It’s difficult for most
of us to imagine what life was like in the England at the turn of the 19th
Century, the period in which Virginia
Street was set. Law enforcement was largely a matter for the individual
who, if he or she felt sufficiently aggrieved, was expected to produce the body
and the evidence before the courts. The concept of a professional police was
frowned on and regarded as means of political suppression as was the case
across the Channel in revolutionary France. Crime prevention was to be left to a
rag-bag assortment of folk of varying degrees of incompetence, including the
militia, a few part time constables attached to magistrates’ courts – like the
Bow Street Runners – and a few, and mostly elderly, parish appointed watchmen.
None were required to actually investigate crimes.
Small wonder, then, that
violent crime should be so prevalent on the streets of all major towns in the
UK in the last years of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th
Centuries. Nor was the situation helped by the huge social and political
upheavals of the period. The years of war in Europe and America, the 1798 uprising
in Ireland and its brutal suppression by the army, and the continuing suspension
of Habeas Corpus four years earlier
all played a part in the disruption of daily life. According to Patrick
Colquhoun, a magistrate in London at the time, ten thousand men in the capital
(of a total population of under a million) got up in the morning not knowing
where they would sleep the following night. On the Thames, a ship bound for the
Port of London would typically lose up to a third of its cargo to piracy.
In essence, by 1800, the
country was bust and was facing the threat of invasion from across the channel
every bit as daunting as that of 1940. A French raiding party had already
succeeded in landing on the West coast of Ireland and was to lead (Prime)
Minister Pitt in his attempts to abolish the (almost exclusively Protestant)
Irish Parliament and bring the island into full union with the UK. But if his
initiative was meant to bring to an end the simmering resentment that existed
between the two peoples, it didn’t work. The open sores of the 1798 uprising
ran too deep.
The thousands who left
Ireland in the wake of the uprising and settled in London and elsewhere in
search of work were regarded with a sense of loathing and suspicion and, along
with Jews and Lascars, occupied the lowest ranks of the social order.
Into this toxic atmosphere
stepped a Portuguese Jew, a man named Emanuel Lazaro who, for nearly thirty
years had served the largely Irish community in and around the Shadwell and
Wapping areas of east London as a Roman Catholic priest. His base in Virginia
Street near the junction of the modern Highway (then called the Ratcliff Highway)
was a small, non-descript building that carried no outward sign of its purpose
as a chapel. To have done so would have been to invite the attention of the
mob. Yet Emanuel hid a secret that had the potential to destroy him and which
forced him to live his life in isolation from Jews and gentiles alike.
When a young Irish
Catholic was attacked and beaten outside the door of his church, it set in
train a series of events for Emanuel that were to threaten his life and the
lives of those around him. And when, three weeks later, the body of one those
responsible for attacking the Irishman is found face down in the Thames, things
go from bad to worse as Emanuel seeks to discover the truth and comes face to
face with an old enemy, a man Emanuel has known since the former was a child.
The relationship between
these two men forms the central theme of the book and when his enemy is charged
with a murder he didn’t commit, it is Emanuel who holds the key to his
survival. Under the seal of the confessional, the priest has learned the
identity of the real killer. It is a secret he is bound to keep yet if he does,
an innocent man will die. But the alternative is equally hard. To tell what he
knows to be the truth would not only lead to his own downfall but perhaps the deaths
of many.
Editorial note
A good deal of the story
told in Virginia Street, is true or
at least as close to the truth as any historical account can ever be. The
plight of the Jews and the Irish in England has not, I hope, been glossed over.
Nor have the dreadful events in Ireland in. the Summer of 1798 been short
changed. Many of the characters who find their names appearing in the book were
real people making decisions in the light of their available knowledge. As for
Emanuel, very little is known of him to history. While it was (and remains)
unusual for Jews to practice the Christian Faith, it was a legal requirement in
Spain and Portugal that every citizen should be a fully baptised Christian –
effectively a Catholic. And as evidence of their apostasy, Jews were required
to attend Mass every Sunday. While there is every reason to believe that Jewish
citizens obeyed the law, there is at least a suggestion that they continued to
follow their Judaic faith in the privacy of their own homes.
Emanuel appears to have
been different but, in leaving the faith of his ancestors, he was effectively
shut off from his own people and must have led a rather lonely life in London.
Virginia Street, (Oakdown Publishing) an historical crime thriller by Patrick Easter
is available from
Amazon
About the author
Patrick Easter is the
author of four previous novels that follow the fortunes of Tom Pascoe and the
newly formed Thames Police based at Wapping. Patrick was himself a former
police officer in London and for part of his service was based with the river
police.
On retirement he became
a freelance journalist for international publications covering advanced traffic
control systems throughout the world. His first book, The Watermen, was
published to high. Acclaim in 2010 and was followed by The River of Fire, The
Rising Tide and Cuckold Point. He lives in Sussex with his wife and their two
dogs.
He can be reached
through his website – www.patrickeaster.co.uk or followed on FaceBook (Patrick Easter –
Crime Writer)
Virginia Street was
first published in April 2018
