London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (33 page)

On Valentine's Day, 1887, the register reveals that Elizabeth Stride (the Ripper's third canonical victim) was fined 2s 6d for being drunk and disorderly and using foul language. Many of the women who appeared thus charged were prostitutes as the East End's unfortunates who infested the streets frequently fell foul of the Metropolitan Police's attempt to clean up the area. Many were like `Long Liz' Stride and would have made regular appearances at the police courts. However, those who were prosecuted here represent just a small proportion of those displaying drunken behaviour on the streets. The police could hardly hope to arrest everyone they found in an inebriated state, especially as that then meant escorting them back to the nearest police station to be formally charged. Even those that did find themselves propped up in front of the desk sergeant must have had a good chance of escaping a court appearance. Many would simply have been shut in a cell until they had sobered up, as Catherine Eddowes was on the night of her murder. Drunkenness also extended to the arrest of persons for being drunk in charge of vehicles. In January 1887, Richard Riches was remanded in custody after being charged with running over a man in the street while under the influence of alcohol. The newspaper reported that Riches was found by PC Thomas Baker at 9.50 p.m. surrounded by a crowd and quite incapable of controlling his horse and van."

Historians of crime have now established that in the eighteenth century the summary courts were being used by large numbers of persons to prosecute assaults.31 The same is clearly true in the 1880s. Interpersonal violence accounted for around a quarter of all offences heard at Thames and slightly more if those cases brought by summons are included. A summons cost 2s which was not an insubstantial sum for a working-class person to find and so it is worth noting that considerable numbers of people felt that the seriousness of the attack upon them was worth the outlay. However, much of this assault was probably fairly trivial and assault itself was open to wide interpretation throughout the nineteenth century. According to the Police Code Book for 1870:

A common assault is the beating, or it may only be the striking, or touching of a person or putting him or her in fear.32

Under this definition a gentle shove could constitute an assault and one can easily imagine how inebriation might have led to numerous assault prosecutions using this criteria. The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 contained a number of offences such as grevious bodily harm (GBH) and wounding that allowed action to be taken by the police but common assault was still extremely vague. Assaults were not indictable (and therefore had to involve a more serious use of violence to be heard before a jury) and were subject to classification by the police themselves and ultimately were dealt with at the discretion of the magistrate. `Assault' was usually deemed to mean reckless, but not necessarily intentional, violence, while `battery' implied the intent to cause harm. Under the 1861 act any assault that caused harm - and this could mean merely bruising or minor breaks - was termed `actual bodily harm'

The more serious offence of GBH was actually two separate offences. Wounding carried a maximum sentence of five years' imprisonment whereas GBH could be punished by life. In January John Haley came before the magistrate at Thames accused of wounding and cutting John Day. The victim alleged that he had been rudely awakened at 1 a.m. by Haley knocking at his door and accusing him of stealing his hat. When Day denied this Haley struck him in the face with a stone and as the pair grappled Day felt a stabbing pain in his side. He could not tell the magistrate what weapon his assailant had used but he was sure it was Haley who had wounded him as there was a light on in the room. The police were called to the house in Devonshire Street and PC Hawell of H division (which covered Whitechapel) found Day with blood on his face and side. Day's wife told the court that three men had come to her house and threatened her husband, demanding he return the missing hat and a local surgeon confirmed that he had treated John's wounds. Mr Lushington was evidently convinced there was a case to answer as he committed Haley for trial."

If a court believed that there was an intention to kill the victim then a charge of attempted murder could be levelled. These broad definitions of interpersonal violence have to some extent survived into current legislation, the most recent reclassification being in 1998. The number of offenders charged with more serious incidents of violence are small: just 26 men in 1887 compared to 311 for common assault. It is notable that while women were accused of violence they appear in much smaller numbers (just 64). There was a large degree of discretion involved in the prosecution of assault. An assault without a weapon or without an associated attempt to steal was not indictable, but if one was to add one of these things it became much more serious. We should note the comment of the criminal registrar in 1909.

There is no ... clear rule, and (it maybe said) no uniform practice as to the degree of violence which makes it proper to prosecute an assault as an indictable offence ... Many of the common assaults and still more of the assaults on police constables, now disposed of summarily, amount in reality to malicious wounding, causing grievous bodily harm, or even felonious wounding, and if they were sent for trial, would swell the number of indictable offences against the person.

Criminal Registrar (1909)34

Once again the numbers of persons appearing before Lushington and his fellow magistrates is not a clear and certain picture of violence in London in this period. Only a relatively small number of assaults would have resulted in prosecutions: again the involvement of the police would have been partial given the number of beat officers available and many people would have chosen to ignore assaults or respond in kind rather than go to the law. This is particularly true for domestic violence as historians have shown that only a small proportion of women were prepared to take their husbands and partners to court, preferring to suffer in silence or find other ways to try and curb their behaviour. The wife that went to law risked a lot: she could find the family breadwinner locked up, fined or indeed freed to meet his vengeance at a later date. Thus the so-called `dark figure' of unrecorded crime is very evident in cases of assault and domestic assault in particular. Because all of the cases recorded in the first register are brought in by police constables it is difficult to be clear who the victims are in many of these assaults. However, by looking at the second register (of cases brought by summons) the prosecutor is more obvious. The following table gives a brief indication of the nature of assaults prosecuted in this way at Thames.

