It was 19 February 1888, and the world’s greatest living explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, was laid up like an invalid in a hut in the middle of darkest Africa. His expedition to rescue the Governor of Equatoria, Emin Pasha, was in ruins. Half of his expeditionary force had deserted or died. The remainder were scattered across hundreds of miles. They had been waylaid by pygmies armed with poison arrows, flesh-eating ants, diarrhoea and starvation. They had bartered their guns, ammunition and even their clothing for food. Their specially designed 25ft boat and dozens of boxes of ammunition had been abandoned in the forest. A journey that had been expected to take seven months had now lasted more than a year and the end was not yet in sight.
Stanley would spend twenty-three days drifting in and out of consciousness, his mind muddled with morphine, until his fever passed. When he finally met with Emin Pasha at Lake Albert on 29 April 1888, his band of weary stragglers looked like they were the ones in need of deliverance. Stanley did his best to keep up the pretence, producing three bottles of champagne that had been carefully preserved all the way up the Congo, but his mission had been a resounding failure.
This did not prevent Stanley receiving a hero’s welcome on his return to London, or publishing a one-sided account of his adventure, In Darkest Africa, in 1890. His tale of half-naked savages, slave traders and cannibals was a sensational success, a triumph of civilisation over savagery. But for some readers, it served as a reminder of the darkness at the very heart of the British Empire: the East End.50
Even before Jack the Ripper, that stretch of city beyond the Tower of London already had its own mythology. That area encompassing Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Ratcliffe and the docks resembled some black hole sucking in every beggar, whore and crook, corrupting all it touched and threatening the destruction of respectable society. For those of comfortable means, born and bred to succeed, it seemed that even the third-world savages were ‘not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an east London slum’. It was this reputation that fuelled the fashion for ‘slum tourism’, inspired by the journalistic accounts of social commentators like Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew and James Greenwood. Scores of curious young men and women sought to complete their education by observing the poor in their native habitat. One fifteen-year-old girl, said to be the daughter of a Lord, was so enthused by Walter Besant’s book All Sorts and Conditions of Men that she decided to investigate the life of a flower seller for herself and spent the night with a Jewish family in Mile End. At around the same time, the Princess of Wales ventured into Whitechapel to see another kind of ‘freak show’, Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, at his small flat at the rear of the London Hospital.51
In the 1880s, newspapers began competing with their own first-hand accounts full of florid descriptions of the blood and filth found in an area dominated by slaughterhouses, cellar workshops and drinking dens. This was the ‘New Journalism’ that would wring every drop of drama and sensation from the Ripper murders. George Sims told of the families ‘packed like herrings in a barrel, neglected and despised, and left to endure wrongs and hardships [as] if they were related of a far-off savage tribe’. Howard Goldsmid, a nineteen-year-old undercover journalist and ex-grammar school boy, covered his face with dirt, donned a soiled shirt and coat, tattered boots and a deerstalker hat, stuck a clay pipe between his lips and ventured into the worst lodging houses he could find. Paying 4d for a bed, he slept in festering rooms jammed full of hags too old and hideous to sell their bodies, abandoned wives, destitute widows, the crippled and infirm, the homeless, the unemployed, loafers, cadgers and thieves – not to mention the fleas and bugs rampaging over every inch of skin. Eleanor Marx, the thirty-three-year-old daughter of the late revolutionary socialist Karl Marx, began exploring the East End herself in 1888.
