by Paul Begg
Another suspect drawn from key players in the Ripper story is Charles Cross, the first person to discover the body of Mary Ann Nichols. Several researchers felt that he was a good contender for the Nichols murder as he was found by Robert Paul standing by the corpse in Buck’s Row.24 Not only that, he gave his name as ‘Cross’ (his stepfather’s name) when his birth name, the one he used at all other times, was Lechmere. This was seen by his accusers as evidence of creating a smokescreen to hide his obvious guilt. From here the theory would expand, suggesting that Cross had every reason to travel near the various murder sites, thus potentially making him truly Jack the Ripper. Christer Holmgren and Edward Stow became the two most vocal supporters of this theory,25 even going so far as to publicize it as part of a memorial presentation about the Bethnal Green Tube disaster, where some of Cross’s descendants died.26 The discussion really took shape on internet message boards, and as more joined the debate, more angles were explored, with one poster adamantly believing that Cross had killed Nichols before Paul arrived, only to then mutilate her after Paul went off looking for a policeman. Almost every report has it that the two men left together and that they were still together when they met PC Jonas Mizen, but this poster would have none of it, leading to some interminable pedantic debates over report wording. But such is the way of things where internet Ripper studies are concerned.
What the activities surrounding Le Grand’s and Cross’s appearances as suspects show us is that neither of these suspects have had full-length accounts published about them, and yet many thousands of words have been typed – in dedicated Ripper periodicals and most notably cyberspace – already. It is as though these theories are doomed for the moment to float on the ether, which is a pity, as both Le Grand and Cross can be considered as far better choices than some other suspects which have been proposed. The efforts that have gone into researching these previously little-known individuals is waiting for a lengthy, less fragmented treatment and as such would be warmly anticipated.
In his overview of almost every person ever accused of being Jack the Ripper,27 C. J. Morley listed nearly 300 names, from obscure individuals accused at the time to the more covered suspects, to celebrities whose alleged guilt flies in the face of reason: Inspector Abberline, King Leopold II of the Belgians, Arthur Conan Doyle, Canon Samuel Barnett, Dr Thomas Barnardo, Joseph Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’), Edward VII, Lewis Carroll, William Gladstone and Lord Randolph Churchill. Not named in Morley’s book, but demonstrating how deeply the suspect barrel can be scraped, are Vincent Van Gogh and Queen Victoria!
A century and a quarter after the Whitechapel murderer left the world looking for an answer, a truly definitive solution is still not forthcoming, despite the assurances of theorists and the media. Nor is it likely to be, and thus the international game of ‘hunt the Ripper’, this veritable ‘pin the tail on the donkey’, will continue unabated. But there is one other element that contributes to the longevity of fascination with the story: because he is an unknown quantity, still lacking a firm motive or identity, Jack the Ripper can become anything we wish him to be. He has become the stuff of folklore, a myth, a legend.
And you can’t kill off a legend.
Part Three
MYTHOLOGIES
16.
Genesis of the Ripper
On the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier Street, opposite the old Spitalfields market and with Nicholas Hawksmoor’s boxy but beautiful Christ Church on the adjacent corner, sits the Ten Bells pub. The current building dates from 1845, but records show that there has been a pub here since at least 1753, and almost certainly earlier. There are a number of alleged minor connections between it and Jack the Ripper, mainly claims that the victims drank there, although the only two references to that being the case come from probably unreliable press reports following the deaths of Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly. But much of the pub is essentially as it was in 1888 when it is very probable that, owing to their proclivities towards heavy drinking, all the victims of Jack the Ripper might well have been familiar with its comforts. Other places which would have had worthier associations with the victims were the Britannia and the Queen’s Head, both nearby, but the former has been demolished and the latter closed down, and thus it falls on the Ten Bells to become the focus of attention in this respect. The centenary of the Ripper murders fell in 1988, ‘the year of the Ripper’ as it was described by the Guardian’s Deborah Cameron,1 in what can be seen as an opening salvo of a skirmish in which a group calling themselves Action Against the Ripper Centenary (AARC) played a prominent part, receiving a high profile throughout 1987–8 and featuring repeatedly in the national and local press. Very soon the rather nebulous ‘centenary’ came together in the Ten Bells.
In early 1975 the pub had closed for a £15,000 refurbishment and when it reopened on 30 April 1975 it had also received a name change: it was now called ‘the Jack the Ripper’.2 Basically a themed pub, the vogue for which never really took off in the UK,3 the Jack the Ripper was decked out with relevant memorabilia and promised its new clientele ‘plush decor’ with an accent on the Ripper. This revamp caused little stir at the time; however, the upcoming centenary promised a boost in trade and the sale of souvenirs, including, most bizarrely, a teapot and a drink called the ‘Ripper Tipple’. It was a parade upon which the feminist AARC was determined to rain, its members campaigning to have the pub’s name changed. As AARC spokesperson Kelly Ellenborne stated, it was ‘outrageous that anybody should be using the historical and horrific murder of women as a tourist attraction to make money’. The then tenants, Yvonne and Ernie Ostrowski, responded by pointing out that ‘The fascination is not with the murders but with the mystery that surrounds them.’4
Both were right. Both were wrong. The trouble is that nobody was celebrating or commemorating a man who murdered women. They were essentially commemorating the centenary of a fictional creation, one that for many was no more real than Dracula, Sweeney Todd or Sherlock Holmes.
By 1988 Jack the Ripper had well and truly become the stuff of myth and legend: the popular image had become one of gin palaces, foggy streets and dark alleys with alluring but seedy women struck down by a gentleman murderer wearing a top hat and cape, holding a black bag and perhaps blessed with a surgeon’s skill. Surrounding this iconography were a police force helpless in their attempts to catch him, always one step behind, and a terrified, unwitting public, trapped in the middle as an increasingly exasperated press screamed out the horrible details. But the creation of a mythical Jack is not a purely twentieth-century concept; in fact, the Whitechapel murderer was most definitely taking on such a legendary status during that period in 1888 when the crimes were still ongoing.
To all intents and purposes, the mysterious ‘Leather Apron’, suggested in the first week of September 1888, was the original mythical killer. Before the Whitechapel murderer had even been given his more famous, lasting sobriquet, the sensational newspaper descriptions of the character seared terrible images into the minds of the public, and so well known did he become that he was the title character in one of the earliest pieces of Ripper literature, Leather Apron or the Horrors of Whitechapel, published in December 1888.5 ‘Leather Apron’ also became effectively one of the earliest issues in the case to be talked of overseas. With reference to the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, one American newspaper imaginatively said that:
The crime, committed last Friday night, has shocked the whole of England, and is generally charged to a short, thickset, half crazy creature, with fiendish black eyes, and known as ‘Leather Apron.’ He frequented the dark alleys, and like a veritable imp haunted the gloom of the halls and passage ways of Whitechapel, and lived by robbing the female Arabs who roamed the streets after nightfall. Of powerful muscle, carrying a knife which he brandished over his victims, the London murder fiend was too terrible an assailant for the victim that cowered beneath the glitter of cold steel.6
A number of prostitutes attempted to assist the press in locat
ing him. Two took a reporter to the corner of Commercial Street and Wentworth Street, where the mysterious man was often allegedly seen, adding: ‘it would be necessary to look into all the shadows, as if he was there he would surely be out of sight’.7 But did ‘Leather Apron’ exist outside of the East End rumour mill or the pages of the sensational press? It is arguable that he did not,8 for it seems that at one point anybody seen acting suspiciously became ‘Leather Apron’ and was swiftly spoken of and reported, giving the newspapers plenty to shock their readership with. The arrest of John Pizer, who made an appearance at Annie Chapman’s inquest to clear his name, did little to quell the fear on the streets. Pizer declared, on being accused of being ‘Leather Apron’, that he was not and that he did not know of any such man,9 but Sergeant William Thick, who arrested him on 10 September, was reported as saying ‘almost positively’ that Pizer was indeed ‘Leather Apron’.10
The ‘Leather Apron’ scare demonstrated that the late nineteenth-century Londoner and pressman alike were extremely susceptible to a form of mass hysteria and showed that, even at that early stage, the image of the Whitechapel murderer was being shaped into whatever form felt suitable at that time. With the East End (and indeed London as a whole) reeling from the fear of ‘midnight terrors’ and ‘man-monsters’ during those early weeks of September, it would perhaps be fitting to mention that, by that time, a well-received stage rendition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 tale The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde had been playing at London’s Lyceum Theatre for a month. Stevenson’s story is well known: the mild-mannered doctor changing into the bestial Mr Hyde was as much a comment on the double standards of the professional classes Stevenson saw around him as it was gothic horror. It would be a story retold in many forms in the ensuing century.
The star of that Lyceum production was Richard Mansfield, an American actor who had impressed theatre-goers and critics alike with his uncanny on-stage transformations from Jekyll to Hyde, successfully achieved by lighting effects and sheer physical performance. With the onset of the Whitechapel murders, comparisons would soon be made:
The Whitechapel murder has taken a turn of most ghastly romance. Those whose sensations were not handicapped while they read it by a haunting idea that ‘the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ was a performance at least as grotesque as it was grim will remember how the horrible Hyde in one of his transformations, butchered a woman just for the fun of the thing. That is an effective passage in the book, and those whom it thrilled with a pleasing terror will snatch fearful joy from the story of ‘Leather Apron’.11
The man-monster idea was taking hold, leading one letter-writer to go so far as to suggest a solution to the mystery based on the ‘dual personality’ concept in the story:
MEANWHILE, writes an eccentric correspondent, you, and every one of the papers, have missed the obvious solution of the Whitechapel mystery. The murderer is a Mr Hyde, who seeks in the repose and comparative respectability of Dr Jekyll security from the crimes he commits in his baser shape. Of course, the lively imaginations of your readers will at once supply certain means of identification for the Dr Jekyll whose Mr Hyde seems daily growing in ferocious intensity.12
It has been said that the production closed down as a result of dwindling audiences, forcing Mansfield into bankruptcy, all because of the Whitechapel murders and the fear they generated. Audiences did decline as a result of the considerable fears on the streets, but although the play did indeed close at the end of September, it was successfully resurrected in repertory theatre only a week later.
If the Whitechapel murders did affect the size of theatre audiences and the profits of small shopkeepers, it did allow some of a more maverick persuasion to make a profit, sometimes in very questionable taste. One enterprising pavement artist attracted a large crowd by drawing his own interpretation of the Mitre Square murder on the pavement in Whitechapel Road, making a respectable sum of money as a result. His cartoon was described as ‘certainly a masterpiece of sanguinary ghastliness. What it lacked in delineation and unity it made up for in disgusting details, and there was a constant struggle among the crowds in the street to get a view of it.’13
A more disturbing manifestation of an attempt to give form to the events unfolding in the East End – and make money from it – came with a grotesque waxworks exhibition. The proprietor was Thomas Barry who, along with his daughter, ran a live entertainment venue from 107 Whitechapel Road, only a few hundred yards from Buck’s Row.14 Next door at no. 106, on the corner with Thomas Street, Barry created a wax museum which generated great interest and outrage in equal measure:
During the past few days a highly-coloured representation of the George Yard and Buck’s Row murders – painted on canvas – have been hung in front of the building, in addition to which there were placards notifying that life size wax models of the murdered women could be seen within. The pictures have caused large crowds to assemble on the pavement in front of the shop. This morning, however, another picture was added to the rest. It was a representation of the murder in Hanbury street. The prominent feature of the pictures was that they were plentifully besmeared with red paint – this of course representing wounds and blood. Notices were also posted up that a life-size waxwork figure of Annie ‘Sivens’ [sic] could be seen within. After the inquest at the Working Lads’ Institute had been adjourned a large crowd seized them and tore them down. Considerable confusion followed, and order was only restored by the appearance of an inspector of police and two constables. A man attired in workman’s clothes and who appeared to be somewhat the worse for drink then addressed the crowd. He said – ‘I suppose you are all Englishmen and women here; then do you think it right that that picture (continued the orator, pointing to the one representing the murder in Hanbury street) should be exhibited in the public streets before the poor woman’s body is hardly cold.’ Cries of ‘No, no, we don’t’ greeted this remark, and another scene of excitement followed. The crowd, however, was quickly dispersed by the police before the showman’s property was further damaged.15
Such shows were described as ‘sinks of iniquity’,16 with one observer stating that ‘to what extent it may influence the East-enders deleteriously, by fostering a morbid interest in crime and criminals, can of course only be a matter of conjecture; but it seems a pity that such a debasing exhibition should constitute one of the principal amusements available to the population of a poverty-stricken neighbourhood’.17
The controversy surrounding Barry’s waxworks18 was understandable and a reflection of what would happen exactly a century later when the AARC focused their attention upon the Ten Bells and other events of 1988. One could suppose that the opening of such an exhibition (which included waxworks of other famous murders) was no different from Madame Tussauds’s Chamber of Horrors or more modern creations such as the London Dungeon, where onlookers can enjoy a grisly spectacle safe in the knowledge that they are not actually threatened by what they are witnessing. But in 1888 that was most certainly not the case, and the fact that Barry was adding exhibits to the show with each new Whitechapel murder must surely have added to the public outrage. A very real killer was still at large, no woman felt she was safe, and Thomas Barry was shoving it in their faces, at a profit.
Nobody in their right mind would really wish to come across a horrifically mutilated body, however such tableaux allow the spectator to obtain some small, visceral entertainment from something which is essentially taboo.
The use of Jack the Ripper as entertainment would be something that would increase dramatically as the decades passed. The mythical Jack we know today was still a long way from forming, but elements of that mythology would introduce themselves as the ‘autumn of terror’ progressed. Descriptions of men seen with the victims shortly before their deaths had no bearing on the image of Jack that is so ubiquitous today. Witnesses like Elizabeth Long (Hanbury Street), Joseph Lawende (Mitre Square), Israel Schwartz and PC William Smith (Berner Street) might well have clapped
eyes on the murderer, but their descriptions were pretty sober and bore no resemblance to the cloak-and-dagger image that perseveres. The first element of that popular iconography came after the murder of Elizabeth Stride, namely ‘the black bag’.
In The Times of 1 October 1888 two witnesses were described as seeing men with such an item. The first was Fanny Mortimer, the resident of 36 Berner Street who, standing at her front door on the morning of the Stride murder, saw Leon Goldstein pass, carrying a black shiny bag which, it was later discovered, contained nothing more sinister than empty cigarette boxes. A second, more suspicious, encounter with a man with a black bag was made by Albert Bachert, who would later become chairman of the Mile End Vigilance Committee:
I was in the Three Nuns Hotel, Aldgate, on Saturday night, when a man got into conversation with me. He asked me questions which now appear to me to have some bearing upon the recent murders. He wanted to know whether I knew what sort of loose women used the public bar at that house, when they usually left the street outside, and where they were in the habit of going. He asked further questions, and from his manner seemed to be up to no good purpose. He appeared to be a shabby genteel sort of man, and was dressed in black clothes. He wore a black felt hat and carried a black bag. We came out together at closing time (12 o’clock), and I left him outside Aldgate Railway Station.19