Chapter Three - Giblin Brothers Slogging Gang. Cunninghams
- Andy Yarwood
- 2 days ago
- 16 min read
The story of the Cunningham family is not one of immediate criminality but rather of gradual descent, shaped by hardship, loss, and the relentless pressure of poverty. Unlike many of their neighbours, the Cunningham family did not step into crime as a birthright. They were not the Giblins, whose name alone commanded fear in the slogging gangs, nor the Morans, where violence passed on through each generation.
The Cunninghams fought against it. For years, they clung to the edges of respectability, believing that hard work might shield them from the fate that consumed so many around them. But Birmingham’s slums had a way of wearing people down, stripping dignity inch by inch.
In places like these, crime wasn’t an aspiration — it was a final option. The system was stacked against them from the start. Wages barely covered rent, landlords cared nothing for the crumbling, rat-infested courts they called home, and work came and went with the whims of the city’s factory owners. Children grew up in streets thick with desperation, continually hungry and every day was a fight to survive, but when faced with starvation, what choice was left?
Society and the law dismissed them as delinquents, beggars and vagabonds, and the worthless dregs of the slums. But in reality, they were simply boys and girls shaped by an environment that offered no escape. Some took to theft as a means to fill their stomachs—a loaf of bread here, a pocket-handkerchief there, anything to keep hunger at bay—until those small acts of desperation hardened into habit. Others, torn from their families and sent to reformatories that offered little reform, learned that survival meant toughness.
Beaten by their parents, brutalised in the so-called reformatory schools meant to correct them, or forced to fight their peers to prove their place in a rigid street hierarchy, they grew to see violence not just as a necessity, but as a language. For some, it was a weapon. For others, it was the only defence they had ever known.
Not every child became a thug. They were made. — moulded by deprivation, abandoned by society, by the brutal streets that shaped them. Each conviction, each sentence, only dragged them further into a life they had never truly chosen.
For some, there was no way back. For others, it was a path they never expected to walk. But all of them were victims long before they were criminals.
From Liverpool to Birmingham: The Search for a Better Life
Patrick Cunningham was born in 1833 in Lancashire. His wife, Catherine McHugh, came from Westmeath, Ireland, and moved to Liverpool with her family as a child. The couple married in 1854, with Catherine already expecting their first son, John.
They began their married life in Rainhill, Lancashire — a town where industry was booming. At the time, Rainhill was a hub for glass bottle and brass foundries, offering stable employment. Patrick secured work as a general labourer, but the work was exhausting, and even with a stable income, the family teetered on the edge of poverty. Each new child made survival harder. By the end of the decade, however, the promise of steady employment had faded. while mouths to feed multiplied. With yet another baby on the way, Patrick and Catherine made a difficult choice — to leave Rainhill behind and try their luck in Birmingham: a city full of promise but equally known as much for its hardship.
What greeted them in Birmingham was not opportunity, but overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a daily fight to survive. They joined thousands of other Irish immigrants and working-class families crammed into narrow courts and broken-down houses. The city’s slum landlords were notorious for squeezing rent from tenants living in appalling conditions. Entire families often occupied a single room, with shared yards and outhouses providing the only sanitation.
Census records of 1861, show they were living at 5 Court 3 House, Snow Hill, where Patrick was the sole earner. Their three children—John, Edward, and Julia—were all under 10 years old. Life was difficult, but not yet criminal.
The birth of two more children, Catherine (1867) and Patrick (1868), further stretched their meager resources. Work was no longer consistent, and Catherine, now with five mouths to feed, turned to petty crime for survival.
Catherine Cunningham’s Fall into Crime (1870-1875)
Catherine’s first recorded offense came in October 1870, when she was charged with burglary alongside Ellen Kennedy, a young married woman. The two women were accused of breaking into a house in Dale End and stealing shawls, petticoats, and a purse containing 14 shillings. The items were later discovered at a lodging house, where Catherine had tried to store them.
Although Ellen Kennedy was convicted, Catherine was found not guilty. However, this would not be her last brush with the law.
By 1873, Patrick Cunningham was absent from records. It is unclear whether he deserted the family, was imprisoned, or had died, but Catherine was now listed as a washerwoman—one of the lowest-paid occupations for women.
That same year, she was charged with pickpocketing, and further convicted of stealing a purse from a woman in a beerhouse. By now, her offense's were intertwined with her life as a prostitute.
