VICTIMS IN THE NIGHT

David Abrahamsen

With life so precarious, and opportunity for the happiness of life so remote, it is inevitable that life shall be cheap…

Jack London, The People of the Abyss

The murders and mutilations of five prostitutes in Whitechapel, in the East End of London, began on the morning of Friday, August 31, 1888. Mary Anne Nichols was found dead, lying in a back street named Buck’s Row. Murders connected to theft or rape were common occurrences, and under ordinary circumstances the death of a prostitute would cause no more than a momentary ripple in the dark pool that was the East End. But these circumstances were not ordinary.

First of all, the motive was clearly not robbery, since Nichols had nothing to steal. Second, the violence of her death was chilling. Her throat was severed almost to the vertebrae. Her face was bruised, and both her upper and lower jaws were injured. A deep slash ran across her abdomen. The cuts had ragged edges and some inner organs had been cut out. The murder seemed to have no purpose except as an expression of violence. The police surgeon duly noted the details in his formal report to the London Metropolitan Police.

As an isolated event, the death of Nichols soon subsided in the public consciousness. After all, the Whitechapel of those days was one of the grimmest of all London slums; life there, as Jack London points out, was cheap indeed. One inhabitant of the East End wrote to The Times (London) at midcentury:

We are Sur, as it may be, livin in a Wilderness, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as the rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filthe. We aint got no privies, no dust bins, no drains, no water splies…We al of us suffer, and numbers are ill, and if the colera comes Lord help us…^*1

The writer accurately perceived that the place where he lived was so cut off from the rest of the prospering city that it was almost another country. The East End was the popular name for the area east of the actual City of London, which had grown up around the docks that lined the Thames, the heart of the trade on which the British Empire flourished. Inside this maze of narrow streets and jerry-built houses with totally inadequate sanitary facilities, some ninety thousand people lived in desperate poverty, victims of unemployment, homelessness, overcrowding and disease. The cholera did indeed come, and much worse. High infant mortality was as common as child labor, and prostitution, alcoholism, crime and murder were endemic. Hanging like an evil cloud over the slums was the thick black tarry smoke from factory smokestacks and thousands of coal fires that Charles Dickens describes at the beginning of Bleak House: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”^*2

In The People of the Abyss—written a little over a decade after the infamous year of 1888—Jack London points out that the personal despair of many East Enders drove them to suicide.

Into this wilderness of poverty, illness and blight some Londoners traveled regularly to buy what could not be bought on more civilized streets—the sexual services of women. In the borough of Whitechapel alone there were ninety thousand people, of whom seventy thousand were women and children, mostly the unemployed poor who lived from hand to mouth. By 1880, there were estimated to be ten thousand prostitutes and three thousand brothels in London. Almost every room, nook, or corridor in Whitechapel, Shadwell, Spitalfields, and adjoining areas was at one time or another used for sexual purposes. Owning a brothel, in fact, was a favored way of investing in a neighborhood. Prostitution was illegal, of course, and many prostitutes were picked up and sent to jail. Men, however, were not harassed, unless they were suspected of performing “unnatural sexual acts” with other men. But the typical English method of dealing with the problem was, in general, to ignore its existence.

The most humane contemporary view of prostitution is found in the writings of the physician William Acton, one of the authors of the Contagious Diseases Act of 1866, which provided that prostitutes in certain areas be subject to periodic medical examination. In his pioneering book on the subject, first published in 1862, Acton writes that “cruel, biting poverty” forces women to become prostitutes:

Unable to obtain by their labor the means of procuring the bare necessaries of life, they gain, by surrendering their bodies to evil uses, food to sustain and clothes to cover them. Many thousand young women in the metropolis are unable by drudgery that lasts from early morning till late into the night to earn more than from 3s. to 5s. weekly. Many have to eke out their living as best they may on a miserable pittance for less than the least of the sums above-mentioned…Urged on by want and toil, encouraged by evil advisors, and exposed to selfish tempters, a large proportion of these girls fall from the path of virtue…^*3

The horror and sadness of the Jack the Ripper murders are intensified when we consider the degraded lives of the victims. Scorned by society, these women were defenseless, alienated, and dispossessed. Their lives were narrowly limited to the goal of getting fourpence from a client to buy a shot of gin or a glass of beer, or to rent a bed for the night in a common lodging house. This economic exchange could easily end in syphilis or gonorrhea, or in an unwanted pregnancy that was terminated by an abortion performed under appalling conditions. Life, as they knew it, was dangerous and callous. In the “brute vulgarities” of this world, as Jack London put it, “the bad corrupts the good, and all fester together.”^*4

