Recent reads - Jack the Ripper (again), Britain in the early Seventies and a Biblical travelogue (of sorts)

I’ll start this post, about three factual works that I have recently read, by saying that I really should stop reading books about Jack the Ripper. It’s not exactly a healthy subject to obsess about. After the latest Ripper book, I think I’m done on that subject for now. It was Jack the Ripper: The 21^st Century Investigation by Trevor Marriott, an ex-copper who was bigged up by the blurb as a ‘top Murder Squad detective’ who ‘reveals the Ripper’s true identity at last’; that last bit is used, with slight variations, for the blurb on almost all books about the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 so I didn’t exactly have high hopes. There followed a re-hash of the murders (I really am not sure if there’s much new that can be said here, but every Ripper murder book must of course cover this very well-trod ground – although to his credit, Marriott does at least suggest that there were victims beyond the ‘canonical’ five) before an admittedly entertaining set of chapters about the more prominent suspects (Montague Druitt, James Maybrick, the Duke of Clarence, etc, etc) in which the cases against each of them were taken apart. Marriott was somewhat put out that he wasn’t able to use his police contacts to have a go on HOLMES, the modern crime-recording database – he must’ve hated the recent BBC documentary, Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened, in which Emilia Fox was allowed to do just that. Marriott’s eventual hypothesis was that the murderer might have been a sailor on one of the many ships in London’s docks which were not far from Whitechapel – not original, but it’s interesting how he’s able to research this (there’s not as much evidence as he’d hoped) and I like how he brought in the international angle – there were reports in the years immediately after 1888 of similar crimes in Germany and Nicaragua, although how much of that may or may not have been true is debatable (as with any Ripper study, Marriott is as quick to disregard any evidence that doesn’t support his theory as he is solid in his defence of the evidence that does). The ‘Ripper’ in this study turned out to be a German sailor who murdered his landlady in New York in 1894 and who, after being found guilty, met his end in the electric chair two years later. Apparently his lawyer thought he might have been Jack the Ripper. I’m not really convinced – we’ve had theories about Ripper suspects ending up getting done for different murders before. This, ultimately, was not the best of Ripper reads (Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed, which also tried to use modern investigatory techniques and came up with a very different but equally unprovable suspect, has the merit of being much better written), while I take my leave of Ripper speculation with a thought that maybe, given recent events involving Russia, the old one about the Ripper being a Russian agent acting to discredit the British police might be due a re-airing.

Moving to more recent history, I’ve encountered Dominic Sandbrook before. He’s the revisionist historian who wrote four books detailing British history – not just the politics, but a bit of everything including society, economics, popular culture, etc – between the Suez Crisis and the election of Mrs Thatcher. I read them out of order, of course, starting with the last one (Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979). I liked that one so much that I went back to the beginning and enjoyed the first one (Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles), then immersed myself in the second (White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties). And so to the third – State of Emergency: The Way We Were, 1970-1974. The early Seventies in Britain were strange times indeed and Sandbrook, true to form, immerses the reader in this period which saw strikes, moral panics over the country’s youth (a recurring theme in Sandbrook’s books, the only thing apparently new about the skinheads being that they dressed different from the Teddy boys from just over a decade beforehand), all hell breaking loose in Northern Ireland, more strikes, a Home Secretary seemingly permanently drunk (stagger forward, Reggie Maudling), several decent sitcoms and massive cultural change while there was a PM who had a grand piano installed in Downing Street (Ted Heath, of whose various faults the worst seems by this account to have been a run of appallingly bad luck). Everything, right down to children’s TV shows (and the accompanying concern that kids were watching too much TV), football hooliganism and popular fiction (in particular Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man which, although published in ’75, is used as a prism here to explore radical chic) gets a look-in here; even life in the suburbs, much maligned at the time, gets a more positive going-over. As with Sandbrook’s other works, things draw to a grand climax in which events and themes previously mentioned draw together as a government teeters on the brink; here, it’s the Heath government declaring a state of emergency for the fourth time (yes, really) as Britain, in economic trouble even before the oil crisis of ’73, lurches into the Three-Day Week in which electricity was limited to conserve energy supplies (and, guess what, people panic-bought toilet paper). Worth a read, even if you haven’t read any other books in the series!

