Jack the Ripper and the Case for Scotland Yard's Prime Suspect

by Robert House

  In conclusion, the committee admitted that its findings were “of an extremely contradictory nature,” and that conditions were variable, depending on the class of work.75 To the antisweating contingent, it was clear that the government was not going to do anything and that the workers would have to take matters into their own hands. On June 27, 1888, the London Tailors’ Association met at a hall on Goulston Street to address a large audience about the evils of the sweating system. The association president, Herbert Burrows, referred to the Sweating Committee’s findings and concluded that the only solution was for the workers to take control of the means of production and establish cooperative workshops—a suggestion that, he conceded, was socialist in nature. At the end of the meeting, those in attendance passed a resolution stating that they considered “the method of production known as the sweating system, inhuman and barbarous,” and that “no workshops be open for more than eight hours during every twenty-four.”76

  The House of Lords Committee on the Sweating System, while not coming to any specific conclusions, did give an air of official recognition to the English workers’ seething disdain of foreigners, whose animosity was not directed solely at master tailors, but instead was a xenophobic hatred of the Jews in general, especially those who worked in the sweated industries. Such were the times that in September 1888, when a man appealed to a court of justice on behalf of a Polish tailor whose master (a Jewish tailor) refused to pay him, the judge replied, “The Pole has no business in this country. He is taking the bread out of the mouths of Englishmen. You may have a summons, but I hope you won’t succeed.”77

  By early 1889, the workers in the tailoring industry began to mobilize. The socialists and the anarchists of the Berner Street club realized that the time for action had finally arrived, so the Arbeter Fraint announced a workers’ parade of Jewish Unemployed and Sweaters’ Victims “to demand work, bread and the eight-hour day.”78 On March 16, some two thousand men gathered at the International Workingmen’s Educational Club on Berner Street and then marched to Duke Street, where they intended to hold an open-air meeting in a courtyard called Mitre Square, directly behind the Great Synagogue. But the police refused to allow the mob to convene in that location, so the throng relocated to the Mile End Waste. After numerous speeches the meeting dispersed, and many of the participants returned to Berner Street, where a large force of police was waiting for them. According to one report, Police Commissioner Monro had sent “some of his men, without any pretext, to break into [the club],”79 whereupon they proceeded to smash up the place and beat up anyone who was there. Numerous club members came out in defense “armed with sticks,” and a vicious street battle erupted. Three club members were arrested, among them a man named Louis Diemschutz. A pamphlet was circulated that sought funds for the club members’ legal defense; it noted, “The wealthy Jews and the sweaters, both Jews and Gentiles, wish to see these men in prison and their club destroyed.”80

  By August, a committee headquartered in the White Hart pub on Greenfield Street had organized a “Great Strike of London Tailors & Sweater’s Victims.” The tailors and the tailoresses met en masse outside the baths on Goulston Street and then marched to Victoria Park, where they listened to speeches demanding “hours be reduced to 12 with an interval of one hour for dinner and half-hour for tea.”81 A contemporary source described the strikers: “A more abject and miserable set of men it would have been impossible to have seen anywhere. Ill clad, dirty, unwashed, haggard and ragged, they looked in the bright sunlight, a picture of abject misery.”82 Some six thousand workers went on strike for three weeks, during which time 120 shops were temporarily shut down. The East London Observer remarked, “The strike of the East London tailors bids fair to make ‘The White Hart’ public house in Greenfield St, Whitechapel, almost as famous as ‘The Wades Arms’ which formed the headquarters of the Strike Committee during the dockers’ agitation.”83 The Jewish Chronicle noted the “questionable policy” of tailors allowing themselves to be led by “men conspicuously associated with Socialist movements,” which it feared might provoke further prejudices against the Jews in a broader sense.84

  Finally, the Jewish MP (Member of Parliament) for Whitechapel, Samuel Montagu, met with strikers at the Working Men’s Club in Great Alie Street, then with members of the Master Tailors’ Protective and Improvement Association at Christ Church parish hall on Hanbury Street, and brokered a deal that ended the strike. The result was that Parliament passed the Factory and Workshop Act (1891) and the Public Health Act (1891), which improved conditions somewhat for workers.

  It is now time to move on to the more grim chapters of our narrative. The stage has been set, and some of the locations and the characters discussed in this chapter will already be familiar to readers who are well versed in the story that follows. The International Workingmen’s Educational Club on Berner Street, the Great Synagogue adjacent to Mitre Square, and the chazar mark for Jewish tailors on Goulston Street held significance to Jews in the East End, but they would also be sites of great significance in the story of the Ripper murders. And in the middle of it all was the White Hart pub, the headquarters of the Great Strike of Sweater’s Victims, just a few houses north of Aaron Kozminski’s brother’s sweating workshop on Greenfield Street.

