The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd (24 page)

In addition to the more stringent lodging house regulations and Dorset Street’s name change, the council also attempted to improve the surrounding area. For decades, the churchyard of Christ Church (which was opposite Duval Street, across busy Commercial Street), had been the unofficial meeting place for numerous local drunks and prostitutes. At some point in the past, benches had been placed along the pathways, the intention being that the churchyard could be used as a place of quiet reflection. By the turn of the century, Christ Church churchyard was anything but. Violent rows broke out among the gravestones. Monuments were used as makeshift privies. The benches were used as al fresco beds and those that reclined on them were so filthy and verminous that the churchyard was known locally as ‘Itchy Park’ – a reference to the constant scratching undertaken by its users.

The problems associated with Itchy Park were raised at a London County Council meeting in July 1904. A few months previously, a children’s playground had been laid out to the rear of the churchyard. However, parents had complained that in order to gain access to the play area, they and their children had to run the gauntlet of drunks and prostitutes that lined the pathway. The rector of Christ Church (one Reverend W H Davies) was consulted and his representative at the council meeting reported that ‘young girls openly ply their prostitution in the churchyard and fights between women are frequent. The people who monopolise this garden are not ordinary poor people, but of the class who habitually refuse every opportunity of improving their circumstances. The result is that the garden which might be of so much use in this densely crowded neighbourhood is a veritable plague spot.’

In its wisdom, the council decided that Itchy Park should henceforth be only accessible to children under 14 years old (and their guardians) during the summer months and that anyone designated to patrol the park should wear a uniform. It is not recorded whether or not this ruling was successful in the short term. However, it should be noted that decades later, musician Steve Marriott wrote about Christ Church churchyard in the Small Faces classic song
Itchycoo Park.
Even if the council managed to rid the park of its verminous visitors, it seems that it failed to erase its nickname.

While the LCC tried its best to begin erasing all traces of the Duval Street area’s seedy reputation, subtle changes in the way the street was run were also taking place. On 28 February 1907, landlord William Crossingham, who owned a considerable amount of property in Duval Street and the neighbouring Whites Row and Little Paternoster Row, died of kidney disease at his home in Romford. All property was passed to his wife, Margaret but tragedy struck a second time, when just four months later, she succumbed to breast cancer. The Crossinghams’ deaths resulted in all their property being taken over by a builder named William Hunnable. Hunnable continued to run the properties as lodging houses, but Jack McCarthy had lost his long-term neighbour and closest ally.

Chapter 23

The Beginning of the End

William Crossingham’s death marked the beginning of the end for Duval Street. Increased regulations and regular inspections from the LCC meant that lodging houses were no longer cheap to run and any lodgers that were halfway decent had deserted the area for the suburbs. The only tenants left were those who lived on the very margins of society. Circa 1908, H. A. Jury described the frequenters of women’s lodging houses for a council meeting:

‘A good proportion are prostitutes, but others are street-vendors and perhaps charwomen, but they all have some vice, even if it is no worse than laziness. It is clear they do not like work. Many pay others to wash their clothes for them and cook their food.’

This aversion to work caused many problems for the landlords as the number of lodgers with the means to pay for a regular bed got smaller and smaller. The area became utterly destitute. Any visitor to the area would never have believed that Duval Street was once the lively centre of a thriving weaving industry. Women lolled around outside the doors of their lodgings, men drank from morning till night and children ran around the streets in little more than rags. The area looked more like the Third World than part of one of the planet’s wealthiest cities. Young men continued to prowl the area in gangs and violence between rival groups remained commonplace. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, gang warfare took on a deadlier twist as guns became more freely available if you knew where to look.

Local gang member Arthur Harding remembered being involved in a confrontation in Duval Street circa 1907. An associate named George King had been arguing with Duval Street resident Billy Maguire and asked for Arthur’s help: ‘He [King] took me down Dossett [Duval] Street because he wanted to do a fellow named Billy Maguire... I fired at him but Kingie got the blame of it, not me.’ Guns were rapidly replacing knives as the gang members’ weapons of choice and Duval Street would echo with gunfire intermittently until its final demise.

The criminal fraternity that populated the lodging houses and furnished rooms of Spitalfields was also changing as the new century began. Jewish families that had fled to Spitalfields from Eastern Europe during the closing decades of the nineteenth century had now firmly settled themselves in the area. However, in a bid to escape the grinding poverty endured by their parents, some of the children of Jewish immigrant families resorted to exploiting their neighbours.

Crime throughout the city was gradually becoming more organised and the way was slowly being laid for the likes of the Kray and Nash families to follow. Like many young men before them, Jewish lads from Spitalfields soon found that good money could be made from illegal gambling, extortion and prostitution. Jews that made a living from running prostitution rings were referred to as ‘shundicknicks’. Probably the most fascinating and well known shundicknick of the era was one Isaac Bogard, known colloquially as ‘Darky the Coon’ on account of his curly hair and dark complexion.

Bogard was born in Mile End Old Town in the early 1890s to Russian parents. Contemporary reports suggest that he possessed a quick brain and a courageous nature and no doubt would have excelled in legitimate business, had he been given the opportunity. However, like so many poor East Enders before him, he found criminal activities were much more widely available. By the time he was in his late teens, Bogard was known for inflicting violent assaults on those who wronged him and was described by rivals as vicious. However, despite his obvious flaws, Bogard was also one of the most flamboyant characters of his era. Long before Westerns were popular, he styled himself as a Cockney urban cowboy and patrolled the streets dressed in a shirt open to the waist and a wide-brimmed hat, with a gun stuck down his belt. Contemporaries even claimed that he cultivated an American accent.

It wasn’t just Bogard’s apparel that was eccentric. News reports of his exploits also reveal unconventional behaviour. In 1914, the
East London Observer
reported that after violently attacking a man with a hammer, Bogard bent down and kissed him before running off. A later article tells of how he attempted to ward off police who were trying to arrest him by climbing onto the roof of a nearby outhouse and pelting them with tiles. There is no doubt that Isaac Bogard was unruly and involved in various criminal activities. However, his fearlessness was invaluable during World War 1, where he was allegedly awarded a medal for outstanding bravery.

Chapter 24

Kitty Ronan

Criminals like Isaac Bogard tended to stick with their own and generally pestered only Jewish stallholders and shopkeepers for protection money. Behavioural studies also suggest that the brothels they ran were primarily aimed at Jewish men. Therefore, the landlords of the other lodging houses were largely unaffected by the rise of the Jewish underworld. The world of Duval Street continued as normal, in more ways than one.

One day a young woman marched into McCarthy’s shop and asked if he had any rooms to let. As it happened, the upper room of number 12 Miller’s Court was available and so the woman paid her deposit and moved her meagre amount of belongings in. Little did McCarthy know that this woman would be at the centre of the most strange and terrible coincidence within a matter of weeks.

Kitty Ronan was a young woman of Irish descent and the daughter of Andrew Ronan of Antill Street in Fulham. Like most girls of her station in life, Kitty received virtually no education and by the age of 14, went into service. However, this mundane way of life proved not to suit Kitty and by her early 20s she had found her way to the East End where she tried her hand at a number of jobs including flower selling and clothes laundering. When Kitty was unable to earn enough money to pay the rent, she took to prostitution.

By the time Kitty Ronan appeared on McCarthy’s doorstep, she had taken up with a man named Henry Benstead, a news vendor who sold his papers on the main thoroughfares of Spitalfields. She and Henry moved their meagre possessions into the top floor of one of the now crumbling cottages in Miller’s Court and tried to enjoy their new life together as much as was possible in such dreadful conditions. However, money was always short and soon Henry’s paltry earnings from selling newspapers was not enough to cover the rent. In desperation, Kitty took to the streets.

In the early morning of 2 July 1909, Henry Benstead left his drinking partner at Spitalfields Church and walked across the road into Duval Street and then turned into the narrow alley that led to Miller’s Court. On arriving at the front door of number 12, he noticed it was ajar and as he reached the top of the rickety staircase, he realised that the door to his shabby room was also open. Henry pushed the door and stepped inside the room. Due to the absence of any artificial light in the court, it was pitch black. He quickly lit a lamp and noticed that Kitty was lying on the bed, fully clothed. He greeted her but received no response. It was then that he noticed a thick swathe of blood around Kitty’s neck that had flowed down into the bed linen.

Henry Benstead shot out of the room, through the court and into Jack McCarthy’s shop screaming ‘someone has cut Kitty’s throat!’ In a scene almost identical to that 21 years previously, Jack McCarthy calmly sent for the police, no doubt cursing the fact that this latest murder would attract unwanted attention to his business affairs yet again.

Henry Benstead’s histrionics had woken a good few people in Miller’s Court and morbid curiosity got the better of many, who climbed the stairs of number 12 to get a look at the body before McCarthy could stop them. Once inside, they found a small penknife, the blade of which was quite blunt, lying on the floor soaked in blood. John Callaghan, a stableman living at Mary Kelly’s old address, picked it up to save for the police.

Early in the morning of 2 July, an ambulance arrived to take away Kitty’s body. As they had after Kelly’s murder, the police interviewed everyone in and around the court. As usual, no one had seen or heard anything untoward. However, two witnesses did come forward and told police that they had seen Kitty go into her room at about midnight with a stranger. About twenty minutes later, the stranger came out of the cottage and, after looking about him in a rather furtive manner, walked out of the court in the direction of Commercial Street.

Despite having a couple of vague descriptions of a suspect and a possible murder weapon, the police’s enquiries quickly went cold and many officers assumed that this, like the murder of Mary Kelly in 1888, would go unsolved. However, 16 days later, events took an unusual turn.

On 18 July, a man calling himself Harold Hall walked into a police station in Bristol claiming to be the killer of Kitty Ronan. Naturally suspicious, the police asked him why he should want to do such a thing and Hall told them the following story. On the evening of 1 July, he had gone to the Shoreditch Empire for an evening’s entertainment. After the performance finished, he came out of the theatre and began to walk down Commercial Street, where he met Ronan plying her trade. She suggested they go back to her room and Hall agreed. Once inside, Kitty asked Hall to light a candle and, while his back was turned, busied herself with rifling through his pockets.