The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  Ho, hum.

  Identification

  In this second category the best-known story is Mrs Belloc Lowndes’ ‘The Lodger’, which has had numerous derivatives. The story originated at a dinner party when she overheard one of the guests telling another that his mother’s butler and cook, who were husband and wife and took in lodgers, believed that they had let one of their rooms to Jack the Ripper. This snatch of conversation inspired her tale, which was published in McClure’s Magazine in January 1911. She did not get one favourable review. She mournfully complained that for the American edition she hadn’t been able to find ‘even one sentence of tepid approval’. Gradually, however, public opinion swung in her favour, so much so that two or three years later the reviewers were perversely complaining that each of her new books was a disappointment, and why didn’t she write a new ‘Lodger’.

  By 1923 the sixpenny edition alone had sold more than half a million copies. It was turned into a stage play called Who is He?, and then into a silent movie directed by the 26-year-old Alfred Hitchcock, who helped to adapt the story. Today it is hailed as the first true Hitchcock-style movie. The star was England’s leading matinée idol, Ivor Novello, but because of his following the storyline had to be changed to show that he was not the murderer and commercial interests dictated that his innocence be spelled out in big letters. Hitchcock would have liked Novello to have been the murderer, but the change was probably for the better since, as Hitchcock says, a cinema audience finds it easier to identify with an innocent man who is wrongly accused than with a guilty man on the run. There is a greater sense of danger.

  When the film was first shown to the distributors they hated it. They thought it too heavy and Germanic. Bookings made on the strength of Novello’s reputation were cancelled and it was put back on the shelves. Several weeks later they had second thoughts and showed it to the trade, which went into ecstasies and hailed it as the most important British film to date. It was a smash hit with critics and public alike.

  The effect for which it is chiefly remembered is a shot ‘through’ the ceiling of the lodger pacing backwards and forwards and making the chandelier in the room below move with him. Hitchcock achieved this by shooting from below through a ceiling of plate glass an inch thick. He had to do it this way because the film was silent; if he had been doing it with sound, he would just have shot the swaying chandelier.

  The fiction which most consistently goes for a solution, and therefore an identification, is that in which Sherlock Holmes is pitted against the Ripper. Although Conan Doyle never wrote anything even remotely similar, he did tell a reporter for the Portsmouth Evening News (4 July 1894) how he thought Holmes might have tracked the murderer. Doyle said that he remembered going to the Black Museum and looking at the letter which was purported to have come from the Ripper:

  It was written in red ink in a clerky hand. I tried to think how Holmes might have deduced the writer of that letter. The most obvious point was that the letter was written by someone who had been in America. It began ‘Dear Boss’ and contained the phrase, ‘fix it up’, and several others which are not usual with Britishers. Then we have the quality of the paper and the handwriting, which indicate that the letters were not written by a toiler. It was good paper, and a round, easy, clerky hand. He was, therefore, a man accustomed to the use of a pen.

  Having determined that much, we cannot avoid the inference that there must be somewhere letters which this man had written over his own name, or documents or accounts that could be readily traced to him. Oddly enough, the police did not, as far as I know, think of that, and so they failed to accomplish anything. Holmes’ plan would have been to reproduce the letters in facsimile and on each plate indicate briefly the peculiarities of the handwriting. Then publish these facsimiles in the leading newspapers of Great Britain and America, and in connection with them offer a reward to anyone who could show a letter or any specimen of the same handwriting. Such a course would have enlisted millions of people as detectives in the case.

  In fact this was one of the methods that Conan Doyle used in the real-life Edalji case but without the sort of success that Holmes might have expected. Perversely, Doyle’s Edinburgh tutor, Dr Joseph Bell, who was the model for Holmes, claimed to have solved the Jack the Ripper mystery (Tit Bits, 24 October 1911). Bell explained how he and a friend with an analytical turn of mind similar to his own set out to investigate. He told a reporter: ‘When two men set out to find a golf-ball in the “rough” they expected to come on it where the straight lines marked in their mind’s eye to it from their original positions crossed. In the same way, when two men made investigations on a crime mystery, where their researches intersected, as it were, gave an important result.’ In line with these principles Dr Bell and his friend made independent investigations and placed their conclusions in sealed envelopes which they eventually exchanged. Both envelopes contained a certain name. They gave this name to the police and soon afterwards the murders came to an end – or so Bell claimed.

  The Holmes stories usually depend upon the recovery of an unpublished Dr Watson manuscript. Ellery Queen’s A Study in Terror (published in Britain in 1966 as Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper) is one such book. It is an interlocking story of past and present events. The main narrative is Dr Watson’s unpublished account of the case; the sub-plot concerns the giving of Watson’s manuscript to Ellery Queen so that he can investigate and clear the name of the man whom Watson wrongly identified as the Ripper. The sub-plot was discarded, as was Ellery Queen’s solution, when a film version was made in 1965: Dr Watson’s ‘false’ ending made for a simpler and much better story. One reason why the book is so unsatisfactory is the denouement in which six of the principal characters are killed, murdered or commit suicide in a little over four pages. One impales himself on his swordstick; four more are burned to death; and the sixth is stabbed by somebody pretending to be Jack the Ripper.

  The unpublished Watson manuscript in Michael Dibdin’s novel The Last Sherlock Holmes Story is considered a ‘criminological time bomb’ with its disclosure that Holmes, tired of being the people’s champion, goes over to the opposition. He turns the murders into a contest of skill between himself and the police, and he runs greater and greater risks to prove in the end he can be the perfect killer just as he is the perfect detective. This book probably contains the most bizarre scene in the Holmes canon, with Dr Watson spying on Holmes who hums ‘La donna è mobile’ as he skins and hangs pieces of Mary Kelly from the picture rail. Others have theorized elsewhere that one of the unrecorded Ripper victims was Mrs Watson whom Holmes murdered so that his lover, Dr Watson, would return to him and their old life at 221B Baker Street!

  In Geoffrey A. Landis’s novelette, The Singular Habit of Wasps, Holmes is once again found to be mutilating the Ripper’s victims except that the Ripper is an invention of the press and the women have been infected by some alien from another planet who has been forced to crash-land on earth. Holmes’s justification for killing and mutilating the Whitechapel women is that they are already dead, living dead, and he is destroying the large purplish-white eggs, each containing a monstrous coiled shape, with which they have been impregnated. The alien has taken possession of an earthling’s body and when finally challenged and brought down with bullets and set on fire Holmes and Watson could see ‘that where a man’s generative organs would have been was a pulsing, wickedly barbed ovipositor with a knife-sharp end writhing blindly in the flames’. As they watch the death throes, ‘it bulged and contracted, and an egg, slick and purple, oozed forth’.

  As new suspects are regularly added to the Ripper canon it is always interesting to see their first appearance in fiction. In 1998, three years after Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey had resurrected Dr Tumblety as a Jack the Ripper, he is fictionally masterminding some outrage on behalf of the Fenian brotherhood in Barrie Roberts Sherlock Holmes and the Royal Flush. The year is 1887, Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Year, and a performance of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild
West Show is held at Windsor Castle. Tumblety’s men are to attack and murder the Prince of Wales and the four kings riding inside a stagecoach (the Royal flush of the title is four kings and an ace). Only the two cowboys riding shotgun on the roof, Holmes and Watson in disguise, can save them from assassination.

  After such role reversal it comes as no surprise to find Professor Moriarty in John Gardner’s The Revenge of Moriarty detecting Montague Druitt as the Ripper and faking his (Druitt’s) suicide to bring an end to the case because of the police activity which is ruining the running of his East End empire. Other Holmesian characters have also had a hand in catching the Ripper. Holmes’s mysterious brother Mycroft is well to the fore in Ray Walsh’s The Mycroft Memorandum, and there is The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade by M. J. Trow. Once again there are walk-on parts for Oscar Wilde and Conan Doyle, plus Lord Alfred Douglas and even an infant Agatha Christie.

  Sociology and Politics

  Recent stage productions have fallen into the sociological and political categories. Writers have tried to use the murders to explain the issues of the day, which has meant less preoccupation with the Ripper himself and more focus on Whitechapel working life. Unfortunately this has generally meant a music-hall setting with noisy cockneys and crowds of women with their hands forever on their hips hollering and shouting, plus a lot of good-humoured audience participation – and ultimately little point to the evening’s proceedings. When Ripper (1973) was performed by the Half Moon Theatre Company, each of the murders was committed by a different and sometimes unnamed suspect. For instance, the body of Polly Nichols was wheeled on by a woman (a backstreet abortionist? Jill the Ripper?) and tipped onto the stage. By switching murderers the play was able to illuminate different facets of Victorian society, moving from a rich man’s viewpoint to an immigrant’s, from a working man’s to a criminal’s. Characters included some rather crude stereotypes, such as the stupid policeman, the greedy capitalist and the worthy trade unionist. The last scene was somewhat numbing. After Kelly had gone into her bedroom with Pedachenko, one wall was removed and a carcass of meat, spotlit from above, was hacked about by a man in a butcher’s straw hat and apron who then tried to offer chops and kidneys to the audience. The play concluded with the cast doing a slow-time ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’.

  A music-hall setting also provided the dramatic framework when Jack the Ripper opened in London’s West End the following year. This production provided a musical reconstruction of the murders, set in a music-hall and surrounding streets, as performed by the inhabitants of Whitechapel. Montague Druitt was portrayed as an avenging angel from Toynbee Hall, founded by the Revd Barnett as the People’s University. The best number was probably ‘Ripper’s Going To Get You If You Don’t Watch Out’. The show has proved popular, especially in Sweden and with amateur groups.

  More recent musicals have been The Reward of Cruelty (Taylor and Watson); Christopher George and Erik Sitbon’s Jack the Musical; Jack the Ripper (originally The Lodger)(1999) a mother-and-son collaboration by Mary and Regan Ryzuk; and Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper (1998) a musical concept by Frogg Moody. The latter, with collaborator Ian Marshall, made a CD recording, Angels of Sorrow, which was based on individual interpretations of the musical characteristics of the five Whitechapel victims, linked with word portraits of each woman by five Ripper authors (Begg, Evans, Fido, Odell and Rumbelow). Carl Jay Buchanan made similar interpretations in his highly original investigative book of poems, Ripper.

  Two other Whitechapel productions worth mentioning are the Curtain Theatre Company’s Hunt the Ripper (1975) in Toynbee Hall itself and The Harlot’s Curse performed in a disused Spitalfields synagogue in 1986. The former’s programme was also part song sheet and the audience were invited to participate in the ‘Eine Kleine Rippermusicke’:

  Oh, oh, oh what a lovely whore,

  What do we want with Frau and Dame,

  When we can rip them into jam.

  As soon as I get them alone,

  I let my fingers roam,

  And I never care if they do not laugh,

  But scream and shout and moan.

  Oh, oh, oh what a lovely whore,

  I will never be satisfied,

  Until the very last one has died.

  Step outside if you’d like to see,

  A ripping good time down an alley with me,

  Oh, oh, oh what a lovely,

  Oh, oh, oh what a bloody,

  Oh, oh, oh what a deathly whore.

  The setting played an important part in The Operating Theatre Company’s production of The Harlot’s Curse by Rodney Archer and Powell Jones. This dramatized documentary focused on the Victorian prostitute’s life as personified by Mary Kelly. Sources ranged from Dickens, Stead, Blake and Shaw to ‘Walter’ (not surprisingly) and Flanders and Swann (most surprisingly). Kelly’s fictional life from birth (actually Oliver Twist’s) to death (Nancy’s from the same book) was the single link with the Whitechapel murders. In between was a curious amalgam of information on sexual perversions, child prostitution, flagellation and upper-class whoring, with digressions on such matters as how to simulate virginity by means of small sponges of blood, the insertion of fish bladders or, more painfully, but requiring less acting, the use of fragments of broken glass.

