Jack the Ripper

The Definitive History

Paul Begg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317866329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

'The clearest, most accurate, and most up-to-date account of the Ripper murders, by one of Britain's greatest and most respected experts on the "autumn of terror" in Victorian London.'

William D. Rubenstein, Professor of Modern History, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

England in the 1880s was a society in transition, shedding the skin of Victorianism and moving towards a more modern age. Promiscuity, moral decline, prostitution, unemployment, poverty, police inefficiency… all these things combined to create a feeling of uncertainty and fear.

The East End of London became the focus of that fear. Here lived the uneducated, poverty-ridden and morally destitute masses. When Jack the Ripper walked onto the streets of the East End he came to represent everything that was wrong with the area and with society as a whole. He was fear in a human form, an unknown lurker in the shadows who could cross boundaries and kill.

Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History is not yet another attempt to identify the culprit. Instead, the book sets the murders in their historical context, examining in depth what East London was like in 1888, how it came to be that way, and how events led to one of the most infamous and grisly episodes of the Victorian era.

Chapter One

The East End

. . . An evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair.¹

I have seen the Polynesian savage in his primitive condition, before the missionary or the blackbirder or the beach-comber got at him. With all his savagery, he was not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East London slum.²

During the 1880s the East End became the focus of a great many general anxieties about unemployment, overcrowding, slum dwellings, disease and gross immorality. It was feared that the unwashed masses would tumble out of their dark alleys and bleak hovels, sweep beyond their geographical containment and submerge civilised society. A working class uprising and revolution was an imagined reality that waited just around the corner. Jack the Ripper gave those fears substance and form, flesh and bone, because Jack the Ripper was a product of ‘the netherworld’³ who could – and in one case fractionally did – move out of the warren of hovels and alleys into the civilised city. And if Jack the Ripper could do it, so could the diseased savages themselves, espousing socialism, demanding employment and fair wages, education and acceptable housing, and bringing an end to the world as the Victorian middle classes knew it.

This isn’t an exaggeration or an attempt to give Jack the Ripper greater importance than he deserves. Many saw the hand of the social reformer in the Ripper crimes, most famously George Bernard Shaw, whose letter to The Star newspaper is often quoted:

SIR, – Will you allow me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel murderer in calling attention for a moment to the social question? Less than a year ago the West-end press, headed by the St. James’s Gazette, the Times, and the Saturday Review, were literally clamouring for the blood of the people – hounding on Sir Charles Warren to thrash and muzzle the scum who dared to complain that they were starving – heaping insult and reckless calumny on those who interceded for the victims – applauding to the skies the open class bias of those magistrates and judges who zealously did their very worst in the criminal proceedings which followed – behaving, in short as the proprietary class always does behave when the workers throw it into a frenzy of terror by venturing to show their teeth. Quite lost on these journals and their patrons were indignant remonstrances, argument, speeches, and sacrifices, appeals to history, philosophy, biology, economics, and statistics; references to the reports of inspectors, registrar generals, city missionaries, Parliamentary commissions, and newspapers; collections of evidence by the five senses at every turn; and house-to-house investigations into the condition of the unemployed, all unanswered and unanswerable, and all pointing the same way. The Saturday Review was still frankly for hanging the appellants; and the Times denounced them as ‘pests of society’. This was still the tone of the class Press as lately as the strike of the Bryant and May girls. Now all is changed. Private enterprise has succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation, and organisation, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept sort of communism. The moral is a pretty one, and the Insurrectionists, the Dynamitards, the Invincibles, and the extreme left of the Anarchist party will not be slow to draw it. ‘Humanity, political science, economics, and religion’, they will say, ‘are all rot; the one argument that touches your lady and gentleman is the knife’. That is so pleasant for the party of Hope and Perseverance in their toughening struggle with the party of Desperation and Death!⁴

The Ripper wasn’t a social reformer, nor did Bernard Shaw mean to suggest that he was. However, it was recognised then, as it has been recognised since, that the crimes provoked a horrified response from those who had hitherto disregarded or ignored the appeals of traditional reformers and for a short time brought a clamouring for change that would in its small way bring about both social changes and changes to the very fabric of the area, such as hastening the destruction of notorious slums. As Jerry White has written:

Within six years, then, Jack the Ripper had done more to destroy the Flower and Dean St. rookery than fifty years of road building, slum clearance and unabated pressure from police, Poor Law Guardians, vestries and sanitary officers.⁵

England in the 1880s was in transition, shedding the skin of Victorianism and moving towards a more modern age. Winston Churchill described the 1880s as:

the end of an epoch. The long dominion of the middle classes, which had begun in 1832, had come to its close and with it the almost equal reign of Liberalism. The great victories had been won. All sorts of lumbering tyrannies had been toppled over. Authority was everywhere broken. Slaves were free. Conscience was free. Trade was free. But hunger and squalor and cold were also free and the people demanded something more than liberty . . .⁶

Society was undergoing fundamental and far-reaching changes to its social, political and economic structure, and as with anything new and different it was frightening, especially for those who by nature or desire abhorred change. By the end of the decade people genuinely felt that revolution was in the air and that there would be an uprising of the masses – as Basil Thompson, Assistant Commissioner CID from 1913 recalled: ‘unless there was a European war to divert the current, we were heading for something very much like revolution’.⁷ And the social evils of London as a whole, and the country beyond, came to be embodied by the poor, the destitute and the unemployed of the East End. As Peter Ackroyd observed in his remarkable and monumental London: The Biography: ‘All the anxiety about the City in general then became attached to the East End in particular, as if in some peculiar sense it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life’. And Jack the Ripper came to represent the East End and so to represent all the anxieties of the age, again as Peter Ackroyd perceptively observed,

. . . the defining sensation which for ever marked the ‘East End’, and created its public identity, was the series of murders ascribed to Jack the Ripper between the late summer and early autumn of 1888. The scale of the sudden and brutal killings effectively marked out the area as one of incomparable violence and depravity . . . The fact that the killer was never captured seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves; that the East End was the true Ripper.

It can therefore be fairly said that had Jack the Ripper killed anywhere else or killed at any other time he would today be a footnote in criminal history, a mere idle curiosity, the subject of a book here and there. But that didn’t happen. By accident – it is unlikely to have been by design – Jack the Ripper committed his crimes in an area that had come to represent the dangerous and threatening underbelly of Victorian society. His notoriety for generations to come was thus assured. But what was so special about the East End? Why was it perceived as representing the evils of society? How did it come to be the way it was? We shall be exploring some of these issues in the coming chapters, but the East End itself is a special place, perhaps even a magical place for those with the gift to feel and sense it. It has a distinct character and a colourful and vibrant history, but it is not a single entity, it did not even exist in the sense of a place defined by the use of capital letters – East End – until the 1880s, when the phrase was first coined.⁸ What the East End is and how it came to be the way it is forms the backdrop to this story and much is down to local geography and the Romans.

The Thames, with marshes stretching from its north and south banks, and the tidal River Lea flowing into it at what is now Poplar, created frontiers and natural barriers and isolated the East End from the surrounding areas like the houses in a cul-de-sac. The area never seems to have enjoyed any concentration of population. About ten thousand years ago some Maglemosean people left a few traces of their habitation in Hackney. This evidence and signs of a pre-Roman trackway running north of the Thames along the line of the modern Bethnal Green Road to a crossing of the Lea at Old Ford are pretty much the only evidence we have of pre-Roman settlement. London itself seems to have been a Roman foundation, although ‘Londinium’ is not a wholly Roman name. Indeed, it may not be Roman at all, but derived from a pre-Roman place-name of considerable antiquity.⁹ Little remains in legend beyond a few stories, perhaps the best known being that of King Lud,¹⁰ who was king of a territory with its capital at London, called Caer Lud, later corrupted into Caer Lundein and then London, and who is today remembered in the place-name ‘Ludgate’. However, there remains little or no archaeological evidence to support significant pre-Roman habitation.

