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- [00:00]
Tom Holland
If you want more from the show.
- [00:02]
Sponsor Announcer 1
Join the rest is History Club and.
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Tom Holland
With Christmas coming, you can also gift.
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Sponsor Announcer 1
A whole year of access to the history lover in your life. Just head to therestishistory.com and click Gifts.
- [00:16]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by the American Revolution on pbs.
- [00:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
The American Revolution is usually staged like Theater Washington center stage, redcoats marching in step, liberty delivering its lines on cue.
- [00:31]
Tom Holland
In reality, it was messy and uncertain, shaped by arguments over what kind of country America might become.
- [00:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Ken Burns new series shows it in that light, not as polished legend, but as lived experience. Rank and file soldiers, women, enslaved people and Native Americans may not have signed the Declaration, but their decisions carried weight in the struggle for independence.
- [00:56]
Tom Holland
What makes this story gripping isn't only the speeches or the battles. It's how the questions that gave birth to the United States continue to shape American life. Two and a half centuries on, the.
- [01:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
Revolution was never frozen in time. It was restless, conflicted, unfinished. Which is precisely why it still matters.
- [01:17]
Tom Holland
As the United states nears its 250th year, the revolution is not a relic under glass, but a mirror still reflecting the soul of a country back at itself.
- [01:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
The the American Revolution premieres Sunday, November 16th on PBS and the PBS app.
- [01:37]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by TikTok. Believe it or not, history isn't just.
- [01:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
In textbooks, it comes to life every day on TikTok. Millions of people are exploring the history of music, fashion, food and art and discovering new facts about the things they love.
- [01:58]
Tom Holland
One scroll could take you from the roots of jazz to the flavors of ancient kitchens, and the next might reveal a quirky fact about how modern traditions came to be.
- [02:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
Discover the past in new ways on TikTok, where curiosity never gets old.
- [02:17]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile.
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Dominic Sandbrook
You don't have to let overpriced phone bills suck the joy out of the holidays, because Right now Mint Mobile's unlimited plans are 50% off. You can get 3, 6 or 12 months of unlimited premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. It's the best deal of the year.
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Tom Holland
Shop Mint unlimited plans@mintmobile.com history terms and conditions apply. See mintmobile.com.
- [02:55]
Sponsor Announcer 1
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Dominic Sandbrook
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History of power, Hive helps you finally know yours. Head to HiveHome.com to find out more. Subject to survey and suitability. Hive app compatible with selected technology. Paid for surplus. Requires SEG tariff.
- [04:22]
Jack the Ripper (reading letter)
Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they won't fix me just yet. I've laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about leather apron gave me real fits. I'm down on whores and I shan't 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 I 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 can't use it. Red ink is fit enough, I hope.
- [05:12]
Tom Holland
Ha ha.
- [05:14]
Jack the Ripper (reading letter)
The next job I do, I shall clip the lady's 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. Don't mind me giving the trade name.
- [05:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
P.S.
- [05:42]
Jack the Ripper (reading letter)
Wasn'T 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.
- [05:51]
Dominic Sandbrook
Ah.
- [05:51]
Tom Holland
Ah.
- [05:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
So that's the most notorious, the most infamous letter in the history of crime. And of course, it's so chilling because of the mocking, sadistic tone, the tone almost of banter. And it was sent on 27th September, 1888 to the Central News Agency of London. And they sat on it for two days, unsure whether it was authentic, and then forwarded it to Scotland Yard. And this is the letter, Tom, that gives the name to somebody who at that point had killed probably two, possibly three, possibly more women on the streets of Whitechapel in an area of the East End of London that was notorious for poverty and crime and Prostitution. And both of these women had had their throats cut and both had been hideously mutilated. And then after the letter reached Scotland Yard in the early hours of 30 September, the killer struck again, not once but twice. The so called double event, you know, one of the most dramatic nights in the history of London. And then we come to the most horrific murder, which was on the 9th of November, wasn't it?
- [07:06]
Tom Holland
Yes. And that was again a woman eviscerated, but this time not on the streets, as the other victims of the Whitechapel murderer had been, but in a cramped and mean room in a place called Miller's Court in the dark heart of Whitechapel. And.
- [07:29]
To those who saw that victim, it seemed, even compared to the previous victims, a vision of hell. So one of the witnesses was a woman who had lived above the victim, so directly above the murder scene. And she said, I could bear to look at it only for a second, but I can never forget the sight of it if I live to be 100 and another. The man who had forced the locked door of the victim's room, he said, the sight we saw, I cannot drive away from my mind. It looked more like the work of a devil than of a man. But as it turns out, almost certainly, although maybe not, but almost certainly the horror of that murder, the horror of Miller's Court, seems to have been the climax of Jack the Ripper's murder. Reign of terror. And the thing that people found eerie about that reign of terror wasn't just the brutality, but the ability of the murderer always to be one step ahead of the police, to avoid apprehension, to avoid almost being seen. And now with this terrible murder in Miller's Court, he kind of vanishes as though into thin air. And he leaves behind him what I think is undoubtedly the most enduring mystery in the annals of crime. Would you agree?
