Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect
Page 5
In the late 1870s, Aaron’s sister Malke (Matilda) married a bootmaker named Mosiek (Morris) Lubnowski.7 Mosiek was in fact the son of Golda Lubnowski’s brother Josek, a shoemaker. In other words, Malke and Mosiek were cousins.8 Cousin marriage was common at the time, and as a descendant of the Lubnowskis acknowledged, “It is well known in the family that Morris and Matilda were cousins.”9 The young couple moved to Germany, where their first two children were born.10 Then, shortly after the outbreak of pogroms in the spring of 1881, Wolek Kozminski likewise married his second cousin Brucha Kozminska and they promptly left Russia for England, bringing fifteen-year-old Aron Kozminski with them.11 Wolek, Brucha, and Aron thus joined the thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Russia and heading to London.
For most Jews, the seven-hundred-mile journey to England was a harrowing and dehumanizing ordeal, during which they were repeatedly robbed and swindled by border guards and other unscrupulous vultures. The passage across the North Sea, according to William Fishman, typically consisted of travelers spending two or three days on a ship similar to a cattle-boat, crammed together and sleeping on dirty, rank-smelling blankets. As a British Board of Trade report described it, “Men, women, and children were lying on the bare boards partly undressed. . . . Young men lay abreast of young unmarried women, chatting jocularly and acting indecently, and young children were witnesses of all that passed.”12 Such was the style in which the Kozminskis traveled to their new home, the East End of London.
Jews from Eastern Europe had in fact been arriving in London for years, but the wave of immigration after the Russian pogroms of 1881 was akin to a tsunami, and by the middle of summer hundreds of Jewish immigrants were arriving at London’s docks daily. It was not a warm welcome. On arrival, the Russian Jews found themselves in an unwelcoming, unfriendly, and unfamiliar ghetto that afforded little in the way of either housing or employment, and it was said that on debarking the men were so enfeebled that they looked “nearer seventy than thirty.” Some of the new arrivals hoped that a distant relative or someone they knew from home might give them refuge.13 The scene at the docks was utter mayhem. Many of the newcomers were robbed almost immediately after arrival, while young unaccompanied women were in constant danger of being stolen away to a bordello by a “white slave” agent. Beatrice Potter described the ensuing chaos as follows:
A little man with an official badge (Hebrew Ladies Protective Society) fights valiantly in their midst for the conduct of unprotected females and shouts or whispers to the others to go to the Poor Jews Temporary Shelter in Leman Street. For a few moments it is a scene of indescribable confusion: cries and counter cries; the hoarse laughter of the dock loungers at the strange garb and broken accent of the poverty-stricken foreigners; the rough swearing of the boatmen at passengers unable to pay the fee for landing. In another ten minutes eighty of the hundred new comers are dispersed in the back slums of Whitechapel; in another few days the majority of these robbed of the little they possess are turned out of the free lodgings destitute and friendless.14
The police were not always sympathetic to the newcomers. As George Sims noted, “When I explain to one that a gesticulating Pole wants to give the boatman into custody for refusing to give up his bundle without the sixpence is paid, the policeman grins and says ‘Lor now, does he?’ ”15 The majority of the Jews who marched up into the city, “like a gang of convicts marching to the mines,” Sims observed, would “presently be working as tailors and bootmakers in the den of the sweater.”16 In their eyes was the “indescribable expression of hunted, suffering animals.”17 Things had not changed much by the time Sam Dreen arrived in London in 1900. “We walked through a rough area, where the inhabitants hated immigrants and threw stones at us all the way to Leman Street.”18
Even London’s established Anglo-Jewish community was not particularly welcoming to the newcomers. Anglo-Jewry had fought long and hard to overcome the undercurrents of anti-Semitism in Britain, while various restrictions on full citizenship rights were gradually removed during the course of the nineteenth century. The influx of poverty-stricken Jewish refugees in the 1880s threatened everything that the Anglo-Jewish residents had gained. London’s “Anglicized” Jewish establishment regarded the immigrants as a lower caste of radical Jews, “fit only to receive alms,” and they feared “social retrogression” through association with them. As an editorial in the Jewish Chronicle put it, “Our fair fame is bound up with theirs; the outside world is not capable of making minute discrimination between Jew and Jew, and forms its opinion of Jews in general as much, if not more, from them than from the Anglicized portion of the Community.”19
Still, the majority of native Londoners, Jew and gentile alike, were initially sympathetic to the plight of the refugees. Compared to life in the Pale of Settlement, London was a vast improvement, and the immigrants found themselves with previously unimagined freedoms and opportunities. Various Jewish social programs assisted the new arrivals in finding jobs and places to live, and, as William Fishman noted, the Eastern Jews’ “compulsive tenacity proved an inbred asset for survival.”20 A Poor Jews Temporary Shelter was eventually established, in 1885, to assist the destitute newcomers; it provided two warm meals a day, a vapor bath, prayer services, and a bed for a maximum stay of two weeks. Opponents of unrestricted immigration claimed that the shelter’s address was “bought and sold” in eastern Europe.21
Yet as the decade wore on, immigration continued and the economy worsened, and rising unemployment, combined with a general mistrust of foreigners, led to a backlash against the Jews. For the Kozminski family and thousands of other Jewish immigrants, the situation in England gradually evolved into a mirror image of the anti-Semitic environment they had just escaped. It was a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.
