Pod Insights The Rest Is History 625. Jack The Ripper: Horror in Whitechapel (Part 2) About this episode Who was Jack the Ripper’s second victim, and why was their murder considered the true starting point of his terrifying killing spree? How did the police investigation unfold? And, when and how did the Ripper strike again…?
Join Dominic and Tom as they travel further into the dark streets of Victorian London and follow Jack the Ripper’s depraved trail, as they unravel the truth behind the world’s most famous murderer.
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Transcript 11,761 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spend all my time working and in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could use to hire that clone for me.
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1:07 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.
1:17 Tom Holland? Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know, coffee. You make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more, except...
1:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Except when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.
1:43 Tom Holland? And suddenly you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us? And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.
1:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Visit tiktok.com/discovermore.
2:10 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode...
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3:37 Tom Holland? London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate, half beast, half man is at large. Who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenceless classes of the community. There can be no shadow of a doubt now that our original theory was correct. And that the Whitechapel murderer who has now four, if not five, victims to his knife is one man. And that man, a murderous maniac.
4:15 Tom Holland? Hideous malice, deadly cunning, insatiable thirst for blood. All these are the marks of the mad homicide. The ghoul-like creature who stalks through the streets of London, stalking down his victim like a porny Indian, is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more. The question is, what are the people of London to do? The police have not even a clue. They are in despair at their utter failure to get so much as a cent of the criminal. London must rouse itself. No woman is safe while this ghoul is abroad.
4:58 Tom Holland? Up, citizens, then, and do your own police work. So that was the Evening Star on Saturday, the 8th of September 1888, after the discovery of yet another victim of the Whitechapel murderer. And I use the phrase Whitechapel murderer advisedly because he is not yet known as Jack the Ripper. Although Dominic, today, we will be exploring how the Whitechapel murderer comes to get that appellation.
5:30 Dominic Sandbrook? We will indeed, yes. So let's remind people where and when we are. We are in the late summer of 1888. We are in the East End of London, which we described last time as this kind of labyrinth, this warren of crowded, narrow streets and sort of reeking tenement slums. And it's a national byword, the East End, for poverty, for homelessness, for prostitution and for crime. And one other thing that's going to become very important in the next couple of episodes. It's an area that is being transformed by immigration, specifically Jewish refugees from the pogroms in Russia and in Poland.
6:09 Dominic Sandbrook? So to recap the story of the last episode, Tom, you described how on the 7th of August, a woman called Martha Tabram was found murdered in a tenement building off Whitechapel High Street, and her body had been stabbed almost 40 times, to quote the accounts at the time, butchered with virulent savagery. And then in the second half of the last episode, we talked about a second body, which was found in an narrow lane called Buck's Row, just before four o'clock in the morning on the 31st of August. And this is another woman who was lying on her back, and the details, as they will be throughout this series, even more horrific, her throat slashed from ear to ear, her body ripped open to
6:48 Dominic Sandbrook? reveal her intestines. And this was Mary Anne, or Polly Nichols, very poor, alcoholic, homeless, possibly an occasional prostitute. And she's the first of the canonical five Ripper victims, because really, although it's quite possible that Martha Tabram was also killed by the same man, it's with Polly Nichols that the press furore begins and the Jack the Ripper phenomenon begins, I suppose, doesn't it?
7:18 Tom Holland? Yeah. And the police, as we mentioned in the previous episode, are at a complete loss. There are no clues. None of the people who lived in Buck's Row had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. And the press, as you mentioned, I mean, they had been fascinated by the murder of Martha Tabram. It has received quite a lot of coverage, a unique and mysterious crime because of its sheer savagery, the East London Observer said. And because of that, and because you now have a second killing, the newspapers immediately assume that both Martha and Polly have been killed by the same person, and that this person must be
8:00 Tom Holland? a lunatic, or perhaps someone of blood-drinking, vampiric, cannibalistic tastes.
8:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
8:10 Tom Holland? So on the evening, Polly's found, the Evening Star, which is the biggest evening paper in Britain, runs the banner headlines, revolting murder, another woman found horribly mutilated in Whitechapel, ghastly crimes by a maniac. And Dominic, then as now, these are the kind of headlines that are guaranteed to get readership, aren't they?
8:29 Dominic Sandbrook? They are indeed, absolutely. And the same paper comes back to the story in the next few days. So the very next day. In each case, the victim has been a woman of abandoned character, each crime has been committed in the dark hours of the morning, and more important still, as pointing to one man, and that man a maniac, being the culprit, each murder has been accompanied by hideous mutilation. And the paper says, clearly, these crimes are, quote, "the work of some cool, cunning man with a mania for murder." They love a bit of alliteration in a late Victorian newspaper. The reason that we're quoting so much from the newspapers is that they are absolutely central, not necessarily to the crimes, but to the Jack the Ripper phenomenon,
9:12 Dominic Sandbrook? to the historical phenomenon of the Jack the Ripper case. Because I think, as lots of Ripper historians think, this is as much a story about the newspapers and about publishing, and indeed about mass literacy, as it is one about crime or poverty or prostitution. And part of that, I think, is because so much of what we know about the murders actually comes to us from newspaper reports.
9:35 Tom Holland? Yeah.
9:36 Dominic Sandbrook? So not from official documents.
9:38 Tom Holland? Because a lot of those have been lost, haven't they? The inquest reports and so on.
9:41 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So what we know of the inquests comes to us often through the newspapers or street scenes and so on. And there's a brilliant book on the Ripper case, I think the definitive book, really, by a guy called Philip Sugden. And if that name rings a slight bell, it's because he's actually the brother of the John Sugden, who's the definitive biographer of Nelson.
10:01 Tom Holland? I mean, imagine the discussions they have at Christmas.
10:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, incredible. So Philip Sugden's book is called The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. And, you know, it's, I think, by far the most scholarly and sort of serious book on this. And he points out that the newspapers in 1888 are competing for a new readership, and they're doing so with ever gorier and more salacious stories. And so everything that we understand about the Jack the Ripper is coloured by that. And the context for this is that Britain has been transformed by the 1870 and 1880 Education Acts, which mandated state education and basically drove up adult literacy to 100% for the first time in history. So for the first time, Britain is genuinely a nation of readers.
10:45 Dominic Sandbrook? And the streets are awash with people selling, for example, penny dreadfuls. These are these cheap stories of crime and horror and adventure and mystery that are read overwhelmingly by young men and boys. And I think the entire reporting of the Ripper phenomenon, including Jack the Ripper's name, owes a huge amount to these penny dreadfuls. So that's one thing to bear in mind. And then the other is the mass market newspaper. So newspapers are cheaper than ever before to produce, new technology and so on. There's hundreds of competing titles and crime and sex are absolutely central to their appeal. So one example that we'll come back to, the Pall Mall Gazette. Tom, tell us about the Pall Mall Gazette.
