JACK THE RIPPER
THIS IS A PIECE I HAVE SENT TO THE GUARDIAN ON SPEC. PRETTY MUCH SUMS UP MY VIEWS ON BLOOD AND GUTS IN GUIDING - TASTELESS YES, BUT LET'S NOT GET TOO SELF-RIGHTEOUS HERE. MOST OF USE IT ON OCCASSIONS...
Walk out of Tower Hill tube station early this (or any other) evening and you will probably bump into a crowd of people listening to somebody in a top hat and dark coat talking about Jack the Ripper. At a time when a weak dollar, terrorism and economic uncertainty are hitting incoming tourism, Jack always seems to attract a decent crowd.
One of the reasons, of course, is that he was never caught and this gives plenty of scope for writers and amateur sleuths to come up with various theories as to who the killer really was. Ferrari driving crime authoress Patricia Cornwell is convinced that the murders were committed by the painter Walter Sickert, despite the fact that he was in France when most of the victims were killed. Sickert did have a morbid fascination with the Ripper but there is no real evidence linking him to any of the killings, which took place in the East end of London in late 1888.
Sickert’s son Joseph, however, talked to the writer Stephen Knight and convinced him that the five known victims of Jack the Ripper were friends of Annie Crook, who had secretly married Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor, known (like me) by the name Eddy. Albert was next in line to the throne after his father and marriage to a poor East End Catholic was unthinkable. The establishment decided to hush up the marriage and the child born to Annie and Eddy. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly were eliminated to keep them quiet because they were all friends of Annie’s who knew her secret. This theory has Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s doctor, as the killer and explains how the killer knew enough anatomy to cut open his victims and spread out their organs. Gull died in 1890 soon after the Ripper murders.
The theory has everything – royalty, scandal, cover-up and plenty of blood and guts. It is also almost certainly a tissue of lies and fantasy but it still has plenty of adherents, not least in Hollywood, which never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Knight died tragically young of a brain tumour at the age of 33, after publishing Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution, while Sickert’s son died five years ago, having withdrawn (and then restated) his story.
Serial killers, when they are finally caught, are usually shown to be pretty inadequate characters who have done nothing with their lives but give themselves significance by striking fear into their almost exclusively female victims. Prostitutes, whether in the Victorian East end, Yorkshire in the 1980s or Suffolk more recently provide easy pickings and are often considered low priority victims by the authorities. Murders in the East End were common enough in Victorian England, but what made Jack’s stand out was the clinical way he disembowelled his victims and then slipped away unnoticed.
Should we be making money from these murders at a time when some communities have recently been terrorised by serial killers? Some guides refuse to do Jack the Ripper tours and there was some talk about boycotting them a while ago, but market forces won out in the end and they are certainly London’s most successful walking tour. There is not much change out of £5000 these days to gain the London blue badge guiding qualification and it takes the best part of two years out of your life. Ripper guides, however, are often armed with little more than an A-Z, a copy of Knight’s book and a top hat. This infuriates guides who have taken the trouble to earn their qualifications and find themselves sidelined by people who glory in the blood and have little sensitivity to those who live in the area where they are conducting walks.
I have been a guide for years but have never been asked to do a Ripper tour and would probably make an excuse if I was. But let’s not get too self-righteous here. Like most guides I am not above using a little blood and guts to liven up a slow day. People are always interested in executions and event he most blasé teenager will listen as you describe how William Wallace’s was hung drawn and quartered. After being hung by the neck, he was disembowelled while still alive and cut into four pieces, his head ending up on London Bridge. The executioners took their time to prolong the agony of the man who defied Edward the First. It did not stop the Wallace myth, however, which grew to such ludicrous proportions that Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart suggested that Edward’s grandson, the future Edward the Third, was actually the seed of Wallace’s loins. This was pretty unlikely but particularly hard to credit given that Wallace was executed in 1307 and Edward was not born until 1312. Pregnant for seven years? Even Mel Gibson would struggle to achieve that.
Wallace’s gruesome public execution was the fate of those who plotted the overthrow of a sovereign and it was used sporadically up until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when the last to be executed in this way were those who had signed Charles the First’s death warrant. The last public beheading took place in 1746 at Tower Hill (near where the Ripper walks start) and the last public execution in Britain took place outside the Old Bailey in 1868. An Irishman called Michael Barrett was hung for setting off a bomb and, in an odd mixture of the modern and the medieval, you could travel to see it by tube, the London Underground railway having opened in 1862.
