The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee was a group of local volunteers who patrolled the streets of London's Whitechapel District during the period of the Whitechapel murders of 1888. The volunteers patrolled mainly at night in the search for the murderer. The committee was set up by local businessmen who were concerned that the killings were affecting commerce in the area. It was led by George Lusk, a local builder who was elected chairman during the committee's first meeting on 10 September 1888.
Other committee members included Mr. Joseph Aarons, the landlord of The Crown public house on Mile End Road (treasurer), Mr. B. Harris (secretary), and Messrs. Cohen, H. A. Harris, Laughton, Houghton, Lord, Isaacs, Rogers, Mitchell, Barnett, Hodgkins, Lindsay, Reeves, and Jacobs. The Daily Telegraph reported on 5 October 1888 that the leading members of the committee were "drawn principally from the trading class, and include a builder, a cigar-manufacturer, a tailor, a picture-frame maker, a licensed victualler, and 'an actor.'" The latter was probably the entertainer Charles Reeves.
As chairman of the committee, Lusk's name appeared in the national newspapers and on posters in Whitechapel appealing for information concerning the identity of Jack the Ripper and complaining about the lack of a reward for such information from the government. Due to this publicity, Lusk received threatening letters through the post, allegedly from the murderer. Lusk is also mentioned in a letter dated 17 September 1888, reportedly discovered among archive materials in the late 20th century; however, most experts dismiss this as a modern hoax.
On 30 September 1888 the committee members wrote to the government under Lord Salisbury in an attempt to persuade them to offer a reward for information leading to the apprehension of the killer. When the Home Secretary Henry Matthews refused, the committee offered its own reward. The committee also employed two private detectives, Mr. Le Grand (or Grand) and Mr. J. H. Batchelor, to investigate the murders without the involvement of the local police.
The committee was unhappy with the level of protection that the community was receiving from the police, so it introduced its own system of local patrols, using hand-picked unemployed men to patrol the streets of the East End every evening from midnight to between four and five the next morning. Each of these men received a small wage from the Committee, and patrolled a particular beat, being armed with a police whistle, a pair of galoshes and a strong stick. The committee itself met each evening at nine in the The Crown, and once the public house closed at 12.30 a.m. the committee members would inspect and join the patrols. These patrols were shortly to be joined by those of the Working Men's Vigilance Committee.
The "From Hell" letter, which was sent with half of a human kidney, was posted to the committee's chairman George Lusk, who received it on October 16, 1888. Many scholars of the Jack the Ripper murders regard this letter as being the communication most likely to have been sent by the killer.
Famous quotes containing the words vigilance committee, whitechapel, vigilance and/or committee:
“I met a Californian who would
Talk California—a state so blessed
He said, in climate, none had ever died there
A natural death, and Vigilance Committees
Had had to organize to stock the graveyards
And vindicate the state’s humanity.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don’t care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity that whispers in our ears that failures are not faults! Now we are taught from infancy that we must rise or fall upon our own merits; that vigilance wins success, and incapacity means ruin.”
—Agnes Repplier (1858–1950)
“The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover her salary was five thousand dollars a year less than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1953)