The Role of Brothels and Prostitution in Livery Street
Livery Street, along with surrounding streets such as Snow Hill, Steelhouse Lane, and Summer Lane, was notorious for brothels and lodging houses catering to the city’s growing population. Prostitution was not only rampant but also deeply intertwined with street crime—the same pubs and back-street establishments that housed prostitutes were also frequented by pickpockets, thieves, and gang members.
Women like Catherine Cunningham, Ellen Kennedy, and Sarah Quinn—all arrested on multiple occasions—were part of an underground economy where survival often depended on sex work, theft, or both. Brothels ranged from high-end establishments catering to middle-class men to low-rent houses where women lived in desperate conditions, often forced into prostitution by economic necessity.
The Victorian press and legal system viewed these women as immoral and criminal rather than victims of poverty. Raids on brothels were common, yet prosecutions disproportionately targeted the women, while the men—clients, brothel keepers, and pimps—were rarely charged.
Edward Cunningham born 1857 ID:EC1857
Catherine’s son Edward Cunningham followed a similar trajectory to other boys from the courts. At the end of February 1871, fourteen year old Edward was arrested alongside Patrick Cooney and John Giblin ID:JG1859 for stealing 4 lbs of cheese from a shop in Goode Street. His story mirrored that of William Bates—It was not greed, but hunger and hardship that forced the crime.
Two years later, Edward appeared to have secured regular employment, working as a brass caster, a trade common among working-class boys seeking regular income. But his criminal record also grew. He was caught stealing from a shop in Wheeler Street that same year and convicted of assault in 1873. Then came a stretch of apparent calm — five years without a single conviction. It’s possible that regular work or fear of harsher punishment kept him in line. Or perhaps it was his mother Catherine, a steady if struggling presence, who held the pieces of the family together.
But in January 1877, Catherine died.
She had already been widowed or abandoned — Edward’s father, Patrick, had disappeared from the record years earlier. With her gone, Edward, now 20, was likely alone. Just weeks later, he was arrested again.
This time, he and 19-year-old Elizabeth Cave, a 19-year-old press worker, were caught stealing a shawl from a carriage owned by Mr. Abrahams on Lichfield Street, the same street where he was living and still working in the brass trade. The brougham had been left momentarily unattended on Lichfield Street when a witness saw someone open the carriage door and remove the shawl. Alerted by the coachman, Detective Sergeant Cooper traced the item to a pawnbroker. Edward and Elizabeth were both arrested, pleaded guilty, and were sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.
Whatever he had held together during those quiet years began to unravel.
The following year brought a harsher punishment. In July 1878, Edward — now 19 — was found carrying a heavy bag through Summer Lane. He was stopped and observed by Police Constable Jones, who watched him enter a marine store where he attempted to sell an ingot of copper. It had been stolen from the foundry of Frederick James Cotterell, where another youth, John Taylor, was employed. Taylor admitted giving the ingot to Edward to sell but claimed he hadn’t disclosed its origin.
Edward’s defence rested on ignorance — that he didn’t know it was stolen, and barely knew Taylor. But it wasn’t enough. The jury found both boys guilty. Edward, having already admitted to a previous conviction, received a sentence of eighteen months’ imprisonment and three years of police supervision
And then — silence.
There are no further records of Edward Cunningham. He does not appear in later censuses, and there’s no trace of marriage, emigration, or death within the usual databases. Whether he changed his name, left the city, or slipped deeper into poverty and obscurity is unknown. But what is clear is this: by the age of 21, Edward had lost both parents, been imprisoned several times, and carried a criminal record that would have barred him from most jobs.
Whatever future he imagined for himself had likely narrowed to a few unforgiving roads.
Julia Cunningham born 1856 ID:JC1898
The streets of Birmingham were quieter at night, but never silent. Even in the dead of winter, the hum of late drinkers, the occasional clatter of a cart, and the distant cries of an argument filled the air. Julia Cunningham knew these streets well. At seventeen, she had the face that life had already left its mark upon. Her red hair, pulled back from her face, untamed scraggly and unwashed, vanity was a luxury she couldn’t afford. Her grey eyes, sharp and watchful, might have once been striking—had both of them still seen the world clearly. She had lost the sight in her left eye long before, how it happened is unknown.