11:31 Tom Holland? There's a case for saying that the Pall Mall Gazette is the original tabloid newspaper of the kind that anyone who's read a British newspaper will be familiar with. And it was edited by a guy from Northumbria called W T Stead throughout the 1880s, who ultimately would end up on Titanic. So that's a link between the two stories. And he ran a series of incredibly sensational stories, exposes, of which the most famous was a crusade against child prostitution. And these stories and campaigns have a direct knock on effect on the programme of slum clearance that is lapping at the borders of Whitechapel throughout this period and the closing of brothels.
12:15 Tom Holland? And we will be coming to to him and his role in the story in a later episode.
12:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
12:20 Tom Holland? But he's a key figure.
12:21 Dominic Sandbrook? So it's through papers like the Pall Mall Gazette and its competitors that people know about the murders. They both stoke and they report the fear and anger on the streets. So there's a great example, the 4th of September, the Daily News sends a reporter down to Buck's Row, where the body was found. And he finds, or he says he finds, crowds of poor women who are sort of studying the paving stones for bloodstains. And he takes great glee in reporting what they say. I say reporting, but of course.
12:51 Tom Holland? He might be making it up.
12:52 Dominic Sandbrook? He might be making it up, right? Because it sounds often too good to be true. Because he says, there's a little woman with a rosy cherub face who says to him, "Life ain't no great thing when many on us, but we don't all want to be murdered. And if things go on like this, it won't be safe for nobody to put their heads outdoors." And this is precisely the kind of thing the readers of the newspaper want East End women to say.
13:14 Tom Holland? But Dominic, I mean, there is also, I mean, it is expressive of a genuine sentiment of of kind of horror and people rallying together, isn't it? And so there's huge crowds for Polly Nichols when she's she's buried in the City of London Cemetery.
13:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course.
13:28 Tom Holland? In Ilford. And this was a woman who was on her own. And now at her death, there are people who think, well, you know, she was one of ours. It's not just made up, is it?
13:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, no, no, it brings out the latent sentimentality of the of the British silent majority. Do you not think of the British working classes? That's always that's always there. And of course, all of this, the genuine horror and fear on the streets, plus the press, puts enormous pressure on the police. And we haven't really talked that much about the police so far. So I think in the popular imagination, there's a general sense that the police are either unbelievably incompetent or uniquely malevolent, don't you?
14:07 Tom Holland? I'd say they're incompetent, aren't they?
14:08 Dominic Sandbrook? They're either the blundering fools of Sherlock Holmes, the Lestrade and his colleagues, who are always one step behind the murderer and of course, any amateur private detective who might want to investigate this case.
14:20 Tom Holland? Yeah.
14:21 Dominic Sandbrook? And I think most serious historians are much more generous and say, you know, the police are far from perfect, but they're actually, you know, in an age before modern technology, they're doing the very best that they can in an impossible situation. So to paint a picture, the Metropolitan Police was set up by Sir Robert Peel in 1829. If you think of the Met's catchment area, as it were, you're looking at round about about six million people and they have 15,000 men to do it. Of course, they are all men. Now, today, the Met has 43,000 people policing about eight and a half million people. So they're comparatively understaffed back in the 1880s.
15:03 Dominic Sandbrook? They, in some ways, they're very modern organisation, so their police stations are linked by telegraph, but they're still working out of the sort of original, very cramped sort of office building in Whitehall, Scotland Yard.
15:19 Dominic Sandbrook? And in recent months, in particular, they've become very controversial. You mentioned in the last episode, the Chief Commissioner of the Met, Sir Charles Warren. He's come from a military background, hasn't he?
15:31 Tom Holland? So he served two terms in South Africa, but also just because it will feed into some of the theories that we'll be talking about in our final episode. He is a Freemason and he has an obsessive interest in the site of the temple in Jerusalem, which is fundamental to Freemasonry. And he was actually, he'd spent a term in Palestine and had conducted the first serious archaeological excavation of Temple Mount, the site of the temple. So I just, I just throw that out.
16:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
16:03 Tom Holland? As some contextualisation.
16:05 Dominic Sandbrook? Maybe that's an important clue, or maybe it's a mad red herring, but we will find out. Anyway, he's been trying to modernise the Met, reflecting his military background. He's been trying to centralise it, to bring in more military discipline and to bring in more people from the army. And at the same time, the Met has been dragged into politics. So for example, you talked last time about the Bloody Sunday, sort of the homeless camp, the demonstrations, the police had cracked down on it. And radical papers have ever since been painting the police as a tool of the capitalist establishment, a tool of repression of the working class. It's literally like listening to Theo Young Smith, our producer, isn't it? So the police have been getting a lot of stick and they're in a very difficult place.
16:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, these murders are a massive challenge for the police, as they would be today, but even more so. So to remind people, the crimes so far have been carried out in this warren of very poor, very narrow streets at night with no witnesses. The killer, they assume, works alone. I mean, I think this is what most people who study the Jack the Ripper murders still believe, there was just one person. He has no accomplices, he leaves no trace and no clues. He has no obvious motive.
17:25 Tom Holland? That's the key thing, isn't it?
17:26 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Now, today, people would say, well, there's an obvious motive. Serial killers do have motives, they're mad, but people don't have a sense of this in the 1880s. The studies have not yet been done on serial killers. So people are bewildered and horrified. This is why there's so much talk of him being a maniac. And to make matters more difficult for the police, the people he kills and their friends are the kind of people who generally keep, as it were, to the shadows of society. They are down and outs, they're poor, they're homeless, they've maybe been in trouble with the police, they're part of the sort of the underclass, as it were. So all of this means that it's a tough case to solve. Police forces today find such cases very difficult to solve.
18:09 Dominic Sandbrook? But in 1888, the CID, the Criminal Investigation Department, they are only 10 years old, they can't test blood, there's no fingerprint bureau, that doesn't get opened until 1901, and they don't have a science laboratory, they don't have any formal laboratory, and they won't have one for another 40 years. So as Philip Sugton, to quote him, says, "The odds were in favour of Jack the Ripper from the very beginning. You don't have to believe there's cover up or a conspiracy, it would have been a very difficult case to solve."
18:39 Tom Holland? But also, just to throw into the mix, there's also the evident fact that the murder is incredibly audacious, very opportunistic, and clearly, I think, very lucky.
