage, shipwrighting, navigation and sail making. When this gave way to steam ships and then oceanic steamships, made possible from the 1860s by metal hulls, screw propellers and high-pressure boilers, new categories of sailors were created such as firemen, trimmers, boiler men, and skilled engineers who had the potential to find work ashore. ⁵⁵ For the less skilled, a competent seaman could take opportunities for casual work when it arose. This will have been in temporary jobs, seasonal jobs or in factories or as unskilled labour on shore; opportunities arising from what Richard Gorski calls the migratory rhythms of employment. ⁵⁶ As just one example, a testimonial written by the Rector of Christ Church Bristol, Reverend E. P. Cole for a sailor, Thomas Trevyn, recorded that he regularly gave him occasional employment and that he found him to be ‘thoroughly sober and trustworthy’. ⁵⁷ Other sailors were employed by the training ship Formidable as instructors and another sailor was employed by the Seamen’s Friend Society and Bethel Union to deliver religious tracts to ships. ⁵⁸

A few higher-ranking sailors like Samuel Baker, did much better for themselves and got employment akin to that of more skilled working-class people. When he retired in 1853 he became the water bailiff and harbour master on a salary of £20 per month. ⁵⁹ Charles Goodland travelled all over the world for the Bristol Steam Navigation Company and on retirement became a lock man at Cumberland Basin. ⁶⁰ T. J. Gyles, alternated working on ships, getting to the rank of first engineer, with working as an engineer on land with Chellow Navigation Company and also attending the Society Of Merchant Venturers (SMV) night school to further his education. ⁶¹ At least one Bristol sailor, Ben Tillet, became a nationally recognised figure as leader of the Dockers Union, founder member of the Independent Labour Party in 1893 and twice MP for Salford.

Dock work was an obviously related job and oral testimonies speak of sailor fathers taking dock work between voyages, which was common enough to necessitate in January 1890 an agreement between the Secretary of the Bristol Dockers Union and the General Secretary of the National Association of Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union on which kinds of work belonged to sailors and which to dock workers. ⁶² It is a shame that it takes a tragedy to reveal an example of a sailor working as a docker but in 1873 a young sailor called Sanderson was working on the docks in the Butts and the platform he was on gave way and he was drowned in the river. ⁶³ Hawking and labouring were probably the easiest option for lower ranked sailors. In October 1876, The Bristol Mercury reported that a usually blind drunk sailor was selling religious tracts in the street and was arrested for using obscene language to anybody who refused to buy one. ⁶⁴ True to stereotype a French sailor walked the streets as ‘an itinerant vendor of onions. ⁶⁵ Any number of labouring jobs that required skills akin to a sailor’s could be found in a developing Victorian city, scaling heights and hanging from ropes, for example. More might have been expected though of a sailor erecting scaffolding for the Wills Tobacco factory extension in Bedminster. It collapsed killing a carpenter below ⁶⁶ and another sailor employed scraping the sides of vessels laying at the Butts, who should have been comfortable with rigging, died when he slipped and plunged into the river below. ⁶⁷

When not at work many sailors could be found mixing with other citizens in the pews of churches and chapels on Sundays and during the week. An article in the Bristol Mercury entitled ‘Church Work Amongst Bristol Sailors’ states that the cathedral was regularly well attended by sailors, as were the churches of 14 parishes that abutted the Floating Harbour. ⁶⁸ One of these was St. Raphael’s, which not only gave sailors spiritual sustenance but also provided a social programme and education classes. Because it was located in the major working-class area of Bedminster it was also popular with non-sailors, ⁶⁹ as was the Mission to Seamen and Seamen’s Institute where the congregation was regularly made up of sailors alongside non-sailors. ⁷⁰ A report of 1884 noted the Mission as only one of four significant ‘clubs’ in the city that lived up to its recommendations of being ‘largely managed by members, having reading facilities, games, entertainments, temperance refreshment, good rooms, good light, comfort, liberty, self-management and a tone of self-respect’. Naturally it was one that appealed to sailors and to other working-class people, many of whom went along for more than tea and a bun. It is fair to assume that religious sailors were more inclined to respectable living and attendance figures attest to the role that the Mission had in this. ⁷¹ For example, in 1896, a weekly average of 372 sailors attended services, and over the year 3476 sailors attended bible classes and 11,863 turned up for suitably sober evening entertainments. ⁷² In 1887, 33,991 sailors and their families had attended some service or other. ⁷³ The mission probably made the role of the city’s numerous temperance organisations easier. A Mrs. Smith, a stalwart member of Bristol’s Clifton Down Gospel Temperance Society formed in 1883 was very encouraged by the fact that 1000 sailors had signed the pledge during the previous 3 years alongside thousands of other workers. ⁷⁴

