Complete History of Jack the Ripper (25 page)

Upon receiving news of the Hanbury Street tragedy, Montagu returned to the capital from Brighton. On 10 September he called on Acting Superintendent West of H Division and, offering a reward of £100 for the discovery and conviction of the criminal, authorized the police to print and distribute the posters at his expense. The police seem to have been disposed to help. At least A. C. Bruce, Assistant Commissioner, forwarded Montagu’s proposal to the Home Office the same day and, in soliciting instructions, pointed out that Montagu was ‘anxious that no time should be lost.’ However, Edward Leigh-Pemberton’s reply, dated 13 September, effectively terminated any police involvement in the matter. The practice of offering government rewards, it ran, had been discontinued some years ago because they had been found to produce more harm than good and, in the case of the Whitechapel murders, there was a special risk that a reward ‘might hinder rather than promote the ends of justice.’ Montagu was less than impressed. As he explained in a letter to Warren, the Home Secretary’s view of rewards was ‘not in accord with the general feeling on the subject.’ In any case he was not apprised of the Home Office opposition to rewards until after his offer had been noticed by the press and by that time he felt honour-bound to abide by it.
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The Mile End Vigilance Committee, in which Jews were also prominent, was not the first nor the last organization of its kind to be inspired by the Whitechapel murders. The St Jude’s committee, with its levies from Toynbee Hall, had already been operative for a month and others were to spring up in the aftermath of the double murder of 30 September. But it was the Mile End committee which dominated the contemporary news columns and, as we shall see, when its president received a human kidney through the post, apparently from the murderer himself, it ensured for itself a kind of immortality by commanding space in every book that would ever be written about Jack the Ripper.

The committee, sixteen strong, was appointed at a meeting of local tradesmen in Whitechapel on 10 September. Its president was George Akin Lusk of 1–3 Alderney Road, Mile End Road, a builder and contractor, a member of the Metropolitan Board of Works and a vestryman of the parish of Mile End Old Town.
The other leading committee members were the vice-president, John Cohen of 345 Commercial Road; the treasurer, Joseph Aarons of the Crown Tavern, 74 Mile End Road; and the honorary secretary, Mr B. Harris of 83 White Horse Lane.

These public-spirited citizens were grossly traduced in a recent television ‘mini-series’, which depicted them ceaselessly roaming the Whitechapel streets like vigilantes from the American frontier west, shouting, flourishing firebrands and hunting victims to string up in wild necktie parties. In reality the Mile End Vigilance Committee was nothing of the sort. Its purpose, as Aarons pointed out at a meeting of 15 September, was to strengthen the hands of the police by action on the part of the citizens. ‘He wished it to be distinctly understood,’ he said, ‘that the Committee was in no way antagonistic to the police authorities, who were doing their best, as he believed they always did, to bring the culprits to justice.’
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The methods employed by the committee to ‘strengthen the hands of the police’ were entirely pacific. At first they directed their efforts towards raising a reward fund. Later they organized patrols that, in the manner of present day neighbourhood watch schemes, reported to the police any suspicious circumstances observed.

On the morning of 11 September a notice, published by the committee in the form of handbills and posters, was being placarded in shop windows throughout Whitechapel, Mile End and Houndsditch. It began:

At first the committee seem to have been optimistic about building up a substantial reward fund. ‘The movement has been warmly taken
up by the inhabitants,’ noted
The Times
on 11 September, ‘and it is thought certain that a large sum will be subscribed within the next few days.’ But by the end of the week it was becoming evident that raising the necessary cash would be no easy matter. On 15 September Mr M. Rogers told the committee that on many occasions, when he had approached people from whom he had expected donations of £5 or £10 without demur, he had found them unwilling to contribute because they considered it the duty of the Home Secretary to offer a reward. By 22 September the committee were beginning to complain that ‘the people generally do not respond quickly to their appeal for funds.’ And at the end of the month the fund still stood at no more than £60 or £70 and the committee were obliged to offer a preliminary reward of £50 only.
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It was in these circumstances that Mr Harris, the secretary, on 16 September solicited the help of the Home Secretary. He requested Matthews to augment their reward fund or state his reasons for declining to do so but Leigh-Pemberton, replying for the Home Office the next day, merely repeated that the practice of offering rewards had been discontinued because they tended to produce more harm than good. Disappointed, the committee wrote again on 24 September, inviting the Home Secretary to attend a meeting of their committee to explain his refusal of a reward. They had to wait several days for a reply that informed them only that Matthews was ‘unable’ to attend.
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On 27 September the committee switched to a new tack. Unable to elicit a satisfactory response out of Matthews, Mr Lusk addressed a petition to the Queen. He reminded Her Majesty that of the four murders that had been recently committed in the East End the last two at least had been the work of the same hand and that the ‘ordinary means of detection had failed.’ He felt that the killer would probably strike again and that the offer of a reward ‘was absolutely necessary for securing Your Majesty’s subjects from death at the hands of the above one undetected assassin.’ Lusk took pains to point out that the Home Secretary’s refusal to sanction a reward had already incurred hostile criticism from his vigilance committee, criticism that had been ‘re-echoed throughout Your Majesty’s Dominions not only by Your Majesty’s subjects at large but, with one or two exceptions, the entire press of Great Britain’, and he therefore begged the Queen to direct that a government reward ‘sufficient in amount to meet the peculiar exigencies of the case’ be offered immediately. These efforts were
to no avail. Lusk’s answer, dated 6 October, came from the Home Office. The Home Secretary, explained Leigh-Pemberton, had laid the petition before the Queen and had also given directions that no effort or expense be spared to catch the murderer. But he had not felt able to advise the Queen that justice would be promoted by a departure from his previous decision.
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Notwithstanding the efforts of these worthies to apprehend the culprit it became evident on 19 September, when Mrs Long gave her evidence to the inquest, that the killer might indeed have been a foreigner. Here, despite all the disclaimers, was the first positive evidence that the murderer was a Jew and the prospect of anti-Jewish riots moved that much closer. By this time, fortunately, the excitement generated by the Chapman murder had subsided. But Sir Charles Warren recognized the danger and was deeply troubled by it.

A regular stream of stories and rumours, mostly unfounded, kept excitement at fever pitch the first few days after the murder. On the day of the crime there were tales of another body having been found at the back of the London Hospital and a woman told of a message chalked on the door of 29 Hanbury Street: ‘This is the fourth. I will murder sixteen more and then give myself up.’ To one story the police attached some significance. It was recounted by Mrs Fiddymont, wife of the proprietor of the Prince Albert at the corner of Brushfield and Steward Streets, and by two of her customers.

At seven on the morning of the murder Mrs Fiddymont was serving behind the bar and talking to a customer, Mrs Mary Chappell of 28 Steward Street. Suddenly a rough-looking man came into the middle compartment and asked for half a pint of ale. As she drew the ale Mrs Fiddymont studied the man in the mirror at the back of the bar and there was evidently something so frightening about him that she asked Mrs Chappell to stay. If the description given by the two women to the press was accurate there was no wonder.

His shirt was torn badly on the right shoulder. There was a narrow streak of blood under his right ear, parallel with the edge of his shirt. There were three or four small spots of blood on the back of his right hand and dried blood between his fingers. Above all, there was his look – ‘so startling and terrifying.’ The stranger wore a stiff brown hat drawn down over his eyes and when he saw Mrs Chappell watching him from the first compartment he turned his back to her and got the partition between them. Then he swallowed his ale at a gulp and left.

Joseph Taylor, a builder of 22 Steward Street, followed him as far as Half Moon Street, Bishopsgate, and described him later for the
Star.
He was a man of medium height, middle-aged or slightly older, with short sandy hair and a ginger moustache curling a little at the ends. He had faint hollows under his cheekbones. Taylor thought his dress ‘shabby-genteel’ – pepper-and-salt trousers of a villainous fit and a dark coat. His manner was nervous and frightened and he seemed disorientated, crossing Brushfield Street three times between the Prince Albert and Bishopsgate. The man walked rapidly with a peculiar springy stride. It was all Taylor could do to overtake him but when he did manage to come alongside the man glanced across at him. ‘I assure you,’ said Taylor, ‘that his look was enough to frighten any woman. His eyes were wild-looking and staring. He held his coat together at the chin with both hands, the collar being buttoned up, and everything about his appearance was exceedingly strange.’
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The Prince Albert was only about four hundred yards from 29 Hanbury Street. Obviously, then, the police were interested in this tale of a man, bewildered and bloodstained, seen there on the morning of the murder. We know that detectives interviewed Mrs Fiddymont and her witnesses on the day of the occurrence. And later, as will be seen, Abberline tried to link the man with at least two suspects – William Henry Piggott and Jacob Isenschmid.

When darkness fell the indignation of the East End mobs gave way to terror. For several days after the murder the closing of the shops and the removal of the flaring lamps of the stalls precipitated a general stampede for home. After 12.30 the streets were all but deserted, abandoned to the possession of patrolling policemen. Some prostitutes fled from Whitechapel. Most people stayed indoors after dark and tradesmen did a roaring trade in locks. Within a week, it is said, most of the street doors of lodging houses in and about Hanbury Street had been newly fitted with locks and bona fide lodgers supplied with keys. There were those who could not even feel safe in their own homes. On Saturday 8th, when Mrs Mary Burridge, a dealer in floor cloth at 132 Blackfriars Road, was standing at her door reading the
Star
, she was so upset by the report of the murder that she retired to her kitchen and fell down in a fit. After briefly regaining consciousness two days later she died on Wednesday 12th.

No one could know for certain that only East End prostitutes were at risk and apprehension spread to all classes throughout the
metropolis. A less tragic expression of it occurred at the White Hart Public House in Southampton Street, Camberwell, on the afternoon of 10 September. A 39-year-old labourer named John Brennan came into the pub. He was a man of ‘a very rough and strange appearance’ and his coat was torn up the back. Soon he began to talk about the murder in a loud voice. No, the police had not yet caught Leather Apron, he said. More, Leather Apron was a ‘pal’ of his and he had the very knife with which the deed had been done. In the East End he would probably have been mobbed. In Camberwell his boasts produced the opposite effect. Within no time at all the other customers were in the street, the landlady had locked herself in the bar-parlour and Brennan was in sole possession of the bar. But the arrival of a constable terminated the labourer’s shenanigans and the next day he found himself before Camberwell Police Court. There Brennan, ‘who treated the whole matter as a good joke’, was ordered to enter into bail to keep the peace.
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The effects of the murder scare were still evident in the East End on Monday night. A Central News Agency reporter, who visited Whitechapel that evening, depicted a general air of desolation.
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Even in important throughfares like Commercial Street and Brick Lane the only prominent pedestrians were constables, patrolling silently past the little knots of homeless vagabonds that huddled in doorways. ‘Other constables, whose “plain clothes” could not prevent their stalwart, well-drilled figures from betraying their calling,’ wrote the journalist, ‘paraded in couples, now and again emerging from some dimly lighted lane, and passing their uniformed comrades with an air of conscious ignorance.’ Smaller thoroughfares like Flower and Dean Street appeared dark and unutterably forlorn, their gloom punctuated only at infrequent intervals by flickering gas jets, and almost everywhere there were caverns of Stygian blackness in narrow entries and areas of unlit waste ground.