Jack the Ripper's London

How London's Socioeconomic and Industrial Changes Led to the Birth of England's Most Infamous Serial Killer

Commercial Street in Whitechapel, late 1800s 
(photo source)

When Alexandrina Victoria ascended to the throne of England in June of 1837, London was the largest city in the world, boasting not only the largest port (an honor held for about a decade), but the heart of global finance, trade and politics.  At the start of the 19th century, London's population was around 1 million.  By the end of the century, the population was nearly seven times that size, larger than Beijing, Paris and five times greater than that of New York City.   With the population bloat, London's actual territory expanded as well.  At 122 square miles around 1850, by the end of the century it had expanded to 693 miles. 

The port of London, in addition to being the largest port in the world, was also a major shipbuilding center, producing some of the most technologically advanced vessels the world had seen.   Unfortunately, the ports simply didn't have the capacity to endure the massive growth, rendering its operations less than efficient.  Ships clogged the stretch of the Thames known as the Pool of London, with sailors sometimes having to wait as long as a week or more to unload cargo, an invitation not only for theft but also evasion of paying import duties.  The sailors brought their earnings, however meager, into the local pubs where they would spend it on drink and women.   

With its financial, political and international trade connections, London soon became a draw for immigrants throughout Europe and the colonies.  A famine in Ireland led to 20% of London's residents being Irish, a population large enough in itself to make up a city the size of Limerick, Belfast, and Cork combined.  The Jewish population in London was estimated as a sizable 46,000 souls in 1882, many of them having fled to London to escape persecution and poverty.  Most of the Jewish community ended up in the area of London known as the East End, the core of Eastern London north of the Thames and indisputably, the poorest district of London.  

The East End and Whitechapel in 1888

Much of London celebrated Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in the summer of 1887 with adornments of  Union Jacks and royal standards, toasting to the Queen's health with champagne, claret and beer,   In a perfect homage to Victorian life (at least for the upper classes), concerts, picnics, dinners, regattas, puppet shows for children and services at Westminster Abbey were held. Debutantes and eligible bachelors danced and sipped lemonade with little knowledge or concern as to what was happening outside their sheltered environments.  

The spring leading into summer of 1887 had been a particularly warm and dry one, leading to water shortages and destroyed harvests.  Unemployment soared, thanks to the lack of agricultural jobs due to the drought.  With no produce to ship, move and sell, it also meant the working class that came into London in an attempt to find work at Covent Garden Market instead found themselves sleeping rough on the streets or in Trafalgar Square.   

This all coincided with Britain's industrial preeminence being challenged by America and Germany.  A trade slump had begun to fester the previous decade and by 1887 and 1888, it led to massive unemployment.  There was a clear line drawn between the West End, where the upper and middle classes resided, and the East End, where the poor working class was shuttered away.  

If the East End was the poorest area of London, the district of Whitechapel was its epicenter, a slum and ghetto where the occupants suffered from poverty, overcrowding, starvation, homelessness and desperation.   Until the mid-nineteenth century the city had been prosperous but by the time Jack the Ripper began making his murderous swath through the area, it was one of the most dangerous areas in London. 

The streets were dirty by day, with sewage, rotting fruit, runoff from the slaughterhouses, human waste and animal waste from the many horses that clip-clopped throughout the area at all times of day and night.  Even in the middle of the day, Whitechapel seemed to be perpetually under a blanket of gloom.  Smoke belched from the nearby shipyard, as well as the multitude of factories, clogging the air.  The stench of waste (human and animal), the slaughterhouses and body odors comingled constantly with the overwhelming hopelessness.  At night, gas street lamps were manually lit by men who climbed ladders to do so.  Lighting was rarely more than adequate and only in certain areas.  Some alleys and walkways were cloaked in almost complete darkness. 

The streets, from the peak of the morning's light to the night's darkest hour, were never silent.  Besides the echoing noise of horses' hooves, drunkards yelled of their discontent at passersby, street performers and barrel organs played on, hawkers yelled of their wares, and soapbox preachers attempted to get the guilty to repent.  

Crime was rampant, along with daily cruelty, making Whitechapel somewhat inured to brutality.  Of the children born there, only half would live to see their fifth birthday, dying from either malnutrition, disease or accident.  Domestic disputes and drunken fights were so commonplace that many who lived in Whitechapel and the East End simply ignored them.  Murder, however, was uncommon.

