The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  Donald Rumbelow

  THE COMPLETE JACK THE RIPPER

  Fully Revised and Updated

  Contents

  Foreword to the First Edition

  Foreword to the Revised Edition

  1. Outcast London

  2. Bloody Knife

  3. Double Event

  4. Miller’s Court

  5. From Hell

  6. Aftermath

  7. Suspects

  8. Gaslight Ghouls

  9. Beyond the Grave

  10. Conclusion

  Illustrations

  Bibliography

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Complete Jack the Ripper

  Donald Rumbelow lectures on crime and London history, and is a former Chairman of the Crime Writers Association. He is a London Tourist Board Blue Badge Guide. He is married and has two children. Among his interests are travel, theatre, collecting first editions and Napoleonica.

  To Molly

  ‘This is 1888 isn’t it? I knew I was Jack. Hats off. I said Jack. I’m Jack, cunning Jack, quiet Jack. Jack’s my name. Jack whose sword never sleeps. Hats off I’m Jack, not the Good Shepherd, not the Prince of Peace. I’m Red Jack, Springheeled Jack, Saucy Jack, Jack from Hell, trade-name Jack the Ripper!’

  Peter Barnes, The Ruling Class

  Foreword to the First Edition

  A more apt title for these preliminary words would be ‘Notes for the Curious’. Where else can you put details of a Charlottesville club in Virginia, calling itself the Minories, which not only had a décor based on the 1888 murders but served such bizarre dishes as the Elizabeth Stride sandwich of mixed meats, Poor Old Jack’s roast beef, Annie Chapman tuna fish sandwiches and Mary Kelly cheesecake?

  From the same state a correspondent writes to tell of a friend who had just added to his Peter Kürten collection the murderer’s guillotined head – though all my letters asking for the How? When? and Where? have so far gone unanswered.

  Equally bizarre is to be sent a businessman’s reading list for exporters going to Nigeria and to find this book among the seven recommended. A note explains why: ‘This book has a description entitled “Outcast London” … picturing the East End of London in the late nineteenth century. This description could apply to parts of present-day African towns and cities and this description will prepare the European who has not visited Africa before for sights which may possibly distress him (or her).’

  Since the publication of the first edition of this book in 1975, a few more original papers have surfaced into the public domain. Among them is the coroner’s inquest records on Catharine Eddowes and all surviving public letters to the City of London Police. Both can be found in the Record Office of the Corporation of the City of London, Guildhall. These are in addition to the surviving Scotland Yard papers in the National Archives at Kew. These are now open to the public although they were officially closed until 1992.

  Why the file should have been closed until that particular year is anyone’s guess. Some see it as proof that the Yard had solved the case and knew the killer’s identity but were concealing the name to protect ‘the highest in the land’. My own guess would be that the case papers were filed away but not closed in 1892 at the same time as the leading Ripper investigator Detective Inspector Abberline retired, and that the hundred-year embargo was purely arbitrary. As the investigating officer there would have been a general tidying-up and, without new evidence, little point in passing on the papers to his successor. Filed away with the Yard’s other papers they could always be got out if any fresh evidence came to hand. Of course, nobody could have foreseen either just how little would survive of the original files a century later or the sinister motives that would be attributed to the police to account for their disappearance. Which is why it was so interesting to read two or three years back that the records of the controversial England–Australia bodyline Test series of 1932–3 are missing from the MCC archives and that little exists beyond some rather unrevealing committee minutes. The explanation for their loss, particularly of the reports by the leading figures, has been variously attributed to wartime conditions, the national need for paper and the lack of a proper archivist – which are precisely the explanations given by the Yard to explain away the missing Ripper papers, though few seem as willing to believe them. One of the things that I have learned about playing the game of Hunt the Ripper with correspondents from all over the world is that every fact is capable of being wrenched into the weirdest of interpretations. Let me introduce a few factors into the game. The house that Abberline retired to in Bournemouth was called Estcourt. Now, to a Ripperologist, this has got to have some hidden meaning. Could it mean ‘escort’? Was he hinting that he had been HRH the Duke of Clarence’s personal detective at some stage? Better still, give the word another twist. ‘Estcourt = Established court’. That’s better. That gives a second link with the Palace. What about ‘Estcourt = East Court’? No, far too mundane. Got it: Abberline, being a policeman, might have acquired some schoolboy French. Perhaps it was a piece of Franglais? ‘Estcourt = Is caught’. In other words, he did solve the case. And as three out of the four explanations point to Royalty it must mean that calling the house Estcourt was Abberline’s novel way of identifying the Duke of Clarence as Jack the Ripper!