Yet there were some people who felt that the prostitutes’ deaths were a kind of moral retribution for the lives they led—essentially, that they got what they deserved. Syphilis was widely regarded as a punishment for sin—why not murder? Hypocrisy, one of the most deadly sins, was nowhere more evident in Victorian society than in the sexual double standard practiced by men. A woman was judged by her effect on men. This was a period when women of one’s own class were set on a pedestal and the wife was idealized as the keeper of the sacred flame of home and hearth: kind, gentle, nurturing, and, above all, pure. And, not surprisingly, this produced a view of women as either virgins or whores. Although Victorian men publicly revered women, courted them, catered to them and married them, they secretly sought out prostitutes for sexual release or for taboo sexual pleasures. But there were other, psychological reasons why the Victorian man sought out prostitutes.

First of all, when a man bought the services of a prostitute, he did not have to establish any emotional relationship with her, or any significant relationship at all. The encounter was generally brief and impersonal. He did not have—and usually did not want—to remember her name or face.

A second reason was the great gulf of class distinction: almost without exception, prostitutes came from the lower classes. Their humble origins and the conditions of squalor in which they lived both excited and revolted the middle-class and aristocratic men who were their patrons. Slumming has always had charms for those who are not condemned to live in poverty, and many Victorian men visited the East End for very different reasons from their wives, who knew it only as a place to set up missions and soup kitchens to save souls and nourish starved bodies.

On the whole there is a general behavior pattern observable among those men who choose prostitutes as their only sexual objects. Such a man is unconsciously attracted to women who are more or less sexually discredited. He identifies with the harlot’s lack of fidelity and loyalty. His choice is rooted in his unconscious fixation on his infantile feelings of tenderness for his mother, a crucial point in his sexual development. From his first belief that his mother is sexually pure, he comes to learn that she (like a prostitute) has had sex with a man (his father). The child feels betrayed by her. He fantasizes rescuing her from the father who he feels has defiled her. This leads him later in life to set up a woman as a substitute mother whom he loves, yet despises for her weakness. He ends up seeking out prostitutes, whom he endows with his mother’s image.

What drives women to prostitution? Without question, it is a way of obtaining through economic means what a woman has not been able to gain through love, the love from a mother or father, or a substitute. For some women, prostitution seems to offer a means of revenging themselves against weak and passive fathers who never defended them against their mothers’ anger and criticism. Other women feel a masochistic identification of sex as sinful or humiliating, as they believe it was for their own mothers. In nineteenth-century Whitechapel, the wretched housing, miserable earnings, and lack of emotional bonds between parents and children inevitably produced strained and callous relationships. Girls moved away from their parents into a situation where the procurer, the pimp, became the father substitute and the madam the mother substitute. The girl’s relationship with her abusing father and unloving mother was now played out in the new environment, complete with all the former ambivalent feelings. One must wonder why a woman abused by her mother would become a prostitute and tolerate the madam. The answer is that she hates the madam as she hated her mother, yet is masochistically tied to her.

For most of the Whitechapel prostitutes, their illicit business was a means of scraping by from day to day in a poverty-stricken world. It had desperate and cruel consequences—broken homes and emotional turmoil, sometimes leading to arrest and jail, in addition to the risk of disease, alcoholism, drug addiction, and exposure to crime. Even if a prostitute married or managed to avoid the fate of poverty and disease, her psychological fate remained cloudy at best.

The eternal wish of every woman from childhood onward is to be taken care of by someone who loves her. But few are given such happiness. And the prostitutes of Whitechapel were no exception. For five of them, a horrible death ended their quest.

Falling from the path of virtue had always been dangerous; the story of Mary Anne Nichols shows that it was becoming more so.

Nichols was no young girl, however; she was forty-two years old and an alcoholic. She had had five children and had left her husband about eight years earlier because of her drinking habits. Though separated from her, her husband continued to support her for several years until she moved in with another man. Several times, Nichols had tried to make a fresh start, but her alcoholism always prevailed. At one point she ended up in a workhouse, but was thrown out because she stole some small items—again, the result of her drinking. The Times (London) described her life as “intemperate, irregular and vicious.”^*5 The meaning of “vicious” here is “savage.”

