Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper

by Peter Thurgood

  The Clerkenwell House of Detention, which was just a very short distance away from Abberline’s patch, had housed many felons over the years, including at one time the notorious highwayman Jack Shepperd. Prisoners came and went at this prison, some detained for many years, others hanged and some, from time to time, released. People could be imprisoned during this time for the pettiest of offences, from stealing a handkerchief to begging on the street for food.

  In November this same year (1867), Richard O’Sullivan-Burke was remanded in custody alongside a compatriot, Joseph Casey, at the Clerkenwell House of Detention. The two men had been charged with planning the outrageous escape of a well-known Fenian member from a prison van in Manchester a few months earlier.

  Scotland Yard, alongside the British Intelligence Services, seemed to have completely overlooked the fact that Richard O’Sullivan-Burke, one of the Fenian chief armaments officers, and his second-in-command, Joseph Casey, were incarcerated in the middle of London. The very city which, as reliable sources had informed them, was about to become the target of more Fenian atrocities.

  While all eyes in Great Britain were focused upon finding possible Fenian groups here, with special emphasis being placed upon the capital, it was still business as usual back in Belfast. Orders were being issued from Fenian High Command in Ireland that Richard O’Sullivan-Burke and Joseph Casey should be sprung from the Clerkenwell House of Detention as soon as possible, as their expertise was sorely needed.

  Two weeks passed without any further arrests being made in London. Abberline and his men had started to relax and were beginning to think that the whole Fenian threat had been called off. In fact, far from being called off, it was just about to erupt.

  Just before 4 p.m. on 13 December, a horse and carriage drew to a halt at the end of St James’s Walk in Clerkenwell. One side of the street consisted of a tall wall which enclosed part of the Clerkenwell House of Detention; the other side of the road consisted of a grimy row of tenement houses, whose windows were bereft of any light due to the closeness of the prison wall, and being December, the sun had also started to set.

  Two young men emerged from the carriage and started to manhandle a large object, which turned out to be a barrel, out of the door and onto the pavement. The horse and carriage drove off, leaving the two men to move the barrel by turning it onto one edge and wheeling it along the street. St James’s Walk was quite busy with people going about their work and doing their everyday shopping, as the young men wheeled the barrel past them. No one seemed to take any notice at all as the two young men reached the corner of the wall, turned the barrel up straight, and placed it against it; no one, that is, apart from a small boy about 6 years old, who was sitting on his doorstep opposite. He watched as one of the men pulled a short fuse from the side of the barrel and then lit it. As the fuse started to spit and crackle, the two men ran away as quickly as they could. The young boy, however, being curious as children of his age are, crossed the street to get a closer look at the sparkling fuse. Seconds later, the fuse ignited the gunpowder, which the barrel was packed with. The explosion was tremendous, instantly killing the young boy and blowing an enormous hole in the prison wall, sending bricks and debris flying in all directions.

  The explosion was heard for miles around, and it knocked down nearby tenement houses across the street in Corporation Lane (now Row). Four people were killed instantly, including the young boy, and eight died later of their wounds with at least another 120 injured, including many children. The bombers’ idea had been to detonate the explosives while their comrades inside the prison were exercising in the yard, thus blowing a big enough hole in the wall for them to climb through and escape.

  The two young bombers, however, were complete amateurs and had no idea of how much gunpowder they needed to use, and how much damage they were going to cause. Luckily for their comrades, and all the other prisoners inside, the two amateurs had chosen the wrong wall, and no prisoners were exercising on the other side of it. If they had been, they would surely have been killed.

  There was public outrage at the incident. The press demanded to know why two very important people within the Fenian movement were kept in a London prison with no visible police presence, when it was common knowledge within the police that a Fenian plot to bomb London was at hand. Calls were made for a shake up within the police service and for a permanent solution to the Irish problem. So vociferous did the press become on this issue that it became an urgent priority for the incoming Liberal government. Abberline’s team was quietly and quickly disbanded, and the government authorised the foundation of a new specialist department which was to be known as the Secret Service Department.

