Ripperologist 140

No.
140 October 2014
“So Help Me God”

NEIL BELL examines what it took
to become a Metropolitan Policeman
WALTER MOSLEY and SCOTT NELSON are Dressed to Kill

DAVID GREEN on The Man with the Black Bag
JAN BONDESON reopens his Murder House Casebook
OBITUARY OF CAMILLE WOLFF | NINA AND HOWARD BROWN

SPITALFIELDS LIFE | PRESS TRAWL | VICTORIAN FICTION
Ripperologist 118 January 2011 1

Quote for the month
“I’d like Johnny Depp to play me in the film of our story, but he would need
to cut his hair – and maybe he’d need to Skype me at Liverpool John Moores
University so he could work on my Finnish accent!”
Dr Jari Louhelainen’s tongue in cheek description of having the spotlight shine his way following the DNA claims.
www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/jack-ripper-johnny-depp-tim-7947235
Ripperologist 140
October 2014
GUEST EDITORIAL: “EIGHTEEN OUT OF
TWELVE APOSTLES ARE BURIED IN SPAIN” EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Adam Wood
by Jon Rees
EDITORS
“SO HELP ME GOD”:
Gareth Williams
BECOMING A METROPOLITAN POLICEMAN
Eduardo Zinna
by Neil Bell
REVIEWS EDITOR
DRESSED TO KILL
Paul Begg
by Walter Mosley and Scott Nelson
EDITOR-AT-LARGE
THE MAN WITH THE BLACK BAG:
Christopher T George
DR ERIC JONES-EVANS AND
HIS FORGOTTEN JACK THE RIPPER PLAY COLUMNISTS
by David Green Nina and Howard Brown
Chris Scott
FROM THE CASEBOOK OF A MURDER HOUSE DETECTIVE:
The Gentle Author
MURDER AND MYSTERY IN LADBROKE GROVE
and ARTWORK
THE PIMLICO MURDER, 1876 Adam Wood
by Jan Bondeson
BIG APPLE WHITECHAPEL
Nina and Howard Brown Follow the latest news at
www.facebook.com/ripperologist
CHRIS SCOTT’S PRESS TRAWL
Ripperologist magazine is free of
The Scotsman special, Part Four charge. To be added to the mailing list,
send an email to contact@ripperologist.
OBITUARY: CAMILLE WOLFF
biz.
I BEG TO REPORT: NEWS ROUNDUP Back issues will be available shortly on
our website at www.ripperologist.biz
THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S SPITALFIELDS LIFE
To contribute an article, please email
VICTORIAN FICTION: A TORTURE BY HOPE us at contact@ripperologist.biz
by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
ADVERTISING Contact us for advertising
REVIEWS rates.
Naming Jack the Ripper and more! www.ripperologist.biz
We would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance given by the following people in the production of this issue of Ripperologist: Paul Daniel, Loretta Lay, Jon
Rees, Edward Stow and the Gentle Author. Thank you!
The views, conclusions and opinions expressed in signed articles, essays, letters and other items published in Ripperologist are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views, conclusions and opinions of Ripperologist or its editors. The views, conclusions and opinions expressed in unsigned articles, essays, news
reports, reviews and other items published in Ripperologist are the responsibility of Ripperologist and its editorial team.
We occasionally use material we believe has been placed in the public domain. It is not always possible to identify and contact the copyright holder; if you claim
ownership of something we have published we will be pleased to make a proper acknowledgement.
The contents of Ripperologist No. 140, October 2014, including the compilation of all materials and the unsigned articles, essays, news reports, reviews and other
items are copyright © 2014 Ripperologist. The authors of signed articles, essays, letters, news reports, reviews and other items retain the copyright of their respective
contributions. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise circulated in any form or
by any means, including digital, electronic, printed, mechanical, photocopying, recording or any other, without the prior permission in writing of Ripperologist. The
unauthorised reproduction or circulation of this publication or any part thereof, whether for monetary gain or not, is strictly
Ripperologist 118prohibited
Januaryand may constitute copyright
2011 2
infringement as defined in domestic laws and international agreements and give rise to civil liability and criminal prosecution.
“Eighteen out of
Twelve Apostles
are Buried in Spain”
The Problem with Ripper Relics
GUEST EDITORIAL by JON REES
Recently myself and a group of fellow Ripperologists visited St Nicholas’ Parish Church in Chiswick
and were taken on a tour by one of the wardens. A fascinating building full of history, the warden
told us a story of when the church was being rebuilt in the 19th century and the then vicar was
approached by a man who offered to sell him stained glass taken from the windows of Cologne
Cathedral during a recent refurbishment. The vicar agreed, and today the window sits on the south
side of the Chapel. The church has always promoted this window (which, while in a different style
from the rest of the church, is very pretty and eye catching) as being a relic of Cologne Cathedral
for over a century.
A couple of years ago they were visited by a PHD student who was
doing his thesis on stained glass windows and had come to look at the
ones they housed. They were very eager to show him the “window that
came from Cologne Cathedral” to which he smiled and said “Oh, you have
one of those windows? With Jesus dressed in blue and St John? If I had
a pound for every church I’ve been to that claims to have that window
from Cologne I’d be a rich man...” It turns out that in the 19th century
there was a UK-wide phenomenon where someone would call around to
vicars whose churches were being built or renovated and offer to sell
them a window from Cologne Cathedral! It was a massive con and none
of the windows had probably ever been anywhere near the Cathedral;
if you took all of these windows you could replace the actual ones in
Cologne many times over (and it is a large building!). Chiswick’s window
is quite special as it apparently is the only one in London, whereas they
are quite common “up North”. At least it’s a pretty window… Cologne Cathedral
“If we were to collect all these pieces of the true cross exhibited in various parts, they would form a whole
ship’s cargo. The Gospel testifies that the cross could be borne by one single individual; how glaring, then, is
the audacity now to pretend to display more relics of wood than three hundred men could carry!”
John Calvin, 1328
John Calvin was, of course, talking about the cult of Religious relics that dominated the medieval Christian church.
From true crosses, shrouds, holy grails, spears, blood and nails to bones of Saints, there was a flourishing trade in buying,
selling and worshipping these items, especially among Crusaders. They gave a connection to the soldiers who left their
homes and travelled thousands of miles to fight and often die, not for land or power (in the eyes of the majority of the
“ordinary” Crusader anyway), but as a sacrifice to their God and Saints.
700 years later have we learnt any better? (the Catholic Church hasn’t, as many Catholic Churches have their own
in-house relic, often a piece of the True Cross). It is, as Martin Luther apparently once said, “Eighteen out of twelve
apostles are buried in Spain”.
Ripperologist 140 October 2014 1

Over the past couple of decades, an influx of items claiming to have belonged to either Jack the Ripper or his
victims have appeared on the horizon. These normally have, at best, questionable provenance but sometimes they
have interesting tales to tell. Look at the debate surrounding the Maybrick Diary and Watch. Twenty years after their
discovery we still have questions about their true origins which may never be answered. Then there is Jack the Ripper’s
knife owned by Donald Rumbleow. Supposedly used as a gardening tool for years, it was still of enough interest that the
Docklands Museum put it on display for their Jack the Ripper and the East End exhibition in 2008.
During the past few years there has been less interest in items owned by the killer (though 1888 pennies do still pop
up on Ebay with the claim “Could this have been owned by Jack the Ripper?”), and instead a growing number of relics
claiming to have been former property of the victims. This link to the victims of course gives us a solid connection to
them (and possibly their killer), so there have often been suggestions of DNA examination in connection with them.
First was a lock of Catherine Eddowes’s hair which came into the possession of Stephen Ryder in 2005. The story
behind this item was it was given to Stephen by a former police officer and High Court Judge’s Clerk along with other
items originally from the Mitre public house near Mitre Square. In a plain wooden frame about 3 feet square the hair was
labelled as follows: “Taken from Catherine Eddowes after her body was removed from close by Mitre Sq after her murder
as 1st victim of Jack the Ripper Aug 1888. Received by the Central Newys Agency via Commercial Road Morge for th sum
of 1gn.” The history of the item was that a friend of the police officer had been sold this and other items by a group of
Irishmen who claimed to have found it in a tin box in the Mitre pub as they were knocking it down. The accuracy of the
label made Ryder think that it was a modern hoax (research into the other items also indicated this), but he nevertheless
had it examined for DNA evidence by Australian pathologist Dr Ian Findlay, who had pioneered a method of extracting
DNA from hair up to 160 years old. The results were disappointing with the profiles being partial or contaminated.
Plait claimed to have been cut from Catherine Eddowes’ head following her murder
Courtesy Stephen Ryder
Then came the supposed locket belonging to Mary Kelly. The owner, Antonia Alexander, claims to be Mary Kelly’s
great-great-great-granddaughter, and says she found the locket in a box of her grandmother’s possessions. The locket
contained a picture of Sir John Williams, who Alexander claims was Jack the Ripper. Tellingly, no one has ever seen the
locket outside the family and only a mockup of it appears in Ms Alexander’s book. The sterling work of Jennifer Shelden
that appeared in the October 2013 issue of Ripperologist has all but debunked this artefact as being nonsense.
And of course, we have the recent headline-hitting shawl supposedly belonging to Catherine Eddowes. The shawl
(though some have argued at its size it is closer to a table runner) is made of silk and printed with Michaelmas Daisies.
This shawl has been known about for close to twenty years and comes from the descendants of Amos Simpson. Simpson
was an Acting Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police serving in N Division (Islington). According to the family tradition,
Simpson was one of the officers who attended the scene of Catherine Eddowes murder in Mitre Square and accompanied
her body to the mortuary. En route he asked if he could take the shawl to give to his wife who was a seamstress and his
request was apparently granted. On arriving home with this very thoughtful gift, his wife was utterly horrified at the
thought of using this bloodstained fabric but instead of throwing it out, locked it in a cupboard for many years. It was

subsequently passed down through the generations, and after a brief stint in the Scotland Yard
Black Museum in the 1990s (where due to its dubious provenance it was not displayed) the
family reclaimed it and finally sold it at auction in 2007 to the current owner Russell Edwards.
It is Mr Edwards’s book and research, together with forensic testing from Dr Jari
Louhelainen, that have taken the newspapers by storm as they have found a mitochondrial
DNA match between material on the shawl and not only Catherine Eddowes’s descendent,
but also a relative of suspect Aaron Kosminski. The likelihood of this being definitive proof
of the identity of Jack the Ripper is still being debated and more information needs to be
forthcoming on the salient details, but the questions of provenance remain as it has not
been adequately explained: a) Why Simpson would have been in Mitre Square; b) Why he was
allowed to walk off with a key piece of evidence; and c) Just why he thought a blood- and
semen- stained garment would be a nice gift for his wife in the first place?
Hot on the tail of these revelations is another relic allegedly connected to one of the
victims. Fiona Kendall, the great-granddaughter of John McCarthy, the owner of 13 Miller’s
Court, claims to own a fish-knife that was once in the possession of Mary Jane Kelly. According
to the family story, when McCarthy cleared out Mary’s possessions following her murder he
found some pawn tickets. Knowing the pawnbroker, he retrieved the pawned items which proved to be various knick
knacks including silver tie pins and a silver fish-knife with a wooden handle. McCarthy believed the tie pins belonged to
a Frenchman whom Mary had known and were quite valuable, and so sold them. He kept the fish-knife to use as a letter
opener, as did his son Steve and grandson John, Fiona’s father. Upon the death of her father in the early 1980s, Fiona
came into possession of the knife and has also used it as a letter opener since.
Fiona has given the knife to

the Whitechapel Society 1888
for auction at their forthcoming
conference in Salisbury on the
condition the proceeds be given
to charity. When you consider that
a shawl supposedly belonging to
Catherine Eddowes was sold for
thousands despite very dubious
provenance, this knife, with its
much better provenance, could
be worth a lot more to the right
bidder.
There are however still

problems in that: despite Fiona’s
known links to McCarthy and the
letter of provenance she has
written, the history of the object Knife claimed to have belonged to Mary Kelly
Courtesy The Whitechapel Society
is not verifiable so it is still just
another family story. However, this particular family story does seem to fit the facts. She was in debt (notably to
McCarthy himself) and with little to no regular income so may well have been pawning her more valuable possessions.
She is believed to have had a Frenchman as a client who took her to Paris, so the tie pins may also fit.
Some Ripperologists have been quick to point out though that any of Kelly’s possessions would have been taken into
evidence by the police and that Abberline made a detailed inventory of the contents of the room, which did not contain
pawn tickets. There is the possibility though that Kelly gave the tickets to McCarthy himself to help pay the backdated
rent (especially if she knew the tie pins were worth something) which is how they came into his possession and the story
has simply been altered in the retelling through the generations. This would still fit the known facts, and this fish-knife-
cum-letter-opener is still the most believable relic of the victims we have yet encountered.
If any are real then this is the type of story that will accompany it.

“So Help Me God”
Becoming a Metropolitan Policeman
By NEIL BELL
In 1877 the Metropolitan police force endured a scandal which shook its very core and forced a
reshaping of the Detective Branch into the organisation we know today as the Criminal Investigation
Department - CID for short. The infamous Trial of the Detectives scandal, as it was to be known,
highlighted that there was still a plague of corruption in within the policing system which had
never really been shaken off since the
formation of the Metropolitan Police,
despite Peel’s vision and drive to do
so.
The scandal was revealed after wealthy
Parisienne Madame de Goncourt lost £10,000
(and exposed to potentially losing a further
£30,000) to two British Conmen named Harry
Benson and William Kurr during a Horse
Racing system betting scam. Soon Scotland
Yard became involved and tried to pursue
the two men across Europe in order to arrest
them. Superintendent Adolphus Williamson1
sent one of his most trusted men, Chief
Inspector Nathan Druscovich, to Amsterdam
in order to bring back the already arrested
Benson and hunt down the elusive Kurr.
Druscovich, half Moldavian and half English,
had originally joined the Met as a Police
Constable. Druscovich was multilingual and
accordingly was sometimes given special
duties centred on his language skills.2
During the World Exhibition of 1862 he took
an unlikely step in his career by becoming
a clerk working for the Superintendent’s
Office.3 However, by 1865 Druscovich was
employed fully by the Detective Branch as a
The participants in the Detective Branch scandal
Detective Constable second class.
1 Adolphus Williamson (1830-1889) Know affectionately as ‘Dolly’, Superintendent in the Metropolitan Force at the time of the Turf
Fraud Scandal, becoming Chief Constable of CID in 1886. A well respected policeman, who had worked his way up through the
ranks from constable throughout 39 years of dedicated service. Died in office in 1889.
2 Druscovich had learnt Moldovan from his father, and was employed by his Uncle on a trading Vessel across the Mediterranean Sea
as a youth. He also worked for the British Consulate in Wallichia, Romania for a period thus enabling him to pick up many
languages.
3 Shpayer-Makov Haia The Ascent of the Victorian Detective- Police Sleuths in the Victorian and Edwardian era (2011).

The introduction of the Extradition Act in 1870 had highlighted the Met’s need for translators, as they were
increasingly dealing with foreigners in criminal and policing matters. Druscovich, with his practical language
abilities, was a rare commodity. He was more than a translator, however. Druscovich gradually rose to the rank of
Detective Inspector, and as he set off in pursuit of Benson and Kurr he had Williamson’s utmost trust. Eventually
Druscovich bought back Benson (albeit with some difficulty). Kurr, though, remained elusive. Three Scotland Yard
men, Detective Sergeants Manton, Littlechild and Roots,4 were then sent in pursuit of Kurr. Several times they
prepared to pounce on their man, but over and over again Kurr vanished. Eventually, they managed to pick Kurr
up in Edinburgh. The difficulties Scotland Yard had experienced in arresting these men began to raise suspicions,
and rightly so. The reality, as told to Scotland Yard officials by Benson and Kurr themselves, was that one of the
most respected inspectors at Scotland Yard, John Meiklejohn, was actually on the payroll of Kurr, and had been
for the past four years. It seemed that every time the authorities were about to pounce Meiklejohn tipped the
fugitive men off in return for a substantial amount of money. Not only that, but the man sent to arrest Benson,
Chief Inspector Druscovich, had in turn accepted monetary offers from the corrupt Meiklejohn in return for
his co-operation. Chief Inspector William Palmer, Detective Chief Inspector George Clarke and Police Solicitor
Edward Froggat were also implemented in these accusations and, at their trial on corruption charges, each of the
five received a two year sentence. This scandal implied that corruption was rife within certain quarters of the
Metropolitan force and that a shakeup was required. The subsequent re-organisation of the prestigious Detective
Branch into the Criminal Investigation Department in 1878 was designed to restore the British public’s confidence
in the police, as well as weed out the misconduct which had now embarrassed the force.5
As a result of this fiasco, the press heavily criticised the police
and cracks began to appear Metropolitan Police Commissioner
Henderson’s leadership. Sir Edmund Henderson6 had steered
the force away from the strict regime envisioned by Peel and
implemented by Mayne and Rowan. Life was more liberal under
Henderson; a simple and perhaps petty example being that the men
were permitted to grow facial hair under his tenure, something
previously prohibited by Mayne and Rowan. Henderson also extended
voting rights to an organisation which had previously forbidden its
members to partake in any political action at all, including election
voting. Some of Henderson’s introductions were very positive. He
bought in schoolmaster sergeants to improve the literacy standards
within the force, added another 200 men to the Detective Branch
and oversaw the creation of the valuable tool that was the Habitual
Criminals Register.7 These actions made Henderson a very popular
Commissioner within the force itself. Outside the force, however,
Henderson was not so popular with a populace which was still
struggling to come to terms with this new model police, and which
held the view that Constables were bumbling comedians who should
be treated with scorn and ridicule. In 1872 his men went on strike
for the first time over pay and a reduction in pension payments.
Henderson had warned his paymasters against such a reduction in
pension; his advice, however, was not heeded, and the men walked.
Henderson reluctantly dismissed the strike’s ringleaders but soon
reinstated the majority of them, and this prompted unwanted accusations: that the force was lacking strong
leadership, that it had no firm direction.
4 The latter two, Littlechild and Roots, were to be connected to the Jack the Ripper case in later years.
5 For an excellent account of this case read The Chieftain (History Press 2011) by Chris Payne, Detective Chief Inspector George
Clarke's great great grandson.
6 Lieutenant Colonel (later Sir) Edmund Henderson (1821-1896) succeeded Acting Commissioner Douglas Labalmondière in 1869
7 The Habitual Criminals Register – a comprehensive record of habitual criminals, giving height, weight, identifying features and so
on. In later years it featured photographs of these repeat offenders.

The Fenian bombing campaign of 1883 triggered similar criticisms and the investigation into these crimes was
left largely in the hands of Henderson’s assistants James Monro8 and Charles Howard Vincent,9 along with advisor
Dr Robert Anderson.10 The final straw was the Trafalgar Square riot of 1886, and it was here that Henderson’s
inefficiency was exposed. The riot, also known as Black Monday, goes under a slightly misleading sobriquet as
rioting did not actually happen in Trafalgar Square itself. Two rival organisations, the London United Workmen’s
Committee and HF Hyndman’s Revolutionary Social Democratic Federation, held meetings in the Square on the
same day. These meetings passed quite peacefully. However, it was when the two organisations dispersed that
trouble began. Rather than go home, the crowds headed towards Hyde Park for a further meeting. Buildings and
clubs around the area had their windows smashed by mobs high on political and social fervour, causing great
damage and costs. Two days later businesses along Oxford Street heard news that another mob was making its way
along the street and, as a precaution, boarded up their premises and closed. The mob, however, didn’t arrive,
and the blame for this false panic and subsequent loss of trade was laid squarely at Commissioner Henderson’s
door. He had little choice but to resign and left a force lacking in order, confidence, popular trust and efficiency.
The authorities now needed a man who could drag the force back on track, instil some order; someone who could
restore respect in the eyes of the authorities and, more importantly, the people. Therefore it was decided that
the best man for the job should be a military man, and that man was Sir Charles Warren.
When he took on the role of Commissioner to the Metropolitan Police Force
in 1886, Sir Charles Warren seemed very much the man for the job. Born in
1840, by 17 years of age Warren had a commission as a Second Lieutenant in
the Royal Engineers, becoming a Surveyor and gaining promotion to Captain
as a reward for his good work. Along with surveying work Warren was also a
subterranean archaeologist whose most noted discovery was ‘Warren’s Shaft’,
a series of tunnels under one of Jerusalem’s most sacred of religious sites,
Temple Mount. In 1882 Warren was chosen by the Admiralty to discover what had
happened to the eminent Orientalist Professor Edward Henry Palmer, who had
gone to Syria to influence Bedouin tribes for British favour at a time of complex
conflict in the area. Sadly Warren discovered Palmer had been murdered and
subsequently recovered his remains, returning them to St Paul's Cathedral for
burial. Two years later, as Major-General, Warren found himself operating as
Her Majesty's Special Commissioner to an expedition to Bechuanaland, South
Africa.11 The aim of the expedition was to assert British authority over the area
and suppress the inter-tribal conflicts which were occurring. With 5,000 men
under his command, Warren executed his task without one single loss of life
and this resulted in him being appointed a Knight Grand Cross of St Michael and
St George (GCMG) in 1885.12 Sir Charles Warren
8 James Monro (1838-1920) Entered straight into the Metropolitan Force in 1884 in the dual role as Assistant Commissioner and head
of CID, taking over the latter position from Charles Howard Vincent. Monro resigned in 1888 due to clashes of personality with then
Commissioner Warren. However Monro did return to the Met as Commissioner upon Warren's resignation, holding the position for
only 18 months, the shortest Commissionership in the Met's history.
9 Sir Chares Edward Howard Vincent (1849-1908). Knighted in 1896, Howard Vincent joined the Met when he became the head of
the newly created Criminal Investigation Department in 1878. Highly thought of by his seniors, peers and men who served under
him, Howard Vincent set many of the standards to which CID and policing as a whole adhere to today. His setting of The Police
Code laid out the procedures and protocols adhered to not only during the Victorian period but for many years after.
10 Dr (later Sir) Robert Anderson (1841-1918). Anderson was working for the Home Office at the time of the Fenian attacks in 1883.
Predominantly a barrister, he became a Home Office advisor on political crime in 1868, resigning the position in 1884. He was
asked to assist the then Met CID head (and Assistant Commissioner), James Monro, in the field of political crime in 1887 however
due to Monro's resignation in 1888, Anderson replaced him in all roles, holding the positions until his resignation in 1901. Anderson
was to become a controversial character during the period of the Whitechapel murders of 1888 and beyond. To this day his actions
and words connected to the case have been hotly debated and mulled over, as they will be for years to come.
11 This was Warren's second visit as a military man to South Africa, the pervious began in 1876 when Warren was sent to survey the
boundary between Griqualand and Orange Free State, fought in the Transeki War of 1877-78 and ended up as the Administrator for
Griqualand, having the town of Warrenton named after him in his honour.
12 For an excellent comprehensive overview of Warren's career, read Evans, Stewart P and Rumbelow, Donald: Jack the Ripper:
Scotland Yard Investigates, Chapter 1: A Gentleman of angularities (Sutton Publishing: 2006).

Warren had inherited a force which was in quite some disarray. Six months after taking the appointment, he
began to mould this force in his image, and, as far as Warren was concerned, that began with recruitment. On 23
August 1886 he issued an Office Regulation that Monsell
...will exercise a general supervision over the Candidate Dept and will bring to the notice of asst
Commer: (Col Pearson) any proposals he may have to make from time to time to facilitate awareness
or enhance the efficiency of the Police Force.
Warren then went on to state that
...[Monsell] will have immediate direction over the preparatory class and will pace them in drill etc,
and will supervise the general drill instructions under the general of Colonel Pearson.13
The days of Henderson’s laxity were over. Organisation and efficiency were the new watchwords, and for a new
recruit that started from the day you joined.
Applicants to the Metropolitan Police force in late Victorian London were
first required to write to the Commissioner at 4 Whitehall Place.14 Men from The days of Henderson’s
either a military or agricultural background were preferred; this was simply
laxity were over. Organisation
because it was thought these types of men would be used to the extreme
physical hardship life as a working policeman bought. Men with good discipline and efficiency were the new
were also favoured, as they would not only commit to the tasks a constable watchwords, and for a new
was expected to conduct without fail, but also because these men would be recruit that started from the
beyond reproach, would not succumb to bribery and keep a cool head in times
of crisis and disorder and they must be between 21 and 32 years of age.15
day you joined.
Men from outside London were also deemed physically fitter than their urban
counterparts; due to his poor diet and environmental pollution, a city man was expected to experience poorer
physical health and lower life expectancy. The regulation height of no less than 5 feet 9 inches.16 was introduced
because it was felt that a constable had to look physically intimidating, alleviating a lot of trouble before it
began, and it was expected that a constable should be able to read and write fairly well, with a good knowledge of
spelling and mathematics. Sailors were looked on favourably as well; however, they were often considered more
suitable for the Police Fire Brigade due to their naval training with ropes, ladders and climbing.
Once the letter was received, an application form and a letter stating the conditions of service by which the
applicant must abide was returned to the applicant, with an additional letter stating that at least two certificates
of character were a requisite.17 The application form itself consisted of several sheets. On the cover sheet were
the applicant's first, middle and surnames. As the applicant progressed through his training and career, this sheet
was stamped with an admission date and leaving date, as well as a list of divisions he worked in. The next page
was the declaration, a series of questions which the applicant had to complete truthfully and in his own writing.
The various questions included name at length, trade or calling, age, height, eye colour, hair, complexion, marks
on person such as tattoos or scars, and the parish, nearest town and county in which the applicant was born. The
declaration also asked whether the applicant was single, married or widowed; the number of children; the age
of the youngest child (if applicable); whether the applicant had previously been in service in either the public
service, the military, or with a railway company (and, if they had, the start date, the period of employment and
with whom); and the name of the applicants last employer and duration of last employment. A rather odd question
was also asked: whether the applicant was, or currently is, a member of a secret society, and if so, what was the
name of that society?
13 MEPO 4/10.
14 Or to The Old Jewry if you were applying to join the City of London Force.
15 Though by 1888 the age range ran from 21 to 35 years old.
16 Initially the height stipulation was 5’ 10” however this was relaxed due to the fact not many of that height were applying. By the
time Warren had taken the Commissionership the height restriction was 5’8½, however Warren soon returned it to 5’9”.
17 MEPO 4/36: Instruction Booklet for Candidates and New Constables, 1871.

The second sheet outlined the Conditions of Service, and reads18:
THE APPLICANT WILL ONLY BE ADMITTED SUBJECT TO THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS UNLESS THE
COMMISSONER SHOULD FROM SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES THINK FIT TO DISPENSE WITH ANY OF THEM:-
A list of criteria:
He must not be under 21, nor over 32 years of age.
He must not be less than five feet nine inches in height without shoes.
He must not have more than 2 children.
He must not carry on any trade, nor will his wife be permitted to keep a shop.
He must read and write legibly.
He must produce satisfactory testimonials as to character.
He must be certified as physically fitted for the Service by the Surgeon of the Police Force.
He will be required to devote his whole time to the Police Service, to reside within the City of London,
and conform rigidly to the provisions of the Act of Parliament under which he is appointed: and to the
Rules, Regulations, and Orders of the Force, some of the most important of which are annexed for the
Applicants information.19
For the misconduct of any kind, a Constable is liable to be dismissed with forfeiture of all pay due to
him – to suspension without pay – to pecuniary penalties, not accompanied with suspension or dismissal,
to the extent of one week’s pay – to the reduction from one rank to any other rank – and, if convicted
before a Magistrate of neglect or violation of his duty in his Office of Constable, to a fine of Ten Pounds,
or imprisonment for one month with hard labour.
On appointment, the pay of Constable is Twenty-five Shillings per week, subject to certain deductions,
during sickness, and for lodgings, &c.
Well conducted Constables are eligible, on discharge from the Service, for Superannuation allowance
in accordance with the terms of the City Police Act, but they cannot, under any circumstances, CLAIM
a superannuation allowance as a right.
At the end of the page came the Declaration:
I HEARBY DECLARE that the answers made by me to the questions on the first page are in all respects
full and truthful, and I FURTHER DECLARE that I have attentively read, and understand, the above
conditions under which alone I can be appointed to the City of London Police Force, and I undertake, if
I should so be appointed, to abide by them in every particular.
(Signature of Applicant) ___________________________
(Residence) ______________________________________
Next was the witness declaration. This was completed by a high ranking official, usually of Superintendent
ranking, who placed his signature at the bottom of the page.
The answers to the questions on the first page, and the above Declaration were filled in and signed by
the applicant in my presence this______________ day of _______________ 18___
18 The following is taken from The City of London Forces Application, hence the slightly differing wording. The context remained the
same for both forces.
19 The requisite to reside in the City of London was relaxed during the 1890s, however residence was strictly monitored and a close
location to the City was preferred. The Met force did not have such a restriction however they also chose where their men did
reside.

Certificates of character were commonly obtained from either the applicant’s previous or current employers,
religious representatives such as vicars and rabbis, former teachers or any other person of good standing within
the community, and were collated and attached with the application form. Great credence was put on these
certificates with each one being verified by the Chief Clerk of the Force. If the applicant came from outside
the London area, or presented a reference from elsewhere in the country, the force contacted the relevant
local Constabulary and asked them to verify the character certificate. Once this initial stage is completed, the
application is assessed and passed; the candidate would be placed upon a list of those suitable candidates who
would like to join the force. The list was a short one, and deliberately so. It was found that keeping a long list of
candidates, for a long period of time, resulted in them finding employment elsewhere and the force missing out
on potentially good policemen. Therefore the turnaround from being accepted on the list to being taken on as a
candidate was only a matter of weeks. The successful few would have a letter issued to them, stating they were
to attend either 26 Old Jewry20 or Great Scotland Yard, Westminster, at their own trouble and expense, for the
next phase of the process - Candidates Day.
Tuesday was Candidates' Day in the Metropolitan
Police,21 when new recruits reported to either
Scotland Yard or Wellington Barracks at ten
o’clock sharp to meet 'The Police Maker', Chief
Inspector George Rose. Rose had joined the Met
in 1860, making a rapid rise to Inspector before
commencing his unique role within the Preparatory
class in 1865.22 There he was to stay until his
retirement in 1907, training approximately
60,000 men in that time. In fact, the majority of
Metropolitan policemen who worked on the Jack
the Ripper case in 1888 would have received the
benefit of Rose’s training and guidance in those
first few formative weeks within the force. The
recruits were sat in a room where Rose would
tell each and every one of them the expectations
City of London Police Divisional Surgeon, Dr Frederick Gordon Brown, which came with the job, and inform them of the
examines the new recruits terms and conditions of service.
The men were then escorted into the changing rooms where they disrobed for the colloquial ‘cough and drop’,
politely known as the physical examination. Clad in a long cloak to preserve their modesty, the candidates would
queue outside the room belonging to the Police Divisional Surgeon in Chief, Dr Alexander MacKellar.23 McKellar
would call the men in one by one, then ascertain their height and weight and rigorously check for ailments and
deformities which may hinder the execution of duty. He would check that the feet were in good condition, as
usually they were often the cause of physical failure amongst regular Police Constables due to the hard and
constant pounding nature of beat work. He would also conduct an eye test to ensure vision was suitable, as
observation was a key weapon in a policeman’s armoury.
As the procession made its way through McKellar’s office, those who had been medically examined re-dressed
and prepared themselves for the final series of tests, covering the three ‘Rs’ - reading, writing and arithmetic.
The men were asked individually to read various passages chosen at random, usually from the Police Instruction
Book or Candidate's Book, and then to take spelling and mathematic tests as a collective. Once these tests were
completed, the men were thanked and told they could go home and await yet another letter to see if they had
passed on to the next phase of the process - Preparatory Class.
20 If joining the City of London Police force.

21 Whilst The City of London Police differed slightly, the basic processes of recruitment remained for both forces. I have decided to
concentrate on the Metropolitan Force for the moment to avoid confusion. Also, Candidates Day fluctuated throughout the period,
in some records it is noted as a Monday.
22 The Daily Graphic, 19 August 1907.
23 Dr Alexander Oberlin MacKellar (1845-1904) was Metropolitan Police Surgeon in Chief from 1885 until his death. He was to play a
prominent part in the Whitechapel Murder series.

New candidates at Wellington Barracks
Preparatory class for the Metropolitan Police was, on average, a two to three week period of extensive training
based between Scotland Yard, Wellington Barracks and the candidates’ section house attached to Kennington Lane
station, where the candidates would eat, sleep and live.24 It was the forerunner to basic police training held at
Peel House and, more recently, Hendon.25 The new recruit was paid during this training, albeit on a reduced rate
than a regular constable, and he was considered to be on probation. The candidates, numbering anything between
70 to 100, were all kept under the watchful eye of Rose and his small team, which included the Kennington Lane
section house sergeant, a drill sergeant and a constable.26 At Wellington Barracks the probationer undertook hours
of marching, referred to as drill work, where his stance and gait were assessed and corrected. It was, and still is,
extremely important for a constable to look the part, to have an air of presence about him, so Rose ensured the
slouch was removed and replaced by the strong upright stance and purposeful walk.
Opened in 1833 for use by the Foot Guard Battalions in the British Army and located not far from Buckingham
Palace, Wellington Barracks was an ideal location to conduct drill work. The Metropolitan Police were permitted
to conduct their exercises upon a part of the parade ground there and a purpose-built parade shed was installed
for use during inclement weather. As well as drill work, the police also conducted various weapons training
(chiefly training with cutlasses) at Wellington Barracks. The use of cutlasses was strictly governed. In the early
days of the force, all constables were trained in its use; however, they were forbidden to draw the weapon unless
ordered to, or as a very last resort when lives were in danger. The drawing of this weapon at any other time could
result in instant dismissal. New regulations introduced in 1885 stipulated that cutlasses were only issued to ten
men in each division, mainly at senior level.
As for Firearms, the Bow Street force had flintlocks amongst their armoury, but Peel's new police avoided
firearms as best they could. Upon the formation of the Metropolitan force Commissioner Mayne did order fifty
pairs of pistols; they were, however, very rarely used.
A rethink was prompted in late 1867, when the Fenian bombing of Clerkenwell prison killed several people,
injured many more, destroyed many buildings close by, and tore a hole in the side of the prison through which two
convicted Fenian terrorists held at the prison, Richard Burke and Joseph Casey, hoped to escape.
24 Kennington Lane section house was created in 1885 and attached to the police station there, at the junction of Kennington Lane
and Renfrew Road. The site is now the Gilmour section house, and still accommodates policemen who require lodgings.
25 The Old Jewry was the predominant location for the City of London police force’s preparatory class, along with residency and
training at Bishopsgate Police Station.
26 70 was the base number, however up to a 100 could be retained depending on numbers of men required to fill vacancies. MEPO
2/442 Internal Home Office Memorandum A46887/7 dated 23 April 1887.

Mayne realised he needed more than mere cutlasses to combat this surge in Fenian activity, and responded
by instigating official police firearm training, not at Wellington Barracks but at Wormwood Scrubs prison and the
Museum of Fire Arms in Rye Lane, Peckham, directing that five constables from each division be trained in the use
of revolvers[27]. In time, firearm training would become more extensive and weapons such as revolvers and rifles
were stored under lock and key at chief Divisional stations, only to be used in emergency situations as stipulated
by the local Inspector. The Tottenham Outrages of 1909 and the Siege of Sidney Street in London’s East End in 1911
are classic examples. However, the use of firearms as a mandatory piece of equipment for all constables to carry
was, and still is, resisted by British police constabularies.
Whilst the army were quite happy for the police to use Wellington Barracks parade ground, one issue did arise
during the early part of this relationship, and that was of the watering of the parade ground. The police watered
the ground regularly, much to the annoyance of the army, who not only disliked the practice but also disliked
having to pay a water bill. However, to avoid further tension, the man in charge of the Met purse strings, the
Receiver, agreed that the Met shall foot the bill, and harmony was swiftly restored.28
Drill took up the majority of training. Warren wanted his men to be a manoeuvrable force, marching in
procession on to and off from their beats, arranging themselves in swift order in times of emergencies and be
ready and able to efficiently and rapidly distribute themselves as and where required. Warren felt that under
Henderson’s tenure, drill was a neglected aspect of police training and as well as everyday policing life, yet to
him it was essential. Therefore Warren bought drill back with an vengeance and the timetable below shows that
four hours per weekday were spent on drill (with another two hours fitted in on Saturdays):
9.00am Parade
9.15am – 10.15am Drill (rest fifteen minutes)
10.30am - 11.30am Drill (go to dinner [ready 1pm])
2.15pm - 3.15pm Drill (rest fifteen minutes)
3.30pm - 4.30pm Drill (dismiss)
Detective Inspector Edwin Woodhall, in his book Jack the Ripper or When London Walked in Terror (1937),
recalls drill, stating that “a squad of us would parade every morning at nine o’clock, drill and listen to instructions
until twelve. Then came a two hour interval for dinner and at two o’clock we paraded again until five”.29 During
the breaks in drill, the men would be asked questions from the Instruction Book for Candidates and Constables,
a small book containing the basic information required for a new recruit, which had been issued to them upon
entry to Preparatory School.
It was not all gruelling marching, however. Recruits were given evenings off and permitted to stay out until
10.30pm, something which did not go down to well with the authorities who felt Rose and his team should be a
little stricter.30 At Kennington Lane the men were awoken at 7.00 am and breakfasted at 8.00am, then they were
either marched to Wellington Barracks for drill or to Scotland Yard for lectures. Some communication training was
undertaken at the telegraph room at Kensington Lane, where the ABC system was taught to each candidate there,31
whilst Chief Metropolitan Police Surgeon MacKellar provided basic First Aid instruction, as well as elementary
anatomy education, at Scotland Yard; his was one of five lectures given during this training period. MacKellar also
provided one final service for the soon-to-be police constable, by jabbing them with a needle. The Vaccination
Act (1873) made it compulsory for all in the United Kingdom to be vaccinated; however, it was also mandatory for
all new police recruits to be re-vaccinated, as the conditions some of the men could encounter on the beat were
27 Police Orders 6 January 1868, also, Waldren, Mike (QPM) – Early Police Firearms (Police History Series) – 2007. Cutlasses became
less prominent as the years passed; by 1885 only ten were permitted in a single division.
28 Training the Metropolitan Policeman – An historical survey from 1829 to 1910. Metropolitan Police Historical Centre.
29 Woodhall, Edwin: Detective and Secret Service Days (1929).
30 In 1904 a report was published in relation to Rose and the adequacy of police training at the time. The report was highly critical
of the methods used; stating that too much time was spent on the parade ground and not enough time was spent on theoretical
and methodical work. It was also critical at the standard of education the recruits showed, with ex CID Chief Howard-Vincent
stating that “The many mistakes of recruits today are due to the ignorance and lack of theoretical knowledge. The beat Police
recruits come from farms and, at worse, domestic service.” Unsurprisingly, Rose retired three years after this report was published,
just as the Metropolitan Force moved to a new training centre in Peel House.
31 A contemporary report into training showed that some of the candidates at Kennington Lane were actually sending communications
of ‘an unsavoury nature’ to each other.

unsanitary and rife with disease.
During this period Rose and his
team kept a close eye on these
probationers, constantly advising
them of the expectations upon
a Police Constable. Any breach
of discipline was ruthlessly dealt
with by expulsion; however, if it
was noted that a probationer was
struggling despite showing lots of
application and dedication, then
encouragement, patience and
guidance were the watchwords.
At the end of the probation period
the men would muster at Wellington
Barracks for drill exercise, as
they had done daily during the
previous three weeks. However,
this was different: this was the final
proficiency drill, performed under
the watchful gaze of one of the Chief
Constables within the Metropolitan
force. If the probationer was given
his approval, they were ordered to
appear at Scotland Yard the following
Monday. Here they were marched in
a processional file to stores, in order
for them to collect their uniform,
into which they changed. Then they
were taken before the Commissioner,
or Assistant Commissioner, where
the recruit would swear an oath,
sign the oath book and be given a
warrant number. This act was called
the attestation. There were two
oaths within the Metropolitan Force:
Top: Fitting uniforms
one for the divisions only, and the Bottom: Swearing the oath
other connected to military bases
and naval dockyards.
The divisional one read:
I swear that I will well and truly to the best of my knowledge and ability act as a Constable for
the Metropolitan Police district and within the Royal Palaces of Her Majesty Queen Victoria and ten
miles thereof for preserving the peace and preventing robberies and other felonies and apprehending
offenders against the peace and that I will well and truly execute such office of Constable and all
powers and duties which I may be authorised or required to execute by virtue on an Act of Parliament
passed in the tenth year of the reign of His Majesty King George the seventh for improving the police
in and near the Metropolis or by virtue of an Act of Parliament passed in the third year of the reign of
Her Majesty Queen Victoria for further improving the police in and near the Metropolis.
So help me God.32
32 MEPO 4/352.
The military and naval dockyard Constables oath read a little differently:
I swear that I will well and truly act as a Constable for in Her Majesty’s Naval Yards and the stations
of the War Department and within 15 miles of such yards or stations for preserving the peace and
preventing robberies and other felonies and apprehending offenders against the peace and that I will
well and truly execute such office of Constable and all powers and duties which I may be authorised or
required to execute by virtue on an Act of Parliament passed in the 23rd and 24th year of the reign of
Her Majesty Queen Victoria for the employment of the Metropolitan Police force in Her Majesty’s Yards
and Military Stations.
So help me God.
Once the attestation ritual is completed, the recruit could now call himself a Police Constable. All that is left
was to assign the new constable to a division, to consolidate what he had already learnt, and give further training
in the day-to-day life as a Bobby. This process of allocation could take up to a week, so in the meantime the men
would return to Kensington Lane station and undertake duties there whilst awaiting their fate, although in the
majority of cases the allocation was instantaneous. Once allocated to a division they were initially taken on as a
Reserve Constable33 for a period of one week to allow them adjust to their new surroundings. Once the week was
up they moved on to the lowest classification for a constable, that of 4th class,34 at a sub-division station35 located
within the divisional area.
Some locations, such as Whitechapel, were keenly avoided by most due to their high criminal activity. However
some relished the challenge, and saw it as an ideal division for a young Bobby to cut his teeth. Superintendent
George Cornish, who joined H Division (Whitechapel) in 1895, described the area as “the best in which to test
the worth of a fledgeling constable”36 and Chief Constable Frederick Porter Wensley, who started his career in
Whitechapel in 1888, stated that it was the knowledge he gained during his early years in H Division which formed
the foundations of his success in the police force.
The Divisional Register, a
large, A3-size ledger, holds all
the collar numbers, page by
page, for each sub-division and
it is in this book that details
of the newest constables
were entered on the relevant
page relating to his new collar
number. Now officially part of
the division, the new constable
would attend the police courts
over a period of two weeks in
order to observe how they work
in relation to his role and to
gain experience, supplementing
the training undertaken in
Preparatory Class. There he
would observe as many cases as
he could, taking notes if need
be and writing down questions
Zoom of the Divisional Register for H Division to ask of his superiors upon his
return to the station. The new
33 A Reserve Constable supplemented a division as and when required.

34 Metropolitan Police Orders, 1 June 1870.
35 A Sub Division is a force of men located within a police station. All police stations are, officially, sub divisions.
36 Cornish, George W: Cornish of the Yard: His reminiscences and Cases (New York: MacMillan Co., 1935).

recruit would also set an hour aside each day to study his book of rules and regulations. All new constables, both
in the Metropolitan and City of London forces, were issued with a variation of this book by the Superintendent
himself which was designed to guide them through various situations which might occur. It was divided into parts,
the first being a breakdown of duties for all divisional ranks within the force from Superintendents to Inspectors
to Sergeants to Constables. The second part concentrated on instructions should a specific scenario occur, such as
a house fire or coming across an unlicensed dog, for example. In addition to the instructions, and laid out at the
back of the book, were the various Acts of Parliament which defined the police’s authority in numerous situations,
and laws of arrest.37 This book stayed with the Constable until the day he left; it was essentially his Bible, and he
would be constantly quizzed by his superiors as to its contents.
During this initial period as constables the men also undertook various station duties (usually menial tasks such
as swabbing out cells, sweeping yards and kit cleaning). This was mixed with more interesting tasks, performed
under the watchful eye of a more experienced Bobby. The force also provided the new constable with lodgings.
If the constable was married, police-owned quarters within his division would be offered, if available; if not,
lodgings as near to the division as possible would suffice.38 The police authorities usually purchased buildings
in rows, or close together in blocks, so that constables lived close to fellow constables. The men themselves
preferred this, as it enhanced camaraderie.
Another scheme connected to property was also in place, by which the landlord of an empty dwelling could
approach the police and request these premises be inhabited by a constable and his family rent free, providing
the premises was in a fit condition and fully furnished. This meant that the landlord had secure police presence
on his property; the constable and his family had somewhere to live; the police force did not have to purchase as
many properties (merely cover the fuel costs); and the area had constable living in it.39
By contrast, single men were assigned to a section house, in case of outbreaks of mass crime such as rioting. In
an era before telephones, it was easier to muster the men if they were already together rather than issue runners
to each individual’s home. However, housing a group of young men together brought its problems. It wasn’t
unheard of for arguments to break out and brawling was fairly common. Boxing matches were organised to break
the monotony (with money being wagered), as an alternative to the dull parlour games and cribbage which the
men were encouraged to undertake to ease the boredom.
Policing was often physically demanding and relentless, and nobody suffered more than the constable on the
beat. A new recruit spent five hours per day on beat work. A seasoned constable would demonstrate how to prepare
for a beat and how to present themselves at muster, and go through the ins and outs of what was expected during
the beat, whilst again reiterating the rules and regulations.40 Over a period of two weeks, it was expected that
fresh constables would established themselves on the beat, with the more seasoned old-timer taking a less and
less active role. Eventually, the new recruit would take over his beat on his own, with the occasional monitoring
of the beat sergeant. This was considered by the cynical ‘old hands’ to be the point when the new constable's
training really began. Experienced Bobbies would pass on their invaluable knowledge and experience, and share
some home truths about life as a policeman. They would explain that friends, wary of being labelled as police
informers, would shun them and their families. They would say that those who used to be friendly and sociable
might start to cross streets to avoid them, succumbing to the fear of association, and of being referred to as a
‘Copper's Nark’, probably the highest insult any East Ender could give to another.41
37 Training the Metropolitan Policeman – An historical survey from 1829 to 1910. Metropolitan Police Archives.
38 Within the City of London Force, men were not permitted to live outside the City, however this was relaxed in the early 1890s
due to the fact lodgings within the City limits was increasingly difficult to find. In fact, City Detective Baxter Hunt, who worked on
the Eddowes case in 1888, lived in Cartwright Street, Whitechapel, in 1891, a stone's throw away from the Pinchin Street torso
discoverer, Met Constable Pennett, who lived in the Peabody Buildings a street away.
39 City PC 922 Richard Pearce was living at No 3 Mitre Square, opposite the site of Ripper victims Catherine Eddowes' murder. As No
4 Mitre Square was empty premises, and that Pearce was to later find lodgings in White Lion Street Spitalfields in 1891, it is
reasonable to assume that Pearce was one of these ‘Caretaker’ PCs.
40 The recital of the rules and regulations was a common thread throughout training and consolidation period. It was heavily installed
into the men and was a constant.
41 A slang term for a policeman’s informer.

The new constable soon realised that he would never be anything but a Policeman to anyone other than his
closest family, and sometimes even for close family members it was too much to have a son, brother or uncle as a
Bobby. It wasn’t unheard of for a policeman to be ostracised by his own father as soon as the latter had discovered
that his son had recruited into the force, such was the distain in which the common policeman was held by many
working class folk throughout Whitechapel and the East End. If the new recruit withstood the hard training and
unsociable hours, and the change of perception amongst family and friends, and if was willing to place himself in
the most stressful and dangerous of situations whilst maintaining a cool calm head, and if luck was on his side, he
can rely on 25 years of regular employment.
However, as Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan’s song states, “a policeman’s lot is not a happy one”.
*****
This is an edited extract from Neil Bell's forthcoming book Capturing Jack the Ripper.
NEIL BELL is one of the most respected students of the Ripper case, especially for his knowledge of the police activity
and procedure. He has been published extensively in specialist journals such as Ripperologist and Casebook Examiner,
as well for the BBC. Neil has written numerous articles upon the case and was the runner up for the Jeremy Beadle Prize
for the year’s best articles featured in Ripperologist in both 2009 and 2010. Neil has also recently been Police Advisor
for the Channel Five documentary Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Story. He has provided information for the current
TV series Ripper Street.
CAPTURING JACK THE RIPPER by Neil Bell

investigates the working lives of these men, and what
it took to become one of Queen Victoria's police
constables, from recruitment to training to life as a
bobby.
The book provides an insight into police life, as well as

an in-depth view of the investigation at the height of the
Ripper murders.
It provides a rare look at the men who protected the

streets, who faced very real dangers every night,
who often suffered severe physical injury and who
sometimes died; men who faced life in the raw in one of
the worst parts of London, and who were the first on the
scene after a killer had struck.
Join the police as they go out into the dank, crime-

infested, gaslit abyss known as Whitechapel and try to
capture Jack the Ripper.
Available from 28 November 2014.

Dressed To Kill
By WALTER MOSLEY and SCOTT NELSON
In the branch of analytical mathematics known as statistics, a ‘flyer’ is a data point that deviates
from others which follow a recognized trend or pattern. In this article we will identify and analyze
some unique aspects of the ‘flyer’ among the Whitechapel Murders: the killing of Polly Nichols in
Buck’s Row.
There may be hidden significance in the relative isolation of the location of Polly Nichols’s killing as compared
to other Whitechapel murders, which took place in a more concentrated area some distance away. Why is that
murder site so far removed from the location of the other murders? Could the explanation be that a fledgling
Ripper committed his first murder injudiciously close to where he worked or lived?
According to eyewitness reports, Polly Nichols was last seen walking along Whitechapel Road, presumably
towards where she was later found, practically across the road from the London Hospital. The Ripper probably
encountered her as he was walking down Whitechapel Road in the opposite direction, heading for the area
that would later become his killing ground. Was he in that relatively remote place because he worked or lived
thereabouts?
The London Hospital is a prime candidate for the Ripper’s presumed regular employment. According to Philip
Sugden, ‘He would look for employment perhaps as a hospital or mortuary attendant.’1 This premise could be
expanded to include a post-mortem room orderly or attendant, who might have been employed at the hospital to
clean up after autopsies and amputations and watch over the corpses awaiting disposition. If so, then this would
be someone who
● would be inured to gore, dismembered corpses and body parts;
● had ready access to amputation or post-mortem knives and other medical paraphernalia needed for his
sorties;
● could experiment and ‘practice’ with impunity on a plentiful supply of corpses which no one would be likely
to bother inspecting after an autopsy;
● could readily work nights, as the post-mortem room would require an attendant 24/7, thus conditioning him
for his nocturnal excursions and allowing him to ‘practice’ in private and under the right conditions;
● could pass virtually unnoticed if smeared or dabbled with blood;
● had a ready disposal method for the odd organ or body part collected as a souvenir, ‘blind’, or red herring;
● was well-placed to ‘commute’ to his killing ground by a brief walk down Whitechapel Road; and
● would seldom, if ever, be interrupted in his gruesome work, regardless of his working hours.
Indeed, in his ghost story The Brown Hand, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describes a scene in which a hospital lackey
is sent to fetch a series of amputated hands from a ‘post-mortem room’.2
1 Sugden, Philip: The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, London, 1994.
2 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Brown Hand, The Strand Magazine, May 1899.

Consider the following passages concerning the Ripper, excerpted from the standard reference works:
‘It must have been some one accustomed to the post-mortem room.’
‘…doctors and surgeons all attested to some degree of knowledge or skill.’
‘he had... a great deal of expertise, both anatomical knowledge and surgical skill.’
Such a professional situation could also go far towards explaining one of the most baffling aspects of the
Whitechapel Murders: how could the Ripper execute such skillful mutilations so quickly in poor light or near-total
darkness? As any ex-serviceman could testify, repeated practice can enable one to quickly disassemble, clean and
reassemble a weapon of considerable mechanical complexity in total darkness. Could the Ripper have done much
the same thing under these predicated working conditions — deliberately ‘practice’ in a poorly lit post-mortem
room on a plentiful supply of corpses destined for disposal?
Although medical doctors would have us think otherwise, rudimentary surgical skill is not difficult to attain on
one’s own. Surely, with sufficient practice, anyone with a general knowledge of human anatomy such as would be
naturally developed by such employment could gain the expertise required to extract selected internal organs in
poor light, entirely by feel, with only awareness of the relative locations as a guide. As Donald Rumbelow states,
‘There has been nothing done yet to any of these poor women that an expert butcher could not do almost in the
dark.’3
That the Ripper was cunning and daring enough to commit murders and extensive mutilations under adverse
conditions has been well established. Surely, when it became apparent that a serial killer was at work, such a man
would know how the authorities of the day would react:
‘The police made repeated inquiries at common lodging houses in the neighborhood of the murders.’ Sugden,
op. cit.
‘The police made ….a house-to-house search of parts of Whitechapel and Spitalfields.’ Sugden, op. cit.
October 1888 — Warren sanctioned a ‘massive’ house-to-house search north of Whitechapel High Street/Road.
If Polly Nichols was indeed the Ripper’s first victim or one of his very earliest ones, it would surely occur to
him that he should not repeat those activities so close to work or home, knowing that searches of the surrounding
areas would ensue. Hence, his killing ground should be relocated to a safe distance away from, say, the London
Hospital, if he was in fact employed there.
Further speculation concerning possible scenarios of the Ripper’s encounters with his victims, the mechanics
of killing and mutilation, and his disappearance will be the subject of future articles. But for now we begin with
what may have been the Ripper’s appearance on the streets and what may have been the tools he employed in
his killing spree.
Now that we have examined one or two possibilities concerning the type and locale of the Ripper’s employment,
as well as his possible motives in selecting his killing grounds, let’s look at his likely appearance.
It has been postulated that the Ripper was a good deal more cunning and clever than the authorities of the
day ever suspected. After all, there must be some very good reasons why the Whitechapel Murders are still
such a profound mystery after more than 125 years. This has been attributed largely to a combination of unique
circumstances such as time elapsed, destruction or theft of critical documents and evidence, lack of scientific
police procedure and forensic investigation, paucity of unimpeachable eyewitness testimony, etc. However, the
crimes were novel for the time and the methods employed by their perpetrator must have been equally novel.
Let’s consider first some of the more reliable eyewitness descriptions of men thought to be the Ripper. Keep in
mind these descriptions as we look at the apparel and possible accessory items of the Ripper:
Elizabeth Long (aka Durrell), re: Chapman:

Dark overcoat, aged 40, foreign appearance, brown deerstalker hat, shabby genteel, dark complexion, slightly
over 5-ft tall.
James Brown, re: Stride:

Stoutish, 5-ft, 7-in tall, long coat almost to his heels.
3 Rumbelow, Donald: The Complete Jack the Ripper, London, 1975.

William Marshall, re: Stride:
Clerky appearance, decently dressed, stout, black moustache, sandy eyelashes, 5-ft, 5-in tall, small black
cutaway coat, dark trousers, round, small peaked sailor’s cap, educated voice, did not see side whiskers.
PC William Smith, re: Stride:
Clean shaven, respectable appearance, dark clothes, dark deerstalker cap, aged 28, 5-ft, 7-in tall, carried
newspaper parcel 18-in long, 6-8-in wide.
Israel Schwartz, re: Stride:

5-ft, 5-in tall, about 30, brown hair, small brown moustache, full face, broad shoulders, dark jacket and
trousers, black cap with peak.
or
About 35, 5-ft, 1-in tall, fresh complexion, light brown hair, dark overcoat, old black felt hat with wide brim,
clay pipe.
Joseph Lawende, re: Eddowes:

Medium build, sailor’s appearance, loose pepper and salt jacket, grey-clothed cap with peak, red neckerchief,
aged 30, 5-ft 7 to 8-in tall, fair complexion and moustache.
George Hutchinson, re: Kelly:

Respectable, Jewish appearance, long, dark coat with Astrakhan collar and cuffs, dark jacket and trousers,
dark felt hat turned down the middle, light waistcoat, with thick watch chain, aged 34-35, button boots, gaiters,
white bottoms, linen collar, black tie with horseshoe pin, thick gold chain with red-stoned seal, fair complexion,
5-ft, 5-in tall, dark hair, slight moustache curled at ends, red handkerchief, small parcel in left hand with strap
round it.
To have a decent chance of solving these crimes, or even explaining them, we must ‘think outside of the box’.
For a criminal so cunning as the Ripper, the use of red herrings, blinds, and false scents would naturally suggest
itself. Knowing as he would that the inhabitants of London’s East End would be growing ever more paranoid and
vigilant as the body count and the horror increased, he would recognize that subterfuge of some nature might
become necessary if he wished to continue his work in the same general area, even as the number of those seeking
him out with a vengeance increased daily. Subterfuge like, say, a disguise.
Although there is no proof that the Ripper ever used a disguise, there have been suggestions of such by
numerous Ripperologists over the years. The following example was given by no less an authority than Stewart P
Evans during an interview with Christopher T George. The discussion concerns the American suspect, Dr Francis
Tumblety:
The moustache was, I believe, a false one, for it was all awry, one end pointing upward and the other
towards the ground. His hair was dark, apparently black, and somewhat long.4
Now the suggestion that Tumblety was wearing a false moustache is not too unlikely, for they were a popular
accessory in 1888 and there are adverts in the contemporary papers for them with rows of different styles
illustrated. Could he have been wearing a larger moustache to conceal a smaller one, or lack of one, beneath?
In a day and age when the majority of adult men sported some degree of facial hair, those who were ‘follically-
challenged’ found themselves at a competitive disadvantage. For these individuals, false moustaches and beards
– made for men who could not grow their own - were available from specialty stores just as Evans intimates, as
also were hairpieces. In Tumblety’s case, sketches and at least one photograph of him would seem to indicate he
sported an oversized moustache. Yet another photograph shows he had a regular sized moustache. Use of a false
moustache would have distinct advantages for the Ripper and could possibly also explain the ‘carroty’ moustache
described by one eyewitness.5 Did the authorities of the time even suspect that the Ripper might be utilizing a
succession of false moustaches as a subterfuge?
4 George, Christopher T.: A Talk with Stewart Evans, Part II, Ripper Notes, November 1999.
5 Cf. Sugden, Philip: op. cit.

Besides the false moustache (additional details of which follow in a later section), the Ripper might have
employed a series of disguises to evade recognition and confuse any eyewitnesses. After all, if a man would go so
far as to wear a false moustache, logic dictates that he might take other measures to keep his identity a secret
as well. These disguises need not have been elaborate or complicated; a disguise that might not have withstood
even a casual scrutiny in broad daylight could certainly have passed muster in the dim hours during which the
Whitechapel Murders were committed.
The Ripper’s phenomenal success at killing in such a dramatic fashion and evading detection and capture
suggests that this series of crimes was premeditated and well planned. Thorough preparations of some nature
were probably made – surely the Ripper did not just impetuously grab a knife one late summer evening in 1888
and set out to murder and mutilate some complete stranger at random. At a time when all strangers in the East
End were looked upon with suspicion and hostility, the Ripper must have taken especial pains to look like a local.
‘Toffs’ (upper-class, moneyed individuals) were rare in that area, and with good reason.6 The stereotype of the
well-dressed doctor or toff wearing a top hat and cape, and carrying a black bag, appeals only to the uninitiated
layman and the Royal Theorist. Whatever the other circumstances, the Ripper must have always appeared as if he
belonged in the areas where he sought his victims.
Dr Thomas Bond wrote in a report to Robert Anderson on 10 November 1888:
The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man probably
middle aged and neatly and respectably dressed. I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or
overcoat or he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his hands or clothes were
visible.
By necessity, the Ripper would have ‘travelled light’, with a

minimum of implements and accoutrements. He would have been
‘self-contained’, with all that was necessary well hidden on his
person. Outwardly, he must have appeared normal for the day
and age, time and place. Certainly, the Ripper would not have
been conspicuous enough to give a casual observer good reason
to remember his features, dress, or actions, unless it were to his
advantage to do so. His immediate problem in all cases would be how
to remain as unremarkable as possible and deliberately mislead or
confuse any eyewitnesses who might observe him parleying with his
intended victims, especially when vigilance in the area was becoming
so pronounced. Compounding the problem was the environment in
which his killing ground was located - a large and teeming slum filled
with street people and the unemployed and bustling with activity at
all hours of the day and night. The Ripper undoubtedly blended in. Figure 1: London Dock Laborers
If the testimony of witnesses to the various murders is to be

believed, the Ripper must have utilized different clothing and style of dress for each murder. Nothing unusual
there – most men do have a varied wardrobe, after all. But the Ripper needed not be too distinctive in any specific
locale. From ‘working class’ through ‘shabby genteel’ to ‘respectable Jewish’, he must have been able to give
the appearance of a particular social or economic class, including an aura of respectability and wealth, virtually
at will.
Wickerman wrote on Casebook: Jack the Ripper:
My Person of Interest is among those who were respectably dressed, a morning-coat and trousers.
Wearing either a billycock hat, deerstalker or peaked cap, and likely carrying a leather bag. A knife with
a 6’ blade will be approx. 10’ long. Not a suitable size to keep in a pocket. He could have kept it in his
belt (Pirate style) if he was a dosser, but not a respectably dressed man.7
6 Cf. Rumbelow, Donald: op. cit.

7 Wickerman, Casebook Jack the Ripper (www.casebook.org).

The ‘power of suggestion’ could certainly have been used to the Ripper’s advantage to help accomplish this
illusion, as many Londoners were already steadfast in their belief that an Englishman could not possibly be
committing these heinous crimes. Given the xenophobic and anti-Semitic prejudices of the day, how simple it
would have been for the Ripper to deliberately dress as a ‘foreign’ or ‘Jewish-looking’ man as a ruse and rely on
that to override any distinctions that might have otherwise been made by the numerous eyewitnesses.
How could the Ripper have effectively disguised himself, yet, at the same time, made preparations to approach
a victim, kill and mutilate her, and escape with trophy body parts? What would have been useful for these
purposes, commonplace and readily available, yet not hinder him in any way? For possible answers, we may
consult the 1902 Edition of the Sears Roebuck Catalogue,8 a comprehensive source for people living in the age
of general stores. Although this catalogue is dated fourteen years after the Whitechapel Murders, nothing of
consequence was significantly different in 1902 from what it had been in 1888. Indeed, the relevant contents
of this catalogue have been compared to those of the 1897 version, released only nine years after the murders,
and it was determined that no significant differences existed between the two. Men’s fashion was still essentially
the same as it had been in 1888, and it remained so well into the first decade of the 1900s. Certainly, anything
that the Ripper might have needed or used in the preparation for these crimes and their commission would have
remained the same.
Let us begin by ‘dressing’ the Ripper for his sorties using contemporary items from the 1902 Sears Catalogue
and discussing each separate item in turn. Interspersed with the catalogue sketches are additional illustrations of
dress items and various knives thought by different researchers to have been used on the Ripper’s victims. Figures
2-4, 6-12 and 21-28 are from the Sears Catalogue.
Figure 2 illustrates the detachable men’s shirt cuffs
that were the fashion of the day, a fashion that continued
well into the 20th century. Detachable shirt collars, as
described by Conan Doyle in his 1902 novel The Hound
of the Baskervilles, could also be found. Detachable
shirt cuffs were available in linen, celluloid and, as
we see here, rubber. Men’s shirts were almost without
exception long-sleeved, and a man could merely change
into fresh cuffs and collar to start the new day, even
though he might have worn the shirt itself for a week
or more. Typically, shirts were laundered by boiling,
and then ironed after starching. If a typical workingman
was single, or of modest means, it is a virtual certainty
that laundering would be conducted no more frequently
than was absolutely necessary. Rubber, and possibly
celluloid, would be the choice to wear if contact with
liquids – such as blood – was a concern. The Whitechapel
killer could easily have carried along in his person a
spare pair of regular linen cuffs for immediate change
as he was leaving the crime scene after completing the
Figure 2: Detachable Men’s Shirt Cuffs and Sleeve Protectors mutilations.
Figure 2 also illustrates an item unique to the 1880s: men’s over-sleeves, or sleeve protectors. They were used
by storekeepers, bartenders, gamblers, bank tellers, railway ticket agents, bookkeepers and many others. Sleeve
protectors were necessary for tradesmen such as butchers, since rolling up one’s sleeves was considered gauche
or unsanitary. Even the sleeves of a shirt that might be worn for a week or more had to be protected from blood
or other staining materials.
Sleeve protectors were usually black or in other dark colors to hide the dirt or ink that could get on them. It
was a lot less expensive to replace the sleeve protectors than the shirt. Worn over the shirt sleeves and under the
coat and overcoat, they would be undetectable.
8 Amory, Cleveland (editor), 1902 Edition of Sears Roebuck Catalogue.

As the Ripper prepared to begin the mutilations, he could merely
roll up or push back and secure the coat and overcoat sleeves, leaving
the over-sleeves exposed. Afterwards, he could easily remove the
over-sleeves, blood and all, and stow them in one of his coat pockets
along with the cuffs, and no one would be the wiser. The use of
these items would allow the Ripper to eviscerate and mutilate with
reckless abandon, secure in the knowledge that no bloodstained cuffs
or sleeves would tell tales. Any blood or body fluids remaining on his
hands might be wiped away with rags or cloths easily concealed in
the pockets of his garb. Even bloodstained hands might quickly and
easily be disguised by ordinary gloves pulled over them.
There is a real possibility that the Ripper used something of
this sort to facilitate his work. Since the use of sleeve protectors
would have been commonplace in a workingman’s area such as
Whitechapel, no one would have given him a second glance, even if Figure 3: Men’s Suits
they had observed them beneath his coat.

Figure 3 illustrates typical men’s suits of the time. These
specimens are in the ‘Prince Albert’ style. Victorian men dressed
well as a rule, and Englishmen took it to extremes. Many anecdotes
exist even today of the proper British gentleman wearing a tie while
hunting or working in his own garden. It should be noted that these
illustrations represent only one style of dress. There were numerous
other styles from which to choose.
Figure 4 illustrates an article of clothing that might well have
been used by someone interested in a quick change of appearance
– or to conceal incriminating stains. This is a reversible man’s coat,
this particular specimen being leather on one side and corduroy on
the other. Although nothing of this exact description was reported
by any of the eyewitnesses, its relevance is to convey the fact
that reversible clothing was available at the time. Reversible dress
clothing may very well have been commonly obtainable in late 19th
century London, or at least on a custom-tailored basis. Would police Figure 4: Man’s Reversible Coat
of the era have been cognizant of this fact – and watched for it?
Figure 6 illustrates men’s
overcoats of the Victorian period.
These were uncommonly handy
articles for a serial killer, as they
could not only cover his other
clothing completely, but their
numerous and sometimes large
pockets were sufficiently voluminous
for easy storage of assorted objects.
In the coldish weather prevalent
in London at the time of the
Whitechapel Murders, men of means Figure 5: Typical Working Men’s Dress
commonly wore waistcoats, suit
coats and dark overcoats such as those shown, as evidenced by the testimony of
several eyewitnesses.
Figure 6: Men’s Overcoats

Figures 7, 8 and 9 illustrate men’s hats typical of the time. These particular
specimens are peaked hats, deerstalkers, and ‘billycocks’, or ‘derbies’, as they
were called in the United States. This was an age when all men customarily wore
hats, a practice which continued well into the 1960s. Hats are conspicuous objects,
as the detailed eyewitness accounts testify. A hat is also a good accompaniment
to any disguise, as it largely
obscures the hair and
complicates an eyewitness’s
physical description of the
wearer and his height and
features. In addition, hats
were often used to carry
objects such as catheters,
and the Ripper may well
Left: Figure 8, Deerstalker Cap. Right: Figure 9, Soft Felt and Derby-styled Hats have used hats for such
purposes. Figure 7: Men’s Stiff Hats
Figure 10 illustrates men’s toupees of the

period. If the Ripper was bald or balding, he
might naturally possess such an article, as
male vanity is not a modern phenomenon.
Use of a toupee as part of a disguise might
be considered superfluous, as there would
normally be a hat concealing it. If the Ripper
felt it necessary to alter his appearance in
this fashion, other more suitable alternatives
were available.
Figure 11 illustrates articles more useful
for a disguise - men’s wigs. These particular
specimens are full wigs and would thus be
Figure 11: Men’s Wigs
partly visible when worn with a hat. Surely
Figure 10: Men’s Toupees
there could be no better manner of fooling or confusing an eyewitness than by
the use of a wig of a different hairstyle or color than one’s own. Referring back
to the dissertation by Stewart P Evans, it would seem possible, even probable, that Dr Tumblety was wearing a
black hairpiece or wig to complement his presumably false moustache.
A false moustache would be a natural and effective accompaniment to a wig,
especially if a variety of such moustaches were to be used. Ian Fleming made
use of a similar concept as a plot device in one of his James Bond novels in which
fugitive Nazis shaved their heads and grew prominent moustaches to serve as
a communal disguise: ‘Shave your head and grow a moustache and your own
mother wouldn’t recognize you’.9 If indeed the Ripper had used devices such as
a wig and false moustache, it would probably have been difficult or impossible
for any of the eyewitnesses to identify or recognize him with them removed.
A ‘red stone’ on a pocket watch chain figures prominently in George
Hutchinson’s eyewitness testimony.10 Figure 12 illustrates typical Victorian
charms worn in a watch chain. It would have been quite easy for the Ripper to
give the subtle impression of affiliation with some fraternal organization, secret
society, or religious or ethnic sect through acquisition and display of such an
emblem bought for the express purpose of conveying the desired appearance.
Figure 12: Secret Society and Emblem Charms
Again, Conan Doyle alludes to the same thing through the person of Dr Watson.11
9 Fleming, Ian: Moonraker (1955).

11 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, London and New York,
1905.
Figures 13 and 14 illustrate two types of Victorian-era rubber boots, buckle-
up and galoshes. It has been postulated that one of the reasons the Ripper
was able to escape the scenes of his crimes without any audible detection was
because he wore some similar type of silent footwear.
We have completed ‘dressing’ the Ripper suitably for his nefarious purposes,
and we now look to his implements and accoutrements. As deep a mystery as
his identity and motives remain, his selection and use of weapons and other
objects are no less mysterious.
At the time of the Whitechapel Murders, there was a nearly complete
lack of forensic sciences in the law enforcement and medical professions.
In 1888, British courts had not yet accepted the science and application of
Figure 13: Buckle Rubber Boots
fingerprinting. Detectives relied more on their ‘photographic memory’12
than on anything else, as official police procedure did not even require that
photographs be taken of the victims or the crime scene. No investigation of
knife wounds had ever been conducted in a proper scientific manner. Most
significant, there exist no detailed descriptions of the wound margins, and
we have only the opinions of doctors untrained in forensic pathology as to
the objects of their cause. The police surgeons and others who performed
the initial inspections of the Ripper’s victims and the subsequent autopsies
undoubtedly assumed that the killer had used a long straight-bladed knife
similar to those they used themselves in the post-mortem room.
Thus the coroner’s report on Annie Chapman read:
Figure 14: Galoshes
The murder weapon must have been a very sharp knife with a thin,
narrow blade, at least six to eight inches long, probably longer. They
[the wounds] could not be from a sword-bayonet or bayonet. They could have been done with a post
mortem knife but the ordinary surgical cases might not contain such an instrument. Those knives, used
by slaughter-men, which were well ground down, were possible alternatives but those used in the
leather trade would not be long enough in the blade.
At the Nichols Inquest, Dr Llewellyn stated: ‘...the cuts must have been caused by a long-bladed knife,
moderately sharp, and used with great violence.’
At the Eddowes Inquest, Dr Brown averred: ‘All these injuries were caused by a sharp instrument like a knife
and pointed.’
Even with the methods of modern forensic pathology, the length of a blade can only be determined with any
certainty from the depth of a stab wound.13 The estimation of blade length from a slashing wound such as the
Ripper used to cut the throats of his victims is problematic at best, and the lack of detailed descriptions of the
wound margins now makes it virtually impossible to determine the type of knife or edged instruments used in
the crimes. The throat cuts to the victims were mostly jagged, suggesting a short-bladed knife was used. The
abdominal wounds were likely done with a long-bladed knife, which produces controlled, long incisions.
On Casebook Jack the Ripper, Errata wrote:
The coroners could only judge the blades by what they knew, and what they were familiar with, and
what they assumed about the killer. The larger the knife, the farther away from the body Jack would
be. But since we know that he had no problem lifting the intestines out and throwing them to the side
we know Jack didn’t have a problem with getting in close. Thus given the lack of a total obliteration
of the organs, I think that we can in fact discount an 8 inch blade. I wouldn’t think it was longer than
5 inches.14
12 Thorwald, Jürgen: Century of the Detective, 1965.

13 Spitz, Werner U, and Fisher, Russell S: Medicolegal Investigation of Death: guidelines for the application of pathology to crime
investigation, Second Edition, 1980.
14 Errata, Casebook Jack the Ripper (www.casebook.org).

