When the Ripper began making his rounds there were only uniformed men walking their beats, all of them overworked and underpaid. They were issued the standard equipment of a whistle, a truncheon, perhaps a rattle, and a bull’s-eye lantern, nicknamed a dark lantern because all it really did was vaguely illuminate the person holding it. A bull’s-eye lantern was a dangerous, cumbersome device comprised of a steel cylinder ten inches high, including a chimney shaped like a ruffled dust cap. The magnifying lens was three inches in diameter and made of thick, rounded, ground glass, and inside the lamp were a small oil pan and wick.
The brightness of the flame could be controlled by turning the chimney. The inner metal tube would rotate and block out as much of the flame as needed, allowing a policeman to flash his lantern and signal another officer out on the street. I suppose that flash is a bit of an exaggeration if one has ever seen a bull’s-eye lantern lit up. I found several rusty but authentic Hiatt & Co., Birmingham, bull’s-eye lanterns that were manufactured in the mid-1800s, precisely the sort used by the police during the Ripper investigation. One night I carried a lantern out to the patio and lit a small fire in the oil pan. The lens turned into a reddish-orange wavering eye. But the convexity of the glass causes the light to vanish when viewed from certain other angles.
I held my hand in front of the lantern and at a distance of six inches could barely see a trace of my palm. Smoke wisped out the chimney and the cylinder got hot – hot enough, according to police lore, to brew tea. I imagined a poor constable walking his beat and holding such a thing by its two metal handles or clipping the lantern to his leather snake-clasp belt. It’s a wonder he didn’t set himself on fire.
The typical Victorian may not have had a clue about the inadequacy of bull’s-eye lanterns. Magazines and penny tabloids showed constables shining intense beams into the darkest corners and alleyways while frightened suspects reel back from the blinding glare. Unless these cartoonlike depictions were deliberately exaggerated, they lead me to suspect that most people had never seen a bull’s-eye lantern in use. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Police patrolling the safer, less crime-ridden areas of the metropolis would have little or no need to light their lanterns. It was in the forbidden places that the lanterns shone their bloodshot eyes as they blearily probed the constables’ beats, and most Londoners traveling by foot or in horse-drawn cabs did not frequent those parts.
Walter Sickert was a man of the night and the slums. He would have had good reason to know exactly what a bull’s-eye lantern looked like because it was his habit to wander the forbidden places after his visits to the music halls. During his Camden Town period, when he was producing some of his most blatantly violent works, he used to paint murder scenes in the spooky glow of a bull’s-eye lantern. Fellow artist Marjorie Lilly, who shared his house and one of his studios, observed him doing this on more than one occasion, and later described it as “Dr. Jekyll” assuming the “mantle of Mr. Hyde.”
The dark blue woolen uniforms and capes the police wore could not keep them warm and dry in bad weather, and when days were warm, a constable’s discomfort must have been palpable. He could not loosen the belt or tunic or take off his military-shaped helmet with its shiny Brunswick star. If the ill-fitting leather boots he had been issued maimed his feet, he could either buy a new pair with his own pay or suffer in silence.
In 1887, a Metropolitan policeman gave the public a glimpse of what the average constable’s life was like. In an anonymous article in the Police Review and Parade Gossip, he told the story of his wife and their dying four-year-old son having to live in two rooms in a lodging house on Bow Street. Of the policeman’s twenty-four-shillings-a-week salary, ten went to rent. It was a time of great civil unrest, he wrote, and animosity toward the police ran hot.