Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  This volatile mixture was about to explode—all that was needed was a spark.

  2

  1881: The Storm Breaks

  I am glad in my heart when they beat the Jews, but it cannot be permitted.

  —Czar Alexander III, 1881

  On March 1, 1881, Alexander II was assassinated by members of the Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will), a revolutionary group intent on overthrowing the Russian autocracy and replacing it with a democratic-socialist republic. The attack took place midafternoon on a Sunday, as the czar was returning to the Winter Palace after reviewing a parade of Imperial Guards in an equestrian training hall called the Manezh. Alexander was riding through the snowy St. Petersburg streets in a closed carriage with six Cossack bodyguards, followed by two open sleighs carrying the chief of police and the chief of guards with a number of additional policemen. When the cavalcade reached a bridge over the Catherine Canal, a young revolutionary named Nikolai Rysakov stepped forward and threw a package containing an explosive device under the carriage wheels. The bomb caused a massive explosion that hurled the assassin across the street into a fence. Several people were wounded in the blast, but the czar was unscathed because his carriage was iron-plated and bulletproof to guard against just such an attack. Rysakov, in a rather weak attempt to divert attention from himself, shouted, “There he goes! Get him!” but the ruse failed, and he was captured almost immediately. The police tackled him and discovered a pistol and a knife hidden under his coat.

  Ignoring the frantic protests of his guards, the czar emerged from his carriage to survey the damage. The chief of police asked the czar whether he was injured. “Thank God, I am fine. But look . . .,” Alexander said, pointing at a boy who lay dying on the sidewalk. “Is it thanks to God?” interjected Rysakov. “A fine one,” the czar muttered, looking the man up and down. At this point, another assassin, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, stepped forward and threw a second bomb at the czar. According to a witness, the blast was “so strong that all the glass was blown out of the gas lights and the post itself was bent.” Some twenty people were wounded in the explosion, and blood, clothing, splinters, body parts, and other debris littered the street. Hryniewiecki himself died as a result of the blast, and the czar’s legs were blown to pieces.

  Some cadets, who had been returning from the parade ground when the attack took place, covered the czar in a cape and lifted him onto a sled. Meanwhile, a third assassin, who had been waiting in the crowd ready to throw another bomb in case the others failed, rushed forward inexplicably and, with the instinct of human feeling, helped the cadets aid their fallen ruler. A little more than an hour later, the “Czar Liberator” was dead.1

  The government was completely caught off guard by the assassination. Members of the czar’s cabinet seem to have worried that a popular socialist uprising was under way, and it was said that the murdered czar’s son and successor, Alexander III, “became a prisoner of the royal palace at Gatchina, literally looking under the bed in his private apartments for assassins.”2 The secret police quickly arrested the conspirators, and on April 3 five of the plotters were hanged in a public square filled with spectators. The assassination marked the end of an era of progressive reform. The new czar, Alexander III, would prove to be a strict autocrat who favored nationalism, state censorship, and a powerful secret police force.

  Jews in Russia and across Europe were shocked by the news of the czar’s death. In London, where much of the Anglo-Jewish population was of Polish-Russian origin, Jews had considered Alexander II an improvement over his predecessor. In a sermon at the Bayswater Synagogue in northwest London, the rabbi Dr. Hermann Adler declared, “His brethren, in common with the rest of civilized mankind, were penetrated with a feeling of horror and indignation at the infamous crime perpetrated in St. Petersburg.”3 On the day of the czar’s interment, a funeral service was held at a synagogue in Catherine Wheel Alley, Bishopsgate, in the City of London, where “every inch of space in the . . . little synagogue was occupied, and even the stairs were thronged by a congregation consisting, with only one or two exceptions, of Russians and Poles.” The walls were hung with black curtains on which was stitched in gold thread: “A grievous mourning of the Jews for the death of the Emperor Alexander.” Under this was an eagle wearing the Russian crown and the words “Fear God and the King.”4

