by Scott Wood
Cut by Tart Cards
It’s not only children who are in danger of getting hurt when out enjoying themselves. There are urban myths of bloody razor blades hidden in the coin return of vending machines and syringes hidden in cinema seats and variations of both. When two women were attacked at a bus stop in Haringey – one on 18 November 2011 and the other on 23 November – by a man with a needle, their first fear was that they had contracted HIV from the assault. At the time of writing neither the attacker has been caught nor has the women’s diagnosis, as far as I can find, been made public.
This leads to the story I told the artists in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre. I have a clipping from the now-defunct London Lite newspaper of a police warning issued in north London, of razor blades hidden behind prostitute cards in King’s Cross and Euston. The also defunct News of the World printed similar stories of cards with blades in Westminster. ‘Tart cards’, as they are known, are a familiar part of the central London landscape, and range from a quick description of the prostitute or specific services available written on a blank card in felt-tip to, thanks to cheap digital printing, full colour erotic images and a phone number. I’ve heard a rumour that one can track changes in the cards in different parts of London: regular sex in the West End and around the train stations, bondage and domination in the legal quarter of Lincolns Inn and things getting kinkier the further into the City of London one goes, the story being that the more affluent and high-powered one is, the more perverted one becomes.
The warning about the ‘sex card booby trap’ came from PC Dylan Belt of Camden Police. Gangsters were protecting their ‘corner of the lucrative sex trade’ by hiding traps behind their cards to prevent cleaners and rival gangs from removing them, and members of the public who may be interested in taking a card or two were warned against it. PC Belt is quoted as saying: ‘We send the cleaners in and they find cards that have been booby-trapped. It could be with razor blades and they also use an irritant which burns the skin.’
An unnamed spokesman for British Telecom said, ‘We will do everything we can to protect people using phone boxes,’ which is what you would expect a spokesman to say whatever the danger.
There’s a temptation here to read a broader narrative within this phenomena. The forbidden fruit of the apple comes at us all the way from Genesis to Snow White to anonymous villains punishing children for their greed at Halloween and accepting gifts from strangers. I think it is worth noting that in almost every instance of scarring waterslides, HIV-laced syringes and maiming tart cards the victim is not doing something entirely virtuous. They are not all procuring prostitutes, but they are all engaged in something fun, even the innocent use of a vending machine or waterslide. Leisure, it seems, and particularly when it involves sliding down a wet surface or an enthusiastic bite into an ill-gotten apple, has its dangers. In the stiffly moral world of urban myths no one is ever harmed after committing a selfless act.
The Chelsea Smilers and Friends
Another urban myth that flourished in the 1980s in south London was that of the ‘Chelsea Smilers’. The Smilers were a group of Chelsea football fans travelling London in a van with a smiley face painted on the side. They would stop schoolchildren and ask them questions about Chelsea football club. If the children got the questions wrong – perhaps they didn’t support Chelsea or, worse, didn’t like football – the gang would slice the corners of their mouth. They would then hit the child hard enough to make them scream, which would widen their wounds into a ‘smile’. The thug’s weapon of choice was a razor blade, knife or the edge of a credit card or phone card. Salt or vinegar was put onto the wounds to make the pain worse. A story of the Smilers’ brutality always ended with a warning: the Chelsea Smilers were at another school yesterday, but they were coming to the child’s school today.
In his book London Lore, Steve Roud talks about his daughter hearing the story in her school in Croydon in January and February 1989 and, from talking to her and her cousins at other schools, finding the myth at those other schools. By doing this, Roud was able to document the scare story as it spread: ‘Many younger ones were in tears, some in hysterics, many refused to come home till their parents came to get them,’ Steve writes. ‘The children talked of nothing else.’
Roud was able to trace the rumour to where it began in Bexley, around 31 January 1989. It spread across south London, reaching Wandsworth, Merton and Sutton by the first week in March. Soon afterward, the story hit Kent and Surrey. He reported that the panic died down quickly, but the story became a standard playground scare story.
