‘So one is forced to conclude that the Abyss is literally a huge man-killing machine and when I pass along the little out-of-the-way streets with the full-bellied artisans at the doors, I am aware of a greater sorrow for them than for the 450,000 lost and hopeless wretches dying at the bottom of the pit… Four hundred and fifty thousand is a whole lot of people. I should not like to hear them talk all at once. I wonder if God hears them?’
Jack London – The People of the Abyss, 1903
Some of the lost souls spoke to the police in the Autumn of Terror. Many more did not. 1 We have a handful of names from the record of the day, from the newspapers vying with each other for the grisliest morsel, the hottest news, to the solemn, yet frustrated, coroner’s inquests. We see a few of the ‘hopeless wretches’ caught on camera where an enterprising journalist of The Star or the East London Observer captured them, posed in their street-clothes outside the doss that was their home. Many of them were Jewish, recent refugees from Russia and Poland and they regarded the police with hatred and dread, victims as they were of pogroms and refugees from the tsarist-imposed violence that rippled through all the Russias after a dissident bomb eviscerated Alexander II.
The best way to study the killing grounds is on foot, as Jack was in his trawling phase, his blood up, wandering the night in his search for prey.
It is night – any night, for they are much the same – in the Autumn of 1888, the Autumn of Terror. We have caught the Metropolitan District Railway’s extension line to the station at Aldgate. This was a new building when Jack struck, twenty-four years old and standing 200 feet to the west of the present one. Its platform was too short for a full length train, belching steam and smoke, clanking through the gas-lit station, rattling east. It is a reminder that we are already living in a modern age, an age of steam and electricity, telephones and trams and typewriters. We need reminders of these tangible, everyday things if we are to keep our grip on reality on this journey. For we have entered a long-vanished netherworld, where life is cheap and nothing is quite as it seems.
‘At the best,’ wrote the American journalist Jack London fourteen years after Jack the Ripper struck:
‘City life is an unnatural life for the human; but the city life of London is so utterly unnatural that the average workman or workwoman cannot stand it… [they] are well on their way to the shambles at the bottom of the Abyss.’
So are we.
John Griffith London was known as Jack too, that most common of English Christian names made chill forever by its hijacking by person or persons unknown, the perfect murderer from Whitechapel. London was on his way to cover the Anglo-Boer War in 1902, but never got further than Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Wapping. In the seven weeks it took him to write The People of the Abyss, he lodged with Sergeant William Thick, of the Metropolitan Police, known to the criminal underworld as ‘Johnny Upright’. ‘No other book of mine,’ London wrote later, ‘took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of economic degradation of the poor.’
His friend, Upton Sinclair, remembered that:
‘…for years afterwards the memories of this stunted and depraved population haunted him beyond all peace.’
Punch or The London Charivari painted this word picture at the end of September 1888:
Where hags called women, ghouls in the guise of men,
Live on death-dealing, feed a loathly life,
On the chance profits of the furtive knife.
….Whither comes
The haggard hag of the pavement, she,
The victim’s victim, whose delirious glee
Makes with a cackling horror; hither shrink
The waifs of passion and the wrecks of drink…
… Look at these walls; they reek with dirt and damp,
But in their shadows crouched the homeless tramp
May huddle undisturbed the black night through.
Those narrow winding courts – in thought – pursue.
No light there breaks upon the bludgeon’d wife,
No flash of day arrests the lifted knife,
There shrieks arouse not, nor do groans affright.
These are but normal noises of the night …
… Must it be
That the black slum shall furnish sanctuary
To all light-shunning creatures of the slime,
Vermin of vice, carnivora of crime?
By that time Jack had struck three times and the Charivari accompanied the poem with its odd, faltering metre with one of its most haunting engravings. John Tenniel’s The Nemesis of Neglect is shown as a hideous ghoul with shroud and upraised knife, floating through the rotting, black street furniture of Whitechapel.
To our right is the Minories, on the edge of the Abyss. Dr Thomas Thynne had a surgery in 1879 at Number 140 and his sometime assistant was Dr Lionel Druitt, cousin of Montague of the Macnaghten Memoranda.
In the Minories, in the early morning of 18 September 1888, City Constable 866 John Johnson was patrolling his beat at the regulation two and a half miles an hour. He heard a scream of ‘murder’ coming from Three King’s Court and went to investigate, truncheon at the ready, heart pounding. Here he found eighteen-year-old prostitute Elizabeth Burns wrestling (as best she could with only one arm) with a client, Charles Ludwig. ‘One-Armed Liz’ was a well-known character in the Abyss, a friend of the Ripper’s fourth victim, Elizabeth Stride. As for Ludwig, he had pulled a knife on Liz, but the arrival of Johnson saw him take to his heels. The man was dangerous and a drunk. He had recently arrived in the Abyss from Hamburg, where he had carried on a barber’s trade. He worked briefly for C A Partridge in the Minories and lodged with a German tailor, Johannes, in nearby Church Street.
But we turn left into Middlesex Street, its iron-framed street stalls empty now and their canvases hanging in the lengthening shadows. This is Petticoat Lane, but it lives only on Sunday, the Jews’ working day and tonight is not Sunday.
‘On Sunday,’ wrote the journalist S Gelberg, ‘“the Lane” and its adjoining thoroughfares are a howling pandemonium of cosmopolitan costerism, a curious tangle of humanity… Round its stalls the coster humour reaches its finest fancies, the coster philosophy its profoundest depths, the coster oratory its highest flights.’
Constable Daniel Halse walked this way on the trail of the man who had just slaughtered Kate Eddowes, shortly after two o’clock on the morning of Sunday 30 September. He was moving back into the Abyss, stopping men on the way, jumping at shadows. Had he but known it, he was following Jack to his lair.
And this was the beat, too, of Constable 272H Walter Andrews, on his way to find the mutilated body of ‘Clay Pipe’ Alice McKenzie in Castle Alley on 17 July 1889. In Middlesex Street the forged diary of the Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick will claim, years ahead, that the Ripper took lodgings, walking those grease-cobbled streets night after night until he knew them and had the killing grounds by heart.
James Maybrick never lodged in Middlesex Street, but others did. George Bolam was a cowkeeper; Mrs Polly Nathan ran a fish and chip shop. Solran Berlinski followed the calling of many of the Chosen People in the Abyss and sold rags. Isaac Woolf, more enterprising and up-market, made playing cards. As a fading memory of the street’s more prosperous past, Samuel Barnett still ran coffee rooms there.
For Whitechapel and Spitalfields had not always been the Abyss. The Huguenot weavers who arrived here, fleeing from religious persecution in France and the Netherlands, brought the skills of their calling and built fashionable houses large enough to house their impressive jacquard looms. Their houses still stand along Wilkes Street, gentrified once more, their ‘long light’ windows a reminder of their workshop origins. Their wares were much in demand and they left their imprint on local names like Fournier Street (Church Street in Jack’s day). A Huguenot chapel was built there in 1742.
But we have already turned right into Goulston Street. Sarah Smith was the manageress of Whitechapel Baths and Washhouses here, the building with its back to Castle Alley. Mrs Smith’s own rooms overlooked the spot where Clay Pipe Alice would be found. Mrs Smith had gone to bed that night between a quarter and half past twelve and had sat up reading for some time. Her windows were closed, but she was certain she would have heard a scream in the darkness. All she heard was the shrill screech of Constable Andrews’ whistle.
It is the spot past the Wentworth Model Buildings and the standpipe near their entranceway that has gained a certain notoriety in the Ripper case. At a little before three o’clock on the morning of Sunday 30 September, Constable 254A Alfred Long was walking his beat here when he came upon a piece of bloody cloth dropped by the drain and only a yard or so away, scribbled on the wall in chalk, the words ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ The cloth carried the blood and faecal matter of Kate Eddowes, the second of Jack’s victims on the terrible night of the ‘double event’. The graffito raised issues in the Whitechapel murder case that have never gone away.
For this is the Abyss, the Ghetto, with its 90 per cent Jewish population of Eastern European immigrants – ‘A hundred thousand men, women and children,’ wrote Gelberg, ‘some of them fugitives still suffering the punishment of Cain’, crowded into an area barely a mile square. They were, he admitted:
…a complicated piece of human patchwork, with the ringletted Pole at one point, the Dutch Jew at another, the English Hebrew in his own corner and the Gentile coster running like a strange thin thread through the design… If you would understand the immortal agony of Jewry, go into its East-End colony.
To Gelberg, and many others, Jew and non-Jew, the Ghetto was ‘a fragment of Poland torn off from Central Europe’ and in the Ripper case, the language barrier remained a problem.
‘You are in a city of endless toil,’ wrote Gelberg, years after Jack was dead and his legend was forming. ‘All day long and far into the night the factories make dismal music in the Ghetto… “Weiber! Weiber! Leimische Beigel!” sing out the women… and long after the shadows have lengthened… they are still vouching by their own lives or the kindness of Shem Yisboroch (God) to Israel for the quality of their wares. So spins the toiling Ghetto round its daily orbit.’
Gelberg was at pains, where less sympathetic ‘Gentile’ journalists were not, to point out that the abject poverty of the Abyss was not universal:
It is really homespun lined with ermine, Dives cheek by jowl with Lazarus.
Kosher restaurants and butcher shops were everywhere – there were seven of them at the junction of Middlesex and Wentworth Streets – and even the poorest would be able to dress up in hired finery on Chometz Battel night (the night before Passover).
We walk ahead into Whitechapel High Street, where the journalist George Sims (himself once taken for Jack the Ripper) noticed:
…there are kerbstone auctioneers, knockers-down of old clothes and patched-up umbrellas, who will patter the whole night… ‘I ask no more; I take no less’. That is the ultimatum.
The White Hart stood here, one of the scores of drinking-kens in the district, immune to Mr Gladstone’s licensing laws, open all hours. Prostitutes Martha Tabram and ‘Pearly Poll’ Connolly drank with two soldiers here the night that Martha died. Emma Smith, a forty-five-year-old widowed prostitute with two children spent the day along Whitechapel High Street, on 2 April 1888, soliciting, looking for custom among the down and outs – ‘Are you good natured, dearie?’ Three men who were not good natured attacked her in the early hours of the next morning, grabbing her near St Mary’s Church, smashing her in the face with their knuckles, ripping her right ear almost off and raping her. One of them, perhaps the nineteen-year-old she mentioned at the London Hospital later, rammed a stick into her vagina.
It was along this street that Constable 221H John Gallagher arrested Charles Ludwig on the morning of 18 September 1889 for his attack on One-Armed Liz. Another of Ludwig’s victims was Alexander Freinberg, known as Alexander Findlay. He lived in Leman Street, the centre of German London, but ran a coffee stall on Whitechapel High Street. Freinberg committed the unforgivable sin of looking at his customer when Ludwig went berserk and pulled a knife. The coffee-stall holder threw a dish at him and was no doubt delighted at the timely arrival of Gallagher.
Right into Wentworth Street:
…a street of ugly, featureless houses… Each ground floor is a shop and the kerb on either side of the road is encumbered with stalls… Your companions are mostly women, Jewesses, the majority wearing the black wigs of the matron over their own scanty locks. There are blowsy and haggard mothers of clinging families; and full-blooded girls with dark eyes, languorously bold, ripe red lips and ebon tresses. The men are of two kinds, the frowsy and the flash. Fish and poultry are the articles of commerce in which trade is most brisk…
– but journalist Edwin Pugh, writing a few years after Jack struck, was talking of the daytime. At night, Wentworth Street is very different:
‘Although it is only a little after eight,’ observed Gelberg, ‘the last stall has been spirited away and the “Lane” is so utterly deserted that the few children playing at leapfrog over its littered stones look lost in it.’
The engraver Gustave Doré had been drawn to it twenty-one years before the Whitechapel murders, when the man who was Jack was already living in the area, descending slowly into madness. Doré drew children in outsize adult clothes squatting in the gutter. They sold old shoes to passers-by. Here the hanging pipe smoke and the stale beer smell of the Princess Alice lured John Pizer, the weird anti-social cobbler called Leather Apron, to its sawdust floors and its grease-scummed tables. He drank here with Mickeldy Joe, his only friend in the world. Frances Coles drank here too. She was Frances Hawkins and Frances Coleman and had packed goods for a wholesale chemist until 1884, when she suddenly, unaccountably, took to the streets to make her living in a different way altogether. She was a good-looking girl, outgoing and vivacious. The artist who drew her from descriptions of those who knew her well caught the sparkle and the beauty. But she looked very different in the mortuary photograph taken soon after Valentine’s Day 1891. Her left earring had been torn out and her throat had been cut. The photographer who captured her that day showed the full lips slightly parted, the hair, unkempt and greasy, swept back and just the hint of the jagged rip that killed her below her right ear.
Go out, out of the Princess Alice with its noise and its smoke, along Commercial Street with its carts and clutter, its tramlines and its penny-gaffes. The intention was to make this a major highway that ran from Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ’s Church to Shoreditch and to demolish the slums that lay on either side of it. Somehow this never happened and it lies at the heart of the Ripper’s stalking grounds. Here stood the Britannia, licensed to Walter Ringer and his wife. It was not actually a pub, merely a beershop; but that did not stop hundreds of locals nipping into ‘The Ringers’ at all hours of the day and night. It was outside this pub that dosshouse deputy Caroline Maxwell claimed she saw Mary Kelly, Jack’s penultimate victim, talking to a plump man in a plaid coat hours after the Irish girl was dead. And it was outside the George, a few yards away, that Alice Graves last saw prostitute Rose Mylett, a little under the influence and talking to two sailors. Constable Robert Goulding found her body in Clarke’s Yard, Poplar, at a quarter past four in the morning of 20 December 1888. She had been strangled – ‘Murder’ as too many coroners’ inquests decided in those days, ‘by some person or persons unknown’.
