Speaker 1: Welcomed Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minke.
Speaker 1: Dr Drew Gray is a historian of the eighteenth and
Speaker 1: nineteen centuries who teaches at the University of Northampton, where
Speaker 1: he's the subject lead for History. He's our guest for
Speaker 1: this episode. You won't be surprised to hear that he
Speaker 1: also specializes in the history of crime and punishment. His
Speaker 1: books on Jack the Ripper include London's Shadows, The Dark
Speaker 1: Side of the Victorian City and Jack in the Thames
Speaker 1: Torso Murders a New Ripper Those hit the shelves, alongside
Speaker 1: big projects like his book Crime, Policing and Punishment in
Speaker 1: England from sixteen sixty to nineteen fourteen. You can also
Speaker 1: find his writing on his blog The Police Magistrate, which
Speaker 1: tells dramatic stories from England's history of summary justice. Dr
Speaker 1: Gray is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Speaker 1: He has been a member of the editorial Board of
Speaker 1: The London Journal since two thousand eleven and is a
Speaker 1: Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Recently, Dr Drew has
Speaker 1: been publishing articles on the myths and legends around Jack
Speaker 1: the b and how historians would benefit from paying more
Speaker 1: attention to the murderers in Victorian Whitechapel. You could say
Speaker 1: that he's been doing a little un obscuring of his own,
Speaker 1: and we're delighted to have him on the show. We
Speaker 1: begin with his thoughts on Jack the Ripper as a myth,
Speaker 1: as someone who never ever existed, and then move on
Speaker 1: from there. This is the Unobscured Interview series for season three.
Speaker 1: I'm erin Minky. Well, if I could start by saying
Speaker 1: something probably signly controversial, which is to say, there's there's
Speaker 1: no such person as Jack the Ripper. He never existed.
Speaker 1: Of course, there was a serial killer or possibly serial killers,
Speaker 1: and that person was responsible for the murder of several
Speaker 1: very poor and vulnerable women. But the monster that's come
Speaker 1: down to us as Jack the Ripper is in many
Speaker 1: ways an invention of popular print culture and then subsequently
Speaker 1: a century or more of how it's a sluicing and
Speaker 1: reculation about the killer. So Jack is a sort of
Speaker 1: dark fantasy figure that was created in and has developed
Speaker 1: ever since, and in doing so has taken on the
Speaker 1: aspects of each succeeding generation that's looked at him. I'm
Speaker 1: not unlike in some respects the way in which Sherlock
Speaker 1: Holmes has been reimagined to suit the age in which
Speaker 1: he inhabits. So since we don't know who Jack was,
Speaker 1: we can continue to continue to offer up suspects that
Speaker 1: reflects our own fears and our own prejudices, the things
Speaker 1: that bother us in our own in our own ages.
Speaker 1: And this process starts right at the beginning of the case,
Speaker 1: in the autumn of when the murderers first thought of
Speaker 1: to be possibly a sort of top hatted top a
Speaker 1: slumming Burlington bertie, or a psychotic doctor carrying a gladstone
Speaker 1: bag full of sharp knives, or perhaps even a crazy
Speaker 1: immigrant do an anarchist revolutionary bent on destroying English society.
Speaker 1: And then when you throw in dark alleyways covered in
Speaker 1: fog from which a murderer can sort of emerge raith
Speaker 1: like clutching a knife and then vanished just as easily,
Speaker 1: leaving the police behind looking baffled, you've got the kind
Speaker 1: of perfect recipe for a Gothic horror story. And the
Speaker 1: fact that this bears very little resemblance to the truth
Speaker 1: is kind of immaterial. The industry that's grown from the
Speaker 1: murder of these women is the reality that most people
Speaker 1: today understand. Another observation that you make in that same book,
Speaker 1: London's Shadows, is that most of what we know about
Speaker 1: the reality of life in London in the eighties is
Speaker 1: filtered through the middle class sensibilities of the time. How
Speaker 1: would you describe those sensibilities and the way that they
Speaker 1: shaped then and shaped now what we can know about
Speaker 1: that moment in the city's history. Maybe you know, in
Speaker 1: Britain's history, what kinds of documents do we have that
Speaker 1: guide us through the details of what was happening in
Speaker 1: the East End, or or the murders themselves. How do
Speaker 1: we get at that? Well, of course, it's extremely difficult
Speaker 1: before our century, or the twentieth century perhaps to know
Speaker 1: at all what people thought about the world around them.
Speaker 1: Especially it's especially true for what you might call ordinary
Speaker 1: working class people. Even if people could read and write,
Speaker 1: which is very far from universal in the eighties, not
Speaker 1: many of them would have at the time to do so,
Speaker 1: all the money to spare on ink and paper to
Speaker 1: write them, So working class memories of life in the
Speaker 1: Victorian period are extremely rare. Instead, we have examples of
Speaker 1: popular culture, so musical song things like my old man,
Speaker 1: My old Man's a dustman, for example, which provide the
Speaker 1: plimpses of now folk understood their society at the time,
Speaker 1: kind of coming down to through song and music, hall
Speaker 1: and jokes and that kind of thing. Um. But that's
Speaker 1: very little from working class people. Instead, historians have had
Speaker 1: to make do with the diaries and writings of the
Speaker 1: middle class um and the elite um. So I'm kind
Speaker 1: of thinking of men like William instead that the newspaper
Speaker 1: editor or authors like George Sims or Andrew Mens, or
Speaker 1: social investigators and reformers like Charles Booth or Beatrice Webb.
Speaker 1: And of course these people mostly from the middle classes
Speaker 1: right as as to some extent, we all do from
Speaker 1: their own perspective, and so this history is kind of
Speaker 1: naturally imbued with their own prejudices and their own moral compass,
Speaker 1: which was quite different, of course from the way in
Speaker 1: which working class people understood their lives. And in terms
Speaker 1: of documentation about White Chapel and the White Chapel murders,
Speaker 1: we've got very little, you know. I always think that
Speaker 1: it's a it's a truism that people in the past
Speaker 1: don't really think about the needs of researchers in the
Speaker 1: future when they're keeping or not keeping documentation. Most of
Speaker 1: what we do have is kept well. Most of what
Speaker 1: we do have in the public realm is kept at
Speaker 1: the National Archives, a que in in the south of
Speaker 1: the River in London, in a couple of police files,
Speaker 1: and this is actually rather disappointing when you actually get
Speaker 1: to look at it. There are some case papers, but
Speaker 1: these are pretty thin. There are some photos of the
Speaker 1: victims which are widely known now and they're all over
Speaker 1: the Internet. And a lot of letters sent to the
Speaker 1: police impressed during and after the summer and autumn um
Speaker 1: In addition, we have the reports of coroner's inquests and
Speaker 1: our commentary on the police investigation through the pages of
Speaker 1: the newspapers, and over the decades have passed, various pieces
Speaker 1: of evidence have emerged um like, for example, the Maybrick Diary,
Speaker 1: which have been hotly disputed, or the Little Child letter
Speaker 1: which these bits and pieces have provided more angles for
Speaker 1: researchers to hang their speculations on what not necessarily much
Speaker 1: illumination into the case itself. And I think most researchers
Speaker 1: will agree that we've probably lost as much evidence over
Speaker 1: the years as we've found, and there's so that we're
Speaker 1: left with very little that a modern detective force could
Speaker 1: use to identify the killer in terms of the history
Speaker 1: of White Chapel in the East End, in terms of
Speaker 1: that sort of documentation, we have census records which are interesting.
Speaker 1: We have street directories which tell us quite quite a bit,
Speaker 1: and we have Charles Boo's fantastic maps of London in
Speaker 1: the late nineteenth century which indicate the areas of poverty
Speaker 1: and relative wealth, but of course not really very much
Speaker 1: survived because again, what why would you keep that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff? That stuff we want to find out about
Speaker 1: ordinary people's lives. They just don't generate those records unless
Speaker 1: they're appearing something, for example, like a court case. Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and speaking of of court cases and and settings
Speaker 1: where where documents are generated. Um, you mentioned that your
Speaker 1: your focused as a historian is on crime, and you've
Speaker 1: done a lot of work on Victorian police courts and
Speaker 1: published regularly on the Police Magistrate blog, which is full
Speaker 1: of fascinating stories. Um. Can you describe Victorian police courts
Speaker 1: and the role that they played in the US, The
Speaker 1: system of the weight eight Yeah, the the the Victorian
Speaker 1: police court and the Victorian police court magistrates that presided
Speaker 1: in these courts is part of a long tradition of
Speaker 1: summary justice in England which has a very long history,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of been the focus of most of
Speaker 1: my career um since I started in academia. And so
Speaker 1: of course, whe do you think it's quite it' quite
Speaker 1: difficul to say a little when you can settle for
Speaker 1: um the police court. A police court magistrate presided over
Speaker 1: a whole range of different sorts of um cases throughout
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century. They were they were appointed as men
Speaker 1: with who had at least seven years of experience of
Speaker 1: practicing law and they sat in rotation in a series
Speaker 1: of courts. So there were there were police magistrates courts
Speaker 1: from the late eighteenth century from on was a little
Speaker 1: bit earlier for places like both streets and they covered
Speaker 1: most of the metropolis. So there were places at Westminster
Speaker 1: and Great Marble Street and Queens Square, there was a
Speaker 1: couple in the East Standard Worship Street and Thames Um.
Speaker 1: There was police courts in in Southbok and Lambeth, and
Speaker 1: then later in the century they moved out to the suburbs,
Speaker 1: like places like Highgate for example, so so you could
Speaker 1: see a magistrate right across the city and there were
Speaker 1: In addition, of course, there were two magistrates courts in
Speaker 1: the city of London itself, which is a separate authority,
Speaker 1: as a separate urban authority, it is not it's not
Speaker 1: under the same government as the rest of the metropolis.
Speaker 1: And these police court magistrates sat alone, which which made
Speaker 1: them unique in England, where most magistrates would sit in
Speaker 1: pairs or threes, but in London they had extra powers.
Speaker 1: They were advised by a clerk, but otherwise they make
Speaker 1: decisions on whether to send someone to prison to find
Speaker 1: them or or to send them on for a trial
Speaker 1: for a jury entirely on their own, so there's no
Speaker 1: jury in these trials. They sit at the bottom, if
Speaker 1: you like, of the criminal justice system, below the the
Speaker 1: quarter sessions and then the assize or the old baby
Speaker 1: court and police court magistrates would have dealt with all
Speaker 1: sorts of crime, but also a lot of social problems.
Speaker 1: So they would deal with a tremendous amount of drunken
Speaker 1: disorderly behavior, but also petty theft, some quite serious theft
Speaker 1: like burglary and fraud, right through two cases of domestic
Speaker 1: violence assorts on the police and murder. They if it
Speaker 1: came to an arder, they wouldn't be convicting somebody of murder,
Speaker 1: but they will be pushing them up through the criminal
Speaker 1: justice system. So this this is a place of first
Speaker 1: first hearing, so it's where some of the facts of
Speaker 1: cases are established before they then sent on up through
Speaker 1: the criminal justice system. But these courts are also the
Speaker 1: first port of call for those complaining about all sorts
Speaker 1: of things that bothered them in Victorian London. So people
Speaker 1: being overcharged by cab drivers, policemen bringing cost costomongers bringing
Speaker 1: in market traders for obstructing the streets, or for the
Speaker 1: very poor in London who are requesting help. Um this
Speaker 1: is where you'll find people accused of committing suicide or
Speaker 1: attempted suicide, escaped lunatics, dangerous dogs. All these sorts of
Speaker 1: things will come before the police courts. So there are
Speaker 1: fantastic wind into the Victorian um capital. Unfortunately, going back
Speaker 1: to the problem of documentation in the past, these courts
Speaker 1: leave us very little in the way of archival material.
Speaker 1: Most of the records are lost if they were ever
Speaker 1: kept for very long. There are a small smattering of
Speaker 1: cases of case books from the Thames Court, but but
Speaker 1: not much else outside of Bow Streets. But we do
Speaker 1: have newspaper reports because the newspapers daily reported on the
Speaker 1: cases that came for the police courts, because I think
Speaker 1: their readers were ready interested in looking at life through
Speaker 1: this this particular lens. M Turning now a little toward
Speaker 1: the East End. You've also written that it's a place
Speaker 1: that had a diverse culture. You say, many places of worship, entertainment, trade,
Speaker 1: a long history. Um. But that after a eight everyone
Speaker 1: in the world new where White Chapel was. But at
Speaker 1: the same time the Ripper murders obscured the reality of
Speaker 1: that part of London. So if the murders didn't actually
Speaker 1: define White Chapel and you know, hide what life was
Speaker 1: actually like thereby be by growing beyond the you know,
Speaker 1: the do of those events, how could the East End
Speaker 1: at the time be more justly described, you know, with
Speaker 1: with your historians eyes looking back beyond those obscuring events,
Speaker 1: How do we describe the East End of London at
Speaker 1: this time? I think it of course, with everything becomes
Speaker 1: sort of mired in in representations from the period. I
Speaker 1: always trying to imagine that I'm going back in time
Speaker 1: and I'm stepping out onto the rather dirty streets of
Speaker 1: London in the nineteenth century. But I would describe the
Speaker 1: East End is a multicultural melting pot, a kind of
Speaker 1: vibrant community of people struggling to vibe in a in
Speaker 1: a society, of course, which generally failed to support those
Speaker 1: that fell on on hard times. So I see a
Speaker 1: series of communities, not not one community, but several communities
Speaker 1: known and not always seeing eye to eye, where kind
Speaker 1: of new immigrants mingled with established ones and native east
Speaker 1: Enders for want of a better word, rubbed shoulders with
Speaker 1: new arrivals, and with slumming tourists, you know, wealthier people
Speaker 1: coming into the area to kind of gorput what they
Speaker 1: could see. I see White Chapel is somewhere where poverty
Speaker 1: was endemic, but at the same time there's an entrepreneurial
Speaker 1: spirit kind of everywhere. So words I'd used to describe
Speaker 1: White Chapel in the would be bold, with brassy, sometimes shocking,
Speaker 1: often funny, amusing, always lively and exciting and and ever changing.
Speaker 1: And I'd probably go further and say that that's actually
Speaker 1: how I see the East End, That East End and
Speaker 1: short ditch and white chaplains, Pittel Fields in twenty one
Speaker 1: century Britain. It's very much that kind of exciting, exciting
Speaker 1: place to be. The first place my mind went when
Speaker 1: I read that passage that you'd written was those those maps.
Speaker 1: There's Charles Booth maps that you mentioned where there there
Speaker 1: you said, you know, there's the color coding and for
Speaker 1: showing different levels of of wealth, of class, of success.
Speaker 1: You know, so there's a the markings for very deep
Speaker 1: poverty and they're marked in black. And with that stereotype
Speaker 1: about the East End, I go to look at the map,
Speaker 1: but it's really a mix it's not there are these
Speaker 1: pockets where he's marked in black, you know, desperate poverty.