And then there’s Apostle: Travels to the Tombs of the Twelve by an American travel writer called Tom Bissell. The clue’s in the title – Bissell has taken it upon himself to visit the tombs (or sites of the tombs) of Jesus’s disciples. As travelogues go it’s an interesting challenge and Bissell – who kicks off by saying that he comes to this as a lapsed Catholic – has really done his homework in the arcane subject of who the twelve Apostles were (the four Gospels are not exactly in universal agreement here), what happened to them and where they ended up. Obviously in some cases their remains ultimately found their way to more than one place and some of this is highly disputed, but Bissell picks one site for each one and goes there to see what he can find out (the sites in question may raise some eyebrows – the site of an obscure monastery in Kyrgyzstan as opposed to Salerno Cathedral for St Matthew, for example, though what with several of the disciples being buried in Rome I guess he chose a site outside Italy for a bit of variation). On the way, he displays some impressively in-depth theological learning, sometimes perhaps too in-depth while in places he does tend to lose patience with the people he meets (his travels occurred over the course of several years, and at one point he notes that it was four years until he met ‘a person visiting a Christian church who knew something about Christianity’). He’s at his best in the first chapter, to be honest – visiting Jerusalem in an attempt to find the place where Judas Iscariot hanged himself – and by the end it seems like he’s running out of steam, devoting a mere four-and-a-bit pages to his pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela. A promising premise and plenty of insights, overall it’s more solidly good than anything else.

On the trail of Jack the Ripper

On the day after Boxing Day, I found myself at Tower Hill tube station at 7:30 in the evening, by a surviving section of the old City Wall that dates back to Roman times. The reason? It is the starting point of the ‘Jack the Ripper’ walk organised by London Walks. Our guide was Shaughan, described by the company leaflet as ‘a distinguished and stylish actor’ as well as being a Blue Badge holder.

Our walking tour took us from the Tower to Spitalfields Market, via a series of sites on the boundary of the City and the East End which are indelibly linked with a string of brutal murders of prostitutes that took place between August and November in 1888, shocking Victorian Britain with their brutality and gruesomeness. The murders were described at the time as being “unique in the history of our country” by no less a person than Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This was the first instance of a serial killer at work, and coming at a time of a burgeoning sensationalist press it gripped the nation, and indeed the wider world, like nothing before or since.

The fact that the murderer, known to history as Jack the Ripper, was never caught means that the Whitechapel murders still fascinate over a century later, to the extent of being taught in some schools; when I did my teacher training it was a special project for one of the GCSE History classes that I taught. We were meant to go on a walking tour then but never did. Since then, I’d always intended to go on the walk and with some friends visiting from Canada this seemed like the ideal opportunity. We were not disappointed.

The venues may have changed in appearance – much of this part of London was destroyed in the Blitz – but Shaughan’s vivid descriptions and recitals of the letters apparently sent by the killer helped to bring the events of 1888 to life. He himself admitted that he’s had over a dozen people faint on his tours over the years, and his gory descriptions of the state of the victims’ bodies are not for the faint-hearted.

Shaughan told us a lot not just about the Ripper murders but also about the history of that particular part of London; the Whitechapel and Spitalfields areas are today a centre of the Bangladeshi immigrant population (which is why Brick Lane is the best place to go for a curry in London), but their proximity to the docks means that they have always been areas of immigrant settlement, from the Huguenots in the seventeenth century to the Eastern European Jews in the nineteenth. This was the poorest part of London, a place where prostitution was rife; according to Shaughan, in 1888 the going rate for sex was the same as the price of a place to sleep in one of the area’s many doss-houses (fourpence), one could purchase enough gin to get drunk on for a penny and there were streets where policemen only ventured in groups of four.

