Annie Millwood met Jack the Ripper on Saturday 25 February 1888. On that day, the satirical mirror of society, Punch, carried an imaginary courtroom scene in which a prisoner is trying to confess to a crime. The magistrate will have none of it – ‘It is the aim of Justice to give everyone in England the chance of getting off, whether guilty or not guilty.’ When the prisoner confesses, the magistrate screams ‘Confess! The man must be mad! Let him be removed.’
The man who was Jack never confessed. Neither was he mad in the conventional sense. What finally removed him was death.
Annie Millwood was thirty-eight and the widow of a soldier, Richard Millwood. In the freezing February of the Ripper’s year, she was living in a doss at Spitalfield’s Chambers, 8 White’s Row, a narrow, dingy thoroughfare that ran parallel to Dorset Street. At five o’clock that afternoon, as dusk settled on Whitechapel, Annie was attacked by a complete stranger who whipped a clasp knife from his pocket and stabbed her.
The attack on Annie Millwood was part of the endemic violence of the East End. Her case would have been regarded by the authorities as an everyday event. Over the whole of London in the 1880s, there were four murders per 100,000 of the population. Robert Anderson, Head of the CID, considered this ‘normal’. On the face of it, the assault was inexplicable. Annie did not know her attacker and the records of the infirmary to which she was admitted merely refer to stabs to the legs and lower torso. The Eastern Post gave more detail –
It appears [Millwood] was admitted to the Whitechapel Infirmary suffering from numerous stabs to the legs and lower part of the body. She stated that she had been attacked by a man she did not know and who stabbed her with a clasp knife which he took from his pocket. No one appears to have seen the attack and as far as at present ascertained there is only the woman’s statement to bear out the allegations of an attack, though she had been stabbed cannot be denied.
We must remember that this article appeared seven months before the Ripper killings began, so at this stage the media are very low key. There is no slaughterhouse, no rising panic; but even so the implication that the wounds may be self-inflicted is odd. Why should the journalist even hint at this? The reason lies in the whole alien world of the workhouse, the casual ward and its infirmary.
The first house of industry for the benefit of the poor in the area was set up as early as 1724 in Ayliffe Street near Goodman’s Fields. This was part of the parish of St Mary Matfelon – the white chapel – and was a response to the problem of poverty here as it was elsewhere in the country. The Poor Law of 1601 provided a system of outdoor parish relief in which the wealthy paid an annual sum – the poor rate – which was distributed amongst the destitute. Even by the 1720s the gathering speed of the Industrial Revolution meant that the workforce became ever more mobile and parishes were unable to cope with the influx of workers. In Ayliffe Street, the anonymous Mistress who kept the house provided for sixty adults who went out daily in search of work and returned for the night. Her house was clean and the beds made up.1
In the nearby parish of Christchurch, where ‘Itchy Park’ would become the unofficial nightly home of hundreds in Jack’s time, a similar workhouse was set up in Bell Lane in the summer of 1728. Housing eighty-four paupers, including thirty children, most of the inmates were employed (as befitted a silk-weaving community) in winding Bengal silk, as opposed to the wool-winding and oakumpicking2 carried out in other workhouses elsewhere. The old women knitted stockings while the children were taught to read and say their Catechism. The house diet included meat three times a week.
By the 1770s both workhouses had grown enormously, a reflection of the fact that London was now the largest city in the world. With an inmate population of nearly 600, the Whitechapel workhouse was one of the biggest in the country, dwarfing Christ Church with its 340. A map of 1830 shows the workhouses, one next to the charity school along Whitechapel High Street, the other (Spitalfields) north of St Thomas’s Street and the Quaker’s Burial Ground. There is a modern sheltered housing block on the High Street site and today it backs onto the old burial ground for the workhouse, which is now a small, open park.