18:47 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, I think so.
18:49 Tom Holland? So these are all factors that are making it more difficult for the police.
18:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So now at this stage, the police, I think, it's just two murders as far as they're concerned, if you count Martha Tabram, and they see no great cause for alarm. So Sir Charles Warren has been on holiday in France, and they've just brought in a new guy, Dr Robert Anderson, as Assistant Commissioner and Head of CID. But on the 7th of September, he leaves for a month's holiday in Switzerland. When he takes the job, he says, "Sure, I'll take the job, but I'd like to go on holiday in Switzerland first." And they later get a lot of stick for this, but of course, it never occurs to them at the time that these, you know, apparently inconsequential killings in the East End will become defining stories of late Victorian Britain. Why would it?
19:36 Dominic Sandbrook? As far as they're concerned, these are two kind of homeless women, whatever, who'd been murdered, so what? They've gone on holiday. But the newspapers, I think it's pretty clear, are itching for the next instalments because they can see that this is going to be a big story.
19:48 Tom Holland? Because this is how the Victorian publishing industry works, isn't it? Through instalments.
19:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
19:55 Tom Holland? And, you know, if you're kind of waiting for the next chapter in the story. Then when it happens, you're going to go massive with it.
20:04 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course, and you get a sense of them. They are desperate for it to happen. So the East London Advertiser, we've quoted that already. This came on the streets, this newspaper, on the morning of Saturday, the 8th of September. Throughout the week, the interest in the Whitechapel murder has been kept at fever heat. The murderer must creep out from somewhere. He must patrol the streets in search of his victims. Doubtless, he's out night by night. Every woman in those parts goes in nightly danger of her life as long as he remains at large.
20:34 Tom Holland? So here's a thought.
20:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
20:36 Tom Holland? What if it's a newspaper editor?
20:38 Dominic Sandbrook? To improve circulation.
20:39 Tom Holland? Yeah.
20:39 Dominic Sandbrook? That's a good thought, actually.
20:40 Tom Holland? Throw that into the mix.
20:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Listeners can let Tom know what they think of that suggestion. They don't need to let me know, just let Tom know personally.
20:48 Tom Holland? I think I might have contributed what is very unusual in Ripperology, an original theory there.
20:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Wow, that's exciting. Well, listen, even as people were reading those words in the East London Advertiser, that the murderer must creep out, he must strike again on that Saturday morning, the news is spreading that just as predicted, the Ripper has struck again.
21:10 Tom Holland? Well, Dominic, the Whitechapel murderer.
21:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, of course. You're right. He's not yet the Ripper. So the scene is 29 Hanbury Street in Spitalfields, and it's on the north side of the street. We're in a dilapidated three-storey house at number 29. Almost every room of this house is rented by a different family, and that tells its own story. So it's a real warren of people. And to picture the house, at the back of the house, there are three stone steps that go down into a little yard. And in the yard, there is an outside toilet, and there's a woodshed, and the whole thing is enclosed by a wooden fence. It's very tight, it's very narrow. And that's Saturday morning, the 8th of September. Some of the people living in the house get up very early because it's market day and they're going to work. As you said before, this is going to be a theme of this whole story.
21:58 Dominic Sandbrook? And one of them is a guy who's a carman, which is a kind of cart driver called John Davis. He's a little man with a stoop and he rents the attic and he lives in the attic with his family. And he gets up when the Spitalfields church clock strikes five forty-five a.m. His wife makes him a cup of tea because he's going off to the Lettenhall market. He goes downstairs and he notices that the door to the street is wide open. Now, that's nothing unusual. There's so many people living in the house, they're coming and going, they're working odd hours and things. So he shuts that door, then he goes to the back door. The back door is closed. He goes out of the back door into the yard because he just wants to take some air before he goes off to work.
22:40 Dominic Sandbrook? And he steps outside and he sees something terrible. It's the body of a woman sprawled on her back between the steps and the fence. And he rushes back through the house and into the street. He hails some workmen. The workmen come and look, they're very shaken. They go off to find a policeman. And by the time the policeman, Inspector Joseph Chandler, arrives, the place is packed. So the house is suddenly alive. There's loads of people in the corridors and the hall and stuff. But no one's gone out into the yard, they've left it alone. So he pushes through and he goes into the yard. He's the first person to inspect the body. And to quote his written report, and of course, this will be very gruesome, so if you're listening to this in the car with small children, I mean, frankly, why are you listening to
23:24 Dominic Sandbrook? a podcast about Jack the Ripper with small children? But anyway, you've been warned. He said, "I at once proceeded to number twenty-nine Hanbury Street and in the backyard found a woman lying on her back, dead, left arm resting on left breast, legs drawn up, abducted, small intestines and flap of the abdomen lying on the right side above right shoulder, attached by a cord with the rest of the intestines inside the body. Two flaps of skin from the lower part of the abdomen lying in a large quantity of blood above the left shoulder, throat cut deeply from left and back in a jagged manner right around throat." So it's a hideous spectacle and it's confirmed by the police surgeon, Dr.
24:06 Dominic Sandbrook? George Bagstef Phillips, who's very highly respected and in his fifties, and he's an important person. Some of his thoughts about who might have done this kind of run right through this case. Phillips thinks that it's possible that the victim was strangled first and then there was this terrible savage cut in her throat.
24:24 Tom Holland? And that is one of the factors that would have stopped there being kind of excessive blood loss.
24:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And then the really shocking thing, the really gory thing, the abdomen was cut open and basically the intestines were taken out and placed by the victim's shoulder. And then Dr Phillips finds that the victim's uterus, most of her bladder and part of her vagina were completely removed with a kind of clean cut and taken away. Now, of course, I've called her the victim, but this was, let's remind ourselves, a living, breathing woman with an inner life of her own. And her name was Annie Chapman and we will be talking about her life and what brought her to this position on our bonus episode for club members, along with the lives of
25:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, two of the other victims. So if you're not a member of the Restless History Club, you can sign up at restlesshistory.com and you'll find out about these lives and what they tell us about the late Victorian world. But a quick summary, just for now, about Annie. She was 47. She'd had a very tragic life. Her father was a soldier and then a kind of a manservant. She'd been born in West London, she'd married a coachman and as actually with Polly Nichols, the curse is alcoholism. She's been a drinker from a young age. She has three children, but she ends up separating from her husband because of drink, because of disorderly conduct and whatnot.
25:55 Dominic Sandbrook? By the time she gets to 1888, she's very badly off.
25:59 Tom Holland? She's ill with tuberculosis as well, isn't she?
26:01 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, tuberculosis. She's kind of drifting from one Doss house to another. We can discuss in the bonus episode whether or not she is a prostitute. What we do know is on the afternoon of the 7th of September, she'd run out of money. She said to a friend of hers, I need to go and get some money, otherwise I shall have no lodgings.
26:19 Tom Holland? So very like Polly Nichols, I mean, almost identical.
26:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. She did get some money, whether through begging or through selling sexual services, we don't know. But then she spent the money on drink instead of lodgings and that decision cost her her life.
26:33 Tom Holland? So again, like Polly.
26:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, because she was kicked out of her lodging house on 35 Dorset Street. She goes out just before 2am onto the streets, probably to earn the coppers for a bed. And her last words, I shall soon be back, don't let the bed.
26:48 Tom Holland? As I said, Dominic, right from the moment that Annie Chapman's body is discovered, the police recognise that they are dealing with the same killer who had dispatched Polly definitely and probably Martha before her.
26:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
27:00 Tom Holland? And they assign to the case the same inspector who is handling the investigation into Polly Nicholls' death. And this is a guy called Frederick Abeline, who is aged 45, he's from Dorset, the son of a clerk. And he is often traduced, isn't he, in kind of popular versions of the Ripper story? And he's kind of portrayed as an alcoholic or weirdly obsessed with prostitutes or being comically incompetent. Although in the film From Hell, he's portrayed by Johnny Depp as an opium addict who sees glimpses into the truth of the actual case. And, you know, Johnny Depp has his very fine features and his cheekbones and everything.
27:45 Tom Holland? In reality, Abeline had the appearance of a bank manager. So he's very stocky, he's very round-faced, and he has an absolutely colossal Victorian moustache.
27:57 Dominic Sandbrook? He does, yeah. We like a good moustache on this show, and that endears Abeline to me, I have to say. I think Abeline is really, really hard done by in the sort of pop history versions of this case, because all the evidence we have is that he was a very, very good policeman. He had risen through the ranks precisely because he was competent, efficient, reliable.
28:19 Tom Holland? And he knows that spittle feels like the back of his hand, doesn't he?
28:22 Dominic Sandbrook? He genuinely does. He's an old East End hand. He'd been in charge of the CID in Whitechapel in the late 1870s and early 1880s. He is the obvious man to put on this case because he knows the area, he has contacts there, and he will go on to work incredibly hard on this case. You know, he goes for days without sleep and he's, you know, he's drowning in paper and stuff and he's doing his absolute best. So it's really harsh for these sort of, you know, to portray him as this sort of prostitute crazed drug addict is bonkers.
28:55 Tom Holland? Yeah, and I think he is highly regarded by his peers. And he does come up with two quite influential theories as to who the Ripper might have been, which again, we will be exploring in due course.
29:07 Dominic Sandbrook? So the problem that he faces, as before, is that there are no clues. The local tenants, the people living in 29 Hanbury Street have seen nothing. This body has just appeared in the yard overnight and they don't know how it got there. None of the neighbours, of course the police talk to every single neighbour, none of them have seen anybody acting suspiciously or with bloodstained hands or clothes or whatever. However, there are three important witnesses, so we should take a bit of time to look at what these people say. The first one is a market porter called John Richardson and his mother rented the ground floor rooms at number 29. Now, she'd had a break-in, you know, very common in this area.
29:49 Dominic Sandbrook? And so every market morning, he would go to look, just check the door of her cellar to see that it was locked. And he'd done so this morning. He'd actually gone out into the yard just before five o'clock in the morning to fix his boot and he didn't see a body. So that means that Annie must have died after five o'clock.
30:10 Tom Holland? Unless he did it.
30:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, unless he did it, I suppose. So we've got quite a narrow window of time now because that bloke who found the body, remember he heard the Spitalfields clock toll 5.45. So we're narrowing down the window. Second witness is a local woman called Elizabeth Long. And at about 5.30 in the morning, she'd been walking along Hanbury Street to Spitalfields Market and she'd seen a man and woman talking outside number 29. And she later went to the mortuary and she positively identified the woman as Annie Chapman.
30:46 Tom Holland? I mean, that's a very narrow window then.
30:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
30:49 Tom Holland? Only 15 minutes, isn't it? I mean, less than 15 minutes.
30:52 Dominic Sandbrook? So if she's right, and I think she probably is right, then the murder must be committed between about 5.30 and 5.45. And not only does she say this woman was Annie Chapman, she gives us a pretty good description of the man that was talking to Annie. And I'll quote it. "He was dark complexioned and wearing a brown deer stalker hat. I think he was wearing a dark coat. He was a man over 40, as far as I could tell. He seemed to be a little taller than the deceased." Now Annie was quite short, she was five foot tall. He's only a little taller, so he's maybe, you know, 5'3", 5'4", 5'5", something like that.
31:27 Dominic Sandbrook? He looked to me like a foreigner, as well as I could make out. Hard to say what that means. He looked what I should call shabby genteel. Philip Sugden, in his brilliant book on Jack the Ripper case, says, this man was the murderer. This is what the murderer looks like. And actually, in the next couple of episodes, we'll be describing other witnesses at other murders who see similar looking men, short, moustache, deerstalker hat. You know, this is a common kind of description, isn't it? It's a common profile, Tom.
31:59 Tom Holland? Yeah.
32:00 Dominic Sandbrook? And one thing that he is not, by the way, he's not tall. And there's no sense whatsoever, really important and probably disappointing for the conspiracy theorist community among our listeners, he's not an aristocrat. He's not wearing a top hat or an opera cloak.
32:14 Tom Holland? He's not carrying a medical bag.
32:16 Dominic Sandbrook? And no, he's not carrying a medical bag. He is none of those things.
32:20 Tom Holland? Although witnesses will in due course claim to have seen such a man.
32:25 Dominic Sandbrook? They will indeed. Yes, we will be coming to that. Now, I said there were three witnesses. The third witness is a carpenter called Albert Kadosh. He lived next door to number 29, number 27. He got up early and he said at about 5:20 or so, he couldn't be sure, he went out into the yard and he heard low voices from over the fence. And the only word he could make out was no. And then a few minutes later, he said he heard a noise like, and I quote, something falling against the fence. Then he left for work and as he passed Spitalfields Church, he looked up and he saw the clock and he noted that it was 5:32. So that would seem to sort of tally. You know, Mrs. Long sees the couple talking round about 5:30.
33:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Then he, similar time, hears people talking in the yard. And then he hears someone falling against a fence. And then at 5:32, he looks up and sees the clock. You know, they're probably out, each of them is out probably by a couple of minutes because people can never be precise about these things, but it seems to tally. So. Remember that Annie had gone out to earn some money just around 2am. So there are two possibilities. Possibility number one, Hallie Rubenholt, in her book The Five, she believes all the women were killed as they slept. So she thinks Annie just went into the yard of number 29. She lay down in a corner, went to sleep and was murdered as she slept. Philip Sugton, on the other hand, she went out to solicit to get customers.
33:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Sometime around 5.30, just before 5.30, she fell in with the killer. He took her into the yard, or she took him into the yard, rather. Then he probably strangled her, lowered her to the ground, cut her throat and then started the ripping process.
34:03 Tom Holland? Mrs. Long's testimony would suggest that is probably more feasible, wouldn't it?
34:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Definitely would. And I don't think Hallie Rubenholt mentions Mrs. Long's testimony in her book The Five, but I find it quite convincing. So a couple of quick observations from this before we take the break. Number one, as you've said, Tom, the Killam is incredibly daring. I mean, there's no doubt about that. The sun rose that day at 5.23. So it is light when he is going about his business and it is a market morning. There are loads of people moving around. Even as he and Annie are in the yard, people are getting up in the house and moving about.
34:43 Tom Holland? Yeah, which makes the question of motivation all the more striking. I mean, what is so desperate that he would take such incredible risks?
34:50 Dominic Sandbrook? Are the risks not the thrill? Is that not the thrill of it for him, do you think?
34:54 Tom Holland? But I'm just thinking in terms of the police.
34:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
34:57 Tom Holland? I mean, these are kind of dimensions of psychology that they're not really attuned to as yet.
35:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course not. They don't employ psychologists or anything like that.
35:06 Tom Holland? No.
35:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Number two, the killer is incredibly quick and he obviously knows the area. So if he did this crime, you know, and did the disemboweling and stuff, he's done it in a matter of moments, you know, no hesitation or anything. He's very fast and then he gets away so quickly. And there's a really interesting little clue. There was a tap in the yard with a pail of clean water underneath and it was still there after he had left. In other words, he didn't clean himself. He didn't turn the tap on because it would have had blood in it. So in other words, he has left covered presumably in blood. I mean, I know you don't bleed that much if you've been strangled and then stabbed, but the disemboweling would be gory work, right?
35:47 Tom Holland? Yeah.
35:48 Dominic Sandbrook? He's got away through the Warren of Streets, carrying some of Annie Chapman's internal organs without being spotted. So he must know the area, right? Here's a spoiler alert. I think if you're a member of the royal family, you're going to get lost in that area and you're going to be spotted pretty quickly. Frankly.
36:09 Tom Holland? Or a distinguished former prime minister or whatever.
36:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Or if you're the Elephant Man, frankly, people are going to spot you.
36:15 Tom Holland? Yeah.
36:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. Finally, the killer knows what he's doing. This is a really, really important thing. Dr. Phillips said, "To take out those internal organs would have taken me an hour, you know, to do the surgery, to find them, all of this. The killer must have done it in moments, in minutes, you know, five minutes, three or four minutes." The coroner at the inquest said, "He must have been somebody who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge." You know, he basically knew what he wanted, where to find it and how to use his knife. "No unskilled person could have known where to find it," this is the victim's uterus, "or could have recognised it when it was found."
36:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Now, that doesn't mean the victim must be a doctor or a surgeon, but it does mean it's somebody who knows a fair bit about anatomy.
37:06 Tom Holland? Yeah.
37:06 Dominic Sandbrook? And knows how to use a knife.
37:09 Tom Holland? So perhaps a butcher or a medical student, or perhaps a slaughterman working in one of the knacker's yards or whatever.
37:18 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So, all interesting clues. Anyway, Annie is buried in secret on the 14th of September. And by this point, Whitechapel is in a state of near hysteria. And we'll come back to the heart of the East End after the break.
37:38 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
37:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, "What is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the West?" And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?
38:20 Tom Holland? So they asked over 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.
38:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory. And keep thinking.
38:43 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.
39:04 Tom Holland? For thousands of years, humanity was defensives against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity. And American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.
39:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. And that leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.
39:44 Tom Holland? This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.
40:25 Tom Holland? Hello and welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are in Whitechapel, East London, and people on the streets of the East End and beyond are coming to terms with the fact that a second, or perhaps even third gruesome murder, has been committed by the man who is not yet called Jack the Ripper, but is already a massive star of the popular press. And the news breaks during the course of Saturday the 8th, and journalists, editors go berserk. And we were talking in the first half, Dominic, I mean, this essentially is their dream scenario. You've got another murder, and
41:06 Tom Holland? it seems to be even gorier than the previous one. So in our first episode, I quoted The Evening Star, which is the stuff about a ghoul stalking the streets of London and so on. This is when it runs. And the headline of that article was Horror Upon Horror: Whitechapel Is Panic-Stricken At Another Fiendish Crime. And again, you can see that is absolutely calculated to fly off the newsstands. And it has to be said that the slightly posher, more quality broadsheets, as they would describe themselves, you know, they're piling in as well. So The Daily Telegraph, still going strong today, at the time the bestselling
41:49 Tom Holland? newspaper in the world, it also buys into this kind of notion of the Gothic, of the supernatural. It tells its readers that the East End is haunted by, and I quote, "beings who look like men but are rather demons, vampires." And the result is exactly what the press wants: mass hysteria, mass excitement. I demand to know more, because there is a huge mystery. You know, who is doing this?
42:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, it's absolutely. So there are huge crowds at the murder sites or all the murder sites. There are crowds outside the mortuary, outside police stations. Reporters said that the crowds were particularly made up of women. And women would bring their children with them, you know, and that's actually a phenomenon that you often see. I mean, we've seen it in recent British history, crowds of women outside, you know, murder sites and police stations and so on.
42:43 Tom Holland? Well, I think also, I gather that women are overwhelmingly the consumers of true crime podcasts.
42:51 Dominic Sandbrook? They are indeed. Yeah. And going back to the golden age of detective fiction, largely read by women. Exactly. So right to this day, true crime shows are watched or listened to by women. Interesting. I don't really have an answer for why that is, but it just is what it is. Some locals saw this as an opportunity to make money. So as ghoulish as it sounds, the neighbours on Hanbury Street opened up their houses and they were charged visitors a penny a head to come and look at the yard, to peer out at the yard of number 29. There was a man on Whitechapel Road who run a sort of despondent little waxworks exhibition.
43:24 Tom Holland? Yeah, the poor man's Madame Tussauds.
43:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. And he got some red paint and daubed it on three waxworks and he charged people a penny to come and see the George Yard, Buck's Row and Ambry Street victims. And there are loads of stories of kind of copycats and false alarms and people almost being lynched. So that very first evening, a man punches a policeman in the pub or something and is basically taken to the police station when, and the word gets around, we've got the Whitechapel murderer. And so people pile in and they're desperate to lynch this bloke. Basically, he's just had a fight in a pub. That's all it is.
43:59 Tom Holland? And there are some kind of proper, properly suspicious people as well that the police are feeling their collars, right?
44:06 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there are. So in the next sort of week or two, the police arrested nine different people and interrogated them on the suspicion that they might be the killer.
44:17 Dominic Sandbrook? And it's tempting to laugh at the police and say, oh, they got it wrong, which they did with all of these men. But it's instructive to look at who they arrested because it shows you how their minds are working. So to give a couple of examples, there's a German barber called Charles Ludwig, who was arrested with a prostitute. And he was carrying a clasp knife, a razor and a pair of scissors with him.
44:39 Tom Holland? Yeah, that's suspicious.
44:40 Dominic Sandbrook? No, you could say the tools of his trade, or you could say she was terrified when the police finally found them and she was worried that he was going to murder her. And, you know, he fits, to some extent, he fits the bill, right? It makes sense. Then there's a butcher, a pork butcher from Switzerland called Jakob Eisen Schmidt. He was a drinker. He suffered depression. He would often sort of meaningfully sharpen his long knife at people, which I think didn't inspire great confidence.
45:09 Tom Holland? Again, suspicious behaviour.
45:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. And also he'd been in and out of lunatic asylums. And he had a strange habit of, he would sometimes get hold of Bullock's entrails and post them to his old shop as a sort of threat.
45:23 Tom Holland? I think the evidence is stacking up. And it's also interesting that both of those men are foreign.
45:29 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
45:30 Tom Holland? And Mrs Long had said that the person that she'd seen talking to Annie Chapman, he looked to me like a foreigner.
45:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
45:36 Tom Holland? And this sense of whether the Ripper is a foreigner or not becomes quite important to editorials and so on, because there's a kind of assumption that no Englishman could possibly be doing this, that it must be someone from abroad.
45:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Absolutely right, absolutely. And the most significant of these early suspects is also somebody with an overseas background. And he is a shoemaker, Jewish shoemaker called John Pizer, who was arrested on the 10th. And he is the man who was mentioned in the last episode because his nickname was Leather Apron. And in the days and weeks since the Polly Nichols murder, his name or his nickname had appeared a lot in the press. And the press had said this, this bloke apparently called Leather Apron, who goes around harassing prostitutes and threatening them and beating them up.
46:24 Tom Holland? It's such a terrifying name, isn't it? And I do think that in these cases, a suspect with a terrifying name ramps up the tension massively.
46:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, definitely it does. So there was a hunt for this bloke Leather Apron. They find him at last and he does tick a lot of boxes. He's five foot four, he has a very strong Polish accent, and he has a history of violence with a shoemaker's knife. And the police genuinely, I think at first think this is the guy.
46:51 Tom Holland? This is him, yeah.
46:52 Dominic Sandbrook? But unfortunately, he has a pretty cast iron alibi for Polly Nichols's murder because he'd been staying at a lodging house and he'd gone outside with the owner of the lodging house to watch a fire at London docks, they'd watched it in the distance. And the bloke from the lodging house said, I absolutely know for sure I spent the evening with this bloke because we stood together watching the fire and talking about it. And with all of these people, with almost all of these people, they were still in custody when future murders happened so the police could be certain that it wasn't them. But people start to mock the police so that the humorous magazine Punch produced a kind of parody called A Detective's Diary. And they said, you know, oh, we heard that there's a rumor that the bloke wore a blue
47:36 Dominic Sandbrook? coat, so we arrested everybody who wore blue coats. The blue coat people were innocent, we heard it might be a soldier, we found a small drummer boy, we arrested him and all this kind of thing, which is sort of mildly amusing, but it's not really fair because actually there is definitely method in their madness.
47:50 Tom Holland? Yeah, I mean, I think that if you're kind of going around thrusting daggers and knives in the face of prostitutes.
47:58 Dominic Sandbrook? Right, yeah.
47:59 Tom Holland? I would arrest them.
48:00 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, correct, exactly. So actually of these people they arrested, three of them had been in asylums, three of them were widely regarded as being of unsound mind, five of them knew about anatomy, one, you know, there might be butchers or slaughtermen or whatever. Interestingly, only three of them actually had been born abroad. So the element about being a foreigner, she's vague about that. She can't really explain why she thinks he's a foreigner. So the police clearly don't put as much weight on that as they do on other elements of her testimony.
48:32 Tom Holland? Because obviously, the police know that English people are perfectly capable of doing murders because they, you know, arresting murderers all the time.
48:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, I think that's, I think that's, that's fair, actually. Now, this business about being a foreigner, though, it is incendiary because it's so dangerous for one group in particular. And this takes us back to the social background of Whitechapel.
48:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Whitechapel has been transformed in the last 10 years, in particular, by Jewish immigration. So in 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in St Petersburg, and that kicked off wave upon wave of repressive antisemitic legislation and then pogroms in the Russian Empire. And people are fleeing that and fleeing to Britain in particular, or the United States. So in 20 years, the Russian and Polish population of London went from less than 9,000 people to almost 54,000 people, concentrated above all in East End neighbourhoods like Spitalfields or Mile End or Whitechapel. And if you read Jerry White's brilliant book on 19th century
49:39 Dominic Sandbrook? London, he talks about how there's an undercurrent of antisemitism all through this period. In some ways, quite small scale stuff. It's kind of broken windows, it's graffiti, it's newspaper cartoons, it's kind of, you know, punch ups on the streets and stuff. But, you know, I said in the previous episode, there's been an economic depression, really, since the early 1870s. So there's a lot of job competition, there's a lot of anxiety about people coming over here and stealing our jobs and whatnot. And so it's not surprising that straight away, some of the newspapers and some people on the streets say, the killer must be a Jew.
50:14 Tom Holland? And that's one of the reasons why Leather Apron is such a kind of popular candidate to have been the murderer, isn't it? Because he is Jewish.
50:22 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, exactly, exactly. It's not surprising either that prominent Jews are then keen to push back. So the very first reward that was put up for the killer's capture was put up by Whitechapel's MP, who was a Liberal, who was Samuel Montague, who was an Orthodox Jew and was a kind of proto-Zionist. And he put up a hundred pounds for the killer. And he was then backed up by a group called the Mile End Vigilance Committee, which will play a bit of a part in this, in this whole series. And the Mile End Vigilance Committee was set up by local, largely Jewish traders and shopkeepers. And as we will see, they became nationally famous because they were to receive a letter and a hideous gift from somebody who may well have been the killer himself.
