Jack the Ripper

[ChrisGeorge]

Thanks Chris. I did recognise Donald Rumbelow from a JTR walking tour I did some years back. And I also welcomed the CGI reconstruction of the murder sites - based on Charles Booth's poverty maps and other contemporaneous material. I'll look forward to the second episode next week.

Hi Dazza

Newer researchers such as Chris Scott, Neal Shelden, Jim Bennett, Robert Clack, Debra Arif, Philip Hutchinson, and Neil Bell are pursuing more factual information about the murders, including finding out more about the victims, the neighborhood where the crimes occurred, and the careers of the policemen involved in the case. Since the late 1990's a number of researchers including those named above and the much-published Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner, have taken a much more objective and careful view of the murders rather than merely publishing books on particular suspects as was the way in the past. Don Rumbelow, whom I have met on a number of occasions, both here in the USA and in England, was a pioneer in publishing a book (The Complete Jack the Ripper, 1975) that took an objective view of the murders. As you may know he is a former City of London policeman and at one time was in charge of the City Police crime museum.

Chris

[dazza]

An excellent appraisal Chris. Thanks.

I find the East End reconstructions fascinating. It's a different way of marshalling all the information we have to date and re-presenting it in a way that will hopefully beg more questions of the established evidence. It's a pity these reconstructions are not online for researcher to virtually walk around in? It could be an ongoing project; a kind of Google Streetview, c.1888

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi Dazza

Actually I can think of several researchers who are in the act of creating such virtual reconstructions. I would not be surprised if before long, then, we might actually be able to walk around a virtual East End of 1888. Meanwhile I can heartily recommend the recent book by Philip Hutchinson and Robert Clack, The London of Jack the Ripper: Then and Now. These gents are responsible for a number of the photographs posted on the Casebook: Jack the Ripper thread on Pictures of the East End.

Chris

[dazza]

Thanks Chris. A very interesting photo archive indeed. Jack the Ripper: Then and Now, looks like a very interesting book, and maybe worth a visit to Amazon. Also, I seem to remember some modern day photographs posted on Casebook, which had older images, and past street lines superimposed on them. I've just had another look on the forum, but couldn't find them. I think these were also published in a book? Any ideas?

Thanks.

Daz

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi Dazza

Andrew Firth has put out a book of now and then pics of the East End. Check out his blog at http://fromthegardenshed.blogspot.com/

Chris

[dazza]

Thanks again Chris. Yes, it was Andrew Firth's work in Past Traces that I was trying to identify. I remember Hawksmoor's Christ Church on the front cover of the book.

Cheers,

Daz

[ChrisGeorge]

Mr. Brough bred bloody good bloodhound pups;
many of their names began with "B"--look it up;
One such pup was by Bobo, out of Betula, by Beckford,
out of Bianca, by Belhus, out of Babette. Good Lord!

Mr. Edwin Brough of Scarborough, England
was a world famous breeder of bloodhounds. Two of
his dogs, Burgho and Burnaby, were involved in a
famous trial held in Hyde Park, London, to try to
track down Jack the Ripper in October 1888.

[ChrisGeorge]

Courtesy of Howard Brown at JtR Forums:

Suspicious Stranger In Shiel Park (Liverpool), from the Western Mail, October 12, 1888.



This same Liverpool report appeared in a number of newspapers around the same date, e.g., the Weekly Herald, 19 October 1888, which adds after the report:

"The steamers leaving Liverpool for American and other ports are now being carefully watched by the police, and the passengers are closely scrutinised by detectives, there being an idea that the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders may endeavour to make his escape via Liverpool."

A number of hoaxers used the Ripper scare to write "Ripper" letters to the authorities -- thousands of such letters were reportedly received after the police published some of the early letters in the newspapers and put them on a broadside. Other mischief-makers used fear of the murderer to scare unwitting people. In a few cases, fear of the Ripper simply overcame some people, as in the following example courtesy of Dave James at JtR Forums--

From the North Eastern Daily Gazette of November 15, 1889:

DIED THROUGH FEAR OF "JACK THE RIPPER"

"The dead body of a woman named Alice Roy, aged 40, of the unfortunate class, was found yesterday in an unoccupied house in Camden-street Birkenhead. For some time past this class of women in Birkenhead have been greatly terrified at the possible prospect of a visit from 'Jack the Ripper', and they have adopted a system of walking in twos and threes at night. The police believe the death to have been caused by a fit, probably brought on by the fear of meeting 'Jack the Ripper'."

[wsteve55]

Fascinating stuff,Chris!

[ChrisGeorge]

Hello Everyone

The Ripperologist web page is now fully operational at http://www.ripperologist.biz/. You can now download a pdf of Ripperologist 118 from the site.

Ripperologist became an electronic magazine with issue 62 and is now published every two months, each issue in full colour and regularly exceeding 100 A4 pages, emailed direct to subscribers. You can receive the magazine in PDF or eBook formats. We will shortly also offer a Print on Demand option, where you can buy a hardcopy from our site.

For the most informed opinion, the latest news and views, subscribe now!

Chris

[dazza]

Excellent work Chris

[ChrisGeorge]

JtR Forums site owner Howard Brown has been posting in a thread on his site reports on Jack the Ripper that appeared in the Liverpool Mercury beginning in 1888 and he has given me permission to post them here. While a lot of the reports give the same information that appeared in countless newspapers worldwide, I thought I would post some of the shorter more interesting and Liverpool-specific articles.

