Jack the Ripper and the East End by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407013268
Publisher: Random House

Grudges against lodging-house keepers, quarrels among lodgers, and quarrels over women were matched by robberies in the limited privacy of a lodging-house cubicle. Daniel Shea violently attacked Fanny Markham, wife of a Dorset Street lodging-house keeper, late one Sunday evening. PC Doughty found Shea in the lodging-house kitchen, where he resisted arrest and had to be held down until the arrival of another constable. Mr Markham claimed that some men had paid Shea to come to the house and create a disturbance. Jeremiah Mahoney and Richard Atkins quarrelled at their lodging-house at 30 Dorset Street. When the latter returned two hours later, the former ‘suddenly snatched up a heavy iron spade, used at the fireplace, and struck [him] a fearful blow across the face with the edge of the iron of the spade’, nearly cutting off his nose. On Boxing Day 1888, Patrick Manning travelled by cab to a Dorset Street lodging-house where a woman he knew lodged. When he entered her room, accompanied by the cabman, another lodger tried to enter the room but was shut out ‘after a struggle’. When Manning and the cabman left, the lodger attacked them on the stairs, stabbing Manning in the thigh. A quarrel between two female lodgers in a Dorset Street lodging-house culminated in one stabbing the other in the face with a pair of scissors.7 Annie Chapman had bruises on her temple and chest, caused by a fight with another lodging-house inmate over the loan of a piece of soap only a few days before her murder.

Kitchen in a single women’s lodging-house, Spitalfields, c.1900

Lodging-house kitchens were the centre of communal life.

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