It takes less than three minutes to walk from Baker’s Row to Buck’s Row and there is only one way to do it. Robert Mann walked that way in the early hours of Friday 31 August. In terms of the genesis of a serial killer he was to grow a long way that night – for the first time he took on a healthy, alert adult and, subconsciously, he had to pass through the phases in a more conventional manner. He had found Martha Tabram to the south-east. This time, he walked south-west.
By the time he left the Infirmary, he had the key to the mortuary in his pocket. Why? Because now he needed a knife with a stronger blade than the pocket knife he had used on Martha Tabram and they were on display in the mortuary. Perhaps he remembered that last time, his clasp knife had not been up to the job. Perhaps, however, he needed the different knife for a different purpose. Either the catling or the cartilage knife, with their 5-inch blades, would be ideal.
Did he accost any other women at the east end of Old Montague Street? How much time did he actually take until he reached Buck’s Row? If he entered it from the western end, he would have seen ahead of him, by the light of the quarter-full moon, the great looming building of the National School with the girls’ entrance to the right and the boys’ to the left. There were horses and stables to his right and weighing machines to his left. Beyond the warehouses that edged Buck’s Row ahead of him were the manure works and the railway lines that ran behind his workhouse home.
Walking towards him, out of the darkness by Essex Wharf, was a middle-aged whore. Her name was Mary Ann Nichols and she would become the first ‘canonical’ victim of Jack the Ripper.
Mann was now in the wooing phase, that most tricky of operations which was almost wholly lacking in the case of Martha Tabram. It had been twenty-four days since he had killed her and the black mood was on him again. John Wayne Gacy offered his young male victims marijuana and killed them when they were high. Ted Bundy feigned a broken arm and asked young, long-haired girls to give him a hand. Both these modern serial killers used charm to lull their victims. How much charm did a workhouse mortuary keeper have? Was it the same for him as behavioural investigative advisor Professor Laurence Alison believes it was for serial killer Robert Napper:
His paranoia about how they looked down upon him, finding him disgusting and repugnant, will have fed his anger, his self-loathing and his lust for their blood.1
The point at issue is that the Ripper’s victims were considerably more vulnerable than any of those killed by Gacy or Bundy. These were desperate women, driven to prostitution by drink and bad luck. To avoid ‘carrying the banner’, they had a straight choice – the casual ward with all the hells that Jack London describes or earning their 4d for a bed in a doss; and that meant appeasing the clients who wandered drunkenly over the cobbles in the early morning air, 365 days a year.
For the last eight years of her life we can piece together the sad world of ‘Polly’ Nichols. Records confirm that she was in Lambeth workhouse in 1880–81. She was back there in 1882–3, spending two days in the Infirmary. She lived with her father that spring, but by May was back in the workhouse again. In the Autumn of 1887 she was living with Thomas Drew in York Street, Walworth, south of the river, but by October was in the St Giles Workhouse in Endell Street. From there she went straight to the Strand Workhouse in Edmonton and was known to be carrying the banner along with hundreds of others in Trafalgar Square.
In the previous year, on 19 November, ‘Bloody Sunday’ had erupted when crowds over 70,000 strong had marched to the Square to complain about the endemic poverty in the East End. They faced 3,500 constables, as well as mounted police and 300 Life Guards. In reserve were 300 Grenadier Guardsmen (including, no doubt, the men who would be quizzed later by Inspector Reid) and their bayonets were fixed. Not since the dark, revolutionary days of Chartism had London seen unrest and numbers like this. Realizing they were trapped in a cul-de-sac of authority, protestors (who were armed) began to fight their way out. There were 150 hospital cases and nearly 300 arrests. In December, Polly Nichols was one of those routinely cleared out by a battered and defiant Metropolitan Police. Christmas of 1887 saw Polly in Lambeth Workhouse again and from January to April of 1888 she was in Mitcham Workhouse, then Holborn Infirmary. She found good employment in the summer, but by the beginning of August was in the temporary workhouse in Gray’s Inn Lane. On the 2nd, she was sleeping in a doss at 18 Thrawl Street and for the last week of her life at the White House, 56 Flower and Dean Street.