1888, off Dorset Street in Whitechapel (photo source) 

  

Employment for the majority of residents was mostly intermittent.  The docks always offered jobs but this required turning up early to await a foreman at the gates, where the sought-after positions were literally fought over; kicking, punching and even biting was a normal means of getting to the front of the line and thus, securing a job.  

Ohers toiled in the many sweatshops and factories that dotted Whitechapel and its environs, from boot making to cabinet making.  The hours were long (10 to 18 hours a day, six days a week) and the pay was abysmal.  An inexperienced factory worker might collect 4 shillings for a week's work (there were 20 shillings to the pound), one shilling less than the 5 shillings required for reasonable lodgings in the poorer areas.  Women who could operate a sewing machine could hope to make 16 shillings a week.  Showing up late to work would likely garner you a financial penalty, as could having dirty feet or an untidy work area.  Some workers were subjected to the constant breathing in of noxious fumes and/or fibers, leading to debilitating respiratory disorders, for which they were given no remedy, and sometimes death.  As there was always another man, woman or child willing to take someone's place, job security was nonexistent.    

The public houses, or pubs, were always busy with many of Whitechapel's residents attempting to drink away their misery, at least for a while.  The pubs, and their closing times, provided thieves, pickpockets and other cunning folks with opportune (and often inebriated) targets.     

The majority of Whitechapel's residents lived in one of the dwelling houses that densely packed the streets.  Oftentimes, as many as 20 people resided in a dwelling, with entire families sharing a single, squalid room.  These buildings were often infested with rats and mice.  The toilet facilities were either a hole dug into the cellar of the property, with the resultant odors and unsanitary conditions, or an outhouse.  Since many of the dwelling houses did not have bathtubs or washing facilities, communal wash houses were available in the area - if the resident could afford it.  If not, neither clothes nor body was washed.  

Landlords of these properties were very often greedy, renting the rooms at extortionate rates and packing as many people as possible into a property.  Unsurprisingly, disease was rampant.  A cholera outbreak had killed more than 3,000 in the 1860s.  Sexually transmitted diseases were common and incurable.

For those who were not fortunate enough to be able to afford to pay for a dwelling house were the lodging houses or doss houses.  In doss houses, four pence paid simply for a bed for the night, where the occupant was packed into an overcrowded facility with poor conditions.  Some of the area's doss houses would let a bed to one person during the day and another during the evening, a sort of "relay" system, and some even let their beds in eight-hour shifts, allowing the owner to basically collect three rent payments for the same bed.  For two pence, some of the lodging houses would allow a person to lean against a rope that was strung from one wall to another.  It was not unusual to have prostitutes conducting their business in a bed next to a poverty-stricken mother and her child.   

Those who didn't have the funds for a lodging house, or who used their money for drink instead, could be found "sleeping rough," choosing to attempt to sleep in doorways and stairwells and even up against gates throughout the area.  These "accommodations" were free but left the individual vulnerable to other homeless, knife-wielding gangs and, eventually, Jack the Ripper.   

      

The "Fallen" Women

The queen's own identification with strict moral codes had an unusual juxtaposition with London during her reign, as well as general notions of the time as far as marriage, sex, and independence.  Divorce was not only taboo at the time but costly enough to elude most working class couples.  While men could retain their jobs and standing in the community after separating from their wives and unofficially remarrying with another woman, the wives, by comparison, had no such luxury.  Married, they had no independence; they could not own property and could not execute contracts.  Without the protection of their husband, and living outside of what was considered conventional matrimony, they were considered "fallen women," unlikely to find what was considered respectable work and provide for themselves.  Women who were fortunate enough to receive financial support from their estranged husbands could just as quickly find that support forfeited should their husbands ever be able to prove they were cohabitating with another man (even if the husband was living with another woman.)  

For the most unfortunate of women, who received no financial support (and this included widows who had received nothing on their husband's deaths), they could apply for public assistance.  In that case, they had to prove their husbands abandoned them (either by leaving or via death) and therefore, they were destitute.  Such an admission required them to live and work in the local workhouses, labeled an "inmate" and forced to wear a uniform.  Workhouses were little more than institutions rife with squalor, degradation, and sexual violence.  Meals were sparse, often a watery porridge made of bread, cheese and potatoes.  Vermin infestation was common, as was illness.  Work was hard labor consisting of stone-breaking, milling corn, and using a spike and bare hands to pull apart ship ropes for fibers that could be used to caulk ships.      

So horrific were the workhouses that it was not uncommon to hear of women who chose to end their lives versus going into a workhouse.  One such woman reportedly set herself alight, after asking two children for matches with which to do the job and ended up in the morgue.  

