The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper

by Paul Begg

  I am disgusted that Lord Sutch and his record company should even consider releasing something of such bad taste. It is simply endorsing male violence against women, further glorifying the Ripper who has become some sort of folk hero. As to filming it all on the original site, well that just shows no sensitivity at all to women. I am completely horrified and think it is sick. This is just men jumping on the bandwagon and trying to make money out of something that was an obscene event and should not be remembered fondly … We will do anything we can to have these, and all the books, posters and T-shirts also being produced by other money-grabbing men, banned.12

  A protest march against male violence and the Ripper centenary (planned for September 1988 and running from Bethnal Green to the Ten Bells) was promoted in the East London Advertiser, which promptly got into a contretemps with the AARC by publishing a twelve-part series on the Ripper crimes.13 As a result of these prominent articles, the Advertiser came under fire from the protestors:

  By printing the mortuary photograph of Polly Nichols and recounting explicit details of the mutilation she suffered, you are using the sexual murder of women to entertain and titillate your readership … when will journalists realise that they are contributing to the mass industry of glamorising a murderer?14

  The photograph in question was one of several of the victims that had been recently rediscovered, allowing the public to see for the first time the faces of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride, as well as a second crime-scene image of Mary Kelly. The decision to publish these new images in the local and national press was a controversial one. One reader made her opinion very clear in the Hackney Gazette:

  I do not wish to see photographs of murdered women and cannot understand how their publication can be seen as anything but bad taste. Is it necessary to drag up 100-year-old male violence with such relish?15

  The Gazette’s response was predictably polite:

  Our article neither glorified the crime nor dragged up male violence with relish – at least not on purpose. What the feature attempted to do was publicise new evidence which coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Ripper murders.16

  The demonstration, organized by the AARC, took place on Saturday 24 September 1988 and attracted considerable publicity. The Hackney Gazette stated that ‘people who run guided tours of the murder scenes, writers who glorify the killings and people who think it’s just an interesting story were the targets’. The focus of the 300-strong march was the Ten Bells pub, which, despite having been forced to change its name earlier in the year, was still exhibiting its Ripper memorabilia inside. The local press displayed headlines such as ‘Women slam Ripper moneymakers’ and ‘Up in arms’.17

  The AARC still found itself challenging long-held attitudes to the Ripper in December when the White Chapel Theatre Company staged a musical about the murders at a venue in Whitechapel Road. Objecting to songs such as ‘The Ripper’s Going to Get You (If You Don’t Watch Out)’, the busy protesters held a demonstration outside the theatre, issuing leaflets to the cast and audience saying that such entertainment ‘adds glamour and mystique to these events. It serves to obscure the truth and is insulting’.18

  What protesters were saying was effectively true: such frivolous depictions did indeed convert brutal murder into pantomime and mere ‘harmless fun’. During the height of the centenary, East End prostitutes, who walked the same streets as their predecessors a hundred years before, claimed that some of their clients were requesting to be taken to the Ripper murder sites for sex. Despite finding these requests abhorrent, they duly capitalized on the situation and charged double. They did not mind having their photographs taken by tourists in return for money either!19

  Following the lead set by Madame Tussauds’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’ back in 1980, the London Dungeon in Tooley Street, by London Bridge, opened its ‘Jack the Ripper Experience’ in 1993. Whereas there had been no protests in the Tussaud’s case, this new, even gorier exhibit became the focus of attention for the Campaign Against Pornography (CAP), again demonstrating how times and attitudes had changed during the preceding decade. Their stance was identical to that of the WAVAW and AARC groups during the centenary, attacking the organizers of the exhibition for what they felt was the trivializing of sexual violence as entertainment and titillation. The London Dungeon’s marketing manager was hard pressed to come back with a convincing argument:

  We have given careful consideration as to whether it should be a rose-tinted picture or a realistic one. We think we have done it in an unglamorous way. There’s obviously an element of entertainment, but we believe there are many lessons to be learned from such horrific crimes.20

  ‘Unglamorous’ it most certainly was, and the Dungeon’s graphic waxwork portrayals of the Ripper’s freshly killed victims made for a particularly disturbing spectacle. What didn’t help was the gift shop ‘Ripper Mania’, which sold T-shirts, mugs, hats and other merchandise emblazoned with a sinister man wielding a bloodstained knife. The snack bar was even named ‘Ripper’s Rapid Snacks’, serving the ‘Ripper steak sandwich’, providing further evidence to the dissenters that the London Dungeon had gone too far.

  Such was the confusion of principles which presented themselves to anybody who wanted to dip their toes into the controversial world of Jack the Ripper. The protest groups were attempting to change strongly ingrained ideas about violence against women, using these particular murders as a well-publicized fulcrum for raising awareness. But the creation of the mythical Jack had already preceded the centenary activities by many decades, and he was part of folklore as much as anything. Despite the few changes that resulted in their actions, groups like the AARC, WAVAW and Reclaim the Night would never be completely successful in their attempts to turn the world against the mythology of the Ripper. It would need to be something more considered and less ‘rapid-response’ to achieve that aim.