51:08 Tom Holland? From hell.
51:09 Dominic Sandbrook? From hell, exactly. Now, the police are not terribly keen on groups like this. First of all, the Home Office don't like rewards. Arguing about rewards, whether or not to give a reward, is a big, big part of the kind of police investigation. And the Home Office hate rewards because they say, basically, if somebody knew who the killer was, they'd tell us because his crimes are so horrible. And almost by definition, anyone who gives this information hoping for a reward is probably a hoaxer, and it's probably a false lead. And actually, the weird thing is that Aberline and his colleagues, I mean, on the one hand, they wish they could have more clues, but on the other, they actually have too much information.
51:50 Tom Holland? Yeah.
51:50 Dominic Sandbrook? They have so many false leads and so many rumours and allegations and stuff.
51:56 Tom Holland? Well, I suppose, Dominic, that the fact that, you know, you were saying how there's a mass market now for the press, means that there are vastly more numbers who can read these stories and say, oh, it could be this, or it could be that, or I've got this idea, or I've got that clue. So the letters just keep coming in, right?
52:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course. And, right, their filing system collapses under the strain. They have no computers. I mean, it's actually the same story, oddly, as what happened in the 1970s in West Yorkshire with the Yorkshire Ripper. Again, a pre-computer world where they were totally overwhelmed by too much information.
52:31 Dominic Sandbrook? So the days go by, there was no breakthrough and the pressure begins to build on the authorities. So by the 14th of September, The Star is calling the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, and I quote, "A feeble manta bank who would pose and simper over the brink of a volcano." It's really one of my old columns, actually.
52:49 Tom Holland? Well, I mean, it's amazing to know that Home Secretaries were getting abuse back then, as they do now.
52:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. And even The Telegraph, a Tory paper which should be supporting him, said of Mr Matthews, "We've had enough of Mr Matthews who knows nothing, has heard nothing and does not intend to do anything." I mean, plus ça change. Even so, you get to late September and there is a sense, I think, that maybe the panic is easing. The authorities have weathered the storm, things, you know, the killer has not yet struck again. It's a fine summer, you know, the weather has been dry, people are out and about. Some of the fear has dissipated. And then on the 22nd of September, another murder grips the public imagination. Another woman has been killed.
53:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Her name is Jane Bedmore, but she has been stabbed and killed on a fell outside Gateshead in the north east of England.
53:45 Tom Holland? A long way from the East End.
53:47 Dominic Sandbrook? A long way, hundreds of miles away. Now, at first, there is speculation she's another victim of the Whitechapel murderer. As it turns out, she was actually murdered by her ex-boyfriend. She dumped him, it was a crime of passion, and he killed her.
54:01 Tom Holland? It's like Mariah Martin in The Red Barn.
54:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. But at the time, people said, well, maybe this killer has moved north. So again, there's a sort of slackening of tension in the East End. And on the 27th of September, The Daily News sent a reporter to Whitechapel and he wrote a long feature about the atmosphere and he said, You know, a few days ago, he said, people seem very, very shocked and very frightened. But now he says things are back to normal and he paints, like, you can look it up online. It's on the kind of casebook, Jack the Ripper casebook website, this story. And he paints a really vivid picture of Whitechapel, the steaming cook shops, the flaring gin palaces and noisy shows, the cheapjacks and shooting galleries, the streaming lights and roar and
54:46 Dominic Sandbrook? rattle and hurrying throngs and noisy groups.
54:49 Tom Holland? Dominic, we mentioned that it's the entertainment capital of the entire East End. So lots to do.
54:55 Dominic Sandbrook? And a lot of eccentric entertainment, shall we say. So he finds people crowding around a performing boy with no legs, for example, or a huge crowd around a trader who's selling trousers for nine shillings. And he stops in Hanbury Street, which is where Annie Chapman had been found. He stops an elderly passerby and he says to this bloke, people don't seem very anxious about these murders. And the guy says to him, no, there's very little anxiety. People, most of them, they think he's gone to Gateshead. But has he gone to Gateshead? Because that same day, the 27th, the editor of the Central News Office in London gets a letter written in red ink.
55:37 Dominic Sandbrook? And that is the letter, Tom, with which we began the first episode. Do you want to read us a couple of extracts to remind people?
55:44 Tom Holland? Yeah, so just to remind people what he said. I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won't fix me just yet. I'm down on oars and I shall quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was, I gave the lady no time to squeal. I love my work and want to start again. You're so near of me with my funny little games. And he said that he'd saved blood from the last job, so Annie Chapman to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can't use it. And then he says, the next job I do, I shall clip the lady's ears off and send to the police. My knife's so nice and sharp, I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.
56:24 Tom Holland? So we said, this is the most notorious letter in the entire history of crime. And the reason for its fame is the sign off because it ends, yours truly, Jack the Ripper. Don't mind me giving the trade name.
56:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
56:42 Tom Holland? And. The reaction of the editor at the news agency to begin with is a hoax, because obviously there have been lots of other letters that have been obvious hoaxes. And so there is the, you know, this question hanging, well, was it a hoax or is it real?
57:01 Dominic Sandbrook? We'll come back to this in the next episode, but most experts think it's a hoax. The killer never did cut off a victim's ears. So he did mutilate a future victim, Catherine Eddowes, and cut off the lobe of one of her ears, but that was a minor thing compared with the other mutilations he carried out. Philip Sugton points out that this letter, you can, people can Google it, they can see lots of examples of it online. The punctuation is all over the place, but there is not a single spelling mistake. So Sugton says, it seems like the work of an educated man pretending to be an uneducated one. He thinks it's revealing that it's sent to a news agency, not the police. In other words, it's a letter sent not to taunt the police, but to get the maximum possible publicity.
57:46 Dominic Sandbrook? And Sugton also notes the postcode, the East Central postcode, which covered Fleet Street, the offices of the major newspapers. And he thinks this is probably the work of a young reporter who is having a bit of fun and is hoping to generate a story. And that would tally with the Jack the Ripper nickname, because first of all, the ripping bit of it, the Ripper. The newspapers had used the word ripping and Ripper a lot. They described the ripping open of the bodies. So somebody who's immersed in the world of newspapers, that would make sense. And then the second thing, Jack.
58:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Jack is the most common name for criminals in the penny dreadfuls that I mentioned in the first half.
58:33 Tom Holland? And of course monkeys.
