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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

 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...