S3 – INTERVIEW 3: Drew Gray

also specializes in the history of crime and punishment. His books on Jack the Ripper include London's Shadows, The Dark Side of the Victorian City and Jack in the Thames Torso Murders a New Ripper Those hit the shelves, alongside big projects like his book Crime, Policing and Punishment in England from sixteen sixty to nineteen fourteen. You can also find his writing on his blog The Police Magistrate, which

tells dramatic stories from England's history of summary justice. Dr Gray is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He has been a member of the editorial Board of The London Journal since two thousand eleven and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Recently, Dr Drew has been publishing articles on the myths and legends around Jack the b and how historians would benefit from paying more

attention to the murderers in Victorian Whitechapel. You could say that he's been doing a little un obscuring of his own, and we're delighted to have him on the show. We begin with his thoughts on Jack the Ripper as a myth, as someone who never ever existed, and then move on from there. This is the Unobscured Interview series for season three. I'm erin Minky. Well, if I could start by saying something probably signly controversial, which is to say, there's there's

no such person as Jack the Ripper. He never existed. Of course, there was a serial killer or possibly serial killers, 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 how it's a sluicing and

reculation about the killer. So Jack is a sort of dark fantasy figure that was created in and has developed ever since, and in doing so has taken on the aspects of each succeeding generation that's looked at him. I'm not unlike in some respects the way in which Sherlock Holmes has been reimagined to suit the age in which

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

And this process starts right at the beginning of the case, in the autumn of when the murderers first thought 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 crazy immigrant do an anarchist revolutionary bent on destroying English society.

And then when you 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. The industry that's grown from the murder of these women is the reality that most people

today understand. Another observation that you make in that same book, London's Shadows, is that most of what we know about the reality of life in London in the eighties is filtered through the middle class sensibilities of the time. How would you describe those sensibilities and the way that they shaped then and shaped now what we can know about

that moment in the city's history. Maybe you know, in Britain's history, what kinds of documents do we have that guide us through the details of what was happening in the East End, or or the murders themselves. How do we get at that? Well, of course, it's extremely difficult before our century, or the twentieth century perhaps to know at all what people thought about the world around them. Especially it's especially true for what you might call ordinary

working class people. Even if people could read and write, which is very far from universal in the eighties, not many of them would have at the time to do so, all the money to spare on ink and paper to write them, So working class memories of life in the

Victorian period are extremely rare. Instead, we have examples of popular culture, so musical song things like my old man, My old Man's a dustman, for example, which provide the plimpses of now folk understood their society at the time, kind of coming down to through song and music, hall and jokes and that kind of thing. Um. But that's very little from working class people. Instead, historians have had to make do with the diaries and writings of the

middle class um and the elite um. So I'm kind of thinking of men like William instead that the newspaper editor or authors like George Sims or Andrew Mens, or social investigators and reformers like Charles Booth or Beatrice Webb.

And of course these people mostly from the middle classes right as as to some extent, we all do from their own perspective, and so this history is kind of naturally imbued with their own prejudices and their own moral compass, which was quite different, of course from the way in which working class people understood their lives. And in terms of documentation about White Chapel and the White Chapel murders,

we've got very little, you know. I always think that it's a it's a truism that people in the past don't really think about the needs of researchers in the future when they're keeping or not keeping documentation. Most of what we do have is kept well. Most of what we do have in the public realm is kept at the National Archives, a que in in the south of the River in London, in a couple of police files, and this is actually rather disappointing when you actually get

to look at it. There are some case papers, but these are pretty thin. There are some photos of the victims which are widely known now and they're all over

the Internet. And a lot of letters sent to the police impressed during and after the summer and autumn um In addition, we have the reports of coroner's inquests and our commentary on the police investigation through the pages of the newspapers, and over the decades have passed, various pieces of evidence have emerged um like, for example, the Maybrick Diary, which have been hotly disputed, or the Little Child letter which these bits and pieces have provided more angles for

researchers to hang their speculations on what not necessarily much illumination into the case itself. And I think most researchers will agree that we've probably lost as much evidence over the years as we've found, and there's so that we're left with very little that a modern detective force could use to identify the killer in terms of the history of White Chapel in the East End, in terms of that sort of documentation, we have census records which are interesting.

We have street directories which tell us quite quite a bit, and we have Charles Boo's fantastic maps of London in the late nineteenth century which indicate the areas of poverty and relative wealth, but of course not really very much survived because again, what why would you keep that kind of stuff? That stuff we want to find out about ordinary people's lives. They just don't generate those records unless they're appearing something, for example, like a court case. Mhmm. Yeah.

And and speaking of of court cases and and settings where where documents are generated. Um, you mentioned that your your focused as a historian is on crime, and you've done a lot of work on Victorian police courts and published regularly on the Police Magistrate blog, which is full

of fascinating stories. Um. Can you describe Victorian police courts and the role that they played in the US, The system of the weight eight Yeah, the the the Victorian police court and the Victorian police court magistrates that presided in these courts is part of a long tradition of summary justice in England which has a very long history, and that's kind of been the focus of most of

my career um since I started in academia. And so of course, whe do you think it's quite it' quite difficul to say a little when you can settle for um the police court. A police court magistrate presided over a whole range of different sorts of um cases throughout the nineteenth century. They were they were appointed as men with who had at least seven years of experience of practicing law and they sat in rotation in a series

of courts. So there were there were police magistrates courts from the late eighteenth century from on was a little bit earlier for places like both streets and they covered most of the metropolis. So there were places at Westminster and Great Marble Street and Queens Square, there was a couple in the East Standard Worship Street and Thames Um.

There was police courts in in Southbok and Lambeth, and then later in the century they moved out to the suburbs, like places like Highgate for example, so so you could see a magistrate right across the city and there were In addition, of course, there were two magistrates courts in the city of London itself, which is a separate authority, as a separate urban authority, it is not it's not under the same government as the rest of the metropolis.

And these police court magistrates sat alone, which which made them unique in England, where most magistrates would sit in pairs or threes, but in London they had extra powers. They were advised by a clerk, but otherwise they make decisions on whether to send someone to prison to find them or or to send them on for a trial for a jury entirely on their own, so there's no

jury in these trials. They sit at the bottom, if you like, of the criminal justice system, below the the quarter sessions and then the assize or the old baby court and police court magistrates would have dealt with all sorts of crime, but also a lot of social problems. So they would deal with a tremendous amount of drunken disorderly behavior, but also petty theft, some quite serious theft like burglary and fraud, right through two cases of domestic

violence assorts on the police and murder. They if it came to an arder, they wouldn't be convicting somebody of murder, but they will be pushing them up through the criminal justice system. So this this is a place of first first hearing, so it's where some of the facts of cases are established before they then sent on up through the criminal justice system. But these courts are also the first port of call for those complaining about all sorts

of things that bothered them in Victorian London. So people being overcharged by cab drivers, policemen bringing cost costomongers bringing in market traders for obstructing the streets, or for the very poor in London who are requesting help. Um this is where you'll find people accused of committing suicide or attempted suicide, escaped lunatics, dangerous dogs. All these sorts of things will come before the police courts. So there are

fantastic wind into the Victorian um capital. Unfortunately, going back to the problem of documentation in the past, these courts leave us very little in the way of archival material. Most of the records are lost if they were ever kept for very long. There are a small smattering of cases of case books from the Thames Court, but but

not much else outside of Bow Streets. But we do have newspaper reports because the newspapers daily reported on the cases that came for the police courts, because I think their readers were ready interested in looking at life through this this particular lens. M Turning now a little toward the East End. You've also written that it's a place that had a diverse culture. You say, many places of worship, entertainment, trade, a long history. Um. But that after a eight everyone

in the world new where White Chapel was. But at the same time the Ripper murders obscured the reality of that part of London. So if the murders didn't actually define White Chapel and you know, hide what life was actually like thereby be by growing beyond the you know, the do of those events, how could the East End at the time be more justly described, you know, with with your historians eyes looking back beyond those obscuring events, How do we describe the East End of London at

this time? I think it of course, with everything becomes sort of mired in in representations from the period. I always trying to imagine that I'm going back in time and I'm stepping out onto the rather dirty streets of London in the nineteenth century. But I would describe the East End is a multicultural melting pot, a kind of vibrant community of people struggling to vibe in a in a society, of course, which generally failed to support those

that fell on on hard times. So I see a series of communities, not not one community, but several communities known and not always seeing eye to eye, where kind of new immigrants mingled with established ones and native east Enders for want of a better word, rubbed shoulders with new arrivals, and with slumming tourists, you know, wealthier people coming into the area to kind of gorput what they

could see. I see White Chapel is somewhere where poverty was endemic, but at the same time there's an entrepreneurial spirit kind of everywhere. So words I'd used to describe White Chapel in the would be bold, with brassy, sometimes shocking, often funny, amusing, always lively and exciting and and ever changing. And I'd probably go further and say that that's actually how I see the East End, That East End and short ditch and white chaplains, Pittel Fields in twenty one

century Britain. It's very much that kind of exciting, exciting place to be. The first place my mind went when I read that passage that you'd written was those those maps. There's Charles Booth maps that you mentioned where there there you said, you know, there's the color coding and for showing different levels of of wealth, of class, of success. You know, so there's a the markings for very deep

poverty and they're marked in black. And with that stereotype about the East End, I go to look at the map, but it's really a mix it's not there are these pockets where he's marked in black, you know, desperate poverty. But you mentioned the entrepreneurial spirit and these different communities kind of shoulder to shoulder, kind of jostled up together, and I see even in terms of class, there are some very very wealthy neighborhoods in the East End as

well as some of the very poor. So even in the documents that we do have from the time Mike Charles Booth's maps, you can see that kind of the mixing and people shoulder to shoulder who are living quite different lives from each other, even in the same neighborhood. Um, when what were the contrasts between East and West London as victorians imagined them in the eighteen eighties. How for how fair were the kinds of generalizations maybe that they

had about each other. Mhmm, yeah, I think yeah. I mean the all all of what you've just said about the about Boothes is stuff I would certainly point to. I mean the West End, or in popular parliance, the best in was to the wealthy. It was a playground for those who had money, and of course it was

a magnet for people who wanted to work. So plenty of East London has worked in the West End, worked in the shops and the pubs and the clubs, and the and came over, you know, the women came over sometimes to act as prostitutes and escorts in that part of town. And this is where the shops and the

clubs and the theaters of Victoria and London were. Um, you know, this is where you'd find the elegant streets and the squares around Bloomsbury, And this is this is what looked like the capital of the greatest Empire of the world had ever seen, all of it, beautifully lit and well served by transport networks. If you contrast that with the East End of London, um, this is poor, dark,

overcrowded and largely degraded. Um. So, as I've I've said before, the while the West End was affluent, the East End was affluent, kind of strich stinking in the noses of those that visited it. And that's the image we have of the contrast between the East and West ends of London in nineteenth century, and it's probably the image that most Londoners would have had, certainly most West Londoners and

people from outside the capital. How fair was this? Well, the East End was poor, it was overcrowded, and it was home to those dirty trades that were necessary, such as slaughtering and tanning. Those industries has always been placed in the east of the capital, and that that goes right back in history. But Charles Boo's Great Survey of Poverty, his mapping of London, reveals that there were certainly more areas of wealth and prosperity in the West End than

in the East End. But the East End wasn't entirely riddled with poverty so rare. It's for commercial and well to do streets mingle with black and dark blue areas which denote poverty and criminality. Um, and you will find pockets of deprivation across the capital right in what in West London as well. So the contrast is a useful starting point. But London was a very mixed city in the eighteen hundreds and poverty and wealth often lived cheap

by jiles side by side. That remains the case about London in a way that it's not true of some of some other European cities like Paris in the nineteenth century or or today, which which kept the wealthy and

poorer areas much better, um, separated mhm. Can you describe the role of journalism, like like the Median Tribute of Modern babylone series that was published I believe in eight five, Um, how the journalism that was being published in the eighties helped to kind of create that imaginative geography, you know, the stereotypes of the East End. Mm hmm, Well, I

think I mean. One thing we have to remember, of course, is that most people were certainly most middle class people, even middle class people in London, and these were the people that read most of the newspapers rarely ventured into the East End or any of London's other poorer areas. It's like St. Giles or the Borough in southern and they just didn't go there. Instead, they learned about those areas through the newspapers they read, and papers gave them

a partial and a biased view of those areas. Not unlike the way in which Darkest Africa was described by the missionaries who went there to you know, loosely use the term civilized it in the nineteenth century, so colorful descriptions of the East End, you know, featuring the strange people that lived there, There weird customs, there smeeady foods,

and the clothes that they wore. We're all printed in ways that was similar to the descriptions offered of far away in exotic lands in India and China and in Africa, all the parts of the all the parts touched by the British Empire MHM, and people like William Stead, who pioneered what what we could probably call who pioneered what's been termed new journalism, recognized the power that the media had to affect change as well as turning a profit.

By saying newspapers. Steadies a very modern journalist and newspaper editor, and he'd fit right in to our modern media circus. So sensational articles like his made in Tribute of Modern Babylon or or Andrew mens Is a bitter Cry of outclass London, which stead also published, were intended to both

shock and titillate the readers. Since most most people have no first hand experience of the way that the poor lived, the articles that they read in the pages of Organs like the Powerma Gazette would have shocked and concerned them and helped to sort of create this vision of um the East End and other parts of London which whilst having germs of truth in them, it's not to say that these things weren't true, but they come to dominate

all the narratives. But it's it's rather like I would say, until people started to travel in the sort of seventies onwards to other parts of the world, including the United States, people got their ideas about other countries through television, so you know, we all have and you know, I grew up having an idea of nineteen seventies and nine eighties Americas and I've never been there, and would you like, you know, your prime time television to be the accurate

portrayal of you know, American life. And you know it's I guess it's a similar to the Americans watching Downton Appe and thinking that's how English people live. Popular culture presents us with an image which isn't necessarily true. Yeah. Yeah, last night I watched since in Sensibility film with my wife, you know, yeah, yeah, And I watched Perry Mason. There we Go, the New One or or or City of Angels. I think that's the only thing I'm watching at a moment.

So you know, I know all about America in the nineteen thirties thirties because I watched for Walk Empire and all these kind of HBO, big budget things, so I know exactly what it's like over there. Ye. Well, and there's another Booth, William Booth, who's working in White Chapel in the eighteen eighties. So at the same time that that Charles Booth is producing his maps and that these journalists are writing stories, there are people who are motivated

to take action. And William Booth and his wife Katherine, uh, they've formed the Salvation Army, and that's in the East End right, absolutely so he founded the East London Christian Mission in eighteen sixty five. Um, I think on the White Chapel Road. Um, it's I think his first part of his first preaching sessions was in a building which is now a pub called the Blind Beggar, which has more famous modernity connections to the Cray Twins in the nineties. Yeah,

the he adopted. They adopted the Salvation Army tag in in eight They were former Methodists and they wanted to bring religion and abstinence from alcohol to the people of East End. They operated by holding large public meetings and organizing marches through through communities. Of these marches are accompanied by brass bands made up of their members. Um, there's

a military system of organizations. So General Booth is at the head and they have soldiers, and of course they distribute their weekly newspaper, the War Cry, on the streets and by going into public houses and Booth Like many social reformers at the time, saw alcoholism as an integral cause of poverty, immorality and then of domestic violence, and his Army challenged men and women to change their lives, looking to recruit from within those working class communities, and

they brought their their kind of brand of religious further into into communities like White Chapel, which often drew down quite a lot of abuse and ridicule from the locals. And it might he might not have listened to the rhetoric that they were putting out their their Christian vision, because in the early days of the Army of the marching bands delivered a sort of a rather terrible din rather than a badley of beautiful music, because they weren't

particularly good at playing their instruments. And you quite often find Salvationists being brought before magistrates by the police for causing a nistance not or causing an obstruction. But they're clearly people who were driven by their very strong religious beliefs to affect change in the communities they see that are so blighted by alcohol and poverty, crime and homelessness. And when you talk about journalists publishing stories about the East End in a way that connects them to the

margins are the reaches of the British Empire. I thought it was so interesting that William Booth he picks up on the in Dark Africa kind of stereotype and he publishes a book called in Darkest England, right, yeah, and I think in eighteen nine one, um, yes, he he publishes a book because it's taking that kind of idea

of the missionary. So if we're sending missionaries out to Africa, you know, we're sending the likes of Stanley and Livingstone, there's kind of explorers come missionaries to bring the word of It's not just the word of God, is it. Of course, it's it's the it's the world word of white civilization. Two so called uncivilized African tribes in that in that terribly imperialistic way that was such a feature

of the nineteenth century. And but if you're going to do that in Africa and you've got desperate poverty and people who are living in immoral conditions, people not getting married and having children out of word and in Andrew Menss term, you know, incest is common in in the

in the hovels of Leash, London. Even if he was exaggerating, then surely you need missionaries to go out to White Chapel and Spittlefields and then down below the river south of the River into the Borough and Southolk and Burman's in place of that where you've got Similarly, it looks like the world has been neglected. It looks like Christ is not permeating into those parts of the Empire, so darkest England is it's kind of perfect vehicle for him

to to make that point. Mm hmmm. And it strikes me that if we're talking about a place that is, you said at the beginning, a multicultural melting part um, then some of what we've been discussing when it comes to middle class sensibilities is also it's mixing and being motivated by some of those ideas about white civilization too, when you're talking about bringing it to the margins of

the Empire or into this multicultural region of your own city. Yeah, I mean, let's I mean, we need to be really clear. It's a different it's a different world, it's a different it's a different society. But but nine century Britain is a is a quite it's quite a racialist society. You know, were the British see themselves as superior, and superior is white, but superior is British English and then pretty much the rest of the world, and we look down on pretty

much everybody. In the nineteenth century, and waves of immigrants from from Eastern Europe that are coming into London will be disparaged. We are pretty pretty down on the Irish, We are pretty down on the Chinese, who have the small pockets of communities around Lime House. And even the Europeans are fellow Europeans like the French and the Germans, well we have a beef with them as well throughout the century. So everybody is everybody compares very badly to

white British civilization. HM. And when you're talking about social reform and there's kind of missions into the East, and you mentioned some of the attitudes towards alcohol, especially for William Booth, but I know those are more general as well. What were some of the attitudes towards you mentioned earlier prostitution? How do the social reformers talk about prostitution as a part of kind of anti vice campaigning and that kind

of thing in the East End. So prostitute, I mean, attitudes towards prostitution, they kind of they yo yo through the century, the eighteenth and nineteen centuries, so there are varying views of prostitution. They kind of come in and out of fashion. So prostitutes are quite often seen as a necessary evil sort of protecting the pure and innocent young women from from lust from male lust, which which

are seen as kind of natural or at least uncontrollable. Um, they're also seen as victims, so the kind of trope of the poor servant girl who's forced into prostitution after being ruined by a predatory master or or a dishonest lover who's promised to marry her and then run off UM.

But in the aftermath of the Crimean War in the eight fifties, the problem of prostitution became mostly focused around sexually transmitted diseases, particularly the diseases of syphilis and ganaria, because these are he's a kind of undermined being the British war effort against Russia and the Crimea UM. Many more people were lost to disease than were lost to bullets and cavalry savers of the Russians, So this kind of dominates the discourse surrounding prostitution and its effects on

society in the sixties. And in the sixties there are attempts to control prostitution and the spread of what we today would call s T I s U, particularly the spread of sexually transmitted infections in the armed forces, the army and the Navy, and a series of acts had passed, the Contagious Diseases Acts, which helped to cement the idea that prostitutes were a pollutant within society. They are spreading disease.

And this is coupled with the concepts that are criminal class existed in Victorian London, not a particularly new concept, but one that sees a revival in the sixties once we stopped transporting people to Australia. So instead of getting rid of our criminals, they're kind of with us still. They're in our prisons and they're back on our streets, and that kind of reinvigorates this idea of a criminal class, a subspecies of humanity that had the power to corrupt

the honest, respectable working man and his family. And prostitutes were seen as the kind of female bit of this criminal fraternity, even though technically prostitutions not not actually a crime, and so prostitutes were associated with immorality, with drunkenness, with theaters and musicals, and of course with poverty. So there's a whole range of things that come with the Victorian associations with prostitution. In the Victorian period. Mhm, Let's let's

take a step into the East End. We've been talking about the attitudes, the stereotypes, but how did people in the East End actually live? Um? You know, I'm interested for thing king about the White Chapel murders. Um, what are the model dwellings that you write about, the pabod buildings or or other structures like them. Um, what were these model dwellings? And relatedly, kind of who owned the property in the East End where where all these people lived?