  Indeed, it would be impossible to consider Kozminski as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders without understanding the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the East End of London in the years prior to the murders. By 1888, the year of the murders, anti-Jewish sentiment had been building up in the East End for almost a decade, and political agitators were giving expression to what William Fishman referred to as “the irrational hatred festering in the mind of the slum dweller.”85 There was a distinct possibility that pogroms and riots would break out in East London, and the Jewish sweaters who ran tailoring workshops were in the firing line, being turned into scapegoats by anti-Semites and Jewish socialists alike. All of this is arguably significant in considering the type of environment that nurtures the intense anger and hatred that give rise to a serial killer.

  We will later examine an FBI survey of serial killers that found that the desire to kill was motivated in part by an “ineffective social environment.” As the study noted, “The child’s memories of frightening and upsetting life experiences shape his developing thought patterns.” Such factors included a “perception of unfair treatment by adults and authority figures.”86 As we have seen, Aaron Kozminski lived in hostile anti-Semitic environments for his entire life. In considering him as a suspect in the Ripper murders, it may be argued that the tension between Jews and gentiles in the East End, which appeared to be at a breaking point in late 1887 and early 1888, laid the groundwork for the unleashing of violence that would soon follow.

  On February 21, 1888, the East End News printed an interview with Captain Colomb, MP for Bow and Bromley, who stated, “I object to England with its overcrowded population, being made a human ashpit for the refuse population of the world.” Three weeks later was the first meeting of the House of Lords Committee on the Sweating System, the reports of which would bring even more pressure to bear on the East End’s most popular scapegoat, the “social plague” known as the Jewish sweater. As had happened earlier in Russia, government committees again seemed poised to attack, ready to blame the Jews—this time for unfair labor competition and for being a general “pest and a menace to the poor native-born East Ender.”87 The social atmosphere was volatile. Given such mounting pressure, it seemed inevitable that something was sure to break.

  In fact, it already had.

  Alexander II of Russia, “the Czar Liberator.” His emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 was called “a piece of philanthropy never equaled in the history of man.”

  Gesya Gelfman, a member of the revolutionary group Narodnya Volya (the People’s Will). Gelfman was the only Jew involved in the assassination plot, and her role was greatly exaggerated in the Russian press.

  The assassination of Alexander II on M
arch 13, 1881. Ignacy Hryniewiecki stepped forward and threw a bomb that blew the czar’s legs to pieces. A little more than an hour later, the czar had bled to death. The assassination sparked a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in southwest Russia.

  Beginning in April 1881, anti-Jewish pogroms broke out in more than two hundred locations in the southwestern regions of the Pale of Settlement. One officer who traveled for a time with a correspondent of the Jewish Chronicle said that he had “seen things that sickened him to think of.”

  A street devastated by the pogroms. The total destruction of property was estimated as high as 100 million rubles. After the pogrom in Elizavetgrad, the town looked “as if it has been devastated by the elements. Whole streets have been literally razed.”

  Aaron Kozminski was born in this small village in 1865. These photos are circa 1910.

  A photo from my trip to Kodawa in May 2008. It is a small village in western Poland that seems detached from the modern world.

  Aaron Kozminski’s birth certificate. Aaron Mordke Kozminski was born on September 11, 1865, a son of Abram Josef Kozminski (tailor) and Golda Lubnowski (Goldy Lubnowskicz). Abram died when Aaron was nine years old.

  A tailoring workshop on Christian Street, circa 1900. Isaac Abrahams’s workshop on Greenfield Street probably looked similar to this. Like the shop pictured above, Isaac’s shop also had a skylight and the same number of employees.

  The Vampire of the Sweatshop, frontispiece of Songs of Labour by Morris Rosenfeld (1914). “The sweatshop at midday, I’ll draw you the picture: a battlefield bloody.”

  A late Victorian–era mantle,

  circa 1880s.

  Greenfield Street today, looking north. None of the original buildings remain on this street. The arrow points to the approximate location of 74 Greenfield Street, where Aaron’s brother Isaac lived, with the “garden workshop” in the backyard.

  Another shot of Greenfield Street, looking south. Isaac lived on the left, and Morris and Matilda lived directly opposite at number 16 (on the right).

  What used to be Yalford Street is now just an alley off Fieldgate Street. Number 34 Yalford Street was the address of Woolf Abrahams. The houses on this street were described as “without water supply or dustbins” and with the woodwork “rotten through filth.” “The stones of the yard exuded when trodden upon damp filth,” and “overpowering smells, from the condition of the houses, pervaded the interiors.”

  The “White Hart” pub on Greenfield Street in the 1880s, headquarters of the Anti-Tailor Strike Committee. This pub was just six doors north of Isaac’s tailoring workshop. The entrance to White Hart Court can be seen next to the ladder. This alley led to Yalford Street, where Woolf Abrahams lived.

  Christ Church, on Commercial Street in March 1909. The church was then, and still remains, the dominant architectural feature of the district. Next door was the Ten Bells, a pub frequented by several of the Ripper’s victims. In 1976, it was briefly renamed the “Jack the Ripper.”

