London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (10 page)

On 12 November George Hutchinson walked into the local police station to make a statement. He had met and spoken to Kelly at 2 a.m. on the morning of 9 November when she asked him for money. Hutchinson had none to give and Kelly wandered off and he saw another man approach her. He `tapped her on the shoulder and said something to her' whereupon they `both burst out laughing'. The man was carrying a small parcel with a strap around it. Hutchinson followed them into Miller's Court and overheard snatches of their conversation (or said he did; his evidence has a rather constructed feel to it - as if he is describing a composite of newspaper speculations). She said `alright' and the man replied `alright my dear you will be comfortable' Hutchinson watched them until they disappeared from view then he waited for three quarters of an hour and then left. Why did he hang around? The man he saw was about 31 to 35 years old and 5 ft. to 5 ft. 6 in. tall, so once again not dissimilar to previous witness statements. Again, how far this reflects what Hutchinson saw or what he wanted the police to think it is hard to say. In his report Abberline noted that Hutchinson was apparently surprised to see `a man so well dressed in her company" The description was quite particular, noting the buttons on his coat and a 'very thick gold chain' that he was wearing. Hutchinson also suggested the man looked Jewish. This enabled The Illustrated Police News to print a detailed, if stereotypical, picture of the suspect. The inquest into Mary Kelly's death was held at Shoreditch Town Hall and opened on the 12th before concluding a day later with the coroner needing little persuasion that it was a case of murder. Little information was made public for fear of hampering the investigation and this starved the press of news. As a result newspaper interest swiftly faded away following Kelly's death. Two days prior to Kelly's murder the government had offered a pardon to any accomplice of the Whitechapel murder and on the same day Sir Charles Warren resigned.

This is the point at which most writers agree that the killings ceased. There were several more arrests and a number of men were chased through the streets with shouts of `lynch him' because they were mistaken for the Ripper. One was well known to the London Hospital, perhaps suggesting he was suffering from a mild form of mental illness.R6 He was accosted because he had been seen near to where Martha Tabram had been murdered and had frightened a female passer by. Another suspect sporting a blackened face claimed to be Jack the Ripper' and was jumped on by two local men, one a former soldier, and a crowd soon surrounded him and started abusing the man who had to be rescued by the police. At Leman Street Police Station he asserted that he was a doctor at the London Hospital; again it maybe that he was suffering from some form of mental illness. The police soon released him.87 On 13 November the police arrested Thomas Murphy at the Holborn workhouse. Murphy gave a poor account of himself and his movements and looked as if he was or had been a sailor - another rough fit with some of the, albeit conflicting, witness statements.R8 For several years the shadow of the Whitechapel killer loomed over the streets of East London. Unsolved murders were invariably attributed to `Saucy Jack' but there were only two events in which he could conceivably have been involved. These were the deaths of Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles.

Alice McKenzie was a 40-year-old prostitute who was killed in Castle Alley near Wentworth Street. The alley was known to locals but it was not the sort of place a stranger would go unless he had been taken there before; again this suggests a local man with local knowledge. McKenzie was murdered and her body attacked but not mutilated to the same degree as the other victims. Dr Bagster Phillips examined her in a makeshift mortuary - a shed in Pavillion Yard - that, in the opinion of The Times, `tended greatly to the thwarting of justice having such a place to perform such examinations in'.R9 Almost a year after the killer spree had begun in Whitechapel, and despite the huge interest and spotlight that had been thrown upon the district, no dedicated mortuary or coroner's court had been established. Whitechapel, it would seem, simply did not warrant any real money being spent on it. Once again the streets were crowded with interested onlookers and worried locals. McKenzie's death, in July 1889, prompted the police to step up patrols in the area but there were no more killings that year. McKenzie's killer had evaded capture by a whisker since, as at Mitre Square, a policeman passed the spot just 6 minutes before she was found. This might explain why her body was not as savagely hacked about as some of the previous victims. The police report on Bagster Phillip's examination certainly drew links between Alice's wounds and the earlier killings:

I see in this murder evidence of similar design to the former Whitechapel murders viz: sudden onslaught on the prostrate woman, the throat skilfully and resolutely cut with subsequent mutilation indicating sexual thoughts and a desire to mutilate the abdomen and sexual organs. I am of the opinion that the murder was perpetrated by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders.9o

The coroner shifted the emphasis onto the prostitutes of the area suggesting that if they stayed off the streets the killer would have no one to murder, an obvious but unhelpful observation.91 According to the witnesses that identified her body at the mortuary, Alice had lived with a man called John McCormack and had been in the neighbourhood for at least 14 years, living at 52 Gun Street, a common lodging house. Alice, like the previous victims, was prone to drinking heavily and on the night she died she had not paid the deputy for her bed. Alice had picked up a client on the evening of 16 July at the Cambridge Music Hall where she had been with George Dixon, a blind boy who she took back to Gun Street before going off with the stranger. However, this was at just after 7 p.m. and the police clearly did not think that Alice's punter had anything to do with her death. Initially the police questioned a man called Isaac Lewis who was off `to get something for my supper' but he was not really suspected. Then on 19 July a man named William Brodie presented himself at Leman Street and confessed to the murder. Brodie had been convicted of burglary in 1877 and had served 13 years. He told the police that he was responsible for nine murders in Whitechapel but that `none of them had troubled him except the last one, that was why he had given himself up'92

There is no record of a William Brodie appearing at Old Bailey in the 1870s but a William Broder (aged 20) was sentenced to 14 years (the amount Brodie claimed) for stealing an overcoat and other goods. In the previous case Broder had met a man, Frederick Hebden, at the Alhambra Palace and accompanied him back to his chambers near Leicester Square. Hebden expressed surprise to find Broder in bed with him in the morning - was this a homosexual liason, was Broder a male prostitute? Broder asked Hebden for money, and became aggressive when Hebden refused, threatening `he would smash me and my place up,.93 Eventually Hebden was forced to hand over a variety of items and write a note authorizing Broder to pawn a carriage clock - he was clearly very frightened that Broder was out of control and extremely violent as he had been that morning. The manager at the printing workshop where William Brodie's brothers were employed described Brodie as a 'reckless character addicted to drink' and it is not impossible that Broder and Brodie were one and the same person.94 According to his landlady and her daughter, Brodie was generally quiet and well behaved but `when in drink he is very curious in his manners and says some quaint things'.95 Brodie claimed to have been to South Africa to work in the diamond mines and when this claim was examined it proved he had sailed on 6 September 1888 and so could not have been responsible for the murders in that year. He was also found to have confessed to a murder in Kimberly and so it would seem that he was a rather disturbed individual who was simply wasting police time. Once he had been discharged for murder they arrested him for fraud.96

The trail had gone cold again but the police increased the numbers of detectives and plainclothes officers in the area in case Alice McKenzie's murder really did mean the killer was operating again. Was McKenzie the Ripper's sixth (or seventh) victim? We cannot rule out the possibility that, as with Liz Stride, the killer was interrupted in his work and that is why her mutilations were less severe. However, it could also be the work of a copycat killer or even someone who knew McKenzie and wanted her dead and saw a way in which to make it look like the work of the Ripper. Like so much of this case the more one uncovers the less clear the overall picture becomes.

On Friday, 13 February 1891, PC Ernest Thompson found Frances Coles lying in a roadway under a railway arch. Her throat had been cut and before a doctor could arrive she expired. A man named Sadler was eventually prosecuted for her murder and some believed they had `Jack' at last, but the case against Sadler collapsed when he was able to establish an alibi. Frances' killer, like the other women before her, was never caught. This is where the case files into the Whitechapel murders are closed.

