CHAPTER TWO
A MURDERER STRIKES IN WHITECHAPEL
As I’ve said, the East End became a special place for me as soon as I got to know it. It is a fascinating area, a distillation of its own rich, evolving history. It feels like it’s constantly in flux, bending and changing with the waves of different people who have lived there, the new and the old rubbing along together, old tenements and warehouses holding their own against the new glass and steel skyscrapers I have watched going up over the last twenty-five years I have been going there.
If you look hard, you’ll see old alleyways and cobbled streets, narrow, dimly lit, just as they were in Victorian times. I have seen rats scuttling along Gunthorpe Street, off Whitechapel High Street, and felt transported back to the nineteenth century. And like them, I feel at home in these dingy streets.
Nowadays the area is enjoying a renaissance as a trendy hangout, but when I first went there it was more squalid, the streets often strewn with rubbish, much quieter than it is today, with transactions between pimps and prostitutes openly conducted on street corners. The lights were dimmer, the sound of music more muted, and the others who hung around the area were locals or, like me and my friends, poor students who liked the lack of pretension and the cheap food.
Today there are two contrasting East Ends. There is the area around Brick Lane where the most recent immigrants are Asian, and where the shops and restaurants cater for them and the outsiders who come in search of a good curry, where the old synagogues are now mosques. Then there is the area around the four streets that have survived and been preserved: Princelet Street, Hanbury Street, Wilkes Street and Fournier Street, where the beautiful four- or five-storey houses built for the Huguenots (themselves religious refugees, escaping persecution in France) and dating back to the seventeenth century now sell for millions of pounds each. In Victorian times these were crumbling, rat-infested tenements with whole families in one room, sometimes with a couple of pigs for company. When I first visited, a quarter of a century ago, those now-restored houses were still slums, many of them in a terrible state of disrepair, the rooms sub-let to a polyglot mix of tenants, only slightly more salubrious than in Victorian times.
Now they attract artists like Tracey Emin and Gilbert & George, the actress Keira Knightley, there are bustling cafes with well-heeled clienteles, pubs that attract a young, right-on crowd, fashion mavens tottering along cobbles in their preposterous shoes. The gentrification is creeping, with lofts on sale for seven figures in Commercial Street and Brick Lane.
Over the years that I have been going to the East End, I have seen the architectural landscape change drastically. I’ve watched warehouses become galleries and restaurants and the old buildings being dwarfed by new and modern office blocks and apartments. Hoardings and cranes are a familiar sight, as every small space between the old and new buildings is developed as prime real estate. I have also seen the Ripper ‘industry’, which has existed since a few years after the murders, grow into a big business, with upwards of ten different walking tours a day being escorted around the area, some in daylight and others at dusk, to add to the atmosphere. Some tours have as many as forty people, others as few as ten; some are in Spanish, German, French. Small coaches struggle round the tight corners, as guides tell the stories of the crimes on their intercoms. Early in the twentieth century the tours were fewer and sparser, but still attracted the curious, reputedly including Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens’s son, also called Charles. Nowadays, with tourism and more leisure time, the tours have become so popular that the East End streets swarm with them, guides swerving down side streets to avoid mingling with other tours.
It is just another phase: the East End has been through so many incarnations over the centuries. But the most interesting time to me is the 1880s, the era that spawned the Ripper Murders. In those times the neighbourhoods of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, as well as nearby districts like Bethnal Green, St George in the East and Poplar, had some of the most scandalously poor living conditions in London. The East End was, in parts, a vast, dirty, overcrowded slum, struggling to cope with the sheer number of people choosing to live there. Much of this was down to the fact that it was home to many of the so-called ‘stink industries’, such as breweries, slaughterhouses and sugar refineries, which had attracted many migrant workers to the area during the industrial revolution.
The City of London refused to allow such noxious trades within its walls, so instead they went to the outlying districts. This resulted in a polluted East End, dirty with soot and other industrial residue that blackened the walls of buildings and the lungs of its inhabitants. Its proximity to the mighty Thames and the growing docks ensured that immigrants arriving in London would find their first point of entry in places like Wapping, Poplar and of course Whitechapel: the French Huguenots in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (who built those amazing town houses), the Irish fleeing the potato famine in the mid-1800s and, later, eastern European Jewish refugees. The Jewish incursion into the East End is vital to the story of the Ripper, so let’s look at what caused it.
When, in March 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated, there were unfounded rumours that the perpetrators were Jewish, and this led to a wave of maltreatment and persecution against the Jews in Eastern Europe, known as ‘pogroms’ (the word comes from Russian Yiddish, and means ‘destruction’). Thousands of Jewish Russians, Germans, Hungarians and, significantly, Poles, fled their homelands in the hope of setting up a newer and safer life elsewhere.
One of the places they chose was London, the largest and most powerful city in the world at that time, and cheaper to reach than America, where many of them dreamed of settling. The area of London outside the old walls of the City already had small Jewish communities and there were a number of synagogues which had been established for many years such as those at Duke’s Place, Aldgate and Bevis Marks at the edge of the East End. Although the Jewish community already living there tried to discourage immigration because of the lack of housing and jobs – even advertising in newspapers in Russia and Poland telling Jews not to come – the dire conditions in Eastern Europe left no choice. However difficult life in the slums of the East End was, it was better than the constant threat to their lives in countries under Russian domination.