The doctors in attendance at the post-mortems have given
generally varied opinions that a knife with a straight blade of 6’
– 8’ in length was used to cut the throats and open the abdomens
of specific victims.15 If so, how could such a knife, possibly a foot
in overall length, be concealed and carried by the Ripper, yet be
readily available when the need arose? For a possible answer, we
look to the contemporary American Old West, where cowboys
and frontiersmen had long since adopted the practice of carrying
a ‘boot knife’. These were generally Bowie-style knives, with
Figure 15: Bowie-style Knife blade lengths of 6’ or longer, merely inserted into the boot on the
outer side and readily accessible (Figure 15). As boots were quite
common footwear for both men and women in London at the time
of the Whitechapel Murders,16 such an arrangement might naturally
suggest itself.
Errata added:
Most knives act like a splint immobilizing the ankle. It may

Figure 16: Dagger-style Knife and Sheath have been strategically advantageous to remove a knife from
your boot, but it means you’ve been peg-legging about for
awhile, which is awkward and perhaps, painful. The only
knives that don’t hurt are the ones small enough that they
don’t completely cover the ankle bone, so some movement is
possible. I think he had two knives for each victim. But there is
only so large a knife you can put in your boot without seriously
compromising mobility. Certainly nothing longer than a table
knife, and even a table knife is very uncomfortable. And
anything longer than maybe 4 inches is just going to fall out
of the boot.17
Alternately, a long knife could easily have been secured against

Figure 17: Straight-Edged Knife and Sheath
the calf, under the trousers leg, as so dramatically illustrated by
Clint Eastwood in the 1971 Don Siegel film Dirty Harry. Use of a
belt sheath was highly unlikely due to its length (although use of
a special shoulder sheath was possible). The same applies to the
stereotyped ‘black bag’ or parcel.
Many Ripperologists contend that the Ripper’s knife or knives
and other implements must have been contained in the parcels
reported to have been carried by several of the suspects described
by eyewitnesses.18 Although this may have been true, there are
compelling arguments against such being the case. A parcel of
any sort being carried even by a man of small means might be a
Figure 18: Pen Knives and Sheaths tempting target for theft in an economically depressed area such
as London’s East End. More important, any such parcel would have
to be laid down while the Ripper tended to business prior to the
mutilations and would not necessarily be easy to locate afterwards
in the darkness. Moreover, the possibility of being interrupted in
that environment was always great, and the consequent need to
flee instantly would mean that any such parcel and its contents,
including any incriminating evidence against him, would likely have

16 Cf. Rumbelow, Donald: op. cit.
Figure 19: Assorted Victorian Knives 18 Cf. Rumbelow, Donald: op. cit; Sugden, Philip: op. cit.

to be abandoned. If indeed the Ripper carried anything at all in such a manner,
it was much more likely to have been something both expendable and non-
traceable.
Were there suitable alternatives much easier to carry and conceal than
a long knife? Figures 20 and 21 illustrate typical lock blade folding knives
that were available at the time of the murders. They can be most effective
weapons. The Ripper could easily have used one to cut the throats of his
victims and eviscerate them, as any hunter who has experience in butchering Figure 20: Folding Clasp (Surgical) Knife
and dressing large animals can attest to. Although the conditions are hardly
the same – the hunter may have perfect light, no need to hurry, and certainly
no fear of discovery – it is possible to cut the throat of a 150 lb. deer clear to
the spine, eviscerate it, and hardly soil one’s hands while doing so, all with
something as small as a folding lock blade knife. With care, no blood or other
body fluids would soil the sleeves or any other part of the clothing. Upon
opening the abdomen, hardly any blood may be present, as the throat had
already been cut. Harvesting any internal organs could be done with very little
blood resulting upon the person. Working under considerably more hurried
conditions, the hands and sleeves of the Ripper might well have become
smeared with blood, but use of the oversleeves and gloves described earlier
would have obviated any attending problems.
Figure 22 illustrates a typical straight
razor used by men for shaving. These
were fearsome things, especially to the
teenager attempting his first shave, and Figure 21: Folding Lock Blade Knives
with good reason. With a sharp hollow-
ground blade 4’ in length, it was possible to do considerable damage to one’s
own self entirely by accident. Such razors were often carried by soldiers and
Figure 22: Straight Razor
frontiersmen in the American Civil War and the Old West for use ‘in case
the fightin’ got close’. Although their use in fiction has often been exaggerated, Edgar Allan Poe conveys a vivid
picture of their effectiveness when used on a woman’s throat for murderous purposes.19
There is no known evidence to indicate that the Ripper confined himself to the use of only one knife on a
victim, and the lack of detailed descriptions of the various wound margins forever precludes knowledge of that
possibility. However, just as a surgeon may use a variety of scalpels in surgery, so could have the Ripper for the
various victims and diverse stages of mutilation. Using a long–bladed knife to produce facial mutilations such as
the nicking of Catherine Eddowes’s eyelids would have been quite difficult and awkward to manage. But a shorter
straight razor would have been ideal for this purpose.
Small, maneuverable, lightweight, and, of course, razor-sharp, a straight razor would have been most effective
and, in addition, would have possessed the desirable quality of being quite easy to conceal. Naturally, possession
of a straight razor by any male suspect could readily be explained away if it ever became necessary to do so.
Errata wrote:
The best tools for the job would have been a short, thin, flexible blade for the throat and a stouter,
longer, full tang blade for the abdomen. So, something like a skinning knife for the throat, and a dual
edged dagger for the abdomen. Neither of which would have been easily available for someone living
in the slums. Although a sharpened file or a broken sword could both be ground to a dual-edged blade
of the appropriate length.
Looking at the medical evidence I think the instrument was probably somewhat narrow and with a
slender point. As for the abdominal injuries, it had to be a fixed blade knife. But because of the
lacerations to Eddowes kidney, it had to be dual edged. A dual edged blade would also make the
extraction of Chapman’s uterus much easier.20
19 Poe, Edgar Allan: The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841).

Figure 23 illustrates a typical patent medicine of the time. This
particular specimen is Dr Hammond’s Nerve and Brain Pills. Its
advertisement copy is especially ironic, as it gives the consumer
a stern warning against quack doctors. Prior to 1910, the year
which marked the passage of the United States Pure Food and
Drug Act, patent medicines such as this were quite common;
many doctors became wealthy by formulating and marketing their
own varieties. At that time, it was common to find ‘medicines’
which contained poisonous substances such as lead, copper salts,
mercury, and, as a well-known Liverpudlian cotton merchant
could have testified, arsenic. This has little to do with the Ripper,
except that one should remember that the numerous doctors who
gave oft-conflicting opinions and testimony in the case, testimony
that is still used today by Ripperologists, were contemporary
professional brothers of Dr Hammond. By likewise making such
authoritative pronouncements as to the time and cause of death
and the manner by which the mutilations were inflicted, they may
have given the enduring impression that they knew far more about
Figure 23: Dr. Hammond’s Nerve and Brain Pills forensic pathology than they actually did.
Misplaced professional opinions can be a dangerous thing, as they are far too often accepted without contest,
coming as they do from admired and respected individuals whose knowledge and judgment are supposedly
above reproach. Students of crime are familiar with Alphonse Bertillon, the French criminologist. He was the
originator of ‘Anthropometry’, the early method of criminal identification through measurement and tabulation
of various body characteristics. At the same time, he dismissed the competing new technology of fingerprinting
as ‘unreliable’. Bertillon’s reputation as an ‘expert criminologist’ was nearly ruined by his erroneous testimony in
the infamous Dreyfus trial once exonerating evidence was produced by others years afterwards.21
During this trial, Bertillon purported himself to be a ‘handwriting expert’, although he had no knowledge or
experience of that analytical science. So great was the popular animosity against Dreyfus (le traître) that no
evidence of any kind would have served to exonerate him, whereas Bertillon’s fabricated theory of ‘autoforgery’
helped cement the prosecution’s case against him. Dreyfus was summarily convicted of treason and condemned
to solitary confinement for life on Devil’s Island.
As an interesting aside, Figure 24 reproduces the Sears Roebuck
catalogue advertisement for breath cachous, famous for their presence
at the Liz Stride murder. For the record, they were cachous, not cashews,
and were priced within the reach of all, even homeless street women,
in 1888. As cachous are now obsolete, many have been confused by
the term throughout the years. There are some who believe that the Figure 24: Cachous
cachous were planted on and around Stride’s corpse to disguise the odor of chloroform or other strong anesthetic.
Cachous might have been effective against the human olfactory sense, even though they did not by themselves
release any significant perfume until placed in the warmth and moisture of the mouth. Yet they would have been
absolutely ineffective in use against a trained bloodhound set upon the sharp and distinctive scent of a specific
anesthetic.
Figure 25 illustrates a gum rubber ice bag. Bags for other specific purposes
or general uses were available at the time but, not being very interesting
items, were edited out of the catalogue reprint. This specimen alone
remains. Commercially available bags of gum or gutta-percha rubber, canvas
or oilskin could have been extremely useful for organ transport. Easily folded
and stored in the voluminous pockets of a coat or overcoat, they would have
been ready for immediate use. Once filled with viscera or other trophy body
parts, the bags could be stowed quickly and discreetly in the same coat
pockets for transport and later retrieval.
Figure 25: Gum Rubber Bags
21 Thorwald, Jurgen: op. cit.

Figure 26 illustrates a small pocket revolver then available by mail-order
like any other goods. Although a sharp knife could prove most effective
against drunken females, able-bodied PCs and vengeful male citizenry were
quite another matter. Even though no record of confrontation is known to
exist, surely a man such as the Ripper would not have been unprepared for
such an event. In that innocent day and age, firearms were quite common
and readily available, even in Great Britain. How common were handguns
in England then? For an answer, we turn again to Conan Doyle, whose
contemporary writing we assume to be a realistic representation of the
Figure 26: Period Pistol Victorian Era. In numerous novels and short stories in the Holmes Canon,
Conan Doyle details the carrying and use of pistols by private citizens.22 If the
Ripper had wished to carry a pistol for defense in case of discovery or entrapment, there appears to have been
nothing to stop him from easily and legally doing so.
If indeed the Ripper had carried a pistol whenever
he went trolling for a victim, how could he have
carried it? Figure 27 illustrates the hardware
available at the time for carrying a pistol on one’s
person - the pocket pistol holster and shoulder
holster. The former is well-known to readers of
Conan Doyle, as his fictitious period detective
Lestrade made extensive use of it, as also did
Figure 27: Pocket Pistol Holster and Shoulder Holster
Holmes and Watson.23 Concealed in the hip pocket
under the tails of one’s coat, the pocket pistol holster offered ready access to the weapon while allowing the
wearer to remain discreet and anonymous. For more positive concealment and access just as ready, the shoulder
holster would have been the implement of choice, although the extent of its use in Victorian England is not known.
Figure 28 illustrates a small carbide lamp of the era. This particular
specimen was intended for use on a bicycle, but would have easily fit
in an overcoat pocket. There is no known direct evidence suggesting
that the Ripper ever used such a device, even though his methodology
in committing extensive mutilations in poor light or near-total darkness
remains a mystery. The point is, had he actually needed to use a light as
he executed the mutilations, he could readily have obtained one. These
lamps utilized calcium carbide pellets or cartridges, which, upon being
moistened with water dripped from an integral reservoir, released
Figure 28: Carbide Lamp
acetylene gas. Acetylene, being very flammable, was easy to light and
keep lit. However, under these conditions acetylene burns with a sooty and smoky flame, and the light it produces
is relatively dim. Placed between the victim’s body and his own, the feeble light would have been effectively
shielded from view, yet would have likely been sufficient for his purposes.
Taken altogether, the applicable items as described would have rendered the Ripper truly and effectively, yet
discreetly, ‘dressed to kill’. Especially significant is the fact that these were all quite common items, readily and
easily available to anyone of ordinary means in late Victorian times.
Further speculation concerning the Ripper’s methodology of procuring a victim and selecting a murder site will
be the subject of the next article in this series, The Pick-up Schtick.
22 Cf. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), The
Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton (1905).
23 Cf. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: The Hound of the Baskervilles.
WALTER MOSLEY is a lifelong Ripperologist, having been introduced to Jack the Ripper in 1961 via Boris Karloff’s Thriller.
He founded the original jtrforums.com in 2003 and is the administrator of the current site.
SCOTT NELSON is an environmental engineer living in northern California. He has been studying the case for 40 years.
The Man with the Black Bag
Dr Eric Jones-Evans and
his Forgotten Jack the Ripper Play
By DAVID GREEN
You sometimes caught a glimpse of Eric Jones-Evans in the hour before dusk, galloping across the
countryside on his New Forest pony. He always wore a wide-brimmed black felt hat and an evening
cloak that billowed behind him and flapped against the mare’s flanks.1 Safely stowed within his
saddlebag was a black leather doctor’s bag. He must have looked for all the world like Jack the
Ripper on horseback. He enjoyed the long rides across the moorland, which were bracing but left
the mind free. When he reached his destination – usually a remote cottage or an old farmhouse
miles from any metalled road – he would whip out his surgical tools and get to work on an appendix
or a strangulated hernia, operating by candlelight on the scrubbed kitchen table.2
Country doctor
Eric Jones-Evans was a country doctor in the parish of Fawley. It was a
sparsely-populated corner of Hampshire running eastwards from the edge
of the New Forest along the banks of Southampton Water. The easiest
way to traverse this far-flung rural practice was in the saddle. (Years
later he would own a dilapidated Wolseley Hornet.) He often joked to his
professional colleagues that he had a “licence to kill”,3 but his patients
revered him for his unfailingly gracious bedside manner. They instantly felt
better just for hearing his beautiful rich baritone voice at the front door.
He filled the very atmosphere with a kind of music and drama.4
Dr Eric John Llewellyn Jones-Evans (1898-1989) came originally from

West Coker in Somerset. His father was a Church of England clergyman
and his mother a talented musician and painter. Eric was educated at
Sherborne School in Dorset.5 In 1916 he began medical training at St
Thomas’s Hospital in London, qualifying as a doctor (MRCS, LRCP) five years
later. During the First World War he served in the Royal Naval Volunteer
Reserves as a surgeon-sublieutenant. He met his wife, Agnes, a theatre
nurse, while working as a house physician at Winchester Hospital after the
war. In 1922 they arrived in Fawley on a motorbike and sidecar, just in time
for Christmas. Eric went straight into partnership with an elderly sawbones
called Dr Hutchinson, and he continued in practice there for well over a
Naval Surgeon: the young lieut. Jones-Evans, c.1917
quarter of a century. Fawley remained his home for the rest of his life. Courtesy University of Bristol Theatre Collection/ArenaPal
1 Dennis Stevens, “Good-night, Sweet Prince…”, Hampshire, September 1989, p.15.

2 Joan Grigsby, “A Forest GP of the Twenties”, Hampshire, February 1974, p.50.
3 Ibid.
4 Ron Lane, Hampshire, July 1969, p.39.
5 A fellow pupil was Alex Waugh, the elder brother of Evelyn Waugh. In 1917 Alex published a semi-autobiographical novel called The
Loom of Youth, set in a fictional public school called Fernhurst but clearly modelled on Sherborne. It caused a storm of controversy
at the time on account of its allusions to homosexual relationships among the boys. Jones-Evans was delighted to find himself
mentioned twice in the novel, and he dined out on the celebrity for weeks. See Joan Grigsby, A Forest GP of the Twenties,
Hampshire, February 1974, p.49.

Murder of Lily White
Courtesy University of Bristol Theatre Collection/ArenaPal
Police surgeon
Dr Jones-Evans was also the district police surgeon for Fawley and Hythe. He got along well with coroners and other
courtroom officials, although his demeanour in the witness box could be histrionic at times. His handling of the so-
called ‘Skeleton on the Sands’ case in July 1932 (when the long-dead body of a woman was found buried on the beach
at Southampton Water) did much to enhance his public reputation as a skilled and assiduous pathologist;6 but by far his
most notable case concerned the murder of twenty-year-old Lily White, a domestic servant from Blackfield in Fawley.
On the evening of 21 July 1937 Lily’s body was found half-hidden in woodland just outside the village of Dibden near
Hythe. It was partly stripped of clothing. Abrasions on her hands and arms showed that she had been dragged over the
rough ground and through some blackberry bushes. The earth around the body had been torn up as if a struggle had
taken place. She was six months pregnant. Dr Jones-Evans was called to the scene at 11.50pm. He examined the body
in situ, and the following day conducted a full post-mortem in the mortuary at Hythe Cottage Hospital. He determined
that death was due to asphyxiation caused by suffocation: he surmised that the victim had been smothered by the blue
beret found lying close to the body.
Frederick Corneby, aged twenty-four, a labourer from Hythe, was already in police custody. Corneby had lost his
left hand six years earlier in a gruesome machine accident at the Fawley petroleum plant where he worked. He wore a
cosmetic prosthesis carved from lightweight wood, which he always kept encased in a brown leather glove. He’d been
courting Lily for around five years and he admitted to being the father of her child. But he was dispirited at the thought
of getting married: he had gambling debts and was morbidly fearful of passing on syphilis to Lily’s baby. Around 9pm
that evening they’d gone for a walk up Mullins Lane. According to Corneby, when he told Lily he couldn’t marry her, she
started crying, and for reasons he could never afterwards properly explain “something seemed to seize me and I seemed
to lose what self-control I had left”.7 He grabbed Lily by the throat. There was a brief struggle and the next thing he
knew she was dead. Panicking, he hauled her body through the hedgerow into a coppice. In his statement to the police,
he claimed he placed the beret over Lily’s nose and mouth because he couldn’t bear to look at her dead face. He then
attempted to cut his right wrist with a razor, but found he wasn’t able to hold the blade in his artificial hand.8 Instead,
he walked to the police station in Hythe and gave himself up.
But the post-mortem told a slightly different story. Dr Jones-Evans detected the presence of semen in the victim’s
vagina. While there were few outwardly visible signs of violence, Corneby appears to have forcibly dragged Lily into the
undergrowth, where he may have raped her. Perhaps he tried to muffle her screams by holding the beret over her face.
6 Evening Telegraph, 18 July 1932, p.5.

7 Portsmouth Evening News, 10 December 1937, p.13.
8 One wonders why Corneby never thought to cut his left wrist with his good right hand.

In December 1937 Corneby was sent for trial at Winchester Assizes before Mr Justice Tucker. Seated in the dock
wearing a navy blue suit and a canary yellow pullover, he seemed bemused by the proceedings. He was found guilty
of the murder of Lily White and sentenced to death. An appeal amounting to little more than a perfunctory insanity
plea was dismissed by the Lord Chief Justice, but in January 1938 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Dr Jones-Evans kept a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings about the case, just as he would do, years later, with Jack the
Ripper.9
Actor
In July 1948 Dr Jones-Evans’s medical career came to a sudden and premature end. Incensed by the introduction of
a free national health service, he destroyed all his textbooks and patient records in a garden bonfire, and resolved to
make his living as an actor and writer.
Jones-Evans always believed he was “born” to go on stage.10 In 1905, when Eric was seven, his parents took him to the
Grand Theatre in Boscombe to see the great Victorian stage actor Henry Irving perform the role of Mathias in Leopold
Lewis’s popular nineteenth-century potboiler The Bells. The experience made a deep and lasting impression on him.11
Jones-Evans made his professional stage debut while still a medical student, appearing in a production of George R
Sims’s drama The Trumpet Call. After the war he briefly toured the English provinces with a change-nightly repertory
company before forming his own troupe in 1928. For about twenty years he maintained a sort of double life as a country
doctor and part-time actor. On matinee days he closed his Fawley surgery so that he could perform at the Grand
Theatre in Southampton. The high point in his stage career came on 24 April
1954, when he appeared at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire alongside his long-time
friend Bransby Williams in a production of The Bells. The BBC was there to film
the event. Jones-Evans took the parts of public prosecutor and president of the
court. Perhaps his professional knowledge of Hampshire courtrooms and inquest
halls lent natural effect and verisimilitude to his acting.
Jones-Evans was essentially a monologist who specialised in quick change

character entertainments in the style of Bransby Williams. While he had a
talent for mimicry and vocal impressions, opinion was divided as to his dramatic
abilities. Clarence Carr spoke of his “deft and realistic cameos. They glow with
truth and colour”;12 but his obituarist in the Daily Telegraph commented dryly
that “Jones-Evans was essentially modest - and with reason - about his powers
as a player.”13
Playwright and Dramatist

Jones-Evans began writing for the stage in the late 1920s but he did not
see his work issued by a trade publisher until he was nearly fifty years old. His
earliest efforts - one hesitates to call them apprentice works - were published
by Samuel French Ltd, the leading London theatre publishers. In the 1960s he
chose a new publisher, G F Wilson & Co, whose offices were on the town quay at
Southampton. Over his writing life he produced perhaps twenty plays in total,
mainly adaptations from Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and George Eliot.
Playwright and dramatist: Jones-Evans, c.1958

While his plays were acted and broadcast all over the world, they received little
Courtesy University of Bristol Theatre Collection/ArenaPal critical acclaim.14
9 For details of the Corneby case, see National Archives HO 144/22660, ASSI 26/49/2. The post-mortem report (dated 25 July 1937)
is in the University of Bristol Theatre Collection, EJE002091.
10 Eric Jones-Evans, “Turnip or cucumber – which?”, Hampshire, August 1982, p.42.
11 See Eric Jones-Evans, “With Irving and The Bells”. In David Mayer, ed. Henry Irving and The Bells: Irving’s Personal Script of the
Play by Leopold Lewis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980, pp.17–29.
12 Clarence F Carr, Eric Jones-Evans: the Dickens Character-Actor, G F Wilson & Co, Southampton, no date, p.3. A copy is in the
Hartley Library, University of Southampton, MS 91 A754 Papers of Dr Eric Jones-Evans.
13 The Daily Telegraph Third Book of Obituaries, (ed. Hugh Massingberd), Pan 1998, p.92.
14 Tony Brode, “A Dickens disciple”, Radio Times, 15 April 1971.

He seemed most at ease developing macabre and supernatural themes, and he clearly revelled in the trappings of
Gothic romance - the deep-voiced villain in a black wig and the blood-stained chemise draped across the open tomb.
Unquestionably he will have drawn parallels between the case of Frederick Corneby and Mary-Anne Radcliffe’s popular
Gothic novel Manfroné; or, The One-Handed Monk (1809).15
Given his interest in the dark and the sinister, it is hardly surprising that Jones-Evans should turn to notorious Victorian
murder mysteries for inspiration.16 In 1952 he started work on ‘The Black Bag’, a one-act drama based on the greatest
murder mystery of them all - the identity of Jack the Ripper. This was quite a daring change of direction for Jones-Evans,
whose theatrical upbringing had prepared him only for the inherited plot structures of Victorian melodrama. What
inspired him to explore the Ripper theme?
Origins of ‘The Black Bag’

Jones-Evans clearly had a fascination
with Jack the Ripper dating back to his
days as a medical student at St Thomas’s.
The writer and broadcaster Sean Street
recounts how the young Jones-Evans used
to walk around Whitechapel in the footsteps
of Jack the Ripper.17 We know that in
February 1944 he went to see Tod Slaughter
in a touring production of George Walkley’s
‘Jack the Ripper’ at the Theatre Royal in
Aldershot. When the Evening News began
serializing Daniel Farson’s Jack the Ripper
in September 1972, Jones-Evans kept copies
of all the articles.18
One of the characters in the ‘The

Black Bag’, a morbid clerk named Henry
Hewitt, admits to owning a book about the
Whitechapel murders called When Terror
Stalked London by Night. “It gives you the
’ole story,” says Hewitt (p. 7). This is an Programme for ‘Jack the Ripper’ at the Theatre Royal, Aldershot (Week beginning 21 February 1944)
Courtesy University of Bristol Theatre Collection/ArenaPal
obvious reference to Edwin Woodhall’s Jack
the Ripper: Or When London Walked in Terror (1937). But it’s quite evident that Jones-Evans drew his information
about the Ripper case primarily from The Mystery of Jack the Ripper by Leonard Matters, published in 1929. Indeed,
‘The Black Bag’ is essentially a reinterpretation of Matters’s ‘Dr Stanley’ solution to the Whitechapel mystery in which
a doctor murders prostitutes in revenge for the death of his son from venereal disease. All the elements from Matters’s
theory are present in the play - a young, motherless medical student, his rendezvous with the prostitute Marie Kelly
in the West End in 1886, the student’s death from “disorders of a promiscuous love”, an avenging father hunting down
Kelly...
Thomas Stowell and the Royal Ripper

There is one other source we need to examine quite closely.
It seems likely that Jones-Evans was acquainted with the physician Dr Thomas Stowell, whose speculations on the
identity of Jack the Ripper were published in the November 1970 issue of The Criminologist. Stowell’s suspect was
Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor (Prince ‘Eddy’), the Duke of Clarence and heir presumptive to the British
throne.
15 Mary-Anne Radcliffe is often confused with Mrs Ann Radcliffe, the highly successful Gothic novelist (1764–1823).
16 See, for example, his Mr Crummles Presents: The Red Barn Murder, or The Gypsy’s Curse (G F Wilson, 1966), based on the murder
of Maria Marten in Suffolk in 1827.
17 Sean Street, “Eric – A link with Sir Henry”, Hampshire, September 1989, p.16.
18 Farson’s Jack the Ripper was published on 2 October 1972.

Stowell and Jones-Evans were both educated at St Thomas’s Hospital and they shared a professional interest in
occupational and industrial medicine: Stowell became the chief medical officer for ICI while Jones-Evans served as
medical adviser for the British Power Boat Company in Hythe and for the Esso refinery at Fawley. They will have attended
the same conferences and moved largely in the same academic and professional circles.
Moreover, Thomas Stowell lived and worked in and around Southampton, just seven miles or so north of Fawley: he
had a medical practice in Bitterne, a suburb of Southampton, and in the fifties and sixties he resided in West End, a
village just to the north-east of the city. Jones-Evans will almost certainly have called regularly on his colleague while
on theatre business in Southampton. As early as 1960 Stowell is known to have discussed his ‘Royal Ripper’ idea with
the writer Colin Wilson, and it seems reasonable to suppose that Stowell will have aired his theories privately to trusted
colleagues well before then. Stowell was a colourful raconteur; Jones-Evans, as we have seen, relished a good murder
mystery: it is easy to imagine the two physicians chatting confidentially about the Ripper crimes over dinner on the south
coast. Perhaps Dr Stowell’s lurid and scarcely believable tale of murder involving the highest in the land helped fire the
younger doctor’s theatrical imagination.
But more than this, in ‘The Black Bag’ Jones-Evans identifies his doomed medical student as ‘Edward’ - a clear allusion
to the Duke of Clarence (Prince ‘Eddy’):
MARIE. I must say Ted never thought twice about spendin’ money on me.
DOCTOR. (sharply) Ted!
MARIE. Yes, he always liked me to call him that. He used to say it sounded more lovin’ than Edward.
‘The Black Bag’ (p. 23)
Is this a coincidence? Or has Jones-Evans name-dropped Stowell’s suspect intentionally? If the latter, then his oblique
mention of Prince Eddy in ‘The Black Bag’ in 1957 represents the earliest printed reference to Prince Albert Victor in
connection with the Jack the Ripper murders, pre-dating Colin Wilson’s discussion of this topic in his Encyclopaedia of
Murder four years later.19
Jones-Evans may have intended the reference as a kind of in-joke for Stowell’s private amusement.20 Draft versions
of the play show that Jones-Evans originally had in mind the name James or Hugh Sinclair for Jack the Ripper, which
suggests the following sequence of events: Jones-Evans mentions to Stowell that he is writing a play based on the Ripper
mystery, Stowell volunteers the Duke of Clarence story, Jones-Evans discards ‘Sinclair’ and alludes to Prince Eddy.
The personal dimension of this ‘Edward’ passage is hinted at in a letter from Jones-Evans’s son, Mervyn, to his father
in April 1976. He tells his father about the “fashionable” theory then doing the rounds that Jack the Ripper was in fact
Princess May (later the Queen consort), who was briefly betrothed to Prince Albert Victor before his unexpected death in
1892. According to Mervyn, Princess May “didn’t care for the morals of the Duke of Clarence… and so rushed round the
East End with a carving knife”. Of course, it’s a crackpot theory - Mervyn calls it “the best joke of 1976” - but surely the
very fact that father and son are corresponding about the Duke of Clarence and the Ripping Royals tends to support the
contention that Eric Jones-Evans had a particular interest in this subject.21
Jones-Evans may even have believed a version of the Dr Stanley/royal conspiracy theory. The May 1968 issue of
Hampshire magazine featured an article by Norman W Turner in which he looks at the unsolved murder of eight-year-
old schoolboy Percy Searle, who was attacked in Havant on the evening of 26 November 1888. He examines the theory
that Percy’s murder was the handiwork of Jack the Ripper.22 Jones-Evans was himself a regular contributor to Hampshire
magazine, writing articles mainly on local history and the arts. Turner’s piece caught his eye.
19 In his Encyclopaedia of Murder, with Patricia Pitman (1961), Wilson mentions the theory that “Jack the Ripper was some relative
of the Royal Family”.
20 This kind of larkiness is quite in character. John Mann tells the story of how drama critic Pat O’Connor arrived at one of Jones-
Evans’s parties to find the other guests chatting animatedly in total silence. See Hampshire, December 1999, p. 51.
21 Mervyn Jones-Evans, unpublished letter to his father, 16 April 1976, University of Bristol Theatre Collection, EJE000891.
22 Norman W Turner, “Did Jack the Ripper Come to Portsmouth?”, Hampshire, May 1968, p.33.

He wrote to the editor dismissing the idea that Jack the Ripper had been active along the Hampshire coast:
“Jack” restricted his sphere of operations to an area of approximately one square mile in the East End of
London, and confined his murderous love-hate solely to women of the twilight. No men or children figured in
what were known to the Press as “The Whitechapel Murders”… 23
He then listed the four key questions that needed to be answered to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper - Who was
he? What was his occupation or profession? What was his motive? And why did he mutilate his victims? “Those interested
in criminology,” he wrote, “will, I hope, find logical and satisfactory answers to those questions in my play ‘The Black
Bag’.”
It seems Jones-Evans regarded his play not simply as stage entertainment but as a credible solution to the Jack the
Ripper mystery.
The Influence of Bransby Williams

‘The Black Bag’ was published by Samuel French in 1957 as No. 685 in their famous Acting Edition series. However,
Jones-Evans actually began work on the play around 1952. He wrote by longhand, jotting down ideas and fragments of
dialogue into inexpensive Lion Brand ruled exercise books. He scribbled supplementary notes on whatever was lying
around the house - invoices, pages from a doctor’s prescription pad - and all these scraps ended up inside the notebooks.
Not surprisingly, the play developed rather slowly, but he completed a first draft by the spring of 1953 and sent a copy
to his friend Bransby Williams.24
Bransby Williams was a Londoner through and through. Born in 1870, he grew up in Bow and lived and worked in the
Whitechapel area at the time of the Ripper murders. By day he was an errand boy in the tea-tasting firm of Turner and
Clarke, so his duties often took him to the premises of Kearley & Tonge in Mitre Square, where Catherine Eddowes was
murdered. By night he was an amateur actor performing at working men’s clubs and institutions in and around the East
End.25
In a letter to Eric Jones-Evans dated 17 July 1953 he recalls an unnerving experience during the Autumn of Terror. He
was walking down Commercial Road on his way to the theatre, dressed in character in an Inverness cape and carrying a
black bag. He was stopped by a plain clothes man, who demanded he open his bag.
I was staggered and frightened. I opened it. An old props revolver and an old dagger! I showed him the play
and the grease paints and the club and he walked to it with me and said “You’re young my lad. Don’t go about
like that just now…” It had never struck this stage struck youth that I was looking like Jack the Ripper.26
While Bransby Williams had good things to say about ‘The Black Bag’, he recoiled at its perversity. Frankly, he thought
it was too bloody and horrid for theatre audiences. He urged Jones-Evans to tone things down. This was well-meaning
counsel from a dear friend and a cherished elder statesman of British theatre, but Williams was then eighty-three and
perhaps a little out of touch with contemporary public taste. Jones-Evans took his advice anyway. He cut out whole
sections of the script and re-wrote other passages. In a way, it was an act of butchery. The Ripper’s medical bag started
off stuffed with handfuls of stinking human viscera; now it was merely dripping and sodden with blood.27
Williams may have felt queasy at the portrayal of the Ripper’s twisted, misogynistic world view:
Streetwalkers, they’re better dead. Better for themselves - better for everyone... Birds of prey - that’s
what they are. Disease, pestilence, and ruin - that’s what these women spread… These women he killed were
parasites - drunken, degraded outcasts of humanity, spreading disease and filth and corrupting the souls of
all with whom they came in contact...
‘The Black Bag’ (deleted passage)
23 Eric Jones-Evans, Hampshire, June 1968, p.30.

24 Fortunately, the notebooks containing the early drafts of the play, as well as the promptbook, have survived. They are held in the
University of Bristol Theatre Collection, EJE001764, EJE002064, and EJE002073.
25 Bransby Williams’s recording of the The Caretaker in 1912 marks the earliest known use of the term ‘Jack the Ripper’ in audio
media. For an excellent short portrait of Bransby Williams and his East End associations, see Andy Aliffe, “Jack Gets Into the
Groove: The Vinyl Solution”, Ripperologist 54, July 2004, p.25. For an account of the friendship between Bransby Williams and
Eric Jones-Evans, see his autobiography Bransby Williams by Himself (Hutchinson, 1954), pp.178-9.
26 Bransby Williams, unpublished letter to Eric Jones-Evans, University of Bristol Theatre Collection, EJE002073/1. For a variation on
this anecdote, see Bransby Williams’s letter to the Sunday Times, 25 October 1959.
27 ‘The Black Bag’, p.30.
He also thought that the play showed “too much sympathy for the Ripper”.28 He was used to a traditional style
of melodramatic narrative in which virtue and justice invariably triumphed over villainy and where murderers were
unremittingly evil. In ‘The Black Bag’ Jones-Evans subverts both these expectations. Not only does Jack the Ripper elude
capture (of course), but he saves the life of the landlord’s wife, who has suffered a heart attack. “A bloke wot can do
that can’t be orl bad,” muses the landlord (‘The Black Bag’ p.31).
Originally, Jones-Evans had Jack the Ripper dying of cancer, “a fitting retribution for the wrong I’ve done”. He returns
to Whitechapel twenty-four years after the murders to unburden himself to the landlord and to seek expiation. His
vendetta against Marie Kelly and the other victims is portrayed as an act almost of paternalistic piety: the life of his only
son was ruined by these women, so they must die to fulfil the obligation of “blood will have blood”. The play ends in
absolution with the landlord shaking the Ripper’s hand in farewell. But most of this was taken out. In the final published
version, the Ripper simply dies in front of the pub hearth and the audience isn’t taxed too much with complicated moral
questions about sinfulness and the nature of human goodness and evil.
It is for the critics to decide if these changes have improved ‘The Black Bag’. Bransby Williams, at any rate, seems to
have welcomed the edits, for he went on to make the first tape-recording of the play with Kathleen Saintsbury.29
Sweet Violets
An important late addition to the effects plot was the song ‘Sweet Violets’, which is sung to the accompaniment of
a barrel-organ. It is used as an interlude to fill the change of phase from 1912 to 1888 Whitechapel, and is heard in the
background several times during the play as a sort of refrain. Marie Kelly is heard singing the song when she leaves the
pub in the company of the doctor we suspect to be Jack the Ripper.
Jones-Evans knew that ‘Sweet Violets’ was a popular tune of the period but he decided to create an original song
based on his own words with a musical arrangement by Ward Gardner. The score and the lyrics are printed at the back
of the play.30
Description and Synopsis

‘The Black Bag’ is a play in one act and three phases. The casting is for ten men
and four women.
CHARACTERS
(in the order of their appearance)
GERTRUDE ELLIS - a shopgirl

DOLLY BATES - Sam’s daughter
HENRY HEWITT - a clerk
A SEAFARING MAN
SAM BATES - landlord of “The Sailor’s Rest”
BILL STOCKER - a bricklayer
TOM MAKINS - a carpenter
BERT SAUNDERS - a Merchant Navy officer
KATE EDDOWES
MARIE KELLY
A DOCTOR
POLICE SERGEANT CRUMP
1st MAN
2nd MAN
‘The Black Bag’ (Samuel French, 1957)

Author’s collection
28 Bransby Williams, unpublished letter to Eric Jones-Evans, University of Bristol Theatre Collection, EJE002073/1.
29 I have been unable to locate the whereabouts of this recording and sadly I fear it is lost to us.
30 Ward Gardner (1923-1994) succeeded Jones-Evans as medical officer at the Fawley refinery. In 1971 he established the Solent
Sinfonia. He composed a large body of work, much of it for the recorder.

The action of the play takes place in the private bar of The Sailor’s Rest, a public house off the Whitechapel Road
but possibly modelled on The Jolly Sailor, Jones-Evans’s local in Ashlett Creek, Fawley. It is November 1912. The gas
lamps are lit and a cheerful fire burns in the grate. There is a horsehair settee, mahogany tables and chairs, and
advertisements for Bass and Worthington on the walls.
An elderly seafaring man enters the pub. He is emaciated and feeble and appears in the grip of an incurable wasting
illness. He sits down close to the fire. The newspapers that day are full of the arrest of a man for murdering and
mutilating two women. Naturally, the conversation turns to the crimes of Jack the Ripper twenty-four years earlier. Sam
Bates, the landlord, relates how he took over The Sailor’s Rest just a fortnight or so before the Ripper murders began.
He has a tale to tell. “But it ain’t a pretty story, I warns you.”
Gradually the lights dim to darkness. From outside, a barrel-organ plays the tune ‘Sweet Violets’. The lights slowly
come up, and it is the night of 9 November 1888. The landlord and customers are dressed in period garb. Kate Eddowes
has a glass of gin in front of her. The pub talk is all about the Ripper.
Marie Kelly enters from the street. She is a “strikingly handsome girl of twenty-four, with blonde hair… Her voice,
husky though it is from disease and drink, has a peculiarly attractive quality.” Kate Eddowes calls it a night and ventures
out into the dark, alone.
We learn that the landlord’s wife has had a heart attack upstairs. Marie Kelly rushes out to fetch Dr Gibson from 32
Berner Street. While she’s gone, another doctor (not Gibson) enters the bar. He is tall with dark hair and side-whiskers.
He is wearing an Inverness cape, a soft black hat, and gloves. And he carries a black bag. He gets talking to the landlord
and on hearing that his wife has had a heart attack goes upstairs to take a look at her.
Meanwhile Marie Kelly returns from her fruitless errand, followed by Police Sergeant Crump who announces that Kate
Eddowes has been murdered by the Ripper. He warns Marie to take care and says goodnight. The doctor comes down and
has a drink with Marie. He is interested in her life story and quizzes her at length over her affair with a young medical
student called Edward. Marie is getting drunk and for a moment she sees a family resemblance between her former West
End sweetheart and the doctor sitting opposite her. He offers to escort her home to Miller’s Court. Together they leave
the pub, with Marie singing the refrain from ‘Sweet Violets’.
A few minutes later the doctor is back, sounding breathless and a little agitated. Running footsteps can be heard
outside. He checks on the landlord’s wife - the injection he gave her earlier has saved her life - then he leaves the pub.
Sergeant Crump returns with the news that Marie Kelly has been murdered. The landlord notices that the doctor has
left his bag behind. It is dripping and sodden with blood! Tentatively, they open the bag… Sergeant Crump rushes out
into the street, furiously blowing his whistle…
The lights fade and we are back in 1912. The regulars notice that the old seafaring chap has died in his chair by the
fire. The landlord recognises a birthmark - like a scar or a burn - on the old man’s wrist. He’s seen that mark before - on
the wrist of that doctor fellow - Jack the Ripper - who twenty-four years earlier came into the pub and saved his wife’s
life.
*****
Jones-Evans’s plays are possibly best appreciated by audiences attuned to the traditions of Victorian and Edwardian
theatre. He was unashamedly old school and had little time for the new wave of social realism that was beginning to
emerge in British theatre after the Second World War. It would be interesting to see what a small repertory company
might make of ‘The Black Bag’ today. Given a sympathetic production, I can see it providing a wholly enjoyable evening’s
entertainment. If nothing else, the play needs to take its small place in history as an early dramatic treatment of the
Ripper legend.31
Last Performance
Eric Jones-Evans has one last surprise for us. On 16 November 1976 he went into the studios at BBC Radio Solent to
record a short piece about Jack the Ripper and his research for ‘The Black Bag’. He was interviewed by the journalist
and radio presenter Dennis Skillicorn. Jones-Evans reminisces about visiting Miller’s Court just after the outbreak of the
First World War when he was a medical student.
31 The play is not mentioned in the fiction and drama chapter of Alexander Kelly’s Jack the Ripper: A Bibliography and Review of the
Literature (London: Association of Assistant Librarians, 1973).

A cassette tape recording of this broadcast has survived.32 In August this year I went along to the library of the
University of Bristol Theatre Collection where I was able to listen to it through headphones. I have transcribed parts of
the recording below:
EJE: I visited the house in which she lived, the sordid ground floor room in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street,
Spitalfields.
DS: Was it just the same as it had been?
EJE: Yes, and in which the body of the Ripper’s last victim had been found on the bed with her heart lying
on the pillow beside her. I remember peering through the grimy panes of the half-boarded-up window, and I
saw a mouldering straw mattress partially covered by a moth-eaten blanket. I suppose it must have remained
there since the girl was murdered. It was a rusty iron bedstead, and the entrance door opening directly onto
the flagstoned court was chained and padlocked so I couldn’t get in, of course, and it seemed to me - and this
was a gruesome thought - that no-one had lived there since the body of the last tenant had been wheeled
away to the mortuary on a police stretcher.
He describes how he knocked on the door of a derelict house adjoining Miller’s Court. It was answered by an
“emaciated, pallid-faced old man of about 70, clad in a filthy shirt, a greasy dressing gown in need of repair, and carpet
slippers that had seen their best days.” He eventually persuades the man to tell all he knows for a quid.
DS: And what did he tell you, Eric?
EJE: He’d lived in Miller’s Court all his life and had actually heard Marie Kelly - that was the victim - singing
‘Sweet Violets’, a popular tune of the day, at about one o’clock in the morning on the day she was murdered.
He’d peeped through the window of her room after her body had been removed by the police, and had seen
the blood-soaked coverlet on the bed, and the ash-filled grate… The murderer [had lit the fire] to complete
his ghastly work and to give him more light in which to do it - that was, of course, the entire dissection of
his victim’s abdominal organs.
I doubt anyone has listened to the tape for close on forty years. It was a strange feeling. Eric Jones-Evans was
suddenly beside me in the hush of the library, talking in his distinguished thespian voice about a murder that was already
more than a quarter of a century old when he’d visited Miller’s Court during the First World War. I wondered how much
of his story was true. And how much of it was just a practised actor’s tale designed to frighten radio listeners on an
autumn evening all those years ago.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Jill Sullivan at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection for allowing me unfettered access to the
enormous Dr Eric Jones-Evans archive. Thanks are also due to John Rooney and staff at the Hartley Library, University
of Southampton, for permission to consult the collection MS 91 Papers of Dr Eric Jones-Evans; to Amy Stolarczyk for
arranging copyright and publication licences, and to the staff at the Portsmouth Records Office. Many thanks to Helena
Wojtczak for her comments on an earlier draft of this article.
32 University of Bristol Theatre Collection, EJE/M/000024.
DAVID GREEN lives in Hampshire, England, where he works as a freelance book indexer. This is his second
article for Ripperologist. He also contributes occasional book reviews. He is currently writing (very slowly)
a book about the murder of schoolboy Percy Searle in Hampshire in 1888.

From the Casebooks of
a Murder House Detective
Murder and Mystery in Ladbroke Grove and
The Pimlico Murder, 1876
By JAN BONDESON
MURDER AND MYSTERY IN

LADBROKE GROVE
James Pope-Hennessy was born
into an aristocratic and intellectual
family in 1916. He left Oxford
without a degree and worked at
a religious publishing company.
During World War II, he held an office
job in military intelligence. After
the war, he established himself as
a writer of popular travel books
and biographies. His 1959 official
life of Queen Mary earned him the
CVO, and important approval from
royal circles. He went on to write
a book about Queen Victoria, and
his biographies of Lord Crewe and
Anthony Trollope were also well
An old postcard showing part of Ladbroke Grove
received. James Pope-Hennessy
had a house in Ireland and a comfortable London flat at No. 9 Ladbroke Grove.
But there was a darker side to James Pope-Hennessy’s life. He had always been a homosexual, and as he got older, he
developed a taste for the denizens of various ‘rough trade’ backstreet gay bars. He drank to excess, and this gradually
undermined his mental faculties, although he remained capable of churning out his biographies well into his fifties.
His friend James Lees-Milne became fearful that Pope-Hennessy would not live much longer, either drinking himself to
death, walking out in front of a bus while bumbling about in the West End, or being murdered by the vicious young men
he consorted with.
In early 1974, James Pope-Hennessy was paid an advance of £150,000 for a biography of Noel Coward. Since he was
a reckless spender, quite incapable of saving money, and possibly also a victim of blackmail for his double life, this
cheered him up considerably. But when Sean O’Brien, one of the young homosexuals he had befriended, read about this
huge advance cheque, he decided to make the money his own. For some reason, he believed that the royal biographer
kept this money in his flat, and after recruiting two accomplices, the young thugs Terence Noonan and Edward Wilkinson,
he went to see James Pope-Hennessy at No. 9 Ladbroke Grove.
The royal biographer was pleased to see his young friend, and ordered his valet, Leslie Walker-Smith, to pour them
a sherry each. After a while, the young valet went out to do some shopping, and O’Brien saw his chance. He made an
excuse to leave the flat, and picked up his two accomplices from the Mitre public house nearby. When the unsuspecting
Pope-Hennessy let them into his flat, they knocked him down, tied him up, and beat him with a bludgeon to make him
tell them where he kept his money. This was something Pope-Hennessy was unable to do, in spite of all their brutal

treatment, since the advance had not yet been paid.
The thugs then thrust a large hair-net down his throat
with considerable force, and proceeded to ransack
the flat for valuables. But their plan went seriously
wrong when Walker-Smith returned with his shopping
– a new carving-knife! Although beaten and stabbed
himself in the furious fight that ensued, the brave
valet hacked away at the intruders with a hearty
goodwill, wounding all three of them.
People in Ladbroke Grove were amazed to see

the three thugs come bounding out from No. 9,
bleeding badly. Noonan, who had been stabbed hard
in the back, jumped onto a passing bus, but he soon
collapsed from the loss of blood, and was taken to
hospital. O’Brien, who had been stabbed in the
leg, hobbled away to the Holland Park underground
The south-western extremity of Ladbroke Grove as it stands today,
with the Mitre pub, the large No. 7, and then the terrace of older houses starting with No. 11
station, and Wilkinson, who had only received minor
injuries, hailed a cab. The badly injured Walker-
Smith shouted for help, and both he and James Pope-
Hennessy were taken to hospital. The valet recovered
from his wounds, but the royal biographer died soon
after.1 The police soon rounded up the three thugs: in
court, they pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and were
sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
It is curious that according to a newspaper article

states that the murder house at No. 9 Ladbroke Grove,
inhabited by James Pope-Hennessy at least since
1963, was actually haunted. Pope-Hennessy believed
that it was haunted by the ghost of a murderer who
had once lived there, and he asked a priest to perform
a ceremony of exorcism. The name of this murderer
was not provided.2 According to another newspaper
article, the author Iain Sinclair once worked as a
decorator in Notting Hill. His employer told him that
The house at No. 7 and the alleyway to the present-day No. 9
the house they were working on had once been the
site for a Gothic tale by Robert Louis Stevenson. The
following day, James Pope-Hennessy was murdered
in a neighbouring house, and when the blood was
cleared from his papers, it was seen that his latest
literary project had been a biography of Robert Louis
Stevenson!3
1 M. Fido, Murder Guide to London (London 1986), 113;

Times 26 January 16f, 28 January 1d, 15 March 4e, 9 July
2e, 10 July 4d, 11 July 2e, 12 July 3a, 1974; Daily Mirror
26 and 29 January 1974. On James Pope-Hennessy’s sad
life, see P. Quennell (Ed.), A Lonely Business (London
1981).
2 Daily Mirror 12 July 1974. I have found nothing to
suggest that any newsworthy murderer ever inhabited
No. 9 Ladbroke Grove.
The present-day No. 9 Ladbroke Grove has nothing to do with the old murder house,
but occupies a different position inside the alley
3 Daily Telegraph April 6 2004.

Clearly, it was time to track down the murder house at No. 9 Ladbroke Grove, something I expected would be quite
easy, since the murder happened as recently as 1974. And indeed, there turned out to be a No. 9, a low modern building
situated in a small alley between No. 7 and No. 11. But since the Times trial report stated that James Pope-Hennessy
had lived in a maisonette flat with a top-floor living-room and a first-floor lounge, the present-day No. 9 could not be
the murder house.4 The numbering of the houses at the southern end of Ladbroke Grove seemed quite odd, with the
Mitre pub still situated at the corner with Holland Park Avenue, and then the large and impresssive modern house at No.
7 as the first numbered house. Had the houses been renumbered at some stage? Both James Lees-Milne and Cecil Beaton
placed James Pope-Hennessy’s flat opposite the local police station, but this building is situated some distance away
from the present-day No. 7 and No. 9, by the crossing with Ladbroke Road.5
But it turns out that the

murder house detection skills
of James Pope-Hennessy’s
two friends were seriously
defective. The relevant Post
Office directories and Ordnance
Survey maps demonstrate
that the present-day No. 11
Ladbroke Grove has always
had that number, and thus the
royal biographer’s flat must
have been closer to the south-
western extremity of Ladbroke
Grove. Since it was clear that
the Pope-Hennessy murder
house no longer stood, it had
no place in my book about the
Murder Houses of London. The The old postcard solving the mystery, showing No. 1-No. 9 Ladbroke Grove
reason for it being discussed
here is that an old postcard of Ladbroke Grove belatedly solved the mystery. Stamped and posted in 1909, it shows five
houses with shops on the ground floor level, No. 1 – No. 9 Ladbroke Grove. Here the short terrace ends, and there is a
small alley before an end-of-terrace house that is clearly identical to the still existing No. 11. It is not known why this
short terrace of perfectly good houses was demolished some time in the 1970s or 1980s; nor can I find anything to suggest
that the spectral population of No. 9 Ladbroke Grove was further increased after the murder of the royal biographer.
THE PIMLICO MURDER, 1876

In 1876, No. 99 Stanley [now Alderney] Street, Pimlico, was home to the wealthy, 58-year-old builder John Collins. He
was known for his financial astuteness, his considerable property portfolio, and his reluctance to spend sixpence if he
could avoid it. Although his terraced Pimlico town house was quite large, the only live-in servant was an elderly cook,
and there were several lodgers. Mrs Collins had to perform quite a few of the household chores herself. Since Mr Collins
did not trust banks, he kept his entire fortune locked away at No. 99 Stanley Street.
On 14 December 1876, Mr and Mrs Collins were visited by a young man named Frederick Treadaway, to whom they had
been introduced by some relations. The following morning, Treadaway unexpectedly returned to No. 99 Stanley Street,
without an invitation. Mr Collins was out at the time, but his wife showed Treadaway downstairs to the dining room.
Since he complained of feeling tired, since he had been “walking about all night”, she suggested he should take a nap,
and kindly put some pillows on the back of one of the chairs. When John Collins returned home for luncheon, he was
surprised to see Treadaway sleeping on one of his dining room chairs. He woke the young man up and Mrs Collins could
hear them having a conversation. As luncheon approached, Mr Collins said “What do you say to broth?” and Treadaway
replied “I’ll have some.”
4 Times July 9 1974 2e.

5 H. Vickers (Ed.), The Unexpurgated Beaton (London 2002), 349-51; M. Bloch, James Lees-Milne (London 2009), 279.

Portraits in connection with the Pimlico murder.
From the Illustrated Police News, 30 December 1876
Mrs Collins went into the back kitchen to help the cook serve at table. All of a sudden, she heard the report of a firearm.
Running back to the dining room, she was confronted by the wild-eyed Frederick Treadaway, who was brandishing a shiny
revolver. He took a shot at her but missed. Seeing that her husband sat slumped in his chair, with blood pouring from his
head, she bravely seized Treadaway by the collar to prevent his escape. He then thrust his thumb into her mouth and
tore her cheek, before knocking her down and making his escape from No. 99 Stanley Street. In spite of the punishment
she had taken, Mrs Collins pursued him out into the street, shouting ‘Stop thief!’ A young man pursued the gunman as
far as Eccleston Square, but lost him in the crowd.
When the local constable came to No. 99 Stanley Street, he

found John Collins in a dying condition, from a revolver shot to the
head. Mrs Collins was alive and conscious, and she provided the
name and description of the fugitive murderer. Inspector Bishop,
who took charge of the case at the College Road police station,
made sure that Treadaway’s description was widely circulated to
police forces throughout London and the Home Counties. It was
presumed that the gunman had planned to murder both Mr and Mrs
Collins, and possibly the old cook as well, in order to be able to
search the house with impunity, and steal the money the capitalist
builder had hoarded on the premises. Frederick Treadaway’s
parents, who were both respectable people, faced some searching
questioning as to where their son might be hiding.
In the hunt for the Stanley Street murderer, railway stations and
omnibus terminals were kept under police surveillance, as were
the homes of known friends of the Treadaway family. It turned out
that Frederick had been staying with a lady friend, Mrs Milton, at
her house in Castle Street, for two days before the murder. He
returned there after the murder, cut off his whiskers, and replaced
his deerstalker with a tall hat. The police kept watch at the
Isleworth cottage owned by a close friend of Frederick Treadaway’s.
And indeed, a whiskerless cove in a tall hat was observed to come
up to this very cottage. As Treadaway was leaving, he was arrested
by some sturdy constables.
It turned out that after he had murdered John Collins, Frederick

Treadaway had been tramping aimlessly around London for 24
hours. He was entirely penniless, and the motive of his visiting
the Isleworth friend had been to borrow £1. Young Treadaway had
once been working as a hosier’s assistant, but his lack of industry
The murder house at No. 99 Stanley Street,

from the Illustrated Police News, 30 December 1876

and punctuality had earnt him the sack. He was fond of
drinking and partying, a talented singer and pianist, and
very popular among his fun-loving friends. He was just
22-years-old and looked even younger; the journalists
marvelled that this unmanly-looking, neatly dressed
youngster stood accused of a callous murder. The police
was much praised for having apprehended the fugitive
within 24 hours. The murder house at No. 99 Stanley
Street, where the body of Mr Collins had been laid out
in one room, and his widow was recovering from her
injuries in another, was daily visited by a thousand
curious people.
On trial at the Old Bailey for the wilful murder of

John Collins, things were not looking good for Frederick
Treadaway. There was no doubt that he had shot Mr
Collins, with a pistol purchased beforehand. The only
tactic open for the defence to try was to play the
‘insanity card’. Treadaway’s father testified that several
of his relatives were quite insane, including the prisoner’s
sister. Young Treadaway had once fallen down, foaming
at the mouth, and he often suffered from headaches. His
mother had once heard him speak of committing suicide.
Frederick Treadaway and other features of the Stanley Street Murder,
from the Penny Illustrated Paper, 30 December 1876 Both the defence and the prosecution called medical
witnesses, but their opinions diverged wildly. The
defence argued that Treadaway suffered from ‘epileptic
vertigo’. He had purchased the pistol to commit suicide.
Inside the Collins house, he had one of his epileptic fits,
and murdered the Pimlico miser in an unconscious state.
During the first day of the trial, one of the witnesses
had made a derogative remark to young Treadaway, who
immediately began shaking uncontrollably.
The prosecution pooh-poohed all these concerns:

there was no convincing family history of insanity, no
doctor had diagnosed Treadaway with epilepsy before
the murder, and they suspected that there was a good
deal of hysteria mixed up with the theatrical fainting fit
inside the courtroom. In his summing-up, Mr Justice Lush
was scrupulously fair: he said that if the jury believed
that the prisoner had not been aware of committing a
crime, they should acquit him on grounds of insanity. But
after deliberating for half an hour, the jury returned a
verdict of guilty. Mr Justice Lush accordingly sentenced
Frederick Treadaway to death.
There was a good deal of debate in the medical

journals about the Treadaway case. Some doctors argued
that the Stanley Street murderer had really suffered
from epilepsy, and that a great miscarriage of justice
had been committed. Others claimed that at most, he
suffered from ‘vertigo’ or ‘hysteria’. Treadaway was to
99 Stanley [today Alderney] Street,

where Frederick Treadaway murdered John Collins in 1876

be executed at Newgate on 26 February 1877. All preparations had been done to carry out the death sentence, and the
executioner Marwood was in readiness. But two days before the planned execution, the Governor of Newgate received
a message from the Home Secretary, saying that after a careful medical inquiry, Treadaway had been respited from
the capital sentence. The prisoner “was very much affected, and appeared deeply sensible of the mercy that had been
extended to him.” The last we hear of Frederick Treadaway is that the 1881 Census lists him as a prisoner in HM Convict
Prison, Chatham, and that at the time of the 1891 Census, he was still a convict at Portsea. There has been Internet
speculation that he was identical to a George Frederick James Treadaway who married in 1894, was listed in the 1911
Census, and died in 1939.
The medical debate concerning Treadaway has continued into the present time. Dr J P Eigen has argued that Treadaway
was justly respited, since he suffered from epilepsy, and committed the murder in a state of automatism, snapping out
of his dazed state after having assaulted Mrs Collins. But Eigen’s account contains some obvious errors: Collins was no
friend of Treadaway, just an acquaintance, and Treadaway was not arrested at the crime scene, but disguised himself
and fled London. He may well have suffered from some variant of epilepsy, but this is irrelevant, since there is evidence
of premeditation (the purchase of the pistol beforehand), motive (Treadaway was poor as a church mouse, and Collins
known to be a wealthy miser), and planning of the crime (disguise and flight). Frederick Treadaway was a lucky man to
escape the hangman’s noose.
In 1878 or 1879, Stanley Street was renamed Alderney Street, quite possibly because of the murder. According to
the relevant Post Office directories, the houses were not renumbered. The murder house at No. 99 Alderney Street still
stands, and looks virtually unchanged since the time of the murder.
JAN BONDESON is a senior lecturer and consultant rheumatologist at Cardiff University. He is the author
of The London Monster, The Great Pretenders, Blood on the Snow and other true crime books, as well as
the bestselling Buried Alive.
MURDER HOUSES OF LONDON deals with central

London’s architecture of capital crime: houses inside which celebrated
murders have been committed.
Pursue Lord Lucan as he escapes from his elegant Belgravia house,

leaving the dead nanny in the basement; prowl the Soho streets once
haunted by an elusive serial killer; and follow in the murderous
footsteps of the Blackout Ripper and the serial killer Patrick Mackay.
And read about London’s many forgotten murders, where only the
murder houses remain to tell a tale.
*****
‘You’ll never look at the closed doors of London the same way
again… MURDER HOUSES OF LONDON combines relentless
research with splendid story-telling to produce a book of unrivalled
interestingness.’ JAMES HARKIN, Head Researcher at BBC’s QI
‘[MURDER HOUSES OF LONDON] documents the grisly histories

of 163 London houses, many of whose current occupants have no
idea of their blood-soaked pasts.’ Daily Mail
‘Comprehensive and detailed... [Bondeson is a] meticulous and Includes

reliable author...I cannot recommend this book highly enough.’ JACK THE RIPPER,
STEWART P. EVANS, author of The Ultimate Jack the Ripper the KRAY TWINS,
Companion the BLACKOUT RIPPER
and ‘ACID BATH’
Ripperologist HAIGH
140 October 2014 42
American Whitechapels
Big Apple Whitechapel

By NINA and HOWARD BROWN
The American metropolis that most of us

would naturally compare to London in terms
of size and importance, even in the LVP, is
New York City, or to be specific, Manhattan...
London being over three times greater in
population (5.5 to 1.5 million) by 1891.
The 24 acres which constitute Manhattan had its
share of rough neighborhoods by the time of the
Whitechapel Murders, even going back to the early
19th Century.
The Five Points, situated within the 6th Ward, The

Bowery (in the 14th Ward), Hell’s Kitchen (within the
16th Ward) and the 4th Ward, the shady, rundown
area entrenched within the Lower East Side where
the murder of Carrie Brown occurred in the East River
Hotel on 24 April 1891. Mrs Brown’s murder occurred
Manhatten’s Five Points circa 1879
ten weeks after the murder of Frances Coles in the
East End of London.
Researchers who focus on newspaper reports, no

doubt, will remember stumbling upon two and three
column articles in which one locality or the other has
been compared to Whitechapel. Due to its size and
the fact that it had more than one area of ill repute
(in fact, several), New York and its neighborhoods
would be the city most often set side by side with
Whitechapel for these comparitive purposes. It
has always been the case, in our experience, that
these articles and exposes put up an American
neighborhood for comparison to Whitechapel, London,
as Whitechapel’s notoriety had been well established
before some of the Yank neighborhoods ever existed,
rather than the reverse where Whitechapel was put up
for comparison with another neighborhood on equal
footing in the realm of poverty, vice, and crime.
Roosevelt Street in the 4th Ward,

close to the scene of Carrie Brown’s murder

One interesting link we located contained the
following excerpt regarding a tenement in the
neighborhood in which Carrie Brown was murdered.
It makes gripping reading:
Sweeney’s Shambles (in Gotham Court) held the

dishonor of being the worst tenement in NYC
history. Not much is known now of the history
of the building except that the nickname came
from the landlord, Sweeney.
Sweeney’s Shambles was a huge imposing
tenement complex that stood at 36 and 38
Cherry Street. It consisted of two rows of
connected tenement houses, 130 feet in length.
It was the home of over 1,000 people, mostly
Irish. You could only enter Sweeney’s Shambles
through one of two alleyways that ran around
the building. On the east side was Single Alley,
a mere 6 feet in width. On the west side was
the 9 foot wide Double Alley, also known as
Paradise Alley.
Gotham Court’s ‘Paradise Alley’, 1879... The Fourth Ward’s large, main sewer ran under
the worst tenement in New York Ciyt’s history
Sweeney’s Shambles. These sewers were used
frequently by criminals evading the police. Many escapees from the Tombs, who refused to hide out in Five
Points, would continue through the sewers until they reached Sweeney’s Shambles. It was possible to enter
the building through the sewer system.
A cholera epidemic once claimed 195 lives in this building alone. Condemned in 1871, evicted tenants would
re-enter the building through the sewers... this game continued for twenty years until it was demolished in
the 1890s.
All the tenements in the Old Fourth Ward were wet from the sewers. Families would splash barefoot through
the puddles of muck while walking through their house. Rats entered just about every building, seeking food.
A lack of shoes made it probable that you would be prone to rat bites. The police didn’t bother patroling the
Fourth Ward...unless it was in groups of 6 or more.
The following article, published in a Kansan newspaper just six weeks after the murder of Mary Kelly, is representative
of one side of the argument that no matter what, no American neighborhood could touch Whitechapel for all the
aforementioned attributes, including overcrowding.
(For the record, in 1894 the 10th Ward in Manhattan, known as ‘New Israel”, had the highest concentration of people
living in any one area in America, with 702 people per acre.)
On the very same day, an article appeared in the Oakland Evening Tribune written by George R Sims, in which the
famous British writer downplayed how ‘bad’ Whitechapel was.... by no means the only comparative article which felt
Whitechapel’s condition had been overexaggerated in the press.
Perhaps the truth lay somewhere in the middle.
*****
WRITE FOR RIPPEROLOGIST!
We welcome contributions on Jack the Ripper, the East End and the Victorian era.
Send your articles, letters and comments to contact@ripperologist.biz

The Topeka Daily Capital
Saturday, 15 December 1888)
DEGRADATION
Is There a Whitechapel in New York?
“VELVET ROOMS” AND “MORGUES”
Gotham Is Bad, But Not So Bad as London

Districts Where Vice Is Greatest in New York
Den Districts of Former Times
Since the Whitechapel murders began to fascinate the horrified interest of the world fantastically imaginative
reporters of the metropolis have been trying to find and describe “the Whitechapel of New York.”
Disconnected, fragmentary bits of the lower conditions of metropolitan life they have discovered that, by exaggeratedly
lurid depiction, could be made to appear worthy of Whitechapel; but the existance in that city of such a district as that
vast pool of human degradation and misery in London is untrue and even impossible. Poverty, vice and crime are there in
heart sickening abundance, but their aggregate volume is comparatively small, and the conditiond of their being prevent
their massing into such a situation totality of evil as in the English metropolis.
To manufacture a Whitechapel in New York we would in the first place require such a maze of tangled streets as are
found in New York only in the Ninth ward, which used to be Greenwich Village - a section of the city in which even born
New Yorkers are liable to lose themselves unto his day - and that maze would would have to be fifty times as big as all
that labyrinthine portion of New York. But in nothing more than its intricacy does the Ninth ward suggest a thought of
Whitechapel. It is populated by respectable, industrious, thrifty citizens, who live comfortably. The aristocratic element
may be scant in the throngs that good humoredly jostle each other on the crowded sidewalks there in the evenings, but
little want is apparent, and vice is not conspicuous. Certainly not in the old Greenwich Village need we look for any
Whitechapel.
Some Pretty Bad Places
There used to be in the Fourth and Sixth wards - in the former within bowshot of where the New York end of the East
river bridge now stands and in the latter about the “Five Points” - many buildings tenanted by the most wretchedly
poor, the irreclaimably vicious and the lowest criminal dregs of the population, places worthy of the vilest portions of
Whitechapel. Some of them still exist, on Baxter, Cherry, James, Oliver and other streets and the adjacent alleys in
those wards, and their condition is such as to sicken and sadden any decent explorer among them. Like the habitations
of the miserable class of beings from among whom the Whitechapel assassin has selected his victims, they reek with
foulness, are dark, filled with a fetid atmosphere, have small, low ceiled, ill ventilated rooms, wherein the unfortunate
beings abiding there are packed without regard to comfort, health or decency. Sometimes even the cellars of those
buildings, where there are no floors and pools of foul, slimy black water stand in the depressions of the ground, are
used as lodging places, where scavengers and besotted things that have been women sleep on piles of rags and straw
But such hideous places are isolated now, are exceptions, and not the rule, even in the lowest localities, and year
after year grow lower.
The board of health condemns them and enforces their reformation. The self interest of their owners dictates their
destruction and replacement by buildings more in consonance with modern requirements. There is no such thing as a
great district of narrow, dark, tangled alleys and blind courts filled with such tenements as exists in Whitechapel.
The Human Element Missing
Finally, New York has not the human element that makes Whitechapel what it is, or at least what there is of it so
small a proportion of the population, in even the worst parts of New York city, that its influence is powerless. The disease
of crime is sporadic in the big city, not epidemic. As is admitted by Englishmen themselves, there is no human brute
so thoroughly brutal as the English one. Ferocious cruelty must be a distinguishing feature of any sport to commend it
to his favor; he knows no joy more supreme than absolute intoxication; for womanhood he has no other consideration
than employing it as his abject slave and the tool of his coarse, animal viciousness. He surrounds himself, through the
vigorous strength of his brutality, with an atmosphere of vicious contamination. The wretched women exposed to his
infamous association are necessarily plunged to the deepest dregs of degradation to be fit companions for him.

Whitechapel contains ens of thousands of men and women whose only means of livelihood are vice and petty crime;
whose only happiness is in gin sodden oblivion; whose only hope in the here or the hereafter is escape from compulsory
labor in a workhouse or a prison.
And these wretches are massed together, giving to each other countenance and encouragement, making their
common destitution, lawlessness, mental pollution and bodily defilement seem to themselves a natural condition of
existence in the only world they know. Now there is no such Dismal Swamp in New York, and its Yahoos are scattered,
and everywhere, even among the poorest poor, are in the minority. Even in those wretched tenements of the Fourth
and Sixth wards, there are sufficient of deeply unfortunate but honest and self respecting poor to compel the vicious
elements of society mixed among them to some measure of self repression and decency.
Drunkenness Not So Common
Drunkenness is not so common a vice among even the most depraved class as it is reported to be among all the grades
of depravity infesting Whitechapel, and the offense of it is not so flaunted upon the streets, and habitually condoned
by the police here, as it is there. It is truethat, not infrequently, hideous beings, male and female, bloated, blear eyed,
tattered wrecks of humanity, are to be seen staggering through New York’s streets. But it cannot be said that there
is any section of the city in which that is the normal condition of a large portion of the population, or in which the
spectacle of it so common as not to cause remark and very probably the promptly active interest of a policeman. Those
types are commonly hived in the “velvet rooms” of the “morgues” where they have courted realization of an English
poet’s assurance that “the best of life is but intoxication,” until they ( -----------) way” along the sidewalk. They are not
allowed to prance about by hundreds, whooping, yelling, singing and insulting or outraging chance decent wayfarers
in a stupendous communal orgie, as their kind are accustomed to do in Whitechapel. For the benefit of those who in
their innocence may suspect those words - “velvet rooms” and “morgue” - of being slang, it may be explained that
a “morgue” is a common appellation for a peculiarily low class drinking saloon (sometimes also called a “distillery”)
where all alcoholic liquors, of equally unutterable vileness and infernal potency, are sold for three or five cents per small
tumblerful; and the “velvet room” is an apartment at the back of the “morgue,” carpeted with sawdust and filth, where
thoroughly inebriated customers, male and female, sleep off their intoxication stretched upon the floor.
Some of the kindest “morgue” keepers let their best regular customers habitually sleep there, when they have no
other homes to keep them out of the clutches of the police. One never sees in New York bunches of wretched women,
huddled together for warmth, sleeping in area ways, unused cellars and such like places. Male tramps sometimes do
so, but if discovered by the police are very liable to be sent up “to the island,” where they will be much better off; a
fact of which the tramps often testify their appreciation by the autumnal perpetration of some petty crime - such as
smashing a shop window or a small theft, while a policeman is looking at them - and so earning free board and warm
lodging through a hard winter.
The Lower Bowery
In garish show and coarse temptations to ignorant curiosity and willful vice the lower end of the Bowery presents
more resemblances to the most presentable side of Whitechapel life than anything else that New York has to offer,
but the imitation is comparatively tepid and colorless. A few years ago there were scores of glittering saloons, with
bands of music in them, “pretty waiter girls”serving customers at the tables, wine rooms dedicated to the vilest uses,
nymphs du pave haunting them hundreds to ply their shameful traffic, gamblers, thieves and thugs making them their
stalkingground, crimes of violence against person and property nightly occurences in them. On Broadway they are
palatial. In the cellars along Chatham street they were nakedly vile. Between those two extremes there were all grades
in externals, but the internal character of all was equally damnable. Their proprietors did “a land office business,” and
by power of money and political influence commanded immunity from police interference. But they no exist no longer.
The moral sense of the community revolted against them. The law put its foot upon them and they were stamped out,
with the exception of a few, probably not more than half a dozen in all - on Sixth avenue, Thirty-first street, the Bowery
and Forsyth street - which still, by cunning evasions of the law, changes of proprietorship and other dodges, manage
to keep up a colorable pretense of the oldtime viciousness, enough to deceive the country “jay” into the belief that in
visiting them he is “seeing the elephant by gaslight.”

In the two largest places on the Bowery - one below Canal and the other near Spring street - where there are
orchestras and beer, there are no “pretty waiter girls” and a sort of measureable respectability is maintained. Evil
little places under the guise of “museums,” for the petty swindling of the unsophisticated or the occasional convenient
robbery of the inebriated, are not scarce, and there are numbers of saloons, frequented largely by thieves, “toughs”
and street walkers, where the drunken visitor is pretty certain to be robbed and possibly almost murdered if he protests
too strenuously against spoliation. Such places exist in every city, but they by no means constitute a Whitechapel, and,
but for the women frequenting them, would indeed possess little to suggest similarity to the blossoms in that peculiar
garden of hell.
Vice Not Concentrated
There is no district of New York in which sexual vice is ostentatiously paraded as the principal industry of the
population, as from the published reports would seem to be the condition of Whitechapel. There are, unhappily, a vast
number of wretched women and girls who are deservedly classified under the euphemistic title of “the social evil,” and
hundreds - yes, thousands- of them haunt the streets at night, but they are not congregated by battalions and legions
in one quarter of the town to shock all moral sense by the enormous aggregation of their misery and shame. Old New
Yorkers who remember the condition of things in Church, Mercer and Greene streets during and soon after the civil war;
or Twenty-seventh street, west of Sixth avenue, from Twenty-seventh to Thirty-fourth street, in later days; or the many
“half-door” houses of the Five Points, in times more remote, appreciate that the town has furbished up its decency, so
far as appearances go, to a highly creditable degree. If New York has not been able to extirpate this form of vice - as
no city probably ever will - it has, at least, scattered it so that everywhere it appears to be in the minority. And, even
among the most degraded and destitute of New York’s “unfortunates,” it is rare to see one who has sunk to such plight
as appears to be the common lot of so many thousands in Whitechapel.
The “Haymarket,” Armory Hall, and a few sailors’ resorts in theFourth ward have been foolishly paraded as constituting
nucleii at least of a New York Whitechapel. Bosh! They are simply dance houses, bad enough places, no doubt, in their
way, but their way is a small one.
The fact is that there is too much earnest practicality in life in the American metropolis; too much probability for
good reward of honest endeavor; too much general moral sense; too many wide streets, electrical lights and vigilant
policemen, for the existence of a Whitechapel in New York.
Further Reading
Excellent links for researching Manhattan’s ‘Whitechapels’: www.irishinnyc.freeservers.com/custom.html; www.
history.com/news/history-lists/7-infamous-gangs-of-new-york; manhattanunlocked.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-hells-
kitchen-follow.html.
Some statistics used in this article came from The Progressives & The Slums: Tenement House Reform in NYC 1890-
1917 Roy Lubove, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962.
NINA and HOWARD BROWN are the proprietors of JTRForums.com.

CHRIS SCOTT’S
Press Trawl
THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS IN THE SCOTSMAN:
ONE NEWSPAPER’S VIEW
In a departure from our normal format, we felt it would be interesting to see how one provincial
newspaper - The Scotsman - reported the murders, and to see how the story developed. Part Four
reports on events of November 1888.
*****
10 November 1888
ANOTHER ATROCIOUS MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL

HIDEOUS MUTILATIONS
ARREST ON SUSPICION
Yesterday morning, in the midst of the popular demonstration connected with the Lord Mayor’s show, the tens of thousands
of persons who had assembled along the line of the route from the City to the West End to watch the civic pageant were
startled and horrified by the cries of the street newspaper vendors, announcing the perpetration of another terrible murder
in Whitechapel. The news received speedy confirmation and even the meagre particulars immediately obtainable left no
doubt that this, the latest of the series of crimes which has for months past kept the East of London in a state of fear almost
amounting to panic, exceeded in its fiendish atrocity any that have preceded it. In one most important circumstance this
murder differs in a startling manner from all that have gone before it. It was committed, not in the open air, but in a house into
which the murderer had taken his victim.
The scene of the murder is Miller Court, Dorset Street, Commercial Street - a district composed of large warehouses. squalid
streets, and, in a striking degree, of registered lodging houses. Dorset Street is a fairly wide thoroughfare, and at night, owing
to the lamps in the windows and over the doors of the numerous lodging houses, it may be described as well lighted. Miller
Court is approached by an arched passage not more than three feet wide, which is unlighted and from this passage open two
doors leading into the houses on either side. The house on the left hand is kept as a chandler’s shop by a respectable man
named M’Carthy, to whom also belongs the house in the court in which the crime was committed. The court is a very small
one, about thirty feet long by ten broad. On both sides are three or four small houses, cleanly whitewashed up to the first floor
windows. The ground floor of the house to the right of the court is used as a store, with a gate entrance, and the upper floors
are let off in tenements, as is the case also with M’Carthy’s house. Opposite the court is a very large lodging house. This house is
well lighted and people hang about it nearly all night. There is another well frequented lodging house next door to M’Carthy’s,
and within a yard or two of the entrance to the court is a wall lamp, the light from which is thrown nearly on to the passage.
The murder was committed at No. 2 Miller Court some time after midnight. The murdered woman is not particularly well known
even to her neighbours, as is customary amongst persons of her class. She had several nicknames, including “Mary Jane” and
“Fair Emma,” but the name by which she was known to her landlord, and which has been proved to be correct, was Mary Jane
Kelly. She had been married for some years, or, at any rate, had lived regularly with a man named Kelly. But, after separating
from her husband, chiefly on account of her drunken habits and quarrelsome disposition, she took to the streets. Almost the
only friend she is known to have had was a woman named Harvey, who used to sleep with her occasionally. Kelly went out as
usual on Thursday evening, and was seen in the neighbourhood about ten o’clock in company with a man of whom, however, no
description can be obtained. She was last seen, as far as can be ascertained, in Commercial Street about half past eleven. She
was then alone, and was probably making her way home. It is supposed that she met the murderer in Commercial Street, and
he probably induced her to take him home without indulging in more drink. At any rate, nothing was seen of the couple in the
neighbouring public houses nor in the beer house at the corner of Dorset Street. The pair reached Miller Court about midnight,
but they were not seen to the house. The street door was closed, but the woman had a latchkey, and as she must have been
fairly sober she and her companion would doubtless reach the woman’s door without making a noise.