What I found fascinating was that the walk took us past the modern-day office block where I work on Middlesex Street (formerly known as Petticoat Lane). London is of course teeming with history but I had not realised just how close some of the murder locations were to my place of work!

As well as describing the murders in great detail (although not all of the sites were visited – there’s no pattern in the way they are spread out over the eastern edge of the City and the East End), Shaughan also touched on the identities of some of the suspects, such as Montague Druitt and Aaron Kosminski.The former’s suicide shortly after the last murder provides an explanation as to why the killings ended when they did, while the latter was actually identified by a witness, although it is possible that this was a case of mistaken identity.

I found that one man who was conspicuous by his absence from Shaughan’s narrative was Frederick Abberline, the detective inspector who investigated the murders with the limited means available to the police of the late nineteenth century. Also missing from the narrative was the man Abberline himself suspected of being the Ripper – a man later arrested, tried and hanged for a series of murders that bore very little resemblance to the Ripper murders (poison being this particular serial killer’s weapon of choice).

What he did mention, though, was an unusual take on Commissioner Warren’s order to remove the graffiti which was found on Goulston Street on the night of the ‘double event’ (30^th September 1888, when two of the victims were killed) – which it turns out can be seen not as a well-meaning attempt to prevent an anti-Semitic backlash (tensions were already running high in the area) but as part of a Masonic plot, although this hinges on whose version of the spelling one chooses to believe (what was controversial about Warren’s decision was that he ordered it to be cleaned before the police photographer arrived, and the police officers’ accounts of what the graffiti said are contradictory) or indeed whether the proximity of the graffiti to a blood-stained piece of apron linked to one of the victims is coincidental.

The Masonic theory was popularised in the 1970s by a book – one of many books on the subject of Jack the Ripper – which proposed that the murders were a means of covering up a secret marriage between HRH the Duke of Clarence (‘Prince Eddie’) and a working-class Catholic woman. This is the theory that has the Royal physician, Sir William Gull, killing the victims in a horse-drawn carriage and then depositing the bodies at the locations where they were subsequently found. Although widely discredited now, this theory brings the Royal family and Freemasonry into the Ripper story and as such remains a popular one, and has influenced film adaptations such as Murder by Decree (in which Sherlock Holmes, played by Christopher Plummer, goes on the trail of the Ripper), the 1988 TV series Jack the Ripper (with Michael Caine as Inspector Abberline) and the 2001 movie From Hell (Johnny Depp as a highly fictionalised version of Abberline).

Perhaps overplaying the Royal/Masonic theory, Shaughan explained to us that it was propagated on the evidence of one Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of the artist Walter Sickert (who was acquainted with the Royal family through his work and had a fascination with the murders). He (Gorman) later confessed that he’d made it up, but for supporters of this theory this can be explained as part of an ongoing cover-up. What Shaughan didn’t say, surprisingly, was that Sickert himself was named as a suspect by the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. Well, there are so many theories about who the Ripper was that it would be impossible to list them all over the course of a two-hour walk.

Incidentally, one of Shaughan’s fellow-guides is Donald Rumbelow, widely considered to be the leading Ripper expert. His book was certainly invaluable to me when I needed to read up on the case prior to teaching it!

At one point, a police car sped by, lights flashing and siren wailing. “They’re still trying to catch him,” quipped Shaughan.

Our tour ended with a few more theories – the notion that the Ripper also killed abroad, that ‘Jack’ was in fact ‘Jill’ on the grounds that the victims would have been more trusting of a woman than a man and so been off their guard (this was a pet theory of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), and that he was actually a doctor who apparently confessed to being the Ripper just before he was hanged for another series of murders.

Of course, we’ll never know for sure – and that is the main reason why Jack the Ripper still fascinates us 124 years later.