The Chapman murder and Charles Lechmere

[Lechmere]

Without checking exact dates, Charles Lechmere moved into 22 Doveton Street in 1888, moved out in about 1895 to Sceptre Street, and in about 1898 moved back to 24 Doveton Street, and in about 1901 moved to Carlton Street.
The stability of East Ed life you depict owes more to the first decades of the 20th century.
True Dorset Street was a lot poorer and more unstable than Doveton Street in 1888. But Kelly was a longer term resident there than Charles Lechmere in 1888. Lechmere had been there a couple of months.

Rather than the East End of popular imagination, which is a 20th century memory, you should draw comparisons with Milton Keynes soon after it was built.

[MrBarnett]

Ed,

With respect, you are the one who keeps banging on about Lech's stability. Was he unique in the whole of East London?

You suggested in an earlier post that my take on things was out by a decade or so. Can you enlighten me as to when London children started to play together in the street? Post 1888, obviously.

And to revert to my folksiness, my grandmother who was born in Breezers Hill in the 1890s, lived for forty years in Mayfields Buildings/Swedenborg Street until her home was condemned and she was forced to move to Essex. At every opportunity she went back to Stepney and was received like a prodigal daughter by her neighbours (she being of Irish descent and many of her pals being Jewish, so not just the extended family). So was the turning point 1890/1900, and before that Eastenders held themselves aloof from their neighbours?

Do we really have to believe that working class neighbourliness was either a myth or started after 1888 to sign up to Lech. as a credible suspect?

MrB.

Re: New towns. Wasn't the main criticism of them that they lacked the community spirit of the old neighbourhoods? When was Doveton Street built, 1887?

[Lechmere]

Mr B

I haven't banged on about Charles Lechmere's stability at all. I have pointed out that despite moving quite regularly, he always went on the electoral register - he isn't missing for a single year despite moving around. That is, in my opinion, rare today let alone back then.

Charles Lechmere was, in my estimation, very punctilious and even anal about form filling and recording his details. This can be shown by the electoral register, but also by his children all being christened and his children not missing a day's school when they moved address. And by the very fact that Charles Lechmere can be located in about 120 records. When researching other Lechmeres on Ancestry, Charles Lechmere’s branch of the family tend to swamp out the rest.
Being punctilious, even anal, is not the same as being domestically or residentially stable. Nor does it inform us as to his social relations with his neighbours.

My point is that the East End was in essence, in many ways similar to a modern New Town up to about 1900. It had an expanding shifting population.
I pointed out that the population stabilised due to a variety of causes such as council housing –with the first council estate in the country built in Bethnal Green in 1900.
The Metropolitan Boroughs were formed in 1900 and this gave new identity and helped provide stability, as did the supply of utilities such as gas and clean water to domestic properties, and the clearance of waste water through drains.
Earlier developments in compulsory education and electoral registration would have also played their part, as will have greater employment stability, in part occasioned by the growth of Trade Unions in the last decades of the 19th century.
A combination of factors would have been responsible for the gradual development of the East End community spirit.
My point is that it is simplistic to imagine that it was already there in 1888.
In New Towns it takes time for socialisation to take place. Close communities do not rear up spontaneously overnight.
The speedy development of this cohesion in the East End was certainly not helped by the mixed population – Jewish immigrants, Irish people, people from all parts of England, and families who had already been settled in the East End for several generations.

I have not suggested that no children played in the streets with their neighbours, nor that East End people held themselves aloof from their neighbours.

I have had a look at the electoral registers for Doveton Street from 1888 to 1901. There is reasonable stability bit people are also clearly moving in and out fairly regularly. More so than you would have expected in say the 1950s.

The families I have studied invariably move from place to place every few years in the 1800s, then more or less stay put from soon after 1900 until the last war. If their house remained intact then the so-called slum clearances of the 1960s invariably did for them.
I know of a family that married into the Lechmere’s that lived in two adjoining houses in Poplar from about 1900 to about 1970.
Before that they were in different addresses in Poplar.
No doubt some families lived in one house for an extended period in the 1880s and 1890s, but I would suggest it was not the norm.
People often tended to move within the same general area, which would improve the chances of continued social interaction and stronger inter family relationships.
But in Charles Lechmere’s case, in 1888 he moved to a totally different district.

The point was made (by you I think) that it was implausible that no one in Doveton Street would have picked up on the reference in the Star newspaper to the address given by ‘Charles Cross’ at the inquest. I countered that given the prevailing social conditions, and given that he had only just moved in, it was very plausible that the Star reference passed off unnoticed.

Your Grandmother’s experience seems to bear out what I have said and seems to relate to the post 1900 period.