So Peabody homes or model dwellings are an attempt from the pretty from the eighteen sixties onwards to rehouse, to re home the poor in better well ventilated and her Genie Holmes, there's a recognition that London is full of unpleasant slums um really badly built and and crumbling housing

from the eighteenth and early and nineteenth century. There are parts of London where which almost no go areas so around St Giles, parts of White Chapel where the term rookery is used, you know, kind of thinking of crows living living together in in nests at the top of

the top of trees. These rookeries are um full of crime and vice and systematically, the the authorities try to knock them down and build better places, or sometimes they knocked down for example around Liverpool Street to build the

new railway station in the nineteenth century. But the idea of model dwellings really comes from movements in the eight comes to fruition in the sixties, and so you have particularly gathering momentum through the philanthropy of George Peabody, who is a wealthy American banker, and he kind of gets together with the architect Henry Derbyshire to establish a trust, the Peabody Trust, which is to which is designed to

build affordable block housing tenement housing across London. Of one of the first of these is in the East End. So these are large tenement blocks um sort of built around built in a sort of square and oblong around the central courtyard, which is creating a safe space for

communities which are shut off from the streets outside. And Peabody is not the only organization doing this, there are other companies who are doing this is part philanthropy, but obviously you're making profit, hopefully but a small profit out of this. So there's the Rothschild Buildings in Flarendine Street,

which built. But many of these places, whilst the emphasis is on rehousing the poor, they only really accommodate the working class who could guarantee to pay the rent, so they acted as a sort of some of these these people are acting as a sort of moral land owner. The model's Weddings movement a kind of moral and owners. Yeah, this is where you'll find people like Octavia Hill from the charity organization Society charity visitors who come around and

check on the people that were living here. So they're checking that the men are in work, they're checking that the children at school, that the rooms are clean and tidy. And if you fail in any of these areas, or you can't pay your rent, then you're going to be evicted. So and that's very difficult to guarantee for people at the very bottom end of society, people who are the casual poor, who don't have regular jobs, who are alive, for example, on work at the docks, on picking up

work on a daily or a weekly basis. Now you can't guarantee that you can pay your rent, so you're not going to get into a model's wedding. And they're actually the people that really need this decent housing. So the models only movement is definitely a good thing. And you can see many of the model dwellings people buildings

are still existent in London today. They built them very well, the beautiful examples of Victorian engineering and building, but they weren't in placea so many other people in the East End will have been forced into you know, poor crowded housing, and we see terrible examples of people living all the way down to two sellers where they're living in sort of stigen conditions in dark, unlit um damp basements all the way up to living in attic spaces, whole families

in one room. Um I no sanitation. You know, you might have um shared pridulate facilities in the yard at the back. So very poor, very cold in winter, very hot in summer. Um. So you see lots of images of white chapel of people outside, people being outside because you wouldn't want to be inside. Because also your inside space is also probably your workshop space. So people who are working, um piece workers, copying or building matchboxes were

going to do that at home. So you've kind of got to get the kids out from under your feet in order to turn them your space into a into a workspace during the day, families sharing beds. These these conditions were what shocked the middle classes when they came

to investigate. And below that, if you, if you, if you couldn't afford even that sort of to rent a room, then you'd be on casual lodging houses where you are paying a few pennies a night for a room or not even a royom, but you're paying for your bed or even a rope to sleep on in the worst possible conditions. And these are some of the situations that the women who found themselves as victims of Chapter Ripper,

and we're living in the nights before they died. And there's even below that, below the casual lodgings are is the workhouse. The workhouse casual ward where you went in in the evening, you've got a little bit of bread to eat, and you've probably got south down as some kind of wash um, your clothes, taking your belongings taking away and workhouse close to where and in the morning you get breakfast. Such a thing it was, but in return for doing some work, breaking rocks or picking oakum

or something like that. So there's a whole degree of poor housing in the East end um, none of it is very good. And who owns it well, it's owned by by slim landlords, mostly people like McCarthy who owns most of whites Row and Dorset Street where Mary Kelly is murdered. These are these are landlords who are not wealthy themselves, but a certainly exploiting the fact that people need somewhere to live in a desperate for anything they can care mhm h. In all of these conditions, as

you say, existed side by side in Whitechapel. Yeah, they they're they're all running and people will probably fall through different gaps, you know. They they Your life was determined by what money you had. So in a society without a benefit system, if you had work then you would probably great. So if you were reasonably if you you and your wife were in work, or you're in work and your wife could look after the kids, and yeah, you could live in a model's warning and probably have

a decent, clean environment to live in. Nobody in the

working class has been played very much. But if you lost work, you've got ill um, your wife died, your husband died, um, then you were very quickly going to fall into poverty and then fall through those gaps in society, So you would fall from a model's welling into a cheap lodging, UM in a room and a cheap lodging, how too, maybe a bunk in a in a kit house to a workhouse, UM to the streets, because because once you once you can't even afford the two or three pence a night for um for part of a

bed in a shared lodging, then you're going to be sleeping on a park bench. M Thinking about the kinds of people that were living in these neighborhoods. You mentioned a large Irish community, a large Jewish community. Um, what was it like to be Irish in London's East End? What was that exp was the experience of being Irish in the East End typical of what they would be like in other places in London? What kinds of trades, what kind of residence as homes were open to London's

Irish population. I think being Irish and being working class Irish and in the East End was probably much to being working class Irish anywhere else in London or anywhere else in England. You know, places like Liverpool had large Irish communities as well, so poor and the Irish population was generally poor, but it was pretty well established. I mean Irish people have been coming to England forever, but

particularly in the nineteenth century after the Potato family. They were generally lower skilled than most other Londoners, that which made them more at risk to unemployment, to lower wages and therefore impoverishment in London. In the East End, they could find work at the docks, because irishman were noted as strong and capable and good workers. They made they made good doctors and importantly they made good Stevie doors, which are the higher end of the of the dock industry.

Irish women would find work in workshops, so they might they might work as seamstresses or match girls, and many of course would have been as they would have been anywhere else in than they would have been employed as domestics and domestic servants. So I mean the Irish being what it was like to be Irish in London. I mean there's prejudiced against the Irish, but it's it's not in the same way that it might have been prejudiced towards people on on the basis of their hum their race.

As such, the Irish um were associated very much with a with a hard drinking and a hard fighting culture and um and their their predominant religion, which is Catholicism for many of the ones that came over, set them apart from largely Protestant England. And I think what you find from the seventies onwards into the eight is the kind of growth of it's the growth of Irish nationalism.

So Irish home rule becomes very much on the comes to dominate politics, domestic politics from the seventies onwards, and then in the eighties we start to see, although it has happened earlier in the eighteen sixes, we start to see episodes of Fenian Irish Republican terrorism. So there's a series of bombings in the eighties, which probably means that

the Irish are um that they're suspected. They become a suspected part of society, and that probably increases prejudices their Catholics, their bombers, their drunkards, they're violence and they're probably all thieves. That's probably a prevalent view of the Irish, but they don't have it as bad as some other people. I think, Hm, can you describe the Jewish community in the East End at the time. Um again kind of homes, trades, attitudes. How long had there been a Jewish community in the

East end of London. Well, there's been a Jewish community in the East end of London for a tremendously long period of time, because it's Oliver Cromwell in the period of the English Republic who allows the Jews who have been expelled from England in the medieval period back in. So they aren't to establish communities, but they're not allowed to live in trade in the city of London, so

they set up around the edges. So that's kind of why we get a Jewish community around Spittle Fields on the on the edge of the city, in the edge

of Mita Square. Um. This community, which is well established by the eighteenth century but quite small, is mainly made up of Sephadic of Portuguese Jews, and this changes in the nineteenth century with large numbers of Eastern European Central European Jews coming and fleeing from persecution and economic distress in the Russian Empire, so that the so called pale of settlement where they're forced to live and forced to

serve in the Czar's armies. So Jewish people are are leaving Russia, UM and places like Poland and Lithuania what we would call today, and they're and they're coming across Europe to settle in England or to travel on to whether I think they really want to go, which is America. And when they settle in places like Spittlefields where there's already an established community, this works for them because there they can find work as shoemakers and as tailors and shopkeepers.

They can they can understand the language, which generally becomes a kind of speaking of Yiddish. And they are concentrated in areas around brook Lane, Went Street, Flower in Dean Street and Galston Street where where their their synagogues are whether people that understand them, where they can buy the food they're used to and actually from descriptions at the time, you know, this is looking like another country. Actually, of course, if you travel to White Chapel today, you'll see a

similar thing, but with a different community. You've got a Bengali community there lots of people from from Um, a different part of the world. But but but similarly to the Jewish community in the nineteenth century, you would have found, you know, black things posted in Hebrew signs on walls in Hebrew. So they brought their own customs, their religion,

their language, their clothes, their food. And they also, of course, and I think it's also helped with their prejudice against them, they bought some of their radical political ideas like socialism and anarchism. Mhm hm um. Jumping forward just a little bit to touch on White Chapel before we continue some

of these general comments. Um, just before any Chapman's murder, the Star begins to publish the story that that Polly Nichols killer was a Jew named leather apron Can you describe what kinds of prejudices, as you said, against Jewish life that kind of reporting would have conjured up for

the Stars readership. Yes, I mean there's a there's a the suggestion that the Whitechapel murderer was a guy called leather apron Um sometimes identified as John Piser, and that this is this is very much in keeping with contemporary views of Jews, but also the way in which the Whitechapel murderer was the idea of the Whitechapel murderer was constructed at the time and has come down to us

ever since. So the descriptions of leather Apron in the newspapers highlighted things like his small black eyes and his Hebrew features, which is probably suggesting he had a large nose, that kind of Semitic appearance, and the color of his skin. He was described as sinister um. He was in the trades that we would associated, not exclusively with Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century, but certainly with many of them.