A light was seen shining through the window of the room for some time after the couple must have entered it, and one
person asserts positively that the woman was heard singing the refrain of a popular song as late as one o’clock yesterday
morning. But here, again, there is a conflict of testimony which the police are now engaged in endeavouring to reconcile.
That which follows is beyond doubt: About ten o’clock, Mr M’Carthy sent a man who works for him to the house with orders
to see Kelly and obtain from her some money, on account of the rent of which she was largely in arrears. The man went and
knocked at the door, but received no answer. He had assumed that the woman would be up, because not unfrequently she made
purchases in M’Carthy’s shop before that hour. He listened, but heard no sound, and then, becoming alarmed, tried the door.
It was quite fast, and seemed to have been locked from the outside. Determined to find out what was wrong, the man went
to the window commanding as view of the whole room with the intention of entering if necessary. One glance into the room,
however, was sufficient. He saw on the bed the body of a woman dead and mutilated in such a ghastly manner that the observer
nearly fainted from horror. He rushed affrighted out of the court and into M’Carthy’s shop, begging him for God’s sake to come
and look. M’Carthy, hardly less horrified, returned to the house with his man and both looked into the room. The place looked
like a shambles. Blood was everywhere, and pieces of flesh were scattered about the floor, while on the little table, in full
view of the window, was a hideous heap of flesh and intestines. M’Carthy sent his man for the police, and Inspector Back (sic),
of Commercial Street Station, and Inspector Abberline, of the Criminal Investigation Department, stationed at Leman Street,
arrived within ten minutes. A strong squad of police were also dispatched from Commercial Street Station to assist the regular
patrol men in maintaining order. A large crowd had already assembled, and Inspector Back’s first care was to clear Dorset Street
of idlers, to close the entrance to the court with two policeman, and then to draw a cordon across each end of Dorset Street.
From that time forward only authorised persons were permitted in Dorset Street. The constables in charge of the entrance to
Miller Court allowed no one to pass in or out, not even the inhabitants of the place. Meanwhile no attempt had been made
to force an entrance to the room, the two inspectors had looked through the window, and had seen sufficient to prove that
an atrocious crime had been committed, but neither officer seemed to care to undertake responsibility, and it was not until
some twenty minutes after the first alarm had been given that Superintendent Arnold, the officer in charge of the Division,
arrived on the scene and at once took charge of the case. By his direction M’Carthy obtained a pickaxe and the door was forced
open, and the police officers entered the room. They did not care to remain longer than was necessary to note accurately the
position of the body, the general appearance of the apartment, and the character of the principal mutilations. The pieces of
flesh which had been dimly seen through the windows proved inexpressibly more ghastly at a close view. Large pieces of the
thighs had been cut off and thrown about with brutal carelessness. Both breasts of the victim had been removed. One of them
lay on the table alongside a confused and horrible mass of intestines; the throat had been cut with such thoroughness that the
head was almost severed from the trunk. The body, which was almost naked, had been ripped up, and literally disembowelled.
It is stated, upon authority which should be trustworthy, that the uterus, as in the case of the Mitre Square victim, had been
removed and taken away by the fiend, but upon this important point the police officers and surgeons refuse, in the most
emphatic manner, to give the slightest information.
Dr. Duke, the police surgeon of the H Division, was the first medical man to arrive on the spot, and he at once undertook
a preliminary examination. Half an hour later he was joined by Dr. Bond, the chief surgeon of the Metropolitan Police, and
together they commenced a post mortem examination on the spot as soon as the requisite authority had been obtained. Sir
Charles Warren arrived at Miller Court at a quarter to two o’clock, having been driven from Scotland Yard. He viewed the room,
and received from Superintendent Arnold a report of what had been done. The Commissioner remained on the spot until the
completion of the post mortem examination at a quarter to four, and then returned to Scotland Yard, taking Dr. Bond with him.
Previous to the post mortem examination, a photographer who was brought on the scene, after considerable difficulty and
delay, was set to work in the court and house with a view to obtaining permanent evidence as to the state of the room and the
condition of the body. The state of the atmosphere was, unfortunately, not favourable to good results. A slight drizzling rain
was falling, and the air was dusky. Even in the open thoroughfares, and in the little court it was at times almost dark, especially
inside the houses. The photographer, however, did his best, and succeeded in securing several negatives, which he hopes will
be useful. The post mortem examination lasted just two hours and was of the most thorough character. Every indication as to
the manner in which the murderer conducted his horrible work was carefully noted, as well as the position of every organ and
the larger pieces of flesh. The surgeons’ report will in consequence be of an unusually exhaustive character, but it will not be
made public until the surgeons give their evidence at the coroner’s inquest. Sufficient is known, however, to place the crime
beyond doubt in the same category as those perpetrated in George Yard, Bucks Row, Berner Street, Hanbury Street, and Mitre
Square. At ten minutes to four o’clock, a one horse carrier’s cart, with an ordinary tarpaulin cover, was driven into Dorset
Street and stopped opposite Miller Court. From the cart a coffin was taken into the house, and the remains put into it. The
news that the body was about to be removed caused a great rush of people from the courts running out of Dorset Street, and
there was a determined effort to break the police cordon at the Commercial Street end. The crowd which pressed round the
van was composed of persons of the humblest class, but the demeanour of the poor people was all that could be desired. The
remains were taken to the Shoreditch mortuary, where they will lie until they have been viewed by the Coroner’s jury. The
inquest will open on Monday morning.
Telegraphing late last night, the Central News states “upon indisputable authority” that no portion of the murdered woman’s
body was taken away by the murderer. As already stated, the post mortem examination was of the most exhaustive character,
and the surgeons did not quit their work until every organ had been accounted for and placed as closely as possible in its
natural position. The most unaccountable feature of the case is the manner in which the murderer mutilated the face of his
victim, as if to make identification difficult or, perhaps, impossible. In the case of the Mitre Square victim, a woman picked up
in the street and murdered in the open air, the murderer’s motive in endeavouring to render the features unrecognisable can
readily be understood, but he could scarcely suppose that the identity of the woman, renting her room as regular lodger and
well known in the immediate locality of the crime, would be fail to be capable of comparatively easy proof. It is, therefore,
assumed by experts that the cutting off of the nose and ears and the slashing of the cheeks in this case were done in a transport
of mad ferocity to which monomaniacs are notoriously subject.
STATEMENT BY THE OWNER OF THE HOUSE

In an interview with a Press representative, John M’Carthy, the owner of the houses in Miller’s Court, made the following
statement as to the murdered women:-
“The victim of this terrible murder was about 23 or 24 years of age, and lived with a coal porter named Kelly, passing as his
wife. They, however, quarrelled some time back, and separated. A woman named Harvey slept with her several nights since
Kelly separated from her, but she was not with her last Thursday night. The deceased’s Christian name was Mary Jane, and
since her murder I have discovered that she was an unfortunate and walked the streets in the neighbourhood of Aldgate. Her
habits were irregular, and she often came home at night the worse for drink. Her mother lives in Ireland, but in what county
I do not know. The deceased used to receive letters from her mother occasionally. The unfortunate had not paid her rent for
several weeks - in fact she owed me 30s. altogether, so this (Friday) morning, about 11 o’clock, I sent my man to ask her if she
could pay the money. He knocked at the door, but received no answer. Thinking this very strange, he looked in at the window,
and, to his horror, saw the body of Kelly lying on the bed covered with blood. He immediately came back to me and told me
what he had seen. I was, of course, as horrified as he was, and I went with him to the house and looked in at the window. The
sight I saw was more ghastly even than I had prepared myself for. On the bed lay the body, as my man had told me, while the
table was covered with what seemed to me to be lumps of flesh. I said to my man, “Harry, go at once to the police station and
fetch some one here.” He went off at once and brought back Inspector Back, who looked through the window as we had done.
He then dispatched a telegram to Superintendent Arnold, but before Superintendent Arnold arrived, Inspector Abberline came
and gave orders that no one should be allowed to enter or leave the Court. The Inspector waited a little while, and then sent a
telegram to a Sir Charles Warren, to bring the bloodhounds, so as to trace the murderer if possible. So soon as Superintendent
Arnold arrived he gave instructions for the door to be burst open. I at once forced the door with a pickaxe, and we entered
the room. The sight we saw I cannot drive away from my mind; it looked more like the work of a devil than a man. The poor
woman’s body was lying on the bed undressed. She had been completely disembowelled, and her entrails had been taken out
and placed on the table. It was those that I had seen when I looked through the window and took to be lumps of flesh. The
woman’s nose had been cut off, and her face gashed and mutilated, so that she was quite beyond recognition. Both her breasts,
too, had been cut clean away and placed by the side of her liver. I had heard a great deal about the Whitechapel murders, but
I had never expected to see such a sight as this. The body was, of course, covered with blood and so was the bed. The whole
scene is more than I can describe. I hope I may never see such a sight again. It is most extraordinary that nothing should have
been heard by the neighbours, as there are people passing backwards and forwards at all hours of the night, but no one heard
so much as a scream. A woman heard Kelly singing “Sweet Violets” at one o’clock this (Friday) morning, so up to that time, at
all events, she was alive and well. So far as I can ascertain, no one saw her take a man into the house with her last (Thursday)
night.” Mr. M’Carthy is spoken of by the police as a most respectable man, and was recently awarded a prize for collecting
money for the hospitals.
STATEMENTS AS TO THE MURDERED WOMAN’S ANTECEDENTS

Mrs Prater, who occupied a room in 26 Dorset Street, above that of the deceased, stated to a press representative last night
that she had a chat with Kelly on Thursday morning. Kelly, who was doing some crochet work at the time, said, “I hope it will
be a fine day tomorrow, as I want to go to the Lord Mayor’s show.” “She was a pleasant girl, “ added Mrs Prater, “and seemed
to be on good terms with everybody. She dressed poorly, as she was, of course, badly off.”
The young woman Harvey, who had slept with the deceased on several occasions, also made a statement. She said she had
been on good terms with the deceased, whose education was much superior to that of most persons in her position in life.
Harvey, however, took a room in New Court, off the same street, but remained friendly with the unfortunate woman who
visited her in New Court on Thursday night. After drinking together, they parted at half past seven o’clock, Kelly going off in
the direction of Leman Street, which she was in the habit of frequenting. She was perfectly sober at the time. Harvey never
saw her alive afterwards. Hearing yesterday that a murder had been committed, she said, “I’ll go and see if it’s anyone I know,”
and, to her horror, found it was her friend.
Joseph Barnett, an Irishman, at present residing in a common lodging house in New Street, Bishopsgate, informed a reporter
last evening that he had occupied his present lodgings since Tuesday week. Previous to that he had lived at Miller’s Court, Dorset
Street, for eight or nine months with the murdered woman, Mary Jane Kelly. They were very happy and comfortable together
until an unfortunate came to sleep in their room, to which he strongly objected. Finally, after the woman had been there two
or three nights, he quarrelled with his “wife” and left her. Next day, however, he returned and gave Kelly money. He called
several other days, and gave her money when he had it. On Thursday night he visited her between half past seven and eight,
and told her he was sorry he had no money to give her. He saw nothing more of her. He was indoors yesterday morning when he
heard that a woman had been murdered in Dorset Street, but he did not know at first who the victim was. He voluntarily went
to the police, who, after questioning him, satisfied themselves that his statements were correct, and therefore released him.
A woman residing at near 5 Miller Court informed a reporter that she heard the deceased singing at a quarter past one o’clock
yesterday morning. This confirms the evidence of other people in the court, and proves that the victim and her murderer spent
some time together in the room upon the most friendly terms, so that there could have been nothing in the appearance of the
man to create alarm or suspicion. Other residents in the court declare that about a quarter to two they heard a faint cry of
murder, which would seem to fix with tolerable exactitude the time at which the crime was committed; but against this must
be set the statement of the woman residing at 26 Dorset Square (sic), a house the back rooms of which abut upon the court,
according to which a cry of murder was heard at three o’clock. It is characteristic of the locality that no one thought anything
of the incident, which, indeed, is of too common occurrence to cause interest or alarm. A man engaged as a market porter, and
residing at 3 Miller Court, states that, although his rooms face the scene of the murder, he heard nothing of it until he went
out in the morning at half past ten to get some milk and was stopped by the police.
10 November 1888
STRAITENED CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE WOMAN

Kelly has (says a press agency) a boy, aged about six or seven years, living with her, and latterly she had been in narrow
straits, so much so that she is reported to have stated to a companion that she would make away with herself, as she could not
bear to see her boy starving. There are conflicting statements as to when the woman was last seen alive, but that upon which
most reliance appears to be placed is that of a young woman, an associate of the deceased, who states that at about half past
ten o’clock on Thursday night she met the murdered woman at the corner of Dorset Street, who said to her that she had no
money, and if she could not get any would never go out any more, but would do away with herself. Soon after they parted, and
the man, who is described as respectably dressed, came up and spoke to the murdered woman and offered her some money.
The man then accompanied the woman home to her lodgings, and the little boy was taken to a neighbour’s house. Nothing more
was seen of the woman until yesterday morning, when, it is stated, the boy was sent back to the house, and the report goes
he was sent out subsequently on an errand by the man who was in the house with his mother. There is no direct confirmation
of this statement, or whether any one really saw the woman yesterday morning, although a tailor named Lewis says he saw
Kelly come out about eight o’clock and go back. It seems clear, however, that the woman was alive at eight o’clock yesterday
morning, that she went out for something and returned to the house. The murder must have been committed between that
hour and a quarter to eleven.
DR FORBES WINSLOW’S OPINION OF THE MURDER

Dr Forbes Winslow has expressed the following opinion on this latest murder:-
“It is the work of the same homicidal lunatic who has committed the other crimes in Whitechapel. the whole harrowing
details point to this conclusion. The way in which the murder was done, and the strange state in which the body was left,
is not consistent with sanity. The theory I stated some days ago has come true to the letter. This was to the effect that the
murderer was in a lucid interval, and would recommence directly this state had passed away. It appears that the authorities
were forgetting this theory, and that some one had been persuading them that from the fact of so long a time intervening
between the murders, therefore he could not a be a homicidal maniac. I desire, as personally being originally responsible for
this theory, to flatly deny this, and to state more emphatically than ever that the murderer is one and the same person, and
he a lunatic suffering from homicidal monomania, who during the lucid intervals is calm and forgetful of what he has been
doing in the madness of his attack. I also say that unless those in authority take the proper steps as advised, and drop the red
tapeism surrounding a Government office, such crimes will continue to be so perpetrated in our Metropolis, to the terror of
London. It appears to me it is the burning question of the hour, and of much more vital importance than some now attracting
the attention of our community.

THE SCENE OF THE MURDER
Dorset Street, Spitalfields, is (says another report) a notorious neighbourhood. It is filled with low class lodging houses,
tenanted chiefly by the lowest classes, amongst them some of the most degraded thieves and women of the streets. It was here
that Annie Chapman, who was murdered in Hanbury Street on the 8th of September, lived, and, by a strange fatality, the scene
of the present crime is a court directly opposite the house to which that unfortunate woman was in the habit of resorting.
Close by is Mitre Square, the scene of one of the murders of September 30th, and Hanbury Street is scarcely a stone’s throw
away. There are eight or ten small houses in Miller Court, which is entered by a low archway and a narrow passage from Dorset
Street, and forms a cul de sac.
ARREST ON SUSPICION
A man was arrested last night in Whitechapel on suspicion of having committed the Dorset Street crime. He was pointed out
to the police by some women as a man who had accosted them on the previous night and whose movements excited suspicions.
He was taken to Commercial Street Police Station, followed by an immense crowd.
SUPPOSED CLUE TO THE MURDERER

Mrs Paumier, a young woman who sells roasted chestnuts at the corner of Widegate Street, a narrow thoroughfare about
two minutes’ walk from the scene of the murder, told a reporter yesterday afternoon a story which (says the Press Association)
appears to afford a clue to the murderer. She said that about twelve o’clock yesterday morning a man dressed like a gentleman
came to her and said, “I suppose you have heard about the murder in Dorset Street.” She replied that she had, whereupon the
man grinned and said, “I know more about it than you.” He then stared into her face, and went down Sandy’s Row, another
narrow thoroughfare which cuts across Widegate Street. When he had got some way off, however, he looked back as if to see
whether she was watching him, and then vanished. Mrs Paumier said the man had a black moustache, was about 5 feet 6 inches
high, and wore a black silk hat, and black coat, and speckled trousers. He also carried a black shiny bag about a foot in depth
and a foot and a half in length. Mrs Paumier stated further that the same man accosted three young unfortunates whom she
knows on Thursday night, and they chaffed him, and asked what he had in the bag, and he replied, “Something that the ladies
don’t like.” Mrs Paumier told her story with every appearance of truthfulness. One of the young women she named, Sarah
Roney, about twenty years of age, states that she was with the other two girls on Thursday night in Brushfield Street, which is
near Dorset Street, when a man, wearing a tall hat and a black coat, came up to her and said, “Will you come with me.” She
told him she would not, and asked him what he had in the bag, and he said, “Something the ladies don’t like.” He then walked
away. A man’s pilot coat has been found in the murdered woman’s room, but whether it belonged to one of her paramours or
to the murderer has not been ascertained.
A NEW THEORY AS TO THE MURDERS

An important fact transpired last evening which (says the Press Association) puts a fresh complexion on the theory of the
murders. It appears that the cattle boats bringing live freight to London are in the habit coming into the Thames on Thursdays
or Fridays, and leave again for the Continent on Sundays or Mondays. It has already been a matter of comment that the recent
revolting crimes have been committed at the end of the week, and an opinion has been formed that the murderer periodically
appears and disappears with one of the steamers. This theory, according to information obtained by a Press Association reporter,
is held to be of much importance by those engaged in this investigation, who believe that the murderer does not reside either
in the locality or even in this country at all. It is thought that he may be either a person employed upon one of these boats, or
one who is allowed to travel by them, and inquiries have for some time been directed to following up the theory.
BLOODHOUNDS AND THE MURDER

The non-appearance of the bloodhounds yesterday is accounted for by the fact that, during recent trials in Surrey, the
animals bolted, and, it is understood, have not been recovered.
THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEE

The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, who have recently relaxed their efforts to find the murderer, have called a meeting
for Tuesday evening next to consider what steps they can take to assist the police.
LIST OF THE EAST END MURDERS

Seven women have now been murdered in the East End under mysterious circumstances, five of them within a period of
eight weeks. The following are the dates of the crimes and names of the victims as far as know:-
1. Last Christmas week, an unknown woman found murdered near Osborne and Wentworth Street, Whitechapel.
2. August 7 - Martha Turner found stabbed in 39 places on a landing in model dwellings known as George Yard Buildings,
Commercial Street, Spitalfields.

3. August 31 - Mrs Nicholls murdered and mutilated in Bucks Row, Whitechapel.
4. September 7 - Mrs Chapman murdered and mutilated in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel.
5. September 30 - Elizabeth Stride found with her throat cut in Berner Street, Whitechapel.
6. September 30 - Mrs Eddowes murdered and mutilated in Mitre Square, Aldgate.
7. November 9 - Woman murdered and mutilated in Dorset Street, Spitalfields.
Another Whitechapel murder! That is the horrible announcement which was made yesterday. Another unfortunate woman
has been slain, and has, it seems, been even more horribly mutilated than were the women who were killed at the end of
September. In this case the murder has been perpetrated in the room occupied by the sufferer. It must have been committed
between midnight and eleven o’clock yesterday morning. It is stated that the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Kelly, was
seen going towards her house with a man sometime about midnight, and about eleven o’clock yesterday morning, or shortly
after that hour, the discovery that she had been murdered was made. The descriptions which are given of the condition of the
body are horrible beyond measure. The perpetrator of the crime seems to revel in bloodshed. He has slashed and gashed his
victim as, it might be thought, no one in human shape could. So far, there seems to be every reason to believe that the crime
has been committed by the same hand that committed the previous murders. In those cases he killed his victims in the street;
in this case he has gone with her to her room, and there taken her life. It may be that he has found the watchfulness in the
streets too close to be evaded, and has therefore adopted his new tactics. If this be the case, the fact only shows how resolute
he is in the pursuance of his murderous work. He is carrying on a war with one unfortunate class, and that war is relentless.
Moreover, he finds the best field for his horrible work in the Whitechapel district. There have not been murders elsewhere since
he began them in that locality. He goes about his work with caution. There was a murder, close to the spot where the one of
yesterday was committed, on the morning of the 9th September. Two more murders were committed on the morning of the
30th September. In the first case the alarm died down sooner, and perhaps the watchfulness became less, so that he found it
possible to do more murder three weeks afterwards. Since the last two murders nearly six weeks have passed away, and now
again a woman is killed. In every case it has been plain that the assassin used his knife suddenly, and in such a manner that the
victim could make no outcry. In the present instance he must have done the same. The cry of a woman in a room in a crowded
tenement must have been heard; yet no one who can be trusted has come forward to say that he or she heard such a cry. It
seems as if the murderer, when he once got the confidence of his victim, could be certain to kill her without any alarm being
given. That he is possessed of anatomical skill seems to be as certain as that he is possessed by a homicidal mania. His madness
is not without restraint, save when he has killed his victim and is revelling in his brutalities. He keeps a watch on the police, and
knows exactly when and where he can strike with the least risk. He must be intimately acquainted with the district in which his
horrible work is done, and with the habits of the unfortunate women whom he makes his victims. Many stories were current in
the Whitechapel district yesterday as to a man of suspicious actions; but these do not help much in the tracking of the fiend.
They may or may not be true. If they are true, then either the assassin is becoming less careful or has some ready means of
changing his dress and appearance. Sir Charles Warren has complained of the criticism of the police as hindering them in the
tracing of criminals. Beyond all doubt there is ground for his complaint. Many of the criticisms of the London press have been
panic stricken and foolish. But if the force under Sir Charles’s command cannot discover the perpetrator of all these murders;
if they fail to trace him after this his latest atrocity, there will be reason for hostile criticism. The problem to be solved is one
of terrible interest; it cannot be solved without careful and intelligent study. That it should be solved is a necessity, if there is
to be any sense of security in our large cities, and especially in London.
13 November 1888
The Whitechapel Murder

Inquest and Verdict.
The inquest into the cause of the death of Mary Janet Kelly, who was found with her throat cut and horribly mutilated in
Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, Whitechapel, London, was opened yesterday, at eleven o’clock, in the Shoreditch Town Hall,
before Dr. McDonald and a jury of fifteen. On the names being called over, the officer asked the jury to name their foreman.
One was named, but he objected on the ground that the crime was not committed in Shoreditch, but in Whitechapel.
The Coroner - Do you think, sir, we do not know our business as to where our jurisdiction runs? The jury have no business to
object. If you persist in your objection, I know how to deal with you - that is all.
Another Juryman - I am on the list for Shoreditch, and not for Whitechapel.
The Coroner - I am not going to discuss the matter of jurisdiction with the jury at all. The body lies in my jurisdiction. That
is all I know; and all I have to say is - jurisdiction arises where the body lies.

The Officer repeated his request several times, and one or two who were named refused to act as foreman. But at length
one consented. He was accordingly sworn, and then the jury went to view the body.
The Coroner directed that they should afterwards be taken to see the place where the body was found.
Inspectors Nairn and Abberline appeared on behalf of the police, but no one represented the deceased. The Court was held
in a small committee room on the ground floor, and one altogether inadequate to the purpose of so important an inquiry. Upon
the return of the jury at noon the taking of evidence commenced.
Joseph Barnett was the first witness called, and after some trouble he was found and entered the Court. Upon the Testament
being handed to him, he at once kissed it, and on being checked by the officer, said, “Oh, well, I don’t know nothing about such
things. I’ve never been on such an errand before.”
The oath was then administered.
The Coroner said, before commencing, he had to request that there should be complete silence in the Court. With regard
to what the newspapers had said about the jurisdiction, he had not had any communication with Dr. Baxter as to jurisdiction.
There was no doubt at all it was his duty to hold the inquest. A previous murder which took place occurred in his jurisdiction,
but the body was taken into the district over which Dr. Baxter had direction, and he of course held the inquest. There was no
question whatever as to his right to hold the inquiry.
Joseph Barnett then deposed - I was originally a fish porter, but now I am a labourer. I work at the river-side and carry fish.
I lived up to Saturday last at 24 New Street, Bishopsgate. Since Saturday last I have been staying at my sister’s, who lives at 21
Portpool Lane, Leather Lane. I have lived with the deceased for a year and eight months. Her name was Marie Jeanette Kelly.
Kelly was her maiden name. I have seen the body of the deceased, and I identify it by the hair and eyes. I am positive that the
deceased was the woman with whom I lived, and that her name was Marie.
Q. - How long have you lived with her at 13 Room, Miller’s Court?
A. - About eight months, but the landlord says it is more.
When did you cease to live with her?
Last Tuesday week, the 30th ult.
Why did you leave her?
Because she took in an immoral woman out of compassion. My being out of work had nothing to do with it.
When did you see her last?
About seven on Thursday evening.
Were you and she on friendly terms?
Yes, very friendly. We were always good friends.
Did you have a drink together?
No, sir.
Was she quite sober?
She was.
Was she generally speaking of sober habits?
As long as she was with me and had my hard earned wages she was sober.
Did she get drunk occasionally?
Occasionally, yes; in my eyesight once or twice.
Did she tell you where she was born?
Yes, hundreds of times. She said she was born in Limerick, and went to Wales when quite young. Then she told me her father
was named John Kelly, and was a “gaffer” at some ironworks. I don’t know whether she said Carnarvonshire or Carmarthenshire.
Did she tell you anything about her other relatives, sisters and others?
Yes. She told me about her sister, who was respectable and lived with her aunt, following her occupation. That was going
from place to place selling things. But I never saw any of her relatives.
(Witness spoke with a stutter, and evidently laboured under great emotion.)
She said there were six of them at home, and one was in the army. I have never seen or spoken to them.
Did she say she had been married?
Yes, but she was very young at the time. The marriage took place in Wales. She told me that she was married to a collier in
Wales, and his name was Davis or Davies.

Did she tell you how long she lived with him?
Until he met his death in an explosion. She did not tell me the exact time she lived with him, but it might have been a year
or two. She said she married Davies at the age of 16.
She told you that she came to London about four years ago?
Yes, she did.
Was that directly after her husband’s death?
After her husband’s death she went to Cardiff, with a cousin.
What was she doing in Cardiff?
She was carrying on with her cousin in a bad life. As I told her, it was her downfall.
When did she come to London?
About four years ago.
What did she do when she came to London?
She lived in a house at the West End - a gay house, with a madam.
How long did she live there?
As far as she described it to me, a few weeks. Then some gentleman asked her to go to France, and she went; but, as she
described it to me, she didn’t like it, and came back in about a week or two’s time.
Did she tell you the name of the place in France?
She told me; but she did not remain long, as she did not like it.
Did she live in France long?
No; about a fortnight. She came back as she did not like it.
When she returned from France, where did she tell you she lived?
In the Ratcliffe Highway.
Do you know how long she lived there?
She must have lived there for some time.
After that where did she live?
Near the Commercial Gasworks, with a man named Morganstone. I have never seen him. I don’t know how long she lived
there. When she left the neighbourhood of the gasworks, she went to live, I think, as far as I can remember, at Pennington
Street. She lived with another man named Joseph Fleming; but why she left him I don’t know. She described him as a mason’s
plasterer.
Did she tell you where Fleming lived?
Somewhere in the Bethnal Green Road.
Was that all that you knew of her history until you came to live with her?
She told me her history while I was living with her.
Who lived with her before you?
I cannot answer whether it was Morganstone or Fleming.
Where did you first pick up with her?
In the parish of Spitalfields, or Whitechapel.
Did you go to live with her the first time you saw her?
We had a drink together, and then we made arrangements to meet on the Saturday.
What did you arrange on the Saturday?
On Saturday we agreed to come together - to keep with one another.
Did you take a house then at once?
No; but we took lodgings.
Have you lived with her ever since?
Yes, ever since, until we parted quite friendly before her murder.
Did she have any fear about any one?

No, not particular; but she used to ask me to read about the murders, and I used to bring them all home and read them.
If I did not bring one, she would get it herself and ask me whether the murderer was caught. I used to tell her everything as
what was in the papers.
Did she go in fear of any particular individual?
No, sir; only with me now and again, and that was always shortly over - one moment rowing, and for days and weeks always
friendly. Often I bought her things coming home, and, whatever it was, she always liked it. She was always glad of my fetching
her such articles, such as meat and other things, as my hard earnings would allow.
The Coroner (no juryman desiring to ask a question) told the witness not to leave the precincts of the Court, and said he
had given his evidence very well.
Thomas Bowyer (sworn) - I live at 37 Dorset Street, Spitalfields. I am a servant to M’Carthy, the owner of a chandler’s shop.
I serve in the shop. The shop is situated at 27 Dorset Street.
The Coroner - Will you tell the jury quietly and slowly what occurred on this Friday morning?
Witness - About a quarter to eleven on Friday morning I was ordered by M’Carthy to go to Mary Jane’s room (No. 13). I did so.
What were you going to do there?
I went for the rent. I knocked at the door, and I received no answer. I knocked again, but got no answer. I went round the
corner by the gutter spout, where there is a small pane of glass broken in the large window. There was a curtain before the
window which covered both windows. I pulled the curtain aside and looked in.
What did you see?
I saw two lumps of flesh lying on the table.
Where was this table?
In front of the bed, and close against. The second time I looked in I saw the body of somebody lying on the bed, and blood
on the floor. I at once then went very quietly back to my master and I told him what I had seen . “Good God,” he said, “do
you mean to say that, Harry?” We both went down to the police station. We told the police what we had seen. No one in the
neighbourhood knew what had occurred. Nobody was in the shop. He came back with the inspector. I often “see” the woman
in and out there. I knew the last witness, Joe. I have seen the deceased under the influence of drink once.
By a Juror - I saw her last alive on Wednesday afternoon in the court. Mr. M’Carthy’s shop is at the corner of the court. I
spoke to her on Wednesday afternoon.
John M’Carthy (sworn) - I am a grocer and lodging house keeper. My shop is No. 27 Dorset Street. On Friday morning, about
10.30, I sent Bowyer to No. 13 to call for rent. He went there, and he came back. The court is called Miller’s Court. The man
came back in five minutes. He said, “Governor, I knocked at the door, and can’t make any one answer. I looked through the
‘winder’ and saw a lot of blood.” I went out with him, looked through the window, and saw the woman and everything. I
couldn’t speak at first, but at last I said, “Harry, don’t tell any one. Go for the police.” I knew deceased as Mary Jane Kelly.
I have seen her alive, and dead, and have no doubt about her identity. I recovered myself and went with Bowyer to the
Commercial Street Police Station. I saw Inspector Beck, and told him what I had seen. He put on his hat and coat, and went to
the house with me at once.
How long has the deceased lived in this room?
About ten months.
With this man Joe?
Yes. I did no concern myself. I did not know whether they were married or not. They had a row some time ago, and broke
two panes of glass. The bed, tables, and chairs in the room belonged to me, and the bedclothes and everything. She paid 4s 6d
a week for the room. The deceased was 29s in arrear of rent. The rent was paid weekly. I often saw the deceased the worse for
drink. She was not reeling about, but she was noisy when under the influence of drink. She was not helpless, and was able to
walk about. She was an exceptionally quiet woman, but when in drink she was noisy, and I could tell that she had been drinking.
Mary Ann Cox was the first of the female witnesses called.
She said - I live at the last house at the top of the court - Miller’s Court. I am a widow and get a living on the streets. I’ve
been unfortunate. On Thursday night, at 11.45, I last saw the deceased. She was very intoxicated. There was short, stout man,
shabbily dressed, with her, who had a pot of ale in his hand. He had a round, black billycock hat and a full carrotty moustache.
The chin was bare. I followed them up the court, and said, “Good night, Mary.” She never turned round, and he banged the
door. He had nothing but a quart can of beer in his hand. She said, “Good night. I’m going to have a song.” Then the door was
shut, and she sang “The violet I plucked from my mother’s grave when a boy.” I remained a quarter of an hour in my room.
She was singing all the time. I went out, returned about one o’clock, and she was singing then. I went into my room to warm

my hands a bit. It was raining hard then. I went out again, and returned at 3.10 a.m. Then the light was out, and there was no
noise. I went in, but could not sleep and did not go to bed. I can’t sleep when I owe anything. When the murder was discovered
I had not had a wink of sleep. I had no sleep at all that day. There are men who go to work in Spitalfields Market, and who leave
early. Once such man lives in the court now. I heard a man go out at 6.15. He might have gone out and come back again, for
all I know. It might have been a policeman. The man who was with Kelly when I saw them was short and stout. All his clothes
were dark. He appeared to be between 35 and 26. I did not notice the colour of his trousers. All his clothes were dark. The
man looked very shabby; but his boots made no noise whatever in going into the court. The deceased had no hat on. I did not
notice that the deceased was the worse drink until I said “Good night” to her. She scarcely had time to say “Good night,” as
the man shut the door.
By a juror - There was a light in the room, but I could not see anything, as the blind was down.
The Foreman - Should you know the man again if you saw him?
Witness - Oh, yes, I should.
By the Coroner - I feel certain that of there had been a cry of “Murder” in the deceased’s room after three o’clock in the
morning, I should have heard it. There was not the least sign of any noise whatever. I have often seen the deceased the worse
for drink.
Elizabeth Prater, wife of William Prater - I was deserted by my husband five years ago. I live at No. 20 in Miller’s Court. On
Thursday I went out of the court about five, and I returned close upon one on Friday morning. I stood at the corner of the court
waiting for a young man. I never saw my young man. I went into my room and lay down. I went into M’Carthy’s shop.
The Coroner - Was it open at 1 a.m.?
Witness - Yes, sir, and sometimes later. I told him to say to my young man that I had gone to my room. From where I was I
could see if a light was in the room of the deceased. I have only spoken to her once or twice. I lay down on the bed at 1.30 in
my clothes. I fell asleep directly, because I had been having something to drink, and slept soundly. I had a little black kitten
which used to come on to my neck. It woke me up from 3.30 to 4 by coming on to my face, and I gave it a blow and knocked
it off. The lights were out in the lodging house. The cat went on to the floor, and that moment I heard, “Oh! Murder!” I was
then turning round on my bed. The voice was a faintish one, as though some one had woke up with a nightmare. Such a cry
is not unusual, and I did not take any particular notice. I did not hear the cry a second time. I did not hear any bed or table
being pulled about. I went to sleep and was awakened about five o’clock. I woke myself. I was not awakened by any noise. I
went downstairs and saw some men harnessing their horses. I walked out, and went into the Ten Bells public house, where I
had some rum. The last witness (Mary Ann Cox) could have come down the court and gone out, but I did not see her. I saw no
one particular at the Ten Bells. I was there at a quarter to six, and shortly afterwards I returned home again, and went to bed
and slept till eleven o’clock on Friday morning. When I went home first at half past one, there was no singing going on in the
deceased’s room. If there had been, I should have heard it.
Caroline Maxwell, of 14 Dorset Street, wife of Henry Maxwell, said - My husband is a lodging house deputy. I have known
the deceased for about four months. I also know Joe Barnett. I believe the deceased was an unfortunate girl. She was a young
woman who never associated with any one much, beyond bowing “Good morning.”
The Coroner - You must be very careful about your evidence, because it is different to that given by any one else.
Witness - I am quite sure what I say. She was so rarely out at that time. I saw her at the corner of Miller’s Court on Friday
morning at eight, because my husband had not left off, and he leaves off at half past eight. My husband had a man to call at
seven a.m. That was his last call. I had never seen the deceased about at that time in the morning. I spoke to her, “What, Mary,
what brings you out so early?” And she said, “Oh, Carrie, I do feel so bad.” Although I had only spoken to her twice previously,
I knew her name, and she knew mine. I asked her if she would have a drink. She said, “I have just had half a pint of ale, and
I have brought it up.” The beer she had thrown up was about three yards away from her on the pavement. She did not say
where she had the beer, but by the motion she made I should imagine that she had it at the Britannia beer house, at the corner
of the street. I left the deceased then, saying I could pity her feelings. I then went to Spitalfields Market to get my husband’s
breakfast, and on my return I saw her outside the Britannia public house talking to a man. That would be about a quarter to
nine.
The Coroner - What description could you give of this man?
Witness - I could not give any. I did not pass them, but I saw them from the distance. I was between fourteen and fifteen
years away from them. I am sure it was the deceased that I saw outside the public house. The man I saw was not tall. He was
short, and a little taller than I am (the witness was about 5 feet 5 inches in height.) The man had a plain coat on. I did not
notice his hat. The deceased was wearing a dark skirt, velvet bodice, and a marone shawl. She had no hat on. I have seen the
deceased in drink, but she was not an habitual drunkard. She was a quiet girl as far as I saw her. She was never about with
anybody that I saw. What she did elsewhere, of course, I don’t know.

