The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  The very poor added up to about 100,000 or 11¼ per cent of the East End’s population. Three-quarters of them were women and children; children under fifteen numbered about 38,000 and young persons aged between fifteen and twenty about 9,000. This category lay between the hammer and the anvil of the outcast poor and the poor. When trade was bad the market was flooded with labour from the categories above, so the casual earnings for which they fought to exist were liable to disappear completely. The women often worked for people as poor as themselves, scrubbing floors, washing and doing needlework.

  The poor numbered about 75,000, or 8 per cent of the population. This category consisted of men whose jobs were seasonal, such as builders who could work only eight or nine months in the year, or dockers, who might get only one or two days’ work a week. Included too were the other victims of a competitive market, the poorer artisans, street sellers and small shopkeepers. Some of the men on casual work could earn as much as fifteen or twenty shillings a week by heaving coal, carrying grain or carting timber, but often this was done at the cost of great physical exhaustion resulting in very heavy eating and drinking and with little money left over at the end of the day to take home. Booth wrote:

  The poor fellows are miserably clad, scarcely with a boot on their foot, in a most miserable state; and they cannot run, their boots would not permit them … there are men who come on to work in our docks (and if with us, to a much greater extent elsewhere) who have come on without having a bit of food in their stomachs, perhaps since the previous day; they have worked for an hour and have earned 5d. in order that they may get food, perhaps the first food they have had for 24 hours. Many people complain about dock labourers that they will not work after four o’clock. But really, if you consider, it is natural. These poor men come on work without a farthing in their pockets; they have not anything to eat in the middle of the day; some of them will raise or have a penny, and buy a little fried fish, and by 4 p.m. their strength is utterly gone; they pay themselves off; it is absolute necessity that compels them.

  The commonest work was sweatshop tailoring. For trouser finishing (sewing in linings, making button holes and stitching on the buttons) a woman might get twopence ha’penny a pair and have to buy her own thread. For making men’s shorts they were paid tenpence a dozen, lawn tennis aprons threepence a dozen, and babies’ hoods from 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. a dozen. In St George’s-in-the-East women and children, some only seven years old, were employed as sackmakers and earning a farthing for each one they made. Sometimes women could earn a penny or twopence a peck by shelling peas, or twopence farthing a gross matchbox making, but out of this they would have to buy the string and the paste. None of these earnings would give them more than tenpence or a shilling a day, and might mean seventeen hours’ work.

  Life in such circumstances had to be lived on a day-to-day or, better still, an hourly basis. Food was bought for immediate consumption. In one family, Booth found, they would buy nothing until it was actually needed. ‘They go to their shop as an ordinary housewife to her canisters; twice a day they buy tea, or three times if they make it so often; in 35 days they made 72 purchases of tea, amounting in all to 5s. 2¾d., and all most carefully noted down. The “pinch of tea” costs ¾d. [no doubt this was ½ oz. at 2s. per lb.]. Of sugar there were 77 purchases in the same time.’

  Couples could struggle along on a hand-to-mouth existence until children came along. (The most common forms of contraception were syringeing, the vaginal sponge, coitus interruptus and the safe period.) Most children were physically and mentally underdeveloped – those who did not die at birth, that is. Fifty-five per cent of East End children died before they were five. One-tenth of elementary school pupils were estimated later to be mentally defective or unnaturally dull. Children frequently came to school crying with hunger and fell off their seats from exhaustion. In winter they could not learn because they were too cold.

  Some sort of financial relief was always expected from the Church when times were hardest. The Revd Barnett made it plain from the beginning that nothing could be expected from him. Indiscriminate charity, he argued, was one of the curses of London, and he went so far as to claim that the poor starved ‘because of the alms they receive’. Demands for money were often accompanied by lies and followed by threats of violence when it was not forthcoming. Frequently the vicarage was under siege and had its windows broken with stones, and eventually a door had to be cut into the church so that the vicar could have an escape route to fetch police reinforcements. His inflexibility on this point was based on a firm belief that suffering would be reduced not by indiscriminately handing out money but only by making a realistic appraisal of each man’s problems and then giving practical help to meet them. In its simplest form this was an exhortation to thrift and better money management but, as the American novelist Jack London angrily pointed out in The People of the Abyss, his account of several weeks spent in the East End, to be thrifty the man had ‘to spend less than his income – in other words to live on less’. He went on:

  This is equivalent to a lowering of the standard of living. In the competition for a chance to work, the man with a lower standard of living will underbid the man with a higher standard. And a small group of such thrifty workers in any overcrowded industry will permanently lower the wages of that industry. And the thrifty ones will no longer be thrifty, for their income will have been reduced till it balances their expenditure. In short, thrift negates thrift … And anyway, it is sheer bosh and nonsense to preach thrift to the 1,800,000 London workers, who are divided into families which have a total income of less than 21s. per week, one-quarter to one-half of which must be paid for rent.

  A start was made on the problems of overcrowding with the passing of the Artisans Dwelling Act in 1875. This Act empowered the two governing bodies for London, the City of London Corporation (for the one square mile only) and the Metropolitan Board, to buy up slum property, demolish it and resell the land for working-class accommodation. The actual financing of the new properties was left to the commercial dwelling companies and private philanthropists. In no way was the scheme meant to impinge on the widely held belief that it was wrong for the state to finance schemes for people who, for whatever reason, hadn’t practised the principles of self-help.

  The next year, in Whitechapel alone, four thousand homes were condemned as uninhabitable. Demolitions did not take place for another four years and, in the meantime, until they were evicted, the tenants suffered even more than usual as their living conditions steadily deteriorated and the landlords refused to carry out repairs. Ironically, it was soon realized that the Act, instead of penalizing the slum landlords, would leave them even better off than before. Profits were so great that there was a rash of speculation in slum property which even tempted some of the reformers who had been urging for years that the properties they were now buying should be pulled down. Compensation had to take into account all the factors affecting the value. This was an open incitement to the landlords to cram even more people into their crumbling tenements and to claim even more by way of lost rents. In the Goulston Street scheme in Whitechapel, the property and land was bought for £371,600 but, because of the conditions imposed by Parliament under which it had to be sold, the auction price when it was resold was a meagre £87,600. The overall loss was catastrophic. Forty-two acres had been bought for £1,661,372. The loss, because the land was sold for homes and not for offices, was a staggering £1,100,000.

  Within a very short time, both the City of London Corporation and the Metropolitan Board were urging that the terms of the Act should be changed and that they should not have to sell the land for unprofitable housing. In two years nearly two thousand people had been cleared out from the slums on the northern fringe of the City, an area so tough, it was said, that no policeman would dare enter it at night. The sites were left vacant. The City refused to sell them for housing because the commercial value was so high. In 1879 the Act was amended to allow the two authorities to reho
use those whom they had evicted from elsewhere. In reality, they only added to the overcrowding.

  In the meantime, private philanthropists such as Octavia Hill were buying up properties and finding ways of making them yield a steady 5 per cent return. There was still the same gross overcrowding in these properties but there was at least a security of tenure for the better-off artisan. But this was dependent on prompt payment of rent. Failure to pay, for any reason, meant instant eviction. Yet it was only by occasionally evading payment or going hungry that they could afford to buy clothes and necessary household items. The philanthropists viewed the problem quite differently. They thought that these ruthless methods would force the tenants to practise those principles of thrift that were always being advocated by Mr Barnett and the lady rent collectors who called each week. Unfortunately, it did not allow for the frequent periods when the men were laid off work, not through any fault of their own but through trade recession or seasonal slackness. For the better-off artisan, there was a chance that, in the long term, he would be able to move out of his one room into two, and that his children could be trained for something better. This was the only level at which this scheme might have worked. No figures are available for the number of failures and evictions, but probably they were quite high. Others who tried to work the same scheme did not have much success. One landlord complained bitterly of the dirty and destructive habits of the low strata of humanity he had been forced to accept as tenants. Lamentably, none of them had absorbed the principles of self-help.

  Most of those who had been displaced by the redevelopments and clearances were dockers, costermongers, watermen and lightermen. Some were offered accommodation in the model Peabody dwellings but few of them could pay the high rent of four shillings a week. Instead they were forced to pack into already overcrowded accommodation or live on the streets and sleep, when they had the money, in the common lodging houses or seek refuge in the workhouse. In the summer months many of them slept out of doors, but between November and April the streets were generally clear. Even then, there was always a residue left, as Jack London discovered when he visited Christ-church Gardens, Spitalfields, nearly thirty years later:

  A chill, raw wind was blowing, and these creatures huddled there in their rags, sleeping for the most part, or trying to sleep. Here were a dozen women, ranging in age from twenty years to seventy. Next a babe, possibly of nine months, lying asleep, flat on the hard bench, with neither pillow nor covering, nor with anyone looking after it. Next, half-a-dozen men, sleeping bolt upright or leaning against one another in their sleep. In one place a family group, a child asleep in its sleeping mother’s arms, and the husband (or male mate) clumsily mending a dilapidated shoe. On another bench a woman trimming the frayed strips of her rags with a knife, and another woman, with thread and needle, sewing up rents. Adjoining, a man holding a sleeping woman in his arms. Farther on, a man, his clothing caked with gutter mud, asleep, with head in the lap of a woman, not more than twenty-five years old, and also asleep.

  The women, his guide told him, would sell themselves ‘for thru’pence, or tu’pence, or a loaf of stale bread’. To illustrate the value put on these women’s bodies, six eggs could be bought for 5d. or 6d., a pint of milk or beer for 2d. and a pound of cheese for 7½d. So a man would pay more for half a pound of cheese than he would for sex with one of these women.

  The Lancet, in fact, had estimated that in 1857 one house in every sixty in London was a brothel and one woman in every sixteen a whore. If true, this meant that there were six thousand brothels in the capital and about eighty thousand prostitutes.

  In October 1888, the Metropolitan Police estimated that there were about twelve hundred prostitutes, of a very low class, in Whitechapel. From figures supplied by the beat men they thought that there were about sixty-two brothels. Probably there was an even greater number of houses that were being used intermittently for the same purpose. Until fairly recently it had always been customary for several prostitutes to share the cost of hiring a lodging-house room to which they could take men. In 1851 a new Act made such hirings almost impossible, since its terms gave the police the right to search the common lodging houses. If exposed, the owners and keepers risked criminal charges of keeping or permitting a disorderly house. Although prostitutes continued to take customers to the lodging houses, things weren’t quite so blatant as before. Generally couples just shared a double bed. They had very little privacy. The beds were in the dormitories and had screens or partitions, open at the top and bottom, pulled around them. Naturally the women preferred renting a room in a private house, if they could afford it as, quite apart from the privacy afforded, the police did not have immediate right of entry into private property. Any prosecutions had to be carried out by the local vestries, but this could be a very expensive business and few of them ever did so. The only vestry which made any attempt to suppress the brothels in its area was Mile End, where a police pensioner was hired to collect the evidence and prosecute the owners. Two streets were cleared of brothels in this way but in the long term the only result it brought was to increase sharply the number of prostitutes who harried and molested men in the streets.

  The crude economic necessity that drove women to ‘sail along on their bottoms’ was generally glossed over with a wishy-washy sentiment that they had fallen because they had been betrayed by a wealthy seducer. A survey carried out by a prison chaplain in 1890 found that, of the sixteen thousand women he had interviewed, over eleven thousand had taken the plunge deliberately and less than seven hundred had been seduced. The age of consent was then thirteen, but prior to 1875 it had been twelve. (In Hanbury Street, Whitechapel, there was a Salvation Army refuge for young girls, many of them ten, eleven and twelve.)

  Given the overcrowded homes incest was inevitable and common. Generally it was between father and daughter or brother and sister. Lord Salisbury told the story of a friend who was going down a slum court when he

  saw on the pavement two children of tender years, or ten or eleven years old, endeavouring to have sexual connection on the pathway. He ran and seized the lad, and pulled him off, and the only remark of the lad was, ‘Why do you take hold of me? There are a dozen of them at it down there.’ You must perceive that that could not arise from sexual tendencies, and that it must have been bred by imitation of what they saw.

  Not many couples bothered to get married. Often it was a question of simple economics. Much to Mr Barnett’s disgust the ‘Red Church’, as he called it, in Bethnal Green Road was prepared to marry couples free of charge. His objection was that it was wrong to start married life with a lie, for couples had to say that they lived in the parish and this in most cases was simply not true. On a more light-hearted occasion, a lady philanthropist had finally managed to persuade a common-law husband and wife to get married, as much for their own sake as for the sake of their children, and made the arrangements for their wedding. On the day of the ceremony the couple didn’t turn up and, in a towering rage, she went to their house to find out why. The woman told her that her man had been offered five shillings for a carting job and that that was much more important.

  Couples, married or not, often lived for years in the lodging houses on a day-to-day basis. There were 233 common lodging houses in Whitechapel accommodating 8,500 persons. Often they were ‘the resorts of thieves and vagabonds of the lowest type, and some are kept by receivers of stolen goods. In the kitchen men and women may be seen cooking their food, washing their clothes, or lolling about smoking and gambling. In the sleeping room are long rows of beds on each side, sometimes sixty or eighty in one room.’ Generally these were a mixture of single and double beds for both men and women. A double bed was eightpence a night and a single bed fourpence. In some lodging houses there was the compromise of a twopenny rope lean-to; this was a rope stretched across the room for the men to lean on and on which they had to sleep as best as they could. If the women hadn’t earned enough money by selling flowers, washing clothes, or scrubbing floors
, but had enough money for their bread and beer but not enough for a bed, they could generally count on finding someone who would let them sleep with them in return for sex.

  Each lodging house was generally visited once a week by a lodging-house police sergeant. He might just as well have stayed away. The time of his visit was always known in advance and it was always in the daytime when the dormitories were empty, never at night when they were crowded with ‘dossers’ and with mattresses laid out on the floors between the beds. He had to count the number of beds, see that the rooms were tidied and dusted and that the slops had been emptied. The lodging-house owners nearly always lived elsewhere in the vicinity. During the daytime they stored any extra beds and blankets in their houses. A deputy, who was generally a ticket-of-leave man (a prisoner on parole), was left in nominal charge. In spite of these inspections, the conditions inside the lodging houses were often quite grim. In one a police inspector reported that ‘The place was swarming with vermin, large blocks of creeping things having been taken out from the walls and ceilings. The bedsteads and bedding were also swarming with insects, and disgusting in the extreme.’