He was a shoemaker or a bootmaker or a slipper maker, and he was he was said to be someone who terrorized local women with a long sharp knife. Now I think that's important because English people weren't necessary associated with knives. You associated foreigners with knives, Portuguese sailors, um, Jewish barbers and shoemakers, Native Americans escaping from buffalo bills while west traveling show. So it was easier for people in London in the nineteenth century to believe that Jack the Repper

was a foreigner. He was a crazy immigrant, someone identified as other, rather than an indigenous resident of White Chapel. So those are all things which it's the presence of large numbers of Jews in that area, and the prejudice and the anti Semitism, which is definitely rife in Victorian London, which helps to allow someone like the start to point the finger at a leather ape. And for what it's worth, of course John Piser wasn't chatter rippey. He had an

alibi for that. That that's um night and the sergeant Sergeant Thick that arrested him ended up having to protect him from the mob outside. Mhm, mhm. In the opening of London Shadows, you mentioned, um that there are some distinctly theological aspects of the East Ends reputation. Uh. And we've talked about the Salvation Army and you know, mentioned kind of missionary efforts and that kind of way of

thinking about what was going on. Um. And in your book you say it wasn't the worst, the most criminal place to live in London in the eighteen eighties, but it was representative from many Victorians of the depths to which humanity could sink when separated from a close relationship with God and Christianity. Can you say a bit more about how theology is shaped the ideas we've been talking about about crime and poverty and vice. Yeah, for sure, I'll never get used to hearing my words come back

at me. Um, yeah, I think I mean Victorian British society was a lot more religious than modern Britoness society is, even if going to church wasn't as ubiquitous as as some people probably thought it ought to be. But most social reformers were motivated by their Christian beliefs. And this this kind of manifested itself in a in a highly moral discourse about society and charity was closely linked to Christianity, or, in the case of the Jewish community, to traditions within Judaism.

It was it was a moral obligation to help the poorest, but that obligation sat side by side with a belief that some sections of Victorian society had lost sight of the message of Christ. They had to be enlightened. The Word of God needed to be brought to the people of our chapel, just as missionaries will bringing it to

the supposedly uncivilized peoples of Africa. Um. So, I think you've got that kind of sense that the all the people that are writing about the East, and Andrew Mens, William Stead, Samuel Barnett, you know, the women like Helen den Dendy, Helen Bows and Cake, Beatrice Web. Very many of those social reformers, Charles Booth, they are motor of eight. They can't separate out there their religion. It's such a

part of them, and I think that's quite different. It's quite difficult, I think, to get that across to people in our world because religion doesn't play that kind of role in our society. It's very much an add on for many people in Britain today. You know, you go to church at certain times for for weddings and funerals and baptisms perhaps, but it's not part of your daily life in the way that it would have informed the lives of people at that time. So everything kind of

gets seen through that particular lens. Mhm, mhm. Thinking about life and death in the East End, Um, what we consider today the Ripper murders weren't the only killings in the White Chapel area or across the East End. And there's violent crime on record in the neighborhood throughout the eighteen EIGHTI its not just you know, in a few months, um, but how violent And again we're kind of talking about

stereotypes of versus reality. How violent was Whitechapel really and and then what was the general understanding of that violence that did occur. Yeah, and it's obviously very difficult to measure violence in the past. It's quite difficult to measure violence in our own society. Is very diffult to measure of violence in the past because because you're you can

only measure statistics of violence. So you can you can measure reported crime, you can measure prosecuted crime, you can measure convictions, so the number of assaults and number of murders, etcetera, etcetera, and we don't really have those sorts of stats for nine century. There's a sense that violence is how the generally speaking crime has been in the decline from the eighteen fifties onwards and is beginning to rise again in the eighties. And that's probably also to do with cycles

of of economic cycles. It's also to do with economic cycles, because poverty and crime are are interlinked. And when we talk about violent crime in the past, we're often talking about violent property crime like robbery, rather than violence per se.

I think violence was endemic in the East ending White Chapel, but murder was relatively uncommon, or perhaps we could say that it was no more common than anywhere else in London, and the White Chapel murders of course are notable because of their particular brutality and the and the sequence that was unusual. Casual violence, assaults, fights between men in pubs, domestic abuse were daily occurrences and we can see this

in the prosecutions at the police magistrate courts. At places like Thames and Worship Street, m violence was mostly carried out by men, either against other men, against the police, or against their female partners and wives, or violence was directed at children. And the East End Whitechapple Spittlesfields was a rough area, but I don't think it's helpful to see it as more violent than any other poor district

in the UK at that particular time. Well, I can say a bit about other murders if that's useful, Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah, I mean there were there were other murders, and not not least the Thames torso mystery, which which could possibly

be linked to the rip of Killings um so. In that case, there was a discovery of a female torso in the Thames at Raynham in May seven, with more body parts surfacing that that same year and then in September right while the White Chappel cases is kind of reaching its enif another torso was being found amongst the building worked for police headquarters at Whitehood and in June, third dismembered female body was dragged from the Thames at Horsby down before in September of that year, the police

discovered the rotting torso underneath arches in Pension Street, which isn't far from where There's Stride had been murdered just a year earlier. There were several other high profile murders in London. Only four men were sent to the gallows of the result of that, so I think we have to put it into context that we think of it as being a murderous age, but actually they weren't sending that many people. We weren't executing that many people for murder.

The most compelling murder of eighteen eighty I think was probably that of Joseph Rumbold, who was killed in May. He was a was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was killed as he strolled in Regent's Park with his girlfriend um and this is part of a gang feud out of hand and his killer was an eighteen year old there was sentenced to death, but reprieved on account of his age. So he kind of tells us that that there were there were domestic murders,

there were murders through robberies, there were gang murders. The Ripper murders because they were serial, because they were particularly brutal, are different. But but but there wasn't a particularly more

murderous here than any other. Mm hmmmm. Well, And in your book Jack and the Temps Torso Murders, Um, you describe those cases that you just mentioned at Raynom and Whitehall and Pension Street, UM, in a way that I think is very that I found very helpful and compelling, because we do talk as if even and this is part of the myth of Jack the Ripper, that what we call the White Chapel murders were particularly horrifying and brutal, and they were. But reading about the Torso murders I

found equally horrifying. UM. And so I appreciated what you

did with that book, and so I'm glad you. I'm glad you went on to mention them in this conversation now despite me not dropping that into the outline, because and Paul Beg does this too in his book Forgotten Victims, where he talks about the way that you think about the White Chapel murders, and often it's a favored suspect or something that based on you know who, uh, someone you know who's identified as a suspect brings in or omits certain crimes are killings that happened in the East

End in that year. So I thought that was very helpful in your own work when we're talking about building a case and how connected to see these things or not um that there's so much of of life of death, even of the crimes that were committed. That's that gets omitted from the stories that we tell for sure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean we focus on what we want to focus on in the replicase and that that's how that's how

it's been driven. And that's kind of the falsification of history in a way, because you leave out the bits that don't fit the argument you want to make. And I think even even the best historians are are guilty of of that um at some point, because it's in as long as you don't admit things which as long as you don't admit omit things which completely dismantle your argument.

I think he's trying to probably get away with with with emphasizing the facts or the situations which they think are most compelling to drive the narrative that they want to present. Thinking about the agencies responsible for investigating or preventing all of these crimes. Um, you mentioned earlier that the City of London Police is different from the Metropolitan Police. You mentioned the Thames River Police. There's also the c i D at Scotland, the Criminal Investigative. I'm sorry, what's

the department? Yes? Can you briefly describe those various agencies how they related to each other? Uh, you know, give our listeners a sense of what was going on with this complex, sometimes seemingly byzantine, policing organization in a complicated city like London. Yeah. Well, the first thing we have to establish, a course, is that London. London didn't have a police force until so the police in still relatively new.

That might seem a strange thing to say, but but you know, it's only fifty or sixty years of policing by the time you get to eight. Since Peel passed the Metro and Police Act in eighteen twenty nine. The that created a professional police force which covered all of London, apart from the City of London, which kept its own discreete police force. The City of London is governed differently to the rest of London. It still is governed differently to the rest of London. It has its own corporation.

So by eight for the Rippmoders, when the Rippermoders take place, London has divided into twenty six police districts, effectively plast the city of London. Um, so you've got they're all they're all given a letter, so aid through to to why Um, I don't think this is it? Actually there might be, so scrap that bit. But anyway, there's there's they've all they're all given a letter, and so H

Division looks after most of White Chaplain's bittlefield. But there is there is the ability to draft in officers from different divisions. But they've all got their own particular divisional commanders and therefore their own petty jealous and rivalries. So we shouldn't think that A division and H Division are necessarily getting on with each other. And there's certainly a divide between uniform and playing clothes. The detectives and detection

has a bad press in England. It took a long time, so there wasn't a detective agency in England in nine when the police was first formed. It took until eighteen forty two, and it took at Chilly a couple of catastrophic failures of the police to catch murderers, high profile criminals, criminals for them to create the detected apartment in eighteen forty two, and that that was a very small number of officers, and you could ask ordinary uniform officers to

go into playing clothes. But the British kind of didn't like the idea of playing clothes policing at the time. It kind of smacked of Napoleonic spies. They had quite strong memories of of Napoleon's secret police, and we didn't really want to have a detective in that way. It only that only really changes in the nineteenth centuries as

detectives get a place in popular culture. So Dickens the American Wilkie Collins, and then of course um Sherlock Holmes, that they these characterizations of detection, if not police detective in the case of homes, that they begin to establish in the in the popular mind, the idea that detection can be a good thing because Jenery speech and we

don't think it's a good thing. Um. Alongside the Met and the City of London Police Force, you have the Criminal Investigation Department which is created in it's basically the Detective Division, the Detective Department renamed so in there's a massive scandal um called the turf fraud scandal, when several members of the detective departments are um fingered as as being part of a criminal fraud racket surrounding betting, and

there's a there's a there's a um. Some of these these detectives kind of flee and the trackdown and eventually there's a big trial at the Old Bailey in in in October November eight and a couple of officers are I think three officers are eventually sent to prison for for the fraud. And there's a Home Office inquiry after that which looks at the defects in the Detective Department

not just in London but elsewhere. And there's a reorganization led by a guy called Howard Vincent who becomes the first director of the Criminal Investigation Department and he appoints a guy called Frederick Adolphus Williamson as the first Superintendency. I d he'd been in the detective department and he

kind of survived the scandal. He'd come out of that smelling of roses and he investigated the guys that have been been called up in it, and so they redeemed it the Criminal Investigation Department so that it didn't have the word detective in its Yeah. Um, and then once we're into the eighteen eighties and we're headed for the year of the White Chapel murders. Before we get there, Ah,

