ABSTRACT
On 26 July 1898 the Daily News carried what now appears to be a truly banal comment: 'It is no wonder . ., that Hooligan gangs are bred in these vile, miasmatic byways.' The significance of this report lies only in the fact that it marks the first time the term 'hooligan appears in print: the sentiment may have been well-worn, the word new. 1 A couple of weeks later, on 8 August, the same newspaper reported a police constable who insisted his 'prisoner belonged to a gang of young roughs, calling themselves "Hooligans'". Two days earlier the Daily Telegraph had referred to one William Lineker who had set upon an innocent man as a 'hooligan'. The August bank holiday of London's hot summer of 1898 produced a rash of such press comment about the apparently new phenomenon of hooliganism. Evidence of an intensification of street disturbances is certainly not hard to find. Conforming to the ritualised choreography of such occasions local ratepayer associations upbraided those in authority. Questions were asked in the House, and the home secretary was called to account. Lancet, never slothful in this period to pronounce on any and every hint of social degeneration, was quick to condemn this new manifestation. But whatever the extent of the disturbances it was the press which made the running. Hyperbole tumbled after hyperbole. Well into the swing of things, the Daily Mail led its edition of 13 August with its catchy headline: 'HE ATE A POLICEMAN' — a reference, it transpires not to the cannibalistic fantasies of truculent youth but, bizarre enough, to the antics of a wayward crocodile. There was a scatter of sceptical voices complaining that the panic was no more than the usual brouhaha of the 'silly season', while the London Police Court Commissioner described the whole affair as 'press-manufactured Hooliganism'. But by then the momentum had become irreversible.
