His main premise that the Ripper was a woman was based on Kelly being three months pregnant (which she was not) and so, as a young woman in danger of being evicted, she wanted to terminate her pregnancy. He suggests that the midwife/abortionist was called and once inside Miller’s Court seized her opportunity and killed Kelly as she was lying helplessly on the bed. Afterwards she burned her bloody clothing in the grate and escaped, wearing Kelly’s clothing. The chief objections to this line of argument are that Kelly’s clothes were left behind and that the only clothing destroyed, judging from the ashes in the grate, were the shirts, petticoat and bonnet belonging to Mrs Harvey (whom Stewart does not mention). Certainly if bloodstained clothing had been burned in the grate it would not have given off enough heat to melt the spout of the kettle, as actually happened. Stewart’s theory is an attractive one if only because it would explain the sighting of Kelly – in fact, the midwife in disguise – at 8 a.m., a few hours after Kelly’s death. Stewart’s secondary points are to underline his main contention that the murderer was a woman. He says that Nichols’s bonnet must have been given to her as she would not buy a hat and leave herself without the money for the bed. He ignores the fact that nowhere is there any evidence to suggest that Nichols bought the hat herself. Her exact words were: ‘I’ll soon get my doss money, see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.’ From this Stewart deduces that the donor was not a man – since if it had been she would have boasted of the fact – but a woman.
The chief flaw in the whole theory is that once again, with the exception of Kelly, none of the women are known to have been pregnant. In fact, in view of their age (most of them were in their forties), living hard and drinking hard, it would have been surprising if they were. Stride certainly was not, and it is equally doubtful that Chapman could have been, particularly after the beating, including a kick in the stomach, which had put her in the infirmary for several days.
Stewart’s theory was updated in a series of articles written for the Sun newspaper in 1972 by ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Arthur Butler of New Scotland Yard. He claimed that the murders were committed by an abortionist who had been living somewhere in the Brick Lane area and that four out of the seven victims (he includes Emma Smith and Martha Tabram) died because of bungled abortions and had not been murdered at all. In fact, he said, the mutilations were an attempt to conceal her mistakes. Two of the other three victims were murdered because they knew too much, he claimed, and the third, Long Liz Stride, was not a Ripper victim at all.
Butler’s source for this theory was unconfirmed gossip. None of his sources is given, except for a reference to nephews of people who were living in the area at the time, and it is difficult to judge, without knowing more of the facts, what value to attribute to his statements. However, he begins by saying that Emma Smith was murdered by the abortionist and her accomplice because she tried to blackmail them for more cash, as apparently she had done in the past. He complicates the story slightly by giving Emma a partner with the unlikely name of Fingers Freddy who, among other things, was a street conjuror. Freddy disappears, possibly into the Thames, says Butler, soon after Emma is murdered by the abortionist’s accomplice. Butler has ignored Smith’s own evidence that she had been attacked by four men, as well as the testimony of the witnesses who took her to hospital. Instead he paints a harrowing death-bed scene with a constable sitting by her bedside waiting for any other clues that she might give him as to the identity of her attackers. Apparently Butler was unaware of the fact that Smith had been dead and in her coffin for three days before the police were told about the original assault, and then only because the inquest was to take place.
Martha Tabram was similarly murdered, according to Butler, because she knew too much about the abortionist’s activities. Allegedly a friend of hers named Rosie Lee went to the abortionist on the Bank Holiday Monday for her pregnancy to be terminated. Later, when Tabram called back for her, she was told that Rosie had been treated and had left. When Martha still could not find her friend after several hours of searching she went back to the abortionist and had a flaming row with her, the inference once again being that the abortionist had bungled her work. (Since Rosie had apparently disappeared without trace, it is surprising that the abortionist, having once found a foolproof method of disposing of unwanted bodies, did not use the same method for her other ‘failures’.) Martha Tabram, said Butler, was killed the same night to stop her from talking.
Butler goes on to say that although he has no evidence that Polly Nichols was ever pregnant he knows (but does not give his source) that she had visited an abortionist twice in the previous two years.
Apart from murdering Smith and Tabram and possibly Fingers Freddy, the abortionist’s accomplice comes in useful for removing the bodies in a pram and dumping them in the street. Annie Chapman was apparently trundled through the streets like this, which, says Butler, accounts for a handkerchief being tied around her neck in order to stop her almost severed head from dropping off completely.
Butler objected to Stride being included as a Ripper victim on two grounds: first, that the throat was cut from left to right, which is in the opposite manner to the other victims (though without knowing the respective positions of murderer and victim this is hardly a valid point); and second, that he would not have killed Eddowes if he had murdered Stride because of the hue and cry that was going on in Berner Street. This assertion seems to display a complete lack of understanding of the nature of the sadistic murderer.
His final points about Kelly’s death are much the same as those that were made by Stewart.
To sum up, without knowing the precise nature of Butler’s sources it is impossible to know just how much credence can be attached to his theory, which must be dismissed as unsupported conjecture.
8. Gaslight Ghouls
In 1973 the Bubble Theatre Company was touring the London boroughs with The Jack the Ripper Show. It was one of several plays that the actors had scripted themselves and performed in two molecular-shaped tents which they pitched in the local park, or on any open space.
To get the full flavour you had to go on a wet and windy night, as I did. Wooden folding chairs stood in rows around the stage, which was in the middle of the tent. The stage itself was a simple platform about two feet high. There was no scenery. As the audience came into the tent they were met by the cast who were in period costume and full make-up and singing music-hall songs to the accompaniment of a jangling piano. Everyone was given a cup of wine upon entering. As I knew some of the cast I was given two (which lulled a sneaking suspicion that all was not well when they isolated me in a gangway seat on the front row).
The play is about the Sharp family of Victorian strolling players. Since there are only four of them they have obvious difficulties when playing Shakespeare: their bowdlerized productions are known as ‘Sharp’s Short Shakespeare Shows’. The son suggests that instead of Shakespeare they perform a ‘Jack the Ripper’ show. A stranger whom they spot lurking outside the tent is hired to play the Ripper. (While he was waiting for his cue, this actor was kept busy chasing off the local kids who kept peering through the canvas and racing round the tent, shrieking and whooping, like Indians around a wagon train.)
The stranger is – naturally – Jack the Ripper!
For the new ‘production’, the play within the play, the title is changed to the much more dramatic ‘Sharp’s Short Shocker’.
An equally dramatic change comes over the cast. The son, in particular, wears make-up, pouts, leers and grimaces with as much verve as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret.
The highlight of the second half is a parade of Ripper suspects. First is the mad Russian with a waist-length ginger beard concealing the hammer and sickle tattooed on his chest. Second is Montague Druitt who changes his identikit as frequently as he changes his hat, from a deerstalker to a bowler and back again. Third is the Duke of Clarence – one of the girls in pink tights, top hat, black underwear and a cardboard moustache. Fourth �
� but there was no fourth.
At this point I knew why I had been put in the front row.
Before I could move, a large number 4 was dropped on to my shoulders and I was yanked on to the stage. There were cheers and shouts as the audience was asked to show by their applause if they thought that I was Jack the Ripper. Naturally they did. All I could do was bow and accept the prize which was presented to me on a covered tray – a glass of tomato juice.
Mistakenly, I thought they had finished with me. They had not.
Just before the end of the show, Jack the Ripper ran away! As the show could not end without him, and the audience had already indicated that they thought that I was the Ripper, I was forced back on to the stage again to take his place on the gallows. After I had been ‘tried’ and protested my innocence – which nobody believed! – I was ‘hanged’.
From which you may gather that any resemblance between this and the real-life murders was purely coincidental.
Why such a series of murders should have inspired a literature and culture all of its own is one of the more puzzling aspects of the crimes. Alexander Kelly and David Sharp’s Jack the Ripper. A Bibliography and Review of the Literature (1995) lists 923 books and articles that have been published on the subject. The number is now easily in excess of one thousand. Denis Meikle’s Jack the Ripper. The Murders and the Movies (2002) is a study of more than fifty film and television series episodes that have been inspired by the murders. The interest shows no signs of abating. Three magazines – Ripperologist, Ripperana and Ripper Notes – are devoted almost exclusively to the subject and there is an expanding website. A partial explanation of this phenomenon might be that because there has never been a universally accepted solution, everyone is free to add their own ending to the story. It doesn’t matter if it flies in the face of reason – which it frequently does; the point is that the explanation is credible to the person offering it. Better still, the unities of time, place and action can be ignored. Just updating Kelly and Sharp’s Bibliography will illustrate the point perfectly. Stories have since been written of the Ripper fleeing to the American West, where he carries on his old habits by murdering dance-hall girls, local Indians and Mr Lusk. He has murdered his way through the galaxy to lodge as an evil force in the computers of the Starship Enterprise and been chased through time by H. G. Wells to modern-day San Francisco; he has danced and sung his way across innumerable stages; he has gone several rounds with Sherlock Holmes; he has become a class weapon in more recent political interpretations; and – the ultimate – as mad Brigadier-General Jack D. Ripper he has brought Armageddon to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
He has been resurrected vampire-style from a coping stone of London Bridge, and as the mad Earl of Gurney in Peter Barnes’s The Ruling Class, who believed himself to be both Jesus Christ and Jack the Ripper!
Jack has been hanged in fishermen’s nets, burned, has died in an electrified pond (The Night Stalker), been stabbed in revenge by American Indians and nuked himself (as well as the rest of the world). He has been a duo and a trio of killers. Retribution has not always followed. He has been elevated to the peerage, had a sex change which turned him into Jane the Ripper (Night Heat), taken holy orders to become a nun of Calais (The Great Victorian Mystery), eloped with poisoner Adelaide Bartlett, transmogrified into Umbrella Jack for the centenary and in a complete role reversal become Sherlock ‘Jack the Ripper’ Holmes.
Jack’s comic-book potentialities have been seized on by a number of authors, most notably by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell with their blockbuster From Hell, on which the Johnny Depp film was based. The royalty link was continued in a four-part Blood of the Innocent which had Prince Eddy battling it out with Dracula who threatens England with a vampire reign of terror, up to the throne itself, because Prince Eddy has killed the woman he loves, Mary Kelly. Another royal note was struck with the three-part Spring-Heel Jack. Revenge of the Ripper when Prince Eddy returns to twentieth-century London and introduces himself at a film premiere to Princess Diana by pulling out a knife and asking her to share ‘a few bits of your Royal innards with me’. Even Batman has been recruited: in Gotham by Gaslight Bruce Wayne was framed for the Jack the Ripper murders. Less well known was the identity of Jack Hack in the Swedish comic Fantomen. The story The Phantom as Sherlock has the Phantom – normal dress tights, trunks and mask – becoming a Sherlock Holmes look-alike, to catch Jack Hack whose real name is … Rumbelow. The writer’s explanation was that he had got so much from this book that he gave Jack Hack my name as a sort of thank-you!
Such an overview of the subject helps one to see that, broadly speaking, the fictional treatments can be broken down into four main categories.
Sensationalism
This first really needs no amplification. A cursory glance at the contemporary illustrated magazines and a lot of the literature since should be sufficient to make the point. What is surprising is just how quickly the public seized on the dramatic possibilities. First in the queue was J. F. Brewer who capitalized on Eddowes’s murder within a matter of weeks by publishing a piece of nonsense called The Curse Upon Mitre Square A.D. 1530–1888. Eddowes, so the story ran, had been murdered on the exact spot where the high altar of Holy Trinity priory had once stood and where Brother Martin still hovered over the scene of the crime he had committed centuries before when, insane with passion, a dozen times he had gashed the face of the woman who had plotted to bring disgrace upon the monastery. ‘With a demon’s fury the monk then threw down the corpse and trod it out of very recognition. He spat upon the mutilated face and, with his remaining strength, he ripped the body open and cast the entrails about.’ Horrors! It was his sister he had killed. In despair Brother Martin turned his knife upon himself. The monks tried to burn the blood from the altar stones but the spot was cursed. Over the centuries, every night between midnight and 1 a.m., a dark young man in the garb of a monk would appear and point to the spot, uttering strange prophecies of terrible events that would occur there.
