CHAPTER 28. Horrible Murder
It has come in many different forms. In the eighteenth century it was often remarked that the noses of the victims were bitten off during the act of strangling. Strangulation and stabbing were popular at the end of that century, succeeded in the early nineteenth century by slashed throats and clubbing; at the end of the nineteenth century poison and various forms of mutilation or hacking to death became more favoured.
Yet the element of mystery remains perhaps the most interesting and suggestive aspect of the London murder, as if the city itself might have taken part in the crime. One of the unsolved murders of the seventeenth century, in an age when all were inured to death, concerned a man known variously as Edmund Berry Godfrey or Edmunsbury Godfrey. He was found in 1678 upon what is now known as Primrose Hill, with his own sword thrust through his body but “no blood was on his clothes or about him” and “his shoes were clean.” He had also been strangled, and his neck broken; when his clothes were taken off, his breast was found to be “all over marked with bruises.” Another curious element lay in the fact that “there were many drops of white wax lights on his breeches.” A Catholic plot was suspected and, on concocted evidence, three members of the royal court at Somerset House were arrested and executed; their names were Green, Berry and Hill. The earliest name of Primrose Hill, where the body was found, was Greenberry Hill. The real murderers were never discovered, but it would seem that the topography of London itself played a fortuitous if malign part.
One evening at nine o’clock, in Cannon Street in the spring of 1866, Sarah Millson went downstairs to answer the street-bell. An hour later a neighbour who lived above her discovered her body at the bottom of the stairs. She had been killed by a number of deep wounds to the head but “her shoes had been taken off and were lying on a table in the hall”; there was no blood upon them. The gaslight had been quietly extinguished after the murder, presumably in order to save expense. The neighbour opened the street door to find help, and saw a woman on the doorstep apparently shielding herself against the heavy rain which was then falling. She was asked for assistance but moved away, saying, “Oh! dear no; I can’t come in.” The murderer was never apprehended, but the characteristics of London mystery are here found in almost emblematic detail-the lodging house in Cannon Street, the heavy rain, the gaslight, the perfectly cleaned shoes. The strange woman shielding herself from the rain only contributes to the air of intimacy and darkness that characterises this crime. Once more it is as if the spirit or atmosphere of the city itself played its part.
That is why the murders committed by “Jack the Ripper” between August and November 1888 are an enduring aspect of London myth, with the areas of Spitalfields and Whitechapel as the dark accomplices of the crimes. The newspaper accounts of “Jack’s” murders were directly responsible for parliamentary inquiries into the poverty of these neighbourhoods, and of the “East End” in general; in that sense, charity and social provision followed hard upon the heels of monstrous death. But in a more elusive way the streets and houses of that vicinity became identified with the murders themselves, almost to the extent that they seemed to share the guilt. One scholarly account by Colin Wilson refers to the “secrets” of a room in the Ten Bells public house of the neighbourhood, in Commercial Street, which suggests that the walls and interiors of the then impoverished streets were the killer’s confessional. There are contemporary reports of the panic engendered by the Whitechapel killings. M.V. Hughes, author of A London Girl of the Eighties, has written that “No one can believe now how terrified and unbalanced we all were by his murders.” This is recorded by one who lived in the west of London, many miles from the vicinity, and she adds: “One can only dimly imagine what the terror must have been in those acres of narrow streets where the inhabitants knew the murderer to be lurking.” It is testimony to the power of urban suggestion, and to the peculiar quality of late Victorian London, that popular belief lent “a quality of the supernatural to the work.” The essential paganism of London here reasserts itself. Even as the murders were continuing, the books and pamphlets began to appear, among them The Mysteries of the East End, The Curse Upon Mitre Square, Jack the Ripper: Or the Crimes of London, London’s Ghastly Mystery. The place becomes the central interest, therefore, and soon after the crimes sightseers were flocking through Berners Street and George Yard and Flower and Dean Street; a Whitechapel “peep-show” even provided wax figures of the victims for the delectation of the spectators. Such is the force of the area, and of its crimes, that several daily tours are still organised- mainly for foreign visitors-around the Ten Bells public house and the adjacent streets.
The connection between London and murder is, then, a permanent one. Martin Fido, author of The Murder Guide to London, states that more “than half the memorable murders of Britain have happened in London,” with the prevalence of certain killings within certain areas. Murder may appear “respectable” in Camberwell, while brutal in Brixton; a litany of cut throats in nineteenth-century London is followed by a list of female poisoners. Yet, as the same narrator has pointed out, “there has been too much murder in London for a comprehensive listing.”
There are episodes and incidents, however, which remain emblematic, and it is noticeable that certain streets or areas come to identify the crimes. There were “the Turner Street murders” and the “Ratcliffe Highway murders,” for example, the last of which in 1827 prompted de Quincey’s memorable essay on “The Fine Art of Murder.” He begins his account of a series of killings, “the most superb of the century by many degrees,” with an invocation of Ratcliffe Highway itself as “a most chaotic quarter of eastern or nautical London” and an area of “manifold ruffianism.” An entire family had been found murdered in a shop beside the highway, in the most gruesome circumstances; less than three weeks later in New Gravel Lane, very close to that highway, a man called out “They are murdering people in the house!” Seven citizens altogether, including two children and one infant, had been dispatched within eight days. One of the killers, John Williams, committed suicide in his cell within Coldbath Fields Prison at Clerkenwell; his dead body, together with the bloody hammer and chisel which had been the means of his crimes, were paraded past the houses where he had assisted in the murders. He was then buried beneath the crossroads of Back Lane and Cannon Street Road or, as de Quincey puts it, “in the centre of a quadrivium or conflux of four roads, with a stake driven through his heart. And over him drives for ever the uproar of unresting London.” So Williams became part of London; having marked a track through a specific locality, his own name was buried in the urban mythology surrounding “the Ratcliffe Highway murders.” He became instead the city’s sacred victim, to be interred in a formalised and ritualistic manner. Some hundred years later workmen, digging up the territory, found his “mouldering remains”; it is appropriate that his bones were then shared out in the area as relics. His skull, for example, was granted to the owner of a public house still to be seen on the corner of the fatal crossroads.