1834 saw a turning point in the history of poverty management throughout the country. In that year, Lord Grey’s Whig government, alarmed at the huge cost of outdoor relief3 commissioned Edwin Chadwick to find a cheaper solution. His answer was an extension of the workhouse system coupled with the principle of ‘less eligibility’. Conditions in the workhouses were to be so grim that a man would take any sort of work, no matter how badly paid, rather than go there. Christened ‘Bastilles’ by the poor after the Paris prison synonymous with corruption and suffering and which had been pulled down by the mob during the French Revolution, the stigma attached to the work-house would last as long as the system did – for another hundred years.
In Whitechapel, the Poor Law Union was set up in February 1837, under the supervision of twenty-five elected Guardians of the Poor and including nine East End parishes, three of which would contain the sites of the murders of 1888–9. In the 1831 census, these parishes’ populations added up to 64,141 (Whitechapel alone being half that) and the expenditure in the financial years 1834–6 had been £23,036.
There was at first no new building and a doctor reported to the Poor Law Commissioners of Whitehall in 1838 on the appalling state of the Whitechapel institution. Of the 104 children there, all girls, eighty-nine had recently been hit by fever. This was partially explained by the fact that all of them slept in one dormitory 88 feet long, 16 feet wide and 7 feet high along with the four women in charge of them. Most beds housed four girls, some five. In the Infant Nursery, twenty-three two to three-year-olds were crowded into a single room which they rarely left, ‘either for air or exercise’. In the main workhouse there were two fever wards (the forerunners of the Infirmary to which Annie Millwood staggered on 25 February 1888) with two patients per bed. There was no ventilation in the room so that even visitors were at risk from infection. The privies (lavatories) were in a deplorable state, drainage was poor and the whole building did not possess a single bath.
By the time this report was written, serious economic hardship had hit Whitechapel and Spitalfields and the independent weavers who had been so prosperous in the previous century were now forced to take what work they could in factories and workshops, operating to the rhythm of steam-driven machines. Consequently, a larger new work house was erected on the site of the old one along Charles Street and Baker’s Row in 1842. A map of 1860 shows the building clearly divided into two blocks occupying the site on the corner of Charles and Thomas Streets. This was upgraded in that year by the architect Thomas Barry and the new plan is faithfully recorded on a map of 1867. There was now a conventional ‘H’ shape to the plot, one block measuring 128 feet by 43 including the master’s house, wards and kitchen. The other block, containing the receiving wards and laundry was smaller and a third a mere 50 feet by 31. The front of the building along Charles Street was a forbidding five storeys high and must have dwarfed the weavers’ cottages and even some of the work shops nearby. Here stood the entrance hall and committee rooms and a central two-storey wing linked this to the rear arm of the ‘H’, a six-storey block with chapel, dining hall and accommodation.
In keeping with tradition, male and female wards were separate, women to the north, men to the south. The relieving offices were ranged along Thomas Street, with a separate laundry block to the north-east and a ward for imbeciles occupying the rear of the plot that backed onto a starch manufactory. The dispensary stood next to the male wards and probably formed the nucleus of the Infirmary.
When the medical journal The Lancet focused on workhouses in 1865 there was no actual visit to Whitechapel, but no doubt it suffered from the usual problems present elsewhere. There was a generic lack of ventilation; medical staff were too few and underpaid; there was very little furniture; there was one comb per ward and no games provided for the sick. The Lancet recommended that there should be a separate ward for sick children and that the labour ward be moved so that screams should not reach adjacent wards.
1867 saw yet more legislation for London’s poor. Now workhouses had to build infirmaries on separate sites and this led to the building of a second workhouse (by 1872) at South Grove. The Clerk to the Governors in these years was William Vallance and his signature is all over the surviving documentation. Today, Baker’s Row is called Vallance Road.4 From now on the whole of the Charles Street/Baker’s Row site operated as the Infirmary.
