London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (21 page)

The garotters and their species have displayed themselves in the true colour of their class as the profound enemies of the human race and their outrages must be suppressed.

The Metropolitan Police swung into action to combat this new threat to people's lives and pockets by deploying extra men on the streets, including plainclothed officers after 10 p.m. Officers were especially instructed to station themselves near to likely garroting sites so as to be able to swiftly arrest any offenders. As a consequence the number of arrests of individuals for being `suspicious characters and reputed thieves' or as `persons loitering with intent' increased notably (the latter by 256 and the former by 779) on the previous year's figures. By the end of 1862 there had been 92 recorded robberies with violence on the streets of London, three times the number that had been registered in 1860 and 1861. Were the police using the garroting scare to take known villains off the streets or perhaps using the crisis to demonstrate their effectiveness in controlling criminal behaviour? The two outcomes are not mutually exclusive of course, and the police were under pressure to justify the expenditure needed to fund them: this was still a relatively new force, inaugurated in 1829 and by no means popular with all sections of society. Indeed, the fact that the police arrested some people on suspicion of being garrotters when it seems that all they were guilty of was brawling in public would appear to support an argument that the Met was using the increased public awareness of street crime to pursue its own agenda.

The focus of police investigations and media interest was on those felons that had been released from prison or had returned from transportation on licence. The so-called `Ticket-of-leave' men were effectively allowed out on parole (to use a more modern term) but under fairly strict regulations. The end of transportation in 1857, after the colonists in Australia had become increasingly uncomfortable about receiving the unwanted criminality of Great Britain and Ireland, caused a crisis of confidence in the criminal justice system in much the same way as the outbreak of war with the American colonists had in 1776. What exactly were we to do with all of our criminals, especially in a period when many believed that a criminal class existed within society, a class of persons that did not subscribe to the work ethic of Victorian society? Ticket-of-leave men were an easy target, leaving prisons such as Pentonville ashen-faced and with little chance of securing respectable employment. They were hounded by police who visited the city's various gaols to list those being set at liberty and those just arrived. As a result of the garroting panic the government passed the Habitual Criminals Act in 1869 which tightened the police grip on released felons further by ensuring that any convicted criminal caught for a second offence had, on release, to undergo seven years of police surveillance and was also subject to rearrest for trivial offences during that period.

The reality of the garroting crisis was that it was far from being the crime spree that police figures and press reports suggested. After Hugh Pilkington fell victim to highway robbers the reporting of incidents seems to have been fairly confused at best. In a sense this was as a result of increased sensitivity of the public to the supposed terror in their midst. This is how `moral panics, as Stanley Cohen has described them, unfold in the public consciousness.' At first a small number of incidents are thrown under the spotlight of the press who then exaggerate either their frequency or their severity. Then, by making the public, the Police and the authorities increasingly aware of a new crime threat the press increases the amount of such crime reported. Often events that were thought of as minor before the panic are blown up into major crimes. Others are literally created by the panic. This was the case in at least one incident from 1862. A man walking home on a foggy night believed he was being followed and feared he was about to be garroted (mugged). Instead of waiting for his pursuer to carry out his heinous crime he turned the tables on him and himself attacked - acting as he saw it in self-defence. However, the man behind him was himself merely walking home in the same direction quite innocently. Both men reported the incident as a garroting attack. Thus, we arrive at a situation where the true number of incidents becomes wildly exaggerated and the public is whipped up into such a frenzy of panic that individuals begin to take drastic action to avoid attacks. In the wake of the garroting panic of 1862 Londoners armed themselves or took advantage of the various anti-garroting devices and armour that canny entrepreneurs were advertising in the press.

Cohen then suggests that the next stage of the panic is for the criminal justice system to enact tougher measures or procedures in response to the perceived crisis. This hopefully calms public fears and the panic subsides; the press will then move on to the next big story and everything returns to normal. However, there are consequences in the form of temporary or permanent changes to the justice system or to individuals caught up in it. In 1862 we have seen that one of the results was an increase in the number of arrests, and this was replicated in the courts by more severe sentences for those found guilty of garroting. Pickpockets, usually dealt with in magistrate courts (which had limited sentencing option - short periods of imprisonment and small fines) were now sent for jury trial where they might receive a much longer custodial sentence. The press called for even tougher sanctions - the return of flogging for felons (characterized in the press as `the Garrotter's Lunch'), which was sanctioned by legislation in 1863 with the Security Against Violence Act. We have already noted the new restrictions on released prisoners and this was accompanied by the Penal Servitude Act a year later, which took a stricter line on sentencing. Those convicted for a second offence could now expect a minimum of five years penal servitude while the Prison Act 1865 continued the path to severity. As we shall see in Chapter 7, for the first time all gaols in England and Wales, even old local ones, were to have uniformly harsh regimes - separate cells, silent regimes, work on the tread wheel or crank etc. The slogan of the prison authorities was `Hard Bed, Hard Board, Hard Labour'.

The panic peaked in November 1862; in October there were 12 alleged robberies, in November there were 32. The trial of 23 alleged garrotters at the Old Bailey in November brought the main phase of the panic to a close. By December the sense that many offenders were now in prison and police measures and court actions had dampened anxieties meant it gradually subsided. In early 1863 public and press concern was still high but the crime wave was over, although its consequence echoed throughout penal policy for many years. Thus we can see that the garroting panic had been effectively used by the authorities to implement a much tougher criminal justice regime and to clamp down on criminal behaviour in a climate where fear of crime and a'criminal class' was on the increase.

Stanley Cohen's original work on moral panics focused on the bank holiday beach fights of the mods and rockers in the 1960s. Historians have applied Cohen's thesis to attacks on elderly New Yorkers in the 1970s as well as the garroting panics of the nineteenth century (in the 1850s and 1860s) and to a series of highway robberies around Colchester in the 1760s.28 All of these share similar characteristics: a series of incidents that are highlighted by the press; the creation of `folk devils (whether they be youth gangs, garrotters, or men in white smocks - as around Colchester); the `panic' causes the authorities to act less leniently towards suspected groups, regardless of the real danger posed by the particular `crisis' The question that we might ask ourselves therefore is whether the Jack the Ripper murders constitute a moral panic using Cohen's model.

There was certainly a panic on the streets of Whitechapel, the ripples of which were felt much more widely: even Queen Victoria commented on the failure of the police to catch the killer. The killings produced, or rather built upon, existing fears about outsiders and criminal elements within Victorian society: foreigners, Jews in particular, the mentally ill and doctors were all chased through the streets or presented to the police as suspects to be investigated. Thus, we could argue that the murders had their own folk devils even if these are not as neatly defined as they are in Cohen's paradigm. There were reported sightings of the Ripper and encounters with strange men who frightened those who met them before running off into the night. This is suggestive of a heightened sense of danger caused by a greater sensitivity to the murders brought about by the intense press coverage. The unprecedented public involvement in the police inquiry, well meant or otherwise, was also arguably a manifestation of a similar form of sensitivity that resulted in some Londoners arming themselves or dressing in ridiculous garb to prevent garrote attacks earlier in the century.

However, I feel that overall we are in danger of stretching Cohen's model to breaking point if we wish it to cover the Ripper murders. There were a limited number of well-documented attacks and the press did not need to exaggerate their severity: the killer's actions were well beyond the imagination of the most frenzied journalist. They used the story for their own purposes, principally to sell newspapers and secondly to highlight social issues such as prostitution, poverty and the threat posed by internal unemployment and external immigration. But this was not a classic moral panic in that the events were very real and, apart from the resignation of the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (an event that might have been prompted by any number of crises given his unpopularity in some quarters of the media and society) there was very little, if any, change in the process of the criminal justice system.

CONCLUSION

The Victorian press was a powerful force in the late nineteenth century, much more so than it had been at any period previously. It enjoyed a much wider readership and new technologies had enabled it to disseminate news, to comment and entertain faster and more cheaply than ever before. The style of news also began to change from the 1860s onwards as greater competition and new formats forced newspaper owners to innovate. The last quarter of the century saw the emergence of `new journalism, a style of writing and presentation that in many ways (the use of headlines and a greater emphasis on investigative reporting) foreshadowed the development of the modern press in the twentieth century. Indeed, it was the success of Alfred Harmsworth's Answers to Correspondents, established in 1888, and which achieved a circulation of 250,000, which gave him the necessary funds to launch the Daily Mail in 1896. The Daily Mail was followed by the Daily Mirror in 1903. The era of press barons such as Beaverbrook and Northcliffe was just around the corner.

The newspapers drew upon the associated forms of popular culture of the period, notably melodrama and the emerging sensation novel, to present news as entertainment - a far cry from the tightly set columns of dry information that were the staple fare of earlier newspapers and, to some extent, remained true for The Times. In men such as William Stead the age also benefited from editors who believed that the fourth estate had an important role to play in society. Stead was a driven man, in many aspects of his life, fired by a deep religious conviction but perhaps blinded by his sense of righteousness at times. His exposure of child prostitution resulted in a change in the age of consent - a tangible measure of success - but it also ruined his helper, Rebecca Jarrett, and to some degree curtailed Stead's own career in journalism. Stead's own paper, the Pall Mall Gazette, maintained a steady critique of the Metropolitan Police and the government throughout the Whitechapel murders. To some extent this was as a result of the actions (or inactions some might argue) in the years immediately preceding the murders. These events, and the desperate poverty of the area that was to some degree highlighted by the attentions of the press investigating the atrocities carried out there, are the subject of the next chapter.

5

The Bitter Cry of Outcast London:' Poverty,

Charity and the Fear of Revolution

In late July 1887 the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, received a number of communications from concerned members of the public and local vestry members. Their intention was to draw Sir Charles' attention to the large numbers of homeless people that had seemingly taken up residence in Trafalgar Square. One correspondent declared that it was, in his opinion, `about the most terrible sight of open-air human misery to be met with in Europe: and this under the eyes of the wealthiest visitors to London!'Z A week earlier the vestry of St Martin-in-the-Fields had complained about the `unseemly conduct of persons sleeping at night in Trafalgar Square', and had asked the Office of Works to `take such steps as may be necessary in order that the evils complained of maybe abated" The press soon took up the story, with the Daily News publishing the vestry's complaint and placing the blame firmly at the door of the police. The Morning Post, in late August, carried an interview with a woman who had been charged with being disorderly in Covent Garden. When the defendant was challenged as to where she lived a witness replied: `Nowhere' - she claimed to sleep in Trafalgar Square. Witness: `There's hundreds there sleeping on the seats or on the

It was not just in Trafalgar Square that the homeless gathered: rough sleepers took up births in St James' Park with one young woman even occupying a makeshift tree house. The park was generally cleared at night and the Police were at pains to point out that in both locations they were powerless to act unless a crime was committed. Other park users were outraged at the presence of the `great unwashed' in one of London's green havens. According to a letter written to Notes and Proceedings these `tramps enjoy al fresco entertainment accompanied by conduct and language of the grossest description, to the scandal of the general public, and the depravement [sic] and detriment of the many children of the cleanly and industrious poor'.5 The police response, as expressed by Acting Superintendent Beard, was more sympathetic. Aware that the press were scrutinizing police activity Beard informed his superiors that: