Badfellas

Crime, Tradition and New Masculinities

Simon Winlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Social Sciences

Fights, fraud and drugs racketeering regularly hit the headlines, but they are just news stories for most of us. For others, they constitute a way of life. This book uncovers a world where male identity is expressed each day through physical strength and power. Focusing on professional criminals and violent men, the author shows how workshop camaraderie, hard physical work and criminal reputations allow for changing masculinities. It is all too easy to stereotype criminals, when, in fact, their world is complex and creative. Criminal men adapt and modify their forms of gender expression to fit in with their changing economic, social and cultural circumstance, as do men in all walks of life. Why is violence attractive to these men? What motivates their crimes, both planned and impulsive? How do criminals themselves view their activities and their reputations, and how do these reputations affect their perception of masculinity? This book is the first sustained analysis of organized crime and violence to use covert research methods. Far from the sensationalized memoirs of retired gangsters, or the abstract discussions of scholars, this book builds on first-hand experiences and relationships made while working amongst bouncers and criminals. The social world of professional criminals and the working environments of criminal bouncers are demystified and laid bare. The author sets individual criminal careers and experiences in the wider context of de-industrialization and globalization, and provides a thoughtful and stimulating addition to the fields of anthropology, sociology and criminology.

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History, Modernity and Masculinities

A Short History of Sunderland and the Surrounding Area

Sunderland, as a town, has a distinct character. It is geographically set off by its position on the river and the coast. Centred visibly and closely on its productive work, it is the antithesis of suburbia: housing is an annex to the workplace and the community is a working community. It is, in a double sense, a working-class town. Sunderland also has a social distinctiveness, which in part reflection and part cause of its physical isolation. There is a shared dialect and accent of the Wearsider, local patriotism for the town’s football team, the community and neighbourhood pubs and social clubs, and the housing in Sunderland.

A. H. Halsey

The observations of A. H. Halsey presented above seem very dated in 1998. The industrial, working-class town with such strong community ties is now a post-industrial city. However these changes are not necessarily recent phenomena. I offer the following passage from a work first published in 1969, as a useful and succinct introduction to the social and economic background of the area:

Sunderland is a town which is living on the dwindling fat of its Victorian expansion. The legacy of the industrial revolution is apparent in its appearance, its physical structure, it’s population growth and in a host of social and economic characteristics. Even attitudes are coloured by its past heritage. The depression years, the final death spasm of the 19th century, are still a real memory amongst much of the town’s population and impinge upon the attitudes of the working population. This imprint of the past, rooted in a continuing dependence on heavy industry, is found to a much greater degree than in the towns of the Midlands or even Lancashire, since the spread of light manufacturing has had only marginal effects in the North East.

(Robson 1969: 75)

Much of the research presented here has its foundations in the city of Sunderland. By this I mean that some, although certainly not all, of the respondents quoted were born and reside there, although their activities were far from restricted to that locale. As they were free to move in space, so was I, and my research took me to all the main conurbations in the North East of England. A large amount of time was spent in Newcastle, Washington, County Durham, Middlesbrough and as far south as Leeds, Bradford and Hull, but aside from issues of access and methodology, Sunderland in particular seemed to possess all of the theoretical characteristics that underlie this study. Aside from this, it was the city of my birth and the area I knew best, thus making it the most obvious locale to focus my study and frame my theoretical points. Since cultural inheritance is central to this text and much is made of the nature of masculinity and socio-cultural change in the area, and as few readers – other than those who live in the North East – will have visited the city or know of its urban landscape beyond the generalizations and stereotypical images, then a brief history of the city of Sunderland seems appropriate at this point. I therefore offer this chapter as a means of laying the foundations for later discussions of changing masculinities and criminal practice in the modern industrial and post-modern eras.

History

Settlements around the mouth of the River Wear have been traced back to the Neolithic age (see Mitchell 1919: 3). However, it was not until the first half of the nineteenth century that Sunderland developed into a major concentration of population and a commercial centre, although the port at the mouth of the Wear had achieved a measure of success before this date (Mitchell 1919; Corfe 1973). The bridge that spans the mouth of the River Wear joining the two major urban centres opened in 1796 and achieved some renown by being only the second iron bridge in the world.

The city also has an interesting religious history, being closely connected with the lives of Benedict Biscop and St Bede in Saxon times. Biscop erected a monastery and church dedicated to St Peter as early as 674, which remains a local landmark. Glass was installed in the church and Sunderland consequently became the first place in England where glass was made, beginning a close association between glass making and the city (Corfe 1973).

St Bede was born in Sunderland and was admitted to Biscop’s monastery where he proceeded to spend much of his life, becoming the most noted scholar of his time, writing fifty books including The Ecclesiastical History of England and other works that provide much of our information on the ancient history of England until AD 731 (Mitchell 1919).

Despite these facts, it is shipbuilding that is most commonly associated with Sunderland and its history, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Benson has pointed out, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of work to a working-class life, especially during this period. It was the way in which workers spent many – if not most – of their waking hours and work determined how much money they had at their disposal (Benson 1989: 9). This in turn would often determine health, housing, social standing and, in some cases, the political beliefs and other associated values that workers possessed (see, for example, Joyce 1982). As Becker and Carper (1956) noted, one’s occupation and commitment to work greatly influence self-identity, and in this respect it is also difficult to communicate fully the importance of Sunderland’s dominant and defining industry to the surrounding community. Roberts (1993, especially: 1–10) offers an insightful discussion of the importance of shipbuilding to Sunderland and the surrounding community:

Sunderland … was by no means a one industry town, but the fortunes of shipbuilding had for so long been the major indicator of economic and social conditions on Wearside … The rope making and pottery industries did not employ a great number, and coal mining was not as prevalent in the Borough as in the rest of the county. This separated Sunderland from the county town of Durham City, the focal point for miners within the Durham coalfield. Lacking the communications, prestige and diversity of Newcastle, only twelve miles away, Sunderland was a closed community, forever in the shadow of these two centres. Shipbuilding was at the heart of the industrial and everyday life at the mouth of the Wear.

(J.A. Brown ‘The General Strike, 1926: Sunderland’, undated and unpublished BA dissertation quoted in Roberts 1993: 18)

In 1834 the Lloyds Register of Shipping regarded Sunderland as ‘the most important centre in the country’, its output equalling that of all other ports put together (Corfe 1973: 75). An author who visited the town in this period commented on the ‘increasing manufactories which vomit forth their black, broad and long extended columns of trailing smoke’ (Dibdin 1838: 314). In the later years of the nineteenth century, Sunderland embraced the shift towards building large steel ocean-going vessels, abandoning its speciality of small coastal vessels, and continued to thrive (Dibdin 1838). A Daily Telegraph reporter in 1882 thought the area a ‘wonderful picture of thriving industry … every acre of land … the basis for some great commercial undertaking’ (Dibdin 1838: 78). The spectacular advance of shipbuilding was the most distinctive feature of Sunderland’s nineteenth-century development. At the same time, the town’s importance as a port was increasing. Its growth was based almost entirely on the shipments of coal coming from mines on the outskirts of Sunderland, and these in turn were affected by the emergence of railway networks linking the collieries to the harbour and the general improvement of facilities at the port itself (Mitchell 1919; Bowling 1958).

Shipbuilding, seafaring and the coal trade dominated the town’s economy to such an extent that half of all employed men were working in these industries. Pottery, glassmaking, limestone, cement and brick works had also been significant sources of employment in the area, but by the mid-nineteenth century all these industries were in severe decline and ‘had either disappeared completely or were on the point of extinction’ by the time of the First World War (Sinclair 1988: 31). The population grew rapidly in the nineteenth century, however, as people flocked to the booming town, causing social conditions to deteriorate with the entrepreneurial middle classes, who had cashed in on the expanding marketplace, moving to the outlying areas. Their houses were split into tenements and brothels and taverns sprung up to cater for industrial workers and the influx of seamen. On average, houses in the parish held ten inhabitants and less than 7 per cent had privies (Corfe 1973: 57). Sewerage was far from adequate and dung heaps formed, prompting a cholera outbreak in 1831, the first in Britain, and again in 1866 (Corfe 1973), which focused national attention on the town’s distressing situation. Charles Grenville, Clerk of the Privy Council, reflected on the town’s ‘state of human misery and moral degradation’ (Corfe 1973: 58).

A B. Granville, like many other visitors at the time, commented on the wonder of the Wear bridge (‘the stupendous structure … one of those projections which show the power of man so strikingly’ (1841: 266), but also made note of passing though ‘a long dirty street … inhabited by the lowest class of people … and from which branched off, to the right and to the left, many very narrow passages or alleys … all presenting … the very stink of gloom and filth – an apt nest or rendezvous for typhus and cholera’ (1841: 268). Murray commented similarly, describing Sunderland as:

black and gloomy in the extreme, and the atmosphere is so filled with smoke that blue sky is seldom seen, especially in the lower part of the town, which consists for the most part of a maze of small dingy houses crowded together, intersected by lanes rather than streets: dirt is the distinctive feature; earth, air and water are alike black and filthy.

