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Dirty Old Town by Rob Johnston
20th - 25th September 2021 - 7pm at
The Greater Manchester Police Museum
“There never was a place so ripe with liars, cheats, and scoundrels as the city of Manchester. To call it a den of thieves is an understatement. It is a steaming pit of contagious villainy. It is a place on fire. It burns day and night with the flames of corruption and wickedness. And I, for one, feel very much at home there!”
Jerome Caminada
1868. Victorian England is hitting its stride and there’s money to be made in the grim north. ‘Where there’s muck there’s brass.’ And places don’t come any muckier than Manchester. Nor people any brassier.
Policeman Jerome Caminada - half-Irish, half-Italian, all Manc - has seen the lot. Forgers, swindlers, thieves, cut-throats. Jerome has met every kind of villain there is to meet. He has cornered, caught, and condemned most of them. And sworn a private oath to corner, catch, and condemn the rest.
But Jerome Caminada is about to see a Manchester he never knew existed. Here in the industrialised new world of factories, cotton-mills, and Empire - where the gap between rich and poor is fast becoming a gulf that can’t be bridged - decent honest people are being driven to commit acts of criminal desperation.
And the finest, sharpest, most-successful policeman in Victorian England will today be reminded of something he’d all-but forgotten while pursuing his one-man crusade against Manchester’s villainy…mercy.
Manchester-based Pact Productions' new stage-play DIRTY OLD TOWN explores the life and work of police detective Jerome Caminada in late nineteenth-century Manchester, at a time of rising political unrest and social upheaval.
Drawn from historical records and personal memoirs, the play follows Detective Caminada into a Manchester underworld of con-artists, forgers, medical quacks, imposters, pickpockets, and revolutionary anarchists, dispensing single-minded and unwavering justice as he goes.
It is said that Jerome Caminada was an inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle's great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. But Caminada was no pipe-smoking violin-playing amateur-sleuth. And despite having a surname nobody he met could pronounce, Detective Sergeant Jerome Caminada was something everybody he met could understand: a Manc.
Dirty Old Town is Supported by Arts Council England to be premiered as a stage play, whilst Pact productions are currently developing Jerome Caminada`s adventures for the screen