Jack the Ripper walk

Without sounding like a gruesome hungry sadist I would just like to express my thanks to Mark for organising the enjoyable and interesting trip to London for the Jack the Ripper walk.

Though the journey was long, I hope you can agree that it was made worthwhile by the excellent guide, Lesley. She was enthusiastic, entertaining and extremely detailed in her factual representation of Jack the Ripper’s London.

The walk was very interesting and informative and some of the places we visited were fairly creepy too. We can only imagine what the streets and pokey alleyways were like without all the lighting of today's society. I imagine Victorian England was a very dark, wet, smelly and frightening place and standing in the Ten Bells at the end of the night with a half pint of lager nearly 119 years to the night that Mary Kelly (9 November 1888) could possibly have been picked up and killed in that area was maybe a tad gruesome too.

Lesley's descriptions of the times enabled me – albeit distastefully - to imagine the dire conditions of the Victorian era that all too often spawned people who would ultimately end up victims of such an opportunistic killer as Jack the Ripper. (I will refrain from referring to him as singularly ‘Jack’ as Lesley pointed out that there many previous Jack’s prior to Jack the Ripper – including Spring-heeled Jack. I would liken this to the American’s using the name John for the majority of anonymous people ie. John Doe and will discuss this later in my blog entry on newspaper research)

I have read a few articles, stories and seen a couple of films and documentaries over the years that have depicted Jack The Ripper and tried to identify him, but I felt that I learned more about the victims on Lesley’s tour and the environment in which they inhabited.

I was truly shocked by the fact that these women more than likely were middle-aged (apart from Mary Kelly) disease infested alcoholics with little hair and no teeth. Not what I would have imagined they type of women that men would freely engage in sexual contact with. However, their desperate need to earn a morsel of bread or help pay for a bed at night made them easy prey for a killer such as Jack the Ripper.

After reading some of the book ‘Jack the Ripper: Anatomy of a Myth' (William Beadle, Dagenham, Essex: Wat Tyler Books, 1995), I realised that I knew very little of the background of the Eastend of London at the time of the killings and in fact this opened my eyes to the possibility that Jack the Ripper was in fact more than likely nobody of great importance – much like the serial killers of today – they live within their society, do normal jobs, may have a slight eccentricity in their personality but all-in-all are just another member of the society in which they live.

I feel that some of the Ripperologists and the way the case has been built up over the many years has led to a ‘romanticised’ version of one of the most horrific killers in the last century. By this I mean that it would be much more ‘interesting’ if Jack the Ripper was a high profile member of the royal family, or a prominent member of high society - like a doctor or surgeon; however, what we cannot escape from is the fact that no matter how many people work on ‘the case’ we will never know who he (she) was and this is what will always make Jack the Ripper an ever-lasting mystery.

The following website provides good background information about the Jack the Ripper case:
http://www.casebook.org

More about Spring-heeled Jack can be found on the following website:
http://www.eastlondonhistory.com/springheeled%20jack.htm

Claire Carter