London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (42 page)

Sir Charles Warren's commitment to `battalion drill' (as the Pall Mall Gazette so disparagingly dismissed it) was almost all the training new recruits received. 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.

Stead had chosen to highlight the traffic in young women, a cause that had been taken up earlier without success. Throughout the century, and indeed in our own, the problem of prostitution was discussed and agonized over by politicians, reformers and social purity campaigners. In the 1860s it was the state of the nation's armed forces that worried contemporaries like William Acton. The result was the introduction of unpopular legislation that attempted to control the activities of prostitutes and by implication, all working-class women. The Contagious Diseases Acts were eventually repealed after a long campaign but they reflect the gender inequalities of late Victorian Britain. In a footnote to Josephine Butler's campaign we might reflect that many of the women that became involved in her campaign went on to take their new-found political consciousness into the movement for women's votes. This crude attack on the female body corporeal helped formulate the female body politic.

William Stead helped to change the British newspaper industry by presenting the news in a new and exciting way for a growing and more literate population. The Pall Mall Gazette and its imitators used headlines and pictures to spice up the news - these have a much more `modern' feel to them than the staid and solid columns of The Times. In the second half of the century newspapers reported more and more crime stories to titillate and frighten their readers in equal measure and we can learn much about contemporary attitudes towards criminality from their pages. The late Victorians were keen to place the blame for most property crime on a mythic `criminal class' that consisted of a whole host of stereotypes of hardened villains with apelike faces and hunched shoulders. The casual criminal that appeared at the Thames Police Court charged with petty theft or drunkenness could be dismissed as a victim of circumstances or need but the Bill Sykes' of this world were highlighted as belonging to another race. The Pall Mall Gazette may have poked fun at the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso's study of criminality but the authorities certainly operated a policy of dealing with habitual criminals firmly. The prison system of the late Victorian period was no picnic for those who found themselves within the walls of Pentonville or Holloway.

That many of these felons hailed from the East End was of no surprise to Charles Booth and others. Large parts of Whitechapel and Spitalfields were coloured black on his poverty maps and indentified as the habitat of the criminal and those that would not work. Walter Dew, the policeman that was the first to view Mary Kelly's mutilated body, observed that Whitechapel was an area with a'reputation for vice and villany unequalled anywhere in the British Isles'' His comments may well have reflected a frustration with the inability of the police to catch the Whitechapel murderer and a desire to shift some of the blame onto the area and its people. Indeed this seems to have been a device employed by several of the newspapers of the period. The killer epitomized all that was rotten in the slums of Whitechapel - a phantom born out of the filth and degradation of Godless communities. From the moment he started killing poor women, `Jack' became a cultural construction used to serve a multitude of diverse causes. He was a purifying angel, an enlightened reformer and a harbinger of revolution.

The mythologizing of `Jack' has continued ever since. He has been seen as a decadent milord, an English gentleman preying on poor working-class women who have no value in his notion of society. Alternatively `Jack' is a medical man, someone who has ripped up the Hippocratic oath as assuredly as he ripped open his victim's bodies. Both myths mirror contemporary fears about a decadent aristocracy and the growth of the medical profession. Lastly, the killer had to be a foreigner because no Englishman could possibly commit such bestial and horrific crimes and have the intelligence to get away with it. After all, with the exception of the `master criminal' Charlie Peace, the criminal classes of London were poor specimens of humanity and the steady bobbies of the Met would surely have captured `Jack' had he been one of them.

But to frame the killer as a foreigner - more specifically as an immigrant Jew who had fled persecution in the Russian Empire - fitted contemporary concerns about immigration and religious difference. The Jewish community of the East End suffered abuse in the summer of 1888 as scapegoats were sought and the papers were quick to trot out all the usual rhetoric of anti-Semitism. Men like Arnold White were quite happy to perjure themselves before parliamentary committees if it led to a stoppage of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Much of the prejudice that was aimed at the `greeners' from the pale was a result of cultural differences of language and religious practice. For others, like the socialist leader Henry Mayers Hyndman, the age old accusation that the immigrants were taking British jobs was used as cover for their own racist opinions. East End Jewry survived the Ripper panic and went on to survive Mosely's Blackshirts. They left the East End in the postwar period as their industriousness earned them better homes in the north of the capital, not because they were chased out by small mindedness and prejudice. The East End has long provided a temporary refuge for foreign immigrants drawn by persecution or a desire to improve their economic situation; now the area is largely settled by Bangladeshi Muslims who are reaping the current hysteria surrounding Islamist terrorism.