by Paul Begg
With the old residents of the East End slowly passing away, 1970 saw the advent of the true organized Ripper tour. Keith Baverstock, an Australian liaison officer for a travel agency who was interested in the more unusual sights of London, created several different tours which aimed to take the walker away from the more hackneyed London tourist destinations and even included one devoted to unusual public conveniences. Baverstock’s project eventually became London Walks, and the Jack the Ripper tour was his first walk, taking place in August 1970:
‘The head had nearly been cut off, and the body had been disembowelled. And I don’t know if anybody here is squeamish, but certain parts of the female anatomy had been removed,’ the guide said with relish, yesterday afternoon. The crowd of about 30 pressed happily closer, anxious to have their flesh made to creep. This was that most curious of English Sunday afternoon entertainments, a trip for tourists around Whitechapel in the bloodstained footprints of Jack the Ripper, fee 5s, children under 10 free. Footfalls echoed uneasily in the memory, hurrying footfalls of a tall man in a dark cloak wearing a top hat, carrying a black bag, and hiding something long and glinting silver beneath his cloak.6
Baverstock also took visitors to Rillington Place, which would remain standing for one more year. Whether these crime-based tours attracted criticism is not clear, but the following year Baverstock was reported as saying that his tours were not morbid and that he would never conduct tours around more modern cases.7 This declaration demonstrated a peculiar dichotomy in that most murders, particularly recent ones, or those where the perpetrators were caught, were ‘out of bounds’ and yet Jack the Ripper was considered acceptable. The mythology of Jack the Ripper had pretty much won over, and he was now folklore, harmless fun from the world of foggy Victorian melodrama.
Those curious members of the public who had chosen to take Keith Baverstock’s Ripper walks in the early 1970s would be the last to see many of the locations as they once were. Slum clearance programmes had seen to it that in a very brief period of time George Yard Buildings, 29 Hanbury Street, parts of Mitre Square and Durward Street had disappeared, and the redevelopment of the East End was seen as being a major threat to the success of Jack the Ripper tours. Guides began to find it increasingly difficult to ‘recapture that sense of melodrama on a site overshadowed by a multi-storey car park or concrete office block’.8 London Walks had by that time been joined by London Unlimited; however, such was the pessimistic outlook that the latter was forced to close. The Daily Telegraph joined eighty tourists on their last tour in August 1974, believing it had attended ‘the last Ripper ramble’.
But the draw of Jack the Ripper meant that there was still a story to be told, and a good one at that. Unperturbed by the disappearance of key locations, surviving tour companies continued their walks, and throughout the early to mid-1980s the industry began to grow. Companies like City Walks and Footsteps realized that a Ripper walk was essential to their business. Often starting at Whitechapel Underground station, many of the tours would take in the less central locations such as Durward Street and nearby Wood’s Buildings. The former Buck’s Row was at this time entirely derelict, and the overpowering gloom of the area complemented the public desire to be ‘spooked’ by the ambience of the Ripper’s London. Wood’s Buildings, a narrow, urine-soaked alley, was the perfect atmospheric place to recount the activities of the prostitutes, as well as supplying customers with the appropriate menace.
Jack the Ripper tours came under a fair amount of flak during the centenary protests, but one imagines that the centenary itself would have contributed so significantly to the success of these walks that the industry would have been too strong for the protestors to take down. So many people really did want to visit the East End and hear the Ripper story in its original context, or at least an atmospheric and entertaining version of it, and so a cycle of supply and demand was instigated. By the end of the 1980s enough companies were operating to make the continual night-time presence of such large groups of tourists a cause for concern. Spitalfields, which for so long had been run down and neglected, had begun to undergo a change, as the old Georgian houses of Fournier Street, Wilkes Street and Princelet Street were slowly being bought by wealthy professionals, the new owners gradually restoring the houses to their former glory. The rejuvenation of Spitalfields as a place to live, rather than just a place to toil, was gradual at first, but the incoming residents of this once maligned and neglected area of London would make their opinions heard and pose a potential threat to the Ripper tour industry.
The centenary furore did little to quash the abiding fascination with Ripper’s London. The guided walks were flourishing and steadily gaining publicity. Tabloid journalism was enamoured of the concept of supposed Ripper experts taking hordes of excitable tourists around the East End and was quick to inject long-held fears into the proceedings, playing into the hands of those who believed (rather irrationally, considering the passing of a century) that, if the Ripper was never caught, then he must still be at large! ‘It’s not until you actually stand on the murder spot and hear the story once more, that you start to shiver and wonder if you should take a cab home …’8
And therein lay the success of the Ripper tour. These guided walks would promote the fact that the participant was ‘walking in the footsteps of the Ripper’ or ‘on the trail of the Ripper’, perhaps following the scent as detectives would have done back in 1888. In other words, everybody had an opportunity of succeeding where Scotland Yard had failed. And visiting the murder sites, regardless of the changes, was part of that ‘ongoing investigation’. It is as though the practically non-existent scene-of-crime analysis of the Victorian police had left unfinished business and that visitors need to see these places to fully understand the context of the crimes. Of course, another obvious reason for the interest in the Ripper’s haunts is the fact that they are so accessible. Most of his victims were found in publicly accessible places, and even now, if one is so disposed, one can stand on the very spots where Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes and Kelly met their terrible fates. And many who visit the East End on these guided walks also want atmosphere, the essence instilled into the Ripper story by so many books and films, but with the changes to the area it is not always a promise that is easy to live up to.
