Jimmy Donnelly was a face in the Quality Street Gang, a notorious gang of Manchester businessmen in the 1960s. Peter Walsh takes up their story
One Friday night in the late 1960s, a group of tough-looking men arrived at the popular Cabaret Club in Oxford Street, Manchester. The head doorman, Billy Ingham, gave them a searching stare, then broke into a smile and waved them through.
"Here they are," he said. "The Quality Street mob."
His remark, a jokey reference to a television advert for chocolates featuring gangsters in double-breasted suits and fedoras, conveyed what many bouncers and club bosses already knew: this was one group not to be messed with. Even the likes of Ingham, an iron man, gave them the utmost respect.
The nickname he coined stuck, and over the next two decades the Quality Street Gang, or QSG, would attract almost iconic status in Manchester. They were the faces in town. Stan Bowles, the soccer star who grew up with them before going on to play for England, said: "In some ways they were greater celebrities than the rock stars and footballers they knew and partied with". They were even immortalised by rock band Thin Lizzy, whose classic The Boys Are Back In Town was inspired by them.
They were less popular with the police. For years, senior officers tried to lay numerous crimes at their door. Invariably, they failed. Indeed some officers concluded that the 'gang' itself was a myth, and that criminals sought to boost their reputations by falsely claiming membership or association with them.
For years, their true nature has remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, one of them has broken has silence. Seventy-one-year-old Jimmy Donnelly, known throughout the city as Jimmy the Weed, was a core members of the QSG. His autobiography, called simply Jimmy The Weed, is partly an attempt to 'set the record straight' and partly an account of a forgotten period in the city's recent history.
"Most of us had known each other for years," he says of the QSG. "Some were straight businessmen, some were rogues, some were a mixture of the two, leaning more in one direction or the other depending on circumstance and opportunity. We could all look after ourselves, and some were very hard men indeed.
"At heart, we were a bunch of mates, mainly from the Ancoats area, who both enjoyed each other's company socially and had dealings together in business. Really, that was all there was to it.'
James Donnelly, was born in 1940, just four weeks before the Luftwaffe launched a series of raids intended to flatten on Manchester. But while the city centre went up in flames, he was safely tucked up on the new Wythenshawe estate, where his parents lived and which his bricklayer father had helped build.
Small in statute, he was nevertheless a hard nut and a bit of a rebel. "I never liked authority, and I was an utter streetfighter," he says. "I boxed at school and I would take on anyone, all the bullies. None of them ever scared me."
Even more than a fighter, Jimmy was a natural entrepreneur. He bought and sold dinner tickets and fireworks, and collected coal from railway lines to flog around the neighbourhood. He was also an incorrigible thief, breaking into local shops and warehouses to steal anything he could find. "I don't know why I turned to like that, as my mother was very religious. I think I just liked the thrill of it, the feeling that I was getting away with something."
The making of the QSG was Smithfield Market, where he got work when he was sixteen. It sat beside Ancoats, the old industrial heartland that bred poor, tough, independent men, many of whom made up the market's vast pool of casual labour. They had little formal education but they were single-minded and determined to make their way in the world.
There Donnelly befriended Jimmy Monaghan, a younger lad. He was a ferocious fist-fighter, flattening grown men when he was barely sixteen, and later became a pro boxer under the ring name Jim Swords. Together they and others formed the Market Mob, the forerunner of the QSG. Donnelly's own nickname has been attributed to his short stature – he stands 5ft 6in – but in fact it came from the market, when an older worker told colleagues, "He grows on you, this Jimmy. Like a weed!"
An infamous fight on the door of the Wilton Club, when a rival lost part of his nose, led to Donnelly and Swords serving time on remand in Strangeways. On their release, Swords concentrated on a boxing career that saw him fight five British champions, while Donnelly built up a construction business. And they began to mix in the wider circle that became the QSG.
One incident they have often been associated with is the story of Ronnie and Reggie Kray's visit to Manchester. The notorious twins were accompanying boxing great Joe Louis around the country on a meet-and-greet tour, and booked into the Midland Hotel with their henchmen. They then went out on the town, resulting in one doorman taking a punch of Reggie.
"We were in the Cabaret Club when a couple of club owners made phone calls to pass on the message that this heavy-duty Cockney firm was in town and to stick about in case of trouble," says Donnelly. "I had briefly met the Krays in north London in the early sixties. I had no beef with them, but we told the club owners we would be about if needed."
There as no further trouble, however, and after a warning from the police, the Krays departed the next day. Despite popular mythology, they were not escorted to the train station by a team of locals. "They were very dangerous men, and could have a fight, but man-to-man they could never in a million years have beaten Jim Swords," says Donnelly.
An inveterate gambler, the Weed eventually declared bankrupt. Having offloaded his building firm, he next embarked on a series of ventures form behind the scenes, included market stalls, a scrap yard and a car lot. He also opened El Corrida, the city's swankiest massage parlour. At night, he and his pals were regular at clubs such as Deno's and the notorious Showbiz bar run by Phyllis, the mother of Thin Lizzy front man Phil Lynott, where the party went on all night. "I saw George Best leave there at eight o'clock in the morning to catch a plane to London to play for United that afternoon." Lynott later name-checked Donnelly in his song Johnny The Fox Meets Jimmy The Weed.
Donnelly went on to own a string of clubs himself as well as pubs such as the famous Brown Bull Hotel by Deansgate train station. He was a fight promoter, bookmaker, scrap merchant, car dealer, market trader and impresario. He was also, by his own admission, a career criminal. He handled stolen gems, touted sports tickets and ran massage parlours. Some of his pals were bank robbers, including the prolific Crazy Face Gang, so-called because they wore fright masks and who caused Chief Constable James Anderton to put armed police patrols on city streets for the first time ever on the UK mainland.
As Donnelly and his cronies jetted to Vegas and Miami to watch boxing, and bought villas and yachts in Spain, they also attracted the attentions of the Regional Crime Squad.
"They saw us poncing about the town in our Rollers and Bentleys, owning clubs, sitting around our car pitches in the sun drinking tea and gossiping, and it was an affront to them. They hated it."
On one occasion, Donnelly noticed a suspicious van parked outside one of their scrap yards. He and a pal went over with a can of petrol and said loudly, "Let's set it alight." The doors burst open and frantic undercover cops jumped out, their cover blown. When police with binoculars watched them from the roof of Ancoats Hospital, a kitchen worker tipped them off. When officers spied from the towering CIS building, the window cleaners let them know. As each attempt at surveillance failed, the police felt sure their ranks had been infiltrated. In fact it was more cock-up that conspiracy.
Eventually Jimmy was arrested for a huge fraud involving the sale of stolen airline tickets. He bargained it down to a reduced charge and walked free. "I have been through eleven court trials and have walked away from them all. Even when I have been convicted, with time already served on remand I have never had to go back to prison."
The QSG would probably have remained unknown to the public outside Manchester had it not been for the so-called Stalker Affair, the biggest police scandal of the 1980s. It involved allegations that Deputy Chief Constable John Stalker, an officer of impeccable credentials, had an improper friendship with a businessman called Kevin Taylor, a friend of the QSG from his days selling secondhand vehicles in Ancoats.
"Kevin moved into property investment heavily in the seventies," said Donnelly. "He often ran short of cash and would borrow money from some of the QSG. As the years rolled on, Kevin became rich, buying a big mansion and yacht. He also involved himself in politics and became a bigwig in the local Conservative association. He had a wide circle of friends."
In May 1984, the officer in charge of internal complaints at GMP was told that Stalker had been "corruptly associating with a number of people who were involved in organised crime in Manchester". The untrue allegation came from David Burton, a notoriously unreliable police informant on the fringes of the QSG. "He put two and two together – we knew Taylor, Taylor knew Stalker – to make five. The allegations were false. We did not know Stalker and he did not know us."
Yet those claims, reinforced by the longstanding suspicion that the QSG had a mole within Greater Manchester Police, led ultimately to Stalker's suspension and his removal from an extremely sensitive inquiry he was conducting into extra-judicial killings in Northern Ireland.
Detectives visited the informant Burton several times in Preston Prison, where he was serving a sentence, to pump him for information. Then something strange happened. In March 1985, Burton suffered a suspected heart attack and died. Foul play was ruled out, but the timing was suspicious. "I suppose that is how powdered glass goes down," says Donnelly, laconically.
Colin Sampson, the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, later conducted an inquiry into the allegation that, between 1971 and 1985, John Stalker "associated with Kevin Taylor and known criminals in a manner likely to bring discredit upon the Greater Manchester Police".
Donnelly was at the centre of the storm. One well-publicised piece of 'evidence' was a photograph taken of him with Stalker's wife at a fiftieth birthday party at Kevin Taylor's mansion near Bury. He was interviewed by police on a couple of occasions, but for once had nothing to hide.
Sampson recommended that Stalker should be disciplined. The police authority disagreed: they gave Stalker a minor reprimand over minor infringements of rules regarding the use of police staff cars and reinstated him.
He returned to work, but retired soon after when he felt he could no longer work within GMP, and wrote a scathing memoir. Kevin Taylor was unsuccessfully prosecuted for commercial fraud and later won a multi-million-pound compensation payout from GMP. And the sensitive Northern Ireland inquiry withered on the vine.
In the early 1990s, Jimmy relocated to Blackpool, partly to escape the ongoing attentions of the Manchester police. He dabbled in a frozen food outlet and other ventures, was arrested and then released for suspected drug trafficking, and got involved in a scam buying cloned Sky TV cards from Germany.
He now divides his retirement between a small flat in Ancoats and Thailand, where has friends. His grandchildren privately educated and his one hope is that they don't follow his lifestyle. His own sons have done well in life, while his nephews founded the highly successful GioGoi clothing company.
"I don't suppose I can get in much trouble these days," he says. "The legs have gone. But the heart is still there."
Also in: December 2011
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There’s a story from the 1960s that the notorious London gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray got off the train at Manchester Piccadilly and were met at the ticket barrier by a tough-looking crowd of locals. They were despatched in short order and ordered to get on the next train back to the smoke. Like a lot of tasty stories, it’s not true, but it has become part of the legend of the Quality Street Gang.
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