Our view of the Whitechapel workhouse is inevitably coloured by our own twenty-first-century sense of comfort and well being, which is aeons away from what Annie Millwood would have understood; and by the external viewpoint of sensitive souls like Jack London. Jack the Ripper was dead by the time of London’s visit. The brilliant People of the Abyss was actually describing the Spike, the men’s casual ward on the other side of Thomas Street. At first he was not allowed in, passing himself off as a down-and-out, because he had too much money in his pocket. Once accepted, however, he underwent an experience he would never forget. London joined the daily queue of the homeless before three o’clock to be told that only twenty-two would be admitted. By four there were over thirty and others turning up later drifted away realizing there would be no bed for the night for them. Men in the line spoke with bitter memories of the smallpox hospital with its loathsome food and its mortality rate of one in six. Each of them had been ‘on the doss’ for three nights and days and were now desperate for shelter. As desperate perhaps as Annie Millwood. People were known to inflict wounds on themselves to gain a ‘hospital’ bed for the night.
‘Age and English hardship had broken them,’ London wrote, ‘and for them the game was played and up.’5
Thomas Street was twenty feet wide, with three feet wide pavements. Here the view from the houses every day was the pauper line of the ‘Ins and Outs’; the children played around the paupers’ feet –
They had been born to the sight of the spike line and all their brief lives they had seen it.
At the gate, where porters like William Keep held sway, paupers had to give their name, age, place of birth, condition of destitution and last night’s doss. London felt his pockets ransacked for knives, matches or tobacco, then realized that he had not been searched, but that a brick-hard loaf of bread had been shoved there. Every man denied having any of the above – matches started fires; tobacco was a source of a quarrel; knives could end it fatally. But every man carried a knife.
In the anteroom, London thought he was on his way to Hell. Shoes came off, blood-soaked, putrid rags were unbound from tired, aching feet. The food was appalling – three quarters of a pint of skilly (maize and hot water) into which hungry men voraciously dunked their bread. The general talk in the badly lit room was of the problem of getting ‘tommy’ (food) anywhere else and that the Polish and Russian Jews had come over, set up sweat shops and taken away a working man’s livelihood.
At seven, everybody stripped off and in pairs went into the two tubs available. All twenty washed in the same water and London dried himself as best he could with a damp towel bloody with the sores from another pauper’s back. He slept (eventually) in a canvas bed, six feet long, less than two feet wide and six inches off the floor. His head was higher than his feet and because all the beds in the narrow dormitory were attached to iron rails, movement in one bed caused them all to shake.
The smell was frightful and sickening and my skin crept and crawled. While the shrill voices of children playing in the street continued til midnight, in the Spike it was all grunting, spitting, snoring and groaning like some giant sea-monster, the sound punctuated now and then by the screams of somebody’s nightmare.
After a six o’clock breakfast of more bread and skilly, men were set to work, some picking oakum, others to scrubbing and cleaning. London was one of eight men sent across the road to the Workhouse Infirmary to scavenge. They emptied garbage cans from the sick wards and carried them down five flights of stairs to receptacles reeking of disinfectant. The inmates here, London reported, were of no use to anyone.
They clutter the earth with their presence and are better out of the way.
At the bottom of what he called the Abyss, they were the first to be struck by disease, the quickest to die. And Jack London found himself sprinkling disinfectant in the new mortuary when the ‘dead waggon’ turned up with five bodies. These were clearly inmates from the Infirmary and it was generally believed that incurables were given a dose of ‘black jack’ or ‘white potion’ and were quietly ‘polished off’.
‘Breakfast’ was a mass of scraps from the wards above –
chunks of grease and fat pork… bones … in short all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manner of diseases.
London’s co-scavengers plunged their hands into this and ate ravenously, anything left over thrust into handkerchiefs and hidden inside their shirts. Jack London ran away from the Spike because he could. He was after all staying some streets away in the comfortable house of Police Sergeant William Thick, and he knew he could bathe and change and try to forget. Most people in the Abyss were not so lucky.
Slightly less harrowing pictures could be found. A year after Annie Millwood was admitted, bleeding and shocked, to this place, Margaret Harkness (writing as John Law) wrote –
The Whitechapel Union is a model workhouse; that is to say, it is the Poor law incarnate in stone and brick. The men are not allowed to smoke in it, not even when they are in their dotage; the young women never taste tea and the old ones may not indulge in a cup during the long afternoons, only at half past six o’clock morning and night, when they receive a small hunk of bread with butter scraped over the surface and a mug of that beverage which is so dear to their hearts as well as to their stomachs. The young people never go out, never see a visitor and the old ones only get one holiday in the month. Then the aged paupers may be seen skipping like lambkins outside the doors of the Bastille, while they jabber to their friends and relations. A little gruel morning and night, meat twice a week, that is the food of the grown-up people, seasoned with hard work and prison discipline. Doubtless this Bastille offers no premium to the idle and improvident habits; but what shall we say of the woman or man, maimed by misfortune, who must come there or die in the streets?6
One maimed by misfortune and an unknown assailant and who might have died in the street, was Annie Millwood. We have no record of who treated her or who called the police, but the Medical Superintendent at the time was Dr Herbert Larder. In the 1881 census, James Holt and Perkins Case were the resident medical officers and by 1885 they had been joined by a difficult colleague, Morgan Davies. They had a team of twenty-one nurses, all of them female. Edward Allen was probably on duty at the gate when Annie arrived and either he or his wife Elizabeth would have helped the injured woman into the waiting room.
At the bottom of the heap in terms of status was Robert Mann, who kept the Infirmary’s mortuary. We have no hard evidence that Mann saw Annie Millwood when she was admitted or that he had anything to do with her, but the central thesis of this book is that it was this chance meeting that led to the Autumn of Terror and the start of a killing spree which still haunts the world a century and a quarter later.
What had happened to Annie Millwood? Had she been attacked by a random lunatic as she walked past him? Unlikely. We know that there were a surprisingly high number of dangerous men wandering the East End; some of them, as we have seen, were or are today, serious Ripper suspects. And it is possible that a pocket knife could have cut through a dress, petticoats and stays. Much more likely is that Annie’s charms were on display when her attacker struck because she was a prostitute and he was her client. We do not know where the assault took place, but Whitechapel and Spitalfields, as we have seen, were hotbeds of open-air sex and even in the dusk of a cold February evening, any alleyway, yard, court or corner would do for a ‘tuppenny upright’.
Annie was patched up and spent nearly a month in the Infirmary. We have no idea whether Robert Mann saw her again, talked to her, spent time with her. It is likely, given the strict segregation of the sexes, that he did not. But that did not matter – what mattered was that he may have witnessed her bleeding state, perhaps even seen her bloodstained clothes and something clicked in his brain. He would see the scars again in the near future…
It is noticeable that when Annie was discharged she did not go home to her doss in White’s Row but to the South Grove Workhouse. Had her client/attacker robbed her as he stabbed, leaving her unable to afford even the 4d for her coffin-shaped bed in the doss? Ten days after arriving at South Grove, Annie was chatting to other inmates at the rear of the building when she suddenly collapsed. Death followed soon afterwards.
No reports mention the fact that Annie Millwood’s body would have been taken to Whitechapel Infirmary, not to the main building but to the mortuary in Eagle Place along Old Montague Street, the mortuary kept by Robert Mann. And it was the pauper’s job to strip corpses, to wash them, to lay them out for the post mortem and the coffin. Robert Mann would have had ample time to look at the partially healed wounds on the dead woman’s body.
The coroner for south-east Middlesex, Wynne Baxter, who features prominently in the Ripper case, presided over her inquest on 5 April. Ironically, Annie’s death had nothing to do with the attack on her. The cause of death was ‘a sudden effusion into the pericardium from the rupture of the left pulmonary artery through ulceration’. Even if she had not met Jack the Ripper in the Whitechapel Workhouse, she would have died anyway.
What went on in Robert Mann’s mind in February 1888? If the police had known that at the time, they may have been able to stop him before his killing spree started. But that would have been to ask the impossible and even today, with sixty years of the criminal psychology of serial killers to draw on, we still cannot identify the problem with certainty and our over-inflated, lopsided notion of human rights means that we can do nothing about it.
