by Paul Roland
But even the most naive reformer must have conceded that the sheer scale of the problem was beyond the powers of the police to control, or even to contain. Whitechapel alone had 63 brothels and boasted in excess of 1,200 prostitutes.
Many older women resorted to selling themselves for as little as 4d to pay for a night’s lodgings. The most desperate settled for 2d, the price of sharing a crowded room slumped over a rope in a doss house. It was only marginally more comfortable than sleeping in the street. Binny described such wretches as being ‘bloated, dissipated, and brutal in appearance; others pale and wasted by want and suffering . . . they often indulge in the grossest indecencies . . . with old grey-headed men on the very edge of the grave. Many of these women are old convicted thieves of sixty years of age upwards. Strange to say, old men and boys go with these withered crones, and sometimes fashionable gentlemen on a lark are to be seen walking arm in arm with them, and even to enter their houses.’
The patronage of these ‘fashionable gentlemen’ led some of the younger women to hope that they might one day be rescued from the streets by a wealthy man. But too often their fate was to die of consumption, starvation or drink. For a few, fate had something far worse in store.
The East End
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’
(Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)
On the afternoon of 6 August 1888, just hours before the first Whitechapel murder, the Bank Holiday crowd at Alexandra Palace were treated to a number of diverting entertainments, one of which involved a certain Professor Baldwin parachuting from a hot air balloon suspended 305m (1,000ft) above the crowd.
Had the fearless professor instead offered flights over the capital to anyone brave enough to climb into the basket, their delight would surely have turned to disbelief as the balloon drifted over the squalid streets of the East End. With its warren of narrow, shabby alleyways, smoke-blackened tenements, derelict warehouses and gutters awash with raw effluent, Whitechapel, Spitalfields and Aldgate looked as if they had been gouged out of the dark heart of Calcutta and deposited just a stone’s throw from the centre of the Empire in a gesture of defiance. This festering sore of criminality and vice was not merely considered an affront to genteel sensibilities; the pillars of polite society argued it was also threatening to infect the more affluent parts of the city and disrupt the social order of the Empire from within.
Even on that mild, wet August Bank Holiday afternoon, Whitechapel and its environs appeared dusted with fuller’s earth. The long, featureless rows of terraced housing, their windows blind with grime, were uniformly grey with only the dull red bricks, open doorways and faded curtains to distinguish each grim dwelling from its neighbour. On the main thoroughfare horse-drawn wagons clattered over cobbles, passing a rude assortment of shops, many bearing the name of their foreign proprietors who had fled persecution in Russia and eastern Europe. And on almost every corner a public house offered a respite from reality behind the frosted glass with the promise of a sentimental song interrupted by a brawl in the public bar which might spill out onto the street.
Off the main thoroughfare the air was thick with the acrid stench of rotting fruit, fresh fish and roasting chestnuts. The inhabitants were accustomed to the noise of hawkers’ cries competing with barrel organs, street performers, soapbox preachers and a wide selection of drunkards yelling abuse at the world in general. Everywhere the East End was heaving with humanity and reeking of dilapidation and decay.
A cruel place
Contrary to such pictures of the East End painted by Dickens and his contemporaries, Victorian England was a far less violent place in the years between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War than in the previous half-century. In fact, reported incidents of murder were approximately half what they had been in the previous period. But random cruelty was a feature of daily life south and east of the River Thames. There is some truth in the accusation made by certain contemporary writers that the inhabitants of Whitechapel were inured to brutality from an early age. Slaughterhouses were open to the streets and children would dare one another to sneak in to see the animals having their throats slit.
It was said that inhabitants were so familiar with the sounds of drunken brawls and domestic disputes that they had become deaf to cries for help and immune to the suffering of their fellow citizens. As George Sims, author of Horrible London, remarked, ‘The spirit of murder hovers over this spot . . . Down from one dark court rings a cry of murder, and a woman, her face hideously gashed, makes across the narrow road, pursued by a howling madman. It is only a drunken husband having a row with his wife.’