Walk out of Tower Hill tube station early this (or any other) evening and you will probably bump into a crowd of people listening to somebody in a top hat and dark coat talking about Jack the Ripper. At a time when a weak dollar, terrorism and economic uncertainty are hitting incoming tourism, Jack always seems to attract a decent crowd.
One of the reasons, of course, is that he was never caught and this gives plenty of scope for writers and amateur sleuths to come up with various theories as to who the killer really was. Ferrari driving crime authoress Patricia Cornwell is convinced that the murders were committed by the painter Walter Sickert, despite the fact that he was in France when most of the victims were killed. Sickert did have a morbid fascination with the Ripper but there is no real evidence linking him to any of the killings, which took place in the East end of London in late 1888.
Sickert’s son Joseph, however, talked to the writer Stephen Knight and convinced him that the five known victims of Jack the Ripper were friends of Annie Crook, who had secretly married Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor, known (like me) by the name Eddy. Albert was next in line to the throne after his father and marriage to a poor East End Catholic was unthinkable. The establishment decided to hush up the marriage and the child born to Annie and Eddy. Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly were eliminated to keep them quiet because they were all friends of Annie’s who knew her secret. This theory has Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s doctor, as the killer and explains how the killer knew enough anatomy to cut open his victims and spread out their organs. Gull died in 1890 soon after the Ripper murders.
The theory has everything – royalty, scandal, cover-up and plenty of blood and guts. It is also almost certainly a tissue of lies and fantasy but it still has plenty of adherents, not least in Hollywood, which never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Knight died tragically young of a brain tumour at the age of 33, after publishing Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution, while Sickert’s son died five years ago, having withdrawn (and then restated) his story.
Serial killers, when they are finally caught, are usually shown to be pretty inadequate characters who have done nothing with their lives but give themselves significance by striking fear into their almost exclusively female victims. Prostitutes, whether in the Victorian East end, Yorkshire in the 1980s or Suffolk more recently provide easy pickings and are often considered low priority victims by the authorities. Murders in the East End were common enough in Victorian England, but what made Jack’s stand out was the clinical way he disembowelled his victims and then slipped away unnoticed.
Should we be making money from these murders at a time when some communities have recently been terrorised by serial killers? Some guides refuse to do Jack the Ripper tours and there was some talk about boycotting them a while ago, but market forces won out in the end and they are certainly London’s most successful walking tour. There is not much change out of £5000 these days to gain the London blue badge guiding qualification and it takes the best part of two years out of your life. Ripper guides, however, are often armed with little more than an A-Z, a copy of Knight’s book and a top hat. This infuriates guides who have taken the trouble to earn their qualifications and find themselves sidelined by people who glory in the blood and have little sensitivity to those who live in the area where they are conducting walks.
I have been a guide for years but have never been asked to do a Ripper tour and would probably make an excuse if I was. But let’s not get too self-righteous here. Like most guides I am not above using a little blood and guts to liven up a slow day. People are always interested in executions and event he most blasé teenager will listen as you describe how William Wallace’s was hung drawn and quartered. After being hung by the neck, he was disembowelled while still alive and cut into four pieces, his head ending up on London Bridge. The executioners took their time to prolong the agony of the man who defied Edward the First. It did not stop the Wallace myth, however, which grew to such ludicrous proportions that Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart suggested that Edward’s grandson, the future Edward the Third, was actually the seed of Wallace’s loins. This was pretty unlikely but particularly hard to credit given that Wallace was executed in 1307 and Edward was not born until 1312. Pregnant for seven years? Even Mel Gibson would struggle to achieve that.
Wallace’s gruesome public execution was the fate of those who plotted the overthrow of a sovereign and it was used sporadically up until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 when the last to be executed in this way were those who had signed Charles the First’s death warrant. The last public beheading took place in 1746 at Tower Hill (near where the Ripper walks start) and the last public execution in Britain took place outside the Old Bailey in 1868. An Irishman called Michael Barrett was hung for setting off a bomb and, in an odd mixture of the modern and the medieval, you could travel to see it by tube, the London Underground railway having opened in 1862.
posted by tourguideddie at 7:53 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home