Complete History of Jack the Ripper (14 page)

P
OLLY
N
ICHOLS WAS
the first victim of Jack the Ripper. Such is the conventional wisdom amongst students of the case. The earlier murders are dismissed as irrelevancies, products of the everyday violence of the East End.

This view would have found little favour in 1888 for although Emma Smith seemed to have been slain by drunken ruffians there had been nothing at all everyday about the murder of Martha Tabram. Her wounds had not been identical to those of Polly Nichols but both killings shared characteristics that set them apart from routine crime. Neither murder appeared to have had any connection with domestic quarrels, drunken affrays or street robberies. In both cases the murderer had left no clue to his identity. And both crimes, even amidst the violence of the Victorian East End, had been remarkable for their savagery.

The last point, perhaps, was more evident then than it is now and the Ripper buffs of today, who so casually disregard the George Yard tragedy as ‘just another murder’, would do well to consider the impact that it made upon Martha Tabram’s contemporaries. In his summing up George Collier, the deputy coroner, spoke of it as ‘one of the most brutal [crimes] that had occurred for some years . . . almost beyond belief,’ and newsmen appeared genuinely appalled and bewildered by the rage of Martha’s killer. ‘The wound over the heart was alone sufficient to kill,’ puzzled the
Illustrated Police News
of 18 August, ‘and death must have occurred as soon as that was
inflicted. Unless the perpetrator was a madman, or suffering to an unusual extent from drink delirium, no tangible explanation can be given of the reason for inflicting the other thirty-eight injuries, some of which almost seem as if they were due to thrusts and cuts from a penknife.’ This journal, admittedly revelling in the sensational, devoted six drawings on its front page and more than a column of small print inside to the crime. But in the East End too the manner of Martha’s death evoked unusual horror. Thus, on 11 August, the
East London Observer
devoted nearly two columns to a murder it considered ‘so unique and mysterious.’
¹

At the beginning of September it was the general belief of the press that at least Martha Tabram and Polly Nichols had been slain by the same hand. And although we have no authoritative statement from the police on this point such clues as can be gleaned from the press indicate that they, too, were now seriously considering the possibility that all three Whitechapel murders were linked.

Three theories were current. One – that the murders had been perpetrated by a gang of thieves – originated in the report of a robbery in Whitechapel circulated by the Central News Agency.
²
According to this tale a woman, leaving the Foresters’ Music Hall, Cambridge Heath Road, on the night of Saturday, 1 September, was accosted by a well-dressed man. Inveigling himself into her company, he walked a short distance with her but, not far from the spot where Polly Nichols had been killed, suddenly seized her by the throat and dragged her down a court. The villain was immediately joined by both male and female confederates. They brutally assaulted their victim and despoiled her of her necklace, ear-rings, brooch and purse. She opened her mouth to scream but was silenced by a bloodcurdling threat from one of the gang. Laying a large knife across her throat he warned: “We will serve you as we did the others.” The whole story was, apparently, a newspaper fiction, but even before it was publicly discredited it should have been obvious that there was a world of difference between its affluent if luckless heroine and the penniless whores slaughtered in George Yard and Buck’s Row. Robbery could not plausibly be advanced as the reason for their deaths. The police themselves evidently toyed with the theory that Smith, Tabram and Nichols had been the victims of a ‘High Rip’ gang which levied blackmail upon prostitutes and then took vengeance upon such as failed to pay them a proportion of their earnings.
³

The most widely held view, however, was that the killer was a
lunatic. As early as 31 August the
Star
fostered this theory in screaming headlines:

A day later it returned to the theme. The Osborn Street, George Yard and Buck’s Row outrages, it insisted, had been committed by a single madman: ‘In each case the victim has been a woman of abandoned character, each crime has been committed in the dark hours of the morning, and more important still as pointing to one man, and that man a maniac, being the culprit, each murder has been accompanied by hideous mutilation . . . All three crimes have been committed within a very small radius. Each of the ill-lighted thoroughfares to which the women were decoyed to be foully butchered are off turnings from Whitechapel Road, and all are within half a mile. The fact that these three tragedies have been committed within such a limited area, and are so strangely alike in their details, is forcing on all minds the conviction that they are the work of some cool, cunning man with a mania for murder.’
⁴

There was undoubtedly news value in such a theory. But there was substance too, as the
East London Observer
, commenting on the Tabram and Nichols murders, ponderously elaborated: ‘The two murders which have so startled London within the last month are singular for the reason that the victims have been of the poorest of the poor, and no adequate motive in the shape of plunder can be traced. The excess of effort that has been apparent in each murder suggests the idea that both crimes are the work of a demented being, as the extraordinary violence used is the peculiar feature in each instance.’
⁵
For whatever reason, the notion of a homicidal maniac stalking the streets quickly took hold of the press and by 8 September, when both the leading East End weeklies endorsed it, their voices did little more than add volume to a chorus.

Talk of this kind naturally stoked the fire of excitement already kindled in the East End by the Buck’s Row murder. In the week after Polly’s death morbid sightseers came in groups of two or three to gaze at the gaudy green gates of the workhouse mortuary. Small crowds, twenty or thirty strong, gathered in Buck’s Row to inspect
the murder site. And the latest details of the outrage were hungrily devoured and discussed at street corners throughout the East End.

In Buck’s Row a
Daily News
reporter mingled with the crowds on 4 September. He found groups of women clustered together, bending over what they supposed to be the bloodstained paving stones, gossiping nervously but insatiably about the murder, and men, for the most part sullen and taciturn, puffing at their pipes, hands thrust deep in their pockets. The reporter’s account, if coloured, preserves for us something of the flavour of the common talk in those early September days of 1888.
⁶
Mixed emotions – compassion for the victim, anger against her killer and fear for themselves – repeatedly surfaced amidst the gossip.

