Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper (6 page)

As even more news involving the Fenians started to seep into British Secret Service agents’ hands, it was decided that an undercover squad of police officers was needed to try to infiltrate the Irish community and investigate any possible Fenian activities in London. As Abberline was a natural choice for this operation, with his history of plain-clothes work, he was, in 1867, assigned to special plain-clothes duties, with orders to do whatever was necessary to infiltrate and report back any anti-British activities within his area.

Abberline’s natural accent was a soft, south country one, but after working in North London for a couple of years, he had quickly picked up quite a reasonable Cockney accent, which was enough to fool most people and one of the reasons he had managed to gain the confidence of the criminal element in his area. The Irish accent, however, was something new to him; it didn’t come naturally as the London Cockney accent had done, but to give him his due, he did try.

There were a number of Irish pubs along the Holloway Road, so dressed in what he thought was suitable attire, Abberline chose a Saturday night to visit as many as he could, in the hope of picking up some hints on the Irish accent, and maybe a word here and there regarding the Fenians.

Most pubs at this time were what is known as ‘spit and sawdust’ pubs, a term relating to the sawdust which was liberally scattered over the floor to accommodate the habit of spitting; it also helped, as Abberline soon found out, soak up the blood from the fights which broke out at regular intervals in such establishments. Guinness was the natural drink in these pubs, sometimes used as a chaser after a dram or two of good Irish whiskey. As Abberline wasn’t exactly a strong drinker, a pint of ale with his colleagues now and then being his usual limit, he soon found himself the worse for wear, and this was in his first pub!

By the end of that first evening, he had learned what to drink, if not how to actually drink it. He had also picked up a few Irish phrases, which were mostly obscenities or profanities, but he had heard no mention of any anti-British or Fenian activity. Not one to give up easily, Abberline continued his quest the following Saturday, and the Saturday after that; this was due mainly to the fact that he had leave on those particular days. He did have permission to carry out this type of undercover work during his normal working week, but he had decided to work alone for the first few weeks, bringing in the rest of his team only when he felt confident enough to show them that he knew the ropes where the Irish contingent were concerned.

After three weeks, the only contact he had managed to make was with a man named Martin, who seemed to like the idea of having an English drinking partner, whom he could brag to about how many people he knew. Not exactly what Abberline had been hoping for, but maybe someone who could be cultivated in the future? He had not heard a mention of the word Fenian, or any other anti-British activity, and as for his hopes of being accepted as an Irishman, that seemed to be completely out of the question, as even his new-found ‘friend’ Martin referred to him as ‘the Brit’.

Abberline decided to change tack. He put several of his team onto surveillance of the Irish pubs, while he decided to disguise himself as a cabdriver. He left his face unshaven for a week or two, wore a cap, polka-dot scarf and an old jacket. Scotland Yard provided the horse-drawn cab, which completed his disguise and allowed him carte blanche to go almost anywhere in London without anyone taking a second glance at him.

It was while waiting at a cab shelter in Kilburn one evening, which was, and still is, a particularly large Irish area of London, that Abberline noticed two young men as they emerged from a house nearby. The men waited on the corner of the street for some time before a third man met them and spoke to them for several minutes. Abberline had thought the men looked suspicious, as it was raining hard yet they did not seek shelter, and the third man wore no hat. After a few minutes, the third man handed one of the men a piece of paper and then left. The two men hurried across the street and asked Abberline to take them to the Horse and Groom pub in Holloway, which was one of the pubs that he had earlier tried to infiltrate.

It was almost impossible to hear what the occupants of the cab were saying, as the noise of the horses hooves, coupled with the heavy patter of the rain, drowned everything out. All Abberline could hear was the constant drone of the men’s voices from within the cab, but not what they were actually saying. He had one option, which was to open the trapdoor in the roof slightly, which he did as carefully and quietly as he could, but instead of hearing their conversation, all he heard was a very strong Irish accent shouting at him, with a few expletives thrown in, to shut that door as they were getting soaked.

As the men alighted from the cab outside the Horse and Groom pub, Abberline tried to get a good look at their faces, but from his position, high above them, this was very difficult. The only thing he did notice was that one of them had a large bushy moustache and, from what he could see of it, bright ginger hair. He continued to watch as the men went to go into the pub and had a slight collision with another man, who was coming out at the same time. By pure chance, this other man proved to be Abberline’s Irish ‘friend’ Martin, who noticed Abberline straight away and leaned up towards him to shake his hand. ‘I didn’t know you were a cabbie,’ he said.’If I had the money, I would ask you to take me to the Three Nuns pub.’ Abberline saw this as a chance to hopefully find out if Martin knew anything about the two men. He lent down, opened the door of the cab and told Martin to jump in. ‘It’s on the house,’ he said.

As the cab rattled along the well-worn cobbles towards the Three Nuns, Martin didn’t seem to mind getting a little wet from the rain, as Abberline opened the trap door and started to talk to him. It turned out that Martin didn’t know the two young men personally, but he had seen them in the pub, and from what he had heard, they had only just arrived in London a couple of days earlier, direct from Belfast. He warned Abberline off them, telling him that they were a couple of hotheads who couldn’t hold their drink and liked to fight.

This snippet of information didn’t sound like much, but to Abberline, coupled with the fact that the two men had come out of a house that he had marked down as a possible safe house, it was enough to make him feel that it might just provide a lead to possible Fenian movement within the city.

Unbeknown to Abberline at this time, an undercover British spy in Belfast, who used the name Ray O’Mara, had managed to infiltrate a gang of robbers who were blowing bank safes in order to fund the Fenian movement in Ireland. O’Mara’s contacts within the gang led him to meet some of the Fenians’ top brass, from whom he found out that they were planning outrages in Great Britain and were eager to buy arms and explosives with the money coming in from the bank raids.

O’Mara knew that he needed to get this information back to his superiors in Great Britain, in strictest privacy and without delay. The telephone had not yet been invented at this time, so it left him with two options: the first to send a colleague to deliver the message by hand, which would take approximately twenty-four hours, travelling by horse and carriage, boat, and then horse and carriage once in Great Britain. The second, which would be the quickest method, was to send a telegram, but this involved writing out his message and passing it to a worker at the post office, who would read it and then transmit it, using international Morse code.

The telegram was obviously the better option, but how safe would it be? O’Mara talked it over quickly with one of his fellow operatives, and between them, they decided that they had no option but to send it by telegram. No secret codes had been agreed between O’Mara and his superiors in Great Britain, so he had to spell out the whole message, just leaving out obvious names and locations, and pass it to the telegraph operator.

No telegram was ever received by O’Mara’s superiors, and O’Mara himself was never seen again. The body of a man, with bruising around his neck, was found floating in the sea just off Carrickfergus. The man was never identified, but it was thought to be Ray O’Mara. In the meantime, however, O’Mara’s fellow operative had decided to get back to England as quickly as possible and relay to his superiors what he knew, and what O’Mara had told him.

By the time this news got through to Abberline and his team he had already followed up his first lead and raided the house from which the two young men had emerged from. Unfortunately the men were not caught in this raid, but they did manage to detain several other suspects, from whom information was extracted, resulting in a number of houses around London also being raided with several arrests.

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.