Speaker 1: But you mentioned the entrepreneurial spirit and these different communities
Speaker 1: kind of shoulder to shoulder, kind of jostled up together,
Speaker 1: and I see even in terms of class, there are
Speaker 1: some very very wealthy neighborhoods in the East End as
Speaker 1: well as some of the very poor. So even in
Speaker 1: the documents that we do have from the time Mike
Speaker 1: Charles Booth's maps, you can see that kind of the
Speaker 1: mixing and people shoulder to shoulder who are living quite
Speaker 1: different lives from each other, even in the same neighborhood. Um,
Speaker 1: when what were the contrasts between East and West London
Speaker 1: as victorians imagined them in the eighteen eighties. How for
Speaker 1: how fair were the kinds of generalizations maybe that they
Speaker 1: had about each other. Mhmm, yeah, I think yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean the all all of what you've just said about
Speaker 1: the about Boothes is stuff I would certainly point to.
Speaker 1: I mean the West End, or in popular parliance, the
Speaker 1: best in was to the wealthy. It was a playground
Speaker 1: for those who had money, and of course it was
Speaker 1: a magnet for people who wanted to work. So plenty
Speaker 1: of East London has worked in the West End, worked
Speaker 1: in the shops and the pubs and the clubs, and
Speaker 1: the and came over, you know, the women came over
Speaker 1: sometimes to act as prostitutes and escorts in that part
Speaker 1: of town. And this is where the shops and the
Speaker 1: clubs and the theaters of Victoria and London were. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, this is where you'd find the elegant streets
Speaker 1: and the squares around Bloomsbury, And this is this is
Speaker 1: what looked like the capital of the greatest Empire of
Speaker 1: the world had ever seen, all of it, beautifully lit
Speaker 1: and well served by transport networks. If you contrast that
Speaker 1: with the East End of London, um, this is poor, dark,
Speaker 1: overcrowded and largely degraded. Um. So, as I've I've said before,
Speaker 1: the while the West End was affluent, the East End
Speaker 1: was affluent, kind of strich stinking in the noses of
Speaker 1: those that visited it. And that's the image we have
Speaker 1: of the contrast between the East and West ends of
Speaker 1: London in nineteenth century, and it's probably the image that
Speaker 1: most Londoners would have had, certainly most West Londoners and
Speaker 1: people from outside the capital. How fair was this? Well,
Speaker 1: the East End was poor, it was overcrowded, and it
Speaker 1: was home to those dirty trades that were necessary, such
Speaker 1: as slaughtering and tanning. Those industries has always been placed
Speaker 1: in the east of the capital, and that that goes
Speaker 1: right back in history. But Charles Boo's Great Survey of Poverty,
Speaker 1: his mapping of London, reveals that there were certainly more
Speaker 1: areas of wealth and prosperity in the West End than
Speaker 1: in the East End. But the East End wasn't entirely
Speaker 1: riddled with poverty so rare. It's for commercial and well
Speaker 1: to do streets mingle with black and dark blue areas
Speaker 1: which denote poverty and criminality. Um, and you will find
Speaker 1: pockets of deprivation across the capital right in what in
Speaker 1: West London as well. So the contrast is a useful
Speaker 1: starting point. But London was a very mixed city in
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds and poverty and wealth often lived cheap
Speaker 1: by jiles side by side. That remains the case about
Speaker 1: London in a way that it's not true of some
Speaker 1: of some other European cities like Paris in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century or or today, which which kept the wealthy and
Speaker 1: poorer areas much better, um, separated mhm. Can you describe
Speaker 1: the role of journalism, like like the Median Tribute of
Speaker 1: Modern babylone series that was published I believe in eight five, Um,
Speaker 1: how the journalism that was being published in the eighties
Speaker 1: helped to kind of create that imaginative geography, you know,
Speaker 1: the stereotypes of the East End. Mm hmm, Well, I
Speaker 1: think I mean. One thing we have to remember, of course,
Speaker 1: is that most people were certainly most middle class people,
Speaker 1: even middle class people in London, and these were the
Speaker 1: people that read most of the newspapers rarely ventured into
Speaker 1: the East End or any of London's other poorer areas.
Speaker 1: It's like St. Giles or the Borough in southern and
Speaker 1: they just didn't go there. Instead, they learned about those
Speaker 1: areas through the newspapers they read, and papers gave them
Speaker 1: a partial and a biased view of those areas. Not
Speaker 1: unlike the way in which Darkest Africa was described by
Speaker 1: the missionaries who went there to you know, loosely use
Speaker 1: the term civilized it in the nineteenth century, so colorful
Speaker 1: descriptions of the East End, you know, featuring the strange
Speaker 1: people that lived there, There weird customs, there smeeady foods,
Speaker 1: and the clothes that they wore. We're all printed in
Speaker 1: ways that was similar to the descriptions offered of far
Speaker 1: away in exotic lands in India and China and in Africa,
Speaker 1: all the parts of the all the parts touched by
Speaker 1: the British Empire MHM, and people like William Stead, who
Speaker 1: pioneered what what we could probably call who pioneered what's
Speaker 1: been termed new journalism, recognized the power that the media
Speaker 1: had to affect change as well as turning a profit.
Speaker 1: By saying newspapers. Steadies a very modern journalist and newspaper editor,
Speaker 1: and he'd fit right in to our modern media circus.
Speaker 1: So sensational articles like his made in Tribute of Modern
Speaker 1: Babylon or or Andrew mens Is a bitter Cry of
Speaker 1: outclass London, which stead also published, were intended to both
Speaker 1: shock and titillate the readers. Since most most people have
Speaker 1: no first hand experience of the way that the poor lived,
Speaker 1: the articles that they read in the pages of Organs
Speaker 1: like the Powerma Gazette would have shocked and concerned them
Speaker 1: and helped to sort of create this vision of um
Speaker 1: the East End and other parts of London which whilst
Speaker 1: having germs of truth in them, it's not to say
Speaker 1: that these things weren't true, but they come to dominate
Speaker 1: all the narratives. But it's it's rather like I would say,
Speaker 1: until people started to travel in the sort of seventies
Speaker 1: onwards to other parts of the world, including the United States,
Speaker 1: people got their ideas about other countries through television, so
Speaker 1: you know, we all have and you know, I grew
Speaker 1: up having an idea of nineteen seventies and nine eighties
Speaker 1: Americas and I've never been there, and would you like,
Speaker 1: you know, your prime time television to be the accurate
Speaker 1: portrayal of you know, American life. And you know it's
Speaker 1: I guess it's a similar to the Americans watching Downton
Speaker 1: Appe and thinking that's how English people live. Popular culture
Speaker 1: presents us with an image which isn't necessarily true. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: last night I watched since in Sensibility film with my wife,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, yeah, And I watched Perry Mason. There
Speaker 1: we Go, the New One or or or City of Angels.
Speaker 1: I think that's the only thing I'm watching at a moment.
Speaker 1: So you know, I know all about America in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties thirties because I watched for Walk Empire and
Speaker 1: all these kind of HBO, big budget things, so I
Speaker 1: know exactly what it's like over there. Ye. Well, and
Speaker 1: there's another Booth, William Booth, who's working in White Chapel
Speaker 1: in the eighteen eighties. So at the same time that
Speaker 1: that Charles Booth is producing his maps and that these
Speaker 1: journalists are writing stories, there are people who are motivated
Speaker 1: to take action. And William Booth and his wife Katherine, uh,
Speaker 1: they've formed the Salvation Army, and that's in the East
Speaker 1: End right, absolutely so he founded the East London Christian
Speaker 1: Mission in eighteen sixty five. Um, I think on the
Speaker 1: White Chapel Road. Um, it's I think his first part
Speaker 1: of his first preaching sessions was in a building which
Speaker 1: is now a pub called the Blind Beggar, which has
Speaker 1: more famous modernity connections to the Cray Twins in the nineties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the he adopted. They adopted the Salvation Army tag in
Speaker 1: in eight They were former Methodists and they wanted to
Speaker 1: bring religion and abstinence from alcohol to the people of
Speaker 1: East End. They operated by holding large public meetings and
Speaker 1: organizing marches through through communities. Of these marches are accompanied
Speaker 1: by brass bands made up of their members. Um, there's
Speaker 1: a military system of organizations. So General Booth is at
Speaker 1: the head and they have soldiers, and of course they
Speaker 1: distribute their weekly newspaper, the War Cry, on the streets
Speaker 1: and by going into public houses and Booth Like many
Speaker 1: social reformers at the time, saw alcoholism as an integral
Speaker 1: cause of poverty, immorality and then of domestic violence, and
Speaker 1: his Army challenged men and women to change their lives,
Speaker 1: looking to recruit from within those working class communities, and
Speaker 1: they brought their their kind of brand of religious further
Speaker 1: into into communities like White Chapel, which often drew down
Speaker 1: quite a lot of abuse and ridicule from the locals.
Speaker 1: And it might he might not have listened to the
Speaker 1: rhetoric that they were putting out their their Christian vision,
Speaker 1: because in the early days of the Army of the
Speaker 1: marching bands delivered a sort of a rather terrible din
Speaker 1: rather than a badley of beautiful music, because they weren't
Speaker 1: particularly good at playing their instruments. And you quite often
Speaker 1: find Salvationists being brought before magistrates by the police for
Speaker 1: causing a nistance not or causing an obstruction. But they're
Speaker 1: clearly people who were driven by their very strong religious
Speaker 1: beliefs to affect change in the communities they see that
Speaker 1: are so blighted by alcohol and poverty, crime and homelessness.
Speaker 1: And when you talk about journalists publishing stories about the
Speaker 1: East End in a way that connects them to the
Speaker 1: margins are the reaches of the British Empire. I thought
Speaker 1: it was so interesting that William Booth he picks up
Speaker 1: on the in Dark Africa kind of stereotype and he
Speaker 1: publishes a book called in Darkest England, right, yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think in eighteen nine one, um, yes, he he
Speaker 1: publishes a book because it's taking that kind of idea
Speaker 1: of the missionary. So if we're sending missionaries out to Africa,
Speaker 1: you know, we're sending the likes of Stanley and Livingstone,
Speaker 1: there's kind of explorers come missionaries to bring the word
Speaker 1: of It's not just the word of God, is it.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's it's the it's the world word of
Speaker 1: white civilization. Two so called uncivilized African tribes in that
Speaker 1: in that terribly imperialistic way that was such a feature
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century. And but if you're going to
Speaker 1: do that in Africa and you've got desperate poverty and
Speaker 1: people who are living in immoral conditions, people not getting
Speaker 1: married and having children out of word and in Andrew
Speaker 1: Menss term, you know, incest is common in in the
Speaker 1: in the hovels of Leash, London. Even if he was exaggerating,
Speaker 1: then surely you need missionaries to go out to White
Speaker 1: Chapel and Spittlefields and then down below the river south
Speaker 1: of the River into the Borough and Southolk and Burman's
Speaker 1: in place of that where you've got Similarly, it looks
Speaker 1: like the world has been neglected. It looks like Christ
Speaker 1: is not permeating into those parts of the Empire, so
Speaker 1: darkest England is it's kind of perfect vehicle for him
Speaker 1: to to make that point. Mm hmmm. And it strikes
Speaker 1: me that if we're talking about a place that is,
Speaker 1: you said at the beginning, a multicultural melting part um,
Speaker 1: then some of what we've been discussing when it comes
Speaker 1: to middle class sensibilities is also it's mixing and being
Speaker 1: motivated by some of those ideas about white civilization too,
Speaker 1: when you're talking about bringing it to the margins of
Speaker 1: the Empire or into this multicultural region of your own city. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, let's I mean, we need to be really clear.
Speaker 1: It's a different it's a different world, it's a different
Speaker 1: it's a different society. But but nine century Britain is
Speaker 1: a is a quite it's quite a racialist society. You know,
Speaker 1: were the British see themselves as superior, and superior is white,
Speaker 1: but superior is British English and then pretty much the
Speaker 1: rest of the world, and we look down on pretty
Speaker 1: much everybody. In the nineteenth century, and waves of immigrants
Speaker 1: from from Eastern Europe that are coming into London will
Speaker 1: be disparaged. We are pretty pretty down on the Irish,
Speaker 1: We are pretty down on the Chinese, who have the
Speaker 1: small pockets of communities around Lime House. And even the
Speaker 1: Europeans are fellow Europeans like the French and the Germans,
Speaker 1: well we have a beef with them as well throughout
Speaker 1: the century. So everybody is everybody compares very badly to
Speaker 1: white British civilization. HM. And when you're talking about social
Speaker 1: reform and there's kind of missions into the East, and
Speaker 1: you mentioned some of the attitudes towards alcohol, especially for
Speaker 1: William Booth, but I know those are more general as well.
Speaker 1: What were some of the attitudes towards you mentioned earlier prostitution?
Speaker 1: How do the social reformers talk about prostitution as a
Speaker 1: part of kind of anti vice campaigning and that kind
Speaker 1: of thing in the East End. So prostitute, I mean,
Speaker 1: attitudes towards prostitution, they kind of they yo yo through
Speaker 1: the century, the eighteenth and nineteen centuries, so there are
Speaker 1: varying views of prostitution. They kind of come in and
Speaker 1: out of fashion. So prostitutes are quite often seen as
Speaker 1: a necessary evil sort of protecting the pure and innocent
Speaker 1: young women from from lust from male lust, which which
Speaker 1: are seen as kind of natural or at least uncontrollable. Um,
Speaker 1: they're also seen as victims, so the kind of trope
Speaker 1: of the poor servant girl who's forced into prostitution after
Speaker 1: being ruined by a predatory master or or a dishonest
Speaker 1: lover who's promised to marry her and then run off UM.
Speaker 1: But in the aftermath of the Crimean War in the
Speaker 1: eight fifties, the problem of prostitution became mostly focused around
Speaker 1: sexually transmitted diseases, particularly the diseases of syphilis and ganaria,
Speaker 1: because these are he's a kind of undermined being the
Speaker 1: British war effort against Russia and the Crimea UM. Many
Speaker 1: more people were lost to disease than were lost to
Speaker 1: bullets and cavalry savers of the Russians, So this kind
Speaker 1: of dominates the discourse surrounding prostitution and its effects on
Speaker 1: society in the sixties. And in the sixties there are
Speaker 1: attempts to control prostitution and the spread of what we
Speaker 1: today would call s T I s U, particularly the
Speaker 1: spread of sexually transmitted infections in the armed forces, the
Speaker 1: army and the Navy, and a series of acts had passed,
Speaker 1: the Contagious Diseases Acts, which helped to cement the idea
Speaker 1: that prostitutes were a pollutant within society. They are spreading disease.
Speaker 1: And this is coupled with the concepts that are criminal
Speaker 1: class existed in Victorian London, not a particularly new concept,
Speaker 1: but one that sees a revival in the sixties once
Speaker 1: we stopped transporting people to Australia. So instead of getting
Speaker 1: rid of our criminals, they're kind of with us still.