[Lechmere]

I’m not a Labour Party apologist, but it is undoubtedly the case that political organisation goes hand in hand with the development of community spirit.
Despite the East End being overwhelmingly working class, and despite the great increase in suffrage at the end of the 19th century, in 1900 there were only 7 Labour Councillors in all the East End, all in Poplar.
By 1925 Labour had clear majorities in the boroughs of Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Stepney and Poplar with 119 councillors. Labour won 4 out of the 8 Parliamentary seats in this area in 1922. Previously the only seat they had controlled was Bow and Bromley (part of Poplar), which the prominent local figure George Lansbury briefly held from 1910-12.
Poplar is adjacent to West Ham, which it perhaps has more in common with than Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Mile End Old Town or St George’s in the East.
By contrast, in what could be called the outer East End, West Ham, which grew later but did not have such a transient population and had greater homogeneity due to large scale and relatively stable employment in the Royal Docks and other industries and the comparative strength of associated Trade Unions, Labour gained their first MP in 1892 and they first took control of the council as early as 1898.

[MrBarnett]

Ed,

A very impressive rebuttal, but in my opinion it fails the common sense test.

The children are the key here. They form instant allegiances that I would suggest are not influenced by trade unionism or the creation of Metropolitan Boroughs. And through them the parents make contact.

For your theory to hold water, human nature itself must have undergone a radical transformation around 1900. And I suppose all the pre 1900 photos showing women and children congregating in the street were posed and don’t reflect reality(?)

With her large brood, I think it’s highly unlikely that Mrs Lech. wasn’t on speaking terms with many of her neighbours. And even if a controlling Lech. disapproved, I doubt she blanked them in the street or the corner shop when he was at work.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that she did, and the kids weren’t allowed to play with others in the street. Then they would have been considered extremely odd and would have been the subject of endless imaginative gossip. And the neighbours, blissfully unaware of Charles’s Cross connection would have found it very suspicious indeed that the oddball at 24 had given a false name to the police.

I sense the Lech. theory has something to do with Charles keeping his involvement with Nichols a secret from his wife. But since she was illiterate, he can’t have been worried that she would herself read of it in the news. His concern would have been that someone else would pick up on it and relay the information to her. (But obviously not the neighbours because they didn’t start talking to each other until the 1900’s.)

The analogy to Milton Keynes was not a good one. A better example would have been the Becontree Estate in Dagenham, which was built in the 1920/30’s specifically to accommodate the overspill from the East End.

MrB.

[Lechmere]

The Becontree Estate was built in one go and as you say was mostly populated by people from one homogeneous background. The Becontree Estate had more in common with West Ham in the late 19th century, than the mixed and mobile inner East End.

The street scenes photographs you refer to tended to be taken in the real dives. Like ‘Benefit Street’ perhaps where everyone knows each other’s business as none of them work and the kids don’t go to school and they are around each other all day. Like Dorset Street where most people seemed to know each other, yet many didn’t know Kelly’s name!

I agree that children can be a motor for social cohesion, but if it were that simple, places like Milton Keynes and other new towns (Thamesmead, Harlow, Crawley, Stevenage, Basildon) would have developed a community spirit much sooner than they did.

For Lechmere’s subterfuge to be exposed, one of his near neighbours must have read the Star and been on speaking terms with the Lechmere family in some way, and known their surname. Or perhaps have been a busy body who spoke to a near neighbour who was, and these people must have cottoned on to the surname difference.
Given the prevailing social conditions, and given the fact they had only just moved there, I think it is highly likely that no one would have picked up on the Star story.
Charles Cross was never revisited nor his story dwelt upon thereafter by the press.
I don’t know the surnames of any of my neighbours and never have anywhere I have lived. I only know my kids friends first names. But I am very anti social.

There is an added factor that I wouldn’t make too much off as it is oral and easy to pooh-pooh.
But the Lechmere family themselves have no knowledge of their ancestor being involved in the case. Charles Lechmere’s widow died in 1940 and some of her great grandchildren are still alive who were school kids at that time (i.e. not babes in arms) and I would expect it to be a family tradition if it was ever known in their family that Charles Lechmere had been involved.
East End families with a Ripper connection magnify it or even make one up. They do not tend to hide it. The Lechmere family have been living in similar areas ever since and have rich oral family traditions, but nothing about the Ripper. It is not as if they went away to other parts of the country as some families do who forget their past.

Incidentally it was the oddball at 22 not 24. He became the oddball at 24 later in the decade.

[MrBarnett]

Hi Ed.

The reason for suggesting the Becontree estate as a better comparison is that it was constructed before the majority of people owned cars and before there were indoor distractions such as TV to keep kids off the street. The other new towns you put forward are not comparable.

The population of the Becontree Estate was as homogeneous as the East End itself had been a generation before. People of English, Irish and Jewish descent (etc.) lived cheek by jowl. It was a series of terraced streets that mirrored the environment from which its inhabitants had 'escaped'. The socially engineered new towns of the 50's and 60's bear no comparison.

