S3 – 10: Never Done

noticed was how shallow the cuts were. In fact, Dr Phillips said in his report that, after careful and long deliberation, I cannot satisfy myself that the perpetrator of all the White Chapel murders is our man. The mode and procedure of the cutting seemed to be different. He had witnessed the terrible brutality visited on East End women in the fall before. No one who had seen Mary Kelly's body

would miss the difference, or so thought Dr Phillips. But just to keep things interesting, Scotland Yard once again requested that Dr Thomas Bond come in to confirm the judgment. But what he said started in an argument that has never quite finished. By the time Dr Bond arrived, Alice mackenzie's body had started to decompose, and it had been

washed and handled since the first examination. Even so, Dr Bond said with confidence that the cuts across her body he saw the design of the Whitechapel murders, and he stated plainly for the police the murder was performed by the same person as usual. Dr Bond convinced his friends at Scotland Yard, or at least some of them. James Monroe wrote to the Home Secretary that he had received word the very moment Alice's body was found at three a m. He had rushed to the scene of Alice's

murder and immediately taken personal control of the investigation. As the evidence was gathered, including Dr Bond's statement, James Monroe was convinced that the murder was identical with the notorious Jack the Ripper of last year. Along with his report to the Home Secretary, Matthews, the new Police Commissioner, sent on a map. On it, he marked the places where

White Chapel murders had taken place. But here's where the next argument lies because yes, that map showed the murders that Dr Bond had considered back in October, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Katherine Eddoes and Mary Kelly. That's five, but the map had eight murders marked. It included two women killed earlier in eighteen eighty eight, Emma Smith and Martha Tabram, along with the new case of the murder

of Alice Mackenzie. It seems the police, under James Monroe's direction, were still considering whether all of these women were killed by the same man. His map, though completely left out the Torso murders, and in the following days, it seems that Monroe's mind changed when it came to imagining the White Chapel killer, the legendary Jack the ripper behind the death of Alice Mackenzie. Monroe's conclusions swung from a green with Dr Bond to agreeing with Dr Phillips. At least

that's what Monroe told the head of Scotland Yard. It was a flip flopping attitude that would follow every East and murder investigation for a long long time. Whenever a new body turned up, the question had to be asked was this the work of Jack the Ripper? In a year that followed Autumn of Terror, everyone responsible for governing life and death in Whitechapel was caught in a fog

of uncertainty. At Alice Mackenzie's inquest, Win Baxter intoned for The Times of London that there is great similarity between this and the other class of cases which have happened in this neighborhood. And if this crime has not been committed by the same person, it is clearly an imitation of the other cases. There is nothing to show why, he said the woman is murdered or by whom this is unobscured. I'm Aaron manky h who was responsible? It was the question now set before every mind that wanted

to solve the Whitechapel murders and unmasked the killer. How many of the women killed in the East End were the victims of a single brutal murderer And did either approach truly lead to the identity of the murderer. It was the question that faced the police too, and men like Melville McNaughton. It's true that McNaughton was not yet on the forest during the Fall of eight but the

new Metropolitan Police Commissioner. His friend James Monroe wrote, I always had a high opinion of his qualifications and abilities, but he has shown an aptitude for dealing with criminal administration and a power of managing and dealing with men. It was a recommendation that sound close to the kinds of compliments given to Donald Swanson for his synthetical turn of mind. So maybe we can't be surprised that McNaughton would turn his powers of analysis to the Whitechapel murders.

After all, how many thousands of us have done the same. But McNaughton's hindsight was more informed than most, and what he wrote had the benefit of coming from inside Scotland. Yard. Here's Dr Drew Gray to tell us about the mark that McNaughton left on the investigation. In February he wrote a report on the case, and that was prompted by a speculation in the Sun newspaper of the day that the murderer was a man named Thomas cut Plush, and

he was kind of refuting that. I think in McNaughton's writing we see the way that a serious police investigator was still devoting time to the hunt for the Whitechapel murder, even long after the cases went cold. Let's have Adam would tell us how he sorted through that evidence. What I find interesting about the McNaughton report is that he names the same five victims as the genuine Ripper victims

as Thomas bonded his report. And this is where we get the so called canonical five victims, from Maryann Nichols through to Mary Kelly, and the victims before these five and afterward a genuine regarded as probably not by the ripper. But that's certainly changed in certainly the case of Martha Tabram. But McNaughton had a reason for describing which victims he thought were truly killed by the ripper, and that was to identify a suspect. But just one suspect wasn't good

enough for mcnaton. In fact, he named three. Here is more from Dr Drew Gray. The report itself is quite short and in it but no names three possible Ripper suspects and three people that were supposedly known to the police part of the investigation at the time. And these were Monsty, John Drewitt, Michael ostrog and a guy just known as Kosminsky not given a first name, but generally has been given the name Aaron Kazmitski, but Kauseminski a

police Jews. McNaughton rights. And when we look at mcnorton's trier of suspects, my problem is that they broadly fit the typology of who the Victorians thought ought to have been the killer. I someone who was considered to be a social other. So we have an upper class gentleman, we have a psychotic doctor, and we have a deranged Jewish immigrant. They're all the people who are drew it

or struggle and Kosminski. And I think it's rather convenient that McNaughton identifies those three as the people that the piece we're looking for, because those are the sort of people the press were telling the police they ought to be looking for. Not only was Melville McNaughton's report a simple product of the way victorians saw the world, it was also a strange document for the very fact that

it named multiple suspects. It tells us that even as the years passed, the police around White Chapel had not been able to narrow down their list of men who might have committed the crimes. Some officers believed one of the men might be responsible, others in their ranks could only come to a different conclusion. The fact is, even in examining McNaughton's report, we don't know much about who else in the Metropolitan Police agreed with his opinions. McNaughton

submitted his report up the line. It was marked confidential and put into the police files, but during his lifetime it was never published. Victorian London was often a killer, and its disasters and diseases led to many more deaths than any one person. But the thrill and terror of murder has a hold on our mind that far outweighs

the mere numbers. The stories of neglect and the awful ordinariness of fatal outbreaks are easy to overlook when there are newspapers like The Star whipping up a fearful frenzy about the danger that our neighbors pose. They're not unrelated, though, and to understand the ways that a government and a police force failed to hunt down a serial killer, we need to understand the world in which those failures take place. Here's more from Paul Beg. Chat Ripper is a mystery,

an understanding, perhaps even sold being it. You have to study the evidence. You have to know how people lived and so on, because all of how they lived could have a bearing on what they did and therefore ultimately lead to perhaps a discovery of who the murderer was, or getting close to that. You have to read books, which is no bad thing. You've got to learn about sources, which ones are and which ones aren't reliable, all sorts

of things that historians do. That's part of their job, and many of those things have applications in our world, such as now there is an increasing need to distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy news stories and blogs and web pages, and goodness knows what else. The White Chapel murder has demanded the attention of London during their own day, and it's never stopped bringing more eyes and more minds to

the mystery of a case. So after the folk us has been on the gaps in our knowledge, the things we don't know or never can. But when it comes down to it, there's so much that we do know, and the obsessive drive to uncover the identity of the killer has often allowed the speculations and fabrications of times past to cover over the real lives and real pass to the place where the killings happened. Even in though Whitechapel was much bigger than just the story of its

infamous killer, Darkest England. That was the smear used against London's East End to accuse it of being just like so called uncivilized parts of the world, the parts of the world that had just a few too many diamonds in their fields according to people like Charles Warren, the parts of the world that needed civilizing missions, according to people like James Monroe, the parts of the world that could be put to work if you had some matches

to make. But what if you were all three and you had a missionary army ready to make some matches. That's what the East End looked like to the Salvation Army. The leaders of that movement saw the ways that Bryant and May were making hay from the East End poor, and they saw an opportunity to compete. So they opened a rival match factory in hopes of lifting people out of poverty, and the Darkest England Match Company started right

down the road from Bryanton May. To their credit, the entrepreneurial mission left the toxic white phosphorus behind, and they paid their workers twice what Bryanton May offered. For a while it seemed like they were succeeding too, and they were putting out six million boxes of matches each year. Members of Parliament and journalists with ready pens came through on tours led by the Salvation Army generals. But as the match women knew all too well, matchmaking was a

ruthless business. The Darkest England Match Company only lasted a few years and when it closed it was gobbled up by a competitor. That's right, it was taken over by none other than Bryanton May. But that's not the end of the story for working people in London's East End, because, as you probably remember, when we last left Mary Driscoll and the match women, they weren't done with their own work. They were still agitating. But in eight nine it wentn't

beyond that too. Here's Dr Louise Raw to tell us more. I found that strikes shut up, shut up right after the match from a strike. And there's no other way to explain it. Because I looked, I went right back and looked at averages on years. Everyone in the East End is going on strike, the tailors, the seamstress, as you know, the jam Factress, the fur place. Everyone's going on strike, you know, because working people aren't stupid. They seeing an example here. Oh look, they are workers like us.

They're supposed to be powerless, blind me. They're now trade union leaders and they've got better conditions. You know, how dumb do we think working people are that this would be lost on them. Of course it wasn't lost on them. And one of those groups who looked at what Mary Driscoll and the other women had achieved was none other than the muscle that made the empire flourish. The dock workers they wanted with the match women had won, and

they decided to make demands of their own. After all, they could only be envious of what the women in their family had won. Here's Louise raw once again. Match for married docers, Match for me and the mothers of doers, their sisters, their friends of doctors. You know, working people do inspire each other. They do tool of course, well.

Armed with the match women's example, the poorest dockers, the Irish laborers who were hired for casual work on a daily basis, got together and wrote a letter to the directors of the dock companies Where they wanted was clear, a penny raise in their daily wage and something more for overtime. But the DOC directors were deaf to their demands,

and so the strike began. First it was men who marched off the West India Dock on August and they put out a call for all the workers on all the docks along the river to support the poorest men. By August one, twenty men were marching, but they took their cues from the match women. Their protests and marches weren't dull. They were accompanied by a royal clamor. The sounds of brass bands and the rolling rattle of pipes and drums filled the East End streets. Every dock was

shut down. Even the police wanted to get in on the union action. After all, other public servants like postmen were also taking steps to unionize. It was a strange turn of events when you think about it. The men who had been beating the socialists with batons in London's Trafalgar Square were coming around to their ideas. At one point, when the strike leaders heard that five hundred more police were going to meet their lines, they welcomed them in

and rather than beating the strikers back. The constables joined them. After all, the Home Secretary was refusing the pay raise that Charles Warren and then James Monroe had asked for. The massive strike only gained strength. And this strike is on questionably a huge event, but it is unsuccessful at first.

The doc company really fight back and John Burke, it's one of the key leaders who goes on to bing MP, says, drew the strike to a mass meeting and hundreds of thousands of men don't give up, stand shoulder to shoulder. Remember the match girls who won their fight and formed their union. Well, I mean wow. And he says that kind of thing constantly. By the way, he doesn't say, oh, some match women. You probably haven't heard of them. They were from Bryan to May, down the road. They apparently

had a strike. He says, they're match girls, and he knows everyone knows. Hundreds of thousands of men listening, they all know, damn well who the match were. Enough, that's how inspiring they are. When the leaders read their memoirs, they said things like it was the match women that started it. They were the first signs. They were the first encouragement, the first inspiration. They were the start of new unions of Soon enough, Monroe was in a furious

battle with Home Secretary Matthews. The Dark owners and the Home Office had wanted the police to beat back the strike. Monroe replied that he believed in impartial policing. His view was that the police were not simply the servants of London's employers or the tools of the city's wealthiest aristocrats. His dispute with Matthews would never resolve, but the strike would come to an end. By November. The doc directors had given in and the longshoremen were drawing their new

higher wages. And that wasn't the only effect. Echoes of the dark workers shouts were heard elsewhere in Britain and around the world, from the Liverpool doctors strike the next year to the men unloading freight in the ports of Australia. And it wasn't just rising workers in other lands who heard John Burns rallying cry to remember the match. Girls

the East End remembered it too. A descendants that I talked to, we're really good at explaining how these notions, these received, notions that were forced on them from above, were rejected and were turned around. And he said I'm really glad you're writing about my grant and her friends

because they were wonderful and nobody thinks they were. And I had to grow up with that, had to grow up with these incredible powerhouse women, strong characters, brave, amazing, you know, did the impossible on a daty basis, fed huge families, and people treated them like dirt. And people would say they weren't ladist, but to us they were. They were East End Ladist. A bigger lesson, I think

would be hard to find. The tables had turned. Now it was not James Monroe celebrating McNaughton, but the other way around. Instead, McNaughton was celebrating the man who got him into the police. You see, James Monroe had lost his job. That might seem to be a strange time to celebrate someone, but think about it, when else would someone need more of a pick me up? So the date was set for a dinner party that brought together the usual suspects. Donald Swanson was there, so was Frederick Eberline.

James Monroe was the guest of honor, surrounded by eight other officers from the top of Scotland Yard and Melville McNaughton hosted them all. Monroe was done with policing for now. Like Charles Warren, James Monroe had resigned the struggle to administer the police under a controlling Home Office was more than he could take, especially when all the forces that wanted to use the police to literally beat the London

pour into their place. We're winning the argument. When he left his post, James Monroe had served as Metropolitan Police Commissioner for the shortest time on record. But what does a police commissioner do when he leaves his position of enormous power in the world's largest city. He sets his sights on the place where he has learned his craft, and he decided to go back to India. He would be welcome, he said, as a medical missionary. And Monroe wasn't the only officer to turn his mind back to

the horizon of the empire. Charles Warren too returned to something familiar, the British Army. But for Warren it didn't mean a return to his former glory, far from it. Instead, it took him to an even worse mess than his failure to capture the Whitechappel Killer. Here's Paul beg to tell us more Warren. Unfortunately, after he resigned, he was sent out to fight abroad. There was a battle that's at a place called spied on Cop, and it was

an absolute disaster. And that's basically stuck with Warren and has damaged to his reputation for the rest of his life and right down to today. Andrew Gray agrees. Eleven years after the Ripper Case, serving in the South African War what sometimes owned as the Boar War, and he has to lead the assault on spine Cop, which is an unmitigated military disaster. I think it's interesting that Paul Beig describes him as a man to whom fate certainly

dealt to cruel hands. Leadership of the police during the Ripper Case, which is probably impossible for them to solve. And leadership of soldiers at the Battle of spine Cop where they were rudely defeated by the Boors. In fact, at spion Cop, the troops under Warren's command were absolutely massacred. His lines were ripped apart by Boar artillery that his own officers couldn't locate on the battlefield. In fact, that's his own small contribution to history, an early use of

what came to be known as indirect artillery fire. Warren saw his men torn apart, but he couldn't see where the attack was coming from, so he didn't know how to respond. It was a cruel irony that wasn't the first time an unidentified attack or worked devastation before his eyes. The battle was such a disaster that Warren was even called arguably the most incompetent commander of the whole Second

Boer War, and those criticisms bit deep. For a man who had dedicated himself to advancing Britain's imperial power, he couldn't stand to have failed so spectacularly again. In eight Warren had attempted to refute the criticism of the Metropolitan Police by publishing his ill fated article in Murray's magazine. After costing thousands of British lives at Spion Up, he answered his critics in a book he entitled Sir Charles Warren and Spion cop of Vindication. He changed his approach

this time. Though he published this self congratulatory rant under a false name. He made sure to quote the best things the Home Secretary ever said about him, that Charles Warren was a man not only of the highest character but of great ability. Looking back, it might have been more convincing if it was someone else reminding the reading public that this had ever been said about Charles Warren.

Donald Swanson also found his later reputation tied up with the violence and the excesses of the British Empire in South Africa. Although his role was something like the opposite of Warren, in fact, Swanson had done everything he could to avoid the conflict that later led to Warren's disgrace. Take for instance, his role in prosecuting what became known

as the Jamison Raid. Here's Adam Wood to fill us in basically n domand Magnets and British naturally, Sir Cecil Rhodes, who had been basically annexing large areas of South Africa, had his eye on the South African Republic, which is a large independent country formerly known as a transfile. Large quantities of gold have been discovered, which caused thousands of many British immigrants called outlanders, who were tolerated thanks to the tax as they had to pay on any gold

that they uncovered. But Rhodes was envious and wanted this land, and he devised a plan whereby arms and money would be provided to the outlanders in order to provoke an armed uprising by these settlers with the result of the overthrown of the South African Republic government and an armed force of around seven hundred men under control of Dr Leander Jameson was to be placed on the Transfile border,

ready to assist and support this insurrection. But things went badly wrong because Jameson badly ignored orders to retreat, and the result was that more than four hundred of his men were captured. That's where Donald Swinson stepped in, because once his crowd of men returned to Britain, the question was how they should be handled. What crimes had been

committed it on the outer reaches of the Empire. Could Jamison be charged with smuggling guns through a chartered company and attempting to overthrow the government of a neighboring country. Swanson knew there had to be consequences for such an outrageous provocation. He made sure that those consequences were felt too. Together with the officers under his command, Donald sorted through the testimonies of all the men involved, and he untangled

the conspiracy. When he was done, Swanson had the thirteen ring leaders charged with unlawful military expedition against the South African Republic. Seeing the evidence that Swanson collected, the magistrate judging the case said that there cannot be a graver offense than that these men are accused of committing that might lead to war between two friendly countries. They were convicted and jailed, and for a time it cooled the tensions on the border of the Dutch and British empires.

It was the sort of thing that Donald Swanson was capable of stepping into a snarl of confusing details and wrestling control of the story. He was up against entrenched forces. Though other storytellers loved what Jamison had done, men like Rudyard Kipling, the infamous cheerleader of British imperial power, wrote poems in Jamieson's honor. Even an investigator as capable as Donald Swanson could only hold back imperial violence for so long.

But investigating outrages at the frontier of the Empire wasn't Donald Swanson's last contribution to history, because his synthetical mind still had one more insight to give. Swanson's last contribution was marginal, and I mean that literally. It wasn't published, It wasn't even reported to his superior officers. In fact, it was his personal notes scribbled in the margins of a book by Sir Robert Anderson, Swanson's boss at Scotland Yard. Swanson had a habit of writing comments on the margins

of whatever he was reading. That included the books by other policemen. Swanson himself decided not to cash in on the hunger for police memoirs, but he made sure to buy the books by his colleagues, and that included Anderson's memoir called The Lighter Side of My Official Life. But just because Donald didn't publish his own perspective, it didn't

mean he had nothing to say. Of course, we can't be surprised that even in his retirement, Donald Swanson had strong opinions about police work, so when he picked up Anderson's memoir it inspired quite a few comments. Today, we might remember Anderson as the man who went on leave in September of eighty eight when Polly Nichols and Annie

Chapman were killed in Whitechapel. Officers like Swanson and Aberline were left behind at Scotland Yard to coordinate the investigation until Anderson returned, it would have been Donald Swanson who filled in for him and brought him up to speed when he came back. In later years, Anderson would write that when it came to summing up the investigation of the White Chapel murders, he was tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer, but no public benefits would result.

In fact, he believed his officers had actually arrested the killer, but they couldn't prosecute him. Why Because, he wrote, the one person who had ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him, but he refused to give evidence against him. That passage in Anderson's book inspired a rush of commentary when Swanson read it, but the thoughts he wrote down would not be discovered for decades, not until well after

Donald Swanson's death. In Donald's books filled with his notes were passed down through the family until night when a relative was sorting through papers and discovered them once he had read them. Though he knew that the discovery was significant because Swanson hadn't just commented on the margin of that page. He had flipped to the end of the book and written out his thoughts. Here's Adam Wood to

say more. Elaborating on the end paper, Swanson wrote, after the suspect had been identified at the seas at home where have been sent by us with difficulty in order to subject him to identification him, he knews identified. On the suspect's returned to his brother's house he whitechap Or. He was watched by police CTC I D by day and night. In a very short time. The suspect, who was hands tied beyond his back. He was sent to Stephanie workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and he died

shortly afterwards. Kause Minski was a suspect. Kazminski one of the three names from Melvin McNaughton's unpublished report written in the eighteen nineties. If there's one man then that attracted the most suspicion from the detectives at Scotland Yard, it seems that he was the one. It just leads me to believe that Swanson probably also believed because Minsky to

beach at the Ripper rather than just another suspect. After all, he was the one officer who saw every scrap of evidence and report, and you have to assume that he knew more than anybody. When Swanson's marginal notes came to light, they were put under enormous scrutiny. Was the handwriting genuine? Did Swanson's opinion reveal the true identity of the murderer? If so, who was this Kosminski? Let alone the other

things mentioned in Swanson's notes, like the seaside home. The comments offered one resolution to the case, but of course questions remained. Research into the Polish Kasminski family commenced, though traces were scarce. Even for those who believed that the truth had finally been revealed, like Swanson's family, there was still so little to go on. Did believing that Swanson and Anderson had identified the suspect really bring the quest

for the Whitechapel murderer to a satisfying conclusion? Here's Paul Beg. What Anderson wrote and how seriously he can be taken depends to a very great extent on what we know about Sir Robert Anderson and what kind of man he was, and how things that we know about may have influenced the way he believed and the things that he said. So We really need to study people like Anderson and

mcnaughtman sponson in great depth. The trouble is there's not an awful lot of information out there that enables us to do Their history now is becoming really important. We can't just theorize Willie Nilly. We we really do have to get down to the serious level of history. Serious study, serious scholarship can keep bringing the details and the texture of the past to light. But the painful truth is that it won't ever be possible to fully live in

the past. What do we conclude in the absence of evidence. It's the question that plagued Win Baxter. It's the question that haunted the police. It's the challenge that has bedeviled historians and writers who have gone back to look at Whitechapel in And it's even harder when there's so much

speculation thrown into the gaps in what we know. Even when some of those gaps were filled in by new information, like when the Metropolitan Police files were finally open in the nineteen seventies, the false leads and the ex the nations that had been spun up around the case made it more difficult for new information to break through especially when that new information didn't offer the kinds of revelations that we might hope for. After all, they confirmed at

least one thing that we already knew. The police simply didn't know who the killer was. There were fears and suspicions, and there were records of all the arrests and internal reports on police action, but little more. Here's Paul Beg

once again. Knowing who Jack the Ripple was largely depends on who the police at the time thought Jack the Ripple was, and the only clues to that that we have are the names provided in the Norton memoranda, and to a slightly lesser extent, to Francis Tumblete and maybe one or two others. But that's basically it. What do we do when there's such gaping hall in our history? What we're left with is legend. The story here is Dr Drew Gray once more. There's no such person as

Jack the Ripper. He never existed. Of course, there was a serial killer or possibly serial killers at loose, and that person was responsible for the murder of several very poor and vulnerable women. But the monster that's come down to us as Jack the Ripper is in many ways, an invention of popular print culture, and then subsequently a century or more of amateur sleuthing and speculation about the killer. So Jack is a sort of dark fantasy figure that

was created in and has developed ever since. So since we don't know who Jack was, we can continue to offer up suspects that reflects our own fears and our own prejudices, the things that bother us in our own ages.

And this prosy starts right at the beginning of the case, in the autumn of when the murderers first sort of to be possibly a sort of top hatted top a slumming Burlington bertie, or a psychotic doctor carrying a gladstone bag full of sharp knives, or perhaps even a crazed immigrant do an anarchist revolutionary bent on destroying English society.

