Post by Gian on Sept 1, 2011 9:09:13 GMT -5
Yesterday was the anniversary of the finding of the Ripper's supposed first victim, Polly Nichols. I posted this on FB, an extract from my upcoming book on the Ripper. It is very rough still, but you get the idea. This is from the chapter "Wormwood Gutter."
ON THE LATE night of August 30, 1888, Whitechapel was drenched in heavy rain fall. Thunder rumbled. Then there was a slap, a crackle and a searing jagged streak of white bolts as lightening slashed the dark gray heavens. The scene is worthy of an old black and white etching, bloodless, ominous and colorless. . . save for the glowing pink bloodstaining the gray sky. It was not the beauty of dusk. Two dock fires burned on the nearby Thames, sending up belching dark plumes. The flames licked about wildly as more wood was consumed. Their brimstone colors pulsed and throbbed off the bloated cheeks of the swollen clouds overhead. The reflections thus were not those of warmth but of hellish torment.
The smell of scorched tar and brine coursed through Whitechapel like a boney finger. Down each dark lane it crept, over the dilapidated tile roofs it slithered, and past the ruckus of all night pubs it crawled. Even in the heavy rain the smell of the quays and old wood was noticeable. The rain had settled the putrid smell of the squalid district. Horse urine didn’t rise from the dark cobblestones, decaying garbage had its sour smell doused, the smell of slaughterhouses and dead fish is gone.
Whitechapel was a gangrenous wound in old London. But not all of it was bad. Middleclass shops and tradesmen’s residences lined the major thoroughfares, but they were to some extent the whitewash on the tomb of coal stained alleys. Behind them lay a veritable labyrinth of pestilential narrow byways and crisscrossing lanes. Like a hedge maze, streets and alleys crisscrossed, turned, turned again and forked. There were dead ends of brick walls, tall wood gates and sometimes the lanes opened up into small squares devoid of any light. Passageways went through buildings— echous promenades that went from courtyards to dismal streets.
Dark cobblestones, ancient and worn, strewn with decomposing rubbish, absorbed all the light at night. A glimmer might reflect off one rough old hewn stone polished by the damp. But it would be from the light of a distant gas burning street lamp, not from the brilliant bursts of lightning. The buildings were too tall, the alleys too narrow to allow light to angle down as far as the street. A beam came down halfway perhaps. A pulse of white light created odd shadows grasping out from under ledges. And there were shadows even in the unlit dark. Eyes grow accustom. Within the gray shroud doorways, windows, corners, were black as if outlined in ink.
The gas lamps added to the forlorn melancholia of the district. These were set few and far between at significant intersections. They were dismal haloes no brighter than a lantern cast afar off in a ghostly moor. They teemed with moths and every other flying vermin buzzing about: a living dust cloud deprived of its carrion in the gutter by the rain.
The labyrinths of dark lanes and alleys were hemmed in by tenement houses, warehouses, the back walls of pubs, stables, slaughterhouses, tobacconists and shops. They were all cheek-by-jowl. Everything was cheek-by-jowl. Windows were closed and boarded with makeshift wood shutters. Until late at night children might be heard crying within. Arguments muffled out through the walls or broke out in staccato bursts as one of the arguers opened the door and stomped away.
The broad streets had pubs, lots of pubs. They were finely decorated according to the fashion of the time: half columns, recessed and alternating brick patterns, fine balustrades, pilasters on the walls, grand signs painted many bright colors. Corner pubs had windows all along their curved front. Lights shined forth. Gaiety rang out. But the main business of Whitechapel was industrial—sweat, really. Entire lanes were lined with warehouses, brick walls protecting receiving yards, tall wood gates. The other main function of Whitechapel was low-income housing. Along the crisscrossing streets the model tenement houses stretched with uniformity. The newer ones were made of golden bricks, main doors and bland windows framed with gray stone. At night, bleached by the coal dust of an industrial age, they took on a rust color, dead, mottled decaying.
All buildings were cold brick or stone. In the dampness they sweated grime and cooking oil. During the day the streets were lined by booths. Butchers set up in certain rows, weavers, importers, vegetable merchants. Whitechapel was a port of entry in London for many things, but as the heart of the East End it was also a city unto itself. No place was dirtier in London. No place was smellier. No place was as crowded or as ignoble.
