‘Noisy and Dangerous Boys’: The Slogging Gang Phenomenon in Late Nineteenth-Century Birmingham

Abstract

Juvenile fighting gangs, called sloggers, were part of a spectrum of street groups in late nineteenth-century Birmingham. Rooted in local craft traditions, they were typically violent rather than criminal, with no strong identity, but with distinctive names taken from their localities. Analysis of age, occupation, ethnicity, and residence, highlights the character of those arrested for slogging and shows some changes over the period from 1870 to 1900. The indications are that, triggered by ethnic tensions in a period of prosperity, the gangs rapidly became essentially territorial. Slogging in gangs moved out from the town centre into Aston and Birmingham’s suburbs. Increased inter-school rivalry may have helped to foster local loyalties, but most sloggers were above school age. Certain families gave cohesion and continuity to the gangs. Local newspapers provided publicity. Music halls were sometimes arenas of conflict, and even death. Fatalities were rare. Efforts to ‘civilise’ and control working class youth intensified in the 1890s, and slogging gangs merged back into the urban milieu, losing their separate identities and being replaced in the public eye by the new generic term for troublesome youth, peaky blinders.