  Whitechapel High Street with St. Mary Matfelon Church in the distance in the 1890s. This thoroughfare would have been Kozminski’s most direct route home after the Eddowes murder, but because it was such a busy street, he probably avoided it. St. Mary Matfelon was close to the geographical center of the murders. Emma Smith claimed that she was accosted by some youths who were hanging around in front of St. Mary’s, and Polly Nichols was last seen alive drunkenly walking down the street across from it. Kozminski lived about one minute’s walk from the church.

  Wentworth Street in modern days. This street was parallel to and north of Whitechapel High Street and was quite possibly Aaron Kozminski’s route home after the Eddowes murder.

  Part Two

  1888

  5

  The Murders Begin

  Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. [I am a man and reckon nothing human alien to me.]

  —Publius Terentius Afer, second century B.C.

  On February 25, 1888, a woman named Annie Millwood was admitted to the Whitechapel Infirmary with numerous stab wounds in the “legs and lower part of the body.” According to a newspaper report, she had been the victim of a “most violent and brutal attack . . . by a man who she did not know, and who stabbed her with a clasp knife which he took from his pocket.”1 The article added, “No one appears to have seen the attack, and as far as at present ascertained there is only the woman’s statement to bear out the allegations of an attack, though that she had been stabbed cannot be denied.”2 It is not clear where the attack took place, whether indoors or out, but Millwood’s address was in the middle of what would later be the territory of Jack the Ripper. Annie’s condition “progressed favourably,” and she was transferred to South Grove Workhouse about a month later.

  Just a month after the attack on Millwood, another unusual attack occurred two miles to the east, in Mile End. At 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, several “screams for help were heard” from a house on a small thoroughfare called Maidman Street.3 Two women nearby heard the screams and ran to Mile End Road, where they found two police constables of K Division standing outside the Royal Hotel. The police rushed back to 19 Maidman Street, where they “found a young woman, named Ada Wilson, lying in the passage, bleeding profusely from a fearful wound in the throat.” Little is known about the nature of this wound, but, as Wilson’s neighbor Rose Bierman said, it “must have been deep, I should say, from the quantity of blood in the passage.” A doctor arrived shortly afterward and bandaged the wound, then sent Wilson to the London Hospital, “where it was ascertained that she was in a most dangerous condition.” At the hospital, Wilson soon recovered enough that she was able to describe the attack. According to Wilson, she had been about to retire to bed when “a total stranger” knocked on her door and told Wilson to give him money, warning, “if she did not at once produce the cash she had but a few moments to live.” When Wilson refused, the man took a clasp knife out of his pocket and stabbed her twice in the neck, then ran off, apparently frightened away by Wilson’s screams. Wilson described her “would-be murderer” as about five and a half feet in height, thirty years old, with a sunburned face, a dark coat, and a “wide-awake” hat, similar in style to a cowboy hat. Although it was initially thought “impossible that the injured woman can recover,” Wilson’s condition gradually improved, and she was discharged as “cured” a month later.4

  The details of the attack came entirely from Wilson herself, but there is some evidence to suggest that she may have been lying. Bierman made a statement the day after the attack that was printed in the Eastern Post and City Chronicle. “I knew Mrs. Wilson as a married woman,” Bierman said, “although I had never seen her husband. Last evening she came into the house accompanied by a male companion, but whether he was her husband or not I could not say.”5 Bierman added that Wilson was “under notice to quit” her lodgings at the time the attack occurred. Her statement continued,

  Well, I don’t know who the young man was, but about midnight I heard the most terrible screams one can imagine. Running downstairs I saw Mrs. Wilson, partially dressed, wringing her hands and crying, “Stop that man for cutting my throat! He has stabbed me!” She then fell fainting in the passage. I saw all that as I was coming downstairs, but as soon as I commenced to descend I noticed a young fair man rush to the front door and let himself out. He did not seem somehow to unfasten the catch as if he had been accustomed to do so before.6

  Bierman’s statement suggests the possibility that Wilson was in fact a prostitute, and that the man was a client in her house. Ripperologist Quentin Pittman has theorized that Wilson might have lied for reasons of “pride and appearance.” Pittman argued, “Being robbed was one thing, but admitting you were an unfortunate [a Victorian term for a ‘low prostitute’], and your client had savagely wounded you was quite another offence altogether.”7 The attack took place on the first day of Passover. As Mrs. Bierman, whom the newspaper described as “a young Jewess,” said, “I am now ‘keeping the feast,’ and how can I do s
o with what has occurred here?”8

  By an odd coincidence, Wilson’s house on Maidman Street was only a few hundred yards from South Grove Workhouse, where at the time of the attack Annie Millwood was recuperating from her own stabbing that occurred a month earlier. The doctors seemed to think that Millwood was recovering well, but suddenly, on March 31, she was “observed to fall, and on assistance being given it was found that she was dead.”9 The coroner’s inquest ruled that Millwood’s death was due to “natural causes.”10 A report of her death was printed in the Eastern Post and City Chronicle on Saturday, April 7. By then, however, yet another brutal attack had taken place.