Storms could not altogether clean Whitechapel. Storms past had left their mark in the soot. Coal dust was streaked by water run-off to make the buildings appear to weep mournfully from window sills and over ledges. The bloodless white light of this night’s pulses of lightning revealed the moody haunts frowning over the dirty streets. Those buildings facing the high streets were dabbled by a certain artistry of form. But they were not gay or brilliant. This was Victorian London. The exuberance of the age of enlightenment was gone. Men did not powder their hair and wear silks. Chimney pipe trousers and stove pipe hats had replaced it all. The rural dandy did not dash by in gilded coaches. The industrial revolution had made a different world. A darker world, one more congested in the big cities, one stained with the residue of mass production. Darker clothes suited it. Restraint suited the Victorian sense of propriety. Cynicism reflected the social and engineering problems facing the big cities. A rural world controlled by country gentlemen and squires was battling overpopulation, poor sanitation, and continued immigration.
Business needs in Whitechapel did not merit any of the grandest architecture or any of the most decorative and innovative. Dirty crimson brick was good enough, the gray of the slag heap fit. New buildings were square. Old ones were incorporated to create interesting if not odd hybrids, geometric curiosities, and some as if the product of archi-tectural leftovers. During the day a cloud of coal dust hung over the place. The smoke of furnaces, stoves, open air fires and grease pits rose up. Mixed with the coal a black plaster was slowly forming on some buildings.
Night actually favored Whitechapel. In darkness it pulled in its ignoble train. Any artificial light only made the surrounding shadows that much darker and the contents their malingering veil concealed that less offensive to the eye. Bland buildings drained of vigor at night. They morphed into skulls in the gray witching light— their windows gaunt, sunken sockets, their form vapid and starved— in which festered the urban east end of the greatest, most populated city on Earth.
This dismal netherworld behind the high streets was Whitechapel at night. It was a sewer, its narrow lanes the bowels into which passed the dregs of the great city. The industrial revolution started it. Mechanized production attracted hordes to the great cities. Factories spewed forth coal dust as they ran at full speed. The effects of the revolution were not fully realized until the 1830 to 40s. By this time the major cities were swelling with laborers. Thousands of children were being born into city environments. Failure here wasn’t the same as in the country. There was no land to fall back on. Poverty resulted. Quasi homeless, dirty poverty. Workhouses were erected. Theft and prostitution increased. Tens of thousands were being born to this. They became the seagulls that feed off the garbage of a ship’s wake and they became every form of infusoria in stagnation. London was the world of Lazarus. Thousands in the East End were under the beautiful white tablecloth of the West End waiting for the scraps to fall from the table. . .Or so many felt.
The East End, too, was naturally the home of many radical ideas and “left” leaning news rags. It was the center of immigrations. Germans, Poles, Russians, mixed together, and it was also the Jewish neighborhood. The police were never sure what ethnicity the foreigners were. All Jews spoke some kind of German, as did the Poles. Many Jews came from all the eastern countries. Jewish neighborhoods were usually quiet and they were centered south of the main road, Whitechapel Road and Whitechapel High Street. But Whitechapel and especially Spitalfields adjacent to its north was a melting pot. All nationalities mixed and they brought with them old bigotries and hatreds and some, like the Jews, ideas of reform. They were often suspected of some socialist subversion.
Prostitution was the main profession at night. It thrived in shadows. Sidewalks and landings were cupid’s dirty bed; shadows were the sheets. The blackness of alleys was a doorway. Entire alleyways yawned with the smell of a filthy proposal. Into them led prostitutes their lover for the hour. The furniture of their parlor of love was dust bins, rubbish cans or the back of a parked wagon. The lan-guage of love was mixed with the splatting sound of horse dung. Gutters coursed with urine, the gentle brook of this wormwood Eden. Its flora was wilted cabbage, bones, soggy bread crust, putrid fish entrails, dead birds and its fauna was maggots.
Sex was three pence a stand. And there was plenty of business. Whitechapel’s pubs were open to all hours. By the 1880s Whitechapel became the destination for any who wanted to experience the forbidden vices. The pubs were the meeting spots. Only the locals knew the bowels of Whitechapel beyond the high streets. No client went too far in to the maze to dally. Robberies and fights abounded. It was a boiling ghetto of contention.
Night trade could be as dangerous as daytime brawls during the day. Fights broke out in pubs and raggedy patrons often were thrown onto the hard cobblestones. Epithets followed, fists were shaken, and the ruffled stuck their nose up with seedy grandeur and went to another pub.