Maybe it was the result of a brutal fight, that also left a scar curved along her right cheek and a flattened nose, the result from fists of those who believed in settling disputes with violence rather than words. Or, perhaps it was an accident—a flying piece of metal from the stamping workshop where she worked as a hinge worker. It might even have been disease, such as untreated infections or smallpox, the silent thief that took so many in the slums before they were old enough to fight back. Whatever the cause, the effect was the same. The world saw her as damaged long before she was given a chance to prove them wrong.
Julia Cunningham’s descent was neither sudden nor surprising. It was a slow disintegration that mirrored the streets she walked—unforgiving, bleak, and blind to mercy. Born in 1856, she grew up in a home where poverty pressed in on all sides. Like her brothers, she learned early that survival meant hard choices. But unlike them, her story unfolded not only through court records but through asylum logs and whispered tragedy.
Her first recorded offence came in 1874: she stole a pair of boots. It earned her three months in prison. Over the next four years, the pattern repeated—petty theft, obscene language, assault. Nothing violent by the standards of the day, and yet each offence deepened her stigma. These were not rare stories among Birmingham’s poor. They were the norm.
In 1877, aged just 17, Julia took part in a theft with William Roach and Mary Ryan, stealing a pound of butter from a shop in Thomas Street.
With companions, William Roach and Mary Ryan beside her, their breath misting in the cold air. The three of them had been watching the shop of William Livingstone on Thomas Street. The plan was simple. Roach eased open the shutter just enough for Julia to lift the catch. A pane of glass was accidentally smashed as they reached in and grabbed what they could—a wrapped slab of butter, which had been placed on the top of a knife-grinders machine behind the door, still cold from the night air.
They ran, Dale End was not far, and Keogan’s lodging house was a familiar hideaway. The sound of breaking glass had not gone unnoticed. Police Constable Robert Woodward had been standing near the Stone Cross, when he saw them running with the butter in hand.
At the trial, Roach and Ryan tried to throw Julia under the bus, stating that they had nothing to do with the burglary, except that Julia came up to them as they were in search of lodgings and asked the time. The court, however, ignored this and found them all guilty of stealing the llb. of butter as well as five butter wrappers. Roach and Julia, who had been previously convicted of smaller offences, were sentenced to fifteen months with hard labour, and Ryan to ten months.
None of these crimes set her apart—these were the typical transgressions of Birmingham’s poorest. But each arrest, each short-term sentence, pulled her further from any chance at a stable life. The theft of a pound of butter—an almost laughable crime in its lack of real reward—resulted in a fifteen-month sentence. The court saw her as a repeat offender, someone in need of punishment rather than help.
At just 22 years old, Julia was committed to the Birmingham Lunatic Asylum. Whether the decline came from untreated trauma, alcohol, isolation, or sheer despair is impossible to know. She was released but re-admitted in 1885. Her behaviour had grown erratic, and her criminal record—33 court appearances in total—offered no hope of redemption in the eyes of the authorities. This was no longer about petty crime. Something had broken inside her—or, perhaps, society had decided she was too broken to remain free.
Strange Disclosure: The Inquest on Edwin Griffiths
Her name surfaced in an inquest in January 1886, when she was involved in a sordid episode in a Lawrence Street lodging house. Edwin Griffiths, a young shoe-black, had died of delirium tremens—alcoholic poisoning after prolonged drinking. Julia Cunningham, along with another woman, Louisa Smith, had shared a two-bedded attic with Griffiths and another man, Robert Sullivan. When questioned, the landlady insisted Julia had claimed Griffiths as her husband—a statement that highlighted the precariousness of her situation rather than any real relationship between them.
The inquest was about Griffiths, but Julia’s presence in that house spoke volumes about her own decline. She was not a wife. She was not even a long-term companion. She was simply someone who had nowhere else to go, drifting between temporary lodgings, entangled with men who were little better off than herself. The jury at the inquest did not pass judgment on her, but the discussion turned instead to the state of Birmingham’s slums—how such places bred lives like Julia’s, and how housing reform was both necessary and, to some, pointless.
The question lingered: had she been sent to the asylum in 1882 because she was truly disturbed, or because she could no longer explain her life in a way that made sense to those with power? A woman living in squalor, blind in one eye, prone to drink and minor crimes, unable to articulate her own desperation—was she mad, or just another victim of a system that had no use for her?
The Final Years: Descent into the Asylum
After the inquest, Julia’s life did not improve. A year later, in 1887, she was arrested yet again for drunkenness and obscene language. This time, she assaulted a police officer as well. By then, she had stood before the magistrates countless times. Each sentence—whether a few days or a few months—had done nothing to change her circumstances.
By June 1889, she was back in the asylum. There would be no release this time. Julia Cunningham remained institutionalised for the next ten years, until her death in October 1898 at the age of 38.
It was a pitiful end, but not an uncommon one. The slums of Birmingham bred lives like Julia’s—brief, desperate, and ultimately discarded. Some, like the magistrates and the housing committee, argued that it was the drunken habits of the poor that kept them in squalor. Others, like reformer T.J. Bass, countered that it was the squalor itself that drove them to drink. Julia Cunningham’s life was both evidence and cautionary tale, proof that no matter the cause, the outcome remained the same: prison, asylum, or an early grave.
Julia’s story ended in silence—her final years spent behind asylum walls, her name lost to time. But while one sister faded into institutional obscurity, another thread of the Cunningham family led to a very different kind of entanglement: one marked not by madness, but by masks.
Catherine Wilkins was not one woman—she was Catherine Lamb, Kate Rafferty, Catherine Moore, and Catherine Cummins. A button maker by trade, but a serial thief, a street brawler, and a woman who knew how to disappear behind a new name. Her criminal career spanned decades, punctuated by stints in prison and countless court appearances under different aliases.
She was a fixture of Birmingham’s streets—bold, sharp-witted, and unpredictable.
Yet, behind her was John Cunningham, her husband, and a man whose criminal record consists of just one known offence: the theft of a clock in 1877, at age fifteen, in the company of Edward Moran and Martin Welch. After that, John seems to vanish from official scrutiny, his name largely absent from the courts and the press. While Catherine spiralled in and out of prison under shifting identities, John’s presence remains shadowy—steady, perhaps, or simply unrecorded.
How did a woman so deeply embedded in crime maintain a household? And was John really as uninvolved as he seemed? Or did he exist just outside the margins—silent, overlooked, and navigating the same world by different means?
Catherine Wilkins was born in Birmingham in 1853, the eldest of six children in a working-class Irish family. By the time she was 18, she was already a button maker, helping to support her siblings alongside her father, Edward, a labourer. In 1871, they lived at Court 33, House 5, Livery Street.
Just a few doors away at Court 36, Livery Street, lived John Giblin, a slogging gang leader of that district. Though distinct from John and Thomas Giblin of Water Street, his reputation was just as violent. Further down, at Court 39, House 1, were Thomas Moran and Mary Cain—names deeply intertwined with the Water Street gangs. At Court 39, House 8, another family was scraping by: the Cunninghams. Among them was John Cunningham, the man Catherine would eventually marry.
Somewhere between 1871 and 1873, Catherine and John’s lives intertwined. No official marriage record exists, but by 1873, when she stood in court for theft, she offhandedly told the judge she was “going to get married.” Whether this was an attempt to appear respectable or a genuine statement remains unclear. What is certain, however, is that by the time she officially became Catherine Cunningham, her criminal career was already well underway.
Catherine began her criminal career in 1873, first appearing in court as Catherine Lamb, stealing a skirt, a habitual offender, her crimes escalating from petty theft to violent robbery. By the start of 1877 and at just 24 years old, she had already racked up convictions under multiple aliases: Lamb, Rafferty, Moore, and Cummins. Her crimes ranged from theft and wilful damage to public disorder, but in January 1877, a probable member of the Giblin Brothers Water Street slogging gang, her crimes were far more violent.
Assault and Highway Robbery
The winter of 1877 was a harsh one, and the streets of Birmingham were growing increasingly dangerous. That night, Elizabeth Cooper and her husband, William, were walking through Thomas Street towards their home when they were set upon by a gang of roughs. Among them were four names already well known to the authorities.
Thomas Bates (19), an iron dresser with a reputation for street violence. *See Bates family
Patrick McCale (19), a printer and known gang associate.
Charlotte Carroll (21), a gunstocker with previous convictions.
Catherine Moore (24), a button maker who had already served time for theft and public disorder.
The gang wasted no time. Elizabeth Cooper was knocked down, her pockets rifled through, and 6 shillings and 6 pence stolen. When William tried to defend his wife, the gang turned on him, beating him to the ground with fists and boots. Witnesses later described how he was kicked and left bleeding in the street while the group scattered into the night.