On the night of August 30, 1888, Nichols had been drinking steadily at a pub. At about 2:00 A.M., she decided to go out on the streets to raise the price of a bed for the night. She went into Buck’s Row, a secluded back alley about a hundred yards from the Jews’ Cemetery, close to the Whitechapel Road. At about 3:45 A.M., her body was discovered there by Constable John Neil working his Whitechapel beat. The Times (London) described Neil’s discovery of the body:

With the aid of his lamp he examined the body and saw blood oozing from a wound in the throat. Deceased was lying on her back with her clothes disarranged. [Neil] felt her arm, which was quite warm from the joints upward, while her eyes were wide open.^*6

She was dressed in a new brown dress, a shabby red overcoat, two flannel petticoats, blue woolen stockings and a straw bonnet, which had fallen from her head and was lying by her side. Her underwear had been removed. Her only possessions were a piece of mirror, a comb, and a handkerchief.

The police surgeon Henry Llewellyn of 152 Whitechapel Road was called to the scene and examined the body at the site. He found no marks of a struggle and no bloody trail as if the body had been dragged. He had the body moved to the mortuary, where he discovered for the first time the mutilation of the abdomen. He concluded that the cuts must have been caused by a moderately sharp, long-bladed knife wielded with violence. Excerpts from his report to the Metropolitan Police the following day, August 31, 1888, are as follows:

…throat cut nearly severing head from body, abdomen cut open from centre of bottom of ribs along right side, under pelvis to left of stomach, there the wound was jagged: the coating of the stomach was cut in several places and two small stabs on private parts…^*7

Inquiries were made of the neighbors, night watchmen, other prostitutes and friends of Nichols, local tavern owners, coffee-stall keepers, and lodging houses. The police also interrogated three slaughtermen doing night work for a butcher’s firm on the next street, but each accounted for himself satisfactorily. Nichols’s history “did not disclose the slightest pretext for a motive on the part of her friends or associates in the common lodging houses,” wrote Chief Inspector Donald S. Swanson in his report on the murder.^*8

Early on Saturday, September 8, 1888, London was jolted once again, when the body of another murdered woman was found. Forty-seven-year-old Annie Chapman—also destitute, a prostitute and an alcoholic—was discovered in the back yard of a house on Hanbury Street, Spitalfields, about half a mile from the site of Nichols’s murder. This woman had also been hideously mutilated. It was suggested “that the murderer, for some purpose or other, whether from a morbid motive or for the sake of gain, had committed the crime for the purpose of possessing himself of the uterus.”^*9

The scene was macabre. Fully dressed, she lay on the ground with her organs exposed like a scientific experiment. The abdominal wall had been cut open and the uterus removed. The vagina, bladder and intestines—still attached to the body—were arranged over her right shoulder. At her feet were her comb and some coins, carefully placed.

On Friday, September 14, 1888, The Times (London) described the postmortem of Annie Chapman and stated that, in the coroner’s opinion, “there had been no struggle between the murderer and the woman.” This was an important finding. Like Nichols, Chapman had died without making any resistance. The coroner also concluded that the murderer “had anatomical knowledge from the way the viscera was removed.” In addition, he believed the murder weapon was not an ordinary knife, but “a small amputating knife or a well-ground slaughterman’s knife,” probably between six and eight inches long.^*10

Annie Chapman was the widow of a veterinarian. They had been separated for several years before his death because of what the police report called “her drunken and immoral ways.” However, her husband continued to send her ten shillings a week until he died, at Christmas, 1886. Like Nichols, Chapman was a victim of her alcoholism, which had caused her to lose touch with her family and turn to prostitution. The Times (London) on September 27, 1888, reported:

She had evidently lived an immoral life for some time, and her habits and surroundings had become worse since her means had failed. She no longer visited her relations, and her brother had not seen her for five months, when she borrowed a small sum from him. She lived principally in the common lodging houses in the neighborhood of Spitalfields, where such as she were herded like cattle. She showed signs of great deprivation, as if she had been badly fed.

The glimpse of life in those dens which the evidence in this case disclosed was sufficient to make them feel there was much in the 19th-century civilization of which they had small reason to be proud…^*11

On Saturday, September 15, 1888, The Lancet, the foremost British medical journal, published an editorial suggesting the theory that the murderer might be a lunatic. But, the writer added, this “appears to us to be by no means at present well established.”^*12

The third victim was Elizabeth Stride, forty-five years old, a Swedish prostitute known by the name of “Long Liz.” On Sunday, September 30, her body was found at Berner Street, Aldgate, a short distance from Hanbury Street. Although her throat had been cut in the now familiar method, she had not been disemboweled, which suggested that the murderer was interrupted in his work. Did somebody warn him?

Later that same night, the murderer struck again, at Mitre Square, which was only about half a mile from Berner Street, just across the boundary of the City of London. The victim was another prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, who was forty-three. As if in compensation for the murderer’s frustration at having had to leave Stride intact, Eddowes’s body had been brutally dissected. Her nose was cut off, her abdomen sliced open, and on her right shoulder were placed her left kidney and intestines.