Middleclass Londoners were scared of the poor and suspicious of foreigners. Whitechapel and the nearby slums of Spitalfields and Aldgate were thus quite a blemish. So long as the areas remained out of the news, it could be ignored. Londoners did not have to blush. The blush was embarrassment, anger, shame perhaps. Perhaps frustration. Nothing could be done about it. The greatest city on Earth merely had the greatest slum as well.
On this night foot traffic was pretty slim. The rain poured in a heavy curtain. Runoff gulped down downpipes and wept over the top of buildings. The old sidewalks were pelted with the heavy drops and dowsing streams.
The storm had remarkably cleaned up Whitechapel. The red glow gave the gray clouds an artistic, though perhaps apocalyptic tint. The fires made visible the holy spires of London beyond and the dome of St. Paul’s.
At 11 p.m. one of the local prostitutes, Polly Nichols, was walking down what is considered the main thoroughfare of Whitechapel Road. It was one end of the Whitechapel High Street. This was that thin exterior shell within which rotted the heart of the Whitechapel District. The street was sparsely lit, but it was even more thinly trafficked this stormy night.
She was a dark figure. No woman dressed up in these areas, whether honest or practicing the illegal vices. She had a dark complexion, some of it no doubt grime, and the bland colors of Victorian sobriety matched well. She wore a black wicker bonnet trimmed with black velvet. It was a bit nicer than most, but not so flashy. Her dress was brown and over this she had a woman’s ulster, which was similar to a man’s ulster, the famous coat of Sherlock Holmes, with its own little cape over the shoulder. For a woman it tied around the neck and had large buttons. It was reddish brown, the same color as this rusty corroded community.
She is not on her way home, for she really had none. Her lodgings were on Thrawl Street, a claustrophobic brick and stone tunnel worthy of thingyensian plaintive moans and a charcoal pencil’s morbid strokes. It was a “doss-house” where you could pay nightly. She was, truly, a citizen of the street and a person of the night. There was nothing for her at Thrawl Street yet anyway. No money in sleep. For Whitechapel the night was still young. The pubs were still clamoring inside. It was a Friday night and the cattle boats had come in to the Thames from all over England and the continent. There were many potential customers awaiting no doubt.
It was here that Polly made her way. The Frying Pan pub was a jumble with the locals enjoying their night indoors. Polly perhaps had been unsuccessful in the heavy rains on Whitechapel Road. Where indeed would a successful prostitute take a chap on a night like this? The streets were too filthy to lie down on, and it was simply too stormy. A bloke needed a few pints in him to get up the gumption on a night like this. The Frying Pan was one of the pubs that would work. It was at Brick Lane and Thrawl Street, so that she was familiar with all the nearby places she could take any willing and paying lad.
Apparently Polly was unsuccessful. She was a small woman, about 45 years old, but she had the good fortune to look about 10 years younger. That still made prostitution viable, especially in Whitechapel. . .and on a dark and stormy night. She had lost up to 5 front teeth, so that she wasn’t a raving beauty. But she had another huge plus. She was more cleanly where it counted than the average hedge drab.
Polly’s type of prostitute wasn’t that of the professional red light district, as in Hamburg where prostitution was advertised by buxom young women sitting in their windows waiting for window shoppers to come by, survey the goods, and pay the price. There were no madams organizing the trade of middle-aged scullery wenches winking over toothless smiles. This kind of prostitution was self-employment. It was for the poor women who needed to supplement their income. It was a way for the talentless to make a living. They did not profit; they made a living, a very modest one.
It seems certain Polly was unsuccessful at the Frying Pan this night. She went back to her lodging around 1:20 a.m. August 31 and was stopped in the kitchen by the deputy-in-charge. She hadn’t the money to pay for her bed, so she had to hop it. She wasn’t worried. At least she put on that stalwart appearance. She had a new black bonnet in her hands. “Never mind,” she replied in her heavy lower-class accent. “I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.”