Liverpool Mercury
September 4, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
September 13, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
September 19, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
September 19, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
October 6, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
October 6, 1888
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[ChrisGeorge]

Here are some more of the articles that JtR Forums site owner Howard Brown has been posting in a thread on his site that appeared in the Liverpool Mercury beginning in 1888. As noted before, with permission from Howard, I am posting some of the shorter articles rather than the longer articles that just carry information on the case that appeared elsewhere.

Liverpool Mercury
October 9, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
October 9, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
October 12, 1888
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[Oudeis]

As, perhaps, by way of a little light relief. From here...

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/ess...ish-murder.htm

Decline of the English Murder
by George Orwell
Tribune, 15 February 1946


It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?

Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr. Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. In addition, in 1919 or thereabouts, there was another very celebrated case which fits into the general pattern but which I had better not mention by name, because the accused man was acquitted.

Of the above-mentioned nine cases, at least four have had successful novels based on them, one has been made into a popular melodrama, and the amount of literature surrounding them, in the form of newspaper write-ups, criminological treatises and reminiscences by lawyers and police officers, would make a considerable library. It is difficult to believe that any recent English crime will be remembered so long and so intimately, and not only because the violence of external events has made murder seem unimportant, but because the prevalent type of crime seems to be changing. The principal cause célèbre of the war years was the so-called Cleft Chin Murder, which has now been written up in a popular booklet; the verbatim account of the trial was published some time last year by Messrs. Jarrolds with an introduction by Mr. Bechhofer Roberts. Before returning to this pitiful and sordid case, which is only interesting from a sociological and perhaps a legal point of view, let me try to define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they say fretfully that "you never seem to get a good murder nowadays".

In considering the nine murders I named above, one can start by excluding the Jack the Ripper case, which is in a class by itself. Of the other eight, six were poisoning cases, and eight of the ten criminals belonged to the middle class. In one way or another, sex was a powerful motive in all but two cases, and in at least four cases respectability — the desire to gain a secure position in life, or not to forfeit one's social position by some scandal such as a divorce — was one of the main reasons for committing murder. In more than half the cases, the object was to get hold of a certain known sum of money such as a legacy or an insurance policy, but the amount involved was nearly always small. In most of the cases the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of careful investigations which started off with the suspicions of neighbours or relatives; and in nearly every case there was some dramatic coincidence, in which the finger of Providence could be clearly seen, or one of those episodes that no novelist would dare to make up, such as Crippen's flight across the Atlantic with his mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith playing "Nearer, my God, to Thee" on the harmonium while one of his wives was drowning in the next room. The background of all these crimes, except Neill Cream's, was essentially domestic; of twelve victims, seven were either wife or husband of the murderer.

With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the "perfect" murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. Most of the crimes mentioned above have a touch of this atmosphere, and in three cases, including the one I referred to but did not name, the story approximates to the one I have outlined.

Now compare the Cleft Chin Murder. There is no depth of feeling in it. It was almost chance that the two people concerned committed that particular murder, and it was only by good luck that they did not commit several others. The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the American film. The two culprits were an eighteen-year-old ex-waitress named Elizabeth Jones, and an American army deserter, posing as an officer, named Karl Hulten. They were only together for six days, and it seems doubtful whether, until they were arrested, they even learned one another's true names. They met casually in a teashop, and that night went out for a ride in a stolen army truck. Jones described herself as a strip-tease artist, which was not strictly true (she had given one unsuccessful performance in this line); and declared that she wanted to do something dangerous, "like being a gun-moll." Hulten described himself as a big-time Chicago gangster, which was also untrue. They met a girl bicycling along the road, and to show how tough he was Hulten ran over her with his truck, after which the pair robbed her of the few shillings that were on her. On another occasion they knocked out a girl to whom they had offered a lift, took her coat and handbag and threw her into a river. Finally, in the most wanton way, they murdered a taxi-driver who happened to have £8 in his pocket. Soon afterwards they parted. Hulten was caught because he had foolishly kept the dead man's car, and Jones made spontaneous confessions to the police. In court each prisoner incriminated the other. In between crimes, both of them seem to have behaved with the utmost callousness: they spent the dead taxi-driver's £8 at the dog races.

Judging from her letters, the girl's case has a certain amount of psychological interest, but this murder probably captured the headlines because it provided distraction amid the doodle-bugs and the anxieties of the Battle of France. Jones and Hulten committed their murder to the tune of V1, and were convicted to the tune of V2. There was also considerable excitement because — as has become usual in England — the man was sentenced to death and the girl to imprisonment. According to Mr. Raymond, the reprieving of Jones caused widespread indignation and streams of telegrams to the Home Secretary: in her native town, "SHE SHOULD HANG" was chalked on the walls beside pictures of a figure dangling from a gallows. Considering that only ten women have been hanged in Britain this century, and that the practice has gone out largely because of popular feeling against it, it is difficult not to feel that this clamour to hang an eighteen-year-old girl was due partly to the brutalizing effects of war. Indeed, the whole meaningless story, with its atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period.

Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder of recent years should have been committed by an American and an English girl who had become partly Americanized. But it is difficult to believe that this case will be so long remembered as the old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.

Source: CW18-2900

[ChrisGeorge]

Thanks for that interesting post of the Orwell article on British murder. I have taken the liberty of posting it at JtR Forums.

Liverpool Mercury
October 13, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
October 15, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
October 15, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
October 16, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
October 17, 1888
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Liverpool Mercury
October 19, 1888
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