  A play, Force and Hypocrisy, and a movie, Murder by Decree (1979), can both be arbitrarily described as ‘political’ stories. The murders are part of the class war and in both instances the instrument of revenge is the coachman John Netley. In the former he is one of the ‘have-nots’ of the world and the final scene shows him triumphing over Clarence, who is wrapped only in the banner of the Social Democratic Federation. Clarence later cuts his wrists, a nonentity to the end, fearing to see a throne at the end of every room. In the latter Netley is the instrument of the ruling classes, murdering to prevent the ruin of existing society by a ‘radical anarchistic ideology’.

  Doug Lucie’s Force and Hypocrisy openly acknowledges that it is based on Knight’s book. Contemporary parallels such as mass unemployment, riots, trade unionists fighting the police, armed struggle in Ireland, murderous attacks on women, and establishment scandals are heavily underlined. The entry of a trade unionist is treated like the Second Coming, even down to the shaft of light. The aristocracy, on the other hand, are sado-masochistic perverts. Such soft targets contribute to the play’s imbalance. An unusual touch is having Gull, after his stroke, confined under the name of Thomas Mason and nursed and breast-fed by Annie Cook (this is a name change). But the evening is Netley’s.

  Murder by Decree treads much the same ground but, possibly for legal or copyright reasons, there are name changes again – Sir William Gull becomes Sir Thomas Spivey, John Netley becomes William Slide – and the story is rendered much more fictional by the inclusion of Sherlock Holmes. One example of the author’s juggling is that Annie Crook commits suicide and is buried at the same time as Mary Kelly. Although the film is extremely atmospheric, a long explanation by Holmes is still needed to explain the illicit marriage and the masonic conspiracy.

  Ripper and royalty was an equally irresistible combination for Michael Caine’s centenary offering Jack the Ripper and fourteen years later Johnny Depp’s From Hell. Caine played Inspector Abberline as a drunk, while Depp showed him as a drug addict dying of an overdose in 1888 rather than as a respected police pensioner in 1929. While Abberline might have had something to complain about, Sir William Gull had even more cause to do so, for making him the Ripper in all three films led to his grave being vandalized. The same thing happened to James Maybrick’s grave. No doubt, someone somewhere will slash a Sickert painting believing the Cornwell nonsense. Caine’s film was hyped by claims that the company had been given access to secret Home Office files naming the murderer. This farrago of nonsense was eventually blamed on an over-zealous publicity department and, despite the claims at the end of the film, there was not a shred of evidence for the company’s claim that they had solved the mystery.

  Class w
arfare was once again the dominant theme of Robert Tine’s futuristic 1980s novel Uneasy Lies the Head. Jack the Ripper imitation murders cause suspicion to fall on the newly crowned George VII whom palace revolutionaries hope to replace by his younger brother Eddie in order to save the nation from the cloth-capped yahoos who are ruining the country. Readers interested in such alternative histories of royalty may like to go back in time with Emlyn Williams’s novel Headlong, which is about a 25-year-old actor called Jack Green who suddenly finds himself King of England in the year 1936. He is the Duke of Clarence’s son by his secret marriage and, as rightful heir, displaces Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, to become King. But once he starts tap dancing at the Albert Hall, it is clearly time for him to abdicate.

  Futurism

  In the final, futuristic category Jack the Ripper is a time-traveller, part human, part spirit. He can be found arguing with the Marquis de Sade, solving the mystery of the Marie Celeste, escaping from H. G. Wells, stalking his eighty-eighth victim or provoking Star Trek’s chief engineer to murder. In Hammer Films’ Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde he is not only mixed up with the Stevenson character but with the body-snatchers Burke and Hare in his search for the elixir of life. Alternatively, he can become Al Borowitz’s ‘Umbrella Jack’, the first Ripper to commit murder and suicide with a poisoned umbrella.