Off she went. But the confidence was probably for pride’s sake. At 2:30 a.m. Emily Holland, one of her former roommates, is at the corner of Whitechapel Road and Osborn Street. She had been watching the Shadwell dock fire. The glow behind her was of a dim sunset as the last embers of the fire smoldered toward the tempestuous gray heavens. The tops of old Georgian inns and modern Victorian brick warehouses only vaguely glowed in reflection, and they created deeper shadows in their lee. Polly was staggering out of the darkness down Osborn Street, emerging from the bowels of Whitechapel. She was “very drunk and staggered against the wall,” said Emily later. She had an excuse this night for still being out. She complained “I’ve had my doss money three times today and spent it.” Then she said “It won’t be long before I’m back.”
Emily Holland paid little attention to it. Polly frequently had a snoot full, and she could have meant anything. But it seems possible that Polly had been successful a few times. Her new “jolly bonnet” was still with her. If it had been an earlier payment for her services, she hadn’t seen the need to hock it yet for her doss money. The amount to let her have a bed was 3 pence, the price of a customer. It was, unfortunately, also the price of a good stout gin, which had proven to be mother’s milk to Polly.
Confidence and compulsion must have inspired Polly to forsake her doss for a gullet of booze. Even now she was certain that she could get another doss down-payment shortly. She had that new black bonnet after all. In the dark and with her fortuitous 10 years younger look, she must have been sure she could attract the higher paying clientele. She spoke with Emily for about 7 top 8 minutes and then staggered off to find some bonnie bloke still about. Perhaps one of the firefighters or gents standing about the docks watching the fire? It was just coming to an end, so they’ll be breaking up soon.
Polly ambled off.
At 3:15 a.m. constable John Thain is walking his beat in the gloomy, bleak morning. Buck’s Row is one of his lanes. He walks it quietly enough, shining his lantern where he sees fit. There is little public lighting. There is a solitary sentinel, a gas lamp at the mouth of this appendix of the Row. Nothing else. Its smoky amber glow is faint. There is a dim wash of light on the wet cobblestones. There is the residue of smoke dimming it and turning the light a tormented color. There’s no need except for a light there. This part of Buck’s Row is narrow and dim, but the part beyond the lamp is a beautiful wide expanse of cobblestones, and lighting would be little good there. The lights were so dim that 2 feet away you often couldn’t see what you had in your hand. Lighting is expensive and precarious. The most important lamps therefore are the only ones on. This lamp will guide anybody from the wide expanse that is Buck’s into the mouth of this narrow little appendix.
But soon it is pitch dark. He walks along with his bull’s eye lamp and shines it about. Buck’s Row here has warehouses and loading courtyards behind tall brick walls. Thick wood gates are shut. Small wood gates lead down side lanes. Some middleclass merchant cottages stand opposite Schneider’s Cap Factory and the Brown & Eagle Wool Warehouse and the Essex Warf. It is very quiet. The good constable’s shoes clack upon the cobblestones. He notices nothing unusual. He hears nobody else. This is not merely the subjective impression of one constable. Sgt. Kerby must have missed Thain by moments. He also walked the lane and noticed nothing unusual.
At 3:40 a.m. many begin their trek to work. Carman Charles Cross is on his way to work at Pickford’s on City Row. (A carman is the driver of a horse drawn tram or other business cart). In the darkness he sees a body before a closed wood gate opposite Essex Warf. He walks into the center of the lane and notices it is that of a woman. She lies on the sidewalk before the wooden gateway to Brown’s Stable. He stops and does not approach closer. In the darkness he can’t make out anything too clear. He hears another man coming up the lane from whence he also had just come. He calls him over. Cross thinks this woman is dead. They feel her face and it’s cold. They feel her arms and legs. The arms are warm above the elbow but cold below. The legs are warm. Her dress has been lifted to be a bundle over her lower body and thighs. The man with Cross thinks he detects a slight heartbeat. He even thinks she is slightly breathing.
What to do? It is too dark to make out anything else. They need to be off to work, so they head up the street and try and find a constable. At Hanbury Street and Baker’s Row they meet Constable Jonas Mizzen. He’s walking his beat. They stop him and tell him they found a body of a woman in distress.
“All right,” he says, and he is quickly on his way.
From the beam of a bull’s eye lamp moving about on Buck’s Row, Mizzen realizes another constable is standing over the body. When he gets there he recognizes it is Constable John Neil. It was Neil who found her. His lantern beam directs Mizzen’s lantern to follow its path. The beams join over the body’s face. The woman’s eyes stare wide open. Blood oozes from a deep slash in her throat. It trickles over the sidewalk and into the gutter. Her left hand touched the wood gate. Her black bonnet lies nearby. He tells Mizzen that he had already called to Thain, who was passing on the cross street east, Brady Street, and told him to fetch a local doctor, Rees Llewellyn.
ON THE LATE night of August 30, 1888, Whitechapel was drenched in heavy rain fall. Thunder rumbled. Then there was a slap, a crackle and a searing jagged streak of white bolts as lightening slashed the dark gray heavens. The scene is worthy of an old black and white etching, bloodless, ominous and colorless. . . save for the glowing pink bloodstaining the gray sky. It was not the beauty of dusk. Two dock fires burned on the nearby Thames, sending up belching dark plumes. The flames licked about wildly as more wood was consumed. Their brimstone colors pulsed and throbbed off the bloated cheeks of the swollen clouds overhead. The reflections thus were not those of warmth but of hellish torment.
The smell of scorched tar and brine coursed through Whitechapel like a boney finger. Down each dark lane it crept, over the dilapidated tile roofs it slithered, and past the ruckus of all night pubs it crawled. Even in the heavy rain the smell of the quays and old wood was noticeable. The rain had settled the putrid smell of the squalid district. Horse urine didn’t rise from the dark cobblestones, decaying garbage had its sour smell doused, the smell of slaughterhouses and dead fish is gone.
Whitechapel was a gangrenous wound in old London. But not all of it was bad. Middleclass shops and tradesmen’s residences lined the major thoroughfares, but they were to some extent the whitewash on the tomb of coal stained alleys. Behind them lay a veritable labyrinth of pestilential narrow byways and crisscrossing lanes. Like a hedge maze, streets and alleys crisscrossed, turned, turned again and forked. There were dead ends of brick walls, tall wood gates and sometimes the lanes opened up into small squares devoid of any light. Passageways went through buildings— echous promenades that went from courtyards to dismal streets.
Dark cobblestones, ancient and worn, strewn with decomposing rubbish, absorbed all the light at night. A glimmer might reflect off one rough old hewn stone polished by the damp. But it would be from the light of a distant gas burning street lamp, not from the brilliant bursts of lightning. The buildings were too tall, the alleys too narrow to allow light to angle down as far as the street. A beam came down halfway perhaps. A pulse of white light created odd shadows grasping out from under ledges. And there were shadows even in the unlit dark. Eyes grow accustom. Within the gray shroud doorways, windows, corners, were black as if outlined in ink.
The gas lamps added to the forlorn melancholia of the district. These were set few and far between at significant intersections. They were dismal haloes no brighter than a lantern cast afar off in a ghostly moor. They teemed with moths and every other flying vermin buzzing about: a living dust cloud deprived of its carrion in the gutter by the rain.
The labyrinths of dark lanes and alleys were hemmed in by tenement houses, warehouses, the back walls of pubs, stables, slaughterhouses, tobacconists and shops. They were all cheek-by-jowl. Everything was cheek-by-jowl. Windows were closed and boarded with makeshift wood shutters. Until late at night children might be heard crying within. Arguments muffled out through the walls or broke out in staccato bursts as one of the arguers opened the door and stomped away.
The broad streets had pubs, lots of pubs. They were finely decorated according to the fashion of the time: half columns, recessed and alternating brick patterns, fine balustrades, pilasters on the walls, grand signs painted many bright colors. Corner pubs had windows all along their curved front. Lights shined forth. Gaiety rang out. But the main business of Whitechapel was industrial—sweat, really. Entire lanes were lined with warehouses, brick walls protecting receiving yards, tall wood gates. The other main function of Whitechapel was low-income housing. Along the crisscrossing streets the model tenement houses stretched with uniformity. The newer ones were made of golden bricks, main doors and bland windows framed with gray stone. At night, bleached by the coal dust of an industrial age, they took on a rust color, dead, mottled decaying.
All buildings were cold brick or stone. In the dampness they sweated grime and cooking oil. During the day the streets were lined by booths. Butchers set up in certain rows, weavers, importers, vegetable merchants. Whitechapel was a port of entry in London for many things, but as the heart of the East End it was also a city unto itself. No place was dirtier in London. No place was smellier. No place was as crowded or as ignoble.
Storms could not altogether clean Whitechapel. Storms past had left their mark in the soot. Coal dust was streaked by water run-off to make the buildings appear to weep mournfully from window sills and over ledges. The bloodless white light of this night’s pulses of lightning revealed the moody haunts frowning over the dirty streets. Those buildings facing the high streets were dabbled by a certain artistry of form. But they were not gay or brilliant. This was Victorian London. The exuberance of the age of enlightenment was gone. Men did not powder their hair and wear silks. Chimney pipe trousers and stove pipe hats had replaced it all. The rural dandy did not dash by in gilded coaches. The industrial revolution had made a different world. A darker world, one more congested in the big cities, one stained with the residue of mass production. Darker clothes suited it. Restraint suited the Victorian sense of propriety. Cynicism reflected the social and engineering problems facing the big cities. A rural world controlled by country gentlemen and squires was battling overpopulation, poor sanitation, and continued immigration.
Business needs in Whitechapel did not merit any of the grandest architecture or any of the most decorative and innovative. Dirty crimson brick was good enough, the gray of the slag heap fit. New buildings were square. Old ones were incorporated to create interesting if not odd hybrids, geometric curiosities, and some as if the product of archi-tectural leftovers. During the day a cloud of coal dust hung over the place. The smoke of furnaces, stoves, open air fires and grease pits rose up. Mixed with the coal a black plaster was slowly forming on some buildings.
Night actually favored Whitechapel. In darkness it pulled in its ignoble train. Any artificial light only made the surrounding shadows that much darker and the contents their malingering veil concealed that less offensive to the eye. Bland buildings drained of vigor at night. They morphed into skulls in the gray witching light— their windows gaunt, sunken sockets, their form vapid and starved— in which festered the urban east end of the greatest, most populated city on Earth.
This dismal netherworld behind the high streets was Whitechapel at night. It was a sewer, its narrow lanes the bowels into which passed the dregs of the great city. The industrial revolution started it. Mechanized production attracted hordes to the great cities. Factories spewed forth coal dust as they ran at full speed. The effects of the revolution were not fully realized until the 1830 to 40s. By this time the major cities were swelling with laborers. Thousands of children were being born into city environments. Failure here wasn’t the same as in the country. There was no land to fall back on. Poverty resulted. Quasi homeless, dirty poverty. Workhouses were erected. Theft and prostitution increased. Tens of thousands were being born to this. They became the seagulls that feed off the garbage of a ship’s wake and they became every form of infusoria in stagnation. London was the world of Lazarus. Thousands in the East End were under the beautiful white tablecloth of the West End waiting for the scraps to fall from the table. . .Or so many felt.
The East End, too, was naturally the home of many radical ideas and “left” leaning news rags. It was the center of immigrations. Germans, Poles, Russians, mixed together, and it was also the Jewish neighborhood. The police were never sure what ethnicity the foreigners were. All Jews spoke some kind of German, as did the Poles. Many Jews came from all the eastern countries. Jewish neighborhoods were usually quiet and they were centered south of the main road, Whitechapel Road and Whitechapel High Street. But Whitechapel and especially Spitalfields adjacent to its north was a melting pot. All nationalities mixed and they brought with them old bigotries and hatreds and some, like the Jews, ideas of reform. They were often suspected of some socialist subversion.
Prostitution was the main profession at night. It thrived in shadows. Sidewalks and landings were cupid’s dirty bed; shadows were the sheets. The blackness of alleys was a doorway. Entire alleyways yawned with the smell of a filthy proposal. Into them led prostitutes their lover for the hour. The furniture of their parlor of love was dust bins, rubbish cans or the back of a parked wagon. The lan-guage of love was mixed with the splatting sound of horse dung. Gutters coursed with urine, the gentle brook of this wormwood Eden. Its flora was wilted cabbage, bones, soggy bread crust, putrid fish entrails, dead birds and its fauna was maggots.
Sex was three pence a stand. And there was plenty of business. Whitechapel’s pubs were open to all hours. By the 1880s Whitechapel became the destination for any who wanted to experience the forbidden vices. The pubs were the meeting spots. Only the locals knew the bowels of Whitechapel beyond the high streets. No client went too far in to the maze to dally. Robberies and fights abounded. It was a boiling ghetto of contention.
Night trade could be as dangerous as daytime brawls during the day. Fights broke out in pubs and raggedy patrons often were thrown onto the hard cobblestones. Epithets followed, fists were shaken, and the ruffled stuck their nose up with seedy grandeur and went to another pub.
