The Police 2 Robert Peel And The Metropolitan Police Force.
Read the text or watch the video - it’s your choice.
In this post, I want to continue looking at 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.
London’s Two Police Forces
London has two distinct geographical territories and two separate police forces police them.
The City of London Police have authority in the one square mile that is the City of London. The Metropolitan Police look after the rest of Greater London. Some experts on the Jack the Ripper murders suggest that this was one reason that the police were unable to solve these crimes.
One such expert is crime historian Donald Rumbelow, a former City of London police officer, one-time curator of the City of London Police’s Crime Museum and a respected writer of books on the Jack the Ripper murders.
He has appeared in many television documentaries on these crimes and, for many years, guided a Jack the Ripper tour from Tower Hill.
The first stop on what was the most popular Jack the Ripper guided walk was at the remains of the wall that surrounded the Roman and then medieval City of London. Don would explain that this is what originally divided London and eventually gave us the two separate police forces.
He would explain that at the time of the investigation into the brutal murders of these women in 1888, the two police forces were practically at war with each other. This lack of cooperation hampered them in their work.
He would also explain that the Ripper could move between the two police territories, escaping capture by one force by simply crossing what was an invisible boundary line into a different police jurisdiction.
He would explain that the uniform of a City of London police officer gave him no authority if he crossed into the territory of the Metropolitan Police. As Don put it, he was nothing more than a man in fancy dress.
The One Square Mile that is the City of London
The London City Police was formed in 1832, and then in 1839, it became the City of London Police when the City of London Police Act was passed.
This act was passed to prevent the City’s police from merging with the Metropolitan Police Force, which had been founded by Sir Robert Peel in 1829.
Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World
From Roman times to the present day, the City of London has been the centre of finance for the United Kingdom and beyond. Nicholas Shaxson’s book Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Treasure-Islands-Havens-Stole-World/dp/0099541726) shows how important the separation of power that the City of London enjoys is for the survival of the world’s financial system.
In 2011, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian:
“The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect, at least, the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer, an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker’s chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City’s rights and privileges are protected.”
Obviously, as ‘the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority’, law and order in the City of London could not be under the control of the Metropolitan Police Force, which was created and is answerable to Parliament in the shape of the Home Secretary.
So, to this day, we have this division in the forces of law and order in the City of London.
Donald Rumbelow believes this division caused problems when it came to catching Jack the Ripper.
Cooperation between the two forces is better today. Still, there is no suggestion that the Corporation of the City of London is prepared to allow an act to pass through Parliament that would allow its police force to merge with the Metropolitan Police Force.
Two Police Forces and Two Nations
That the police in London were divided into two separate forces at the time of Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror is a fact.
It is also a fact that these two police forces had to deal with a society that was itself divided in two.
In 1845, 23 years before he became Prime Minister, the 41-year-old Benjamin Disraeli wrote Sybil: Or the Two Nations. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sybil-Nations-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0199539057
In it, he said that there were:
“Two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”
What Disraeli wrote in 1845 was still true when he died in 1880. Truer still more than four decades after he wrote those words in 1888. He wrote in that same book that:
“a people without power or education had been induced to believe themselves the freest and most enlightened nation in the world, and had submitted to lavish their blood and treasure, to see their industry crippled and their labour mortgaged, in order to maintain an oligarchy, that had neither ancient memories to soften nor present services to justify their unprecedented usurpation.”
Monstrous Conditions Breed Monsters
Disraeli is describing an oligarchy, a tiny elite that has absolute power and is driven both by greed and the determination to maintain that absolute power over an ignorant and docile population.
This is obviously not a way to build a healthy and compassionate society. Indeed, what was created was the very reverse. A monstrous society was created, and this monstrous society bred monsters.
Jack the Ripper was simply one of those monsters, and the police tasked with dealing with his crimes faced a double difficulty.
The monstrous conditions that arose out of this monstrous society bred not just crime but anger, despair and resentment for the police to contend with, but every one of the police officers who had to deal with all of that was a product of that same dysfunctional society.
The next post will look at the men at the top of the Metropolitan Police Force and the City of London Police Force.
Men faced with a press campaign that whipped up a frenzy of mass hysteria around the life and deaths of the women who were killed by Jack the Ripper.
Thank you for checking out this post.
I hope I’ll get to meet you on one of my tours.