Another way of demonstrating sailors’ efforts to become respectable citizens is to show how they endeavoured to better themselves educationally. Again, evidence is sparse but some Bristol sailors clearly wanted to better themselves through getting an education, as did other working-class men. They took advantage of the schools provided by city elites that were regarded, as were reading rooms and other more cerebrally inclined places and institutions, as tools in a moral crusade to get labour to invest in its own betterment. ⁷⁵ There had been some rudimentary training of sailors since 1821 when the first Bethel Ship Mission, The Ark was brought into service followed by the Aristomones in the same year, then the Etna in 1846 and the Gloriosa in 1883. As well as teaching scripture to sailors it also gave a basic nautical instruction and attendances of men eager to benefit from this training was always high. ⁷⁶ An early marine school was established in January 1824 and in that year 29 out of the 74 enrolled were adult sailors. Commendably, an inspection committee noted that,

Adult sailors also attended during the day, ‘voluntarily seated at the same desk with mere children and sedulously endeavouring, by redoubled application, to acquire, at a more advanced period of life, those advantages of education the less enlightened spirit of the times had denied to their earlier years. ⁷⁷

As a continuum of this, a diverse curriculum teaching alternative skills was also available to adult sailors who could take advantage of the educational opportunities offered by the SMV. The SMV later established a marine school in King Street in 1845 where the roll gradually changed from children to 16-18-year-old sailors taking their masters and mates examinations after finishing their apprenticeships. By 1869 the school had changed to become a school exclusively for adult sailors ⁷⁸ aiming to ‘raise their social status, making them thereby a more efficient and trustworthy body of men’. ⁷⁹ The school’s buildings were also used as a private school for candidates for Marine Board Examinations and enrolled 19–45 year old sailors for two to 6 weeks at a time at their own volition and expense. ⁸⁰ The SMV also ran a Technological College that put on evening classes attended by sailors aspiring to higher ratings including in navigation, types of sailing, use of nautical instruments, mechanical engineering and related sciences. ⁸¹ We cannot gauge the effect of such education other than to say that gaining qualifications would have been beneficial to sailors and it is likely that these educational institutions could produce well-adjusted sailors with a modicum of intelligence and aptitude and enhanced masculine respectability. ⁸² Higher qualified sailors rose through the ratings which allowed them to migrate to the more prosperous areas of the city and so there is an implied correlation between qualifications and personal betterment.

The ways of integration above lie largely within cultural contexts that align with new notions of masculine respectability – family, employment, leisure and faith. ⁸³ There were, however, other less commendable and more unfortunate ways that sailors were a commonality with working-class people in shared urban space. One of these were the hardships that they suffered which put them in the care of city institutions. For example, the registers of the Bristol Infirmary and the General Hospital record sailors being admitted not just for maritime accidents and illness such as breakages, crushing, head injuries, diarrhoea, malaria, ague, scurvy and enteric fever but also common ailments including toothache, laryngitis, tonsillitis, coughs, haemorrhoids, bronchitis, dog bites, constipation, vomiting and colic. ⁸⁴

It was not just physical treatment that sailors needed and sailors of whatever rank could suffer from mental illnesses. Consequently, many were incarcerated with non-sailors in the city’s asylum, often with a diagnosis of mania or dementia but also depression, melancholia, monomania of suspicion and delirium. As an example, a sailor called Edwin Kebby got sunstroke in the Caribbean and went delirious. The ship’s captain, whether through ignorance or malice, decided to put him in leg irons for the whole of his return voyage. This affected his mental state and when he got on shore he was put straight into the asylum where he became excessively violent. On his periodic discharges from the asylum back to his family he regularly beat his children which rendered him unfit for any further employment and eventually consigned him to the workhouse. ⁸⁵ In August 1896, Charles Little had a fall whilst he was on his ship which resulted in a head injury. He spent the next 2 years trying to get a berth but his injuries prevented him being taken on. He had fits, three attacks of paralysis and had not spoken for 6 months before his admittance to the asylum. His five children (he had had ten but five had died of bronchitis) and his wife were left to the mercy of the Poor Law. ⁸⁶ For other sailors in the asylum, their mental breakdown was nothing to do with being on a ship and were due to the same adverse personal circumstances that any person could suffer. The tragedy in sailor John Bezzant’s life would test anybody’s sanity. His father had been a heavy drinker and was dead, his mother did not have anything to do with him, he had not seen his wife for 18 years, his only brother had been killed in a fight, his five sisters ‘were very bad tempered’, five of his six sons died in infancy and his only daughter died of diphtheria. ⁸⁷ Other sailors festered in the city’s workhouses and made up a proportion of the inmates, albeit not a very large one until they died. The 1881 census records 18 sailors out of 1195 inmates across the city’s workhouses, with luck at the one in Eastville. A social services pamphlet published in 1887 shows 618 workhouses below Eastville for money spent on spirits, wines and malt liquors for the inmates. Put another way, the 971 inmates that year had more spent on their drink than 30,885 inmates put together elsewhere. ⁸⁸

