They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  * See Appendix I, ‘The Parnell Frame-Up’.

  13

  A Gentleman’s Lair

  Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.

  Disraeli

  Toynbee Hall was established by the Reverend Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta in 1884. At the very hub of Whitechapel, it was conceived as a university for the poor, flourishing, in principle, upon the benevolence of the compassionate rich. ‘An East End colonisation by the well to do’ is how one contemporary magazine described it. It was a kind of intellectual Oxfam, ‘a crusade by members of old universities amid the evils and shadows of one of the most populous quarters of London’. Given the environment, it was an extraordinary campus, an outpost of the other Victorian world.

  Barnett and his wife fought ignorance like a bitter enemy. Believing the Church had ‘overslept’, they planned a cultural uplift of their Whitechapel flock, ‘under the aegis of an intellectual and artistic elite’. As Toynbee Hall grew, dozens of the most famous names in London paid their cab fares to teach, entertain, and often stay at Commercial Street in the heart of the East End.1

  There were lectures, societies, and clubs across the spectrum. If you didn’t like football you could row on the Thames with the ‘Argonauts’. ‘The work of the Entertainment Committee,’ wrote Henrietta, ‘reflects the many sided activities of which Toynbee Hall is the centre. Teachers, East End Club Members, University Extension Students, Working Men, Politicians, Men and Women of Science, Street Orderly Boys, Policemen, Railway Porters, Clergy and Philanthropists, have met in its rooms, friendships have been made, pleasure has been given [and] bonds of sympathy between many representing separate spheres of life have been strengthened.’2

  ‘It is reassuring to know,’ recorded the popular magazine Varieties in 1888, ‘that there has long been a stream of West End people, who have come to visit regularly amongst the East Enders, and that it has included some well-known illustrious names.’ Nowhere was this more focused than in the arts. The ‘Elizabethan Literary Society’ had on its committee some of the greatest writers of the day – Robert Browning, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, Algernon Swinburne and many others.

  In the visual arts the names were perhaps more impressive still. Samuel Barnett’s dream of a picture gallery was made a reality by the generosity of the Bohemian elite, and artists of every rank loaned canvases and gave their time and money. Some illustrious names hung on the walls. Many are familiar to this narrative, and read like a roster of Michael Maybrick’s intimates from the Arts Club and the Artists Volunteers. Frederick Leighton, William Holman Hunt, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John Everett Millais were represented in pictures, and often in person.

  ‘Among our hosts,’ wrote Henrietta, ‘were those whose professions afforded abundant interest, and evenings with Lady Battersea, Lord and Lady Brassy and Sir Frederick Leighton, are among treasured memories to many people who have climbed out of the degradation of Whitechapel into a purer environment.’3

  Henrietta’s fond reference to Leighton isn’t surprising. Throughout 1888, the Honorary Colonel of the Aritsts Volunteers and his creative muster were ensconced at Toynbee Hall on a variety of levels. They brought their pictures and their music, and, as will become apparent, even their military expertise.

  Music was always high on the agenda, the Hall’s professional contingent performing in club rooms as ‘opulent as any in Pall Mall’. In summer months there were open-air concerts ‘in the lighted quadrangle of St George’s Yard’. ‘At all parties we had music,’ wrote Henrietta, ‘sometimes really fine renderings: Miss Fanny Davies, by way of example, was among those who made “joyful noise” in Whitechapel.’4 Miss Davies was an exceptional young pianist, who by notable coincidence was to lease Michael Maybrick’s new house in St John’s Wood when he took off suddenly for the Isle of Wight.

  Some of London’s greatest concert stars came here to play or sing, and if they tarried too late past the chimes there were always the guest rooms, and handsomely appointed they were. If you couldn’t sleep and fancied a walk, well, you were hardly out of step with an institution that, as Varieties reported, ‘slumbered neither day or night’. ‘Every Saturday was a musical evening,’ it wrote, just as on occasion it was a night of savage murder.

  ‘Toynbee Hall was at the heart of the terrorised area,’ records an official history. ‘One of the victims had been found within a few yards of the rear of the settlement. The panic was amazing. In August [1888] a Vigilante Association was formed at St Jude’s [Barnett’s church at Toynbee Hall] and the streets were patrolled by members of the Association, which included both residents and working men. The most important discovery,’ continues the history, ‘was the deficiency of the police.’ Remarking on the utter ‘inadequacy of policing’, the author concludes of the Vigilantes: ‘they were, in fact, doing the work which should have been done by the police’, who were clearly ‘swamping’ elsewhere.5

  Barnett and his wife were beyond exasperation. ‘Into deaf ears,’ wrote Henrietta, ‘was loudly shouted the tale of the crimes of Jack the Ripper,’ and particularly when the bastard put one down outside their own back door.6

  Martha Tabram was the first in the series, murdered on a tenement stairway backing onto Toynbee Hall in the early hours of 7 August 1888. Like those to follow, she was a middle-aged drudge and part-time whore who liked gin and often needed pennies for a bed. Her life was snuffed out by multiple stab wounds, amounting to what today’s professionals call overkill.

  No official autopsy report exists for Tabram, and newspaper coverage was scant. It seems she was silenced by strangulation before the attack with a weapon began. According to the examining physician, more than one weapon was used: ‘The wounds generally might have been inflicted with a knife,’ deposed police surgeon Dr T.R. Killeen, ‘but such an instrument could not have inflicted one of the wounds which went through the chest bone.’ He thought this was caused by some kind of dagger. I think it was caused by a bayonet. There was much blood between the legs, which were positioned open, with the clothes pulled up. It seems very probable this area was focus of her assassin’s rage.

  In such a crime, the victim is the only witness you’re going to get. Tabram was the first of Jack’s outings, and (excepting Lilly Vass) one of only two he killed under a roof. The supposed last of the Whitechapel series, Mary Kelly, was also murdered off-street.

  In both cases I imagine the choice of location was deliberate, but for reasons that are entirely opposite. Kelly was obviously killed inside because by experience Jack had become cautious of the streets, but on this, his experimental debut, it was inexperience of the streets that dictated the relative safety of an inside location.

  This seemed to me a point of importance. Jack was no homicidal Einstein, and I thought his initial clumsiness – two weapons and all – might well shed some light on his place of residence. Everyone’s got to start somewhere, even a sadistic murderer, and Tabram was right at the beginning of Jack’s learning curve.

  Two of the world’s greatest detectives, the Americans Robert Ressler and Robert Keppel,7 have written extensively of the dilemma I, in my amateur way, was trying to unravel. I had a map on the wall, and got my first Whitechapel fix with cotton and pins. My ‘X’ was around the upper end of Commercial Street. Then I got lucky with another American, this time an anonymous journalist on the New York Herald. On 19 July 1889, two days after the slaying of Alice McKenzie a spit from Toynbee Hall, the Herald ran an overview by its London correspondent that reads like something ahead of its time.

  The murderer, it is reasonable to suppose, was keen enough to realise that owing to the great excitement that prevailed and the vigilance instituted after [Tabram’s] murder – which was one of the most atrocious of the lot – it would be extremely hazardous to attempt another in that immediate vicinity.

 
; He is a marvellously bold and daring man, as his crimes attest, but he is evidently possessed of caution. [After Tabram] he went a mile or more to the eastward, in Buck’s Row, to kill his next victim [Nichols]. This happened on 31 August, only three weeks after Tabram. Next he came back and mutilated his third victim [Chapman] as far westward as numbers (1) and (2) and only a few blocks to the northward. Three weeks later he jumped to about the same distance south or south-east of the centre and did the next murder the same night [Stride]. The short interval necessitated hurrying, and he went a few blocks to the westward to Mitre Square and slew number (5) [Eddowes]. Five weeks later number (6) [Kelly] was butchered only a short distance from the centre of the locality. And now number (7) [McKenzie] has her throat cut scarcely more than a stone’s throw from where number (1) suffered in like manner.

