Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  The first witness of the second day was Mr Charles Moore, a young man living at 96 Blackchurch lane, where he managed an oil shop. After a little preliminary tiff with the coroner, he said that on Tuesday the 28th of June about nine o’clock in the morning a man came into his shop and asked for a pennyworth of aqua fortis, producing at the same time the bottle which had been shown at the last sitting of the Court and was now lying on the coroner’s table. The bottle was a two ounce container which was therefore about half filled – a pennyworth being equivalent to an ounce. In reply to the query as to what the purchaser required the liquid for, he said he used it in his trade. The man who came into his shop was about 22 years of age and evidently a foreigner by his speech. The witness had gone with Inspector Final that morning to the London Hospital and was shown a man in bed who he believed to be the same man to whom he supplied the aqua fortis.

  Mrs Lipski, the wife of the tenant of the home, stated that Israel Lipski – the accused – had formerly worked outside of Batty Street, but on Monday this week he commenced carrying on his business there with the assistance of a boy named Pitman. On Tuesday last she was asleep on the ground floor – where there were only two rooms – when her husband left. Therefore anyone coming downstairs would have to pass the door of her bedroom to get out into the street although admission was obtained to the yard without going through the kitchen. At 8:30 on Tuesday morning she got up, went to the kitchen and saw Israel Lipski there. He asked the witness for some coffee, but, finding that she had none in the house, she asked him to wait there while she proceeded to Blackchurch lane to purchase some. She was absent for about twenty minutes and when she returned ‘Israel’ – as she called him – had gone. However, she prepared the coffee and called upstairs, ‘Israel, come down, the coffee is ready!’ to which the boy Pitman upstairs replied that he was not there. She did not see Lipski again until she met him in custody at the Leman Street Police Station. At ten o’clock she left the house and proceeded to Petticoat Lane to purchase some meat. She was therefore in the house for about an hour and ten minutes – between ten minutes to nine and ten o’clock – during which time she was positive that no one could have gone upstairs, her mother, Rachel Rubenstein and Leah Levy being also in the kitchen.

  Recalled to give further evidence, Dr Kay stated that since the last sitting he had examined the vagina of the deceased and had put it under the microscope. He produced a glass bottle with some of the matter taken from the vagina, but he was still unable to say with any degree of certainty from his examination whether it pointed conclusively to recent intercourse. It might, however, be submitted to a further chemical examination.

  Richard Pitman, the lad employed by the accused, said he had started work that prior Wednesday and had worked there till Monday night. He came again at eight o’clock on Tuesday morning – the day of the murder – but left at 9:30 to have his breakfast, returning an hour later. The front door was shut when he went out and he shut it after him. It was at eleven o’clock that he heard of the tragedy. He saw Lipski at half past ten when the accused gave him some instructions. At the time, Lipski also said that he had been out to buy a sponge and a vice and that he was going out again. He then left the room but Pitman could not say if he had actually left the house. He affirmed that to his knowledge stick makers used methylated spirit in their trade, but he could not say if acid was used. He also stated that when he saw Lipski, the accused had on his black coat (produced) but there were no stains on it then.

  The coroner having summed up, the jury returned a verdict of ‘Wilful Murder’ against Lipski, who was then committed for trial on the coroner’s warrant.

  CHAPTER 4

  IT’S EARLY SATURDAY evening. The pungent smell of manure hangs thick in the air. Maggie is walking along Whitechapel Road fascinated by the exotic mix of peoples swept up in the kaleidoscopic, sepia-tinted madness. Taking out her little moleskin journal, she scribbles down some notes about the rich diversity that surrounds her (or as she believes it to be): ‘An Algerian merchant walks arm-in-arm with a native of Calcutta. A little Italian plays pitch-and-toss with a small Russian. A Polish Jew enjoys sauerkraut with a German…’ – though her guess as to the origin of these people has to do with her own peculiar fantasies. And then her eye fixes upon the down-and-outs, the lingerers soused in gin, who, themselves are observing this parade of humanity, but with narrow eyes and barely restrained hostility. Of them she writes: ‘The East End loafer, monarch of all he surveys, lord of the premises. It is amusing to see his British air of superiority. His hands are deep down in the pockets of his fustian trousers, round his neck is a bit of coloured rag or flannel, on his head is a tattered cap. He is looked upon as scum by his own nation but he feels himself to be an Englishman and able to kick the foreigner back to his native land if only the government would believe in England for the Englishman…’