  Almost immediately, London’s Jewish press began to express apprehension over the potential consequences of the situation in Russia. On March 18, the Jewish Chronicle reported:

  It is, we fear, unfortunately to be dreaded that in the reaction which is sure to ensue on the murder of the Czar, the Jews will lose some of the privileges gained during the reign of Alexander II. Such fear is augmented when we remember how persistently the Russian officials contend that the Nihilist movement is supported by the Jews. God help them if but the faintest shadow of suspicion rests upon any Jews for complicity in the Regicide conspiracy. When we reflect that the fate of the majority of existing Jews is thus hanging in the balance, we cannot but follow the course of events in Russia with breathless anxiety. The assassination of the Czar of all the Russias may, we fear, be an event of disastrous importance to the condition of Russian Jews.5

  It was an insightful prediction. In fact, one young Jewish woman, Gesya Gelfman, had been involved in the assassination plot, although her role was minimal. Gelfman, a free-love practitioner and a revolutionary, was described in press accounts as a “stupid and unimportant follower of the ringleaders.”6 The fact that the rest of the conspirators were gentiles went by the wayside, and within the week, at least two Russian newspapers, Vilenskii Vestnik and Novoye Vremya, had openly speculated that Jews were behind the assassination.7 Both papers later retracted these statements, but the damage was done. It didn’t help matters that the assassination took place on the eve of the Jewish Feast of Esther, and as the Daily Telegraph pointed out, “The Jews were charged with having made merry in anticipation of what was going to happen.” By Easter, it was rumored (falsely) that the new czar had “issued a decree instructing the people to beat and plunder the Jews for having murdered his father and for exploiting the people.”8

  Beginning around the end of April, reports of large anti-Jewish riots began to filter through to the West. The first incident of pogromy (the Russian word for “devastation”) occurred in April in the southwestern city Elizavetgrad. The immediate cause of the pogrom was not clear, and early reports only said, “The rioting arose out of a dispute between some Christians and Jews.”9 But as the Jewish Chronicle noted, “Bigotry, envy, and excitement combine to make the mind of the Russian peasant peculiarly inflammable just now, after the remarkable tragedy recently enacted at St. Petersburg.”10 Christian peasants from surrounding villages flocked into Elizavetgrad, where “one hundred houses were pillaged, a quantity of furniture being thrown into the streets.”11 After the pogrom, the town looked “as if it has been devastated by the elements.”12 According to reports, at least one Jew was killed, and hundreds of people were injured.13

  After the Elizavetgrad riots, a veritable wave of pogroms was unleashed in numerous locations in the southwestern regions of the Pale, and a correspondent traveling through the area wrote that Judenhetze (Jewish agitation) had “assumed proportions of which Western Europe is not yet aware.”14 An officer who traveled for a time with the correspondent said that he had “seen things that sickened him to think of,” and it was said that “unheard-of cruelties” were perpetrated by the mob.15 Women and young girls were raped, and one report even claimed, “In many Jewish homes infants had been thrown out of windows into the street.”16 In Kiev, a huge crowd stormed through the streets, smashing the doors and the windows of Jewish houses and businesses and throwing all of the Jews’ property into the street. The mob wrecked the synagogue, and the Torah scrolls were “torn to shreds, trampled in the dirt, and destroyed with incredible passion.” The riots then spread to a suburb called Demiovka, where the mob demolished all of the Jewish saloons and set fire to Jew
ish residences. Then, “under the cover of night indescribable horrors were perpetrated,” according to author Simon Dubnow. “Numerous Jews were beaten to death or thrown into the flames, and many women were violated.”17

  Police and army troops were dispersed to quell the riots, but they were unable to stop the carnage. In fact, in many instances, the police were more or less complicit with the rioters and “allowed the sanguinary acts of the rioters to proceed without check.” In Kiev, soldiers were said to have “fraternized with the mob,” and often the soldiers and the police “accompanied [the mob] from place to place, forming, as it were, an honorary escort.”18 When the Jews in Kiev appealed to the police for protection, they were told, “You Jewish hogs only get what you deserve.”19 In Odessa, a Jewish man was killed by a party of Cossacks, while the officer in command “almost choked himself with laughter to the consternation of the affrighted people.” The man was later buried privately.20

  Ultimately, two hundred or more attacks were made on Jewish communities in at least eight Russian provinces in the southwestern region of the Pale, and outbreaks were also reported in Germany, Romania, and Egypt. One modern source estimates that there were “some forty Jews killed, many times that number wounded and hundreds of women raped.”21 Thousands of Jews were financially ruined and left homeless. Many decided to flee the affected regions, and emigrants who arrived at the Austrian border reported, “A general massacre of the Jews in South Russia is imminent.”22 Romania and Prussia took steps to prevent an influx of refugees from crossing their borders.

  Although the Russian government did not (apparently) have a direct role in instigating the riots, anti-Semitism was rife at the top levels of government, and many officials may have sympathized with the rioters in sentiment, if not in deed. Despite this, the government lived in fear of any popular disturbances and was worried that the peasants’ anger might shift from the Jews to the landowners and then broaden into a general socialist uprising. As a result, the government was all too happy to frame the story in the usual manner. When the minister of the interior Nicholas Ignatiev set up regional commissions to investigate the pogroms, he did not ask whether Jewish exploitation was the cause—this was assumed. Instead, he merely asked the commissions which specific examples of Jewish exploitation had caused the peasants’ anger.23 The Russian government, in other words, turned to its tried-and-true formula and blamed the Jews themselves for instigating the attacks. Ignatiev ultimately concluded that the peasants were angry because the Jews had taken over trade, manufacturing, and also large amounts of land. Moreover, the “uncharacteristic violence” of the Russian peasants who plundered and destroyed the Jews’ possessions was justified, it was argued, because the peasants “were merely appropriating property that did not rightly belong to the Jews.”24 The official sentiment of the government was perhaps best expressed by Czar Alexander III himself, who said, “I am glad in my heart when they beat the Jews, but it cannot be permitted.”25 Konstantin Pobedonistev, the czar’s chief adviser on Jewish affairs, supposedly proposed the following solution to the Jewish Question: “One third of the Jews would emigrate, one third would be assimilated, and one third would die out.”26

  The pogroms of 1881 were the primary catalyst for a wave of Jewish emigration from Russia that would continue for decades. A veritable flood of penniless and frightened Jewish refugees streamed across the borders in search of safety. According to William Fishman, some 225,000 Jewish families left the country between April 1881 and June 1882 alone.27 The majority ended up in America, but many thousands went to London. Among the latter group was Aaron Kozminski, a fifteen-year-old boy who, according to the head of Scotland Yard, would grow up to become the most famous murderer of all time.

  3

  The Victorian East End

  I have seen the Polynesian savage in his primitive condition, before the missionary or the blackbirder or the beachcomber got at him. With all his savagery he was not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East London slum.

  —Thomas Huxley

  London in the 1880s was the world’s largest city and the capital of the most far-reaching empire on the planet.1 Yet despite England’s generally thriving economy, there was a vast disparity of wealth between the rigidly defined classes. The upper classes lived in West London, where they enjoyed plays, fine dining, strolls in Hyde Park, and the numerous fruits of a prosperous capitalist society. The lower classes, by contrast, scratched out a tenuous existence in the vast and violent East End, an area described by Arthur Morrison as “an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things.”2 The East End was plagued by disease, poor sanitation, poverty, excessive drinking, and crime, and novelists and social commentators typically wrote of the area in what can only be described as apocalyptic terms.

  For example, in The Anarchists, the novelist J. H. Mackay likened the East End to a monster. “Like the enormous black, motionless, giant Kraken, the poverty of London lies there in lurking silence,” he wrote, “and encircles with its mighty tentacles the life and wealth of the City and of the West End.”3 If London was the beating heart of the empire, then the East End was a festering sore, like a cancer, lurking menacingly at its core.

  As recently as the early eighteenth century, the East End was a largely undeveloped area, with fields surrounding the area of Commercial Road. The region had historically been outside the old walls of the City of London and was a place for industries whose manufacturing processes were considered too noxious and/or dangerous to be performed within the city proper, such as leather tanning and gunpowder production. By the nineteenth century, however, the East End had developed into the overcrowded slum of dark alleys and criminality for which it gained a peculiar notoriety.

  At the very stinking center of the area was Whitechapel, a district named after a small white parish church called St. Mary Matfelon. By the late nineteenth century, Whitechapel was the epicenter of crime in London, known for its brawling public houses (pubs), prostitution, robbery, and violence. At night it was dark, the back streets lit by a few sparsely located gas lamps, many of which were only partly working or not working at all. To outsiders, Whitechapel was a forbidding place, considered the breeding ground for countless varieties of immoral behavior. As the Reverend Samuel Barnett said, “Dark passages lend themselves to evil deeds.”4 Indeed, the whole East End was a veritable maze of alleys, courtyards, tunnels, and streets, and at night danger seemed to lurk everywhere. In one instance, when a Texas policeman visited Inspector Henry Moore in Whitechapel, presuming to give the experienced London detective advice on how to catch Jack the Ripper, Moore took his guest to one of the murder sites, a warren called Castle Alley. Once there, the Texan exclaimed, “I apologize. I never saw anything like it before. We’ve nothing like it in all America.” Inspector Moore knew the area well and claimed that Whitechapel was called the “three F’s district, fried fish and fights.”5 He was known to carry a cane painted to look like maple—it was actually made of iron.

  By 1888, the year of the Ripper murders, Great Britain had been in a state of economic depression for more than a decade, and falling food prices had caused thousands of poor rural farm workers to move to the cities in search of jobs. Poverty and unemployment hit hardest in the East End. In 1887–1889 in Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Mile End, and the Docklands, more than 150,000 residents, or 35 percent of the population, scraped out a meager existence “on or below the level of subsistence.”6 The legions of unemployed fought a daily battle to survive, and thanks to a weak labor market, those who had work did not fare much better. Many of the East End’s inhabitants toiled away in low-paying jobs at match mills, chemical plants, distilleries, gasworks, and breweries, while others worked as tailors, carmen, factory workers, or bootmakers. Thousands of others were casual dock laborers, who would show up at the docks every morning to stand in a crowd of desperate job seekers, each hoping to get chosen for a day’s work. Others worked in one of the area’s many slau
ghterhouses. Such work lent an air of savagery to the district, as a letter by Reverend Samuel Barnett to the Times illustrated. “At present animals are daily slaughtered in the midst of Whitechapel,” he wrote, “the butchers with their blood stains are familiar among the street passengers, and sights are common which tend to brutalize ignorant natures.”7 Although working conditions across the board were generally abominable, industrial capitalists profited from the situation by exploiting the cheap labor and intense competition for jobs. Labor-organizing and unionist tendencies were suppressed, until by the 1880s, there was a general distrust of capitalism by the East End’s working classes.8

  On the other side of the great divide, the propertied classes of London’s West End (much like their counterparts in Russia) were becoming increasingly worried about the perceived threat of social revolution. Such fears seemed about to become a reality in February 1886, when a protest meeting in Trafalgar Square by a group called the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) got out of hand, and rumors spread that East End socialists and the unemployed were descending on Westminster to wreak vengeance on the upper classes. This caused a brief terror in the West End, but the rumors turned out to be exaggerated. Another protest by the SDF and large numbers of unemployed Irish in November 1887 degenerated into a riot, which was so violently suppressed by Foot Guards and Life Guards that it became known as Bloody Sunday.9 Class tension was an ever-present facet of London life in this period, and more clashes between the police and “vagrants” were to follow.