Police 3 - Did The City And Metropolitan Police Cooperate?
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This is my third post about how the history of the police in London impacted the investigation into the crimes known at the time as the Whitechapel murders and today more popularly called the Jack the Ripper murders.
Only one of the victims who are known to ‘ripperologists’ as ‘the canonical five’ was murdered in the City of London. She was Kate Eddowes, and she was the fourth victim. But the City of London Police had been on heightened alert since the first of the five victims, Polly Nichols, was discovered in Buck’s Row.
Buck’s Row, now Durward Street, is only a 20-minute walk from the City of London Police’s boundary on Middlesex Street. A brutal murder less than a mile from the City of London Police territory was a murder that they couldn’t ignore.
In 1888, the year of the Jack the Ripper murders, the man in charge of the City of London Police was Sir James Fraser; however, he was absent during the time that the first four murders took place. The investigation was left to Major Henry Smith, who had been appointed Chief Superintendent of the City of London Police in 1885. In James Fraser’s absence, he became Acting Commissioner.
Henry Smith was born in 1835, the son of Reverend George Smith of the Church of Scotland. He was educated at the Edinburgh Academy.
In The Complete Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow writes:
“Acting Commissioner Major Henry Smith was described by a contemporary as a good raconteur and a good fellow. Since August, he had been desperately keen to lay hands on the killer and, to guarantee success, had put nearly a third of the force into plainclothes, with instructions, as he candidly admitted in his memoirs, "to do everything which, in ordinary circumstances, a constable should not do. It was subversive of discipline, but I had them well supervised by the senior officers. The weather was lovely, and I have little doubt that they thoroughly enjoyed themselves, sitting on the doorsteps, smoking their pipes, hanging about public houses, and gossiping with all and sundry.”
At the time of the murders, the City of London Police had 781 constables and 92 sergeants to keep an eye on them. A third of the force, therefore, was around 250 men.
Two hundred and fifty men “sitting on the doorsteps, smoking their pipes, hanging about public houses, and gossiping with all and sundry.” All with one aim to answer the question, “Who was Jack the Ripper?” Although the question they would have been asking until the end of September was, “Who is the Whitechapel killer?”
Nobody had heard of Jack the Ripper until a letter written in red ink arrived at the Central News Agency at the end of September. A letter that was signed with the name Jack the Ripper.
The writer called it his ‘trade name’. We would call it a brand name. It is, of course, an excellent brand name. The top marketing men in global corporations today could not come up with a better brand name.
It’s descriptive and memorable; it has rhythm, and proof of its excellence is the fact that it remains one of the most recognisable brand names around the world. And makes this unknown murderer the best-known serial killer around the world.
Major Henry Smith’s two hundred and fifty spies were presumably not wasting their time sitting on doorsteps around St Paul’s or the Mansion House. To have any chance of gathering useful information, they had to have been smoking their pipes around the crime scenes. Close then to where Martha Tabram was stabbed 39 times in George Yard Building. Or where Polly Nichols was murdered in Buck’s Row and where Annie Chapman was discovered in the yard behind 29 Hanbury Street.
Locations that have one thing in common. They were all in Whitechapel. And Whitechapel is not in the jurisdiction of the City of London Police. The Metropolitan Police control it.
So, at least in this instance, there must have been some cooperation. Major Henry Smith could not have expected his two hundred and fifty men to have gone unnoticed by the Metropolitan Police whether or not they were in plain clothes.
It is clear that police officers did cross the invisible boundary line back then; right after the discovery of the brutally murdered and mutilated body of Kate Eddowes in Mitre Square, detectives from the City of London police scoured the area around the crime scene, including territory in the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police.
Despite all this effort and even cooperation, neither police force got even close to answering the question that everybody in the country at the time of Kate Eddowes’ murder wanted answered. The question was, “Who is Jack the Ripper?”
Although right after the murder of Kate Eddowes, it did appear to some that this time, Jack the Ripper had left a calling card. A message that was chalked on the brickwork surrounding a doorway just 500 yards from where Kate had been brutally murdered.
A chalk message that did indeed lead to a lack of cooperation between the two forces and created angry recriminations for some years after.
The Goulston Street graffito is a celebrated incident in the Jack the Ripper story. An incident that we will investigate in the next blog post.
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