  The people who flock to Whitechapel Road on Saturday nights are like moths attracted by the flaring gas torches set before the stalls of vendors shrilly crying out their wares: ‘Buy! Buy! Buy!’ That one word, repeated thrice, sums up for her the crazed desperation of the hawkers frantic to survive in this cutthroat artery of impoverishment. As she walks, as she observes, she is slowly transformed into her other self, through whose mind she can enter her most beloved character – the gentle Captain in the Army of Salvation. She tries once more to imagine what he would have made of all this and then she sees an old woman selling pig’s feet, her wrinkled head wrapped in a shawl, who just the other day she came upon dead drunk. Instead of letting her lie there on the ground, as she had done, he would have escorted her home to that dark and dingy cellar she shared with three other crones – three fearful hags who frightened her but not the good Captain. He would have treated them with the respect they hardly deserved because, to him, they weren’t hags at all, but simply the innocent children of God.

  She stops before an arcade, a storefront freak-show – one of many on the road. Outside the door stand two men dressed as Ottoman warriors brandishing swords. A crowd of children flock around them, begging for coins so they can gain entrance to see the main attraction – The Boy With The Skeleton Arm. Passing the doorkeepers she enters the low-ceilinged room used for the penny entertainments. Inside the walls are plastered with old circus and carnival posters of lion-tamers, bare-back riders, high-wire acrobats and clowns which in this musty space seem odd and even a bit creepy as the colours, once bright and cheery have, in the dampness, become muted and anaemic.

  The entertainment – or what passed for such in this chamber of curiosities – had already begun (though it never really ceases) and consists of a youth, half naked and quite normal looking except for a limb that was severely atrophied. Known on the street as ‘Skeleton Arm,’ what makes this lad unique is his ability to use his withered appendage for deeds of prowess such as throwing knives and lifting heavy iron bars. And the audience who had paid their penny to see this queer mix of ordinary and bizarre, pushed forward to get a better view, tramping over nutshells and other bits of detritus dropped on the earthen floor.

  Maggie has come here several times before and is lured back not by the grotesque performers themselves but by the reaction of the audience who seem to find immense pleasure in witnessing pathetic creatures even more miserable than themselves – at least this is what she feels.

  About 300 people crushed inside to see Skeleton Arm, dressed up as Buffalo Bill, and his colleague, a sullen midget masquerading as Napoleon. There were all types – mothers carrying market baskets, old men, youths, and children who stood gawking at these human disfigurements while a girl turned the handle of an organ filling the room with deafening sounds, loud and discordant. And as Maggie made ready to leave – for she could only bear to stay for several minutes – she heard a woman say, ‘How could God Almighty make anything so ugly?’

  It was a beautiful night and on reaching the open air Maggie looked up at the stars with a sense of r
elief; they seemed so far away, so still, so restful. Then glancing at a sign plastered on a newsstand screaming the words, ‘Shocking Murder in Whitechapel!’ her thoughts turned back to that terrible day on Batty Street again.