58:34 Dominic Sandbrook? And monkeys. Well, that occurred to me as well. So when we did our episode about history's greatest monkeys, a lot of them were called Jack. Jack O'Makako, Jack the Signalman, Corporal Jackie and so on. Jack was a standard name that you reached for, you know, if you were creating a character, should we say.
58:50 Tom Holland? Yeah. And there's a hint of a kind of a rogue, a lad, an adventurer as well, isn't there?
58:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Jack the lad, exactly. So one of the most popular figures on the Victorian stage was the 18th century burglar, Jack Sheppard. And there was also a kind of urban legend, I mean, it seems mad now that there would be such an urban legend, but it was very popular in the sort of middle of the 19th century, an urban legend of somebody called Spring Heel Jack, who would kind of leap out and attack young girls and young women.
59:20 Tom Holland? Yeah, and kind of vanish in a blaze of fire.
59:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, and these sort of rumours of this character, it's the kind of thing kids would tell each other in the playground, there's this boy called Spring Heel Jack, who kind of leaps out and then vanishes again. The nickname is precisely the kind of nickname I think that a young journalist who goes to the stage a lot, goes to the theatre, reads penny dreadfuls, would choose. And it's an exciting, newsworthy name.
59:44 Tom Holland? Yeah, and the evidence for that is that it goes viral, doesn't it?
59:47 Dominic Sandbrook? It does go viral, exactly, based purely on this, right? So the editor of the central news agency doesn't think it's real, but two days later, he passes it to Scotland Yard anyway and says, you know, you might want to just check this out. And then that very evening comes the most dramatic episode of the whole story, one of the most gruesome nights in London's history. So we'll start in Burness Street, in the heart of Whitechapel. It's the evening of Saturday, the 29th of September. And we are at specifically a sort of courtyard called Dutfield's Yard, and it was enclosed by a row of cottages, by a print workshop, and by the International Working Men's Educational Club, which was a socialist club for Russian and Polish Jews.
1:00:31 Dominic Sandbrook? And every Saturday night, this club had debates about socialism and whatnot. And it breaks up, the debate breaks up at about 11.30, most people go, but a few of them stay upstairs in the reading room to chat. Now, in the other buildings around the yard, people are still working, so the print workshop, people are coming and going, the lights are kind of burning. At about 12.40, the chairman of the socialist club, who's a guy called Maurice Eagle, he comes into the yard, he's been walking a lady friend home, and he can hear someone singing in Russian upstairs at the club, perfectly normal. He goes through the gates, he goes through the yard, he doesn't notice anything strange in the yard at all. So this is, I'm telling you this because it gives people a sense of the wind over time.
1:01:17 Dominic Sandbrook? Then 20 minutes later, a man riding a little cart comes into the yard and he's a Russian Jew called Louis Dimshutz. He's the steward of the club and he lives there with his wife and he's been out selling jewellery all day. And he turns his cart into the yard and almost immediately the pony shies away. And he looks down to the right and he sees something huddled by the wall of the club in the darkness. And he prods this thing with his whip and it doesn't move and he lights a match and it's a human body. And he runs upstairs to the club to get help from his wife and so on. And then he runs back and as his wife later told the press, "I at once recognised it as the body of a woman, while to add to my horror, I saw a stream of blood.
1:02:01 Dominic Sandbrook? She was lying on her back with her head against the wall and the face looked ghastly." And a crowd gathers and they lift her head, they light a match and they see a gash in her throat. They go and get the police, the police arrive, they bring a doctor. The doctor is there by about 1.15 and he says she's been dead for about 20 minutes or half an hour. So in other words, once again, this has happened very, very quickly. And then about half an hour later Detective Inspector Reed of the Metropolitan Police arrives and eventually they identify this woman. Her name is Elizabeth Stride. We'll tell her story in the bonus episode for our club members, just very briefly. She's an immigrant herself, she's from Gothenburg in Sweden.
1:02:45 Dominic Sandbrook? She'd been a domestic servant, then almost certainly in Gothenburg, she was a prostitute. She came to England, she married a bloke called Stride, they set up a coffee house which collapsed. Her marriage fell apart, it's a very familiar story, the spiral of poverty, homelessness and so on. She had cleaning jobs, but she also definitely worked as a prostitute. And she'd probably gone out soliciting that night, hoping to get some money for lodgings, again, a very familiar story. And there are intriguing witness reports that describe her talking to a man and we'll talk about them next time. But for now, let's rewind to the discovery of the body in Dutfield's yard. So that was just before 1 o'clock in the morning, right?
1:03:28 Dominic Sandbrook? But the drama is not yet over. So if we move the camera now, three quarters of a mile to the west, 12 minutes' walk away, and we're now in another enclosed space, Mitre Square, just off Allgate, which is close to the eastern edge of the City of London. And this has a very different feel. It's not that far away, it's only 12 minutes' walk, but the atmosphere is different. This is much more respectable. It's a square lined with offices and warehouses, and it's pretty empty.
1:03:58 Tom Holland? And it's in the City of London, so there is a different police jurisdiction there. It's a much older centre of habitation, and the name Mitre derives from the fact that a priory had stood on the site.
1:04:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh, nice. So it's this dull, lonely spot, surrounded by offices and warehouses. And at 1:30, so we're talking about just over half an hour after Elizabeth Stride's body was found, at 1:30, Police Constable Edward Watkins entered Mitre Square as part of his regular night-time beat. And he walks into the square, and there's no sound but his own footsteps. And he looks around the square, and there's nothing, seems completely deserted. So he leaves the square at the far end, and he carries on his beat. And it takes him 15 minutes to come round. So now he's come round, and he comes back into the square, and it's 1:44. And again, he hears nothing.
1:04:54 Dominic Sandbrook? And then, by his own account, "I turned sharp round to the right, and flashing my light, I saw it in front of me. A more dreadful sight I never saw; it quite knocked me over." And he runs towards the nearest lit window, which is a warehouse on the far side. And there, the night watchman is sweeping up. And PC Watkins runs in, and he shouts, "For God's sake, mate, come to my assistance! There's another woman cut to pieces!" Because, for the second time in barely an hour, Jack the Ripper has struck again. But who, Dominic, has he slain?
1:05:33 Tom Holland? And what further horrors may lie ahead. And Rest is History Club members can find out right away because the next three episodes, including the final episode in which we will be unmasking the identity of the murderer, are available to hear right now. And if you would like to hear them too, and you're not signed up to the Rest is History Club, then you can go to therestishistory.com and do so there. Thank you very much, Dominic. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Goodbye. Bye bye.
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