Middleclass Londoners were scared of the poor and suspicious of foreigners. Whitechapel and the nearby slums of Spitalfields and Aldgate were thus quite a blemish. So long as the areas remained out of the news, it could be ignored. Londoners did not have to blush. The blush was embarrassment, anger, shame perhaps. Perhaps frustration. Nothing could be done about it. The greatest city on Earth merely had the greatest slum as well.
On this night foot traffic was pretty slim. The rain poured in a heavy curtain. Runoff gulped down downpipes and wept over the top of buildings. The old sidewalks were pelted with the heavy drops and dowsing streams.
The storm had remarkably cleaned up Whitechapel. The red glow gave the gray clouds an artistic, though perhaps apocalyptic tint. The fires made visible the holy spires of London beyond and the dome of St. Paul’s.
At 11 p.m. one of the local prostitutes, Polly Nichols, was walking down what is considered the main thoroughfare of Whitechapel Road. It was one end of the Whitechapel High Street. This was that thin exterior shell within which rotted the heart of the Whitechapel District. The street was sparsely lit, but it was even more thinly trafficked this stormy night.
She was a dark figure. No woman dressed up in these areas, whether honest or practicing the illegal vices. She had a dark complexion, some of it no doubt grime, and the bland colors of Victorian sobriety matched well. She wore a black wicker bonnet trimmed with black velvet. It was a bit nicer than most, but not so flashy. Her dress was brown and over this she had a woman’s ulster, which was similar to a man’s ulster, the famous coat of Sherlock Holmes, with its own little cape over the shoulder. For a woman it tied around the neck and had large buttons. It was reddish brown, the same color as this rusty corroded community.
She is not on her way home, for she really had none. Her lodgings were on Thrawl Street, a claustrophobic brick and stone tunnel worthy of thingyensian plaintive moans and a charcoal pencil’s morbid strokes. It was a “doss-house” where you could pay nightly. She was, truly, a citizen of the street and a person of the night. There was nothing for her at Thrawl Street yet anyway. No money in sleep. For Whitechapel the night was still young. The pubs were still clamoring inside. It was a Friday night and the cattle boats had come in to the Thames from all over England and the continent. There were many potential customers awaiting no doubt.
It was here that Polly made her way. The Frying Pan pub was a jumble with the locals enjoying their night indoors. Polly perhaps had been unsuccessful in the heavy rains on Whitechapel Road. Where indeed would a successful prostitute take a chap on a night like this? The streets were too filthy to lie down on, and it was simply too stormy. A bloke needed a few pints in him to get up the gumption on a night like this. The Frying Pan was one of the pubs that would work. It was at Brick Lane and Thrawl Street, so that she was familiar with all the nearby places she could take any willing and paying lad.
Apparently Polly was unsuccessful. She was a small woman, about 45 years old, but she had the good fortune to look about 10 years younger. That still made prostitution viable, especially in Whitechapel. . .and on a dark and stormy night. She had lost up to 5 front teeth, so that she wasn’t a raving beauty. But she had another huge plus. She was more cleanly where it counted than the average hedge drab.
Polly’s type of prostitute wasn’t that of the professional red light district, as in Hamburg where prostitution was advertised by buxom young women sitting in their windows waiting for window shoppers to come by, survey the goods, and pay the price. There were no madams organizing the trade of middle-aged scullery wenches winking over toothless smiles. This kind of prostitution was self-employment. It was for the poor women who needed to supplement their income. It was a way for the talentless to make a living. They did not profit; they made a living, a very modest one.
It seems certain Polly was unsuccessful at the Frying Pan this night. She went back to her lodging around 1:20 a.m. August 31 and was stopped in the kitchen by the deputy-in-charge. She hadn’t the money to pay for her bed, so she had to hop it. She wasn’t worried. At least she put on that stalwart appearance. She had a new black bonnet in her hands. “Never mind,” she replied in her heavy lower-class accent. “I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.”
Off she went. But the confidence was probably for pride’s sake. At 2:30 a.m. Emily Holland, one of her former roommates, is at the corner of Whitechapel Road and Osborn Street. She had been watching the Shadwell dock fire. The glow behind her was of a dim sunset as the last embers of the fire smoldered toward the tempestuous gray heavens. The tops of old Georgian inns and modern Victorian brick warehouses only vaguely glowed in reflection, and they created deeper shadows in their lee. Polly was staggering out of the darkness down Osborn Street, emerging from the bowels of Whitechapel. She was “very drunk and staggered against the wall,” said Emily later. She had an excuse this night for still being out. She complained “I’ve had my doss money three times today and spent it.” Then she said “It won’t be long before I’m back.”
Emily Holland paid little attention to it. Polly frequently had a snoot full, and she could have meant anything. But it seems possible that Polly had been successful a few times. Her new “jolly bonnet” was still with her. If it had been an earlier payment for her services, she hadn’t seen the need to hock it yet for her doss money. The amount to let her have a bed was 3 pence, the price of a customer. It was, unfortunately, also the price of a good stout gin, which had proven to be mother’s milk to Polly.
Confidence and compulsion must have inspired Polly to forsake her doss for a gullet of booze. Even now she was certain that she could get another doss down-payment shortly. She had that new black bonnet after all. In the dark and with her fortuitous 10 years younger look, she must have been sure she could attract the higher paying clientele. She spoke with Emily for about 7 top 8 minutes and then staggered off to find some bonnie bloke still about. Perhaps one of the firefighters or gents standing about the docks watching the fire? It was just coming to an end, so they’ll be breaking up soon.
Polly ambled off.
At 3:15 a.m. constable John Thain is walking his beat in the gloomy, bleak morning. Buck’s Row is one of his lanes. He walks it quietly enough, shining his lantern where he sees fit. There is little public lighting. There is a solitary sentinel, a gas lamp at the mouth of this appendix of the Row. Nothing else. Its smoky amber glow is faint. There is a dim wash of light on the wet cobblestones. There is the residue of smoke dimming it and turning the light a tormented color. There’s no need except for a light there. This part of Buck’s Row is narrow and dim, but the part beyond the lamp is a beautiful wide expanse of cobblestones, and lighting would be little good there. The lights were so dim that 2 feet away you often couldn’t see what you had in your hand. Lighting is expensive and precarious. The most important lamps therefore are the only ones on. This lamp will guide anybody from the wide expanse that is Buck’s into the mouth of this narrow little appendix.
But soon it is pitch dark. He walks along with his bull’s eye lamp and shines it about. Buck’s Row here has warehouses and loading courtyards behind tall brick walls. Thick wood gates are shut. Small wood gates lead down side lanes. Some middleclass merchant cottages stand opposite Schneider’s Cap Factory and the Brown & Eagle Wool Warehouse and the Essex Warf. It is very quiet. The good constable’s shoes clack upon the cobblestones. He notices nothing unusual. He hears nobody else. This is not merely the subjective impression of one constable. Sgt. Kerby must have missed Thain by moments. He also walked the lane and noticed nothing unusual.
At 3:40 a.m. many begin their trek to work. Carman Charles Cross is on his way to work at Pickford’s on City Row. (A carman is the driver of a horse drawn tram or other business cart). In the darkness he sees a body before a closed wood gate opposite Essex Warf. He walks into the center of the lane and notices it is that of a woman. She lies on the sidewalk before the wooden gateway to Brown’s Stable. He stops and does not approach closer. In the darkness he can’t make out anything too clear. He hears another man coming up the lane from whence he also had just come. He calls him over. Cross thinks this woman is dead. They feel her face and it’s cold. They feel her arms and legs. The arms are warm above the elbow but cold below. The legs are warm. Her dress has been lifted to be a bundle over her lower body and thighs. The man with Cross thinks he detects a slight heartbeat. He even thinks she is slightly breathing.
What to do? It is too dark to make out anything else. They need to be off to work, so they head up the street and try and find a constable. At Hanbury Street and Baker’s Row they meet Constable Jonas Mizzen. He’s walking his beat. They stop him and tell him they found a body of a woman in distress.
“All right,” he says, and he is quickly on his way.
From the beam of a bull’s eye lamp moving about on Buck’s Row, Mizzen realizes another constable is standing over the body. When he gets there he recognizes it is Constable John Neil. It was Neil who found her. His lantern beam directs Mizzen’s lantern to follow its path. The beams join over the body’s face. The woman’s eyes stare wide open. Blood oozes from a deep slash in her throat. It trickles over the sidewalk and into the gutter. Her left hand touched the wood gate. Her black bonnet lies nearby. He tells Mizzen that he had already called to Thain, who was passing on the cross street east, Brady Street, and told him to fetch a local doctor, Rees Llewellyn.