Jack The Ripper - The Definitive History Part 5

Eventually James Stansfield, the Repealers' parliamentary representative, created and dictated a policy of restricting anti-CDA agitation to the democratic process. He began by seizing opportunities to put forward the anti-CDA perspective in parliament, in particular during discussion of the annual army estimates. He debated them at such deliberate length and with such tedium that many MPs simply left the House. A Conservative MP named Henry Lucy b.i.t.c.hily defined an empty House as one in which 'Stansfield was on his legs delivering his annual speech on the rights of his fellow women'. Eventually, in March 1879, as Stansfield rose to his feet to begin yet another wearing debate, he was forestalled by an announcement that a select committee was about to be set up to investigate the workings of the Acts. It was a victory. The Acts were repealed.

The campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts seems distant and unconnected with the Ripper crimes, but the campaign of Josephine Butler and her like played a huge part in awakening the public mind to the existence of social problems presented by prost.i.tution. It focused attention on and enabled discussion of the subject. This in turn led to a couple of other campaigns that directly impacted on the East End and the public perception of Jack the Ripper.

Curiously, the first of these campaigns could have greater relevance than expected. One of the most shocking revelations of the 1880s was the white slave trade the abduction into, or forcible detention in, brothels in England and abroad of girls and women. This was probably blown ma.s.sively out of proportion, but did take place and one of its victims may have been Mary Kelly, Jack the Ripper's final canonical victim. According to a story she told which gained some independent support she had arrived in London from Wales and been befriended by a French woman in Knightsbridge. She had entered a brothel run by the woman or her a.s.sociates, had been presented with several fine dresses and been driven about in a carriage. A gentleman had then taken her to France, but she said that she didn't like it there and returned to England. But she did not return to the West End. Instead she went to the East End and an area noted for prost.i.tution off the Ratcliffe Highway. The question, of course, is why? Why abandon the fine dresses and carriages and gentlemen of the West End for a notorious slum district of the East?

When the puritan lobby discovered that British women were being kept against their will in continental brothels they were outraged. The stories told, believed and perhaps in some cases even true, exposed a supposed scandal horrifying to a civilised country. It was also blown out of all proportion. Judith R. Walkowitz's research has suggested that 'the evidence for widespread involuntary prost.i.tution of British girls at home or abroad is slim', and despite evidence of a small traffic, 'the women enticed into licensed brothels in Antwerp and Brussels were by no means the young innocents depicted in the sensational stories'.23 This, however, was not the opinion of Alfred S. Dyer, a Quaker puritan activist who ran a small but successful publis.h.i.+ng business in London producing all manner of religious literature and social commentary such as A Manual for Mourners and The Menace of Opium. Walking home one evening from the Friends' Meeting House in Clerkenwell, he was shocked and outraged by a story his companion related. Some weeks earlier a 'respectable' Englishman had visited a brothel in Brussels and there met a young English woman who said that she had been courted by a gentleman who had eventually proposed marriage and suggested that they marry in Brussels. They had travelled first to Calais, where her lover had unexpectedly announced that he had run out of money and needed to return to England to obtain more. He entrusted his bride-to-be to the care of a French friend who would take her on to Brussels, where he would rejoin her. Unhappy and protesting, she was nevertheless forced onto a train and taken by the Frenchman to Brussels, where she found herself placed on the register of prost.i.tutes under a false name (taken from a false birth certificate obtained from Somerset House), violated and imprisoned in a brothel, 'as much a slave as was ever any negro upon Virginian soil'.24 Some friends put Dyer in touch with Pastor Leonard Anet in Brussels who investigated and confirmed that the story was true. He was able to rescue the young woman, whose name was Ellen Newland, and returned her to Britain in December 1879. The story of Ellen Newland and that of another young woman named Ada Higgleton, who had also been forcibly detained in a Brussels brothel, received wide publicity in several newspapers, including the Daily News, Daily Chronicle and the Standard,25 provoking a furious response from Edward Lenaers, chief of the Brussels police des meurs, who stated unequivocally that all women entering brothels had to state in their own language before a police officer that they were entering a brothel of their own free will, knew what a brothel was and also what would be expected of them. The British Consular official in Brussels, Thomas Jeffes, defended the Brussels police, writing, 'I can confidently a.s.sure the parents of all really virtuous girls that there is no fear whatever of finding their children in the same position as the girls referred to in Mr. Dyer's letter'.26 Since this was contrary to his own experience, it is perhaps unsurprising that Mr. Dyer formed the view that he was not merely dealing with white slavers but with the conscious or unconscious collusion of the British and Belgian authorities. He therefore decided to go to Brussels and with his friend Charles Gillett, one of the most influential members of the Society of Friends, visit brothels and rescue any Englishwoman detained against her will. They discovered a woman in a brothel on the Rue St. Laurent named Louisa Bond who wanted her freedom, but who had no street clothes. The following morning Dyer and Gillette, along with a Brussels lawyer named Alexia Splingard, visited the Procureur du Roi, the official in charge of the morals police. He referred them to the commissioner of police, who referred them to the deputy commissioner, who visited the brothel and returned to say that Louisa was completely happy and did not want to leave. The three men then returned to the brothel and demanded to see Louisa, but were threatened with violence. They then went to see the Minister Plenipotentiary to Belgium, J.S. Lumley, who refused to see them and directed them to the vice-consul, whose office was closed. Dyer therefore went to the vice-consul's home, where he was pa.s.sed onto the pro-consul, Thomas Jeffes, who wasn't particularly interested, having established to his own satisfaction that the Belgian authorities ensured that no women were held against their will.

Meanwhile, Dyer and Gillett found other women who wanted their freedom but were afraid to talk, and their fears were reinforced when the two men found a woman named Adeline Tanner being detained against her will in the prost.i.tutes' wards of the Hopital St. Pierre. Dyer confronted Thomas Jeffes, who quietly arranged for her to be sent home, but it turned out that she had signed the police register of prost.i.tutes using a false name and had stated that she was over 21 when she was really only 19. The Belgian authorities therefore decided to prosecute her for making a false statement to the police. She was found guilty and sentenced to prison. It was a warning fully appreciated by purity campaigners and the prost.i.tutes themselves of the treatment troublesome prost.i.tutes could expect in future. Dyer managed to get Adeline Tanner back to England after she had been released, but would have been more convinced than ever that the authorities were on the side of the brothel keepers. Dyer busied himself forming the London Committee for the Exposure and Suppression of the Traffic in English Girls for the Purposes of Continental Prost.i.tution and preparing for battle with the authorities.

What Dyer did not know was that the authorities actually shared his concern and on behalf of the Foreign Office, Chief Inspector Greenham of Scotland Yard had already begun a cautious investigation in Brussels. However, because they thought Dyer was a troublesome fanatic (which he probably was) they decided not to tell him anything and thereby created a garden ripe for the sowing of suspicion. Greenham reported that he had found nothing amiss in Brussels, where everything was 'tickety boo' as the Brussels officials had described it.

Meanwhile, on 1 May 1880 the formidable Josephine Butler published in The s.h.i.+eld an impa.s.sioned article in which she focused on the highly charged issue of child prost.i.tution. As she would later write: In certain of the infamous houses in Brussels there are immured little children, English girls of from ten to fourteen years of age, who have been stolen, kidnapped, betrayed, carried off from English country villages by every artifice, and sold to these human shambles. The presence of these children is unknown to the ordinary visitors; it is secretly known only to the wealthy men who are able to pay large sums of money for the sacrifice of these innocents.27 Armed with a sworn statement by a Belgian detective alleging police corruption and collusion between the police and the Brussels brothel owners, Butler led a private prosecution in Brussels in December 1880 which resulted in the conviction of 12 brothel keepers for prost.i.tuting girls under the age of 21. A Belgian newspaper, La Nationale, used information supplied by Josephine Butler and named names. Stupidly, but perhaps with no alternative, Edward Lenares, chief of the police des meurs, and Schroeder, his second-in-command, accused the newspaper of libel, which served only to produce evidence of their collusion with the brothel owners and both policemen were dismissed. Back in England the carefully composed report by Chief Inspector Greenham was buried without ceremony and the Foreign Office undertook another investigation, run by a Middle Temple barrister named Thomas W. Snagge who in early December 1880 brilliantly broke through the facade to expose the corruption of the Brussels police. He concluded: Young English girls are a form of merchandise to be acquired by industry and disposed of at market prices per package. 'Three hundred francs per colis' appears to be the ordinary tariff. From the point of view of the brothel keepers the girls form a costly portion of their stock-in-trade; they are like stock in a farm, kept in good condition more or less, and prevented from straying or escaping.28 The Foreign Office set up a select committee that the Earl of Dalhousie brought before the House of Lords on 30 May 1881, saying: It is no longer a matter of doubt that for many years past large numbers of English girls, some of whom were perfectly innocent, have been annually exported to supply the demand of foreign brothels . . . there can be no doubt that, during the last 15 years, many Englishwomen have, against their will, endured a life worse than living death, from which there was no escape, within the walls of a foreign brothel.29 The select committee published its recommendations on 10 July 1882, advocating changes to the law that raised the age of consent to 16, made it illegal for anyone to allow a girl under 16 to use their home for s.e.xual intercourse, gave police magistrates the power to issue a warrant permitting a police officer to search a house in which it was suspected that a girl under 16 was used for the purposes of s.e.xual intercourse, and which made attempts to solicit or to procure English girls to leave their homes in order to enter foreign brothels (regardless of the girls' willingness) a serious misdemeanour.

These recommendations were then embodied in a piece of proposed legislation called the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, which the Earl of Rosebery introduced to the Lords on 31 May 1883. It received its second reading on 18 June, immediately ran into opposition and the government killed it. Having undergone some revisions, it was reintroduced to the Lords in 1884, got through the necessary three readings and was introduced to the House of Commons on 3 July 1884. A week later it was killed again, which meant it had to go back to the Lords, where it was introduced for a third time in the spring of 1885. It quickly pa.s.sed through the Lords and was introduced to the Commons on 22 May 1885. That was the day before the Whitsun break, most MPs had already left for their holiday and Cavendish Bentinck, who opposed the bill, talked until the Speaker seized the opportunity of Cavendish Bentinck drawing breath to adjourn the debate. As W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, noted: Once more we regret to see that the protection of our young girls has been sacrificed to the loquacity of our legislators. Mr. Bentinck talked out the Criminal Law Amendment Act yesterday, and we fear that the chances of proceeding with this measure before the General Election are the slightest . . .30 Meanwhile, another scandal had been brewing. On 11 April 1882 a Metropolitan policeman named Jeremiah Minahan was promoted to Inspector and transferred from 'E' Division (Holborn) to 'T' Division (Kensington). After a short while he encountered a brothel keeper named Mrs. Jeffries who attempted to bribe him. This Mrs. Jeffries had four brothels, at 125, 127, 129 and 155 Church Street (Old Church Street), Chelsea, and also, according to Charles Terrot, a flogging house at Rose Cottage in Hampstead, a house catering for a.s.sorted perversions in or near the Gray's Inn Road, and a white slave clearing house for the Continent on the river near Kew Gardens. Her brothels catered for the rich and famous, had made Mrs. Jeffries very wealthy and apparently operated through the widespread use of bribery. Minahan 'a narrow and puritanical figure in the Dyer and Scott mould. An honest man with principles, he worked with unwavering zeal and a remarkable lack of tact'31 complained to his superior, Superintendent Fisher, but was ignored. Minahan then kept a special watch on Mrs. Jeffries' houses and in April 1883 submitted an official report. He was almost immediately demoted to Sergeant, apparently for making unfounded allegations against brother officers. Minahan protested and the MP for Chelsea, Charles Dilke, took up his case. Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt investigated and replied on 28 January 1884 that, 'After the most careful enquiry by the a.s.sistant Commissioner and District Superintendent into a series of charges which he (Minahan) brought against the Superintendent of the Division and other officers, all of which were proved to be without foundation, I see no ground to review the decision of the Commissioners'.32 Minahan resigned, sent a copy of his investigations to three newspapers, none of which paid him any attention, and in utter frustration decided to explore the possibility of publication. He knocked upon the door of publisher Alfred S. Dyer. Dyer, who believed the police and government were in collusion with the brothel keepers and white slavers, not unnaturally saw Minahan's charges as the proof he needed to blow the scandal wide open and with a.s.sistance from Benjamin Scott's London Committee for the Suppression of Traffic in English Girls, Minahan was hired as a private detective to gather evidence against Mrs. Jeffries. Neither white slavery nor catering for s.e.xual perversions was illegal, so Minahan had to prove that Mrs. Jeffries ran brothels, and he was soon able to obtain evidence from former servants and neighbours that included a list of aristocratic clients: Lord Fife, Lord Douglas Gordon, Lord Lennox, Lord Hailford, Leopold, King of the Belgians,33 and Edward, Prince of Wales.34 Charges were brought against Mrs. Jeffries, she was arrested and Minahan presented his evidence at the magistrates' court. 'This alleged encouragement of vice and connivance in bribery on the part of highly-placed officers of police must be probed to the bottom', proclaimed the campaigning W.T. Stead the next day.35 The trial, which opened on 5 May 1885, was a disappointing farce. On the instruction of her defence council, Montagu Williams, Mrs. Jeffries pleaded 'guilty' and thereby saved herself and her clients the embarra.s.sment of being asked difficult questions. Mrs. Jeffries was fined 200, which she paid with cash.

