by Bob Biderman
Eight Weeks in the Summer
of Victoria’s Jubilee
The Queen, the Jews and a Murder
BOB BIDERMAN
First published in Great Britain
Black Apollo Press 2012
Germinal Productions, Ltd
Copyright © Bob Biderman 2012
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available at the British Library. All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
eISBN: 9781906448264
Paperback ISBN: 9781900355711
For information about our other titles, please go to our website:
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CONTENTS
Introduction
7
The Crime
15
Part 1: Weeks 1-4, The Inquiry
24
Part II: Week 5, The Trial
91
Part III: Weeks 6-8, The Aftermath
174
Epilogue
310
Endnote
316
Bibliography
317
Introduction
THE BIG RED double-decker tram clattered down Whitechapel Road, shooting sparks from its iron wheels as they grated noisily along tracks of rusty steel. Two lovers rode atop, gazing down at the bright and colourful regalia lining the boulevard, great and garish posters and signs in English and Yiddish celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee. They looked but didn’t speak. It was a lovely Sunday afternoon. The world was bright. But in the distance beckoned the unknown.
It was the year before Eric Alfred Leslie Satie composed his maddening brilliant piano composition, Gymnopedies. That is to say it was a year before he put it to paper as it was still in his head along with blazing images of undulating whiteness. In fact, it would be correct to say that as these two young people clattered along in their blood-red tram, the future Gymnopedies was in a period of advanced gestation. But they knew nothing of Gymnopedies and it knew nothing of them. And therein resides the first in a series of strangely disconnected ironies.
Those Gallic gusts which blew northward across the channel, however, were of limited duration, reaching the ears of only a few and fewer still on Whitechapel Road that summer afternoon. Sometime later, when the woman from the tram met Eleanor Marx, who had just returned from France bringing sour loaves from the Baker of the Third Republic, she might have touched the sentiment which gave rise to the musical impressionists who were starting to paint the ossicles of a generation with tonal colours never before heard, though it’s far more likely that from her East End room it would have been the sounds of a Klezmer band recently arrived from Warsaw that assaulted her.
The young woman – we’ll call her ‘Maggie’ – and her beau – we’ll call him ‘John,’ because that’s what she called him – weren’t ordinary lovers. Not that any lovers are ordinary, but these two were much less ordinary than most. This seemingly subjective observation was actually an objective fact and was true for the simple reason that John did not exist – at least not in the eyes of the world at large that year in the summer of the Queen’s Jubilee. (This was also the year that a man named Jean Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris began to wonder about one of his students who had recently returned to Vienna with a trunk full of notes which, unbeknownst to Charcot, would provide the basis for a seismic shift in thought behind the construction of the mental universe, giving new and profound meaning to the term ‘alter ego’).
For Maggie was John and John was Maggie. And love him she did – as one can only love a cerebral creation. He travelled with her wherever she went and was, in the main, her obedient servant. But there were times – ah, yes, there were times – when John was not as obedient as Maggie might have desired. Yet isn’t this true of all lovers?
However, that summer’s day on the big red tram trundling down Whitechapel Road toward the great waste at Victoria Park, John was being the solicitous gentleman – a role which Maggie had taught him to perfection. And being a solicitous gentleman that day, he lent her his masculine eyes to observe but it was her feminine hand which wrote the details of these observations into the moleskin notebook he had once given her along with a box of coloured pencils (though doing so had set them both back nearly a shilling which meant that evening they had only bread and mouldy cheese for dinner).
At the same time Maggie and John were headed for Victoria Park another character, named Z, was making his way to the great market off Wentworth Street which was known as Petticoat Lane. Z was, at that time, in his middle twenties and though it was some years since he had left his East End home to move not so many miles in physical distance (light years in mental ones) to the northwest of London, still he found his way to the market quite often of late. Something drew him back there – several things, actually. First there was money, or at least the promise of money. And second there was … something else rather vague. It had to do with that duality all of us contend with at one time or another – like the duality of Maggie and John but, in this case, also quite different. Z’s duality had more to do with the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of something you long to escape and then find that you’re attracted back because the very things you’ve tried escaping are the very things you feel you’ve lost – which causes a strange sense of emptiness. It’s one of those spiritual paradoxes that make life rather entertaining and unpredictable. And Z, being an individual with a finely developed sense of ironic humour, appreciated everything paradoxical – as long as it didn’t injure anyone (especially those he came to call his ‘People’).
Z, that day, was wearing a wrinkled shirt and an ancient cravat. He was also wearing a very dusty fedora – black – which was showing extreme signs of wear from being carelessly tossed onto chairs, tables, sofas and whatnot (but often ending up on the floor). And over his shoulders he wore a long, ill-fitting jacket – also black – that almost reached down to his knees and looked like something between a cape and an artist’s smock. (His future wife was to ask him about that jacket and the rest of his similarly ill-fitting clothes some years later, wondering aloud why he didn’t change his tailor. And he would reply that his tailor was a kind and honest schlemiel who had come over from Russia, was poor as a church-mouse, had a wife and children to support and it would kill him if Z took his business elsewhere. Fortunately for Z, his future wife understood and told him that, of course, he should never take business away from that dear, sweet man – which was also fortunate for the tailor.) Shabbiness was not out of place in the Petticoat Lane market for that was its very essence. Yet beyond the shabbiness, if one could get that far, was something remarkable. Beyond the dirt, beyond the grime, beyond the sputum, beyond the rank smells of unwashed bodies and rotting flesh, there was another world that Z found, to his great surprise, was far more fascinating than the one he had received in exchange for having taken several outstanding scholastic prizes thanks to a razor-sharp, parrot-like memory that had been honed to perfection as a child by his maternal grandmother.
Thus Z saw this amazing market with very different eyes than did Maggie. For Maggie, Petticoat Lane was dark, dingy and
unpleasant – a dank and dirty place where foreign people with ghostly faces and bony arms and hands with sores that never seemed to heal would fix you in their terrifying gaze (trying to sell you something you never really wanted) sending a diabolical chill down her back that caused a twitch in her Achilles tendon.
Yet, curiously, Maggie came to Petticoat Lane with the same regularity as Z himself and a similar objective – though different reasons. For Maggie had taken it upon herself to right the wrongs of the world. And for her there was something terribly wrong about a place where people lived with so much filth and squalor – something terribly evil. Of course, having been brought up in the quiet protection of the English countryside, Maggie, as a sensitive, God-fearing, Christian would have found it quite shocking and unsettling to see the other side of Britain in the 1880s. Whereas for Z, it was home.
Z had also come to Petticoat Lane to observe. But he saw the market very differently. Yes, he saw the dirt and the grime – though, as we have noted from his demeanour, dirt didn’t particularly offend him. And, to him, the people of the market didn’t look particularly foreign – unless he looked foreign to himself when he gazed languidly into his mirror. Of course there had been times when he did look foreign to himself, especially in the early days when he had first moved away and found himself surrounded by people who had a distinctly ‘Christian’ look (whatever that meant, he wasn’t sure). As the days went on, finding more and more of his friends and colleagues had that ‘distinctly Christian look,’ he tried to curry such an appearance in himself. Not knowing precisely what that ‘look’ entailed presented problems, for if you can’t precisely define something it’s very hard to emulate it (and even if you do finally come up with a definition, it’s still hard to ‘be’ it – for ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ are essentially two different things). Finally, realising the problem was insoluble, he gave up. Curiously, the people at the market felt he actually had succeeded in this bodily transformation which they saw more correctly as a metaphysical process of transition. His new friends, however, noticed nothing different. To them he was still ‘exotic’ no matter what tie he chose, how he combed his hair, what paper he read or even how he pronounced his vowels.
Z was, so to speak, between two worlds. He had grown up in one but had chosen to live in another. Though he had left the world of his father by choice, he never truly left it in his head. There were things about his former life he rejected and there were things he cherished (although what he accepted and rejected was not always clear to him). So when he returned, he returned both as a denizen and a stranger. He spoke the languages (some of them at least) but had lost much of the meaning. Maggie, on the other hand, spoke only English (and only a certain kind of English) and thus had to create her own meaning.
Not that the meaning Maggie had imposed on the Petticoat Lane market was entirely incorrect. There was poverty and there was misery. Yet that was only part of it. Later, when they had met, Z tried to explain the difference between Petticoat Lane and the Jago which was only a stone’s throw away. The Jago, he told her, was poor and impoverished. The people who worked Petticoat Lane and lived in the densely packed streets and alleys of Whitechapel were poor and impoverished, too. But they were poor in a different way. In the Jago people were abjectly poor. Poverty for them was a way of life and they accepted it in a manner that a terminally ill leper might accept his disease, continuing to beg until his arms finally fell from their sockets. The people of Whitechapel (and here he was speaking of his People) saw poverty as a temporary situation which related strictly to immediate bodily comforts and could change from day to day according to circumstances. These people, Z told her, had three things the people in the Jago had not and those three things were Faith and Hope and an Abiding Sense of History.
Of course, Maggie responded, they have their God. And that is what is missing in the Jago. But even God might weep at the number of children who found their way to the morgue because of disease brought on through malnutrition.
At first Z hadn’t told her that ‘their God’ was also his God because at the time he wasn’t absolutely sure their God was his God anymore – though it had been clear to her from the start there was something beyond curiosity linking him to Whitechapel. And therefore he interested her all the more because he came to exemplify in her mind what good could happen through the transforming nature of education.