The fact that this murder took place within the City boundaries meant that it was handled by the City Police Department, and these fresh investigators zealously set about gathering evidence. Eddowes’s murder, it seems, was the only occasion when a description of the possible assailant was available.

Catherine Eddowes had been trying to make some extra money by picking hops in Kent with her friend John Kelly, who had spent 2s. 6d. of his earnings to buy her a pair of boots. When they returned to London together on Thursday, September 27, however, they had to pawn the boots to get enough money to pay for a night’s lodging. The following night they had to part and she spent the night in the Mile End casual ward (a dormitory), while Kelly stayed in a cheap lodging house. By Saturday they had no money left and were unable to find any odd jobs. So at 2:00 P.M., Eddowes left Kelly and went off to Bermondsey to try to borrow money from her daughter. At 8:00 P.M. that evening, she was back in the City, in a drunk and disorderly condition, was arrested by two City policemen and taken to the Bishopsgate Police Station, where she remained until shortly after midnight. During her incarceration, she continued, in the words of Dr. Francis Camps, one of the major authorities on the Ripper story, “singing to herself and asking to be released.” His report continued:

At about 1 A.M. her wish was complied with and she was shooed off into the night. It was a singularly bad piece of luck for her that the instructions of Major Smith, the City Police Commissioner, were not carried out, for he had ordered that every man and woman seen together after midnight must be accounted for and she might have been followed to Mitre Square.^*13

As City Police Commissioner, Major Smith was responsible for all police activity within the City of London, while the Metropolitan Police were under the separate command of General Sir Charles Warren, who had no jurisdiction within the City. Both commanders were out in the field that night, and Smith, a more enthusiastic participant than Warren, was intensely frustrated to discover later on that he had been on the heels of the murderer the whole time.

It was a City constable, P.C. Watkins, who found Catherine Eddowes’s body. He had passed through the square at 1:30 A.M. and noticed nothing unusual, but when he returned, about fifteen minutes later, his police lantern at once illuminated the body of a woman lying on her back in the corner of the square with her left leg extended and her right leg bent at the knee. Further investigation showed the shocking nature of her wounds, which were subsequently noted by the police surgeon in some pencil drawings made at the scene.

Subsequently, it seemed, the murderer had made his way from Mitre Square across Houndsditch and Middlesex Street to Goulston Street, where a bloodstained rag from Eddowes’s apron was found at 2:55 A.M. To confuse the public and the police still more, a chalked message about the Jews—“The Jewes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing”—was found in the passageway at Goulston Street. Neither the rag nor the message had been there half an hour before when the police constable passed through on his beat at 2:20 A.M.

As soon as Major Smith was told of this discovery, he dispatched an inspector with two detectives to photograph the message, but General Warren had arrived in Goulston Street meanwhile and took it upon himself to order the writing rubbed out at once, without waiting for the photographer, on the grounds that he feared it would incite an anti-Jewish riot. We shall hear more later about this mysterious communication about the “Jewes.”

While the police doctors, F. G. Brown and George Sequiera, were examining the body in Mitre Square, the murderer apparently left Goulston Street and went north to Dorset Street, where he paused to wash blood off his hands at a public sink. This suggested that he knew the neighborhood, because the sink was set back from the street. Passersby observed the blood shortly afterward.

Eddowes’s body was removed to the mortuary. It was stripped and an autopsy carried out, but the body was not identified until Tuesday, October 2, by her friend John Kelly. Ironically, his last words to Eddowes had been a warning to her to be careful of the Ripper; he had been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that one of his friends had seen her being taken to the police station. It was he who identified her shattered body, finally, by the pawn ticket found in her bonnet for the boots he himself had bought a few days earlier. (Her own husband took two weeks to come forward, having changed his name to avoid being traced by her.)

At the Eddowes inquest in October 1888, a commercial traveler named Joseph Lawende and a J. H. Levy reported having seen a man and a woman talking together at the corner of the court leading to Mitre Square in Duke Street shortly before the murder. The police released the following description: “Thirty years old, five feet nine inches in height, with a small fair moustache, dressed in something like navy serge and with a deerstalker’s hat, peak fore and after. He also wore a red handkerchief.”^*14

Until 1966, this was the only description given of a man seen close to the scene of the murder. My own research has turned up other and more substantial findings.

By now the whole of London was in an uproar. Suggestions for catching the murderer poured in from all quarters. A Mr. Blair wrote from Dumfries to suggest the use of decoys:

Let a number of men—say twelve—be selected, of short stature, and as far as possible of effeminate appearance, but of known courage & tried nerve, dress them as females of the class from whom the victims are selected, arm them with the best and lightest weapons and distribute them over the district haunted by the murderer.