A Juror - If the man that you saw the deceased with had worn a silk hat, should you have noticed it?
Witness - I don’t know that I should have done so. I am accustomed to see all classes of people, but I don’t take any notice
of them.
But would you have noticed his hat if it had been a silk one?
If he had worn a silk hat I might have noticed it.
Sarah Lewis, living at 24 Great Pearl Street, Spitalfields, a laundress, said - I know Mrs. Keyler, in Miller’s Court, and saw her
on Friday morning about 2.30 a.m. This I noticed by Spitalfields Church clock. In Dorset Street I saw a man with a wideawake
on, stopping on the opposite side of the pavement. The man was alone, and was not talking to anybody. He was tall, and a
“stout” looking man. He had dark clothes on. A young man went along with a young woman, who was drunk. The man I noticed
was looking up the court, as though he was waiting for some one. I stopped at Keyler’s that night. I had had a few words at
home. The court was quiet. I sat in a chair, and fell asleep. I woke up at 3.30 as the clock “went.” I sat awake until nearly
five. A little before four I heard a female shouting “Murder” once. It was loud, and there was only one shout. The cry was from
where the shop is. There was no repetition. It was a young woman’s voice. I took no notice. I was not alarmed. I left the house
at half past five in the afternoon. I could not get out sooner, because the police would not let us leave. On Wednesday night
I was going with a friend along the Bethnal Green Road at eight o’clock in the evening, when a gentleman passed us, and he
followed us back again. He wanted us to follow him. He said he didn’t mind which of us. He went away, and came back to us,
and said if we went along a certain entry he would treat us. He put down his bag - his black, shiny bag - and said to my friend,
“Are you frightened? I’ve got something in my bag.” Then he began feeling about his clothes, and we ran away. He was a short,
palefaced man, with a black moustache. The man appeared to be about forty. His bag was not very large - about six to nine
inches long. The hat he wore was a round one, rather high - a stiff felt hat. He had a long overcoat on, and a short black one
underneath. His trousers were dark. On the night of the murder, I saw him again in Commercial Street. I cannot tell you where
he went when we left him. We did not look behind us. On Friday morning, about half past two, on my way to Miller’s Court, I
met the same man, who was accompanied by a female. They were in Commercial Street, near the Britannia public house. He
was wearing the same clothes, with the exception of the overcoat. He had the black bag with him. They were standing talking
together. I passed on, but looked back at him. I went on my way. I did not tell a policeman, as I did not pass one on my way. I
saw the man talking to the woman at the corner of Dorset Street, and left them there.
The Coroner - Should you know the man if you saw him again?
Witness - I should.
Dr. George Baxter (sic) Phillips, M.R.C.S., (sworn) - I am surgeon to the H Division of the Metropolitan Police and reside at
2 Spital Square. On Friday morning I was called by the police about eleven o’clock, and proceeded to Miller’s Court, which I
entered at 11.15. I found a room, numbered 13, having two windows. (Photograph of the premises produced.) There were two
windows looking into the court. Two of the panes in the lesser window nearest to the passage were broken, and, finding the
door locked, I looked through the lower broken pane and satisfied myself that the mutilated corpse lying on the bed was not
in need of any immediate attention from me. I also came to the conclusion that there was nobody else upon the bed or within
view to whom I could render any professional assistance. Having ascertained that it was probably advisable that no entry should
be made into the room at the time, I remained until about 1.30 when the door was broken open leading into the room. The
door was broken open by Mr. M’Carthy. The direction was given by Superintendent Arnold. The police before that prevented
Mr. M’Carthy from breaking the door open. The yard was in charge of Inspector Beck. On the door being opened it knocked
against a table which was close to the left hand side of the bed, and the bedstead was close up against the wooden partition.
The mutilated remains of a female were lying two thirds over towards the edge of the bedstead nearest the door of entry. She
had only her chemise upon her or some underlinen garment, and on my subsequent examination I am sure the body had been
removed, subsequent to the injury which caused her death, from the side of the bedstead which was nearest to the wooden
partition before named. The large quantity of blood under the bedstead,and the saturated condition of the palliasses, pillow,
and sheet at the top corner of the bedstead nearest the partition, lead me to the conclusion that the severance of the right
carotid artery was the immediate cause of her death, and was inflicted while the deceased was lying at the right side of the
bedstead, and her head and neck in the top right hand corner before alluded to.
At this stage, the inquiry was adjourned for a quarter of an hour for luncheon. During the adjournment, the Coroner’s officer
reported that an officialof the Shoreditch Vestry had been persuading the jury that they ought not to have been summoned to
this inquest at all.
On the jury reassembling, the Coroner said - May I ask, gentlemen, this? It has been reported to me that during your brief
absence for luncheon some one has made a statement to you that you ought not to have been summoned. Is that the fact?
The Foreman - So far as I know nothing of the kind has taken place.
Several jurors added that there was no truth whatever in the statement.

The Coroner - Then I must have been misinformed. I should have taken care that if I had found anybody interfering with my
jury he would have had a quiet life for the next week.
The inquiry then proceeded.
Julia Venturney deposed - I occupy a room in Miller’s Court, and the man I am now living with is named Harry Owen. I knew
the deceased. It was some time before I came acquainted with her, but when I knew her she told me that her name was Kelly,
and she was a married woman. I know the young man Joe Barnett with whom the deceased lived. They lived happily together.
He objected to her walking the streets. I have frequently seen the deceased the worse for drink; but when she was cross, Joe
Barnett would go out and leave her to quarrel with herself. She told me that she was fond of another man - that she could not
bear the man (Joe) that she was living with, although he was very good to her. Strangely enough, the other man, she said, was
named Joe. Witness went to bed on Thursday night in Miller’s Court about 8 p.m. She did not sleep. She could not tell why,
but she did not sleep at all. Perhaps she dozed a bit. She heard a strange sound with some door, which was not like the way in
which the deceased used to shut the door. There was no noise in the court that night, and she heard no singing. If there had
been any singing, she must have heard it. The deceased used to sing Irish songs.
Maria Harvey, of New Court, Dorset Street, knew deceased. On Monday and Tuesday she slept with the deceased. She saw
the deceased on the Thursday night about seven o’clock. Joe came in whilst she was there. She left some clothes to be washed,
including one man’s shirts, pettocoats belonging a child, and a black overcoat.
The Coroner - Two shirts belonging to the same man?
Witness - No, sir. She saw the coat again on Friday, when it was shown her by some gentlemen.
Inspector Walter Beck, of the H Division, stationed at Commercial street, said information was brought to the station at five
minutes to eleven on Friday morning. He went at once and gave direction to prevent any one leaving the court, and he directed
other constables to make a search.
Inspector G. Abberline, of Scotland Yard, said he was in charge of the case on behalf oif the police. He reached the court
about 11.30 on Friday last. When he reached the place he was informed by Inspector beck that the bloodhounds had been
sent for and were on their way, and Dr. Phillips said it would be better not to force the door until the dogs arrived. At 1.30
Superintendent Arnold arrived, and stated that the order for the dogs had been countermanded, and gave directions for the
door to be forced. I looked through the window and saw how matters really were before we entered. I subsequently took an
inbentory of the things in the room. There were traces of a large fire having been kept in the grate, and the spout of the kettle
had been melted off. We have since gone through the ashes of the grate, and found portions of the brim of a hat, and portions
of a shirt. I consider that the articles were burnt to enable the murderer to see what he was about. There was a small piecec
of candle standing in a broken wine glass. The key of the lock had been missing for some time, and the door could be opened
by putting a hand through the broken window and pushing the latch back. A man’s clay pipe was found in the room, belonging
to Barnett.
The Coroner said that was all the evidence they were prepared to lay before the jury today. It was for them to say whether
they were satisfied with it, or whether they would adjourn and hear the furether evidence on a future occasion. If the Coroner’s
jury came to the conclusion as to the cause of death, that was all they had to do. The police would take charge of the case,
and it was for the jury to say whether they had heard sufficient evidence to enable them to come to a conclusion as to the
cause of the death of Mary Jane Kelly. If that was the case, there was no occasion for a further adjournment; but the matter
was one entirely for the jury.
The Foreman said the jury considered that they had heard enough evidence to justify them in coming to a verdict.
The Coroner - Then, gentlemen, what is your verdict?
The Foreman - Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown.
The Coroner - You are satisfied as to the identity of the deceased?
The Foreman - We are, sir, perfectly satisfied.
This closed the inquiry.
By design, the medical testimony adduced at the inquest was limited to that which was absolutely required to enable
the jury to find respecting the cause of death. The Daily Telegraph of today is enabled to state on good authority that,
notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, a portion of the bodily organs was missing. The police, and with them
the divisional surgeon, have arrived at the conclusion that it is in the interest of justice not to disclose the details of the
professional inquiry. On all hands, the evidence of the witness who declared that she saw Kelly between eight and nine o’clock
on Friday morning is put down to error, the common impression being that the witness is thinking of what happened on probably
the previous day. Those who have charge of the case are most of all surprised that the huge blaze in the unfortunate woman’s
room, which the murderer kept up for burning his victim’s clothes, in order, as it is supposed, to give him light to execute his

appalling work, did not attract the attention of the residents in the adjoining tenements.
The Press Association states that up to last evening practically nothing new had come to light tending to elucidate the
mystery surrounding the Dorset Street murder. One noteworthy incident during the day was the receipt by Mrs M’Carthy, wife
of the landlord of the house where the murder was committed, of a post card bearing the Folkestone post mark, and signed
“Jack Sheridan the Ripper.” In bad spelling and equally bad calligraphy, the writer said:-
“Don’t be alarmed, I am going to do another; but this time it will be a mother and daughter.”
The card, which, unlike many of the previous communications of a similar character, was written in black ink, was at once
handed over to the detectives. The handwriting was of a different character from that of the former letters on the subject.
During the day a large crowd loitered about Dorset Street discussing the crime, and extraordinary statements were made by
persons professing to have special information on the topic. Among those who visited the locality were two officials of the Royal
Irish Constabulary, a prominent post office official, and two or three members of Parliament.
Telegraphing later, the Press Association states that the police last evening received information which not only establishes
a clue to the perpetrator of the murder, but places the authorities in possession of an accurate description of the person seen
in the company of the murdered woman shortly before her death. It appears that a man, apparently of the labouring class,
with a military appearance, who knew the deceased woman, last evening lodged with the police a detailed account of an
incident which attracted his attention on the morning of the murder, and, although his story has been sifted, and the narrator
cross examined, he adheres to it rigidly. The informant stated that on the morning of the 9th he saw the deceased woman in
Commercial Street, Spittalfields, in the vicinity of where the murder was committed, in the company of a man of respectable
appearance. The man was bout five feet six inches in height, and 34 or 35 years of age, with dark complexion and dark
moustache, curled upwards at ends. He wore a long dark coat, trimmed with Astrachan, a white collar, with black necktie, in
which was affixed a horse shoe pin. He wore a pair of dark gaiters, with light buttons, over button boots, and displayed from
his waistcoat a massive gold chain. The highly respectable appearance of the man was in such contrast to the appearance of
the woman that few could have failed to have noticed them at that hour of the morning. This description, which agrees with
that given of the person seen with the deceased by others, is much fuller in detail than has yet been in the possession of the
police, and the importance which they attach to it may be estimated from the fact that immediately it was taken, a special
messenger was sent with it to the headquarters of H Division, where Detectives Abberline, Nairn, and Moore set about an
immediate investigation.
A STARTLING SUGGESTION
[SPECIAL TELEGRAM]
Berne, November 12, evening.
A Lucerne journal reports the history of a series of crimes which startled Paris sixteen years ago, and which it is thought
may possibly throw some light upon the horrible tragedies in the East End of London. Shortly after the war of 1872 the Paris
police arrested a daring and ferocious assassin, who had confined his operations almost exclusively to the women of the demi
monde. He was a Russian, named Nicholas Wassili. Born at Tiraspol in 1847, he had studied at the University of Odessa, and
was exceedingly well educated. An inquiry revealed the fact that his mind had fallen prey to religious fanaticism, and that he
was not responsible for his actions. He was confined in a lunatic asylum, from which, however, he was liberated last January as
cured. Of his subsequent movements nothing definite is known, but he is just as likely to have gone to London as anywhere else.
14 November 1888
THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS

Whenever a savage homicide is committed, for the perpetration of which no adequate motive can be suggested, the public
mind reverts to the theory of insanity as the only one affording a possible explanation. Doubtless a diagnosis arrived at by a
process of exclusion is warrantable when we have the full data of a case before us; but in the absence of full information, such
a process is liable to be misleading. Before any theory of madness can be accepted in a given case of crime, however atrocious
and revolting the circumstances connected with it may be, it is well, in the interests of justice, to weigh the evidence of all
the circumstances against the well ascertained facts of the natural history of insanity.
The hideous details of the Whitechapel series of murders have, it might be said, naturally led to the conclusion that they
must have been committed by a maniac. I venture to point out that there are many circumstances connected with these crimes
which militate against this opinion. I base my remarks on “clinical” observations, personal and otherwise, of cases of what is
falsely termed “homicidal mania.” In point of fact, there is no such thing as homicidal mania per se - that is to say, no case
has ever been placed on record in which the sole evidence of insanity has been an impulse to kill; the homicidal tendency
has never been known to exist apart from other manifestations of brain disease or defect. There are certain acute forms of

insanity in which it is known to be a pretty frequent concomitant, and in certain chronic conditions a desire to kill or injure
is not uncommonly met with. The public mind should be disabused of the idea of an insanity whose only characteristic is an
impulse to kill. The scientific and practical view of the position is that the so-called homicidal impulse is merely an incident
in particular cases of aberration. It is manifestly impossible to enter here on a description of the various forms of insanity in
which the homicidal tendency occurs; I shall therefore confine myself to enumerating the leading characteristics of murders
committed by insane persons, and relate them as far as possible with the reported incidents of the Whitechapel crimes:
(1.) In the very large proportion of cases the act is distinctly impulsive - there is an entire absence of premeditation
or forethought, whether as regards the method of commission or the avoidance of detection. The crime may be entirely
motiveless, or it may be the result of some accidental irritation acting on the mind of a person whose power of control over his
will is partially or wholly in abeyance.
(2.) Many cases are on record in which there cannot be a shadow of doubt that the lunatic has carefully premeditated and
deliberately laid his plans for the perpetration of murder, stimulated by delusion, by an insane feeling of revenge, or by a desire
to remove from the world relatives who he believes are implicated in the same misery which pervades his own existence. In
such cases forethought extends only up to the period of the commission of the crime; his purpose effected, he commits suicide,
he gives himself up to the police, or he runs and hides himself, the attempt to escape being of the most feeble kind, possessing
none of the characteristics of a prearranged scheme.
(3.) Instances are pretty numerous of persons in the earlier stage of melancholia confessing to their physician a desire to
commit suicide or homicide, the latter tendency being much less frequent than the former, in the proportion, roughly speaking,
of 1 to 50. In such cases, however, it often happens that the suicidal tendency is concealed, and this may also be the case as
regards the homicidal impulse. But in all instances in which the case has culminated in murder, the lunatic either commits
suicide or gives himself up to justice.
(4.) There are cases of recurrent insanity in which homicidal tendency may be evinced; but in all such the symptoms of
depression or excitement are so manifest as to call for special supervision.
(5.) There are cases of an acute transitory character; but here again general madness is manifest.
(6.) We have lastly a class of cases more difficult to deal with than any of the preceding. Every asylum physician is aware
that a considerable number of insane persons discharged from lunatic hospitals because their symptoms are longer so overt as
to render their further detention legally warrantable, retain a residuum, so to speak, of insane mental action. To all outward
appearance their walk and conversation present no evidence of aberration, or they may be but slightly eccentric. Nevertheless,
the taint of delusion, or a moral or an intellectual “twist,” or a certain general slight instability, may be constantly or
occasionally manifest to those acquainted with the cases. This is of comparatively small importance when the patient is
surrounded by friends, but our criminal records bear evidence that in the friendless, unstable waif the delusional element may
gather strength, and be followed by criminal action.
Now I think that there can be no doubt that with the five classes of cases first spoken of the Whitechapel murders have
nothing to do. Were I constructing for myself an imaginary case of lunacy, the subject of which might be the perpetrator of the
series of crimes under consideration, I should select him from the sixth class, and picture to myself a person partially recovered
from insanity, retaining a residual delusion connected with the class of persons who have been the victims, and desirous of
satisfying an insane revenge. But my idealisation would not stand the test of relation with the general characteristics of
insanity. It is all but impossible for any one who has worked among the insane to imagine a lunatic possessed of steadfast,
persistent determination applied to acts committed at long intervals of time, and characterised by forethought applied to their
perpetration, and to evasion of their criminal consequences, each individual act calling for a nervous courage without which
failure would be certain, a general promptitude and cleverness suited to exigencies as they arise, and a steady reticence.
It would not be hard to imagine the commission of an isolated act of this character by an insane person, but the whole
circumstances of the commission of these crimes, save one, are outside insanity. If they have been committed by a lunatic,
his is a case which in this country is without parallel or precedent. I have said the circumstances of these crimes are outside
insanity, save one; that circumstance, of course, is the horrible nature of the act. But are we to deduce insanity from the
revolting nature of a crime alone, when all the other circumstances point away from it? Why should we underestimate the
power of strong human wickedness and overestimate that of weak human insanity? For my own part, I can more easily conceive
these crimes being the result of savage wickedness than of insane mental action. There is a conciseness in the first idea which
there is not in the second. Moreover, there is an incentive to wickedness productive of crime analogous to those now under
consideration, which only those very intimately acquainted with the dark records of medical jurisprudence know of. This is
not the place to speak of it, and I only allude to it in order to indicate that there are incentives to crime unappreciable by the
great mass of the community.
JOHN BATTY TUKE.
Continued in the next issue.

OBITUARY
Camille Wolff
True Crime Bookdealer and Publisher
23 May 1912 - 4 September 2014
A Remembrance by ADAM WOOD
There is something very fitting that in a decade which as seen the passing of True Crime aficionados
such as Jonathan Goodman, Wilf Gregg, Colin Wilson and Jeremy Beadle, the ‘little old lady’ who
supplied most the contents of their bookshelves outlasted them all.
Cam Wolff, who died recently aged 102, counted as customers these experts and other famous names such
as musician Nick Cave and Great Train Robbery mastermind Bruce Reynolds, who she called “my favourite ex-
criminal”.
She ran Grey House Books from her home, initially in Chelsea and then at Portobello Road, where books on
every aspect of crime imaginable lined the walls, staircases and eventually bedrooms, with the Mafia in the loo
and Jack the Ripper in the hallway. Although run as a mail-order business, customers could, by appointment, be
invited to browse this vast ‘bookshop’, always leaving with more books than they intended and often fortified
with a glass or two of wine. For while Cam’s knowledge of crime and her unrivalled collection of books was among
the largest of its kind in the country, her customers invariably became friends and her literary lunches, organised
by her assistant Loretta Lay, became the stuff of legend. Attendees were asked to sign a visitors’ book, where
entries alongside the famous names mentioned above included a gravedigger, a milkman and your humble editor.
It was at a Grey House lunch in the 1990s that for the first time I met Keith Skinner, who inscribed my Jack the
Ripper A-Z thus: “Dear Adam, a pleasure to meet you, such a shame Donald Rumbelow is here also.” Paul Begg
was cooking the meal at the time, and I later earned the nickname from Cam of “the washer-upper” thanks to my
kitchen etiquette. The Grey House lunches were a social hub for those interested in true crime.
Apart from her unique gift for bringing together crime readers from all walks of life, perhaps Cam’s greatest
legacy to the Ripper world was the 1995 book Who Was Jack The Ripper?, which featured 50 experts hand-selected
by Loretta Lay. Each wrote a single chapter each on the identity of the Whitechapel murderer. The launch, where
each contributor was invited to sign the limited run of 100 copies, was held at Grey House Books at Portobello
Road and is famous for the tension caused by the attendance of Paul Feldman and Melvin Harris, the latter being
a highly-vocal critic of the Maybrick diary and Feldman’s part in its story. Who Was Jack The Ripper? is now a
collector’s item in its own right, currently available at £300.
Camille Joan Muriel Cohen was born on 23 May 1912 at Didsbury, Manchester. Her father was a cotton broker
from Cairo, her mother a Sieff from the Marks and Spencer family. Cam trained as a doctor but never practised,
instead joining Marks and Spencer in London and working for more than 20 years as a hygiene inspector. She
married solicitor Eric Wolff in 1934, the couple having two daughters. It was not until she retired in the 1970s
that Cam began Grey House Books, and was well into her 90s when she finally ‘retired’ for a second time, leaving
Loretta Lay to continue the true crime book banner going through Lay Books.
She once explained why she was drawn to the world of crime: “What I’m really interested in are the people
who come here to buy the books, even more than the books; in the people who argue over who Jack the Ripper
was, not in the theories themselves,” (although she once told me that the Ripper was “Queen Victorian riding the
Loch Ness Monster”).
In 1997 she told Seth Linder, in a feature piece for the Evening Standard, that she had one regret. “The one
crime I approve of is assassination where the person is truly evil. I wish I had killed Hitler or Saddam, but I just
didn’t have the courage.”

I Beg To Report
NEWS ROUNDUP
FROM AROUND THE RIPPER WORLD
JACK’S PLAICE. News reaches Rip Towers of the relaunch of perhaps the most
photographed chip shop in London, Happy Days on Goulston Street. With its door
situated in what was the entrance to 108-119 Wentworth Model Dwellings, Happy
Days sits on the location of the Goulston Street graffito and as such appears in the
photograph album of every student of the Ripper case. While debate continues as
to whether the chalked message - “The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed
for nothing” - was written by the Ripper, what is not in doubt is that a portion
of Catherine Eddowes’s apron was found by PC Alfred London on the ground under
the graffito an hour after her murder, the only tangible clue in the case. Happy
Days owner Michael Papastavrou opened the chippy in 1981, completely oblivious
of the Ripper link. He told the East London Advertiser how he became aware of the
significance: “I was working late at night on my own when I first bought the premises
when the police came knocking on the shutters at 11pm asking what I was doing here.
I explained I was decorating, ready to open as a café, and they asked if I knew story
Sir Charles Warren examines the of what had happened here in 1888. They enlightened me and showed me where the
Goulston Street graffito before
ordering it’s removal graffiti was and I realised this was history - I knew about Jack the Ripper, but had no
idea this is where he scrawled his message.”
After observing hundreds of visitors

standing outside the doorway each
day, Mr Papastavrou recently decided
on a refit to reflect the link. The
restaurant now features photographs
of Ripper suspects, policemen and
buildings related to the case, as well
as a replica of the graffito positioned
where the original was probably
written and subsequently erased by
Commissioner Sir Charles Warren in
order to prevent an anti-semitic riot.
Dismissing claims that the Ripper-
themed refurbishment was in poor
taste, Mr Papastavrou said: “It’s in The doorway into Happy Days restaurant.
tribute to the victims. A lot of people Courtesy Edward Stow
told me when I was planning it that it won’t be tasteful. But there are no pictures of the Ripper or even the
mutilations of his victims.
The refurbishment continues a recent trend of recognising the area’s heritage as the scene of the Whitechapel
murders after many years of businesses ignoring the history evident on their doorstep, and follows the opening of
barber Jack the Clipper and Russell Edwards’s Official Jack the Ripper Store, both on Toynbee Street.
Chip shop takes on ‘Whitechapel Murders’ theme where Jack the Ripper taunted police.
Mike Brooke, East London Advertiser, 8 October 2014.
www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/news/chip_shop_takes_on_whitechapel_murders_theme_where_jack_the_ripper_
taunted_police_1_3798894

C A MATHEW LEAVES SPITALFIELDS. Following
on from our report on the photographs taken
in Whitechapel during 1912 by photographer
Charles Mathew (see Rip 137), it has been
announced that an exhibition of the images
will be staged outside of Spitalfields for the
the first time. C A Mathew: Spitalfields 100
years ago opened on 21 October and runs
until 18 December 2014 at the London Jewish
Cultural Centre, Ivy House, 94-96 North End
Road, London NW11 7SX. Opening hours are
Mondays to Thursdays 10am to 8pm and Fridays
10am to 2pm. Limited edition prints will be
for sale during the exhibition, with proceeds
going to the London Jewish Cultural Centre
and Bishopsgate Institute, who co-organised
the exhibition.
Crispin Street and Duval Street, buildings demolished in 1908. www.ljcc.org.uk/events/3822-exhibition-c-a-
Courtesy The Bishopsgate Institute mathew-br-i-spitalfields-100-years-ago-i.html
HORROR AT THE BRITISH LIBRARY. Horace Walpole has a lot to answer to. His novel The Castle of Otranto,
published in 1764, is recognised as the first Gothic novel and over the subsequent 250 years has inspired all
manner of sinister stories and dark literature from Frankenstein to Dracula. To celebrate the anniversary, a
new exhibition has opened at the British Library which gives a gimpse into the minds of these and other Gothic
masterpieces. Terror and Wonder: the Gothic Imagination takes visitors on a journey where ilterary treasures
such as early editions of Walpole’s novel, a draft of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (complete with handwritten edits
by Percy Shelley), the first ever depiction of Count Dracula (1901) and a photograph of actor Richard Mansfield
as both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1899). A section on the Hammer film Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde includes the ‘Dear
Boss’ letter, which can stake a claim to bestowing a Gothic horror moniker on the Whitechapel murderer - Jack the
Ripper. The exhibition also looks at more modern Gothic media, from film posters, fashion and music memorabilia
to teen fiction and modern classics. Exhibition Curator Greg Buzwell said: “The Gothic imagination has shaped
many other aspects of our lives, such as fashion, architecture, art, film and music. I hope the show brings home to
our visitors just how much inspiration we owe to the dark side of our imagination, and the enduring and beautiful
impact it has had on our lives. In the right circumstances, fear is a delicious sensation.”
Terror and Wonder: the Gothic Imagination is at the British Library until 20 January 2015, open 9.30am-8pm
(5pm Saturday, Sunday and public holidays, 6pm Friday). Admission is £5-£10 (free for under 18s). Further details
can be found at www.bl.uk/events/terror-and-wonder--the-gothic-imagination.
Dracula, Frankenstein and the Ripper – gothic comes to the British Library.
Alison Flood, The Guardian, 2 October 2014 .
www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/02/terror-and-wonder-gothic-imagination-british-library-exhibition
From Dracula to Jack the Ripper, British Library’s Terror of Wonder shines light on darkness.
Rachel Teskey, culture24.org.uk, 6 October 2014.
www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/literature-and-music/art501471-from-dracula-to-jack-the-ripper-british-
library-terror-of-wonder-shines-light-on-darkness
HOLMES UNDER THE MICROSCOPE. Another genre most famously defined by a fictional character is Detective
Fiction, where the biggest name is Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887. The stories of
Holmes’s adventures became so popular that many thought the detective to be real, attempting to contact him
via Scotland Yard (more of which in the next issue of Ripperologist). Now, for the first time since 1951, a major
exhibition on Holmes has opened at the Museum of London. Sherlock Holmes: The Man Who Never Lived And Will
Never Die runs until 12 April 2015; a full report will appear in Ripperologist 141.
www.museumoflondon.org.uk/london-wall/whats-on/exhibitions-displays/sherlock-holmes/#sthash.NOnubV7q.dpuf

Spitalfields Life
By THE GENTLE AUTHOR
of www.spitalfieldslife.com
“In the midst of life I woke to find myself living in an old house
beside Brick Lane in the East End of London.”
These are the words of The Gentle Author, whose daily blog at spitalfieldslife.com has captured
the very essence of Spitafields since August 2009. We at Ripperologist are delighted to have The
Gentle Author’s blessing to collate these stories and republish them in the coming issues for your
enjoyment. We thank the Gentle Author and strongly recommend you follow the daily blog at
www.spitalfieldslife.com.
THE SPITALFIELDS NIPPERS:

AN ASTONISHING PHOTOGRAPHIC DISCOVERY
It is my great delight to reveal these breathtaking photographs
taken by Horace Warner in Spitalfields at the turn of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. These pictures which have never been
reproduced before, and have hardly been seen by anyone outside
his immediate family, are published with the gracious permission of
Horace Warner’s grandson, Ian McGilvray.
Previously, only a handful of Warner’s sympathetic portraits of

the children who lived in the courtyards off Quaker Street – known
as the Spitalfields Nippers - were known to exist, but through some
assiduous detective work by researcher Vicky Stewart and a stroke
of good luck upon my part, we were able to make contact with his
grandson who keeps two albums comprising more than one hundred of
his grandfather’s pictures of Spitalfields, from which the photographs
published here are selected.
Many of the pictures in these albums are photographic masterpieces

and I believe them to be the most significant set of photographs in
existence of East Enders in this era. There is a rare clarity of vision
in the tender photography of Horace Warner that brings us startling
close to the Londoners of 1900 and permits us to look them in the
eye for the first time. You can imagine my excitement when I met Ian
McGilvray and opened Horace Warner’s albums to discover so many
astonishing pictures. I experienced a sensation almost of vertigo, like
looking down the dark well of time and being surprised by these faces
in sharp focus, looking back at me.
Copyright The Gentle Author
It was no straightforward journey to get there. I first published a
series of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers on spitalfieldslife.com

in 2011, reproduced from a booklet accompanying a 1975 exhibition of the handful of pictures once published in
fund-raising leaflets by the Bedford Institute in 1912. Then last year, when I sought to reproduce these pictures
in The Gentle Author’s London Album, Vicky Stewart established that the photographic prints were held in the
Quaker archive at Friends House in the Euston Road.
This discovery which permitted me to include those pictures in my Album was reward enough for our labours
and I wrote an account of our quest entitled “In Search of the Spitalfields Nippers” last August. The story might
easily have ended there, if we had not been shown a 1988 letter from Horace Warner’s daughter Gwen McGilvray
that accompanied the prints. In this letter, Gwen mentions the ‘albums’ which was the first tantalising evidence
of the existence of more of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields photographs.
Even as our hopes of finding these other pictures were raised, we were disappointed to realise that Gwen was
unlikely to be still alive. Yet through the research facility now available online and thanks to his unusual surname,
Vicky was able to find an address for one of Gwen’s four children, her son Ian, in Norfolk. It was a few years out
of date but there was a chance he was still there, so we waited until the Album was published in October and
sent off a copy to Ian McGilvray.
Within weeks, Ian wrote back to ask if I would like to visit him and see the ‘albums’. It was my good fortune that
the one of Horace Warner’s grandchildren we had been able to reach was also the guardian of the photographic
legacy. And so it was that on a bright winter’s day I made a journey to Norfolk to meet Ian and see the complete
set of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers for the first time. My fear was that I had seen the most important
images among those already known, but my shock was to recognise that the best pictures have not yet been seen.
These wonderful photographs have the power to revolutionise how we think about East Enders at the end of
the nineteenth century since, in spite of their poverty, these are undeniably proud people who claim a right to
existence which transcends their economic status. Unlike the degraded photographic images created by charitable

campaigners or the familiar middle-class studio portraits, Horace Warner’s relaxed intimate pictures draw us into
a personal relationship with his subjects whom we meet as our equals. The Spitalfields Nippers are a unique set of
photographs, that witness a particular time, a specific place, a discrete society, and an entire lost world.
As a designer managing the family wallpaper-printing business, Horace Warner had the income and resources to
explore photography in his spare time and produce images of the highest standard technically. As superintendent
of the charitable Bedford Institute, he was brought into close contact over many years with the families who lived
nearby in the yards and courts south of Quaker Street. As a Quaker, he believed in the equality of all and he was
disturbed by the poverty he met in the East End. In the Spitalfields Nippers these things came together for Horace
Warner, creating compassionate images that gave dignity to his subjects and producing great photography that is
without parallel in his time.
IN SEARCH OF HORACE WARNER

This is a self-portrait by Horace Warner
taken when he was around thirty years
old at the time he was photographing the
Spitalfields Nippers, the pictures by which
he is remembered and that establish his
posthumous reputation as a photographer.
If you look closely you can just see the
bulb in his left hand to control the shutter,
permitting him to capture this image of
himself.
With his pale moon-like face, straggly

moustache and shiny locks, Horace looks
younger than his years and yet there is an
intensity in his concentration matched by
the poised energy of his right arm. This is
how he chose to present himself – wielding
a brush, indicative of his profession as a
wallpaper designer in the family business of Jeffrey & Co, run by his father Metford Warner (1843-1930), where
he and his brother Marcus worked. The company was established in 1836 and Metford was a junior partner who
became proprietor by 1869 and, under his leadership, they became a leading manufacturer. He was committed
to representing artists’ designs more accurately than had been done before and commissioned William Burges
and Walter Crane, among other leading designers of the time – most famously, collaborating with William Morris.
Last week, I set out to visit three places that were familiar to Horace Warner in an attempt to better understand
the connections between the different aspects of his life that found their expression in these locations. First, I
took the train to Highbury and walked up the hill beside the long eighteenth century terrace bounding the fields,
turning off into the quiet crescent of Aberdeen Park, a private estate laid out in the eighteen-fifties.
The turret of the former Warner family house stood out among the other comfortably-appointed villas, as
testimony to the success of Jeffrey & Co, supplying wallpaper to the artistic classes in the growing capital at
the end of the nineteenth century. A woman pushing a pram along the pavement in front of me turned out to be
the nanny employed the current residents and, when I explained the reason for my visit, she volunteered that
there were a series of old photographs still hanging in an upper room, which also retains its turn of the century
embossed wallpaper.
Leaving the ghosts of Aberdeen Park, I turned south, following Horace’s route to work by walking for half an
hour down through Canonbury, past the Tower and along the route of the New River, to meet the Essex Road where
the Jeffrey & Co wallpaper factory stands. An elegant turn-of-the century utilitarian building with three well-lit
floors above for manufacturing and a showroom on the ground floor, it is currently occupied by a wholefood chain.
William Morris’ wallpaper designs were all printed here until the thirties when they were taken over by Sandersons

and the factory closed in 1940 but, if you go round to the side
street, the loading doors remain as if another delivery might
arrive at any time.
From here, the East End is a couple of miles south. Now

in her nineties, Horace Warner’s daughter, Ruth Finken, still
remembers accompanying her father on this journey as a small
child to deliver Christmas presents in Quaker Street, where
he was Sunday School teacher. She recalls how dark, dirty
and frightening everything looked, and being told to hold her
father’s hand and keep close. Ruth reports that her father was
always one for getting the family to pose for his photos and that
he spent ages getting everyone in exactly the right position. She
also has a memory of one of his photographs of a pair of child’s
boots upon the drawing room wall, along with a couple of his
portraits of the Spitalfields Nippers, as reminders of those who
were less fortunate.
Horace Warner’s participation as Superintendent at the

Bedford Institute continued an involvement for his family in
Spitalfields that stretched back to the seventeenth century
when the Warner Bell Foundry was established. The Warner
family were part of the Quaker movement too, almost since its
inception, and the naming of Quaker Street derives from the
Friends Meeting House that opened there in 1656.
Yet the Quaker Mission at the Bedford Institute, that Horace Bedford Institute, Quaker Street, Spitafields,
Warner knew, owed its origin to a revival of Quakerism that where Horace Warner was Sunday School Superintendent
happened a century later in Spitalfields – encouraged by Peter Bedford (1780-1864), a philanthropist silk merchant
who devoted himself to alleviating poor social conditions. Rebuilt in 1893, the handsome red brick Bedford House
that stands today would have been familiar to Warner.
In The Condition of The Working Class in England, Frederick Engels referred to the tragedy of a family living in
the courtyards south of Quaker St as an example of the degradation of the poor in London and it was these people,
living almost upon the doorstep of the Bedford Institute, that Horace Warner befriended and photographed. It
was a small area, a narrow rectangle of shabby dwellings circumscribed by roads upon four sides, and no more
than a hundred yards wide and five hundreds yards long. Today there is nothing left of it but Horace Warner’s
photographs, yet since he annotated them with the names of his subjects we hope we can now discover more
about the lives of these people through research into the records. Ultimately, what we can discover about Horace
Warner exists in his response to others and their response to him, as manifest in his photographs.
“There isn’t a great deal of information we know about Horace,” his grandson Ian McGilvray admitted to me,
“and, in any case, I imagine he would probably have been quite content to have it that way.”
The Gentle Author will be showing the photographs

and telling the stories at Waterstones Piccadilly on
Wednesday 19 November at 7pm.
Admission is free to this event and tickets are available

but must be reserved via email to piccadilly@waterstones.com


Victorian Fiction
A Torture by Hope
By Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
Edited with an Introduction by Eduardo Zinna
Introduction
The dead are always with us. There are many more of them than there are of us and they can
count among their number the best and the brightest. We mourn for them, we remember them,
we propitiate them. Sometimes we fear them. Many believe that the dead may return to earth;
some believe that they have never left.
A story was told in the old days about Hallowe’en. It seems that the souls of the dead were not allowed to enter
heaven (if that was indeed their destination) until All Hallows’ Day, when the saints and the martyrs are honoured.
Until then, they wandered the earth, mixing with the living, watching them go through their everyday chores and
listening to their talk, but unable to speak. On Hallowe’en, the eve of the day when they would finally leave this
world, the dead had a last chance to avenge the slights they had suffered during their lifetime. But people, aware
that on that day hostile souls might be in their midst, wore masks and disguises to avoid been recognised by their
old enemies. Perhaps when we go out on Hallowe’en night, a fearsome mask over our face, a dark cloak round
our shoulders and trick-or-treating in our mind, we walk among those whom we have, willingly or unwillingly,
wronged. Perhaps they are looking for us.
To many Hallowe’en is just an opportunity to poke fun at what once frightened us. On this day we might watch
a horror movie, but not with unease but with amusement. We are entertained by the bogeyman and the vampire,
the mummy and the Frankenstein monster, the amazing melting man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
A ghost story would no doubt be most welcome, as long as we are not expected to shudder at its pale phantoms
rattling their chains and rolling their shrunken eyes in their sockets.
In the spirit of today’s Hallowe’en, all fun and no fear, we might have chosen as our offering for this issue one
of the many excellent ghost stories published during Victoria’s long reign. But this time we don’t want to entertain
you; we want to send a chill down your spine. And to do so we have summoned not the dead but the living. The
monsters of our tale are men, as are their victims, and although the tale was meant then and is meant today as
a narrative of times long past, it would not be too difficult to find their counterparts in the present day. It might,
indeed, prove altogether too easy.
Our Victorian Fiction choice for this issue is a short story called A Torture by Hope. Its author, Jean-Marie-
Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Count of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, was a French poet, dramatist, and short-story writer
born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, on 7 November 1838. His family called him Mathias and his friends Villiers; he signed
his work Auguste. HIs aristocratic, conservative, fervently Catholic family were descended from one of the noblest
lines of France and claimed as their ancestor Philippe Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, the Grand Master of the Order of the
Knights of Malta in the 16th century. They were, however, hopelessly poor, having lost all their possessions during
the Revolution and the Empire, and depended on the charity of a relative for their sustenance.
Auguste Villiers was a gifted child who wrote poetry and composed music from an early age. In 1855, the family
moved to Paris, where Auguste took with alacrity to the Bohemian life. He frequented literary circles and the
café society, decided to become a writer, and was befriended by François Coppée, Leconte de Lisle and Charles
Baudelaire, who introduced him to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Together with Baudelaire himself, Poe and
Richard Wagner would be Villiers’s most important influences. His first publication, at his own expense, was a book
of verse, Premières Poésies, which did not meet with success. Indeed, it seems to have made no impression at

all. In 1862, Villiers published the first part of a novel, Isis, whose second part
never saw the light of day. Three plays followed: Elën (1865), Morgane (1866)
and La Révolte (1870).
By then Villiers was well into his lifelong pattern of entertaining romantic
relationships with demi-mondaines and working-class women at the same time
as he pursued marriages of convenience. From 1863 to 1864 he had a liaison
with Louise Dyonnet, a woman whose reputation scandalised his family, though
it must be said that it did not take much to scandalise them. In 1866 he became
engaged to Estelle, the daughter of the poet and writer Théophile Gautier,
but both Gautier and Villiers’s own family strongly disapproved of what they
considered, for quite different reasons, a misalliance. The Villiers thought that
in marrying Estelle their son would be marrying beneath himself; Gautier did
not want his daughter to marry a penniless poet. He knew enough about that. Be
that as it may, the engagement was broken in 1867. In 1873, Villiers’s plans for
marriage to Anna Eyre Powell, an English heiress, also failed. He subsequently
entered into a relationship with Marie Dantine, an illiterate widow, who gave
him a son, Victor, in 1881. After Victor’s birth Villiers set house with Marie and
gave up any marriage plans.
During the Franco-Prussian War Villiers was a commander in the National
Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
Guard. He became an admirer of the Commune of Paris and wrote articles
supporting it in the Tribun du peuple, but soon became disenchanted with the excesses of the communards. In
1871 his godmother, Mlle de Kérinou, died, and together with her life ended the financial support she had given
him. Though Villiers had many admirers in literary circles, his work did not find favour with the mainstream
newspapers or the theatrical impresarios. Thus his fiction remained unpublished, his plays unstaged and his
pockets empty. He lived the remainder of his days in extreme poverty.
In 1883 Villiers’s first collection of short stories, entitled Contes Cruels, came to the attention of Joris-Karl
Huysmans, who praised it in his influential and infamous novel À Rebours. Huysmans’s novel in turn greatly
impressed Oscar Wilde, who listed it as a book Dorian Gray had read and eventually saw it become an exhibit in
his trials. Further collections of Villiers’s stories, often with a background of horror and fantasy, included Tribulat
Bonhomet (1887), Histoires insolites and Nouveaux Contes cruels (1888). His major accomplishments remained
the philosophical novels L’Amour suprême and L’Ève future, which both appeared in 1886. With L’Ève future,
Villiers became one of science fiction’s first precursors. The Future Eve, the ‘ideal’ woman, is an artificial creature
that surpasses in seductiveness all women of flesh and bone. The ‘andréïde’, as Villiers calls this replica of a
human being, would in time become the androids of Metropolis, Blade Runner and the novels of Isaac Asimov.
Recognition and fame were finally coming to Villiers, but it was too late. He died of stomach cancer at the
hospital of the Frères Saint-Jean-de-Dieu, in Paris, on 18 August 1889. On his deathbed, he married Marie Dantine
and legitimised his son Victor. His last work, Axël, a play which he considered as his masterpiece, was published
posthumously.
Upon Villiers’s death Anatole France wrote of him: ‘Although this wide-eyed sleeper has taken with him the
secret of his most beautiful dreams, although he has not disclosed everything he had seen in that dream which
was his life, at least he has left enough pages to give us an idea of the original riches of his imagination. It must
be said, to confound those who ignored him when he was alive: Villiers is a writer, and his style is of the best. He
has the number and the image. When he does not encumber his sentences with incidents whose intentions are too
profound, when he does not linger too much over hidden ironies, when he renounces the pleasure of surprising
himself, he is a magnificent prose writer, full of harmony and sparkle.’
A Torture by Hope first appeared in the collection of short stories, Nouveaux Contes cruels, published in Paris
in 1888. An English version appeared in the Strand Magazine, issue No. 6, in June 1891. The text below has been
taken from that version together with original Illustrations by Paul Hardy. I deleted one word, updated the spelling
of a few others, and restored the epigraph by Edgar Allan Poe which Villiers had placed at the beginning of the
story.