The phantom razor hiders and Chelsea Smilers are not the first imaginary gang to disfigure Londoners. ‘The Mohawks’, (also know as the Mohocks or Mowhawks) were a gang who wandered 1712 London. They were rumoured to have tattooed innocent faces, put fish hooks in people’s cheeks and drag them along with a fishing line, and crush the noses, slit the ears and gouge out the eyes of their victims with ‘new invented weapons’. The Mohawks were said to be like a horror-story version of the Bullingdon Club; rich young men who would meet in their clubs, drink to excess then head out, often into St James’s Park, to cause havoc.
Another cruel trick of theirs was to put their sword between a man’s legs and move it to make the poor chap dance, or to surround a man with their swords and one would stab him in his backside. The man would spin round to face his attacker and then another would stab him from behind. The idea was to keep the unfortunate fellow spinning around like a top.
With all of this cruelty on the street it may be surprising to learn there was was only one Mohawk trial. Sir Mark Cole and Viscount Hinchingbrooke are named in most books as the chief Mohawks. The total number of arrests was seven and the names read like a list of society party attendees: Edward Richard Montague, Lord Hinchingbroke; Sir Mark Cole, baronet; Thomas Fanshawe; Thomas Sydenham, gentleman; Captain John Reading; Captain Robert Beard; Robert Squibb of Lincoln’s Inn, gentleman; and Hugh Jones, servant to Sir Mark Cole.
As recorded in Chambers Book of Days this aristocratic crew were put on trial for being ‘mohocks’. Their crimes are explained below:
… they had attacked the watch in Devereux Street, slit two persons’ noses, cut a woman in the arm with a penknife so as to disable her for life, rolled a woman in a tub down Snow Hill, misused other women in a barbarous manner by setting them on their heads, and overset several coaches and chairs with short clubs, loaded with lead at both ends, expressly made for the purpose.
The defendants claimed that they themselves were vigilante ‘scourers’ and were out looking for Mohawks. After raiding and wrecking an illegal gambling den, the team heard that the Mohawks were in Devereux Street. On arrival they helped three wounded men, but the nightwatchman John Bouch, an early type of policeman, mistook the rich crime-fighters for Mohawks, attacked them and arrested them.
The jury found them guilty and fined them each three shillings and four pence, which even for the early eighteenth century seems quite cheap for a sadistic night out. It is not clear whether their victims were ever found or if they were invented by the nightwatch, and it doesn’t prove much other than a group of privileged men were convicted for a night’s misconduct. It does not prove that a conspiracy of Mohawks ever existed. With a lot of rumour and little evidence, the doubts about these stories grew. Jonathan Swift thought the Mohawks were the result of mass hysteria, and Daniel Defoe thought they had the ‘air of Grub Street’ about them: Grub Street being the home of London’s cheaper and more sensationalist publishing and writers at the time – an earlier Fleet Street, if you will.
Dashing Blades
After the Mohawk moral panic of 1712 came the appearance of Spring-heeled Jack in 1838. Jack was a dark, iron-clawed, fire-breathing figure who would terrify people, often women, walking at night in London before making his getaway by leaping or bouncing over a wall with the aid of his spring-heeled boots. Jack is now thought of as a ghost or demon, some elemental presence spreading fear across
London. He has featured in popular culture several times, from penny dreadfuls to comics to the fiction of Philip Pullman, as a supernatural or super-gadget bearing superhero.
The earliest description of Jack appeared in a letter from a Peckham resident to the Lord Mayor of London, published in The Times dated 9 January 1838, describing a dangerous bet laid by an affluent group of men:
The wager has, however, been accepted, and the unmanly villain has succeeded in depriving seven ladies of their senses, two of whom are not likely to recover, but to become burdens to their families. At one house the man rang the bell, and on the servant coming to open the door, this worse than brute stood in no less dreadful figure than a spectre clad most perfectly. The consequence was that the poor girl immediately swooned, and has never from that moment been in her senses. The affair has now been going on for some time, and, strange to say, the papers are still silent on the subject.