For other women, sex work seemed a preferable option to the workhouse.  Back in 1888, prostitution was not illegal.  Unfortunately, whether working in a brothel, kept by wealthy men or soliciting on a street corner, be it full-time or part-time, the women were stained by the association and were unable to escape it.

Young women were not immune from the necessity of sex work, should their parents or siblings be unable to work.  In such cases, the daughters/sisters were expected to contribute to the family's coffer however they could. 

It was unknown exactly how many females were forced to prostitute themselves in order to survive.  The founder of the Salvation Army claimed 60,000 to 80,000 in the East End, although that number may have been exaggerated.  At the height of Jack the Ripper's reign, the police constables believed there were 1,200 prostitutes just in the quarter-mile area to the east and west of Commercial Street in Whitechapel and they were "mostly of a very low condition." 

This particular class of prostitutes, most of whom were homeless, were called "unfortunates."  These were the workers who would lead clients into the darkest alleys and corners of Whitechapel, where there was less chance of interruption by police or anyone else.  It also put them at greater risk.  Besides Jack the Ripper in 1888, they were also vulnerable to gangs who would often beat them in order to steal their pitiful earnings, clients who would do the same in order to get out of paying them and on occasion, even other prostitutes who would get territorial over someone else coming into her territory.

During the winter of 1887/1888, Frederick Charrington, heir to a local brewing dynasty, took it upon himself to rid the East End of vice.  The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 allowed him, as a citizen, to report any house suspected of operating as a brothel to the police -- and he did so.  Police reportedly closed down 200 brothels, which had dire results for the displaced workers.  For those who did not pack up and move elsewhere (and "spread their moral contagion elsewhere" as newspapers of the time reported), they were forced to work on the streets, amid all types of weather and potential violence.  Charrington, instead of being a do-gooder, was accused of adding to the general misfortune.    

For those in the West End, who preferred to live as though the East End simply did not exist, when they did think of sex workers, it was under the misapprehension that they were doing so out of an immoral desire for sex.  

Some of London's finest, circa 1888 (photo source) 

The Police

To patrol London before, during and after Jack the Ripper, were two police forces:  the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police.  Both were dealing with a serious manpower shortage.  For London's over five million occupants, the city had a reported 14,000 officers.   

At that time, officers were allowed to be men only.  Wearing a blue uniform and hat, their gear consisted of a wooden baton, handcuffs (called shackles in those days), a lantern, and a whistle to signal for assistance.  

Sixty percent of the police force worked the night shift - 10 p.m. until 6 a.m., patrolling their beat on foot.  Most officers walked up to 20 miles a day during their shift, moving at the regulated pace of two and a half miles per hour.  The passageways that snaked through areas like Whitechapel made the officers' jobs that much harder; standing on a street corner, they could only see what was happening on that particular street at that particular intersection.  

For most of the officers, they weren't able to prevent crime so much as catching criminals in the act. 

They were, however, kept constantly busy.  Those who broke the law, if convicted, faced harsh conditions.  Prisons were notoriously tough with enforced hard labor and damp cells.  Being sentenced to flogging and whipping was not uncommon, nor was a date with the hangman.  Public executions were banned in 1868 but reporters would still flock to the prisons, where executions were carried out inside the prison walls.  In 1887, the year before the Ripper committed his acts that would put him into infamy, 21 men and women died on the gallows.

Standard police equipment in 1888 (photo source)

   

The Metropolitan Police was headed by Sir Charles Warren, a Wales native with extensive military service before becoming Police Commissioner.  At first hailed by The Times upon his commission, Warren came under fire during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in June of 1887 when an allegedly respectable young seamstress was arrested for alleged solicitation.  When the seamstress's employer supported her in the courts, and was quite verbal about it, Warren, and the Metropolitan Police, took a bashing in the press.

The more radical press turned against him completely only months later, in November of 1887 when Warren, in response to a socialist demonstration in Trafalgar Square, sent in baton-wielding police officers, soldiers, and mounted police.  While the majority of the 40,000 protestors were peaceful, the small percentage that was not were armed with knives, pokers, and iron bars and pipes.  The result was a violent explosion that ended with 75 persons badly injured and 400 persons arrested and would become known as "Bloody Sunday."  Worse, it became known that Warren had turned down the use of a steam fire engine as a water cannon in order to clear protestors more peacefully out of the Square.

(photo source) 

Warren's style of leadership also apparently caused problems within the police department itself.  Things grew so bad between him and his assistant commissioner, James Monro, that Monro abruptly quit on August 31, 1888 -- in the very thick of the Ripper investigation.  The department, already stretched thin and working on what would end up being the greatest unsolved murder cases in Britain's history, were demoralized and worn out.  

To replace Munro and given direct responsibility for the Ripper case, a Dublin-born lawyer by the name of Dr. Robert Anderson was chosen.   Unfortunately, Anderson arrived on the job suffering from exhaustion and within a week was forced to take recuperative leave to Switzerland, a break that would last a month.  To take Anderson's place, at least until October, was Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, who would eventually become most knowledgeable about the elusive Ripper.    

Within the Metropolitan Police were divisions, each of which had responsibility for policing a specific area.   Once the ghastly murders of 1888 began, two different divisions would be involved in the investigations:  H and J.  

The H Division was headed by a popular detective called Edmund Reid.  Reid, who had been a pastry cook and a ship's steward before joining the force in 1872, had the unusual distinction of being the shortest man with the Metropolitan Police, standing at only five foot six.   In 1887, he succeeded Frederick Abberline as the Local Inspector and Head of the Criminal Investigation Department at H Division in Whitechapel.   Reid, unlike many of his coworkers, was spared the brutal criticisms they were regularly subjected to by the increasingly hostile press.

Frederick Abberline, after moving to Scotland Yard following his tenure in the H Division, would soon return to Whitechapel.  The former clockmaker, who had been with the Metropolitan Police since 1863, was placed in charge of the J Division on August 31, 1888 - the same day that James Munro resigned and the day Ripper victim Mary Ann Nichols was murdered.  His extensive experience in the Whitechapel area led him to be placed in charge of the detectives investigating the Ripper murders, leading the on-the-ground hunt for the unknown killer.

The murder of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square on September 30, 1888 took place in the City of London and so fell within the jurisdiction of the City of London Police.  Acting Commissioner Major Henry Smith and Detective Inspector James McWilliam, whose forte pre-Ripper was the investigation of financial fraud, joined the investigation with the Metropolitan Police.

George Lusk (photo source)

The Mile End, or Whitechapel, Vigilance Committee

On September 10, 1888, following Annie Chapman's murder by the Ripper, a group of some sixteen Whitechapel and Spitalfields businessmen and tradesmen got together to form a volunteer group to patrol the streets of Whitechapel during the Ripper's killing season.  They elected local builder George Lusk as their president and made it their goal to assist the police in bringing the killer to justice.   

They orchestrated their own nighttime patrols of the area, paying unemployed men a small stipend and furnishing them with a police whistle and stick, and worked on raising funds to offer as a reward for information on the Ripper.   The Committee met each evening at 9 p.m. in The Crown pub. 

As president and chairman, Lusk's name appeared in national newspapers and posters around Whitechapel, bringing him unwanted attention and threats, the most famous of which would be the October 15, 1888 "From Hell" letter address to him and containing half of a human kidney.    

(photo source)

 The Newspapers

Before the  mid-1880s, newspapers had been subject to a wide variety of taxes that made them very expensive and typically beyond the average person's means.  Repealing these taxes over a decade or so, along with the Education Act of 1870 in which elementary education was compulsory, meant that newspapers would reach a wider mass of the populace.  

Circulation skyrocketed and led to more newspapers being launched.  By 1880, there were a reported 158 daily newspapers in the United Kingdom, all of them in a daily circulation war, working hard to grab a maximum share of the readers' market.  

At the same time, a new kind of journalism emerged, one we recognize today as investigative journalism, brought about by a fascination of the habits of the rich and famous and an ever-growing need for sensationalism.  The paper Truth exposed political and financial scandals while the Pall Mall Gazette exposed society scandals.   

On January 17, 1888, a newspaper called The Star made its debut in London.  Its editor, Thomas P. O'Connor, found a young journalist named Ernest Parke who could be trusted to come up with daily sensationalistic stories.  While all the papers would devote coverage to the Ripper, it was O'Connor, and The Star in particular, who realized the public's thirst for every gory detail and went about titillating its readers with any morsel, no matter how small, it could find.   Soon, The Star had reached unparalleled circulation, particularly with its evening editions.   

Before long, the other newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, making a cottage industry of not only the Ripper but pointing out the local police's mistakes and missteps and suggesting they were buffoons.  