(1864: 124)

During this period, slum areas were subject to market forces, which were allowed to run wild producing a ‘cellular and promiscuous’ residential style of inward-looking, dead-end alleys, courts and blindbacks, a ‘perfect wilderness of foulness’ (Daunton 1983). The area Murray seems to be referring to as ‘the lower part of the town’ is the East End of Sunderland, an area that then, as now, housed low-income families. The area became increasingly overcrowded due to the influx of industrial workers, some of whom were Irish labourers (see Belchem 1990 for an overview of Irish immigrant experience in industrial England) who came seeking work at the time of the great famine. In 1851, 5.7 per cent of East Enders were Irish (Census Enumerators Returns 1851). Although most writers portray the bleaker aspects of life in the East End in the industrial age, Corfe believes that ‘poverty and squalor, depravity and ignorance didn’t necessarily mean that the East End was an unhappy place. On the contrary, outsiders and residents alike felt its inhabitants for the most part enjoyed life; there was a strong sense of group loyalty and good neigh-bourliness; they worked hard and played hard’ (in Milburn and Miller 1988: 79).

Many male inhabitants of Sunderland’s’ East End were seamen, a group described by shipping owners as an ‘ignorant, disloyal, drunken rabble’ (Plimsol 1873, republished 1980). It would seem that anyone employed as a seaman at this time had good reason to drown their sorrows, given the descriptions of their working conditions: ‘The majority of merchant seamen … are broken down in health soon after the early age of 35 years, and the expectation of life of seamen (… at about 20 years of age) does not extend beyond the forty fifth or perhaps even fortieth year’ (1867 ‘Report of the Society for Improving the Conditions of the Merchant Seamen’). The seamen ‘worked harder and longer than the hardest working navvy ashore for wages less than those of the most common labourers, and in every port pimps, prostitutes and publicans waited to strip him of the wages he had’ (Patterson 1988: 49).

It appears that seamen were not the only working group to work long and hard in poor working conditions and consequently seek some release in the little leisure time afforded them. Patterson (1988) describes the lot of miners in and around Sunderland as ‘long hours of hard and dangerous toil’ and comments: ‘one master, who even owned the house the miner lived in’, created ‘particular types of community. On the positive side can be cited village solidarity … on the other, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, over-large families, huge infant mortality and premature death rates’ (Patterson 1988: 47). Commenting on Monkwearmouth coal mine, Patterson points out that the moral elite of the mid nineteenth century believed the pits’ close proximity to Sunderland proper could prove costly, quoting one George Eliot as believing that ‘generally the neighbourhood of a town corrupts the colliery people. Fairs, dances, theatres, etc. seduce them. Drunkenness is prevalent here. The police prevent at present many disorders’ (Patterson 1988: 47).

Although the general picture of Sunderland during the industrial eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is one of a thriving industrial town, albeit with a number of social problems, ‘cycles of depression and boom and serious unemployment were always features of the economy of Sunderland and indeed the whole North East’ (Dougan 1968: 221). An example of this can be seen in the serious slump in shipbuilding output in the 1880s (Smith and Holden 1946; Bowling 1958), which caused unemployment and poverty for many. Shipping World commented that the trade was never before in ‘such a wretched state’ and added: ‘The present suffering is among a class of highly respectable artisans, self reliant, proud workmen, who will endure long rather than disclose their poverty and want’ (cited in Clarke 1988) Some in the town were so impoverished that the food was taken from pigs’ troughs and the Medical Officer of Health reported, ‘their homes are bare of furniture, their clothes scanty, the season promises cold and fires are a luxury which they cannot afford’ (Clarke 1988: 39). This slump coincided with the general decline of Sunderland’s other industries, and when the town emerged from it, shipbuilding was of even more importance to the region.

The collapse of the world economy in the 1930s also greatly affected the town (see Pickard 1989; Roberts 1993). Unemployment in shipbuilding shot up to 74.9 per cent, comprising of a variety of skilled and highly skilled trades. Overall, the level of unemployment in 1931 was 36.6 per cent (Miller 1989: 95), and the plight of the poor was made worse with the introduction of the Means Test in 1931, which promptly entered lower class folklore (Miller 1989). To those who lived through it, it must have seemed that the Means Test was designed to torment and humiliate. National as well as local narratives exist of people being told to sell the sideboard before qualifying for benefit, of parish boots with holes punched in the back to prevent them being pawned, of children having to support their parents with their meagre earnings, as well as of the pleasure to be gained from evading the authorities by creating fictional addresses for young people, thus avoiding their wages being taken into account when their father applied for benefit, or of passing possessions via the back door to neighbours when the ‘Means Test Man’ was at the front (Patterson 1988: 169).

The War Years

Preparations for the Second World War restored full employment after policies of appeasement towards Hitler reached their limits and war seemed inevitable. Rearming was well under way by 1938 and the arrival of war the following year guaranteed a busy industrial period for Wearside and the North E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 History, Modernity and Masculinities
• 2 And Then the World Changed …
• 3 Bouncing as a Contemporary Urban Career: Post-modernity, De-industrialization, Masculinity and Cultural Adaptation
• 4 Summary and Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index