The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd (12 page)

However, research shows that this was far from the truth. Against the odds, a strong sense of community and mutual support developed in the blocks and the tenement rules (which looked very forbidding on paper,) were generally enforced by the tenants themselves in the interests of safe and orderly communal living. In his book
Rothschild Buildings,
Jerry White notes that ‘after that first and crucial decision about who could have a flat and who could not, the people of Rothschild Buildings were largely on their own. The myth of an all-powerful rooting system of “rebuke and repression” which kept the people orderly owed more to bourgeois prejudice than reality... the community life which centred on the landings of Rothschild Buildings was friendly and vibrant. “At Rothschild, we were like one family” is a frequently heard description of the relationship between neighbours’.

However, life was not this rosy at all tenement blocks. However good their intentions, most philanthropic housing developers sought tenants that were poor but hard working and honest. They were not in the business of providing housing for the indolent, criminal or chronically sick. Consequently, most people that frequented the common lodging houses in Spitalfields were ineligible as tenants and Spitalfields became unattractive to developers. The sites the housing companies wanted were in Finsbury and Westminster, where there were plenty of people willing and able to pay 6/- or 7/- a week, not in the East End, where flats remained empty and rents were often unpaid. Only 2% of the population of Tower Hamlets and 2.8% in Southwark, lived in charity tenements in 1891, compared to 8% in Westminster. Several slum clearance sites in Wapping, Shadwell, Limehouse and Deptford were rejected by housing charities in the 1870s and 1880s, and remained undeveloped until the LCC took them on.

Over 4% of London’s population lived in philanthropic housing blocks in 1891, but as we have seen, the charities did not provide shelter for the very poor and the demolitions which they encouraged and depended upon intensified the plight of the destitute. For example, the 1884-5 Royal Commission was convinced that the really poor, including those evicted in the demolition schemes undertaken to satisfy philanthropic developer the Peabody Trust’s need for land, did not find places in the Peabody Buildings, and that preference was given to respectable artisans and families with more than one income.

Poor families with nowhere to go moved into Spitalfields with alarming regularity and despite the efforts of men such as the Reverend Barnett and the Rothschilds, the area continued to be overrun with honest poor rubbing shoulders with criminals. In 1885, an old woman spoke to the Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Classes: ‘I came to London 25 years ago and I’ve never lived in any room for more than two years yet: they always say they want to pull down the house to build dwellings for poor people, but I’ve never got into one yet.’ The Government could not fail to ignore the deplorable situation regarding the housing of the very poor in many areas in London. In a bid to improve the situation, the Housing of the Working Classes Act was passed in 1885. However, housing of the poor was not tackled with any real success until four years later, when the Metropolitan Board of Works was replaced with the London County Council. By then, the already sizeable problem with overcrowding in Dorset Street and its surrounds had worsened.

Chapter 15

The Fourth Wave of Immigrants

On 1 March 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated by a gang of revolutionaries. This act, although seemingly unconnected to religion, proved to be a catalyst for an outbreak of extreme violence and animosity towards Jewish communities in Russia, Poland, Austro-Hungary and Romania and provoked an exodus on an unprecedented scale.

Following the assassination, rumours abounded throughout Russia that the Jews were responsible (in actual fact, only one of the gang was Jewish). Word spread that the new Tsar had issued a decree instructing all Russians to avenge the death of his father by attacking any Jew they might happen to come across. Although this decree never existed, it gave many Russians the opportunity to vent their frustrations at the sorry economic state their country was in by providing a scapegoat. In April 1881, an anti-Jewish riot (known as a pogrom) broke out in Elisavetgrad. In scenes that were to be repeated in Nazi Germany, Jewish businesses were attacked, shops ransacked and homes burned. Jews were beaten, insulted and spat on. Word spread fast about the attack and soon pogroms were breaking out all over Eastern Europe.

The Russian Government pandered to the anti-Jewish feeling and passed a hastily-written act that was designed to remove any of the power and status held by Jews that so upset the rest of the population. This act, known as the ‘May Laws’ required all Jews to live only in urban areas. Even the ownership or purchase of countryside land was forbidden. In addition, restrictions were applied to Jewish businesses, university quotas for Jews were halved and Jews were no longer allowed to practice professions such as medicine or law.

The May Laws, coupled with the constant fear of violence resulted in a mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe. Between 1880 and 1914, nearly three million Jews emigrated from Russia and her neighbouring countries. Most went to America but 150,000 came to Britain.

Once admitted to Britain, many of the Eastern European immigrants headed for the East End, mainly because there were established Jewish communities there where they could buy kosher food, speak languages they understood and perhaps even meet up with old friends. Spitalfields had a well-established Jewish community by the 1880s and so seemed to be a perfect destination for the newly arrived immigrants. However, not all Spitalfields Jews welcomed the new arrivals.

By the late-19th century, London’s Jewish community had created a comfortable niche for itself. Wealthier Jews held office in parliament and were even part of the Royal family’s inner circle. Working-class Jews had to work no harder than their non-Jewish counterparts in order to make a living. Most importantly, Jews could live in London without fear of anti-Semitism ruining their lives. The arrival of the Eastern European Jews, many of whom were peasant country folk, worried the British Jewry. Many felt their position in society was jeopardised. Others were simply embarrassed by their country cousins. Even the Chief Rabbi urged his counterparts in Eastern Europe to dissuade the population from travelling to Britain. However, their attempts at restricting the amount of Jews arriving at the ports failed miserably.

Although the British Jews were understandably wary of the sudden rush of Jewish immigrants, once the immigrants arrived, they did their very best to help them. In much the same way as the Huguenots had operated 200 years previously, the Jews set up schools, adult education centres and employment agencies to help the new arrivals integrate into English society as easily as possible. Much of this work was funded by established families such as the Rothschilds. However, the sheer numbers of Jewish immigrants flooding into areas such as Spitalfields caused problems with the existing population, mainly because there was already very little room to spare. The Jewish immigrants did their best to cram as many people as they could into the space available, causing one wit to note, ‘give a Jew an inch and he’ll put a bed in it; give him two and he’ll take in a lodger.’

Chapter 16

The Controllers of Spitalfields

By the 1880s, living conditions in Dorset Street and many other roads in Spitalfields had reached an all-time low. The area was vastly overcrowded, extremely poor and largely ignored by the authorities. Unable to take on the labouring jobs available to men, poor, single women fared the worst and as we have seen, many resorted to selling themselves on the street in order to put food in their stomachs and a roof over their head.

The women roamed the badly-lit streets and alleyways of Spitalfields for hours on their nightly quest for bed money. They couldn’t afford to be choosy when it came to punters and copious amounts of alcohol helped to dull their judgement. These sad, desperate women were sitting ducks for any man with a sadistic streak and assaults were common. However, the autumn of 1888 brought with it the spectre of something much more sinister, that would leave an indelible mark on Dorset Street, Spitalfields and its people for well over a century.

The women who were forced to prostitute themselves tended to live in the roads to the east of Commercial Street plus Dorset Street, Whites Row and further north, the Great Pearl Street area. Due to the distinctly brutal and lawless nature of many of the inhabitants, these roads became known as the ‘wicked quarter mile’. Amazingly, it was from this tiny area that virtually every character involved in the Jack the Ripper mystery came.

By 1888, the vast majority of the ‘wicked quarter mile’ was owned or let by just six families of lodging house proprietors. The area to the north of Spitalfields Market, bordered by Quaker Street, Commercial Street and Grey Eagle Street fell under the control of a man named Frederick Gehringer, who lived in Little Pearl Street. Gehringer, who was from German stock, also ran a very successful haulage business from his premises and no doubt had business connections at nearby Spitalfields Market. In addition to this, he also ran the City of Norwich public house in Wentworth Street.

The southern end of Brick Lane was largely run by longstanding resident and erstwhile greengrocer Jimmy Smith and his son (also Jimmy), who resided for much of the 1880s in their common lodging house at 187 Brick Lane. Jimmy Smith Junior was to become one of the most influential figures on the streets of Spitalfields. As a young lad, he had shown the enterprising side to his nature by setting up a small coal dealership, selling mainly to the residents of nearby Flower and Dean Street (where he rented a coal shed). Realising that many residents were too weak to carry the coals back to their rooms, he offered a delivery service, thus enabling him to sell the coal at quite an inflated price.

By the time he reached adulthood, Jimmy Smith had also gained a reputation for being the man who ‘straightened up the police’, especially when it came to illegal street gambling. Local resident Arthur Harding remembered Jimmy’s antics thus: ‘The street bookies gave him money to share out among the different sergeants and inspectors and they relied on him to keep out strangers. He had a good team against anybody who caused trouble. He was the paymaster – the police trusted him and the bookies trusted him. He was a generous man, always good for a pound when anybody was hard up. He was the governor about Brick Lane.’

After the Cross Act-induced slum clearance at the western end of Flower and Dean Street, the remaining slums and lodging houses were run by Jimmy Smith’s sister Elizabeth and her husband Johnny Cooney, who lived at number 54. These lodgings were among the most notorious in Spitalfields and it was common knowledge that many operated as brothels. Like Fred Gehringer, Cooney also had interests in the beer trade and ran the Sugar Loaf in Hanbury Street. The pub was a popular meeting place for music hall artistes not least because it was frequented by Cooney’s cousin, the most famous music hall star of them all – Marie Lloyd.

The lodgings in nearby Thrawl Street and George Yard were controlled by Irishman Daniel Lewis and his sons. Little is known of the Lewis family. They had close links with the Smith and Cooney clans and may even have been related but this cannot be confirmed.

Dorset Street, by this time the worst street of the lot, was presided over by another Irishman – the ex-Borough resident Jack McCarthy and his close friend and colleague, William Crossingham, an ex-baker from Romford in Essex. Jack McCarthy had endured an impoverished childhood on the streets of The Borough but his entrepreneurial spirit had enabled him to climb out of the gutter at a relatively early age. While working in the building trade as a bricklayer, he supplemented his income by dealing in old clothes and then used the money to set himself up as a letting agent of furnished rooms along Dorset Street and in Miller’s Court. As more money was earned, McCarthy progressed from agent to proprietor and by the time he was 50, owned a considerable amount of slum property throughout the East End.