  To say Abberline was dispirited was an understatement to say the least. He felt that he had accomplished a great deal in the short while he had been working on this particular case, and that it was not the Fenians who had caused this massive incident, but a pair of amateurs trying to make a name for themselves within the Fenian movement. His suspicions were confirmed when he paid another visit to the Horse and Groom pub and made contact with his ‘friend’ Martin again. He told Abberline that the two young tearaways he had warned him off earlier had entered the pub about an hour after the bombing, both looking quite dishevelled and one of them had a large burn on his hand. Abberline was sure in his mind that it was this pair that had caused the bombing, but by this time they had completely disappeared from the London scene. He passed the information on to his superiors, who seemed to ignore him completely.

  Some months later, the newly formed Secret Service Department arrested a man named Michael Barrett, and charged him with the Clerkenwell bombing. Months earlier, before the Clerkenwell incident, Michael Barrett had been arrested in Glasgow for illegally discharging a firearm. The prosecution alleged that Barrett had told another man, an Irishman named Patrick Mullany, that he had carried out the Clerkenwell bombing with an accomplice by the name of Murphy.

  In court, Barrett produced a list of witnesses who testified he had been in Scotland on the date of the bombing, but the court was more inclined to believe Mullany, who had a criminal record and had been found guilty of giving false testimony to a court on a previous occasion. After two hours’ deliberation the jury pronounced Michael Barrett guilty. He was subsequently hanged, and was the last man to be publicly hanged in England. Patrick Mullany was rewarded with a free passage to Australia.

  While all this was going on, Abberline’s team was disbanded and he found himself back in uniform once again, demoted to normal everyday duties including mundane activities like arresting street drunks, pickpockets, rowdy children and even rounding up stray dogs – something the police took very seriously at the time, as they were often used by local thugs as weapons.

  Abberline felt despondent and demoralised. He had gained important information on one of the most dangerous organisations in Great Britain; he had made numerous arrests, which in all probability had stopped other atrocities being carried out; and he had also offered yet more information on the identity of the real bombers. His reward for all this work had been his demotion, and in his opinion, an innocent man had been sent to the gallows.

  At this point in time, the shine had diminished somewhat from his police work, and Abberline found that, to take his mind off the mundane work he was being allocated, he started to socialise more by going to pubs and spending the occasional night at the theatre. One Saturday evening he was invited to dinner at a colleague’s house, where he was introduced to a lovely 25-year-old girl, Martha Mackness, who was a friend of his colleague’s wife. It seems that the purpose of inviting both himself and Martha Mackness was to hopefully pair them off. It certainly worked, for Frederick George Abberline, who under normal circumstances was not very comfortable around women, pulled his chair closer to hers and chatted constantly to her, almost ignoring his hosts throughout the whole evening.

  Abberline wasted no time in arranging to see Martha again and picked her up from her rented accommodation i
n Islington the following morning. Abberline was certainly a God-fearing man, but not exactly an avid church-goer, but being a Sunday, and probably in the hope of impressing her, he took her along to his local church which was only a very short distance from his police lodgings. After the service they walked over Highbury Fields and, even though there was snow on the ground and the air was freezing, Abberline felt warmth and comfort with Martha.

  The couple saw more and more of each other throughout the following weeks, and within six weeks they had decided to get married. Abberline told Martha about his early life in the pretty little village on the River Stour, in Dorset, and of his early ambitions to open a clock-making shop there. By this time, Abberline felt totally despondent with the police force and was seriously thinking of giving it all up and moving back to Dorset. Martha was a little more realistic than Abberline and talked him into waiting for a while; after all, she explained, he was still relatively young, had his own flat and was earning a decent wage by the standards of the day.

  Abberline took notice of Martha, and they married in Islington, in March 1868. She moved into his flat where they planned to stay for a while, until they found a larger place where they could hopefully start a family.

