The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (7 page)

The sighting was soon linked to another early suspect, Jacob Isenschmid, who had come to the attention of the police on 11 September. Isenschmid, a butcher, had spent time in Colney Hatch asylum and since release had led a very unsettled life before being found by the police and placed at Fairfield Road asylum in Bow. Inspector Abberline felt that Isenschmid’s description fitted that of the man seen by Mrs Fiddymont
et al.
, and an identity parade was arranged.
⁴²
However, Isenschmid’s mental health was unsatisfactory, and it is now not known if Mrs Fiddymont was ever called to identify him.

Following the death of Annie Chapman, the East End detonated. Thanks to the widespread news coverage of the murder and the resultant panic, the realities of East London, its populace, characteristics and far-reaching problems, exploded into the faces of the public in a way that could not be ignored. More than was the case for any of the women who fell victim to the Whitechapel murderer, Annie’s life was a most dramatic demonstration of the journey taken by those unlucky enough to be driven to the doss houses of Spitalfields, via the workhouse and the park bench, through a combination of circumstance, personal weakness and just plain bad luck. What the public now had to face was the fact that these women were by no means unique in the mighty city that was London. The
Daily Telegraph
made this perfectly clear in an editorial:

‘Dark Annie’s’ spirit still walks Whitechapel, unavenged by Justice. Most miserable, most desolate, most degraded, most forgotten and forsaken of all her sex in this vast Metropolis, Destiny also reserved for her to perish most awfully and mysteriously of all the recent martyrs of neglect by the hand of some horrible assassin, who, not content with slaying, desecrated and mutilated the body of his victim. The inhuman murderer still comes and goes about our streets free and unpunished, hiding in his guilty heart the secret known only to
him, to Heaven, and to the dead. And yet even this forlorn and despised citizeness of London cannot be said to have suffered in vain. On the contrary, she has effected more by her death than many long speeches in Parliament and countless columns of letters to the newspapers could have brought about. She has forced innumerable people who never gave a serious thought before to the subject to realise how it is and where it is that our vast floating population – the waifs and strays of our thoroughfares – live and sleep at nights, and what sort of accommodation our rich and enlightened capital provides for them, after so many Acts of Parliament passed to improve the dwellings of the poor, and so many millions spent by our Board of Works, our vestries, and what not … but ‘Dark Annie’s’ dreadful end has compelled a hundred thousand Londoners to reflect what it must be like to have no home at all except the ‘common kitchen’ of a low lodging-house; to sit there, sick and weak and bruised and wretched, for lack of fourpence with which to pay for the right of a ‘doss’; to be turned out after midnight to earn the requisite pence, anywhere and anyhow; and in course of earning it to come across your murderer and to caress your assassin.
¹

The problems of the East End, the ‘second square mile’ that sat in complete opposition to its eminently wealthy neighbour, the City, were many. Throughout the industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century, it became a magnet for migrant workers from the shires and provinces looking to earn a living in the factories and workshops placed there by a city wary of ‘noxious trades’. Breweries, slaughterhouses, tanneries and smithies flourished in an area where prevailing winds would blow pollutant fumes and smoke away from the financial quarter. Some, disposed to working at home or in less
industrial surroundings, would settle into smaller industries like cigar and cabinet making, matchbox assembly or tailoring. The creation and subsequent growth of London’s docks had seen to it that areas close to the river grew phenomenally quickly as London became a hub of world trade. But could the East End comfortably cope with the rapidly growing population? It appeared not; fields gave way to the urban sprawl and orchards and tenter grounds disappeared under new housing, crammed dangerously into the limited spaces available and often accessible only through small alleyways and dark passages. The average population density in London in 1888 was 50 people per acre, but in Whitechapel it was 176; shockingly, in the Bell Lane district of Spitalfields it was 600 people per acre.
²
Such a vast population made the availability of work for all practically impossible, and with the ravages of a long-standing recession, ‘unemployment’, a word coined in the 1880s, became a condition which touched many. By 1888, it is believed that out of a population of 456,877 in Tower Hamlets, over a third lived below the margins of subsistence, with a total of 13 per cent being ‘chronically distressed’ – in other words, facing daily starvation.
³

