Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [28]
All suggestions and suspicions, however curious, were pursued. Swanson’s report notes that there are ‘994 dockets besides police reports’. Inspector Abberline would often leave work and patrol Whitechapel until four or five in the morning before retiring for the night. On many occasions he would be summoned back immediately to Whitechapel to interview another suspect. Certainly, the Ripper case nearly broke him, and the pressure on most of the police force was not aided in other quarters. Their lack of success was continually attacked by the press, who ridiculed Sir Charles Warren’s failure to organise his men properly. Papers of all political stripes united in calling for Matthews’ and Warren’s resignations. While private rewards offered exceeded £1,200, Matthews continued to vacillate. Now aware that any change of heart would be viewed as an embarrassing climb-down, he sought to implicate the Commissioner by offering a reward only on Warren’s admission of police defeat. Warren immediately saw through this and backtracked. The stalemate continued.
Despite doubts about their being able to function properly within Whitechapel’s heavily-populated streets, bloodhounds were also tested. Several successful trials of the two dogs, Barnaby and Burgho, were held in Regent’s Park and Hyde Park in early October, with Sir Charles Warren twice playing the hunted man. The press and public supported their use, believing their introduction was keeping the Ripper at bay. Warren was clearly impressed enough to leave orders that, should another murder occur, nothing be touched until the dogs were brought to the scene. This order appears not to have been retracted and caused a long delay in investigating Mary Kelly’s murder. By then, the bloodhounds’ owner had reclaimed them, once it became clear that the police weren’t prepared to buy them or pay for their upkeep.
Other, more worrying suggestions, were made. Sir John Whittaker Ellis, a former Lord Mayor of London, proposed the police draw a half-mile cordon around Whitechapel and search every house in that area. Warren resisted, wisely seeing that such an operation, as well as being illegal, had the very real possibility of causing rioting and further damaging the police’s reputation. In the end, the search area was confined to houses within Spitalfields and Whitechapel bounded roughly by Whitechapel Road to the south, Dunk Street to the east, Buxton Street and the Great Eastern Railway to the north and halting to the west at the City boundary. Properties were only searched with owners’ consent, but such was the response from people that they met with little obstruction. Dr Robert Anderson noted a week later that ‘the public generally and especially the inhabitants of the East End have shown a marked desire to assist in every way, even at some sacrifice to themselves, as for example in permitting their houses to be searched’.
Anderson appears to have been little help. Appointed Assistant Commissioner for Crime on the day of Polly Nichols’ murder, he went on extended sick leave to Switzerland the day Annie Chapman was found. Hastily recalled, following the double murder, and given personal responsibility for the case by Warren and Matthews, his first proposal was even more short-sighted than that of Ellis. Taken aback by prostitutes having police protection, he suggested that any woman ‘on the prowl