CHICAGO might have employed Eliot Ness and his Untouchables to fight the bootlegging gang of Al Capone but here in Worcester, where we do things slightly less lavishly, it was a trio of local coppers who took on three criminal kingpins in a back-street scrap to settle who ruled the city turf.
The year was 1912 and the men of Worcester City Police were getting mightily hacked off by the tirade of constant assaults and general disrespect coming their way from the ne’er-do-wells of the slum quarters.
Hot spot of the trouble was Dolday which had become virtually no-go for the police.
This is an area you won’t find on maps now but in the early decades of the 20th century stretched roughly from the towering spire of St Andrew’s Church in Deansway all the way down to the river docks on South and North Quays.
The spine of Dolday was Newport Street which does still exist today but in a much less raucous fashion than in the early 1900s.
Then it was a cheek by jowl conglomeration of rundown accommodation set around courts of flats.
Here the poorest of the poor lived, several families shared one toilet and disease was rife.
It was also the location chosen for the notorious Newport Street Scrap which settled the city’s law and order pecking order on the evening of Monday, August 5, 1912.
All unofficial of course, it was agreed Worcester’s street coppers would have it out with the local gang leaders once and for all.
Three combatants from each side would fight man-to-man in a bare-knuckle slug fest. Each contest decided by last man standing.
With the time and date fixed, police officers in the know sealed off Newport Street as Sgt Bill Hollister Short, Det Sgt John Penlington and PC3 Fred Hawker faced up to criminal hardmen Dennis Reardon, a hawker, sinker Charles Chaplin and labourer Frank Smith.
A crowd of 300 came out of their houses to watch the action.
The three fights, one straight after the other, lasted three quarters of an hour and were far bloodier and more violent than the usual drunken brawls seen in the city slums.
Although bashed and battered, the three policemen beat their opponents in each of the contests and left them lying shattered in the mud of Newport Street.
Even the spectators, no friends of theirs, applauded the officers’ courage and recognised the rock-hard heroes of law and order had won.
Word of the victory soon spread through the local underworld and underlined that they messed with Worcester City Police at their peril.
For this little gem of life as it was in the city, I am indebted to former school colleague and 1960s rocker Bob Blandford who features it in his book 500 Worcester Secrets.
As a much-published historian, Bob seems to reach the parts others cannot and this book is full of things you’ve never heard of before.
In contrast, much has been written about Dolday and its environs and the neighbourhood became so desperate it was eventually swept away in a comprehensive slum clearance programme either side of the Second World War.
Never again were the gangs going to rule the streets.