When Aaron’s brother Iciek had arrived in London’s East End in 1872, he followed the common practice of Jewish immigrants to English-speaking countries and changed his foreign-sounding Jewish name to one that was thought to be easier to spell and pronounce. Hence, Iciek Kozminski became Isaac Abrahams. When the rest of the family arrived in 1881, they settled in the same neighborhood where Isaac had already been living for nearly a decade.22 Following Isaac’s lead, they likewise adopted more English-sounding first names. Wolek Kozminski became Woolf Abrahams; Wolek’s wife, Brucha, became Betsy; and Mosiek and Malke became Morris and Matilda Lubnowski. We must also assume that fifteen-year-old Aaron Kozminski became Aaron Abrahams at this time. As we shall see, however, Aaron continued to use the name Kozminski, at least on some occasions, although the reason he did so is unknown.
By December 1885, all four Kozminski siblings were living on Greenfield Street, just south of Whitechapel Road and St. Mary Matfelon. Greenfield Street was lined with two- and three-story brick houses and was said to be comparatively respectable for the district. According to Charles Booth’s 1888 survey of the area, it was inhabited by “a rather superior class of people.” The great majority of those in the street were Jewish, Booth noted. “A few fairly well off. Others poor, but tolerably comfortable.”23 Both of Aaron’s brothers, Woolf and Isaac, were ladies’ tailors in the business of making jackets and outer garments called mantles. As with many tailors in the East End, it was probably a somewhat tenuous existence. Woolf especially, it seems, struggled to make ends meet. From 1881 until 1887, he moved several times and lived at four different addresses, all on Greenfield Street.24
In April 1886, Woolf’s house at 62 Greenfield Street was broken into, as reported in the Illustrated Police News:
John Isaacs, seventeen, has been charged, at the Thames Police court, with burglariously entering the premises of Woolf Abrahams of Greenfield street, Whitechapel, and attempting to steal therefrom various articles, value 12 pounds, on the previous night. The prosecutor stated that when he and his brother-in-law entered the front room they saw the prisoner lying under the bed. As soon as he saw witness he said, “Be quiet. Your watch and chain are under the bedstead. I did not mean to do
anything. Let me go.” They pulled him out from under the bedstead and then sent for a constable. When the prisoner was searched at the station a silver watch, some matches, a piece of candle, a knife, and 6d were found in his possession.25
This article unfortunately does not tell us very much. The brother-in-law mentioned must have been Morris Lubnowski, who lived just down the street at the time. Woolf then moved again sometime around 1887 and lived (apparently briefly, in either 1888 or 1889) on Yalford Street, a narrow street parallel to Greenfield Street that was described as being the residence of “very poor class Polish Jews.”26 At some time prior to February 25, 1890, he relocated once more, this time to 3 Sion Square, another poor area, characterized by “chronic want.”27
Aaron Kozminski’s sister Matilda and her husband, Morris, likewise lived at various addresses in the area before moving into a two-story brick row house at 16 Greenfield Street in December 1885.28 They would stay at this address for the next five years, until early 1891. Morris was a bootmaker, and he probably had a workshop in the house. It was most likely a cramped situation, and by 1888, Morris and Matilda had four young children living with them. (After arriving in England, Morris and Matilda Lubnowski changed their last name to Lubnowski-Cohen and later simply to Cohen.)
Directly across the street from Morris and Matilda’s house was 74 Greenfield Street, a modest brick row house that was the home of Aaron’s other brother, Isaac, who, as previously mentioned, had been living in the East End since 1872. By the middle of the 1880s, Isaac had established himself as a prosperous ladies’ tailor, making dresses and mantles as a subcontractor for wholesale manufacturers in the West End or in the area around St. Paul’s. A description of Isaac’s business can be gleaned from Charles Booth’s survey of East End tailors in 1887–1888. Booth, the son of a Liverpool cotton merchant, was a dedicated philanthropist who, from 1886 until 1903, conducted extensive surveys into poverty, industry, and religion in London, with the intention of providing a statistical basis for understanding social and economic issues in the East End. The result of his undertaking was Life and Labour of the People in London, the third edition of which (1902–1903) was a staggering seventeen volumes long. Booth’s inquiries included the study of various trades, such as a survey of the tailoring industry in the East End, which consisted of data from questionnaires and interviews with workers, trade union leaders, and employers. By 1888, Isaac Abrahams had fourteen employees, and it would appear that he was reasonably well off. He appeared in Booth’s survey as follows: “Abrahams / 74 Greenfield St / III. B. 1. Grade B. Garment: C.”
Good Work. Ladies coats.
First class work. Employs about 14 men. Gets an average price of 12/- per coat. Of this the men get 6/-, & he takes 6/-, out of wh. he pays 1/3 for machining & B.H., making 4/9 profit. Some of the men employ an assistant, & the firm can turn out 20 coats a day. In busiest season (May, June, July) he can make £40 a week.29
Isaac’s workshop was located in the yard behind his house. The building was about thirty-five feet long, with a long skylight, which extended the length of the ceiling. The one large room would have been filled with several tables and chairs, a number of sewing machines, and piles of fabric of different types and colors. Beatrice Potter commented on this type of “garden workshop” in 1887. “Between factories proper and home work lie a class of home workshops,” she wrote. “These are usually built in the yard or garden behind the dwelling house.”30 Booth’s survey noted that there were fifteen “nice garden workshops” of similar construction on the east side of Greenfield Street.31 Some of these were described in the survey. For example, the workshop of a Mr. Solomon at 83 Greenfield Street was described as “similarly built to the others in this street but longer being 38 ft long.”32 Another interview, with a Mr. Goldstein at 70 Greenfield Street, noted, “Workshop a counterpart of Mr. Rosen’s (No. 71) and this is the type of shop on this side (east) of Greenfield St.” Mr. Rosen’s shop was described in some detail and probably gives some idea of what Isaac’s shop was like:
It is about 28 ft by 24 ft and is lighted by a large skylight extending the whole length of the room and fitted with six ventilators. The walls are matchboarded & polished. A comfortable shop & one that appears to meet all sanitary requirements. Coke fire was situated in the furthest corner & the brick stove appeared to be built back into the wall. When I first saw the shop these hands were all at work and Mr. R was at his table. The four machines were ranged along the side of the shop. The two pressers tables were at the further end of the shop. In the centre the baisters boards were placed and adjoined the masters table, while the girls were seated at a low table at the side nearest the door.33
Tailoring was the leading profession practiced by immigrant Jews in the Victorian East End. It was a highly competitive trade, in which workers struggled to meet the needs of a “huge and constantly increasing class” with “wide wants and narrow means.”34 The 1870s had seen the emergence of a market for British-made, tailored ladies’ clothing, especially ladies’ jackets and mantles, typically elaborate and frilly outer garments worn over the shoulders as a barrier against chilly temperatures. All ladies’ tailoring prior to the 1870s had been done abroad, mostly in Germany and France. But by 1890, the East End mantle- and jacket-making industry was well established, and by 1895 it employed more than a thousand workers. According to Morris Cohen (no relation to Aaron’s cousin and brother-in-law, Morris Lubnowski, later Morris Lubnowski-Cohen or Morris Cohen), the man generally credited with being the first ladies’ tailor in London, the trade was entirely created by Jewish immigrants. In his testimony before the alien commission, Cohen said that there were no English ladies’ tailors in London prior to 1870. As he exclaimed in an 1898 interview, “Why! English ladies’ tailors? Are you aware of their existence? . . . The English tailor . . . is all right in his place,” Cohen said. “That is in the men’s trade, where solidity and durability is the chief quality required.” The ladies’ trade, by contrast, required “something smart in appearance, something to catch the eye. This quality you will not find in an English tailor. It is not in him. You might as well expect water from a rock.”35 A letter from the wholesale clothing firm Hitchcock, Williams, and Co. confirmed this statement. When asked why they employed foreign laborers in their factory, they replied, “Our experience shows that these foreign Jewish tailors do a class of work which our workers cannot undertake with success, and earn a high rate of pay.”36
