In 1751 Henry Fielding published his Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and a year later the Murder Act added a further terror to death by declaring that the bodies of the hanged should be publicly dissected by surgeons and anatomists. A measure such as this may have been prompted by a perceived increase in crime, but it was also a direct product of panic fear among the gullible and the anxious.
London has always been the centre of panic, and of rumour. At the end of the twentieth century, for example, an official survey reported that “fear of crime is a social problem in itself” with a significantly higher proportion of Londoners—as opposed to those living elsewhere—feeling unsafe both in their dwellings and in the streets. They might have been echoing the sentiments of a Londoner in 1816 who stated that “from the author’s own experience in almost every part of Europe … he can mention no place so full of peril as the environs of London.” Of course it was then still a relatively compact and enclosed city—the crucial intensity of crime has in fact diminished with London’s growth—and indeed its criminals seem to have borrowed their habits and demeanour from its earlier eighteenth-century life.
The “low Toby” or footpad was known in the early nineteenth century, for example, as a “Rampsman” but the violent assault had not changed. The house-breaker of this period was called a “Cracksman,” while a “Bug Hunter” was one who picked the pockets of drunks; a “Snoozer” was one who booked into a hotel before robbing its guests, while an “Area Sneak” called at kitchen doors in the hope of finding them open and unattended. These were the crimes typical of the city, and their perpetrators were generally thieves, pickpockets, burglars, and those fraudulent merchants and tricksters who took advantage of the gullibility or credulousness of the passing transient crowd.
Although it would be going too far to say that “the man who knew his London—could recognise each type by his dress and manner,” as Thomas Burke puts it in The Streets of London, criminals were still a particular and distinguishable element of city life until the middle of the nineteenth century. Their language, too, like that of the “abraham men” of a previous century, was itself pronounced and peculiar—“Stow that … pottering about on the sneak, flimping or smashing a little … If I’m nailed it’s a lifer.” This existence had its own kind of music also. A villain was known as a “sharp” and his victim a “flat.”
It was reported, in 1867, that this “criminal class” amounted to 16,000. Yet the streets were by then safer than they had ever been. Five years before there had been an outbreak of “garrotting,” the popular name for violent robberies, but that had been effectively suppressed by means of equally violent floggings. It was no longer possible to claim, as the Duke of Wellington had done forty years before, that “the principal streets of London” were “in the nightly possession of drunken women and vagabonds” as well as “organised gangs of thieves.” Where in previous periods of the city’s history the “vagabonds” and “thieves” were scattered indiscriminately in various “islands” off the main thoroughfares, they had by the middle of the nineteenth century retreated into various quarters on the fringes of the now more civilised metropolis. They were often located in the eastern suburbs or, as it soon became known, the “East End.” That area, some sixteen years before “Jack” rendered the region of Whitechapel notorious, was reputed to be a place of thieves’ kitchens and ragged public houses “charged with the unmistakable, overpowering damp and mouldy odour” attendant upon street crime. In Bethnal Green, too, there were pubs and houses which acted as “a convenient and secluded exchange and house of call” filled with “dippers” and “broads” and “welshers.” These are the words of Arthur Morrison, writing A Child of the Jago at the end of the nineteenth century when once more the slang or “patter” had changed in order ever more colourfully to depict the familiar crimes of London. A “house of call,” like “exchange,” was in fact a word used to describe a dealing room of city business. So, in mockery as well as implicit deference, the terminology of financial and commercial London was parodied by the more secretive, if more notorious, speculators in urban goods.
In Bethnal Green and its environs, Morrison noticed the presence of the most successful late nineteenth-century criminals who belonged to “the High Mobs” or, as one resident put it, “’Igh mob. ’Oohs. Toffs.” Morrison was in fact depicting a traditional London pursuit—that of an organised gang, generally of more than usually skilful or vicious practitioners of the criminal arts, with one or two leaders. The “mob” or gang controlled a certain area of the city or certain specific activities. Dick Turpin led “the Essex Gang” of thieves and smugglers in the 1730s; while a decade earlier such gifted individuals as Jonathan Wild could dominate the general course of London crime. But, as the city expanded, it became divided into separate territories controlled by specific gangs.
In the nineteenth century, rival gangs vied for territory and for influence. In the early twentieth century, east London once again became the scene of murderous conflict. The opposition of the “Harding Gang” and the “Bogard Gang” culminated in a violent confrontation in the Bluecoat Boy public house in Bishopsgate. In the 1920s and 1930s the crime families of the Sabinis and Cortesis fought against each other in the streets of Clerkenwell, over the control of clubs and racetracks, while in the next decade the White family of Islington were challenged by Billy Hill and his “heavy mob” from Seven Dials.
