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

by Gray, Drew D.

  There was an ongoing argument about the value of offering rewards for information with Warren, initially at least, very much against it. The local chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, George Lusk, accused the government and police of double standards in not stumping up a reward when they had been quick to do so after Lord Cavendish's murder by Irish republicans years earlier. To many in the East End it seemed that elite lives were given a much higher value than those of the poor `unfortunates' that serviced the sexual needs and desires of poor and well-to-do male Londoners. Following the murder of Catherine Eddowes on City territory in Mitre Square and a well-attended public meeting where the government and police were loudly criticized, the City of London Police and the lord mayor put up rewards of £500. Warren again told Matthews that a reward was `of no practical use' before then advocating one of £5,000. Matthews smelt a rat, and in a private letter he complained that: `Anybody can offer a reward and it is the first idea of ignorant people. But more is expected of the CID. Sir C. W. will not save himself, or put himself right with the public, by merely suggesting that. 141

  In the eighteenth century rewards were commonplace. Individuals could earn rewards from the successful prosecution of felons for a number of property crimes including highway robbery and horse theft.49 This had led to corrupt practices and the emergence of blood-money scandals, the last of which had been exposed in 1816 and 1818. Concerns about entrepreneurial policing had been voiced in the debates about the creation of a professional force and the government was understandably reluctant not to return to the practice in the 1880s. However, some individuals - Samuel Montagu MP and George Lusk himself - did offer private rewards for information about the Whitechapel murders.50 The home secretary himself was clear that offering a reward would be a retrograde step, and he told the House of Commons his reasons for this. The Home Office had frequently offered rewards but had abandoned the practice in 1884 after a conspiracy to conceal a bomb at the German Embassy (and then frame an individual using planted evidence) was exposed. Matthews went on to add, with some justification given the numerous examples of persons being accused in the streets, that while there might be occasions when rewards were necessary (for example, to illicit information about the whereabouts of the murderer if his identity became known):

  In the Whitechapel murders, not only are these conditions wanting at present, but the danger of a false charge is intensified by the excited state of public feelings'

  The panic that was induced by the killings and the police's failure to catch the murderer manifested itself in a number of ways and touched areas far beyond the capital. An elderly man walking in an unspecified mining district of England was accosted by a group of `seven stout collier lads. They accused him of being Jack the Ripper' and demanded he `come along wi' us' to the nearest police station. In Whitechapel a young chestnut seller reported a bizarre encounter with a man who claimed to know a great deal about the killing of Mary Kelly. The stranger was dressed `like a gentleman' complete with tall silk hat and a black shiny bag that apparently contained, `Something the Ladies don't like'.'' A German visitor walking down the Whitechapel Road was chased by a mob after a woman stared into his face and screamed `he's Jack the Ripper!' and a plainclothes police officer suffered similar manhandling by local `roughs' who mistook him for the notorious killer on account of his `low broad-brim hat of rather singular appearance'53 An arrest was made on the Old Kent Road when a man left a bag at a public house that was found to contain a variety of sharp implements including a 'very sharp dagger' and two pairs of `very curious looking Meanwhile even as far away as Glasgow the police were warned to be on their guard at night; `if they hear any cry of distress, such as "Help," "Murder," or "Police," they are to hasten to the spot at once. This latter request seems somewhat unnecessary since presumably they might have been expected to undertake that particular task without the need for a circular to remind them.55

  It should be remembered that aside from the Ripper inquiry the Met still had to continue to perform a great deal of mundane daily tasks. The Pall Mall Gazette's concerted attack on the London force included a detailed analysis of police numbers and roles. The Met numbered some 13,315 men in 1888 and 1,500 of these were patrolling the streets in four-hour shifts between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. before 5,000 night officers came on to relieve them. A further 464 officers were stationed at fixed points throughout the capital during the day. Licensed cabs and other vehicles had to be checked, letters and correspondence read and answered, inquiries into crimes followed up and recorded. The Pall Mall Gazette noted that:

  In the course of the twenty-four hours they will take into custody 181 persons, of whom 40 will be drunk and disorderly, 16 simply drunk, 10 will be disorderly persons, 8 will be disorderly prostitutes, while about 4 will be arrested merely as suspicious characters, and 12 as vagrants. One-half of the arrests will be for offences against order, the other half will be criminal. Taking one day with another the police run in every twenty-four hours about 30 thieves, 18 persons guilty of assault, while there are nearly half-a-dozen persons locked up for assaults on the police nearly every day all the year round.16

