Complete History of Jack the Ripper (24 page)

The police would not have regarded this man as a serious suspect but they would have been anxious to trace him in order to eliminate him from their inquiries. And this was apparently the purpose of the telegram. The identification of the man in the passage with Mrs Richardson’s trespasser would seem to be clinched by a statement which she gave to the
Daily Telegraph
as early as 8 or 9 September:

The police telegram, then, did not describe a man seen with Annie Chapman but one found skulking about No. 29 a month before
the murder. As such it cannot seriously be advanced as a clue to Annie’s killer. The detectives knew this perfectly well. Which is why Chief Inspector Swanson, reviewing the Chapman investigation on 19 October, recorded only
one
description of a suspect in connection with the murder – that of Mrs Long.
²⁵

Our demolition of these time-honoured shibboleths must not delude us into thinking that we have seen the last of them. They will continue to be trotted out by the idle and incompetent and facts, in any case, have never stood in the way of a sensational theory. The arrangement of Annie’s pathetic belongings around the feet of her corpse struck William Stewart as a typically feminine gesture. And anxious to promote his own indictment of a demented midwife, he was not the man to question the truth of that neat array. Similarly, for Stephen Knight the rings and coins
had
to exist, if only to legitimize his fantasy of a Masonic murderer. ‘Human kind,’ sighed T. S. Eliot, ‘cannot bear very much reality.’ The century-old obsession with the Whitechapel murders might truly be cited as a vindication of his view. Jack the Ripper has been, and looks destined to remain, whatever writers, songsters and film-makers wish him to be.

None of which alters the fact that in the patient study and careful evaluation of our primary sources, the truth – or what survives of it – is there for those who seek it.

O
N
S
ATURDAY
, 8 S
EPTEMBER
, tidings of the fourth murder crackled out from Hanbury Street like a bushfire. They produced a run on the evening papers the like of which no newsagent for several miles around could remember. For when stocks sold out crowds waited outside the shops for fresh supplies to be brought in and customers successful in obtaining copies themselves became the centres of clamorous groups eager to hear the latest.

The press, by giving currency to inaccuracy and rumour, and by resort to the most sensational language imaginable, did much to promote alarm. On the day of the murder the
Star
prefixed a four-column notice of the tragedy with this bloodcurdling passage: ‘London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate – half beast, half man – is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless classes of the community. There can be no shadow of a doubt now that our original theory was correct, and that the Whitechapel murderer, who has now four . . . victims to his knife, is one man, and that man a murderous maniac. There is another Williams in our midst. Hideous malice deadly cunning, insatiable thirst for blood – all these are the marks of the mad homicide. The ghoul-like creature who stalks through the streets of London, stalking down his victim like a Pawnee Indian, is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more.’ The quality papers were not exempt from such journalism. On Monday morning the
Telegraph
set the hearts of its dignified
middle-class readers pounding with talk of a baleful prowler of the East End alleys, of ‘beings who look like men, but are rather demons, vampires . . .’
¹

Whitechapel had stood firm in the face of three savage murders. But this fourth, coming so soon after the last, plunged the community into panic and hysteria. On Saturday evening thousands of people were out on the streets of the East End. ‘Rumours of other murders were set afloat,’ noted the
Observer
, ‘and gained no small amount of credence, until East London became panic-stricken – for there is no other term to describe the aimless, frightened way in which the people paraded the crowded thoroughfares.’
²
The first three days after the murder witnessed extraordinary scenes in the vicinity of the crimes. Crowds gathered in Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street, outside both entrances to the mortuary, and about the police stations in Commercial Street, Leman Street and Bethnal Green. On Monday a
News
reporter encountered an immense throng of loafers in Hanbury Street. The upper storey windows on both sides of the street framed the faces of yet more spectators. ‘Not a man could I see in any of those windows,’ he wrote, ‘only women, grown-up girls, and children. They had the air of people who thought their quarter of the world invested with a new importance.’
³

Anger and indignation were the ruling passions of these crowds. With blind fury they turned upon anyone they fancied to blame for the tragedy. The newspapers record some half dozen such incidents for the weekend of the murder but details are garbled and untrustworthy. We will instance just one which seems to be related to a memory of Walter Dew.

In his memoirs, published in 1938, Dew devoted no less than six pages to the arrest of ‘Squibby’. It was his most vivid memory of the Chapman murder. Squibby was a young villain. Covered from head to foot in tattoos, short but immensely strong, he engaged in regular battles with the police. ‘Whenever this “charming” young fellow was arrested,’ wrote Dew, ‘it took six or eight policemen to get him to the station, and by the time he was brought in he was usually devoid of every stitch of clothing, and the policemen pretty well hors de combat.’
⁴
In short, Squibby was the complete Pocket Hercules.

Now, at the time of the Hanbury Street murder Squibby was wanted by the police. Some time previously he had been amusing himself by throwing bricks at a policeman and one badly aimed missile had struck and injured a child. Squibby had gone into
hiding but the murder coaxed him out. Mingling with the crowds of sightseers, he made his way, on the morning of the murder, towards Hanbury Street. That morning Dew was one of many detectives taking statements in the neighbourhood. It was while standing talking to a fellow detective in Commercial Street that he espied Squibby. And at the same time Squibby saw and recognized the detectives.

In an instant he was off. Diving between the legs of a horse and crossing the road, Squibby raced like a hare up Commercial Street towards Aldgate. During the Whitechapel investigation detectives were permitted to carry truncheons and Dew and his colleague were thus armed. Immediately they gave chase to the fugitive, drawing their truncheons as they did so. The sight of a man fleeing from the neighbourhood of the murder with policemen at his heels whipped the crowds into a paroxysm of excitement. ‘Jack the Ripper! Jack the Ripper! Lynch him!’ they roared. Soon a frantic mob had joined in the pursuit. ‘Behind us as I ran,’ recalled Dew, ‘I could hear the tramp of hundreds of feet.’

The detectives eventually cornered their quarry in a house in Flower and Dean Street. But although they anticipated a ferocious resistance they found Squibby a changed man. ‘Instead of finding, as we expected, an animal of a man, foaming at the mouth and ready to fight to the last breath, his face was of a ghastly hue and he trembled violently.’ He was, of course, petrified of the mob. And he had reason to be for the house was now in a state of siege. The rabble were calling out for his blood. Inside the detectives and their prisoner listened to their cries: ‘Lynch him! Fetch him out! It’s Jack the Ripper!’

Dew promised Squibby protection and their chances improved with the arrival of large reinforcements of uniformed police. Even then, however, the little man’s ordeal was not over. When he was brought out of the house the crowd seemed to go mad and, making a concerted rush, nearly broke through the police cordon. When he was placed in a four-wheeled cab the mob set about the vehicle and its escort. More than once it was nearly overturned and eventually it had to be abandoned. And when he was lodged in Commercial Street Police Station the building was invested and repeatedly assaulted. From upper windows police inspectors tried to explain that their prisoner had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder and ultimately, although not until many hours later, the crowd began to quieten down and disperse.

After that desperate day Squibby’s attitude to the police changed. Wrote Dew: ‘Whenever he met me he never failed to thank me for “saving his life” and, as far as I know, he never again gave trouble to police officers whose duty it was to arrest him.’

In one respect at least Dew’s fifty-year-old memory was confused. No one would have referred to the murderer as ‘Jack the Ripper’ as early as 8 September because at that time the dreaded nickname had not yet been invented. Undoubtedly too, the inspector used his imagination to pad out his recollections. But he explicitly stated that this incident took place on the morning of the Chapman murder and a study of contemporary newspapers certainly suggests that there is nothing inherently implausible about it. In fact it is typical of several incidents ascribed by the press to the first three days after the murder. One report, indeed, seems to refer to the same event.