And in Commercial Street stood the Victoria Working Men’s Home, one of dozens of common lodging or dosshouses that littered the area. Except that this one, Victoria Home No. 2, had delusions of grandeur. The building was divided into two blocks separated by a central corridor with a staircase ‘leading to subterranean depths’. Here, a door was marked ‘Shaving Saloon’. A second flight of stairs led to a kitchen and coffee shop. Its tariff explained to journalist T W Wilkinson ‘how some of the dejected specimens of humanity scattered over the kitchen can live on a shilling a day, lodgings included’. Hot roast beef cost 3d; pudding was 1d; half a pint of tea cost ¼d. The food, Wilkinson believed, was ‘good and wholesome’. Upstairs, the bedrooms were light and airy and surprisingly clean. The sixpenny beds were placed in small cubicles made of hollow tiles, each space having the luxury of a mirror and a picture – something Biblical and uplifting, no doubt. The fivepenny beds were partitioned with zinc and the fourpennies had four beds to a room…
Downstairs, the recreation rooms boasted a piano, a billiard table and three bagatelle tables. When Wilkinson visited the place in 1902, he took in the ‘human wreckage’ who loitered in the kitchen:
…some clustered near the huge coke fire, some eating at the tables, some sitting aloof from their congeners, apathetic, dull-eyed, temporarily oblivious of their surroundings.
One of these, in the Autumn of 1888, was George Hutchinson, a friend of Jack’s penultimate victim, Mary Kelly, a tall man with an upright bearing who gave a suspiciously over-detailed description of a foreign-looking ‘toff’ with Mary on the night she died.
On the East side of Commercial Street is the graveyard of Christ Church – ‘Itchy Park’ – where the desperately poor slept rough. Jack London remembered it years later:
The shadow of Christ Church falls across Spitalfields Garden and in the shadow of Christ’s Church, at three o’clock in the afternoon, I saw a sight I never wish to see again. There are no flowers in this garden…
There was a police station in Commercial Street, one of those beacons in a naughty world outside of which the blue light shone and moustachioed constables with watch chains and ‘bull’s eye’ lanterns and hardwood truncheons would march out in pairs into the Whitechapel night. In the Autumn of Terror, they wore rubber strips on their hobnailed soles in the faint hope of catching Jack red-handed.
We are already in Thrawl Street, littered with dosshouses like Cooley’s where Mary Kelly stayed. The Victoria Homes were palaces by comparison with these.
‘The little private doss-houses,’ Jack London wrote, ‘are unmitigated horrors. I have slept in them and I know… From the kitchen came the sounds of more genial life… But the smell… was stronger and a rising nausea drove me into the street for fresh air.’ But it was no better here – ‘The colour of life is grey and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved and dirty. Bath tubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of the gods. The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange, vagrant odours come drifting along the greasy wind and the rain, when it falls, is more like grease than water from heaven. The very cobblestones are scummed with grease.’
Wilkinson was there too. ‘There is no need to knock: the door is open’ and at four in the morning, the hour when Jack was on the prowl, it swung back to let out the market porters on their way to work. The smell of bloater stayed with Wilkinson, drifting out from the kitchen ‘the loafing place of the idle and the workshop of the industrious’. The fire burned continuously because it was the dosshouse’s only means of cooking. There was to be no washing [of clothes] on a Sunday and other grimy notices reminded inmates of the house rules. Where the deputy was a man – as in Cooley’s – such people were chosen for their bulk, acting as ‘chuckers’ should the conversation turn to fisticuffs of an evening.
Wilkinson took in the typical dossers draped before him – ‘a seedy, frock-coated failure’ dipping bread into his tea, itself the sweepings of the tea-shop’s floor. An old man with a snowy beard gnawed a hambone. A ‘pallid youth’ ate his supper of bread, tea, margarine and the inevitable bloater with his fingers; his tablecloth was an old newspaper:
All have that haunting expression – that dull, despairing look in the eyes – which hunger and buffeting engender.
They are living, at least for tonight, in the fourpenny hotel. Tomorrow? Who knows?
Jack London knew:
But the girl of fourteen or fifteen, forced [by circumstance] to leave the one room called home… can have but one end. And the bitter end of that one end is such as that of the woman whose body the police found this morning in a doorway in Dorset Street… Homeless, shelterless, sick, with no-one with her in her last hour, she had died in the night of exposure… She died as a wild animal died.
Elizabeth Mahoney went out to buy supper at a chandler’s shop in Thrawl Street in the early hours of Tuesday 7 August. She would walk past the landing where Martha Tabram would be found at George Yard Buildings later that morning. Rumour had it that another dead woman lived at a dosshouse at 18 Thrawl Street and her fellow inmate, Ellen Holland, told the police her name had been Polly. That was her street name; in reality she was Mary Ann Nichols, Jack’s second victim. At Number 6 lived Eliza Gold, the sister of another of Jack’s victims, Kate Eddowes.
We are walking north into Flower and Dean Street.
‘Over no other part of the kingdom,’ wrote D L Woolmer, ‘do the two angels of life and death hover more continually; and nowhere… is the fight between good and evil more fierce and stubborn.’
James Greenwood in Strange Company described the place as ‘perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis’, although five years before Jack struck, the philanthropist Nathan Rothschild had bought up part of it to provide good ‘affordable’ housing for the poor.
Here stood Cooney’s dosshouse at Number 55 where Kate Eddowes and her sometime lover, John Kelly, shared a bed in one of those houses where couples were afforded a modicum of privacy. Frederick Wilkinson was the lodging-house deputy and he would testify that the pair ate breakfast there on the morning of Saturday 29 September. Kate would not live to eat another breakfast.
Next door stood the White House, the doss at Number 56. An anonymous photographer took a picture of street life here, with a huddled group of women and their children outside the front door. It looks natural, but was probably posed – there is a girl in a clean white apron and a woman wrapped in a shawl. Only her face is partially covered, as if, at the last moment, she did not want our world to capture too closely an image of hers.
‘I stood yesterday,’ wrote Jack London, ‘in a room in one of the “Municipal dwellings” not far from Leman Street. I looked into a dreary future and saw that if I would have to live in such a room until I died, I should immediately go down, plump into the Thames and cut the tenancy short.’
Perhaps the woman in the photograph felt the same.
We have walked along Brick Lane that runs parallel with busy Commercial Street. The Lane was home to a brick and tile workshop but the Black Eagle Brewery dominated the site. In Jack’s time, the Frying Pan public house stood at the corner of the intersection with Thrawl Street. The Ripper’s second victim, Polly Nichols, staggered out of its doors at half past twelve on the morning of Friday 31 August, the last morning of her life.
Dr Timothy Killeen, who performed the post mortem on prostitute Martha Tabram, Jack’s first victim, lived at Number 68. Jack’s penultimate victim, Mary Kelly, lived for a while with her lover Joseph Barnett along the Lane. Dr William Dukes lived at Number 75 and was the first medical man on the ghastly scene at Miller’s Court to view her body. Sitting on the step of a barber shop nearby, Margaret Franklin saw her friend ‘Clay Pipe’ Alice McKenzie pass by at twenty to midnight on 16 July 1889. She was on her way to her death.
Let us go north into Fashion Street, made famous for years after Jack by Israel Zangwill in his Children of the Ghetto. Of the houses there, he wrote:
It was not a room… It was a den, a lair. Seven feet by eight were its dimensions and the ceiling was so low as not to give the cubic airspace required by a British soldier to live in barracks… Five dollars would have purchased everything in sight. The floor was bare, while walls and ceilings were literally covered with blood marks and splotches. Each mark represented a violent death – of an insect, for the place swarmed with vermin, a plague with which no person could cope single-handed.
It was in Fashion Street that Kate Eddowes, Jack’s fifth victim lived. That at least was the address she gave, the common lodging house at No 6. But since she also gave her name as Mary Anne Kelly we cannot be sure of that. Those responses, about her name and address, were given to Constable George Hutt at Bishopsgate Police Station in the early hours of Sunday 30 September. He asked her to close the door on her way out. Approximately fifteen minutes later she died in Mitre Square.
The Queen’s Head stood on the corner of Fashion Street and Commercial Street. Elizabeth Stride was drinking in this pub hours before she died and it was outside the Queen’s Head that George Hutchinson saw Mary Kelly on her last day on earth, talking to a man.
If we stand, as Jack probably did hundreds of times at the end of Fashion Street, we are facing the parallel alleyways of White’s Row and Dorset Street. White’s Row does not figure centrally in the complex story of the Whitechapel murders, but one lodger in the dosshouse at No 8 was Annie Millwood who was actually the trigger for the whole series. Dorset Street, however, has assumed a huge importance with many Ripperologists and historians accepting the tenet that, in the Ripper case, ‘all roads lead to Dorset Street’. By Jack’s time, it had so many common lodging houses that locals called it Dosset Street and it was equally full of pubs. At the corner of Commercial Street stood the Ringers’ Britannia and, at the far end where it met Crispin Street, the Horn of Plenty. Mary Kelly drank there with her prostitute friend Julia Venturney and ‘Danny’, who was probably Joseph Barnett. The Blue Coat Boy stood in the centre, not far from the narrow entrance to Miller’s Court in whose shadows the most appalling ritual of a serial killer was carried out. Along Crispin Street, Isaac Mendoza sold furniture and Meyers Markos tin-plate toys. The Street Directories of the time list saddlers and sack-makers, beer-retailers and farriers, largely Jews all trying to prove the Chief Rabbi wrong when he warned that emigration to England was a sort of descent.
T W Wilkinson was writing of the Farm House doss in Southwark, but his description of female dossers could equally well apply to Crossingham’s or any of the dozen more along Dorset Street:
How many of the women bear marks of brutality – swollen lips, cut cheeks, black eyes! … a young woman with dishevelled hair and open bodice… is frying steak and onions. By her side a companion equally untidy… drops her ‘halfpenny tea and sugar mixed’ into a pot, cautiously lets two eggs sink on the heap and pours boiling water on the lot.
Wilkinson knew all too well what a grim round there was for the people of the Abyss:
Look back long, long ago – twenty years, thirty, forty in some cases – numbers of these women came here or to a neighbouring house as girls. And now look forward. You can see them all going to the workhouse or the hospital gate. That is their well-nigh inevitable end, unless they meet a worse fate.
Seven of them did.
Annie Chapman lodged at Crossingham’s for four months prior to her death – the deputy there, Timothy Donovan, confirmed it at her inquest. Two years earlier, she was living across the road at No 30 with John Siffey or Sievey who may or may not have been a sievemaker. Another resident at Crossingham’s was ‘Clay Pipe’ Alice and she often shared a bed there with her lover John McCormack, also known as John Bryant. T W Wilkinson commented on dosshouses like Crossingham’s:
The difference between a place of this class and one for men or women only lies solely in the sleeping accommodation. There is more privacy… though not much in some cases, for the cubicles are like stable stalls. In general, they are similar, only smaller, to those boxed-off spaces which the coffee-shop keeper dignifies with the name of bedrooms.
Wilkinson noted that single men might keep the same ‘kip’ for five or ten years or longer, but couples rarely stayed anywhere for more than a few days together:
So that some phases of life in cubicle houses are not so exceptional as the circumstances surrounding certain murders which have been committed in them have led many to suggest.
On one point however, Wilkinson’s comments seem demonstrably wrong:
In these places… no questions are asked and no names taken. A man or a woman may live in a fourpenny hotel for years and yet be known to the ‘deputy’ by the number of his or her bed. The majority of lodgers in hotels for the poor, too, are casuals, not regulars.
Yet, without exception, the deputies, like Timothy Donovan of Crossingham’s, who gave evidence at Ripper inquests, seem to have known their charges well and to have been very aware of their movements.
John McCarthy owned a chandler’s shop at No 27 and the adjacent 26, which included Miller’s Court. That made him Mary Kelly’s landlord and it was McCarthy’s gofer Thomas ‘Indian Harry’ Bowyer who went to fetch overdue rent from Mary and found her mutilated corpse instead.
‘Governor, I knocked at the door and could not make anyone answer. I looked through the window and saw a lot of blood.’
We have left depressing Dorset Street behind and are walking due north along Commercial Street. The Ten Bells stood here, where Mary Kelly drank under the shadow of Christ Church. And if we turn right into Hanbury Street, we are at the northern extent of the Ripper’s hunting grounds.
At No 29 stood a house occupied in the year of the Ripper by seventeen people, none of whom ever saw or heard anything in the early hours of Saturday 8 September when ‘Dark Annie’ Chapman was butchered in their backyard. Amelia Richardson lived there with her fourteen-year-old grandson, Thomas. A Mr Walker lived in a back room with Alfred, his retarded son. Walker senior made tennis boots, somewhat incongruous in the Abyss. Mr and Mrs Copsey made cigars; Mr Thompson and Mr Davis were carmen, those luckless souls up by four in the morning and trudging through the scum-cobbled streets to work at Spitalfields or other markets in the area. Another resident was Harriet Hardiman who lived with her sixteen-year-old son and ran the cat’s-meat shop at the front of the building.
It was Albert Cadoche, who lived at No 27, who may have heard what was Annie Chapman’s last word on earth. It was shortly after quarter past five that morning that he heard the cry ‘No!’ and a thud, as though something heavy was hitting the fence that divided Nos 27 and 29. At 23A stood the premises of packing-case manufacturers Messrs Joseph and Thomas Bayley, the company that employed several men who were the first on the scene of the murder. Little Laura Sickings lived at No 25 and was only trying to be helpful when she told the police she had found bloodstains in her backyard. They turned out to be urine. Somewhere along Hanbury’s dingy frontage, H Smith was the undertaker who supplied the hearse that carried Annie Chapman to her final resting place.
