Morbid stories

Regular readers will know that I love history, and that murder mysteries are just one of my many morbid interests. When I first started seeing my boyfriend, I took him on a date to Wilton’s Music Hall via Ratcliff Highway so I could tell him about the famous murder case there.

So I get it, I do. The Whitechapel murders of 1888 are grimly fascinating, and the question mark over the killer’s identity is a magnet for myths and stories. The study of the murders and their legacy illuminate the historical and the contemporary context in valuable ways. One example is Judith Walkowitz’s superb book, City of Dreadful Delight. And Madame Guillotine has a great post exploring her interest in Jack the Ripper as a feminist.

But there are other tales we could tell. There are plenty of morbid stories to choose from (our other major historical export is the Krays) and it might even be nice to talk about some East London history that doesn’t involve murder. Although we know nothing about him, Jack the Ripper overshadows a cast of amazing East End characters, and the Whitechapel murders draw far more attention than any number of incredible events. Just one example: this year is also the 125^th anniversary of the Matchwomen’s strike which launched the modern trade union movement. Thanks to the efforts of Louise Raw, there was a commemorative event at the Bishopsgate Institute and a bit of media coverage. But will we be tripping over Matchwomen walking tours in Bow?

Jack and his victims

It’s not just the extent of it but the tone. Jack the Ripper is everybody’s favourite mystery serial killer. There is endless speculation about his identity, his knowledge of anatomy and even admiration for his ability to evade capture. In contrast, the women he murdered are reduced to objects for study or criminal evidence for analysis.

For example: my local paper recently contained a special 12 page Jack the Ripper supplement including a page entitled “The victims: How women met their gory deaths”, featuring detailed descriptions of the last movements and mutilated bodies of five women who were murdered – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Lizzie Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly – complete with pictures of their faces taken after death.

Where is the respect for these women? Poring over details like how drunk they were and how deep the gash in their throat was or how their intestines were arranged may be one thing in a history book, but why is it being printed in the Newham Recorder, along with photographs of their corpses? I don’t want these intimate and gruesome details exhumed for my entertainment.

Missing the big picture

Like almost all media coverage of the subject the article fails to connect the Whitechapel murders to any kind of context about violence against women then or now. Another article highlights the fact that six other women were murdered in the same area in the same year, three also working in prostitution and killed by punters (Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Rose Mylett), three killed by their husbands.

Sadly this article reads like a masterclass in how to subtly blame victims and excuse perpetrators when it describes the three cases of women killed by their husbands – Hannah Potzdamer, Susan Barrell and Elizabeth Bartlett:

“ordinary people driven to the ultimate crime by circumstance, a fit of anger or a desire for revenge” (this is a quote from author Peter Stubley, included in the article)

“her throat is slashed… in a jealous rage”

“Hannah had left him and moved in with a bootmaker”

“Robert, suffering from delirium tremens, also shoots himself”

“she refused to give him money for drink”

Over a century on it’s felt necessary to include details like this which serve to exonerate the killers. I wish I could afford to send every journalist a copy of this guide to responsible media reporting of violence against women (PDF).

Ripper chic

Whether blasé or breathlessly excited, the tone used to talk about Jack the Ripper almost everywhere makes me feel queasy. Have a look at this New York Times article about how All Saints clothing store makes use of “the romance of Jack the Ripper” and its location in “the Ripper’s hallowed stomping grounds”. Big stomper was he?

And did you know the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields (where one of the victims had been drinking before she was killed) was at one point called ‘Jack The Ripper’? They used to sell T-shirts, and a blood-coloured cocktail called Ripper’s Tipple. Tasteful. Obviously there’s a difference between the crimes of one serial killer and the carnage of the First World War, but that has an anniversary coming up too – can you imagine a WWI-themed bar serving ham and mustard gas sandwiches? Although I guess we’re getting close with ‘Blitz parties’, but that’s a rant for another day.

Ripperology

Many people do seriously study the Whitechapel murders without celebrating ‘Jack’, but as this brave article explains, unintentional sexism abounds in Ripperologist circles. The focus is firmly on the suspects and not the victims, whose suffering is silent or sensationalised. The LIFT campaign in Tower Hamlets have subverted this with an alternative Ripper tour which talks about the lives and the communities of the women who were killed. There are some interesting tweets from the walk in this Storify.

Here’s a classic response to criticism of Ripperology:

We do not celebrate, we commemorate. We do not idealise, but we condemn him. We examine the harsh realities of that world to allow us to understand where we came from, how society has changed and why we should be thankful for these changes, and recognise where it has not and strive to put this right.

While this may be the aim, and I fully admit I haven’t had time to research this post very thoroughly, I haven’t seen many examples of Ripperologists striving to end violence against women.

Violence against women

That is the issue at the heart of this, and the reason I can’t join in the fun: violence against women is epidemic, often lethal but frequently trivialised. The most uncomfortable parallel I found between Ripper fandom and damaging contemporary attitudes to violence against women was this, on the London Dungeons profile page for Jack the Ripper:

DOs and DON’Ts

DO look over your shoulder.

DO dress conservatively.

DO go unnoticed.

DO NOT flirt.

DO NOT walk alone.

DO NOT accept his offer to buy you a drink.

This is advice that is seriously but unhelpfully issued to women today in the guise of rape prevention. It is also a classic example of the victim blaming which prevents many women reporting violence let alone seeing their attacker convicted. Repeated in this context it’s ghoulish, and not in a good way.

