Archive - The Manchester History Club

The Ballad of Ginger Liz

Meet the doyenne of Victorian Manchester's criminal elite, who had secret access behind the scenes of Minshull Street police court

Jul 13 •

June 2024

Doctor Gaulter's cholera casebook

Family history tips: Tracing ancestors using a doctor's casebook from the 1832 cholera epidemic

Jun 26 •

The racecourse thieves

How thieves including Flying Gibb and Dicky Drag earned their spurs as 'ticket snatchers' and 'rampers' at the horse racing in Manchester

Jun 21 •

May 2024

How to train a pickpocket

Could you make it as a Victorian ‘breech buzzer’? This is how Manchester’s wiliest pickpockets learned their trade

May 25 •

The coffin flood

'For all we know, hundreds of bodies have been washed down the river, and some of them have gone into the sea' - the horror of Manchester's worst flood

May 11 •

Criminal ancestry: The secret art of using tattoos to investigate your family history

Victorian prison registers offer rare clues for family historians about the lives and loves of their criminal ancestors

May 1

April 2024

Manchester’s lost boys: How scuttling began with a war in a Europe

The Franco-Prussian War had an unexpected impact on youth culture in the streets of Cottonopolis

Apr 27 •

Welcome to the Manchester History Club

Join the new club for Mancunian history fans and share the story of the world's first modern city

Apr 19 •

March 2024

'The bigger villain bit through Billy's hand': Victorian street fighting Manchester style

On a Sunday afternoon, the usual time for settling grudges, hundreds of people watched two one-armed beggars fight for their lives

Mar 8 •

February 2024

The pearl divers of the black River Irk

In the grey dawn, he saw them. From beneath the slimy waters a head bobbed up — and then another

Feb 2 •

January 2024

Step back in time with an Angel Meadow history tour

Hear about life in Victorian Manchester's most notorious slum in a new history walking tour starting in March 2024

Jan 26 •

December 2023

The Manchester Christmas miracle

For Christmas dinner he gave them beef, potatoes, a loaf, two ounces of tea, half a pound of butter — and a tin of mustard

Dec 21, 2023 •

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