The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents

by Alex Butterworth

  Henceforth the Metropolian Police’s counter-subversion activities would be unified under a single Special Branch, supervised by Munro, its brief now widened beyond the Irish threat alone. Heading the Branch was Chief Inspector Littlechild, whose officers included the impressive young tyro William Melville, who had done sterling service as a liaison and surveillance officer in France, and others who brought with them valuable skills acquired under Jenkinson’s tutelage.

  In the past, Britain had always viewed with disdain the kind of political police that Continental tyrannies relied upon to enforce their will. In Special Branch, however, Britain now had the makings of just such a department, ready to turn its attention to fresh fields of investigation. As the fight to free Ireland took its place alongside that to liberate Britain from the capitalist yoke, and to raze the institutions of state rule across Europe that kept men and women in economic and spiritual bondage, Special Branch would be ready: watching and waiting, Jenkinson’s methods never quite forgotten.

  The scene in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, 13 November 1887 was so dramatic that William Morris ‘quite thought the revolution had come’. For the previous few months, unemployment in Britain had been rising rapidly, and Trafalgar Square had again become the venue for those without work to express their discontent, as well as housing a permanent contingent of the dispossessed. Up to 600 men and women slept rough in the square every night, to be joined during the day by thousands more who had walked in from the East End, for whom the People’s Palace remained an irrelevance as long as their basic needs were not met. When, two days after the execution of the Haymarket martyrs on 11 November, Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation staged a protest rally against the Irish Coercion Act recently passed by Lord Salisbury’s government, the scene was set for confrontation. Thousands of constables from the Metropolitan force lined up four deep to enforce the ban on public meetings in the square which had been pronounced the previous week; large reserve units of infantry and cavalry from the army regiments stationed in the capital were present as backup. It was precisely the kind of situation that Salisbury’s two-year-old government knew it might precipitate, by passing the draconian Coercion Act, which suspended civil rights without time limit: an ideal opportunity for the government to present itself as the guardian of law and order.

  The circumstances were unnervingly reminiscent of those in Chicago’s Haymarket two years earlier when the fateful bomb had been thrown, but it took only the first police advance for Morris’ bold assessments of the left’s readiness for revolution to be exposed as naïvety. The retreat soon became a rout, with those at the front and stragglers left behind beaten ferociously by the police, with fists and batons. ‘I don’t know how fast the sturdy Briton is expected to fly,’ Edward Carpenter told a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette immediately afterwards, ‘but in our case I suppose it was not fast enough, for in a moment my companion (a peaceful mathematician, by the way, of high university standing) was collared and shaken in the most violent – I may say brutal – manner. I remonstrated, and was struck in the face by the clenched fist of “law and order”.’ ‘Running hardly expressed our collective action,’ according to Shaw, cornered in nearby High Holborn: ‘we skedaddled, and never drew breath until we were safe on Hampstead Heath or thereabouts.’

  Bloody Sunday was, the Pall Mall Gazette declared, ‘a Tory coup d’état’, though such was the lack of organisation and mettle among those would-be insurrectionists attending the demonstration that the infantry had been unused and the cavalry never ordered to draw their sabres. As a consequence of this restraint, only three protesters had died, though 200 attended hospital while many more were afraid to present themselves for treatment. That the list of casualties was not much longer was a clear indication of the complete absence of the spirit of revolution that Morris, Hyndman and so many others had convinced themselves was abroad. ‘I was astounded at the rapidity of the thing and the ease with which military organisation got its victory,’ Morris admitted, having calmed his nerves, though not yet ready to face the crushing reality of the socialists’ failure. A more honest account of the disappointment of the day, though, was offered by Shaw: ‘On the whole I think it was the most abjectly disgraceful defeat ever suffered by a band of heroes outnumbering their foes a thousand to one.’