Violent sailors

The above has suggested factors, both commendable and unfortunate, that located sailors within working-class communities. Their integration with others normalised sailors’ behaviours and this included their misdemeanours and criminal acts. Figure 5 below shows the breadth of these over a nearly 70-year period and they were the same crimes as those committed by any number of labourers, hawkers, colliers, cab drivers, shoemakers and porters. Criminality, including types of violence, was merely the encoding of cultural norms into action and sailors were just doing what other working people did. ⁸⁹ They committed crimes and meted out violence in ways that were common to all and in ways that were engrained in urban culture. Sailors were not in respect of their violence a breed apart and as with any other man, a British or foreign sailor sought personal revenge for slights on his honour, masculinity, integrity or reputation. His violence was usually personally motivated, intra-class and one-on-one violence that was enacted in what Victor Turner describes as ritualised performance in which culture is manifested in behaviours. ⁹⁰ This has, to varying degrees, been borne out in relatively recent work on sailors’ anti-social and violent behaviour, including on Bristol by Steve Poole. The case of Bristol is now taken further and provides an in-depth case study that attempts to give a fuller understanding of sailors’ anti-social behaviours on shore. ⁹¹

It is important to note that in respect of violent behaviour sailors should not be seen as an homogenous group of workers with the same attitudes and proclivity for violence, just as showing a preference for living a more respectable lifestyle cannot be extrapolated to all sailors. The likelihood is that it was the younger, uneducated, single, transient and foreign sailors that were likely to cause trouble to the authorities, including committing violent acts. However, this can only be an assumption and more research is needed to show this conclusively. The fact that the age of offenders is rarely mentioned in the press police reports does not help clarify this. Nor do descriptions of violence perpetrated by sailors against their wives and children in their own residences preclude older resident sailors with families from being guilty of violent crime. Similarly, the fact that British sailors were as likely to be guilty of violently using knives does not help any argument that it was only foreign sailors who committed knife crime. Furthermore, the number of different types, ages, classes and nationalities of sailors living in or passing through Bristol at any one time will have a bearing on how accurately conclusions can be drawn.

However, what can be demonstrated is that the criminality of sailors, whatever their background or provenance, gives them further congruency with other working-class people. The types of crime that sailors committed were the same as any other working man, including sailors’ violent crimes. Furthermore, the personal nature of Bristol’s sailors’ violence suggests further congruency with other workers’ violence; the motivation for violence was largely the same. The evidence for this comes from a variety of sources and particularly useful have been the crime reports written in the Bristol Mercury. ⁹² These were interrogated using a variety of search terms relating to violence and the results of January, April, July and October for every year between 1850 and 1900 are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3.

Sailors’ violent assault, 4-month yearly survey, 1850–1900. Source: Bristol Mercury Crime Reports, 1850–1900.

The categories in Figure 3 are mine and are based on the description of the crime given in the reports, although they will contain inaccuracies. For example, the name given to a type of crime was down to the reporter and this could be open to interpretation, be inaccurate or not recorded at all and some criminal activity will have had multiple causes. For the same reasons the number of times the different types of crimes were committed by sailors and by men in other occupational groups will not be the true figures. ⁹³ Nevertheless, their usefulness lies in giving a broad indication of crimes that sailors were most involved in. Another useful source that does the same are the records of Horfield Prison, which was Bristol’s main prison from 1883. Sailors made up a fair proportion of prisoners, and between 1884 and 1907, 0.7% of all males that went to prison were sailors. ⁹⁴ Figure 4 shows the types of crime that sailors were encarcerated for and the prevelance of them, including their violent ones.

Figure 4.

Types and numbers of crimes sailors in Bristol were imprisoned for. Source: Horfield Prison records, 1884–1907. ⁹⁵

Because of the formal recording of these, the categorisation and numbers are more accurate but again some crimes are hard to classify and count. For example, the dividing line between neglect of family and personal circumstances (which includes issues such as mental illness or being unemployed) is blurred. Similarly, being drunk and disorderly was very often part of the reason for assaults on policemen and sex crimes can include rape and other types of indecent assault. Furthermore, Figures 3 and 4 do not give the full extent of criminal activity for all months in all the years between 1850 and 1900. To help mitigate this Figure 5 lists all of the criminal acts sailors were charged with found in all sources of evidence consulted for this article. Stowing away, failure to join ship, disobeying commander, failure to report and smuggling were unique to sailors but all the rest were committed by non-sailors as well. Criminal activity was the same, although one of the sources the Chief Constable’s Annual Reports on the criminal activity of all working males for 1890, included three crimes that no evidence for sailors committing them were found; horse stealing, sacrilege and concealing the birth of a child. ⁹⁶

Figure 5.

List of criminal activity of sailors in Bristol, 1850–1914. Source: Horfield Prison records, Quarter Session, Assize and Police Court reports in the Bristol Mercury for the whole of 1850–1900, Police beer house complaint books, other police records, Bristol Council records, Asylum and workhouse registers and other miscellaneous sources.

