Gangsters running through Little Chicago armed with cut-throat razor blades.

Vicious beatings with rubber truncheons and children’s scooters. Extorting hard-working citizens for their wages. Throwing coal in chip shop fryers. Bitter turf wars over an elaborate game of heads or tails. Hiding from the hangman’s noose.

It might sound like something out of an American gangster film or the next series of Peaky Blinders. But not too long ago, this was reality in Sheffield.

During the early 1920s, Sheffield was besieged in a gang war between two of the most notorious villains the city has ever produced: George Mooney and Samuel Garvin.

These gangland kingpins and their cronies terrorised Sheffield for over a decade.

People were terrified for the livelihoods and their lives. It was well-known that, should you catch the eye of a Sheffield gangster, you’d be wise to look away and walk swiftly on by.

The dance halls, theatres and cinemas might have been packed with young people making the most of the Roaring Twenties. But the streets were the scene of anarchy and misery.

The violence and chaos reached a head in 1925. A gang war started two years earlier culminated in a tragic killing of a Sheffield man and the execution of two brothers for his murder.

To mark 100 years since that fateful year, historian John Stocks has published a second edition of his book, Sheffield 1925: Gang Wars and Wembley Glory.

The book, first released in 2022, looks at life in Sheffield in 1925, from poverty, hunger and social tension to violence against women and backstreet abortions. A slum city with over 10,000 unsanitary back-to-back houses, three families to a house and four to a bed.

It also details Sheffield United’s journey to winning the FA Cup.

But it is the Mooney and Garvin gangs that feature heavily.

“At one point, everybody knew about these gangs. They were part of Sheffield folklore. It’s a hundred years ago now, so those people whose parents or grandparents told them stories about the Mooneys or the Garvins are sadly dying out. But people are still so fascinated by this part of Sheffield’s heritage,” John says.

Criminal gangs had been a familiar feature in Sheffield for generations.

There were the Irish bludgeon men in the Victorian era. The 1850s saw the rise of the horse stealers, house breakers and forgers. Kingy Broadhead and his trade union gangs ruled the Park area behind the train station in the 1860s and ‘70s, while the Guttapercha Gang patrolled the slums of the workers.

Over in the north of the city, The Neepsend Gas Tank Gang thrived in the dimly lit and unprotected streets of Neepsend and Shalesmoor. They were ousted by the Red Silk and White Silk gangs, before they decided to split and attack each other.

In 1908, Sheffield even had its own Fagin who groomed impoverished children to commit crimes on his behalf.

But these predecessors were small fry compared to Mooney and Garvin.

George Mooney was hailed as the generalissimo of Sheffield crime. He went from being a miscreant teenager accused of stealing cigars and cigarettes from a pub’s tap room to biting people’s ears off and knocking their teeth out with a crowbar.

The force of his fist was gender neutral. He had no qualms with beating a woman and was sentenced to two years of hard labour for an unprovoked attack on a married woman, knocking her down and kicking her while on the floor.

Samuel Garvin, although ten years older than Mooney, was his second in command. The partners in crime met in prison. Shock!

Garvin was a professional criminal whose day job involved violence and intimidation. He had a string of convictions and prison sentences for assault, con-tricks and theft. In 1911, he was accused of rolling out the barrel, quite literally, when he was involved in the theft of a cask of rum from the Barrel Inn, what is now Fagan’s.

Both Mooney and Garvin managed to avoid national service in the First World War by moving around the country and living off petty crime.

Back in Sheffield after the war, Mooney, described as a broad man with a head like a pig, ran an illicit pitch and toss gambling site at Sky Edge, what is now Park Hill flats.

Gambling was endemic in the 1920s. Britain was in a post-war unemployment crisis. In Sheffield, an industrial city whose steelworks and munitions factories powered the British Army, there were 25,197 unemployed men in 1925.

By comparison, only eight years earlier there had been full employment. With men away fighting, women were drafted into work at factories for the first time. But as the war ended, working-class men returned to find they’d lost their jobs. 

Gambling seemed to offer a shred of hope for those in poverty. It became as much an addiction as drinking, with 90 percent of the working-class population gambling in 1923. But only gambling on the horses was legal, and that was expensive.

In the very poor East End and Park areas of the city, ‘pitch and toss’ thrived. It required just three coins to play, placed at the end of your fingers and tossed. With no equipment to set up and dismantle, it was cheap, quick and could easily escape detection from the police.

