Catch Me When You Can

1888: A Jack the Ripper Novel is available to buy now from Amazon

Even people who know "nothing" about Jack the Ripper, seem to know a good bit of the details of the crime.

There are, of course, exceptions. Some people may believe they know more about the Ripper than they actually do. One such example happened a few years back when I was getting off the tube train at Baker Street. For those who have never been, Baker Street station has large tile murals of Sherlock Holmes in silhouette along with information about Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation.

I was walking behind a young girl and her father, when she asked him, "Who is Sherlock Holmes?"

"He was the policeman who caught Jack the Ripper." was his reply; a sentence that is so riddled with errors, that it is almost impossible to know quite how to begin correcting it.

However, most people will be able to tell you some facts. Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes in Victorian London, he was never caught and he wrote letters to the police, taunting them and giving them clues.

These letters have proven to be one of the most compelling aspects of the mystery. There were over 200 hundred sent during the autumn of terror and the following years and almost all of them have been discredited as fanciful hoaxes from duplicitous members of the public, or even newspaper journalists eager to print the next installment of this baffling saga.

A handful however, cannot be dismissed outright and a couple made it into 1888, mostly because they had proven to be the most interesting historically.

The first such letter was sent to the Central News Agency of London on 27th of September, 1888. The two page letter was written with such a precise hand, some believe that it may have been copied down from another source. The opening line "Dear Boss," would give the piece of evidence its title.


"Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck. 

Yours truly
Jack the Ripper

The "Dear Boss" Letter

Dont mind me giving the trade name

PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. ha ha"


(For the eagle of eyed among my readers, yes, the sign-off at the end of this letter is why I end my blog posts in the manner I do.)


The letter itself was thin on details and very few historians believe that it actually came from the pen of the Whitechapel murderer. However, with this letter, the country had a name to give this most elusive killer. I wanted to include this letter simply for that reason, and also because in doing so, I could finally begin referring to the killer as "Jack the Ripper" in the narrative.

The second letter included in my novel was to become known as the "From Hell" letter and in many ways is a much more startling piece of evidence.

In reality, as in the book, the letter was received at the house of George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Unlike my book, Lusk was slow in believing it to be genuine and actually had to be talked into handing it to the police. The most striking aspect of the letter is the garbled, misspelled scrawl of text - an inconsistent sort of illiteracy in which the writer is incapable of correctly spelling "nice" but is aware that "knife" begins with a silent "k."

It arrived just over a fortnight after the "Dear Boss" letter and was somewhat unique in regards to not using the term "Jack the Ripper" - which all of the hoax letters sent in that duration were wont to do.

The "From Hell" Letter

"From hell
Mr Lusk
Sor
I send you half the
Kidne I took from one women
prasarved it for you tother piece
I fried and ate it was very nise. I
may send you the bloody knif that
took it out if you only wate a whil
longer.
signed
Catch me when
you Can
Mishter Lusk."

Most chilling of all, the note was sent with the remains of a human kidney. What may be the most infuriating aspect of the case is that the kidney itself, though preserved in formaldehyde at the time, has been lost from the police records. Were it still in the possession of the police, it could have been possible to test the remains for DNA and then could be matched against the living relatives of Catherine Eddowes, thus proving if the letter was indeed genuine.

There was another letter sent a couple weeks later to Thomas Horrocks Openshaw, a surgeon who had worked on the case for some time. The letter has some superficial similarities to the "From Hell" letter, but I have yet to be convinced that they are from the same person, and not simply someone writing intentionally poorly with their non-dominant hand.

Whatever the truth, I did not think for a moment that I could write a Jack the Ripper novel and not include one of those pieces of information everybody (save for perhaps, that gentleman at Baker Street Station) knows to be part of the case.

I suspect that in truth the "From Hell" letter may have been a more elaborate than usual hoax from a medical student at the time, but we can never know for sure. In my book, we are never really certain and as with so many aspects of this crime, the uncertainty is what keeps the mystery alive.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.

The Mystery of the Batty Street Lodger

 1888: A Jack the Ripper Novel is available to buy now from Amazon

A still image from Hitchcock's "The Lodger."

One of the most enduring tales to have come out of the autumn of terror is that of "The Lodger," a fictional story first published in a national newspaper before being expanded into a full novel. Eventually at least five movie adaptations of the book were made (most memorably in 1926, by a young Alfred Hitchcock.)

The arresting image of the unknown stranger in an insignificant lodging house has become one of the most recognised from the era, but few people are aware that the story itself was based on a very real incident from the time.


Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes wrote "The Lodger" in 1913 and over the intervening quarter century, the original tale of the landlady with a suspicious house guest had all but been lost to time. However, Lowndes claims to have found inspiration for her latest tale after eavesdropping upon a conversation between two friends at a dinner party, who provided the outline for what would later become her book.

The story was that a relative of one of the guests believed herself to have rented a room to Jack the Ripper during the autumn of the murders. The tale had clearly changed somewhat from 1888 as the house was now far grander than the lodging house on Batty Street and had a maid and a cleaner.

Others have pointed out that Lowndes was not the first person to recall such a story. Artist Walter Sickert had for years believed that he had stayed in a room in a lodging house where the Ripper once slept and noted psychiatrist L. Forbes Winslow believed that the murderer had been renting a room in Finsbury Square.

By 1913, it is quite possible that the concept of the lodger had become a sort of urban legend. A piece of folklore that had arisen in response to the crimes. However, the details of all three of these stories are strikingly similar enough to the real life case of the Batty Street lodger, that many believe that they are simply retelling and expanding the original tale.

Israel Lipski

22 Batty Street was a tall, narrow dwelling on a street on the south side of Commercial Road. The previous year, it had acquired a certain notoriety owing to the brutal murder of the heavily pregnant Miriam Angel by Israel Lipski. This murder gave rise to much of the anti-Jewish sentiment that typified so much of the Ripper era (and indeed, the killer's cry of "Lipski!" to a Jewish onlooker during the murder of Elizabeth Stride reflects the mood of the area at the time.)

The murder happen at number 16, Batty Street. Just three houses down lived Mrs. Kuer, a widowed landlady of limited means who made her living mostly by renting out the room above her. She was in her mid fifties by 1888 and had lived in her house for several years at that time, after having emigrated from Germany at some unspecified year before.

Over the Autumn of 1888, Mrs. Kuer had taken in a lodger who she would later claim was prone to late night jaunts which often coincided with the Ripper murders. He was said to have been well dressed and possibly wealthy and "foreign born."

The mysterious lodger left on the morning following the "double event" after Mrs. Kuer had been handed some clothes to clean. Among these garments, she discovered a shirt with blood stained cuffs and sleeves.

Mrs. Kuer reported her findings to the police who launched an investigation, whereupon the details become somewhat hard to ascertain. Some reports claim that a man was arrested and released, others that the police became unconvinced by Mrs. Kuer's story and its inconsistencies.

Ivor Novello as "The Avenger" in "The Lodger."

MODERATE SPOILERS FROM HERE ONWARDS!

In 1888 the Batty Street lodger tale is retold with respects to Mrs. Kuer's story being accurate. The lodger is revealed to be Francis Tumblety, who quickly flees from the lodging house once he discovers that his blood stained clothes have been discovered.

There are a few reasons to suspect that this may have been the case. There are contemporary newspaper articles who suggest that the Batty Street Lodger may have been an American and a doctor, who may also have had a place in the West End (as Tumblety is believed to have done.)

Mrs. Kuer's identification of her lodger as being a rather nondescript "foreign" may seem to rule out an American as that accent seems so familiar to our ears as to be instantly recognisable. However, this was probably not the case in 1888 as without the influence of film and television, an American dialect was likely to be as hard to place as any other.

SPOILERS END HERE!

Whoever the Batty Street lodger was, his story and that told by Mrs. Kuer, have become part of the folklore of Jack the Ripper. It is a fascinating, eerie tale that has survived for so long because the idea of being so close to a dangerous stranger who is quietly living in our midst, is possibly one of the most terrifying I can imagine.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith

The Writing on the Wall

1888: A Jack the Ripper Novel is available to buy now from Amazon

The graffito as it was copied onto paper at the scene

In my novel, the night of "The Double Event" allowed an interesting opportunity for me to litter the pages with red herrings, false leads and pertinent information. It also meant that I would be able to bring several characters' plots to a climax. In fact, only a single, very short chapter separates the two murders and they are surrounded by a kind of crescendo as other story lines reach their tipping points.

It was an exhaustive write. I was writing at the pace of about one or two chapters an evening for the first draft but I had opted to spend an entire day writing the story of that night, in hopes of adding a sense of continuity and pace. Throughout the course of the 29th of September, almost every character in the book interacts with another and a very subtle chain of events are put in motion to which everyone is involved.

The end product had to be reworked several times but by the end of the evening, the story of the night had at least been birthed. From a a romantic breakup to a surprise kiss by way of an abortion, a revelation, a broken nose and basement sink stained with blood.

One of the most memorable of such climaxes involves the  discovery of what would come to be known as "The Goulston Street Graffito" and while I used my imagination to composite an idea of how it was discovered, the details of this clue are essentially accurate.

The graffito itself was found near a scrap of cloth that had once been part of Catherine Eddowes' apron and had been drenched with blood and discarded upon the ground of a narrow walkway outside one of the district's largest Jewish tenaments.

There is some speculation about the exact wording, as the graffiti itself reads semi literate at best, but the form that was written by Police Commissioner Charles Warren has it as:

"The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing."

Speculation as to what this could mean has often escalated to wild flights of fancy, suggesting that the odd word "Juwes" was some kind of masonic code, rather than a semi-literate attempt at spelling "Jews" as part of an antisemitic slur.

The use of a double negative in the phrase is actually a rather common feature of the cockney dialect, which may go some way to explain the true meaning of the message. (Are the Juwes to be blamed or not, in the writer's esteem?) However, common parlance of the East End would suggest that the graffito could alternatively be written as: "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed," or more directly, "The Juwes will not take responsibility for anything."

