Jack The Ripper: The Tour Guide’s Friend
Richard and friends on a tour!
There will be more people going out on a Jack the Ripper tour tonight than on every other guided tour offered in London.
The Jack the Ripper Tours go seven nights a week, every week of the year, and there's a good reason. It's a heck of a story.
The best-selling writer of fiction in world history is Agatha Christie. She has certainly proved that the whodunit is a very, very popular genre in fiction. Jack the Ripper is a whodunit.
Another big-selling genre in fiction, as Stephen King has shown, is horror. Jack the Ripper is very definitely a horror story.
So, two of the best-selling genres in fiction are combined in this story. And, of course, Jack the Ripper is not fiction. It’s a true crime story.
Add in sex and illicit sex at that, prostitution, and you have an amazing story.
There is, of course, another reason that Jack the Ripper is such a good story, and that is its atmospheric setting.
The murders took place in 1888 at a time when London was gaslit, filled with narrow alleyways, and often blanketed in thick fog.
It was a time before motor cars when everything was moved by manpower or horsepower. With the men in their top hats and opera capes and the women in the long gowns.
A world of Sherlock Holmes. The very first adventure written by Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, was published just the year before the Ripper murders happened.
One year before that, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published. Robert Louis Stevenson's amazing story of good and evil was published in 1886, just two years before the Ripper murders.
It's. A fact that. Holmes and Watson, Jekyll and Hyde and Jack the Ripper were all running through the same ga- lit streets at the same time, and they are all still as well known today as they were more than 136 years ago, as I write.
The fact that it is such a good story has meant that Jack the Ripper has been the inspiration for hundreds of books. And indeed, films.
Michael Caine starred in the 1988 miniseries, Jack the Ripper, in which he played the man heading up the investigation in Whitechapel.
Detective Inspector Frederick Abilene also appeared in a 2001 film, From Hell, in which Johnny Depp played him.
It is a story that still fascinates me. I have been guiding tours in London for almost 20 years, and Jack the Ripper is the one that I've done most, and it's the only one that I still do.
For 15 years, I started at Tower Hill, then came lockdown when we couldn't present the walks in the real world, so I did it on Zoom and it forced me to review what I had been saying.
I reread the books that I had read and read books that had recently been published, and the result was a new look at the events surrounding this infamous case.
And, of course, guiding allows me to learn from those who join me. I am fascinated to learn what they know about Jack the Ripper.
For some, it's just the name. Some know the name Jack the Ripper and that he was a killer in 19th century London. And often, of course, they will say they know that the victims were prostitutes.
Some people will even know some of the suspects. This is not too surprising as there are more than 100 suspects. It does include a monkey, so the list may not be that reliable.
Obviously, the popular suspects crop up most often, like Queen Victoria's grandson Prince Albert Victor.
Walter Sickert also gets mentioned since the crime writer Patricia Cornwell presented him as her suspect in two books about the case. She claims to have spent $600,000 in researching this Victorian artist.
Another contender is Aaron Kosminski, who was resurrected in a 2014 book called Naming Jack the Ripper.
In it Russell Edwards claims DNA evidence proves that Aaron Kosminski was Jack Ripper.
One thing is certain: no other serial killer has a name that is so universally recognised. I have yet to meet a person who doesn’t know the name Jack the Ripper.