  The day of the murder, that hot and sultry morning of 28 June, she had been at the market picking up the few meagre necessities her budget would allow. Suddenly she had felt something strange in the air, something she had experienced only once before, when she was living in the country as a child and had noticed that the animals in the fields had started acting very odd, doing things she had never seen them do, as if possessed, and it had frightened her because it seemed that the world was being turned askew and she and all the animals were being tilted into another dimension. It was a similar feeling that day. No one knew what it was, but it reminded her of those animals. People had begun to quiver and pale and then they had started to move around restlessly. There was a feeling of unease and apprehension. Everyone knew something was wrong but no one seemed to know what it was. And then a procession, like the movement of ants, was drawn magnetically, to Batty Street. Why? No one understood. The crowd grew ever larger, people kept coming, endlessly, taking over the narrow street until the police arrived and pushed them back so they could establish a cordon sanitaire. Then a body was carried out of number 16 wrapped up in cloth and a cry rose from the crowd. A short while later a man was brought out, weak, pale, barely alive, and another cry arose, but this one frightening and the crowd of mourners now became a mob.

  Even though Maggie, herself, had been caught up in that bizarre frenzy she still had managed to keep her journalistic head and continued to ask questions, observing and taking notes. And she remained as the crowd, having finally satisfied its morbid fascination, began to drift away.

  ‘The only things in which East End people take much interest are murders and funerals,’ she wrote. ‘Their lives are so dull; nothing else gets their sluggish blood into motion. But a murder is like giving them a dose of smelling salts. Was the person poisoned or was her throat cut? Did the corpse turn black or did it keep until the nails were put into the coffin? The thing that strikes me most about East End life is its soddenness…’

  It was then she had seen a young woman, standing outside the Batty Street house. A man dressed in soiled worker’s clothes stood over her, threateningly, shaking an accusing finger as his body quivered, his grotesque countenance flushed red in uncontrollable anger till it seemed about to explode. But instead of rupturing into violence, the misshapen face had suddenly transformed into pitiful sobs and tearful supplications to God in a language Maggie scarcely understood.

  The young woman suffered this abuse without flinching. Her features were wooden, her disposition inert. If he had struck her, Maggie felt she would have accepted it as fitting punishment. For what? The question was irrelevant. It was as if life had bestowed nothing but misery upon that poor woman and, for reasons that would remain forever elusive, she was convinced the blame was hers alone.

  The man, now weeping uncontrollably, was led away into the Batty Street house, leaving the young woman standing outside by herself. It was then Maggie had caught her eye and felt that mysterious link to another soul that happens rarely in one’s life when two opposites connect by chance and sense the fascination of what might have been if they were born into a different world. But she also felt the depth of despair in the obscure figure standing alone across the road, the painful emptiness of solitude. At least she thought she did. For Maggie, like many writers, was keen to fill a vacuum with ideas and emotions that would have been hers had she been placed in some other role.

  Several months before this episode on Batty Street she had been on a march for Simon Tweed, a boot finisher from Whitechapel who had died, according to his comrades, owing to the results of overwork. Tweed had sweated 18 hours a day throughout the year at 10s per week. One day his body just gave out. He was taken to hospital but died soon after – at the tender age of twenty-four.

  When the procession reached the West Ham Jewish cemetery, where Tweed’s body lay in state awaiting burial, the marchers boldly broke through the gates and entered the chapel where a nervous Rabbi was holding service for the grieving relatives. Chanting and waving their banners, the marchers commandeered the coffin and carried it out to the freshly dug grave in order to hold a service of their own. They were soon confronted by a force of 100 policemen who barricaded the chapel doors and made free use of their batons. Fighting ensued and a number of people were trampled in the struggle.

  This incident caused Maggie much anxiety when she thought about the event sometime afterward. She saw Tweed as a martyr to the barbaric labour practices that broke so many lives, their youth and vitality slowly squeezed away like drayage mules driven mercilessly night and day until time came to hobble them off to the glue yard. But, she also questioned the motives of those who tried to steal the coffin from the family of mourners. For the leaders of that manifestation, she thought, Simon Tweed was little more than a symbol, dipped in red, used to goad the troops and fan the flames of revolution – a revolution that, in her mind, would only lead to more torment and bloodshed.