Speaker 1: They're in our prisons and they're back on our streets,
Speaker 1: and that kind of reinvigorates this idea of a criminal class,
Speaker 1: a subspecies of humanity that had the power to corrupt
Speaker 1: the honest, respectable working man and his family. And prostitutes
Speaker 1: were seen as the kind of female bit of this
Speaker 1: criminal fraternity, even though technically prostitutions not not actually a crime,
Speaker 1: and so prostitutes were associated with immorality, with drunkenness, with
Speaker 1: theaters and musicals, and of course with poverty. So there's
Speaker 1: a whole range of things that come with the Victorian
Speaker 1: associations with prostitution. In the Victorian period. Mhm, Let's let's
Speaker 1: take a step into the East End. We've been talking
Speaker 1: about the attitudes, the stereotypes, but how did people in
Speaker 1: the East End actually live? Um? You know, I'm interested
Speaker 1: for thing king about the White Chapel murders. Um, what
Speaker 1: are the model dwellings that you write about, the pabod
Speaker 1: buildings or or other structures like them. Um, what were
Speaker 1: these model dwellings? And relatedly, kind of who owned the
Speaker 1: property in the East End where where all these people lived?
Speaker 1: So Peabody homes or model dwellings are an attempt from
Speaker 1: the pretty from the eighteen sixties onwards to rehouse, to
Speaker 1: re home the poor in better well ventilated and her
Speaker 1: Genie Holmes, there's a recognition that London is full of
Speaker 1: unpleasant slums um really badly built and and crumbling housing
Speaker 1: from the eighteenth and early and nineteenth century. There are
Speaker 1: parts of London where which almost no go areas so
Speaker 1: around St Giles, parts of White Chapel where the term
Speaker 1: rookery is used, you know, kind of thinking of crows
Speaker 1: living living together in in nests at the top of
Speaker 1: the top of trees. These rookeries are um full of
Speaker 1: crime and vice and systematically, the the authorities try to
Speaker 1: knock them down and build better places, or sometimes they
Speaker 1: knocked down for example around Liverpool Street to build the
Speaker 1: new railway station in the nineteenth century. But the idea
Speaker 1: of model dwellings really comes from movements in the eight
Speaker 1: comes to fruition in the sixties, and so you have
Speaker 1: particularly gathering momentum through the philanthropy of George Peabody, who
Speaker 1: is a wealthy American banker, and he kind of gets
Speaker 1: together with the architect Henry Derbyshire to establish a trust,
Speaker 1: the Peabody Trust, which is to which is designed to
Speaker 1: build affordable block housing tenement housing across London. Of one
Speaker 1: of the first of these is in the East End.
Speaker 1: So these are large tenement blocks um sort of built
Speaker 1: around built in a sort of square and oblong around
Speaker 1: the central courtyard, which is creating a safe space for
Speaker 1: communities which are shut off from the streets outside. And
Speaker 1: Peabody is not the only organization doing this, there are
Speaker 1: other companies who are doing this is part philanthropy, but
Speaker 1: obviously you're making profit, hopefully but a small profit out
Speaker 1: of this. So there's the Rothschild Buildings in Flarendine Street,
Speaker 1: which built. But many of these places, whilst the emphasis
Speaker 1: is on rehousing the poor, they only really accommodate the
Speaker 1: working class who could guarantee to pay the rent, so
Speaker 1: they acted as a sort of some of these these
Speaker 1: people are acting as a sort of moral land owner.
Speaker 1: The model's Weddings movement a kind of moral and owners. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is where you'll find people like Octavia Hill from
Speaker 1: the charity organization Society charity visitors who come around and
Speaker 1: check on the people that were living here. So they're
Speaker 1: checking that the men are in work, they're checking that
Speaker 1: the children at school, that the rooms are clean and tidy.
Speaker 1: And if you fail in any of these areas, or
Speaker 1: you can't pay your rent, then you're going to be evicted.
Speaker 1: So and that's very difficult to guarantee for people at
Speaker 1: the very bottom end of society, people who are the
Speaker 1: casual poor, who don't have regular jobs, who are alive,
Speaker 1: for example, on work at the docks, on picking up
Speaker 1: work on a daily or a weekly basis. Now you
Speaker 1: can't guarantee that you can pay your rent, so you're
Speaker 1: not going to get into a model's wedding. And they're
Speaker 1: actually the people that really need this decent housing. So
Speaker 1: the models only movement is definitely a good thing. And
Speaker 1: you can see many of the model dwellings people buildings
Speaker 1: are still existent in London today. They built them very well,
Speaker 1: the beautiful examples of Victorian engineering and building, but they
Speaker 1: weren't in placea so many other people in the East
Speaker 1: End will have been forced into you know, poor crowded housing,
Speaker 1: and we see terrible examples of people living all the
Speaker 1: way down to two sellers where they're living in sort
Speaker 1: of stigen conditions in dark, unlit um damp basements all
Speaker 1: the way up to living in attic spaces, whole families
Speaker 1: in one room. Um I no sanitation. You know, you
Speaker 1: might have um shared pridulate facilities in the yard at
Speaker 1: the back. So very poor, very cold in winter, very
Speaker 1: hot in summer. Um. So you see lots of images
Speaker 1: of white chapel of people outside, people being outside because
Speaker 1: you wouldn't want to be inside. Because also your inside
Speaker 1: space is also probably your workshop space. So people who
Speaker 1: are working, um piece workers, copying or building matchboxes were
Speaker 1: going to do that at home. So you've kind of
Speaker 1: got to get the kids out from under your feet
Speaker 1: in order to turn them your space into a into
Speaker 1: a workspace during the day, families sharing beds. These these
Speaker 1: conditions were what shocked the middle classes when they came
Speaker 1: to investigate. And below that, if you, if you, if
Speaker 1: you couldn't afford even that sort of to rent a room,
Speaker 1: then you'd be on casual lodging houses where you are
Speaker 1: paying a few pennies a night for a room or
Speaker 1: not even a royom, but you're paying for your bed
Speaker 1: or even a rope to sleep on in the worst
Speaker 1: possible conditions. And these are some of the situations that
Speaker 1: the women who found themselves as victims of Chapter Ripper,
Speaker 1: and we're living in the nights before they died. And
Speaker 1: there's even below that, below the casual lodgings are is
Speaker 1: the workhouse. The workhouse casual ward where you went in
Speaker 1: in the evening, you've got a little bit of bread
Speaker 1: to eat, and you've probably got south down as some
Speaker 1: kind of wash um, your clothes, taking your belongings taking
Speaker 1: away and workhouse close to where and in the morning
Speaker 1: you get breakfast. Such a thing it was, but in
Speaker 1: return for doing some work, breaking rocks or picking oakum
Speaker 1: or something like that. So there's a whole degree of
Speaker 1: poor housing in the East end um, none of it
Speaker 1: is very good. And who owns it well, it's owned
Speaker 1: by by slim landlords, mostly people like McCarthy who owns
Speaker 1: most of whites Row and Dorset Street where Mary Kelly
Speaker 1: is murdered. These are these are landlords who are not
Speaker 1: wealthy themselves, but a certainly exploiting the fact that people
Speaker 1: need somewhere to live in a desperate for anything they
Speaker 1: can care mhm h. In all of these conditions, as
Speaker 1: you say, existed side by side in Whitechapel. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: they're they're all running and people will probably fall through
Speaker 1: different gaps, you know. They they Your life was determined
Speaker 1: by what money you had. So in a society without
Speaker 1: a benefit system, if you had work then you would
Speaker 1: probably great. So if you were reasonably if you you
Speaker 1: and your wife were in work, or you're in work
Speaker 1: and your wife could look after the kids, and yeah,
Speaker 1: you could live in a model's warning and probably have
Speaker 1: a decent, clean environment to live in. Nobody in the
Speaker 1: working class has been played very much. But if you
Speaker 1: lost work, you've got ill um, your wife died, your
Speaker 1: husband died, um, then you were very quickly going to
Speaker 1: fall into poverty and then fall through those gaps in society,
Speaker 1: So you would fall from a model's welling into a
Speaker 1: cheap lodging, UM in a room and a cheap lodging,
Speaker 1: how too, maybe a bunk in a in a kit
Speaker 1: house to a workhouse, UM to the streets, because because
Speaker 1: once you once you can't even afford the two or
Speaker 1: three pence a night for um for part of a
Speaker 1: bed in a shared lodging, then you're going to be
Speaker 1: sleeping on a park bench. M Thinking about the kinds
Speaker 1: of people that were living in these neighborhoods. You mentioned
Speaker 1: a large Irish community, a large Jewish community. Um, what
Speaker 1: was it like to be Irish in London's East End?
Speaker 1: What was that exp was the experience of being Irish
Speaker 1: in the East End typical of what they would be
Speaker 1: like in other places in London? What kinds of trades,
Speaker 1: what kind of residence as homes were open to London's
Speaker 1: Irish population. I think being Irish and being working class
Speaker 1: Irish and in the East End was probably much to
Speaker 1: being working class Irish anywhere else in London or anywhere
Speaker 1: else in England. You know, places like Liverpool had large
Speaker 1: Irish communities as well, so poor and the Irish population
Speaker 1: was generally poor, but it was pretty well established. I
Speaker 1: mean Irish people have been coming to England forever, but
Speaker 1: particularly in the nineteenth century after the Potato family. They
Speaker 1: were generally lower skilled than most other Londoners, that which
Speaker 1: made them more at risk to unemployment, to lower wages
Speaker 1: and therefore impoverishment in London. In the East End, they
Speaker 1: could find work at the docks, because irishman were noted
Speaker 1: as strong and capable and good workers. They made they
Speaker 1: made good doctors and importantly they made good Stevie doors,
Speaker 1: which are the higher end of the of the dock industry.
Speaker 1: Irish women would find work in workshops, so they might
Speaker 1: they might work as seamstresses or match girls, and many
Speaker 1: of course would have been as they would have been
Speaker 1: anywhere else in than they would have been employed as
Speaker 1: domestics and domestic servants. So I mean the Irish being
Speaker 1: what it was like to be Irish in London. I
Speaker 1: mean there's prejudiced against the Irish, but it's it's not
Speaker 1: in the same way that it might have been prejudiced
Speaker 1: towards people on on the basis of their hum their race.
Speaker 1: As such, the Irish um were associated very much with
Speaker 1: a with a hard drinking and a hard fighting culture
Speaker 1: and um and their their predominant religion, which is Catholicism
Speaker 1: for many of the ones that came over, set them
Speaker 1: apart from largely Protestant England. And I think what you
Speaker 1: find from the seventies onwards into the eight is the
Speaker 1: kind of growth of it's the growth of Irish nationalism.
Speaker 1: So Irish home rule becomes very much on the comes
Speaker 1: to dominate politics, domestic politics from the seventies onwards, and
Speaker 1: then in the eighties we start to see, although it
Speaker 1: has happened earlier in the eighteen sixes, we start to
Speaker 1: see episodes of Fenian Irish Republican terrorism. So there's a
Speaker 1: series of bombings in the eighties, which probably means that
Speaker 1: the Irish are um that they're suspected. They become a
Speaker 1: suspected part of society, and that probably increases prejudices their Catholics,
Speaker 1: their bombers, their drunkards, they're violence and they're probably all thieves.
Speaker 1: That's probably a prevalent view of the Irish, but they
Speaker 1: don't have it as bad as some other people. I think, Hm,
Speaker 1: can you describe the Jewish community in the East End
Speaker 1: at the time. Um again kind of homes, trades, attitudes.
Speaker 1: How long had there been a Jewish community in the
Speaker 1: East end of London. Well, there's been a Jewish community
Speaker 1: in the East end of London for a tremendously long
Speaker 1: period of time, because it's Oliver Cromwell in the period
Speaker 1: of the English Republic who allows the Jews who have
Speaker 1: been expelled from England in the medieval period back in.
Speaker 1: So they aren't to establish communities, but they're not allowed
Speaker 1: to live in trade in the city of London, so
Speaker 1: they set up around the edges. So that's kind of
Speaker 1: why we get a Jewish community around Spittle Fields on
Speaker 1: the on the edge of the city, in the edge
Speaker 1: of Mita Square. Um. This community, which is well established
Speaker 1: by the eighteenth century but quite small, is mainly made
Speaker 1: up of Sephadic of Portuguese Jews, and this changes in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century with large numbers of Eastern European Central
Speaker 1: European Jews coming and fleeing from persecution and economic distress
Speaker 1: in the Russian Empire, so that the so called pale
Speaker 1: of settlement where they're forced to live and forced to
Speaker 1: serve in the Czar's armies. So Jewish people are are
Speaker 1: leaving Russia, UM and places like Poland and Lithuania what
Speaker 1: we would call today, and they're and they're coming across
Speaker 1: Europe to settle in England or to travel on to
Speaker 1: whether I think they really want to go, which is America.
Speaker 1: And when they settle in places like Spittlefields where there's
Speaker 1: already an established community, this works for them because there
Speaker 1: they can find work as shoemakers and as tailors and shopkeepers.
Speaker 1: They can they can understand the language, which generally becomes
Speaker 1: a kind of speaking of Yiddish. And they are concentrated
Speaker 1: in areas around brook Lane, Went Street, Flower in Dean
Speaker 1: Street and Galston Street where where their their synagogues are
Speaker 1: whether people that understand them, where they can buy the
Speaker 1: food they're used to and actually from descriptions at the time,
Speaker 1: you know, this is looking like another country. Actually, of course,
Speaker 1: if you travel to White Chapel today, you'll see a
Speaker 1: similar thing, but with a different community. You've got a
Speaker 1: Bengali community there lots of people from from Um, a
Speaker 1: different part of the world. But but but similarly to
Speaker 1: the Jewish community in the nineteenth century, you would have found,
Speaker 1: you know, black things posted in Hebrew signs on walls
Speaker 1: in Hebrew. So they brought their own customs, their religion,
Speaker 1: their language, their clothes, their food. And they also, of course,
Speaker 1: and I think it's also helped with their prejudice against them,
Speaker 1: they bought some of their radical political ideas like socialism
Speaker 1: and anarchism. Mhm hm um. Jumping forward just a little
Speaker 1: bit to touch on White Chapel before we continue some
Speaker 1: of these general comments. Um, just before any Chapman's murder,
Speaker 1: the Star begins to publish the story that that Polly
Speaker 1: Nichols killer was a Jew named leather apron Can you
Speaker 1: describe what kinds of prejudices, as you said, against Jewish
Speaker 1: life that kind of reporting would have conjured up for
Speaker 1: the Stars readership. Yes, I mean there's a there's a
Speaker 1: the suggestion that the Whitechapel murderer was a guy called
Speaker 1: leather apron Um sometimes identified as John Piser, and that
Speaker 1: this is this is very much in keeping with contemporary
Speaker 1: views of Jews, but also the way in which the
Speaker 1: Whitechapel murderer was the idea of the Whitechapel murderer was
Speaker 1: constructed at the time and has come down to us
Speaker 1: ever since. So the descriptions of leather Apron in the
Speaker 1: newspapers highlighted things like his small black eyes and his
Speaker 1: Hebrew features, which is probably suggesting he had a large nose,
Speaker 1: that kind of Semitic appearance, and the color of his skin.
Speaker 1: He was described as sinister um. He was in the
Speaker 1: trades that we would associated, not exclusively with Jewish immigrants
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, but certainly with many of them.
Speaker 1: He was a shoemaker or a bootmaker or a slipper maker,
Speaker 1: and he was he was said to be someone who
Speaker 1: terrorized local women with a long sharp knife. Now I
Speaker 1: think that's important because English people weren't necessary associated with knives.
Speaker 1: You associated foreigners with knives, Portuguese sailors, um, Jewish barbers
Speaker 1: and shoemakers, Native Americans escaping from buffalo bills while west
Speaker 1: traveling show. So it was easier for people in London
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century to believe that Jack the Repper
Speaker 1: was a foreigner. He was a crazy immigrant, someone identified
Speaker 1: as other, rather than an indigenous resident of White Chapel.
Speaker 1: So those are all things which it's the presence of
Speaker 1: large numbers of Jews in that area, and the prejudice
Speaker 1: and the anti Semitism, which is definitely rife in Victorian London,
Speaker 1: which helps to allow someone like the start to point
Speaker 1: the finger at a leather ape. And for what it's worth,
Speaker 1: of course John Piser wasn't chatter rippey. He had an
Speaker 1: alibi for that. That that's um night and the sergeant
Speaker 1: Sergeant Thick that arrested him ended up having to protect
Speaker 1: him from the mob outside. Mhm, mhm. In the opening
Speaker 1: of London Shadows, you mentioned, um that there are some
Speaker 1: distinctly theological aspects of the East Ends reputation. Uh. And
Speaker 1: we've talked about the Salvation Army and you know, mentioned
Speaker 1: kind of missionary efforts and that kind of way of
Speaker 1: thinking about what was going on. Um. And in your
Speaker 1: book you say it wasn't the worst, the most criminal
Speaker 1: place to live in London in the eighteen eighties, but
Speaker 1: it was representative from many Victorians of the depths to
Speaker 1: which humanity could sink when separated from a close relationship
Speaker 1: with God and Christianity. Can you say a bit more
Speaker 1: about how theology is shaped the ideas we've been talking
Speaker 1: about about crime and poverty and vice. Yeah, for sure,
Speaker 1: I'll never get used to hearing my words come back
Speaker 1: at me. Um, yeah, I think I mean Victorian British
Speaker 1: society was a lot more religious than modern Britoness society is,
Speaker 1: even if going to church wasn't as ubiquitous as as
Speaker 1: some people probably thought it ought to be. But most
Speaker 1: social reformers were motivated by their Christian beliefs. And this
Speaker 1: this kind of manifested itself in a in a highly
Speaker 1: moral discourse about society and charity was closely linked to Christianity, or,
Speaker 1: in the case of the Jewish community, to traditions within Judaism.
Speaker 1: It was it was a moral obligation to help the poorest,
Speaker 1: but that obligation sat side by side with a belief
Speaker 1: that some sections of Victorian society had lost sight of
Speaker 1: the message of Christ. They had to be enlightened. The
Speaker 1: Word of God needed to be brought to the people
Speaker 1: of our chapel, just as missionaries will bringing it to
Speaker 1: the supposedly uncivilized peoples of Africa. Um. So, I think
Speaker 1: you've got that kind of sense that the all the
Speaker 1: people that are writing about the East, and Andrew Mens,
Speaker 1: William Stead, Samuel Barnett, you know, the women like Helen
Speaker 1: den Dendy, Helen Bows and Cake, Beatrice Web. Very many
Speaker 1: of those social reformers, Charles Booth, they are motor of eight.
Speaker 1: They can't separate out there their religion. It's such a
Speaker 1: part of them, and I think that's quite different. It's
Speaker 1: quite difficult, I think, to get that across to people
Speaker 1: in our world because religion doesn't play that kind of
Speaker 1: role in our society. It's very much an add on
Speaker 1: for many people in Britain today. You know, you go
Speaker 1: to church at certain times for for weddings and funerals
Speaker 1: and baptisms perhaps, but it's not part of your daily
Speaker 1: life in the way that it would have informed the
Speaker 1: lives of people at that time. So everything kind of
Speaker 1: gets seen through that particular lens. Mhm, mhm. Thinking about
Speaker 1: life and death in the East End, Um, what we
Speaker 1: consider today the Ripper murders weren't the only killings in
Speaker 1: the White Chapel area or across the East End. And
Speaker 1: there's violent crime on record in the neighborhood throughout the
Speaker 1: eighteen EIGHTI its not just you know, in a few months, um,
Speaker 1: but how violent And again we're kind of talking about
Speaker 1: stereotypes of versus reality. How violent was Whitechapel really and
Speaker 1: and then what was the general understanding of that violence
Speaker 1: that did occur. Yeah, and it's obviously very difficult to
Speaker 1: measure violence in the past. It's quite difficult to measure
Speaker 1: violence in our own society. Is very diffult to measure
Speaker 1: of violence in the past because because you're you can
Speaker 1: only measure statistics of violence. So you can you can
Speaker 1: measure reported crime, you can measure prosecuted crime, you can
Speaker 1: measure convictions, so the number of assaults and number of murders, etcetera, etcetera,
Speaker 1: and we don't really have those sorts of stats for
Speaker 1: nine century. There's a sense that violence is how the
Speaker 1: generally speaking crime has been in the decline from the
Speaker 1: eighteen fifties onwards and is beginning to rise again in
Speaker 1: the eighties. And that's probably also to do with cycles
Speaker 1: of of economic cycles. It's also to do with economic cycles,
Speaker 1: because poverty and crime are are interlinked. And when we
Speaker 1: talk about violent crime in the past, we're often talking
Speaker 1: about violent property crime like robbery, rather than violence per se.
Speaker 1: I think violence was endemic in the East ending White Chapel,
Speaker 1: but murder was relatively uncommon, or perhaps we could say
Speaker 1: that it was no more common than anywhere else in London,
Speaker 1: and the White Chapel murders of course are notable because
Speaker 1: of their particular brutality and the and the sequence that
Speaker 1: was unusual. Casual violence, assaults, fights between men in pubs,
Speaker 1: domestic abuse were daily occurrences and we can see this
Speaker 1: in the prosecutions at the police magistrate courts. At places
Speaker 1: like Thames and Worship Street, m violence was mostly carried
Speaker 1: out by men, either against other men, against the police,
Speaker 1: or against their female partners and wives, or violence was
Speaker 1: directed at children. And the East End Whitechapple Spittlesfields was
Speaker 1: a rough area, but I don't think it's helpful to
Speaker 1: see it as more violent than any other poor district
Speaker 1: in the UK at that particular time. Well, I can
Speaker 1: say a bit about other murders if that's useful, Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there were there were other murders, and not
Speaker 1: not least the Thames torso mystery, which which could possibly
Speaker 1: be linked to the rip of Killings um so. In
Speaker 1: that case, there was a discovery of a female torso
Speaker 1: in the Thames at Raynham in May seven, with more
Speaker 1: body parts surfacing that that same year and then in
Speaker 1: September right while the White Chappel cases is kind of
Speaker 1: reaching its enif another torso was being found amongst the
Speaker 1: building worked for police headquarters at Whitehood and in June,
Speaker 1: third dismembered female body was dragged from the Thames at
Speaker 1: Horsby down before in September of that year, the police
Speaker 1: discovered the rotting torso underneath arches in Pension Street, which
Speaker 1: isn't far from where There's Stride had been murdered just
Speaker 1: a year earlier. There were several other high profile murders
Speaker 1: in London. Only four men were sent to the gallows
Speaker 1: of the result of that, so I think we have
Speaker 1: to put it into context that we think of it
Speaker 1: as being a murderous age, but actually they weren't sending
Speaker 1: that many people. We weren't executing that many people for murder.
Speaker 1: The most compelling murder of eighteen eighty I think was
Speaker 1: probably that of Joseph Rumbold, who was killed in May.
Speaker 1: He was a was in the wrong place at the
Speaker 1: wrong time. He was killed as he strolled in Regent's
Speaker 1: Park with his girlfriend um and this is part of
Speaker 1: a gang feud out of hand and his killer was
Speaker 1: an eighteen year old there was sentenced to death, but
Speaker 1: reprieved on account of his age. So he kind of
Speaker 1: tells us that that there were there were domestic murders,
Speaker 1: there were murders through robberies, there were gang murders. The
Speaker 1: Ripper murders because they were serial, because they were particularly brutal,
Speaker 1: are different. But but but there wasn't a particularly more
Speaker 1: murderous here than any other. Mm hmmmm. Well, And in
Speaker 1: your book Jack and the Temps Torso Murders, Um, you
Speaker 1: describe those cases that you just mentioned at Raynom and
Speaker 1: Whitehall and Pension Street, UM, in a way that I
Speaker 1: think is very that I found very helpful and compelling,
Speaker 1: because we do talk as if even and this is
Speaker 1: part of the myth of Jack the Ripper, that what
Speaker 1: we call the White Chapel murders were particularly horrifying and brutal,
Speaker 1: and they were. But reading about the Torso murders I
Speaker 1: found equally horrifying. UM. And so I appreciated what you
Speaker 1: did with that book, and so I'm glad you. I'm
Speaker 1: glad you went on to mention them in this conversation
Speaker 1: now despite me not dropping that into the outline, because
Speaker 1: and Paul Beg does this too in his book Forgotten Victims,
Speaker 1: where he talks about the way that you think about
Speaker 1: the White Chapel murders, and often it's a favored suspect
Speaker 1: or something that based on you know who, uh, someone
Speaker 1: you know who's identified as a suspect brings in or
Speaker 1: omits certain crimes are killings that happened in the East
Speaker 1: End in that year. So I thought that was very
Speaker 1: helpful in your own work when we're talking about building
Speaker 1: a case and how connected to see these things or
Speaker 1: not um that there's so much of of life of death,
Speaker 1: even of the crimes that were committed. That's that gets
Speaker 1: omitted from the stories that we tell for sure. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: I mean we focus on what we want to focus
Speaker 1: on in the replicase and that that's how that's how
Speaker 1: it's been driven. And that's kind of the falsification of
Speaker 1: history in a way, because you leave out the bits
Speaker 1: that don't fit the argument you want to make. And
Speaker 1: I think even even the best historians are are guilty
Speaker 1: of of that um at some point, because it's in
Speaker 1: as long as you don't admit things which as long
Speaker 1: as you don't admit omit things which completely dismantle your argument.
Speaker 1: I think he's trying to probably get away with with
Speaker 1: with emphasizing the facts or the situations which they think
Speaker 1: are most compelling to drive the narrative that they want
Speaker 1: to present. Thinking about the agencies responsible for investigating or
Speaker 1: preventing all of these crimes. Um, you mentioned earlier that
Speaker 1: the City of London Police is different from the Metropolitan Police.
Speaker 1: You mentioned the Thames River Police. There's also the c
Speaker 1: i D at Scotland, the Criminal Investigative. I'm sorry, what's
Speaker 1: the department? Yes? Can you briefly describe those various agencies
Speaker 1: how they related to each other? Uh, you know, give
Speaker 1: our listeners a sense of what was going on with
Speaker 1: this complex, sometimes seemingly byzantine, policing organization in a complicated
Speaker 1: city like London. Yeah. Well, the first thing we have
Speaker 1: to establish, a course, is that London. London didn't have
Speaker 1: a police force until so the police in still relatively new.
Speaker 1: That might seem a strange thing to say, but but
Speaker 1: you know, it's only fifty or sixty years of policing
Speaker 1: by the time you get to eight. Since Peel passed
Speaker 1: the Metro and Police Act in eighteen twenty nine. The
Speaker 1: that created a professional police force which covered all of London,
Speaker 1: apart from the City of London, which kept its own
Speaker 1: discreete police force. The City of London is governed differently
Speaker 1: to the rest of London. It still is governed differently
Speaker 1: to the rest of London. It has its own corporation.
Speaker 1: So by eight for the Rippmoders, when the Rippermoders take place,
Speaker 1: London has divided into twenty six police districts, effectively plast
Speaker 1: the city of London. Um, so you've got they're all
Speaker 1: they're all given a letter, so aid through to to
Speaker 1: why Um, I don't think this is it? Actually there
Speaker 1: might be, so scrap that bit. But anyway, there's there's
Speaker 1: they've all they're all given a letter, and so H
Speaker 1: Division looks after most of White Chaplain's bittlefield. But there
Speaker 1: is there is the ability to draft in officers from
Speaker 1: different divisions. But they've all got their own particular divisional
Speaker 1: commanders and therefore their own petty jealous and rivalries. So
Speaker 1: we shouldn't think that A division and H Division are
Speaker 1: necessarily getting on with each other. And there's certainly a
Speaker 1: divide between uniform and playing clothes. The detectives and detection
Speaker 1: has a bad press in England. It took a long time,
Speaker 1: so there wasn't a detective agency in England in nine
Speaker 1: when the police was first formed. It took until eighteen
Speaker 1: forty two, and it took at Chilly a couple of
Speaker 1: catastrophic failures of the police to catch murderers, high profile criminals,
Speaker 1: criminals for them to create the detected apartment in eighteen
Speaker 1: forty two, and that that was a very small number
Speaker 1: of officers, and you could ask ordinary uniform officers to
Speaker 1: go into playing clothes. But the British kind of didn't
Speaker 1: like the idea of playing clothes policing at the time.
Speaker 1: It kind of smacked of Napoleonic spies. They had quite
Speaker 1: strong memories of of Napoleon's secret police, and we didn't
Speaker 1: really want to have a detective in that way. It
Speaker 1: only that only really changes in the nineteenth centuries as
Speaker 1: detectives get a place in popular culture. So Dickens the
Speaker 1: American Wilkie Collins, and then of course um Sherlock Holmes,
Speaker 1: that they these characterizations of detection, if not police detective
Speaker 1: in the case of homes, that they begin to establish
Speaker 1: in the in the popular mind, the idea that detection
Speaker 1: can be a good thing because Jenery speech and we
Speaker 1: don't think it's a good thing. Um. Alongside the Met
Speaker 1: and the City of London Police Force, you have the
Speaker 1: Criminal Investigation Department which is created in it's basically the
Speaker 1: Detective Division, the Detective Department renamed so in there's a
Speaker 1: massive scandal um called the turf fraud scandal, when several
Speaker 1: members of the detective departments are um fingered as as
Speaker 1: being part of a criminal fraud racket surrounding betting, and
Speaker 1: there's a there's a there's a um. Some of these
Speaker 1: these detectives kind of flee and the trackdown and eventually
Speaker 1: there's a big trial at the Old Bailey in in
Speaker 1: in October November eight and a couple of officers are
Speaker 1: I think three officers are eventually sent to prison for
Speaker 1: for the fraud. And there's a Home Office inquiry after
Speaker 1: that which looks at the defects in the Detective Department
Speaker 1: not just in London but elsewhere. And there's a reorganization
Speaker 1: led by a guy called Howard Vincent who becomes the
Speaker 1: first director of the Criminal Investigation Department and he appoints
Speaker 1: a guy called Frederick Adolphus Williamson as the first Superintendency.
Speaker 1: I d he'd been in the detective department and he
Speaker 1: kind of survived the scandal. He'd come out of that
Speaker 1: smelling of roses and he investigated the guys that have
Speaker 1: been been called up in it, and so they redeemed
Speaker 1: it the Criminal Investigation Department so that it didn't have
Speaker 1: the word detective in its Yeah. Um, and then once
Speaker 1: we're into the eighteen eighties and we're headed for the
Speaker 1: year of the White Chapel murders. Before we get there, Ah,
Speaker 1: Charles Warren comes in as Commissioner of Police. Um. Can
Speaker 1: you describe his personality and maybe some achievements from his
Speaker 1: career leading up to his appointment as commissioner and what
Speaker 1: were his relationships to these various players in the in
Speaker 1: the Metropolitan Police, the Home Office, the Detectives. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: As Charles Warren is is an interesting character. UM. He's
Speaker 1: a military man. He's background is in the military. In fact,
Speaker 1: his his background was particularly in the Royal Engineers. So
Speaker 1: he's a kind of military man who builds bridges, literally
Speaker 1: builds bridges, UM, does earthworks and as part of the Empire,
Speaker 1: that's extremely important. So he's a very successful military man.
Speaker 1: For most of his career. He blots that a bit
Speaker 1: later on, but will come to that. UM and he
Speaker 1: I mean he's prior to the his appointment in six
Speaker 1: as head of the Metropolitan Police, he for example, investigated
Speaker 1: the disappearance of an eminent Orientent. Orient and eminent Orientent,
Speaker 1: I can't say that a guy called Professor Edward Henry Palmer.
Speaker 1: He disappeared in Syria. UM and he looked into into
Speaker 1: what had happened to him on bath of the government. UM.
Speaker 1: He earned a knighthood for his service in South Africa
Speaker 1: in Becuana Land, so he was he was kind of considered.
Speaker 1: He must have been considered as a safe pair of
Speaker 1: hands and Henderson had to well. Henderson resigned from the
Speaker 1: MET has been been in charge for many, many years
Speaker 1: and he resigned for the MET following the West End
Speaker 1: riots of when the police mishandled the demonstration in Table
Speaker 1: Square which ended up with rioters smashing windows in power
Speaker 1: Mau and I think what what the authorities wanted was
Speaker 1: someone who could who could impose some discipline on the police,
Speaker 1: because there were also concerns that the police we weren't
Speaker 1: disciplined enough and weren't able to deal with these sorts
Speaker 1: of difficult situations, and I think his military background in
Speaker 1: many respects defines his time as commissioner of them. He
Speaker 1: didn't really get detection, he didn't get planes closed, so
Speaker 1: he clashed with C I, with I D. And he
Speaker 1: didn't get on with his boss, who was the Home Secretary, Matthews,
Speaker 1: so he wasn't well served by his relationship. Probably I
Speaker 1: imagine it was quite a prickly upstanding military guy. You
Speaker 1: probably see him in those sort of images of him
Speaker 1: in those things like the Charge of the like Brigade,
Speaker 1: and there's sort of great films from the sixties and
Speaker 1: seventies of British Imperial military figures, so I kind of
Speaker 1: see him like that. Um, but actually a very successful
Speaker 1: military man until he resigned in their memor, not as
Speaker 1: people say, because of the failure of the police to
Speaker 1: catch the ripper, but actually because he he published a
Speaker 1: sort of defensive himself in a and a popular magazine,
Speaker 1: and he forgot to ask his boss for permission to
Speaker 1: do so, so he kind of had to fall on
Speaker 1: his um, on his sword and leave the police. I
Speaker 1: suspect he was probably quite bad of that, and he
Speaker 1: went back to the army and and and in this
Speaker 1: case he ends he ends up in in eighteen nine,
Speaker 1: so eleven years after the Ripper case, serving um in
Speaker 1: the South African War that what sometimes owned as the
Speaker 1: Boar War. And he's he has to lead the assault
Speaker 1: on Spine Cop which is an unmitigated military disaster. He
Speaker 1: got through that and actually he recovered his reputation in
Speaker 1: the relief of the the town of Ladysmith. And I
Speaker 1: think it's interesting that Paul Big describes him as a
Speaker 1: man to whom fate certainly dealt to cruel hands. Leadership
Speaker 1: of the police during the Ripper case, which is probably
Speaker 1: in sible for them to solve, and leadership of a
Speaker 1: of the of soldiers at the battles Fine Cop where
Speaker 1: they were rudely defeated by the boors. So yeah, interesting guy.
Speaker 1: One other piece of the legal process that becomes very
Speaker 1: important in the White Chapel case is coroners. There there
Speaker 1: are plenty of surgeons and coroners who have a hand
Speaker 1: in the investigation, uh the inquests, the examinations in general.
Speaker 1: How significant were coroners in the legal process of the
Speaker 1: eighties when it came to murder or violent crime. Well,
Speaker 1: I kind of think of the coroner is very important
Speaker 1: because they kind of declare that someone's their role is
Speaker 1: to decide that someone has been unlawthy killed, So that
Speaker 1: do tears to investigate sudden or unexplained death so long
Speaker 1: as that's been notified as a death by a member
Speaker 1: of the public um. But we shouldn't assume that they
Speaker 1: investigated every suspicious death, or that that every homicide was
Speaker 1: identified as such. I think in the case of the
Speaker 1: Ripper motors is pretty clear that you didn't need a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of medical knowledge to know that somebody had
Speaker 1: been murdered in those situations. But in recent years, I
Speaker 1: think historians have concluded that as the costs of coroner's
Speaker 1: inquest and the cost of investigation investigating crime increased in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, some of the homicides that were deemed
Speaker 1: more difficult to solve might might more commediently been labeled
Speaker 1: as accidental death by by coroner's um so and going
Speaker 1: on from the eight fifties, the police took on quite
Speaker 1: a few of the duties of the coroners. So you
Speaker 1: have policemen appointed as coroner's office is, and that they're
Speaker 1: the intermediates between the police and the coroner, so by
Speaker 1: corner is important. But the police also have their own
Speaker 1: attached officers and of course the police surgeons to help
Speaker 1: them determine whether a death was suspicious, and then if
Speaker 1: it was, what clues whatevidence could be gleaned about the
Speaker 1: cause of death and any potential perpetrated mhm, mhm. And
Speaker 1: so we come to and let's begin with Emma Smith
Speaker 1: and Martha Tabram. What were the circumstances of their murders
Speaker 1: and how were they interpreted when they first occurred and
Speaker 1: were examined and discussed. They're quite different. I think the
Speaker 1: two murders, the murders of m Smith and the murder
Speaker 1: of Martha Tabron, should probably be separated out. I think
Speaker 1: you'll find as a as a consensus growing now that
Speaker 1: Martha Tabran was a ripper victim was killed by the
Speaker 1: same man who killed the five canonical victims. Not not
Speaker 1: everybody would agree that with that, But then not everybody
Speaker 1: would agree that the five canonical victims were killed by
Speaker 1: the same person anyway, But then a Smith is quite different.
Speaker 1: She was most probably a prostitute living in spittlefields, living
Speaker 1: in George Street who in April was set upon by
Speaker 1: a gang of men on Osborne Street, which is at
Speaker 1: the foot of Brick Lane. It looked like a particularly
Speaker 1: nasty street robbery and Emma was left was left for dead.
Speaker 1: She she managed to crawl back to her digs, but
Speaker 1: she died later she was she was taken on on
Speaker 1: the stretcher to a London hospital where she died of
Speaker 1: peritonitis on the fourth of April. So I think she
Speaker 1: was killed by a group of men, which doesn't really
Speaker 1: fit in with them the rest of the murders, and
Speaker 1: at the time I think it was just put down
Speaker 1: to a group of bullies, bullies being like a group
Speaker 1: of pimps, prostitutes, pimps or bullies. Martha Tabram is a
Speaker 1: bit different. I mean, she's thirty seven year old woman,
Speaker 1: possibly a prostitute um but like many of the victims,
Speaker 1: you know, she may not have been a prostitute. She
Speaker 1: may she may have temporarily been a prostitute. She had
Speaker 1: a family background, but she was an alcoholic and she
Speaker 1: had a reputation for being seen out with men that
Speaker 1: she wasn't going out with, which might have tainted her reputation.
Speaker 1: And she was found dead on the landing of George
Speaker 1: Yard Buildings on the seventh of August. She'd been stabbed
Speaker 1: thirty nine times. Most of the wounds have targeted her abdomen,
Speaker 1: so she hadn't had her throat slashed, and she hadn't
Speaker 1: had organs removed, which would be like the later killings
Speaker 1: or some of the later killings. But I think there's
Speaker 1: enough in in Martha's murder which is suggestive of somebody
Speaker 1: early on in the process developing the the modes operandi,
Speaker 1: which was which we would see in later killings. I
Speaker 1: think at the time it was considered to be a
Speaker 1: very brutal murder, and there was a suggestion it might
Speaker 1: have been carried up by soldiers off duty soldiers, a
Speaker 1: though there was never any proof of that. Um it
Speaker 1: made a link to prostitution because again she one of
Speaker 1: the women that came forward in the aftermath of her
Speaker 1: murder was a woman called Mary Anne Connolly or pearly Pole,
Speaker 1: who was a local prostitute, who said that she and
Speaker 1: Martha had been out and picked up men on the
Speaker 1: White Chapel Road. UM So it made the identification between
Speaker 1: prostitution and a killer on the streets and that there's
Speaker 1: kind of those kind of links, But it wasn't until
Speaker 1: Polly Nichols was murdered at the end of all, because
Speaker 1: the people began to put those two things together in
Speaker 1: the newspapers. Yeah, and when you talk about the newspapers
Speaker 1: starting to put things together with the murder of poly Nichols,
Speaker 1: can you describe the way that the press covered murders
Speaker 1: like this and maybe, um, what relationship did that put
Speaker 1: journalism in with the police. Yeah, I think probably the
Speaker 1: reality is that the relationship between the press and the
Speaker 1: police in the throughout the Rippl case was was pretty
Speaker 1: mixed and and that depended on as well on what
Speaker 1: newspaper you were reading. So the police, Charles Warren in fact,
Speaker 1: had drawn both praise and criticism for the way that
Speaker 1: they dealt with things like Bloody Sunday, which is the
Speaker 1: suppression of writing in Faco Square in the November seven
Speaker 1: the previous year. Um So the Times, which is an
Speaker 1: establishment newspaper, kind of admired the strong armed tactics used
Speaker 1: against a mob of near due worlds and vagrants. But
Speaker 1: the more liberal press, so the Star radical press like
Speaker 1: the Star or William Staid to powermal gazette tended to
Speaker 1: condemn police brutality and heavy handedness, and that follows through
Speaker 1: into the Ripper murders as they as the Watchhopple murders
Speaker 1: unfolded and they become a national and then an international story.
Speaker 1: The inability of the police to catch the killer, to
Speaker 1: catch Jack, drew down greater criticism on them and and
Speaker 1: onto Warren. And then once you start to see the
Speaker 1: publication of taunting letters from supposedly coming from the murderer
Speaker 1: himself or officers advice from the public, the police investigation
Speaker 1: actually becomes part of the story and that becomes a
Speaker 1: negative or that it's very easy for the press to
Speaker 1: snipe at the police. And you have that business as well,
Speaker 1: if you wouldn't have today of the police investigation being
Speaker 1: tainted by the fact that journalists are all over it.
Speaker 1: So as soon as the murder occurs, there's not that
Speaker 1: business of a sort of clean police space for them
Speaker 1: to investigate. It's full of journalists with pens and paper
Speaker 1: and ask interviewing witnesses. And you have examples of the
Speaker 1: police interviewing somebody and then half an hour later they're
Speaker 1: being interviewed by by a journalist and that there were
Speaker 1: to have been printed in the newspapers. That's very difficult
Speaker 1: for the police to control the investigation in that way.
Speaker 1: Mhm hm. Why so you mentioned those letters. Why did
Speaker 1: the press publish the what's called the Dear Boss letter.
Speaker 1: How would you describe the significance of that letter and
Speaker 1: it's public pitian for the case and for an understanding
Speaker 1: of these murders. Well, I think actually the reality is
Speaker 1: that the letter was of course, the letter is not
Speaker 1: written by Jack the Ripper. It's given the name Jack
Speaker 1: the Ripper. It's not coming from the killer. It's probably
Speaker 1: coming from an enterprising journalist or a newspaper editor. And
Speaker 1: I think we probably know now that that is Tom
Speaker 1: Bullying and Charles Moore of the Central News Agency. They
Speaker 1: could see a good story when they saw one, and
Speaker 1: they and they exploited it by penning that letter and
Speaker 1: getting it onto the pages of the London Press. And
Speaker 1: I think probably with the compliance it will be reluctantly
Speaker 1: at first of the police. The police are desperate from lead,
Speaker 1: so they this might work. This might get people to
Speaker 1: recognize the handwriting, who knows, might trigger a memory. That's
Speaker 1: why they That's why they do it. But in publishing it,
Speaker 1: they kind of created the monster that we know as
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper. Before the Deer Boss letter was published, UM,
Speaker 1: and it was published in the newspapers and on bill
Speaker 1: bill posters, at least two women have been brutally murdered
Speaker 1: by a person or persons unknown. After the release of
Speaker 1: the Better and the subsequent double event, that the killing
Speaker 1: of two women on one night, a mythical lone assassin
Speaker 1: has been established in the minds of the Victorian public.
Speaker 1: And significantly, I think we've we've never shifted from that
Speaker 1: view of the killer in the hundred and thirty or
Speaker 1: more years that have passed since the murders ended. And
Speaker 1: that's the power of the Victorian press. It created the
Speaker 1: idea of a lone assassin. What in the history of
Speaker 1: of the British press, what kinds of precedents were therefore
Speaker 1: discussing a case like this? UM. Was the sensational journalism
Speaker 1: part of a tradition or you mentioned that it's called
Speaker 1: sometimes the new journalism? Is it something really new? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So what was new about new journalism was its focused
Speaker 1: I think on an investigation on highlighting and interrogating social
Speaker 1: ills scandals in some depth. But This is actually prompted,
Speaker 1: of course, in part by the greater freedoms of publishing.
Speaker 1: So in previous part of the century there's been restrictions
Speaker 1: on the presidents, some degree of censorship which could form
Speaker 1: the way largely by the nineteenth century, and taxation. So
Speaker 1: newspapers are expensive. And if you couple this with the
Speaker 1: fact that what we see coming across from from the
Speaker 1: USA is the technological development in printing that makes us
Speaker 1: able to produce newspapers um more rapidly and cheaper. And
Speaker 1: then of course things like railways allow us to distribute
Speaker 1: distribute them more quickly, so news could travel further and
Speaker 1: travel faster. Many more people could read, or know somebody
Speaker 1: who could read, so they could read to them, sit
Speaker 1: around in the pub and read it. More people could
Speaker 1: afford to buy a newspaper because they're cheaper, and so
Speaker 1: the newspaper industry is growing. So it's a massive takeoff,
Speaker 1: particularly from the sixties and seventies, in newspaper readership and
Speaker 1: newspaper production. Um So the kind of modern newspaper industry,
Speaker 1: certain newspaper industry we're familiar with by the middle of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century is kind of established in the late century,
Speaker 1: and as a result, newspaper editors are looking for more
Speaker 1: and more sensational copy, especially stories that are going to
Speaker 1: plug readers in and keep them coming back for next installments.
Speaker 1: If you're a daily newspaper, what are you going to
Speaker 1: how are you going to attract your reader to come
Speaker 1: back Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Um. If you're a
Speaker 1: weekend newspaper and you've got that's more time to think
Speaker 1: about the story you're putting out. What kind of sensation
Speaker 1: your story do you want to represent to your readers
Speaker 1: to get them to buy your newspaper on Sunday rather
Speaker 1: than your rivals. And you've got paper boys crying the
Speaker 1: news in the streets and literally shouting the headlines and
Speaker 1: persuading people to part with their pennies and shillings. So
Speaker 1: that's really important to have an installment story, and the
Speaker 1: Ripper case is perfect for that in terms of sensational
Speaker 1: crime news, though there's nothing particularly new about in news terms.
Speaker 1: Prime news had filled columns in the papers going right
Speaker 1: back to the eighteenth century, right back to the early
Speaker 1: days of the newspapers, and which which emerged really after
Speaker 1: the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century, and in
Speaker 1: addition to newspapers, there's a tremendous English print culture, British
Speaker 1: print culture, which had provided a regular diet of murder
Speaker 1: news and moral panics for readers all the way through
Speaker 1: through that period. So every execution there would be people
Speaker 1: selling pamphlets about the person being executed, so you could
Speaker 1: kind of read about the person you're seeing slowly strangled
Speaker 1: to death. And the Victorians, as I think writers like
Speaker 1: Judith Flanders and Rosalind Crone have both eloquently described, the
Speaker 1: Victorians are fascinated by murder, and they followed all the
Speaker 1: gruesome details of homicides, from the discovery of dead bodies
Speaker 1: through to the capture of the killers, to their trial
Speaker 1: and then and then at least until eight their public execution.
Speaker 1: And actually, I think Flanders has argued that once you
Speaker 1: remove hanging from the public gaze, whence it's no longer
Speaker 1: taking place on in front of a prisoner, on the
Speaker 1: roofs of a prison, and you put it behind brick walls.
Speaker 1: Actually that makes people's fascination with murder grow even more.
Speaker 1: And of course, by the sixties we were only hanging
Speaker 1: people for murder. We weren't hanging people as we did
Speaker 1: in the eighteenth century for all forms of crime MHM.
Speaker 1: One case from the eighteenth century that looks like an
Speaker 1: interesting point of comparison or a precedent is the London
Speaker 1: monster case. Can you describe that in brief terms and
Speaker 1: maybe how it was published about in the press? Yes, briefly.
Speaker 1: In there were a series of attacks in London on
Speaker 1: women which kind of provoked a sort of moral panic.
Speaker 1: They kind of happened like this, So a strange man
Speaker 1: would approach respectable women, offered to let them smell his
Speaker 1: his bunch of artificial flowers, his nosegay, and then stabbed them,
Speaker 1: usually whilst making suggestive comments. And he generally stabbed them
Speaker 1: in in, in the behind, in the buttons, and sometimes
Speaker 1: they wouldn't even realize they've been stabbed until they got home.
Speaker 1: And because they wore so many players of clothing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the story occupied the columns of newspapers, which created
Speaker 1: a sensation. And the man named John Julius Augustine, he
Speaker 1: was a wealthy insurance broker, off with a fifty pound reward,
Speaker 1: which fifty pounds is a considerable sum of money. And
Speaker 1: eventually someone was caught and put on trial in July
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety a man named Rennick Williams. He was an
Speaker 1: artificial flower sell um. He had two trials because the
Speaker 1: first trial is a bit of a fast but it
Speaker 1: was he was convicted and sent to prison. And I
Speaker 1: think we can see some links between the man because
Speaker 1: he was dubbed the London Monster or the monster two
Speaker 1: event in and and of course to the context of
Speaker 1: the time. I think it's important to always to see
Speaker 1: history in context. And it's seventeen eighty nine. We know
Speaker 1: about seventeen eighty nine is there was a revolution going
Speaker 1: on across the channel in France. But the revolution in France,
Speaker 1: following on from the the revolution in America in the
Speaker 1: seventeen seventies, had raised all these ideas about rights and freedoms,
Speaker 1: and one of the rights and freedoms that people talk
Speaker 1: about was women's rights and freedoms. And I think when
Speaker 1: we look at the London Monster, while it didn't directly
Speaker 1: influence press reporting of the White Chapels, there's a connection
Speaker 1: in between the way in which the demonizing of the
Speaker 1: represvctives as loose women operating outside of male protection, and
Speaker 1: the late eighteenth century advice for women to stay off
Speaker 1: the streets for fear of the London Monster. There's a
Speaker 1: connection there in this idea that women should stay off
Speaker 1: the streets. So the White Chapel murder and the London
Speaker 1: Monster of both examples along with spring Hill Jack in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, of characters who target women, and male
Speaker 1: characters and target women and are kind of saying get
Speaker 1: back inside the house. Stopped straying into what is male
Speaker 1: masculine territory. So regarding uh, the letters that came that
Speaker 1: followed after, Um, the Dear Boss letter that, as you say,
Speaker 1: gives the kind of mythological character of Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 1: his his name and you know, a kind of saucy identity. Um,
Speaker 1: you've written that it's highly likely that all of the
Speaker 1: letters are fakes or hoaxes and do not come from
Speaker 1: the killer at all. You mentioned the only one that
Speaker 1: that maybe is different from that is the what's called
Speaker 1: the Fromhell letter. Um. You explore those ideas at length
Speaker 1: in the Torso Murders book. Can you say a bit
Speaker 1: more about that point about the letters likely all being hoaxes.
Speaker 1: How difficult was it for police to trust any kind
Speaker 1: of tips or notes or witness statements that they got. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think most researchers today would agree that
Speaker 1: the vast majority of the letters, certainly the letters that
Speaker 1: are purport to be from the killer are either fakes
Speaker 1: or hoaxes. I mean, lots of people writing letters, were
Speaker 1: writing letters which were offering advice, and we probably have
Speaker 1: to deal with them slightly differently. Um, but it's not
Speaker 1: it's not beyond the bounds of credibility that the killer
Speaker 1: would try and communicate with the police of the public.
Speaker 1: I mean in the States, and you have the Zodiac killer,
Speaker 1: who certainly did. It's just that these particular letters generally
Speaker 1: seem incredulous. And I think the exception being made from
Speaker 1: hell letters because it wasn't signed chat the Ripper. Um.
Speaker 1: Also that handwright some handwriting experts, and I would qualify
Speaker 1: that because they don't all agree. Do hold out the
Speaker 1: possibility that this was the work of some poorly educated
Speaker 1: individual who was unused to writing, perhaps someone learning their
Speaker 1: letters as an It's one of the points that we
Speaker 1: make in attempts to also case a book about the
Speaker 1: tempts also cases that we imagine that our guy was
Speaker 1: potentially kind of trying to trying to improve himself. So,
Speaker 1: but regardless of whether the letters are real or fake,
Speaker 1: hoaxes or whatever. Um, it follows that in such a difficult,
Speaker 1: fevered situation as the police found themselves, they'd have to
Speaker 1: check every single lead they got, regardless of whether it
Speaker 1: was credible or not. Um. So hours and hours and
Speaker 1: hours of police time would have be wasted following up
Speaker 1: those kind of false leads sent in by attention seekers.
Speaker 1: If that's how we want to see them. Um, just
Speaker 1: because the stuff is looks obviously fake of him, what
Speaker 1: if it had been true? And I think that's probably
Speaker 1: explains also why they published the deer Bost letter, because
Speaker 1: it's what if when it when it came to investigating crimes, um,
Speaker 1: to what extent did police depend on good informants and
Speaker 1: good tips in order to solve a tricky case? Were
Speaker 1: there any significant or high profile crimes that were solved
Speaker 1: with the assistance of like an anonymous letter leading up
Speaker 1: to this point, I, yeah, it's one of your curveballs.
Speaker 1: I don't really know of any. I mean, what I
Speaker 1: can say is that the police use informants, and you know,
Speaker 1: the use of informants by detectives by polices is often reported.
Speaker 1: So there are very many cases that have become for
Speaker 1: the police, magistrates, or before the old baby in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century where you will hear a policeman saying acting
Speaker 1: on information, acting on information, and some of that information
Speaker 1: will be information by what we would call a steak out,
Speaker 1: you know, watching a watching a building, watching watching particular
Speaker 1: suspected criminals. But often it's information from the criminal um fraternity,
Speaker 1: from neighbors overhearing conversations. In much the same way that
Speaker 1: the police have probably always and will always gain information.
Speaker 1: The public will tell them some, they'll get some from
Speaker 1: criminals who want two um get a lighter sentence, or
Speaker 1: they'll they'll pay money to people on the margins of
Speaker 1: criminality in order to get information. All of that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff is really important. I don't think the police
Speaker 1: could operate without and I don't think the police in
Speaker 1: the ninete century could operate without informants, without information. Um.
Speaker 1: We have to bear in mind because of the nineteent
Speaker 1: century police don't have many of the tools that the
Speaker 1: modern police have, you know, like DNA testing, fingerprint testing,
Speaker 1: close circuit television, and they have none of that stuff.
Speaker 1: M mhm. Thinking um, back to the people who were
Speaker 1: the women who were targeted. You challenge the idea that
Speaker 1: all of the women killed in the White Chapel murders
Speaker 1: were prostitutes, and you mentioned this earlier in this conversation too.
Speaker 1: Um you wrote, one of the first things that anyone
Speaker 1: reads about the Ripper murders is that all of the
Speaker 1: victims were prostitutes. However, it is probably more accurate to
Speaker 1: say that all of the women killed by the White
Speaker 1: Chapel murderer had been selling themselves for sex in the
Speaker 1: streets shortly before they met their death. So can you
Speaker 1: describe the significance of the distinction that you're making there,
Speaker 1: because I do think it's important, But I'd like to
Speaker 1: hear hear you talk a little bit more about how
Speaker 1: from your understanding of what was going on in the
Speaker 1: East End of One at the time, what life was
Speaker 1: like there, how important this distinction is. Mhmm. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's become it's now become wholly contested whether
Speaker 1: the victims um of Jack the Ripper, specifically the canonical
Speaker 1: fire victims were prostitutes. I think I'd make a distinction
Speaker 1: on the grounds ocasionally selling sex in order to get
Speaker 1: enough money to eat, drink, or pay for the roof
Speaker 1: of your head is not the same thing as being
Speaker 1: a full time sex worker. It may well be that
Speaker 1: all of Jack's victims were impoverished prostitutes, as they've been
Speaker 1: described for over a century, But I think we should
Speaker 1: hold out the possibility that at the time that they
Speaker 1: met their deaths, they were so down and out the
Speaker 1: prostitution was their only option. It's, of course very easy
Speaker 1: for the police. It was very of course, very easy
Speaker 1: for the police and oppressed to dismiss these women as
Speaker 1: unfortunate who brought their own deaths upon themselves. They were
Speaker 1: all thought to be prostitutes. But whether that's because they
Speaker 1: were single women, or they were women who were out
Speaker 1: drinking and they're women out on their own, I mean,
Speaker 1: those all fit with ideas of what prostitutes were. So
Speaker 1: kind of that boundary between being what we might describe
Speaker 1: as a woman of loose morals and a prostitute. A
Speaker 1: prostitute somebody who sells sex for money. Women to lose
Speaker 1: morals doesn't necessarily sell sex at all, and she might
Speaker 1: have sex with people who she's not married to m
Speaker 1: and have multiple partners and that might even in our
Speaker 1: own society be frowned upon, rightly or wrongly, but in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century most certainly would have been So I
Speaker 1: think for me, all these women were killed because the
Speaker 1: the killer for they were prostitutes. There is also a
Speaker 1: distinction there. I think the killer believed that they were
Speaker 1: prostitutes and that was his motivation for killing them. But
Speaker 1: the same token prostitutes would present themselves in parts of
Speaker 1: London where it was they made themselves vulnerable to a
Speaker 1: killer who targeted strangers in the way that we think. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and in some of your writing you followed Walker
Speaker 1: with in describing Eastern sex workers as members of the
Speaker 1: working class. Can you describe how how that point helps
Speaker 1: us to understand their lives, how they would have thought
Speaker 1: about themselves, their control over their own trade. How is
Speaker 1: it helpful to think of sex workers as members of
Speaker 1: the working class. Yeah, absolutely, I think it's really important.
Speaker 1: I mean, um, these are poor women. None of them
Speaker 1: came from wealth, and we know a bit more about
Speaker 1: thanks to the work of various members of the White
Speaker 1: Chappele Society and authors like Neil Sheldon. We know that
Speaker 1: many of these represctives had kind of normal, respectable lives
Speaker 1: before they arrived in the East Den. But but almost
Speaker 1: invariably their lives are characterized by kind of decline into
Speaker 1: poverty exacerbated by by alcoholism, um, personal tragedies, broken marriages,
Speaker 1: you know, bereavements, financial insecurities. This is of what led
Speaker 1: them to the East End. But they're all working class women.
Speaker 1: None of them came from a higher ranking society. And
Speaker 1: I think Walker which is interesting in saying that when
Speaker 1: we look at Victorian prostitutes, who who are invariably described
Speaker 1: as fallen and unfortunate by people at the time, these
Speaker 1: these are women who have fallen from grace, who are
Speaker 1: unfortunately in the situation. They find themselves a Walker which
Speaker 1: wants to turn that around. And I think this is
Speaker 1: interesting to see these women as being empowered and independent
Speaker 1: being you know, these are women who have refused to
Speaker 1: follow the kind of path in life that's been mapped
Speaker 1: out for them by men generally, and instead of gone
Speaker 1: for the relative quick prosperity and freedom that that that
Speaker 1: prostitution might bring them, at least in the short term.
Speaker 1: So I mean we again, context is everything. We have
Speaker 1: to remember that late nineteenth century British society was heavily patriarchal,
Speaker 1: with women's rights, feminism. These are things that are emerging,
Speaker 1: but but it's very very slow. For the vast majority
Speaker 1: of working class women, life offered not very much. You
Speaker 1: had a life of judging, drudgery. You had a life
Speaker 1: which is it's a life characterized by almost constant pregnancy
Speaker 1: or childcare, and a marriage to a man who, frankly
Speaker 1: was probably considered decent if he didn't beat you up.
Speaker 1: So perhaps it's not unreasonable for some young women to
Speaker 1: choose to prostitute themselves for a relatively brief period of
Speaker 1: time if it brought them much more money than they
Speaker 1: would earn by sewing or charing or something else. Um Like,
Speaker 1: like young women of all ages, they want to be
Speaker 1: able to spend money on nice things, on the hats
Speaker 1: and clothes and jewelry. And I think we should recognize
Speaker 1: that that that this sort of female independence was frequently
Speaker 1: being repressed by by male and female actors in society
Speaker 1: at all classes. Victorian society is obsessed with notions of
Speaker 1: respectability and the proper social order of things. So prostitutes
Speaker 1: are independent women who clearly didn't know their proper place,
Speaker 1: and who flaunted their sexuality, and for some that set
Speaker 1: them apart as social priors, and in many ways, of course,
Speaker 1: justified the actions of a serial killer in murdering them. Um.
Speaker 1: It's something that um Donald Romblo for his sites is
Speaker 1: it's for some victorians that the Ripple was just engaged
Speaker 1: in street cleaning. Um. You mentioned Neil Sheldon, and you
Speaker 1: know in reading I mentioned already Paul Begs Forgotten Victims book.
Speaker 1: But in those studies that have looked at the lives
Speaker 1: of these women, you know, we find as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: that any Chapman was married to a coachman for a
Speaker 1: time and lived with him in Berkshire where she where
Speaker 1: he attended to sear test marry um before she ended
Speaker 1: up in Whitechapel, And that Liz Stride she opened a
Speaker 1: coffee hall with one of her husbands. Um. What sort
Speaker 1: of of class positions were these? Were these still working
Speaker 1: class people? Um kind of what from what heights did
Speaker 1: any Chapman and list Ride in particular fall if we're
Speaker 1: talking in that kind of parlance of the time. But
Speaker 1: as I understand it, Liz Stride, you know, should come
Speaker 1: over from Sweden, so she's an immigrant and a very
Speaker 1: interesting life, and it's reasiful to know about her life
Speaker 1: because I think much of it was invented by her
Speaker 1: and tellings of it. And that's one of the problems
Speaker 1: that we have. We know very little about the repect
Speaker 1: and dreading. We're very very little about Mary Kelly, for example,
Speaker 1: so that allows people to him fill with invention stories
Speaker 1: out um. But I think in terms of the fall yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's a danger here to say that these
Speaker 1: women have these women are unusual in um in in
Speaker 1: falling through the social thrawning down the social staircase. But
Speaker 1: I suspect that's true of very many women in in
Speaker 1: Victorian society. I think you would probably characterize this drivers
Speaker 1: coming from the working class with a bit of entrepreneurial
Speaker 1: spirit in setting up a coffee shop. And we're not
Speaker 1: talking about somebody who's going to have a string of
Speaker 1: Starbucks up and down the country. Is not It's not
Speaker 1: that this is not a rich entrepreneur. This is somebody
Speaker 1: getting by running a coffee shop. And um, so the
Speaker 1: coachman is still a servant. So any chapman is married
Speaker 1: to a coachman, but a coachman is a respectable servant,
Speaker 1: but it's still a domestic servant, so you're still tied
Speaker 1: to a family house and depends upon um, your master,
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a subservient position in society. Is
Speaker 1: a member of the working class. But there are degrees
Speaker 1: of working class life. And I think, what's happening to
Speaker 1: these women and we see it and it's very it's
Speaker 1: very well illustrated in in Reuben Holtz book. Is is
Speaker 1: the way that a series of events, tragic events, undermined them.
Speaker 1: And when you add things like drinking to that or something,
Speaker 1: it's a drink which is the catalyst for this. That's
Speaker 1: when they start to slip. And a woman without a
Speaker 1: husband is is really in a very very dangerous situation,
Speaker 1: which is why so many women in working class women
Speaker 1: in Victorian London would have quickly found another partner adopted
Speaker 1: his name. So you know, with several of the Ripper victims,
Speaker 1: their names are kind of movable. It's whoever they are
Speaker 1: with it becomes their common law husband. And marriage is
Speaker 1: not necessarily something you need to have. UM in that
Speaker 1: respect of quite modern, I suppose, but there is a
Speaker 1: fall from grace. But we know about these five or
Speaker 1: six women because they were murdered by someone who's come
Speaker 1: down to history as Jack the Ripper. And it's interesting
Speaker 1: because one of the criticisms of ripper ology has been
Speaker 1: that it focuses on the ripper and not on the victims.
Speaker 1: But of course we would only know that. We only
Speaker 1: know the victims because they were killed by the Ripper.
Speaker 1: You know, millions of working class women died. Plenty of
Speaker 1: them were murdered or or beaten and then died of
Speaker 1: injuries or died of relative starvation or illness in the
Speaker 1: nine century, or died in childbooth. We don't know any
Speaker 1: of their names. They weren't killed by a syrial. I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not making a case for a statue to
Speaker 1: the Ripper. It's just it is another way to look
Speaker 1: at him. Well. And I yeah, when you were talking
Speaker 1: about Liz Stride coffee shop, when I read that detail
Speaker 1: of her life, that was actually what I just felt,
Speaker 1: such a close connection to someone like that. No, I haven't,
Speaker 1: I haven't, but I do have friends. I do have
Speaker 1: friends who you know, opened a small shop. So when
Speaker 1: I was thinking about yeah, of course, but that's that's
Speaker 1: the thing, isn't it. It's like walking the streets to
Speaker 1: Whitechapel and it's like being in a place where someone
Speaker 1: was Those are the things that connected to it. You know.
Speaker 1: The class is is you know famously in another country,
Speaker 1: but actually it's a most of things that we recognize
Speaker 1: in it. M hm. So you mentioned earlier, UM that
Speaker 1: in November the murder of the murder investigation is under way, UM,
Speaker 1: and the police are not catching the killer. There's been
Speaker 1: a huge mobilization of the forces in October that has
Speaker 1: been unsuccessful in charging anyone with these crimes. And as
Speaker 1: you mentioned, that's often pointed to as the reason for
Speaker 1: Charles Warren's resignation. UM. But he publishes his article the
Speaker 1: Police of the Metropolis in Murray's magazine. UM. And you
Speaker 1: talked a little bit about the consequences of that already
Speaker 1: with with Matthews in the Home Office. But what was
Speaker 1: the substance of the article, UM? You know, what's this
Speaker 1: this military man who is now in charge of the police.
Speaker 1: What's he arguing about the way that policing should be done.
Speaker 1: What's he saying? Well, I think what what is mostly
Speaker 1: saying in that article is that he hasn't been able
Speaker 1: to run the police in the way that he wants
Speaker 1: to run it. He's being he's having interference, is frustrated
Speaker 1: by interference from from c I D you know, from
Speaker 1: the detectives. Um, he's suffering a tremendous amount of criticism,
Speaker 1: and it suggested he's trying to resign several times and
Speaker 1: not been allowed to resign. UM. So I guess what
Speaker 1: he's really saying in that is the police are a
Speaker 1: fine body of men. My police are working extremely hard,
Speaker 1: and UM, while I'm working with one hand type behind
Speaker 1: my back, I'm not able to properly run this case
Speaker 1: as I want I want to. And I think that's
Speaker 1: that's a kind of inevitability you get in that In
Speaker 1: that that conflict which which exists in British policing, I
Speaker 1: think even to some extent people would probably arguing it
Speaker 1: still exists. It certainly existed in British society right through
Speaker 1: until the relatively recent decades of that tension between the
Speaker 1: uniform and playing clothes, uniform and detection. The detectives are
Speaker 1: kind of seen as a they see themselves as an
Speaker 1: elite part of the police, and they're kind of seen
Speaker 1: as people who don't have to follow the rules by
Speaker 1: by others and therefore resented to get better pay conditions
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff. It may be the
Speaker 1: same in the US, but it's certainly um frustrates Sir
Speaker 1: Charles Warren. And I'd rather suspect you couldn't get out
Speaker 1: of the police quick enough so that the article for
Speaker 1: Laurie's magazine was his chance to have a goal for
Speaker 1: those who criticize and called for his resignation. I mean,
Speaker 1: and you just look at the reaction of the press
Speaker 1: to it. I mean, you know, the start as a
Speaker 1: real go in from it. You know, it's it says
Speaker 1: I wrote this down. A more extraordinary document never found
Speaker 1: its way into print. It would be charitable to suppose
Speaker 1: that when he penned this remarkable addition to the literature
Speaker 1: of Connie Hatch, Sir Charles Warren was laboring under some
Speaker 1: unusual excitement for contents. Coney Hatch is London's largest lunatic asylum.
Speaker 1: It was it's kind of like saying that he'd gone
Speaker 1: that basically, No, and I didn't. I didn't mention this
Speaker 1: in any of the outlines. But I've been thinking a
Speaker 1: lot about Charles Warren bringing that kind of imperial military
Speaker 1: discipline to the London police. And you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of the discussions that I'm a part of here in
Speaker 1: the in the United States today are about the militarization
Speaker 1: of the police. You know, it's kind of the phrase
Speaker 1: that we used to get at that issue here and now,
Speaker 1: and and I've read a little bit about some of
Speaker 1: the radical press criticizing Charles Warren along similar grounds, saying
Speaker 1: that he was turning the London Police the met into
Speaker 1: a military and occupying military force. Um, this wasn't the question.
Speaker 1: So maybe you don't have something prepared, but would you
Speaker 1: be able to say a few more words about you know,
Speaker 1: was it fair to criticize Charles Warren for militarizing the
Speaker 1: police in London. I think it's. Um, it's certainly something
Speaker 1: that's thrown at him, and it's thrown at him in
Speaker 1: the wake of Bloody Sunday in November Heaven, when when
Speaker 1: he kind of he doesn't want to suffer what happened
Speaker 1: to his predecessor Henderson in in the pal mall all
Speaker 1: the West End Rights of six. So he tries to
Speaker 1: close down demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, which is kind of
Speaker 1: London's traditional place for demonstrations and political gatherings and that
Speaker 1: kind of He's met with cries of outrage, cries about
Speaker 1: free speech, as you might imagine, and protests go ahead,
Speaker 1: and he sends in the soul. He ends in his
Speaker 1: he's disciplined policeman with in a in a battle, charged
Speaker 1: to crack heads and clear the square, and that creates
Speaker 1: a riot. And some fantastic cartoons from the time depicting
Speaker 1: Warren as on top of Nelson's column and policeman beating
Speaker 1: up protesters on all the plints around the square, um
Speaker 1: the Lions getting involved in everything else, and there's a
Speaker 1: there's that kind of sense of the he's an own
Speaker 1: goal really for Warren because the press can can rage
Speaker 1: against his militarization into Faga Square. Although some of them
Speaker 1: are very pleased with what he does, the Times are
Speaker 1: very pleased with what he does. And and when it
Speaker 1: comes to the riplicate, of course he doesn't catch the killer.
Speaker 1: So there's a you know, the criticism is aimful square
Speaker 1: at the metroids and police because here is a murderer
Speaker 1: who's killing poor women in East London, and here is
Speaker 1: a commissioner of the met who sent his men into
Speaker 1: beat up poor men in the West end of London,
Speaker 1: So there's kind of a it's a it's a very
Speaker 1: obvious target for radical press, for the liberal press to
Speaker 1: have a go up, to have a go out warrant
Speaker 1: about it, whether it's fair. He did concentrate on military discipline,
Speaker 1: but he probably thought that was very important. And let's
Speaker 1: face it, he only becomes a commissioner in late he
Speaker 1: has not had that much time to do very much
Speaker 1: with metropologies, and already they've got one of the most
Speaker 1: high profile murder cases, were the most high private profile
Speaker 1: murder case for decades, So it's a bit tricky for him. Really.
Speaker 1: I always started off disliking to Charles Warren and I
Speaker 1: kind of have a lot of sympathy for him now. Hm.
Speaker 1: When it comes to the press covering the murders and
Speaker 1: the investigation, um stories start to dwindle after the inquest
Speaker 1: of Mary Kelly. Why is that? Why Why does the
Speaker 1: press kind of decide that the story is over at
Speaker 1: that point? Well, I guess someone like Stanley Cohen and
Speaker 1: sociologists would argue that a moral panic with us out
Speaker 1: and the press eventually get bored of it and they
Speaker 1: move on to something else. But I think the answer
Speaker 1: is quite simple really, in the police refuse refused to
Speaker 1: cooperate with the press in the wake of Mary Kelly's murder.
Speaker 1: They stopped providing any information or access. You kind of
Speaker 1: imagine them closing down. You imagine, I imagine reporters standing
Speaker 1: outside Lehman Street and being told to go away by
Speaker 1: by uniformed officers. And when they've got the the inquest
Speaker 1: is closed down. And that's another trific place for the
Speaker 1: press to get information. So there's no inquest, there's no
Speaker 1: information coming out of the police headquarters. Coppers on the
Speaker 1: beat aren't talking to the press. There's nothing to print.
Speaker 1: So if there's nothing to print, then you go on
Speaker 1: and start talking about something else. H M. Of course,
Speaker 1: those of us who are looking back at the year,
Speaker 1: at the case, at the killings with um historical interest,
Speaker 1: there are things that follow events, documents that do continue
Speaker 1: to draw interest, and one of those is McNaughton's memorandum.
Speaker 1: H can you talk about Melvin McNaughton and who he was?
Speaker 1: What is this this memorandum that he wrote, and to
Speaker 1: what extent it is or is not significant, especially in
Speaker 1: light of one of the comments you've written that that
Speaker 1: he in particular may have been invested with too much
Speaker 1: significance by others who have looked at the investigation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think one thing you probably have to
Speaker 1: say is if you you could ask, you could ask
Speaker 1: a dozen different so called experts about the replication about McNaughton,
Speaker 1: and you'd probably get a dozen slightly different answers. But this,
Speaker 1: this would be mine, I think. So we know Melville
Speaker 1: mcdorton was Chief Comsortable c I D In June, so
Speaker 1: he has an indirect connection to the Whitechapel murdericers. He
Speaker 1: would have known people who were involved in the case,
Speaker 1: even though he wasn't directing the case himself. In February
Speaker 1: he wrote a report on the case, and that was
Speaker 1: prompted by speculation in the Sun newspaper of the day
Speaker 1: that the murderer as a man named Thomas cut Blush,
Speaker 1: and he was kind of refuting that. I think the
Speaker 1: report really comes to light though, in in nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: when mcnorton's daughter allowed a TV documentary maker access to
Speaker 1: her father's papers. Um, so that's kind of how we
Speaker 1: we get this this thing. The report itself is quite short,
Speaker 1: and it In it mcdaorton named three possible ripper suspects,
Speaker 1: So three people that were supposedly known to the police's
Speaker 1: part of the investigation at the time, and these were Monskey,
Speaker 1: John Druitt, Michael Ostrog's Michael Michael Ostrog and a guy
Speaker 1: just known as Kosminski, not given a first name, but
Speaker 1: generally has been given the name Aaron Kazmitski, but Kazminski
Speaker 1: a police jews how mc norton right. The mc norton memorandum,
Speaker 1: as it's known, has been given significance, considerable significant over
Speaker 1: the years since because because it names three men and
Speaker 1: because it suggests the police had them in mind. Um.