Note, The men would require to be fair actors, and behave in the natural manner of women of that class, further they would require to be shadowed by help, in an unobtrusive way, and the whole scheme would require to be kept absolutely secret, for once let the press get a hint of it, and farewell to any chance of success.^*15

Mr. Blair added that his plan was “based on the theory that the murderer solicits intercourse, and that the woman accompanies him to a quiet spot, where the crime is committed while in the act, so that men who undertook the duty of capturing him would require to have all their wits about them.”^*16

A civil servant with the Customs Department became convinced that the murders were the work of Portuguese sailors, because, he said, they had contracted venereal disease from a prostitute and were acting out the “characteristic revengefulness of the Portuguese race.” His theory was carefully, if illogically, set forth and Scotland Yard treated it seriously for a while, then concluded the man was “a troublesome faddist.”^*17

An engraver wrote to the Yard suggesting that a full pardon be offered to the murderer and that, when he turned himself in, the promise should be ignored: “for once [we should] break our national word of honour for the benefit of the universe.”^*18

The fact that the murderer had shown some skill in eviscerating the bodies led the police to suppose that the Ripper might have a medical background, and the police spent much time tracking down “three insane medical students.” The police also employed bloodhounds, though to little effect. In the Scotland Yard files I also found a “Secret” memorandum ordering a supply of tricycles for the police to enable them to follow more quickly on the trail of the mysterious assassin who struck with such lightning speed. Local Whitechapel businessmen formed a Vigilance Committee, headed by Mr. George Lusk.^*19 A Member of Parliament named Samuel Montagu suggested that a reward be paid for the murderer’s capture.^*20 Terrified prostitutes continued to ply their trade, however; they had no other means of support.

For forty days following Eddowes’s death, nothing happened. It seemed that, temporarily, the violent homicidal impulses of the murderer had become satiated. But on Friday, November 9, a twenty-five-year-old prostitute named Marie Jeanette Kelly was found dead at Miller’s Court, Spitalfields, in the vicinity of Hanbury Street. This murder took place in the privacy of Kelly’s own room in Miller’s Court, and not in the streets. The murderer, therefore, had the safety and leisure to commit the bloodiest butchery of them all.

London policemen who saw Kelly’s body never forgot it. She was unrecognizable. Her skin was flayed on the face, upper body and thighs, and the flesh removed on some parts so that only her skeleton remained. The bed and night table had bits of flesh on them. Her nose and ears were cut off and her liver was located at her feet. Her uterus was mutilated. Her amputated breasts and kidneys were carefully placed on a nearby table. A doctor who had viewed the body reported to an American newspaper that the sight of the murdered woman surpassed all his gory experiences.

Once again, those who examined the victim concluded that the murder knife was wielded with some knowledge and practice. At the autopsy it was discovered that Kelly was pregnant.

The Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard continued their massive investigations, and millions of Londoners became hostages to the night as they waited for Jack the Ripper to be caught. It was a name he had introduced for himself in one of his cocky notes to the authorities and it immediately captured the public’s imagination. Everybody had an idea about the identity of the murderer, and it seemed that almost everybody passed on their suggestions to Scotland Yard, which painstakingly investigated each one they thought worthy and filed the others away.

In a memo on October 25, 1888, a police report to the Home Office noted:

That a crime of this kind should have been committed without any clue being supplied by the criminal is unusual, but that four successive murders should have been committed without our having the slightest clue of any kind is extraordinary, if not unique, in the annals of crime.

The result has been to necessitate our giving attention to innumerable suggestions, such as would in any ordinary case be dismissed unnoticed, and no hint of any kind, which was not obviously absurd, has been neglected. Moreover, the activity of the Police has been to a considerable extent wasted through the exigencies of sensational journalism, and the action of unprincipled persons, who, from various motives, have endeavoured to mislead us.^*21

The Ripper murders stopped just as suddenly as they had started. It was some months before it became apparent that the nightmare was over, but like everything about the case, it was a puzzle to know why. Had the murderer become insane, or fled the country, or had he himself died or been murdered? The guesses were as diverse as the list of people whom the police interrogated about the murders, or on whom public suspicion rested, however briefly.

Whatever the reason, there were no more murders following Kelly’s death that bore the Ripper’s bloody and unmistakable trademarks. And despite the days and months of dogged work by the police, the case remained unsolved. Eventually, the official files and a mass of papers connected with them passed into the archives of Scotland and New Scotland Yard, some marked with the top confidential notation: “closed until 1993.”^*22 Despite the British practice not to publish information about a controversial event for at least a century, I obtained permission to release the material in this book. The Jack the Ripper murders became a part of history.

There has always been some dispute about how many women Jack the Ripper killed; the number has varied from five to twelve. But the common features in the five murders presented here, I believe, are conclusive.

All five murders shared certain characteristics. They all took place in an area within one square mile of each other. All were committed between the hours of eleven at night and five in the morning. Each took place on a weekend. The throat of each victim had been severed, and with the exception of Stride, the body carved up and mutilated with a knife. And all of their faces were congested. An article in The Lancet which described the circumstances of one of the murders “suggests that the absence of a cry was due to strangulation being the real cause of death, a common practice of sexual murders.”^*23

All the women were prostitutes, suggesting a psychologically intimate, if unconscious, connection between the murderer and his victims. They were destitute, vulnerable, and alcoholic. Four out of the five were over forty years old and had borne children. Kelly was pregnant.

The mystery of Jack the Ripper’s identity is a major reason for the persistence of the myth. Considering the vast efforts of both police and public, even in those days when investigation was a much more primitive business, it is remarkable that he was never apprehended.

The grotesque murders instilled widespread terror not only throughout London itself, but also across a nation that was already gripped by strong anti-Jewish feelings and fears of radical movements that would lead to political anarchy. Faced with confusion and incredulity over the murders, the police were involved simultaneously in trying to pursue the investigations, reassure frightened citizens, and prevent future attacks.

A divided leadership within the police department exacerbated their difficulties. Individual policemen who remained diligent in their duties were nonetheless hampered in their activities. But weak leadership within the police was far from being the only catalyst of an explosion of social unrest. On the flip side of police ineptitude lay its power structure, designed to protect the upper strata of England’s monarchy.

In 1886, two years before the Whitechapel murders, bloody riots and demonstrations had erupted in Pall Mall and Oxford Street. Fueled by continuing mass unemployment, the upheavals continued into the following year, with unemployed workers camping out in the parks and Trafalgar Square on a semi-permanent basis. Finally, a confrontation took place on November 13, 1887, in Trafalgar Square between a huge mob of demonstrators and several thousand men from the Metropolitan Police; inevitably, there were injuries and massive arrests, and the day became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

The Home Secretary appointed General Charles Warren, a professional soldier, as Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and it was Warren who handled the confrontation in Trafalgar Square. His success in controlling the riots was rewarded with a knighthood, but his harsh tactics increased public outcry and agitation. Renewed outbursts of dissatisfaction with Warren surfaced during the investigation of the Whitechapel murders.

Warren was not only taken to task for the failure of his men to find the Ripper, but he was also rumored to be a Freemason.^*24 In today’s society, Freemasonry is considered perfectly respectable, but at that time Freemasons were thought to be potential anarchists because they operated under a clandestine code. It has been subsequently suggested that the rumors themselves were a diversionary tactic masking the involvement in the Whitechapel murders of certain powerful men in the government, and even in the royal family.

There were reasons for Warren’s inept handling of the murders. In the first place, he was deprived of full authority to conduct the investigations. Although he had been brought in originally to reorganize the police force, the Metropolitan Police continued to operate under dual supervision. The General was given control only of the operations of the uniformed branch, while the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) remained under the command of a superintendent who dealt directly with the Home Office.^*25

There is considerable mystery as to the extent of Warren’s responsibility for the investigation of the Ripper murders. He certainly paid an almost instant visit to the passageway at Goulston Street where the mysterious message had been chalked on the wall: “The Jewes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.”^*26

The inspector in charge of the case appealed to Warren to know what action he should take; Warren told him to erase the message immediately, without waiting for the photographer summoned by Major Smith of the City Police, who was expected within the hour. Warren claimed that the reason for the erasure was to prevent an anti-Jewish riot, and his report to the Home Secretary of November 6, 1888, consists of a lengthy defense of this position:

4 Whitehall Place, S.W.

6th November 1888

Confidential

The Under Secretary of State

The Home Office

Sir,

In reply to your letter of the 5th instant, I enclose a report of the circumstances of the Mitre Square Murder so far as they have come under the notice of the Metropolitan Police, and I now give an account regarding the erasing the writing on the wall in Goulston Street which I have already partially explained to Mr. Matthews verbally.

On the 30th September on hearing of the Berner Street murder, after visiting Commercial Street Station I arrived at Leman Street Station shortly before 5 A.M. and ascertained from Superintendent Arnold all that was known there relative to the two murders.

