JACK’S WORLD - Part Two by Tour Guide Richard Walker
Image of the discovery of Polly Nichols’s body in Bucks Row
As I said in my previous post the conditions that existed in Whitechapel in 1888 were appalling. It’s worth just looking at what contemporary observers wrote.
Outraged by these terrible conditions, the congregational minister Andrew Mearns wrote The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. He began it with a warning to the reader:
“No exaggeration has been made in the descriptions of conditions; indeed, we have had to tone down the descriptions.”
And the descriptions he gave were desperate. This is just one example.
“Living in a dank and filthy cellar there was a poor woman with her three children, and lying beside her was a fourth child who’d been dead for thirteen days.”
And he added that her husband had shortly before committed suicide.
In such conditions, it wasn’t just physical health that suffered. Mental health was also a victim.
In 1888 a German doctor, Julius Koch wrote about his research into the mentally ill. He described one condition as soul suffering - or translated to Greek - psychopath.
The term caught on in 1888. The same year that the psychopath we know as Jack the Ripper began his reign of terror.
As I said in my earlier post, a total of seven homeless middle-aged women - middle age came on earlier in the poverty that existed in Victorian Britain - and one woman in her mid-twenties died after being brutally attacked.
It is assumed by many experts that it was the last five of those attacked who were the victims of a single serial killer.
To Ripperologists - that is those who study the crimes of this unknown serial killer - the five women are known as the ‘Canonical Five.’
The belief that these five women were killed by a single killer rests solely on the ‘modus operandi’ of the killer.
The way in which those five murders were carried out is so similar that it is believed it can only be explained by them being the victims of one individual.
There is fierce debate about this, with a few claiming that the method by which Annie Millwood, Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram were killed can be explained by believing the killer was starting out.
By the time he killed Polly Nichols, he was a more practised executioner.
Whether it was five or eight, it has to be an assumption that it was a single killer simply because nobody was ever brought to trial.
And despite the intense activity on the part of scores of investigators up to the present day, there is no agreement about who killed these women.
Probably the best-known theory about the Jack the Ripper murders is the one that explains that the murders were part of a conspiracy designed to protect those at the very top of Victorian society.
The theory began to take shape in 1973 when the BBC put together a six-part programme examining the Jack the Ripper case. Two television detectives investigated the case, and their discussions were interspersed with dramatised scenes set in the 19th century.
Z Cars, Softly Softly, and Barlow at Large were hugely popular series featuring Chief Superintendent Barlow, played by Stratford Johns and Chief Superintendent Watt, played by Frank Windsor.
Research during the making of the BBC programme led to a man who told a remarkable story. The man was christened Joseph Gorman but he called himself Joseph Sickert because he claimed he was the illegitimate son of the Victorian painter Walter Sickert.
His story was so amazing that a young journalist named Stephen Knight asked him for an interview. The result was a bestselling book by Stephen, published in 1976, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.
This was followed by another book linking Joseph Gorman, Walter Sickert and a Royal Conspiracy to the Jack the Ripper story.
Sickert And The Ripper Crimes was published in 1990. It was by a woman, Jean Overton Fuller, who was an author, and an agent in the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War.
Jean Overton Fuller heard a story from her mother about the painter Florence Pash.
Jean Overton Fuller said that her mother heard from Florence Pash, who was then in her late eighties, that Walter Sickert knew who Jack the Ripper was, and he painted clues into some of his pictures.
She claimed the murders were linked to an illegitimate child of a member of the royal family. An illegitimate child who, as an adult, had an affair with Walter Sickert, thus producing another illegitimate child. An illegitimate child christened Joseph Gorman but who called himself Joseph Sickert.
Unfortunately, we have no real evidence that Walter Sickert did, in fact, begat Joe Gorman.
The only evidence comes from Joe Gorman himself and from what it is claimed Florence Pash told Jean Overton Fuller’s mother, who then told Jean. The claim that Joe’s mother had a fling with the 65-year-old Walter Sickert. A fling that resulted in the birth of Joe Gorman.
In 1990, when Jean Overton’s book Sickert And The Ripper Crimes was published, the highly regarded website dedicated to analysing everything around the Jack the Ripper case, casebook.org, awarded the book one star and two sentences:
“Suggests Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, but the book provides shockingly little evidence to back this up. Not recommended.”
That is true but we must remember what Mark Twain said about not letting the truth get in the way of a good story.
And whatever it is, it is a good story. It was picked up by BBC researchers in 1973, written up as Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution in 1976, reworked in Sickert and The Ripper Crimes in 1990. The story then made it into the film From Hell, starring Johnny Depp, in 2001.
And then the tale was grabbed by a very successful storyteller.
In 2002, bestselling crime writer Patricia Cornwell launched Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed.
It became an international bestseller.
It was a bestseller, but not all reviewers were kind. Author and historian Caleb Carr, writing in the New York Times in 2002, said:
“Portrait of a Killer is a sloppy book, insulting to both its target and its audience. The only way for Cornwell to repair its damage will be to stay with this case, as she says she intends to, continuing her research, studies and tests for the years required to complete them thoroughly. Perhaps then she can do what she claims to have done already - prove Walter Sickert’s guilt decisively. Failing that, she should apologise for this exercise in calumny.”
Caleb Carr New York Times December 15 2002
Patricia Cornwell is made of sturdy stuff. Such brutal reviews did not deter her, and in 2017, she presented what she promised: RIPPER: THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER SICKERT.
If there is any truth in the idea that mass murderers want glory and fame then ‘Jack’ is without equal. And he has achieved that goal while maintaining his anonymity.
Thank you for checking out this post. I hope to meet you on one of my Jack the Ripper Whitechapel walks, which go out at 7 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. This is Richard Walker saying goodbye.