The Sheffield Gang Wars: Sky Edge, the Mooney Gang and “Little Chicago”
For two years in the 1920s, Sheffield had a gang war. Between 1923 and 1925 two outfits fought over a gambling ring on a hilltop above the city with razors, pokers, coshes and bayonets, the streets around West Bar earned the name “Little Chicago”, and the police eventually answered with a squad of hard men whose job was to be harder. It is one of the best stories in the city’s history and one of the least told outside it. This guide covers what happened, who was involved and how it ended, and then how the same racket turns up on the other side, in the Below the Murkline gamebooks. For the older layer of the city’s stories, see Sheffield folklore; for its hauntings, the ghosts of Sheffield S6.
The tossing ring at Sky Edge
Everything started with pitch and toss, which is heads or tails made complicated. A caller throws coins in the air, the crowd bets on how they land, and money changes hands fast. It was illegal to play for money in public, and in the years after the First World War, with work scarce and men with nothing else to do, it was enormously popular.
The biggest ring in Sheffield ran on Sky Edge, a stretch of waste ground on the hill behind where the Park Hill flats stand now. Hundreds of men gathered there to play, and the site had been picked with care. From the top you could see the police coming up the hill long before they arrived, and the ring kept lookouts posted to do exactly that. Whoever ran the ring took a cut of every pot: four shillings in the pound, a straight twenty per cent. On a busy day that was a great deal of money, collected in cash, on a hill nobody official could reach by surprise.
George Mooney and the break
The man who ran it was George Mooney, a man of Irish descent whose gang worked out of the West Bar area near the city centre. Pitch and toss was the core business, but not the only one: the gangs of the period also took protection money from pubs (the fee kept the “breakages” down), and took a cut of men’s wages on payday.
After the war the money dried up. The slump hit Sky Edge along with everything else, and Mooney responded the way a business does: he cut back and let men go. The men he let go did not go quietly. Around 1923 they set up on their own as the Park Brigade, and their leading figure was Sam Garvin, who had been Mooney’s second in command. Garvin was a professional criminal with convictions for assault, illegal gaming, confidence tricks and theft, and he had a gift for living well through hard times.
Old partners on opposite sides of the same hill is how a feud becomes a war, and it did. From 1923 until 1925, almost without a break, the two gangs fought for control of the tossing ring and everything around it: slashings, beatings and street fights in the city centre and the east end, with razors, pokers, bayonets, coshes and the one everybody feared most, a lump of lead on a length of string. West Bar, roughly from Scotland Street to Corporation Street, got its nickname: Little Chicago.
The death of William Plommer
The war ended because of a man who was not in it. William “Jock” Plommer was a 34-year-old Scot, a former soldier who worked in the steelworks and lived in the east end of the city. He had no gang connections. Accounts of what set things off differ; the one most often told is that he had helped a beaten man back to his feet.
On 27 April 1925 a group of men, somewhere between six and twenty depending on who was counting, attacked him in Princess Street with pokers, coshes and the lead on a string, and stabbed him in the stomach. He died of his wounds in the Royal Infirmary. Two brothers in their early twenties, Wilfred and Lawrence Fowler, were convicted of his murder and hanged, Wilfred on 4 September 1925 and Lawrence after his appeal failed. Others involved were sent down for hard labour. Thousands of people turned out for Plommer’s funeral at Burngreave Cemetery; the most-quoted figure is eight thousand.
The Special Duty Squad
The police had already lost patience. On 1 May 1925, four days after the attack on Plommer, Sheffield’s Chief Constable, Hall-Dalwood, set up the Special Duty Squad, a small plain-clothes unit picked for toughness rather than tact, which the city soon took to calling the Flying Squad. Its method was to meet the gangs on their own terms. His successor, Percy Sillitoe, kept the squad and sharpened it, adding ju-jitsu training and forensic work, and his years in charge finished the gangs off. Sillitoe earned a reputation as Britain’s first gangbuster; he went on to run MI5 after the Second World War.
By the late 1920s the gangs were broken, the squad was disbanded in 1928, and Sky Edge went quiet. The Park Hill flats went up on the hill in the late 1950s, which is its own kind of ending: the most notorious gambling pitch in the city is now the view from one of its best-known buildings.
From Sheffield to Hellsborough: the Wharncliffe Crew
Hellsborough is a dark-matter Sheffield, and its underworld is Sheffield’s underworld with the murk let in. The gang wars are the basis of The Edge, the second book in the Below the Murkline series of solo gamebooks, where the choices, and the consequences, are yours. The history is not quoted in the book; it is moved. The Wharncliffe Crew has run a gambling racket on a hilltop called the Edge since the old turf war, and they still dress, speak and swear loyalty the way that decade did, because the old war is their claim to the ground: we were here for the war; everyone else is new money. The rival crew have no rite and no manners.
The game on the Edge is pitch and toss, but Hellsborough’s version. The caller waits for the murk’s funfair tune to crest and throws a handful of ¢hits up into the fog, and the crowd bets on whether the murk keeps them or gives them back. The Crew takes Mooney’s cut, carried straight over: four ¢hits in every twenty. The murk takes whatever it takes. Every player on the Edge settles two accounts at once, and that is where the book’s trouble starts.
The first book in the series, A Life in Death, is out now, and The Edge is listed as coming soon, both on the library page. If you want the same streets as a game you can play tonight, Foked is a free solo RPG of the Dark Peak. For the wider genre all of this sits in, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide, and for the real ground Hellsborough is built on, the field guide to Sheffield S6.
Sources: Now Then, Crime+Investigation, Around Town and ON Magazine. Figures such as the size of the attacking group and the funeral crowd vary between accounts; where they do, this page gives the range or the most-quoted number.
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