Children walked the streets barefoot and wearing rags. Baby farming was common, as was skinning, the seizing of a child too young to resist and removing and then selling his or her clothes.
Despite the Education Act of 1870, which made schooling compulsory for children aged between five and thirteen, many families were unable to either pay the school fee – about one or two pence per week – or spare their children, simply because by the age of five most of them were already working and their small income was essential for the survival of the family. Those children who did attend school were taught only the basics: girls were expected to learn domestic skills and the boys the three Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic.
The principal form of entertainment for the masses was turning up at places like Tyburn – where Marble Arch now stands – to watch the frequent public executions. The Tyburn Tree stood in various forms for over 700 years, and in that time well over fifty thousand men, women and children died at the end of its ropes. Capital punishment was applied to a range of so-called crimes that was simply breath-taking, ranging from the theft of goods valued at less than one penny to consorting with gypsies, and neither age nor sex had any bearing on the punishment. Children under ten years old were executed just as frequently as male and female adults.
Unemployment was a major problem. At the London docks, some ten thousand men would appear each day although there were only about six thousand available jobs. In other locations, hundreds of men would compete, and frequently fight, for a small handful of positions. Women and children of both sexes were frequently forced into prostitution simply to survive, because the alternative was starvation and sleeping rough. At common lodgings, or doss houses, payment for a bed was by cash, and for many women selling their body for ten minutes on the streets would provide the few coppers they needed to pay for these most basic and appalling of accommodations.
A bed in a doss house – which meant just that, a bed, in a large room that might be occupied by as many as sixty or seventy other people at the same time – cost about four pence a night, or slightly less than the price of a ticket on an omnibus from Cricklewood to Oxford Circus. There were hundreds of such doss houses in the East End, some licensed but most not. Five shillings would buy a cheap room in a basic lodging house for a week. A labourer in steady work and with a good job could earn as much as three pounds a week, but most brought home a lot less than this.
As well as what might be termed casual prostitution, there were also women for whom this was their principal employment, their way of life. By 1870, there were estimated to be 1,200 full-time prostitutes operating in the Whitechapel area alone, and more than sixty brothels. According to a contemporary source, in one street alone, in a line of thirty-five houses, thirty-two were known to be brothels. In another area near Whitechapel there were forty-three brothels housing over 400 ‘unfortunates’ or ‘fallen women’, as prostitutes were then known, some of them as young as twelve.
Homelessness was endemic, not least because the Artisans and Dwelling Act of 1875 had seen many of the slum dwellings demolished. But few of the working-class accommodations that were intended to be erected in their place had been built. In some cases the sites simply remained vacant, many for years, and on other sites commercial establishments were built instead. And some landlords of what replacement properties were built were charging rents that put the accommodation out of the financial reach of the very people for whom they were intended.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the city faced an economic crisis, which resulted in frequent demonstrations on the streets, especially in the area around Trafalgar Square, which was seen as the symbolic location where the starving and homeless of the East End met the well-fed and wealthy inhabitants of the West End.
And all this was the reality at a time when Britain was far and away the richest nation on earth, and London seen as the greatest city in the world. By 1870, Britain’s volume of foreign trade was four times greater than that of the developing United States, and also greater than that of Germany, France and Italy combined, and the British Empire was still expanding.
This, then, was the London that Charles Warren had been so unexpectedly appointed to police as its most senior officer. He had major problems to face, and not just because of conditions in the city: the police force he had inherited was incompetent, disillusioned and riddled with corruption.
For any man, even an experienced law officer, this would have represented a serious challenge, but Warren faced a number of additional difficulties. He didn’t get on with his political master, the Home Secretary, and his attempts to introduce more military-style procedures into the police force, in an effort to instil a sense of discipline and root out corruption, met with considerable and continuing resistance.
The low point of his time in office had occurred on 13 November the previous year, at what became known as the Bloody Sunday demonstration in Trafalgar Square, a protest against coercion in Ireland, which Warren had ultimately been forced to break up. But he’d used overwhelming force against the 10,000-odd marchers: some 4,000 police officers, 600 mounted police and Life Guards, and three hundred infantrymen. At least three people were killed and hundreds injured when the policemen and troops waded in to disperse the demonstrators, using fists, boots, rifle butts and clubs.
Warren was vilified in the press over his handling of the incident, and in truth he could have managed the situation much better. After that, things quietened down slightly in the city, and for a time Warren began to think that the worst was over. His political masters apparently believed the same thing, because on 7 January 1888 Warren was awarded a KCB – Knight Commander of the Bath.
But, actually, Sir Charles Warren’s problems were only just beginning.
