Most dossers had casual jobs, and any work they did was generally badly done. Such money as they earned was spent on basics such as bread, margarine, tea and sugar. Meals cost on average a penny three farthings a head. In late summer, in the August slackness in the docks and many other trades, some thirty thousand Londoners went hop picking in Sussex and Kent. It was the nearest thing that most of them ever had to a holiday. Better still, the work was family work. Every child who could walk was wanted. Those over twelve could easily earn 1s. 6d. to 2s. 6d. a day for three weeks’ work.
Yet even when they had any money, few of them would try to put by for the hard times that followed the next day or the next week. As well as being a brutal and rootless way of life, it was also a careless existence, with tomorrow never coming. Life as they lived it was boldly set out in a statement made by a seaman, James Thomas Sadler, when he was arrested for the murder of a prostitute, Frances Coles, in Whitechapel in 1891. As she had been ripped in the by now familiar manner, he was suspected of being not only her murderer but also Jack the Ripper.
In the statement made after his arrest, he said that he had been discharged from his ship at 7 p.m. on 11 February and, after a drink, had fixed up some lodgings. He had then gone to the Princess Alice where he saw a prostitute named Frances Coles. He had picked her up in Whitechapel Road some eighteen months earlier, on another shore leave, and had spent the night with her at a lodging house in Thrawl Street. He asked her to have a drink but she said she would rather go on somewhere else because whenever she was flush the other Princess Alice customers expected her to spend the money with them. After an evening’s drinking in other pubs in the area and buying half a pint of whisky to take home with them (Sadler later got twopence-worth of drink for returning the bottle), they finished the night in the eightpenny double, and stayed in the lodging house until almost noon the next day.
Drinking was resumed as soon as they got up. They visited several more pubs, including The Bell in Middlesex Street where they stayed for about two hours. Frances had by now wheedled out of Sadler a promise to buy her a hat. At the shop in Baker’s Row he gave her half a crown and waited for her while she went inside to buy it. As some elastic had to be stitched on before the hat was ready to wear, they waited in a nearby pub and had some more drinks until it was time for Frances to return and collect it.
As this point there was some suspicion that she arranged for Sadler to be mugged later that afternoon and, in the circumstances, it seems more than likely that this was so.
When she returned with the hat Sadler made her try it on. He told her to throw her old hat away but this she wouldn’t do and she pinned it instead to her dress. It was still hanging there when her body was found later that night with her throat cut and the stomach disembowelled.
By now Sadler was beginning to feel somewhat drunk. They continued drinking in the Marlborough Head in Brick Lane and afterwards he remembered that the landlady objected to Frances being there but he could not say why. It was soon afterwards, as they were walking down Thrawl Street, that he was mugged. A woman in a red shawl hit him on the head and knocked him down. As he tried to get up he was surrounded by several men who put the boot in and robbed him of his money and watch. They escaped by running into a lodging house. Sadler, when he managed to stagger to his feet, had a raging quarrel with Frances (it was this that led to his arrest) as he thought that the least she could have done was to help him when he was down.
As he was now penniless and had not got the money to pay for a bed, he went back to the docks to try and get on board his ship. He was in a foul mood and swore at the men on the dock gates and at some passing dockers who threatened to give him a good hiding if the young policeman who was standing nearby would only turn his back. He did more than that. He walked away, and after he had turned the corner one of the dockers, to whom Sadler had been particularly abusive, made a dead set at him. Sadler was knocked down and kicked and would have been badly injured if his attacker had not been forcibly restrained from doing him further injury. Sadler managed to stagger to a lodging house in East Smithfield, where he was known, and begged the night porter to let him have a bed. When he saw that pleading was useless, he hobbled back to the lodging house in Dorset Street where he’d spent the previous night with Frances, and found her in the kitchen with her head on her arms. She was fuddled with drink and, like himself, didn’t have any money, not even a farthing, to pay for a bed. Sadler told her that he had £4 15s. ship money coming to him. But when he tried to persuade the lodging-house deputy to let him have a bed on the strength of it, he was thrown out, although Frances was allowed to stay.
Sadler set off for the London Hospital to have his injuries seen to. En route he was stopped by a policeman who told him that he looked a pretty pickle. Sadler grumbled that he’d had ‘two doings over’ that day and that he’d been cut and knocked about with a knife or bottle. Immediately he mentioned the word ‘knife’ the constable said ‘Oh, have you a knife about you?’ and searched him in spite of Sadler’s protests that he never carried one. At the hospital his head was bandaged and he was allowed to spend the rest of the night on a couch in the Accident Ward until morning when he was turned out. Once more he went to his regular lodgings and begged yet again for the loan of a few pence. Again he was unlucky. He had to wait until the shipping office was open before he could get the £4 15s. he was owed. The first thing he did was to pay for a bed. He slept and moodily drank by himself and didn’t go out for the next twenty-four hours until he was arrested and accused of, but never prosecuted for, murdering Frances the night before.
Without money, anyone who was down and out had no choice but to go into the workhouse. In spite of the unpleasant regime it did offer a chance of survival. Queuing usually began early in the day and the admissions, starting in the afternoon, were taken in three at a time. Jack London’s experiences in 1902, as related in The People of the Abyss, were of the system after it had been improved and not, as might easily be supposed from his account of the conditions, as they were before. On entering he was given a loaf of bread which, he says, felt like a brick, and was searched for knives, matches and tobacco, which casuals such as he were not permitted to have. In the cellar to which he was first sent, the light was very dim. Most of the men were wearily taking off their shoes and unwrapping the bandages from their blistered feet. For food he was given a pannikin, a small cup, three-quarters filled with skilly, a mixture of Indian corn and hot water. The sight and smell of it turned his stomach, and he gave it away. He had no better luck with his bread. It was so hard that he had to soften it with water before he could bite it. Most of the men, when they came to eat their own, dipped it into the piles of salt that were scattered about the dirty tables.
At 7 p.m. they were forced to take their baths in pairs. Twenty-two men washed in the same tub of water. London blanched when he saw that one man’s back was ‘a mass of blood from attacks of vermin and retaliatory scratching’. Afterwards his clothes were taken away and he was given a nightshirt and a couple of blankets to roll up in. In a long narrow dormitory lengths of canvas were stretched between two iron rails on the ground, each strip about six inches apart and eight inches off the floor. These were the beds. London tried unsuccessfully to sleep. He listened wistfully to the children playing outside in the street, and then dozed off about midnight but was woken up by a rat on his chest. His shouts woke everyone else up and he was roundly cursed by them all.
At 6 a.m. they were made to get up, and after a further meal of skilly, which London again gave away, the men were given various jobs to do. In some workhouses the work was both punitive and mindless. Stone might have to be pounded into a fine dust and sieved through a grille in the wall at the end of the room. London was included in the work party that was sent to the Whitechapel infirmary to do scavenger work.
‘Don’t touch it mate, the nurse sez it deadly,’ warned one of the men as London held open a sack into which a garbage can was being emptied. Waste food had
to be collected from the sick wards, and London had to carry the sackloads down five flights of stairs and empty them into waste bins which were immediately sprinkled with disinfectant. When the work was done they were given tea and some scraps of food that London, unable to conceal his disgust, described as
heaped high on a huge platter in an indescribable mess – pieces of bread, chunks of grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints, bones, in short, all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manners of disease. Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging, pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting and scrambling for. It wasn’t pretty. Pigs couldn’t have done worse. But the poor devils were hungry, and they ate ravenously of the swill, and when they could eat no more they bundled what was left into their handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.
‘Once, when I was’ere before, wot did I find out there but a ’ole lot of pork ribs,’ said Ginger to me. By ‘out there’ he meant the place where the corruption was dumped and sprinkled with strong disinfectant. ‘They was a prime lot, no end of meat on them, and I ad’em in my arms and was out of the gate and down the street lookin’ for some’un to gi’em to. Couldn’t see a soul, and I was runnin’ round clean crazy, the bloke runnin’ after me and thinkin’ I was slingin’ my ’ook. But just before ’e got me I got an ’ole woman and poked em into ’er apron.’
London couldn’t take any more. He fled to a hot bath, a decent bed and food.
In the 1870s there had been a general impression that the working class was becoming better off. It was a shock to learn that overcrowding, bad sanitation and prolonged periods of unemployment were beginning to blur uncomfortably the distinctions between the respectable working class and the thousands who were ‘physically, mentally and morally unfit’ to live and for whom the state could do nothing except let die by leaving them alone. There was also the growing fear that the two might combine to overwhelm the established order.
‘This mighty mob of famished, diseased and filthy helots,’ George Sims wrote in How the Poor Live, ‘is getting dangerous, physically, morally, politically dangerous. The barriers which have kept it back are rotten and giving way, and it may do the state a mischief if it be not looked to in time. Its fevers and its filth may spread to the homes of the wealthy; its lawless armies may sally forth and give us the taste of the lesson the mob has tried to teach now and again in Paris, when long years of neglect have done their work.’
Another pamphleteer, Arnold White, wrote in The Problems of a Great City: ‘How much more repugnant is it to reason and to instinct that the strong should be overwhelmed by the feeble, ailing and unfit!’
Events in 1886 and 1887 only intensified these fears. The winter of 1885–6 was the coldest for thirty years. Men and women with haggard faces and thin worn bodies crowded into the relief offices. Even the vicar’s wife Mrs Barnett came near to jettisoning her principles for the sight of some temporary happiness in ‘those sad faces’ with the ‘gift of nice bright half crowns all round’ – except that Mr Barnett, ‘ever wishful to redeem character stood resolute’. Mrs Barnett could still wince, many years later, as she recalled the reproaches of a broken-hearted mother who had sobbed, as she wept over her baby whose life might have been saved: ‘They said it was no use a-sending to the Church, for you didn’t never give nothing though you spoke kind.’
