By 1888 there were just over 200 common boarding houses accommodating 8,500 people. Many of the women living in these relied on prostitution for extra money. There were at least 1,500 prostitutes in Whitechapel alone.
By day Whitechapel was a riot of colour and infernal noise, where everyone struggled to make enough money to feed themselves once a day. By night the public houses, prostitutes and street gangs plied their trade. Life was desperate and often short.
The murders of 1888 that brought national and international notoriety to Whitechapel coincided with the rash of cheap newspapers that were to make it so notorious: it was the year when all taxes on newspapers were finally abolished, enabling these to produce cheaper reading material for a larger section of the newly literate public. The public was now catered for in local, national and international news, not forgetting sensationalism. Newspapers mushroomed all over England. What certain newspapers forgot in the rush to make money, however, was that publishing news brought a certain public responsibility. The brutal killings in Whitechapel demonstrated the power and the irresponsible journalism of many papers.
The East End already had an insalubrious reputation and was known for gratuitous violence and the occasional murder, but the brutal murder of a woman in 1888 heralded a new dawn for the media and the annals of crime.
At 4.45 a.m. on 7 August 1888, the bloodied body of 37-year-old prostitute Martha Tabrams was found on a landing of George Yard Buildings. She was punctured with thirty-nine stab wounds, one of which seemed to have been made by a bayonet. Most of the wounds were around the sex organs, implying that the attack was sexual.
Martha was known to the police and had lived in a common boarding house in George Street. The last time she had been seen alive was when she and a friend, ’Pearly Poll’ Connolly, were draped drunkenly over two soldiers outside the White Swan pub in Whitechapel Road at 11 p.m. the previous night.
The Whitechapel murders.
The police followed the only clues available, that of the bayonet wound and its military connotation. These led nowhere, as the two soldiers had acceptable alibis and second-hand bayonets could be purchased from most stalls in East End markets. The inquest of 9 August resulted in the open verdict of ‘murder by person or persons unknown’. The Times’ austere reportage differed markedly from the sensationalist articles published by the Sunday and evening papers.
The whispers had barely died down when the next murder in Whitechapel took hold of the public imagination.
Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nicholls was a pretty, dark-haired, young-looking 44-year-old woman. She was literate, close to her parents, but her recourse to drinking had broken up an otherwise stable marriage to a printer, William Nicholls.
From 1882 until the summer of 1888, Mary Ann had been in and out of Lambeth Workhouse with the occasional return to her parents. A final stab at a respectable job ‘in service’ in Wandsworth ended when she absconded with items belonging to her employers in July 1888. She finally ended up, on 24 August, at a boarding house known as ‘The White House’ at 56 Flower and Dean Street.
It had been a heavy night for Mary Ann on 30 August 1888. She had been seen walking down the Whitechapel Road towards the Frying Pan pub at 11 p.m., eventually pouring out of it past midnight and ending up a little more sober in the kitchen of another boarding house in Thrawl Street at 1.20 a.m.
At 2.30 a.m. her friend, Emily Holland, found her drunk outside a grocer’s shop at the corner of Osborne Street, opposite Whitechapel Church. Emily tried to persuade Mary Ann to come home with her, but she refused. It would be the last time Emily saw her friend alive.
Buck’s Row (later re-named Durward Street) was a narrow cobbled street with two-storey houses on one side and industrial premises on the other. Charles Cross, a Pickford’s driver, was walking to work down the Essex Wharf side of Buck’s Row at 3.30 a.m. on 31 August when he saw the body of a woman lying against some stable yard gates. He called over a passer-by and both men grabbed a passing policeman.
The workhouse stamp on the woman’s petticoat eventually established her identity – that of Mary Ann Nicholls.
Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn performed the autopsy at the mortuary in Old Montague Street, with Inspector John Spratling in attendance. She had been butchered. Apart from two very deep cuts in the throat that virtually severed the head from the body, there was a vicious jagged cut running down the left side of her abdomen and several cuts down the right side. The private parts had, like Martha Tabrams’, been the primary object of the assault. It was evident that her killer had been left-handed and had anatomical knowledge. The attack would have only taken five minutes.
