Four years after that night of 9 November, on which the Ripper butchered his fifth victim, a reporter went to the house in Miller’s Court where the murder took place. He found the house and the rented room where Mary Kelly suffered such an excruciating death. Lottie Owens, the new tenant, let him in.
As soon as he entered the room he saw them: enormous liver-coloured stains across the walls and the bare floorboards. There was no doubt about it: this was Mary’s congealed blood. The landlord had not thought it necessary to redecorate the room.
The area in which Jack the Ripper found his victims was quintessential lodging house land. On the nights they were murdered, two of his victims – Mary Nichols and Annie Chapman – were evicted from their lodging houses for want of a few coppers to pay for a bed. Three of the Ripper’s victims had at one time lived in the same lodging house. We know a lot about this area and not simply because of the murders: the neighbourhood to the east and west of Commercial Road, Whitechapel, where all the victims lived, had for many years been the subject of intense interest to social reformers. In particular, the common lodging house and its denizens were of endless fascination to both the serious investigator and those in search of grim stories with which to titillate the readers of broadsheets and the yellow press.
Long before 1888, the year of the Ripper, this area was infamous for crime and in particular violent crime, to such an extent that only criminals dared venture there even during the day. No policeman dared enter alone. In a small area bounded by Baker’s Row, Middlesex Street and Whitechapel Road virtually every house was a lodging house, 146 in total, with over 6,000 beds. Over 1,500 of these were in Flower and Dean Street alone, with nearly 700 in Dorset Street. Flower and Dean Street was described by one social commentator as ‘perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis’. The average tenant in a Dorset Street lodging house was a man between the ages of 20 and 40, working in the docks, the nearby Covent Garden Market or on a building site – all of which offered opportunities for pilfering, with the result that the area was awash with stolen goods.
The houses ranged from private homes that took in a few lodgers to enormous buildings which accommodated as many as 350 people. Some of these were single sex but the majority were known as ‘double-class beds’ and were the haunts of prostitutes. Of Dorset Street’s 1,078 inhabitants in 1871, 902 lived in 31 lodging houses.
Hugh Edward Hoare, director of Hoares’ Brewery, who represented West Cambridge as MP from 1892 to 1895 and took over the running of a lodging house in this area, was a perceptive observer who expressed succinctly what many others hinted at in the Cambridge Independent Press beginning on 14 September 1888. What struck him most forcefully was not the physical squalor but the ethos these streets exuded: ‘I was perfectly conscious of a different moral atmosphere.’ When he first turned into the street, he both saw and felt this difference. ‘A feeling comes over you that you can do as you like, you become aware of a disposition to throw open your coat, to pull out your pipe and put your hands in your pockets and the hat on the back of your head.’
In 1888, a rented room at 26 Dorset Street cost 4s 6d a week. Furnishings inside the 10ft square room consisted of a bed, two small tables, a clothes horse and a storage cupboard. Heat and cooking facilities were provided by an open fire. The floor was of bare boards and, as there were neither blinds nor curtains, the window was obscured by clothing hanging from the curtain rail. This room was home to Joe Barnett and his paramour, Mary Kelly. Joe lost his job and could no longer afford to pay the rent, forcing Mary into prostitution. She became the Ripper’s fifth and final victim.
Mary Anne Nicholls, known as Polly, could not afford such a room. As a broken down, alcoholic prostitute, even the few coppers required for a bed in the lodging house near the junction of Thrall Street and Flower and Dean Street were beyond her means on the night she was murdered. Turned out onto the street, she went in search of someone prepared to pay sixpence for her body.
Annie Chapman’s situation was identical to Polly’s. Her husband had turned her out because of her drinking and she fell into prostitution, spending the money she did not drink on a bed in McCarthy’s lodging house at 30 Dorset Street. She had recently left there and moved the short distance to Crossingham’s lodging house at 35 Dorset Street. On the night she was murdered she was thrown out as she had no money.
Three doors along from Crossingham’s was another lodging house, number 38, owned by Jack McCarthy. The reputation of the houses in this street was abominable. Such was the hostility to them that at the height of the Ripper terror, in October 1888, the wife of a local clergyman presented a petition to Queen Victoria signed by 4,000 ‘Women of Whitechapel’ beseeching her to close them all. The houses remained open, but the Home Office asked the local police to provide information on prostitution in the area and in particular the extent to which lodging houses were involved. The police return showed that in the area to the east and west of Commercial Road there were 233 lodging houses, with accommodation for 8,530, and 62 brothels. They estimated that there were 1,200 prostitutes in the locality, most of whom were of ‘the lowest condition’.
The Rookeries – ‘The Night Time Haven of the Wandering Tribes’
This entire area of the East End was what one contemporary described as ‘the night time haven of the wandering tribes’. Lodgers made up the bulk of the wandering tribes and were of two types: the transient and the ‘regulars’. The same mixture seems to have been found in lodging houses everywhere and just as those in Whitechapel were in the worst houses in the worst areas of the city so were those to be found in cities and towns elsewhere. In Leicester at this time, for instance, many of the town’s most dilapidated old timber buildings were lodging houses.
Similarly, one of the most infamous clusters of Manchester lodging houses was centered on Charter Street, in Angel Meadow, which was within a short distance of the sprawling Manchester cotton mills. Over half this area’s residents in 1851 lived in lodging houses and were professional or occasional criminals, ‘well-known to the police throughout the kingdom’, according to Angus Bethune Reach. The worst streets were Charter Street, the main thoroughfare, Blakeley (Bleakley) Street and Dantzig Street. In 1865 the police found the area swarming with crowds of known thieves, sometimes up to a hundred strong, who gathered during the middle of the day.
A number of feared criminals dominated the area. One such was Joe Hyde, who ran the London Tavern, a meeting place for criminals from all over the country. Nearby, Teddy Bob Butterworth provided accommodation in his lodging houses for professional rogues of every description. The area was also home to three of Manchester’s most prominent fences – Bob Macfarlane, One-armed Kitty and Cabbage Ann – who constituted the means by which thieves disposed of much of the swag that sloshed around the area.
What all these places had in common was that they were the oldest parts of the city, with the worst housing and near sources of unskilled, casual employment. Pubs, beerhouses and lodging houses shouldered each other in this tangle of streets and courtyards. These were archetypal rookeries.
The term ‘rookery’ was widely used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to refer to a part of the city that was not just run down and squalid but also the haunt of criminals and prostitutes. These were honeycombed with small alleys and narrow streets, the complexity of which could be used by miscreants to evade arrest. Rookeries were places into which criminals could escape and often the hole in which they took refuge was a lodging house.
The term ‘slum’ which, courtesy of the town planners and the politically correct, now sounds both archaic and objectionable, is of 1820s vintage. One part of mid-nineteenth century Leeds provides another good example of a slum. Packed into an area 400m from the parish church, there were 222 lodging houses, home to 2,500 people, with an average of 2.5 people per bed and 4.5 to a room. When cholera struck the city in 1851 public health officials traced its origins to this area. Joseph Dare found that in Leicester at the same time
the majority of the city’s lodging houses were concentrated in the oldest and most dilapidated areas, particularly St Margaret’s. Studies of lodging houses in Cardiff, Wolverhampton and Huddersfield all show that they were concentrated in central districts, where there was an abundance of suitably large and cheap buildings.
In 1899 Charles Booth identified the other rookeries of London. He cited St Giles, Jacob’s Island and Old Nichol Street, all three of which were demolished at the end of the nineteenth century as part of the slum clearance scheme. The Devil’s Acre, a notorious area near Westminster Abbey, was one of the first places to which the term ‘slum’ was applied. Clustered around Old Pye Street, which was lined with lodging houses, it became known as the ‘Irish Rookery’. The 1851 census records that in one of these houses, fifteen of the twenty occupants were Irish; five described themselves as beggars, two as beggar bricklayers, one a labourer beggar, one a needlewoman beggar, one a hawker, one a labourer bricklayer and one an errand boy.