CONCLUSION

So what have we learnt about Whitechapel murders based upon the evidence (such as it is) surviving from the police archives and the pages of the press? The killer remains masked and will probably never be revealed to everyone's satisfaction. Modern criminology would support a theory that the murderer was, if operating alone, either a non-social or disorganized asocial killer: both have elements that fit the persona of `Jack'. We also need to consider David Canter's geographical profiling as all of the victims shared a very similar locale. This may be purely coincidental of course, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a `slummer' or other person was travelling into the district because he knew he would find a suitable target for his rage and lust. But it would be more plausible to believe that someone who evaded the law and left so few clues and was seen by so few people knew the area he operated in and had somewhere close by to escape to. This would make `Jack' a local man and also someone who could blend into his surroundings with some ease; a nondescript individual of little or no importance. That he assumed centre stage with his devastating purge of Whitechapel's `unfortunates' must have caused him a frisson of excitement: perhaps that is one of the reasons he killed.

The murders were beyond anything Victorian society had experienced before, both in their intensity and in the way that they unfolded in the press, week by week. The press and the public became involved in this case in an unprecedented manner, which merely served both to add to the panic and obfuscate the police's attempt to catch the villain. Murders were often newsworthy but in 1888 even the discovery of a headless torso paled in comparison with `Jack's antics. The press are the subject of a later chapter of this book but without them it is possible that the Whitechapel murders might not have become the international sensation that they did. Certainly the myth making that has surrounded the killings have raised this case above all previous murders in British history and we need to be very careful about how we think about the murders.

Having now established the context for the Whitechapel murders both within Victorian murder reportage and more recent criminal profiling we will now turn to the area in which the killings occurred, Whitechapel, and more broadly, the East End of London. If the Ripper has been the subject of myth making then so has this area of the capital. Unpacking the truth about the East End is just as problematic as identifying the culprit behind the mask of `Jack the Ripper.

3

East Meets West: The Contrasting Nature of Victorian

London and the Mixed Community of the East End

Towards the end of the 1850s the great Victorian essayist and champion of British art and culture John Ruskin summed up the fears of many Victorians at what they saw as the slow suffocation of rural England at the hands of industry:

The whole of the island ... set as thick with chimneys as the masts stand in the docks of Liverpool; that there shall be no meadows in it; no trees; no gardens; only a little corn grown upon the house tops, reaped and thrashed by steam, that you do not even have room for roads, but travel either over the roofs of your Mills, on viaducts; or under the floors, in tunnels; that, the smoke have rendered the light of the sun unserviceable, you work always by the light of your own gas: that no acre of English ground shall be without its shaft and its engine ...

Two Parks (1859)

By the 1870s Ruskin's dislike of industry and, in particular, the omnipresent railways that carved great swathes through the verdant countryside, had brought him to embrace the back-to-the-land movement with his fellow travellers Edward Carpenter and William Morris. Ruskin believed that open fields and all the flora of nature were `essential to the healthy spiritual life of man' and furthermore argued that agricultural labour was somehow superior to the industrial labour that so many British workmen had been forced into performing.'

In this chapter we will look at this dichotomy at the heart of Victorian culture and at how competing views of country and town manifested themselves within the ages of the nineteenth-century press and periodicals. The long shadow created by the growing towns and cities threatened to destroy the traditional pastoral image of `merrie England. While the new industrial centres of the Midlands and north clearly defined much of this threat, it was in London that the real danger to civilization had reared its ugly head. Having explored general attitudes towards the city this chapter will therefore focus on London, and in particular on the East End of London and the fears that surrounded it. It will consider how we define and understand this complex area of the capital and the people that lived in it. The East End has been represented and misrepresented for several centuries and uncovering its real nature is not an easy task. Nonetheless this chapter will attempt to discover the real Eastender (whoever he or she may be). In doing so it will look at the various migrants that have made the east side of London their home and at the problems they encountered there. This will be the story of the Irish and the Jews, but it will not neglect the indigenous people of Bethnal Green and Tower Hamlets, the Cockneys, costermongers and pearly kings and queens and the feisty match girls who recorded one of the most memorable and formative industrial relations victories of the late Victorian era.