This emphasis on ‘sense of place’ could be considered as making these Ripper tours, like other tourist-centred walks, mass-marketed exercises in ‘psychogeography’.9 As with the numerous ghost walks of York and Edinburgh, the walker is seeking an appropriate feeling from the urban environment. The desire to have the places visited appear and feel just as they would have all those years ago is a strong one, sometimes leading to a sense of disappointment when that desire goes unfulfilled. Authors such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd have used Jack the Ripper’s London in their work, significantly so in the case of the former, whose novel White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings10 repeatedly brings the reader on to the streets, digging up old associations and myths. Parts of the narrative recount the author’s perambulations across Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and the names of the murder sites appear sporadically, sometimes repeated mantra-like, showing us that the legend of Jack is always part of that particular urban context.
The significance of sites where death has occurred is also another principle that must be considered, and J. F. Brewer’s The Curse upon Mitre Square gave an early account of the importance of Catherine Eddowes’s murder site as a place of ritual sacrifice, tainted by the blood of innocents across the centuries. From the grand scale of the battlefields of northern France, where millions fell during the First World War, to the more personal micro-memorials of flowers tied to lampposts signifying the scene of a fatal car crash, locations of sudden death maintain a power and mystique that the human psyche, for all the interference of the modern world, can still understand. To that effect, the Whitechapel murder sites have often been given improvised memorials, from stencilled graffiti renaming the location after its victim (‘Mary Ann Nichols Row’
and ‘Mary Jane Kelly Court’, for example) to small plaques recording the women by name, announcing that they ‘died here’. These memorials are often removed or covered up soon after they appear mysteriously, and a more lasting monument to the victims of Jack the Ripper has long been sought by some.
By the mid-1990s that all-important urban milieu of the East End had begun to change significantly. Both Spitalfields market and the Truman Brewery had closed and were now being revamped as centres for leisure and the arts. These developments were now catering for tourists as well as a rapidly growing young crowd of artists and new-media professionals. To these new visitors and residents, Jack the Ripper was an anathema, and, annoyed by the regular tours outside their homes every night, they rose up in protest. The first complaint was lodged with the council in January 1996: one resident was quick to dispel the belief that visiting tourists injected much-needed money into the area:
The idea that the area will be regenerated by Jack the Ripper walking tours is pure rubbish. The people who go on these tours spend an hour walking the street being told in grisly detail about the murder of prostitutes, buy a pint in the sponsoring pub, then leave with the image of the East End as a seedy, dangerous red-light district firmly enforced in their minds.11
The crunch year was 1996. With so many groups of anything up to 200 people being led around the streets, the council felt that it might have to act. It was even thought at one point that the tours might be banned altogether. The East London Advertiser gave the new protesters a voice, and for several months during the spring and summer of 1996 the controversy over what to do with these disruptive tours was almost a constant feature on their pages. Even the national press picked up on the story when the Sunday Telegraph interviewed residents affected: ‘It’s a particularly nefarious and disgusting form of tourism. It wouldn’t be tolerated at the scene of Fred West’s crimes or in Dunblane: the fact that it’s 100 years old doesn’t make it quaint.’12
Nobody ever did say it was quaint, but the distinction was made, as Keith Baverstock did in 1971, between the Ripper crimes of 1888 and those perpetrated in living memory with the murderers identified and those affected by them still alive. It may well be significant that the rise of the Jack the Ripper tour began at a time when those directly affected by his crimes were no longer around to voice their dissent.
Eventually the situation reached bursting point when tour company owners met with Tower Hamlets council to thrash out a code of practice, promoting the use of sanctioned ‘Blue Badge’ guides to squeeze out the unofficial operators who were seen as being irresponsible and disruptive and ensuring that groups did not congregate outside private homes.13 But such a code was difficult to enforce, because noise from the human voice did not constitute a statutory nuisance under the Environmental Protection Act, and it appears that no solution, or code, was forthcoming. By the new millennium, Ripper tours were even more numerous, and even the Ten Bells, once the Mecca for tour groups, felt compelled to put a sign up to the effect that it would not welcome tours of more than ten people without prior arrangement. By now, Spitalfields had become a burgeoning leisure area, with the eateries of the old market and the bars and curry houses of Brick Lane attracting visitors from far and wide. The Ten Bells, situated as it was in the middle and more popular than ever, no longer needed the extra clientele the Ripper tours so readily supplied in previous decades. Eventually, the pub would completely distance itself from its own dubious history. The tidal wave of guided walks which descended upon the area night after night presented a bizarre scenario on the streets of the East End, as documented by Jonathan Edwards in the Daily Mail in 2007:
An army walked up Bell Lane behind their tour guide. They were going north. It clashed with another army going east at Spitalfields. Then there was a coachload of Americans in Fournier Street. The Bell Lane mob were veered right by the guide and avoided them.
More coaches rolled in. A throng marched through from the Tower of London. Guides like generals shifted the routes of their people. ‘We’ll keep out of Hanbury Street since you can’t move there,’ one of the guides was saying.
Whole streets were choked with tour groups trying not to mingle and tripping on kerbsides hidden under a thousand pairs of feet. It was mayhem in Ripper country the other Friday night. Streets seething and more crowded than they had ever been in Jack’s days.14
It did indeed seem like mayhem, proving that, despite the regular protests, there really was little anybody could do to quash interest in Jack the Ripper, whatever forms that interest took.
Presently, the Ripper walks continue to flourish, and there seems to be no stopping them. Thousands of people must attend these walks every week, and there are now many companies to choose from. Thanks to the internet, a company name is not a necessary requirement, and hardly a month goes by without some new individual appearing on the streets with a small, private group. There are tours in Spanish, French and Italian, coachloads of students from the European mainland and school groups getting an on-the-spot rundown of the murders to complement their GCSE history coursework. The strangest version of the Ripper tour is that which is conducted as a pub crawl: the office party with a difference or the hen-party for screaming girls, where everybody is essentially out for a night of serious drinking. They request to be taken around the East End, drinks in hand, only to get increasingly inebriated as the guide struggles to tell them a story of tragedy and brutality. For these people, Jack the Ripper never really existed; he is truly Jack the Myth, the figure from Victorian melodrama or the kitsch killer from a dozen tacky Hammer films. With similar lack of understanding of the true nature of these crimes, parents sometimes take small children on the tours, unaware that the guide will unavoidably have to speak of prostitution and the removal of sexual organs. Whether any of these people bring significant revenue to an area which is already bursting with bars, restaurants and flea markets is open for debate, but it does introduce some to a part of London they may never have traversed otherwise, one that has a rich history beyond the Ripper legend.
As for the guides themselves, they are multifarious in their approach. Undoubtedly there are some whose grasp of the basic facts takes a back seat to the job of entertaining; some have the knowledge through experience, others from learning a guide script. With so many in the streets at any one time, taking a group to a specific location can be difficult; the closure of Dorset Street for redevelopment in 2012 has created a focus for groups at the Crispin Street end, resulting in congestion; ‘Ripper’s Corner’ in Mitre Square is often the scene of some mad dash to claim the all-important spot, made harder by ongoing redevelopment. On Halloween, the busiest night of the Ripper tour calendar, Mitre Square fills up to the point where there is literally nowhere to go. The push to be in the right place at the right time can cause some awkward moments and is part and parcel of some strange jockeying, where every Ripper tour guide would like to think they are more deserving of getting the exact spot, and there appears to be some unwritten hierarchy where guides assume they are delivering the ultimate experience and are thus better than the rest.
Perhaps the best method of measuring the way that Jack the Ripper, the reality and the myth, is perceived by the world at large is by observing the participants of these guided walks. Strangely enough, despite the previous protests about promoting violence towards women, it is women who seem to be most interested, and on pre-booked tours female names considerably outnumber male ones on the guest list. Some attendees appear genuinely shocked when told of the social conditions or the victims’ injuries, as though their opinions on the Ripper have been fabricated from watching too many stylized horror movies (which is usually the case). A tour guide’s ears will frequently ring with the question ‘Wasn’t he something to do with the Royal Family?’ Other suspects get mentioned too, however. Occasionally one is asked about ‘the American’ or ‘that bloke from Liverpool’; Montague Druitt becomes the ‘guy that drowned himself’, Kosminski is ‘the one that the police tho
ught it was’, and the Duke of Clarence is usually rendered as ‘the Prince of Wales or something’. The guide ends up filling in the blanks, but then after all that should be part of the job.
One final observation: the different walking tours, vying for business in an oversaturated market, stake their pitch with varying claims for prevalence in the field. Whether they are ‘Blue Badge’ guides, published authors or possessed of decades of experience, augmented by photographs, projectors, sound effects or costumes, most of these tour operators have one thing in common. No matter how they describe themselves, their marketing material usually depicts a foggy street, a solitary gas lamp or splash of blood; and in the middle walks the man with the top hat, cape, bag and glinting knife. It’s that stalker in the dark again, the icon of fear – the mythical Jack that still haunts the shadows.
Afterword
London, June 2013
The peeling office blocks of this small City of London square, having lain empty for half a decade, stand shrouded in scaffolding and tarpaulins. At ground level, large metal containers lie stacked upon each other, and hoardings and makeshift fencing have blocked entrances and reduced the size of the square to the point of awkwardness. To the north-east, the service road at the rear of the Spitalfields Fruit and Wool Exchange is blocked off by similar metallic fencing, and the doors and windows of the Exchange building itself are boarded up with green panelling. Signs on the fencing tell us that guard dogs are in operation and a single security guard is seen strolling forgetfully across the lonely thoroughfare. Further east, behind Whitechapel Underground station, cranes and drills work feverishly in and around the narrow street. Metal hoardings hide great industry, and huge lorries struggle to back into the building sites from which emanates the sound of the construction of yet another ‘grand project’.