  Jack the Ripper had returned to the centre of his field of operations, around which, it is apparent, he has been hovering all the time when in murderous moods. He had been bent all along in killing his victims in that limited district of four or five blocks square. He has digressed north, east, south and west in order to puzzle the police, and very likely for reasons of personal safety.

  And furthermore, ‘He lives now or has lived in this crime centre, or at all events he has been a frequenter of it.’8

  For a nineteenth-century newspaper this is classy thinking, vivid with perception that was apparently beyond the permitted or intellectual capacity of the Metropolitan Police.

  1) Martha Tabram – St George’s Yard

  2) Mary Anne Nichols – Buck’s Row

  3) Annie Chapman – 29 Hanbury Street

  4) Elizabeth Stride – Dutfield’s Yard, Berner Street

  5) Catherine Eddowes – Mitre Square (City)

  6) Mary Jane Kelly – Miller’s Court, Dorset Street

  7) Alice McKenzie – Castle Alley

  8) Lydia Hart(?) – Pinchin Street

  9) Writing on the wall – Goulston Street

  We can’t actually go to Tabram’s crime scene at George Yard Buildings; it’s long since demolished. But this reporter from the Herald did: ‘As I stood in George Yard, looking up at the balcony where the poor woman was found with strips of her remains tied round her neck [sic], I turned and saw lights gleaming in a large building separated from the court by a high fence. On enquiry I found it was a large hall where a much talked-about black and white art exhibition was being held. It seemed incredible that an institution reflecting the light and genius of the nineteenth century could actually exist and be filled with cultivated men and women with its windows looking down into the very purlieus of London.’

  He was looking at Toynbee Hall.

  Just over a hundred years later, in 1994, a professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool had justifiably made a name for himself with his geographic profiling of criminals: ‘David Canter’s pioneering techniques are revolutionising the way police act and think about criminals.’ It is a species of thinking ‘that will change forever what it means to follow a criminal’s footsteps’.

  Canter converts criminals into a kind of personalised mathematics. Be he a rapist or a serial killer, even the most cautious of criminals has got to hang his hat somewhere, and he’s got to walk out of his door. The moment he does he’s unconsciously making a map, putting down a personalised geography that Professor Canter is able to read. A metropolis becomes an area, and areas become streets. Computers (as yet) are never better than the brain they serve, and Mr Canter is not short-changed in this department. By a process of sophisticated deduction, he’s able to find where ‘X’ marks the spot.

  Canter has looked at a likely geographic profile of the Ripper. ‘There is,’ he determines,

  the real possibility that Jack came into the area because of the opportunities available to carry out his mission. But the distribution of the crimes – around a small area, together with their timing, also offers the possibility that he had a base in the area.

  If we assume that Jack did have a base in the area circumscribed by the crimes, then various forms of analysis are open to us to see if we can find its location. One approach, for example, is to assume that the crimes describe a region of activity spreading out from the base. On this assumption the base would be in the middle of a notional circle, but human activity is rarely so symmetrical, and I have found in many studies that the centre of the circle is not the closest estimate of the offender’s home, although the home is frequently not far from the geometric centre. In the case of the Whitechapel Murders this would put the residence somewhere a little north of where Commercial Street meets Whitechapel Road.9

  Professor Canter has put his ‘X’ within yards of Toynbee Hall. His conclusion startled me, because I had a dozen or more reasons for believing Jack was operating out of that very place. I came to the same ‘X’ spot, but from an entirely different geography of reasoning.

  Jack’s Conduit Street letter, referencing ‘four more cunts to add to my little collection’, contained an enclosure. It was a small card. Its top is partially destroyed, but it’s a ticket to a ‘Song Service’ at the ‘Polytechnic’ – the Young Men’s Christian Institute at 309 Regent Street, putting it literally next to John Boosey’s offices. Written in pencil on the back of the card is ‘Jack Ripper is in town JR’.

  Anyone who cares to can read in a subliminal homosexuality here, and I’m one who does. It was ‘cunts’ Jack hated, and cunts he killed. The concert at the Young Men’s Christian Institute was for ‘Young Men Only’. It’s quite impossible of course to know if Michael Maybrick was at that performance, but from the point of view of maintaining his anonymity this card proved to be a foolish move. Jack didn’t enclose it by accident – he scrawled his name on its verso. Did something in his psyche oblige him to advertise his presence at this place? In my view it was because his ego was bigger than his secret, and it became a side door that will lead us right back into Toynbee Hall.

  The Young Men’s Christian Institute was a kind of poor boys’ university. Although orientated towards industry, it also offered a variety of apprenticeships. If you were a youth of ambition you could hasten along and learn yourself a trade. You could go to classes in bootmaking, book-keeping, and even beekeeping. One course in bootmaking, beginning in October 1888, cost five shillings. We know all about it because for some reason somebody mailed a flyer about bootmaking at the Polytechnic to the City of London Police.

  The making of boots was incidental to my interest. What interested me was why this supposedly independent correspondent should choose to focus attention on the same institution singled out by Jack.

  The Polytechnic was founded by a remarkable Victorian called Quintin Hogg. His family’s wealth put him through Eton, and it was there that he fell under a ‘deep religious influence’ that was to order the rest of his life. At eighteen he left school and headed to London with the intention of entering business. But it was the metropolis itself that was to become his vocation. ‘Stirred to his depths by the sight of poverty and misery’, he determined to do something about it. Thereafter his time was divided between his father’s house in Carlton Gardens and the children of London’s slums.10

  These kids, the ‘street Arabs’, were the inspiration behind Oliver Twist, a detested underclass of infant criminals who knew nothing but brutality and fed out of the gutter like dogs. Hogg’s efforts to help them were initially met with derision and hostility. Never daunted, he built them a school where bare feet got shoes and thieving hands learned a trade. ‘Mr Hogg had already laid down the lines on which his work has since been carried out.’ A quarter of a century later these principles were realised in the polytechnic he built at 309 Regent Street, then the largest of its kind in the world.

  I ran into a lot of names while researching Hogg and his institute, and one of them was someone I didn’t even know I was looking for. But it turned up repeatedly, and was a name I remembered from somewhere: ‘the Reverend Richard Whittington’. Cut from the same Christian cloth as
Hogg, Whittington was a mathematical master at the Merchant Taylors’ School. In the latter half of the nineteenth century he had attempted to organise a version of what Hogg had now so magnificently achieved: ‘to establish in every city parish, as part of the church organisation, evening classes for young men, where the ordinary subjects of commercial education should be very cheaply taught’.11 Whittington ‘gave ungrudgingly all his scanty leisure to teaching and administering at the evening classes’. But the reason Richard Whittington interested me was that in the City of London Ripper archive there is a letter signed ‘Richard Whittington the Second’.

  Whittington was a famous teacher of underprivileged boys. Was ‘Richard Whittington the Second’ similarly engaged? Did he have some sort of association with poor boys, and consider himself a teacher? ‘The motivations behind the acts of a madman possess their own logic,’ wrote Dr James Brussel, when describing ‘the hidden mathematics of the disturbed mind’.12

  So what was the ‘mathematics’ here? Here is the full text of the letter.

  Leeds Sundy Januy 27th 1889

  To the Chief Constable

  City of London

  (Sir) I posted a letter in Leeds about 13th November 1888 wrote in red ink Directed it to the Chief Constable City of London would you be so kind by Return of Post if you received that same letter

  Yours truely

  Richard Whittington the Second

  I can confirm that they did. It’s also in the City of London archives, posted from Leeds and dated 13 November 1888.

  ‘Whittington’ could not have sent his second letter if he hadn’t written the first. Neither was ever published, and he must therefore be the same man. His first (unsigned text) from Leeds itself refers to a postcard mailed from Folkestone two days before.