Sometimes I am inclined to wonder how one can go on living with all this suffering around one. One room especially haunts me. Room! – cellar, dark, underground – In it a woman lying on some sacking and a little straw, her breast half eaten away with cancer. She is naked but for an old red handkerchief over her breast and a bit of old sail over her legs. By her side a baby of three and other children – four of them. The oldest just nine years old. The husband tries to ‘pick up’ a few pence at the docks – that last refuge of the desperate – and the children are howling for bread. What has become of those children heaven knows. – But that’s only one out of thousands and thousands.52
This ‘furore for social facts’ also attracted professional men like Charles Booth, who set out to map economic conditions in the East End in a bid to disprove some of the wilder assertions being flung around. And while his colour-coded view of the city revealed a healthy middle and upper-working class lining the main streets, he estimated that a third of the population was on or below the poverty line of 21s a week for a medium-sized family. What was to be done? In an age without state benefits, the task of relieving the distress of the poor was left to the church, charities and rich philanthropists like the banker Nathan Rothschild, the first Jewish member of the House of Lords.53
The characterisation of the East End as a ‘plague spot’ only became more exaggerated when Jack the Ripper started murdering prostitutes in the autumn of 1888. There were, however, some journalists who felt the stereotyping unfair. The Illustrated London News reported that: ‘Those who are well acquainted with the East End of London will not assent to the unfavourable notion of its general character and condition which is often ignorantly expressed in conversation among persons in society remote from that part of the metropolis.’ In its view, Whitechapel, Stepney and Bow were similar to the manufacturing districts of Manchester and Leeds. ‘The wide and airy thoroughfares, frequented by decent, orderly, and cheerful people, most of whom are in pretty constant and regular employment at various factories; the neatness and comfort of their habitations, and their orderly domestic and social life, may be an agreeable surprise to visitors.’ The East London Observer also attempted to inject some balance by claiming that Whitechapel was safer than any other part of the country due to increased police patrols.54
Two major reasons for the focus on the East End, and Whitechapel in particular, were concerns about ‘sweated labour’ and unchecked immigration. To some, they were two sides of the same coin. The East End was overcrowded, and the lack of work encouraged the exploitation of men, women, girls and boys. People were so desperate for a few pennies to buy food, drink and a bed for the night that they would work for a penny an hour, sixteen hours a day, six days a week, in hot cellars churning out cheap goods like trousers, boots and jackets for the department stores. The blame for this situation was put not only on the unscrupulous ‘sweaters’, but also on the thousands of Jews flooding the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. It was claimed that the Jews were driving down wages, pushing out English workers, forcing the respectable middle classes out of their homes and setting up illicit gambling dens. It mattered little that many of these newcomers were fleeing from persecution in Eastern Europe following the assassination of Tsar Alexander III in Russia.55
In the summer of 1888 both issues were examined in parallel by the House of Lords select committee on the sweating system, and the House of Commons select committee on Emigration and Immigration. Often the evidence overlapped – the Lords heard that ‘foreigners were much more steady than Englishmen’, while the Commons investigated claims that sweaters were offering money to Polish and Russian Jews to come to England.
One of the major contributors to the immigration committee was Arnold White, who had in 1886 attempted to finance a ‘society for the suppression of the immigration of destitute aliens’, and wrote that ‘England will cease to be England if our rulers do not show that they love the English more than the frugal, unlovable foreigner’.56 The committee was told that hundreds of ‘aliens’ were arriving every week at Tilbury Docks alone. Some ports, such as Dover, did not even count the number of immigrants. The figures showed that at least 9,000 had arrived from Hamburg and other European ports in the year up to 30 June 1888. For all the government knew there were thousands pouring unchecked into the country.
But why England? Henry Dejonge, a Jewish cigar maker, told the committee: ‘In many instances they are sent for by their friends and relatives, and the great attraction I should think from what I have heard from them, is the freedom there is in this country as compared to the despotic country they are leaving.’ The suspicion was that they were being encouraged to leave; Samuel Hoare MP noted that: ‘It was stated a short time ago that there was some Polish newspaper which stated that the streets of London were paved with gold and advising poor people to come over here.’ Their ultimate destination was the East End, and Whitechapel, which Charles Booth described as ‘the great centre of the foreign population of London’.57
It was estimated that there were at least 60,000 Jews in east London, half of them foreign born. Two out of the multitude living in Whitechapel in 1888 were twenty-five-year-old Abraham Potzdamer and his wife Hannah, aged twenty. It was said they had arrived from Russia in September (although their surname hinted at a connection with Germany) and that she had formerly worked at a ‘house of ill fame’. At first they stayed with a family of Jews running a cookshop – the Victorian equivalent of a greasy spoon – in Brick Lane. Abraham took a job there but apparently he gave it up after eight days because the work was too hard. It seems this did not endear him to his young wife and she moved in with one of his friends, Louis Cohen, at No.147 Backchurch Lane. It was a road ‘inhabited mostly by a low type of foreigners and small shopkeepers’, including the whisky wholesaler Kinloch & Co. and a chandler by the name of Gallowitz. Behind the houses on the western side of the lane ran the railway line that the Potzdamers most likely arrived on from Tilbury Docks.