  This range of activity is echoed by the records of the Thames Police Court as we saw in the previous chapter. From the surviving ledgers of the court we can see that in September 1888 policemen were bringing in large numbers of drunks, disorderly persons, prostitutes and petty thieves including a number of young boys found guilty of setting off fireworks in the streets. Many of those appearing had been accused of assault - sometimes on the police as a subsidiary to being arrested for drunkenness. The Pall Mall Gazette noted that these latter assaults nearly always resulted in convictions and the magistrates at the Thames Police Court fined offenders 10s or sent them to gaol. Overall the paper praised the average bobby on the beat, ending its report on police duties with the comment that `sufficient has been said to show that they do a very good day's work every twenty-four hours'.5' The Graphic had echoed these sentiments in 1887. Although it acknowledged that within a body of men as large as that of the Metropolitan Police there were bound to be a 'few erring mortals in their midst' there were also `men of pluck and fibre, doing their duty honestly, valiantly and well' .51

  Victorian police officers in the capital were largely drawn from the ranks of the working classes, as Haia Shpayer-Makov's important study of the late Victorian force has established.59 The constituency for police officers was the same as that for the ranks of the army - steady, reliable men who would obey their social superiors and not question orders. The early police commissioners believed that solid agricultural workers would produce the best recruits but the evidence of Shpayer-Makov's study suggests that a broader cross section of working men joined the force, many of them coming from outside of the capital. The work of a London bobby was rather dull and repetitive with an emphasis on beat patrolling over investigation and the commensurate risk of physical violence in the more dangerous areas such as St Giles and the East End. As a result, in the early years of the force many of those who had exchanged jobs as skilled members of the working classes left the Met in their droves. The force was left with `men from unskilled or semi-skilled backgrounds, for whom the police service was an avenue of upward mobility"' A career in the police represented an opportunity for steady work at a reasonable rate of pay in a period when pay and the availability of the work was subject to the fluctuations of trade and the wider economy. This probably resulted in the police being largely staffed with men of little imagination who were not well suited to the pursuit of a cunning serial murderer. However, they were generally honest, hard-working and physically strong, healthy (an advantage given that in the poorer districts of London illness and malnutrition were commonplace) and taller than average so that they were able to deal with most of the trouble they might encounter on the streets.

  Sir Charles Warren's commitment to `battalion drill' (as the Pall Mall Gazette so disparagingly dismissed it) was almost all the training new recruits recei
ved. Apart from learning how to obey orders and walk their beat at a steady pace, a new London bobby would have had to have learnt the rest of his trade on the job from his colleagues. In this, as Shpayer-Makov shows, a police culture was disseminated to the new members of the force. As Stephen Inwood's work also demonstrates local policemen therefore learnt how to police their particular areas, regardless, in some respects, of how the upper echelons wished them to operate. Naturally this closeness to the community may have led some to get a little too cosy with the locals they policed and corruption was always possible, on the other hand, however, it probably allowed them to get the information they needed to deal with more serious criminality. The imbedded antipathy towards the police from some sections of East End society was certainly a factor in the failure of the Met to catch the Ripper. In some respects the Victorian police could not win: the middle classes saw policemen as unimaginative `jobsworths' while the working classes complained that they were indiscriminate in their targets and open to bribes. Many working-class people would have probably resented being lectured by men from their own background while the middle classes expected them to behave as their servants did.

  CONCLUSION

  Could the Metropolitan Police have caught the Whitechapel killer? Why did they fail? The answer is complex but I think that history has been a little hard on the police. Serial killers are extremely rare and very hard to track. Most murderers leave clues because they kill those close to them while serial murderers choose strangers. Without the benefits of modern technology and forensic science the Victorian police were severely hamstrung and almost totally reliant upon catching `Jack' in the act. The nature of the victims meant that the murders occurred in out of the way places where few witnesses were likely to have seen anything. They were also not an organization steeped in the principles of detection, and for this Warren and his predecessors are perhaps culpable. The evolving history of policing in England, and the problematic relationship between the police and the public, meant that detectives were thought of with suspicion for much of the century. The failure of the Ripper inquiry did result in a gradual improvement in policing methods and the resignation of Warren no doubt helped this process. Thereafter the Met had a less military feel to it. One final point is worth considering in the light of the supposed failure to apprehend the murderer. If one believes that the killer was actually a poor immigrant Jew called Kosminsky (or similar) then the notion that the inquiry failed has to be revised. If Paul Begg is correct then the police did capture the Ripper but were unable to persuade an important witness, possibly Israel Schwarz, to give evidence in court. This might be another convenient device to explain why he was never prosecuted but it does have a certain credibility. The suspect was locked up in a mental asylum where he died some years later. So if perhaps the police did have their man, we will probably never know.61

  9

  London's Shadows: The Darker Side

  of the Victorian Capital

  In 1888 London was the capital of the greatest empire the world had ever known. In the opulent thoroughfares of the West End the glittering lamps illuminated the homes of the wealthy and the emporiums that provided the countless luxuries they enjoyed. Robert Cecil, the second marquis of Salisbury led the Conservative government that ruled from 1886 to 1892 and then had the dubious honour of presiding over the debacle of the South African War. At Buckingham Palace the elderly Queen Victoria had celebrated her golden jubilee the previous year. London led the world in transportation: the underground railway was 25 years old in 1888, the Paris metro was still two years away while the New York subway did not begin operating until 1904. London was also a place of entertainment with dozens of theatres and music halls offering an eager public a dazzling array of burlesque, melodramas, spectacular shows and pantomime to cater for all tastes and budgets. If you had the money then late nineteenth-century London had everything one might wish for.