Buck’s Row.
Inspector Helson, the Senior Inspector, thought that Mary Ann had been murdered in situ, although the papers surmised that she may have been killed somewhere else and dumped in Buck’s Row, and that a gang may have been involved.
The Times of 1 September was quite categorical:
… viewing the spot where the body was found, it seems difficult to believe that the woman received her death wounds there … If the woman was murdered on the spot where the body was found, it is almost impossible to believe that she would not have aroused the neighbourhood with her screams.
The article added that none of the internal organs were missing.
The next day a local firm suggested that a reward might be offered for information. The Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, rejected this idea, to his cost!
What Scotland Yard did decide, however, was that the East End police needed a senior inspector who knew the area well and had some standing in the community. They chose Inspector Frederick Abberline (1843-1930). He was a CID Inspector at Whitehall who had been at Whitechapel from 1873-1887. Well-liked, efficient, and an officer with a promising future, Abberline’s avuncular exterior held a razor sharp and analytical mind that would be put to great use in future cases, notably the Cleveland Street Scandal. DC Walter Dew (of later Crippen fame) was one of those who welcomed their inspector back.
Despite Abberline’s return, the police made no headway on this murder either. The newspapers described the East End as the ‘Heart of Darkness’ or a ‘Terra Incognita’, creating an even greater divide between the genteel West End and the poor East End.
Papers competed with one another to produce theories about the murder. William Le Queux, of The Globe, Charles Hands of the Pall Mall Gazette, and Lincoln Springfield of The Star would take it in turns to publish different theories about how the murders had been committed.
Annie Chapman, better known as Annie Sivvey or Dark Annie, was a friendly 47-year-old brunette who resorted to prostitution when selling matches, antimacassars and flowers couldn’t pay the rent or buy food. Her coachman husband, John Chapman, had left her in 1885, taking their two children with him, because of her drinking, although he had continued to give her a weekly stipend until his death in 1886. She had then taken up with a Jack Sivvey, amongst other men. The only time she drank was at weekends, and on Saturday 8 September she left her lodgings in Dorset Street, to go down Paternoster Row at 1.35 a.m. She said she was going to make some money to pay for her bed. This was the last time she was definitely seen alive.
Henry Matthews.
Inspector F. Abberline.
PC Walter Dew.
Number 29 Hanbury Street was a wooden house housing seventeen people, at the front of which were two doors, one leading into a shop, the other into a passage leading to stairs to the various floors and a door with steps leading down to a yard with a recess to its side, next to a fence separating the property from another.
At 5.15 a.m. the next-door carpenter, Mr Cadosch, went to his yard toilet and heard people talking in the yard next door, followed by a thud against the fence. Shortly after, at 5.30 a.m., a woman saw a man whom she took to be a Jew talking to a woman she thought she recognised as Annie Chapman outside 29 Hanbury Street.
At 6 a.m. Police Inspector Chandler of Commercial Street Station received notice of the disco
very of a murder some fifteen minutes earlier at 29 Hanbury Street. Dr George Bagster Phillips, the Police Divisional Surgeon, arrived half an hour later.
Annie Chapman’s body, legs drawn up and knees splayed outwards, was tucked in the recess of the yard.
The details of this murder were not made public for good reason. It was a particularly gruesome murder. The Lancet would publish this later. She had first been strangled, and then her throat slit to drain the body of blood. The body was then mutilated blood-free. The throat was cut to the spine from left to right, indicating a right-handed assailant. The abdomen had been slit open; the severed intestines had been lifted out and placed on the right shoulder. The pelvic area was totally mutilated; the uterus, the upper portion of the vagina and two thirds of the bladder had been entirely removed. The doctor admitted that this mutilation would have taken nearly an hour and the murderer had probably used a small amputating knife with a blade of about 6-9 inches in length. He also thought that the murder may have occurred at about 4.30 a.m., although he suggested that the cold may have made the time of death an hour later. This implied that Mr Cadosch may have heard the murder taking place.