London developed essentially as a Roman city and it appears to have become a rather important trading centre, rather than a place of political or military significance. The Roman historian Tacitus, describing the uprising of a British tribe called the Iceni under the leadership of Queen Boudica in AD60 said that London ‘undistinguished by the name of a colony, was much frequented by a number of merchants and trading vessels’.¹¹ The Boudican revolt¹² was a disaster for Roman Britain: Dio Cassius says that ‘eighty thousand of the Romans and of their allies perished’ and London was razed along with St. Albans (Verulamium) and Colchester (Camulodunum). Following Boudica’s eventual defeat London was rebuilt, expanded, and provided with a forum, basilica, public baths and a palace for the provincial governor. By AD200 it had acquired considerable status and the Romans built a protective wall around the 330 acres that the city then occupied. This wall was about 21 feet (6.4m) high, ran for about 2 miles (3.2km) around the perimeter and probably used about 86,000 tonnes of stone. The wall essentially defined the City of London, what would become known as the square mile, the financial and commercial heartland. The City was entered and exited through one of five large gates that opened onto superbly constructed roads linking London with several nearby towns, and beyond them across the country. These gates have not survived, the last gates to the City and surrounding walls being demolished between 1760 and 1766, but the locations are preserved in London place-names. Newgate and Ludgate converged outside the city perimeter and ran westwards to Silchester, Hampshire. Aldersgate led out to the famous Roman road called Watling Street, then ran north-west towards St. Albans in Hertfordshire. From Bishopsgate the road led north to Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire. And from Aldgate the road ran north-east to Colchester. This was the east gate (Aldgate perhaps derived from the Saxon Æstgeat) and that part of London within the wall by Aldgate would have been the original East End.

The gates were grand affairs. We don’t know what the original Aldgate looked like, but it was reconstructed in the late 1500s and a description has been left us by Don Manoel Gonzales in 1731:

Upon the top of it, to the eastward, is placed a golden sphere; and on the upper battlements, the figures of two soldiers as sentinels: beneath, in a large square, King James I, is represented standing in gilt armour, at whose feet are a lion and unicorn, both couchant, the first the supporter of England, and the other for Scotland. On the west side of the gate is the figure of Fortune, finely gilded and carved, with a prosperous sail over her head, standing on a globe, overlooking the city. Beneath it is the King’s arms, with the usual motto, Dieu et mon droit, and under it, Vivat rex. A little lower, on one side, is the figure of a woman, being the emblem of peace, with a dove in one hand, and a gilded wreath or garland in the other; and on the other side is the figure of charity, with a child at her breast, and another in her hand; and over the arch of the gate is this inscription, viz., Senatus populusque Londinensis fecit, 1609, and under it, Humphrey Weld, Mayor, in whose mayoralty it was finished.¹³

Roman cemeteries have been found outside the City walls at Minories and Trinity Square. Three other cemeteries further out have suggested small communities, although the Romans did bury their dead along roadways. One cemetery was found at Old Ford, which was a place where roads met to cross the River Lea, an unsurprising place for a community to have developed. Another has been found at Shadwell, which is where access to the Thames is easier than at any place between the City and Blackwall, so a community may have grown up there. But the Roman cemetery discovered in Spitalfields is more difficult to explain.

In 407 the Roman troops in Britain elevated to emperor a soldier named Constantine and in 409 he withdrew the garrisons to Boulogne to seize and secure Gaul. He enjoyed success until betrayed, after which his campaign collapsed and he was captured and executed at Ravenna in 411. Constantine had not abandoned Britain, but intended to return. Troops would therefore have been deployed, albeit in seriously depleted numbers, and the political, administrative and commercial machinery would have remained in place, strong enough after three hundred years of Roman rule to survive Constantine’s collapse, although officials appointed by Constantine probably changed sides, fled or quietly retired. There is even a vague suggestion that the Britons rose against and ruthlessly slaughtered Constantine’s appointees.¹⁴ Whatever happened, by 410 someone had acquired sufficient power that they could communicate on behalf of the country and pledge the allegiance of the civitas (cities) of Britain to Emperor Honorius. London is unlikely to have been abandoned and left to decay and collapse, as is the impression most often r...