Hundreds of people would gather at Mooney’s Sky Edge patch to take part. His gang took a twenty percent toll of four shillings from every pound bet.

But as the depression continued to bite, Mooney’s criminal empire suffered a fall in earnings. In a bid to hold onto the lion’s share, Mooney decided to break from some of the gang in 1923.

In retaliation, they formed a rival gang called the Park Brigade, led by none other than Sam Garvin, and a gang war ensued.

The two gangs were described as Sheffield’s version of the Montagues and Capulets.

But instead of Fair Verona, the Sheffield battles took place in an area colloquially dubbed Little Chicago. This was in West Bar, from Scotland Street to Corporation Street with Shakespeare’s pub in the middle.

The gangsters dressed in sharp suits and drove flash cars while the rest of the population slummed it. Garvin was even given Sheffield’s first council house in Walkley, despite renting out a series of his own properties.

The Sheffield gangs made some of their money from protection services. They’d threaten workers on their way out the wages office for a cut of their pay. Or they’d bully shop owners into paying them a fee to protect their shop or pub.

Better to be on their side than against them.

Elders from each gang would train young recruits in their gruesome tactics.

These young boys were from the generation who grew up feral while their dads were away at war and mums were drafted in to work. They’d formed their own gangs as pre-teens and got up to mischief, as kids often do.

But petty crime like pickpocketing and disabling the ‘ping’ of a cash register soon morphed into brutality and blackmail.

Guns were not so readily available, except for the hardcore criminals who got their hands on ex-army pistols. So the gangs armed themselves with cut throat razor blades, truncheons, hammers, and knuckledusters.

They went in mob handed, never to kill, only to maim. Back then, murderers were sentenced to death by hanging. If anyone ever was killed, their families wouldn’t report it for fear of retribution from the gangs.

Christmas Eve 1923 marked the start of the real turmoil. Garvin and his gang attacked Mooney’s house, driving Mooney out of town for the best part of 1924.

Garvin became the self-appointed ‘King’ of the criminal underworld. He was superficially polite and charming, but his moral compass was beyond repair. Yet he seemed to be immune from prosecution, aided by the power and influence he had to undermine the legal process.

This was proven in 1925 when he somehow managed to be acquitted for murder, despite being the mastermind behind the operation.

On 27^th April, William Plommer was killed in a premeditated attack by the Garvin gang. He wasn’t a gangster; he was an ex-soldier and worked at Bessemer Steelworks. But he stuck up for another man involved in a gang-related dispute with two of Garvin’s followers. Garvin saw this popular, good looking street fighter as a threat.

Garvin, as ringleader, ordered vengeance on Plommer. The gang tracked him down and launched a frenzied attack on him with bottles and a children’s scooter, all while his wife and 11-year-old son Thomas, the eldest of four children, watched on.

But in the middle of the fracas, Plommer was fatally stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. The murder shook the country and made headline news. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets of Sheffield for his funeral at Burngreave Cemetery.

Eleven Park mob members went on trial for the murder of William Plommer, including Sam Garvin and his brother Robert. Around 70 witnesses were in court to testify against the gang.

Two brothers, Wilfred and Lawrence Fowler, both in their early 20s, were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Three others were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to between seven and ten years of penal servitude. The rest, including Sam Garvin, walked free.

Garvin had conveniently gotten himself an alibi by attacking another man down at the Wicker shortly after the attack on Plommer.

By 1930, with 41-year-old Mooney now out of exile, and Garvin at the ripe old age of 51, they both decided that fighting was a young man’s game.

But you can’t keep an old dog down.

Garvin took on the persona of George Mee and became a bookie at racecourses up and down the country, including York and Doncaster. Mooney stayed closer to home, adopting the alias of Big George Barratt and taking odds at Owlerton greyhound races.

John will be giving talks about Little Chicago and the Sheffield gangs as part of this year’s Sheffield Beer Week.

There is a pub heritage talk on Thursday 13^th March at The Harlequinn on Nursery Street (S3 8GG) from 8pm. Then on Sunday 16^th at 11.30am, he will be leading a 90-minute heritage walk around the Little Chicago area, meeting outside Sheffield Crown Court on West Bar (S3 8BH).

Tickets for each event are £4.95 and there will be a chance to purchase a book at the reduced price of £10.

Sheffield 1925: Gang Wars and Wembley Glory is on sale now at outlets including Waterstones in Orchard Square and the Millennium Gallery.