Just as the city expanded and evolved, so did the group of men dedicated to maintaining law and order. At its formation in 1829, the Metropolitan Police began with 144 police constables patrolling five divisions. Eight months later there were 3,200. By the end of 1888 the figure was 12,025 over twenty-one divisions covering an area of 688 sq. miles. Gone were the top hat and rattle, replaced by the helmet (1864) and whistle (1884). But they were not just uniforms patrolling the streets any more – the force now took on the investigation of crime, the protection of public buildings and public figures, and the surveillance of criminal gangs and terrorists. The policeman could just as well wear plain clothes, and walk his beat disguised as an ordinary member of the public. He could also be stuck behind a desk.
There were still large numbers of officers out on the streets twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Just over 9,000 were available, of which roughly 60 per cent were used for night duty between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. During daylight hours there were 1,561 men on ordinary beat duty, 522 at ‘fixed points’, and eighty-eight watching over the hackney carriage stands.64 So who were these police officers? Many were from poor and working-class families, men in their teens and early twenties who either felt a sense of duty or saw the chance of a steady job where there was little real alternative. Fortunately, because of a public enthusiasm for police stories and the Ripper murders, a number of policemen went on to describe their experiences – albeit occasionally with exaggerated nostalgia – in print in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Walter Dew, the detective who later became famous for the capture of Dr Crippen, joined the Met in 1882 on a wage of 15s a week. He had left school at thirteen and was sacked from his job as a clerk for deserting his desk to watch the Old Bailey being ravaged by fire. Benjamin Leeson was the son of a country policeman but worked as a cricket groundsman from the age of twelve before joining the force in 1890. Frederick Wensley came to London to join the police at twenty-two in January 1888. After a few weeks of drills, he was given a brand new uniform and sent off to patrol the streets of Lambeth, only to be drafted over to help in Whitechapel at the height of the Ripper scare. John Sweeney, the son of an Irish farmer, worked as a gardener before taking up a clerical job in the Hammersmith T Division in the late 1870s. Tom Divall was born on a farm in Sussex; he started work at eight years old and spent his teens as a car-man for a railway company before joining the force in 1882. Frances Carlin was another policeman’s son but started work in the commercial office of a coal company at fifteen before being recruited to the Limehouse Division in 1890. Arthur Neil was born in Lewisham; he left school at fifteen and worked as a footman until he was accepted by the Met in May 1888, having been rejected by the City of London police.
Each had their own opinion of the worst areas of London, although most chose Whitechapel because of the notoriety of the Ripper murders and their effect on the police force. Dew believed H Division had ‘a reputation for vice and villainy unequalled in the British Isles’ even before Jack the Ripper. Leeson also recounted how he had first encountered the area when he wandered by mistake into ‘the notorious Shovel Alley itself, a dirty, ill-lit court of about twenty houses, or rather, I should say, hovels’. When he asked for directions the children hurled abuse: ‘Copper lost his way!’, ‘Do him in!’ and ‘We kill all coppers who come down this street’. Wensley, who spent six months off work after being beaten up while on duty in the New Cut, believed Lambeth was ‘a model of propriety and decorum compared with Whitechapel’. It wasn’t just common criminality, prostitution and gruesome murder, but also ‘organised gangs of desperate men and lads, armed with lethal weapons, terrorising whole areas, blackmailing tradesmen, holding up wayfarers, and carrying out more or less open robbery in any direction that offered’. That didn’t mean other areas made for an easy life – Sweeney recalled the Hammersmith of 1880 as being:
… plagued by numerous gangs of roughs who … indulged in a large amount of petty larceny, amused themselves by having faction fights in the streets, wrenching off door-knockers, breaking windows, shutters and facias, pushing people about and assaulting them if they remonstrated. Several houses were broken into while the occupants were at divine service.