  Yet the forces of law and order would not become complacent. One of Melville’s colleagues in the new Special Branch was a man named Sweeney, an ardent reactionary who had joined the Metropolitan Police a few years earlier having been too short in stature for the Royal Irish Constabulary. Sweeney, it seems, was clear about where the new challenge for Special Branch lay. It was around the time of the Jubilee, he would later recollect, that the anarchists ‘began to grow restless. They held frequent meetings; there was quite a small boom in the circulation of revolutionary periodicals. Then, as now, England was a dumping ground for bad characters, and London thus received several rascals who had been expelled from the Continent as being prominent propagandists.’ Such sentiments were echoed in a Home Office internal communication, which described the émigrés as ‘a violent set and utterly unscrupulous’.

  In other countries, too, eyes were turned towards London as a seedbed for violent activity. From early 1887, reports had been sent to the Paris prefecture suggesting that instructions to what remained of the terrorist underground in Russia were no longer coming from France but London and even New York, with Hartmann and Kropotkin strongly implicated, and anarchists across the Channel said to be seeking gelignite for the assassination of the tsar. The claims, though confused and far-fetched, were summarised for the French cabinet, and may have found their way on to Rachkovsky’s desk. However, it was on the advice of his agent Jagolkovsky, who had assisted in the raid on the People’s Will press in Geneva, that the Okhrana chief now turned his attention to London and the anti-tsarist groups coalescing there.

  A keen empire-builder, Rachkovsky straight away set about establishing an Okhrana presence in Britain following a possible personal visit in June 1888. The man he hired for the job was an old freelancer with the Russian police department, Wladyslaw Milewski, who had served as the case officer in Paris for those non-Russian agents and informants previously run by the Barlet Brigade. And as when the Okhrana had originally established itself in France, it is likely to have been from ex-officers of the native police that Milewski recruited his agents in England, while the air of secrecy around the pseudonymous ‘John’ suggests that he may even have been a moonlighting Met officer. If the Okhrana had indeed decided to retain the services of an insider, no one would have been a better investment than the rising star of Special Branch, William Melville; his long service in France, liaising with the Sûreté and handling informants and provocateurs with an interest in Fenian affairs, may well have brought him into contact with the Paris Okhrana. Years later, Rachkovsky would hint at some pecuniary relationship, but Melville would always make a point of officially distancing himself from the Russian.

  The priorities that Rachkovsky detailed for Milewski in London, too, can only be guessed at, though it is safe to surmise that they entailed at the very least the demonisation of Russian émigrés, who had so scrupulously distanced themselves from violence. Would a strategy of intimidating surveillance prove as effective in subjugating the old nihilists here as in France, or might the strategy used by Jenkinson against the Fenians, and Anderson against Parnell, work better? Anti-Semitism and the fear of anarchism were two promising routes in France, if linked to nihilism in the popular imagination, but would England be so responsive?

  Rachkovsky’s visit to London in the summer of 1888 would have coincided with the matchgirls’ strike at the Bryant and May factory in the East End. Three weeks of protest led by Annie Besant, with whom Kravchinsky had lodged on first arriving in the country five years earlier, extracted an undertaking from the management of wholesale improvements in the terrible working conditions. For the Labour movement it provided important evidence of what might be a
chieved through concerted action, even when carried out by those with no prior organisation. Such moderate methods offered lean pickings for the Okhrana if they wished to demonstrate to the British public the threat from Russian Jews and extremists among the East End immigrants. Before the summer was out, however, the Whitechapel slums would throw up an exemplary case of how quickly general unease could turn to terror when popular attention was focused through the prism of violent crime, and the monstrous ‘Kraken’ given shadowy, human form.

  Violence was an everyday hazard in the notorious area, and the desperate poverty that drove its female inhabitants to prostitution made them more vulnerable than most. What distinguished the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, whose body was discovered in a backstreet during the afternoon of 31 August 1888, was the brutal nature of the attack and the mutilation of the corpse: the neck severed through to the spinal cord and the torso half eviscerated. A week later, when Annie Chapman was found similarly butchered barely half a mile away, the crimes became national news. A further fortnight after that they became an international story, when the taunting predictions of further deaths in a letter received by the Central News Agency from ‘Jack the Ripper’ were realised: two more mutilated women were discovered on the night of Sunday, 30 September.