Whatever the interpretation, it was ordered that the graffito be removed to prevent a full scale race riot in the district. There is a suggestion that it was photographed before erasure but this photo has yet to be released to the public (if it still exists at all.)

The motive of the writer is impossible to distinguish from this coarse and confused statement, as is the length of time the graffito had been present when it was found. One could walk down any street of Whitechapel and find equally offensive, misspelled, anti-Jewish invective, particularly around the domiciles of the district's Jews who no doubt had to face this kind of hostility (and worse) everyday.

Whether the writing was from the hand of Jack the Ripper, or from some other resident of the district who thought himself wronged by a Jewish person, will never be known. But in a case that fosters so much interest, yet where clues are so few and far between, it is impossible to read those words and not wonder what the writer meant, who he was and perhaps, that they could have had any idea that the nasty piece of hate they were scrawling on the wall of a building, would still be discussed over a century into the future.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith

P.s. There is one more thing I wanted to add to this post which is only tangentially related to 1888. Today marks the day on which my grandfather died, after succumbing to the cancer he had been living with for many years. With him, our family loses its oldest member and I lose my final grandparent.

Harold Stone was born and raised in the East End. His school was built next to Mitre Square, a few years after Catherine Eddowes was murdered there. While this is, of course, very interesting to me, the role Harry Stone would truly play in history came in the second world war, when at the tender age of 18, he enlisted in the navy and found himself fighting for the allied forces during the hellish battles that would come to be known as the Normandy landings.

The awful scenes he saw there were not ones he liked to dwell upon, and it was several decades before he spoke to anyone in our family about what had happened. It was that same, quiet dignity that came to typify his generation, which allowed him to confront his illness with that sense of humble grace for which he can only be commended.

He is the only person I have met for whom history will remember as a genuine hero, yet above all else, I shall remember him as thoroughly decent man. I will miss you, Granddad. X x

Catherine Eddowes: A Doomed Woman

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The discovery of Catherine Eddowes' Body

In the early hours of the morning of the 30th of September, 1888, PC Edward Watkins could have had no idea that what he was about to discover would launch an unnamed killer of East End prostitutes into eternal infamy.

The discovery of the body of Catherine Eddowes would shake London to its core. The boldness of a killer managing to slay two women, on the same night and under the noses of the entire police force, would stagger generations with his audacity.

Catherine Eddowes was the only one of the five canonical victims not to have spent her summer in London. Every year, she and scores of the city's poor would leave the cobbled streets for the countryside, where they could find relatively secure work picking hops throughout the warmer months.

It was hard, hot and strenuous work but many of the destitute looked upon this change of location as a kind of holiday. Despite the back breaking labour, a woman such as Catherine Eddowes would have found the steady stream of income and the guarantee of accommodation over the season a blissful change of pace.

Some time before her death, Catherine Eddowes had informally adopted the surname of her partner, John Kelly (whose full name is never revealed in the book in hopes of keeping things simple as far as the completely unrelated Mary Kelly was concerned.) It was with him that she travelled to the hop fields of Kent and most likely, would have had every intent to marry.

A contemporary sketch of Eddowes

For a book that is light on romance, I did very much enjoy writing about Catherine and John. Despite their doomed romance, I really wanted to capture the giddy, delicate sensation of the early stages of a love affair, without clouding it with a shadow of its inevitable end.

By taking the action temporarily out of London, I was hoping to be able to present these star crossed lovers in a completely different way. Light and happy and desperately in love, devoted to each other with such intensity that it will forsake all others. That is, of course, until they return to London.

John and Catherine made the long trek back to the city on the 27th of September and immediately were required to find separate accommodation. The Ripper killings had frightened so many, that a lot of the lodging houses in the East End had instigated a single sex policy in hopes of securing the safety of the female residents.

The happy life John and Catherine had forged together almost immediately unravels once they reach Whitechapel. Within hours Catherine is alone and forced back into prostitution, John is sent away to work as an overnight porter in Spitalfields Market.

 On the day before her murder, Catherine Eddowes left John at the market he was attending (work schedules were uncompromising things for a market porter and an 18 hour shift would not have been uncommon for a man in his position.) The pair made arrangements to meet up that evening at her lodging house (in Mile End, but changed to Whitechapel in the novel for the sake of simplicity,) and she headed to Bermondsey to meet her daughter and ask for a loan.

The pair would not meet at Catherine Eddowes lodging house, nor would they ever see each other again. It is not known if she ever made it as far as Bermondsey and even if she had, it would not have done her any good as her daughter had moved from the area some months previously.

The police autopsy sketch

Somehow, Catherine had managed to make enough money that she could spend the rest of the day drinking, (in 1888, this is thanks to a pair of sailors) so that by 8.30PM she was found unconscious on the corner of Aldgate High Street after having apparently entertained a crowd of onlookers by singing and performing impressions.