And then we need to throw in dark alleyways covered in fog from which a murderer can sort of emerge raith like clutching a knife and then vanished just as easily, leaving the police behind looking baffled. You've got the kind of perfect recipe for a Gothic horror story, and the fact that this bears very little resemblance to the truth is kind of immaterial. But we don't have to settle for the story, if we can instead allow ourselves to come to grips with truths that are much more uncomfortable,

If we can give ourselves permission not to know. What we can always do is try to clear away cobwebs and at least be honest with ourselves. There will always be some people and entire portions of the past that's sadly get left in the dark. Why should we care about Jack the Ripper? Why does this one story carries so much power? It's not like it died away with the end of the press accounts. No, we know that the stories of that brutal murder stuck around, terrifying readers

and even inspiring vicious mimics. And when it hasn't been taken seriously, it's been left at Here's Paul beg Chack the Ripper now is part of our popular culture known around the world. You still can, i believe, go to a burger bar in Singapore where you can have an anti burger. You can see how the name has been used in everything from advertising, which virtually began as the murders were being committed right through. There's everything. There was

a World War Two bomber called Jack the Ripper. There's everything from a toilet spray to a computer game bmat to a novel or a movie or even an opera all about check the rippon. Obviously, some of that goes beyond the bounds, and no, we're not talking about taking the violence of these crimes lightly. But there's something that made it an enduring sensation, and that's worth considering. Why does the story of the Ripper remain an open wound in the imagination of the British Empire and the history

of true crime. It's a reminder that the institutions that were bringing Britain into the modern era didn't extend their rewards to everyone. In the end. There's a whole list of ideas that the Whitechapel murders up end. The police keep us safe, for instance, following the news helps us understand our world. The charity of the middle class can meet the needs of the working poor. The courts and

governments we create will bring criminals to justice. Us that the modern empires of trade replaced the rot of an old aristocratic world with a new era of equal prosperity. All of these ideas were challenged by the stories we learn When we go back in time and study the Whitechapel murders, we find a police force acting like an occupying army. We find middle class missionaries looking down their

noses at their poor neighbors. We find the press inventing sensationalist narratives out of whole cloth and demonizing vulnerable people to sell halfpenny sheets. Jack the Ripper matters because it's a story that resists blind faith in the modern world. But if that modern way of doing business actually neglects the people it impoverished, how can we defend it. If the modern methods of policing are the product of colonialism,

how can we trust it. If Jack the Ripper can commit a string of atrocities on the bodies of women and escape capture, how much has modern life really improved over the past. The lesson here isn't that all of these moves to the texture of modern life are false or frauds. No, it's that none of them can be

taken for granted. A rigorous and honest press, a functional government, an equal society, all of these are things that need to be fought for, not once, but always it's work that's never truly done, but it's the work worth doing. If we're tempted to follow the Ripper stories into the embrace of human darkness, we can leave this history with a deeper despair about what humans are capable of. We can make an all too common mistake. We let fear win.

We let the most vicious outliers like the Whitechapel murderer, control the story. And when we do that, it's easy to fall into what some scholars call veneer theory, the idea that civilization is only the thin glossy of veneer

over the deep, monstrous hunger that lies beneath. And sure, that's one way of telling the story of Jack the Ripper monsters around every corner, under every top hat and mustache, but it's a short trip toward the destination of deep cynicism about what kind of life is possible and what

humans can achieve by working together. But the way I see it, the truth is the opposite, because when we look at the history of London in the eighties, the monstrous crimes of the so called civilized Empire aren't buried there right there on the surface. Diamond mines cutting into Africa military police trained in Ireland and then imported home

to brutalize England. How about the deep disregard for the lives of poor and working women by the city developers and factory owners and bankers demolishing their homes to usher in a new era of industrial power. There's no real veneer over it is there. The gloss itself is an imperial fist squeezing riches from the vulnerable people near and far. The murderer, called Jack the Ripper, became just another layer

