The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd (13 page)

Probably through his fellow landlord Johnny Cooney of Flower and Dean Street, Jack McCarthy became involved in the Music Halls. His involvement in the theatre inspired his offspring and he became the founder of quite a theatrical dynasty, which included music hall celebrities, variety performers and even a Hollywood star (of which more will be written later.)

Jack McCarthy also developed an interest in boxing and, together with the Smith family of Brick Lane, was involved in the organisation of prize fights in the London area. These fights proved to be extremely popular and attracted hundreds of spectators eager to gamble their hard-earned cash in the hope of backing the winner. However, the fights did not pay particular attention to the Queensberry Rules and the gambling that was inherent to the event was illegal. As we have seen, Jimmy Smith was adept at bribing the local Spitalfields police to turn a blind eye to his exploits; however, officers from further afield were more difficult to handle. Consequently, fights held outside the Spitalfields area often received unwanted attention from the local constabulary.

In 1882, Jack McCarthy and Jimmy Smith’s brother Richard were involved in an ugly confrontation with the police during an illegal prize fight they had organised at St Andrew’s Hall in Tavistock Place. Both men were arrested and eventually found themselves in front of the judge at the Middlesex Sessions House in Clerkenwell. Although neither man could deny they were present at the fight, Jimmy Smith managed to persuade Sergeant Thicke of the Whitechapel Division to give both men glowing character references, thus saving them from incarceration. Instead, McCarthy was fined and Smith (who had assaulted a policeman during the fracas) was bound over to keep the peace and made to pay £5.

The final man who exerted control over the mean streets of Spitalfields was Jack McCarthy’s neighbour and business associate, William Crossingham. Like most of his fellow landlords, Crossingham was not native to Spitalfields and had been brought up in semi-rural Essex before coming to London in his early twenties to work as a baker. After a stint of living in Southwark (possibly where he first met McCarthy), Crossingham married and changed his career to lodging-house keeper. He enjoyed a close relationship with the McCarthy family for many years – his daughter married McCarthy’s brother, Daniel – but always maintained a link with his birthplace; he moved back to Romford in the early 1900s but retained an interest in Dorset Street until his death.

Being a landlord of some of the most notorious properties in London required a fearless temperament combined with shrewd business sense. In this, the Spitalfields landlords did not disappoint. They were hard men who had no qualms about forcing their tenants to live in often filthy, degrading and hopeless conditions. They thought nothing of forcing the sick, elderly and infirm out onto the street if they had insufficient money for a bed. They remained unmoved as desperate women were forced to prostitute themselves in order to pay their rent. However, as the State offered absolutely no assistance to those on the bottom rung of society, the landlords also provided an invaluable service. Were it not for the common lodging houses, many Spitalfields residents would be forced to sleep rough every night. The neighbourhood recognised this and consequently the landlords enjoyed grudging respect from their tenants and more importantly, the freedom to run their businesses as they pleased with little or no interference from the authorities.

A feature of the Spitalfields landlords was the additional services they provided for their tenants. Both the McCarthy and the Smith families ran general shops close to their lodging houses that sold all manner of essentials, from soap to string, at highly inflated prices. These shops operated long hours and were in many ways the forerunners of today’s corner shops. They were generally open every day (except Sundays) and many only closed for a couple of hours (at around 2am) before opening again to catch the market porters on their way to work. These long hours meant that members of the family would take it in turns to work in the shop and, while McCarthy and Smith’s children were small, local people were employed to help out.

As we have seen, another service provided by the lodging house keepers was that of the public house. There were an incredibly large number of pubs in Spitalfields during the latter part of the 19th century. Dorset Street alone had the massive Britannia at the Commercial Street end, the particularly rough Horn of Plenty at the Crispin Street end and the Blue Coat Boy slap bang in the middle. The Blue Coat Boy was a relatively small concern when compared to the gin-palace grandeur of some East End pubs but it held the honourable distinction of being the only building along Dorset Street that never changed usage.

Built during the halcyon days of the silk weaving boom, the pub was run by a variety of owners and landlords throughout the 19th century. In 1896, it was sold to the City of London Brewery for the princely sum of £2,000. By this stage, the pub was beginning to show irreparable signs of decay and in 1909 was torn down and completely rebuilt. It survived another 20 years before falling victim to the London County Council’s redevelopment plans for Spitalfields Market. The Britannia pub was run for a large part of the 19th century by the Ringer family, who let the upper floors as furnished rooms and eventually took over the building next door. These properties became collectively known as ‘Ringer’s Buildings’ and over the years played host to some particularly suspicious tenants including a couple of spinsters who appear to have run a brothel comprised of under-age girls.

While the general shops and public houses provided an additional (and legal) revenue stream for the Spitalfields landlords, other opportunities presented themselves that were not so above board. As we have already seen, the very nature of the landlords’ clientele meant that opportunities to fence stolen property, run protection rackets and pimp for the local prostitutes existed in abundance.

As each Spitalfields landlord bought up more property and expanded his miniature empire, divisions began to appear on the landscape. This was primarily due to the latest influx of Jewish immigrants. All of a sudden, the Irish (including McCarthy, Lewis and Cooney) were no longer the new kids on the block. While some Irishmen joined forces with their old enemies the English in order to make the newly arrived Jews feel as unwelcome as possible, many agreed it was less trouble to try to get along with their new neighbours. However, cultural differences meant that by the end of the 1880s, Spitalfields was far from an integrated society.

The Jews, believing there was safety in numbers, began to heavily populate the streets to the south of Dorset Street such as Butler, Freeman, Palmer and Tilley Street. Rothschild Buildings was only let to Jews. Thus, all the non-Jews that had previously lived on these streets got pushed north towards the market and the common lodging houses became unbearably overcrowded. Displaced youths became furious at the Jews for taking over what had been their homes and roads such as Dorset Street became so full of anti-Semitic feeling that some Jews couldn’t walk past the end of the road without being called ‘Christ killers’, let alone venture down it.

As these new divisions embedded themselves within Spitalfields’ society, youths began to form gangs, partly out of mutual distrust, partly for their own safety. Admission rules to the gangs were strict: the Jews only accepted Jews; the Irish cockneys only accepted non-Jews. Gang members were fiercely protective of their own kind and socialising between the two factions was strictly prohibited. Heaven help any Irish girl who became friendly with a Jewish boy as both would be ostracised by their respective peers. However, these gangs often tired of racial warfare and began to look for other forms of entertainment, one of which was hassling, robbing and sometimes violently assaulting the local prostitutes.

Whether English Protestant, Irish Catholic or Eastern European Jew, all the gang members held a pretty dim view of the local prostitutes. This was not without cause. Far from being exotic ladies of the night such as were found further west, the vast majority of Spitalfields prostitutes were middle-aged, rough women. For many, a love affair with alcohol had driven them away from their families to a life living hand-to-mouth in the common lodging houses. Needless to say, these were not women who commanded respect from any quarter. They plied their trade in and around the pubs and most ‘tricks’ comprised taking their client up the nearest alley for a ‘fourpenny touch’, thus earning themselves enough money for a lodging house bed or another hour in the pub.

Many chose the latter option. Some women took up with thieves and lured unsuspecting clients down dark passages to be promptly robbed by their accomplice. Others worked for brothels that specialised in charging hugely inflated prices for services rendered. Any punter that protested was robbed, threatened with violence and thrown out, sometimes without his clothes.

Part Three

INTERNATIONAL INFAMY

Chapter 17

Jack the Ripper

Due to their unsavoury profession and dishonest ways, the Spitalfields prostitutes seemed fair game for the gangs of young men. However, sometimes their taunting of the women went much further. On 8 December 1887, Margaret Hames, a prostitute from Daniel Lewis’s lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street was plying for trade when she was set upon by a gang of men who beat her so badly on the face and chest that she was admitted to Whitechapel Infirmary and wasn’t released until after Christmas. Four months later, her neighbour Emma Smith suffered a worse fate...

Emma Smith was a 45-year-old alcoholic who, like so many other Spitalfields women, had resorted to prostitution in order to fund her habit. At the time of the attack, she had been living at Lewis’s lodging house for about 18 months. On the evening of 2 April 1888, Emma left her lodgings on her usual quest for money and alcohol. By the early hours of the next morning she had made her way to the Whitechapel Road and as she ambled down the thoroughfare, she noticed a group of men outside Whitechapel Church. Naturally wary of male gangs, Emma crossed the road to keep her distance but the men turned and followed her. By the time she had reached the corner of Osborn Street, the men had caught up with her.
En masse,
they violently assaulted her, beating her around the face and ripping her ear (possibly in an attempt to steal her earrings). The assailants then took away her money and as a parting gesture, rammed an unidentified blunt instrument into her vagina with such force that it ruptured the peritoneum and other organs. Satisfied with their work, they turned and left, leaving Emma bleeding and trembling on the pavement.

Although in utter agony, Emma had the presence of mind to try to get back to her lodgings where she could be assured of help and unbelievably, she managed somehow to stagger the short distance to 18 George Street where she was met by the deputy, Mary Russell. Mrs Russell was so horrified by Emma’s injuries that she decided to take her to hospital immediately and enlisted the assistance of another lodger named Annie Lee. Once at the hospital, Emma was seen by the house surgeon, Dr Hellier and immediately admitted. Sadly however, peritonitis had set in and she died of her injuries the following day.

Considering the rough and constantly dangerous atmosphere that pervaded Spitalfields, it is interesting to note that the press thought the murder of Emma Smith, who was, after all only a common prostitute, notable enough to report on. In fact, the murder made the front page of
Lloyds Weekly News
on the Sunday following her death, suggesting that, despite its dreadful reputation, Spitalfields was not host to as many incidents of extreme violence as one might have expected.

Emma’s murder no doubt had a profound effect of her fellow prostitutes, not least because the attack seemed to be completely random. But as the women still had to eat and find shelter each night, they had little choice but to risk taking to the streets unless they could afford their own room in one of the many ramshackle houses, which, of course, cost more than a bed in a lodging house. One way of affording a private room was by getting a boyfriend who could not only pay half the rent, but could also offer some degree of protection should the need arise. Recognising the benefits of such a set up, many prostitutes paired up with any man that would have them.