  Life was idyllic for the first few weeks, with Abberline and his new wife still acting like a young courting couple. At weekends they would go for walks in the park during the day and sometimes the theatre during the evening. Martha was a wonderful cook and would always have a meal ready and waiting for Abberline when he got home from work in the evenings. Just five weeks after they were married, Abberline returned home from work to find Martha lying in bed. She was terribly pale and couldn’t stop coughing; she said that she felt very weak, and couldn’t bring herself to eat anything.

  Thinking that it was probably nothing more than a bad winter cold or chest infection, which would normally clear up within a few days or so, Abberline did not take it too seriously. By the end of the week, though, her condition had deteriorated; she now had a very high temperature and was coughing up blood. Abberline rushed to the nearest doctor and told him of Martha’s symptoms. The doctor wasted no time and returned to Abberline’s flat with him, where he diagnosed Martha with tuberculosis. Within two weeks Martha was dead. They had been married just eight weeks.

  Needless to say, Abberline was devastated. He had Martha’s body taken back to Oundle, Northamptonshire, where her family originally came from, and she was buried in the local churchyard. He stayed in the area for nearly two weeks, contemplating his future, which he found hard to perceive without his beloved Martha. Friends and family eventually talked him into returning to London and continuing with his career in the police force, which he eventually did. There was only one thing for it, in his mind, and that was to throw himself into his work with renewed vigour, in the hope of overcoming his distress. He couldn’t bear to move back into his old flat, which was filled with memories of his life there with Martha, so he put in a request for a change of accommodation and was quickly given a new place in Kentish Town Road police station.

  He worked day and night, refusing even to take a Sunday off. His sole purpose in his private life was to try to forget Martha, which he never really did, but he did manage to turn his life around regarding his police work. Within a few months he had been promoted to police sergeant, which was a great achievement, especially at such a catastrophic time in his life. Although his promotion gave him more money and prestige, it still didn’t offer him exactly what he had always been looking for, which was more detective work. He had a taste of it while he was investigating the Fenians but had been demoted from it – something he was still smarting from. Now, however, his promotion would hopefully lead to another chance, but for the time being his duties consisted of him patrolling his North London beat, exactly as he had done as a constable.

  As unexciting as this period in his life was, it did help him to an extent to take his mind off his great loss. It was probably the sheer quantity of cases he had to handle, rather than any real interesting facts they might possibly throw up, that helped in this instance. Most cases he had to deal with were very mundane: cases such as drunks charged with assault, a man charged with stealing a purse, another with forging a cheque, and yet another charged with stealing 5s. In 1872, probably one of his more interesting cases was the arrest of three women, Elizabeth Sullivan, Maria Sullivan and Jane Adams, all three charged with disorderly conduct for the ‘heinous’ crime of dressing in male attire. If this law still applied in Britain today, probably 60 per cent of the female population would have to be arrested and charged with wearing trousers and masculine-looking shirts and jackets.

  Another interesting case was that of Thomas Ross, who was charged with unlawful gaming; this involved two men or more playing a game of pitch and toss, where they toss up a coin and call ‘heads or tails’. Not exactly organised crime by any standards, but together with more petty larceny, and drunk and disorderly charges, Abberline somehow managed to fill his days and nights, and take his mind off the terrible loss of his wife. Another case, which is worth mentioning, was one that involved the Great Eastern Railway Company, which was charged with obstructing the public thoroughfare. It isn’t very clear just how a railway company managed to obstruct a public thoroughfare: not with a locomotive engine surely?

  Abberline’s diligence, and his often very boring work, managed to get him through his bad period, although it didn’t happen overnight. The days progressed into weeks, the weeks into months, and the months into years, until finally, on 10 March 1873, he was promoted again, this time to inspector, and transferred to H Division, Whitechapel.

  This was just what he had been waiting for: real promotion and a completely different setting. Whitechapel had long been known as a hotbed of crime, which would presumably be something he could really sink his teeth into.