It was on the day after the trial that the Criminal Law Amendment Bill received its second reading in the House of Commons, the debate being adjourned for the Whitsun break. Benjamin Scott, Chairman of the London Committee for the Suppression of Traffic in English Girls, realised that the Act would probably wither and die unless it received some support. On 23 May 1885 Scott visited W.T. Stead at the offices of the Pall Mall Gazette and told him all about how children and young women were abducted into brothels, some of them kidnapped from the very street, and how government and police alike turned their backs. Stead would write: everyone admitted that juvenile prost.i.tution had increased to a terrible extent. All agreed that the law as it stood was powerless to deal with the evil. The Bill amending the law had been twice through the House of Lords but it had always been held up by the House of Commons. 'All our work', said the Chamberlain [Scott], 'will be wasted unless you can raise public opinion and compel the new Government to take up the Bill and pa.s.s it into law'.

I naturally wanted to try, but every instinct of prudence and selfpreservation restrained me. The subject was tabooed by the Press. The very horror of the crime was the chief secret of its persistence. The task was almost hopeless. No ordinary means could overcome the obstacles which were presented by the political situation.36 Stead visited Bramwell Booth, the son of Salvation Army founder William Booth. The Salvation Army had been reclaiming prost.i.tutes since 1884 and their first refuge for 'fallen women' was in Hanbury Street in the East End where Jack the Ripper's second canonical victim would be found. Booth showed him three street children who had been used for prost.i.tution. Moved but unpersuaded, Stead turned to Howard Vincent of the CID: 'Do you mean to tell me', said Stead, 'that actual violation, in the legal sense of the word, is constantly being perpetrated in London, on unwilling virgins, purveyed and procured to rich men at so much a head by brothelkeepers?' 'Certainly', replied the chief of the department, 'there is no doubt of it'. 'Why', exclaimed Stead, 'the very thought is enough to raise h.e.l.l'. 'It is true', said the officer, 'and although it ought to raise h.e.l.l it does not even rouse the neighbours'. 'Then I will raise h.e.l.l', said Stead, and set himself to arouse the nation. 'Be the results what they may', he wrote, 'no n.o.bler work could a man ever be privileged to take. Even a humble part in it is enough to make one grateful for the privilege of life'.37 Shocked and angered, Stead then visited Benjamin Waugh, Honorary Secretary of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty, founded in 1884, who in 1889 would found the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Waugh had been a Congregational minister in the slums of East London and had there witnessed the cruelty and deprivation that children suffered. Waugh introduced him to two little girls who were in his care. One, aged 7, had been abducted to a fas.h.i.+onable brothel where she had been raped, the other, aged 412, had been lured into a brothel and raped 12 times in succession. As the burly and bearded Stead approached her, she began to scream hysterically and plead with him not to hurt her. Stead broke down as emotion overwhelmed him: 'I'll turn my paper into a tub! I'll turn stump orator! I'll d.a.m.n, and d.a.m.n, and d.a.m.n!'38 Stead realised that he didn't have much time. On 8 June 1885 Gladstone had resigned and Lord Salisbury formed a minority government. There not being a general election meant that the Criminal Law Amendment Bill still breathed just! A general election would have cancelled all bills not pa.s.sed by parliament, so there was still a chance that it could get through the Commons and become law. But it was inevitable that Salisbury would soon have to call an election, so Stead and the campaigners didn't know how long they would have Salisbury's administration in fact lasted seven months. It was self-evident that they needed to do something sensational.

Stead did it. He decided to prove that children could be bought and sent into enforced prost.i.tution by doing it himself.

Having taken necessary precautions and secured legal advice, Stead set about finding a child to buy and was introduced to a woman named Rebecca Jarrett,39 a reformed prost.i.tute, brothel keeper and procuress, who was ideally suited to the task but very reluctant to do as Stead asked. 'She demurred, she shrank from it. I was very, very hard upon her. I think I may have done wrong; but when a woman tells you that she has taken young girls at the age of thirteen and beguiled them away . . . administered sleeping potions, and then turned loose her good customer upon them unsuspectingly, a man may be pardoned if he does feel somewhat hot. I insisted; I was as ruthless as death'.40 Born on 3 March 1846, Rebecca Jarrett was probably prost.i.tuted by her mother at a young age. By 15 or 16 she was living with a succession of men, had begun drinking very heavily and had eventually become the manager of several brothels and specialised in procuring young virgins. There was a demand for child prost.i.tutes, both by perverts and by men who paid for virgins because they were not diseased. Rebecca Jarrett once said of a young virgin she procured, 'A gentleman paid me 13 for the first of her'. This was a substantial sum of money, estimated by one source to be the equivalent of about 900 today. Child prost.i.tution was the subject of somewhat chilling humour, as with Oscar Wilde's distasteful remark that Leonard Smithers, Aubrey Beardsley's publisher, 'loves first editions, especially of women: little girls are his pa.s.sion'. In 1884, aged 38, a chronic alcoholic, suffering from severe bronchitis and badly lame from a diseased hip, Rebecca Jarrett met a Salvationist and underwent her own conversion. She was taken to the Salvation Army refuge in Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Ten weeks later, after treatment and 'drying out' at the London Hospital, she went to a rescue home in Winchester run by Josephine Butler and enthusiastically set about rescuing other 'fallen women', eventually becoming matron of her own home, Hope Cottage. Hers was quite a remarkable conversion and achievement and it is understandable that she should have drawn back at Stead's request. However, browbeaten by him, she returned to her old haunts in London, met an old friend from her former life named Nancy Broughton and settled on a bright, dark-haired 13-year-old named Eliza Armstrong as suitable for Stead's plan.

