The Sexual History of London (27 page)

Attempts to raise the age of consent were making little impression on Parliament until the campaigner Josephine Butler turned for help to the editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, W. T. Stead. Butler's mission was to stamp out prostitution in general and the trade in virgins in particular. As a committed Christian, Stead was sympathetic to Butler's views. He was also eager to make a name for himself as a journalist. In 1885, he undertook his own investigation into the sex trade. The result was ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon', one of the first examples of muck-racking sensationalism.
³⁸

While journalists such as Mayhew and his assistant Bracebridge Hemyng had interviewed and recorded the voices of working prostitutes, Stead set up his own sting operation by manipulating a young and impressionable girl as adroitly as any old bawd. One of Stead's contacts, a Member of Parliament, had told him over a glass of champagne that it was possible to buy a virgin for £5.
³⁹
With the help of Bramwell Booth (son of the founder of the Salvation Army), Stead set out to prove this theory. Stead recruited a retired prostitute, Rebecca Jarrett, as his agent and she procured a girl for him.
⁴⁰
The girl in question turned out to be thirteen-year-old Eliza Armstrong, who arrived with her mother, the latter sporting a split lip, evidence of the fact that Mr Armstrong, Eliza's father, had not approved of the enterprise. Eliza was wearing a long dark travelling dress with a yellow collar, a black hat and a hairstyle known as a ‘Piccadilly bang' which Stead regarded as rather common. (‘Bangs' or fringes, lying over the forehead and often curled with irons, were considered to be vulgar.)

Eliza was taken to a Madame Mourez, an underground midwife who certified her
virgo intacta
, and then Stead took her to a low boarding house in Poland Street where Rebecca Jarrett had obtained rooms. Stead ordered drinks, while Rebecca chloroformed Eliza and put her to bed. Stead, decked out in grotesque make-up that made him look like an old rake, insisted on entering Eliza's bedroom to carry out the charade as far as possible. But Eliza woke up screaming: Rebecca had forgotten how to chloroform her victim efficiently, and Stead retired in confusion.
⁴¹

After being subjected to another examination, this time so that a proper physician could certify her unharmed for Stead and Booth's ultimate protection, Bramwell Booth packed the miserable girl off to the Salvation Army in France.
⁴²

Stead took great pride in this episode. ‘Even at this day,' he wrote, ‘I stand amazed at the audacity with which I carried the thing through.'
⁴³
It did not occur to him that Eliza might have found the experience disturbing. ‘Beyond the momentary surprise of the midwife's examination, which was necessary to prove that a little harlot had not been palmed off upon us, she experienced not the slightest inconvenience.'
⁴⁴

Despite the fact that Stead and Booth had exploited the girl much as any old rake would have done – for their own purposes and without her consent – Stead became an overnight sensation and, most importantly for any journalist, saw a massive boost in his paper's circulation figures. ‘The Maiden Tribute' hit the headlines like a bombshell, promising readers ‘
shuddering horror
…
the violation of virgins
', ‘
confessions of a brothel keeper
' and even ‘
strapping girls down
'.
⁴⁵
The language of pornography had been pressed into the service of journalism in order to expose a social evil and boost the circulation of the
Pall Mall Gazette
. There were riots outside the offices of the
Gazette
as eager readers tried to get their hands on a copy, which was banned by W H Smith on moral grounds. Copies changed hands at twelve times the cover price and the articles were syndicated in the USA and published across Europe from France to Russia.
⁴⁶

As a result of the scandal, a massive demonstration, 250,000 strong, took place in Hyde Park, demanding the raising of the age of consent to sixteen. Feminists, socialists and Christians converged to express their horror at ‘Modern Babylon': wearing white roses for purity, ten columns of marchers descended upon the park, accompanied by the sound of tambourines, drums and flutes, and carrying banners appealing to men to ‘Protect the Girls of England' while inviting women to ‘Join the War on Vice' and steer the nation away from ‘Shame, Shame, Horror!' There were wagonloads of young virgins dressed in white, flying a flag which read ‘The Innocents, Will They Be Slaughtered?' and then, borne aloft like a god, came the conquering hero, accompanied by shouts of ‘Long live Stead!'
⁴⁷

