Rethinking Whitechapel

Walking down the Whitechapel Road today is never dull, with its bustling market of giant, spiky jackfruits, fresh herbs piled up, and cooking pots of all shapes and sizes; the aromas lofting from the Bangladeshi curry houses, shop windows filled with jewellery of deep yellow gold, the increasingly numerous cafes and a fabulous selection of charity shops. Of course, add to this the rush hour traffic, delivery bikes zipping past and just the average East End shouting, it can also be a noisy activity.

A journalist describes a similar experience 135 years ago:

“Its flaunting shops, its piles of glowing fruit, its glittering jewellery, its steaming cook-shops, its flaring gin palaces and noisy shows, and clubs and assembly rooms, and churches and mission halls, its cheap jacks and shooting galleries, its streaming naphtha lights and roar and rattle, and hurrying throngs and noisy groups…”

Turn onto Gunthorpe Street however, and tranquillity envelops you almost as soon as your feet touch the cobblestones. Though quiet, the atmosphere of a Victorian East End is just about palpable. Not a Street but George’s Yard, named after the nearby George pub and mostly home to labourers and dockworkers.

One of the names intrinsically linked to this little corner of Whitechapel is another George: George Holland, founder of the George Yard Mission and Ragged School which opened in 1854. In the early days, the ragged school catered for around 30 boys in just one room and had already apparently shot up to 700 just a few years later.  

This grocer from the Minories, just down the road, really knew how to rub shoulders with the right people. That would include Anthony Ashley Cooper, AKA Lord Shaftesbury, the “Poor man’s Earl”. Shaftesbury would get George and his mission even more attention until, fast forward to 1889, he’s expanded the premises and it’s being opened by Princess Mary Adelaide and her daughter, the future Queen Mary. 

The new building was dubbed the “Girls Institute” and besides the Mission’s current services of accommodation, Sunday school, nursery, marching band and singing lessons, there would now be more space for women’s classes, lectures and preaching.

Some of the older buildings on Gunthorpe street, including part of what belonged to the George’s yard Mission. Image: Rebel Tours

Just half a year before the opening of the new building, however, George Holland shares his worries with the Daily News about the effect the Whitechapel murders, known more popularly today as the Jack the Ripper murders, are having on his Mission. The murder of Martha Tabram, found in the early hours of August 7, in the stairwell of the nearby George Yard Buildings, “had affected his institution very greatly” he claimed. 

George goes on to say that the many women who use the Mission are too frightened to go out after dark and the women who lead the classes and educational talks are too anxious to venture to this part of town after what had happened to Martha. 

Now although this particular article in the Daily News presents quite a vilified version of Whitechapel and its working-class inhabitants, I think this snippet is an important insight into how the people themselves felt about the murders, instead of relying on the sensational headlines of the tabloid media. 

In our established view of the Victorian East End, we are told to imagine a lawless land of rogues and criminals, where murder was as common as breathing. In this scenario, our East End residents would carry on with their day-to-day without too much fuss, as this was just another part of it. But what George Holland’s words betray is the fear and the panic that had started to set into the area as early as August 1888. Martha Tabram isn’t even one of the “canonical five”, so some don’t even consider her to be the first victim of the so-called Jack the Ripper. 

But in truth, violent crime has been ever descending in London over the centuries, and though there was a short spike following the Industrial Revolution, it had taken quite the tumble by the 1880s. With our popular culture filled to the brim with serial killers and stalkers, we tend to forget that murder is a very extreme crime and as such is rare, even in Victorian Whitechapel. The murder rate around the time of the Whitechapel Murders averaged around 350 people a year. Of course, it has dropped a lot more since then, with 109 homicides in 2022 in the capital, but it still meant that for our East Enders, these crimes were naturally shocking, and terrifying and spread a great deal of anxiety through the community. The level of brutality of these particular murders was something most had never seen before.

Perhaps it’s time to shatter our image of an intensely violent and vilified Whitechapel and its portrayal of a “wicked” working class who have murder in their nature, and instead take a deeper look at how these traumatising events impacted the lives of ordinary people.

If you want to hear us speaking all about this stereotype of the East End, plus the lives of the resilient women at the centre of the Whitechapel murder story, join us on our walking tour: Jack the Ripper - What about the Women?

Charlie talking about Martha Tabram on Gunthorope Street. Image: Rebel Tours