Charles Arrow, a police inspector in the 1880s and ’90s, said that he had heard Tottenham Court Road was ‘the most wicked road in London’, while Divall insisted that there was ‘no doubt Deptford was the rowdiest district in London’ thanks to the docks. ‘Their great object was to attack the police,’ he remembered, ‘and I have often seen our charge room at the station more like a slaughterhouse than a place for human beings.’ When he was transferred to Southwark M Division, he found it ‘inundated with criminals of all descriptions from all parts of the world’. Writing in 1893, the former Chief Inspector Cavanagh remembered a mass brawl outside a pub near Union Street as: ‘… men and women skull-dragging each other all over the place, pokers, flat-irons, bellows etc. in free use everywhere. Shrieks of murder, police, fire, robbery filled the air.’ Detective Robert Fuller, working there in the 1880s, told of ‘hundreds of thieves and loafers lounging about the street corners in gangs that would not be allowed anywhere but in such a place as this’. In Fuller's memory, Borough saw ‘no end of murders’ and Rotherhithe was prowled by ‘gangs of ruffians’ robbing men and women at will. Even in the City of Westminster officers would have to chase thieves through the ‘labyrinth of streets and a network of low “doss houses” into which the person who committed a crime could dive and be lost’. Patrolling the streets was not a job for the fainthearted – in 1888 there were more than 2,200 assaults on officers of the Metropolitan Police.65
PC Michael Lewis had the more comfortable beat of Chelsea, known as B Division. He had been born in Cork in Ireland, and had served in the Royal Irish Constabulary before getting married to a local girl and coming to London. By 31 May 1888, he was forty-eight years old and had given twenty years to the Metropolitan Police. That night he was on duty patrolling the King’s Road, so-called because it was originally Charles II’s private highway to Hampton Court. Now open to the masses, it was seen as a shabbier version of Oxford Street, ‘with its straggling, dirty, stucco mid-century houses and shops’ which were easily outshone by the grander residences along nearby Cheyne Walk. There was, however, one section which attracted the artistic minds of London. The Vale, on the north side of King’s Road, just a few hundred yards past the Town Hall, was a land of quaint little cottages and ‘wild gardens and houses hidden behind trees’. The painter James McNeill Whistler lived at No.2, known as ‘The Pink Palace’, and in later years Walter Sickert would occupy No.1. Oscar Wilde was an occasional visitor.66
No doubt PC Lewis and his colleague Robert Feek were less concerned about the beauty of their surroundings than the human activity on the streets that night. For one, there were two men hanging about suspiciously on the pavement; PC Feek, who was new to the beat, ordered them to stop obstructing the footway and move along. There was some grumbling from one of them about how they couldn’t even stop and chat for five minutes after getting off work, but they moved away and the officers continued down to the junction at Beaufort Street. It was on the way back towards the Vale at around 7.10 p.m. that they saw the same two men walking out some gates with zinc flower boxes on their shoulders. ‘Where did you get that from?’ Feek asked.
The first man, Edward Warne, made no reply but the second man gave the game away by saying, ‘We might as well have gone home at first as be copped like this.’ Feek grabbed hold of them and called Lewis over to help him escort them down to the station. Warne, aged thirty-five, and his accomplice Frederick Wood, aged twenty-four, worked as car-men – a delivery driver of sorts – and it turned out that Warne had done a bit of work in the Vale a few days earlier. He had obviously spotted the zinc boxes in one of the gardens and had decided that they were an opportunity he could not refuse.
The four men had barely left the Vale on the way to the station when Warne grabbed PC Feek by the testicles and threw him to the ground. Ignoring his pain, Feek held on to his man, despite suffering a kick in the stomach for his efforts. Meanwhile Wood was also wrestling to get free from Lewis, and at the same time trying to kick PC Feek. The next few minutes were a tangle of arms and legs as the policemen battled to get their prisoners under control. As Feek recalled:
A struggle ensued between Lewis and Wood, and Wood caught hold of his throat and hold of his waist. Wood was trying to get at me to release Warne. Lewis fell to the ground in the struggle, Wood on the top of him. I got up from the ground, and asked Warne to go to the station quietly. He said ‘Let me go’ then kicked me in the bottom part of the stomach and knocked me under a bus wheel. I got up and struck him a blow with my fist; he made another kick at me, and got me down on the ground; I had to call for assistance, as he got hold of my testicles a second time.