She was kept in a cell for some time until she was deemed sober enough to be released. Her last known words were claimed to have been, "Good night, old cock," said to the officer in charge of her release as she was freed from her cell. At almost the exact same time, Elizabeth Stride was being murdered, just a few streets away.

Instead of returning to her lodging house via the quickest route. Catherine headed east, presumably looking to make some money for such accommodation.

PC Edward Watkins was doing the rounds of his patch at the same time and visited Mitre Square at 1.30AM and found nothing. When he returned, a mere fifteen minutes later, he discovered the mutilated body of Catherine Eddowes.

Her attack had been the most savage yet. Everything from her lower ribs to her inner thighs had been hollowed out and her face had been carved with curious incisions. She had been sliced upwards from her navel to between her breasts. Her nose had been cut off.

It was not until her autopsy that it was discovered that one of her kidneys was missing. The letter to George Lusk may have included the proof necessary to suggest that the writer was indeed the killer.

The saddest part of this story for me, was not just the sorrowful fate of a woman who struggled to survive in a brutal city, but the story of the man she left behind. Before identifying the corpse of his beloved, John Kelly was said to have whispered a prayer to himself. Upon seeing her body, he broke down in hysterics and swore that he could never love again.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.

George Lusk: The Quiet Revolutionary

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George Lusk in 1888

When the radical suffragette, Emily Davison, launched herself in front of the King's horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, she could have had no idea that almost a hundred years later, she would be remembered as a tragic icon in the fight for the suffrage of women, a symbol of the ultimate sacrifice one could make for their cause, and the extraordinary lengths one must sometimes resort to in the pursuit of justice.

At the time, however, it could be argued that Davison may have harmed the very cause she would die for. While historians have argued whether her actions were intended to end in her suicide, (she had a "Votes for Women" banner on her at the time and may have intended to mount the horse and unfurl it) she must have been aware of the grave danger she was putting herself in. Many more have suggested that her act of self sacrifice did very little to dispel the opinion of much of the public; that the suffragettes were hysterical women, prone to fits of mental abandon.

It would take another five years, after almost fifty years of fighting for women to secure the right to vote, (and even then, under circumstances that prohibited many from being allowed to do so.)

We do, and should remember the revolutionaries, from Emily Pankhurst to Malcolm X, to the men and women of the Stone Wall riots who kicked (with a literal kick line) the contemporary gay rights movement into life. But we should also spare a moment to reflect upon the subtler types whom history may overlook. The people for whom revolution was not a shout, but a whisper.

George Lusk's credentials as a revolutionary among his peers may at first look suspect but in his own, small way, he helped the people of Whitechapel stand up to menace of Jack the Ripper.

Lusk was by all accounts, a gentleman. Always well dressed for a man of the East End and soft spoken to a fault. Eternally trapped between the strata of class, (managing to become a Freemason but not for long, once he could no longer afford the membership fees) he nevertheless, helped form a crusade of people of all classes to protect the women of the street during the autumn of 1888.

The first time we meet Lusk in my novel, he is preparing himself to address an audience of local businessmen who have gathered outside St. Mary Matfelon Church, (a church which now no longer exists, thanks to the Luftwaffe, but from which the pale exterior of the building would give name to the district of Whitechapel.) He was a well respected member of the community and at the time, may have been regarded with higher esteem than the police investigating the case.

He proposed the establishing of the "Whitechapel Vigilance Committee" - a band of men who would roam the streets and pubs of the East End in hopes of keeping them safe. He was ultimately elected to head this committee and he was to spearhead it long after the canonical five murders (after all, the people at the time had no idea if the killer was still out there.)

A newspaper illustration of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee

Lusk's group may have proven fruitless in their pursuit, but the mere idea of circumventing the authority of the police was in itself, a quiet revolution in the minds of the people. The general opinion of the public in the area was that the police simply did not care about Whitechapel, that it was seen as nothing more than an abysmal slum which would be better forgotten.

For a long time, Whitechapel had been the haunt of many a temperance society; groups of Christians who had sought to eradicate poverty by closing all establishments that sold alchohol (while providing a heavy doses of guilt and religion in exchange.) Lusk appears to have held no such notions. While he was religious, he was known to drink and seemed to have had an easy alliance with the publicans of the time.

The "From Hell" letter

Lusk's involvement in the Committee, must have brought a great deal of attention to himself, as it was sometime after he was elected its head, he began reporting a belief that his house was being watched. Later on, he would become the recipient of the "From Hell" letter, (and its accompanying kidney) although, it should be confessed that this was sent through the post, rather than delivered by the sender, as occurs in the book.

If I am on the subject of fabrications for the sake of fiction, I have been pleased to note that readers of my book have picked up on the unspoken depiction of Lusk's alcohol dependency. There was no reason for me to suspect that he drank too much, but there was something irresistible about contrasting the plight of the poor and their addiction to gin, with his middle class friends who drink ale fall day long without a second thought.

