History

The story starts not for Timothy Anderson, but Timothy MacCleary. Born in the slums of Belfast, Ireland, as the almost-youngest of far too many children to a pair of Irish Catholics, his life was ill-fated from his first breath. Most of his very young days were spent being cared for by his eldest sister, striving for the barest crumbs of his mother's affection, and generally being a bit under-foot.

When he got old enough – that is, when he was five or six – he joined his family working in the near-by textile mills. It was a horrible experience for him; the loud machines, the dangerous accidents, and finally the death of his older brother because of one of those accidents, all resulted in him leaving the mills when he was about nine years old. For a few years he was a wild thing, running about Belfast, one of many young boys doing so and causing all kinds of havoc and violence.

A job opportunity in London brought the family from the tenements of Belfast to the slums of Limehouse when Tim was 11, and while things improved a bit, the bounteous fortune that Patrick MacCleary had been promised never manifested. Instead he still had many mouths to feed, a proposition made all the more difficult as he took more and more to the drink – leaving fewer and fewer pennies for food and rent.

In his search for a method to contribute that didn't include returning to the factories, Tim ended up coming upon the gang that ruled over their street. The Greenstreet Gang was a small-time group, Irish immigrants all, but they were the family that Tim had never had, even with the size of his actual family. All too soon he fell in completely with them, and was a fully blooded member within a few months of joining, at the tender age of 12.

Two years later, his younger brother Thaddeus – Tad – had become entirely enamored with the group. In spite of Tim's best efforts to keep him out of the gang, and out of danger, a street fight with another gang resulted in Tad's death. Tim was blamed for it, both by the rest of the family and himself, and as a result was disowned by his family. He began living with the gang, often sleeping out on the street, and often going without.

Things changed for him through pure dumb luck and happenstance. Whitechapel had never proven very profitable, and so he took himself to central London, to try his luck with the gentry and such. With his luck, not only was he immediately caught by the first man whose pockets his hands wandered into, but the man who caught him was the division chief of Whitehall. By all measure, Harold Anderson should have had Tim taken into police custody, where he would have no doubt been sentenced to hard labor. Instead, the man took the errant young man under his wing.

It was Harold who taught Tim how to read; his wife, Eliza, who taught him how to comport himself as appropriate for polite society. It was their money that paid for tutors and clothing, and it was their two children that welcomed Tim in as an adoptive sibling. It was Harold's own encouragement that led him to change his surname, albeit unofficially. In the Andersons Timothy found stability and acceptance that had long since been denied him in his actual family.

Because of his adoptive father, Tim became a constable at the age of 19. While Harold remained hands off as far as shepherding his adopted son's career, Tim nonetheless still benefited from that connection somewhat. He spent just about ten years as a constable, spending the majority of it in Whitechapel. It was an uncomfortable thing, given his associations with the Greenstreet Gang, but he most often steered well clear of the streets he had grown up on.

In 1883, with the formation of the Special Irish Branch, Tim did use his father's connections to arrange a meeting with the to-be chief of the group, Cruickshanks. Taking one hell of a leap of faith, he divulged his family's Irish Republican connections, and requested to join the group. His request was approved, and he's spent the last four or so years working to help curtail Irish Republican activity in London. Undercover more often than not, he's also used that as an excuse to forestall Eliza Anderson's less and less subtle attempts to see him married. The Andersons might be gentry, but Tim is not, and more than that are his disobliging career and temperament.

As of the beginning of 1888, he is undercover and working to infiltrate the Greenstreet Gang to learn more about their new leadership and goals.