  However, there was a dark side to Victorian London. In the shadows lurked all manner of vice and crime, degradation and despair. The late Victorian period had witnessed a gradual rise in criminality after a steady decline from the mid-century. There was a sense that the new police were no longer winning the war on crime and commentators questioned the leadership of the `boys in blue' On the streets of the East End the costermongers still grumbled that these `blue locusts' were more intent on disrupting their recreational habits and interfering with their attempts to scrape together a living than they were in dealing with proper villains.

  The wealth of the West was in stark contrast with the poverty of the East as Charles Booth was to discover. Booth was unconvinced by the socialist agitator Hyndeman's claim that poverty was rife in the capital and set out to deploy the new science of social investigation to prove his point. Instead he discovered that the situation was much worse than he had suspected. As armies of reformers, do-gooders, Christian missionaries and journalists swarmed into the alleys and courts of Spitalfields and Whitechapel they could see for themselves the debilitating effects of overcrowding and abject poverty. The term `unemployment' entered the dictionary in 1888 and has remained a constant measure of economic failure in Britain ever since.

  The middle-class charity visitors had differing views of the poor but most, if not all, believed that there were real problems being stored up for society in the future. Many fundamentally believed that poor living conditions, which required families to share cramped accommodation and forced brothers and sisters to sleep together, was corrupting the morals of the working classes. Incest may not have been `common' as Andrew Mearns had alleged but it was not unheard of. Cholera had been eradicated, largely thanks to John Snow's discoveries in the late 1850s, but mortality rates were still much higher in the East than in the rest of London. With desperate poverty came a retreat from Christianity and missionaries were as keen to minister to the spiritual needs of the people of the East End as they were to the `savages' of the African continent in the earlier years of the century. What the poor made of all these well-meaning Christian ladies appearing on their doorsteps is hard to judge: some may well have welcomed the attention and the attempts to help, others probably resented the intrusion into their homes. In the words of women like Margaret Tillyard we can hear the prevailing voice of a paternalistic ruling class that believed it had a duty towards those it clearly felt to be its social inferiors.

  We can be critical of individuals such as Beatrice Webb and Helen Bosanquet and accuse them of failing to understand that the real problems of nineteenthcentury society were based in the economic inequality that powered the wheels of Victorian industry and progress. Simply put, if Victorian Britain was to be the most powerful nation in the world then the capitalist system demanded sacrifices. That so many of these were concentrated in the poorer districts of the capital was an inevitable consequence of years of inequality and neglect. Despite fears that the great unwashed residuum of East London would be seduced by the type of socialist or anarchist revolutionary politics that blighted continental Europe, the worst that the capital experienced was an occupation of Trafalgar Square and a few days of rioting. Paris suffered considerably worse in the dark days of the Commune. London labour was never as well organized as the ruling classes feared and the partial extension of the franchise in 1867 and 1884 had given a semblance of power to working men.

  The Ripper murders concentrated attention on the area but it would be wrong to argue that they were responsible for dramatic change or reform. After all, men like Samuel Barnett, the rector of St Jude's, had been working quietly in the district for many years before. The model dwelling movement had been around since mid-century and had been attempting to improve conditions, as had the Cross and Torrens legislation in the last quarter. Reform had been largely ineffective, as much Victorian reform was, because it lacked a powerful body to implement it. The Metropolitan Board of Works was woefully ill-equipped to take on the improvement of centuries of slum building and private profiteering. In 1888 the London County Council was
created and arguably it was the investiture of this august body that provided the impetus for real change. That said, the social problems of the East End - exacerbated as they were by waves of overseas immigration in the last 25 years of the century - were not really addressed until after the Second World War and the introduction of social welfare policies by Atlee's Labour government.

  The press were also behind the move to improve conditions in the East End of London. Journalists such as Jack London went undercover to expose the worst excesses of doss houses. Much of this rings a little hollow to the modern reader; how much they were keen to promote change and how much they simply wanted to sell newspapers is open to question. Perhaps we should give then the benefit of the doubt and recognize that we are probably guilty of viewing the new journalism' of the nineteenth century from the perspective of our own disillusion with the tawdry modern media machine. Men like William Stead were driven by a desire to see real change and if his methods left behind martyrs to his cause like Rebecca Jarrett perhaps that is a small price to pay for ensuring that fewer teenage girls were routinely raped and abused for the gratification of wealthy Victorian gentlemen. Stead's final outing was to see him take a newly launched liner on a fateful voyage across the Atlantic. He died on the Titanic, so never got to file the copy.