Some of the most notorious neighbourhoods existed in the back streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields; namely those districts where property owners had seized on the needs of a transient and fundamentally poor population, providing them with beds in common lodging houses. Spitalfields became particularly notorious; once the prosperous home of immigrant Huguenot silk weavers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the area had suffered with the passing of time. As the silk-weaving industry faltered in the early nineteenth century, the French settlers moved on, allowing their once handsome properties to become sublet or converted into doss houses,
and their gardens, once planted with fruit and mulberry trees, were replaced by cramped tenements. The most notorious district consisted of the streets around Commercial Street, a road which had been built in the 1850s with the intention of clearing slums as well as extending trade routes from the London docks. It cut through leprous, overcrowded warrens, but the displaced population did not disperse far and wide, and the already crammed thoroughfares on either side filled up with the exiled poor. Flower and Dean Street, Thrawl Street and Dorset Street were names that even today are historically synonymous with the worst of London poverty. And it was in the common lodging houses here where could be found the Ted Stanleys, the Eliza Coopers, the Pearly Polls and of course the Mary Ann Nichols, Martha Tabrams and Annie Chapmans of this world. As one correspondent described it:

Thieves, loose women, and bad characters abound, and, although the police are not subject, perhaps, to quite the same dangers as they were a few years ago, there is still reason to believe that a constable will avoid, as far as he can, this part of his beat, unless accompanied by a brother officer. The district, in short, is one of common lodging-houses, and it is believed by some that if the mysteries of their ownership were exposed to the public eye much would be made clear.
⁴

Philanthropy, however, was not scarce. Commercial Street was home to Toynbee Hall, set up in 1884 by Canon Samuel Barnett of St Jude’s Whitechapel to bring help, education and culture to the impoverished east Londoner. The Salvation Army, formed by William Booth in 1865, saw its genesis on these very streets. And Thomas Barnardo, a former medical student at the London Hospital on Whitechapel Road, was
moved to provide care and shelter for the destitute children of the East End in the 1880s after seeing so much impoverishment. But these well-meaning social reformers were taking on a resilient adversary, and the problems endured, with many of the solutions failing or being too slow to effect positive change. East London had become a Gordian knot – a problem insoluble in its own terms. With the murder of Annie Chapman, the dark underbelly of the East End slums was brought into focus like never before. Suddenly, newspaper readers around the globe were made aware of the conditions, and it did not reflect favourably on what was then the world’s largest and wealthiest city.

One other ingredient impacted on the life of the East End significantly during those turbulent 1880s – immigration. Proximity to the river Thames meant that this quarter of the capital would invariably receive waves of immigrants who would go on to stamp their mark on the area. After the Huguenots came Irish travellers, fleeing problems caused by the potato famine of 1845–52, and from 1881 onwards Jews from Eastern Europe, and it was this latter wave of settlers whose presence was felt by many to exacerbate the already ingrained problems.

On 1 March 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated, provoking a wave of persecution against Jews in Eastern Europe, even though only one of the five assassination conspirators was Jewish. Anti-Jewish ‘pogroms’ ensured huge migration as thousands attempted to flee dire poverty and unremitting maltreatment, and for many the only way to escape the relentless hardship and enforced transience was to go overseas. London, and specifically the East End, with its small, previously established Jewish communities, was an ideal choice for many. Whitechapel became the first point of entry
to the United Kingdom for those who disembarked at St Katherine’s Dock near the Tower of London. The influx was more like an avalanche – by 1888, it is estimated that in the district of Whitechapel, over 40 per cent of the population were Jewish settlers, forming micro-communities or ‘ghettos’ of their own. With the unemployed scraping to survive, these newcomers, who needed work as much as anybody else, were blamed for inflaming the situation. Large numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled Jewish workers were prepared to work long hours for poor wages, effectively putting the indigenous workers out of the job market. As these newcomers began to descend upon specific areas of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, further resentment was forthcoming from those who believed that they were responsible ‘for pushing up rents by accepting overcrowded conditions, therefore forcing native East Enders to move out’.
⁵
As the alarm surrounding the Whitechapel murders took hold during September 1888, eyes inevitably turned to the Jews, again the ideal scapegoat:

On Saturday in several quarters of East London the crowds who had assembled in the streets began to assume a very threatening attitude towards the Hebrew population of the district. It was repeatedly asserted 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 – and forthwith the crowds proceeded to threaten and abuse such of the unfortunate Hebrews as they found in the streets. Happily, the presence of the large number of police in the streets prevented a riot actually taking place.
⁶

Just as our correspondent was writing a gang of young vagabonds marched down Hanbury-street shouting ‘Down with the Jews!’ ‘It was a Jew who did it!’ ‘No Englishman did it!’
After these the police were prompt, and whenever there was a stand they quickly, and without ceremony, dispersed them. There have been many fights, but the police are equal to it, as men are held in reserve under cover, and when there is a row they rush out and soon establish order. As the night advances the disorderly mobs who openly express antipathy to the Jews increase, and a request has been forwarded to headquarters for extra men.
⁷

The heady mix was, of course, being continually stirred by the sensationalist newspapers. The
Star
, perhaps the most lurid of them all,
⁸
boasted that its circulation on the Monday after Annie Chapman’s murder was 261,000 – 55,000 more than any other evening paper in London. The
Star
could also be said to have been responsible for one more unwitting victim of the Whitechapel horrors, when Mary Burridge, a resident of Blackfriars Road, collapsed in a fit after reading one of their reports. After regaining consciousness for a brief while after, she promptly died.
⁹

Such unrest led to the formation of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, a group of local businessmen who felt that the scares surrounding the murders were affecting trade. At a meeting of the committee on 10 September, George Lusk, a painter and decorator of Tollet Street, Mile End, was nominated chairman. The question of rewards was now a major concern, and the Mile End Vigilance Committee, along with the already extant St Jude’s District Committee, were committed to pressurizing the authorities to offer them. A long list of subscribers was drawn up with the aim of securing £100 from private contributors to bolster the same amount already being offered privately by Samuel Montagu MP. Direct pleas to the home secretary, Henry Matthews, were unsuccessful, with the
reply stating that ‘such offers of reward tended to produce more harm than good, and the Secretary of State is satisfied that there is nothing in the circumstances of the present case to justify a departure from this rule’.
¹⁰

But all was not well as far as the investigation was concerned; with the newspapers reporting fresh incidences of knife crime and threats against women around London and the East End, it was becoming difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Detectives were now increasingly irritated by using precious time sifting through innumerable reports and claims which had no foundation.
¹¹
One example was the case of Edward McKenna, who was arrested on suspicion of being a man seen in Flower and Dean Street with a knife on the day of Chapman’s murder. Several members of the public were found who had seen suspicious individuals that morning, including the potman of the Ten Bells and Joseph Taylor, the man who had followed the suspicious individual from the Prince Albert pub,
¹²
but all to no avail. As Annie Chapman lay cold in the Whitechapel workhouse mortuary, Dr Robert Anderson was on his way to Switzerland for his first day of sick leave and, despite not mentioning his inconvenient absence, the radical press were apoplectic at the investigating authorities’ lack of progress:

And when public opinion is at last aroused, and the whole East-end is under a Red Terror, our authorities refuse to take the most obvious and elementary precautions for ensuring detection. All we can say is that if a mad panic sweeps through the quarters desolated by a maniac’s knife, the Home Office and Scotland-yard will be alone to blame. It is impossible to exaggerate the utter want of confidence in the whole police system which this frightful tragedy has evoked; and if sheer fright grows
into crazed fury we shall hold Mr MATTHEWS and Sir CHARLES WARREN responsible.
¹³

On 10 September, the
Evening Standard
made a passing mention that a message had been found on a wall in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, reading ‘Five; 15 more, and then I give myself up.’ This story, mentioned in other forms and with different wording, would remain unsubstantiated; however it did hint at a more tangible and genuine phenomenon to come – alleged communications from the murderer, namely in the form of letters. The first known example
¹⁴
was written on 24 September and sent to Charles Warren: