As for Dr. Cream being Jack the Ripper, it seems that if he really did make that utterance on the scaffold, then it must have been his last attempt at the very exhibitionism which had finally betrayed him. For at the time that Whitechapel was under the terror of Jack the Ripper Dr. Neill Cream had been serving a prison sentence in America.
However, Cream’s part in the Ripper story does not end here. Some years before Cream was convicted and hanged Sir Edward Marshall Hall, the famous advocate, defended him on a charge of bigamy.*6 Several women claimed to have been “married” to Cream, and Marshall Hall advised his client to plead guilty.
Cream indignantly refused, and protested that he had in fact been in jail in Sydney, Australia, at the time he was supposed to have committed the offences. Cream’s description was sent to Australia, and a reply was received confirming that a man of that description had been in prison in Sydney at the time in question. This provided a perfect alibi, and Cream was subsequently released.
The theory was that Cream had a double in the criminal underworld, and they went by the same name, using each other’s terms of imprisonment as alibis. It has been suggested that as Cream himself was in prison in America at the time of the Whitechapel murders his double was actually Jack the Ripper and that Cream’s last words on the scaffold were aimed at providing his double with a final alibi, this being in the nature of a repayment for the double, whose imprisonment in Australia gave Cream an alibi to escape the charge of bigamy.
This “double” theory is ingenious, but simply leads inquiry round in ever-decreasing circles, and, of course, there is no supporting evidence for making the initial assumption anyway. Actually the idea of Jack the Ripper’s double identity arises later in connection with another theory, but such unexplained assertions, though novel, have little application in the serious quest to solve the Ripper mystery.
* * *
*1 See Lost London, by B. Leeson (Stanley Paul, 1934).
*2 For the information contained here I am indebted to “Frenchy—Ameer Ben Ali,” from Dr. Ruth Borchard’s Convicting the Innocent (Banks-Baldwin Law Publishing Co., Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., 1943).
*3 This person should not be confused with the Annie Chapman murdered in Hanbury Street.
*4 Forty Years of Manhunting, by A. F. Neil (Jarrolds, 1932).
*5 Carson, by H. Montgomery Hyde (Heinemann, 1953).
*6 The Life of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, by Edward Marjoribanks (Gollancz, 1929).
In the Fourth Ward
THEODORA BENSON
Although largely forgotten today, Eleanor Theodora Roby Benson (1906–1968) was once a widely read author of humorous but cynical novels that depicted broken marriages and romances, ruthless selfishness, shattered idealism, and superficial goals of wealth and social position.
Benson’s first novel, Salad Days (1928), a study of the unfolding of a young girl’s character, was dedicated to her friend Betty Askwith, with whom she collaborated on many books. Among Benson’s more successful books were Façade (1933), in which a Mayfair couple realize their marriage was a mistake, and Concert Pitch (1934), about a music hall headliner, his wife, and the colorful vaudevillians in their circle.
Among the best-known books by Benson and Askwith were Lobster Quadrille (1930), a novel, and Foreigners, or the World in a Nutshell (1936), a humorous, politically incorrect, grossly exaggerated series of biases, clichés, and prejudices, and its sequel, Muddling Through, or Britain in a Nutshell (1935), which focused on the British Isles.
If Benson is read today it is for her rather dark short fiction, mainly mysteries and stories of the macabre, some of the best of which are collected in The Man from the Tunnel and Other Stories (1950). Her only mystery novel was Rehearsal for Death (1954). She also wrote several books on travel and, during World War II, was a ghostwriter of political speeches.
“In the Fourth Ward” was first published in 1930, but I have been unable to find where it originally appeared.
IN THE FOURTH WARD
Theodora Benson
Ben Higgs only told me this story once. This in itself was memorable, because most of his stories, as is generally the case with old seafaring men, he told again and again. The pirates in the South Seas and the five days spent rounding Cape Horn in a blizzard, if I heard of them once I heard of them twenty times.
This tale that he never repeated again (or not to me) came out shortly before he died. I don’t think he liked to think about it much; and he was a tough old man. “It was,” he said, “the most horrible thing that ever happened to me,” and he told it to me on a hot August afternoon, while the sea scarcely moving shimmered blue at our feet, and the stones on the beach were hot beneath our hands, and the whole world seemed wrapped for eternity in stillness and peace.
“It was the first and last time I ever was in New York,” he told me. “I was but a boy at the time, along on my second trip, and we sailed aboard the Isabella C. Paterson from Liverpool. We had a long voyage, and of course when we reached port I was mad keen to go ashore. New York wasn’t the place I’ve heard it is now, with buildings a hundred storeys high and the streets practically paved with gold, but it was a prospering lively town enough, and as for wickedness—well, I’ve seen little to touch it and I’ve seen the back parts of a good few seafaring towns. I went ashore with an older seaman who’d taken a kind of a fancy to me. Middling tall he was, with quick bright dark eyes and a slow gentle voice. He didn’t tell us much about himself, he’d been brought up in the country, had started life as a butcher’s assistant, and when his old mother died had chucked it up to go to sea. He’d been main fond of her it seemed, had a picture of her inside his sea-chest he’d show me sometimes. He had a picture of his brother too, a nice-looking lad, and one of a pretty girl—but he’d gashed it across with red chalk as though it was wounds. He told me once she’d been his brother’s girl; he spoke in such a way that I didn’t feel inclined to ask any further questions. But he was very good to me, very very good, and I was only a slip of a boy at the time.
“Well this man, Thomas Goolden his name was, and I, went ashore. To the old Fourth Ward we went, and if there’s a wickeder horrider place on the face of the earth Ben Higgs has yet to find it. Kit Burns’s rat pit was the first place we visited. Sportsmen’s Hall they called it, and there in the middle was a kind of ring with low wooden walls round it. Huge grey half-starved rats were sent against terriers and sometimes against each other, and the terriers didn’t always win neither. There was a great tall ruffian with bulging blue eyes in a red bloated face leaning against the wall, and the man next me pointed him out as Snatchem, one of the Slaughter House gang; it was his job to suck the blood from scratches and cuts at the bare knuckle prizefights they used to hold down there. There was also a thin weaselly looking man known as Jack the Rat, and he was Kit Burns’s son-in-law, and for ten cents he’d bite the head off a mouse and for a quarter the head off a rat. It turned my stomach rather odd, being only a boy as it were. But Thomas Goolden, who’d ever seemed gentle, was laughing and joking as hard as nails. I mind me he said: ‘There’s rats and rats, Benny. My kind’s different—but I like to see their blood too.’
“We’d seen four or five of these rat fights and then we made our way out and went along to another place on Water Street called the Hole-in-the-Wall. And there I met the oddest woman I’m ever like to see. She was six foot at least, as large as a grenadier. She’d a pistol stuck in her belt and a huge bludgeon strapped to her waist. Her skirt was held up with braces, or suspenders as Americans say, above her knee. Galluses they used to call them, so she was known as Gallus Mag. She acted as a kind of chucker-out; when she’d hit a man on the head with her club, she’d fix her teeth in his ear and drag him to the door, all the room cheering and yelling like mad, and if he struggled she’d bite his ear right off. Yes sir, right off, and she’d put it in a jar of pickle she kept back of the bar with all the others she’d collected. It doesn’t seem hardly possible, does it? But I saw her do it mys
elf—it made me feel very queer; she was English too. They say she once gave an ear back to its owner years later when they made up a quarrel. Sadie the Goat was the favoured party; a female pirate who’d made men walk the plank. She appreciated getting her ear again and wore it afterwards mounted in a locket.
“Well, we stayed there for a time, spending our money as sailors do. And lucky not to be killed for it. In that very place, the Hole-in-the-Wall, Slobbery Jim and Patsy the Barber, who belonged to the gang called the Daybreak Boys, had fought for over half an hour about how to divide twelve cents they’d murdered a German for. The chuckers-out didn’t hinder them, because it was a matter of principle, not just drink, you see, and Slobbery Jim stabbed Patsy the Barber in the throat and trampled him to death with his hob-nail boots. Still, we stood a few drinks and they treated us quite friendly, though they didn’t like the English much mostly in New York in those days. And somehow the talk turned on Jack the Ripper and his murders; you’ll have heard of them I expect, sir? Well, Byrnes who was Chief of Police in New York at that time, he’d been boasting that if Jack the Ripper had done his murders in New York their police would a’ caught him. He wrote in the papers, it was published just before we sailed, that he defied Jack the Ripper to come to the United States. They kept asking us that evening whether we’d caught him yet and saying he wouldn’t dare show his face in New York or their police’d have him. It seemed kind of funny that such a group of thugs and criminals should be boasting about their police force, but I s’pose in a way it was what you’d call an indirect compliment to themselves.
“By and by an old hag comes in and that stops the talk about the Ripper. Because they all turns round and calls to her: ‘Why there’s Shakespeare, come along Shakespeare, give us a piece.’ (They were all pretty drunk and so were we by this time.) Well I don’t rightly know, sir, but I believe there was a famous actor or play writer or something called Shakespeare; and whether this old girl was any relation of his I can’t rightly say—but it seems that she claimed she came of a fine family back over here. (It’s funny that both these women I’ve told you of were English. I dunno if one’s exactly proud of it or not—but in a way it sort of made me feel one up on the Yanks.) She would have it too she’d been a famous actress in her day. How it was I can’t say but they gave her a bottle of swan gin, and there she stood wrapping her shawl around her and sure enough she began to recite. Maybe ’twas the drink that did it but in any case ’twas wonderful, you’d never have thought that poor bleary-eyed old creature would have had the lungs or the voice to put her stuff over like she did. What she recited I can’t remember. There was a lot of it. One bit she said with her voice all deep and shivery made my blood run cold. Something about how she’d given suck and yet how she’d have plucked her breast away and dashed the baby’s brain out had she sworn—and something about her voice made you feel she’d have done it too. It was funny, there were all these thieves and murderers, Gallus Mag who I’d seen with my own eyes bite a man’s ear off an hour or two agone, and yet they didn’t make one shiver like this harmless old crone saying over some kind of fool poetry. And then right at the end she changed her voice and her manner altogether. She went round the circle offering this man a rusty old nail and that man a bit of calico. ‘Here’s a pansy,’ she’d say, or ‘here’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.’ And do you know not one of us laughed? Her voice was like that of a maid as she said it, she was pretending to be half-crazed and God knows in truth she wasn’t far off it. But she sounded so young and innocent and pitiful-like, that we stood there like stuck dummies, taking the little scraps of rubbish she offered, and the tears weren’t far from all our eyes.
“Only I heard a voice beside me, and it came from Thomas Goolden and it was queer and excited-like and terrible, though he spoke quite low so that it was only me that heard him. ‘She’s not only mad,’ he said, ‘she’s diseased.’
“I can’t tell you much about the rest of that evening, sir, it got a bit blurred as it were. I lost Goolden after the Hole-in-the-Wall and I wandered into John Allen’s which was a very famous house on Water Street; a dance-hall and bar and you-know-what-else with cubicles for girls and customers. The girls there wore low black satin bodices and scarlet skirts and stockings, and boots with red tops and bells round their ankles. Very taking it was, and indeed I might have stayed there, but it fell out this way. Allen had been trained for a minister, which is what his three brothers were, and he still had a feeling for it, with a Bible in every cubicle. And quite a popular thing in that vice-house was to have religious sing-songs. They struck up one hymn, and the girl who was sitting on my knee told me it was their favourite, that as luck would have it my mother used to sing. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, sir?—
“ ‘There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for you,
On the other side of Jordan,
In the sweet fields of Eden,
Where the Tree of Life is blooming,
There is rest for you.’
“And what with thinking of my old mother and being so drunk, I came over all soppy and burst into tears and got out somehow.
“Finally I got a bed at the old Fourth Ward Hotel on Catherine and Water Streets. (I found out the name afterwards.) I’m pretty sure they doctored my liquor though I don’t know as they needed to, since I was pretty far gone by that time anyway. I woke up with a head such as I never hope to have again and my hands tied behind me in a cellar and a man with a knife creeping towards me. If ever I have nightmares I see that over and over, and I have the feeling of sick terror and I try to get my hands free and I can’t. And then I saw the man was Thomas Goolden.
“ ‘Why it’s you, Ben,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wondering what became of you.’
“And he came up to me and he cut the rope that tied my hands and he helped me up and he showed me a back way out. And just as we got out into the street he gave a chuckle (not very loud but kind of quiet and amused like) and said in his low soft voice as well as I could catch: ‘Here’s to you, Mr. Byrnes,’ and then he disappeared. I got back to the ship as fast as I could. I was sick and sore and shaken, I’d nothing in my pockets, and I’d had enough of New York. I’d been lying in that cellar the best part of eighteen hours I found, and we were to sail the next morning. We did too though we sailed without Thomas Goolden, who never turned up again. But before we left we heard there’d been a terrible murder at the Fourth Ward Hotel, the very one where I’d spent the night. That poor old hag Shakespeare had been carved up as neat as you please, just like a Jack the Ripper murder. They arrested and put in prison a half-wit known as Frenchy, though he swore he was innocent; there were plenty that said he’d been framed and that the Ripper had accepted Byrnes’s challenge and come over and the police dursn’t own it. All I know is that, when I got out into Water Street that night, there was fresh blood on my hands and wrists; I’d no cut or scratch, and whether it came off the cellar floor or whether it came off the knife that cut my bonds, I don’t like to think. But of all the places I’ve ever been to, New York in those days was the worst, and that was the most horrible thing that ever happened to me.”
Jack
ANNE PERRY
Anne Perry is the pseudonym of Juliet Marion Hulme (1938– ), an internationally bestselling author of historical mystery fiction with more than twenty-seven million copies sold. She has produced more than seventy books, most of them classic Victorian-era detective novels about Thomas and Charlotte Pitt or William Monk. In addition, she has written more than a dozen highly successful Christmas-themed novellas, works set during World War I, fantasy novels, young adult books, short stories, and stand-alone novels, and she has edited five anthologies.
The first Perry book was The Cater Street Hangman (1979), featuring Thomas Pitt, a Victorian policeman, and his highborn wife, Charlotte, who helps her husband solve mysteries out of boredom. She is of enormous help to him as she is able to gain access to people of a high social rank, which would be
extremely difficult for a common police officer to do. There are nearly thirty books in the series, set in the 1880s and 1890s. Intimately familiar with this era, Perry nonetheless has never written about Jack the Ripper, the most infamous villain of the time, until producing this story.
The Monk series, with twenty novels, is set in the 1850s and 1860s. Monk, a private detective, is assisted on his cases by the excitable nurse Hester Latterly. The events in the first Monk book, The Face of a Stranger (1990), precede Sherlock Holmes’s investigations by a quarter of a century, though Holmes is frequently described as the world’s first consulting detective.
After winning an Edgar in 2000 for her short story “Heroes,” which was set during World War I, Perry began a series of novels featuring its protagonist, British Army chaplain Joseph Reavely, whose exploits and character were suggested by the author’s grandfather; the first book was No Graves as Yet (2003).
“Jack” was written especially for this collection and has never been previously published.
JACK
Anne Perry
It was the last day of September and the mists swirled along the pavement, dimming the streetlamps and muffling the sounds of hooves as the occasional hansom cab went by. Not that there were so many around in the East End of London at two in the morning. Gwen was glad that her husband, Riley, was with her, not that she would ever have been out alone at such an hour! No woman would. Especially this year of 1888, when the man known as Jack the Ripper had killed two women and left them hideously mutilated, not so very far from where they were walking, the four of them, she and Riley, and their good friends Albert and Mary Clandon.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 27