On the evening of the 8th the
Star
reported that earlier in the day the police had arrested a man in Spitalfields. The arrest had precipitated a rumor that the murderer had been caught. ‘In an instant the news spread like wildfire,’ ran the report. ‘From every street, from every court, from the market stands, from the public-houses, rushed forth men and women, all trying to get at the unfortunate captive, declaring he was “one of the gang”, and they meant to lynch him. Thousands gathered, and the police and a private detective [plain-clothes detective] had all their work to prevent the man being torn to pieces.’ The police succeeded in getting him inside the station and closing the doors against the mob. And the inspector in charge explained to a
Star
reporter that the man had been wanted for some time for an assault upon the police. ‘The crowd sighed at hearing the news,’ concluded the
Star
, ‘but were not persuaded that the person in question had not something to do with the murder.’
⁵

One aspect of the East End disturbances was particularly sinister. The indignation of the community quickly developed anti-semitic overtones and on the day of the murder the crowds assembling in the streets began to threaten and abuse Jews. At that time there was no evidence of any kind to connect a Jew with the murders. How, then, might we explain the actions of the mobs?

The answer lies partly, of course, in the baseless press campaign against Leather Apron. Then, too, the crimes were unprecedented in English experience and in the minds of many bore a distinctly Continental stamp. ‘It was repeatedly asserted,’ said the
Observer
, reporting the attacks on Jews, ‘that no Englishman could have
perpetrated such a horrible crime as that of Hanbury Street, and that it must have been done by a Jew.’
⁶
Such notions were perhaps fortified by hazy folk memories of the medieval ‘ritual murder’ or ‘blood libel’ accusation against Jews, a superstition which held that the Jewish festival of Passover required a human sacrifice and that Jews abducted and ritually slaughtered unoffending Christians. Finally, the indictment of the Jews for the murders was acceptable to a swelling anti-alien if not anti-semitic sentiment in the East End. For it is important to understand that the crimes were enacted against a backdrop of mounting social tension in Whitechapel prompted by the rapid influx of destitute Jews after 1881. By the middle of the decade the sympathy that had first greeted these incoming victims of pogroms had started to crumble in favour of a climate of fear and suspicion sustained by job competition at a time of depression.

The outburst of Judaeophobia called forth by the death of Dark Annie immediately conjured up the spectre of serious anti-Jewish riots. ‘It is so easy to inflame the popular mind when it is startled by hideous crime,’ cried the
Jewish Chronicle.
‘There may soon be murders from panic to add to murders from lust of blood . . . A touch would fire the whole district in the mood in which it is now,’ warned the
News.
It is difficult now to judge how realistic such fears were. But if Whitechapel was half the powder keg the
News
represented it to be it is scarcely surprising that Anglo-Jewry acted with haste to stamp out the match. One of its number dashed off a letter to the
Star.
No Jew, he insisted, could have committed the murders because Jews have a horror of blood traceable to the Bible: ‘“The blood is the life” is so perfectly and persistently before the Jews that they soak their butcher-meat in water before they will prepare it for cooking, and Jews have been seen to shrink from tasting the red juice that runs from a succulent beef-steak in process of cutting it.’ Saturday, 15 September, was observed in the synagogues as the Day of Atonement. Adverting to the murders in his sermon at Bayswater, Dr Hermann Adler, the Acting Chief Rabbi, spoke to the same purpose. Although urging a need to humanize, civilize and Anglicize the impoverished Jewish refugees, he asserted that no Hebrew, native or alien, could be guilty of such atrocious and inhuman crimes.
⁷
It was partly a desire to exonerate the Jewish community from complicity in the murders, furthermore, that inspired prominent Jewish citizens to spearhead private efforts to bring the killer to justice. Samuel Montagu, the Jewish MP for the Whitechapel Division of Tower Hamlets, was the
first to offer a reward for his capture and the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which quickly seconded his initiative, consisted largely of Jewish tradesmen.