The Mile End Murder by Sinclair McKay

Author:Sinclair McKay [McKay, Sinclair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2017-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

16

‘His Conduct was Very Bad’

After the sea air of Dublin, the bitter, greasy fog of London must have been difficult to readjust to. The city to which Mullins and his family returned was now glowing hotter with the furnaces of industry and was drawing immigrants from all over. When he was last there, Mullins had seemed assured of a strong and satisfying future with the police; now, all that seemed to have changed and he could not understand why.

In Ireland, he had been an inspector; on returning to K Division, Mullins was told that he was once more a sergeant. This was possibly for budgetary reasons; perhaps the division could not afford one more inspector. However, the demotion was more than just a blow to his pride.

He was back in the East End, where the docks were now being served by an elegant and unusual new expression of industrial progress: an innovative railway, sweeping along a four-mile viaduct, powered not by steam locomotives, but by steam-hauling machines that pulled the trains along on cables, themselves miles-long in length and held on giant drums. Mullins found that his demoted duties would be focused on and around what was called the London and Blackwall Railway.

It was a line intended mainly for passengers embarking and disembarking steamships downriver; instead of the grindingly slow sail to and from London Bridge on the gridlocked Thames, one could now leave a ship at Blackwall and transfer to the train. The service included carriages painted in rich blue and gold livery, divided into first and second class, running every fifteen minutes into the heart of the city. On the face of it, it was a more agreeable proposition for a policeman than breaking up drunken fights, dealing with harrowing outbreaks of domestic brutality, or even investigating internal cases of police malfeasance, of which there were a growing number. Mullins, although demoted, still had a degree of responsibility; there were also several ordinary constables assigned to the line, posted at the stations along the route, who were under his control.

Mullins and his family had lodgings provided near Fenchurch Street station. They shared a house with two other men, a constable called Dempsey and a guard on the railway called Rutherford. It was not long before tensions in the house began to rise. Rutherford conceived an ill-will not only towards Mullins, but also to his wife and children. Eventually, Rutherford lodged a complaint with his superiors at the railway about ‘the dirty habits’ of the Mullins family and their general ‘disorderly conduct’. (1) He wanted them evicted.

It is difficult not to detect a tang of anti-Irish feeling in this outburst; indeed, in the popular press and journals of the time, portraits of Irish people were nakedly bigoted. The stereotyped Irishman was depicted either as vaguely simian with an elongated jaw and an infernal temper stoked up with excessive drink, or as a childlike simpleton with an attachment to fairy stories. Even sympathetic newspaper coverage (in 1843, there was a

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