  As journalists competed with the police in speculating as to the Ripper’s identity, the circumstances of the two most recent murders allowed those with a political agenda to suggest that the killer might come from the underworld of revolutionary immigrants. The body of Elizabeth Stride, the first of the two to die, was found close to the rear entrance to the International Working Men’s Club on Berner Street, one of seven revolutionary clubs set up by Joseph Lane in the east of the city, where lectures and classes were held on Sunday evenings with such prominent figures as Kropotkin frequently in attendance. Then, on a door jamb close to where the second body, of Catherine Eddowes, was found, a message had been freshly scrawled in white chalk: ‘The Juwes are (not) the men that will (not) be blamed for nothing’. Witnesses disputed the position of the ‘(not)’ after a policeman had hastily rubbed out the words, fearing that they might incite a pogrom.

  There were suggestions that the strangely spelled ‘Juwes’ might imply Freemasonic connotations, while contemporary commentators variously construed the double negative as indicating that a Frenchman or Cockney was the Ripper – if indeed the message had been chalked by the murderer. Fascinating and unfathomable, the hideous deeds of the serial killer generated, then as now, a myriad of possible perpetrators to haunt the imagination. Special Branch ledgers of the period have been construed to suggest both that the killings were carried out by the Branch itself, to cover up Jenkinson’s employment of Catherine Eddowes and her husband John Kelly as agents, and that Anderson and his officers suspected it to be a Fenian plot conceived to humiliate the Metropolitan Police.

  That Anderson, a religious zealot, might have been keen to promote the notion of Irish involvement is quite credible. Soon after his appointment as assistant commissioner that summer, he had been sent away to Switzerland for an extended rest cure, where he must have hoped to remain for the duration of the Parnell Commission’s inquiry into the letters he had secretly helped forge to incriminate the Irish leader. Having viewed the Whitechapel murders, from a distance, as a useful warning to immoral women to stay off the streets, and one that the authorities should not go out of their way to prevent, he was certainly indignant at being recalled to deal with the continuing killings.

  For a period after 30 September, however, most observers expected that the murderer would be found among the local population of immigrant Jews and political extremists. As far away as Vienna, the British ambassador Augustus Paget was persuaded by an informant that the killer was Johann Stammer, a member of the anarchist International operating under the alias of Kelly, and when Scotland Yard refused to pay for the informant to travel to London to present his evidence, Paget personally provided £165. The Paris Embassy’s refusal to meet the informant’s demands for another £100, en route, brought an end to that avenue of enquiry: but at the beginning of November, Madame Novikoff, eager to find an angle on the Ripper story for propaganda purposes, contacted the Okhrana in Paris to request additional information on another political extremist, this time Russian. Where the rumours about Nicholas Vasiliev started is uncertain, but as stories of his involvement bounced between newspapers in France, Britain, Russia and America, the biography of this elusive – and quite possibly non-existent – character received an interesting spin: he was ‘a fanatical anarchist,’ both the Daily Telegraph and the Pall Mall Gazette reported, who had emigrated to Paris in 1870, shortly before the Commune.

  With even the Illustrated Police News depicting Jack the Ripper as a vicious caricature of the eastern European Jew, thick-nosed and with large crude ears, Rachkovsky, now back in Paris, could surely not have been more satisfied had he planned the whole gruesome sequence of murders himself. Coming at almost the same time as the publication by his erstwhile agent Madame Blavatsky of The Hebrew Talisman, which claimed the existence of a Jewish conspiracy for worldwide subversion, such prejudiced reporting of the Whitechapel murders was more grist to the mill.

  Before long the press was peddling fresh rumours and proposing new criminal types – the butcher with the bloodied apron or the aristocratic dandy – for their readers to chew over and, by early 1889, with no new murders to report, interest in the Ripper began to wane. Nevertheless, the brutal myths that the killings had generated seeped into the fabric of the East End, adding their hellish stench to what was, as three contemporary observers commented, ‘a kind of human dustbin overflowing with the dregs of society’, or a ‘vast charnel house’ whose denizens lived ‘in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth’ and from which, it was predicted, a plague would soon spread across the city.

  Charles Booth’s investigators were just beginning their survey of London, pounding the streets to collect data for the Poverty Maps that would first appear in 1889, coloured to represent the life experience of the capital’s inhabitants according to a seven-point scheme: a firelight glow of oranges and reds for ease and affluence, chilly blue for those slums whose inhabitants suffered the greatest deprivation. The areas from Whitechapel out to the docks of Limehouse and Wapping were coloured like a great, sprawling bruise.

  For Malatesta, though, back from four years in South America, the workers of the East End, immigrants and indigenous alike, possessed an energy to force change that impressed him.

  Since his sojourn in England after the 1881 London Congress, Malatesta had seen a lot of the world. In Egypt he had fought the British in the cause of independence; returning to his homeland of Italy he had evaded a police hunt for the perpetrators of a bomb attack by hiding in a container of sewing machines; then in Patagonia he had laboured for three months in sub-zero temperatures prospecting for gold to fund anarchist propaganda, only to have the few nuggets he had found confiscated by the Argentine state. In Buenos Aires, though, he had discovered something more precious still: with 60,000 peasants from Mediterranean Europe arriving in the city each year, at a rate higher even than those of eastern Europe pouring in to London and New York, he found a receptive audience for his ideas.

  Working in a range of industries to win his colleagues’ trust, Malatesta had galvanised their belief in anarchism. In January 1888, the Bakers Union in Buenos Aires, whose members had previously satisfied their anti-authoritarian urges by turning out dough-based products with names such as ‘nun’s farts’ and ‘little canons’, staged its first strike, and later in the year the Shoemakers Union followed suit. Learning from those he taught, and under the guidance of the older Irish anarchist Dr John Creaghe, Malatesta realised how militant trade unionism might advance his ideas of social revolution, and in four manifestos published in the space of two years he refined his ideological position. Whether or not his return to London in 1889 was due to pressure from the vexed Ar
gentine authorities, there was no doubt that in the time he had been away both Britain and Europe had become more receptive to his ideas.

  Industrial action continued intermittently in the French mining regions, and in Italy there were the first signs of the fasci groups of radical syndicalists challenging landowners over their mismanagement of agriculture. Meanwhile, the frequency of anarchist meetings and weight of anarchist publications in Belgium surpassed that of any other socialist group, and recent years had seen strikes and protests tend towards insurrectionary violence that the Catholic government had struggled to quell. In Spain too, where Malatesta had travelled on a mission for Bakunin more than a decade before, anarchism had taken deep root, unifying the peasantry of Andalucia and the industrial workers of Catalonia with uncommon success, setting the stage for a long-lasting struggle against the clerical and political authorities. From a base in London, Malatesta could reach out to this diffuse body of support, through frequent forays to the Continent and the regular publication of a new paper, L’Associazione. But as Kropotkin had found before him, the British capital could now afford inspiration of its own, even to a veteran anarchist.

  Trade with the empire was the lifeblood of Britain, and London’s docks its fast-beating heart. Only a few weeks after London’s gas workers had won themselves an eight-hour day by striking, a walkout by 500 men from one dock in the summer of 1889 caused it to miss a beat. Then, almost immediately, 3,000 stevedores, nearly the entire workforce, followed suit. Within a fortnight, they were joined by 130,000 more Londoners from all trades and industries, omnibuses abandoned in the streets as their drivers and conductors flocked to protest. ‘The great machine by which five million people are fed and clothed will come to a dead stop, and what is to be the end of it all?’ wondered the Evening News and Post. ‘The proverbial small spark has kindled a great fire which threatens to envelop the whole metropolis.’ And it seemed it would rage on. Just when a lack of funds threatened to force the dockers back to work, a huge donation arrived from their colleagues in Australia to save the strike. Solidarity seemed to stretch around the globe.