For alcoholism - like all things of the Victorian era, to fit neatly on a sliding scale of social privilege, allowed Lusk to give voice to some of his more revolutionary ideas. He hints at an understanding that drink is not the social evil, desperation and poverty are. I wrote him as somebody who understood that his drinking was out of hand and were it not for the sake of his wealth, he too would be filling his gut with glasses of gin at the Frying Pan Public House. After all, the only thing that separates the addict who is quaffing champagne at a dinner party from the junky who is shooting up heroin, is the girth of their wallets; they both end the night with their heads down the toilet.

Lusk as portrayed in the 1988 BBC Miniseries "Jack the Ripper"

While it may have been unfair to portray Lusk as an alcoholic, I feel I have better serviced the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee than the 1988 TV adaptation of the crimes. The BBC miniseries "Jack the Ripper" promoted itself as being a thoroughly accurate portrayal of the crimes, yet poor Mr. Lusk is depicted as a bestial, vicious hooligan and his group is renamed "The Whitechapel Vigilante Committee" - the pamphlets in their hands, literally replaced with torches and pitchforks.

So Lusk may not have had the impact of an Emily Davison, but his tireless work in the district ensured that the following year, Whitechapel would be fully gas lit on every street and a constant police presence would be visible. This quiet man caused a quiet revolution, not just because he tried to keep the streets safe, but because he taught the people of the East End that if the police would not protect them, they could always stand up for themselves.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith

Walter Sickert and the Art of Murder

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Sickert circa 1888

Throughout the course of my novel, it becomes clear that there are a certain number of characters that can be regarded as outright villains. Two obvious examples of such creatures are Duffy and Thicke. At the same time, there are a handful who rise to the position of hero, Gina and Toby, for instance.

Far more interesting to write, however, are the characters that occupy a certain grey area. Those figures whose motives are not immediately discernible. Two such creations for me were Francis Tumblety and Walter Sickert, however, the latter of these two almost made it into the book purely by accident.

In my initial planning of 1888, I went through lists of established Ripper suspects and selected the ones who were either intriguing personalities in their own right, or ones which hadn't been given too heavy a literary treatment in the past. I discounted Sickert because I felt he had been too overused in both fiction and non fiction (most notably (and unforgivably) by Patricia Cornwell, whose hatchet job on Sickert boiled down to her being a bit spooked by his eyes and him possibly having an odd willy.)

The dashing gent in 1911

I thought it was best that Sickert be left to rest in his grave for a few decades more before another writer came along and caused him to turn within it.

Sickert certainly qualified as an intriguing character though. Despite being born in Germany, he went on to become one of the most important figures in the British art movement of the early 20th century. Along with the group he helped form, The Camden Town Group, he and his contemporaries not only established an art style that would forever be recognisable as part of the post-impressionist wave of painters of that era, but their works would prove to be an invaluable resources for historians researching pre-WWI London.

Still in the initial stages of my plotting, I had been having a particularly difficult time determining the story arc for Gina, once the initial surprise of her identity had been exposed and thought that one route that may prove to be fruitful, would be to give her a love interest, with some important qualifications.

An old man circa 1942

The first such qualification was that this man would be significantly older than she was. I really hoped that by offering the fifteen year old Gina a gentleman considerably senior to her would give their union the necessary queasy inappropriateness that I was looking for - I really didn't want the reader to be rooting for their love to blossom.

There had to be an obstacle. What if he was married? What if he was of a higher class than she was? Perhaps he lived outside of Whitechapel and was away for long periods of time, only to reappear at some inopportune time?

Perhaps he was a revolutionary, venturing to the East End as part of a anthropological study into the working class. What if he was an artist, documenting the people of the district in paint?

It suddenly dawned upon me that I had in fact, just created Walter Sickert.

The realisation was an irritant. I was irked because I had inadvertently gone against my own intentions but at the same time, the fit was so perfect that it was impossible to decline. Poor Walter was going to have his corpse dragged across the coals once again.

"Jack the Ripper's Bedroom"

However, once I put my vexed notions aside, there were some intriguing notions that Sickert could bring to the book. For instance, he is the only suspect to whom we can attribute some interest in the crimes themselves. In fact, Sickert was so fascinated in the crimes of Jack the Ripper that he went on to paint a dark and very mysterious piece of art entitle "Jack the Ripper's Bedroom" - under the belief that he had once stayed in the same room as the killer himself. (In fact, this musty, airless painting came to be my inspiration for the garret Sickert brings Gina to on the night he decides he wishes to paint her.)

Moreover, there is a certain peculiarity to his work. There is a grittiness, a dirty, damp and nauseous atmosphere in all of his art. There was a level of intrigue in this gentleman, this dapper, creative, irresistibly handsome man who could mix with high society and the lowly poor on equal terms in an affable, friendly fashion and then go on to paint them as hideous, deformed echoes of themselves.

Then of course, there are his nudes. If one wants to find evidence for Sickert as the Ripper, one really doesn't have look much farther. It has long been noted just what a striking similarity there is between his paintings of naked women and some of the crime scene photographs taken at the time, (photographs which were not released by the police until some time after his death) most notably that of Mary Kelly.