There were other criminal fraternities, known variously as “the Elephant Gang,” “the Angel Gang” and “the Titanic Gang.” These dealt in organised shoplifting or “smash-and-grab” raids as well as the general business of drugs, prostitution and “protection” racketeering. In the late 1950s and 1960s the Kray brothers of the East End, and the Richardsons from “over the water” in the southern suburbs, controlled their respective areas with notable success. In the Krays’ own territory, “the popular admiration for great thieves,” to use a phrase of the mid-nineteenth century, had never seriously abated. In 1995, the funeral procession for Ronnie Kray, along Bethnal Green Road and Vallance Road, was a great social event; as Iain Sinclair wrote of the East End in Lights Out for the Territory, “no other strata of society has such a sense of tradition.” The memories of grand criminality in that neighbourhood go back to Turpin’s “Essex Gang” and beyond.
It is hard to say that any aspect of crime or criminal behaviour is altogether new. “Smash and grab” became popular, for example, in the 1940s and 1950s although it did not originate then; there are records of that offence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The gangs of the Krays and the Richard-sons have now been displaced by those with other ethnic origins, the Jamaican “Yardie” and Chinese “Triad” groups, for example, working their own particular areas. In the 1990s, as the trade in drugs such as heroin, khat, crack and ecstasy became ever more lucrative, gang elements from Nigeria, Turkey and Colombia participated in the city’s new criminal activity. The “Yardies” are considered to be, in the twenty-first century, responsible for the largest proportion of killings in a city where murder is perpetual. Murder, to paraphrase Thomas de Quincey, is one of London’s fine arts.
CHAPTER 28
Horrible Murder
It has come in many different forms. In the eighteenth century it was often remarked that the noses of the victims were bitten off during the act of strangling. Strangulation and stabbing were popular at the end of that century, succeeded in the early nineteenth century by slashed throats and clubbing; at the end of the nineteenth century poison and various forms of mutilation or hacking to death became more favoured.
Yet the element of mystery remains perhaps the most interesting and suggestive aspect of the London murder, as if the city itself might have taken part in the crime. One of the unsolved murders of the seventeenth century, in an age when all were inured to death, concerned a man known variously as Edmund Berry Godfrey or Edmunsbury Godfrey. He was found in 1678 upon what is now known as Primrose Hill, with his
own sword thrust through his body but “no blood was on his clothes or about him” and “his shoes were clean.” He had also been strangled, and his neck broken; when his clothes were taken off, his breast was found to be “all over marked with bruises.” Another curious element lay in the fact that “there were many drops of white wax lights on his breeches.” A Catholic plot was suspected and, on concocted evidence, three members of the royal court at Somerset House were arrested and executed; their names were Green, Berry and Hill. The earliest name of Primrose Hill, where the body was found, was Greenberry Hill. The real murderers were never discovered, but it would seem that the topography of London itself played a fortuitous if malign part.
One evening at nine o’clock, in Cannon Street in the spring of 1866, Sarah Millson went downstairs to answer the street-bell. An hour later a neighbour who lived above her discovered her body at the bottom of the stairs. She had been killed by a number of deep wounds to the head but “her shoes had been taken off and were lying on a table in the hall”; there was no blood upon them. The gaslight had been quietly extinguished after the murder, presumably in order to save expense. The neighbour opened the street door to find help, and saw a woman on the doorstep apparently shielding herself against the heavy rain which was then falling. She was asked for assistance but moved away, saying, “Oh! dear no; I can’t come in.” The murderer was never apprehended, but the characteristics of London mystery are here found in almost emblematic detail—the lodging house in Cannon Street, the heavy rain, the gaslight, the perfectly cleaned shoes. The strange woman shielding herself from the rain only contributes to the air of intimacy and darkness that characterises this crime. Once more it is as if the spirit or atmosphere of the city itself played its part.
That is why the murders committed by “Jack the Ripper” between August and November 1888 are an enduring aspect of London myth, with the areas of Spitalfields and Whitechapel as the dark accomplices of the crimes. The newspaper accounts of “Jack’s” murders were directly responsible for parliamentary inquiries into the poverty of these neighbourhoods, and of the “East End” in general; in that sense, charity and social provision followed hard upon the heels of monstrous death. But in a more elusive way the streets and houses of that vicinity became identified with the murders themselves, almost to the extent that they seemed to share the guilt. One scholarly account by Colin Wilson refers to the “secrets” of a room in the Ten Bells public house of the neighbourhood, in Commercial Street, which suggests that the walls and interiors of the then impoverished streets were the killer’s confessional. There are contemporary reports of the panic engendered by the Whitechapel killings. M.V. Hughes, author of A London Girl of the Eighties, has written that “No one can believe now how terrified and unbalanced we all were by his murders.” This is recorded by one who lived in the west of London, many miles from the vicinity, and she adds: “One can only dimly imagine what the terror must have been in those acres of narrow streets where the inhabitants knew the murderer to be lurking.” It is testimony to the power of urban suggestion, and to the peculiar quality of late Victorian London, that popular belief lent “a quality of the supernatural to the work.” The essential paganism of London here reasserts itself. Even as the murders were continuing, the books and pamphlets began to appear, among them The Mysteries of the East End, The Curse Upon Mitre Square, Jack the Ripper: Or the Crimes of London, London’s Ghastly Mystery. The place becomes the central interest, therefore, and soon after the crimes sightseers were flocking through Berners Street and George Yard and Flower and Dean Street; a Whitechapel “peep-show” even provided wax figures of the victims for the delectation of the spectators. Such is the force of the area, and of its crimes, that several daily tours are still organised— mainly for foreign visitors—around the Ten Bells public house and the adjacent streets.