Detective-Sergeant Cooper and Police Constables Fowkes and Hoare were already familiar with their suspects. It didn’t take long before they were rounded up and arrested, though one man, John Adams, was discharged due to lack of evidence. The remaining four—Bates, McCale, Carroll, and Moore (Catherine)—were sent to trial at the Assizes, where their past convictions were laid out before the court.
Bates and McCale, identified as ringleaders, received seven years' penal servitude with an additional four years of police supervision. Carroll, less involved, was given a one-year sentence. Catherine, despite her criminal record, received fifteen months' imprisonment, a sentence reflecting her role as an active participant rather than an instigator.
But as much as she was a perpetrator of crime, Catherine was also a product of her environment—one of extreme poverty, violence, and constant danger. Nowhere was this clearer than in two key events of her life: the 1877 robbery that led to her imprisonment and, four years later, her brutal assault in Hospital Street in 1881.
Four years after her release, Catherine was living in Hospital Street lodging at the house of William and Ann Lucas, with John and their first son 4 month old, also called John. She had returned to button-making, the same trade she had before prison. She had not disappeared from crime, but by now, she was also a mother, a wife, and a woman trapped in the same brutal world she had once helped create.
On the night of July 11, she was walking along Stafford Street when she was set upon by a young hawker named James MacKenzie (20).
MacKenzie knocked her to the ground, tore her pocket from her dress, and stole her purse, containing 2s. 3½d. The attack mirrored the crime she had been imprisoned for just four years earlier—except now, she was the victim. Her desperate cries for help attracted attention, and MacKenzie was swiftly arrested. In court, Catherine gave evidence against her attacker, describing the violence she had suffered at his hands. But in a twist of fate, the prosecution’s case was deemed unreliable, and MacKenzie was acquitted.
Catherine’s story is not just one of crime but of the relentless cycle of violence that defined the poorest areas of Birmingham. In 1877, she had prowled the streets, preying on the weak. By 1881, she was the weak, vulnerable to the same brutal tactics she had once employed.
A Family Growing, A Life Unchanging
Despite having a growing family, Catherine did not give up crime. In 1882, she gave birth to her second son, James, and continued accumulating minor convictions—often for public disturbances or theft. Her crimes escalated again in 1885, when she was convicted under the alias Catherine Cummins for stealing 90 yards of cashmere, receiving a six-month sentence. Given her husband’s work as a lapidary—a jeweler specializing in cutting and polishing gemstones—one wonders whether Catherine’s fabric thefts were linked to Birmingham’s thriving trade in high-quality textiles, possibly intended for resale within similar artisan circles.
Each new alias gave her another mask to slip behind, another chance to evade the consequences that might have followed a consistent name. Despite her repeated arrests and prison sentences, she continued to have children, a testament to the instability and hardship of her family life. While she spent months at a time incarcerated—serving sentences ranging from weeks to a full year—John was left to manage their growing household. With four young children by 1891, he carried the responsibility of providing for them, all while maintaining his work as a lapidary in Birmingham’s jewellery trade.
John’s only recorded crime, the 1877 theft of a clock, suggests he was not heavily involved in crime like his wife and his Brothers. Yet, his close friendships with Martin Welch and Edward Moran—both men with criminal records—hint that he was part of the same rough social networks. Whether his lack of further arrests was due to restraint or luck is unknown, but he was undoubtedly surrounded by crime.
Catherine’s thefts, particularly the stealing of cashmere in 1885, raise the question of whether her crimes were linked to John’s trade. As a lapidary, John worked with semi-precious stones, likely within Birmingham’s jewellery district, where luxury textiles and fine goods were commonly exchanged. Was Catherine stealing to supplement their income, potentially selling stolen goods within the same trade circles? Or were her thefts simply a means of survival, independent of John’s profession?
By 1901, the family seemed more settled. John was still working as a lapidary, and Catherine had temporarily ceased criminal activity. However, by 1911, life had taken another downward turn. John had died, leaving Catherine a widow at 54, forced to return to low-paid button-making to survive. With her daughter Rose still living at home, Catherine's final years brought her full circle — back to the same low-paid button-making trade she had first taken up as a teenager, long before prison sentences and stolen cashmere had defined her name.
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