The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd (22 page)

McCarthy’s Dorset Street neighbour William Crossingham, took advantage of the new council legislation too and bought up more property. By this stage, McCarthy and Crossingham owned or let virtually the whole of Dorset Street and the Courts that ran off it. And despite the recent expense of refitting their lodging houses to meet the new council requirements, both men continued to make a lot of money.

Chapter 21

The Worst Street In London

By the 1890s, Spitalfields was one of London’s most crime-ridden areas and Dorset Street was its worst thoroughfare. Charles Booth’s researchers described it as the ‘worst street in London’ and many local people, including tough, well-built men, were scared to go there. Even policemen only ventured into the street in pairs. It appears that Jack McCarthy and William Crossingham did very little to improve the image of the street they virtually owned. This was with good reason.

Dorset Street’s near-mythical notoriety meant that the residents could carry out their business relatively undisturbed, and that made the dilapidated properties that lined the street ideal venues for illegal gambling dens, brothels, and the storage of stolen property. The courts served as makeshift rings for bare-knuckle boxing bouts and could be fenced off for illegal dog fights. McCarthy and Crossingham’s property empire opened up possibilities for all manner of business activities. The trouble was, few of them were legal.

Despite the remarkable control McCarthy and Crossingham had over Dorset Street, they were becoming increasingly isolated. By 1895, this little street was a gentile ghetto in an area that had become overwhelmingly Jewish. That year, one of the last surviving silk weaving firms left Spitalfields for leafy Braintree in Essex, taking sixty weavers and their families with them. Later in the year, a map of Jewish East London was compiled. What it revealed was startling: three quarters of the area immediately north of Dorset Street was populated by Jews and 95% of the households immediately south were Jewish. In contrast, less than 5% of Dorset Street inhabitants were Jewish.

Most of the Jewish immigrants that now populated Spitalfields were honest, hardworking, law-abiding people who did their level best to maintain peace with their non-Jewish neighbours. However, the sheer numbers of immigrants that flooded into this relatively small area during the latter part of the 19th century meant that some new residents would cause trouble.

The 1890s saw the arrival of the first organised gangs of Eastern European immigrants. Once settled in Spitalfields, these gangs set about organising protection rackets. They generally picked on their fellow immigrants, particularly those who had set up small shops and demanded money in return for ‘protection’. Although plenty of Spitalfields residents were involved in many nefarious activities such as prostitution and illegal gambling, there is no evidence to suggest that they ever harassed shopkeepers. Therefore quite who the new gangs were protecting the shop keepers from remains unclear and it must be surmised that the ‘service’ was purely an attempt at extortion.

The most notorious gang to emerge from the area in the 1890s were the Bessarabians, otherwise known as the ‘stop at nothing’ gang. The gang was made up of Eastern Europeans and Greeks who, in addition to running protection rackets, forced respectable Jewish families to pay them hush money. If the family refused, the Bessarabians could ruin a family’s reputation within the Jewish community by spreading rumours about them.

The Bessarabians also ran prostitution rings and operated illegal gambling establishments. Within a short space of time, their criminal activities had won them quite substantial rewards and more than a modicum of local influence. However, their nemesis was about to materialise in the form of another Eastern European gang called the Odessians.

Over in Brick Lane, there was a restaurant called the Odessa, which was owned by a Jew named Weinstein. One day, the Bessarabians turned up at the restaurant demanding protection money. Weinstein, who was a big man with gangland connections of his own, refused to give in to their demands and attacked the gang with an iron bar, putting several Bessarabians in hospital. Word got around the Brick Lane area about Weinstein’s heroism and a group of Russian youths formed the Odessian gang in a bid to put a stop to the Bessarabians’ rackets. Before long, the Odessians were inundated with requests from shop and pub owners who were being intimidated. One such man was the owner of the York Minster Music Hall, just off the Commercial Road. The owner told the Odessians that the Bessarabians planned to sabotage that night’s performance because he hadn’t paid their protection money.

That evening, the Odessians lay in wait for their rivals, who showed up during a Russian dancing act. A vicious fight broke out, the police were called and several members of each gang were arrested. Once in custody, some gang members decided to talk, which resulted in the gang leaders becoming so sought-after by the police that they had to go into hiding. With no leaders available, their ‘businesses’ disintegrated. However, some of the original gang members managed to escape on ships bound for America, where legend has it, they became instrumental in shaping the now notorious Chicago underworld of the 1930s.

Gang warfare did little to improve the atmosphere of Spitalfields and, as the end of the 19th century approached, Dorset Street and its surrounds reached their lowest point. This once proud, prosperous street had been reduced to a den of iniquity, where prostitutes openly plied their trade, thieves fenced their pickings and violence was an everyday occurrence. The arrival of the Eastern European Jews had made an already bad situation worse as non-Jews created their own ghetto in the mean street and courts that had escaped population by the immigrants. The redevelopment of the once dreadful Flower and Dean Street pushed even more of the dregs of society into this little street. Locals humorously referred to the road as Dossett Street due to the fact that it was comprised almost entirely of doss houses. Soon this small, seemingly insignificant thoroughfare began to attract the attention of the press once again.

Local clergyman and social reformer Canon Barnett, referred to Dorset Street in a letter to
The Times
in 1898. He described the residents as men and women who seemed to ‘herd as beasts’ and declared the road to be the ‘centre of evil.’ During the same year, a researcher ventured into Dorset Street on behalf of the social investigator Charles Booth. Accompanied by a policeman, he made his way around the doss houses, courts and alleyways and later described what he found:

‘The lowest of all prostitutes are found in Spitalfields, on the benches round the church, or sleeping in the common lodging houses of Dorset Street. Women have often found their way there by degrees from the streets of the West End. He (the policeman accompanying him) spoke of Dorset Street as in his opinion the worst street in respect of poverty, misery, vice – of the whole of London.’