  The ‘Jack the Ripper and the East End’ exhibition at the Museum in Docklands in 2008 reflected a welcome change in approach to the study of the Whitechapel murders which had been developing gradually since the centenary furore. For so long the Ripper story had been dominated by the media in increasingly outlandish movies, irresponsible populist journalism and the popular imagination of those who were merely content to soak up what that media spoon-fed them. The case of Jack the Ripper, as a subject, was bigger, more wide-ranging and more deserving of a proper evaluation than it had so far been allowed. Through the work of dedicated researchers, it had become a platform for studies into late Victorian social history, the history of law enforcement, immigration, culture and any number of related factors. It was the effect the murders had on these issues that made ‘Ripperology’ such an appealing area for research, something lost on the average tabloid-reader or movie-goer. And thus, in a world dominated by ‘amateur’ historians and crime enthusiasts, the Ripper came under the close scrutiny of academics, perhaps a little late in the game, but nonetheless giving the field a sheen of respectability that so many genuine authors had attempted to bestow upon it for decades.

  The Jack the Ripper conferences in Britain and America had been bringing together like-minded enthusiasts from around the world since 1996, and London’s own ‘Cloak and Dagger Club’21 had done likewise, both presenting guest speakers on a range of topics relating to the case. The internet, via Casebook: Jack the Ripper and other websites, had turned ‘Ripperology’ into a fast-paced research field which often threw new light on not just the case itself, but the events that were the cause and result of the murders. The world of academia duly took notice.22

  The Museum in Docklands exhibition was therefore a product of that shift. Using artefacts from the Museum of London’s own collection as well as original documents from the National Archives and private collectors, it produced an extremely impartial overview of the period and the crimes themselves. As well as items which demonstrated factors in the lives of East End dwellers at the time, the exhibition included notable paraphernalia from
the Ripper case – original police statements, Ripper letters (including the ‘Dear Boss’ letter) and objects belonging to key figures in the investigation. The Macnaghten memoranda and the Maybrick Diary were present, as was Walter Sickert’s painting Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom, but the exhibition did not push any suspects.

  Here was a genuine attempt to put the murders into their historical context to the point of being described by one reviewer as ‘The History of the East End (by stealth)’, as well as an attempt to dispel the wider myths, fictions and misconceptions. A series of lectures was undertaken, featuring established Ripper authors as well as East End historians, writers and academics. All the Whitechapel murder victims were represented, from Emma Smith to Frances Coles, and the final exhibit, a separate area where visitors could view the mortuary photographs through small windows (complete with warning), attempted at least to avoid the crass sensationalism of exhibits like the London Dungeon. Of course, on that score, there was a certain amount of protest from feminist groups; despite the unsensational, perhaps conciliatory nature of the project, it did not quite please everyone:

  I’d rather I hadn’t looked at the cigarette card style, sepia photos of the victims that are displayed at the end of the exhibition. Each one is lined up along a starkly lit, white circular wall that forms a sort of round, mini-gallery. There is a warning on the outside, that some may find the crime scene photos disturbing. They certainly are images I could have done without putting into my head, and now they are an addition to all the other horrors that men inflict on women that I know far too much about. As I walked round the photos, with the name of each woman underneath, like some sort of ghoulish roll call, it felt like a memorial; an unfitting memorial. It made me think that perhaps we do need somewhere to remember our dead, to remember all our sisters fallen in a struggle that has been going on for far too long. But this place is not in a museum exhibition dedicated to one of their killers.

  When I left, I felt rather sullied, and found myself wondering what I’d been part of.23

  The book published to accompany the exhibition24 was a handsome, full-colour affair, featuring essays by a number of academics on different aspects of the case, a companion perhaps to Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, Diversity, a similar, less glossy offering from the previous year.25 Both took a fresh stance from an academic viewpoint, one that is instantly recognizable as being different from that of the conventional ‘Ripperologist’. In fact the Ripper exhibition tie-in book actually had very little about Jack the Ripper in it, preferring to concentrate on analysis of the more tangential subject matter that the Ripper case often throws up. Despite this, one thing was very telling; this may have been a robust and thoughtful look at the subject, but it still needed the man with the top hat in the fog on its cover to deliver the message.

  Looking back at the events of 1988, the field’s most publicly turbulent era, it is strange to imagine how much anger Jack the Ripper provoked in people. Today, opinion seems more circumspect, although it is certain there are still those who, if given the right opportunity, will be happy to dive headlong into the fray and remind us all that, by giving the murders attention, we are glorifying sexual violence, trivializing the lives of the women who died and ignoring real issues. As that now seems to be a rare occurrence, perhaps academia has finally saved ‘Ripperology’ from being filed away with other subjects in the box marked ‘lunatic fringe’.

  19.

  Murderland Revisited

  Should one feel disposed to walk the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields on any given night, at any time of the year, one will invariably pass a guided Jack the Ripper walk. Within a minute of passing the group of avid listeners, it is very likely that you will encounter another, or be caught in the path of a large crowd of chattering students being led to the next site of interest by their guide. Sometimes, Mitre Square is packed with tour groups and Goulston Street can have so many that the only way to continue is to walk in the road. Each guide is in the flow of their narrative, the passer-by catching small soundbites of royal conspiracy, descriptions of mutilation or the name of a familiar suspect. What is apparent is that these guided walks are massively popular and do good business; they are truly a phenomenon and are the biggest manifestation of the continuing fascination with Jack the Ripper today.

