Whitechapel, c1870- c1900: Crime, policing and the inner city. The Whitechapel part of the course is a historic environment study. This means that it will focus on an environment- Whitechapel, for a specific period of time; in this case 30 years. It will be examined in Paper 1, which will also cover the rest of the Crime and Punishment course. The Whitechapel part of the paper will be at the start of paper 1, there will be three questions in this part. Two of the questions are source based, the use of sources are very important to this unit. Whitechapel is a district in the East End of London. It was a hive of beggars, prostitutes, criminals and alcoholics. There was widespread unemployment. Perhaps up to 1 in 30 people were homeless. Social reformer Charles Booth investigated East End living conditions between 1889-1903 and found that 37.5% East Londoners were living in utter poverty. The police were rarely ready to deal with crime. For example this was a time that Jack the Ripper operated in the East End of London. This was the context that the H Division (the police division that was in charge of Whitechapel) of the Metropolitan Police had to operate. In this session we will look at the context of Whitechapel. What Whitechapel was like at the time of the famous Jack the Ripper murders. We will explore: - The issues relating to poverty in Whitechapel. - Problems with housing. - How to answer question 1. Source A: This is the map produced by social reformer Charles Booth. What can we learn from the map? ‘The Five’ by Hallie Rubenhold tells the story of Whitechapel through the lives of the five victims of Jack the Ripper. As you read through the passage, highlight important details linked to poverty, employment, immigration, living conditions, crime. Definitions: Notorious: famous or well known typically for something bad. Social reformer: someone who wants social change- usually better conditions for people. sordid: bad/ dirty Whitechapel was the most notorious of these What does this text [London’s poorer areas], but was by no Do any of these key suggest life in means the only sink of poverty in the capital. Whitechapel was like? As social reformer Charles Booth’s extensive features tell us study of London’s impoverished areas in the anything about crime 78000 - Packed in- 1890s revealed, pockets of destitution, crime or problems with crammed in and misery flourished throughout the policing? metropolis, even within otherwise comfortable areas. However, Whitechapel’s Would need a lot of police. reputation [was] the most sordid. By the end of the nineteenth century, 78000 souls were packed into a quarter of warehouses, lodging houses, factories, sweat shops, abattoirs, ‘furnished rooms’, pubs, cheap music halls and markets. [. .] Booth’s social investigators regarded these residents as fairly uniform in terms of their social class. With a number of middle-class exceptions, a significant percentage were identified as ‘poor’, ‘very poor’ or ‘semi-criminal’. Housing and Living Conditions in Whitechapel Task: In the poorer areas of the city such as Whitechapel the housing was 1. Highlight the 2 most terrible. Long rows of terraced houses were built to accommodate important details in each the massive influx of workers to the factories. There was no paragraph. sanitation and sewage ran openly through the overcrowded, streets. Added to this there were very few street lamps in the poorer areas. 2. What impact would this have Several different people would sleep in the same room, sometimes on living conditions in from different families. These people would also use the same toilet Whitechapel? which landlords refused to pay to have emptied. This resulted in the spreading of diseases such as cholera and diphtheria. London was an industrial city and suffered from pollution. The smoke and stinking gas fumes choked the streets so badly that at times it was not even possible to see your own hand in front of your face, this was known as smog (smoke and fog) Londoners called this smog ‘peasoup’ due to its thick, soft-green appearance. Rookeries- A rookery is a slum- an area of overcrowded poor housing. Task- In 1870 Flower and Dean Street was a well-known rookery. Flower and Dean street had a The historian Jerry White used the 1871 census to work out number of ‘doss houses’ this that there were 902 lodgers staying in 31 of the ‘doss houses’ on this street alone. Some of these houses dated back to late meant that the lodger would pay 1600 and they were in a terrible condition. Their yards had per night, it was not a permanent been built over to provide more rooms and at the front the place to live. street was narrow – only 16 feet at its widest part in the middle. There were outside toilets, but buckets and pots were used indoors, and often spilled. Some lodging were more 1. How does having more doss settled, but families moved on after a few days or weeks, houses link to more crime? perhaps because they couldn’t afford the rent, or because they moved to find other work. Due to this the worst doss houses, Flower and Dean Street had a terrible reputation as a haunt of thieves, drunkards and prostitutes. On Source A Flower and Dean Street is coloured in black showing it was a ‘vicious semi-criminal area’, but if you look very closely you can see that ‘well-to-do’ families lived very nearby. Workhouses Those who were unable to afford a bed for the night in a doss house, or who were too young, too old and too unwell to work, could go to the Task: Which were the three Workhouse. However, people were very reluctant to go to for help at the Workhouse because of the strict rules that dictated what people harshest rules of the ate, how they worked, the time they went to bed and when they got up. workhouse? Those with families were segregated from their children and their wives 1. or husbands and for much of the time were not even allowed to speak to one another. Parents were only allowed to see their children once a day. The Whitechapel Workhouse was at South Grove, to the east, just 2. off Mile End Road. In the centre of Whitechapel at Buck’s Row there was a Workhouse Infirmary for the sick which could take around 400 inmates, and across the road at St Thomas’s Street there was a 3. ‘Casual Ward’. The Casual Ward, for those who wanted a bed for one night, only had spaces for around 60 people. The rules of the Casual Ward were very harsh – inmates were expected to work to earn their bed for the night. They would be made to pick oakum, which means picking apart the fibres of old rope, or they could be asked to work in the kitchens or to clean the Workhouse. It was thought that otherwise the inmates would be tempted to stay on at the expense of the taxpayers, who funded the Workhouse Union. One feature of accommodation for poor people in Whitechapel was lodging houses. Lodging houses were not permanent instead people paid per night. Another feature of accommodation for poor people was slum housing in rookeries. Slum housing in Whitechapel was overcrowded, they had poor ventilation. They had no toilets, there was lice in the walls. Task- Use my example to complete your own question 1, 4 mark question. 1. Describe two features of workhouses in Whitechapel. Feature 1. Feature 2. Whitechapel 2 2 In this session we will: - Understand the attempts to improve housing in Whitechapel: the Peabody estate - To be able to consider the role of lodging houses - To understand why people did not leave Whitechapel. Lodging Houses As you read through the passage, from ‘The Five’ by Hallie Rubenhold, highlight important details about life in a lodging house. In the margins you can make inferences about how the highlighted details lead to issues for the police. Task- How could this lead to The lodging houses provided temporary homes for the homeless, issues for the police? who divided their nights between the reeking (smelling) beds on offer here, the oppression of the workhouse casual wards and sleeping on the street. They were the haunts of beggars, criminals, prostitutes, chronic alcoholics, the unemployed, the sick and old. In Whitechapel alone there were 233 common lodging houses which accommodated an estimated 8,530 people without homes. Four pence per night could buy a hard single bed, 8 pence a double, there were single sex and mixed sex housing. All lodgers were entitled to make use of the communal kitchen. Social investigators and reformers who sat at the kitchen tables were appalled by the grotesque manners and the horrific language heard, even from the children. However it was the violent behaviour, degrading filth and overflowing toilets in addition to the drunkenness, child neglect Task- How could these issues and free sexual intercourse to which they truly objected. In the lead to issues for the police? ‘doss house’ all that was offensive about the slum was concentrated under one roof. The police and reformers were especially concerned about the link between common lodging houses and prostitution. Lodging houses provided shelter for a variety of women facing an assortment of unfortunate circumstances. While some of them resorted to ‘casual prostitution’ to broadly assume that all did is categorically wrong. Pairing up with a male partner was also an essential part of defraying costs. Often these relationships were short lived and formed out of necessity.