London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City

by Gray, Drew D.

  There were also several Irish women among those charged that week in September 1888. Mary O'Connor was charged with wounding; Catherine Donovan, Elizabeth Donelly and Catherine McGam with being drunk and fighting; and Catherine Murphy with assaulting PC Harrison as he attempted to arrest her. Murphy was given ten days hard labour for her offence while Donelly and McGam were bound over to keep the peace for six months. Mary Ann Bowen was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct, which probably meant that she had been soliciting as a prostitute and had been picked up by a policeman on patrol.99 Many of London's whores were poor Irish women who had turned to prostitution in desperation or had been forced into the trade by unscrupulous pimps.However, prostitution was a step too far for some women while for the elderly it was not even an option. In January of 1880 Julia O'Donnell was brought before the lord mayor of London at the Mansion House Justice Room. Julia was aged 60 and had been begging in Fenchurch Street with what appeared to be a baby in her arms. A policeman watched her solicit some loose change from a respectable couple by asking for `a copper for dear baby's sake'. He approached her and discovered that all she was carrying was a bundle of rags. She denied the charge but was found guilty of obtaining money by false pretences and given seven days' imprisonment."'

  Another Irish resident of the East End found herself in court before the magistrate because she was also struggling to make ends meet. Kate McCarty was 22 and had left her sickly child at home while she went out to borrow enough money to pay the week's rent. Instead of a loan she had been given a day's work that she presumably felt she could not refuse. Unfortunately for her the doctor who had been treating her one-year-old child for measles had made a house call only to find the baby `on a bed, exposed to the cold, without fire or anyone to look after it' He had the child taken to the workhouse and Kate was arrested when she came home at nine o'clock. She had left her sick baby alone for 12 hours but promised not to do so in future and so the magistrate, after reprimanding her, let her go.'°' The desperation that drove a mother to abandon her baby in order to get a precious day's work speaks volumes to the distress that many Irish families experienced in the capital in the late nineteenth century.

  In an amusing footnote to these examples of drunken, violent and criminal Irish men and women is a case from the Southwark Police Court. A man described as `respectable' and certainly not Irish was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in Borough Market. Thomas Hodges, who told the court he was a schoolmaster, had been found by a patrolling policeman shouting out `Ireland for ever!' When he approached him Hodges declared, `I am a supporter of Mr. Parnell. I defy you all!' and refused to go home quietly. In court he was notably repentant and said it must have been all the talk of Home Rule in the press that had led him to make such a display of himself. He was fined 20s, which he paid, and he left the court promising that `I won't be a Home Ruler again' 102 The pages of the London press are rich in examples of Irishmen and women coming before the magistracy and higher courts of the capital. It is one stereotype of the Irish in England that they were drunken, violent and criminal. This has led to some speculation that the Ripper himself was a local Irish immigrant as one of the most contentious Ripper letters was allegedly written in an Irish dialect.

  On 16 October 1888 the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, George Lusk, received a parcel by post. Inside was a piece of kidney (later identified at the London Hospital as human) and the following letter:

  From Hell

  Mr Lusk,

  Sor

  I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman praserved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody nife that took it out if you will only wate a whil longer

  signed

  catch me when you can Mishter Lusk

  On 19 October the Pall Mall Gazette reported the arrival of the parcel and reminded its readers that the fourth victim of the murderer, Catherine Eddowes, had had her left kidney removed. It did not mention the above letter but instead referred to a postcard that George Lusk had received two days earlier."' The `From Hell' missive was soon reported in the London and regional press, all of them carrying a similar description of the contents of the box as well as Lusk's initial belief that it was a nasty hoax. The paper also made the link with the letter and the slaying of Catherine Eddowes. However, none of them suggested that the writer was an Irishman. During the panic surrounding the murders many arrests were made and not all of them in London. The Manchester Times reported the release of a man who had been detained in County Derry on suspicion of his involvement in the killings but most of the focus of the investigation appears to have been on the Jewish community and the occasional medical doctor that was chased by local mobs.104 The use of `Sor' and `Mishter' might suggest the writer was either Irish or wished to make it appear that he was Irish and, as at least two ripperologists have noted, the terminology was consistent with contemporary expressions of Irish dialect.'°5