Violence used in taking personal revenge

For a city’s labourers, hawkers, shoemakers, dock workers and sailors, violence was largely for revenge in the form of a spontaneous, street level scrap that was used to defend personal honour and integrity. If a man was wronged, he was obliged to respond. In 1851, one man was sufficiently aggrieved and eager to justify his use of violence that he wrote to the Bristol Mercury about it. He had gone to the assistance of a sailor being beaten up outside the York Hotel. He too was hit by the assailant, and therefore felt ‘obliged in self-defence, to retaliate, as any other man would have done if similarly assaulted’. ⁹⁷ The principle was important to him but more often than not, revengeful violence could be meted out for the most trivial of reasons and usually when simple squabbles got out of hand. Often it was sailor on sailor violence but not always. The Bristol Mercury crime reports indicate that between 1850 and 1900, sailors were charged with assault on lumpers, porters, lamplighters, landlords, brothel keepers, prostitutes, tram inspectors, shop keepers, postmen and even teachers. Sailors attacking other was most common though, which is unsurprising considering they were cooped up together for weeks on end. Using knives is discussed later but two sailors from an American ship, the Villafranca, were hardly displaying much crewmate bonding when one of them, having had enough of a long-standing feud between them over who was a more competent seaman, stabbed the other one. On another occasion a German crewmember stabbed a fellow German seaman for criticising his steering and he had to be hospitalised when the ship docked. ⁹⁸ Two crewmen from the steamship SS Balmoral were not overly friendly to each other when engaged in a knife fight over who was next to use a prostitute at a pub on the Quay in August 1866. ⁹⁹ In other cases, inter-crew squabbles could get seriously out of hand; for example, when a Norwegian sailor, Berg, was murdered by a fellow Norwegian crewmember called Olsen in a squabble at the White Hart in Lower Maudlin Street. ¹⁰⁰ It had started when Berg had tweaked Olsen’s whiskers when they were arguing about who the superior sailor was, Olsen being a boatswain and Berg an ordinary sailor. There was more provocation on both sides which resulted in Olsen stabbing his fellow countryman for which he received 7 years penal servitude. The judge’s main point in his summing up was that it might be alright to use knives in a fight abroad but in Britain it was taken very seriously, a theme that will be taken up later in this article.

The rather silly causes of these aggressive acts are congruent with those committed by other workers. Variously these included a man beating up another for playing his concertina, for tweaking a donkey’s ears, for jumping the queue in a taxi rank, for putting an evil spell on someone and for not being allowed to smoke in a theatre. These all ended up in a punch up and very often the press reports of violence like this state that alcohol was involved which could naturally aggravate an already tense or silly situation. Sailors, as any other working-class male were drawn to the bottle and when released on to shore there was certainly plenty of opportunity in Bristol to get a drink. ¹⁰¹ In 1884, the Bristol Mercury carried out a major investigation into the homes of the Bristol Poor and it revealed that Bristol had one licenced drinking establishment for every 152 people, second only to Portsmouth with 148. ¹⁰² An earlier report carried out by the Bristol Examiner into the condition of the working classes of the city in 1850 noted that, ‘Even donkeys have a habit of stopping outside pubs, so used to their masters going in’. ¹⁰³ When over half or Bristol’s population, 104,000 people, went to a drinking place on the first Saturday of 1882, it is probable that sailors would be a part of this demography. ¹⁰⁴ For the more respectable citizen, this was a concern and such behaviour had to be modified not least because drunkenness was seen as a major contributory factor to other crime. ¹⁰⁵ It certainly was for sailors and Tomas Nilson’s work on Gothenburg notes that 83% of crimes committed by sailors were drink related and included indecency, disturbing the peace, insubordination, urinating in public, screaming and shouting, singing loudly and violence. ¹⁰⁶

Bristol’s sailors were similarly guilty of these offences when drunk but whether violence without lubrication would have happened anyway is impossible to tell. However, drunken assault is the second largest category of violence for sailors and the spark to it was very rarely serious. (Figure 3). For example, in a common case of male intransience over who should have the right of way on a pavement, a very drunk Irish sailor, O’Brien, shouted to a man blocking his way, ‘if you don’t get out of my way, I’ll give you something else’. The equally drunk man, Smith, would not back down and so O’Brien did indeed give him something else in the shape of a stab wound to his neck for which he got 18 months hard labour. ¹⁰⁷ In November 1890, the Sailors’ Home was the setting for a fracas between a French and an English sailor. They had been stranded on their waterlogged ship 200 miles off land for a few days where an obvious dislike between them developed. It was perhaps a drunken overreaction though when the French sailor took umbrage at being laughed at by the Englishman and stabbed him several times in the head. ¹⁰⁸

Violence against the police

Assault on the police by working-class males, sailors among them, was almost a leisure pursuit and it is not surprising therefore that Figure 3 shows that violence against the police was the most common type of assault, 19 cases, and there were another 48 who were gaoled for it (Figure 4). Again, drink played its part; of the 19, the reports in the press says the sailor was drunk. Apart from being insensible, the reasons are various but in using violence against the police, sailors were again seeking personal revenge and it is not hard to detect motivational forces around feeling hard done to or having one’s rights traduced. For example, in 1883 a sailor attested to the court that he had assaulted a policeman in retaliation for the policeman using excessive force in stopping him from standing about on the street and for the policeman giving him ‘a heavy back hander in the mouth’. ¹⁰⁹ In a similar case earlier in 1850, the judge found in favour of a sailor up for assaulting a policeman and concluded that the policeman had been over zealous in the use of his truncheon and had exceeded his duty in trying to move the sailor along. ¹¹⁰ These sailors were taking exception to being prevented from going about their normal everyday activity, which was also the case when the police came in between a sailor and his drinking. Police were often attacked when they were trying to remove sailors from pubs. For sailors, the Saracen’s Head in Temple Street and the Royal Coliseum in Marsh Street, seemed to be popular places to get thrown out of but fracases with the police could happen anywhere. In December 1886 a Swedish sailor called Anderson, drunk of course, seriously beat up a PC Taylor who was trying to evict him from the Masonic Tavern in Thunderbolt Street. He beat the policeman up so badly that he was hospitalised for a week. ¹¹¹ Another particularly violent case was when a drunk Irish sailor called Matigan threatened to have a policeman’s eyes out and indeed succeeded, gouging PC Drew’s left eye out with his finger and then for good measure biting the wrist of a man trying to help Drew. ¹¹² A drunk sailor called Cutler violently assaulted two policemen who were trying to remove him from the Kings Arms in Baldwin Street. One of the policemen received severe facial injuries and damage to his legs that rendered him permanently unfit for duty. ¹¹³

On some occasions, revengeful violence was used on the behalf of others to get them away from the police, in the sense of having a shared grievance against the law. ¹¹⁴ This was a common use of violence by a working class which was naturally set in opposition to those policing their behaviours and sailors were similarly minded to help others in defiance of the police. In Lewins Green in February 1872 an Italian sailor attacked a police constable who was arresting him in a pub. A group of fellow Italian sailors violently tried to get him away from the policeman, unsuccessfully as it turned out. ¹¹⁵ A more successful effort occurred in the above incident involving the Swedish sailor Anderson. Neilson, a fellow Swedish sailor, was committed to trial for violently assaulting PC Taylor on the ground and holding him there whilst Anderson got away. Once again, something silly and comical could start incidences like this off. Two very inebriated sailors went into a baker’s shop in Hotwell Road, pretended they thought it was a pub and asked for some beer. It was good hearted at first but it got out of hand when they were told it was not a pub and they started throwing the bread and cakes around. A policeman was called and one of the sailors, Robert Lyall, severely beat him up. The constable managed to pin him to the ground but the other sailor, John Brander, attacked him and pulled him off so allowing Lyall to get away. Notwithstanding the violent intensity of the attack, it drew a crowd, some of whom helped in the rescuing. The magistrate commented on this and said it was sad that respectable citizens could witness such a disturbance without taking the side of law and order and assisting the police. ¹¹⁶

Violence against women and girls

An altogether more serious synchronicity with working-class males of other occupations, especially those who had no intention of aspiring to civilised respectability, was sailors’ violence on women, prostitutes and girls. Figures 3 to 5 above loosely categorise the types of violence perpetrated against females which included sexual assault, indecent exposure, domestic violence, carnal knowledge of children and rape. Within these it is again possible to detect the underlying umbrage felt by men without the emotional intelligence to deal with perceived slights to their masculinity. How dare Rosina Spennell go off and get married whilst a sailor called Murray, whom she was not interested in, was away at sea? When Murray returned to find out he stabbed Spennell five times in the back in a fit of pique, puncturing her lung and hospitalising her for a month. ¹¹⁷ Females of whatever status or age were easy recipients of revengeful rage and this is easily evidenced by violence against prostitutes, perhaps exacerbated by the female company having been paid for. Violence against prostitutes was often extremely severe, as in the case of two drunk French sailors assaulting a prostitute on Queen’s Head Court for not going with them. They knocked her down, punched her and tried to throttle her and then tried to stab the policeman who came to intervene. ¹¹⁸ But not all males were intent on finding, using or abusing prostitutes and it has already been intimated above that there was tendency towards family and home amongst sailors of Bristol. Indeed, many a sailor, as other males, could be fiercely protective of their wives. For example, in 1888 a labourer beat another man with a whip after he had accused his wife of adultery. He was proud to say to the court that he had given Davies a good thrashing and implied his sentence was worth it for maintaining a show of masculinity. ¹¹⁹ It was the same for sailors; in October 1857, an American sailor William Neron was stabbed by a Greek one, George Worgeris for being rude about his wife. ¹²⁰

More likely to reach the newspapers though were cases of what we now term domestic violence, despite assault of this kind becoming increasingly incongruent with notions of masculine respectability. ¹²¹ The passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857 and particularly its amendments in 1878 reflected increasing societal intolerance of violence against women and wife beaters were deemed a ‘brutal other of the urban lower depths.’ ¹²² On the other hand, domestic violence was not always condemned and was often seen as excusable revenge for the wrongdoings of the female. Furthermore, many middle-class contemporaries still thought that wife beating was acceptable as a means of social control, allowing the man to manipulate women through culturally engrained corrective behaviours. ¹²³ As long as the man exhibited other positive traits such as being hardworking ¹²⁴ the judiciary could still tolerate wife beating as ‘disciplinary violence’ against wives. ¹²⁵ In 1866, one William Tyler, who was seen by the arresting police officer beating his wife in the street with some tongs, was let off by the magistrates because she ‘was three parts drunk’. Tyler was teaching his (unnamed) wife a lesson and the hearing was conducted in an air of frivolity with much laughter in court at the description of the wife and Magistrate Herpath making light of the ‘little tap’ that Tyler gave her. ¹²⁶ Such attitudes were increasingly being challenged and a few years later, a judge signalled the authorities’ determination to stamp out wife beating, stating that the ‘magistrates were determined that wife beating, which prevailed to a terrible extent in Bristol, should be put a stop to’. ¹²⁷