But before the end of the year even the most world-weary resident would be sickened by the horrors which spilt on to the streets of Whitechapel.
A tour of Whitechapel
‘A horrible black labyrinth, think many people, reeking from end to end with the vilest exhalations; its streets, mere kennels of horrid putrefaction; its every wall, its every object, slimy with the indigenous ooze of the place; swarming with human vermin, whose trade is robbery, and whose recreation is murder; the catacombs of London darker, more tortuous, and more dangerous than those of Rome, and supersaturated with foul life. Others imagine Whitechapel in a pitiful aspect. Outcast London. Black and nasty still, a wilderness of crazy dens into which pallid wastrels crawl to die; where several families lie in each fetid room, and fathers, mothers, and children watch each other starve; where bony, blear-eyed wretches, with everything beautiful, brave, and worthy crushed out of them, and nothing of the glory and nobleness and jollity of this world within the range of their crippled senses, rasp away their puny lives in the sty of the sweater. Such spots as these there certainly are in Whitechapel, and in other places, but generalities are rarely true, and when applied to a district of London so large as that comprised under the name of Whitechapel, never. For Whitechapel, as understood colloquially, goes some distance beyond the bounds set by the parish authorities of St Mary, and includes much of Aldgate and Spitalfields, besides a not inconsiderable fragment of Mile End.
We make a small excursion into Mansell Street, which is quiet. All about here, and in Great Ailie Street, Tenter Street, and their vicinities, the houses are old, large, of the very shabbiest-genteel aspect, and with a great appearance of being snobbishly ashamed of the odd trades to which many of their rooms are devoted. Shirt-making in buried basements, packing-case, or, perhaps, cardboard box-making, on the ground-floor; and glimpses of very dirty bald heads, bending over cobbling, or the sorting of “old clo’,” through the cracked and rag-stuffed upper windows. Jewish names – Isaacs, Levy, Israel, Jacobs, Rubinsky, Moses, Aaron – wherever names appear, and frequent inscriptions in the homologous letters of Hebrew. Many of these inscriptions are on the windows of eating-houses, whose interior mysteries are hidden by muslin curtains; and we occasionally find a shop full of Hebrew books, and showing in its window remarkable little nick-nacks appertaining to synagogue worship, amid plaited tapers of various colours.
Petticoat Lane is before us . . . As Hog Lane, with its sunny hedgerows and one or two pleasant citizens’ houses; as Petticoat Lane, with its thievery and squalor and old clothes; and as Middlesex Street, with its warehouses, this thoroughfare has lived through a chequered existence . . .
At the end we have Artillery Lane, Gun Street, and Raven Row. Dirt, rag shops and small beer-houses. Sometimes a peep down a clogged grating, or over a permanent shutter, into the contaminated breath of a sweater’s lair, where poisoned human lives are spun into the apparel which clothes the bodies of wholesome men. Through White’s Row, or Dorset Street, with its hideous associations, into busy Commercial Street, with its traffic, its warehouses, its early lights, and the bright spot in this unpleasant neighbourhood, Toynbee Hall and Institute, and St Jude’s Church, whose beautiful wall-mosaic of Time, Death, and Judgement has its own significance here, in the centre of the scattered spots which are the recent sites of satanic horrors.
> Fashion Street, Flower and Dean Street, Thrawl Street, Wentworth Street. Through which shall we go to Brick Lane? Black and noisome, the road sticky with slime, and palsied houses, rotten from chimney to cellar, leaning together, apparently by the mere coherence of their ingrained corruption. Dark, silent, uneasy shadows passing and crossing – human vermin in this reeking sink, like goblin exhalations from all that is noxious around. Women with sunken, black-rimmed eyes, whose pallid faces appear and vanish by the light of an occasional gas-lamp, and look so like ill-covered skulls that we start at their stare. Horrible London? Yes.