A Torture by Hope
By Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam
‘Oh! for a voice to speak!’
Edgar Allan Poe, The Pit and the Pendulum
Below the vaults of the Oficial of Saragossa one nightfall long ago, the venerable Pedro Arbuez d’Espila,
sixth Prior of the Dominicans of Segovia, third Grand Inquisitor of Spain - followed by a fra redemptor
(master-torturer), and preceded by two familiars of the Holy Office holding lanterns - descended towards
a secret dungeon. The lock of a massive door creaked; they entered a stifling in-pace,1 where the little
light that came from above revealed an instrument of torture blackened with blood, a chafing-dish, and
a pitcher. Fastened to the wall by heavy iron rings, on a mass of filthy straw, secured by fetters, an iron
circlet about his neck, sat a man in rags: it was impossible to guess at his age.
This prisoner was no other than Rabbi Aser Abarbanel, a Jew of Aragon, who, on an accusation of usury
and pitiless contempt of the poor, had for more than a year undergone daily torture. In spite of all, ‘his
blind obstinacy being as tough as his skin,’ he had refused to abjure.
Proud of his descent and his ancestors - for all Jews worthy of the name are jealous of their race - he was
descended, according to the Talmud, from Othoniel, and consequently from Ipsiboe, wife of this last Judge
of Israel, a circumstance which had sustained his courage under the severest of the incessant tortures.
It was, then, with tears in his eyes at the thought that so steadfast a soul was excluded from salvation,
that the venerable Pedro Arbuez d’Espila, approaching the quivering Rabbi, pronounced the following
words:
‘My son, be of good cheer; your trials here below are about to cease. If, in presence of such obstinacy, I
have had to permit, though with sighs, the employment of severe measures, my task of paternal correction
has its limits. You are the barren fig-tree, that, found so oft without fruit, incurs the danger of being dried
up by the roots... but it is for God alone to decree concerning your soul. Perhaps the Infinite Mercy will
shine upon you at the last moment! Let us hope so. There are instances. May it be so! Sleep, then, this
evening in peace. Tomorrow you will take part in the auto-da-fé, that is to say, you will be exposed to the
quemadero, the brazier premonitory of the eternal flame. It burns, you are aware, at a certain distance,
my son; and death takes, in coming, two hours at least, often three, thanks to the moistened and frozen
clothes with which we take care to preserve the forehead and the heart of the holocausts. You will be only
forty-three. Consider, then, that, placed in the last rank, you will have the time needful to invoke God, to
offer unto Him that baptism of fire which is of the Holy Spirit. Hope, then, in the Light, and sleep.’
As he ended this discourse, Dom Arbuez - who had motioned the wretched man’s fetters to be removed
- embraced him tenderly. Then came the turn of the fra redemptor, who, in a low voice, prayed the Jew
to pardon what he had made him endure in the effort to redeem him; then the two familiars clasped him
in their arms: their kiss, through their cowls, was unheard. The ceremony at an end, the captive was left
alone in the darkness.
Rabbi Aser Abarbanel, his lips parched, his face stupefied by suffering, stared, without any particular
attention, at the closed door. Closed? The word, half unknown to himself, awoke a strange delusion in his
confused thoughts. He fancied he had seen, for one second, the light of the lanterns through the fissure
between the sides of this door. A morbid idea of hope, due to the enfeeblement of his brain, took hold on
him. He dragged himself towards this strange thing he had seen; and, slowly inserting a finger, with infinite
precautions, into the crack, he pulled the door towards him. Wonder of wonders! By some extraordinary
chance the familiar who had closed it had turned the great key a little before it had closed upon its jambs
of stone. So, the rusty bolt not having entered its socket, the door rolled back into the cell.
1 In-pace: A dungeon in a monastery where certain condemned could be locked up until death.

The Rabbi ventured to look out.
By means of a sort of livid obscurity he
distinguished, first of all, a half-circle of
earthy walls, pierced by spiral stairways,
and, opposite to him, five or six stone
steps, dominated by a sort of black
porch, giving access to a vast corridor, of
which he could only see, from below, the
nearest arches.
Stretching himself along, he crawled
to the level of this threshold. Yes, it
was indeed a corridor, but of boundless
length. A faint light - a sort of dream-
light - was cast over it; lamps suspended
to the arched roof, turned, by intervals,
the wan air blue; the far distance was lost in shadow. Not a door visible along all this length! On one side
only, to the left, small holes, covered with a network of bars, let a feeble twilight through the depths of
the wall— the light of sunset apparently, for red gleams fell at long intervals on the flag-stones. And how
fearful a silence! Yet there - there in the depths of the dim distance - the way might lead to liberty! The
wavering hope of the Jew was dogged, for it was the last.
Without hesitation he ventured forth, keeping close to the side of the light-holes, hoping to render
himself indistinguishable from the darksome colour of the long walls. He advanced slowly, dragging himself
along the ground, forcing himself not to cry out when one of his wounds, recently opened, sent a sharp
pang through him.
All of a sudden the beat of a sandal, coming in his direction, echoed along the stone passage. A trembling
fit seized him, he choked with anguish, his sight grew dim. So this, no doubt, was to be the end! He
squeezed himself, doubled up on his hands and knees, into a recess, and, half dead with terror, waited.
It was a familiar hurrying along. He passed rapidly, carrying an instrument for tearing out the muscles,
his cowl lowered; he disappeared. The violent shock which the Rabbi had received had half suspended
the functions of life; he remained for nearly an hour unable to make a single movement. In the fear of an
increase of torments if he were caught, the idea came to him of returning to his cell. But the old hope
chirped in his soul - the divine ‘Perhaps,’ the comforter in the worst of distresses. A miracle had taken
place! There was no more room for doubt. He began again to crawl towards the possible escape. Worn out
with suffering and with hunger, trembling with anguish, he advanced. The sepulchral corridor seemed to
lengthen out mysteriously. And he, never ceasing his slow advance, gazed forward through the darkness,
on, on, where there must be an outlet that should save him.
But, oh! steps sounding again; steps, this time, slower, more sombre. The forms of two Inquisitors,
robed in black and white, and wearing their large hats with rounded brims, emerged into the faint light.
They talked in low voices, and seemed to be in controversy on some important point, for their hands
gesticulated.
At this sight Rabbi Aser Abarbanel closed his eyes, his heart beat as if it would kill him, his rags were
drenched with the cold sweat of agony; motionless, gasping, he lay stretched along the wall, under the
light of one of the lamps - motionless, imploring the God of David.
As they came opposite to him the two Inquisitors stopped under the light of the lamp, through a mere
chance, no doubt, in their discussion. One of them, listening to his interlocutor, looked straight at the
Rabbi. Under this gaze - of which he did not at first notice the vacant expression - the wretched man
seemed to feel the hot pincers biting into his poor flesh; so he was again to become a living wound, a living
woe! Fainting, scarce able to breathe, his eyelids quivering, he shuddered as the robe grazed him.

But - strange at once and natural - the eyes of the Inquisitor were evidently the eyes of a man profoundly
preoccupied with what he was going to say in reply, absorbed by what he was listening to; they were fixed,
and seemed to look at the Jew without seeing him.
And indeed, in a few minutes, the two sinister talkers went on their way, slowly, still speaking in low
voices, in the direction from which the prisoner had come. They had not seen him! And it was so, that, in
the horrible disarray of his sensations, his brain was traversed by this thought: ‘Am I already dead, so that
no one sees me?’
A hideous impression drew him from his lethargy. On gazing at the wall, exactly opposite to his face, he
fancied he saw, over against his, two ferocious eyes observing him! He flung back his head in a blind and
sudden terror; the hair started upright upon his head. But no, no. He put out his hand, and felt along the
stones. What he saw was the reflection of the eyes of the Inquisitor still left upon his pupils, and which he
had refracted upon two spots of the wall.
Forward! He must hasten towards that end that he imagined (fondly, no doubt) to mean deliverance;
towards those shadows from which he was no more than thirty paces, or so, distant. He started once more
- crawling on hands and knees and stomach - upon his dolorous way, and he was soon within the dark part
of the fearful corridor.
All at once the wretched man felt the sensation of cold upon
his hands that he placed on the flagstones; it was a strong current
which came from under a little door at the end of the passage.
O God, if this door opened on the outer world! The whole being
of the poor prisoner was overcome by a sort of vertigo of hope.
He examined the door from top to bottom without being able to
distinguish it completely on account of the dimness around him.
He felt over it. No lock, not a bolt! A latch! He rose to his feet: the
latch yielded beneath his finger; the silent door opened before him.
‘Hallelujah!’ murmured the Rabbi, in an immense sigh, as he
gazed at what stood revealed to him from the threshold.
The door opened upon gardens, under a night of stars - upon
spring, liberty, life! The gardens gave access to the neighbouring
country that stretched away to the sierras, whose sinuous white
lines stood out in profile on the horizon. There lay liberty! Oh, to
fly! He would run all night under those woods of citrons, whose
perfume intoxicated him. Once among the mountains, he would be saved. He breathed the dear, holy air;
the wind re-animated him, his lungs found free play. He heard, in his expanding heart, the ‘Lazarus, come
forth!’ And, to give thanks to God who had granted him this mercy, he stretched forth his arms before him,
lifting his eyes to the firmament in an ecstasy.
And then he seemed to see the shadow of his arms returning upon himself; he seemed to feel those
shadow - arms surround, enlace him, and himself pressed tenderly against some breast. A tall figure,
indeed, was opposite to him. Confidently he lowered his eyes upon this figure, and remained gasping,
stupefied, with staring eyes and mouth drivelling with fright.
Horror! He was in the arms of the Grand Inquisitor himself, the venerable Pedro Arbuez d’Espila, who
gazed at him with eyes full of tears, like a good shepherd who has found the lost sheep.
The sombre priest clasped the wretched Jew against his heart with so fervent a transport of charity that
the points of the monacal hair-cloth rasped against the chest of the Dominican. And, while the Rabbi Aser
Abarbanel, his eyes convulsed beneath his eyelids, choked with anguish between the arms of the ascetic
Dom Arbuez, realising confusedly that all the phases of the fatal evening had been only a calculated
torture, that of Hope! the Grand Inquisitor, with a look of distress, an accent of poignant reproach,
murmured in his ear, with the burning breath of much fasting: ‘What! my child! on the eve, perhaps, of
salvation... you would leave us?’

RIPPING YARNS
Reviews
JA
CK ER
THE RIPP
Naming Jack the Ripper

Russell Edwards
London: Sidgewick and Jackson, 2014
www.panmacmillan.com
www.jacktherippertoursandstore.co.uk
ISBN: 978-0-283-07208-6
hardcover; 312pp; illus; appendices; index
hardback £16.99
ebook (Kindle) £6.59
This review is based on the ebook version and so I won’t be able to give precise page numbers.
However where appropriate, I shall give the chapter in which specific points I allude to will be found.
Given the frenzied discussion of this book in the media and in various Ripper forums, it’s difficult to avoid bringing
preconceptions to bear when reading it. Nevertheless it is necessary to try.
Since this book is a popular study of the Ripper mystery, it may not be fair to bring academic standards of criticism to
bear, but even popular studies ought, these days, to show their sources. There is not a single reference throughout the
entire book. It’s true in some cases, that the overall source is clear but it is often not easy to pinpoint the exact location
within the source. Frequently, even this imprecise source identification is not possible.
Much of the book is anecdotal and biographical, with sometimes intimate details of personal hardships, sadnesses,
and even tragedies. It fits well into what the author describes as his ‘journey’ or his ‘quest’. It actually reads in a
fairly breezy way and so, while not great literature, it’s quite a tolerable read. Like many Ripper books, it contains
an overview of the East End and the several victims. There is nothing new to be found here and, despite the above
comments, it is irritating to read for anyone who knows even a little of the case.. The meat of the book can probably be
compressed into about a third of its overall length, and it is that which I’ll concentrate on from hereon.
Russell Edwards makes his position very plain at the outset. He has solved this case: ‘I believe I have incontrovertible
proof, the kind of proof that would stand up to any cross-examination in a courtroom today. … But I believe it was my
ability to think laterally that helped me to see a link that nobody else had spotted’ (Chapter 1).
Given many comments on the web, it comes as a surprise to learn that Edwards is big on provenance. Discussing the
Swanson marginalia he notes ‘as with any important document, there is always the issue of provenance’ (Chapter 10).
Perhaps the author does not consider the ‘shawl’ a document, and therefore doesn’t seem so concerned about its
provenance. The story, as he presents it, is familiar to anyone who has been following the debate in Ripper forums
since the book came out. It almost all comes from a ‘tradition’ handed down by the descendants of Amos Simpson who
obtained the shawl shortly after the murder of Catherine Eddowes when he was present in or near Mitre Square. But
then we learn that additional details are merely speculation by the shawl’s previous owner, David Melville Hayes. For
example, ‘[Hayes] believed that it was possibly his grandmother, Eliza Mary, who had cut the large chunk from the shawl

to be rid of the heavy bloodstains and that she may also have attempted to bleach out other smaller stains [emphases
added](Chapter 7). Further we are told that parts of the story cannot be true - the notion that Simpson was first on the
scene is one such - and so other ideas are brought into play. In short, the linking of the shawl to Mitre Square, and its
subsequent history, are a mixture of family history, as mediated through just one family member, speculation by that
family member, and a few caveats by Edwards when the story fails to conform with known facts. He notes that the story
cannot be proven, ‘but equally it cannot be disproven’ (Chapter 7).
The book teems with such assertions which seem to be considered as proof. Inaccuracies also abound. In trying to
establish that a shawl was known about not long after the murders, he cites two stories about other shawls. Citing an
article in The Collector from 1892 he says, ‘If the tale is genuine (and it is almost too bizarre to have been invented)
and the shawl mentioned was actually the one supposedly taken from Catherine Eddowes, then the identity of the
‘charwoman’ could have been Amos Simpson’s wife, Jane, who we know did not like or want the shawl’ [emphases
added] (Chapter 7). Yet the Simpsons had lived in Cheshunt since at least the mid-1880s, so while it is possible Jane had
cleaning jobs in East London, it is extremely unlikely.
A glaring inconsistency occurs in his discussion of the witnesses who ‘saw’ the Ripper His whole approach to this
seems absurd.‘There are discrepancies between the descriptions of the man seen that night by Schwartz, Lawende and
PC Smith, but there are also many points in common, and from what we now know about the (unintentional) inaccuracy
of eye-witness accounts, it seems probable that all three saw the same man’ [emphasis added] (Chapter 5).
So, despite the variable descriptions given by the witnesses Edwards thinks they were describing the same man.
Edwards is confident that the man who identified ‘Kosminski’ at the Seaside Home was Israel Schwartz. According to
Edwards, Schwartz saw the same man as Lawende and Smith. He tells us explicitly that Lawende’s man had ‘a small
fair moustache’ yet the man Schwartz allegedly identified, and who, according to Edwards, was Kosminski whose DNA
was ‘certainly’ found on the shawl ‘definitely did not have red or blond hair’ but had dark hair according to the DNA
(Conclusion). I am at a loss as to how this circle is squared.
There are numerous similar examples.
Edwards sought expert opinions on the origins of the shawl. Christies thought it was from Spitalfields or Macclesfield,
although it could be continental. ‘The Sotheby’s expert thought the shawl could be later in the nineteenth century, and
possibly French’ (Chapter 9). However, since they had only seen photos, Edwards felt their suggestions were unreliable.
Nevertheless, once he found somebody to support his preconceptions, the fact that they too only saw a photo of the
shawl seemed unimportant. His Swiss expert said ‘I am fairly sure this shawl is early 1800s. However, it is not really
familiar to me, and not English. I’m sure you realize that, as it is in pieces, it has no value. What a terrible shame! It
would only be suitable for use for documentation or crafts. The quality of silk, as far as I can see, is typical of silk circa
1810 to 1830, but more I can’t say’ [emphases added] (Chapter 9).
Pretty vague, one would think but Edwards thought he had ‘struck gold’. ‘It was that phrase “not English” that
inspired me to make a great mental leap, especially as it was backed up by the Christie’s expert saying it could be
continental.’ Now it all became clear, the shawl belonged not to Eddowes, but to the Ripper. ‘I also realized that, for
the Michaelmas daisies to have real significance, they had to be connected to the Ripper’ [emphases added] (Chapter 9).
With this insight, Edwards asked his Swiss contact - could it be Polish or Russian? Her reply ‘I honestly can’t say, but
it is possible. I don’t usually have a problem identifying shawls from Western Europe, but this is a bit of a mystery to
me – yes, it could be either’ [emphases added].
Later he writes to Jari Louhelainen: ‘I’ve just had a breakthrough. Shaking actually. This is strictly between us. I went
back to the specialist who told me the shawl isn’t English, and I asked if it could be Russian or Polish. She confirmed it
could well be. It has nothing to do with the Huguenots at all. Pavlovsky Posad made shawls from the early 19th century
and deeply religious Eastern orthodoxy is where we get the Michaelmas daisies from. He brought it over from Poland
with him, and now we have a trail to him [emphases added].
So one page, his contact says ‘I honestly can’t say, but it is possible’ that the shawl is Polish or Russian, while on the
next ‘she confirmed it could well be’.
Then we learn that a Polish Jew was so imbued with Eastern Orthodox religiosity that he brings the shawl with him
and along with all the alleged religious and economic significance of Michaelmas, it becomes central to his murderous
activities.

Other aspects of the shawl discussion are frankly even more uncertain, I almost wrote, risible. The material relating
to Michaelmas and the flowers of the shawl shows an extremely shallow understanding of the religious and economic
significance of Michaelmas in England. Rightly, he identifies it as a quarter day and thereby assigns it some significance
for some contracts. He seems unaware that it probably had little day-to-day significance for people in London’s East
End. Moreover, he seems completely unaware that even where it did retain significance (more often in rural areas), it
was often Old Michaelmas Day (11 October) that was the more important. A vestige of this older calendar seems to have
passed Edwards by. To this day, the UK tax year runs from 6 April to 5 April the following year. That is from Old Lady Day.
This date, like Old Michaelmas Day, officially became obsolete in 1752, but is still important to anyone who pays UK tax.
Edwards doesn’t even attempt to explain why the Christian festival of Michaelmas would be important to a Polish Jew.
So, the shawl origins and its provenance are utterly unconvincing. There is nothing that makes any sense to this
reader. So what about the DNA?
Probably because a genuine specialist was involved with this aspect of the book, the DNA analysis is, even when
mediated through Edwards, the most thought-provoking part of it. There are countless questions to be asked, but these,
apart from one, largely arise from Edwards’s uncertain explanations, his over-enthusiasm about the results, and indeed
the very incomplete picture that we have of those results, and how they were obtained. This is true for the ‘Kosminski’
DNA but is not entirely absent as regards the ‘Eddowes’ results either. In fact, as we shall see, the latter is especially
problematic.
It’s important to remember, that Edwards is convinced that Aaron Kosminski was the Ripper, even before he gets the
tests completed. To judge from his narrative, apart from a brief flirtation with Deeming, Kosminski was his favourite
suspect for a very long time. To justify this he cites, mainly, the familiar trinity of Macnaghten, Anderson and Swanson,
all of whom, he says thought Kosminski a likely candidate. In fact he says, in relation to the Macnaghten memorandum,
that ‘for me it was the mention of Kosminski that was of prime importance, but for other researchers Druitt, because
he was named first, was given the top slot’ [emphasis added] (Chapter 10).
Cynical observers might argue that other researchers favour Druitt, not because he was named first, but because
that’s what Macnaghten said. He was ‘inclined to exonerate’ Kosminski and Ostrog. Edwards doesn’t mention this
although he does later allude to the fact that Macnaghten ‘favoured’ Druitt, but it’s easy to miss.
He certainly likes Anderson’s case for the ‘Polish Jew’ as supported by Swanson’s marginalia, and finds criticisms of
Anderson’s motives, memory, etc unlikely due to his being a professional man and a ‘devout fundamental [sic] Christian
[who] believed in the imminent coming of Christ’ (Chapter 10).
Now it’s difficult to know quite what to make of Edwards’s take on the DNA. This is partly because, although he is a
lively enough writer, he is an extremely disorganised one. It’s never entirely clear how his thoughts are developing. For
example, he says that ‘we knew that the stains on the shawl appeared to contain human DNA, most likely to originate
from human blood and other bodily fluids, including semen’ yet this comes before the semen tests are conducted.
He quotes verbatim, an email from David Miller:
“The fact that I didn’t find any sperm does not automatically exclude their presence, but considering that squamous
cells are a minor component of a typical semen sample (they get into the semen by mechanical sloughing from the
urethral epithelium during ejaculation), I would have expected to see them if they had been there. [emphasis added]
On the other hand, squamous cells like these are also found in other bodily fluids including saliva, sweat etc (basically
any fluid that washes over or bathes an epithelial surface).”
So, despite Miller saying that the cells could have come from almost anywhere, Edwards decides, apparently off his
own bat, ‘because the stain fluoresced like semen under Jari’s forensic lights, it was the likeliest candidate as a source.
...we had been successful in Leeds with the sperm head analysis’ (Chapter 9).
The apparent match between Karen Miller’s DNA and mtDNA found on the shawl seems, at first sight, to be interesting
indeed. The claim is made in the book that the ‘match’ between the DNA on the shawl and that of Eddowes descendant,
Karen Miller, contained a rare mutation as follows: “This DNA alteration is known as global private mutation (314.1C)
and it is not very common in worldwide population, as it has frequency estimate of 0.000003506, ie approximately
1/290,000.” (Chapter 9).
If the rarity of the 314.1c mutation was confirmed, then it would suggest a strong chance that an Eddowes relative
came into contact with the shawl at some point and this would certainly warrant exploration. Predictably, Edwards
cannot contain himself:

‘… in Jari’s dispassionate prose: ‘Hence the analysis strongly suggests that the shawl could contain the DNA of the
Jack the Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes.’
Science appears to have proven that the shawl was what it was said to be. It must have been at the scene of the crime
back on 30 September 1888 and shows traces of Catherine Eddowes’ blood, proven to match that of her direct female
descendant.’ [emphases added] (Chapter 9).
Once more, Edwards moves seamlessly from ‘strongly suggests’ and ‘could’ to ‘must’ and ‘proven’. It is a constantly
recurring pattern throughout the book.
Moreover, there really does seem to be a problem with the science in that the 314.1C ‘mutation’ is not real. It
seems to be simply an ‘error in nomenclature’ and, far from relating to only one person in 290,000 as claimed in the
book, it is actually identical with 315.1C which may apply to 99% of the European population, according to the EMPOP
database. This means that any claims of rarity of the Eddowes match must be treated with grave suspicion. The matter
is a technical one, but not especially so. Briefly, in one part of the mtDNA, (locations 310 to 316 of the HVR2 region
there is, in the revised Cambridge Reference Sequence, a string of nucleotides, indicated as TCCCCCG. The letters
indicate individual nucleotides, C representing cytosine. The string of five Cs include locations 311 to 315. If, like most
Europeans, there is an additional C inserted then the string looks like TCCCCCCG. Edwards’s book implicitly claims that
the extra C follows position 314, hence the mutation 314.1C, which in DNA-speak means that one C has been inserted
after position 314. However, it is impossible to know which C is the extra one, so that it is usual to express this extra
C as 315.1C (see Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods: Interpretation Guidelines for Mitochondrial DNA
Analysis by Forensic DNA Testing Laboratories - rule 8). Most software corrects for the ‘error of nomenclature’ but that
used in this case, Haplogrep, did not. It has been confirmed to this reviewer, by a senior member of the Haplogrep
development team, and by the head of the Phylotree project, that the 314.1C nomenclature is incorrect, and that it
should have read 315.1C. In the latter’s words, ‘313.1C and 314.C are just the same as 315.1C’. Moreover, as a result
of these discussions, the Haplogrep 2 product is to be amended to point ‘to such common nomenclature errors’ should
they be entered in future. Had this been in place earlier, then the issue relating to 314.1C would not have arisen, and
the claims about its rarity could not have been made.
So, it would seem that the claims about the great rarity of the so-called ‘Eddowes match’ are simply wrong. There
may be additional relevant information available, but as it is not in the book, we cannot make any judgements. It would
be useful to get the views of the scientists involved, but so far that has not been possible. In the absence of such views,
and from the evidence in the book, it would seem that the central claim for an ‘conclusive’ Eddowes ‘match’ cannot
be sustained.
The link to Kosminski is just as tenuous, and does not have even the superficial appearance of meaningfulness that
the Eddowes ‘match’ has. Indeed from what Edwards says, its virtually non-existent in any meaningful way. Now this
may be a shortcoming of his text rather than the science, but from what he says, there is not much that points towards
Kosminski in any serious way. True, there appears to be a mtDNA match with ‘M’ a descendant of Matilda Kosminski. The
swabs were provided to ‘M’ by Edwards and then given to Jari Louhelainen for analysis.
But it is here that it gets very unclear. We are told that the ‘suspect’s’ mtDNA matched that of ‘M’ and was assigned
to the haplogroup T1a1, a ‘type [that] is very typical in people of Russian Jewish ethnicity (with ‘Russian’ embracing
Polish as well…)’ [emphasis added] (Conclusion). The problem is that other authorities say the opposite. That T1a1
is quite untypical (under 5%) of Russian/Polish Jews. When the sequence was compared with the National Center for
Biotechnology Information database, only a single match - just one - was found. That match was indeed Russian - but
Jewish? We don’t know. Edwards seems to consider the haplogroup T1 to be synonymous with its subclade T1a1, and
he effortlessly morphs between a discussion of the haplogroup and the subclade without any understanding of the
differences between them.
And from this skeletal information, Edwards claims ‘We’d got the evidence we needed to name Kosminski definitively
as the Ripper, with his perfect match with his descendant M’.
So, from this reader’s perspective, the book carries virtually zero conviction. The origins of the shawl, how it came
into the hands of the Simpsons, the DNA link to Kosminski, and much more, all seem a triumph of wishful thinking over
what the evidence shows. Unless and until the work of Jari Louhelainen is published properly we cannot take the analysis
of the ‘suspect’ DNA remotely seriously. The ‘Eddowes’ DNA also seems flawed, and without clarification, must also be
considered very doubtful.

Russell Edwards may have convinced himself that Kosminski was the Ripper, but I cannot imagine he will convince
many others.
Review by Mick Reed.

[Reviewer’s note: I am grateful to Chris Phillips, Tracy l’anson and Debra Arif for developing the critique of the
314.1C/315.1C issue. This critique was bolstered by an article in the Independent newspaper on 19 October
(www.independent.co.uk/news/science/jack-the-ripper-id-hinges-on-a-decimal-point-as-scientists-flag-up-dna-
error-in-book-that-claims-to-identify-the-whitechapel-killer-9804325.html?origin=internalSearch), which cited DNA
experts, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of genetic fingerprinting; Mannis van Oven, professor of forensic
molecular biology at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University; Professor Walther Parson of the Institute of Legal Medicine in
Innsbruck, and Hansi Weissensteiner, also at Innsbruck and one of the scientists behind the computer algorithm used
by Dr Louhelainen to search the mtDNA database. The report in the Independent was published after this review was
written.]
The Little Book of Jack the Ripper

The Whitechapel Society
Stroud, Gloucester: The History Press, 2014
www.thehistorypress.co.uk
www.whitechapelsociety.com
ISBN 978-0-7509-5839-4
hardcover; 290pp; illus; biblio;
hardcover £9.99
Written by members of the Whitechapel Society, this book is an overview of the Ripper crimes and
kicks off with each of the victims getting their own short chapter. The book looks at the suspects, the
letters and several other topics. Altogether the line up consists of Mary Ann Nichols by Ian Parson, Annie Chapman by
Clare Smith, Elizabeth Stride by Jacqueline Murphy, Catherine Eddowes by Mickey Mayhew, Mary Kelly by Melanie Clegg,
Other Victims by Robert Clack, The Police by William Beadle, The Press by Andrew O’Day, East End 1888 by Edward
Stow, Suspects by David Bullock (whose book The Man Who Would Be Jack about Cutbush is shamefully neglected), The
Establishment by Alan Hunt, The Letters by Christopher Jones, and finally The Fall Out by Gill Payne.
It is an excellent introduction to the case, but I can’t help wondering how many introductions to the case we really
need. Unfortunately some errors have crept in and one of the biggest hits you between the eyes in the first chapter -
the author calls Charles Cross, who discovered the body of Mary Ann Nichols, George Cross. I thought this old error had
been done away with thirty years ago, so it was surprising to see it resurface here. To make matters worse, at the end
of the chapter the author, who seems hopelessly confused, tells us that George Cross called himself Charles Cross at the
inquest but that recent research had revealed his real name to be Charles Lechmere.
The author is confused about other things too. He seems to think that Robert Paul walked down the side of the road
where the body was found, began to cross the road to avoid Cross and that Cross reached out and touched him on the
shoulder. It’s difficult to visualise how the shoulder touching would have been achieved, but it is irrelevant because
Robert Paul walked down the same side of the street as had Cross and was summoned across the road. There was no
tapping on shoulders.
It’s small stuff, I suppose, but embarrassing. I also cringed just a little when Bill Beadle, in his chapter about the
police, quoted the Macnaghten memoranda and next to “Kosminski” put “Aaron Mordke” in square brackets. Brackets
or no brackets, it still suggested that “Kosminski” was Aaron Kosminski, an identification that is almost certainly correct
but not absolutely certain and one with which some people take exception.
Errors and niggles aside, the nice wipe-clean cover and whimsical jacket design set the book aside as something
different. The text isn’t going to tell you a lot that you didn’t already know (although it might just surprise you), but it
provides a good introduction to the case. I liked it.
Review by Paul Begg

Jack the Ripper:
The Murders, The Mystery, The Myth
Victor Stapleton
Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2014
www.ospreyadventuresbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-4728-606-2
softcover; 80pp; illus; further reading
softcover £10.99
A heavily illustrated eighty pages with a high cover price, this is another overview but this time
appears to be for young adults, so the gory stuff is pretty much omitted. Martin Fido is quoted on the
back cover as saying “Captures the interest. I hugely enjoyed it”, which is perhaps a little overgenerous
for a book that briefly covers the murders, the inquests, the police the suspects (both contemporary
and those suggested over the years since the crimes) and finishes off with a breezy look at Jack in fiction and films.
There are a couple of niggles, not so much the author’s fault as things that are fast becoming accepted when they
probably and almost certainly shouldn’t be. One is that Sir Melville Macnaghten’s description of “sexually insane” is
a Victorian euphemism for homosexual, which I am not altogether sure it is, and the other is the claim that Aaron
Kosminski’s medical records don’t reflect the profoundly disturbed person the Ripper would have been, when in fact the
records concern Kosminski’s physical health and barely mention mental condition at all.
Just niggles. Nothing major. But the price is on the scary side. Still, if there are budding Ripperologists in the family
then this could be the overview you’re looking for.
Review by Paul Begg
Little Book of Jack the Ripper

Melvin Harris
Woking, Surrey: Demand Media, 2014
www.demand-media.co.uk
Originally published as The True Face of Jack the Ripper. London: Michael O’Mara, 1994
ISBN: 978-1-910270-01-1
hardcover; illus;
hardcover £12.99
hardcover with DVD £12.99
It’s quite a coincidence that two books with the same title should be published in the same month,
but don’t confuse this book with the one published by the History Press and penned by members of the
Whitechapel Society.
It seems that this book can be bought on its own or in a package with a DVD called Jack the Ripper Conspiracies (made
back in 2003), and the set can be bought for about a fiver in discount shops like The Works. Curiously, on Amazon the
illustrated DVD was clearly Jack the Ripper: The Definitive Story, so it was something of a relief to discover it was Liam
Dale’s effort instead. The other curious thing about the book is that it was authored by someone called Melvyn Harris, or
so the front jacket says. Two books with the same title, one of them authored by someone with the same name (bar the
name being misspelled) as a deceased Ripper luminary! Extrordinary! But as it turned out, the book was written by said
Ripper luminary and his name was misspelled. The book is in fact a reprint of Melvin Harris’s The True Face of Jack the
Ripper, published back in 1994, which makes it a little difficult to justify the claim on the box that it “presents a mass
of unpublished evidence”. The book is published sans the appendices in the original.
Harris was a good researcher and a distinguished debunker, though rather more interested in collecting and writing
about the bunk than he was in establishing the facts, and he was convinced that Jack the Ripper was Roslyn Donston
Stephenson, but Donston’s star has waned over the years and barely glimmers today. Melvin’s reputation has also been
tarnished a little since his death, but his trilogy of Ripper books, to some extent forgotten, still make interesting
reading. This probably isn’t the best of the three, but it’s the best introduction to Donston, who was an interesting
character without the Ripper’s mantle.
Review by Paul Begg