"What Shall We Do to Pay the Rent?" or "The Camden Town Murder"

"Untitled Female Nude"

If you look for clues in his paintings, you are likely to find them them in abundance, after all, art is such a subjective form that it's nearly impossible to separate personal experience from the piece itself. The closer you look, the more you are seeing what you want to see.

In conclusion, I ended up feeling really happy that Sickert came along to join my merry band of misfits. He fitted in so seamlessly that I now find it hard to imagine the book without him in it. He is at once beguiling, then repellent. Agreeable, then sinister. In short, everything a good Jack the Ripper suspect needs to be.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.

The Trains of London

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Throughout researching my novel, it never occurred to me that the chapter that would prove hardest to write and the one which would require the highest amount of historical investigation, was the deceptively simple tale of Duffy's ride on the underground to Aldgate Station.

Run away!

Many people have heard the story of the Lumière Brothers' short film, depicting a train pulling into the station of a small French town named La Ciotat and the public reaction to seeing moving images on a screen for the first time. It is said that the audience was so terrified of the vision of a black and white, completely flat train looming towards them, that it caused such panic they ducked beneath their seats or fled from the projection hall.

Like most stories that try to suggest that people who lived in the past were a bunch of blithering idiots with no understanding of technical innovation, this story is almost certainly an urban legend, but it is interesting in itself that as early as 1896 when the film was shown, the train was such a familiar sight to the public, it was a suitable enough subject to star in one of the very first films of its age.

The chaotic scenes of a London station

In London, the underground train had been familiar to the average commuter for over thirty years at this time and had been travelling on the surface ever since the early 19th century, but it was towards the second half of the Victorian era that the age of the train really began to advance.

The tale of Duffy's journey to Whitechapel proved to be so alarmingly difficult to research owing to the fact that during this time, the underground was expanding to new stops and digging into established stations every year, and the trains themselves were being redesigned with such frequency, that by 1888, it was hard to be sure of just how close to Whitechapel Duffy could ride, and just what sort of vehicle would be transporting him there.

The early lines themselves were barely subterranean at all and it's still easy to tell if you are travelling on one of the original Victorian lines because you may occasionally find yourself breaching the surface to daylight. The original line - The Metropolitan was built using a combination of "cut and cover" methods (whereby a trench was opened on the surface and then covered over) and the more common method of gouging into the earth to create a tunnel.

Cut and cover construction of the Metropolitan

Fears around the construction of this line ranged from the justifiable, (the cut and cover method required the destruction of many properties and gouging caused surface damage to others) to the bizarre, (many fretted that the builders of the line may inadvertently break through to Hell.)

Nevertheless, the line was completed in 1863 by which time, anxiety had moved on to the details of riding underground in the dark. To allay such fears every carriage was fitted with gas lighting and was by all accounts, pleasantly illuminated.

On its first day of operation, an astonishing 40,000 people rode the train from Paddington to Farringdon and by the end of the year, almost ten million journeys had been made upon it. The huge success of the underground meant that expansion was inevitable and almost immediately, work began to connect the Metropolitan line to other stations across London.

By 1888, the underground was already being referred to as "The Tube" and was operating as several connecting lines which had extended as far out as Whitechapel and beyond. By the time Duffy takes his journey (where he exits at Algate East, in hopes of not being spotted at Whitechapel station) the initial sheen of novelty had given way to the general grittiness of the average London worker.

It became a notorious place for pickpocketing as the confined spaces the carriages provided put the wealthy in far closer contact with the poor than they ordinarily would have chosen. It wasn't long before some lines became the sole providence of the penniless, as the wealthy returned once again to travelling in the far more gentlemanly form of a hansom cab.

An early example of a train designed to travel under and overground

Another problem with the tube was its inaccuracy. Running on steam meant that there was quite a learning process as far as stopping and starting were concerned. Often a misjudged train would have to skip a station all together if it was travelling too fast and to put the brakes on would cause serious damage. More commonly a train would stop too soon, or too late for the station and the passengers at either end may not be able to work their way out.

There was really no great need to include this chapter in my book. It doesn't add any real details to the plot and all we really learn is that Duffy is just as perverted as the last time we saw him. However, my story was to tell a larger story than just that of Whitechapel, but of London itself. A bustling, enormous city in the throes of a massive period of advancement, the likes of which nowhere else on earth had seen before.

In some ways, London will always belong in the Victorian age, as so much of that era is the mass development of it into the world's first, great super-city and so much of that change is visible today. In fact, I would go as far to say that London will forever belong to Victoria, but Whitechapel will always be belong to Jack.

Yours truly,



Charlie Revelle-Smith.

The Short Life of Long Liz

1888: A Jack the Ripper Novel is available to buy now from Amazon

In writing a novel based on the most notorious serial killer in history, I never thought that the introduction of one of the victims would allow me to add a touch of levity to my story.

Of the canonical five, Liz Stride shares the least amount of time on the page before her murder but in doing so, she left an indelible mark upon me. Perhaps she is the breeziest of all the victims but she suffers what was perhaps the hardest, most brutal murder of them all - she was the one who fought back.