Table 7.2 The nature of assault prosecutions at the Thames Police Court by summons, January to December 1887

The unsurprising result is that most violence was perpetrated by men and more often than not it was women who were the victims. It is also worth noting the large numbers of persons that appear here. If we include the assault cases brought in directly (those listed in the first register) then we can estimate that around 20-24 cases of assault were being dealt with by this court each week in 1887. This is a not inconsiderable amount of petty violence if we remember that many or indeed most assaults did not result in a hearing of any kind. The table also shows that women were not averse to attacking each other even if they seem to have refrained from assaulting their menfolk. This last statistic is slightly problematic: men were much less likely to report an assault on their person by a woman for reasons of pride and notions of masculinity. The 21 cases that do appear are unusual and may well include complaints from elderly males or young boys, possibly servants or employees. One was written up by the court reporter from The Illustrated Police News in September 1887 and serves to remind us that tales of parental cruelty towards children are not new. Jane Sibley of Mile End had married her husband and taken on the responsibility for his 6-year-old son, Alfred, and his two siblings. The family lived on Turner Street in a shared lodging house owned by Henry Eade. Eade had often heard little Alfred cry out or scream and feared that he was being abused by his father and stepmother. One Friday night when Sibley's husband was out, Eade heard Alfred's cries and decided to intervene. He warned Jane that `You had better be careful ... I think you will go too far with the boy. I do not think you fairly treat the boy'. Mrs Sibley protested that she was simply `holloaing more to the boy to frighten him than beating him' When Henry Eade encountered Mr Sibley he told him to sort his wife out saying that, `If this goes on I shall have to stop it' Sibley told him to mind his own business. At this point Eade decided to involve the authorities and alerted a constable. Alfred was examined by a local doctor after the policeman noticed marks on the child's legs, some of which seemed to be burns. Mrs Sibley claimed she had pushed the child and he had fallen against the stove but the policeman was unconvinced. On a more thorough examination Alfred was found to have burns on his legs, thighs and buttocks, as well as bruising to his forehead. Some of these showed signs of systematic abuse over a long period. The court decided that the injuries were not consistent with the child accidently falling against the stove and the boy's 8-year-old brother testified that after Alfred had been caught stealing sweets his stepmother had forced him to sit on the stove as punishment. He struggled and she beat him with a stick - which is how he had sustained the injuries that so alarmed Mr Eade and the constable. Justice Lushington committed Jane Sibley for a jury trial for her cruelty. Violence towards children was endemic in the period and beatings common so it is interesting that in this case the close-knit nature of East End dwellings resulted in a prosecution for cruelty and hopefully saved young Alfred from a more serious fate at the hands of his stepmother.35

The high proportion of attacks on women by men includes 112 instances that can quite clearly be described as domestic violence or wife beating. In all these cases the parties share the same surname and while this could be coincidental or represent other familial relationships it is more likely that these are wives bringing their husbands to court (or at least obtaining a summons against them). As we noted earlier this was a risky strategy to pursue and it is not surprising that in many of these hearings the case was dismissed because the complainant failed to appear. Several women may have threatened their abusive spouses with a court appearance but have not actually needed to attend to see their spouses punished. By obtaining the summons they achieved a sort of moral victory rather than the pyrrhic one that might have followed had their husbands been fined or even imprisoned by the magistrate. What is clear is that many East End women were prepared to go to law to try and arrest abusive behaviour in the home; sometimes this could have particularly severe and unexpected consequences for the convicted wife beater. In March 1887 a man appeared at the Thames court to ask the magistrate's advice. In January he had been prosecuted by his wife for assaulting her and had been fined £6. Unable to raise the funds he was sent to prison. Meanwhile his wife had sold his home and moved away. The unfortunate husband had also failed to find work on his release from gaol and was not able to comply with a court order to support his estranged wife with l Os a week. What, he asked the court, could they do to help? The answer was stark: what his wife had done was perfectly legal and there was nothing the justice could do to help him. The newspaper reported this case perhaps as a salutary warning to others who might be inclined to use violence to resolve domestic issues.36 The figure for domestic violence could indeed be even higher given that many cohabiting couples lived without seeing the need for a formal marriage ceremony, therefore, many of the 109 other cases of male on female violence could be described as domestic.

Much of this violence received relatively little sanction from the magistracy. On many occasions no prosecutor appeared to back up their complaint (the summons or perhaps the knowledge that their assailant had spent a night or two behind bars was often satisfaction enough) and in others the magistrate dismissed cases for lack of evidence. Offenders could be fined or sentenced to short periods in prison of up to a month, and this was invariably the outcome for individuals who assaulted policemen. More serious cases could be sent for trial if actual or grievous bodily harm could be proven and the court routinely bound parties by recognizance (which required them to enter into a financial bond to ensure their future good behaviour) where it could not resolve the matter by agreement or fines. All of this again reflects what we already know about `common assault': it covered a tremendous range of violent action, much of which was relatively petty. The amount of assault prosecuted at the Thames court does, however, reflect the fact that this was a rough and violent area of the capital and that much of this violence was fuelled by drink. Indeed the correspondent at The Graphic believed that Thames Police Court heard more cases of assault, actual violence, attempted murder and murder than `probably any other court in the