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 21st 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.
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