  The name Lusk is Celtic in origins, and so it may be that George Lusk originated from Ireland or had Irish ancestry. If the writer of the letter was a hoaxer they may have been deliberately teasing the committee chairman in their choice of inflection. Nevertheless it seems highly likely that all the letters and postcards received by the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, the police and the newspapers were fake or hoax, written by cranks and attention seekers and so despite the perceived credibility of this missive (because of the kidney it contained) we should also consider it to be a `red herring' The police at the time certainly appear to have thought little of it, noting that any medical student was capable of obtaining a kidney that resembled that belonging to a 45-year-old woman with a drink problem. Whatever the truth of the matter the continual pressure of the investigation, and the series of unpleasant letters and postcards, had their effect on George Lusk. On 20 October he resigned, along with the rest of the committee members, citing the `lack of moral and material support they have experienced during their philanthropic efforts to benefit their fellow The suggestion that the writer of the letter was Irish emerged a few days later. Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper reported that a man with an Irish accent asked for Mr Lusk's address after seeing a reward notice in the window of a leather workshop in the Mile End Road. Miss Marsh, looking after the shop in the absence of her father, was able to give the man Mr Lusk's address as Alderney Road but she did not know the house number. The parcel, when it arrived, did not have a number on it (presumably the postman knew George Lusk and where he lived)."' Apart from this, however, there is little to suggest that either the police or local people believed the killer was an Irishman.

  London was home to other immigrant communities as well as those from other parts of England, Scotland and Wales. The Irish and Jews were by far the largest groups but there were settlers from China, Italy and Portugal as well as from Africa and India. Britain's position as the world's largest empire ensured that London was a magnet for those seeking new opportunites, adventure or escape from oppression. The reporting of the activities of immigrants often reveals the prevalent prejudices of contemporaries. An extract from Lloyd's Weekly is indicative of this stereotyping. The paper reported `A Chinese funeral in London, noteworthy on this occasion because it was officiated over by an English clergyman. The groom, Sut Poo, was a resident of Limehouse, where most of the Chinese population of London (and indeed of Britain) lived in the 1880s. This community was fairly small in comparison with the Jews of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green but it was significant. According to the census returns for 1881 there were 665 Chinese-born `aliens' in England and Wales and a sixth of these lived in London, most on Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields both situated at the heart of London's Docks.1°8

  Unsurprisingly most of the Chinese community here worked as seamen, historically with the East India Company from the eighteenth century onwards. The newspaper described Limehouse as a 'Chinese colony, where many opium dens are known to exist'; it reported that fireworks were set off from the cortege and that there
was plenty of food (consumed with chopsticks, naturally) and Chinese gin. The emphasis throughout was on the precise ceremony of the Chinese, something that was frequently noted in any discussion of China and its peoples.109 Their `difference' is apparent, as is their exoticism to the English viewer. In a report from the early twentieth century the Pall Mall Gazette reflected the view that `one looks much like another to European eyes'. The reporter referred to the increasing numbers of `John Chinaman' coming to the capital and willfully makes fun of the hard to pronounce Mandarin names by declaring that this `gentleman we shall call Wun Lung for want of a better By the 1900s many of those working in Limehouse were operating in laundries (another stereotype for music hall performers and pantomime artists to exploit in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) but remained close to their original settlement and its association with the sea.