Journalist William Le Queux, who wrote for The Globe, would write in 1923 of "writing lurid and picturesque details" while he and two journalist friends "stood in the very spot where the tragedy occurred."  If one newspaper published a theory on how the murder happened, a competing newspaper would publish its own the following day, leading another newspaper to do the same the following day, and so on.  Truth mattered little when death, disaster and murder sold papers.    

Other Attacks and Acts of Murder

At the time the Ripper picked up his knife in 1888, a string of murders in London spanning nearly 15 years had been taking place.  Beginning in September of 1873, when a portion of a woman's torso had been found floating in the Thames (more body parts, including her severed head, were discovered over the next seven days but she was never identified), six more victims would be found , with the last being discovered in July of 1887.  All victims were women and none were ever identified.   Neither was their killer or killers, who was dubbed "The Embankment Killer," 

On February 25, 1888, a 38-year-old widow named Annie Milwood was admitted to the Whitechapel Infirmary with numerous stab wounds in her legs and "the lower part" of her body.  She said she had been attacked by a man with a clasp knife that he had pulled from his pocket and claimed to not know him.  It is not known where the actual attack took place, although the time was said to be at 5 p.m., but Annie lived in a lodging house at Number 8 White's Row in Spitalfields, very near the Ten Bells pub and the Christ Church on Commercial Street.  She survived the knife attack but on March 31, after being admitted to the South Grove Workhouse on Mile End and while working at the rear of the building, she fell.  It was assumed she was ill.  She was, in fact, dead.  

On Tuesday night, April 3, a woman named Malvina Haynes was attacked by a knife-wielding man near the Leman Street railway station.  Her screams for help got the attention of a nearby lodging house keeper, who came outside to investigate.  He arrived to see Malvina being attacked "with great violence" and her assailant ran off.   By the time a police constable arrived, Malvina was lying in a pool of blood, moaning and "insensible."  Upon arrival at London Hospital on Whitechapel Road it was determined that she was suffering from "a concussion of the brain" and a scalp wound "of rather extensive character."  She was not expected to recover, much less survive, but after laying unconscious for a week she did recover but with no memory of her attack.  Unlike Annie Milwood, Malvina Haynes was a married woman, or at least considered herself to be a married woman.  

On the same night of Tuesday, April 3, a 45-year-old widow by the name of Emma Smith suffered a horrible, and ultimately fatal, attack.  She had been on Whitechapel High Street around 1:30 a.m., heading back to her lodgings on George Street when she saw "some men" coming and crossed the road to get out of their way.  They followed her to Osborn Street and Brick Lane and near Taylor Brothers Limited, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer on Brick Lane, she was "assaulted in the most brutal manner" and robbed of what little money she had.  She managed to get herself back to her lodgings on George Street, her face bleeding, her right ear torn, and with an injury "to the lower part" of her body - a blunt instrument had been forced into her vagina with such force that it had penetrated her peritoneum (the membrane that lines the abdominal cavity) and caused peritonitis.  Emma could not describe her attackers other than to say that one of them she suspected was a youth of around 19.  

Emma was taken to the London Hospital on Whitechapel Road, same as Malvina Haynes, but she wasn't as lucky.  Soon after arriving, she fell into a coma and died.  

On Saturday, May 5, 26-year-old Georgina Green, a resident of Spitalfields, was attacked by a man as she walked along to Whitechapel in the early hours of the morning.  She was stabbed in the forehead and lost "a quantity of blood" but was taken to London Hospital on Whitechapel Road and survived.  

Whoever attacked and/or killed these women remained at large as Jack took to the streets and were never caught.    

Whitechapel in 1888 (photo source)

 

Sources:

Jack the Ripper 1888 (2021).  The Metropolitan Police 1888.

Jack the Ripper Tour (5/10/2017).  London in 1888.

Jones, Richard.  The Jack the Ripper Files, Andre Deutsch Limited, 2015.

Mr. Castle History (2021).  The Metropolitan Police, 1888.

Priestley, M.P.  One Autumn in Whitechapel, Flower and Dean Street Ltd., 2016.

Roland, Paul.  The Crimes of Jack the Ripper: The Whitechapel Murders Reexamined, Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2012.

The Jack the Ripper Tour (2021).  Jack the Ripper and the London Press.

The Victorian Web (2021).  Slums and Slumming in Late Victorian London.

Trow, M.J. Jack the Ripper:  Quest for a Killer, Pen & Sword Books Ltd., 2009.

Whitechapel Jack (2021).  The 1888 Autumn of Terror.