Charles Warren comes in as Commissioner of Police. Um. Can you describe his personality and maybe some achievements from his career leading up to his appointment as commissioner and what were his relationships to these various players in the in the Metropolitan Police, the Home Office, the Detectives. Mm hmm. As Charles Warren is is an interesting character. UM. He's a military man. He's background is in the military. In fact,

his his background was particularly in the Royal Engineers. So he's a kind of military man who builds bridges, literally builds bridges, UM, does earthworks and as part of the Empire, that's extremely important. So he's a very successful military man. For most of his career. He blots that a bit later on, but will come to that. UM and he I mean he's prior to the his appointment in six as head of the Metropolitan Police, he for example, investigated

the disappearance of an eminent Orientent. Orient and eminent Orientent, I can't say that a guy called Professor Edward Henry Palmer. He disappeared in Syria. UM and he looked into into what had happened to him on bath of the government. UM. He earned a knighthood for his service in South Africa in Becuana Land, so he was he was kind of considered. He must have been considered as a safe pair of

hands and Henderson had to well. Henderson resigned from the MET has been been in charge for many, many years and he resigned for the MET following the West End riots of when the police mishandled the demonstration in Table Square which ended up with rioters smashing windows in power Mau and I think what what the authorities wanted was someone who could who could impose some discipline on the police, because there were also concerns that the police we weren't

disciplined enough and weren't able to deal with these sorts of difficult situations, and I think his military background in many respects defines his time as commissioner of them. He didn't really get detection, he didn't get planes closed, so he clashed with C I, with I D. And he didn't get on with his boss, who was the Home Secretary, Matthews, so he wasn't well served by his relationship. Probably I

imagine it was quite a prickly upstanding military guy. You probably see him in those sort of images of him in those things like the Charge of the like Brigade, and there's sort of great films from the sixties and seventies of British Imperial military figures, so I kind of

see him like that. Um, but actually a very successful military man until he resigned in their memor, not as people say, because of the failure of the police to catch the ripper, but actually because he he published a sort of defensive himself in a and a popular magazine, and he forgot to ask his boss for permission to do so, so he kind of had to fall on

his um, on his sword and leave the police. I suspect he was probably quite bad of that, and he went back to the army and and and in this case he ends he ends up in in eighteen nine, so eleven years after the Ripper case, serving um in the South African War that what sometimes owned as the Boar War. And he's he has to lead the assault on Spine Cop which is an unmitigated military disaster. He got through that and actually he recovered his reputation in

the relief of the the town of Ladysmith. And I think it's interesting that Paul Big describes him as a man to whom fate certainly dealt to cruel hands. Leadership of the police during the Ripper case, which is probably in sible for them to solve, and leadership of a of the of soldiers at the battles Fine Cop where they were rudely defeated by the boors. So yeah, interesting guy. One other piece of the legal process that becomes very

important in the White Chapel case is coroners. There there are plenty of surgeons and coroners who have a hand in the investigation, uh the inquests, the examinations in general. How significant were coroners in the legal process of the

eighties when it came to murder or violent crime. Well, I kind of think of the coroner is very important because they kind of declare that someone's their role is to decide that someone has been unlawthy killed, So that do tears to investigate sudden or unexplained death so long as that's been notified as a death by a member of the public um. But we shouldn't assume that they investigated every suspicious death, or that that every homicide was

identified as such. I think in the case of the Ripper motors is pretty clear that you didn't need a tremendous amount of medical knowledge to know that somebody had

been murdered in those situations. But in recent years, I think historians have concluded that as the costs of coroner's inquest and the cost of investigation investigating crime increased in the nineteenth century, some of the homicides that were deemed more difficult to solve might might more commediently been labeled as accidental death by by coroner's um so and going on from the eight fifties, the police took on quite

a few of the duties of the coroners. So you have policemen appointed as coroner's office is, and that they're the intermediates between the police and the coroner, so by corner is important. But the police also have their own attached officers and of course the police surgeons to help them determine whether a death was suspicious, and then if it was, what clues whatevidence could be gleaned about the

cause of death and any potential perpetrated mhm, mhm. And so we come to and let's begin with Emma Smith and Martha Tabram. What were the circumstances of their murders and how were they interpreted when they first occurred and were examined and discussed. They're quite different. I think the two murders, the murders of m Smith and the murder

of Martha Tabron, should probably be separated out. I think you'll find as a as a consensus growing now that Martha Tabran was a ripper victim was killed by the same man who killed the five canonical victims. Not not everybody would agree that with that, But then not everybody would agree that the five canonical victims were killed by the same person anyway, But then a Smith is quite different.

She was most probably a prostitute living in spittlefields, living in George Street who in April was set upon by a gang of men on Osborne Street, which is at the foot of Brick Lane. It looked like a particularly nasty street robbery and Emma was left was left for dead. She she managed to crawl back to her digs, but she died later she was she was taken on on the stretcher to a London hospital where she died of

peritonitis on the fourth of April. So I think she was killed by a group of men, which doesn't really fit in with them the rest of the murders, and at the time I think it was just put down to a group of bullies, bullies being like a group of pimps, prostitutes, pimps or bullies. Martha Tabram is a bit different. I mean, she's thirty seven year old woman, possibly a prostitute um but like many of the victims, you know, she may not have been a prostitute. She

may she may have temporarily been a prostitute. She had a family background, but she was an alcoholic and she had a reputation for being seen out with men that she wasn't going out with, which might have tainted her reputation. And she was found dead on the landing of George Yard Buildings on the seventh of August. She'd been stabbed

thirty nine times. Most of the wounds have targeted her abdomen, so she hadn't had her throat slashed, and she hadn't had organs removed, which would be like the later killings or some of the later killings. But I think there's enough in in Martha's murder which is suggestive of somebody early on in the process developing the the modes operandi,

which was which we would see in later killings. I think at the time it was considered to be a very brutal murder, and there was a suggestion it might have been carried up by soldiers off duty soldiers, a

though there was never any proof of that. Um it made a link to prostitution because again she one of the women that came forward in the aftermath of her murder was a woman called Mary Anne Connolly or pearly Pole, who was a local prostitute, who said that she and Martha had been out and picked up men on the

White Chapel Road. UM So it made the identification between prostitution and a killer on the streets and that there's kind of those kind of links, But it wasn't until Polly Nichols was murdered at the end of all, because the people began to put those two things together in

the newspapers. Yeah, and when you talk about the newspapers starting to put things together with the murder of poly Nichols, can you describe the way that the press covered murders like this and maybe, um, what relationship did that put journalism in with the police. Yeah, I think probably the reality is that the relationship between the press and the police in the throughout the Rippl case was was pretty mixed and and that depended on as well on what

newspaper you were reading. So the police, Charles Warren in fact, had drawn both praise and criticism for the way that they dealt with things like Bloody Sunday, which is the suppression of writing in Faco Square in the November seven the previous year. Um So the Times, which is an establishment newspaper, kind of admired the strong armed tactics used

against a mob of near due worlds and vagrants. But the more liberal press, so the Star radical press like the Star or William Staid to powermal gazette tended to condemn police brutality and heavy handedness, and that follows through into the Ripper murders as they as the Watchhopple murders unfolded and they become a national and then an international story. The inability of the police to catch the killer, to catch Jack, drew down greater criticism on them and and

onto Warren. And then once you start to see the publication of taunting letters from supposedly coming from the murderer himself or officers advice from the public, the police investigation actually becomes part of the story and that becomes a negative or that it's very easy for the press to snipe at the police. And you have that business as well, if you wouldn't have today of the police investigation being tainted by the fact that journalists are all over it.

So as soon as the murder occurs, there's not that business of a sort of clean police space for them to investigate. It's full of journalists with pens and paper and ask interviewing witnesses. And you have examples of the police interviewing somebody and then half an hour later they're being interviewed by by a journalist and that there were to have been printed in the newspapers. That's very difficult for the police to control the investigation in that way.

Mhm hm. Why so you mentioned those letters. Why did the press publish the what's called the Dear Boss letter. How would you describe the significance of that letter and it's public pitian for the case and for an understanding of these murders. Well, I think actually the reality is that the letter was of course, the letter is not written by Jack the Ripper. It's given the name Jack the Ripper. It's not coming from the killer. It's probably

coming from an enterprising journalist or a newspaper editor. And I think we probably know now that that is Tom Bullying and Charles Moore of the Central News Agency. They could see a good story when they saw one, and they and they exploited it by penning that letter and getting it onto the pages of the London Press. And I think probably with the compliance it will be reluctantly at first of the police. The police are desperate from lead, so they this might work. This might get people to

recognize the handwriting, who knows, might trigger a memory. That's why they That's why they do it. But in publishing it, they kind of created the monster that we know as Jack the Ripper. Before the Deer Boss letter was published, UM, and it was published in the newspapers and on bill bill posters, at least two women have been brutally murdered

by a person or persons unknown. After the release of the Better and the subsequent double event, that the killing of two women on one night, a mythical lone assassin has been established in the minds of the Victorian public. And significantly, I think we've we've never shifted from that view of the killer in the hundred and thirty or more years that have passed since the murders ended. And that's the power of the Victorian press. It created the

idea of a lone assassin. What in the history of of the British press, what kinds of precedents were therefore discussing a case like this? UM. Was the sensational journalism part of a tradition or you mentioned that it's called sometimes the new journalism? Is it something really new? Yeah? So what was new about new journalism was its focused I think on an investigation on highlighting and interrogating social

ills scandals in some depth. But This is actually prompted, of course, in part by the greater freedoms of publishing. So in previous part of the century there's been restrictions on the presidents, some degree of censorship which could form the way largely by the nineteenth century, and taxation. So newspapers are expensive. And if you couple this with the fact that what we see coming across from from the USA is the technological development in printing that makes us

able to produce newspapers um more rapidly and cheaper. And then of course things like railways allow us to distribute distribute them more quickly, so news could travel further and travel faster. Many more people could read, or know somebody who could read, so they could read to them, sit around in the pub and read it. More people could afford to buy a newspaper because they're cheaper, and so

the newspaper industry is growing. So it's a massive takeoff, particularly from the sixties and seventies, in newspaper readership and

newspaper production. Um So the kind of modern newspaper industry, certain newspaper industry we're familiar with by the middle of the twentieth century is kind of established in the late century, and as a result, newspaper editors are looking for more and more sensational copy, especially stories that are going to plug readers in and keep them coming back for next installments. If you're a daily newspaper, what are you going to how are you going to attract your reader to come

back Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Um. If you're a weekend newspaper and you've got that's more time to think about the story you're putting out. What kind of sensation your story do you want to represent to your readers to get them to buy your newspaper on Sunday rather than your rivals. And you've got paper boys crying the news in the streets and literally shouting the headlines and

persuading people to part with their pennies and shillings. So that's really important to have an installment story, and the Ripper case is perfect for that in terms of sensational crime news, though there's nothing particularly new about in news terms.

