Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline In Fact And Fiction

Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline was involved in the Whitechapel murders and has appeared as a character in stories based on the murders.

In the 1988 television miniseries Jack the Ripper, Abberline was played by Michael Caine.

Michael Caine in the Television Mini-Series Jack the Ripper

Michel Caine played him as a man whose determination to solve the murders made him fight against his alcohol addiction.

In the 2001 film From Hell, Johnny Depp played him.

Johnny Depp as Inspector Abberline in the film "From Hell"

Johnny Depp plays him as a young detective and a clairvoyant.

Despite being addicted to opium with a taste for absinthe, he crusades against an evil Masonic conspiracy to save the Monarchy.

The grotesque murders of Jack the Ripper in this story are being committed to silence a group of women who are threatening to bring down the established order.

This film version adds romance to the tale. Abberline is attracted to Mary Kelly, played by Heather Graham.

However, despite defeating Jack the Ripper, Abberline decides he must never see Mary again to ensure that she is not discovered.

It may all be too much for the hero because, in the end, he dies. We are left to assume that his opium overdose is, in fact, suicide.

Michael Caine and Johnny Depp are not the only actors to have played this detective but they are the best known.

So, how close to reality do the two leading men get?

Well, this is the real Detective Inspector Abberline.

Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline in moustache and bowler hat.

As Mark Twain said: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

Like many of those young men who became London police officers, Abberline was not a Londoner. On average, boys who grew up in the foul air and cramped living conditions of London didn’t often turn into vigorous, well-made young men. And the diet was also generally better in the countryside than in the slums of the nation’s capital.

Frederick Abberline was born on January 8, 1843, 120 miles southwest of Whitechapel in Blandford, Dorset.

He was the youngest son of Edward Abberline and his wife Hannah.

Edward died when Frederick was just six years old. Hannah opened a small shop and brought up her four children alone.

Frederick worked as a clockmaker, but at the age of 19, he moved to London.

Then, on the 5th of January 1863, just days before his 20th birthday, he joined the London Metropolitan Police Force.

He was described as being 5ft 9 and a half inches tall, with dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and a fresh complexion.

By the 19th of August 1865, he had so impressed the force that he was promoted to Sergeant and moved from the Islington Division to the neighbouring Highgate.

By 1867, he was a plainclothes officer investigating Irish Republicans.

On March 10th, 1873, at the age of 30, he was promoted to Inspector and three days later, on March 13th, transferred to H Division in Whitechapel.

On April the 8th, 1878, Abberline was appointed Local Inspector in charge of H Division's CID.

On the 26th of February 1887, he was transferred to the London Metropolitan Police Headquarters at Scotland Yard. A year later, on the 8th of February 1888, he was promoted to First Class Inspector.

On the 25th of February 1888, a 38-year-old woman, Annie Millwood, was attacked in the Spitalfields area of Whitechapel. She was stabbed multiple times. She died five weeks later, on the 31st of March.

Three days later, on the 3rd of April 1888, a 45-year-old homeless woman, Emma Elizabeth Smith, was brutally attacked again in the Spitalfields area; she made it to the London Hospital but died the next day from her injuries.

On the 7th of August 1888, a 39 year-old-woman, Martha Tabram, was found dead on the landing of a stairwell of a building that was again in the Spitalfields area. She had been stabbed 39 times.

These three attacks were not ignored by the press.

These women had died after violent attacks on them, and although violence was not uncommon in the area, murder was not common.

In 1886 and 1887, not a single murder was reported in Whitechapel.

Street gangs had proliferated in the towns and cities of Britain. These gangs of boys and teenagers revelled in mindless acts of mindless violence. To quote one Victorian writer, they were “cruel and thoughtless - cruel because they were thoughtless.”

It is possible that the press coverage of the attack on Annie Millwood egged on the next two murders.

Mary Ann Nichols, or Polly Nicholls, made sure she put a half mile of distance between herself and the area where those three murders were committed.

It didn’t save her. She became the fourth homeless woman in Whitechapel to be brutally attacked.

The murder of this 43-year-old homeless woman made the headlines, and the Metropolitan Police were under pressure.

Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline was seconded back to Whitechapel.

His 14 years of service in Whitechapel meant he was the man to lead the investigation.

According to fellow police officer Walter Dew, Abberline looked more like a bank manager than a detective.

So far as we know, he didn’t interrogate the man who was at the scene of the murder of Polly Nicholls. Charles Allan Letchmere was accepted simply as the man who discovered the body of Polly Nicholls in Buck’s Row.

We don’t know what Joseph Barnett said to Abberline that convinced the detective that he was not the murderer of Mary Jane Kelly.

For many, it is also a puzzle why Abberline should have claimed that George Chapman, AKA Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski, was Jack the Ripper.

The year after the Whitechapel murders, Abberline was involved in investigating the Cleveland Street scandal in 1889.

That investigation into a homosexual brothel frequented by people at the top of London society left Abberline disenchanted with his superiors and probably contributed to his decision to retire from the Met.

He retired to Bournemouth, where he died on the 10th of December 1929 at the age of 86.