  There was more to Whitechapel than the newly promoted Inspector Abberline could ever have dreamt of. There were certain streets where police officers wouldn’t patrol, unless in pairs. Before leaving the office, the outgoing superintendent in charge of H Division stated that assaults on police officers were more frequent in H Division than any other part of the country. This was an area where the inhabitants fought with each other using knives, knuckledusters and coshes.The intended victim, who was usually a drunk emerging from a pub, would be mugged, in the hope that he or she might provide the mugger with their beer money for the evening. Apart from shopkeepers, many of whom employed personal minders, no respectable person, man or woman, would walk through many of these streets, especially at night.

  It didn’t take Abberline long to find out most of these facts; and far from putting him off, they made him more determined than ever to make the streets of Whitechapel safe again for ordinary people. He was probably one of the first police officers in Great Britain to install amongst his officers what we call today a zero-tolerance policy.

  Just a couple of weeks after becoming installed at H Division, a case was brought to his attention which involved a Jewish shopkeeper named Abraham Kikal, who had apparently attacked two men with an axe. One of the men lost two fingers in the attack and the other one suffered multiple cuts and bruises.

  Abberline went down to the cells where Kikal was being held. He wanted to see for himself what sort of monster could commit such a crime on an open street in broad daylight. He interviewed Kikal for nearly an hour before returning to his office, where he summoned the arresting officers. Abberline was furious as he paced up and down his office, shouting at the officers at the top of his voice. ‘How long have you two worked in Whitechapel?’ he asked them. ‘Did either of you take a good look at this man, or ask him his age?’ he demanded. Kikal, it seemed, was in his mid-seventies, and had never been in trouble with the police since he had come to Great Britain some thirty years earlier. The two officers were dumbfounded; they were under the impression that they needed to come down heavily on any wrongdoer, especially one who committed such a violent attack as this.


  ‘This man,’ yelled Abberline, ‘was the victim in this affair, not the aggressor.’ He explained to his men that all Kikal had done was try to protect his business, and possibly his life, from a local gang of thugs known as the Bessarabians, who were demanding protection money from local shopkeepers, stallholders and publicans.

  The Bessarabians were a forty-strong gang, who owed their curious name to a region of southern Russia, located on the Romanian border. They specialised in terrorising mainly Russian Jewish immigrants, who had an ingrained terror of authority and the police in general. In almost every case involving the Bessarabians, the victim refused to give evidence against them and consequently the majority of cases had to be dropped through lack of evidence.

  When local people heard about Kikal, and the way he had stood up to the gang, they decided to organise themselves and take an example from the old man’s books. They set up a vigilante group for their mutual protection, but within a few weeks, the vigilantes, who termed themselves the Odessians, had seen the huge profits that were made by offering protection, and they also started demanding money with menaces.

  Instead of bettering the situation, it grew worse, with shopkeepers now being attacked and beaten up just for paying off the wrong gang. Meanwhile, the Bessarabians and the Odessians fought each other openly on the streets, in a battle for control of the Whitechapel area. At one point, the Odessians lured a leading Bessarabian named Perkoff into an alley and sliced off one of his ears. In revenge, the Bessarabians smashed up a coffee stall which was supposedly under the protection of the Odessians.

  Abberline worked ceaselessly with his team to combat the gangs, but on the rare occasions that the police did manage to get either of the gangs into court, the case would invariably collapse, with witnesses intimidated into silence. The climax eventually came when the two gangs held a meeting, which was to supposedly sort out their differences. The meeting took place in a hall over the York Minster public house in Philpot Street. Needless to say, neither gang would give ground to the other, and within thirty minutes, the 200 gang members present erupted into violence. One man, known as Kid McCoy, who, despite his name, was a Jewish boxer, killed one of his rivals and the police were called in. This time, the evidence was there before them and people started to come forward to add their testimony. A case was brought not just against Kid McCoy, but against the leaders of the gangs as well. The case ended up in court and both gangs were eventually smashed.