The connection between London and murder is, then, a permanent one. Martin Fido, author of The Murder Guide to London, states that more “than half the memorable murders of Britain have happened in London,” with the prevalence of certain killings within certain areas. Murder may appear “respectable” in Camberwell, while brutal in Brixton; a litany of cut throats in nineteenth-century London is followed by a list of female poisoners. Yet, as the same narrator has pointed out, “there has been too much murder in London for a comprehensive listing.”
There are episodes and incidents, however, which remain emblematic, and it is noticeable that certain streets or areas come to identify the crimes. There were “the Turner Street murders” and the “Ratcliffe Highway murders,” for example, the last of which in 1827 prompted de Quincey’s memorable essay on “The Fine Art of Murder.” He begins his account of a series of killings, “the most superb of the century by many degrees,” with an invocation of Ratcliffe Highway itself as “a most chaotic quarter of eastern or nautical London” and an area of “manifold ruffianism.” An entire family had been found murdered in a shop beside the highway, in the most gruesome circumstances; less than three weeks later in New Gravel Lane, very close to that highway, a man called out “They are murdering people in the house!” Seven citizens altogether, including two children and one infant, had been dispatched within eight days. One of the killers, John Williams, committed suicide in his cell within Coldbath Fields Prison at Clerkenwell; his dead body, together with the bloody hammer and chisel which had been the means of his crimes, were paraded past the houses where he had assisted in the murders. He was then buried beneath the crossroads of Back Lane and Cannon Street Road or, as de Quincey puts it, “in the centre of a quadrivium or conflux of four roads, with a stake driven through his heart. And over him drives for ever the uproar of unresting London.” So Williams became part of London; having marked a track through a specific locality, his own name was buried in the urban mythology surrounding “the Ratcliffe Highway murders.” He became instead the city’s sacred victim, to be interred in a formalised and ritualistic manner. Some hundred years later workmen, digging up the territory, found his “mouldering remains”; it is appropriate that his bones were then shared out in the area as relics. His skull, for example, was granted to the owner of a public house still to be seen on the corner of the fatal crossroads.
Other roads and streets can prove to be injurious. Dorset Street was the site of Mary Kelly’s murder in the winter of 1888, at the hands of “Jack”; it reclaimed its original name of Duval Street after this peculiarly savage crime, as a way of preserving anonymity, only to be the site of a fatal shooting in 1960. In both cases no murderer was ever convicted.
There are many accounts of such anonymous killers, wandering through crowds and crowded thoroughfares, concealing a knife or some other fatal instrument. It is a true image of the city. The remarks of the killers have on occasion been recorded. “Damn her! Dip her again and finish her … Yours to a cinder … Get the knives out!” The streets themselves then become the object of fascinated enquiry. We read, for example, in The Murder Guide to London that the “murder victim in Baroness Orczy’s Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, had his office in Lombard Street. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone the gem was pledged to a banker in Lombard Street.” An actual police station in Wood Street has been used as an imaginative location by several writers of mysteries, and Edgar Wallace turned All Hallows by the Tower into “St. Agnes on Powder Hill.” In a city where spectacle and theatre become an intimate part of ordinary reality, fact and imagination can be strangely mingled.
A complex of streets can also become haunted by crime, so that Martin Fido, himself an eminent criminologist, writes of “the dense murder area of Islington” located “in the back streets behind Upper Street and the City Road”; in this neighbourhood the sister of Charles Lamb killed her mother in the autumn of 1796, only a few yards from the room where Joe Orton was murdered by his lover in 1967. In the early decades of the twentieth century there were killings known generically as the “North London murders,” although they were in fact separately conducted by Hawley Harvey Crippen and
Frederick Seddon.
The list of London murderers is long indeed. Catherine Hayes, proprietress of a tavern called the Gentleman In Trouble, severed her husband’s head in the spring of 1726 and tossed it into the Thames before strewing other parts of the corpse all over London. The head was recovered and placed upon a pole in a city churchyard, where eventually it was recognised. Mrs. Hayes was committed for trial and sentenced to death, earning the further distinction of being one of the last women ever to be burned at Tyburn.
Thomas Henry Hocker, described by an investigating policeman as “a fellow in a long black cloak,” was seen springing from behind some trees in Belsize Lane on a February evening in 1845. Singing to himself, he walked past the scene of the murder he had just committed and, still undiscovered, conversed with the policeman who had found the body. “It is a nasty job,” he said and then took hold of the dead man’s hand. “This site was his own handiwork,” as The Chronicles of Newgate puts it, “yet he could not overcome the strange fascination it had for him, and remained by the side of the corpse until the stretcher came.”
London Page 33