Jack the Ripper:
Catch Me When You Can
Sywell: Igloo Books, 2014
www.igloobooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78197-961-7
softcover; 224pppp; illus;
£7.99
Yet another overview, but nicely produced on art paper and amply illustrated. It begins with the
murder of Emma Smith and dredges “Fingers Freddie” from murky memory and Arthur Butler’s series of
rather fanciful articles in the pages of The Sun a few decades ago.
It’s well-written and reasonably accurate, although the unknown author goes astray in his brief
account of the suspects. Although he restricts himself pretty much to the police suspects, he does give
a lot of space to the Royal/Freemasonic Conspiracy, and perhaps reveals himself to be an American when he writes
of “Lord Gull”. Also, Tumblety is said to have been the Batty Street lodger (he wasn’t) and we’re regaled with Trevor
Marriott’s claim that there were seventeen victims and that Jack is an urban legend created by Central News honcho
Thomas Bulling.
The book has gone straight to the discount book stores where it can be picked up for about £2.99. Overall it is a nice
little book and would make a great stocking filler.
Review by Paul Begg
Murder Tales: Jack the Ripper

H N Lloyd
Amazon, 2014
estimated 250pp; biblio;
Part of a fairly extensive series called ‘Murder Tales’, this is the first I have seen and I don’t know
whether it is representative of the series as a whole. It begins with a rather good essay on Ripperology,
but to get to it you have to wade through a couple of pages of way over the top load of nonsense. For
example, we are told that the study of Jack the Ripper “has been known to cause madness”. People
who advance new theories have been known to die from the “sheer stress”. Bank balances have been
“decimated as a result of costly litigation”. And some “squabbling Ripper researchers” have even been
accused of attempted murder.
This is utter drivel, of course, but it reflects the author’s willingness to play fast and loose with the truth. But, as
said, the essay then slips into a rather good read.
The book follows the usual pattern by successively describing the police, the area, and then the victims (canonical
and non-canonical). There are some pen portraits of the more important policemen involved in the investigation, then
a review of potential witness sightings, the Ripper correspondence, and the Goulston Street gaffito.
We eventually get to the theories. He covers the main suspects - and a few who aren’t - and dismisses Druitt and
Kosminski, but finds David Cohen persuasive. He refers to Russell Edwards’ book Naming Jack the Ripper, so is very up-
to-date, but it’s only a passing mention.
Things go haywire for a while when we come to Tumblety. We are treated to a great account of Stewart Evans in a
second-hand bookshop, where he comes across a bundle of old papers which the elderly bookdealer casually tells him
all concern Jack the Ripper. Stewart rifles through these papers and comes across the Littlechild letter.
Where on earth did that idea come from?
The author covers pretty much all the theories and gives them each fair consideration, even the silly ones. He
concludes by claiming that nobody wants the case solved and quoting the famous couple of lines by Don Rumbelow that
when in the next life the Ripper steps forward to identify himself, Ripperologists will look at him and say, “Who are
you.”
Review by Paul Begg

The Terrible Quiet
Peter Wilson
Raleigh, North Carolina: Lulu, 2014
www.lulu.com
ISBN: 978-1-312-36323-6
eBook (ePub); 228pp; biblio;
£1.19
Glancing through this eBook prior to reading it, one got the impression that it was Royal conspiracy
rubbish. It was an impression not too wide of the mark, and it is reinforced by the choice of source
material; Stephen Knight of course, but also Pamela Ball’s psychic investigation. The impression is
added to by occasional spelling mistakes and poor punctuation, there being times when I wondered if
the author’s keyboard lacked a comma. But once you settle into the reading the book isn’t too bad.
Wilson’s conclusion is that the murders were committed by more than one person working together, and he presents
his evidence piece by piece, some of it not so good, but there’s sufficient to set you thinking. For example, what were
the chances of two victims being called Mary Kelly (Eddowes used the name)? What did Henry Matthews mean when he
spoke of certain circumstances connected with the murder of Mary Kelly which made it probable that the murderer was
aided by someone else, albeit after the crime? What was the back story behind the article in the Philadelphia Times in
December 1888 that the City Police had concluded that the murders were a conspiracy and not one man’s work?
Overall there is too much wrong with this book, not the least being what appears to be an uncritical use of sources
and a selective use of sources that lead to a pre-conceived theory, but some of the material is worth the effort and the
eBook costs so little that one can afford to give it a whirl.
Review by Paul Begg
The Servant Girl Annihilators

D W Skrabanek
Wimberley, Texas: S&S Press, 2014
www.facebook.com/donald/skrabanek
ISBN: 0934646163
softcover or ebook; 434pp; illus;; notes; biblio and resources
softcover £13.86
O Henry (whose real name was William Sydney Porter), one of America’s finest short story writers,
gave the somewhat cumbersome name ‘Servant Girl Annihilator’ to the murderer or murderers who
caused considerable panic in Austin, Texas, in the 1880s. In retrospect it was a misnomer: one victim
was male, one was a child, and two were married white women who weren’t servants, but the name
has stuck.
The strange series of crimes began at the end of 1884 and consisted of breaking into the private quarters of domestic
servants, all of them young black women, smashing windows, shouting threats, and physical attacks and attempted
rapes. This happened almost nightly. Eventually a woman named Mollie Smith lay dead. Further murders followed and
Austin fell into the grip of panic as the inefficient law officers were at a loss to find the culprit(s).
Curiously, when the Jack the Ripper murders were taking place in London several American newspapers, among
them the Atchison Daily Globe in Kansas and the Daily Statesman in Texas, speculated that the Austin crimes were
committed by the same person who was active in Whitechapel. The suspect was a Malay cook. In London a sailor named
George Dodge had met a Malay in a music hall who had been relieved of a considerable sum of money by a woman and
threatened to murder and mutilate every woman he met until he found the one who had robbed him. The police appear
to have taken the case very seriously, although it was reasonably suggested that Dodge had said “a lascar” not Alaska.
It was suggested in the American press that a Malay cook calling himself Maurice who had been employed at a hotel in
Austin called the Pearl House, leaving there in January 1886 with the intention of going to London. A reporter had talked
to Mrs Schmidt, who owned the Pearl House, and she confirmed the story.
The story of the servant girl murders was almost forgotten when author Steven Saylor resurected them in his novel A
Twist At The End. Since then there have been two books, The Servant Girl Murders by J R Galloway and Annihilation

in Austin by Tim Huddleston. Skrabanck’s book is therefore the third non-fiction offering since 2010. Of the three it
is probably the most meticulously researched and detailed book on the case currently available and possibly sets the
bar for Ripper authors. I thought Skrabanck’s take on the identity of the murderers was Interesting but not entirely
persuasive, possibly because I am not that conversant with the case. Nevertheless this book was a great read and is
highly recommended.
Review by Paul Begg
east end
Whitechapel and Stepney Through Time

Robert Bard
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2014
www.amberley-books.com
ISBN: 978-1-4456-1062-7
softcover; 93pp; illus;
£14.99
Amberley’s “Through Time” series are always worth looking forward to, the juxtaposition of
photographs of streets as they were and as they are is interesting even when you are unfamiliar
with the area, but I particularly looked forward to this volume in the series. Unfortunately it was a
big disappointment. The selection of photographs lacked flair and imagination, there were too many
modern photographs, and some of them were not very good. The photo of the East London Mosque on
page 89 is blurry and seems to be low resolution, and the photo of Petticoat Lane market on page 84 is taken from an
odd angle and appears to be a quiet day.
Most remarkably there is a photograph on page 27 of Dutfield’s Yard, where Elizabeth Stride was murdered. It was
purchased on eBay and was part of a collection of photographs taken by a lady on a European tour at the turn of the
century. It belongs to Philip Hutchinson, he has protected his copyright, and I can’t imagine he gave his permission for
its use here. The book says it appeared in the Pictorial World on 18 October 1888. As it is impossible for it to have done
(and anyway it didn’t), it’s use here spoiled the whole uninspired book for me. What a wasted opportunity!
Review by Paul Begg
An East End Album

Steve Lewis
Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5658-1
hardcover; 120pp; illus;
£20.00
About four years ago Steve Lewis produced a book that was a collection of photographs of the East End taken when he
was a photo journalist for a local newspaper. It was called London’s East End: A 1960s Album. I don’t have a copy of that
book, but I have seen a lot of the photographs it contains They are superb, but many, most, or maybe all of them are in
this book too. Search as I might I can’t find any suggestion that this book is a reissue of the old one, even Nick Ferrari’s

brief foreword is dated 2014, so I am baffled and don’t feel able to review this book as fully as I’d like.
The photographs are great, seem to be mainly of Newham, and aren’t really of interest to us historically. However,
this is a book of nostalgia, remembering part of the East End, good and bad: a group of photographs of kids at play,
then a selection of photos of David Bailey, caravan dwellers, alcoholic down and outs in their hovels or sleeping rough,
and so on.
Review by Paul Begg
VICT
ORIANA
Victoria: A Life
A N Wilson
London: Atlantic Books, 2014
www.atlantic-books.co.uk
ISBN: 9781848879560
hardcover; 642pp; illus;; notes; biblio; index;
hardcover £25.00
eBook (Kindle) £9.59
There’s no shortage of biographies about Queen Victoria, they are all pretty big volumes and as
we’re not exactly awash with fresh source material, it begs the question whether we need another
exhaustive biography to add to the pile. The answer is probably not, but then a new one comes along
and proves that we do. I wasn’t too sure whether A N Wilson had produced one of those, but I think he
has.
It presents the human side of Queen Victoria, and although it’s clear that Wilson liked his subject, he doesn’t disguise
the fact that she could be pretty awful. To say that Queen Victoria had her faults is an understatement. It was generally
agreed that she “was neither a wise or competent Head of State” and her eccentricity led some people to think that
she was bonkers. Courtiers were not slow to recall that her grandfather, George III, suffered mental illness and it was
thought possible that Victoria had inherited the same problems. Wilson agrees, but attributes it to a mixture of grief,
the menopause, and the quantity of whisky she could put away.
She was introduced to whisky by John Brown, the rough and ready Highland ghillie who became her close friend and,
it has been suggested, her lover and possibly even her husband! Did they have sex? Wilson doesn’t seem to have found
any evidence one way or the other, but concludes that her relationship with Brown was “much more than that felt by
many old ladies for their servants.”
Victoria was mean, obsessed with funerals, very nasty to her children, especially Bertie, though he probably deserved
it. She also wrote an awful lot and unfortunately much of it was destroyed after her death, giving rise to much
speculation about what it contained. Victoria was also garrulous to the point of being indiscreet and even dangerous.
However, the 60 million words that survives is enough for Wilson to have made good use of.
Review by Paul Begg

The Playboy Princes:
The Apprentice Years of Edward VII and Edward VIII
Peter J Beer
London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2014
www.peterowen.com
ISBN: 978-0-7206-1500-6
softcover; 320pp; illus;; notes; biblio; index
£15.99
Edward VII and Edward VIII both had to wait until middle age before they ascended the throne, they
both filled their time with engagements of little merit and otherwise lived profligate lifestyles which
sailed both to the shores of scandal and public disgrace and sometimes ran them aground.
Edward VII was an appalling child, grew into an appalling youth (though it has to be said that his
regimented day would have made a delinquent out of a saint), and was debased and debauched as an adult. However,
exuding a certain charm, he was an amiable companion, and when eventually he did ascend the throne he reinvented
the monarchy and brought a much needed light and sparkle into what had become a staid and jaded institution.
Edward VIII was likewise a womaniser, but his sexual indiscretions pale in comparison to his attitude to constitutional
conventions, the crisis he caused by proposing marriage to the twice divorced Mrs Wallis Simpson, his abdication, his
racism and anti-Semitism, and his Nazi sympathies and alleged betrayal of British secrets to Germany. Winston Churchill
shuffled him off to the Bahamas for the duration of WWII, which wasn’t a bad place to be shuffled off to and was one
infinitely preferable to where other suspected traitors were sent. Edward VIII hated it - oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
The Playboy Princes, Peter J Beer’s second book, takes us from the Victorian era and the scandals surrounding Bertie,
the father of sometime Ripper suspect Prince Albert Victor, through the first half of the 20th century, and explores the
commonalities between two young men bred to be kings. It’s a fascinating read and an escape from the sometimes
gloom-laden Victorian era.
This is an excellent book. Highly recommended.

Review by Paul Begg
Great Victorian Inventions:

Novel Contrivances and Industrial Revolutions
Caroline Rochford
ISBN: 978-1-4456-3617-7
softcover; 288pp; illus; index
£9.99
We know the Victorian age saw some astounding advances in science and technology, but this book is
full of surprises, like the early application of electricity to domestic appliances such as a kettle, iron,
and even a frying pan. Using Cassell’s Family Magazine 1884, 1885, 1887, 1892, 1893, Caroline Rochford
has compiled a fascinating collection of Victorian inventions, each invention discussed in a maximum of
two pages and collected in themed chapters that include the home; fashion, art and design; education,
work and industry; technology and communication; and so on.
Some are absolutely extraordinary, such as a 6ft tall robot who could walk at 5 miles per hour and was powered
entirely by steam. Built by a Canadian inventor named George Moore, the fate of this robot is a mystery. One claim is that
its remains were found in a New York junk store. Some pour cold water on the robot altogether and claim that it never
existed in the first place. Or what about the story told by Professor William White Jacques, an American electrician, in
an address in Boston in 1893. He described a visit to a laboratory in which there were two rooms, one contained a small
box from which two wires ran to a wall, then through the wall into the adjoining room, where they were connected to
another box. In the first room the professor wrote ‘Good Morning’ on a card, which was then photographed, developed,
and the photo then dropped into a slit on the box. Taken into the second room, the good professor was in time to see a
thin piece of paper issuing from the box there and on which there was a facsimile of his writing and his message. Real
or a con?
This book is ideal for dipping into. Recommended.
Review by Paul Begg

Life in the Victorian Asylum:
The World of Nineteenth Century Mental Health Care
Mark Stevens
Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword History, 2014
www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
ISBN: 178159373-6
softcover; 176pp; illus; sources; biblio; index;
hardcover £19.99
I was very impressed with the novel approach taken in this excellent book to telling what it was like
to be committed to a Victorian asylum and the life and treatment you would receive inside. It’s written
in the form of a patients’ guide or handbook to life in the asylum from admission to discharge. It’s a
quirky approach that enables author Mark Stevens to look at every detail of asylum life, including an
introduction to the management and staff, from the Medical Superintendent (the boss), through the Attendants, to the
Servants.
The book is in two parts, the first and by far the longest is the patients’ guide. The second, though called A History of
Victorian Asylums, is really an account of Moulsford Asylum in Berkshire, which was the basis for much of the material in
Part One. This is followed by a few pages about Broadmoor, which the author explains was run on much the same lines
as Moulsford, with the exception that the sexes were rigorously segregated and the security was higher.
This was a thoroughly and surprisingly enjoyable book and an important introduction to the world that the certified
Jack the Ripper would have encountered. Mark Stevens is a professional archivist who works at the Berkshire Record
Office and looks after the Broadmoor and Fair Mile Hospital archives (Fair Mile is the subject of a book due next year
by Ian Wheeler). His previous book was Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (2013), also from
Pen and Sword.
Review by Paul Begg
Asylum: Inside the Pauper Lunatic Asylums

Mark Davis
ISBN: 976-1-4456-3614-6
softcover; 160pp; illus;
sotcover £15.99
I would love to have seen the commissioning editor’s face when Mark Davis suggested a book of
photographs of the interiors of the country’s abandoned asylums. I’d probably have thought that Davis
belonged in or had escaped from a functioning one. It’s not such a nutty idea though and this book is a
fantastic and in many ways a rather shocking one.
It beggars belief that anyone can allow a building containing such a magnificent ballroom as that at Glasgow District
Pauper Lunatic Asylum fall into decay.
West Park Mental Hospital was demolished in 2011, but it was photographed by Davis before then and one photo shows
patients’ records just left there to moulder in the damp. Another photo shows clothes still hanging on hooks on a wall.
From the outside these lunatic asylums - in the early 1920s they were renamed mental hospitals - were grim and
forbidding from the outside, but efforts were made to provide a pleasanter interior, as the ballroom in the Glasgow
Asylum illustrates, but conditions were often harsh.
Packed with stunning illustrations, this is a great book that I haven’t tired of dipping into and the Kindle edition seems
a bargain.
Review by Paul Begg

Alcohol and Moral Regulation:
Public Attitudes, Spirited Measures and Victorian Hangovers
Henry Yeomans
Clifton, Bristol: Policy Press, 2014
www.policypress.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1-44730-993-2
hardcover and eBook; 279pp; illus; notes; biblio; index
hardcover £67.73
Once upon a time, beer was regarded as the ‘second necessity of life’. That was in 1267 (and nothing
much has happened to change many drinkers’ minds since then, except that some people might say it
was the first necessity of life) and until recently beer was regarded as a food, and it was in Russia until
four or five years ago. But today it is claimed that Britain has a drink problem and that it’s growing
worse. In fact some people think it is so bad that it requires immediate legislation and stiff legal penalties to bring it
under control. It is seen as a new problem - Tony Blair is on record as calling heavy drinking ‘a new British disease’ - and
boozing in the past seems to be thought of as somehow responsible, restrained, and controlled.
The reality is that average consumption today is arguably lower than it was when Jack the Ripper stalked the streets
of London. And far from being restrained back then, Victorian anxieties about alcohol consumption led to the creation
of a flourishing temperance movement.
This is an academic title, as the price indicates, and its principle objective is to look at the legal history of alcohol in
Britain. As a history, though, it is informative about drinking in general, especially during the 19th century, and is written
in a non-academic style. An interesting and important study.
CRIME
Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime

Val McDermid
London: Profile Books, 2014
www.profilebooks.com
www.valmcdermid.com
ISBN: 978-1781253199
hardcover, eBook; 310pp; illus; biblio; index
hardvover £18.99
Val McDermid as the successful author of rather graphic crime novels, notably her series featuring
Dr Tony Hill, adapted for television as Wire in the Blood. Here she leaves fiction to provide a highly
readable account of the development of forensics. It consists of stories, interviews, and accounts of old
and famous crimes, and McDermid also provides some stories that show where forensics failed.
Between 1993 and 2009 mtDNA left at the scene of robberies and murders across Austria, France and Germany
suggested a woman serial killer from Eastern Europe who was dubbed “The Phantom of Heilbronn”. However, in 2009
the DNA of the burned body of an asylum seeker matched that of the “Phantom”, but in this case the body was a
male. Investigation showed that the DNA was the result of laboratory contamination, cotton swabs having been used
which were unsuitable for the purpose and which were traced to a factory where numerous Eastern European worked

and who had DNA that fitted the profile of the “Phantom”. The Phantom simply didn’t exist, but was the creation of
contamination. This story of the failure of DNA interpretation probably has a greater resonance for Ripperologists today
than it would have a year ago!
Jack the Ripper gets a couple of mentions, particularly in connection with offender profiling which had its official
origins in the 1940s when a psychiatrist named Walter Langer was asked by the US Office of Strategic Services to draw
up a profile of Adolf Hitler. However, as Val McDermid states, the first profile was probably penned by Dr Bond following
the murder of Mary Kelly.
It was a good few years ago that I was with a group of people sipping coffee and kicking our heels while we waited to
go into a TV studio where we were about to film a round table discussion. I was with Professor David Canter and profiling
was being discussed. I mentioned in passing that the earliest profile I’d come across was Dr Bond’s. David Canter put
this in one of his books and from there it has become generally accepted and often repeated. Now, I’m the guy who
confidently pronounced that the Beatles wouldn’t go far, so I have little with which to flatter my ego. I therefore stake
my claim to this one, bright observation.
Anyway, each chapter of McDermid’s book looks at a different aspect of crime scene investigation: fire, entomology,
pathology fingerprinting, blood spatter and DNA, facial reconstruction, and several other topics are very readably
described, a lot of tit-bits of fascinating information imparted in the process - it takes maggots about a week to chomp
through 60 per cent of a human body, for example. As you read you’ll meet cheese flies, flesh flies, coffin flies, and blow
flies, plus an assortment of other insects such as maggots, beetles, mites… It’s enough to put you off lunch.
Recommended.
Review by Paul Begg
Calendar of Crime
Peter Stubley
Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2014
ISBN: 978-8-7509-5654-3
softcover; 368pp; illus (line drawings);
softcover £9.99
Stubley describes one crime a day for every day of the year, creating, as the title makes clear, a
calendar of crime. It seems to me that this idea is a well-worked one, but that’s probably because it’s a
good one. It certainly works well enough here. It’s the perfect book for dipping into, especially during
those quiet and solitary moments.
The crimes span a thousand years, the cut-off date being 1960, so there is nothing here that’s tastelessly too recent.
The earlest crime is the murder of Edward the Martyr, King of England, at Corfe Castle on 18 March 978. Edward was
different to most kings of the time because he had a boy’s name, all the other kings being called Ethel. He was 16-years-
old and may have been mad, it being reported that he was prone to extreme and unprovoked outbursts of anger that
shocked those around him. This instability may have been why other claimants to the throne thought it a good idea to
bump him off. Curiously, this bad tempered and foul-mouthed lad was afterwards pronounced a saint, and as befitted
a saint his bones were moved from time to time to grander locations. At the time of the Reformation they were hidden
to save them from destruction. They were discovered during an archaeological excavation in the 1930s, though it
wasn’t until the 1970s that they were confirmed as Edward’s. And the point of this history lesson is that the person who
confirmed that they were Edward’s was an osteologist named Dr T E A Stowell. Now, that’s a name every Ripperologist
should recognise.
The book isn’t all murder, assassination, and bloody execution, although undoubtedly there is a lot of that. It also
embraces robberies such as Adam Worth’s theft of Gainsborough’s Duchess of Devonshire on 25 May 1876, and the
escape from the Tower of London by its first prisoner, Ranulf Flambard on 2 February 1101.
Review by Paul Begg

In The Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland’s Torso Murders
James Jessen Badal
Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2014
www.KentStateUniversityPress.com
ISBN: 978-1-60635-213-7
softcover; 289pp; illus; maps; biblio;
softcover £19.95
In the 1930s, as the Depression bit deep, a small army of homeless and transient men briefly settled
amid the litter in a ravine that slashed through the east side of Cleveland, living in shacks made from
whatever they could find. Along the rim of the ravine cheap housing decayed but provided homes for
families. The area was known as Kingsbury Run and it was here that two headless corpses were found
in late September 1935. The murderer would become known as “The Mad Murderer of Kingsbury Run”
and between 1935 and 1938 he killed at least twelve men and women, probably more. Most of the victims were drifters,
their identities never certainly established. They were all beheaded, many were disembowelled, and the killer was
never identified.
This case is one of America’s greatest murder mysteries and it is given an extra frisson of excitement and interest
because Cleveland’s Safety Director who had authority of the police and other services was Eliott Ness. He was famous
but was not as famous as he would become after his death, when a fanciful biography written by a journalist named Oscar
Fraley sold 1.5 million copies and inspired a popular television series and more recently a movie, The Untouchables. This
was the name given to a group of incorruptible FBI agents led by Ness in Prohibition Chicago who helped to bring down
Al Capone. Corruption was also endemic in Cleveland, so Ness was the perfect man for the job.
Ness, like Sir Robert Anderson in the Jack the Ripper murders, believed he knew the identity of the murderer but
lacked sufficient evidence to arrest him. Ness’s suspect was a man named Dr Francis E Sweeney who he interviewed
and subjected to two polygraph tests which Sweeney failed to pass. Ness thought he wouldn’t gain a conviction against
Sweeney who was the first cousin of Congressman Martin L Sweeney, who was also related by marriage to Sheriff
O’Donnell.
Other suspects have been advanced over the years, one, Frank Dolezal, was actually suspected at the time and
probably suffered at the hands of the police in their effort to extract a confession. He would die soon after, but
retracted the confessions before he did so.
In 2001 James Badal, an assistant professor of English and journalism in Cleveland, wrote what must now be considered
the definitive book about the Kingsbury Run murders. His provided what must be a detailed description and analysis of
the victims and the crimes. He was able to prove beyond question that Ness did indeed have a suspect and he was able
to identify who it was. What he couldn’t do was prove that Ness was right. Since then Badal has undertaken additional
research and feels able to confirm that Ness was right. He also shows where the killer incapacitated his victims and
where he mutilated them.
Review by Paul Begg
Eliott Ness:
The Rise and Fall of An American Hero
Douglas Perry
London: Viking, 2014
www.douglasperry.net
ISBN: 0670025887
ebook (Kindle) (Nook) Ect.
The paperback will be published in March 2015;
339pp; illus; notes; biblio; index
£2.69
Eliott Ness died in 1957 from a massive heart attack. He was fifty-five years old, broke, forgotten,
and, ironically, an alcoholic.
Today Elliot Ness is best known for heading a team of incorruptible federal agents called “The Untouchables” in a
corruption-ridden Chicago where mobsters, notably Al Capone, ran numerous rackets including an illicit booze trade in

the dark days of the Prohibition. Ness and his men raided speakeasies, intercepted booze deliveries, smashed distilleries,
and would probably have put Capone behind bars had he not gone down for tax evasion. A highly fictionalised biography
was published seven months after Ness’s death, sold over a million copies and was the basis for an iconic noir television
series in the 1950s and for a pretty good movie starring Kevin Costner.
In the 1930s Ness was appointed Safety Director in Cleveland, a city so corrupt it was tough to find someone who
wasn’t on the take. Ness took them on, mobsters, labour leaders, politicians, and dirty cops. He also tackled the torso
murderer, a serial killer similar to Jack the Ripper. But by the late ‘40s his swashbuckling days were over. Ness started
drinking to excess, just as Sherlock Holmes turned to cocaine when he had no crimes to solve.
In recent years Ness has suffered at the hands of historians. His achievements have been played down and his faults
played up, but Perry’s well-researched book tries to get the balance right. Recommended.
Review by Paul Begg
Doctor Crippen:
The Infamous Cellar Murder of 1910
Nicholas Connell
ISBN: 979-1-4456-3465-4
softcover; 224pp; illus; notes; biblio; index;
Originally published in hardcover: Stroud, Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2013
softcover £9.99
Few murderers have achieved the notoriety of Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen. His crime was a sordid
domestic murder which might not have attracted much attention had his flight across the Atlantic,
hotly pursued by policeman Walter Dew, not captured the attention of the media and held the public
in thrall.
Crippen was a downtrodden little man who murdered his wife, Cora, a music hall performer of little talent who went
under the name of Belle Elmore, and whilst nobody deserves to be murdered, Cora, who never missed an opportunity to
belittle her husband, even to the point of parading her lovers in front of him, comes very close. Then Crippen found love
in the shape of Ethel Le Neve and the worm suddenly turned. Cora went under the cellar floor. Or maybe not.
This is the popular story, but one Nick Connell challenges in this meticulously researched book. Little, lovelorn
Crippen may have been something of a sexual predator, and Cora a well-liked woman who cared for the family home. As
for Le Neve, was she really ignorant of the murder?
All sorts of questions are examined and Connell takes an especially close look at claims that it wasn’t Cora’a body in
the cellar and that Crippen was innocent of murder.
A real must-have for any true crime reader’s bookshelf.
Review by Paul Begg
The Trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen

Notable British Trials
Filson Young
London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2014
www.bloomsbury.com
eBook; 357pp; illus;
Originally published: Edinburgh and London: W. Hodge & Company, 1920
£4.28
By a strange coincidence, almost to coincide with the softcover publication of Nick Connell’s book,
Bloomsbury has published an eBook edition of the classic Notable British Trials: The Trial of Hawley
Harvey Crippen. I don’t know if more volumes from this series are planned for publication, but I
certainly hope so.

Like all the Notable British Trials, this book takes you into the courtroom and provides word-for-word the cut and
thrust of the exchanges in what many regarded as the most sensational trial of the new century. A detailed introduction
is given by Filson Young, who Nick Connell holds responsible for creating the picture of Crippen as the henpecked
husband and Cora as the beastly, domineering wife.
Review by Paul Begg
Bloody Lies:
A CSI Scandal in the Heartland
John Ferak
Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2014
www.KentStateUniversityPress.com
softcover and eBook
296pp; softcover £19.96
It was Easter Sunday night, 16 April 2006, in a remote section of Cass County, Nebraska.
So begins the tale told in Bloody Lies, the debut non-fiction release from journalist-cum-author, John
Ferak. As would be expected of any good true crime story, that peaceful Easter Sunday in rural Nebraska
was not allowed to end without brutal murder; in this case, a brutal double murder. The victims were
successful farmer and agriculturist Wayne Stock and his wife, both torn asunder by gun fire.
Not your kind of crime story? That’s what I would have thought as well. Sadly, home invasion murders have become
commonplace and don’t make for particularly engaging reading. But the Stock murders provide only the catalyst for
what would become a series of crimes committed not only by criminals, as one would expect, but also members of law
enforcement. Following the Stock murders, a suspect is arrested. He confesses and points to accomplices, but the police
cannot find a shred of physical evidence to back up his story, so they lean hard on hot shot crime scene investigator David
Kofoed, who has charge of the supposed getaway car. His team had found nothing incriminatory in their sweep of the
vehicle, but under pressure to deliver results, Kofoed checks the car himself one last time and lo and behold uncovers
a small sample of the victim’s blood inside the car.
The detectives were thrilled to be handed the final link in their chain of evidence. With both a confession and forensic
evidence on their side, prosecution would be a breeze.
But then the real killers were captured by another police force. A closer look at the ‘confession’ revealed it was full
of holes. However, if their man was innocent, how did the victim’s blood get into the car he was allegedly driving?
Author Ferak was on hand as a journalist covering this story from the beginning. His insider’s perspective and clear
talent as a writer combine to offer a book that this reader places above many of the true crime crop currently on the
market. The story itself is almost impossible to believe with not one, not two, but several false confessions, overzealous
and unscrupulous detectives, a crooked crime scene investigator, and the expected political ramifications. In spite of all
these obstacles, could justice still prevail?
If you need a break from your Ripper reading and want to go behind the scenes of rarely exposed law enforcement
corruption, I strongly recommend Bloody Lies.
Review by Tom Wescott
WANT US TO REVIEW YOUR BOOK?
Ripperologist magazine has a circulation list of over 600 readers,

each with an interest in Jack the Ripper, Victorian crime and London’s East End.
If you are an author or publisher of a forthcoming book and would like to reach our readers,
please get in touch at contact@ripperologist.biz

HI
ST R IES
O RY
’S M YSTE
Once Upon A Time:

A Short History of Fairy Tale
Marina Warner
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014
www.oup.com
ISBN: 978-0-19-87-1865-9
hardcover; 199pp; illus; further reading; index
£10.99
I can’t say that I am fascinated by fairy tales, but I do wonder whether they are all complete fiction
or whether they recall a long-forgotten historical event. Marina Warner is an extensively published
authority on fairy tales, and there is probably nothing in this little volume that readers with even a
passing interest in the subject won’t know. For me, a casual reader, the book was fascinating.
Serial killers are discussed in the chapter called “Potato Soup”, historians
having suggested that Bluebeard was based on Gilles de Rais, the nobleman He suggested that the real Snow
accused of murdering an unknown number of children, perhaps numbering White was Margarete von Waldeck,
hundreds. It is unlikely that he did so, the charges having been trumped who was probably poisoned in
up. More interesting is the ingenious theorising of a German scholar named dynastic squabbles. According to
Eckhard Sander to identify Snow White. He suggested that the real Snow Sander she grew up in Wildungen
White was Margarete von Waldeck, who was probably poisoned in dynastic
where the growth of the local children
squabbles. According to Sander she grew up in Wildungen where the growth
of the local children was stunted by working down the copper mines. Their
was stunted by working down the
appearance was like that of dwarves. copper mines. Their appearance was
like that of dwarves.
This is a little book, a pocket book, but it covers its subject in a breezy
fashion that doesn’t flag and packs in information almost without you
noticing. It isn’t all about serial killers and the history behind fairy tales. It’s just a little on the academic side, a bit
dry here and there, but an excellent introduction to once upon a time, long, long ago, when there were princesses and
elves and demons, giants, monsters, goblin, glass slippers and so much more.
Review by Paul Begg
WRITE FOR RIPPEROLOGIST!
We welcome contributions on Jack the Ripper, the East End and the Victorian era.
Send your articles, letters and comments to contact@ripperologist.biz

OVER 200 JACK THE RIPPER AND ASSOCIATED TITLES ON LAYBOOKS.COM INCLUDING:
DEW (WALTER): SHELDEN (NEAL):

The Hunt for Jack the Ripper (reprinted). Jack the Ripper and His Victims : Research Into the Victims of the
Paper wraps. As New. £40. Scarce. Infamous Victorian Murderer.
softcover. As new. £40. Scarce.
EVANS/SKINNER:
The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook. SHELDEN (NEAL):
hb/dw. Signed. As New. £70. Catherine Eddowes : Jack the Ripper Victim.
paper wraps. Signed. £50. Scarce.
JONES/LLOYD:
The Ripper File. SIMS (GEORGE R):
hb/dw + 2 BBC TV 1973 Barlow & Watt Investigation JtR Videos. My Life: Sixty Years’ Recollections of Bohemian London.
Rare. £125. h/b. £150. Scarce.
KELLY (ALEXANDER) & WILSON (COLIN): SMITHKEY III (JOHN):

Jack the Ripper a Bibliography and Review of the Literature. Jack the Ripper: The Inquest of the Final Victim Mary Kelly.
h/b. Rare 1984 Edn. As New. £50. softcover. Signed + Stewart P Evans label. As New. £40. Scarce.
McLAUGHLIN (ROBERT): STEWART (WILLIAM):

The First Jack the Ripper Victim Photographs. Jack the Ripper: A New Theory.
Limited Edition. Numbered (73). Signed Robert + Whittington-Egan hb/dw. extremely rare in dw. which has pieces missing. £1600 (or
label. As New. £225. Rare. offers).
MORLEY (C J): SUGDEN (PHILIP):

Jack the Ripper: The Suspects. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper.
softcover. Signed. As New. £70. Scarce. hb/dw. As New. £65.
OSWALD (H R): TUCKER/SOUDEN:

Memoirs of a London Coroner. Ripped From the Headlines.
h/b. £275. Scarce. softcover. As New. £25.
RUSSO (STAN): WHITTINGTON-EGAN (MOLLY):

The Jack the Ripper Suspects. Doctor Forbes Winslow: Defender of the Insane.
h/b. As New. £40. hb/dw. Signed. £70.
RYDER (STEPHEN P): WHITTINGTON-EGAN (RICHARD):

Public Reactions to Jack the Ripper. The identity of Jack the Ripper.
softcover. Signed label. As New. £45. Scarce. paper wraps. Limited Edition. Numbered (77). signed label. As New.
£60. Rare.
SHELDEN (NEAL):
Annie Chapman Jack the Ripper Victim. WHITTINGTON-EGAN (RICHARD):
paper wraps. £40. Scarce. A Casebook on Jack the Ripper.
h/b marked covers, good only. Signed £150 (other copies available).
SHELDEN (NEAL STUBBINGS):
The Victims of Jack the Ripper. WOLFF (CAMILLE):
p/back. Signed Shelden/Norder (publisher). As New. £45. Who Was Jack the Ripper? A Collection of Present-Day Theories and
Observations. hb/dw. 1st Signed Ltd. Edn. Numbered (57). £300.
Scarce.
Happy Halloween!
Jack the Ripper costume
on offer at costumecraze.com

Ripperologist 140

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ripperologist 140

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

No.

140 October 2014

“So Help Me God”

WALTER MOSLEY and SCOTT NELSON are Dressed to Kill

OBITUARY OF CAMILLE WOLFF | NINA AND HOWARD BROWN

Ripperologist 118 January 2011 1

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 1

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 2

Fiona has given the knife to

There are however still

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 3

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 4

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 5

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 6

Warren then went on to state that

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 7

At the end of the page came the Declaration:

(Signature of Applicant) ___________________________

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 8

20 If joining the City of London Police force.

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 9

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 10

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 11

33 A Reserve Constable supplemented a division as and when required.

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 13

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 14

CAPTURING JACK THE RIPPER by Neil Bell

The book provides an insight into police life, as well as

It provides a rare look at the men who protected the

Join the police as they go out into the dank, crime-

Available from 28 November 2014.

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 15

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 16

Elizabeth Long (aka Durrell), re: Chapman:

James Brown, re: Stride:

3 Rumbelow, Donald: The Complete Jack the Ripper, London, 1975.

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 17

Israel Schwartz, re: Stride:

Joseph Lawende, re: Eddowes:

George Hutchinson, re: Kelly:

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 18

By necessity, the Ripper would have ‘travelled light’, with a

If the testimony of witnesses to the various murders is to be

6 Cf. Rumbelow, Donald: op. cit.

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 19

8 Amory, Cleveland (editor), 1902 Edition of Sears Roebuck Catalogue.

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 20

they had observed them beneath his coat.

Figure 6: Men’s Overcoats

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 21

Figure 10 illustrates men’s toupees of the

9 Fleming, Ian: Moonraker (1955).

12 Thorwald, Jürgen: Century of the Detective, 1965.

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 23

Most knives act like a splint immobilizing the ankle. It may

Alternately, a long knife could easily have been secured against

15 Cf. Sugden, Philip: op. cit.

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 24

19 Poe, Edgar Allan: The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841).

21 Thorwald, Jurgen: op. cit.

Dr Eric John Llewellyn Jones-Evans (1898-1989) came originally from

1 Dennis Stevens, “Good-night, Sweet Prince…”, Hampshire, September 1989, p.15.

Ripperologist 140 October 2014 28

6 Evening Telegraph, 18 July 1932, p.5.