Large clothing manufacturers around St. Paul’s and in the West End had initially employed workers in-house, but they soon found it to be more profitable to contract work out to East End Jewish tailors, who could produce garments more cheaply by employing foreign workers. This system, in which work was farmed out to middlemen whose employees toiled away in workshops or in their own homes, was referred to as “the sweating system.” The workers were typically forced to work long hours for low pay, and thus the term “sweater” came to mean “any sub-contractor or middleman who squeezes a profit out of the labour of the poor.”37 Isaac, as a subcontractor running a small tailoring workshop, would have been called a sweater. In fact, Woolf Zeitlin, the secretary of the Jewish branch of the Amalgamated Society of Tailors, specifically referred to Isaac Abrahams as a sweater in an interview conducted for the Booth surveys. Zeitlin claimed, “He had worked in the ‘sweaters’ workshops, and thought that as a rule they make very good profits, though some of them were poor.” The interview noted, “Another example given by Mr. Zeitlin (No. 96—Abrahams) will be found in the general notes on list.” (No. 96 was Isaac Abrahams.)38
The influx of poor Jewish immigrants in the 1880s had severely weakened an already cheap labor market. Large numbers of unskilled or semiskilled Jewish immigrants known as “greeners” were desperate for work and were willing to work long hours in often unsanitary workshops for starvation wages. “They would bring with them the scantiest means of existence,” wrote Myer Wilchinski in 1882, “some married and with families and all with that e
nquiring, beseeching look, that half starved, helpless, hopeless beings must of necessity possess.” The greeners would stand in the employment market known as the chazar mark (literally “pig market”) on Goulston Street and try to get work with the master tailors. There they would wait, looking like “unwashed corpses,” “with barely any clothes to cover them, and without a penny in the pockets.”39 As described by William H. Wilkins,
To call the place where these transactions are carried on a “slave-market” is perhaps an abuse of terms, since, in a strictly legal sense, nobody buys and nobody sells; but that it is a traffic in human beings cannot be denied. Almost any Sunday morning during the spring, summer and autumn months, at the corner of Goulston Street, Whitechapel, for instance, may be seen a varying number of men drawn up in a line against the wall. In front of them stands a man who engages—I will not say sells—them to the sweater, who gets his victims to sign a paper, binding them to work for so many weeks and at so much money in the sweating dens. It is a pitiful sight.40
An 1884 article in the Poilishe Yidl noted, “When you come to London, on Sabbath take a stroll to the well known . . . chazar mark and you will see masters (you can distinguish them by their fat bellies!) scuttling about like a plague of mice between the poverty stricken workers [calling], ‘Jack, are you a machiner? John! I need a presser!’ ”41 The journalist George Sims later described the sweating system as “little better than the importation of foreign slaves.”42
Greeners were often compelled to work for “bare keep”—no money, but a little food and a place to sleep—ostensibly in exchange for learning the trade. Then after a few months, they would be offered a pitiful wage, which, out of desperation, they would accept. The Jewish master tailor who employed greeners was thus able to be more competitive than those who employed English tailors. Such an arrangement pushed down wages generally, and, as a result, sweaters, especially in the tailoring industry, came under great scrutiny for unfair labor practices. By 1884, antisweating forces were mobilizing on multiple fronts. In March, a factory inspector who spoke at a meeting of the Amalgamated Society of Tailors said, “The Factory Laws have socially raised every trade which has been subjected to them, and have given independence to workers in every case, save for the one degraded and wretched trade of East London tailoring!”43 Then in May, the Lancet published a “Report of the Lancet Special Sanitary Commission on the Polish Colony of Jew Tailors,” exposing the “unwholesome, overcrowded” conditions of sweatshops and evasion of the Factory and Workshop Act. The article cited a workshop in Hanbury Street, where eighteen workers were found “crowded in a small room measuring eight yards by four and a half yards and not quite eight feet high.” In one room in the building, “the window frame was almost falling into the street; in another the floor was broken and the fireplace giving way.” The Jewish Chronicle suggested that the evils of the sweating system “are to be cured by the pressure of public opinion acting upon the unscrupulous masters, and by a combination among the work people themselves.”44