Because of the mutilations, Abberline agreed that Chapman and Nicholls had been murdered by the same person. The killer was obviously unhinged and had medical knowledge. On the strength of this slender clue the police would try to trace three ‘insane’ medical students – two were traced and one had gone abroad. Another unstable man, a failed barrister, Montague John Druitt, was also sought by the police.
The Press, in the dark about the mutilations, surmised. The pure sensationalism of The Star gave it 261,000 sales per day! The Times would surmise on 9 September that the murderer was not a member of the working classes and was possibly a lodger.
On 25 September the Central News Agency received a letter signed ‘Jack The Ripper’. This would, unfortunately, start the legend and spawn an industry. The police would later admit that it was a hoax made by an ‘enterprising’ journalist.
A greater police presence did not guarantee a safer neighbourhood. Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian Jew, had just reached the gateway of the yard of the International Workers’ Educational Club on Berner Street at 00.45 a.m. on Sunday 30 September when he saw a man with dark hair and small brown moustache speak to a woman at the gateway. They scuffled and he pushed her into the street before throwing her onto the footway. Not wanting to be involved, Schwartz crossed the street, noticing a man with a pipe in the doorway of another house. He couldn’t see the man properly but he did recognise the woman. She was a local prostitute, Lizzie Stride, and it was the last time she was seen alive.
Berner Street.
The International Workers’ Educational Club had been founded by a group of Jewish Socialists in 1884. It was a hive of radical thought, provided food and lodging as well as entertainment for the radical political elite of the East End. Its largely immigrant patrons were considered evil and depraved by the native Eastenders. This led to more friction and fights than normal.
Louis Diemschutz, the Steward of the Club and a travelling jewellery salesman, was just returning from Norwood in a pony and trap at one o’clock when his horse shied away from a corner of the Club yard. He noticed a bundle on the ground and saw it was the body of a woman. He rushed to tell the Club members and then went off to find a policeman. Two policemen were found, one of whom fetched Dr Blackwell of Commercial Road. Dr Phillips, the police surgeon, arrived at 1.25 a.m. Lizzie Stride was easily identified.
Fourty-four-year-old Lizzie Stride had started early, as a prostitute, in her native Sweden. One of the many immigrants to the East End, she was known to the Swedish authorities, had married several times, and had recently been lodging at 32 Flower and Dean Street. Her current boyfriend, Michael Kidney, had seen her for the last time on 25 September. She was a quiet, conscientious woman with a sense of humour when she had work. Many thought they had seen her at various times that night but most sightings were discarded as invention or embellishment.
She was found lying on her back close to the wall by the gates of the Club. Her extended left hand held a packet of lozenges. Her right arm, the hand and wrist covered with blood, was over her belly – she had obviously tried to staunch the blood with it. The legs were drawn up and both shoulders had a bluish discolouration, implying that two hands had pressed down on the shoulders. The throat had been cut from left to right, severing the carotid artery – her assailant had attacked her from behind, ensuring no blood on his clothes. There were no other wounds. Was the killer interrupted? Phillips agreed that the murderer knew where to cut. But was it the ‘Ripper’?
Not forty-five minutes later, PC Watkin, on a return journey to Mitre Square, found the body of a middle-aged woman in a dark corner of the Square. He called a night watchman to fetch another policeman. PCs Harvey and Holland arrived, Holland being despatched to call for a surgeon. Doctors George Sequeira and Frederick Gordon Brown arrived within ten minutes. Only an hour later PC Alfred Long was passing 118-119 Goulston Buildings when he noticed a torn, bloodied piece of apron that matched the one worn by the victim, and on the wall a chalk-written message: ‘The Jewes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ It is a shame that a photographer never took a picture and that the sign was erased on the orders of Sir Charles Warren, the Police Commissioner. The Press widely asserted that the killer could have been a Jew. Even Matthews, the Home Secretary, came to the conclusion that the killer was a Jew – after all, an Englishman could never bow to such morbid proclivities …
Sir Charles Warren.