  Now you know how to play it – enjoy the game!

  I should like to thank once again the following: Colin Wilson, Robin Odell, Tom Cullen, Dan Farson, the late Stephen Knight, Joe Gaute, Richard Whittington-Egan, David Anderson, Dale Wilkinson, Peter Simmons, Philip Loftus, David Brass, the late Professor Francis Camps, Professor J. M. Cameron, Bill Tidy, Pat Plank at the Metropolitan Police library, New Scotland Yard, the Commissioner of the City of London Police, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Polly Rumbelow, and the Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate for permission to reproduce a letter from the Collected Letters 1874–1897, edited by Dan H. Laurence and published by Max Reinhardt, 1965.

  For more recent help I should like to thank Klas Lithner for the new Swedish evidence on Elizabeth Stride, K. Arne Blom, Anthony M. Berry, ARPS, Simon Wood, Martin Howells, Keith Skinner and Alan Neate who not only provided me with the same duplicate material that he had provided to Stephen Knight in his capacity as Record Keeper of the Greater London Record Office but also read the completed draft in manuscript.

  Lastly, I should like to thank the two Mikes. One is my editor Mike Bailey. The other is my literary agent Michael Shaw of Curtis Brown who is always there when needed. To both of them my deepest thanks.

  Foreword to the Revised Edition

  According to a survey in 1993 into the phenomenon of fear, Jack the Ripper tops the list of historical killers we would most fear to meet after dark. Not surprisingly, women were in the overwhelming majority in expressing such a fear.

  Dr David Lewis, a leading psychologist who conducted the survey, said that there were three reasons the Ripper killings still managed to invoke these fears. First, the killings were brutal – there was throat-cutting and mutilation. Secondly, there remains the mystery surrounding his identity, all of which adds to the intrigue. Thirdly, ‘there is the atmospheric setting … fog-shrouded back streets, gas lights and hansom cabs’.

  There is no slackening of public interest in the subject. Tourist numbers for the Ripper walks grow every year. It is a popular topic in schools, as other studies on late Victorian England can be built around them. It has been included on the national GCSE examination syllabus. No theory, it seems, is too ridiculous to consider. I was taken to task by an elderly lady for rejecting her suspect, Lord Randolph Churchill. Her only evidence was
that he had lived in London and died of syphilis. When I observed, reasonably as I thought, that this might have been said of any number of men, she was outraged by my doubts and banged down the telephone. Almost any contemporary is fair game. Even Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, has been considered as Jack the Ripper.

  The mystery still goes on. The case is definitely not closed.

  I owe a great deal to many people for help in preparing this new edition for press. Special thanks go to Neal Shelden, Nick Connell, John Godl and Pippa Townsend. My biggest debt is to Stewart Evans who has helped in so many ways that I hardly know where to begin to thank him. He has been a friend indeed.

  I should also like to thank the many contributors to ‘Ripperana’, ‘Ripperologist’ and ‘Ripper Notes’, and their editors Nick Warren, Paul Begg and Christopher Michael Di Grazia who have helped in so many ways. Faced, at times, with such a conflict of facts and theories it has made my task both easier and harder but always stimulating.

  Needless to say, any mistakes are my own.

  DONALD RUMBELOW

  2004

  1. Outcast London

  ‘This street is in the East End’: so begins Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets, which is about life at the end of the nineteenth century.