Help was at hand, although not from the crowd of eighteen to twenty people who had gathered to watch. PC Thomas Wilson, who had run to the scene from the station further down King’s Road, helped Lewis take Wood back to the station. Meanwhile, a local pub landlord and a parish surveyor on his way home from work went to the aid of Feek. Eventually, Warne saw sense and gave up the fight. Both men were taken into custody at the station and charged with assault and resisting arrest. The two constables then began cleaning themselves up so they could get back on duty. By 8.50 p.m. they were ready. But as they entered the yard, PC Lewis grabbed Feek’s arm and said: ‘Chummy, I feel so faint’, before slumping to the ground. Blood oozed from his eyes, nose and mouth. Five minutes later he was dead.
The post-mortem revealed that Lewis, a slight but otherwise healthy man, had suffered a rupture to the right ventricle of the heart. Police surgeon Richard Daniel believed the direct cause was excitement or violent exertion, most likely as a result of the struggle in King’s Road. But Lewis had told his inspector that Wood had not assaulted him – in Lewis’ words, ‘We had an “up and downer”’ and I think I must have ricked my chest.’ The jury at the inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder against Wood. Both he and Warne were then charged before the magistrate, ‘as it is alleged by the prosecution that they had a common felonious purpose, and that when taken into custody they offered a common resistance to their lawful apprehension’.
It was a weak case but bolstered mainly by the fact that the victims were police officers. When it came before Mr Justice Hawkins at the Old Bailey he ruled that the evidence did not amount to murder or manslaughter, and the charge was dismissed. Warne was instead sentenced to five years for grievous bodily harm on PC Feek, while Wood received three months' hard labour after pleading guilty to stealing the zinc and resisting arrest.
Michael Lewis was one of sixty-eight Met Police officers who died in 1888, although his was the only death linked to violence. For others it was typhoid fever, pneumonia, bronchitis, diphtheria and other common diseases. One drowned accidentally, while another hanged himself. At that time there was no automatic right to a pension, either for a retired officer or their widow. PC Lewis’ wife, Mary, was given a £49 lump sum from the Constables’ Death Fund, but otherwise relied on the 17s a week earned by her two youngest sons, who were aged fourteen and sixteen and lived at home with her in Lots Road, Chelsea. Her second eldest son had died two years earlier and the eldest, aged nineteen, was serving as a soldier in India. When her plight was raised at court, the magistrate expressed his hope that she would receive a compassionate allowance and in the meantime ‘to relieve her necessities temporarily’ gave her a sovereign out of the poor box.67
In 1890 there was a mass strike in support of the Police Pensions Bill. Whether or not the threat of industrial action played any part, the Act was passed allowing retirement on 60 per cent of pay after twenty-five years’ service. But pensions were just one of a series of crises threatening the force at that time. In 1888, they not only had the Whitechapel murderer and a feral press to deal with, but also public dissent in the streets, a divided leadership, a troubled relationship with the Home Office and the stirrings of mutiny within the ranks. Much of the unrest could be traced back two years earlier to 8 February 1886.
On that day, a crowd of 5,000 unemployed and casual labourers ran riot through the West End after leaving two mass meetings held by the London United Workmen’s Committee and the Social Democratic Federation in Trafalgar Square. Windows were smashed first in Pall Mall and St James’ on the way to Hyde Park before the group returned to target shops along Oxford Street. But the damage caused during the rampage wasn’t so much to property; it was the fear created that the West End was at risk from the marauding mobs of the East. The American journalist George Smalley wrote that the multitude was, for three hours, ‘in absolute possession and unchecked control of the West End of London’. Panic quickly took over and for the next three days shopkeepers closed and boarded up their businesses as rumours spread of mobs arriving from Deptford and other wild areas of London to join the uprising. Once the hysteria had subsided, the blame landed squarely on the Metropolitan Police, and Commissioner Edmund Henderson felt compelled to resign after seventeen years in the job. He would be replaced by Sir Charles Warren, an officer in the British Army who was called back from Sudan to bring some discipline to the police and the capital.68
But the West End riots hinted at more trouble to come. The behaviour of the mob could not be explained just by wanton criminality. As the journalist Howard Goldsmid wrote later that year:
Most of the men who took part in the riots of that day came from the low lodging houses, and though the majority perhaps were actuated solely by cupidity and greed, there was many a stern, determined man there who believed that in plundering and destroying he was merely executing the righteous wrath of starved oppressed and discontented labour against harsh, bloated and unsympathetic capital.