The subsequent story is a little complicated: Jarrett and Broughton bought Eliza from her mother for 5. They maintained that they told the mother that Eliza would be entering a brothel and that she knew what this meant. The mother later said that she thought Eliza was going into service, which is what Eliza was told. Eliza then went through the procedure that she would have gone through if genuinely procured: she was examined and confirmed a virgin, taken to an accommodation house where Stead briefly entered her bedroom masquerading as a ravisher, examined by a doctor who confirmed that her virginity was still intact, then taken to France. Meanwhile, Eliza's step-father Charles Armstrong, locally known as 'Basher', had come home to discover Eliza gone and his wife unable to say where she was, with whom she had gone or how she could be contacted. There was an argument, Basher lived up to his nickname and Mrs. Armstrong fled for solace to the Marquis of Anglesey, where her 5 purchased so much solace that the police were called and she was arrested. News of the row and its cause became common knowledge in the slum community around the Armstrong home in Charles Street, Marylebone, and public opinion sided with Basher.

On 4 July 1885 the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette carried a warning to its readers: All those who are squeamish, and all those who are prudish, and all those who prefer to live in a fool's paradise of imaginary innocence and purity, selfishly oblivious of the horrible realities which torment those whose lives are pa.s.sed in the London inferno, will do well not to read the Pall Mall Gazette of Monday and the following days.

For the first time a national newspaper exposed with unsparing detail to its complacent, hypocritical, self-satisfied and hitherto indifferent readers.h.i.+p, the sordid sink of immorality and vice that had spread its corruption through the highest levels of society. Stead called the four articles 'the Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon', alluding to young men and maidens sent from Athens to be sacrificed on Crete to the Minotaur in this case the children of the poor being the men and maidens and the blood-sated creature of the mythical Labyrinth the profligate rich and influential: If the daughters of the people must be served up as dainty morsels to the pa.s.sions of the rich, let them at least attain an age when they can understand the nature of the sacrifice which they are asked to make. And if we must cast maidens . . . nightly into the jaws of vice, let us at least see to it that they consent to their own immolation, and are not unwilling sacrifices procured by force or fraud. That is not too much to ask from the dissolute rich.

Stead's articles made it clear that the rich and influential cared only about themselves and would mercilessly exploit the poor and underprivileged, even to the point of stealing their children so that they could uncaringly indulge their perverse l.u.s.ts and pa.s.sions: In all the annals of crime can there be found a more shameful abuse of the power of wealth than that by which . . . princes and dukes and ministers and judges and the rich of all cla.s.ses are purchasing for d.a.m.nation the as yet uncorrupted daughters of the poor?

It is difficult to appreciate the sensation the articles caused. People clamoured to buy copies of the paper and when the chain of newsagents W.H. Smith declined to stock it, impromptu vendors took copies into the streets. A famous story of uncertain veracity has it that George Bernard Shaw took a pitch in the Strand and told Stead, 'I am quite willing to take as many quires of the paper as I can carry and sell them'.41 By the time the third article appeared the offices of the Pall Mall Gazette in Northumberland Street were under siege, the crowd overspilling into the Strand, halting traffic and becoming a serious threat to public order. A riot even broke out, possibly caused by bullies hired by the brothel keepers, and the staff had to barricade doors with desks and cabinets. Stead, learning that the government was considering prosecuting him, challenged them to do it, ominously observing that 'Mrs. Jeffries pleaded guilty in order to save her n.o.ble and Royal patrons from exposure. There would be no such abrupt termination to any proceedings that might be commenced against us . . . We await the commencement of those talked of proceedings with a composure that most certainly is not shared by those whom . . . we should be compelled to expose in the witness box'. It was no idle threat.

On 9 July, Home Secretary Cross rose in the Commons to move the second reading of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill42 and the ensuing debate was casual and unremarkable and the bill went to committee. The bill pa.s.sed through the Commons and the Lords and received the royal a.s.sent on 14 August. Stead had won.

Stead also lost.

The Pall Mall Gazette had called Eliza Armstrong 'Lily', but otherwise published enough information for locals to identify her. A crowd descended on the Armstrong house and Mrs. Armstrong, who was fiercely maintaining that she had let Eliza go with extraordinary reluctance and only because she thought she would have a better life entering the service of respectable people, applied to the Marylebone magistrates' court for help in securing the return of her daughter. The court instructed the police to investigate and Inspector Borner set about the task of tracking Eliza down. He soon picked up the trail that led to Mrs. Broughton, who in turn directed him to Josephine Butler in Winchester, who sent him off to see Bramwell Booth, who said Eliza was safe but her whereabouts not known to him and that he'd make some enquiries and pa.s.s her address to a.s.sistant Commissioner Monro. Borner told Mrs. Armstrong that Eliza was well and to drop the matter, and set about arranging his holiday. Mrs. Armstrong returned to the magistrates' court, the police were told to find the child, Borner set aside his holiday plans, retraced his steps, played the heavy here and there and eventually Eliza was handed over to her mother.