Assault on wives or cohabiting females by working-class males, very often paralytic, accounted for 13.3% of all categories of violent crime shown in Figure 3, which gave the press adequate material for emphasising the inferiority of the working classes, sailors among them, and for feeding the ‘voracious appetite for vice and villainy’ of the reading public. ¹²⁸ No details were spared. The Bristol Mercury reported the case of a haulier who knocked down his wife whilst she was nursing their child and ‘threatened to kick her face off’. ¹²⁹ In July 1895, there was a report of a brutal beating of a woman by her husband with a poker and then another time with some tongs in revenge for her pawning his only change of clothes for beer money. ¹³⁰ Similarly, sailor’s domestic violence was consistent with working-class behaviours. Sailor Henry Matthews went home drunk to his wife in Dowry Place in Hotwells and tried to shoot her (and the cat) with a revolver for nagging him about not having had a ship for 5 months, being drunk all the time and not providing for the family. ¹³¹ Another sailor severely beat his wife because he was annoyed with her spending all her time at the Church of the Latter Day Saints and in entertaining its congregation at their house. ¹³² In 1876, in another display of ‘cannibalism’ so loved by the press, a ship’s captain savagely beat the woman he was living with and bit off her chin for not having his dinner ready. ¹³³ Mothers were often the recipients of violence by their sons, as in the case of Thomas Cox who received 21 days hard labour for beating up his mother when in the process of robbing her of her best blankets. ¹³⁴

Worse still are examples of violence towards children, although it was never too horrific not to be embellished in the press. On 3 January 1895, non-sailor Bristol fitter Thomas Bateman, was summoned for assaulting and hospitalising his daughter by throwing her against the ceiling. He had previously been cautioned for beating her and kicking another child down the stairs. Sailors’ behaviours were no better. In 1876, a sailor physically assaulted his wife but also his mother-in-law and son at the same time, ripping out the inside of the boy’s cheek. ¹³⁵ The oral testimony of a woman born in 1900 remembers her sailor father being a hard man who gave her regular beatings and making her sell flowers on the streets, not letting her return home until she had sold them all, raising the issue of emotional abuse as well as physical.

Physical violence against women was bad enough but sailors also exhibited the depths of depravity by committing rape of women and girls, the 22 sex crimes in Figure 4. Fraternity among sailors is hardly evident when William Pocock raped another sailor’s wife at the lodgings they shared in Guinea Street whilst he was away at sea. ¹³⁶ Three sailors were prosecuted separately for sexual assault on their own children, two on daughters and one on a son. In other cases, The Bristol Mercury wrote explicitly of an Italian sailor indecently assaulting a little girl aged six, the daughter of the proprietor of the British Workman pub. ¹³⁷ An English sailor, John Longman, the nephew of the owner of the house he lodged in and William Mereweather, a labourer, attacked Elizabeth Coles, the daughter of the owner and then her friend Ellen Mockridge. They raped them in turn and brutally beat them with a poker. ¹³⁸ Another sailor lured three 13-year-old girls on board his ship; he took up the ladder so they could not get off but their screams alerted a passing policeman. ¹³⁹ One sailor was convicted of sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl well away from the water front in a public park in the northwest of the city. It was a planned attack, waiting for her to go by and then grabbing her leg and pulling her into some bushes. ¹⁴⁰

Knife violence

Up to now, this article has largely focussed on British sailors on Bristol’s streets and on violence that fell short of causing fatalities. But when discussing sailors’ violence as an integral part of a wider urban culture, it is also important to discuss foreign sailors’ violent crime. Foreign sailors are still sailors after all and this is best done in the context of the most serious types of violence, stabbings and murders using knives. Violence of this nature centres foreign sailors in the normality of streetwise, working-class behaviours, albeit of a more serious nature. By using knives in violent attacks, foreign sailors were settling wrongs in their own culturally engrained way, just as much as British workers and sailors were doing using their fists. However, British sailors and other working men were also inclined to wield knives, as has been shown in the cases of the violence already described. The concept that only foreigners used knives and British workers used fists does not stand scrutiny. British and foreign sailors fitted into an urban culture where the use of knives in violence was ubiquitous. Furthermore, the common use of knives by sailors and other working men extended across the period of this article. Police crime reports in the press show that stabbings, and indeed other violent crimes committed by sailors, happened steadily across the years of this study.