  The concept of visiting the Ripper’s murder sites is not a new idea; in fact, it is as old as the murders themselves. In the aftermath of each crime, hundreds of curiosity seekers would assemble at the scene of the latest tragedy to see for themselves the dreadful places, perhaps to catch a glimpse of congealed blood between the flagstones or to find out the latest news and gossip. Following each subsequent murder, crowds would gather at the most recent location and all the other murder sites that had gone before. As if to prove that such curiosity knew no bounds, following the murder in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street residents of neighbouring properties would profit by ‘renting’ out the windows that overlooked the yard to anybody willing to pay a penny to see the place where Annie Chapman met her end at the hands of ‘Leather Apron’, as he was then known.

  No other murder case has so much emphasis on ‘place’ as the Ripper crimes. Some of the names of the murder sites, such as Buck’s Row and Mitre Square, are almost as well known as the names of the women who died there. Only 10 Rillington Place, the slum house in London’s Ladbroke Grove where serial murderer John Christie executed hapless women, has as much infamy. But the house, and Rillington Place itself, are gone. The streets where the bodies of the victims of Jack the Ripper once lay are still there, much altered, but still accessible to the curious. The fascination with Ripper’s London began with the first press descriptions of the murder sites and continues unabated today.

  In 1890 the Pall Mall Budget published a lengthy article entitled ‘Murderland Revisited’,1 a piece conducted in the form of a journalist’s self-guided walk. Many newspaper reports contained detailed descriptions of the murder sites as the murders were happening, giving the reader a sense of the ‘scene of crime’, but this particular report was retrospective in tone and could be seen as one of the first documented examples of exploring the Ripper’s territory in the aftermath of the murders. Although he did not visit Dorset Street, the writer went to Buck’s Row, George Yard, Hanbury Street, Mitre Square, Berner Street and Castle Alley. As well as describing these places in terms of their visual appearance and atmosphere, the author mentioned incidents that occurred during his visits and a little of how the events of two years before had instigated changes, or not, as the case may be. But the Pall Mall Budget journalist was not alone in his perambulations, for within a short time, the residents of Buck’s Row became so frustrated by the undeservedly mean reputation of the street that was perpetuated by the continual visits from curiosity seekers that they petitioned to have the name changed. The Metropolitan Board of Works originally could see no reason to do so, but eventually capitulated and on 25 October 1892 renamed the thoroughfare Durward Street.2 It remains the only name change directly influenced by the notoriety of the murders.

  The year after the Pall Mall Budget article was published Canadian journalist Kathleen Blake Watkins was sent to London and ventured into Whitechapel to visit the Ripper sites, leaving a grim account of her experiences there. Hanbury Street was described as ‘a foul, stinking neighbourhood where the children are stunted little creatures with vicious faces’ and Miller’s Court was accessed via ‘an arch reeking with filth’.3 There she met ‘Lottie’, the current occupant of Mary Kelly’s old room, who had trouble speaking owing to the broken nose her husband had recently given her. Watkins’s passing mention of black stains on the wall of room 13 suggested that Mary Kelly’s bloodstains were still evident after three years. Fifteen years later, a group of distinguished gentlemen from the Crimes Club were taken around the murder sites by Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, accompanied by three detectives; among the attendees were the noted coroner Samuel Ingleby Oddie, writer and critic John Churton Collins and one
Arthur Conan Doyle. Together, they made up what could questionably be regarded as the first organized Ripper tour.4

  By the late 1950s and 1960s, Ripper authors were still fortunate enough to be able to speak to elderly members of the public who remembered the murders or who could recall their parents talking about them. Authors like Daniel Farson and Tom Cullen were often offered to be taken to the sites by these residents, as if they too realized the importance of the locations in the story. Farson, a noted photojournalist as well as writer and broadcaster, seemed particularly taken with the area and took photographs which would ultimately appear in some of his books. At the end of ‘Autumn of Terror’, Cullen produced his own brief equivalent of ‘Murderland Revisited’, creating a highly evocative view of a 1960s Spitalfields still seemingly under the Ripper’s pall:

  It is wandering around the area at night, when the garment factories are empty and the loading bays at Spitalfields Market have shut down, that one feels the presence of Jack the Ripper. At night Commercial Street is now so silent and deserted that in passing Christ Church one fancies that one can hear the death-watch beetles gnawing away at the fabric of this, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s most noble spire. On the corner is the Ten Bells pub where Mary Kelly used to stop by for a quick gin. Standing outside as a customer pushes through the saloon bar door, one listens for the ghostly laughter of Mary Kelly and her sisters in trade. But no, the Ten Bells at night is now quite sedate. Its customers are respectable working-class types who linger long over a pint of beer. An air of stagnation hangs over the entire district. Somehow one feels that Spitalfields is cursed, that this is unhallowed ground.5