A week later warrants were issued for the arrest of W.T. Stead, Rebecca Jarrett, Bramwell Booth and others involved in the abduction of Eliza Armstrong. The issue that would prove their downfall was that a child's father possessed sole authority to make decisions on the child's behalf.43 The mother had no rights. By not getting Basher's permission, Stead and his a.s.sociates were indeed guilty of abduction. The prosecution seemed hypocritical when compared to the release of Mrs. Jefferies. As the Methodist Times observed: Do the government intend to prosecute the Pall Mall Commission and n.o.body else? Are public money and all the resources of the state to be used in attacking those who have exposed an infamous traffic, while those who engage in the traffic, and find their base pleasures in it, are to go scot-free? . . . Why did they not take the brave advice of Mr. Cavendish-Bentinck and prosecute the Pall Mall Gazette as an obscene publication? Was it because in that case Mr. Stead would have been able to place in the witness box those whom Mrs. Jeffries calls 'persons in the highest ranks of life', and to confront them with their obscure victims?44 Stead really had no defence. The best he could hope for was that the jury would believe Rebecca Jarrett's claim that Eliza's mother knew she was going to enter a brothel but Rebecca Jarrett was disastrous in the witness box, tried hard not to implicate other people, lied and became confused. Left with no real defence except n.o.bility of motive, Stead finally addressed the jury: Mr. Attorney said, 'We must protect the children of the poor'. Was not this the object which I did all this for? . . . You KNOW it was! You know that was why Rebecca did it and Jacques did it and Booth did it and we ALL did it! It was not in order to abduct a girl, but to rescue a girl from what we believed to be her inevitable doom. And, gentlemen, if in the exercise of your judgement, you come to the conclusion that you can take NO note of motive, NO note of interest, NO note of the scope of the operations all I have to say, gentlemen, is that when you return your verdict I shall make no appeal to any other tribunal . . . If in the opinion of twelve men twelve Englishmen born of English mothers with English fathers and possibly fathers of English girls if they say to me you are guilty, I take my punishment and do not flinch.45 Stead's closing speech was the work of genius and won him a spontaneous round of applause, but there was a final dramatic twist when the jury, unable to agree, sought advice from the judge, saying through the foreman: 'Our difficulty is this; that if Jarrett obtained the child by false pretences, we feel it was directly contrary to Stead's intentions. We find it therefore, difficult as businessmen to hold him criminally responsible for that which, if he had known it, he would have repudiated'. Judge Lopez dismissed this as irrelevant and insisted that the only relevant question was whether Stead and Jarrett, individually or together, had taken Eliza Armstrong out of the possession of the father and against his will. After retiring for further discussion the jury returned and through the foreman issued the following statement: 'We find that Stead did not have the consent of the father to use the child for the use to which he put her, but that Stead was misled by Jarrett. There's a further recommendation, m'lord, and that is this "That the jury trust that the Government will secure the efficient administration of the Act recently pa.s.sed for the protection of children"'.46 The judge interpreted this as a guilty verdict against Stead and Jarrett. Booth and the other defendants were acquitted. Stead faced a further trial on the a.s.sault charge, was found guilty and sentenced to three months' imprisonment without hard labour. Jarrett got six months without hard labour, and Madame Mourey, another of Stead's group, received six months with hard labour and died in prison.

Stead's professional reputation and in some quarters his personal stature was sacrificed on the 'Maiden Tribute' altar. In getting the Criminal Law Amendment Act pa.s.sed he had achieved the impossible.47 He was manipulative, scheming, bullying, emotionally involved and committed to a unhealthy degree, and although the story he told was broadly true, he served several helpings of fiction along with the fact, in particular portraying the child's mother and father as 'indifferent to anything but drink', and saying that they had virtually forced their daughter onto the procuress for the drink the offered money could buy. He also failed to state that he had been the purchaser. Saying and saying sensationally that Eliza Armstrong had been sold into vice carried a lot of impact; saying that a child could have been sold into prost.i.tution carried considerably less. People felt duped. George Bernard Shaw said 'n.o.body ever trusted him [Stead] after the discovery that the case of Eliza Armstrong was a put up job and that he put it up himself'. Even the Judge, Mr Justice Lopez articulated these feelings when he said, 'It appears to me that you made statements which, when challenged, you were unable to verify. You then determined to verify the truth of your a.s.sertions by an experiment upon a child . . . An irreparable injury has been done to the parents of this child. They have been subject to the unutterable scandal and ignominy of having been charged with having sold their child for violation'.48 Even The Times wrote in an editorial, 'It is a matter for rejoicing that a test case has shown that one of the gravest charges against the English perpetrators the charge of selling their children for infamous purposes cannot be substantiated'.