Now, as then, women working in prostitution are particularly vulnerable to violence – especially trans* women and migrant women. A woman working in prostitution is 18 times more likely to be murdered than the general population. While I don’t want to be a party pooper, I can’t get that figure out of my head. I’ll sign off with this quote on ‘Jack’, from feminist academic Deborah Cameron:

The question for society is not which individual man killed, but why so many men have done and still do.

Some links

• End Violence Against Women campaign
• The excellent NHS Open Doors project
• International Union of Sex Workers

One of the 19^th century’s best-loved stereotypes is that shivering waif, the Match Girl. Standing in the snow in a tattered shawl and starving to death in a picturesque way, she is well known to all of us thanks in large part to Hans Christian Anderson.¹ In Victorian Britain her colleagues worked only slightly less prettily making the matches in factories under horrific working conditions. Many of them were girls too, teenagers and children who started work well before the age of 10.
But is there another side to this charming picture of honest suffering? I’m not saying for a moment that life wasn’t hellish for the matchgirls, and the rest of the Victorian working classes. But I welcome any attempt to dig a little deeper than the hand-wringing waifporn of many contemporary accounts to uncover the experiences and agency of actual persons.

One famous event which lends these pathetic characters another dimension and a bit of agency is the Bow Bryant & May match factory strike of 1888. The broadly accepted chain of events is this…

Annie Besant

Outspoken socialist, women’s rights campaigner and general lefty do-gooder Annie Besant heard a lecture by Clementina Black about the terrible working conditions in Bryant & May factories. She discovered that the women worked 14 hours a day for less than five shillings a week, and didn’t often receive this thanks to a system of fines for offences including talking, dropping matches or going to the toilet without permission.

The Bryant & May Factory on Fairfield Rd, Bow in the 1920s

Besant also learnt that the women’s health had been damaged by the phosphorous used to make the matches, which caused yellowing of the skin, hair loss and ‘phossy jaw’, a jolly name for a particularly gruesome kind of facial bone cancer.

Appalled, Besant went to the gates of the factory in Bow the next day and interviewed some of the women as they were leaving. Having the stories confirmed, she wrote an article for her newspaper The Link with the incendiary title ‘White Slavery In London‘.

In response to the bad PR, Bryant & May cleverly attempted to force their workers to sign a statement that they were happy with their working conditions. When a group of women refused to sign, the organisers of the group were sacked, and the rest of the workforce reacted: 1,400 of the women at Bryant & May went on strike.

Cue national uproar. Besant gathered support for her campaign from a number of prominent figures who all seem to have had their own newspapers, and they used them to call for a boycott of Bryant & May matches. The women at the company formed a Matchgirls’ Union and Besant agreed to become its leader. After three weeks the company announced that it would re-employ the dismissed women and bring an end to the fines system. The sacked women returned in triumph.

Matchwomen

According to this version of events, Annie Besant encouraged and led the factory workers to strike for better conditions. Certainly the identities of the girls and women involved in the strike have been obscured by her fame.

The Matchgirls Strike Committee, and Annie Besant. I don't know who is who I'm afraid (except Besant, standing, centre)

But a new book by Louise Raw claims that the impetus and leadership for the strike came from the women themselves, and Annie Besant got most of the credit because she was already notorious. And because she was middle class – there were doubts in many circles that the matchwomen themselves could have organised their way out of a paper bag without the help of a learned socialist.

This Times Higher Ed review of <Striking a Light: The Truth About the Match Girls Strike and the Women Behind It explains that the matchwomen “have not been hidden from history but hidden by history” because the standard account of events very early on became the go-to example of women’s industrial action, even to the point of cliché, so historians have avoided revising it. Until now:

In a careful reconstruction of events, Raw exposes inaccuracies in the standard accounts which, while petty, suggest a lazy acceptance of a chronology that fits the conventional story. Not only was Besant not the first mover, and she was probably neither sympathetic to strike action nor optimistic about its outcome, preferring instead a boycott of Bryant and May… Raw’s revised account has the match women themselves deciding to strike, generating leaders and possessing a solidarity usually denied to unskilled workers of this era, especially female ones.

BBC History magazine recorded an interview with Raw, which is available as a podcast. If you’re at all interested I recommend it. In the interview she names the five ‘ringleaders’ identified by Bryant & May – Kate Slater, Alice Barnes, Jane Wakely, Eliza Martin, Mary Driscoll – and describes newspaper accounts about their charisma, inspiring speeches and popularity with the other factory workers. Rather wonderfully, Raw was able to find out more about these women after three of their grandchildren approached her at her talks at the Museum in Docklands and the Ragged School Museum. Local history events FTW!

The Matchgirls’ Strike is a landmark in the history of women and protest, but also in labour history. It famously inspired the Dockers’ Strike: the organisers sought advice from the Matchgirls Union and continually referenced them in their speeches.

BUT WAIT! Where is the pop culture link?

• Well, I reckon the story about the ‘troublemaker’ Eva Smith who leads a factory strike in An Inspector Calls may well have been inspired by the matchgirls. Here’s a YouTube clip of the relevant bit.
• Secondly, in the course of my researches I discovered that there is a MUSICAL version of the matchgirl’s story, called, er, The Matchgirls. It looks appalling. Here’s one of the songs from it.
• Then I found out that lovely East London history music project Songs From The Howing Sea have done a song about the strike! Listen here.

1. I am being flippant here but in fact the story reduces me to a crying mess of sentimentality and socialist idealism. There’s also a good recent Disney / Pixar animation. For a horrible moment I thought they were going to happy-end it a la The Little Mermaid and The Hunchback of Notre Dame but they let her die.