Showing category "Jack the Ripper" (Show all posts)

What Was London Like in 1888?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Wednesday, December 15, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

In 1888 the population of London was almost five million out of which I would say that over 2 million lived below the poverty line and that of those about 900,000 lived in the East End about 76,000 in Whitechapel.


Why was there so much overcrowding in areas like Whitechapel? From the 1840s farming was becoming mechanised and so farm-hands lost their jobs and came to London looking for work. From 1845 the Irish Potato Famine began from a disease that blighted the potatoes causing them to rot in...


Continue reading ...
 

Whitechapel: Poverty Breeds Crime

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guidev on Monday, October 11, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

The Whitechapel murders by Jack the Ripper took place in 1888 in one of the most poverty-stricken places in London. Whitechapel was an area with massive overcrowding caused by multiple reasons:


From the 1840’s farming started to become mechanised people fled to London looking for work. The Irish Potato Famine from1845 meant one million Irish people left their homes in search of a new life abroad. Some came to London, some of those later went on to America. From the mid 1800’s Jews fled fro...


Continue reading ...
 

Sir William Gull: Ripper Suspect

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Friday, September 24, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

Most of the candidates for Jack the Ripper have fatal flaws. For example, the queen’s doctor Sir William Gull. In 1887, Sir William Gull suffered the first of several strokes at his Scottish home, Urrard House, Killiecrankie. The attack of hemiplegia and aphasia was caused by a cerebral haemorrhage. He recovered after a few weeks and returned to London, but was under no illusions about the danger to his health, remarking "One arrow had missed its mark, but there are more in the quiver".


Over...


Continue reading ...
 

William Bury - Jack The Ripper Suspect

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Friday, August 13, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

One of the lesser-known suspects for the Ripper murders is William Bury and his is a strange tale indeed!


He was born in May 1859, orphaned at an early age and attended a charitable school in the Midlands. After he left school, he was in regular employment for a while and then got into financial difficulties and was dismissed for stealing. He became a street pedlar. In 1887 he moved to London and met and married Ellen Elliot, who was probably a prostitute. Their marriage was stormy, punctuated...


Continue reading ...
 

Suspect Montague John Druitt

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Thursday, July 29, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

Montague John Druitt was 31 years of age at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. He had been born into a reasonably well-off family from Wimborne Dorset, and went to New College Oxford in 1876. He graduated three years later with a third-class honours degree in classics, thereafter taking up a post as a teacher at Blackheath Boys School, a boy’s preparatory school. It was a successful school, run by George Valentine who was widely respected as a headmaster.


Druitt played cricket at the M...


Continue reading ...
 

The Ten Bells

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Tuesday, June 8, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

Not far from where Mary Kelly, the last victim of Jack the Ripper, was brutally slaughtered in her room in Millers Court, off Dorset Street lies her favourite pub, the Ten Bells. Mary was known to solicit on the corner outside and woe betide anyone else who decided to take her spot, as she would drive them off very quickly. Jack may well have drunk here also before his killing sprees!


The pub originally stood at 12 Red Lion Street, but this was pulled down as part of the cutting of Commercial ...


Continue reading ...
 

Graves of the Victims of Jack the Ripper

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Thursday, June 3, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

Walking round on a Jack the Ripper walk, I am sure that most people would be wondering where all the victims of Jack the Ripper were buried. Even though most of these women were buried in common graves as their families either could not be traced or did not have the money to buy them a plot in a cemetery, it is still possible to find and visit their resting places.


Here is a list of all the graves that have been discovered up until now.


Martha Tabram - unknown but most likely common grave in th...


Continue reading ...
 

Why Was Jack the Ripper Never Caught?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Tuesday, March 9, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

I think there are many reasons why the police did not catch Jack the Ripper, even though at one time they believed that they were only five minutes behind him after the murder of Catherine Eddowes on 30 September 1888, the night of the double event.

One reason was that policing in those days was far removed from the efficient methods of today. Just imagine no fingerprinting until 1906, no crime scene analysis, no DNA, no genetic sequencing, or any of the other tools that the police now have.

On...


Continue reading ...
 

The Common Thread Among All The Victims of Jack

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Friday, January 8, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

All the victims of Jack the Ripper had a few things in common. They were all poverty stricken, all lived in Whitechapel at the time of their death, and they were all alcoholics.

 

Most were around or over the age of 40, so these were prostitutes at the end of the line. This includes Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. All of these were over 40, except Martha Tabram who was 39, (strangely enough this was the amount of stab wounds inflicted on her ...


Continue reading ...
 

Jack The Ripper – The Diary of James Maybrick

Posted by By Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Wednesday, December 9, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

This is a convoluted theory which I first became aware of in t1993 when I went to a book launch at the Alma Pub in Spellman Street,  just off of Hanbury Street where Annie Chapman was murdered.

 

The book told the story of James Maybrick, a cotton broker from Liverpool who lived in Battlecrease House with his American wife Fanny. The couple had met on a voyage from Britain to America. James was wealthy but a lot older than Fanny. They married and eventually settled down to live in Battlecrease ...


Continue reading ...
 

Walter Sickert

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Friday, November 13, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

According to the book Portrait of a Killer, Jack The Ripper Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell, Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, the murderer who stalked the streets of Whitechapel in 1888.

 

Patricia Cornwell went to a great deal of trouble and expense trying to prove her theory. She even spent about £1million in the attempt. She bought Sickert’s desk and cut some of his paintings out of their frames, desperately searching for DNA from blood/skin shreds she hoped to find on the edges of th...


Continue reading ...
 

James Maybrick: Fact or Fiction?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Monday, September 14, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

James Maybrick, a cotton broker from Liverpool, did not become a suspect until 1992 when a diary written on part of a Victorian ledger was rumoured to have been found by Tony Devereux, in the attic of Battlecrease House, Aigburth in Liverpool, the former residence of Maybrick. He supposedly gave it to a friend Michael Barrett in a pub, but the story later changed as his wife Ann said it had been in her family for generations. She had asked Devereux to give it to her husband because he had lit...


Continue reading ...
 

Jack the Ripper

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Monday, August 10, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

Jack the Ripper has remained a mystery for the past 132 years. That is not to say that numerous (too numerous to calculate) attempts have not been made to identify this most famous serial killer. Practically every year a new book and a new theory emerges and is pored over by Ripper enthusiasts in the hope that this is the theory that will finally nail him. But to no avail!

 

However, after reading five or six theories you come to realise that every book is slightly different in their view of ho...


Continue reading ...
 

Was Francis Tumblety Jack the Ripper?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Thursday, May 14, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

 A man of dubious character to be sure, as at 15 he was selling pornographic books and papers on the canal packet boats. He apparently disappeared from the area, returning years later he advertised he was ‘a great physician’, but he was really a man who sold potions from the back of a wagon. One of these, for pimples, was very effective and made him a fortune.  A boastful flamboyant man, who held sumptuous dinner parties in his tastefully furnished apartment in Washington, intimate with m...


Continue reading ...
 

John Pizer a Possible Jack the Ripper Suspect?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Thursday, April 23, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 
After Polly Nichols was murdered by Jack the Ripper on 31 August 1888, followed by Annie Chapman a few days later on 8 September, the police questioned many members of the local community asking if they knew anybody locally who showed a hatred for prostitutes, someone who might attack them, rob them or rape them.

Many people were eager to help the police catch this terrible killer and came forward with a possible suspect - John Pizer, a Polish Jew working at a boot- finisher. Being in that t...

Continue reading ...
 

Was Martha Tabram a Ripper Victim?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 
For many years it was not acknowledged that Martha Tabram (Turner) was a victim of Jack.

However, in a recent documentary Jack the Ripper Case Reopened, presented by Emilia Fox, star of Silent Witness with help from Professor David Wilson, a expert criminologist, they uncover many fact that point to the fact that Martha could have been Jack’s first victim not Mary Ann Nichols or Polly as she is better known. Calling this the ultimate cold case he carefully looks at the murders with cold case...


Continue reading ...
 

Why we provide Jack the Ripper tours

Posted by Hazel Baker, Director of London Guided Walks on Monday, February 10, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

In today’s Guardian author and social historian Hallie Rubenhold has announced her plans to commemorate the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper with a new mural in Whitechapel.  She claims Ripper tours are ‘atrocious’. 

One of the most popular questions we get asked by people is if we provide a Jack the Ripper tour. Yes we do. If we didn’t, they would just go with someone else. Is it not better to provide a Ripper tour which truly reflects the Whitechapel of 1888, the murky...


Continue reading ...
 

Aaron Kosminski - Jack the Ripper Suspect

Posted by Jenny Phillips - Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Thursday, February 6, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 
Arron Kosminski, the suspect hinted as being Jack the Ripper, by Sir Melvlle MacNaughton as being the most likely suspect. Also, the subject chosen by Author Russell Edwards, who bought the shawl in 2007 Results from a forensic examination of this stained silk shawl that investigators claim was found next to the mutilated body of Catherine Eddowes, the killer’s fourth victim, in 1888. The shawl is speckled with what is claimed to be blood and semen, the latter believed to be from the killer...
Continue reading ...
 

Who was Jack the Ripper?

Posted by Jenny, Jack the Ripper Guide on Saturday, February 1, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 
Who Was Jack?

This is the most common question that I an asked by people attending the tour. His Identity is a never-ending source of mystery and interest to most people.

To answer this question, I have studied many books, films and police reports from the time and I have a unique answer which explains why, after Mary Kelly he never struck again and disappeared just as mysteriously as he had started these horrific murders. I love the mystery of this case and take great delight with sharing my...
Continue reading ...
 

Jack the Ripper and Winter Nights

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Sunday, December 29, 2019, In : Jack the Ripper 
What a perfect time to do a Jack the Ripper Walk as the streets are dark (from 4:00 pm and starting at between 6-7:30 you can be sure of a great atmosphere on the walk. It’s even better when it’s misty or cold, as this gruesome walk will make you shiver to your bones.

A mysterious man our Jack never caught at the time, never really identified. So, who was he? You had a multitude of suspects even at the time, as the police arrested and questioned over three hundred men but never found enou...
Continue reading ...
 
 
 

Tags

"online bookings' cpd #earthrise 17th 1830s 18thcentury 1930s 20th 50th a abbey adele afternoon afternoon tea age ages alastair ancient and animals annie anniversary apps architecture arsenal art arts attack autumn awards baker bank bankside barbican barrier bathhouses battersea bazalgette bear beasts becket bells bexley bishopsgate black blackfriars blackout blitz bloomsbury bombers book books borough bowie breakfast brewery brick bridge britain british bronze bronze age brunch buckingham burger burlesque buses cab cabaret cake canal canary captain care carl carol caroline carols cathedral cemetery cenotaph century chapman charles charlton cheap cheapside cheese childhood chips chiswick chocolate christmas church city city of london clapham clerkenwell cocktails coffee coffeehouses common company concert corporate covent covent garden covid-19 cream crime cross crown cruise crystal danson david davy day december dental deptford dick dickens dinner dinosaurs do dock dockland museum dragons dreamtime druitt earth east eat eating eats ecommerce edward edwardians edwin egypt elizabethan end engineering era ernst event events exhibition exhibitions facebook fair fairytale fall family fantastic farringdon fashion february festival film finance fire first fiscus florence folklore food for francis free friars frost gallery galliard garden george georgian georgians german germany gibb gift girls globe grade great greenhithe greenwich group guided guides gun half hall halsk handel harle harry potter hats havering havering hoard hawksmoor hazel heroes hidden highbury hill hilton history holloway homes hooke hot hotel house housing how humphry i ian ianmcd ice ice cream icelandic ii iii in india inigo isaac islington italian iv jack jack the ripper jack's james jenny jewels john johns jones joseph katharines kelly kenneth kew gardens kids kidstours killer kim king kings kingston lambeth lane lewis lights limestone literature liverpool locations londinium london london bridge london's londoners londonhistory lunch lutyens macaulay magnus management maritime market markets martyr mary match matilda maufe mayfair mcdiarmid measure medical medieval memorial middle military millennium mock-tudor modern modernist montague month monument moorgate mosaic murder murderers museum museum of london docklands music musicals mystery n7 national gallery national history museum ned new newcomen news newton nhs nichols night nightingale nurse of old street oliver open opera paddington palace palaces pancakes pandemic panoramic park parties path pauls people philip photo photograhy photography photos pizza places plague plantation plays plumstead podcast poetry pokemon polly poor pop poplar port poverty prince priory private tours pub public pubs purbeck qe2 queen queenhithe quirky railways recording regency reid religion rembrandt renaissance restoration ripper river road rob robert roman romans roundhouse royal saga saints salute saxon school. science sculpture scupture seacole second serial servants sewers shakespeare shoreditch siemens sir slave slavery small smartphone smith smithfield smithfields soap soho somme south southbank southwark spitalfields spy squirrels ss st statue stories stow street strike stuart stuarts studios subscription suffragettes sugar summer susan sydenham tate taxi tea ten term terror thames thamesmeade the theatre thiepval things things to do thrifty thriftytheatre to toothbrush tour tours tower trade travel truman tudor tudors tumblety twelfth twentieth twist und underground update v&a ve victims victoria victorian victorian london victorians viking virtual vouchers wales walk walking walks wall war water werner west westend westminster wharf wheeler whitechapel wilde wildlife willelm william windrush wine winter women wood woodland woolwich world wyatt york zachary 1666 1888 2019 2020

LONDON GUIDED WALKS:

LEARN MORE:

CONNECT WITH US:

USEFUL LINKS:

Site by Hazel  |  Photographs by Hazel or Ian