The Times and Justice Lopez's 'generally bogus point about the Armstrong's damaged reputation'49 all managed to miss the point that Mrs. Armstrong did sell her child for 5 and, whether she was told that the child was going to enter a brothel or told that she was entering service, she had no idea where the child had gone or to whom she had gone or how she could be contacted, and Eliza's ultimate fate was completely unknown to her. Mrs. Armstrong's sense of responsibility and concern was obviously seriously deficient and social welfare and legal protection obviously needed. The failure of Stead, who was to die in 1912 aboard the t.i.tanic, was ultimately a 'failure to understand the law which allowed a man to buy a child if he obtained the consent of both her parents'.50 Rebecca Jarrett worked for the Salvation Army following her release and died in 1928. As for Eliza Armstrong, 'shortly after the trial she was more or less adopted by the Salvation Army and did not see her parents again. She grew up into a fine young woman and married happily'.51 As far as the Jack the Ripper murders are concerned the Maiden Tribute may seem rather far removed, although the series did conclude with a blistering attack accusing the police of corruption and complicity in white slaving. It was based on hearsay, the only direct evidence of attempted bribery being that of Minahan, but an unnamed prison chaplain had told Stead that all prost.i.tutes affirmed that they had to tip the police with money or s.e.x or both, and brothels also paid the constable on his beat, one old brothel keeper telling Stead that he paid '3 a week year in and year out' and that an East End brothel paid the Metropolitan Police 500 a year for protection.52 However, the influence of the Maiden Tribute articles is incalculable, first because they highlighted the levels of depravity to which abject poverty could reduce someone, thus focusing attention on areas of poverty such as the East End, and second because they gave open air acknowledgement to the existence of the clearly visible but taboo subject of prost.i.tution. But there was a third and far more long-term reason. Stead alleged that poor people were being exploited by the rich and privileged and that the most prurient and disgusting crimes were being suppressed and in some cases abetted by the influence of the rich and with the a.s.sistance of the authorities. In short, Stead alleged that the authorities were not interested in and did not care about the poor. This echoed and consequently attracted the support of the fledgling socialist movement and such diverse groups as Fabian intellectuals, socialists, the Marxist Democratic Federation and the working-cla.s.s radical paper Reynold's News (all of whom had their own fears and doubts but for the moment rallied behind Stead). Convinced that although the bill had been pa.s.sed it would not be implemented, these various and diverse groups maintained their pressure and found that they had enormous working-cla.s.s support. A meeting in Hyde Park on 22 August attracted an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 people,53 including a very substantial contingent from the East End. The exploitation of the poor by the upper cla.s.ses would soon s.h.i.+ft from white slavery and prost.i.tution to focus on unemployment, but was very quickly revived when it became apparent that the police couldn't catch Jack the Ripper. It was then claimed that the authorities cared little about the women sacrificed to the Minotaur that was Jack the Ripper because they came from the poorest and most helpless strata of society. The police would soon have had the murderer behind bars, they said, if his victims were middle-cla.s.s women from the West End. This view emerged very early, the foreman of the jury at an adjournment of the murder of Nichols stating that he thought the murder would not have happened if a substantial reward had been offered by the Home Secretary in the case of the murder in George Yard, adding that he believed a substantial one would have been offered had a rich person been murdered.54 And perversely, the pa.s.sage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act may have made life easier for Jack the Ripper. The new law offered a reward to any private citizen reporting to the police a house operating as a brothel. This meant that the police were obliged to investigate any such house so accused and, if the accusation was correct, to prosecute. Frederick Charrington, heir to the huge brewing fortune, but himself a teetotaller and temperance activist, set out to use the law as a means of closing brothels. Charrington and some companions would seek out at night these sinks of iniquity and although they were frequently set upon and beaten up they proved so successful that a claimed 200 brothels in many notorious areas of Tower Hamlets were closed by his actions alone; 'the bullies, the keepers of evil houses, the horrible folk who battened on shame and enriched themselves with the wages of sin, feared Frederick Charrington as they feared no policeman, no inspector, no other living being . . .'.55 As far as Jack the Ripper was concerned, this may have helped: 'The Police commissioner pointed out to Charrington that he had forced the women to exercise their calling in the streets' where as a result they were horrifically butchered.56 Charrington was not deterred. As the Ripper terror abated, he redoubled his efforts.57

Notes.

1. Ensor, Sir Robert (1936) England 18701914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.170.

2. Strachey, Lytton (1921) Queen Victoria. London: Chatto and Windus, p.141.

3. Writing of his experiences of the East End of 1902, Jack London explained how he had encountered great difficulty finding anyone who knew about the East End. He visited the Cheapside branch of travel agent Thomas Cook, who, he said, could send him 'to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet' but of the East End, 'barely a stone's throw away', they admitted: 'we know nothing whatsoever about the place at all'. (London, Jack (1903) The People of the Abyss. London: Macmillan.) 4. Thomas, Christopher, Sloane, Barney and Phillpott, Christopher (1997) Excavations at the Priory and Hospital of St. Mary Spital, London. London: Museum of London Archaeology Service, p.43.

5. Mayhew, Henry (1983) London's Underworld. London: Braken Books (originally published with an introduction by Peter Quennell in 1950 and in numerous editions since then), is the fourth volume of Mayhew's London Labour and The London Poor, was orginally called London Labour and The London Poor Those That Will Not Work and was published in London by Griffin, Bohn in 1862, years after the previous three.

6. Acton, William (1865) The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age and Advanced Life, Considered in their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations. Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston.

7. See the arguments surrounding the suspect Aaron Kosminski, the cause of whose insanity was given in his medical papers as 'self-abuse', otherwise masturbation.

8. Acton, William (1857) Prost.i.tution, Considered in Its Moral, Social, & Sanitary Aspects, In London and Other Large Cities. With Proposals for the Mitigation and Prevention of Its Attendant Evils. London: John Churchill.

9. The British soldier was rarely treated as more than cannon fodder. The pay was low, punishment savage, conditions appalling and the barracks were diseased and overcrowded men in prison were allotted a minimum of 1,000 cu. ft. each; in barracks soldiers were given 300400 cu. ft. and the death rate in 1857 in barracks was higher than in the worst slums. (Ereira, Alan (1981) The People's England. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, p.79).

10. Hansard, 7 May 1883 but not without Gladstone's knowledge, given that he had concluded the 'debate' on the second reading of the 1866 bill. That the Act pa.s.sed with such little attention was probably due to the absence of real interest in the welfare of either group, soldiers or prost.i.tutes, both of whom fell into the category of 'outcasts'.

11. Pearsall, Ronald (1969) The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian s.e.xuality. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p.100. For more information see Chapman, Maria Weston (1877) Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, with Memorials. Boston, Ma.s.s.: James R. Osgood and Co.

12. At meetings of working-cla.s.s men, Rev. Dr. Hoopell was in the habit of displaying the instruments used in the examination of women and describing minutely their use, which Josephine Butler described to Henry J. Wilson, 26 August 1872 as 'needlessly & grossly indecent'.

13. 18281906.

14. Josephine Butler suffered an early tragedy when before her eyes she witnessed her youngest child and only daughter fall to her death as she over-excitedly rushed from an upstairs room to welcome her home.

15. London: Horace Marshall and Son, 1898.

16. Ensor, Sir Robert, op. cit., p.171.

17. Published in full in Johnson, George W. and Lucy A. (1909) Josephine E. Butler. Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, pp.947.

18. The unmarried Becker fell out with the married Emmeline Pankhurst when she supported as a temporary measure the proposal that Parliament grant single women the vote. Although forced to resign from the Married Women's Committee, she continued in the editors.h.i.+p of the Women's Suffrage Journal and in 1887 was elected as president of National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She died in 1890.

19. Published in full in Johnson, George W. and Lucy A., op. cit.

20. Josephine Butler in a letter to her husband in November 1870.

21. The s.h.i.+eld, 12 November 1870, p.292.

22. Butler, Josephine (1898) Personal Reminiscences. London: Horace Marshall and Son, pp.8598.

23. Walkowitz, Judith R. (1980) Prost.i.tution and Victorian Society. Women, Cla.s.s and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.247.

24. Dyer, Alfred S. (1880) The European Slave Trade in English Girls. A Narrative of Facts. London: Dyer Bros., p.7.

25. Terrot, Charles (1959) The Maiden Tribute: A Study of the White Slave Traffic of the Nineteenth Century. London: Frederick Muller, p.68.

26. Pearson, Michael (1972) The Age of Consent. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, p.41.

27. Butler, Josephine, op. cit.

28. Terrot, Charles, op. cit., p.116.

29. Hansard, 30 May 1881, cols.16089.

30. Pall Mall Gazette, 23 May 1885.

31. Fisher, Trevor (1995) Scandal: The s.e.xual Politics of Late Victorian Britain. Stroud, Gloucesters.h.i.+re: Sutton, p.58.

32. Hansard, 21 May 1885, col. 1024.

33. At the trial of Mrs. Jeffries Leopold was revealed as a purchaser and trafficker in under-age girls and was alleged to purchase as many as 100 under-age English virgins a year, paying as much as 800 annually. (See Railton, G.S. (ed.) (1885) The Truth About the Armstrong Case and the Salvation Army. London: Salvation Army Bookstores, p.8.) 34. Mrs. Jeffries consistently denied that he was one of her clients.

35. Stead, W.T. (1885) The Armstrong Case: Mr Stead's Defence in Full. London, p.6.

36. Scott, J.W. Robertson (1952) The Life and Death of a Newspaper: An Account of the Temprements, Peturbations and Achievements of John Morley, W.T. Stead, E.T. Cook, Harry Cust, J.L. Garvin and three other Editors of the Pall Mall Gazette. London: Methuen, pp.1256.

37. Snell, Lord (1936) Men, Movements, and Myself. London: J.M. Dent.

38. Petrie, Glen (1971) A Singular Iniquity, the Campaigns of Josephine Butler. London: Macmillan.

39. There are several versions of Rebecca Jarrett's life. The archives at the Salvation Army Heritage Centre, Queen Victoria Street, London, contain four versions. One is handwritten by Rebecca Jarrett herself, another was typed by a Salvation Army officer who interviewed her. The two others are a typed version that more or less follows the former and a set of supplementary notes. Rebecca Jarrett also wrote a memoir specifically for Josephine Butler, who wrote a biography Rebecca Jarrett (London: Morgan and Scott, 1886).

40. Railton, G.S. (ed.) (1885) The Truth About the Armstrong Case and the Salvation Army. London: Salvation Army Bookstores.

41. Holroyd, Michael (1990) Bernard Shaw Vol. 1: The Search For Love 18561898. Harmondsworth, Middles.e.x: Penguin, p.290.

42. Cross had previously supported an amendment to lower the age of consent from a proposed 14 to 13!

43. Only much later was it discovered that 'Basher' Armstrong was the child's step-father and that his permission wasn't required.

44. Terrot, Charles, op. cit., pp.1901.

45. The Times, 5 November 1885.

46. The Times, 9 November 1885.

47. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, officially ent.i.tled 'An Act to make provision for the Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and other purposes' (48 and 49 Victoria, Chapter 69), raised the age of consent from 14 to 16 and comprehensively protected women under 18 from 'white slavery'. It also contained Henry Labouchere's notorious Clause 11 measure against male h.o.m.os.e.xuality.

48. The Times, 11 November 1885.

49. Hattersley, Roy (1999) Blood & Fire: William and Catherine Booth and Their Salvation Army. London: Little, Brown, p.322.

50. Ibid., p.321.

51. Terrot, Charles, op. cit., p.221.

52. Pall Mall Gazette, 10 July 1888. It rather delightfully called the police 'the truncheoned custodians of public order' and spoke of them as being converted 'into a set of "ponces" in uniform, levying a disgraceful tribute on the fallen maidens of modern Babylon'.

53. Pall Mall Gazette, 24 August 1885.

54. The Times, 18 September 1888.

55. Thorne, Guy (1913) The Great Acceptance: The Life Story of F.N. Charrington. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

56. Bristow, Edward J. (1977) Vice and Vigilance. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, p.167.

57. Fisher, Trevor, op.cit., p.163.

Chapter Eight.

'At the Crater of a Volcano'

'The year 1880 opened in the midst of a fog unparalleled in our annals, which almost without intermission brooded over London from November 1879 to the following February. This gloom bad for the health, depressing to the spirits, obscuring the outlook might well have been the emanation of the feelings of Englishmen . . .'.1 Trade was struggling with falling prices, a soaking summer had caused a complete failure of the harvest and in Hyde Park gatherings of the unemployed were beginning to bring public attention to the severity of the problem. A depression had hit Britain in the 1870s and the nation was just struggling out of it when another ushered in the new decade. 'The word "unemployed" used as a noun is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary from the year 1882; the word "unemployment" from 1888.'2 The depression would begin to lift by the end of 1887, but by this time the effects would have changed Britain for ever.

Early in January 1885 3,0004,000 men in Birmingham, 'orderly, quiet, but near starvation',3 marched to pet.i.tion the Mayor for employment. Similar marches took place in other cities, including London, as they had taken place in previous years, but the winter of 188485 had been harsh, unemployment severe, the distress appalling. And the men in consequence exhibited a new and menacing frame of mind. The Government, proclaimed the men who marched on the Local Government Board on 16 February, would be responsible for the deaths brought on by dest.i.tution. The Government, they said, was 'responsible for murder'.