Speaker 1: And this supported the claims of Sir Robert Anderson, who
Speaker 1: was head of c D at the time of the murders,
Speaker 1: and so we can consider to be a fairly reliable
Speaker 1: source um. And he said this in he said the
Speaker 1: police knew who the rewards in his memoirs, which were
Speaker 1: published in nine Now police memoirs and notoristly difficult because
Speaker 1: they're often self justifications and they're written after the event.
Speaker 1: So we we can give them quite a lot of credibility,
Speaker 1: but we need to also be skeptical at the same time.
Speaker 1: And when we look at mc norton's trier of suspects,
Speaker 1: my problem is that they broadly fit the typology of
Speaker 1: who the Victorians thought ought to have ought to have
Speaker 1: been the killer I someone who was considered to be
Speaker 1: a social other. So we have an upper class gentleman,
Speaker 1: we have a psychotic doctor, and we have a deranged
Speaker 1: immigrant dr um, deranged Jewish immigrants. That they're all the
Speaker 1: people who are drew it or strong on Kosminski, and
Speaker 1: I think it's rather convenient that mc norton identifies those
Speaker 1: three as the people that the piece we're looking for,
Speaker 1: because those are the sort of people the press we're
Speaker 1: telling the police they ought to be looking for. So yeah,
Speaker 1: m the annoying thing about McNaughton is spending his name right.
Speaker 1: That's his name spelled differently all the times, and I
Speaker 1: spelt it wrong, having corrected it in my book, my
Speaker 1: last book, And that was one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: Ripper ologies had such a nothing like, nothing like a
Speaker 1: typo to get them upset. I spelled a few of
Speaker 1: my own I spelled it a few of my own
Speaker 1: ways to um you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation,
Speaker 1: when you were talking about Jack the Ripper has a
Speaker 1: modern myth um that kind of without the mystery, the
Speaker 1: White Chapel murders are just another tale of statistic killing,
Speaker 1: and that part of what makes it compelling is the
Speaker 1: ability to project our own ideas into the gap where
Speaker 1: we don't have a person there. Can you speak a
Speaker 1: little bit more to the idea that it's the uncertainty
Speaker 1: about the identity of the killer that keeps this story
Speaker 1: your life. Do you have more to say about that
Speaker 1: than you already already said? Well, I can certainly try.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, and I think identifying Jack the Ripper,
Speaker 1: or arguing about the identity of the White Chappel murderers
Speaker 1: as has kind of fuel the ripper industry. It's an
Speaker 1: industry which has existed for over hundred years. I mean,
Speaker 1: there are ripper tours taking place whilst the murders are
Speaker 1: are happening. You know, ripper tours aren'to modern invention. People.
Speaker 1: There was a waxworkshell on Whitechappel High Street at the
Speaker 1: time of the Ripper murders. This is an industry which
Speaker 1: started in and has continued the pace ever since, and
Speaker 1: now we have films and movies, and we have franchises
Speaker 1: like Assassin's Create the video game which references the Rapper.
Speaker 1: You can play as Jack the Ripper if you want to.
Speaker 1: And there are numerous Ripper solution histories, and there are
Speaker 1: Ripper novels, and um, you know, I have a Ripper
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper game. You can get rapp Jack the
Speaker 1: Ripper themed T shirts, you know, all sorts of things, Um,
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper if you want to. Um. But the
Speaker 1: fact that so many facts in the case of disputed
Speaker 1: like like, for example, just a number of victims, how
Speaker 1: many were there? Were there? Five? Were? The six? Were
Speaker 1: the eight? Were? Nine? Were? Were there more? The writing
Speaker 1: on the wall in Galston Street graffiti, the Ripper letters themselves.
Speaker 1: You know, whether the Dear Boss or from Hell or
Speaker 1: any of the others are real or not, all of
Speaker 1: those things. I mean, we can keep on revisiting the
Speaker 1: case in the hope of finding new evidence, or more accurately,
Speaker 1: we can look for new interpretations of old evidence. But
Speaker 1: I kind of think it's worth saying this again. But
Speaker 1: more than this, successive popular representations of Jack the Ripper
Speaker 1: have kind of recast the killer for their own age.
Speaker 1: So currently Jack has become sort of Mr Ordinary, a
Speaker 1: mundane every day a killer hiding him side. And I
Speaker 1: think that's interesting because he's like the modern terrorists who
Speaker 1: we don't notice until he draws his knife or he
Speaker 1: reveals he's wearing a suicide. So I think it's the
Speaker 1: ability of Jack to fit in where we want him to.
Speaker 1: And of course we all love the past, and we
Speaker 1: love the Victorians because they kind of seem very close
Speaker 1: to us. I mean, they're only a hundred or so
Speaker 1: years ago. You know, there are people alive who were
Speaker 1: alive in almost alive in the Victorian period UM. And
Speaker 1: my grandmother was born um at the turn of the century.
Speaker 1: I mean she she's passed away now, but she's you know,
Speaker 1: she could tell me things from her mother which were
Speaker 1: about Queen Victoria's jubileean things. It seems close, but it's
Speaker 1: so different. And in Jack's London there are things we'd recognize,
Speaker 1: but they're all kind of I want to say, swathed
Speaker 1: in a sort of gas, like a sort of mystic
Speaker 1: mystic missed in a smoke that kind of swirls around
Speaker 1: and giving that kind of touch of Gothic horror. That's
Speaker 1: so much part of our way of viewing that period. Um.
Speaker 1: So I don't think we'll ever be able to conclusively
Speaker 1: prove who Jack the Ripper was, um, at least not
Speaker 1: be able to prove to a standard that you could
Speaker 1: prosecute somebody in a port in England today. But that
Speaker 1: kind of sense of mystery of wanting to work out
Speaker 1: who it was, and then spinoffs from that that keep
Speaker 1: the story going. So organizations like the White Chapel Society
Speaker 1: are people who have moved on from just identifying the
Speaker 1: Ripper trying to They're now interested in the victims. They're
Speaker 1: interested in the streets, the buildings, the social history, the
Speaker 1: popular culture of the time, that that the riplication is
Speaker 1: so much more than it was even twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: I think. I mean, I'm planning a conference in two
Speaker 1: thousand and twenty two if we ever get through lockdown. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I want to have an international conference at
Speaker 1: Northampton that brings people who are amateurs rheologists as we
Speaker 1: might call them, Whitechappel Society and their their their groups
Speaker 1: together with serious academics like you know some I like
Speaker 1: you the walk of It or you know, um, some
Speaker 1: of the people that have researched, who have researched things
Speaker 1: like prostitution and crime, and bring those people together to
Speaker 1: have a conversation because they get pro fascinating mm hm um,
Speaker 1: and you just to kind of sew things up for us. Um.
Speaker 1: I read your Jack in the terms torso murderous book
Speaker 1: as one of those studies that does look at Jack
Speaker 1: as or the killer, because there is noough Jack as
Speaker 1: one of those kind of everyman figures, someone who wasn't
Speaker 1: one of those three stereotypes, but who instead was at
Speaker 1: home and fit in and would have been recognizable as
Speaker 1: belonging in the East end. Um. Could you talk about
Speaker 1: your own thinking about why it was important to put
Speaker 1: that book together and explore the reasons for making an
Speaker 1: identification of the killer the way that you did. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know how very aware that in under
Speaker 1: shadows I kind of said, you can't do this, So
Speaker 1: it's no point is there are much more interesting things
Speaker 1: to talk about. And now I wrote a book saying
Speaker 1: who I thought the report was. Um, I mean I
Speaker 1: have very particular reasons for doing that. I wrote it
Speaker 1: with someone else, with Andy Wise, who felt he had
Speaker 1: a story to tell and I wanted to enable him,
Speaker 1: as a former student of mine, to tell his story,
Speaker 1: because I think he was a struggle to get that
Speaker 1: out into print in the way that perhaps with a
Speaker 1: little bit of background behind me, I was able to
Speaker 1: enable him to do so. There was partly a personal
Speaker 1: story of allowing Andy to tell the story he wanted
Speaker 1: to tell. And then he'd spent many, many years researching UM.
Speaker 1: I always felt it was problematic to identify a killer,
Speaker 1: and I kind of still do. But I think Harderman
Speaker 1: is as good as suspect, as as any and better
Speaker 1: than many. And I think so. I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the things we concluded was if we if we tried
Speaker 1: to apply historical research methods and the rationale of a
Speaker 1: police detective who's looking for means, motive and opportunity, we
Speaker 1: could point the finger at a local man who we
Speaker 1: believed was responsible, a man involved in them trade. He
Speaker 1: seems to fit. So we we figured that the killer
Speaker 1: had to know White Chapel. He had to be able
Speaker 1: to move around White Chapel in Spittlefield without causing suspicion.
Speaker 1: UM and I had to know all these dark alleys
Speaker 1: and cut throughs. He had to appear to avoid police patrols,
Speaker 1: particularly as has more and more police were put on
Speaker 1: the streets, particularly following the double event. So this is
Speaker 1: someone who needs to know his local environment, and that
Speaker 1: doesn't really fit with a doctor from outside, or a
Speaker 1: slumming top or any of these other people. It has
Speaker 1: to be a local man. I think you had to
Speaker 1: have somebody who had a clear motive for wanting to kill.
Speaker 1: In many of the books I've read about Jack Ripper,
Speaker 1: I can't really understand why he would do the things
Speaker 1: he would do. That's kind of a bit that the
Speaker 1: writers don't tell you why would you do that? Now?
Speaker 1: I understand, of course that without knowing who the killer ism,
Speaker 1: without a confession, we can never know why somebody chooses
Speaker 1: to murder. Um. We think of serial killers today and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of time spent pouring over what they
Speaker 1: have to say, if they can say, or they choose
Speaker 1: to say what they want to say, and we can't
Speaker 1: necessarily trust it anyway. But I feel you had to
Speaker 1: find a try and identify a motive, and in this
Speaker 1: case we found somebody who had means, motive and opportunity.
Speaker 1: So James Hardiman had been flagged up in a previous
Speaker 1: short article in a couple of short articles for a
Speaker 1: phiologists and and he thought he was worth investigating, so
Speaker 1: he set off to investigate him. And James Hardiman was
Speaker 1: probably a pet food salesman and someone who probably worked
Speaker 1: as a horse slaughterer. We accept that you can't find
Speaker 1: records for many of these things, so it's very difficult
Speaker 1: to prove, but it seems quite likely um And if
Speaker 1: he was a horse slaughterer, if he was involved in
Speaker 1: the meat trade, he was probably familiar with or operate
Speaker 1: or he was probably familiar with or working for a
Speaker 1: company called Harrison Barber in the eighteen eighties because they
Speaker 1: entirely dominated horse saughtering and horse slaughtering. You know, it
Speaker 1: might seem like a niche occupation, but London is entirely
Speaker 1: powered by horses. In the nineteenth century. There are thousands
Speaker 1: of horses carrying carts, people riding horses, pulling carriages, hands
Speaker 1: and cabs. Everything is horse drawn. We talk about horsepowering cars,
Speaker 1: but this is literally horsepower. And horses get sick and
Speaker 1: they get old, and when they get old and sick,
Speaker 1: you know, they don't go and live in some nice
Speaker 1: little paddocks somewhere on the outskirts of London. They're slaughtered,
Speaker 1: and their flesh and their bones and all their bits
Speaker 1: and pieces are turned into other products like blue and
Speaker 1: pet food and all sorts of other things, and sometimes
Speaker 1: Dickens suggested human food. So it's kind of ubiquitous. And
Speaker 1: the man pushing a cart run the street selling captives
Speaker 1: everyone and know who was but no one really see
Speaker 1: him because he was just that guy, you know, that
Speaker 1: strange guy, probably a bit weird. So that's kind of
Speaker 1: why he's having in plain sight. And as for motive,
Speaker 1: we believe that Harderman had contracted syphilis, probably from a prostitute.
Speaker 1: He would have passed up to his wife, who passed
Speaker 1: it to their child, and their own a child who died,
Speaker 1: and then his wife died in the hospital. She was
Speaker 1: in London for a long time, so he had plenty
Speaker 1: of opportunity. He lived in White Chapel, he lived in
Speaker 1: Henning Street, His family lived in Hambury Street where any
Speaker 1: Chapman was killed. He lived right next door to where
Speaker 1: any chapman was killed by that court, so he was
Speaker 1: right at the heart of the killing zone. And we
Speaker 1: kind of extrapolated that to think that perhaps Hardyman was
Speaker 1: not just responsible for the White Chapel murders, but we
Speaker 1: also believe he could be connected to the four Torso
Speaker 1: murders that occurred in London between May seven and September
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty nine. And in total, we argue that that
Speaker 1: Harderman is probably responsible for thirteen murders and three more
Speaker 1: fatal attacks over a period of nearly four years. He
Speaker 1: died in December eight He was only thirty two. And
Speaker 1: Alice Mackenzie is the last victim in the series, dying
Speaker 1: in February UM and her death is looks like a
Speaker 1: tired killing. You know that that she she almost survives
Speaker 1: at least, and comes upon her bodies has had a
Speaker 1: throat cut and nothing else has been done to I
Speaker 1: think I concluded that James Hardyman is as good as
Speaker 1: suspect as many and I think you know, you can
Speaker 1: criticize quite a lot of our case, um wides quite
Speaker 1: a lot of my writing, but he certainly bears close examination.
Speaker 1: But we're not going to know who the ripper was.
Speaker 1: No one is going to be satisfied who the ripper
Speaker 1: was for the quite simple things. As soon as you
Speaker 1: decide who the ripper was. And we agree that kills
Speaker 1: the industry, or or it kills one branch of the industry.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around
Speaker 1: after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's
Speaker 1: in store for next week. It's a very hard life
Speaker 1: that the people were living at that time, particularly in
Speaker 1: the East End. But an event like a murder captures
Speaker 1: the witnesses and the investigators in that moment of time
Speaker 1: going about their day to day lives, and they're things mains.
Speaker 1: As I said, mainstream histories don't often tell you. For example,
Speaker 1: there were lots of horses, lots of them. What did
Speaker 1: you do if your horse was injured in an accident
Speaker 1: or if it dropped dead in the street? And how
Speaker 1: dirty were those streets are washed with horse urine and worse?
Speaker 1: And what was it really like to travel in a
Speaker 1: handsome cab rocking along like a ship tossed in a storm.
Speaker 1: So we you know, all of that is sort of
Speaker 1: stuff that you don't normally find out about. Even the
Speaker 1: Sherlock Holmes story have you have homes rolling along in
Speaker 1: a handsome cap, but we don't actually get told when
Speaker 1: it was really like Unobscured was created by me Aaron
Speaker 1: Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh
Speaker 1: Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research and writing
Speaker 1: for this season is all the work of my right
Speaker 1: hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed
Speaker 1: the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians,
Speaker 1: source material and links to our other shows over at
Speaker 1: history unobscured dot com, and until next time, thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Unobscured is a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron
Speaker 1: Monkey for More podcast for my heart Radio, because heart Radio, app,
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Speaker 1: H