The most pressing question at that moment was some writing on the wall in Goulston Street evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews, and which Mr. Arnold with a view to prevent serious disorder proposed to obliterate, and had sent down an Inspector with a sponge for that purpose, telling him to await his arrival.

I considered it desirable that I should decide this matter myself, as it was one involving so great a responsibility whether any action was taken or not.

I accordingly went down to Goulston Street at once before going to the scene of the murder: it was just getting light, the public would be in the streets in a few minutes, in a neighbourhood very much crowded on Sunday mornings by Jewish vendors and Christian purchasers from all parts of London.

There were several Police around the spot when I arrived, both Metropolitan and City.

The writing was on the jamb of the open archway or doorway visible to anybody in the street and could not be covered up without danger of the covering being torn off at once.

A discussion took place whether the writing could be left covered up or otherwise or whether any portion of it could be left for an hour until it could be photographed; but after taking into consideration the excited state of the population in London generally at the time, the strong feeling which had been excited against the Jews, and the fact that in a short time there would be a large concourse of the people in the streets, and having before me the Report that if it was left there the house was likely to be wrecked (in which from my own observation I entirely concurred) I considered it desirable to obliterate the writing at once, having taken a copy of which I enclose a duplicate.

After having been to the scene of the murder, I went on to the City Police Office and informed the Chief Superintendent of the reason why the writing had been obliterated.

I may mention that so great was the feeling with regard to the Jews that on the 13th ulto. the Acting Chief Rabbi wrote to me on the subject of the spelling of the word “Jewes” on account of a newspaper asserting that this was Jewish spelling in the Yiddish dialect. He added “in the present state of excitement it is dangerous to the safety of the poor Jews in the East [End] to allow such an assertion to remain uncontradicted. My community keenly appreciates your humane and vigilant action during this critical time.”

It may be realised therefore if the safety of the Jews in Whitechapel could be considered to be jeopardised thirteen days after the murder by the question of the spelling of the word Jews, what might have happened to the Jews in that quarter had that writing been left intact.

I do not hesitate myself to say that if that writing had been left there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost; and I was much gratified with the promptitude with which Superintendent Arnold was prepared to act in the matter if I had not been there.

I have no doubt myself whatever that one of the principal objects of the Reward offered by Mr. Montagu was to shew to the world that the Jews were desirous of having the Hanbury Street Murder cleared up, and thus to divert from them the very strong feeling which was then growing up.

I am, Sir,

Your most obedient Servant,

(signed) C. Warren^*27

Warren enclosed two identical copies of the following message:

The Jewes are

The men that

Will not

be Blamed

for nothing^*28

There has been some argument about whether the spelling was “Jewes” or “Juwes,” the exact position of the word “not” (which differs in the version above from that given earlier), and whether there was significance in the breaks in the message. But it seems clear that the purpose of the message was diabolically cunning—the Ripper intended to throw the police off the scent, linking the message to the murder through the rag from Eddowes’s apron; no doubt he also disliked the Jews, and he may well have hoped to incite the sort of anti-Jewish demonstration Warren’s swift decision prevented.

In fact, several chief suspects in the murders were Jewish. One, a Polish Jew named John Pizer, was known to be a small-time blackmailer and abuser of prostitutes. He was a boot finisher by trade, and when the police came to question him they found several sharp knives and a leather apron on the premises. Since a leather apron had been found not far from the body of Annie Chapman, he was taken to the police station and jailed on suspicion of her murder. However, the apron turned out to belong to a neighbor on Hanbury Street. Pizer’s alibi held up, and the police were forced to release him.

The Jews were particularly unpopular in Whitechapel, where they formed a considerable proportion of the population, and the situation had not been helped by a notorious murder case, some four years earlier, when a Jew named Lipski had been hanged for the murder of his Jewish girlfriend.

Sir Charles Warren considered social liberation in England a critical issue. The Britain of this era was great indeed, rich and authoritative, proud possessor of an Empire on which the sun never set, in which members of a burgeoning middle class could hope to reap rewards, too—although the mansions and great estates were still the privilege of the selected and wealthy few. The British fleet ruled the oceans.

The extravagant lifestyle of the rich was in stark contrast to that of the many slum dwellers who struggled in the wilderness of poverty, alcohol, and illness. In general, members of the aristocratic class lived in an atmosphere of luxury and festivity and appeared to pass their days entirely in entertaining themselves. Very few participated in helping the more unfortunate or were prepared to take on genuine responsibilities. The royal family, in particular, was criticized. Queen Victoria lived almost entirely in retirement at Windsor, in the Highlands, or on the Isle of Wight, while the Prince of Wales, denied by his mother any opportunity to participate in the business of ruling, spent most of his time hunting, going to parties, traveling around Europe, or making triumphal trips through India. People observed, also, that though the Prince had married the beautiful and popular Alexandra, he regularly left her at home while he continued his peripatetic existence, constantly meeting with other attractive women. Such behavior earned him positive dislike in many quarters. His elder son Prince Albert Victor, known as Eddy, was a very unprepossessing heir to the throne and, as we shall hear later, involved in scandals. Even the Princess of Wales’s personal popularity could not bring people to think well of her neglectful husband or look forward to Prince Eddy’s ascent to the throne.

There were those who agreed with Warren on the social and class inequities. Nevertheless, the General began to feel outcast and isolated. Six months earlier, in March 1888, he had informed the Home Secretary of his intention to resign. The idea of a conspiracy directed by the Freemasons seems extremely questionable; more likely, there may have been some interference by various officials in the murder investigations, including cover-ups and glossing over of possible suspects. It was probably the personality more than the practices of Sir Charles Warren that created controversy and condemnation.

Earlier, Warren appointed as his assistant commissioner a man named Robert Anderson. There were several curious features about Anderson’s involvement in the case. The new assistant had arranged to take a vacation in Switzerland and was to begin his duties on his return. The murder of Mary Anne Nichols in Buck’s Row took place on August 31, eight days before Anderson was due to leave, and Annie Chapman was murdered on Hanbury Street on September 8, the morning of that eighth day. Despite these dual emergencies, however, Anderson refused to postpone his vacation and departed as planned. Barely a month later, Anderson seemed to be taking credit for the operation by submitting an updated report of the murder investigations to the Home Secretary’s Office, though he had had very little to do with its preparation.

As if adding insult to injury, the Home Secretary’s Office kept issuing orders directly to Anderson and Warren’s other subordinates, rather than routing them through the General himself. This deliberate bypassing of the regular channels caused confusion and resentment throughout the police division and certainly slowed the investigation of the Whitechapel murders. A catch-22 situation evolved in which Warren was severely hampered in his efforts to capture Jack the Ripper while being criticized for not devoting his efforts to the capture of Jack the Ripper.

In the House of Commons on November 12, 1888, Mr. Conybeare rose to question the Home Secretary.

RESIGNATION OF SIR C. WARREN.

Mr. CONYBEARE asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he could state the exact reason why the late head of the Detective Department in the Metropolitan Police resigned his position; whether it was the fact that Sir C. Warren had now practically the direct control of the Detective Department; and whether, in view of the constant recurrence of atrocious murders, and the failure of the new organisation and methods to detect the murderer, he would consider the propriety of making some change in the arrangements of Scotland-yard. The hon. member also wished to know whether it was true, as reported in the newspapers that afternoon, that Sir C. Warren had tendered his resignation, and that it had been accepted.

The HOME SECRETARY.—I have already more than once stated the reason why Mr. Monro resigned. With regard to the remainder of the question, Mr. Anderson is now in direct control of the Criminal Investigation Department, under the superintendence and control, as provided by statute, of the Chief Commissioner. The failure of the police, so far, to detect the person guilty of the Whitechapel murders is due, not to any new reorganisation in the department, but to the extraordinary cunning and secrecy which characterise the commission of the crimes. I have for some time had the question of the whole system of the Criminal Investigation Department under my consideration, with a view to introducing any improvement that may be required. With regard to the last question, I have to inform the hon. member that the Chief Commissioner of Police did on the 8th inst. tender his resignation to her Majesty’s Government, and that his resignation has been accepted (loud Opposition cheers).^*29

Finding the continual erosion of his status intolerable, Warren had in fact tendered his resignation on November 8, and the Home Secretary now confirmed to Mr. Conybeare that it had been accepted, amid loud cheering from the political opposition.

Despite the bifurcated police operations, the CID (now being run by Anderson) fervently pursued all potential clues that might lead them to the murderer. They increased the number of policemen on the case and interrogated an ever-growing number of suspects.

Among those suspected were the seamen whose ships came to London, unloaded their cargo, then left and returned again on a fairly regular basis at the end of each week. The list of crew and cattlemen issued by the Statistical Department of the London Custom House on November 15, 1888, shows that every one of those examined at great length by the police proved to have a watertight alibi.

During their investigations, the department also discussed the idea of offering rewards to those who could help them in their inquiries, but in line with British morality, rewards were felt to be unnecessary, and Mr. Montagu’s offer of five hundred pounds was never taken up.

Almost unanimously, the newspapers expressed the outrage of a British public held hostage by fear and panic. The only way of easing the tension was to find the murderer and bring him to justice.