to that all too ordinary violence. And the records of disease and industrial disaster in the Victorian era far outstripped the numbers of people murdered in Whitechapel. Cholera alone was a far deadlier killer. But in eighty eight the press and the police allowed themselves to be sucked into the monstrous imagination of a misogynist murderer and made their careers and sold their writing on that story. But we can't forget that underneath that violent layer, a stronger, more decent,

more courageous human spirit was always burning. As Louise raw has reminded us before, life was always dangerous for East End women. Victorian London was a place where horrifying violence against women became a global spectacle. But it's also a place where the poorest and most exploited women got together one a landmark victory and moved history forward. The fire lit in the subterranean communities of London's poor caught on

and spread. So in looking at the legacy of the Victorian East End and the year of eighteen eighty eight, we ultimately must look to Marry Driscoll, Irons and me in the match Women's Union. Here's Louise r one last time. This is a chain of events. This is hundreds and thousands of the most exploited workers who have been completely left out of any kind of consideration of unions, and before on the whole saying we're going to do what

they did. They used strikes to force the right to form their own unions and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them formed across the country as far away as Ireland too. It's incredible how news traveled in those days, and Irish seems just as unions wrote and said, we've heard about the match women, please come and tell us how to do it. We want to unionize as well, so it really was striking a light, you know, it really went like a fire. It just spread and spread

and spread. And it's out of that modern labor movement, that modern trade union movement that the Labor Party of course began. So yes, there was one hell of a lot more going on in this period it than one, you know, inadequate psychopath measuring women. As much as the stories of Jack the Ripper have endured to terrify and entertain generations, what the match Women did has come down to us right beside it, if we're willing to look

past the sensationalism to the truly significant. And like the stories of murder and mutilation, the story of the match women's courage and unity and self respect has built not just enduring political parties, but many more victories for working people over a century and more. That's something to hold onto. It's a reminder that when the horrors of life step out of the shadows and threaten the things we hold dear,

the important thing is not to give in to that fear. Instead, remember the ways that vulnerable people have stood shoulder to shoulder against it. The thing is, we have a choice about who we allow to tell the story of a place like London's East End. We could listen to the killer, or the racist press, or even the militant police memoirs. Or we could instead look to the margins, listen to the striking dock workers, take their advice, and rally to

their cry. Remember remember the match girls. Today's episode was the final leg of this season's exploration of the Whitechappel murders, which brings our journey to an end. If you've enjoyed the results of our team's hard work, you're written reviews and star ratings would be incredibly welcome over at Apple Podcasts. Your kind words go a long way toward helping newcomers tap that subscribe button, and it all helps the show grow.

It's been an honor to be your guide over the past few weeks, and I look forward to our next tour through the darkest corners of history. But we're not quite done with season three. Starting on January six, will be releasing all four of our incredible historian interviews in full. These are powerful conversations with the leading scholars in the world of Jack the Ripper, and the insights and details they bring to the topic are perfect for those that

want more. Just leave your podcast apt subscribed to the show, and those interview episodes will arrive automatically every week, as well as future news about season four. In fact, if you stick around after this brief sponsor break, I'll give

you a test of what's to come. I think the mid to late Victorian era is extremely important in terms of studying police history, particularly because the Metropolitan Force had only been formed forty years before Swanson joined in eight they were still senting officers for Cutler's training in response of the Fenian bombing campaign, which is ongoing at the time, and the Detective Department was only twenty five years old. And by contrast, when Swanson retired, the met had just

started using fingerprint evidence. So the thirty five years of Swanson's career covering the late Victorian period saw an enormous development in forensics and methods of detection. We can carry that evolution through to more recent times introduction of the

photo fit, chemical composition forensics of course. DA and I Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis, and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack.

Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at history unobscured dot com, and until next time, thanks for listening Unobscured as a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Monkey. For more podcast for My Heart Radio, visit i heeart radio app, Apple podcast, USTs, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.