Prime news had filled columns in the papers going right back to the eighteenth century, right back to the early days of the newspapers, and which which emerged really after the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century, and in addition to newspapers, there's a tremendous English print culture, British print culture, which had provided a regular diet of murder news and moral panics for readers all the way through

through that period. So every execution there would be people selling pamphlets about the person being executed, so you could kind of read about the person you're seeing slowly strangled

to death. And the Victorians, as I think writers like Judith Flanders and Rosalind Crone have both eloquently described, the Victorians are fascinated by murder, and they followed all the gruesome details of homicides, from the discovery of dead bodies through to the capture of the killers, to their trial and then and then at least until eight their public execution.

And actually, I think Flanders has argued that once you remove hanging from the public gaze, whence it's no longer taking place on in front of a prisoner, on the roofs of a prison, and you put it behind brick walls. Actually that makes people's fascination with murder grow even more. And of course, by the sixties we were only hanging people for murder. We weren't hanging people as we did in the eighteenth century for all forms of crime MHM.

One case from the eighteenth century that looks like an interesting point of comparison or a precedent is the London monster case. Can you describe that in brief terms and maybe how it was published about in the press? Yes, briefly. In there were a series of attacks in London on women which kind of provoked a sort of moral panic.

They kind of happened like this, So a strange man would approach respectable women, offered to let them smell his his bunch of artificial flowers, his nosegay, and then stabbed them, usually whilst making suggestive comments. And he generally stabbed them in in, in the behind, in the buttons, and sometimes they wouldn't even realize they've been stabbed until they got home. And because they wore so many players of clothing. Yeah, And the story occupied the columns of newspapers, which created

a sensation. And the man named John Julius Augustine, he was a wealthy insurance broker, off with a fifty pound reward, which fifty pounds is a considerable sum of money. And eventually someone was caught and put on trial in July seventeen ninety a man named Rennick Williams. He was an artificial flower sell um. He had two trials because the first trial is a bit of a fast but it

was he was convicted and sent to prison. And I think we can see some links between the man because he was dubbed the London Monster or the monster two event in and and of course to the context of the time. I think it's important to always to see history in context. And it's seventeen eighty nine. We know about seventeen eighty nine is there was a revolution going

on across the channel in France. But the revolution in France, following on from the the revolution in America in the seventeen seventies, had raised all these ideas about rights and freedoms, and one of the rights and freedoms that people talk

about was women's rights and freedoms. And I think when we look at the London Monster, while it didn't directly influence press reporting of the White Chapels, there's a connection in between the way in which the demonizing of the represvctives as loose women operating outside of male protection, and the late eighteenth century advice for women to stay off the streets for fear of the London Monster. There's a connection there in this idea that women should stay off

the streets. So the White Chapel murder and the London Monster of both examples along with spring Hill Jack in the nineteenth century, of characters who target women, and male characters and target women and are kind of saying get back inside the house. Stopped straying into what is male masculine territory. So regarding uh, the letters that came that followed after, Um, the Dear Boss letter that, as you say, gives the kind of mythological character of Jack the Ripper,

his his name and you know, a kind of saucy identity. Um, you've written that it's highly likely that all of the letters are fakes or hoaxes and do not come from the killer at all. You mentioned the only one that that maybe is different from that is the what's called the Fromhell letter. Um. You explore those ideas at length in the Torso Murders book. Can you say a bit more about that point about the letters likely all being hoaxes. How difficult was it for police to trust any kind

of tips or notes or witness statements that they got. Yeah, I mean, I think most researchers today would agree that the vast majority of the letters, certainly the letters that are purport to be from the killer are either fakes or hoaxes. I mean, lots of people writing letters, were writing letters which were offering advice, and we probably have

to deal with them slightly differently. Um, but it's not it's not beyond the bounds of credibility that the killer would try and communicate with the police of the public. I mean in the States, and you have the Zodiac killer, who certainly did. It's just that these particular letters generally seem incredulous. And I think the exception being made from hell letters because it wasn't signed chat the Ripper. Um. Also that handwright some handwriting experts, and I would qualify

that because they don't all agree. Do hold out the possibility that this was the work of some poorly educated individual who was unused to writing, perhaps someone learning their letters as an It's one of the points that we make in attempts to also case a book about the tempts also cases that we imagine that our guy was potentially kind of trying to trying to improve himself. So, but regardless of whether the letters are real or fake,

hoaxes or whatever. Um, it follows that in such a difficult, fevered situation as the police found themselves, they'd have to check every single lead they got, regardless of whether it was credible or not. Um. So hours and hours and hours of police time would have be wasted following up those kind of false leads sent in by attention seekers. If that's how we want to see them. Um, just because the stuff is looks obviously fake of him, what

if it had been true? And I think that's probably explains also why they published the deer Bost letter, because it's what if when it when it came to investigating crimes, um, to what extent did police depend on good informants and good tips in order to solve a tricky case? Were there any significant or high profile crimes that were solved with the assistance of like an anonymous letter leading up to this point, I, yeah, it's one of your curveballs.

I don't really know of any. I mean, what I can say is that the police use informants, and you know, the use of informants by detectives by polices is often reported.

So there are very many cases that have become for the police, magistrates, or before the old baby in the nineteenth century where you will hear a policeman saying acting on information, acting on information, and some of that information will be information by what we would call a steak out, you know, watching a watching a building, watching watching particular suspected criminals. But often it's information from the criminal um fraternity,

from neighbors overhearing conversations. In much the same way that the police have probably always and will always gain information. The public will tell them some, they'll get some from criminals who want two um get a lighter sentence, or they'll they'll pay money to people on the margins of criminality in order to get information. All of that kind of stuff is really important. I don't think the police could operate without and I don't think the police in

the ninete century could operate without informants, without information. Um. We have to bear in mind because of the nineteent century police don't have many of the tools that the modern police have, you know, like DNA testing, fingerprint testing, close circuit television, and they have none of that stuff. M mhm. Thinking um, back to the people who were

the women who were targeted. You challenge the idea that all of the women killed in the White Chapel murders were prostitutes, and you mentioned this earlier in this conversation too. Um you wrote, one of the first things that anyone reads about the Ripper murders is that all of the victims were prostitutes. However, it is probably more accurate to say that all of the women killed by the White Chapel murderer had been selling themselves for sex in the

streets shortly before they met their death. So can you describe the significance of the distinction that you're making there, because I do think it's important, But I'd like to hear hear you talk a little bit more about how from your understanding of what was going on in the East End of One at the time, what life was

like there, how important this distinction is. Mhmm. Yeah, well, I mean it's become it's now become wholly contested whether the victims um of Jack the Ripper, specifically the canonical fire victims were prostitutes. I think I'd make a distinction on the grounds ocasionally selling sex in order to get enough money to eat, drink, or pay for the roof of your head is not the same thing as being

a full time sex worker. It may well be that all of Jack's victims were impoverished prostitutes, as they've been described for over a century, But I think we should hold out the possibility that at the time that they met their deaths, they were so down and out the prostitution was their only option. It's, of course very easy for the police. It was very of course, very easy for the police and oppressed to dismiss these women as unfortunate who brought their own deaths upon themselves. They were

all thought to be prostitutes. But whether that's because they were single women, or they were women who were out drinking and they're women out on their own, I mean, those all fit with ideas of what prostitutes were. So kind of that boundary between being what we might describe as a woman of loose morals and a prostitute. A

prostitute somebody who sells sex for money. Women to lose morals doesn't necessarily sell sex at all, and she might have sex with people who she's not married to m and have multiple partners and that might even in our own society be frowned upon, rightly or wrongly, but in the nineteenth century most certainly would have been So I think for me, all these women were killed because the the killer for they were prostitutes. There is also a

distinction there. I think the killer believed that they were prostitutes and that was his motivation for killing them. But the same token prostitutes would present themselves in parts of London where it was they made themselves vulnerable to a killer who targeted strangers in the way that we think. Yeah. Yeah, And and in some of your writing you followed Walker with in describing Eastern sex workers as members of the

working class. Can you describe how how that point helps us to understand their lives, how they would have thought about themselves, their control over their own trade. How is it helpful to think of sex workers as members of the working class. Yeah, absolutely, I think it's really important. I mean, um, these are poor women. None of them came from wealth, and we know a bit more about thanks to the work of various members of the White

Chappele Society and authors like Neil Sheldon. We know that many of these represctives had kind of normal, respectable lives before they arrived in the East Den. But but almost invariably their lives are characterized by kind of decline into poverty exacerbated by by alcoholism, um, personal tragedies, broken marriages, you know, bereavements, financial insecurities. This is of what led them to the East End. But they're all working class women.

None of them came from a higher ranking society. And I think Walker which is interesting in saying that when we look at Victorian prostitutes, who who are invariably described as fallen and unfortunate by people at the time, these these are women who have fallen from grace, who are unfortunately in the situation. They find themselves a Walker which

wants to turn that around. And I think this is interesting to see these women as being empowered and independent being you know, these are women who have refused to follow the kind of path in life that's been mapped out for them by men generally, and instead of gone for the relative quick prosperity and freedom that that that prostitution might bring them, at least in the short term.