Thursday, 2 August 1888
London
A slim, dark haired man in his mid thirties leaned against one of the trees which lined Whitehall Place and stared across and down the street. At the far end, the imposing and completely unmistakable sight of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben dominated the road. Most of the old Palace of Westminster had been destroyed in a serious fire in October 1834, and this new building erected in its place. The freestanding clock tower, which had already become something of a symbol of London and Britain itself, had been completed thirty years earlier, in April 1858, and the clock and bells installed the following year.
But it was neither the palace nor the clock which held the man’s attention.
On the opposite side of the road stood a large and imposing building. The lower two storeys were constructed of white stone, with two further storeys above them, the whole surmounted by a roof of dark grey, almost black, tiles, itself studded by three rows of windows which indicated the presence of additional floors. The official address of the building, a former private house, was 4 Whitehall Place, but almost nobody referred to it by that name, because the structure had two entrances. At the rear of the building was a street called Great Scotland Yard, on which the public entrance to the headquarters of the Police of the Metropolis was located, and over the half century that the police had been based there, the expression ‘Scotland Yard’ had become synonymous with both the building and the organization which occupied it.
Alexei Pedachenko had been waiting patiently in the street for almost an hour, and had every intention of remaining there for the rest of the day if necessary, because that afternoon he wanted to see his prey.
In Jerusalem, it had taken him less time than he had expected to confirm that the man who had carried out the excavations – and they had been, by any definition, illegal excavations because Pedachenko had seen the tunnels which had been created – around and under the Temple Mount, was an Army officer named Charles Warren. As far as he could tell from his researches in Jerusalem, nobody else had done any digging, approved or illegal, anywhere in the vicinity. That meant that Warren must be the man who had taken possession of the menorah.
And as soon as he’d established that fact to his own satis
faction, Pedachenko had contacted Moscow and advised his superiors that for personal reasons he needed to be relieved of his duties in Jerusalem for a period of twelve months. He reasoned that if he couldn’t track down the menorah within that period of time, he would probably never find it, and he was trying to leave the door open so that he would be able to find employment with the Okhrana again if his search failed.
If he succeeded, which he confidently expected to do, he wouldn’t care about ever working again, because he had already calculated that the probable value of the gold from which the relic had been fabricated would be more than enough to ensure that he would immediately be able to retire. And if he didn’t need to sell the object as bullion, but could sell it as the ancient menorah of the Jews, then its value would be so high that he had no idea how to even begin to calculate it.
As he had expected, permission was granted very swiftly by Moscow. His career in the Okhrana had been highly successful to date, and he was confident that the organization would not want to lose him.
But even before that particular letter arrived in Jerusalem, Pedachenko had already set in motion a number of enquiries intended to find out where Warren was, and exactly what he was doing.
Because already he knew that the man was a serving officer in the British Army, the Russian had been prepared to travel to Africa or wherever else the Englishman had been posted, and that had been one of his major concerns. He had been worried that if Warren was serving on a campaign somewhere out in the field, perhaps in the African bush, he would almost certainly not have the menorah with him: it would have been placed in his bank or some other safe location pending his return. So when he discovered that Warren was not only in Britain, but was actually being employed in a civilian capacity in London, he guessed that both the man and the menorah would be easy enough to track down.
He’d arrived in London at the end of June, and spent a few nights in a modest hotel. During his career with the Okhrana, Pedachenko had used his position to accumulate adequate funds from a variety of illegal activities to which he had been paid to turn a blind eye, and could actually afford the very best of accommodation, but he had decided to maintain a low profile from the first.
Then he moved out into a comfortable furnished lodging near the centre of the city, not far from Charing Cross railway station. The building was a tall, five-storey residence, and Pedachenko took half of the ground floor, which comprised a small drawing room, a double bedroom, a tiny study and a very basic kitchen that was only a little bigger. The bathroom and lavatory were on the same floor, at the back of the house, and he shared these facilities with the lodger on the other side of the ground floor of the property.
And once he had established himself in the house, he set about locating his quarry.
The civilian job to which Warren had been appointed had come as a surprise to Pedachenko, and not an entirely pleasant one. He had expected the man to have been serving somewhere in the city in a military capacity, not heading a civilian unit. And he’d also realized that, with an entire police force under Warren’s command, it might be a lot more difficult to achieve his objective than he had expected.
If the commissioner was always surrounded by squads of officers, simply getting close enough to him to pass him a message might have proved impossible. But that hadn’t been the case: getting in contact with Warren was clearly not going to be difficult. Persuading him to hand over the menorah would, of course, be an entirely different matter, but after mulling over the problem for about a month, Pedachenko now believed that he had come up with a plan that would work. It was at once both crude and brutal – which appealed to the Russian’s nature – but it would also prove to be exquisitely sophisticated and force Warren into an impossible position. That, at least, was Pedachenko’s belief.
