ABSTRACT
Just before midnight a group of men skulking in the shadows of Sheffield’s Cambridge Street pounced on a hapless victim. One man kept him in an armlock whilst three others robbed him, thereafter pushing him to the ground and kicking him repeatedly. This incident of ‘garrotting’ reported in 1871 fitted the public imagination of how the city streets contained danger and threat to respectable passers-by. Whilst the courts sentenced three men for this assault, one of the accused, Patrick Madden, was released because he could not be identified by the victim. Madden was a well-known fixture of Cambridge Street. Later he was identified and singled out as a ringleader of a group of ‘Irish Toughs’, pursued and cornered by the police during a ‘Cambridge-Street riot’ at Christmas in 1871. It was not surprising that they had recognised him because the teenager was well known to the courts, having had three convictions for violence and for theft by his seventeenth birthday. The police probably had an added incentive to apprehend Madden because two years earlier he had kicked a police officer so hard that the man was disabled for life. When they took him away, four officers escorted him in the back of the police van – for their own protection, or to mete out some informal punishment of their own perhaps. For his part in the riot he received a year’s prison sentence, but this would be a relatively short visit to prison for a man who would ultimately serve nearly a quarter of his life in prison. What sort of man was Patrick Madden?