The second victim of the night was well known to the police. Catherine Eddowes (aka Kate Kelly) had just been released from Bishopsgate police station at the time Stride’s body had been discovered. She had been drunk a few hours before and placed in a cell to sober up. She was last seen walking towards Houndsditch.
Catherine was 45, had had children but had fallen out with her family because of her drinking habit and migrated to London. She lodged at 55 Flower and Dean Street, earning a crust from prostitution, hop-picking and scrounging off her daughter. Her current partner, John Kelly, had last seen her at about 11 p.m. the previous evening. Apart from the police, a Joseph Lawende had possibly been the last person to see her, at 1.35 a.m., at the corner of Church Passage and Duke Street. She was talking to a man whose description seemed to fit with that of Schwartz’s description of the man seen with Lizzie Stride.
This time the police kept quiet. The Press complained that they were receiving no new information and that Mr Lawende was being separated from the public.
The injuries were horrific: Dr Gordon Brown noted that the face was severely cut. The eyes, nose, lips and cheeks were severely hacked. The throat had been cut and the abdomen had been the primary target – the left kidney and uterus were missing. Doctors Brown and Sequeira agreed that the killer did not have a great anatomical skill. This was also Dr W.S. Saunders’ opinion. The killer possessed a good deal of knowledge as to the position of the organs and how to remove them, but this could have been done by someone used to cutting up animals. Dr Phillips concurred with their findings.
The Home Secretary was publicly castigated for not offering a reward. He now wrote to Sir Charles Warren saying that he would, on the condition that Warren publicly admitted the incompetence of the police.
One curious anomaly was that Israel Schwartz, who had last seen the first of that night’s victims, did not appear at the inquest nor was his account known until the Home Office files were opened to public inspection. His evidence, however, had been considered of sufficient interest and importance to the police to keep it from the public and refer to it several times. It was only reported on 10 October in The Star.
The tall, pretty, blonde and educated Mary Jane Kelly was behind with her rent on the night of Friday 9 November. The manager of her lodging house at Miller’s Court asked his deputy to ask her for some rent at 10.45 p.m. He tried her door, but it was locked. He pushed back the
curtains from a broken window to find her two severed breasts on a table. By 11.30 p.m. Inspector Abberline and Dr Phillips had arrived. Photographs were taken and the locked door was forced.
The mutilated corpse of Catherine Eddowes.
Dr Thomas Bond, who conducted the post-mortem, concluded that the attacker had no scientific knowledge. She was asleep and in her bedclothes at the time of the attack. The whole of the abdomen had been opened and emptied of its contents. The face was hacked beyond recognition and the neck tissues were severed to the bone. The uterus and kidneys were under her head.
Aside from a severed kidney received by post, and ultimately rejected as evidence, the brutal murders stopped after Kelly. The police agreed that at least five of the murders were committed by the same person. Sir Charles Warren resigned. Abberline remained convinced that the killer was one George Chapman, a barber surgeon, despite no tangible evidence. He would later say, ‘theories, we were lost almost in theories; there were so many of them.’ The hapless barrister Montague John Druitt committed suicide in November, leading many to think that he might have been the killer.
Fleet Street had done its worst damage. It had turned the murders into a media event by stressing the inherently dangerous nature of the East End. The ‘Ripper’ murders prompted the papers to promote a moral and social panic that swept through the City and beyond. The Daily Chronicle of 10 September was to encapsulate the public’s alarm by calling Whitechapel ‘The Eastern Murderland’. The Evening News of the same date stressed the sex element, with ‘the murders’ being ‘erotomanic’ and showing ‘amatory desires of an inordinate nature’. Other papers stayed aloof, maintaining a conciliatory moral tone, such as the Bath and Cheltenham Gazette, who maintained that ‘the excitement has largely been stimulated and fed by the unnecessary prominence given to the subject and by the many foolish rumours which have been published.’
Murder & Crime in London Page 5