Now homeless and wifeless, Abraham Potzdamer tried to support himself by taking work as a boot finisher, like many immigrant Jews in the East End. Skilled finishers could earn as much as 45s a week, but it was now a trade under intense pressure from large-scale manufacturers. Many were casual workers required only to polish and tidy boots, the last stage of a production line. Prices had been cut by nearly half over the previous thirty years, and wages had followed suit. Small-scale workshops thrived by ‘sweating’ their employees for sixteen or eighteen hours a day, and fining them if they were late or produced shoddy goods. Foreigners were happier to do the back-breaking work than the English, most likely because they had little choice – it was either work or starve. Still, even at the rate of 3s a week for new recruits, they were better off than in Poland or Russia.
Without a job, Potzdamer would have had to walk to the soup kitchen on Fashion Street operated by the Board of Guardians. There he would join the throng of foreign Jews, described in one contemporary novel as:
… strange stunted swarthy hairy creatures with muddy complexions illumined by black twinkling eyes. A few were of imposing stature, wearing coarse, dusty felt hats or peaked caps, with shaggy beards of faded scarfs around their throats. Here and there, too, was a woman of comely face and figure, but for the most part it was a collection of crones, prematurely aged, with weird, wan, old-world features, slipshod and draggle-tailed, their heads bare, or covered with dingy shawls in lieu of bonnets, red shawls, grey shawls, brick-dust shawls, mud-coloured shawls. Yet there was an indefinable touch of romance and pathos about the tawdriness and witch-like ugliness, and an underlying identity about the crowd of Polish, Russian, German, Dutch Jewesses, mutually apathetic, and pressing forwards. Some of them had infants at their bare breasts, who drowsed quietly with intervals of ululation.58
At first Potzdamer kept away from his wife, not even revealing his new address. This might have indicated that he had accepted her decision and moved on, but in reality he was sinking into a deep depression. He confided in his brother that he felt life without her was not worth living.
On the morning of Wednesday, 1 February, he was spotted hanging around in the street outside Louis Cohen’s house. Cohen thought little of it, and at around 1 p.m. sent Hannah Potzdamer out to buy some provisions. Moments later he heard a terrible scream, and the cry of ‘Murder!’. He rushed downstairs and followed a trail of blood leading out the front door. Outside he found Hannah lying in the middle of the road, with crimson gushing from her neck. She was able to lift her hand and gesture weakly at her escaping attacker before slumping unconscious. Cohen and a group of neighbours set off in pursuit.