Public demonstrations of this kind had become popular during the secondhalf of the nineteenth century. In fact, the word 'demonstration', in the sense of a meeting showing public support, was first coined in the 1860s. By 1872 The Times was complaining that organising demonstrations 'appears to be becoming a recognised branch of industry in this country',4 and by the 1880s 'Henry Matthews characterised its popularity as a national mania'.5 Of all the things that had by 1888 focused public and media attention on the East End of London, perhaps nothing was more significant than the increasing militancy of the working cla.s.ses and the various socialist groups a.s.sociated with them. Demonstration by the unemployed, significant numbers of whom came from the East End, awakened or fed fears of revolution.

'The year 1886 was a terrible one for labour, everywhere reductions of wages, everywhere increase of the numbers of the unemployed.'6 Desperation was great and revolution was in the air, as an outbreak of rioting by followers of the Social Democratic Federation would quickly bring home to the government and public alike, focusing eyes more firmly on the East End than ever before.

In 1880 a sometime Pall Mall Gazette journalist named Henry Mayers Hyndman (the son of barrister John Beckles Hyndman, sometime Liberal benefactor to East End churches) boarded a s.h.i.+p bound for the United States where he was to conduct some business. He had taken with him as a little light reading, Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and by the time he stepped onto American soil was a convert to socialism and determined to form a Marxist political group when he arrived back in England. The following year he founded the Democratic Federation, which became the Social Democratic Federation in 1884 and is regarded as the first important socialist body in England. Members included Tom Mann, John Burns, Ben Tillet, Eleanor Marx (Karl Marx's youngest daughter), William Morris, George Lansbury (future MP for Bow and Bromley), Edward Aveling, H.H. Champion and the remarkable Annie Besant. Hyndman and his organisation became deeply committed to resolving the plight of the unemployed.

Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation, the newly formed Social Democratic League (founded in 1884 by William Morris when he dropped out of the SDF) and the Fabian Society whose most distinguished members were George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb (founders of the London School of Economics), H.G. Wells and Leonard Woolf were all strongly opposed to an organisation called the Free Trade Movement, an anti-socialist organisation that believed the economic difficulties were a consequence of 'unfair' foreign compet.i.tion. Although supported by manufacturers, it sought working-cla.s.s support and sponsored the London United Workmen's Committee that orchestrated rallies and demonstrations targeting the unemployed. The socialist groups thought fair traders were p.a.w.ns of the capitalists and traitors to the labouring cla.s.ses. Lambeth-born John Burns,7 founder of the Battersea branch of the SDF, thought the fair traders were 'the most infamous scoundrels that ever wore boot-leather in the streets of London'. When the fair traders planned a ma.s.s demonstration of and for the unemployed in Trafalgar Square on 8 February 1886, the Social Democratic Federation decided to sabotage the meeting by getting to Trafalgar Square first. The fair traders got wind of the plan and at a meeting with Chief Inspector Charles Cutbush,8 head of Scotland Yard's Executive Branch,9 they warned that any interference by the SDF would inevitably lead to disturbances and suggested that their own force of 500 Stewards and 50 Marshals be augmented by additional police as a precaution.

On 5 February Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Edmund Henderson reviewed police preparations with the Home Secretary, Richard Cross. It was Cross's last day in office, Lord Salisbury's Conservative government having lost the election to a short-lived Gladstonian third term, and Cross would be replaced by Hugh Childers. Demonstrations in London had been relatively orderly for several years and neither Henderson nor Cross thought that this one was likely to be different. Later that day Henderson, Cutbush and a.s.sistant Commissioner Pearson agreed that they needed only to augment the routine patrols by 260 police reserves. Henderson increased this reserve to 500 men on the morning of the demonstration. One hundred men were deployed at St. George's Barracks adjacent to the square, 60 more were at King Street Station to protect the Houses of Parliament, 20 at Vine Street Station and 320 were held in reserve at Scotland Yard, to be deployed wherever there may be trouble. In charge of these forces were District Superintendents Dunlop, Hume and Walker, 10 inspectors and 50 sergeants, and four plainclothes detectives under Chief Inspector Sh.o.r.e.

Crowds were gathering in Trafalgar Square by noon on Monday 8 February. Childers made his first visit to his office and met with Henderson and Pearson, who a.s.sured him that sufficient policemen were available to handle any contingency. When riots proved them all wrong, Childers wrote complainingly to his son: I took over this department between eleven and twelve, and the heads of the police told me that all necessary preparations had been made, and, of course, I could not have made any change even had I wished. But all the trouble of inquiry falls on me, and the Police are greatly discredited, part of this discredit being reflected on the Home Office.10 At about 2.30 in the afternoon District Superintendent Robert Walker, who was 74 years old and had overall responsibility for the police presence in Trafalgar Square, arrived there singularly illinformed about what to expect. He knew only about the fair traders' demonstration, had no idea the SDF would turn up, had no special instructions about what to do if there was trouble, had no idea where the reserves were deployed, and in the course of the afternoon he would get lost in the crowd, see absolutely nothing of interest and would have his pockets picked clean.

The fair traders arrived at 3.00pm and conducted a very orderly meeting. Then the SDF arrived, John Burns brandis.h.i.+ng a red flag which he later claimed to be a worker's red handkerchief tied to a stick (the 'worker's flag'; Burns knew how to elaborate a good story when he saw one) which he said he carried so that his followers and the police would know where he was. According to a freelance journalist named Joseph Burgess: Burns, in opening the meeting, declared that he and his friends of the Revolutionary Social Democratic League were not there to oppose the agitation for the unemployed, but they were there to prevent the people being made the tools of the paid agitators who were working in the interests of the Fair Trade League.

He went on to denounce the House of Commons as composed of capitalists who had fattened on the labour of the working men, and in this category he included landlords, railway directors, and employers, who, he said, were no more likely to legislate in the interests of the working men than were the wolves to labour for the lambs.

To hang these people, he said, would be to waste good rope, and as no good to the people was to be expected from these 'representatives', there must be a revolution to alter the present state of things.

The people who were out of work, he continued, did not want relief, but justice. From whom should they get justice? From such as the Duke of Westminster and his cla.s.s, or the capitalists in the House of Commons and their cla.s.s?