Elizabeth Stride was known to almost everyone she knew as "Long Liz." It is often assumed that this was owing to her height but at 5' 5" Stride would not have been particularly statuesque in an age of diminutive people, (Queen Victoria herself stood at only 4" 11") Other theories have suggested that her moniker came from her slender frame or even her leggy, wide gate as she walked.

For the sake of simplicity, this is never addressed in my book as there are few things I find more tedious in novels than unnecessary exposition. The origin of her name, like so many other aspects of her life, remain a mystery.

We know this much about her. She was born in 1843 on a farm a little north of Gothenburg, Sweden and moved to London in 1866, whereupon she took up work as a seamstress and inevitably, a prostitute (a crime for which she had been charged several times in the years before her move to England.)

She could read English relatively well and was a fluent speaker and she seemingly took well to her new home, quickly finding a relationship with a Michael Kidney who she would live with on and off for her remaining years (despite marrying another man, John Stride in 1869)

Liz was clearly somewhat of a fantasist. One story she liked to share was that her husband and child died while aboard the SS Princess Alice - a paddle steamer that sank in the Thames in 1878 after a collision which resulted in the deaths of around 640 people. She claimed she survived by climbing the mast of the ship and lost her lower front teeth after being kicked in the face by another fleeing passenger.

In truth, her husband was alive and well and did not die until 1884. Details such as this are always interesting to hear when you're trying to flesh out a character for a novel. In 1888, Liz Stride became a dreamer, before she was a liar. Someone for whom the blissful escape from the miseries of her life can be achieved by fantasising about a different life.

Liz's final moments will not be recounted in this post as the impact, I believe, works by having its fully brutality intact. However, I will say that all of the details recounted in the book are entirely accurate, from the initial meeting, to the fleeing witness and the shout of "Lipski!" Even the pack of Cachos Mints that was found in her hand plays a role.

What I did omit is that the fleeing witness, Israel Schwartz claimed that he saw another man, standing in the shadows of the yard and smoking a cigarette, who followed him for some distance. If this story is to be believed, it may bring into question whether there was only one killer, or, if Liz Stride was killed by the Ripper at all.

Of course, Liz Stride was not to be the only victim that evening - Long Liz and Catherine Eddowes will forever be remembered as the bodies left on the streets on the night of the "double event."

In fact, the Ripper had a lot of work left to do...

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith,

The Final Cut: Sir. William Gull

1888: A Jack The Ripper Novel is available to buy from Amazon now

A lot of things can happen between the inception of a book and its final version. For this blog entry, I wanted to talk about one of the characters and story threads that didn't make it into the final edition of 1888 and the reasons why he was omitted.

Sir. William Gull in 1881

The plotting of my novel had to be meticulously calculated before I even typed my first word of it, and as such, every single character and their story line was carefully choreographed to fit in both with the lives of the other characters and the true events which occurred at the time. Occasionally, these timings worked beautifully; Gina and Kosminski's discovery of the torso in the grounds of Scotland Yard was one such instance. Others were patently ridiculous (Edward and Toby managing to be at the scene of two murders and the Goulston Street graffito all on the same night had to be axed.)

One character who regrettably never found a final home was that of Sir. William Gull, chief surgeon and confidante to Queen Victoria (who was also erased from the pages. Sorry ma'am!)

Many of the characters of my novel were real people who had been accused of being the Ripper in works of fiction and non-fiction and there was something delightful about bringing so many of them together into one grand tale. More than almost any other others, I was keen to feature Gull, not simply for sensationalism, but because I genuinely wanted to do my best to restore his name.

Gull was a fascinating man. He was born to a family of somewhat slender means, who could not possibly have envisioned the dizzy heights his ascent of the social ladder would take him to. After an early interest in botany and help from the fostering attention of a local rector, the young Gull pursued a career in medical science.

By 21 he was working in Guy's Hospital, under the patronage of its treasurer and from there, successfully rose through the ranks of both the hospital and formal education, eventually earning his MD at the age of 29 - a near impossible feat for a man born the son of a wharf keeper.

After treating the heir apparent, Albert Edward (Edward VII) for typhoid fever, his mother, Queen Victoria appointed Gull as her personal surgeon in 1871, a role he would play until his death in 1890.

This in itself is a fascinating story, but how he came to be named as a Jack the Ripper suspect is as bizarre as it is ludicrous, and was popularised from a nasty little book of lies and naive assumptions entitled Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.

These assertions were groundless, vicious and entirely based upon the second hand testimony of a man who told the tale without a shred of evidence to support it (and would later renounce.) Moreover, this man had actually created such a fanciful web of lies that by the time his story was completed, it was revealed that he was the true monarch of 1970's Britain.

The real shame here is that Sir. William Gull was a great man. To thrive in an age where class meant everything is one thing, to make it all the way to the tallest tower of the establishment is quite another; but in doing so, Gull became a revolutionary in thought. He was a fearless and tireless advocate for the education of women and fought for their right to practice medicine alongside men in an age when to do so, was not so far removed from asking for equal education for animals.