So I mean we again, context is everything. We have to remember that late nineteenth century British society was heavily patriarchal, with women's rights, feminism. These are things that are emerging, but but it's very very slow. For the vast majority of working class women, life offered not very much. You

had a life of judging, drudgery. You had a life which is it's a life characterized by almost constant pregnancy or childcare, and a marriage to a man who, frankly was probably considered decent if he didn't beat you up. So perhaps it's not unreasonable for some young women to choose to prostitute themselves for a relatively brief period of time if it brought them much more money than they

would earn by sewing or charing or something else. Um Like, like young women of all ages, they want to be able to spend money on nice things, on the hats and clothes and jewelry. And I think we should recognize that that that this sort of female independence was frequently being repressed by by male and female actors in society at all classes. Victorian society is obsessed with notions of

respectability and the proper social order of things. So prostitutes are independent women who clearly didn't know their proper place, and who flaunted their sexuality, and for some that set them apart as social priors, and in many ways, of course, justified the actions of a serial killer in murdering them. Um. It's something that um Donald Romblo for his sites is it's for some victorians that the Ripple was just engaged

in street cleaning. Um. You mentioned Neil Sheldon, and you know in reading I mentioned already Paul Begs Forgotten Victims book. But in those studies that have looked at the lives of these women, you know, we find as you mentioned, that any Chapman was married to a coachman for a time and lived with him in Berkshire where she where he attended to sear test marry um before she ended up in Whitechapel, And that Liz Stride she opened a coffee hall with one of her husbands. Um. What sort

of of class positions were these? Were these still working class people? Um kind of what from what heights did any Chapman and list Ride in particular fall if we're talking in that kind of parlance of the time. But as I understand it, Liz Stride, you know, should come over from Sweden, so she's an immigrant and a very interesting life, and it's reasiful to know about her life because I think much of it was invented by her and tellings of it. And that's one of the problems

that we have. We know very little about the repect and dreading. We're very very little about Mary Kelly, for example, so that allows people to him fill with invention stories out um. But I think in terms of the fall yeah, I think there's a danger here to say that these women have these women are unusual in um in in falling through the social thrawning down the social staircase. But I suspect that's true of very many women in in

Victorian society. I think you would probably characterize this drivers coming from the working class with a bit of entrepreneurial spirit in setting up a coffee shop. And we're not talking about somebody who's going to have a string of Starbucks up and down the country. Is not It's not that this is not a rich entrepreneur. This is somebody getting by running a coffee shop. And um, so the

coachman is still a servant. So any chapman is married to a coachman, but a coachman is a respectable servant, but it's still a domestic servant, so you're still tied to a family house and depends upon um, your master, So it's a it's a subservient position in society. Is a member of the working class. But there are degrees of working class life. And I think, what's happening to these women and we see it and it's very it's

very well illustrated in in Reuben Holtz book. Is is the way that a series of events, tragic events, undermined them. And when you add things like drinking to that or something, it's a drink which is the catalyst for this. That's when they start to slip. And a woman without a husband is is really in a very very dangerous situation, which is why so many women in working class women in Victorian London would have quickly found another partner adopted

his name. So you know, with several of the Ripper victims, their names are kind of movable. It's whoever they are with it becomes their common law husband. And marriage is not necessarily something you need to have. UM in that respect of quite modern, I suppose, but there is a fall from grace. But we know about these five or six women because they were murdered by someone who's come

down to history as Jack the Ripper. And it's interesting because one of the criticisms of ripper ology has been that it focuses on the ripper and not on the victims. But of course we would only know that. We only know the victims because they were killed by the Ripper. You know, millions of working class women died. Plenty of them were murdered or or beaten and then died of injuries or died of relative starvation or illness in the nine century, or died in childbooth. We don't know any

of their names. They weren't killed by a syrial. I'm not I'm not making a case for a statue to the Ripper. It's just it is another way to look at him. Well. And I yeah, when you were talking about Liz Stride coffee shop, when I read that detail of her life, that was actually what I just felt, such a close connection to someone like that. No, I haven't, I haven't, but I do have friends. I do have

friends who you know, opened a small shop. So when I was thinking about yeah, of course, but that's that's the thing, isn't it. It's like walking the streets to Whitechapel and it's like being in a place where someone was Those are the things that connected to it. You know. The class is is you know famously in another country, but actually it's a most of things that we recognize in it. M hm. So you mentioned earlier, UM that in November the murder of the murder investigation is under way, UM,

and the police are not catching the killer. There's been a huge mobilization of the forces in October that has been unsuccessful in charging anyone with these crimes. And as you mentioned, that's often pointed to as the reason for Charles Warren's resignation. UM. But he publishes his article the Police of the Metropolis in Murray's magazine. UM. And you talked a little bit about the consequences of that already with with Matthews in the Home Office. But what was

the substance of the article, UM? You know, what's this this military man who is now in charge of the police. What's he arguing about the way that policing should be done. What's he saying? Well, I think what what is mostly saying in that article is that he hasn't been able to run the police in the way that he wants to run it. He's being he's having interference, is frustrated by interference from from c I D you know, from

the detectives. Um, he's suffering a tremendous amount of criticism, and it suggested he's trying to resign several times and not been allowed to resign. UM. So I guess what he's really saying in that is the police are a fine body of men. My police are working extremely hard, and UM, while I'm working with one hand type behind my back, I'm not able to properly run this case

as I want I want to. And I think that's that's a kind of inevitability you get in that In that that conflict which which exists in British policing, I think even to some extent people would probably arguing it still exists. It certainly existed in British society right through until the relatively recent decades of that tension between the

uniform and playing clothes, uniform and detection. The detectives are kind of seen as a they see themselves as an elite part of the police, and they're kind of seen as people who don't have to follow the rules by by others and therefore resented to get better pay conditions and all that kind of stuff. It may be the same in the US, but it's certainly um frustrates Sir

Charles Warren. And I'd rather suspect you couldn't get out of the police quick enough so that the article for Laurie's magazine was his chance to have a goal for those who criticize and called for his resignation. I mean, and you just look at the reaction of the press to it. I mean, you know, the start as a real go in from it. You know, it's it says I wrote this down. A more extraordinary document never found

its way into print. It would be charitable to suppose that when he penned this remarkable addition to the literature of Connie Hatch, Sir Charles Warren was laboring under some unusual excitement for contents. Coney Hatch is London's largest lunatic asylum. It was it's kind of like saying that he'd gone that basically, No, and I didn't. I didn't mention this in any of the outlines. But I've been thinking a lot about Charles Warren bringing that kind of imperial military

discipline to the London police. And you know, a lot of the discussions that I'm a part of here in the in the United States today are about the militarization of the police. You know, it's kind of the phrase that we used to get at that issue here and now, and and I've read a little bit about some of the radical press criticizing Charles Warren along similar grounds, saying that he was turning the London Police the met into a military and occupying military force. Um, this wasn't the question.

So maybe you don't have something prepared, but would you be able to say a few more words about you know, was it fair to criticize Charles Warren for militarizing the police in London. I think it's. Um, it's certainly something that's thrown at him, and it's thrown at him in the wake of Bloody Sunday in November Heaven, when when he kind of he doesn't want to suffer what happened to his predecessor Henderson in in the pal mall all

the West End Rights of six. So he tries to close down demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, which is kind of London's traditional place for demonstrations and political gatherings and that kind of He's met with cries of outrage, cries about free speech, as you might imagine, and protests go ahead, and he sends in the soul. He ends in his he's disciplined policeman with in a in a battle, charged to crack heads and clear the square, and that creates

a riot. And some fantastic cartoons from the time depicting Warren as on top of Nelson's column and policeman beating up protesters on all the plints around the square, um the Lions getting involved in everything else, and there's a there's that kind of sense of the he's an own goal really for Warren because the press can can rage against his militarization into Faga Square. Although some of them are very pleased with what he does, the Times are

very pleased with what he does. And and when it comes to the riplicate, of course he doesn't catch the killer.

So there's a you know, the criticism is aimful square at the metroids and police because here is a murderer who's killing poor women in East London, and here is a commissioner of the met who sent his men into beat up poor men in the West end of London, So there's kind of a it's a it's a very obvious target for radical press, for the liberal press to have a go up, to have a go out warrant about it, whether it's fair. He did concentrate on military discipline,

but he probably thought that was very important. And let's face it, he only becomes a commissioner in late he has not had that much time to do very much with metropologies, and already they've got one of the most high profile murder cases, were the most high private profile murder case for decades, So it's a bit tricky for him. Really. I always started off disliking to Charles Warren and I

kind of have a lot of sympathy for him now. Hm. When it comes to the press covering the murders and the investigation, um stories start to dwindle after the inquest of Mary Kelly. Why is that? Why Why does the press kind of decide that the story is over at that point? Well, I guess someone like Stanley Cohen and sociologists would argue that a moral panic with us out and the press eventually get bored of it and they

move on to something else. But I think the answer is quite simple really, in the police refuse refused to cooperate with the press in the wake of Mary Kelly's murder. They stopped providing any information or access. You kind of imagine them closing down. You imagine, I imagine reporters standing outside Lehman Street and being told to go away by by uniformed officers. And when they've got the the inquest is closed down. And that's another trific place for the

press to get information. So there's no inquest, there's no information coming out of the police headquarters. Coppers on the beat aren't talking to the press. There's nothing to print. So if there's nothing to print, then you go on

and start talking about something else. H M. Of course, those of us who are looking back at the year, at the case, at the killings with um historical interest, there are things that follow events, documents that do continue to draw interest, and one of those is McNaughton's memorandum. H can you talk about Melvin McNaughton and who he was?

What is this this memorandum that he wrote, and to what extent it is or is not significant, especially in light of one of the comments you've written that that he in particular may have been invested with too much significance by others who have looked at the investigation. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing you probably have to say is if you you could ask, you could ask a dozen different so called experts about the replication about McNaughton,

and you'd probably get a dozen slightly different answers. But this, this would be mine, I think. So we know Melville mcdorton was Chief Comsortable c I D In June, so he has an indirect connection to the Whitechapel murdericers. He would have known people who were involved in the case, even though he wasn't directing the case himself. In February he wrote a report on the case, and that was prompted by speculation in the Sun newspaper of the day that the murderer as a man named Thomas cut Blush,

and he was kind of refuting that. I think the report really comes to light though, in in nineteen fifty nine, when mcnorton's daughter allowed a TV documentary maker access to her father's papers. Um, so that's kind of how we

we get this this thing. The report itself is quite short, and it In it mcdaorton named three possible ripper suspects, So three people that were supposedly known to the police's part of the investigation at the time, and these were Monskey, John Druitt, Michael Ostrog's Michael Michael Ostrog and a guy just known as Kosminski, not given a first name, but generally has been given the name Aaron Kazmitski, but Kazminski

a police jews how mc norton right. The mc norton memorandum, as it's known, has been given significance, considerable significant over the years since because because it names three men and because it suggests the police had them in mind. Um. And this supported the claims of Sir Robert Anderson, who was head of c D at the time of the murders, and so we can consider to be a fairly reliable

source um. And he said this in he said the police knew who the rewards in his memoirs, which were published in nine Now police memoirs and notoristly difficult because they're often self justifications and they're written after the event. So we we can give them quite a lot of credibility, but we need to also be skeptical at the same time.

And when we look at mc norton's trier of suspects, my problem is that they broadly fit the typology of who the Victorians thought ought to have 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

immigrant dr um, deranged Jewish immigrants. That they're all the people who are drew it or strong on Kosminski, and I think it's rather convenient that mc norton identifies those three as the people that the piece we're looking for, because those are the sort of people the press we're telling the police they ought to be looking for. So yeah, m the annoying thing about McNaughton is spending his name right.

That's his name spelled differently all the times, and I spelt it wrong, having corrected it in my book, my last book, And that was one of the reasons that Ripper ologies had such a nothing like, nothing like a

typo to get them upset. I spelled a few of my own I spelled it a few of my own ways to um you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, when you were talking about Jack the Ripper has a modern myth um that kind of without the mystery, the White Chapel murders are just another tale of statistic killing, and that part of what makes it compelling is the ability to project our own ideas into the gap where

we don't have a person there. Can you speak a little bit more to the idea that it's the uncertainty about the identity of the killer that keeps this story your life. Do you have more to say about that than you already already said? Well, I can certainly try. I mean, yeah, and I think identifying Jack the Ripper, or arguing about the identity of the White Chappel murderers as has kind of fuel the ripper industry. It's an

industry which has existed for over hundred years. I mean, there are ripper tours taking place whilst the murders are are happening. You know, ripper tours aren'to modern invention. People. There was a waxworkshell on Whitechappel High Street at the time of the Ripper murders. This is an industry which started in and has continued the pace ever since, and now we have films and movies, and we have franchises like Assassin's Create the video game which references the Rapper.

You can play as Jack the Ripper if you want to. And there are numerous Ripper solution histories, and there are Ripper novels, and um, you know, I have a Ripper Jack the Ripper game. You can get rapp Jack the Ripper themed T shirts, you know, all sorts of things, Um, Jack the Ripper if you want to. Um. But the fact that so many facts in the case of disputed like like, for example, just a number of victims, how many were there? Were there? Five? Were? The six? Were

the eight? Were? Nine? Were? Were there more? The writing on the wall in Galston Street graffiti, the Ripper letters themselves. You know, whether the Dear Boss or from Hell or any of the others are real or not, all of those things. I mean, we can keep on revisiting the case in the hope of finding new evidence, or more accurately, we can look for new interpretations of old evidence. But

I kind of think it's worth saying this again. But more than this, successive popular representations of Jack the Ripper have kind of recast the killer for their own age. So currently Jack has become sort of Mr Ordinary, a mundane every day a killer hiding him side. And I think that's interesting because he's like the modern terrorists who we don't notice until he draws his knife or he reveals he's wearing a suicide. So I think it's the ability of Jack to fit in where we want him to.

And of course we all love the past, and we love the Victorians because they kind of seem very close to us. I mean, they're only a hundred or so years ago. You know, there are people alive who were alive in almost alive in the Victorian period UM. And my grandmother was born um at the turn of the century. I mean she she's passed away now, but she's you know, she could tell me things from her mother which were about Queen Victoria's jubileean things. It seems close, but it's

so different. And in Jack's London there are things we'd recognize, but they're all kind of I want to say, swathed in a sort of gas, like a sort of mystic mystic missed in a smoke that kind of swirls around and giving that kind of touch of Gothic horror. That's so much part of our way of viewing that period. Um. So I don't think we'll ever be able to conclusively prove who Jack the Ripper was, um, at least not be able to prove to a standard that you could

prosecute somebody in a port in England today. But that kind of sense of mystery of wanting to work out who it was, and then spinoffs from that that keep the story going. So organizations like the White Chapel Society are people who have moved on from just identifying the

Ripper trying to They're now interested in the victims. They're interested in the streets, the buildings, the social history, the popular culture of the time, that that the riplication is so much more than it was even twenty years ago. I think. I mean, I'm planning a conference in two

thousand and twenty two if we ever get through lockdown. Um, you know, I want to have an international conference at Northampton that brings people who are amateurs rheologists as we might call them, Whitechappel Society and their their their groups together with serious academics like you know some I like you the walk of It or you know, um, some of the people that have researched, who have researched things like prostitution and crime, and bring those people together to

have a conversation because they get pro fascinating mm hm um, and you just to kind of sew things up for us. Um. I read your Jack in the terms torso murderous book as one of those studies that does look at Jack as or the killer, because there is noough Jack as one of those kind of everyman figures, someone who wasn't one of those three stereotypes, but who instead was at home and fit in and would have been recognizable as

belonging in the East end. Um. Could you talk about your own thinking about why it was important to put that book together and explore the reasons for making an identification of the killer the way that you did. Yes, I mean, you know how very aware that in under shadows I kind of said, you can't do this, So it's no point is there are much more interesting things to talk about. And now I wrote a book saying who I thought the report was. Um, I mean I

have very particular reasons for doing that. I wrote it with someone else, with Andy Wise, who felt he had a story to tell and I wanted to enable him, as a former student of mine, to tell his story, because I think he was a struggle to get that out into print in the way that perhaps with a little bit of background behind me, I was able to enable him to do so. There was partly a personal story of allowing Andy to tell the story he wanted

to tell. And then he'd spent many, many years researching UM. I always felt it was problematic to identify a killer, and I kind of still do. But I think Harderman is as good as suspect, as as any and better than many. And I think so. I mean, one of the things we concluded was if we if we tried to apply historical research methods and the rationale of a police detective who's looking for means, motive and opportunity, we could point the finger at a local man who we

believed was responsible, a man involved in them trade. He seems to fit. So we we figured that the killer had to know White Chapel. He had to be able to move around White Chapel in Spittlefield without causing suspicion. UM and I had to know all these dark alleys and cut throughs. He had to appear to avoid police patrols, particularly as has more and more police were put on

the streets, particularly following the double event. So this is someone who needs to know his local environment, and that doesn't really fit with a doctor from outside, or a slumming top or any of these other people. It has to be a local man. I think you had to have somebody who had a clear motive for wanting to kill. In many of the books I've read about Jack Ripper, I can't really understand why he would do the things he would do. That's kind of a bit that the

writers don't tell you why would you do that? Now? I understand, of course that without knowing who the killer ism, without a confession, we can never know why somebody chooses to murder. Um. We think of serial killers today and there's a lot of time spent pouring over what they have to say, if they can say, or they choose to say what they want to say, and we can't

necessarily trust it anyway. But I feel you had to find a try and identify a motive, and in this case we found somebody who had means, motive and opportunity. So James Hardiman had been flagged up in a previous short article in a couple of short articles for a phiologists and and he thought he was worth investigating, so he set off to investigate him. And James Hardiman was probably a pet food salesman and someone who probably worked

as a horse slaughterer. We accept that you can't find records for many of these things, so it's very difficult to prove, but it seems quite likely um And if he was a horse slaughterer, if he was involved in the meat trade, he was probably familiar with or operate or he was probably familiar with or working for a company called Harrison Barber in the eighteen eighties because they

entirely dominated horse saughtering and horse slaughtering. You know, it might seem like a niche occupation, but London is entirely powered by horses. In the nineteenth century. There are thousands of horses carrying carts, people riding horses, pulling carriages, hands and cabs. Everything is horse drawn. We talk about horsepowering cars, but this is literally horsepower. And horses get sick and they get old, and when they get old and sick, you know, they don't go and live in some nice

little paddocks somewhere on the outskirts of London. They're slaughtered, and their flesh and their bones and all their bits and pieces are turned into other products like blue and pet food and all sorts of other things, and sometimes Dickens suggested human food. So it's kind of ubiquitous. And the man pushing a cart run the street selling captives everyone and know who was but no one really see him because he was just that guy, you know, that

strange guy, probably a bit weird. So that's kind of why he's having in plain sight. And as for motive, we believe that Harderman had contracted syphilis, probably from a prostitute. He would have passed up to his wife, who passed it to their child, and their own a child who died, and then his wife died in the hospital. She was in London for a long time, so he had plenty of opportunity. He lived in White Chapel, he lived in Henning Street, His family lived in Hambury Street where any

Chapman was killed. He lived right next door to where any chapman was killed by that court, so he was right at the heart of the killing zone. And we kind of extrapolated that to think that perhaps Hardyman was not just responsible for the White Chapel murders, but we also believe he could be connected to the four Torso murders that occurred in London between May seven and September

eighteen eighty nine. And in total, we argue that that Harderman is probably responsible for thirteen murders and three more fatal attacks over a period of nearly four years. He died in December eight He was only thirty two. And Alice Mackenzie is the last victim in the series, dying in February UM and her death is looks like a

tired killing. You know that that she she almost survives at least, and comes upon her bodies has had a throat cut and nothing else has been done to I think I concluded that James Hardyman is as good as suspect as many and I think you know, you can criticize quite a lot of our case, um wides quite a lot of my writing, but he certainly bears close examination. But we're not going to know who the ripper was. No one is going to be satisfied who the ripper

was for the quite simple things. As soon as you decide who the ripper was. And we agree that kills the industry, or or it kills one branch of the industry. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. It's a very hard life that the people were living at that time, particularly in

the East End. But an event like a murder captures the witnesses and the investigators in that moment of time going about their day to day lives, and they're things mains. As I said, mainstream histories don't often tell you. For example, there were lots of horses, lots of them. What did you do if your horse was injured in an accident or if it dropped dead in the street? And how dirty were those streets are washed with horse urine and worse?

And what was it really like to travel in a handsome cab rocking along like a ship tossed in a storm. So we you know, all of that is sort of stuff that you don't normally find out about. Even the Sherlock Holmes story have you have homes rolling along in a handsome cap, but we don't actually get told when it was really like 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 is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Monkey for More podcast for my heart Radio, because heart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H