London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (32 page)

M. Lombroso states that no less than 40 per cent of prisoners are born, or habitual criminals, whom no house of detention, no penal servitude will change, and to whose existence the public had better accustom themselves, adjusting their minds to the existence of this latest of natural phenomena, a phenomena which, to use the philosopher's reasoning, is as necessary as birth and death.14

Lombroso's theories, however wild or generalized they might appear to us, were therefore in circulation in the period of the Ripper murders. The public's appetite for crime news, as demonstrated in earlier chapters, clearly ran to devouring the latest theories for explaining the workings of the criminal mind. Just under a year after the `double event' the Gazette commented that when `Jack the Ripper is finally caught it will be very interesting to see whether his physiognomy corresponds with that thus graphically described by Professor Lombroso'.ls In 1890 Havelock Ellis, more noted for his work on sexuality, contributed to the debate with his volume in The Contemporary Science Series called The Criminal which took a very similar line to Lombroso in examining the physicality of offenders."

Lombroso, in accepting that criminality was inevitable, was in effect arguing for a new attitude towards crime and its prevention. The new science of criminology could be used, he believed, to assist in the fight against crime just as much as new methods of detection. While there is much that is innovative in the approach of Lombroso and others towards understanding and defining criminals and criminal behaviour, they were treading a well-worn path that stretched back at least as far as the last decades of the eighteenth century. Jeremy Bentham's 1791 design for the panopticon or `Inspection-House' envisaged a prison system in which offenders could be observed, controlled and analysed. We will return to the use of the prison and punishment policies at the end of this chapter because they are crucial to understanding nineteenth-century attitudes towards crime and the so-called `criminal class"' Before that it is necessary to explore the ways in which criminals were prosecuted in the period and to look at the problem of crime as it was reported in the newspapers. Thus, we will first look at the work of the Thames Police Court that covered the Whitechapel area before moving up the criminal justice system to see the sorts of crimes that came before the Old Bailey, London's premier criminal trial court.

Figure 7 `Whitechapel,1888, Punch (October 1888) pokes fun at the police and at the same time provides its readership with a stereotypical characterization of the `criminal class'."

LONDON POLICE COURTS: THE NATURE OF SUMMARY JUSTICE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CAPITAL

In response to widespread concern about crime and a perceived lack of law and order towards the end of the eighteenth century, seven police courts were established in London in 1792. These followed the pattern of the investigative office created by the Fielding brothers at Bow Street with a justice of the peace and a team of thief-takers. By the late nineteenth century these `police courts' were dealing with a wide range of petty crime, vagrancy and interpersonal violence and were to some degree an arena for the resolution of all manner of disputes that arose from everyday life.'9 Unfortunately only partial records survive from these early magistrate courts but those of the Thames Police Court do exist for the period. In addition the London newspapers regularly reported on the proceedings of these courts, although it is likely that they selected only those cases that were particularly interesting or chimed with contemporary fears or preoccupations with certain forms of offending behaviour. We also have a late nineteenth-century sketch of the police courts, and a detailed, if very descriptive, tract on a selection of offenders that were brought before them that offers anecdotal observations without specifying which court is being examined.

The Thames Police Court had been created as part of the general reform of policing in 1792. In 1821 the Lambeth office was merged with Thames and in 1845 a purpose-built court was established in East Arbour Street in Stepney. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century the court served the population of the East End and was presided over by the notoriously harsh magistrate Mr Lushington and his colleagues Thomas Saunders and Montague Williams. Lushington, as we shall see, was not prepared to tolerate drunkenness, bad language, gambling or attacks on the police and handed out fines and short prison sentences to thousands of petty offenders each year. Mr Saunders, by contrast, was said to be `an acute, discriminating, and merciful magistrate, according to The Graphic at least.20

The records of the Thames Police Court are not complete but we do have a series of registers of proceedings that cover the 1880s.21 There are two sets of registers; one covers all offences arising from arrests (and so, usually, features brief details of the police officer involved) while the other consists of cases brought by summons. There is some overlap between the two registers but, as we shall see, the first set is most predominantly concerned with criminal activity. For the purposes of this study I have surveyed the first court register for January to December 1887. The decision to pick the year before the Whitechapel murders was deliberate: incidents in the court between August and December 1888 have been referred to in other chapters and there is some sense in picking a period not coloured by extraordinary events that might affect the workings of the court.

The police office at Thames was a summary court: the cases were heard before the magistrate and a clerk, no jury sat and all judgements were made by the sitting justice. He therefore wielded tremendous power in his courtroom. By the middle of the nineteenth century common assaults and petty thefts had been made summary offences rather than crimes for which a judge and jury were required. The late nineteenth-century magistracy had a range of options open to them when offenders were brought before them. They could send offenders on for a full jury trial if the crime was suitably serious. Alternatively they could punish minor offenders with fines and short spells of imprisonment (or order a beating if they were small boys). They could acquit them if no prosecutor appeared or the case was unlikely to stand up to close examination, or simply admonish them and send them on their way. The court dealt with a tremendous variety of offences. Offenders were charged with thefts and burglaries, assaults and rapes, drunkenness and foul language, criminal damage, failing to maintain their families and not sending their children to school. Those prosecuting were individuals who had fallen victim to crime - violent or property - and the officers of the Metropolitan Police who were playing an increasingly proactive role in the prosecution process. However, this was a local court serving the local community and we should not simply view it as an arm of state authority in the East End. Throughout the century the number of criminal prosecutions increased and there are some clear reasons for this. As Jennifer Davis has observed, the establishment of the Police and the police courts made it much easier for offenders to be caught and prosecuted `quickly and decisively'.22

Table 7.1 shows that most of those brought before the courts were men, a factor that is consistent with all studies of crime and criminality throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Men dominated statistics for property crime as well as those for interpersonal violence and so it is no surprise to see that 77 per cent of hearings featured a male defendant. Indeed if we were to remove the category of disorderly behaviour (which covers cases of drunkenness, drunk and incapable, foul language, refusing to move along or to quit premises when asked - which meant the pub in many cases) then the proportion of male offenders would rise to around 85 per cent overall. The large numbers of women arrested and then prosecuted for their bad behaviour when drunk has thus distorted the figures to some degree.

Table 7.1 Hearings at Thames Police Court, January 1887-December 1887 (Court Register 1)

While it is necessary to say something about the nature of all the offences prosecuted here I do not intend to spend too much time on the regulatory business of this court. The offences covered under this category include dangerous (or `furious') driving, desertion (of the armed forces or one's family), refractory paupers (who have refused work or absconded from the workhouse), damage to property or throwing stones (usually the antics of small boys) and cruelty to animals. There are some very serious offences here of course; a Mrs Donovan was prosecuted in August 1887 for kidnapping children and using them to help her beg on the streets, but this was a rare crime.23 The numbers are generally small and, if taken together with the administration of the Education Act and the prosecution of individuals under the various property acts that controlled lettings and house building, can be seen as part of the general regulation of everyday life in the capital rather than as strictly criminal behaviour. Instead we will look in more detail at the prosecution of disorderly persons, at petty theft and interpersonal violence, for it was these that occupied most of the business of the Thames office in 1887.

On almost every page of the Thames court's registers offenders appear charged with some form of disorderly behaviour. The Graphic noted that a considerable number of these types of offenders were presented before the court on Monday and Tuesday mornings, `when the offenders have had their week's wages to pitch away over the pewter-covered counters of the publicans'.24 If we take 1 June 1887 there are 17 hearings listed of which all but one mention drunkenness in the nature of the offence. Elizabeth Shand and Hannah Morebly were discharged after being arrested for being drunk and disorderly the previous evening. John Edmonds and Mary Botely were not so fortunate: both had compounded their crimes by using foul language to the police and Edmonds received a 40s fine (which he paid) while Mary was sent to gaol for 14 days. John Doyle and Maria Mitchell were picked up for being drunk and fighting and were bound over to keep the peace for six months on pain of losing their £10 recognizance. Bella Blue-Eyes, a young woman of only 18 ('at first sight she looks thirty' stated Redding Ware, the author of a small pamphlet describing offenders appearing at the police courts of the capital) was in the police court because she had `been found drunk, hysterical and blasphemous, in a gutter, whence she has been removed by a severe-faced policeman, and Redding Ware had some sympathy for this costermonger's wife who had had her eye gouged out by her husband in a jealous rage. In his view this was the sorry tale of a `mere child' who was `mercilessly converted into a woman' who tried to live up to `the high living and drinking bouts of her athlete of a husband, and in a couple of years she is a complete Helen Bosanquet had noted that East End women were worn out by 25 and almost all of `Jack's victims were broken women in their late thirties and forties. Bella received 14 days' imprisonment for her drunken behaviour as she had no funds to pay the 10/- fine offered as an alternative. How many of those women found dead drunk on the streets were trying to wipe out the misery of their desperate lives, as Bella surely was, we can only wonder at.27

Nicholas Buckley drunkenly refused to go home when PC Elliot asked him and gave him a mouthful of abuse instead: the magistrate fined him 10/- with the threat of seven days incarceration if he failed to pay. In a similar incident a 19-year-old youth with a record of violent behaviour was charged with disorderly conduct and using obscene language. John Downey had already served six months for assaulting a policeman but this does not seem to have improved his temperament. One evening two gentlemen had complained about his boorish drunken behaviour to which Downey responded by pushing them off the pavement. The men then took their complaint to the nearest police officer. When a police constable told Downey to go home and sleep off his drunkenness, he received a mouthful of invective and a refusal. Downey was fined 5s and discharged.28 John and Agnes Kemp (possibly a married couple or perhaps siblings) were jointly accused of being drunk and refusing to return home: Agnes caused some damage as she was arrested and they were fined 60s between them. In neither case is the motive for the drunken actions of the defendants at all clear. Indeed the only explanation necessary might be the consumption of too much booze, but in some instances the underlying tensions of life are revealed by the prosecutions in the police court. Edward Robinson had worked at the Rose and Crown pub in Bromley before he was dismissed for what the paper called his `drunken habits'. In the ensuing three months Robinson had continually returned to the pub to vent his anger at his former employer. On this occasion he had overstepped the mark, challenged the entire pub to a fight while inebriated and assaulted one of the customers; Mr Lushington fined him 10s.29