To do this, the ‘unmanly villain’ appeared in villages around London (including Peckham) disguised as ‘a ghost, a bear and a devil’, and had already left one woman so afraid she could not bear the sight of men. The Peckham resident thought that news or warning of this campaign had not yet appeared in the papers because those involved, being of higher ranks, had sought to keep the stories out of the press. In 1907, Jack was identified as the Marquess of Waterford, an aristocrat with a reputation for cruelty and practical jokes who would hide in dark places in costume, waiting to frighten people.
The identification with the rich may be twofold: firstly there is the idea that those in the higher echelons of society may have contempt for ordinary people and that they gain sport from tormenting and terrorising them. There is also the lack of capture or publicity about the great danger of Spring-heeled Jack. No Mohawk or Spring-heeled villain has ever been captured and shown to the public. This may be because they do not really exist and so are impossible to capture, but those convinced of their reality had other ideas: the Mohawks and Jack are rich and privileged and so escape arrest and publicity through their power.
The reality may be stranger and more sophisticated. Guising was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and dressing up as a ghost and walking the night, looking to frighten people was an almost common adult pastime. As well as Jack there was the Peckham ghost, Plumstead ghost and others. Mike Dash, in his authoritative Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost, investigated news reports on one of the most famous Spring-heeled Jack cases. As reported in The Times on 22 February 1838, Jane Alsop of Bearbinder Lane, Old Ford, answered a late-night ring at the door. She answered and the man at the door said, ‘For God’s sake, bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-heeled Jack in the lane.’ Jane gave the candle to the man, who she thought was a policeman, but instead of running off with it he threw off his heavy cloak, put the candle to his chest and ‘vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flames from his mouth’. Jane saw that the man was wearing a large helmet and that his clothes fitted him very tightly, like a white oilskin. Spring-heeled Jack, as the man was thought to be, darted toward her, catching her by the dress and back of her neck and placed her head under his arm. He began to tear at her dress with his claws and Jane screamed loudly for help. One of her sisters arrived and rescued her.
This account is the heart of the Spring-heeled Jack myth, and the description of the helmet and tight-fitting suit lead researchers in the 1970s to suggest that Jack was an alien running amok in early Victorian London. Mike Dash looked into supplementary accounts of the attack that covered the two investigations the newly formed Metropolitan Police opened to look into it. After a number of interviews, officers Young and Lea concluded that, ‘In her fright the young lady had much mistaken the appearance of her assailant.’ Two men, a bricklayer named Payne and a carpenter called Millbank, were seen walking away from Jane Alsop’s house just after the attack. Millbank was wearing a white hat and a white fustian (heavy woven cloth shooting jacket), which the police thought was Jack’s white oilskin. During the investigation, one James Smith, a wheelwright, described an encounter with Millbank and Payne later that evening on the Coborn Road. Millbank, the one in the shooting jacket, pulled the wheel Smith was carrying on his shoulder, and asked him, ‘What have you got today to Spring Jack?’ Smith replied that he desired Jack to give his wheel back. Smith told the police: ‘I have no doubt but that the man Millbank was the person who so frightened the Misses Alsop.’
The myth of Spring-heeled Jack is of a lone monster, either man or a supernatural entity, scaring and assaulting the people of London. One big part of the myth is that it may have been an insane aristocrat. In a talk at the London Ghosts conference of October 2012, Mike Dash suggested that while the main suspect, the Marquess of Waterford, was known to have dressed in a devil costume at a party, this does not mean countless others were doing the same. It seems sensible to suggest that there was not one individual Spring-heeled Jack; this ghost, bear or devil was either a viral idea taken on by many men or something they did – guising in the city – that gained the label of Jack. Some may have been playing practical jokes, others have a more aggressive air to them, and many may have a blend of both.
Saucy Jack
If Spring-heeled Jack, the Chelsea Smilers and the Mohawks are moral panics, is it possible that another series of actual violent acts have a fictional boogieman attached to them? Is the Jack the Ripper mystery not a mystery at all but a moral panic grown into urban legend and conspiracy theory? I think parallels between the rumours of Mohawks and Spring-heeled Jack and the theories about Jack the Ripper are worth drawing.
That the murders themselves took place is not in doubt; that there was one killer, the enigmatic Jack in his cape and top hat carrying a surgeon’s leather bag, is an unproven idea that has developed into a cultural icon. Historian Jan Bondeson wonders in an article in ‘History Today’ whether the moral panic over the prostitute murders in 1888 created a myth of a single killer. He reports that ripperologists disagree on the number of victims that Jack took, and that two may have been murdered by partners or ex-partners. The violent death of Polly Nichols, Jack the Ripper’s first victim, caused a moral outrage, like his Spring-heeled forebear and the Mohawks, and a number of other deaths – Emma Smith, Martha Turner and Rose Mylett – were, at first, also attributed to Jack the Ripper. These deaths have not made it into the ‘canonical five’ murders for which most ripperologists think Jack the Ripper was responsible; Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. Annie Millwood, Ada Wilson and Annie Farmer were all suggested Jack the Ripper victims or survivors, but have since been discounted from the ripper-orthodoxy. Another victim, the aptly named ‘Fairy Fey’, was allegedly found on 26 December 1887, ‘after a stake had been thrust through her abdomen’, but there are no records of a murder in Whitechapel over the Christmas period of 1887.
The authorities were unsure whether Rose Myatt had been murdered at all or whether she had choked to death whilst drunk. Writing about the death, Robert Anderson, the officer in charge of the investigation, thought if there had not been a Ripper scare, no one would have thought she had been murdered.
With the mythology of the Ripper has grown the idea that the killer has never been brought to light because of a conspiracy amongst the powerful. Leonard Matters, described by Alan Moore as ‘the first ripperologist’, in his appendix to From Hell: the Dance of the Gull Catchers, named a Dr Stanley as the Ripper in his book The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, published in 1929. Stanley – not his real name – murdered and mutilated London prostitutes in revenge for his son’s death from syphilis before fleeing to Argentina. Dr Stanley was no ordinary doctor, having a large aristocratic practice which no doubt protected him.
Prince Albert Victor, the grandson of Queen Victoria, was named as a possible Ripper suspect in the 1960s, after he was driven mad and angry as a result of catching syphilis from a prostitute. This rumour has evolved into the idea, popularised in Alan Moore�
��s graphic novel and the film it inspired, that the Ripper was Sir William Gull, surgeon to Queen Victoria and a Freemason, another secretive group seen by some to be above the law. The conspiracy now is that Albert Victor had an affair with a woman which the Ripper victims found out about and were murdered by an insane Gull to cover up the truth.
Other suspects include the Duke of Clarence, Sir John Williams, who was obstetrician to Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Beatrice, and sensitive, creative types such as Lewis Carroll and painter Walter Sickert. Each suspect appears in a new book and with the continued growth in popularity of Ripper lore and the deepening of the myth, new and even more unlikely suspects are investigated all the time. After a long look comparing Jack the Ripper crime scene photographs and the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, writer Dale Larner has concluded that van Gogh was, indeed, Jack the Ripper. John Morris takes the idea of Sir John Williams being the Ripper, driven to insanity after not being able to have children, and transfers the crimes to his wife, Lizzie Williams, in his book Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman. Bram Stoker, author of Dracula has never been in the frame for being Jack the Ripper, but The History Press book The Dracula Secrets: Jack the Ripper and the Darkest Sources of Bram Stoker, suggests that Jack the Ripper was, sort-of in a round-about-way, Dracula. That through ‘a secret code’ found in ‘previously unpublished letters’, Stoker wove details of Ripper suspect Francis Tumblety into his novel. This ‘ripper code’ was inspired by Stoker’s relationship with Sir Thomas Hall Caine, to whom he dedicated Dracula. Caine also had a relationship with Tumblety, and Tumblety was fingered as a Ripper suspect in the book Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer. Tumblety was arrested in 1888 for ‘gross indecency’, and was possibly gay. Did this drive him to murder and mutilate women? I must confess that I have not read any of the above books; these theories are taken from promotional websites, press releases and news reports, so I have no idea whether each author is sincere, cynically milking the myth for money or undertaking a conceptual exercise in how evidence can be bent into the strangest proofs.