  Large numbers of what contemporaries referred to as `Asiatic' sailors worked as crew on British merchant ships throughout the nineteenth century. The British India and the Peninsula and Oriental (P&O) Steam Navigation Company employed something in excess of 17,000 `Asiatics' according to reports in the 1880s. Of these some were Chinese while others are routinely described as `Lascars' In some instances this appears to be a generic term for Asian, African and other foreign seamen serving on British ships, while other reports suggest that Lascars were those sailors who came from the Indian subcontinent, in particular from the `Gulf of Kutch and the fishing villages north and south of Bombay `Lascar' is also mentioned by contemporaries as the Mohammedan name for a 'seaman' and so could in fact cover a wide range of nationalities and ethnicities. During the panic surrounding the Whitechapel murders the idea that the killer was a Lascar from one of the merchant fleets in the port of London was given initial credibility but with little evidence. The notion that a sailor was the culprit has arisen because several of the witnesses spoke of seeing men with a sailor's cap or `having the appearance of a sailor, but there is again very little direct evidence that `Jack' was a nautical man or a `foreign' one at that.

  The desire to blame `Johnny foreigner' for the outrageous crimes committed by the Whitechapel murderer should not surprise any modern reader; we still look to scapegoat the `other' for the problems of our own society. London contained many foreign nationals at the time of the murders: Italians in Saffron Hill, Portuguese sailors, Americans working in the travelling Wild West show, as well as Germans, French and other Europeans. Indeed London was a cosmopolitan city at the heart of empire. However, we should not neglect its indigenous local population, and therefore we can close this section by looking at the native Eastender, the Cockney, a character no less the product of prejudice, myth and stereotyping than the East End Jew, Irishman or Chinese.

  As we noted earlier, the history of the East End of London has evolved from a blending of fact and fiction, reality and myth, to leave us with an image of an area that is in many ways a construction rather than a reflection of the truth. This is also largely true of the traditional inhabitants of the East End, the London born `cockneys. In popular culture the archetypal Cockney was the pearly king or queen, resplendent in their sequin covered suits and oyster feathered hats. They evoke a cheerful bravado, a 'never say die' spirit and a sense of fun. There is a sense that `pearlies' represent the nineteenth-century East End, an East End that has been lost with the impact of two world wars and the redevelopment of the London Docklands in the late twentieth century. However, the amiable Cockney with his love of the music hall and drinking, his patriotism and mistrust of authority was really a product of the last years of the century - the period immediately after the Ripper murders - and in some ways a last ditch defence of a culture that was in decline."'

  It would seem that Cockneys have grown out of late nineteenth-century music hall culture. The pearly king is a throwback to a medieval past, a characterization of a 'lord of misrule, representing a challenge to authority (and so helping to ingrain the `cheeky Cockney' imagery)."' An alternative view is that the `pearlies' had their origins in the rough and tumble of the market place where they emerged as `the uncrowned Kings of their respective communities' 114 This association with the market is perpetuated within EastEnders, the BBC's longrunning soap opera that creates a fictitious community in Albert Square centred around a street market that bears little reality to the modern East End. In the early twentieth century the Cockney has been associated with the costermonger, the small trader operating from a barrow on the streets and selling a range of goods or services. But the link between costers and `pearlies; and costers and Cockneys, has its roots in the 1890s and beyond and not wholly in the Victorian period. Mayhew saw the costers as members of the so-called `dangerous classes', while the Cockneys of mid-century were focused instead on `the plebeian smartness of the young journeyman, shop assistant, or lawyer's clerk"" Instead of barrow boy, the Cockney was a `swell' with money in his pockets and a desire for a good time and fashionable clothes. As one writer to the theatre press remarked: `Nowadays your attorney's clerk - apparently struck by some "levelling up" theory of democracy - is dissatisfied unless he can dress as well as the son of a This image of the Cockney was further embedded by the creation of the character of 'Arry by E. J. Milliken in Punch from 1877 onwards. 'Arry represented the city dweller, and in one of his first appearances he is writing to his friend Charlie who is stuck in the countryside, urging him to return for `some sport' in the city.117 'Arry was patriotic, conservative and embraced jingoism in the war fever of 1878; he had little time for Gladstone and the Liberals.

  'Arry came to represent the stereotype of the Cockney in late Victorian Britain, reaching far beyond the pages of Punch. Musical hall adopted him as a character in a very popular song that extolled his characteristics as a virtue, not as the satire that Milliken presumably intended.

  As Gareth Stedman Jones has pointed out, 'Arry was the `symbolic point of tension between civilisation and the masses' In 'Arry the Cockney we have the realization that the working man that has earned the right to vote under the 1866 Reform Act will not necessarily exercise that right in the way in which the middle classes hoped he would. The genie was out of the bottle and to some extent 'Arry knows this and is prepared to enjoy his new found power within the electoral system. He takes part in demonstrations - even those that involve the socialists to which he holds no allegiance - because he can. His views are ultra conservative as this exchange with his country `chum' about the rights of women shows:

  Women's rights and that moonshine, my pippin. Thinks I'there's a barney on here' And wherever there is hens on the crow, 'Arry's good for an hinnings, - no fear! Needn't tell you my views on the subject. The petticoats want keepin' down,

  Like niggers and Radicals, CHARLIE; but spouters in bonnet and gown, While they haven't got votes are amusing. They can reel it off and no kid. Though I hold their right line is to marry, bile taters, and do as their bid.119

  By the last decades of the nineteenth century the cockney character that 'Arry represented was a largely negative one and, according to Stedman Jones, was in need of a political and cultural makeover. This was achieved by the coming together of elite and popular culture in the music hall of the 1890s and in the creation of a new stereotype of the Cockney, the hard working costermonger as played by Albert Chevalier. Chevalier used a version of cockney dialect that, while not representing an accurate depiction of coster patter or street slang, gave his audience the sense of cockney speech and made him a more acceptable and engaging presence to the popular theatre-going audience. Chevalier was a less grating character than 'Arry. Easier to embrace and identify with, he was also altogether less threatening to the political classes. Gradually the image of the Cockney changed - from being brash outsiders they were brought back into the fold of the nation. After the upheaval of the London Dock Strike in 1889, and the long-standing fears of a revolutionary residuum, the Cockney emerged in the early twentieth century as a reassuring figure of optimism for early Edwardians. As Stedman Jones notes, th
is reassuring image was recreated in the 1940s as the Ministry of Information drew upon the `cockney spirit"with its emphasis on "cheerfulness" and the "carry-on spirit"; as the dominant motif in its attempt to sustain morale during the Blitz'.izo

  It is very hard to see the real Eastender, the indigenous resident of East London, among all these competing images of foreign migrants and local Cockneys. Most of the population of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green was white and English-born, although London attracted migrants from all over the British Isles. Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth both mapped the community of the East End but these give us views of the inhabitants filtered through a middle-class perspective. The overwhelming image we are left with is that of the poverty of the area and the desperate conditions of its people. This we will address in some detail later and so in finishing this look at the people and geography of the East End we might explore one event in which the real denizens of the east come to the surface in a more positive and proactive way. These were not the flash'Arry's of Punch nor the furtive criminals of Mayhew's London, Labour, and the London Poor (1861), but instead the Match Girls who took on Bryant and May and won.

  STRIKING A BLOW FOR THE WORKERS: THE MATCH GIRLS' STRIKE AT BRYANT AND MAY'S

  On 23 June 1888, the Fabian socialist Annie Besant published an expose of conditions at the Bryant and May match factory in the Bow Road, Tower Hamlets. On Friday, 6 July the Aberdeen Weekly Journal reported that:

  A strike of match girls in the employment of Messers. Bryant and May has taken place under peculiar circumstances. Mrs. Besant having, in a publication known as the `Link, given particulars of a system of inflicting fines on the match girls for trivial offences, two girls suspected by the firm of supplying the information on which the article was based were dismissed. The remainder of the female employes [sic] failing to sign a document controverting Mrs Besant's statements, came out on strike yesterday.121