While Stead succumbed to grandiose self-satisfaction, other more urbane commentators questioned his motives. The MP for Whitehaven suggested that Stead might be liable to criminal prosecution himself for buying a young girl, while the playwright George Bernard Shaw described the Eliza Armstrong case as ‘a put-up job' and doubted his journalistic credentials. ‘After that, it was clear that he was a man who could not work with anybody, and nobody could work with him.'
⁴⁸
However, it was a Mrs Lynn Linton who seems to have got Stead pegged and hinted at his true motivation. This reactionary campaigner (she made it her life's work to deride the feminist ‘new woman' beloved of the progressives) made a shrewd assessment of Stead as a dirty old man when she wrote that ‘he exudes semen through the skin'.
⁴⁹

Meanwhile, Eliza Armstrong's mother read the
Pall Mall Gazette
and recognized her own daughter in the account of the young virgin, ‘Lily', acquired by Stead. Mrs Armstrong had been told that Eliza had gone into service. Horrified to find out that the girl had been sent to France, Mrs Armstrong went to the papers, and received a sympathetic hearing from
Lloyd's Newspaper
, a rival scandal sheet. A reporter from
Lloyd's
, accompanied by another journalist from
St James's Gazette
, tracked down Madame Mourez, while Eliza's father, Mr Armstrong, headed to Paris to find his daughter, and got lost in the brothels (or at least that was his explanation).
⁵⁰
Eliza, meanwhile, had been sent back to England, and was discovered with Stead, in his garden in Wimbledon. Stead, to his evident delight, found himself under arrest for fraudulently procuring Eliza; he felt he had proved his point by drawing attention to the so-called white slave trade. ‘To the legal minds the substantial question was whether or not Eliza had been taken “fraudulently” out of possession of the parents, the axiom being that all fraud annuls all consent.'
⁵¹

There was only one answer. Madame Mourez and Rebecca Jarrett got six months each, and Stead received three months, which he embraced enthusiastically because he felt vindicated and enjoyed the publicity. Incarcerated in Holloway (now a women's prison), Stead received sympathetic treatment: his ‘cell' consisted of a room with an armchair, a blazing fire, a comfortable bed, a writing desk and a tea-table. The months in ‘Happy Holloway' flew by; years later Stead was to reflect that he had never been happier.
⁵²
Once he had completed his jail term, the
Pall Mall Gazette
took him back, ‘provided there were no more virgins',
⁵³
but his career faltered thereafter, and his behaviour became increasingly erratic. Every 10 November, Stead dressed up in his prison uniform, boarded his commuter train in Wimbledon, and walked across Waterloo Bridge in the style of a convict, reliving the glory days of his trial.

After a number of failed ventures, including a spiritualist newspaper,
Borderland
, aimed at the twilight world of mediums and table-tappers, Stead met his appropriately sensational end in 1912, during a transatlantic voyage, when ‘the man of most importance now alive' went down with the ship that could not sink: the
Titanic
.
⁵⁴

For girls at risk of sexual exploitation, Stead's publicity stunt had one positive outcome. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 raised the age of consent from twelve to sixteen, made procurement a criminal offence and stated that the penalty for assaulting a girl under thirteen was whipping or penal servitude. The Act gave the police extensive powers against procurers and brothel keepers, but also had the effect of outlawing consensual male homosexuality, with disastrous consequences. The consequences were also severe for prostitutes. A new wave of repression followed, as lodging houses and brothels were closed down. In 1887 the brewery heir turned purity campaigner Frederick Charrington rampaged through the streets of the East End with his supporters, closing down brothels, assaulting prostitutes and in one case kicking a brothel attendant so hard in the stomach that Charrington was subsequently sued.
⁵⁵
So many street prostitutes were arrested that open soliciting was replaced by a ‘stealthy glance or mumbled word'.