They had met in the summer of 1887. By that time both had gone some distance down the road which was to bring them, in one case, a certain amount of fame and glory and, in the other, several interesting but short-lived books which would rest, neglected, on library shelves for the foreseeable future.
Z, at the time, was going through something of a crisis which would occur now and again throughout his peripatetic life. He was torn between two vastly different worlds. On the one hand he had made friends with a rather interesting set of people from his student days who liked to call themselves the ‘New Humorists’ (though the word ‘humour’ to them wasn’t necessarily synonymous with ‘funny’). They were young and free-thinking, nurtured on Huxley and Spencer, and quite into the vanguard stream of literature coming to them from both America and the Continent. They would take long, languid boat trips down the Thames discussing the curiously absurd nature of life and would sketch out whole series of frothy articles for a magazine venture they planned to call ‘The Idler’.
On the other hand, Z was by nature a serious man. Certainly, he could see the humorous side of life and that was doubtless one of his saving graces. But he was also drawn to another world that went far beyond the sunny days basking in the light of Imperial England. That side of him had not yet been fully developed, but it was beginning to emerge.
For her part, Maggie had been attracted by the likes of Charles Booth, Beatrice Potter and Fredrick Engels – who the following year would write back after reading her first novel which she had sent him unsolicited, saying simply, ‘Not quite real enough.’ She considered herself a Christian Socialist – more Christian than socialist, which is why she once made her hero into a Salvation Army officer. But she, too, was a committed writer even though she had little sense of ‘career.’ She wanted to write to help change the world. Z wanted to write to help define it. (Later he too would write to change the world and that’s when he found his problems became manifest.)
This story, however, isn’t about them as individuals but a brief and fascinating encounter that changed their lives and their perspective on themselves, England and the world. The consequences of this adventure, which is soon to unfold, and the meaning of what eventually happened may not have been understood for some time to come – if ever. So this is a tale left for us to tell – for certainly it’s a story worth telling. And it happened in eight weeks, during Jubilee Summer.
The Crime
June 27, 1887
BATTY STREET. The name had a touch of the peculiar, leading one to suspect there was something uniquely deranged about it. But that was far from the case. It was, in fact, one of many dreary little streets with an uncertain water supply that ran south off Commercial Road; a street of tired row houses facing a similar row of dark facades without the hint of a smile – in defiance, perhaps, of its slightly wacky name.
Number 16 had already been awake for a good five hours by the time Leah Lipski and her upstairs lodger, Mrs Levy, came home after a quick shopping trip to Petticoat Lane. Outside, in the passageway, an elderly woman – Mrs Rubenstein – was seated in her chair, making the most of the morning sun as she tended her little grandchild, the youngest of Leah Lipski’s brood of five. So focused was she on her duties, looking out for the child, and, perhaps, dreaming of life back in the Polish shtetl, that she didn’t notice her daughter approach with Mrs Levy – the widow who shared the upstairs room with her. Besides, at that hour (nearly 11 AM) there was quite a bit of competition for her attention; the street life, even on a narrow road like this had all the appearances of an on
going beggar’s carnival with a constant stream of characters passing in review – from organ grinders, with their flea-bitten monkeys, prying another farthing out of the penniless neighbourhood, to the barrow merchants pushing their little carts, selling anything from Lucifer matches to rancid meat thinly disguised as ‘cat food’.
Going inside the bleak entrance of the three story house, Leah Lipski walked through the narrow hallway, past the door on the left which led to the room in which most of her family squeezed together and continued along to the kitchen with its bare oak table and skinny larder and bunk beds tucked into a little cranny where two of her children slept. Stopping to put down her provisions she noticed the metal pot was still filled to the brim with the coffee she had fetched from a nearby shop earlier that morning when one of her lodgers – a young man named Israel – had asked her for his breakfast at around half past eight. She had thought it curious the coffee was still there since he had seemed so anxious when she saw him earlier that day. But he was in such a state – perhaps he had forgotten.
When she pictured this young man with lipid blue eyes, she recalled the time some eighteen months before when Katz, the umbrella maker, had sent the ‘greener’ around to her former house, just a few streets away, to ask for room and board. Standing awkwardly, pale and wane in his rumpled clothes, he had the same look of dream-like disorientation that she knew so well from others straight off the boat who had waited before her door. What made him different was his manner; boyishly shy, there was a sense of quiet dignity about him confirming her carefully nurtured instincts that this was someone she could trust to pay the rent on time, and, as importantly, to keep the delicate balance which was necessary in maintaining such a densely populated household. She quickly sized him up as one of those determined young men, without financial resources or physical prowess, who still had a naïve certainty that through sacrifice and hard work they could succeed where their fathers had failed, and carve out a business from nothing but sweat and grizzle.