  There is no need to say in the East End of what. The East End is a vast city, as famous in its way as any the hand of man has made. But who knows the East End? It is down through Cornhill and out beyond Leaden-hall Street and Aldgate Pump, one will say; a shocking place, where he once went with a curate; an evil plexus of slums that hide human creeping things; where filthy men and women live on penn’orths of gin, where collars and clean shirts are decencies unknown, where every citizen wears a black eye, and none ever combs his hair. The East End is a place, says another, which is given over to the Unemployed. And the Unemployed is a race whose token is a clay pipe, and whose enemy is soap; now and again it migrates bodily to Hyde Park with banners, and furnishes adjacent police courts with disorderly drunks. Still another knows the East End only as the place whence begging letters come; there are coal and blanket funds there, all perennially insolvent, and everybody else wants a day in the country. Many and misty are people’s notions of the East End; and each is commonly but the distorted shadow of a minor feature.

  To the average Victorian the East End was outcast London. There was a feeling that it was separated from the rest of the metropolis geographically as well as spiritually and economically. Its people were as strange as the African pygmies and the Polynesian natives with whom they were often equated by journalists and sociologists who wished to draw attention to its problems. So little was known about them, until slumming became fashionable in the 1870s and 1880s, that an educated woman who was visiting St George’s-in-the-East in the 1870s remarked with some astonishment on the fact that the people didn’t sleep squatting against a wall, and that they lived in houses and not in railway carriages, as she had expected.

  For the greater part of Victoria’s reign, the East End was ignored by the Church. Occasional lip service was paid to the needs of the ‘lapsed masses’ but very little practical help was given them. An impact was beginning to be made on some of the area’s major social problems by philanthropists and private charities when the Revd Samuel Barnett and his wife moved to St Jude’s vicarage in 1873. The previous incumbent was still in residence and too ill to be moved, so they were forced to take temporary lodgings nearby. The landlady had some careless habits: she apologized one day for not serving Mr Barnett his usual rice pudding as a mouse had drowned in it. Many years later, there was still a rasp in Mrs Barnett’s voice when she retold the story for her memoirs.

  Their church, St Jude’s, was an isolated and empty one. At the first Sunday service there was a congregation of six or seven old women who all expected some dole for attending. The newly hired organist played tunes on a damp-stained piano and Mrs Barnett, who could not sing a note in tune, led the hymn singing. Most of their parishioners had been lured away by the Sunday street market in Middlesex Street (Petticoat Lane), where card sharps, thimble riggers and swindlers of all sorts, as well as men seeking casual work, went in their thousands hoping to get enough money to see them through the week. Equally disgraceful to Mrs Barnett were the herds of cattle goaded through the streets of Whitechapel each week to the slaughterhouses in and around Aldgate. Sometimes the horns would catch in the spokes of moving wheels and the animals, maddened with pain and fear, would scramble onto the pavement scattering the crowds. At the slaughterhouses, which were often ordinary shops, the sheep would be dragged in backwards by their legs and the bullocks hounded in by dogs and blows, while small boys clustered excitedly round the door and passers-by stepped as best they could through the blood and urine flooding the pavement.

  Mr Barnett’s parish was bounded by the City on the west and Whitechapel High Street, where there were forty shopkeepers and their families, on the south. Apart from the lessees of some large warehouses in Commercial Street and several rows of well-kept cottages tenanted by Jews, the bulk of his parishioners were crowded into a network of courts and alleys, none of which was intersected by any roads. All these courts stank from the accumulated piles of rags and rubbish and a miasma of liquid sewage that flooded the cellars of the houses. At the end of each court there might be a solitary standpipe, the only source of fresh water.