And as for surnames, you are showing your youth. Children, of course, identified each other by their forenames, but their parents were invariably known as Mr or Mrs Surname until well into the mid 20thc.

MrB

[MrBarnett]

Ed,

One more thought.

I have a cottage in Cley-Next-The-Sea, Norfolk, near where the USAF helicopter recently crashed. My phone didn't stop ringing for days afterwards. Family, friends, ex-colleagues (including some I hadn't heard of for years) were curious to know whether the event had had any effect on me or my family. Just human nature, I would say.

So if no one in 1888 who had a connection (however remote) to Doveton Street or Pickfords thought to follow the reference to the Nichols murder up, it suggests that people in the 1880's were almost a different species.


MrB.

[Lechmere]

I will accept that I am showing my extreme youth.

[MrBarnett]

I'm calling the crash team for this thread.

Is there a photo. of Charles available? It would be great to be able to look him in the eyes and make up our own minds about his guilt, or otherwise.

MrB

[Lechmere]

There is but it won't make its first appearance here

[caz]

Hi All,

I have just spent a pleasant afternoon reading through this long thread. I was almost afraid to tackle it before, when I saw the number of pages, but I'm glad I did.

As far as I can see, there can be no objection to Charles Lechmere having used the surname Cross as a youth while his stepfather was alive and the head of the family. Out of Victorian respect for family, the growing Charles would most probably have been called Cross at home and school, and happily used the name himself, if only to avoid the awkward and inevitable questions about why his surname was different from his mum and dad's. There was still a stigma attached to such things when I was a child in the late 1950s. There was a reason why his stepfather named him Cross in the 1861 census.

Following on from this, if Charles began working while still in the Cross family home, he would have taken the name to work with him when his school days were over, and everyone at Pickfords would have come to know him as Charlie Cross. He was still officially a Lechmere, and always would be, so when his stepfather died, he could have reverted to Lechmere at home and work (as well as for official documents) and not worried about offending anyone, but it may just have been a whole lot easier to stay as Cross at Pickford's, rather than have to explain the name change.

Giving that name to the authorities would have made perfect sense if they knew him best as Cross at Pickford's, as his employers were also the best people to vouch for his movements and his reason for being in Buck's Row at the time. In addition, as his wife and kids were all Lechmeres, at home and school, it would certainly have helped distance them from his ghastly discovery, and possibly protect them from repercussions - from media or gang members alike.

Why give both his forenames - Charles Allen - if he was trying to hide his true identity from anyone for his own sake? Also, if his wife knew the truth (and I think she probably did), I am not surprised she would have kept it from the children and the neighbours and never mentioned it, if that's what Charles thought was best for his family's security and wellbeing.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

And another thing...

There has been a lot of talk about Lechmere not stating his address at the inquest (although the evidence seems unclear as to whether he did or didn't), as if this could have been an attempt on his part to keep it out of the public domain, and therefore some kind of plus point in the case for him being the ripper.

This is surely just a sleight of hand argument, as he volunteered his address to the authorities privately, after which he could no more have tried to prevent it being broadcast far and wide than fly to the moon. If he had been asked to state his address at the inquest he'd have done so; if he wasn't asked, it was a matter of pure luck, and not down to anything he could have done about it.

Similarly, the fact that one newspaper printed his real address (with himself as the primary source, whichever way you look at it) shows that he had given up all possible control over its wider publication. Again, it was down to luck that only one paper did so - and one was enough if Lechmere had, for one moment, hoped to keep his address a mystery. He really had no say in the matter.

Love,

Caz
X

[MrBarnett]

Hi Caz,

Your thoughts on Lechmere pretty much tie in with my own. The one thing I haven't been able to get my head around, though, is why the Lechmere children were christened Lechmere after their mother had bigamously married P.C. Cross. Would seem a strange thing for her to initiate. Perhaps church attendance was important to Thomas Cross and he wanted his stepchildren to follow suit.

MrB

(Don't you think Ed is being a meany not sharing his Lech pic with us? )

[Patrick S]

I have not participated in this thread for while now. Of course, Caz makes exellent, common sense points. I think most agree that there is nothing that points to Charles Cross as the Ripper, save the fact that he discovered Polly Nichols' body.

The details of his name are not relevant in any way. They were not relevant to the police. He disappears from the case files after the Nichols' inquest. So many assumptions must be made in order to suspect him that his being the Ripper becomes an absurd improbablility, barely worthy of discussion. Any one of us can list 100 reasons for him giving the name 'Charles Cross', from it simply being how he though thought of himself, to the fact the owed a debt, wanted to hide from an old girlfriend, we could go on and on.

Bear in mind that the current US President, Barack Obama was known as Barry Sotero for much his childhood. Where was he in late 1888?