His inspiration, oddly enough, was an event which had occurred earlier that year, on 2 April, in Spitalfields, and which he had only found out about from reading an old newspaper he had discovered when he moved into his lodgings, and which he had then investigated further. It wasn’t so much the event itself which had inspired him, but more the reaction of the people of the East End of London to it.
He had spent much of the intervening time walking the streets of the city, getting his bearings and identifying locations which he thought would be suitable if the new commissioner refused to accede to his demand from the start. Knowing something about Warren, he didn’t expect the man to give in without a fight, and he was, in truth, rather relishing the struggle which he guessed was to come.
Pedachenko already knew where Charles Warren lived. He’d followed him back to his home address from Scotland Yard several times, sometimes on foot and occasionally in a carriage, and believed that he had established the man’s routine with a fair degree of accuracy. He’d also done what he could to build as complete a picture as he could of Warren. He knew he’d been married since September 1864 to a woman named Fanny Margaretta Haydon, that he was a devout Anglican – a mark of the man’s weakness, in Pedachenko’s opinion – and was also a keen Freemason. That final piece of information had provided a further refinement he decided he could use to fuel the plan he was about to put into practice.
In fact, he’d had several ideas, but they were all variations on the same theme, a theme which he was quite convinced would eventually be enough to persuade Warren to hand over the menorah, because as far as he could see it would leave the man with absolutely no alternative.
Freemasonry was just one of the factors that he believed he could use, but that was one of the most important. Two other considerations were seemingly unconnected, but would actually, he knew, be crucial in the implementation of his plan. These were the appalling conditions in the Whitechapel area of London, and the presence in the city of a large Jewish community. Pedachenko thought he could use both of these elements to his advantage.
He glanced over to his left, towards the Thames, the water a dark and muddy brown and running swiftly, the smell of raw sewage rising from it unmistakable, even at that distance. Several barges, laden with goods, were manoeuvring around each other fairly close to the shore, the actions being accompanied by the yells and oaths which seemed inseparable from almost every kind of physical activity Pedachenko had observed since he’d arrived in London. The English, he had concluded, were a very noisy race.
And he noticed something else. Faint yellow tendrils of mist were beginning to appear over the water, and were already starting to spread to the streets around him. It looked as if the population of the city were to be treated to another evening of smog.
Which would be appropriate for the Russian’s mood, if not, on this occasion, for the actions he had planned.
Pedachenko straightened up as he saw the main door of 4 Whitehall Place open, the private entrance used only by senior police officers, and the now-familiar figure of Charles Warren, dressed in civilian clothes instead of the dress uniform which the Russian had seen him wearing on a couple of occasions, appeared outside the building, carrying a leather briefcase.
Even if Pedachenko had not seen Warren before, he would probably still have been able to recognize him. The commissioner had not been perceived by any of the London newspapers to be doing a particularly good job, and he had frequently been caricatured in the press, the artists concentrating on his two most obvious distinguishing features: his large and well trained moustache, and the elaborate scarlet uniform he had had made for him when he had taken up the post, complete with cocked hat, epaulettes and a chest-full of medals, which had attracted a huge amount of ridicule.
He was talking to two other men, neither of whom Pedachenko had seen before, and in whom he had no interest whatsoever. After a few moments, Warren turned away, the other men turning back to re-enter the building whilst the commissioner strode into the street and hailed a hansom cab.
As the vehicle pulled away from the kerb, the iron shoes of the horse clattering on the cobbles, Pedachenko stepped away from his observation post and began w
alking in a leisurely fashion down the street. Warren, he knew, was almost certainly returning to his home, and would most likely remain in the property for the remainder of the evening, as he usually did. The Russian decided he would leave him alone for about two hours, then knock on the door and put the initial phase of his plan into operation.
And that would give him time to make his own preparations for his conversation with Warren, a conversation which he anticipated would be extremely brief.
Thursday, 2 August 1888
London
The house which Charles Warren owned in London was a substantial four-storey property, easily big enough to accommodate his wife and family, two sons and two daughters. His position allowed him to employ a small domestic staff of just three people: a chambermaid, a cook and a butler-cum-footman named Thomas Ryan, a former soldier in Warren’s regiment. Ryan was a kind of general factotum who essentially ran the house and supervised the other two members of the staff.
And it was this man who climbed the stairs to Warren’s study early that evening and knocked respectfully on the door.
‘Come.’
Ryan opened the door and stepped into the room. It was perhaps the most restful and certainly the most masculine room in the house, panelled in dark wood, one wall lined with open book shelves on which several sets of leather-bound volumes were positioned. The room itself was dominated by a large mahogany desk behind which Warren was seated in a comfortable dark wood-and-leather swivel chair, studying a typewritten sheet of paper. The job of the Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis did not end when he left Whitehall Place, and on most evenings Charles Warren expected to spend at least two or three hours studying paperwork and reports.
The Ripper Secret Page 9