From its earliest days, Scotland Yard and its uniformed divisions were resented by the public. Policing was viewed as an affront to the Englishman's civil rights and associated with martial law and the government's way of spying and bullying. When the Metropolitan Police were first organized, they did their best to avoid a military appearance by dressing themselves in blue coats and trousers and topped themselves off with rabbit-skin stovepipe hats reinforced with steel frames just in case an apprehended criminal decided to knock an officer on the head. The hats also came in handy as footstools for climbing over fences and walls or getting into windows.
At first, the Metropolitan Police had no detectives. It was bad enough having bobbies in blue, but the idea of men in ordinary garb sneaking about to collar people was violently opposed by citizens and even by the uniformed police, who resented the fact that detectives would get better pay and worried that the real purpose of these plainclothesmen was to tattle on the rank and file. Developing a solid detective division by 1842 and introducing plainclothes officers in the mid-1840s entailed a few fumbles, including the unenlightened decision to hire educated gentlemen who had no police training. One can only imagine such a person interviewing a drunk East End husband who has just smashed his wife in the head with a hammer or taken a straight razor to her throat.
The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) was not formally organized until 1878, or a mere ten years before Jack the Ripper began terrorizing London. By 1888, public sentiment about detectives had not changed much. There remained misgivings about police wearing plain-clothes or arresting people by artifice. The police were not supposed to trap citizens, and Scotland Yard strictly enforced the rule that plain-clothes policing could take place only when there was ample evidence that crimes in a certain area were being committed repeatedly. This approach was enforcement, not prevention. It delayed Scotland Yard's decision to order undercover measures when the Ripper began his slaughters in the East End.
Scotland Yard was completely unprepared for a serial killer like the Ripper, and after Mary Ann Nichols's murder, the public began to cast its eye on the police more than ever, and to criticize, belittle, and blame. Mary Ann's murder and inquest hearings were obsessively covered by every major English newspaper. Her case made the covers of tabloids such as The Illustrated Police News and the budget editions of Famous Crimes, which one could pick up for a penny. Artists rendered sensational, salacious depictions of the homicides, and no one - neither the officials of the Home Office nor the policemen nor the detectives and brass at Scotland Yard nor even Queen Victoria - had the slightest comprehension of either the problem or its solution.
When the Ripper began making his rounds there were only uniformed men walking their beats, all of them overworked and underpaid. They were issued the standard equipment of a whistle, a truncheon, perhaps a rattle, and a bull's-eye lantern, nicknamed a dark lantern because all it really did was vaguely illuminate the person holding it. A bull's-eye lantern was a dangerous, cumbersome device comprised of a steel cylinder ten inches high, including a chimney shaped like a ruffled dust cap. The magnifying lens was three inches in diameter and made of thick, rounded, ground glass, and inside the lamp were a small oil pan and wick.
The brightness of the flame could be controlled by turning the chimney. The inner metal tube would rotate and block out as much of the flame as needed, allowing a policeman to flash his lantern and signal another officer out on the street. I suppose that flash is a bit of an exaggeration if one has ever seen a bull's-eye lantern lit up. I found several rusty but authentic Hiatt amp; Co., Birmingham, bull's-eye lanterns that were manufactured in the mid-1800s, precisely the sort used by the police during the Ripper investigation. One night I carried a lantern out to the patio and lit a small fire in the oil pan. The lens turned into a reddish-orange wavering eye. But the convexity of the glass causes the light to vanish when viewed from certain other angles.
I held my hand in front of the lantern and at a distance of six inches could barely see a trace of my palm. Smoke wisped out the chimney and the cylinder got hot - hot enough, according to police lore, to brew tea. I imagined a poor constable walking his beat and holding such a thing by its two metal handles or clipping the lantern to his leather snake-clasp belt. It's a wonder he didn't set himself on fire.
The typical Victorian may not have had a clue about the inadequacy of bull's-eye lanterns. Magazines and penny tabloids showed constables shining intense beams into the darkest corners and alleyways while frightened suspects reel back from the blinding glare. Unless these cartoonlike depictions were deliberately exaggerated, they lead me to suspect that most people had never seen a bull's-eye lantern in use. But that shouldn't come as a surprise. Police patrolling the safer, less crime-ridden areas of the metropolis would have little or no need to light their lanterns. It was in the forbidden places that the lanterns shone their bloodshot eyes as they blearily probed the constables' beats, and most Londoners traveling by foot or in horse-drawn cabs did not frequent those parts.
Walter Sickert was a man of the night and the slums. He would have had good reason to know exactly what a bull's-eye lantern looked like because it was his habit to wander the forbidden places after his visits to the music halls. During his Camden Town period, when he was producing some of his most blatantly violent works, he used to paint murder scenes in the spooky glow of a bull's-eye lantern. Fellow artist Marjorie Lilly, who shared his house and one of his studios, observed him doing this on more than one occasion, and later described it as "Dr. Jekyll" assuming the "mantle of Mr. Hyde."
The dark blue woolen uniforms and capes the police wore could not keep them warm and dry in bad weather, and when days were warm, a constable's discomfort must have been palpable. He could not loosen the belt or tunic or take off his military-shaped helmet with its shiny Brunswick star. If the ill-fitting leather boots he had been issued maimed his feet, he could either buy a new pair with his own pay or suffer in silence.
In 1887, a Metropolitan policeman gave the public a glimpse of what the average constable's life was like. In an anonymous article in the Police Review and Parade Gossip, he told the story of his wife and their dying four-year-old son having to live in two rooms in a lodging house on Bow Street. Of the policeman's twenty-four-shillings-a-week salary, ten went to rent. It was a time of great civil unrest, he wrote, and animosity toward the police ran hot.
With nothing more than a small truncheon tucked into a special pocket of a trouser leg, these officers went out day after day and night after night, "well nigh exhausted with [our] constant contact with passionate wretches who had been made mad with want and cupidity." Angry citizens screamed vile insults and accused the police of being "against the people and the poor," read the unsigned article. Other better-off Londoners sometimes waited from four to six hours before calling the police after a robbery or burglary and then publicly complained that the police were unable to bring offenders to justice.
Policing was not only a thankless job but also an impossible one, with one sixth of the 15,000-member force out sick, on leave, or suspended on any given day. The supposed ratio of one policeman to 450 citizens was misleading. The number of men actually on the street depended on which shift was on duty. Since the number of policemen on duty always doubled during night shift (10:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M.), this meant that during day shift (6:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.) and late shift (2:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M.) there were only some 2,000 beat officers working. That is a ratio of one policeman to every 4,000 citizens, or one policeman to cover every six miles of street. In August, the ratio got even worse when as many as 2,000 men took vacation leave.