Reflections upon the character of the deceased were met with such emphatic expressions of compassion that the critic was invariably abashed into silence. ‘No matter what she was, poor thing,’ one woman chided, ‘’taint for the likes of us to judge her now.’ ‘No, that’s right enough,’ agreed another, ‘whatever she was it was an awful cruel thing to do to her.’

The story that the murders had been committed by a gang of robbers had been published that morning in the papers and was widely credited by the gullible Buck’s Row tattlers. But one bystander dismissed it. ‘That’s a got up yarn,’ he scoffed. ‘I rather wish it was true. If there was a gang like that, one or t’other of ’em ’d split before long, and it’d all come out. Bet your money this ain’t been done that way.’ No one was betting anything but this observation stimulated a lively discussion amongst the females as to what they would like to see done to the killer if it did come out. By general acclamation it was agreed that he deserved to be turned out in the midst of the Whitechapel women and then, ‘seemingly forgetful of all the pain and pathos of the dreadful event, [the] women squeezed their elbows and clenched their fists, and went through a mimic performance on the person of the murderer.’

It was an anger fuelled by apprehension for the womenfolk were alert to the danger that the killer would strike again. ‘Thank God I needn’t be out after dark!’ exclaimed one. ‘No more needn’t I,’ chimed in another, ‘but my two girls have got to come home latish and I’m all of a fidget till they comes.’ A little woman with a rosy cherub face summed up the general view: ‘Life ain’t no great thing with many on us,’ she said, ‘but we don’t all want to be murdered,
and if things go on like this it won’t be safe for nobody to put their ’eads out o’ doors.’

Pity, anger, fear – but, above all, fascination. The murder held the collection of gossips and loafers in Buck’s Row as if by a spell. Some dropped away but their places were taken by fresh sightseers and every time new arrivals joined the crowd the supposed bloodstains were pointed out to them and the whole affair was avidly discussed again. And if the talk temporarily faltered the crowd ‘stood and silently stared at the pavement and the brickwork of the adjacent house and minutely examined the scratches and other marks in the wall, as if these things helped them to realise the horror of it all.’

Polly Nichols was buried in the City of London Cemetery, Ilford, on the afternoon of Thursday, 6 September.
⁷
The collection of the body proved complicated because although the time at which the cortege was to start had been kept a profound secret the date of the funeral had not and a large crowd had assembled about Old Montague Street. In order to get the body out of the mortuary, therefore, the undertaker resorted to stratagem. A two-horse, closed hearse was observed jogging eastwards along Hanbury Street. The crowd made way for it to turn into Old Montague Street but instead it passed on into Whitechapel Road and, doubling back, entered the mortuary by the back gate in Chapman’s Court. The ruse worked. There was not a soul about when the undertaker’s assistants placed the coffin into the hearse.

The coffin was of polished elm and bore a plate inscribed with the words: ‘Mary Ann Nichols, aged 42; died August 31, 1888.’ It was driven to Hanbury Street, probably to No. 87, the house of Mrs Henry Smith, the undertaker, and there awaited the mourners. They were late in arriving, however, and by the time the cortege was ready to start news that the body was in the hearse had been passed around the district and the vehicle was surrounded by curious onlookers. With a police guard to keep the crowd at a distance the little procession – the hearse and two mourning coaches – at length set off for Ilford. It turned into Baker’s Row, passed the corner of Buck’s Row and entered Whitechapel Road, where police, stationed at intervals of several yards, ensured its passage. The mourners included Edward Walker, Polly’s father, William Nichols, her husband, and Edward John Nichols, her son, but the entire community appeared united in grief. Everywhere the greatest sympathy was expressed for the relatives and all the houses in the neighbourhood had their blinds
drawn. ‘The expenses of the funeral,’ noted
The Times
, ‘were borne by the relatives of the deceased, her father, husband, and son.’

When Polly was murdered Parliament had been in summer recess for eighteen days and would remain so until 6 November. Her death, nevertheless, sent the first ripples of alarm washing into the Home Office. For on 31 August, the day of the murder, L. & P. Walter & Son of Church Street, Spitalfields, manufacturers of clothing for export, sent a newspaper clipping and the following letter to Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary:

At this time neither Matthews nor his advisers can possibly have anticipated the furore the murders would ultimately visit upon them and they considered a brief reply, barren of explanation, sufficient to exculpate them from further concern in the matter. Signed by Edward Leigh-Pemberton, Legal Assistant Under-Secretary at the Home Office, and dated 4 September, it curtly informed Walter & Son that ‘the practice of offering rewards for the discovery of criminals has for some time been discontinued; and that so far as the circumstances of the present case have at present been investigated, they do not in his [i.e. Matthews’] opinion disclose any special ground for departure from the usual custom.’
⁸

The direct responsibility for laying the killer by the heels fell to the Metropolitan Police. They were ill-prepared to meet the challenge. Nevertheless, in the context of the murder investigation, the extent and nature of their difficulties have been almost universally misconstrued. Assuredly the regime of General Sir Charles Warren, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1886 to 1888, was a troubled one. For while at loggerheads with his immediate superior, Henry Matthews, he made a determined effort to tighten up the structure and discipline of the force and was confronted by the need to police increasingly formidable demonstrations by socialists and the unemployed. The details of these much published differences do not concern us.
⁹
Their impact upon the detective problem in
Whitechapel does and that, contrary to popular belief, seems to have been negligible.