The potteries and piggeries of Notting Hill made no pretence to respectability and gloried in the epithet ‘Cutthroat Lane’. In 1850 Dickens described it as ‘a plague pot scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London’. Saffron Hill in Camden was in 1850 a squalid neighbourhood, home to paupers and thieves. Dickens located Fagin’s den in Field Lane, a southern extension of Saffron Hill.
With so many areas vying for notoriety there developed a competition between commentators, each claiming to have uncovered the worst rookery in the city or in the entire country. While there were plenty of obvious candidates, there were also unexpected contenders, their claims advanced by experienced observers. One such, proffered by Mr Walker, a City Missionary of vast experience, was the Berwick Street district of St James’s in the mid-nineteenth century. This area he said was ‘one of the most vicious districts which blot the map of the metropolis – a busy nursery of vice and crime, and the very focus of the kingdom’s worst criminality. Wretchedness and ruin appear on every side. Neither Whitechapel nor St Giles’s could vie with it in the scenes of depravity it could exhibit.’ This area is worth describing in some detail as, even allowing for Walker’s gift for hyperbole, its features are typical of virtually all the rookeries in every British city of the time.
The district contained 190 houses:
which appear encrusted with the filth and smoke of generations, twenty-four lodging-houses and seven pubs. The population is around 3,000, most of whom seemed to be on the streets most of the time, hanging about in groups, half-dressed, unwashed, loitering in doorways, leaning out of derelict windows or at the end of narrow courts, smoking, swearing and occasionally fighting, their children filthy and swarming about their feet naked and neglected.
Burglars, pickpockets, coiners, passers of counterfeit money and every type of criminal seemed to have their headquarters in the district and the remainder of the population were beggars and hucksters.
Every house appeared to be packed to capacity with reprobates of all hues. New Court, for instance, contained twelve houses, each made up of six rooms, and in one house alone seventy-two people were living. From this same house, over a period of three months, sixty-nine young people were transported (to an Australian penal colony) and one inhabitant was executed at Newgate. Walker also reported that he had ‘seen upward of forty policemen beaten out of this street by the inhabitants while attempting to take a thief ’.
The King Street rookery in Southampton and the London Road area of Manchester enjoyed a similar reputation. A police survey of the latter at the end of the nineteenth century provides a vivid picture of life in the area. Shepley Street, just off London Road, was typical. Numbers 8 and 10 were brothels. Numbers 22 and 26 were common lodging houses, separated by the Rose and Crown, the haunt of prostitutes. However, the police report reveals something that none of the commentators mention or even hint at: on these same streets lived many respectable labourers, skilled craftsmen and shopkeepers. Invariably these people were struggling to live honest and useful lives, seeking to distance themselves from known criminals.
It is noteworthy that even in areas such as this, the population was never clearly divisible into the respectable and the criminal. Mixed up with the honest workers, professional criminals and the recent immigrants trying to scrape a living in an alien environment, were large numbers of people who lived in a twilight zone between legitimate society and the underworld. They drifted between these two worlds, never entirely sure where one ended and the other began. Most of this amorphous group consisted of those who never enjoyed the benefits of regular employment but survived only because they were able to pick up occasional jobs. Many sometimes worked as hawkers, knife-grinders, ballad singers and sellers of broadsheets.
In county towns lodging houses were concentrated in areas close to sources of employment for lodgers. In Daventry, Northamptonshire, for instance, lodging houses were clustered around Brook Street, where local businesses included a bone collector, a dealer in old iron and an umbrella-maker – all occupations commonly found among lodgers. In the vicinity of Baker Street, the focus of Shrewsbury’s lodging houses, were a sugar boiler, marine-store dealers and second-hand clothes dealers. Adjacent to Banbury’s largest lodging house was a one-legged old soldier who manufactured matches – which many of the lodgers subsequently hawked. This pattern was replicated throughout the country.
From the 1850s onwards, the economic situation of those in irregular employment, never better than precarious, was also declining relative to their neighbours in permanent employment. Factory workers’ incomes were generally improving, however. Whole leisure and consumer industries – notably the pub and the music hall – grew up to meet the needs of working men with money. It was this coming together of criminals, wanderers, the honest poor, those whose economic position was improving and large numbers of immigrants which gave the slums their multi-faceted character.
Unlike today, when a great deal of official language seems designed to conceal reality and to promote ‘non-judgmental’ attitudes, the Victorians tended to use terms which made their attitudes clear. Thus by the 1880s common lodging houses, home to about 50,000 Londoners who lived in these places more or less permanently, were often known as ‘low lodging houses’. As Mayhew remarks, this term partly referred to the small charge paid by lodgers and partly to the character of their clients. He does, however, acknowledge that many lodging houses did not deserve this term in its opprobrious sense. He lists seventeen areas in the capital where these houses are to be found in great abundance and five areas were there are many of them – all within the poorest parts of the city and which yet contained many good lodging houses occupied chiefly by working people. Examples include those in Orchard Street, Westminster and the Mint.
Yet it is indisputable that conditions in the worst lodging houses were depressing. Many were tiny, distinguishable from private houses only by their dirtier exteriors and the fact that their windows often contained more paper than glass. Such signs were easily read by those seeking shelter who immediately realised that thieves and prostitutes were welcome. ‘Some of them are of the worst class of low brothels,’ Mayhew claimed, ‘and some may even be described as brothels for children.’ The better sort of street sellers and traders immediately knew to go elsewhere.
In such places in the 1850s bed generally consisted of a mattress of strong canvas stuffed with the worst cotton flocks, two sheets and a rug or leather sheet. It was known for the sheets to remain unchanged for three months. Changed frequently or not, they were all infested with vermin: Mayhew claims he ‘never met an exception’. A pail in the middle of the room ‘to which both sexes may resort’ was the sole toilet facility available. One of Mayhew’s informants told him, ‘I myself have slept in the top room of a house not far from Drury Lane, and you could study the stars through the holes blown off the roof ’. This, however, turned out to be an advantage for ‘the room wasn’t as foul as it might have been without them’. In other places he had ‘scrape
d handfuls of bugs from bed clothes and crushed them under a candlestick many a time.’ He often slept in a room that could barely hold twelve, with thirty others where the odour of their bodies rose ‘in one foul, choking steam of stench’.
Overcrowding was often at its worst when local attractions drew great crowds of punters including those hoping to batten on unwary spectators. Everything from the Greenwich Fair to the Epsom Derby meant that the only available accommodation at local lodging houses involved sleeping with two or three strangers in a bed intended for one. On such occasions the space between beds would be filled with shake-downs or people sleeping on the floor. In the better houses these emergency beds were small palliasses or mattresses, whereas in the worst they were often no more than bundles of rags. In rural areas loose straw was commonly used.
When houses were packed to bursting, it was common for lodgers to sleep on the kitchen floor, which was often stone, without any bedding. This saved the lodger a penny. ‘The Irish,’ Mayhew remarked, ‘at harvest time, often resort to this mode of passing the night.’
The cholera outbreak of 1854 had, Mayhew believed, one very beneficial effect: it frightened even vagrants into insisting that beds and bedding were improved. Yet standards remained low in many areas. Mayhew’s informants in the 1850s assured him that the most unpleasant houses were to be found in London and the worst of these for both filth and the infamy of its lodgers were in the area around Drury Lane. The places they referred to were no more than gaunt barns, with punctured roofs, where lodgers were charged 3d a night.
The immorality that was common in these places was also frequently remarked on. Curiously in this context the Irish, who feature prominently in all accounts of lodging houses and who were blamed for so many ills, were held up as models of propriety: in Mayhew’s words, ‘Of all the people who resort to these places the Irish are far the best for chastity.’
The Secret World of the Victorian Lodging House Page 6