He was the first person to identify anorexia nervosa and suggest means to treat it (most of which are still in use today.) In fact, much of his storyline involved his attempts to rescue a young woman who was starving herself to death.

He's someone who should be remembered as a decent gentlemen in an age when men of privilege were afraid to speak up. Unfortunately, if people have heard of him at all, most of the time it is thanks to films and books that depict him as the Ripper (at the age of 71, no less, after having suffered a stroke.)

Bilbo Baggins as Sir. William

In my book, his story strand involved his friendship with the Queen and their improbably jaunts through Whitechapel as Victoria served as a a dark tourist of the murders, and an echo to the character of Annie Chapman (both women were widows, struggling with their grief in impossibly different circumstances.)

Victoria is amused

Later he was to meet and befriend Gina, but by this time, his story had become so cut off from the other characters, and his position as the gentlemanly social reformer was better fitted to George Lusk - who allowed the story to remain in the East End, that Gull's tale was, regrettably, never even finished.

Along with him went the Queen, who, quite frankly, hadn't been doing much other than hanging around the Albert Memorial while dressed in black and feeling sorry for herself.

It was with great shame that I had to carve a Gull shaped hole in 1888 and in doing so, lost the tale of a good man who history should remember as one of the good guys in a era when such men were few and far between, and should not have to suffer the indignity of his legacy as a killer.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith.

Gina: A Girl of her Time

1888: A Jack the Ripper Novel is available to buy now from Amazon

WARNING: THIS POST INCLUDES A MODERATE CHARACTER SPOILER

Gina Chapman, aged about 8

Before I had written even a single line of 1888, I knew I wanted one of the central characters to be a relative of one of the victims in hopes that, unlike so many other works on the Ripper case, the reader would understand that all five of those women had not existed in a bubble and had people by whom they would be missed.

It soon became clear that there was a daughter of one of the victims about whom there was already a rather intriguing mystery - Annie Georgina Chapman, the fifteen year old daughter of Annie Chapman whose whereabouts at the time were unknown.

I renamed her Gina for the sake of simplicity; there was obviously already an Annie Chapman in my novel and to complicate things further, a very popular Ripper suspect himself went by the name of George Chapman (this drought of names became a recurring theme throughout my writing process.) By the time I had come to write her, I had become so used to regarding her with the perhaps slightly anachronistic moniker of Gina, that I could no longer imagine her with any other name.

Right from the beginning, Gina quickly became my favourite character to write - an ode to those fearless, witty and smart women who I have always admired in fiction, (and have been lucky enough to meet in real life.) She is a girl who is as sharp of intellect as she is of tongue. A headstrong individual with a fierce understanding of justice and perhaps most significantly, a young woman for whom the world holds no fear and no experience, no adventure and no person can overwhelm her.


Very little is known about the real life Gina Chapman - at least, very little is known to public record, but it is believed that she was educated at a rather prestigious girls' school in Windsor, a fact that I took full advantage of by depicting her as a voracious reader of books on history and geography. In fact, so taken was I by this vision of her, Gina's original storyline was to conclude with Sir William Gull - a man who attracted much notoriety at the time, owing to his support of women being educated in science and medicine, would become a benefactor to Gina and see her through a university degree. (Needless to say, this dénouement was abandoned on grounds of being preposterous, and poor William Gull didn't even make the cut into the second draft.)

We also know a little about Annie Georgina in the years following 1888, where she was living with her aunt in Oxfordshire, probably working as a servant before going on to have several children (one of whom, as implied in an earlier post, is astonishingly still alive.)

The mystery of Gina's whereabouts concern the autumn of 1888. For a while it was suggested that the young woman had run away with the circus and was now living in France but this unlikely story was denied by her family at the time. A hole in a character's narrative is too tempting a proposition for me to ignore, so my characterisation of her is almost entirely speculation, imaging what if she had stayed in Whitechapel. What would she have done? How would she survive?

While the sassy, strident young woman in my novel may seem like a thoroughly modern one, I would argue that my depiction of Gina was probably accurate for a girl of her time.

Quite often, we bemoan the fact that children are being forced into adulthood at too early an age. That the pressures to grow are too strong upon the young and that childhood is becoming more truncated with every generation. However, I often wonder if such complaints come from people who have ever considered just what a terrible time childhood would have been in the Victorian era.

Most of the children of Whitechapel would have been put to work at a considerably young age. Had Gina been born in the region to a poorer family, she could have been working from as young as ten in some dark, satanic mill or workhouse, and by the age of fifteen, it would not be surprising to have found her married.

A girl in her position, without a parent to support her and with only her wits to survive, would have to grow up fast, stay smart and above all else, be incredibly fortunate in order to survive the ravages of Victorian poverty.

Whoever Gina was; a scrappy brat, a precocious intellectual or even a girl who ran away to join the circus, Gina Chapman will forever entrance me. Quite simply, I think she's marvellous.

Yours truly,
Charlie Revelle-Smith