At the end of Hanbury Street, we are walking towards the site of the second of Jack’s killings, that of Polly Nichols in Buck’s Row. But we have two stops to make first. Hanbury and Old Montague Street converge on Baker’s Row that intersects the Whitechapel Road to the south. Here stood the great, grey edifice of the Whitechapel Union Workhouse and its casual ward, known as the Spike. Between them, Jack London and T W Wilkinson summed up the horror of the place:
‘I have been to the spike,’ London wrote, ‘and slept in the spike and eaten in the spike; also I have run away from the spike.’
Wilkinson took in the flotsam that found itself at the Spike’s front door, ‘the doorway of sighs’. He saw a man tired of the unending struggle with poverty, his steps slow and unwilling, his eyes dead and old. He saw a wastrel, who called himself an artist, but was actually an ‘in and out’ man, of the casual ward, discharging himself at dawn and back again by nightfall. And Wilkinson saw another type:
…a man for whom the poor house has no secrets and no terrors. He was born in the workhouse – he has lived in the workhouse; and he will die in the workhouse.
The workhouse was an object of horror to most people because that was what it was designed to be. The Whigs, in their zeal to save money in 1834, had introduced the concept of ‘less eligibility’, that a man would take any work, no matter how poorly paid, rather than enter the ‘Bastille’ as the various houses of industry were called by the poor. A contemporary wrote:
The Bastille stretched further than the eye could see and seemed a standing rebuke to its poverty-stricken surroundings, for it was clean, not a spot on it, not a stain, nothing to show a trace of sympathy with the misery and sin of the people who lived in this neighbourhood.
The ‘grubber’ or kitchen was at the heart of the workhouse. It was lined with white-glazed bricks and boasted twenty steam-jacketed coppers, roasting ovens and tea coppers. The 1881 census shows that 695 souls lived in this building and they all had to be fed. The equipment could cook sixty-gallon milk puddings, 240 gallons of tea, a quarter of a ton of bacon and a ton of cabbage at one sitting. The mincing machine was vital in chewing up the meat for toothless and senile paupers unable to manage on their own. Tuesday was roast mutton and potatoes with bread, four and a half ounces of meat and bread for the able-bodied, twelve of potatoes. Breakfast was bread, a pint and a half of porridge or a pint of cocoa. Supper was six ounces of bread and one and a half pints of broth – hell-broth as it was often called.
In the dormitories and the segregated wards, men sat huddled in groups, playing dominoes, sleeping, talking. They made their own bread and ground their own coffee, ‘fulfilling the primeval curse’ of work to the grinding, squealing crank of the machines. They chopped their own wood in the lumber yard and cranked the machine that drove the circular saw screeching through the timber. In the French polishing shop, the stench of methylated spirits filled the nostrils and an endless collection of hand-me-down boots filled whole piles for gardening work, being adjusted by the hand-stitching of the cobbler, the leather-aprons down on their luck.
In the women’s wards, many of the inmates were octogenarians, their white-capped heads nodding in conversation over their afternoon tea. They seemed happy enough on the days when Wilkinson visited, but ‘most of them will gradually rust out and die at last of the workhouse complaint, old age’. The apartments for the Darbies and Joans were as pleasant as the institution could make them – the odd knick-knack on the bedside table, the photograph hanging on the wall.
In the nurseries, where the orphans and the abandoned lived, milk and bread and butter were available all day. Wilkinson noticed ‘a chubby-cheeked girl who never takes her eyes off your face’ and wondered where her parents were and what had happened to them.
At six o’clock, as dark descended in the Autumn of Terror, the doors of the casual ward opened. In trooped the out of work artisans – ‘too old at fifty’, families with sobbing babies, prostitutes too battered and exhausted to offer their services that night. The answers to the night porter’s questions are always the same:
‘Where did you sleep last night?’ ‘Nowhere.’ The key to the street; dropping asleep on a doorstep or, worse still, while still walking… dodging about in the cold, grey dawn to get a wash at a street fountain when a policeman is not looking.
Beyond the gate, the ‘casuals’ peeled off into male and female queues, the men searched for pipes, tobacco or matches. Any money above 4d was taken from them, to be returned when they left – often the next morning. But we are left wondering why, if they could afford a doss, they didn’t spend their 4d more profitably. It may be because here, they got a bed and a room of their own. ‘This is the life of those who by the vicissitudes of things, are undermost …’
Among the undermost in the census of 1881, Eliza Adams was a needlewoman from the City; Harriet Ashley was a carman’s widow (a reminder of the fragile fortunes of the working class dependent on a breadwinner now gone); Jane Bernardin was a silk weaver, listed as ‘imbecile’; Michael Callaghan was a coal whipper; Mary Chaplin was a domestic servant and blind; Adelaide Cowlan was a prostitute (a lucky one who escaped Jack’s knife); Margaret Foxley was an orphan, one year old;William Hayward was a cattle drover. Robert Holme was a ship’s steward, referred to as ‘lunatic’ and hailed from Denmark; Robert Mann was a dock labourer; Mary Over was a hatter; Thomas Pike a walking-stick maker – and so it went on. Six hundred and ninety-five of the flotsam of the Ghetto, the people at the very bottom of the Abyss.