  Most of the rooms in these houses were let out to single families at eightpence a night. In 1883 the chairman of the London School Board reported that out of three schools with children from 1,129 families, 871 families had only one room to live in and in the majority of cases the number of people sharing with them was as many as five and sometimes as high as nine. The broken windows were frequently stuffed with rags or covered with papers (they were rarely opened because of the smells outside, and because the wretches who lived there were badly clothed and couldn’t be exposed to draughts. In Went-worth Street, a daily procession of wagons carted their uncovered piles of rubbish to the dust destructor which Mrs Barnett renamed the dust distributor because of the clouds of dust it vomited out and the way it choked the drains.) In some cases, even such inadequate window ‘repairs’ might be enough to justify the landlord’s charging an extra threepence a week for rent. In the house at 35 Hanbury Street, typical of the parish, there were seven people in each room with adult sons and daughters sleeping on the floor. In none of the rooms was there more than one bedstead, and the only w.c. was on the ground floor. This was normally in such a filthy state that the tenants used their chamber pots which, said the Revd R. C. Billing giving evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee, were left in the rooms for a very long time before being taken down and emptied in the yard. Staircase banisters had often been removed for firewood and it was a common sight to see vermin-infested wallpaper hanging in strips from the walls. What furniture there was might consist of the broken-down remains of an old bedstead or table but was more likely to be a wooden board across some bricks, or an old hamper or box turned upside down; the bed might be a sack of flea-infested straw.

  Andrew Mearns in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London pulled few punches:

  Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports finding a father, mother, three children, and four pigs! In another room a missionary found a man ill with small-pox, his wife just recovering from her eighth confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with dirt. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little dead child lying in the same room. Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, and a child who had been dead thirteen days. Her husband, who was a cabman, had shortly before committed suicide. Here lives a widow and her six children, two of them who are ill with scarlet fever. In another, nine brothers and sisters, from 29 years of age downwards, live, eat and sleep together. Here is a mother who turns her children into the street in the early evening because she lets her room for immora
l purposes until long after midnight, when the poor little wretches creep back again if they have not found some miserable shelter elsewhere. Where there are beds they are simply heaps of dirty rags, shavings or straw, but for the most part these miserable beings find rest only upon the filthy boards. The tenant of this room is a widow, who herself occupies the only bed, and lets the floor to a married couple for 2s. 6d. per week. In many cases matters are made worse by the unhealthy occupations followed by those who dwell in these habitations. Here you are choked as you enter by the air laden with particles of the superfluous fur pulled from the skins of rabbits, rats, dogs and other animals in their preparation for the furrier. Here the smell of paste and of drying match-boxes, mingling with other sickly odours, overpowers you; or it may be the fragrance of stale fish or vegetables, not sold on the previous day, and kept in the room overnight. Even when it is possible to do so the people seldom open their windows, but if they did it is questionable whether much would be gained, for the external air is scarcely less heavily charged with poison than the atmosphere within.

  The population of Whitechapel was about 80,000 people. For the East End as a whole the figure was about 900,000. Charles Booth, author of Life and Labour of the People in London, broke these figures down into several categories. At the bottom were the occasional labourers, loafers and semi-criminals. Above them were the very poor and the poor. The poor he defined as those who had a meagre but regular income of between eighteen shillings and twenty-one shillings a week, and the very poor were those whose income fell below this level. The former struggled to make both ends meet and the latter lived in a state of chronic want. The condition of the lowest class of all, which doesn’t get a name, can be imagined. At a rough guess there were about 11,000 of them – about 1¼ per cent of the total population. This figure includes the ‘dossers’ and the homeless outcasts who slept on staircases, in doorways and even in dustbins and lavatories for warmth. Their lives, Booth said, were the lives of savages, ‘with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and occasional excess’. It was not easy to say how they lived. When they could not find threepence for a night’s lodging they were turned out onto the street. Booth wrote of them: ‘They render no useful service, they create no wealth; more often they destroy it. They degrade whatever they touch, and as individuals are perhaps incapable of improvement.’ Their children were often the ragged street arabs who might be found, separated from their parents, in pauper schools or in homes such as Dr Barnardo’s.