In Bristol as elsewhere, there was anti-foreign prejudice. Foreigners’ inferiority was embedded in social consciousness through various means, including through scientific and anthropological justifications of superiority in which ‘everything was measured in the light of British technology, law, religion and philosophy’. ¹⁴¹ The press played its part in demonising foreigners as dangerous and making the streets unsafe. For example, a correspondent writing about foreign sailors to the Bristol Mercury articulated fear of the foreigner,

One quite shudders at the idea of hot-blooded desperados going about with long knives concealed about them, ready to be whipped out and plunged, without a thought for the value of human life, into the vitals of any temporary foe or some innocent whose only fault is not to be in bed by 10.00 o’clock. ¹⁴²

Despite this characterisation, views of foreigners were not always negative in Bristol and there was also some kindness and sympathy expressed at times. When a couple of Greek sailors were attacked by a group of ‘ruffians’, the headline in the Bristol Mercury, ‘Serious Disturbance in Bristol, Cowardly Attack on Foreigners,’ showed some sympathy with the foreign seamen and a correspondent in the same issue urged that ‘the hand of fellowship be extended to all, considering that the commerce of our nation is dependent both on British and foreign sailors’. ¹⁴³ These two sailors were victims but as perpetrators, it cannot be denied that foreign sailors in Bristol were guilty of violence using knives and they were vilified for it. On the 6^th of July 1867, the Bristol Mercury the blazoned the title ‘Shocking Murder of a Seaman in the Welsh Back’ in which two Greek sailors used a knife, bludgeon and sling shot to kill a Swedish sailor; not just one murder weapon but three. ‘Shocking Murder of a Sailor at Bristol Docks’ ran the headline of a story on 3 August 1881, in which it was reported that a Portuguese sailor was stabbed by another from Manila at Cumberland Basin. Details were given of the knife dripping with blood and how the attacker was ‘marked with small pox and of a sullen, ferocious cast of features’ and who ‘appears to have been feared even by those who were his own countrymen from his savage disposition’. ¹⁴⁴ The most heinous murder by a foreign sailor, according to the press, was in January 1873, because it was the murder of an Englishman by the archetypal swarthy, drunken, knife wielding Italian maniac. An innocent seventeen-year-old docker, William Claypole, the sole provider for his widowed mother and five sisters, accidently brushed up against two Italian sailors, one of whom, Guiseppe Colletto, stabbed him. ¹⁴⁵ The press made much of Claypole’s stainless character in stark contrast to the Italian murderer who delighted in shouting as he ran away, ‘I’ve stabbed an Englishman!’, and then casually going to the Three Sugar Loaves pub where he continued to boast of it. ¹⁴⁶ He continued to broadcast what he had done and relished in telling a Portuguese crewmate that he had wiped the blood off the knife between his lips. ¹⁴⁷

Clearly the character of the foreign sailors in these cases was inferior to the British ones, especially because they had the temerity to use knives. But using knives was an ethnic ritual that equated with British ritualistic pugilism and even upper-class duelling. ¹⁴⁸ In fact, despite protests to the contrary, using knives was a part of many European working-class cultures, including British working-class culture. British working-class men, sailors among them, carried knives as tools of their trades and like their foreign counterparts used knives for violent purposes. A correspondent to the Bristol Mercury in August 1878 wrote in to complain that Bristol’s residents were copying foreigners judging by the number of stabbings on Bristol’s streets. ¹⁴⁹ A later editorial in the same publication, commenting on the use of knives on the city’s streets, lamented the passing of ‘the openness and frankness of John Bull’ and its giving way to the ‘secretive character of the Italian’. The Editor went as far as to say that, ‘using knives will transform the English character and the fairness that is fostered by pugilism will be replaced by the vengeful features of the secret stabber’. ¹⁵⁰ To an extent he was right. Continuing the work of Steve Poole into stabbings by foreign sailors in Bristol beyond his parameters to include 1875 to 1900, (Figure 6), British and Irish sailors were clearly not averse to using knives in fights. This is commensurate with the 191 cases of knives being used by other British working-class males and more stabbings were done by British and Irish sailors, 19 (25%) than Italians and Greeks combined (18%) and Spanish and Portuguese combined (12%). The variety of sailors’ victims - labourers, women, wives, prostitutes, a brothel owner, a shop keeper, a black man (the one example of clear racist motivation), policemen and a child, is also congruent with those stabbed by British non-sailors.

Figure 6.

Stabbings in Bristol by males 1850–1900. Source: Police Court, Police Intelligence, Assizes, and Quarter Session reports in the Bristol Mercury and all other sources on criminality.

The causes of knives being drawn was again often trivial and a squabble gone too far, just as it was for the violent assault discussed already. There were of course serious cases where there was clear intent to injure and these were severely punished when they came to court. A ship’s fireman, William Granger, was given 10 years penal servitude in 1895 for intending to wound with intent. ¹⁵¹ But most stabbings were not premeditated and were when silly incidents got out of hand, the majority in fact starting with squabbles over women, often prostitutes. In other incidents, one Italian sailor admitted his fault in starting a fight when he threw a bunch of thistles at an Englishmen through the window of the Albion on Cumberland Road. ¹⁵² One of the Englishmen threw it back and it then escalated into throwing drinking cups, a fender and a kettle of boiling water which led to knives being brandished in the Italian – English melee. The lubricating effect of a night in the pub often resulted in knife violence, as in the case of a Swedish sailor stabbing someone during a quarrel over cleaning up a mess in the kitchen at a boarding house on College Place. He was so drunk that he had no recollection of anything taking place. ¹⁵³ Two American sailors fell out about beer in the Bell Inn on Broad Quay. They squared up and one stabbed the other in the arm. It was not just foreign sailors lost their sense of proportion. In 1866, two sailors from Bristol left a pub and one chided the other for not being able to walk straight after having half a gallon of beer. A quarrel erupted, a fight was started and a knife was drawn resulting in one of them being stabbed in the neck. ¹⁵⁴

Various other drink fuelled stabbings were the outcome of two men bumping into each other on a pavement, a squabble over who paid for the best bed in a lodging house, a sailor complaining about another one being too noisy in the Sailors’ Home and a sailor being overcharged in a refreshment house. These were not serious issues that warranted the intentional killing of one’s adversary and most of them would have been intended to maim at the most. Maiming was a ritualised use of the knife in many cultures; a slash across the face being typical for Italians, for example. ¹⁵⁵ Limitations on murderous intent is also shown by the fact that other stabbings and lacerations did not always involve a knife. Various cases reported in the Bristol Mercury noted sailors using a candlestick, a cheese taster, broken glass, scissors, an axe and by biting, the latter on many occasions.

Conclusion

This article has argued that sailors’ violent deviant behaviours were congruent with that of other working-class people in the context of urban culture. Part of this culture was the maintenance of masculine identity and a sailor’s motivation for violence, as for any working-class male, was mainly revenge for perceived slights on his manhood, integrity and honour. The sailors and members of other occupational groups featured above did not align themselves with the decline in the acceptable use of violence, and therefore would presumably, if they were around to do so, take issue with John Carter-Wood and Martin Weiner and others on this matter. Instead of contributing to a new mentality of violence, with the help of copious amounts of alcohol, sailors upheld cultural norms in resorting to physical aggression, usually for the most silly and trivial of reasons. Slights could not go unchallenged and any man, sailors among them, was honour bound to enact revenge on any other man who belittled or offended him. Violence was also meted out to the police, who if not challenging the integrity of a sailor, were perceived to be curtailing their streetwise behaviours or being overly forceful in their duties. Some of this violence was performative in that it took the form of rescuing fellow workers from the clutches of the police. That this was often abetted by other on-looking citizens suggests an anti-authority commonality with others. Women, prostitutes and children also bore the brunt of much sailor physical or sexual violence and as such situated some sailors firmly in the most depraved aspect of working-class culture.

Most of the violence by British sailors was meted out by using fists and in doing so they were demonstrating their credentials as true working-class males. But British sailors and non-sailors were also using knives in fights, something that only foreigners were once stereotypically known for. The superior values placed on pugilism was still present but there was a cultural closeness of foreign and British sailors using knives and certainly in Bristol, the most danger was from British sailors, not foreign ones.

Violence by sailors was not just committed on sailor streets and sailors took their violent behaviour into other areas of the city. This resulted in sailors being integrated with other working-class people and within working-class cultural norms. In part, this migration away from the water was forced on them because the extent of Bristol’s sailortown was constrained by the physical boundaries of the city’s waterways. Bristol’s sailors’ theatre for lamentable behaviours was small and it was also situated within Bristol’s civic centre. Consequently, there were conflicting demands on the same city centre space and the facilities found in other port cities for sailors were situated among other city institutions. Whilst there is no suggestion that Bristol’s sailors were enlightened exemplars of respectability, the integrated nature of sailors within the city’s civic area and their dispersal into wider working-class areas had the potential to temper the worst of behaviours. This was enhanced by sailors who were determined to throw off the stereotypical characterisation of the less than wholesome sailor and who instead preferred a more constrained and respectable existence. Their efforts to find alternative employment, their tendency to go home to the family, to live in better areas of the city and to rub shoulders with respectable people in church, helped to integrate them into more acceptable aspects of working-class culture. Not that efforts towards respectability always worked out well for the sailor. Common hardships, want, physical and mental illness, unemployment, family break ups and general impoverishment often provided a commonality with the more unfortunate members of society.

The above presents a different characterisation of the perceived stereotypical Jack ashore, wasting his time and money in, ‘pubs, dance halls, groggeries and brothels on some Shit Street, an effluent maze of alleys found in sailortowns throughout the world’. ¹⁵⁶ Naturally many sailors continued to dally on those streets, were an annoying presence on them and elsewhere and were involved in criminal acts, some minor but also some seriously violent. Importantly, however, they may have behaved in these ways but they did so alongside and in common with other working-class people. Many sailors dutifully played the role of ‘a lion afloat and an idiot ashore’ but as a collective and individually, they were no more poorly behaved or criminally inclined than anybody else. ¹⁵⁷