Even jobs as scavengers were beyond the physical capabilities of most of the men. A mass meeting of unemployed dockers and labourers was held in Trafalgar Square that winter, and afterwards some of the crowd marched to Hyde Park where they intended to disperse. In Pall Mall there was some provocation from clubmen and the march turned into riot. About three thousand demonstrators rampaged and looted their way through Piccadilly and Mayfair to Oxford Street where they were eventually dispersed by the police. In the aftermath, the Home Secretary appointed a committee of inquiry to look into the conduct of the police and he took the unusual step of chairing it himself … which meant that he presented the committee’s findings to himself. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Colonel Sir Edmund Henderson, was made scapegoat for the debacle and he resigned.
His successor was Sir Charles Warren. The appointment of another soldier caused a few lifted eyebrows, but the feeling was that his appointment might give the force the discipline it seemed to be lacking. Already trouble was being fomented in the force from outside agitators urging them to strike, and there were genuine grievances over pay and punishments.
The next year, 1887, saw Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Trade was slack but the weather was fine and throughout the summer a great many of the destitute unemployed slept in Trafalgar Square and St James’s Park. In October the weather changed, but by now camping out – in Trafalgar Square especially – had almost become a permanent way of life. Charities and well-meaning individuals had got into the habit of taking food and clothes to the square, which was described by one writer as a ‘foul camp of vagrants’, and by another as consisting of the ‘scum of London’. Sir Charles Warren also complained that he had to employ two thousand men to shepherd workers’ demonstrations through the West End, while the City police, with far fewer men and outside the scope of Home Office control, had broken up similar-sized crowds. There was one law, it seemed, for the City and one for the metropolis. Warren cleared Trafalgar Square of its ragged army of squatters but his action brought him into direct conflict with the Home Secretary, who subsequently rescinded his original order empowering him to do so. West End shopkeepers now publicly threatened to take the law into their own hands and to hire armed bands to clear the square themselves. Warren demanded additional powers to control a situation that was rapidly getting out of hand. With the Home Secretary’s approval, he banned the use of the square on certain days.
His challenge was taken up, and on 13 November the battle of ‘Bloody Sunday’ was fought in the square. Altogether four thousand constables, three hundred mounted constables, three hundred Grenadiers and three hundred Life Guards, as well as seven thousand constables held in reserve, were used to break up the giant mob of demonstrators – many were armed with iron bars, sticks and knives – that struggled to break through to the square. More than a hundred and fifty of the crowd had to be treated for injuries and nearly three hundred more had been arrested. Some were sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour, for one, two, three or six months.
Warren’s high-handed action was both censured and praised. Working-class hatred for him was perhaps epitomized by one of the many anonymous personal threats which he subsequently received: ‘Beware of your life you dog. Don’t venture out too far. Look out. This is yours’, was followed by a crudely drawn coffin. Other threatened demonstrations against ‘police rule in London’ never materialized, and Warren was able to bask in the glow of official approval. The following month the Queen knighted him.
As fears of mob rule began to recede, so criticisms of the police, and of Warren in particular, began to increase. Within a year, the scorn and abuse which had been hurled at the Trafalgar Square mobs had been turned against the police who, from being the champions of liberty, had become the downtreaders of the suffering poor. George Bernard Shaw was not slow to point out how quickly attitudes had changed.
Less than a year ago the West End press was literally clamouring for the blood of the people – hounding Sir Charles Warren to thrash and muzzle the scum who dared to complain that they were starving … behaving, in short, as the propertied class always does behave when the workers throw it into a frenzy of terror by venturing to show their teeth.
Whilst we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation and organisation, some independent genius has taken the matter in hand …
He was to be known as Jack the Ripper!
2. Bloody Knife
When Charles Cross walked through dark and empty Buck’s Row on his way to work as a market porter at about 3.40 a.m. on the morning of Friday, 31 August 1888, th
e only light was a solitary gas lamp at the far end. On one side of the street was a warehouse wall, and on the other some terrace houses occupied for the most part by better-class tradesmen. He was opposite these houses when, in a gateway leading to some stables, between the houses and the board school, he saw a bundle that he at first thought was a tarpaulin. It was only when he crossed over for a closer look that he realized the bundle was in fact a woman. She was lying on her back with one hand nearly touching the stable gate and the other her black straw bonnet, which was lying close by. Her skirt was pushed up almost to her waist. His first thought was that she had been raped and was still unconscious from the attack; and his next that he might have disturbed her attacker. Normally there was a great deal of noise in the street, but at that hour of the morning it was quiet and although he listened carefully for any strange noises he could hear none. If he had disturbed the woman’s attacker he must have heard his footsteps as he escaped or, supposing that the woman had been brought there in a cart and dumped, the rattle of wheels as he drove off. He was still by the body when he heard footsteps behind him.
Robert Paul, also a market porter, was likewise on his way to work when he saw Cross standing in the roadway. He stepped off the pavement to avoid him, but as he did so Cross touched him on the shoulder and said, ‘Come and look at this woman.’ Paul cautiously did so but when Cross, thinking she was only drunk, suggested that he should give him a hand to lift her to her feet, he refused. Instead he knelt down and felt the woman’s face and hands. They were already cold and he thought she was dead. But as he straightened her clothes to make her a little more decent, he felt her heart and thought that he could detect a slight movement. The men hurried off together in search of a policeman. In the dark neither had noticed the blood, now concealed by the skirt, coagulating on the pavement.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 3