Goldsmid warned, a little melodramatically, that without reform there might instead be revolution.69
This hardly seemed likely when the Golden Jubilee was triumphantly celebrated the following year. If anything the people of London seemed more enthusiastic than ever for the monarchy and the society it represented. When Henry Mayhew, the great investigator of the Victorian poor, died the same month it was said that ‘no one cared very greatly’. But the mask soon slipped once the pomp and ceremony died away. It was estimated that in 1887 there were 20,000 men out of work and that 27 out of every 100 workers in east London, Battersea and Deptford were unemployed. The homeless continued to gather in Trafalgar Square during the summer, and by August and September it was effectively a campsite ‘occupation’. There they were entertained, educated and agitated by socialists against the Conservative government of Lord Salisbury. With the Liberal Party weakened and split, it was the ‘Classes against the Masses’ – working-class politics were on the rise.70
Warren’s response to this continuing blight on a London landmark, as well as the problem of having to monitor repeated processions through the West End, was to ban them from the square. His proclamation of 8 November 1887 read:
In consequence of the disorderly scenes which have recently occurred in Trafalgar Square, and of the danger to the peace of the Metropolis from meetings held there and with a view to prevent such disorderly proceedings, and to preserve the peace, I, Charles Warren, the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, do hereby give Notice, with the sanction of the Secretary of State and the concurrence of the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Works and Public Buildings, that until further intimation no Public Meetings will be allowed to assemble in Trafalgar Square, nor will speeches be allowed to be delivered therein; and all well-disposed persons are hereby cautioned and requested to abstain from joining or attending any such meeting or assemblage; and Notice is further given that all necessary measures will be adopted to prevent any such meeting or assemblage, or the delivery of any speech, and effectually to preserve the public peace, and to suppress any attempt at the disturbance thereof.71
The challenge was quickly taken up by the left-wing press and a demonstration was called for Sunday, 13 November. This meeting would embrace a number of different grievances, including the poor and the unemployed, casual workers, dock workers and radicals, and protestors against coercion in Ireland and the imprisonment of William O’Brien MP. Joining the marchers were the socialists Robert Cunninghame-Graham MP and John Burns, who had been acquitted of inciting the West End riots, Annie Besant and the playwright George Bernard Shaw. Press reports put the numbers between 10,000 and 150,000 people. Opposing them were 2,000 constables and 400 soldiers equipped with bayonets and rifles.72 In the end the army was not called into action, but forceful attempts to disperse the protestors left 200 injured. Besant remembered how ‘peaceable law-abiding workmen, who had never dreamed of rioting, were left with broken legs, broken arms, and wounds of every description’. Shaw, who had gone home for a cup of tea at 5.15 p.m. after failing to get to the square, later condemned Sir Charles Warren for turning ‘an ordinary political meeting … into a formidable riot’ and further claimed that ‘the terrible edged tools with which he is at present playing so wildly must be taken out of his hands at once’. Burns and Cunninghame-Graham were arrested, convicted of unlawful assembly, and were sentenced to six weeks’ hard labour at the Old Bailey.73
William Bate Curner, a forty-one-year-old stonemason and member of the Deptford Liberal Club, was in the crowd that day, on what was to become known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. During the riot he suffered a blow to the head and following his arrest was sentenced to fourteen days’ imprisonment. When he died suddenly on 3 January 1888, more than a month after his release from prison, his widow was convinced that he had effectively been killed by the police. She told the inquest that her husband had complained that ‘the policemen that took him were most barbarous and cruel’. Two days later his body was carried through the streets in an open hearse bearing the banner ‘Killed for Trafalgar Square’. The secular funeral became a small demonstration involving members of radical, socialist and Irish National organisations and was attended by Annie Besant and W.T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Once the body had been lowered into the grave, a socialist choir sang William Morris’ ‘Death Song’, composed following the riot. It began:
What cometh here from west to east awending?
And who are these, the marchers stern and slow?
We bear the message that the rich are sending
Aback to those who bade them wake and know.
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all if they would dusk the day.
The Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper linked his death to that of Alfred Linnell, who had died after suffering a broken leg at another demonstration on 20 November. It proclaimed:
Another victim to the Queen and the classes has fallen, and it is impossible to say how many more deaths may result from the Queen’s Jubilee truncheoning of the citizens of London … The blood of Linnell and Curwin [sic] calls to the fellow citizens of these unhappy murdered men for vengeance.
But just as the inquest on Linnell’s death failed to ascribe any blame to the police, Curner was found to have died from heart disease and natural causes ‘and not from the effects of violence from any person or persons whoever’. The Morning Post used the Curner verdict to attack the liberal press and the demonstrators. They wrote:
The champions of lawlessness were sorely in need of a martyr or two, whose deaths might be effectively [used] as advertisements of their cause. The result of the inquiry is eminently satisfactory in so far as it may lead some well-meaning but injudicious persons to look with more suspicion upon the other stories of massacre and brutality and the like, which are dressed up in such specious garb to harrow their feelings.
While many accounts of Bloody Sunday state that three men died as a result of police brutality, the Morning Post was adamant that ‘no proof that would convince any reasonable man has yet been brought forward to show that any single person was fatally injured by the police in suppressing the riot of the 13th of November’.74
Demonstrations continued throughout 1888. The release of Burns and Cunninghame-Graham from prison was celebrated with a public meeting on 20 February. On 4 March, Robert Harding from Poplar was arrested trying to padlock himself to a seat in Trafalgar Square while wearing a board reading: ‘This is a protest against the forcible exclusion of the people.’ On the back was the question and answer: ‘What is the main business of the government? To steal from the people to feed vast numbers of professional murderers.’
In May, Cunninghame-Graham was still persisting in his attempt to defy Warren and hold a meeting in the square. He partially succeeded on 14 July and by then the Morning Post was wearily describing the event as ‘the customary demonstration of agitators’. In early November, the Revd Stewart Headlam told a crowd of unemployed workers that ‘if Jesus Christ came into Trafalgar Square he would very soon get arrested.’ But it was not just in Trafalgar Square – in July a radical ‘anti-sweating’ demonstration took place in Hyde Park, and a socialist league demonstration was held at Victoria Park on 18 November. The anniversary of Bloody Sunday was marked by a crowd of 4,000 at Hyde Park and calls for Sir Charles Warren to resign.75
Warren had in fact already handed in his resignation a few days earlier on 8 November, although his decision appears to have had more to do with internal politics than external events. His arrogant, commanding manner led him into conflict with both the Home Secretary Henry Matthews and his Assistant Commissioner James Monro, the head of the Criminal Investigation Department. Warren believed Matthews was meddling in police affairs and Monro was trying to bypass him by dealing directly with the Home Office. In August 1888, Warren demanded that either he or Monro would have to resign, and Monro walked. If Warren thought that would make his life easier, he was mistaken, because Monro was simply transferred to the Home Office and retained much of his influence over the CID.76
Monro’s replacement, Sir Robert Anderson, an Irish lawyer who had worked for the Home Office, did not do much to relieve the burden. Anderson took up his post just hours after the prostitute Mary Ann Nichols was murdered in Whitechapel on the morning of 31 August. The following week Anderson left for Switzerland, having been advised by his doctor that he was ‘physically unfit’ and needed two months’ rest. A few hours after his departure another prostitute, Annie Chapman, was murdered. ‘The newspapers soon began to comment on my absence,’ Anderson later recalled in his memoirs.
Letters from Whitehall decided me to spend the last week of my holiday in Paris, that I might be in touch with my office. On the night of my arrival in the French capital two more victims fell to the knife of the murder-fiend; and next day’s post brought me an urgent appeal from Mr Matthews to return to London; and of course I complied.77
That double murder in the early hours of 30 September also added complications by involving the City of London police. After Catherine Eddowes was murdered on their patch, the City offered a reward of £500, something that the Met had deliberately not done following the previous attacks. Warren and Matthews had previously agreed that rewards had been shown to have little effect but Warren, perhaps trying to improve his standing with the press, went on to suggest that £5,000 should be offered. He also enthusiastically adopted a suggestion that bloodhounds could be used to track down the killer. On 9 October he played the part of the hunted man in a test of two dogs called Barnaby and Burgho in Hyde Park. Although The Times had called for just such an experiment a week earlier, the general opinion was that Warren was opening up the police to ridicule. There were suggestions that the CID was not up to the job, and that better candidates for the job of catching criminals might be found outside the police force. Warren felt it necessary to circulate a statement defending the system of recruiting candidates younger than twenty-seven and of at least 5ft 9in in height, adding that ‘as a general rule it has been ascertained by the Criminal Investigation branch that the candidates who have applied to be appointed direct to detective duties have not possessed any special qualifications which would justify their being so appointed’. The feminist Frances Power Cobbe responded with her own letter to The Times asking why there should not be female detectives. ‘She would pass unsuspected where a man would be instantly noticed, she could extract gossip from other women much more freely … a keen-eyed woman might do as well in her way as those keen-nosed bloodhounds.’ The flood of suggestions, comments, theories and criticisms was endless, and Warren was beginning to crack under the pressure.78
The commissioner hit back with an article in the November edition of Murray’s Magazine. His main gripe was that he was the victim of a sensationalist press and public which praised the police when things went well, only to condemn them as soon as the chance presented itself. ‘Year by year the metropolis of our Empire has become more and more prone to dangerous panics, which if permitted to increase in intensity must certainly lead to disastrous consequences.’ In his opinion, his handling of the Trafalgar Square riots had ensured that for ‘almost the first time during this century the mob failed in ascendancy over London and in coercing the government’. The police had also successfully dealt with the threat from Fenian terrorists and disrupted a plot to bomb the Golden Jubilee. Yet now that he had restored peace, he was facing an ‘insidious’ attack on the system of policing itself. Such behaviour would lead to more officers on the streets, higher taxes, and the adoption of the ‘elaborate detective operations practiced on the continent’, where government espionage was rampant. He wrote:
This violently fickle conduct of the public is very dangerous to the preservation of peace … it is straining the administration of the police, it is endangering the discipline of the force, it is encouraging the mob to disorder and rapine, and it very much increases the police rate.79
The article not only astounded the government and the press, it also upset the ranks. In a direct reply to the commissioner, an anonymous ‘PC’ lambasted Warren’s ‘exultant egotism in each page’ and his fondness for the word ‘mob’. According to the author, the force was demoralised under his command and officers were regretful rather than boastful about the clearing of Trafalgar Square. ‘The friendly feeling that had previously existed between the great majority of the poorer portion of the public and the police received a rebuff, not yet got over.’ Warren had also snubbed the detective department, brought in harsh punishments for drinking on duty and introduced a new squad drill more suited to the armed forces. The radical liberal MP Charles Conybeare supported the pamphlet with a letter calling for ‘the freeing of London from the incompetent and arrogant administration of Charles Warren’.80
Matthews responded to the article by sending Warren a copy of an 1879 Home Office circular asserting its power over the Metropolitan Police by banning anyone in the force, including the commissioner, from publishing anything relating to the department unless approved by the Secretary of State. Warren replied, ‘Had I been informed that such a circular was to be in force, I should not have accepted the post of commissioner’ and handed in his resignation for the second time on 8 November. The following day, the mutilated body of the prostitute Mary Kelly was discovered in Whitechapel. It was clear that the stalemate could not continue, and Matthews accepted Warren had to go on 10 November, although he would not formally leave the job until 1 December. Warren's defeat was completed when it was announced that James Monro would be his replacement.81 Monro would make no mention of Warren in his report to Parliament for the year 1888, but noted that:
… crime during the year has shown a decided tendency to increase. This fact may be accounted for, to a certain extent, by circumstances which affected the administration of the Force in a peculiar manner at different periods of the year. The agitation which centred at Trafalgar Square, and the murders in Whitechapel, necessitated the concentration in particular localities of large bodies of police … diminishing the number of men ordinarily employed in other divisions.82
Coincidentally, the so-called Ripper also appears to have resigned, never to be identified. But the Whitechapel murders were not unique in baffling the detectives of the metropolis. Newspapers began retelling other unsolved, undiscovered or unavenged cases going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. One 1888 murder in particular would haunt the Metropolitan Police and its detectives.83