Complete History of Jack the Ripper (52 page)

Inevitably the double murder lashed the press into fresh volleys of vituperation against the Metropolitan Police and its masters. Matthews’ refusal to sanction a government reward was condemned on all sides. The
Daily Telegraph
, so representative of Conservative opinion, denounced the Home Secretary as a ‘helpless, heedless, useless figure’ while the radical
Star
accused him of ‘philandering with pot-house Tories at Birmingham while God’s poor are being slaughtered wholesale in London.’ ‘We do not ask what is the duty of the Home Secretary,’ said the
Pall Mall Gazette
scathingly, ‘because whatever it is he will not do it.’ Criticism of the police,
too, transcended political alignments. The
Star
predictably damned the entire force as ‘rotten to the core.’ But even Conservative journals castigated the CID. The
Daily Telegraph
fumed about the ‘notorious and shameful shortcomings of the Detective Department, or rather of the botched-up makeshift which does duty for a Detective Department at Scotland Yard’ and the
East London Advertiser
considered that there was ‘no detective force in the proper sense of the word in London at all.’
¹⁴
. It was widely believed that under Warren the energies, resources and organization of the police had been subverted from the prevention and detection of crime to the politically motivated containment of outcast London. A huge placard, exhibited at a meeting of the unemployed in Hyde Park on 2 October, summed it all up: ‘The Whitechapel Murders. Where are the Police? Looking after the Unemployed!’

Part of the trouble was that police secrecy made it impossible for press or public to judge how adequately the force
was
discharging its responsibilities. Sir Charles Warren, replying on 3 October to a plea from the Whitechapel District Board of Works for improved policing of the area, assured the board that ‘every nerve’ was being strained to detect the murderer. But, he added, ‘you will agree with me that it is not desirable that I should enter into particulars as to what the police are doing in the matter. It is most important for good results that our proceedings should not be published.’
¹⁵
Curiously, newspaper reporters often contrasted the silence and churlishness of Metropolitan officers with the courtesy and co-operation of their counterparts in the City. Yet both forces embraced the secrecy principle. Thus when Joseph Lawende was called before the Eddowes inquest on 11 October, his description of the suspect was suppressed at the express wish of Henry Crawford, City Solicitor, appearing on behalf of the City Police. In 1888 such tactics effectively blindfolded the press. Now, a century after the crimes, confidential Home Office and Metropolitan Police files have been opened and we can see that despite the ultimate failure of the Ripper hunt a great deal was done.

One of Warren’s first actions after the double killing was to draft extra men into the district. These were transferred temporarily from duties in other divisions. One of them was Frederick Porter Wensley, then a uniformed constable of but nine months’ standing in the Lambeth Division, later to rise to the rank of Chief Constable of CID. In his book,
Detective Days
, published more than forty years
later, Wensley recalled his Whitechapel interlude: ‘In common with hundreds of others I was drafted there and we patrolled the streets – usually in pairs – without any tangible result. We did, however, rather anticipate a great commercial invention. To our clumsy regulation boots we nailed strips of rubber, usually bits of old bicycle tires, and so ensured some measure of silence when walking.’
¹⁶

There were no policewomen in the Metropolitan Police before World War I. Back in 1888, therefore, it was commonly suggested in the press that detectives might successfully entrap the Ripper if they perambulated the streets dressed as women. At that time police recruits were all five feet seven inches in height or over so this idea would not have been as easy to implement as it sounded. Nevertheless, we know of at least one detective who
did
don female disguise. He was Detective Sergeant Robinson of G Division and his activities have come down to us because he became embroiled in a melée with a pair of pugnacious cab-washers in Phoenix Place, St Pancras.

Investigating a rumour that the Ripper was in the neighbourhood, Robinson proceeded to Phoenix Place where, between twelve and one on the morning of 9 October, he was with Detective-Sergeant Mather, one Henry Doncaster and several Italians, watching a man who ‘was in company with a woman under circumstances of great suspicion’. Robinson was disguised in female clothing. At this point the watchers themselves came under the notice of William Jarvis and James Phillips, two cab-washers from a nearby cabyard, and they evidently concluded that the strangers were up to no good.

What happened next depends upon which party one believes. According to Robinson, the cab-washers accosted him in an intimidating manner.

‘What are you messing about here for?’ demanded Jarvis.

Robinson took off his woman’s hat. ‘I am a police officer,’ he said.

‘Oh, you are cats and dogs, are you?’ replied Jarvis. And with that he threw a punch at the detective.

Then, when Robinson grasped him by the coat, Jarvis pulled a knife.

Jarvis and Phillips told a different story. By their account, they asked Robinson’s party what they were doing near the cabs and Robinson told them to mind their own business and thrust Jarvis away by putting a fist against his chin.

Whatever the origins of the dispute, a fierce struggle ensued during which Robinson was stabbed over the left eye and on the bridge of the nose, Doncaster was stabbed in the face and had his jaw dislocated, and Jarvis was cracked across the head with Robinson’s truncheon. Jarvis’ cries for assistance – ‘Come on, George, cats and dogs!’ – brought several other men from the cabyard, armed with pitchforks and other implements. But they made no attempt to use their weapons and, after police reinforcements had come up, Jarvis and Phillips were taken into custody.

The combatants made a sorry sight when they came before Clerkenwell Police Court later in the day, the cab-washers accused of cutting and wounding Detective-Sergeant Robinson. Robinson appeared with surgical straps around his left eye, Doncaster and Jarvis with their heads bound in bloodstained bandages. Robinson contended that he had struck at the hand with which Jarvis had been holding his knife but had missed and struck his head. However, pressed by Mr Ricketts, the prisoners’ solicitor, he conceded that after he had been stabbed he didn’t care whether he hit Jarvis on the hand or the head. The prisoners were remanded for a week and then committed for trial and released on bail. At the end of the month they were tried at the Middlesex Sessions of the Peace for assaulting police in the execution of their duty. Phillips was acquitted but Jarvis was convicted and sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment with hard labour.
¹⁷

The influx into Whitechapel of plain clothes detectives, with or without women’s clothes, must have presented something of a problem to patrolling constables. The night after the murders PC Ludwig, patrolling between Cannon Street Road and Back Church Lane, encountered a very strange figure indeed, its height and masculine stride ill-befitting its shabby raiment as a woman of the town.

‘Stop!’ cried the constable. ‘You’re a man, aren’t you? I can see that you are.’

The figure confessed that it was.

‘Are you one of us?’ queried Ludwig.

No, the man explained, he was not a detective but a reporter who had disguised himself as a prostitute the better to root out copy on the murders.

Ludwig eyed him dubiously and then conducted him to Leman Street Police Station. There, however, his story was verified and he was allowed to go.
¹⁸

Although there was always a chance that the murderer might be taken red-handed attempting another crime, the drafting in of extra men was designed primarily as a short-term, preventative measure. Detection of the criminal required more offensive operations and, in the days immediately after the Stride murder, the Metropolitan Police conducted extensive inquiries and searches throughout Whitechapel.

One was the inevitable visitation of common lodging houses and over 2,000 lodgers were interviewed. By this stage, though, it was commonly believed that if the killer had resorted to such an establishment he would not have escaped notice and that it was more likely that he lived with relatives or in private lodgings. So, in order to solicit information from landlords and their tenants, some 80,000 handbills
¹⁹
were printed and distributed in the area:

Critics doubted the efficacy of this bill, pointing out that it contained no promise of a reward for information leading to the arrest of the killer and that, printed in English, it was incomprehensible to large numbers of the immigrant population, a fact not without significance if it was held that the murderer was a foreigner being sheltered by compatriots.

But other searches were in hand too. Seventy-six butchers and slaughterers were visited by police and the characters of their employees inquired into. The Thames Police investigated sailors working aboard vessels in the docks or on the river. Inquiries were mounted into Asiatics living in London and into the reputed presence of Greek gipsies in the capital. The latter were cleared of suspicion when it was learned that they had not been in London at the times of the murders. Similarly, three cowboys attached to the
American Exhibition were traced and satisfactorily accounted for their whereabouts at the critical times. If the newspapers are to be credited the net was cast wider still, taking in hospitals, workhouses, prisons and vacant buildings.
²⁰

Sir John Whittaker Ellis, a former Lord Mayor of London, wrote to Matthews on 3 October with an idea for a bolder initiative. He suggested that the police draw a half-mile cordon around the centre of Whitechapel and search every house within it. ‘It is a strong thing to do,’ he admitted, ‘but I should think such occasion never before arose.’ A better word than ‘strong’ would have been ‘illegal’ because the police had no authority to forcibly enter and search anyone’s home without a warrant from a magistrate.

Warren baulked at the prospect. He felt that if the search failed to unearth the killer it was sure to be roundly condemned, and worried that such an unlawful step might succeed in uniting the Socialists to resist the operation, endangering the lives of his constables and exposing them, in the event of damage to property or injury to civilians, to dire legal consequences. Writing to Ruggles-Brise, Matthews’ private secretary, on 4 October, Sir Charles declared himself ‘quite prepared to take the responsibility of adopting the most drastic or arbitrary measures that the Secretary of State can name which would further the securing of the murderer, however illegal they may be, provided HM Government will support me.’ But he doubted whether it was worth risking riot and loss of life in order ‘to
search
for one murderer whose whereabouts is not known.’ The next day Matthews replied with a more practicable alternative. Could not the police, he suggested, take all the houses in a given area ‘which appear suspicious upon the best inquiry your detectives can make’, search those for which the permission of the owners or occupiers could be procured and then apply to a magistrate for search warrants to enter the rest? The flaw in his plan, of course, was that since the police didn’t know where the killer might be hiding they would have found it next to impossible to show plausible grounds for the granting of a warrant to search any particular house. That suggested by Matthews – that it was possible ‘the murderer may be there’ – could have been applied to almost any habitation in the metropolis! The Home Secretary did appreciate the difficulty. ‘If search warrants are refused,’ he wrote, ‘you can only keep the houses under observation.’
²¹

In the end it was decided to confine the search to those premises
within a given area for which the consent of the occupier could be obtained and by 13 October the operation was under way. Embracing some of the worst slums of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, the area of the search was bounded by Lamb Street, Commercial Street, the Great Eastern Railway and Buxton Street on the north and Whitechapel Road on the south, by the City boundary on the west and Albert Street, Dunk Street, Chicksand Street and Great Garden Street on the east. There, for the best part of a week, plain clothes officers went from house to house, seeking admission to every room, looking under beds, peering into cupboards, inspecting knives, interviewing landlords and their lodgers. Mrs Andleman of 7 Spelman Street regaled the
Star
with her story of the search: