Before taking lodgings in Sidney Street, Whitechapel, to study the
haunts of Peter the Painter and his fellow “thugs,” I tried to get a
room in the house in Grove Street to which the handsome young Russian
had been carried when he was mortally wounded by the police.
With my companion Eddy, I knocked at the door of this dark little
dwelling place, in a sinister street with a railed sidewalk, where
foreign-looking men lounged about in doorways, and young drabs with
painted faces started out at dusk for the lighted highways. Eddy and I
believed ourselves to be disguised adequately for East End life. We had
put on our oldest clothes and cloth caps, but we were both aware that
our appearance in Grove Street aroused immediate suspicion. After three
knocks, the door was opened on a chain, and a frowsy woman spoke to me
in Yiddish. I answered in German, which she seemed to understand. Upon
my asking for a room, she undid the chain and opened the door a little
way, so that I could see the crooked wooden stairs up which the man’s
body had been carried by two of those men who now lay burned to death
in Sidney Street.
The woman asked us to wait, and then went down a stinking passage
and spoke to a man, as I could hear by the voices. While we waited,
shadows crept up out of the dark street about us, and I saw that we
were surrounded by the foreign-looking men who had been lounging in
the doorways. The woman came back with a tall, bearded man who spoke
English.
“What do you want?”
“A room for the night.”
“What the hell for?” he asked. “Do you know there’s been a murder in
this house?”
“That makes no difference,” I said, casually. “It’s late and raining,
and we want to sleep.”
“Not here. We don’t want no narks in this house. We’re honest people.”
“All right,” said Eddy. “We’ll go somewhere else.”
He was moving off, when the man took hold of his arm.
“Perhaps you won’t,” he snarled. “I may get into trouble about this,
with the cops. You’ll stay here till I send a word round to the
station.”
He gave a whistle, and the men lurking in the darkness about us pressed
closer. They were young Jews of Russian type, anæmic and white-faced.
He shoved the man off, and pushed his way through the crowd. They
jabbered in a foreign tongue, and followed a little way, but did not
touch us.
“Let go of my arm, or I’ll hit you,” said Eddy.
The rain fell faster, and we were splashed with mud. With good warm
houses in the West of London, it was ridiculous to be tramping about
the East like this, homeless and cold. We knocked at many doors in
other streets, and every answer we had was a rough refusal in Yiddish
or German to take us in. Not even when we offered as much as a
sovereign for a night’s shelter.
“These people don’t like the look of us,” said Eddy. “What’s the matter
with our money?”
The truth was, I think, that the affair in Sidney Street had thoroughly
scared the foreign element in the East End, and these people to whom we
applied for rooms were on their guard at once against two strangers who
might be police spies or criminals in search of a hiding place. They
were not accepting trouble either way.
It was late at night when at last we persuaded an Israelite, and master
tailor, to rent us a room in Sidney Street, next door to the house in
which Peter the Painter and his friends had defied the armed police of
London, and escaped capture by dying in the flames.
From that address Eddy and I wrote a series of articles describing our
experiences in the East End, among anarchists, criminals, and costers.
The anarchists were the most interesting, and we visited them in their
night clubs.
We went, I remember, to a Russian hotel in Whitechapel, where the chief
anarchist club in London had established its headquarters through fear
of a police raid at its old address. Certainly they took no precautions
to ensure secrecy, for even outside the hotel, down a side street, Eddy
and I could hear the stentorian voice of one of their orators, and see
the shadows of his audience on the window blinds. We went into the
hotel and found the stairs leading to the club room densely packed by
young men and women, for the most part respectably, and even smartly,
dressed, of obviously foreign race--Russian, German, and Jewish.
Eddy and I wormed our way upstairs by slow degrees, sufficiently
close to hear the long, excited speech that was being made in German.
Here and there at least I heard snatches of it, and such phrases as
“the tyranny of the police,” “the fear of the _bourgeoisie_,” “the
dictatorship of the people,” “the liberty of speech,” and “the rights
of labor to absolute self-government.” Such phrases as these were
loudly applauded whenever the speaker paused.
“Who is speaking?” I asked of a good-looking young fellow sitting on
the stairs.
He answered sullenly:
“Rocca. What’s that to you?”
Presently there was a whispering about us. Sullen faces under bowler
hats held close consultation. Then there was a movement on the stairs,
jamming Eddy and myself against the banisters.
“What do you want here?” asked one of the young men, aggressively. “If
you’re police narks, we’ll turn you out!”
“Yes, or do you in!” said another.
“We don’t want any bleeding spies here,” said a woman.
Other expressions of hostility were uttered, and there was an ugly look
on the faces of these foreign youths.
I thought it best to tell them frankly that I was merely a newspaper
reporter on _The Daily Chronicle_, finding a little descriptive
material. I should be interested to hear the speech upstairs, if they
had no objection.
This candor disarmed them, or most of them, though a few raised the cry
of “Turn them out!”
But an elderly man who seemed to have some authority raised his hand,
and took me under his protection.
“That’s all right. We’ve nothing to hide. If _The Daily Chronicle_
wants our views, it can have them. Better come and see Mrs. Rocca.”
The crowd made way for us on the stairs and my companion and I were led
to a narrow landing outside the room, where the orator still bellowed
in German to a packed audience, and then into a little slip of a room
which I found to be an ordinary bathroom.
On the edge of the bath sat a well-dressed, rather good-looking and
pleasant-eyed lady, to whom I was introduced, and who was introduced to
me as Mrs. Rocca. She was the wife of the orator in the next room, and,
like himself, German.
She spoke English perfectly, and in the presence of half a dozen
men who crowded in to listen, we had an argument lasting at least
an hour, on the subject of anarchy. She began by disclaiming, for
the anarchists in London, all knowledge of and responsibility for
the affair of Peter the Painter and his associates. They were merely
common thieves. But it was laughable, she thought, what a panic fear
had been caused in middle-class London by the killing of a policeman
or two. It filled columns of the newspapers, with enormous headlines.
It seemed to startle them as something too horrible and monstrous for
imagination. Why all that agitation over the deaths of two guardians
of property, when there was no agitation at all, no public outcry, no
fierce clamor for vengeance, because every night men and women of the
toiling classes were being killed by the inhuman conditions of their
lives, in foul slums, in overcrowded bedrooms, in poisonous trades, in
sweated industries, as the helpless slaves of that capitalistic system
which protected itself by armies of police. The English people were
the world’s worst hypocrites. They hid a putrid mass of suffering,
corruption, and disease, caused by modern industrialism, and pretended
that it did not exist.
“What is your philosophy?” I asked. “How do you propose to remedy our
present state?”
“I am an intellectual Nihilist,” said the lady very calmly. “I believe
in the ultimate abolition of all law, all government, all police, and
in a free society with perfect liberty to the individual, educated in
self-discipline, love for others, and moral purpose.”
I need not here repeat her arguments, nor their fantastic disregard of
human nature and the stark realities of life. She was well read, and
quoted all manner of writers from Plato to Bernard Shaw, and I marveled
that such a woman should be living in the squalor of Whitechapel as
a preacher of the destructive gospel. We had a vehement argument, in
which Eddy joined, and though we waxed hot, and disagreed with each
other on all issues, we maintained the courtesies of debate, in which,
beyond any mock modesty, I was hopelessly out-argued by this brilliant,
extraordinary, and dangerous woman.
It was from acquaintances made in that club that we were led into other
byways of Whitechapel and heard strange and terrible tales of Russian
revolutionaries, who showed me the sores of fetters and chains about
their wrists and legs, and swore eternal hatred of the Russian Czardom,
which crushed the souls of men and women and tortured their bodies.
They were, doubtless, true tales, and it was with the remembrance
of those horrors that the Russian Revolution was made, in all its
cruelty and terror, until the autocracy of the Czars was replaced by
the tyranny of Lenin and the Soviet State, when the dream of Russian
liberty was killed, for a generation at least, in the ruin and famine
and pestilence of the people.
Eddy and I dined in the kosher restaurants of the East End, went to the
Jewish theater, and explored the haunts of the Russian and Oriental
Jews of London.
In our wanderings we discovered the most Oriental place this side of
Constantinople. It was Hessell Street Market, in a deep sunken road,
reached by flights of steep steps through blocks of buildings in the
Commercial Road, and quite unknown to most Londoners. On each side of
the sunken street were wooden booths which looked as though they had
been there since the time of Queen Elizabeth, and at night, when we
went, they were lit, luridly, by naptha flares. In these booths sat,
cross-legged, old bearded men with hooked noses, who looked as though
they were contemporaries of Moses and the Prophets. They were selling
cheap Oriental rugs, colored cottons and silks, sham jewelery, rabbit
skins, kosher meat, skinny fowls, and embroidered slippers. The crowd
marketing in this place, chaffering, quarreling, picking over the
wares, with the noise of a Turkish bazaar, were mostly of Oriental
types. Some of the men wore fur caps, or astrakhan caps, like the
Persians who cross the Galata bridge at Constantinople. Others wore fur
coats reaching to their heels, and top hats of ancient architecture.
It was the market of the London Ghetto, and thronged with flashy young
Jews and Jewesses, starved-looking men of Slav aspect, and shifty-eyed
boys who were professional pickpockets and sold the harvest of their
day’s toil to the old villains in the booths.
It was a young thief who acted as our guide to some of these places,
and he performed a delicate operation in the way of housebreaking for
our benefit. We were eager to get a photograph of Peter the Painter,
and he told us that he knew of the only one in existence. It belonged
to a “young lady” who had been Peter’s friend, and naturally wished to
keep secret her association with this bandit. It stood on her bedroom
mantelpiece, and if we would give him half an hour, he would “pinch” it
for us. But he would have to replace it after we had made use of it. At
the end of an hour he returned with the photograph of a good-looking
young Russian, and told us that it had been an “easy job.” This
photograph was reproduced as the only authentic portrait of Peter the
Painter, but I have grave doubts about it.
With this lad, who was an intelligent fellow and vowed that henceforth
he was going to lead an honest life, as burglary was a mug’s game,
he went into the cellars below a certain restaurant which were used
as a library of anarchist literature. Doubtless there was more high
explosive here, in the way of destructive philosophy, than one might
find in Woolwich Arsenal, but we did not examine those dangerous little
pamphlets and books which preached the gospel of revolution. At that
time, before the advent of Bolshevism in the history of the world,
that propaganda seemed to have no bearing upon the ordinary facts
of life, and did not interest us. It was at a later period that the
international anarchist in London translated his textbooks and touted
them outside the gates of English factories, and slipped them into the
hands of unemployed men.
In those pre-war days, the foreign revolutionaries in London kept
themselves aloof from English life and, as I have said, generally
avoided unpleasant contact with the English law. Living in the foulest
lodgings--I sicken still at the memory of the stench we encountered in
some of their tenement houses--many of these young tailors, cigarette
makers, and factory hands dressed themselves up in the evening and came
down West with their girl friends to the music halls and night clubs in
the neighborhood of Piccadilly, leaving the older folk to their squalor
and the children to the playground of the streets and courts. Now
and again they stabbed each other, or cut each other’s throats, but,
as a rule, such incidents were hushed up by their neighbors, and the
London police were not invited to inquire into affrays between these
aliens.... The war made a great clearance of these foreigners, and many
of their old haunts have disappeared.
By the merest chance I saw the disappearance of one of the oldest and
most historic haunts of London lawbreakers. It was the abandonment
of the Old Bailey, before its grim and ancient structure was pulled
down to make way for the new and imposing building where Justice again
pursues its relentless way with those who fall into its grip. Ever
since Roman days there has been a prison on the site of the Old Bailey,
and for hundreds of years men and women have languished there in dark
cells, rattled their chains behind its bars, rotted with jail fever,
and died on the gallows tree within its walls. The dark cruelties of
English justice which, in the old days, was merciless with all who
broke its penal laws, however young and innocent till then, belong
to forgotten history, for the most part, but as time is counted in
history, it is not long since the judges of the Old Bailey condemned
young girls to death for stealing a few ribbons or handkerchiefs, and
my own grandfather saw their executions, in batches.
But on the last day of the Old Bailey, when the police were withdrawn
from its courtroom and corridors, before its furniture and fittings
were to be put up for public auction, the crowd I met there did not
remember those old ruthless days. They were the criminals of a later
generation who had been put in the cells as “drunks and disorderlies,”
as pickpockets and “petty larcenies,” brought up for judgment with the
knowledge that short sentences would be inflicted on them.
It was one of the most remarkable crowds I have ever seen. Some queer
sentiment had brought all these crooks and jailbirds to see the last
of their old “home.” Frowzy women and “flash” girls, old scamps of the
casual ward and doss house, habitual drunkards, and young thieves,
sporting touts and burglars of the Bill Sikes brand, had gathered
together, as though by special invitation, to the “private view.”
Laughing, excited, full of loquacious reminiscences, they wandered
through the charge room and the cells where they had been “lagged,”
pointed out the cell from which Jack Sheppard had escaped, and other
cells once inhabited by famous murderers and criminals, and surged
into the great court where they had stood in the dock facing the
scarlet-robed judge and all the majesty of law. They stood in the dock
again, lots of them, jeering, with bursts of hoarse laughter at the
merry jest.
They crowded up to the judge’s throne. One young coster, with a gift
of mimicry, put on a judicial manner, wagged his head solemnly, and
sentenced his pals to death. Shrieks of laughter greeted his pantomime.
An old ruffian with a legal-looking face, sodden with drink, played the
part of prosecuting counsel, addressed an imaginary judge as “M’lud,”
the crowd as “gentlemen of the jury,” and asserted that the evidence
was overwhelming as to the guilt of the prisoner, who was indeed “a
naughty, naughty man.”
“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!” screamed a
girl with big feathers in her hat, and she laughed hysterically at her
own humor.
There was something grim and tragic beneath the comedy of the scene.
This travesty of the law by those who had been in its clutches revealed
a vicious psychology lost to all shame and decency, but was also a
condemnation of society which produced such types of men and women,
for the most part victims of slum life, foul surroundings, and evil
upbringing, tolerated, and indeed created, by the social system of
England. It needed the pen of Dickens to describe this scene, and truly
it was a hark-back to the days of Dickens himself. I was astounded that
such characters as Bill Sikes, Old Fagin and Nancy, and Charley Bates
should still remain in the London of Edward VII, as they appeared in
the living image that day in the Old Bailey.
I wandered upstairs into deserted rooms. They were strewn with papers
ankle-deep, and on the table I saw a bulky volume, bound in iron, which
was the old charge book, dating from 1730. To this day I regret that I
did not “pinch” it, for it was an historic relic which, with scandalous
carelessness, was thrown away. But I was afraid of carrying off such
a big thing, lest I should find myself on a more modern charge-sheet
at another court. I did, however, stuff a number of papers into my
pockets, and when I reached home and examined them, I found that they
were also historical documents of great interest.
One of them, for instance, was a list of eighty convicts, or so,
condemned to penal servitude and transportation to Botany Bay. Many
of them--boys and girls--had been sentenced to death for the crime
of stealing a few potatoes, a pinafore, some yards of cotton, or, in
one case, for breaking a threshing machine, and had been “graciously
reprieved by His Majesty King William IV” and condemned to that
ferocious punishment of penal servitude in the convict settlements
of Australia, which to many of them was a living death, until by
flogging, and insanitary conditions, and disease, death itself released
them. That was but a few years before the reign of Queen Victoria!
It was in the new Old Bailey, very handsomely paneled, nicely warmed,
lighted with delicate effects of color through high windows--doubtless
the clerks of the court thought it quite a privilege for the criminals
to be judged in such a place--that I saw the trial of that famous and
astonishing little murderer, Doctor Crippen.
It will be remembered that he was captured on a ship bound for Halifax,
with a girl named Ethel le Neve, dressed up in boy’s clothes, with whom
he had eloped after killing his wife and dissecting her body for burial
in his cellar.
Crippen looked a respectable little man, with weak, watery eyes and a
drooping moustache, so ordinary a type of middle-class business man in
London that quite a number of people, including one of my own friends,
were arrested by mistake for him when the hue and cry went forth.
I was at Bournemouth at that time, in one of the aviation meetings
which were held in the early days of flying. It was celebrated by
fancy fêtes, open-air carnivals, fancy-dress balls, and all kinds of
diversions. The most respectable town in England, inhabited mostly by
retired colonels, well-to-do spinsters, and invalids, seemed to take
leave of its senses in a wild outburst of frivolity. Even the Mayor
was to be seen in the broad glare of sunshine, wearing a false nose.
Into that atmosphere of false noses and fancy frocks came telegrams to
several newspaper correspondents from their editors.
“Scotland Yard believes Crippen at Bournemouth. Please get busy.”
That was the tenor of the telegram sent to me, and I saw by the pink
envelopes received by friends at table in the Grand Hotel one night
that they had received similar messages. One by one they stole out,
looking mightily secretive--in search of Crippen, who, by that time was
nearing Halifax.
With a friend named Harold Ashton, a well-known “crime sleuth,” I went
into the hall, and after a slight discussion decided that if Crippen
was in Bournemouth it was not our job to find him. We were, for the
time, experts in aviation, and couldn’t be put off by foolish murders.
As we went upstairs, Ashton put his head over the banisters, and then
uttered an exclamation.
“Scotland Yard!”
Looking over the stair rail, I saw a pair of boots, belonging to a man
sitting in the hall. True enough, they had come from Scotland Yard,
according to the tradition which enables any detective to be recognized
at a glance by any criminal. One of those detectives had been sent down
on the false rumor, and probably hoped to find Doctor Crippen and Ethel
le Neve disguised as Pierrot and Columbine on the pier.
Ashton and I decided to have a game with the man. We wrote a note in
block letters, as follows:
“ARE YOU LOOKING FOR DOCTOR CRIPPEN? IF SO, BEWARE!”
By a small bribe, we hired a boy to deliver it to the detective, and
then depart quickly.
The effect was obviously disconcerting to the man, for he looked most
uneasy, and then hurried out of the hotel. Doubtless he could not
understand how anybody in Bournemouth could know of his mission. Ashton
and I followed him, and he was immediately aware that he was being
shadowed. He went into a public house and ordered a glass of beer which
he did not drink. Ashton and I did the same, and were quick on his
heels when he slipped out by a side door. We kept up this game for
quite a time, until we tired of it, and to this day the detective must
wonder who shadowed him so closely in Bournemouth, and for what fell
purpose.
Curiously, by the absurd chances of journalistic life, I became mixed
up in the Crippen case, not only by having to describe the trial, but
by having to write the life story of Ethel le Neve. That girl, who
had been Crippen’s typist, was quite a pretty and attractive little
creature, and in spite of her flight with him in boy’s clothes,
the police were satisfied that she was entirely innocent of the
murder. Anyhow, she was not charged, and upon her liberation she was
immediately captured at a price, by _The Daily Chronicle_, who saw
that her narrative would make an enormous sensation. They provided
her with a furnished flat, under an assumed name, and for weeks _The
Daily Chronicle_ office was swarming with her sister’s family, while
office boys fetched the milk for the baby, and sub-editors paid the
outstanding debts of the brother-in-law, in order that Ethel le Neve
should reserve her tale exclusively to the nice, kind paper! Such is
the dignity of modern journalism, desperate for a “scoop.”
Eddy and I were again associated in the extraction of Ethel le Neve’s
tale. Eddy, as a young barrister, now well-known and prosperous at
the Bar, cross-examined her artfully, and persistently, with the firm
belief that she knew all about the murder. Never once, however, did he
trap her into any admission.
From my point of view, the psychology of the girl was extremely
interesting. Just a little Cockney girl, from a family of humble
class and means, she had astonishing and unusual qualities. It is
characteristic of her that when she was staying in Brussels with
Crippen, disguised as a boy--and a remarkably good-looking boy she
appeared--because she knew that Crippen was wanted by the law for “some
old thing or other,” which she didn’t bother to find out, she spent
most of her time visiting the art galleries and museums of the Belgian
capital. She had regarded the whole episode as a great “lark,” until at
Halifax detectives came aboard and arrested the fugitives on a charge
of murder. She admitted to me that, putting two and two together,
little incidents that had seemed trivial at the time, and remembering
queer words spoken by Crippen--“the doctor,” as she called him--she
had no doubt now of his guilt. But, as she also admitted, that made no
difference to her love for him. “He was mad when he did it,” she said,
“and he was mad for me.” That was the extraordinary thing--that deep,
sincere, and passionate love between the little weak-eyed, middle-aged
quack doctor, and this common, pretty little Cockney girl.
I read Crippen’s love letters, written to Ethel le Neve from prison,
immensely long letters, written on prison paper in a neat little
writing, without a blot or a fault. All told, there were forty thousand
words of them--as long as a novel--and they were surprising in their
good style, their beauty of expression, their resignation to death.
These two people from the squalor of a London suburb, might have been
mediæval lovers in Italy of Boccaccio’s time, when murder for love’s
sake was lightly done.
In a little restaurant in Soho I sat with Ethel le Neve, day after
day, while all the journalists of England were searching for her. Many
times she was so gay that it was impossible to believe that she had
escaped the hangman’s rope by no great distance, and that her lover was
a little blear-eyed man lying under sentence of death. Yet that gayety
of hers was not affected or forced. It bubbled out of her because of
a quick and childish sense of humor, which had not been killed by the
frightful thing that overshadowed her. When that shadow fell upon her
spirit again, she used to weep, but never for long. Her last request
to me was that I should have Doctor Crippen’s photograph made into
a miniature which she could wear concealed upon her breast. On the
morning of his execution she put on black for him, and wished that she
might have died with him on the scaffold.
I am certain, as the police were, that she was guiltless of all
knowledge and participation in the murder of Mrs. Crippen, but she
seemed as careless of that crime as any woman of the Borgias when a
rival was removed from her path of love. Some old strain of passionate
blood had thrust up again in this London typist girl, whose name of le
Neve might hold the clue, if we knew her family history, to this secret
of her personality.
I was glad to see the last of her, having written down her tale,
because that was not the kind of journalism which appealed to my
instincts or ideals, and I sickened at the squalor of the whole story
of love and murder, as I sat with Ethel le Neve in friendly discourse,
not without pity for this girl whose life had been ruined by her folly,
and who would be forever haunted by the grim tragedy of Crippen’s crime.