‘All the while,’ write Schechter and Everitt,7 ‘[the serial killer’s] hunger for blood is building inside him, his fantasies of torture and death are growing more urgent by the day. Suddenly, something pushes him over the edge from morbid daydream to murderous action, driving him to fulfil his lethal fantasies on living victims.’
This is the trigger and it is highly complex. Schechter and Everitt cite the 1981 example of David Bullock who went to a Christmas party at the flat of an acquaintance, Herbert Morales. In one single, incomprehensible sentence, Bullock summed up the bizarre nature of the ‘trigger’ – ‘He started messing with the Christmas tree,’ he told police, ‘telling me how nice the Christmas tree was. So I shot him.’
The Whitechapel murderer was not, technically, the first serial killer in history, but he was among the first and he showed all the characteristics of what is actually a disease. Robert Mann’s behaviour would have changed slowly between February and August 1888 as he entered what criminologists call the aura phase. As a long-term inmate of the workhouse, he had his well-developed routines – meals, exercise, work and bed followed a rigid timetable. Breakfast, eaten at six o’clock in the Infirmary in 1888, was a carefully measured five ounces of bread, half an ounce of butter and a pint of tea. Dinner (the midday meal) consisted of four ounces of cooked meat (five times a week), eight ounces of potatoes or other vegetable and three ounces of bread. Once a week, inmates were given fourteen ounces of suet pudding with their Irish stew and pea soup twice a week. The last meal of the day, supper, was a replay of breakfast, but with one ounce less of bread. Lights were put out at ten o’clock.
In the case of Mann it was slightly different. As the mortuary keeper, he could be summoned day or night to unlock the green-doored ‘shed’ at the end of Eagle Place off Old Montague Street to admit a corpse. This in itself gave him a sense of relative power and superiority over his fellow inmates. It would also explain, up to a point, his presence on the darkened streets of Whitechapel, should he ever be challenged by the police. As the records for 1889 in the London Metropolitan Archive show, the ‘existing mortuary and Post-Mortem Room is not within the curtilage of the Infirmary but at a distance of some 300 yards therefrom’.
Deborah Gough was a night nurse who resigned two months after Annie Millwood’s admission because she clashed with the matron who seemed bent on making life as difficult as possible –
… when a patient has died through the night I have been obliged to walk and get another patient to help me lay the body straight and put the large screens around the bed.8
In the August before the attack on Annie Millwood, forty-nine-year-old inmate Betsy Wilks cadged some matches from two boys who were looking over the wall of the yard at the back of the Infirmary. She set herself alight and ended up in the mortuary on Robert Mann’s slab. So did Esther Shanley who died of rheumatic fever in the year of the Ripper. It was not only dead workhouse inmates who were brought to the mortuary, but suicides from the Thames; the tragic poor who had died on doorsteps overnight from exposure, ‘carrying the banner’ as sleeping rough was called. And any victim of violent crime.
During the aura phase, although life went on as usual for Robert Mann, time would have seemed to slow down. His sense of smell would have become more acute and his skin extra sensitive. Sounds and colours became louder and brighter. This condition can last for a few moments or a few months. Dr Joel Norris of the University of Georgia, a world expert on serial killers, describes the aura phase as passing through a portal between two realities. One is the everyday, the commonplace – for Mann, the workhouse routines, the monotonous diet he had known for years. ‘Laws are obeyed,’ Norris writes, ‘rules observed.’ And apart from prison itself, there was nowhere by the 1880s more hidebound and ritualized in terms of rules than the workhouse. The other is the dark, unfathomable world of the killer. Here there are no rules, only the insatiable thirst for blood, the lust to kill.
The serial murderer is translated into a different kind of creature. Whatever is human in him recedes for a while and he enters into a shadowy existence, a death in life which law and threats of death or punishment, morality, taboos or the importance of life itself, hold no meaning… he will not re-emerge into the world of the living until after the hallucination has broken or the ritual has been acted out.9