The influx was persistent and dramatic – by 1887, Whitechapel was home to 28,000 Jewish immigrants alone, amounting to almost half of the entire population of Jews in the East End. Ten per cent of the total East End population were eastern European, settling into culturally confined ‘ghettos’ and finding work where they could, mostly in sweated trades like tailoring. But it was not easy, for regular work was already difficult to come by, and the swelling population made unemployment a problem for many. The arrival of the Jewish immigrants caused resentment among the indigenous population and the smaller number of other immigrants who had long ago been assimilated into the fabric of the East End. The Jews, willing to work all hours for poor pay (out of necessity) were blamed for pushing others out of the job market, for aggravating the precarious housing situation and for all the other ills of the area.
For centuries the East End had been a great melting pot, and until this massive flood of immigrants it had dealt well with incomers, but now it was stretched to breaking point, and anyone who could afford to move away did, leaving a population who were, by and large, scraping by. Survival was the key, food and lodging the most important aims. Typhoid, cholera and venereal disease were rife, and the area had the highest birth rate, the highest death rate and the lowest marriage rate in the whole of London.
Housing was the big problem. Whereas parts of Whitechapel and Spitalfields had once been prosperous and semi-rural, demand throughout the early to mid-1800s resulted in gardens being built over to provide accommodation, often only accessible from narrow alleyways and courts. These squalid dead ends were the preserve of the desperately poor and the criminal element, who could use the anonymity of an enclosed passageway
to hide from the law. Sanitary facilities were appalling: for example, in one Spitalfields tenement near Brick Lane, sixteen families shared a single outside lavatory which did not seem to be cleaned regularly and which, shockingly, was next to the only source of running water for the inhabitants, a single water tap.
Children were born and brought up here, although 20 per cent of them failed to reach their first birthday. They worked to earn money as soon as they could, sweeping pavements, cleaning windows and scavenging food from the rubbish in the streets, until they were big enough to work in the ‘sweaters’ (sweat shops) doing tailoring and other work for long hours and very low pay. Some of them formed small bands of skilful pickpockets.
More prosperous Victorians never ventured to the area they nicknamed ‘the dustbin’. The writer Jack London called it ‘the Abyss’. When he went undercover to write about the poverty of the East End in 1902 he wrote of the filth and vermin, and that when rain fell ‘it was more like grease than water.’
A major scourge in the area was the Common Lodging Houses, or ‘dosshouses’ as they were commonly called, properties owned by private landlords and catering for the transient and the homeless. Spitalfields in particular had a great concentration of such houses and their owners, who lived elsewhere and appointed ‘wardens’ or ‘keepers’ to run them, were happy to take money from any available source.
Each lodging house had to be licensed and was subject to police supervision, and had to display a placard of how many beds were available. Men and women were supposed to be housed separately, paying four pence for a bed in a dormitory, and there were double beds for ‘married’ couples, in effect a place for prostitutes to take clients, costing eight pence. Some stories suggest that for as little as two pence, the desperate could sit on a bench and sleep upright, supported by a rope stretched across the room in front of them, although this was not part of the official licence. A house, which today would comfortably house a family in four bedrooms, would regularly have more than 50 beds for rent, and larger buildings crammed in as many as 300, with children sneaking in to sleep with their mothers.
Each person rented their bed for one night at a time, and unless they could guarantee their next night’s rent there was no provision for them to leave their belongings: men and women put all the clothes they owned on their backs in the morning. Each day was a battle to scrape together the money for a bed. The law said that every bed had to have clean sheets once a week, and that every day the windows would be opened at 10 a.m. to clear the fetid air, but even if the lodging-house keeper stuck to the rules, you can imagine how unpleasant it was by the standards of today.
Food was for sale from the dosshouse wardens, making more profit for the owner, and there were communal cooking facilities in the grubby kitchen, and in the better ones there was a stove or fire for warmth. There were frequent fights and squabbles over food.
The neighbourhood around Commercial Street, which had been built in the 1850s and ran from Whitechapel, through Spitalfields, to Shoreditch, was particularly notorious and names like Thrawl Street, Flower and Dean Street and Dorset Street would become synonymous with the three vs: vice, violence and villainy. There were 700 beds for rent in Dorset Street alone, and 1,150 in Flower and Dean Street. It’s hard to imagine today the desperation that the population of these places felt, struggling every day to find the pennies to survive.
The men looked for casual work; many were involved in petty crime and others in serious lawbreaking, attacking passers-by and making the area dangerous after dark. The women tried to eke out a meagre existence on a day-to-day basis, perhaps selling flowers, embroidery, matches or, when things were really harsh, themselves. Without anywhere to take their clients, they would use dark, secluded alleyways and courts, and they charged as little as four pence for their services, the money for a night’s sleep. Prostitution was illegal, but the police turned a blind eye, believing that if they routed it out of the East End it would spread into more respectable areas. The women were sitting targets for street robbers and were often victims of violence.
Two of the women whose stories I would come to know well, the Ripper’s victims Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman, were effectively sent to their deaths, having been turned away from the dosshouses where they wanted to sleep because they did not have enough money. The punter who went with them into the dark alleys that night should have been their ticket for a night’s rest: instead he sent them to a permanent rest, in his own horrific way, leaving his trademark on their malnourished, neglected bodies.
The prostitutes were known collectively as ‘the unfortunates’, and that’s the name I prefer to use, because most of them were not full-time vice workers, they preferred other work, but they were sucked into it when the choice was selling their bodies or starvation and sleeping on the streets. At the time the Ripper struck there were an estimated 1,200 women available for hire in the East End.
As well as the dosshouses, there were rooms to be rented, and here some of the women of the East End managed to keep their children. But most of the unfortunates had lost their families, and at times spoke wistfully of children and husbands. Being abandoned by the men in their lives was a common theme, and frequently the cause of the abandonment was drink: a very large proportion of the women plying their trade in the East End were alcoholics.
So another important feature of the area was the pubs – many of the dosshouse owners, always out to make as much money as they could, ran the pubs as well. Seeing the Ten Bells in the Johnny Depp film jumped out at me: I had passed it many times. Other pubs in the area date back at least as far as the Ten Bells, which is now a trendy haunt for City workers, but even more have been demolished or closed and the building changed to become shops or cafes. There were, in the Ripper’s day, literally pubs on every street corner and more in between. Alcohol was as important to the men and women at the very bottom of the poverty ladder as food and lodging. Getting drunk – and alcohol was cheap – was an easy way out of the misery of life, and the pubs were a good source of trade for the prostitutes, who would trawl from one to another looking for punters. We know that at least some of the Ripper’s victims had imbibed a plentiful amount of strong liquor before their deaths: I can only hope it helped to anaesthetize them a little from the savage attack he made on them.
So what about the victims themselves?
The first two murders in the sequence known as the Whitechapel Murders are generally thought not to be the work of Jack the Ripper. For years it has been debated as to whether they are his handiwork, but most experts accept that, in fact, there are five Ripper deaths, and these two are not among them. I, for one, am not convinced: I think the second of the two may be his first killing, even though it does not conform completely to his later pattern. Whoever was responsible for these murders, they were both violent, horrific deaths, and they sparked the fear and hysteria which began to stalk through the East End, meaning that by the time of the five ‘official’ Ripper deaths the area was on high alert.
They also shone a light on conditions for the very poor in the East End, stirring an underlying concern for the welfare of those who lived below the poverty line and raising urgent questions about what should be done to sort out the problems: perhaps the only good legacy of the Ripper is that a society that had turned a blind eye to the horrors of poverty was forced to confront it.
The victims of these first two murders both lived in the dark heart of the Spitalfields dosshouse district and died close by in mysterious and appalling circumstances. They were typical of the type of women the Ripper would later choose to murder, so their stories are important.
Between 4 and 5 a.m. on the morning of 3 April 1888, the day after a particularly wet and cold bank holiday Monday, Emma Smith stumbled into her lodging house at 18 George Street. She was in a terrible state; her face was bloodied, one of her ears had been torn and was hanging off, and she was suffering excruciating pain from an injury to her abdomen. She had hobbled back with her shaw
l stuffed between her legs to soak up the blood.
She managed to tell Mary Russell, the deputy of the lodging house, that she had been set upon by a gang of three men who had assaulted her and robbed her of what little money she had. Even though she did not describe her attackers, she did say that one of them looked to be about nineteen years of age. Mrs Russell, together with another lodger, Annie Lee, convinced Emma that she needed to go to the London Hospital on Whitechapel Road. As they made their way there, with the two women supporting Emma, they passed down Brick Lane to Osborn Street. Emma pointed out the spot where the attack occurred, by a cocoa and mustard factory at the corner of Wentworth Street and Brick Lane. It is a junction I had crossed many times as I walked along Brick Lane, oblivious to what had happened there. Then, as now, the spot was hardly secluded: it was at a crossroads and at the time of the assault it would likely have been busy with people returning home after their bank holiday celebrations.
Emma, who was forty-five at the time, must have been a powerfully strong woman to have made it back to the lodging house and then on to the hospital. There she was attended by Dr George Haslip and she told him in more detail what had happened to her. She had been walking by the church of St Mary Matfelon on the Whitechapel Road at about 1.30 a.m. and, seeing a small group of men ahead, had crossed the road to avoid them, probably because they appeared unruly or threatening. Unfortunately, they followed her up Osborn Street, a reasonably spacious thoroughfare that segued into Brick Lane. They attacked her outside the factory. Dr Haslip’s examination revealed the horrific extent of Emma’s injury to the lower abdomen: a hard instrument, probably a stick, had been thrust into her vagina with such force that it had ruptured the perineum.
Emma’s condition worsened, and she eventually lapsed into unconsciousness. There was little the hospital could do and at 9 a.m. the following morning, 4 April, she died, the cause of death being peritonitis, a direct result of that brutal injury.
Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 Page 3