Manchester’s Lost Boys

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

One autumn morning in 1871, teachers at several schools in Manchester arrived to find their classrooms strangely empty.

They spent the next few hours knocking on parents’ doors and searching through the city’s back yards and alleys, but none of their pupils could be found.

The boys — hundreds of them — had vanished.

It would be weeks before the reason for…