The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (2 page)

The Easter bank holiday weekend of 1888 would turn out to be one which Margaret Hayes, a fifty-four-year-old resident of a common lodging house at 18 George Street, Spitalfields, would perhaps prefer to forget, for it did not end well. No doubt she would have spent much of that day carousing in the East End pubs and generally getting into the spirit of what, for many people, would have been a well-earned respite from the daily toil. Although it has never really been determined, Hayes was in all likelihood a prostitute, one of over a thousand
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such women who plied their trade on the streets of Whitechapel and neighbouring districts at that time in an attempt to earn money for food and lodgings. The fact that the holiday would have attracted many revellers to the local hostelries meant that a woman disposed to this lifestyle could expect to make something from it. That night found Hayes in Poplar, a quarter of the East End close to the London docks, which she described as a ‘fearfully rough’ neighbourhood.

On nights such as this, the people of the East End were not unused to allowing their bank holiday Monday to drift effortlessly into the early hours of the following day, and as Tuesday 3 April began, Margaret Hayes was to get a sudden reminder of the unpredictability of Poplar when she was approached by a pair of young men; one asked her for the time, and then, for reasons unknown, his companion punched Hayes in the
mouth, at which point both men ran off.
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Hayes later admitted to having been badly beaten just before Christmas the previous year, an assault that had resulted in time at the infirmary,
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and perhaps with that also in mind and no doubt shaken, she appeared to cut her losses, call it a night and make her way on foot back to the George Street lodging house a little over two miles away.

It was as she passed the corner of Burdett Road and Farrance Street that she caught sight of a fellow George Street lodger, Emma Smith, who was talking to a man. Hayes satisfied herself that this individual – who was wearing dark clothes and a white neckerchief – was not one of those who had attacked her a little while earlier and hurried on her way. The time was 12.15 a.m.

Emma Smith was a typical ‘unfortunate’ of the East End. As 1888 would progress, the public, courtesy of the press, would hear many more stories like hers as the issue of poverty and the problems it generated in the east London slums were brought into sharp focus by the shocking events that quickly followed that Easter bank holiday. Admittedly, what is known about her is scarce and basically comes from a police report made at the time,
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but it does allow us to build a perhaps vague, yet not wholly unexpected, picture of her.

Emma Elizabeth Smith was apparently forty-five years of age, about 5 feet 2 inches in height with fair hair and a small scar on her temple. She was apparently ‘from the country’, and one would imagine that, for some time at least, hers was a respectable, maybe ordinary life. She claimed to have been married and subsequently widowed, although some reports said that she and her husband had separated and that he was still alive.
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Two children were also mentioned, a boy and a girl, who by 1888 were supposedly living in the Finsbury Park area
of north London. As with many women in her position, there obviously came a time of crisis, and thus Emma Smith found herself in the common lodging houses of Spitalfields. By 1888 she had apparently not seen any of her friends for ten years.

The lodging house or ‘doss house’ at 18 George Street was one of many in the small neighbourhood of Spitalfields which also included those in Flower and Dean Street, Thrawl Street and Fashion Street. Owned by Daniel Lewis since 1886, it was registered to accommodate around fifty lodgers, sharing a kitchen with a neighbouring premises, and it was perhaps a typical example of the houses available to those with no fixed abode of their own.
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As a result of the transient population of these lodging houses, many had mean reputations, offering shelter on a short- or long-term basis to all manner of people. Sure, there were the journeymen traders and their professional ilk, but also the dispossessed, the chronically homeless, criminals lying low and, naturally, prostitutes. The George Street area was particularly notorious and appeared in many philanthropic articles during the preceding decades as an example of where the great metropolis of London was going wrong. An attempt in the 1870s and early ’80s to begin clearance of this district with its numerous slum courts proved slow,
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and despite the appearance of Lolesworth Buildings and Charlotte de Rothschild Dwellings on the west side of George Street, built for the respectable working classes in 1886, there were still many notorious doss houses remaining. By 1888, the area of which 18 George Street was central had become a pariah.

In the eighteen months that she had been living there, Emma Smith appears to have developed a routine, and, as the deputy of the lodging house, Mary Russell was party to much
of Smith’s habits and behaviour. According to Mrs Russell, she often left the house at around 6.00 or 7.00 p.m. and would return in the early hours, often drunk. It was the drink which would have appeared to elicit a transformation, for on several occasions Smith would return bruised and battered from brawling and on one occasion even claimed to have been thrown out of a window. When drunk, Mrs Russell claimed, Emma Smith behaved like a ‘madwoman’.
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And so it was on the evening of Monday 2 April, Smith took her leave of the lodging house in her usual manner and, like her fellow lodger Margaret Hayes, ended up in Poplar with its numerous drinking establishments no doubt filled with dockers, sailors and sundry other bank holiday revellers and, therefore, the chance of earning some money.

What happened after Margaret Hayes saw Emma Smith with the man in Burdett Road comes to us from Smith herself, and while the story seems consistent enough, there are a number of vagaries which still remain unresolved. She was making her way back to Spitalfields in the early hours of the Tuesday morning and had reached the western end of Whitechapel Road at about 1.30 a.m. As she passed the church of St Mary, she noticed a group of men standing in the road and, perhaps dubious as to their character, crossed the main road to avoid them and walked up Osborn Street. The men followed her, and as she reached Taylor Bros. cocoa factory at the junction of Osborn Street, Wentworth Street and Brick Lane, they set upon her.
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What followed was a horrendous attack. They beat her violently – her face was bloodied and one of her ears was partially torn – and stole what little money she had. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, a blunt instrument was rammed into her vagina with great force before the men made their escape.

Between 4.00 and 5.00 a.m., Emma Smith reached her
lodging house in George Street in an obvious state of distress and in great pain. Among the lodgers present were Annie Lee and Mary Russell, who, on being told by Smith what had happened, decided to take her to the London Hospital, about half a mile away. Apart from mentioning that one of the assailants was a young man of about nineteen years, Smith did not describe the attackers to her companions and seemed reluctant to go to the hospital. Nonetheless she agreed, and as the three passed the spot where the assault had taken place, by the cocoa factory opposite 10 Brick Lane, Smith pointed it out.

On arrival at the hospital Russell and Lee left Smith in the capable hands of the house surgeon, Dr George Haslip. While in his care, Emma Smith went into a little more detail about her attack, furnishing him with much of the detail we still rely on today, and eventually he discovered that the blunt object that had been thrust into her had ruptured the perineum. As time passed, Smith began to sink and fell into a coma; at about 9.00 on the morning of Wednesday 4 April, she passed away from the effects of peritonitis. What had started as a brutal and unprovoked attack had become murder.

Dr Wynne Baxter, the coroner for East Middlesex, presided over a brief inquest at the hospital on Saturday 7 April. From what little information we have – essentially from newspaper reports – those in attendance were Mary Russell, Dr Haslip (sometimes referred to as ‘Hellier’), Margaret Hayes and Chief Inspector John West, who was representing the Metropolitan Police’s H- (Whitechapel) division. In fact, the first the police had heard of this incident was the day before the inquest, when the coroner’s office informed them in the standard manner. What is peculiar about the attack is that apparently no constables who would have been in the immediate neighbourhood that morning had heard anything about the assault; nor
had they seen any behaviour relating to it, and, unfortunately, none of the inquest witnesses had felt compelled to inform them of the incident when it happened. By all accounts, the streets appeared to be rather quiet at the time. The jury were advised to make a quick decision, as the fact that murder had obviously been committed and the cause of death had been ascertained without doubt, and so, after a brief deliberation, the verdict of ‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’ was given. Coroner Baxter advised that all facts surrounding the case be sent on to the Public Prosecutor, and Inspector Edmund Reid of H-division was given charge of the resulting enquiry. And that is where, owing to the scarcity of official reports, the case of Emma Smith’s murder ends.

The mystery of how nobody – particularly police officers on the beat – saw or heard anything of the assault remains, for the unresolved question of what happened to Smith immediately after the attack lingers too. If she was assaulted a little after 1.30 a.m. then a period of anything up to three hours must have passed before she arrived at 18 George Street, which was little more than 200 yards away. Of course, there is a possibility that she was incorrect about the timing of the attack, although the fact that she said she had passed St Mary’s Church at 1.30 a.m. could suggest she had got the time from the church clock. Had she been lying in the street unconscious or at the least in great pain and distress for that amount of time, surely somebody would have seen her. The streets might have been described as ‘quiet’, but in the aftermath of a bank holiday Monday, with the scene of crime being so close to a well-used thoroughfare like Brick Lane, surely they could not have been entirely deserted. Linked to this is Emma Smith’s reluctance or inability to describe her attackers in any great detail. There may be reasonable explanations for this – she might not have
had a good look at them under the traumatic circumstances, or she might not have been able to recall small details on account of shock and pain from the injuries. But there is also the possibility that, whereas an assault most definitely took place, it might well have been under different circumstances. Was Emma Smith attacked by a gang as she claims, or was it a single assailant? Was robbery the motive (as it appears) or was it the work of a dangerously violent client? There is even the possibility that she had a pimp who turned nasty, inflicting what might have been unintentionally fatal injuries as a warning. We cannot rule out the fact that Emma Smith might have been telling the truth (and why wouldn’t she?), but the strange circumstances of her death leave matters open to speculation. Obfuscation, intentional or otherwise, on Smith’s part and the dearth of official reports by investigators leave us in the dark.

Emma Elizabeth Smith was buried in a pauper’s grave at the City of London Cemetery (Little Ilford) on 12 April 1888. For all we know, this unfortunate woman’s funeral might have been attended by very few people; perhaps her lodging house friends were there; maybe the two children made an appearance; maybe nobody came at all. In the aftermath of what transpired to be a shocking attack even by the rough and tough standards of the East End, the culprits were never apprehended, the act itself no doubt becoming a terrible ‘one-off’ to the residents of Whitechapel and the few newspapers that gave the incident column inches. With the general acceptance that Emma Smith’s death was the result of a gang attack, one newspaper felt compelled to make comment:

The state of our London streets at night is an old subject and a sore one. It cannot be said that at any time within memory of living man their condition has been particularly creditable to
the greatest capital in the world. Still, there certainly was a time, and that not very long ago, when things were very much less disgraceful than they are now. The seamy side of London life which is revealed to anybody whose homeward way lies through Regent-street or Piccadilly at midnight is positively shameful. Cases (one in particular our readers will remember which is not yet decided) are continually arising of riot and assault by women as well as men; and the police are powerless to prevent solicitation and annoyance.
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Nobody could foresee that within a few months more brutal crimes would shock the sensibilities not just of those immediately affected, but also of the nation and ultimately the world. The death of Emma Smith would soon be seen as the beginning of the world’s most infamous series of killings: the Whitechapel murders.

In June or July of 1888, Martha Tabram, a sometime flower hawker and prostitute, began staying at Satchell’s lodging house at 19 George Street, immediately next door to Emma Smith’s former residence. John Satchell had been the owner of the three-storey tenement for nearly twenty years and owned numerous other doss houses in the immediate vicinity. Martha Tabram would have been one of anything up to fifty or more lodgers who would be spending that summer in the cramped house, paying fourpence a night for a single bed and using a communal kitchen on the ground floor shared with no. 18.
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The series of life events which culminated in her arrival in the East End has been well documented.

Martha White was born at 17 Marshall Street, Southwark, on 10 May 1849, the youngest of five children, two boys and three girls, born to Charles White and his wife Elisabeth. Charles and Elisabeth’s marriage was not to last, and for
reasons unknown they separated in 1865, whereupon Charles took lodgings in the Pitt Street home of Rebecca Glover. He was not in good health at this time; unable to work because of a weak back, he complained of diarrhoea, bad circulation and cold as well as admitting that the family situation troubled him. In October of that year, Elisabeth visited him for the first time since the separation and by November was seeing him regularly. Such visits perhaps cheered him, and he was in a good frame of mind on 15 November, when his estranged wife and daughter Mary Ann had supper at his lodgings. A little later, he made ready for bed and, while undressing, collapsed and died.
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