The night twenty-three people were killed in a Manchester music hall

Life and death in the Victorian city.

Manchester nightlife in our current era has many thriving venues in all parts of the city centre, plus a history of former glories. Tens of thousands of people make their way into town every weekend.

The latest generation, like each one before it, tends to believe it invented partying and living a mad late-night life. But the history of hedonism in Manchester goes back beyond yellow and black themed warehouses, amphetamine-fuelled Sixties venues like the Twisted Wheel, or, indeed, photographs of the Ritz looking splendid in its first years in the late 1920s.

One of the key moments was the rapid growth of new industrial towns like Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and elsewhere in the first half of the 1800s. Families from rural villages, looked to find work in the new manufacturing industries, the factories, the mills, the workshops. In 1851, Manchester had grown from a small market town of 48,000 people to a bursting metropolis of 455,000 in the space of fifty years.

In those boom towns with their rapidly growing populations, housing was a mess, with gross overcrowding, insanitary conditions and exploitation by landlords. The population in Manchester’s centre lived in crowded back-to-backs, cellar dwellings, hovels crumbling into the river. The area from St Peter’s Sq south to St George’s, Hulme was packed with people. Thousands of families were crowded into Ardwick, and Ancoats.

Houses were next to factories; there was no demarcation between industrial and residential areas. In Ancoats, the air was polluted by smoking chimneys, open drains, chemical works, soap and bone works, and a horse-slaughtering compound. Worst of all, the authorities had sited the city’s Health Works in Ancoats, for the collection of household sewage and other waste. The horse-drawn refuse vans passed through the area 625 times a day, carrying 8,000 pails of refuse daily.

The middle classes had abandoned the city centre, moving into the cleaner spaces of the suburbs. The new urban poor were rootless, strangers, worked to the bone in barely-regulated factories, inhabiting a cross between the Wild West and a shanty town.

Given such a dismal daily life, there was a widespread and almost desperate demand for night-time entertainment in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1851 around half the entire population was under twenty years old. There was a sense of transience, instability and a fervid enthusiasm for escape. The quickest way out Manchester was the demon alcohol…

Engels reported thus in the 1840s: “On Saturday evenings, especially, when wages are paid and work stops somewhat earlier than usual, when the whole working class pours from its own poor quarters into the main thoroughfares, intemperance may be seen in all its brutality. I have rarely come out of Manchester on such an evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others lying in the gutter.”

In some beer houses, like the Trafford Arms - on the Manchester Cathedral side of the Victoria Bridge over the River Irwell - there'd be informal sing-songs, nights spent listening to a piano, or a mechanical organ, perhaps with accompanying drums and tambourines.

You couldn't get a quiet drink in Manchester in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1849 Angus Bethune Reach reports wandering by the Oldham Road. “I was somewhat surprised to hear loud sounds of music and jollity which floated out of public house windows.”

To help meet this demand for music, the Theatres Act of 1843 relaxed the rules governing entertainment on licensed premises. This triggered a sharp rise in the number of pubs building stages and offering organised live performances, or setting up designated ‘music saloons’ in adjacent rooms of buildings. A new type of venue emerged – music halls.

Many music halls weren’t much more than an add-on or a function room, but some were purpose built. One of the first music halls was the Star in Bolton, owned and run by Thomas Sharples. In the mid-1840s, on some nights, fifteen hundred people would attend his venue, but his business suffered a setback after a fire in 1851.

The Trafford Arms was owned by Ben Lang. This is a view of the Victoria Bridge in the 1850s; the Trafford Arms is a red brick building with five storeys above ground, adjacent to this side of the bridge. Mr. Lang owned and hired out rowing boats and ran passenger steamers down the Irwell to Pomona Gardens; you can see the landing stage at the water’s edge.

It's said that when he retired, Ben Lang had amassed a fortune amounting to £100,000 (approximately £15m in today’s money). Like night-time operators in subsequent generations, Ben Lang liked to appear public spirited, including making charitable donations. In 1849 he made a donation of ten shillings to the local fever hospital.

Ben Lang repurposed and extended the Trafford Arms into the Victoria Music Hall, big enough to hold two thousand people or more; at this point, there were no legal capacity restrictions to such venues. It was a case of pack ‘em in and hope for the best.

In the late 1860s there were at least three major music halls in Manchester, but many others of a smaller nature and several illegal halls too, including the Albion Music Hall, New Islington, Ancoats, which was prosecuted in 1870 after it became clear it was being run without a licence.

The music halls would present an onstage mix of patriotic, comic and sentimental songs, magic tricks and satirical sketches, tightrope walkers, and cross-dressing singers. Audiences flocked to marvel at acrobats, magicians and the likes of Dan Rice the Clown (‘And His Wonderful Performing Dogs’). It was raucous, communal, mass night-time entertainment of the day, part pub and part nightclub, part circus and part talent show.

There were pubs more-or-less on every street corner, but the music halls provided bigger treats, to audiences drawn from a demographic including casual labourers, young apprentices, soldiers, factory workers of both sexes, dockers, servant girls and families.

Less sophisticated halls were particularly a feature of Manchester life. As one local paper remarked at the time, “In no place in England, probably, are concert halls better supported, as far as the lower classes are concerned, than in Manchester”. Another newspaper, in the late 1860s, explained to readers that Ben Lang’s Victoria Music Hall was the “oldest music hall in Manchester… the class of people which it has been frequented being of the lowest”.

Ben Lang's was well placed to meet local demand for escape and entertainment, attracting numbers on a par with nightclubs in the city today; despite a front entrance no bigger than a shop doorway, In the 1860s there was housing right up close to Victoria Bridge St, bunched in old cobbled streets around the Cathedral and up towards Shudehill - this was where medieval Manchester was centred. Over the bridge in Salford thousands of workers were housed in cramped streets and courts clustered around Greengate; they’d be a major part of Ben Lang’s regular crowd. There was even a ballad from the early nineteenth century, 'Victoria Bridge on a Saturday Night', describing the noise, the crowd, the street hawkers selling “Stretford black puddings”.

Ben Lang produced a programme of regular concert performances and comic shows at his venue. Many of the songs dealt with public gossip and local events. One popular song in the music halls, from the 1830s onwards, was 'Manchester's Improving Daily', a cynical commentary contrasting the reality of life in the city with the public hype, and wondering where class war, and the revolutionary, fighting, spirit of the Manchester people had gone as cash and commerce had taken over.

It wasn’t unusual for a full house on Fridays and Saturdays. Admission to the gallery seats was 2d, and to the pit 3d. Alcohol was available from the beer house attached to the hall, despite the view voiced by a local magistrate that tea, coffee and ginger beer should be sufficient refreshment for the patrons. Lang retired in August 1864 but just four months later, he died, aged 58. After his death, the hall was owned by Ben Lang's son and daughters, and tenanted and run by a Mr. R. D. Davies, but the Victoria Music Hall was still widely called Ben Lang’s. Probably the easiest way to imagine Ben Lang’s is as a very rough and ready Albert Hall on Peter St, less well-lit though, with a wooden floor covered with sawdust to absorb dirt, and spilled alcohol.

Music halls, though providing an escape from the troubles of the everyday couldn’t help but be a reflection of the world outside. Music halls had varying reputations, including some said to be frequented by prostitutes. Prostitution was rife in Manchester in the mid-Victorian era. One police report in 1843, claimed there were seven hundred and one prostitutes in Manchester operating in three hundred and thirty brothels; what can complicate such figures is that poverty could drive some other women into part-time or very occasional sex work as an emergency way of supplementing their income.

The Mancunian working class were not an amorphous, uniform community. Social gradations were recognised, and demarcations between respectable and those deemed not, those in work and those not, those considered slovenly and those who liked to stay smart.

Where numbers of the working class would take every weekend as an opportunity to hit the town – and then the gutter – another feature of life among the Victorian poor was the desire for self-improvement and radical political debate. Engels describes a Sunday evening trip to the Hall of Science on Byrom St, where there were “tea-parties where young high and low, men and women, sat together and partook of the customary supper, bread-and-butter and tea.”

Beyond the urban poor, the city had a broad population, and the range of music on offer in this period reflected this. The Hallé Orchestra (founded in 1858), and a network of clubs for the town’s leading business and professional men, and art venues were established by the emergent middle classes. The aristocracy, meanwhile, would seldom venture into town at night, unless it was for a glitzy ball or some other party, perhaps at the Free Trade Hall. Such was the division between classes, the music halls were in effect unseen by the upper echelons of society; or at least, if acknowledged, considered part of a strange, seedy, separate world best ignored.

It’s noticeable the large numbers of young people in the music hall audiences. The logic is clear; if you’re old enough to work the looms, or carry the cotton bales, you’re old enough to be out at night on your own. There was a Dickensian underworld populated by street urchins, aged six or seven and known for their petty pilfering and pickpocketing.

In addition there were a frightening number of lost or abandoned children in Manchester at any one time. In the 1830s, estimates frequently put the number at more than a thousand).

In the late nineteenth century violent lads who hung around the streets in groups became known as 'scuttlers'. In their heyday, the Northern scuttler and his 'moll' achieved a level of infamy on a par with any gang in modern times. Mostly their activities were limited to the streets of their territory, but they’d also wander into town make themselves known in pubs and music halls, and, if so inclined, working en masse, knocking down passers by in order to rob them. It earned them a fearsome reputation.

The ‘Deansgate Mob’, recruiting from the densely packed housing around where the high gloss restaurants and corporate office blocks in Spinningfields are now situated, frequently attacked a rival scuttler gang who were based at a music hall, the Casino on Peter Street, and would do battle inside the hall. In reality, though, it’s unlikely halls were any more dangerous than the street outside (and possibly less so), and more safe than many back street taverns in the wrong part of town. The presence of women and children in the average music hall audience generally kept proceedings decent. Operators couldn’t tolerate high profile prostitution or signs of violence in their hall; on occasions magistrates and police would close down unruly and intemperate premises.

The biggest threat to the life of the music hall patrons and the livelihood of the owners was fire. Wooden constructions, lighting by gas lamps, sawdust on the floor; it’s unsurprising there were dozens of music hall fires. In February 1849, at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, sixty-five people died trying to escape from a fire. At the Surrey Music Hall in Sheffield in 1858, five people died during a performance by Madame Marietta. In the first of those cases the fire was soon extinguished but the panic had its own momentum. In the second, it was an entirely false alarm.

It was a false cry of “Fire!” that led to a tragedy at Ben Lang’s that claimed the lives of twenty-three people, many of them teenagers. On the 30th of July 1868, Ben Lang's was packed with Friday night revellers enjoying a programme of comic songs and talent contests.

The Northern Weekly Gazette soon afterwards painted the picture; “The amusement of the moment was a sack race on the stage, to see which a number of men and boys in the pit stood upon the front benches. The benches creaked as if giving way; several boys caught hold of a gas pendant to save themselves from falling, and the pendant broke off in their hands. The smell of the escaping gas led someone to cry "Fire," and instantly the audience in every part of the house rushed to the staircase in a mad effort to escape. Mr Clifford [the compere] shouted to them from the stage that there was no cause for alarm, but no one heeded him”.

As the audience fled in panic, a banister on the packed staircase out of the building collapsed. Eye-witness reports spoke grimly of crushed bodies being hauled out at the bottom of the stairs.

After the accident there was chaos outside as crowds descended on the scene, blocking hansom cabs sent to ferry the injured to the Infirmary. Some men who had hurried to assist ended up dragging the injured on their backs, running through the streets. Twenty-three people died, all but one under the age of twenty. The exception was Elizabeth Strothers of Clayton Street, Salford, aged 42 and the mother of four children.

It was a disaster that must have shaken the working-class people of Manchester, but there's little trace of it now. There's no memorial, and few mentions in the history books, but in truth there was little made of it at the time too. This reflects of how uninvested in the lives of the poorer classes the well-to-do were; not just their in leisure activities, but in their lives in general. For example, there were no systems to investigate factory accidents in Manchester at this time, even though it’s believed almost half the patients in the Infirmary at any time were there after suffering injuries at work. Deaths and injuries to the working poor were collateral damage in the race for wealth.

Despite the great loss of life at Ben Lang’s, coverage of the disaster gets but a quarter of the space allotted to reports from the Cotton Supply Association annual meeting in The Manchester Guardian.

The Northern Weekly Gazette declared that “Not more than one or two [of the dead and injured] were dressed in even decent clothing, and it was obvious that nearly all belonged to the class of street Arabs”. Other reports also used the phrase 'street Arabs' - urchins - although details of the dead and injured reveal that most of them had a job of one sort or another: factory operatives, a founder, a weaver, a moulder, and a fifteen-year-old spindle and fly maker. Ben Lang's catered for that mass of factory fodder who lived lives in so different a world to the newspaper's readers. Workers or 'street Arabs', to them it's all the same; the poor are dispensable.

Investigations into the fire at Ben Lang’s included a statement from Superintendent Gee, of A Division; “Drunkenness may not have been an issue in the investigation of the incident, but overcrowding certainly was”. Overcrowding was an accepted practice, and presented no major problem on a normal night, but that evening in July 1868 the only staircase provided couldn't cope with the pressure of the stampede; it was only five foot wide.

At the inquest it was revealed that there was a second means of escape from the galleries, a staircase that went via the pit. However, in a move which was devious but not illegal, the management had locked the door to this staircase to stop customers who had paid 2d for a gallery place from sneaking down into the 3d pit. The Licensing Act then in force made no reference to the quality or quantity of the exits, so no action could be taken against the management of the music hall.

In August 1868, The Manchester Courier called for laws to be introduced; "The great desirability of compelling the proprietors of music halls and places of amusement to provide proper means by which speedy egress might be made in cases of panic”. It’s now the case that the calculation of a venue’s licensed capacity is measured by the provision and size of the emergency exit routes.

It was said that the damage to the Victoria Music Hall amounted to no more than five pounds; a couple of smashed windows and a gas pendant or two, and the broken balustrade on the staircase. The hall open again within a fortnight of the tragic incident. There was no room for sentimentality when there was money to be made.

The incident was not the last nor the worst fire-related incident; in 1878 a false cry of ‘fire’ at the Colosseum Theatre in Liverpool led to the deaths of thirty-seven people. Nine years later, a fire at the Theatre Royal in Exeter killed a hundred and eighty-six people.

In Manchester, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the unhinged, unregulated chaos of urban life became a little tamer, and challenges to the social order from the Chartists and trade unionists had dissipated. The relative prosperity of the era encouraged conformity among the populace and investment in leisure. The entertainment offer evolved from the first music halls and was now dubbed “variety”; songs, comedy, sketches, with a greater appeal for the middle class (the likes of tradesmen, office managers and civil servants), and elements borrowed from the straight theatre. The Palace Theatre of Varieties opened on Oxford St in 1891, ornate, prestigious, and as far from Ben Lang’s spit and sawdust hall as can be imagined. And, as the Palace Theatre, it still operates today.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, audiences flocked to see so-called ‘moving pictures’; many music halls closed, or were themselves converted into cinemas. The arrival of jazz and investment in venues like the Ritz, provided new avenues to explore for the young music fans of Manchester. By the mid-1930s every town or city centre had a ‘palais de danse’, holding a couple of thousand people or more.

By this time, Ben Lang’s Victoria Music Hall had long gone. Within just a few years of the tragic accident, the building was demolished and replaced with a very grand hotel, the Grosvenor, which catered for a business-oriented clientele, making the most of its close proximity to both the cotton (Royal) Exchange and the Corn Exchange and to Victoria Station. The hotel operated for ninety years until, it too was demolished in March 1971, and replaced with a regrettable concrete edifice (car park and offices known as Premier House) which was levelled in 2022. The site where Ben Lang’s music hall was is still under development (see photo above, the end of the bridge, up close to the river, in the right foreground).

Eras erased, histories buried, the twenty-three dead forgotten, including William Ramsden (aged 16), of 70 Broster Street, Salford, and Caroline Carlisle (aged 11) of 1 Back Caygill St, who were among those who had crossed the bridge from Salford, perhaps with neighbourhood pals, in pursuit of laughter, a sense of freedom, a nugget of joy, but then met their deaths crushed on the music hall stairs.

Further reading