The social purity movement proved catastrophic for whores. With the closure of lodging houses and houses of assignation, women were forced to book into seedy hotels or to rent furnished rooms. In both instances, this entailed the risk of being alone with clients who might rob and/or assault them, a constant source of anxiety for any woman involved in the sex trade. But in this case the dangers were more acute: there was no vengeful madam to scold a penniless client or kick him out if he got rough; no fellow whore next door to storm in and knock him over the head with a frying pan if he became abusive. The only other option was to ply their trade on the streets, but down dark alleys where the police could not find them.

Conditions were more dangerous for London's whores than they had ever been. And it was at this point, at the height of the purity campaign, that they faced their most deadly enemy: the serial killer known as ‘Jack the Ripper', who terrorized the East End in 1888 with the murders of five prostitutes, and who may also have been responsible for killing another six. From the first terrible discovery of a woman's body, to the killer's game of cat and mouse with the Metropolitan Police, Jack the Ripper's bloody campaign constituted a reign of terror in the foggy backstreets of the East End.

The first body was discovered on the morning of 31 August 1888, when a driver from Pickford's removals spotted a woman lying in an alleyway called Buck's Row, just off Whitechapel Road and yards from the London Hospital. Thinking the woman to be drunk, or dead, he and a colleague went to investigate, and found that the woman's head had been severed from her body, leaving a gash over an inch wide. When the body was taken to the mortuary one officer, an Inspector Spratley, casually turned up the victim's clothes and saw that the lower part of her abdomen had been ripped open. According to one investigator, the injuries were such that ‘they could only have been inflicted by a madman'. The police surgeon, Dr Ralph Llewellyn, observed that he had never seen a more horrible case. ‘She was ripped open just as you see a dead calf at a butcher's shop. The murder was done by someone very handy with the knife.'
⁵⁶
Bystander apathy was a notable feature of this crime: one local resident heard five cries of ‘Murder! Police!', but knowing Buck's Row to be a haunt of street prostitutes, she did not bother to find out what the fuss was about and was quite satisfied when the shouts for help died away.
⁵⁷
The victim's name was Mary Ann Nichols, and the police had no idea of a motive, apart from a theory that Mary Ann might have been the victim of a blackmail gang. With the local division out of their depth, Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline, a detective with previous experience in Whitechapel, was brought in to head up the case.

A week later, on 8 September, the corpse of Annie Chapman was found in a passage leading to a lodging house at 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Annie lived with ‘Sievey' who, as his name suggests, was a sieve-maker, in Dorset Street, and had left him in bed while she went out at 1.45 a.m. to earn the rent. Annie's body was discovered at 6 a.m. by a fellow lodger, John Davies, who lived on the top floor. He called across to some workmen, saying that a woman had clearly been murdered. ‘Her clothes were thrown back, but her face was visible,' said James Kent, another eyewitness. ‘Her apron seemed to be thrown back over her clothes. I could see from the feet up to the knees. She had a handkerchief of some kind round her throat, which seemed sucked into her throat…it seemed as if her inside had been pulled from her, and thrown at her. It was lying over her left shoulder.'
⁵⁸

At this point, rumours began to circulate to the effect that a man with a leather apron and a knife had been seen in the area. And there was indeed a ‘Leather Apron' in the form of John Pizer, a Jewish tradesman, who was arrested and released when he convinced the police that he had nothing to do with the killings. Given the mood developing in the neighbourhood, ‘Leather Apron' was lucky he did not get lynched, but the theory that the murders had been committed by a man in a leather apron gained credibility as the plot thickened.
⁵⁹

On 27 September 1888, the Central News Agency received a letter which was subsequently forwarded to the Metropolitan Police on 29 September. Written in lurid prose, it purported to be from the murderer: ‘Dear Boss…' the letter began. ‘That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits…I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled…' The letter continued in this vein and was signed ‘Jack the Ripper', a name which naturally caught the popular imagination as soon as the police went public with it.