Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [3]
They did not die in vain. Jack is accredited with instigating social reform where others had failed.The highest in the land were regularly informed of the state of the poor. Even Queen Victoria sent letters to the police, offering suggestions as to how the killer might be traced.Whitechapel, the labyrinthine immigrant quarter so close to the City, home to 80,000 forgotten people, became front-page news. The reports drew attention to the neglected, the poor and, at the bottom of the social ladder, the extreme poor, forced to sleep in doorways, to beg or sell themselves for fourpence for their doss in one of the 233 overcrowded common lodging houses. Between them these houses accommodated around 8,500 people. Despite the frequent cries of ‘Murder!’ which most witnesses remarked on and ignored, and despite the brutality and violence which thrived in the area, not one of the 80 murders committed in London the previous year had occurred in Whitechapel. Jack’s victims, drawn from ‘the unfortunates’ (the polite euphemism for prostitutes), raised the profile of the area as no reformer had done before. George Bernard Shaw went so far as to acknowledge the Ripper as achieving what he and fellow socialists had failed to do.This said, Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1902), relating his time spent living amongst the extreme poor of the East End, revealed that little had been done to alleviate the suffering in the area fifteen years after the Whitechapel Murders.
Sexual maniac, proto-serial killer, social reformer, black humorist, man of a thousand faces... The trouble with Jack, ultimately, is that the more you read about him, the more his stature as a legendary figure grows. At some point the masks have to be removed. Not to reveal his identity. That bearpit remains. Stripped of his iconic veneer, Jack is just a murderer. Someone who found women who had no other option but to sell their bodies then strangled and mutilated them. Not a devil. Not a ghost. Not a black magician endowed with supernatural powers. An ordinary person, one of the crowd, like you or I. Someone who could pass without let or hindrance through the East End streets with no one noticing his presence as being out of the ordinary.
The trouble with Jack is getting people to realise that.
In Hindsight
‘Vice can afford to pay more than honesty, but its profits at last go to landlords.’ Reverend Samuel Barnett, letter to The Times, 19 September 1888.
Emma Smith
Sometime between 4 and 5am on 3 April 1888, Emma Smith returned to lodgings at 18, George Street, Spitalfields. She told the house’s deputy keeper, Mary Russell, that she had been assaulted and robbed in Osborn Street (about 300 yards away). Smith, a 45-year-old prostitute, had lived at George Street for 18 months and was known for returning at all hours, usually drunk. That night, she had been returning from a night’s soliciting at 1.30am when three men had attacked her outside Taylor Bros Cocoa factory near Brick Lane.
Russell and Annie Lee, a lodger, escorted her to London Hospital where she was attended by house surgeon Dr George Haslip. As well as bruising to her face and a torn right ear, Smith’s vagina had been penetrated by a blunt object so forcefully that it had ruptured her peritoneum. Peritonitis resulted. After slipping into a coma, she died at 9am on 4 April.
Despite probably passing several policemen during her journeys to and from George Street, Smith had not reported the incident, or asked for assistance. Officers on patrol that evening said that they hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual. The police were not alerted to the attack on Smith until they were informed that a coroner’s inquest was to be held on 7 April.
Wynne Baxter presided over the inquest at the London Hospital. Baxter would conduct inquests into six