Some years ago, it was fashionable to “slum” – to walk gingerly about in dirty streets, with great heroism, and go back West again, with a firm conviction that “something must be done”. And something must. Children must not be left in these unscoured corners. Their fathers and mothers are hopeless, and must not be allowed to rear a numerous and equally hopeless race. Light the streets better, certainly; but what use in building better houses for these poor creatures to render as foul as those that stand? The inmates may ruin the character of a house, but no house can alter the character of its inmates.’
Extract from The Palace Journal by Arthur G. Morrison (24 April, 1889), which vividly illustrates the terrible poverty and squalor of life in Whitechapel towards the end of the 19th century.
Chapter 2: The Murder Casebook
In defiance of the overcast skies, many middle-class Londoners made the most of August Bank Holiday Monday, 1888, by taking day trips to the south coast or excursions into the countryside. Those who chose to remain in the capital were spoilt for choice as to how to pass the day. Almost all the customary attractions were within a short omnibus ride of the West End and were still a novelty. For half a crown a family of four could spend an agreeable afternoon gaping at the animals in the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, marvelling at the lifelike figures at Madame Tussaud’s or taking in a tour at the Tower of London and still have change for refreshments and the ride home. A couple of shillings would cover entrance to the exotic orchid houses at Crystal Palace or the manicured gardens at Kew, while edification and culture could be had for free at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum in fashionable Kensington or at the National Portrait Gallery, which relocated from South Kensington to Bethnal Green in 1885. The advantage of museums was that they offered both diversion and shelter should the skies open unexpectedly.
In contrast, many of those living south of the river enjoyed the day in a more modest manner. Martha Tabram (aka Martha Turner) and her friend Pearly Poll spent the day cadging drinks in various public houses around Whitechapel. Martha, who for some reason had told her new friend that her name was ‘Emma’, was a plump, 39-year-old married mother of two teenage sons, with a swarthy complexion. She had been separated from her husband Henry, a foreman furniture packer, for nine years and had been living with William Turner, a carpenter, in George Street, Whitechapel, supplementing their income by hawking trinkets for a halfpenny an item. But her fondness for ale, and anything stronger when she could afford it, had led her to rely on prostitution. Turner had given up on her and Martha was in need of a few coppers for a room. Poll’s offer to team up for the night must have seemed like a practical solution.
By 10pm they had befriended two soldiers at the Angel and Crown, who said they were stationed at the Tower of London, and were confident of procuring enough change to pay for their lodgings. Shortly before midnight the pair separated. Polly led her client into nearby Angel Alley and Martha staggered arm in arm with her customer round the corner to George Yard, off Whitechapel High Street. Half an hour later Polly and her punter bid each other goodnight and she wandered off giving no further thought to her friend.
A body discovered
It was not until 4.45am the next morning that John Reaves, a tenant at 37 George Yard Buildings, came upon the lifeless body of a woman sprawled on the first-floor landing as he made his way to work. It was Martha Tabram. She was lying on her back with her legs apart and her long black jacket, dark green skirt and brown petticoat pushed up to the waist, suggesting that she had been killed while engaged in intercourse. Her fists were clenched in her death agony and thick sticky blood pooled around her on the flagstones from her black bonnet to her side-spring boots. Reaves stepped over the body and legged it down the stairs and out into the street in search of a policeman.
Under the headline ‘The Murder in Whitechapel’, the following extract from The Times, dated 10 August 1888, details what Dr Killeen, a local physician, discovered when he was called to the scene that morning. The fact that the murder went unreported for three days suggests that both the press and the police were slow to realize the significance of the Martha Tabram murder.
‘Dr T R Killeen, of 68, Brick-lane, said that he was called to the deceased, and found her dead. She had 39 stabs on the body. She had been dead some three hours. Her age was about 36, and the body was very well nourished. Witness had since made a post mortem examination of the body. The left lung was penetrated in five places, and the right lung was penetrated in two places. The heart, which was rather fatty, was penetrated in one place, and that would be sufficient to cause death. The liver was healthy, but was penetrated in five places, the spleen was penetrated in two places, and the stomach, which was perfectly healthy, was penetrated in six places. The witness did not think all the wounds were inflicted with the same instrument. The wounds generally might have been inflicted with a knife, but such an instrument could not have inflicted one of the wounds, which went through the chestbone. His opinion was that one of the wounds was inflicted by some kind of dagger, and that all of them had been caused during life. The Coroner [remarked that]…it was one of the most dreadful murders any one could imagine. The man must have been a perfect savage to inflict such a number of wounds on a defenceless woman in such a way.’
It was established that Martha had been murdered between 1.50 and 3.30am. At the coroner’s inquest, resident Elizabeth Mahonney had testified that she had returned at 1.50 to her rooms at 47 George Yard and seen no one on the landing. An hour and 40 minutes later cab driver Alfred Crow ascended the wide stone staircase to his rooms at number 35 and noticed a woman lying on the landing, but thought little of it as vagrants were in the habit of sleeping off their drink at George Yard. None of the residents had heard a sound during the night, although Mrs Hewitt, the building superintendent’s wife, had heard a cry of ‘murder’ earlier that evening, but hadn’t informed her husband as it appeared to originate from outside and such disturbances were an almost nightly occurrence in the area.
The reason no one heard the poor woman’s cry for help was addressed by the Illustrated Police News, a sensationalist tabloid which, despite the title, had no association with the authorities. It speculated that her cries had been stifled. She had been ‘throttled while being held down and the face and head being so swollen and distorted in consequence that her real features are not discernible’. The Daily News added that Dr Killeen had concluded that there may have been two assailants, one evidently left-handed and the other right-handed and that the wounds had been inflicted by two weapons, one a penknife and the other either a dagger or bayonet.
A soldier under suspicion
Suspicion immediately fell on the soldier who appeared to have been the last person to have seen Martha alive. PC Barrett, the officer who had been called to the scene by Reaves, had seen a soldier loitering in George Yard at 2am, at the time the murder might have occurred. It is very likely that this was the same soldier Martha had been keeping company with two hours earlier when she parted with Pearly Poll. When PC Barrett approached him and asked what he was doing at this hour the soldier replied that he was waiting for a friend who had gone with a woman.
PC Barrett described the soldier as a private in the Grenadier Guards who had a good conduct badge pinned to his tunic but no medals. He was in his early to mid-twenties, of average height (about 175cm/5ft 9in) with a fair complexion, dark hair and a
small brown moustache turned up at the ends. But when an identification parade was arranged at the Tower on the morning of 8 August, the constable picked out two men who verified each other’s story and were allowed to return to the ranks. That may have been Scotland Yard’s first fatal mistake. The soldiers were almost certainly the killers and, had they been questioned more thoroughly, Martha Tabram might not be acknowledged today as the Ripper’s first victim.
The body in Bucks Row
Fate was particularly cruel to Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols. She should have been safe in bed on the morning of 31 August 1888 but was instead found sprawled in the street gutted like one of the pigs in nearby Spitalfields market. She had earned her bed and board three times that day but had drunk it all away. Had she saved just a few coppers, she would not have been soliciting for her final customer of the evening when she fell foul of Jack the Ripper.
Polly Nichols was a short, stout, middle-aged, married woman with five children who had been separated from her family because of her fondness for alcohol and was forced to rely on the charitable ministrations of Lambeth Workhouse. But shortly before her death she had tried to get back on the straight and narrow by taking a position as a domestic servant to a respectable couple in Wandsworth. Her new-found employment enabled her to leave the workhouse and find lodgings at Thrawl Street with an elderly room-mate who described her as clean, quiet and inoffensive, so long as she was sober. Her new employers evidently found her agreeable too and something of her state of mind at the time can be gleaned from her final letter to her estranged husband, which paints a very different picture of a penniless streetwalker to the blowsy, foul-mouthed bawd of popular fiction.