In what must be a classic example of bad taste the pamphlet in which this tale appeared carried only one advert on the red ink wrapper of its back page: ‘Warner’s Safe Cure for Kidney and Liver Disease’.
In the immediate aftermath of the murders a showman had offered to rent Kelly’s room for a month, and another to buy the furniture. Possibly he was successful because four months later, in February 1889, there was a report that a music-hall was presenting an entertainment, possibly a sketch, about the Ripper and Mary Kelly.
In Finland in 1892 Adolf Paul published what was possibly the first piece of Ripper fiction. This was a collection of short stories in Swedish called Uppskäraren (The Ripper). Few copies of the book exist (one is in the Royal Library in Stockholm) as it was suppressed by the Russian censor – we do not know why. The basic plot is that Paul visits Berlin and, while he is there, he collides with the Ripper who is running away from yet another murder and causes him to drop his diary. The book is badly written and it is possibly the author’s attempt to explain away the murders through the Ripper’s sex drive that gave offence, and may have been the reason for the book’s suppression.
Desmond Coke’s The Bending of a Twig (1906) has been described as
an extreme illustration of the whole school career of the hero being influenced, and partly destroyed through reading a queer selection of school stories, provided by a well-meaning mother, consisting of Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Farrar’s Eric (1859), Kipling’s Stalky (1899), Vachell’s The Hill (1905), and a probably fictitious story ironically subtitled A Tale of Real Life in which the headmaster turns out to be Jack the Ripper.
Neither was the theatre to be found lacking. In 1910 there was, almost unbelievably, a one-act comedy. Of far greater significance, however, were the intervening plays by the German author Frank Wedekind – Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904) – which became the basis for Alban Berg’s opera, Lulu, begun in
1929. Berg described Lulu as ‘a glowing fireball, singeing everything that comes into contact with her’. Two husbands die, she shoots her lover, is sent to prison and, on her release, becomes a prostitute. Lulu is a predator and in a world of predators it is her fate to fall victim to the male of the species. Both she and her lesbian admirer are stabbed to death by Jack the Ripper. The play Lulu by Peter Barnes from the same sources had its premiere in 1970.
In 1975 the Ripper was more of the voyeur in a Swedish porn movie, Musfallan (The Mousetrap). ‘Mus’ in Swedish is a colloquialism for the vagina. The film’s mousetrap was a seduction chamber. The brothel madam was played by Diana Dors.
At this point the term ‘sensationalism’ requires further qualification. This is a purely arbitrary categorization, but in the sensationalist treatment of the murders Jack the Ripper is an eponymous individual, a human shell without character or identity, a shrouded knife-wielding demon. He is the caped figure walking through the nineteenth-century fog with the Gladstone bag by his side. Berg’s Ripper is the top end of the market. At the other extreme are books such as Robert Bloch’s The Night of the Ripper, which it is hard to believe came from the author of the excellent story ‘Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper’, which subsequently became a television play introduced on American television by Boris Karloff. The Night of the Ripper mentions the usual suspects and practically everyone else – or so it seems – who was living at the time, including Bernard Shaw and the Elephant Man; Oscar Wilde exonerates the Duke of Clarence while Conan Doyle identifies London Hospital probationer nurse Eva Sloane as one half of a murderous Jack the Ripper duo (she strangles, he stabs). Dr Pedachenko is the other half but (no playing fair with the reader here) he doesn’t appear until page 220 of a 252-page book. What the book lacks in suspense it makes up for with nastiness by spicing the beginning of each chapter with totally gratuitous examples of sadism culled from all ages and countries. None of these have any relevance whatsoever to the book. As in Ellery Queen’s Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper, a burning house provides the author with his exit. Pedachenko breaks his neck, Eva is spiked on some railings, and what the flames don’t destroy (the Ripper knives, Kelly’s foetus and the duo’s disguises) good old dyspeptic Inspector Abberline of the Yard covers up.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 30