  Slowly she found her allegiance shift from those leaders, brazen and proud, who wrote and spoke grand phrases, whipping up passions but rarely waiting around to pick up the pieces that lay shattered on the pavement. Instead she became attracted to the lonely settlement workers who volunteered their time to care for the needy, enduring the filth and privation to do God’s work – for their calling could only be supported by God since the State had long since abandoned them.

  And so she chose a career as a writer. Her mission was to capture on paper, with pen and ink, the lives and labours of the people who existed in such vile conditions in the very heart of the greatest Empire the world had ever known. Done with care, understanding and passion, she felt that her words would, some day, cut like a rapier through the mental lethargy of those privileged and pampered who refused to see the hell that existed right around the corner from their beloved Stock Exchange – or, if they did, could hardly identify with the tragedies which played themselves out on a daily basis. The day when she could accurately mirror that world was still some years away. But in the meanwhile she continued to pursue her research by living in a squalid room and observing, methodically, all the misery that surrounded her. The streets had become her canvass; the people, her subject and the dire poverty of their lives, her rationale.

  Maggie takes the potatoes she purchased from the hawker, who once was a sailor, back to her room. It’s a small, box shaped space with just a bed, a flimsy wardrobe and a desk which was simply a pinewood writing table into which some former tenant had carved, all in German, the word ‘Liebe’ and then, next to that, the word ‘Hass’ and perpendicular to both the word ‘Angst.’ Even though the furrows made it difficult to keep her writing singularly clean and flowing (for she took great pride in her penmanship) she made no attempt to even the surface of the wood because, in a curious way, these words embossed by that unknown hand seemed to represent to her the holy trinity of life in the East End – Love and Hate connected by Fear.

  The world she had entered was one that was filled with smells of the unknown – the food, the dirt, the very air she breathed all had the sense of the unfamiliar. Yet there was something distinctly exotic here, in the faces of the people, dark, pallid, pained and yet so expressive and so unlike the rough and ruddy faces of her younger years in the countryside. But it was the smells, the raw, filthy odours, which had first hypnotised her far more than the visual as these effluvia entered her body and lingered there mingling with her bodily chemistry until she, herself, was part of them. It horrified her, these smells that invaded her propriety. And yet once she had allowed it to happen, they took her over and, far more than the visual images which formed the matter of her work, they soon became part of her inner ambiance – so much so that when she left this world to re-enter her own little England, it
was the scent of rosewater and cologne that seemed to her strange.

  When she sat at her little desk, pencil in hand, the words came out but not in the same manner as with Z. There wasn’t that easy flow as if tapping into an inner stream and running with the current. For her words were more tortured as she was writing to expose the evils of poverty and misfortune and thus needed to find the phrases that described the imagery which related to those concepts. If her eye was to be a camera, her pencil was a stylus of light that she indelibly imposed onto her canvas. But her camera was focused on subjects she, herself, had positioned, so her eye could only see what her brain allowed.

  Today, however, her writing took a different turn. The pencil in her hand seemed to override her censorious biology which had been so effective up till now keeping it in line. And she wrote of a woman, maybe her age, maybe a little older or a little younger. The actual age didn’t matter for it wasn’t the years that accounted for the pallid face and sunken eyes of this character. It was something else, not the phases of the moon nor the elliptical motion of the earth around the sun, that gave this woman’s face its mystery. As she put down her pencil and stared at the jagged carvings in the wood, Maggie realised she could describe the face in minute detail. She could even write about a mole curiously located under the woman’s nose that became a hypnotic focal point for anyone who looked at it. But she couldn’t get any deeper than that even though she was aware what lay beyond the crust was far more interesting. She could make this character walk and she could dress it in believability, if believability existed in simply three dimensions, but she couldn’t get underneath the skin – the fourth dimension where the heart and soul resided. And that is exactly where she wished to be – someplace on the other side of the looking glass. Though, once there, she wasn’t absolutely sure she could find her way back out again.