At the end of Baker’s Row, we can see, as darkness falls in the Abyss, the looming front of the London Hospital. Seamstress/prostitute Ada Wilson was brought here on Wednesday 28 March 1888, having been attacked in her own home in Maidman Street, Mile End. She survived. Dr Thomas Openshaw worked here and on 18 October he received a visit from Mr F S Reed, assistant to Dr Frederick Wiles of the Mile End Road. He brought him a human kidney preserved in spirits of wine and asked him for his medical opinion. And when he published his findings on the kidney he received one of the 122 known letters or postcards attributed to Jack the Ripper.
A far better known colleague was Thomas Barnardo, an Irishman who, appalled by the squalor he trudged through on his way to work every day, took particular pity on the ragged waifs dogging his footsteps and begging for food. In the year of the Ripper, he wrote in his Three Truths:
In cellar, in garret, in alley and court,
They weep and they suffer and pine,
And the wolves of the city are prowling near.
Back wolves. For the children are mine.
And it was Thomas Barnardo who had visited the doss at 32 Flower and Dean Street and talked to Liz Stride there. He went to see her butchered body in the mortuary in St-George’s-in-the-East.
On 26 July, the occultist and fantastist Robert Donston Stephenson booked himself into the London Hospital for treatment for neurasthenia. He was there until 7 December, covering the whole period of Jack’s spree.
But it was not all murder and mayhem. In the summer months, weather permitting, convalescent patients were stretchered out into the grounds for open-air concerts. Standing at the entrance to the place, journalist R Austin Freeman noted the ‘pale consumptive’ jostling with the sturdy labourer with a bandaged head. There were the rasping coughs of those destined to roam the streets so near to the river; patients on crutches; patients swathed in bandages. An enterprising coster sold bottles at a stall near to the main gate because the hospital did not provide them and most people brought their own containers – ‘the jovial whisky bottle is degraded into a mere receptacle for cod liver oil’.
All human life was here, as it was everywhere in the Abyss. Visitors were only allowed on certain days, creaking in polished shoes along the corridors and ‘Nightingale’ wards past rows of starched nurses with white caps and aprons, silverware gleaming at their waists. Bed No 23 had his leg amputated above the knee yesterday, but he was cheered by the visit of his wife and little son – ‘for he cannot see her blinding tears or hear her sobs as she hurries away through the echoing corridor’.
But this side of the hospital, the dingy thoroughfare called Buck’s Row was the site of the second of Jack’s killings, that of Polly Nichols. The street converged with Winthrop Street halfway along its length and was very broad for an East End road. There were residential, terraced houses along the narrow part and warehouses, known as wharves because they edged a canal. A huge Board School dominated the site from 1870 and it was near the stable doors opposite the fancy-fronted manager’s house of Essex Wharf that Polly Nichols’ body was found, lying on the pavement with her head to the east and dark blood oozing from the gash in her throat.
What lies behind a high wall along Brady Street has brought us to the end of our journey across the Abyss – the Jews’ burial ground. Properly the Brady Street Ashkenazi Cemetery, it was opened in 1761 and by 1840 was close to being full. Most of London’s graveyards were in the same state, with coffins and bones jutting out from the ground and ‘miasma’ floating in a green and sulphurous gas across residential areas. In 1839 there had been between eight and ten burials a day, which kept four full-time gravediggers pretty busy.
The overcrowding problem was solved by creating a new layer of earth four feet deep over the top of existing graves and placing the tombstones back to back, one for the upper level, one for the lower. Various trade symbols were carved into the stone – hammers, fish, shuttles, knives. The hereditary priests (kohanin) had hands and water pitchers ready for the blessing sculpted above their names and many of these residents had their addresses written on them, if only to prove that they had now moved on to a better one! Thirty years before the Ripper, the gates were locked forever.
We have walked where Jack walked. We have glimpsed, if only for moments, the world into which he was born, in which he died and in which he killed.
An East End expert, Bill Fishman, wrote:
Even now, in the still hours, as the moon strikes the steeple of old Christ Church and casts a long shadow over the rickety tenements of Spitalfields, a sudden catch of movement, crouched silhouette in a desolate alleyway, all senses alert, as Old Jack poised momentarily en route, continues on his way to a rendezvous with murder in the City of Dreadful Night.
Jack was just one of the 450,000 lost souls who inhabited the Abyss. Our only problem now is to find him.