Chapter 22

The Murder of Mary Ann Austin

It appears that by the turn of the century, the police had all but given up attempting to maintain any sort of public order in Dorset Street and had pretty much left the road to police itself. An explanation for their defeatist attitude can be found in the events surrounding the death of a young woman named Mary Ann Austin, an inmate of William Crossingham’s lodging house at number 35, in May 1901.

At about 10.30pm on Saturday 25 May, Mary Ann Austin arrived at Crossingham’s lodging house with a man purporting to be her husband. Despite the fact that the lodging house was supposed to be reserved for women only, the deputy let the couple a bed after the man produced 1/6d (an exceptionally large amount of money to pay for such accommodation.) The couple were shown to bed number 15 on the third floor of the lodging house and promptly retired for the night. At approximately 8.30am the next morning, a female lodger came rushing into the deputy’s office claiming that Mary Ann had been viciously attacked. The deputy’s wife (one Maria Moore) went immediately to the third floor to find Mary Ann groaning in agony from several stab wounds. Her erstwhile male companion was nowhere to be seen. Mrs Moore sent for a doctor immediately but instead of also calling the police, she summoned William Crossingham’s brother-in-law, Daniel Sullivan, who ran another of Crossingham’s lodging houses just round the corner in Whites Row. On arriving at the scene, Sullivan decided against summoning the police and set about destroying any useful evidence before the doctor arrived.

First, he dressed the dying Mary Ann in another lodger’s clothes and arranged for her own clothing to be burnt. He then moved her downstairs to a bed on the first floor, presumably so the murder site could be cleaned up. By time that the doctor arrived, any incriminating evidence had been successfully removed but poor Mary Ann was in a very bad way. The doctor immediately arranged for her to be taken to hospital but it was too late to save her. Mary Ann Austin died of her injuries on Sunday 26 May.

The subsequent inquest into the murder of Mary Ann Austin proved to be frustrating and baffling for both the police and the coroner. The man that took the bed with Austin on the Saturday night was found and identified himself as her husband, William, a stoker by profession of no fixed abode. However it seems more likely that he was simply a casual acquaintance of Mary Ann, who had promised her a bed for the night in return for sexual favours. William was promptly arrested for her murder; a crime he vehemently denied committing. Whether William Austin really did kill Mary Ann is a moot point. However, the subsequent fiasco at the inquest clearly shows the complete lack of respect the inhabitants of Dorset Street had for the authorities.

At the start of the murder inquiry, all witnesses lied about the circumstances surrounding Mary Ann’s death including the fact that the body was moved and evidence destroyed. They only changed their story in court when alternative accounts of what happened proved they were lying. Daniel Sullivan’s account of events was so inconsistent that the coroner was moved to conclude that he had ‘run as close to the wind as you possibly could’. Despite the best efforts of the police to find reliable witnesses, the coroner was forced to conclude that there was no reliable evidence to convict William Austin of the murder and the prisoner was released.

The fatal stabbing of Mary Ann Austin joined the long and ever-growing list of unsolved crimes perpetrated in Dorset Street at the turn of the century. However, the inquest fiasco shows conclusively that by this time, Dorset Street was run exclusively by its inhabitants. The lodging house keepers and their employees took on total responsibility for dealing with any crimes committed within the walls of their establishments and any outside interference was to be avoided at all costs.

Despite the residents’ dislike of outside interference, Mary Ann Austin’s murder prompted yet more unwelcome attention for Dorset Street from press and well-meaning members of the public alike. Two months after the murder and subsequent cover-up, Dorset Street received its most damning indictment to date when one Fred. A. McKenzie wrote about the street in the
Daily Mail
under the heading ‘The Worst Street In London’. Mr McKenzie trod the same path as many ‘social investigators’ before him, taking an uneducated and frankly snobbish stance against the street’s beleaguered residents, laying much of the blame at the feet of the dreaded lodging house keepers and resorting to sensationalism in order to drive his point home. Nonetheless, his article does paint a clear picture of the depths to which Dorset Street had sunk by the turn of the century and illustrates that the social deprivation that had first come to the public’s attention during the Ripper murders had most definitely not been addressed. Under the heading ‘Blue Blood’, Mr McKenzie wrote:

‘The lodging houses of Dorset Street and of the district around are the head centres of the shifting criminal population of London. Of course, the aristocrats of crime – the forger, the counterfeiter, and the like do not come here. In Dorset Street we find more largely the common thief, the pickpocket, the area meak, the man who robs with violence, and the unconvicted murderer. The police have a theory, it seems, that it is better to let these people congregate together in one mass where they can be easily found than to scatter them abroad. And Dorset Street certainly serves the purpose of a police trap. If this were all, something might be said in favour of allowing such a place to continue. But it is not all... Here comes the real and greatest harm that Dorset Street does. Respectable people, whose main offence is their poverty, are thrown in close and constant contact with the agents of crime. They become familiarised with law breaking. They see the best points of the criminals around them. If they are in want, as they usually are, it is often enough a thief who shares his spoils with them to give them bread. And there are those who are always ready to instruct newcomers in the simple ways of making a dishonest living. Boy thieves are trained as regularly and systematically around Dorset Street to-day as they were in the days of Oliver Twist.’