Potzdamer crossed Commercial Road and ducked into Greenfield Street with his bloody shoemaker’s knife in hand, only to see PC Collinson coming in the opposite direction. Turning his back upon the officer, he drew the blade across his own throat. As the policeman grabbed him, Potzdamer plunged his fingers into the wound to widen it and finish the job even quicker. Both he and his estranged wife died on the way to the London Hospital a few hundred yards away. One newspaper illustrated its report by depicting Hannah Potzdamer being wheeled past a shocked gaggle of neighbours in a barrow. Brief reports were filed under headlines such as ‘Terrible Tragedy in London’ and ‘Murder and Suicide at the East End’. But if this episode shed any light on the terrible conditions in which people were living in Whitechapel, the full picture would not emerge until later in the year.59
While reports of East End poverty filled the pages of books, newspapers and Parliamentary reports, other areas of the capital suffered the same problems in relative silence. Before Whitechapel, probably the most notorious district was the ‘Mint’ in Borough, a few minutes’ walk from London Bridge. In the early to mid-nineteenth century it was said that there was ‘no spot that looks so murderous, so melancholy and so miserable’. Mint Street, a maze of stinking alleys and dilapidated lodging houses, had been a notorious hideout for villains and a rich hunting ground for diseases like cholera. Between 1881 and 1886 much of it was demolished, and the new Marshalsea Road opened in 1888 to take traffic from Borough to the Southwark Bridge. ‘Formerly the borough was one of the nastiest districts in the Metropolis,’ wrote one observer in 1886, ‘now however … the borough is comparatively respectable.’ Slum clearing wasn’t a total solution, as the evicted were simply pushed into surrounding areas. Part of the Old Mint remained standing, along with a large number of common lodging houses catering for prostitutes, pickpockets and the poor at 4d for a stinking, dirty room crammed full of vermin-infested beds. The police officer Tom Divall, who served with the Met from 1882 to 1913, later wrote that, ‘I think I can truthfully say that no other known place could equal it for vice.’60
Just to the east of the Mint lay the General Post Office on the part of Borough High Street then known as Blackman Lane. The postal service was in the middle of a boom period that only levelled off after 1910, and was making more than £3 million a year net profit. The late nineteenth century was a time when there were six deliveries a day and letters posted before 6 p.m. could be delivered the same evening. Stamps cost ½d for postcards and 1d for letters under an ounce in weight. More than 100,000 people worked for the Post Office, collecting, sorting and delivering seventy items of mail per person per year.61 Two of them were William Hall, aged thirty-two, and George Figes, both sorters at the headquarters in St Martin’s-le-Grand. At 1 a.m. on 7 December 1888, they left work and started making their way home along the Marshalsea Road towards New Cross. A man and a woman came towards them, and the woman tearfully complained that she had been insulted by her companion. At that moment a third stranger suddenly appeared and knocked the hat off the companion before walking away. This strange series of events led Hall and Figes to follow the woman to the Borough to seek out a police constable. While Hall stopped and had a smoke outside St George the Martyr Church, the hat-tipping stranger reappeared and, without a word of warning, punched him on the side of the head, knocking him to the floor. Hall was able to walk to the Stone’s End police station and identify his attacker as William James, a thirty-three-year-old street hawker, before being taken to Guy’s Hospital. He died a few hours later of a fractured skull and brain haemorrhage.
The inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder against James after witnesses testified that the fatal blow had been entirely unprovoked. During the hearing, Constable Sutherland recalled how James had walked up to the group at the corner of Marshalsea Road shortly before the attack and declared himself to be Jack the Ripper. It had only been three weeks since the murder of Mary Kelly but these kinds of boasts were becoming so familiar that those in court burst into laughter.
The following month James stood trial for manslaughter before Mr Justice Denman at the Old Bailey, the murder charge being replaced with the lesser alternative by the Grand Jury. James claimed that he had only pushed Hall away because he was ‘interfering improperly with the woman’, but eventually changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to twelve months' hard labour. It was not his first brush with the law – he already had a criminal record for assaulting the police.62
The West End was often held up as a direct contrast to East End poverty; Kensington, Knightsbridge and Mayfair were where the rich dwelt in opulent luxury when they weren’t enjoying the clean air of their countryside retreats. But while Booth’s poverty map showed Hyde Park surrounded by the golden yellow colour denoting the ‘upper classes’, it also revealed scattered pockets of the black ‘semi-criminal’ and dark-grey ‘poor’. In the alleyways behind Paddington railway station, in the homes along Horseferry Road and Peter Street in Westminster, the streets off King’s Road, Chelsea, in Soho, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the poor lived yards away from people spending more in one day than they would in a year, despite the best efforts of the landowners to cleanse their districts.
Notting Hill and Notting Dale epitomised these contradictions. In the sweeping crescents, gardens and walks along Ladbroke Grove down to Campden Hill and Holland Park stood row upon row of terraced Victorian townhouses. They had replaced the failed Hippodrome Racecourse, an 1830s’ attempt to bring the glamour of Ascot and Epsom to the city; in the late nineteenth century its inhabitants included the writers G.K. Chesterton and Arthur Machen, and the spiritualist Helena Blavatsky. That these grand properties failed to attract the wealthy upper classes away from Mayfair and Belgravia was mainly due to the proximity of an area known as the ‘Potteries and Piggeries’ to the west along Pottery Lane. Forty years earlier it had been condemned as ‘a plague spot, scarcely equalled for insalubrity by any other in London’ and as being worse than famine-stricken Ireland.
It comprises some seven or eight acres, with about 260 houses (if the term can be applied to such hovels), and a population of 900 or 1,000. The occupation of the inhabitants is principally pig-fattening; many hundreds of pigs, ducks and fowls are kept in an incredible state of filth. Dogs abound for the purpose of guarding the swine … There are foul ditches, open sewers and defective drains, smelling most offensively and generating large quantities of poisonous gases; stagnant water is found at every turn … Nearly all the inhabitants look unhealthy, the women especially complain of sickness, and want of appetite; their eyes are shrunken and their skin shrivelled.
It was said that in 1860 a woman stumbled into a bog near Latymer Road and drowned. Gradually the pigs and kilns disappeared but even in 1888 the area around St Ann’s Road and Bangor Street was a notorious slum populated by beggars, gypsies, Irish immigrants and drunks.63
At 10.30 p.m. on Saturday 20 October 1888, George Quinney was still serving cooked fish at his shop in Bangor Street when a quarrel broke out. Michael Patten, a well-known local drunk going by the nickname of ‘Brummie’, had made an unsolicited remark to the wife of nineteen-year-old labourer James Marshall, known as Scottie. Tempers flared, and Quinney ordered them outside. The ensuing brawl attracted a small crowd, who shouted and jeered as the pair tussled on the pavement. ‘Patten fell in the gutter, and when he was there Marshall kicked him on the back of the head and punched him,’ recalled William Bond, a shopkeeper’s son. ‘Before they began to fight I heard Marshall say “Come on, I will fight you now I have got you’’.’ Within minutes a uniformed policeman arrived and ordered them to break it up, before ushering Marshall and his wife into the fish shop to finish their supper. Patten tried to get another drink at the Red Lion pub, but was quickly told to leave and walked back to the common lodging house where he was staying, at No.27 Crescent Street. Conveniently the lodging house also contained a beer shop.
At 11.30 p.m., Patten was standing in front of the fire in the kitchen when he was told that Joseph Lay, one of Marshall’s friends, wanted to have a word. Patten wiped a little blood from the back of his head and put on his hard hat before going outside in his bare feet. It would be Patten’s second fight of the night and the last of his life. It was witnessed by the wife of a coal porter, Agnes Cooling:
I saw Lay punching Patten about the body, just outside the archway, and I heard Patten fall. I heard his head go against the wall. Lay went back and said ‘Get up, what’s the matter with you?’ Patten made no reply then Lay dragged him out by his coat collar and then Marshall rushed up and punched him in the chest and kicked him in the head. I said, ‘Oh you have killed the man, I will fetch a policeman.’ I went for one but could not find one and when I returned the place was all clear.
In fact, Lay and another man had carried Patten inside the lodging house. The next morning he was found dead in his bed.
Lay was arrested the same day. ‘He insulted Scottie and his wife at the fish shop and was turned out,’ he said in a statement. ‘I was standing outside the Shamrock, in Crescent Street. He came up; he was drunk and wanted to fight. We had a struggle and he fell on the kerb.’
Two days later, Marshall was arrested but denied being involved in the second fight in Crescent Street. ‘I had never spoken to the man before in my life,’ he told magistrates. ‘I am innocent of touching the man after the fight with him at St Ann’s road. It is all lies.’
Both men stood trial for manslaughter at the Old Bailey and both were found not guilty. The case hinged on the medical evidence – the lack of certainty about the cause of the wound at the back of Patten’s head and the bleeding on his brain were crucial. Dr James Miller, a surgeon living in Notting Dale, testified that death could have resulted from either the fall at the fish shop or the one outside the lodging house. The jury probably had little sympathy for a man who, according to Lay, ‘was well known about the neighbourhood to be drunk, and he would have three or four fights a night before he came home’. For some, it was a way of life.