- [08:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
Definitely. He's the one serial killer whose name is known across the world, who appears in films and video games as we shall talk about, and novels and all sorts of things. And I guess even at the time there was something otherworldly about him, wasn't there, to people in London. So people would describe him right from an early stage. This isn't sort of back projection. People would talk about him as a. As a ghost slipping through the streets of the East End, as a ghoul or a vampire kind of feeding on the blood.
- [09:25]
Tom Holland
Yeah, they literally use the word vampire.
- [09:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, exactly. So there's a quote, isn't there, from the East London Advertiser what can be more appalling than the thought that there's a being in human shape stealthily moving about a great city, burning with a thirst for human blood and endowed with such diabolical astuteness as to enable him to gratify his fiendish lust with absolute impunity. And it's the sort of combination of the horror but also the stealth that he is. I mean, especially the night when he kills two people, that he is moving from one scene to another like a wraith in the night, you know, completely undetected. He must know the area like the back of his hand. He's always one step ahead of the police. And for people at the time, that was both horrifying but also kind of darkly fascinating, wasn't it?
- [10:13]
Tom Holland
I mean, in that the thirst for human blood, I mean, there's something vampiric, but there's also a kind of a hint of almost cannibalism, because organs are being excised and there are rumours that they're being eaten by the killer. So it does seem something very primordial. But at the same time, there is a feeling that this is something perhaps expressive of modernity. So there's another newspaper that says of Jack the Ripper, perhaps he is some mysterious and awful product of modern civilization. So people are wondering, what is it about our industrial society that is producing such a monster? And we've said that Jack the Ripper is the most famous serial killer. I think almost the most intriguing thing about him from the historical point of view, is he's actually the first serial killer we know about. I mean, presumably there were serial killers before him, but he is the first person who is identified as a serial killer in the sense that we understand it today in 2025.
- [11:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, there were people previously who'd killed an awful lot of people, so in Middle Ages or whatever, but there was not the sense of a serial killer phenomenon. And he. He invents the phenomenon, doesn't he? Or rather the newspaper editors who write about him invent the phenomenon, or the.
- [11:32]
Tom Holland
Psychiatrists who kind of home in on what he represents as a particular kind of. Of monster, and they classify what he might be in scientific terms. And I think that's also a part of the story. So for all these reasons, he's notorious. But I think there are two obvious reasons why he remains such a notorious figure still almost 150 years on. The first, most obvious is that he was never caught, so his identity remains a mystery to this day. And we will be exploring the range of possible Suspects in our final episode of this five part series, surely solving.
- [12:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
The mystery and unveiling the killer.
- [12:13]
Tom Holland
Yes, we will. But also, I think that name, Jack the Ripper, I mean, it's so horribly, brilliantly memorable. We will be returning to that letter and other letters that were thought by the police at the time perhaps to have been sent by the murderer, asking whether they really were, were they authentic or were they fake? There are lots to come.
- [12:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, absolutely. So we've got lots of episodes to come, but just on this sort of history of the study of Jack the Ripper. So Jack the Ripper was a literary phenomenon right from the beginning as much as he was a kind of a physical one. Because most people experience the Ripper story through the newspapers. And ever since, you know, people have written, I mean, people have written about him, they never stopped writing about him. So there's an Australian journalist in 1929, isn't there, called Leonard Matters, who wrote one of the first big studies of the murders. And he said, if a journalist cannot sell anything else in London, he can always sell a story about Jack the Ripper.
- [13:08]
Tom Holland
And it's interesting he's Australian, because it's a reminder that Jack the Ripper is properly a global story. People are fascinated by this and, you know, huge topic of fascination in the English speaking world, but even beyond the English speaking world as well. And to this day, the idea that if you want to sell a book, you come up with a theory about who Jack the Ripper was, I mean, it remains the case. And there's this entire field, Ripperology, it's a kind of sub genre of the true crime genre. And I guess that we, by doing this podcast are, you know, we're standing in that tradition, aren't we?
- [13:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
So not only did I read lots of books about this, but there's a website called Casebook, Jack the Ripper. And it's the world's largest repository of Ripper, Rihanna. And when you fall into that hole, there is always a danger that you will never, ever climb out again. And there were moments researching this where I just thought, I'm absolutely drowning in kind of theories and stuff here.
- [14:01]
Tom Holland
Yes, not another kidney.
- [14:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Right. Not quite. But. But yeah, but the thing about Jack the Ripper. So for those people who are thinking, hold on, this isn't. The rest is true crime. The Jack the Ripper story is a brilliant window onto 1880s London, isn't it? I mean, that's the appeal of it. It's a fascinating melodrama in its own right, but it Also allows us to do all kinds of social and cultural and political history of a period that looms quite large in our collective imagination because of, as we'll see, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Sherlock Holmes and the sort of the image of the Dracula, the image of the gas lamps and the fog and the streets of London and so on. London at this imperial height. And that's another element to this story. So that's the. That's the appeal of this for us, isn't it, as historians?
- [14:47]
Tom Holland
Well, I think it reminds me of the series we did on Titanic, which was like this, a drama, you know, replete with. With horror and with tragedy, and has essentially become a myth again, something that everybody knows about. But it does simultaneously provide a brilliant window onto the social history of the age. So if you look at that letter, the famous Jack the Ripper letter with which we opened this episode, you've got hints of all kinds of aspects of late Victorian life that we will be talking about in this series. So there's the police, you know, Jack the Ripper is mocking them for being useless. You've got the press. That letter gets sent to a press agency first. To what extent are they creating the image of the Ripper, the hints of immigration, because leather apron that Jack the Ripper mentioned. He was a Polish Jew who'd been an early suspect. And then there's that kind of final mocking payoff. They say, I'm a doctor now, which is expressive of all kinds of anxieties about medicine, about vivisection, about abortionists, as we'll see. And there's an abiding question that runs throughout the inquests and which is still a very live issue today among people who study the murders, as to whether the mutilations that the Ripper inflicted on his victims betrayed specialist knowledge. And there's been no consensus about that. But it matters, because in Whitechapel, you have the London hospital, so full of surgeons, full of people who are very proficient with a knife, but it is also full of knackers, yards and slaughterhouses, of which the barber's horse slaughterhouse was the foulest. So throughout Whitechapel, there are, you know, the scent of blood, piles of offal, and, of course, people walking the streets with aprons, perhaps, you know, spattered with drops of blood. And I think that in that context, the red ink that the Ripper, if he is the Ripper, is using when he writes that letter, I mean, it's a gruesome kind of knowing joke. It's a hideous malevolent Wink.
- [16:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
And I guess the other thing that this has in common with the Titanic story that we did a couple of years ago is that it has the extremes of wealth and poverty, doesn't it? Privilege and deprivation. The kind of. The theme of class conflict and class tension runs right through this story. So we'll be spending as much time with the sort of the Metropolitan Police and the establishment as we will on the streets of Whitechapel.
- [17:17]
Tom Holland
Yeah. So, I mean, it is absolutely a topic of obsessive interest in the corridors of power and it does seem to people to express something that is rotten in the state of policing and the Home Office and so on. So the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the London Police Force, the guy called Sir Charles Warren, who was originally a military man, served in South Africa, he ends up resigning. And although that is not directly because of the failure of the police to catch the Ripper, the Ripper case is definitely a contributory factor to that resignation. You've got a Tory government Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, he comes close to following Sir Charles Warren and even the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. By the end of the case, he's getting kind of irate telegrams from Queen Victoria. So the day after the climactically hideous murder at Miller's Court, she telegraphs him. This new ghastly murder shows the absolute necessity for some very decided action. All these courts must be lit and our detectives improved. They are not what they should be. So Queen Victoria there, sounding eerily like Mrs. Thatcher.
- [18:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. And yet, on the other hand, I mean, the place where we'll be spending most of our time, it's probably the single grimmest place in London, arguably, you know, one of the grimmest places in, certainly in England, if not in Britain. And this is Whitechapel at the East End. It's centred on Spitalfields. It's really important for listeners to get this into their heads. It is not like it is now. It is an absolute kind of reeking, stinking, crowded labyrinth of little. A sort of warren of little alleys and courts, lines with these kind of crumbling, decrepit tenement houses and doss houses and lodging houses and the very names of the streets to people at the time reading this in the newspaper. So Flower and Dean Street, Dorset Street, Thrall Street, Blood Alley, Frying Pan Alley, Shovel Alley. These places, these were redolent of extreme poverty. You know, the sort of poverty that was, you would not associate with the richest and most, you know, powerful country on earth.
- [19:22]
Tom Holland
They're the last, what were called rookeries in the Keynesian period, in the 18th century, they, you know, they're kind of tangles of. Of streets that are seen as being literally poisonous, full of sewage and rubbish and vermin, and also incredibly violent. And so whether it's true or not is debated. But. But the kind of, you know, the. The conventional take is that the police only enter this. This area in pairs. And to readers of newspapers in the West End, it's a synonym for violence. So here is the Daily Telegraph. In these squalid parts of the metropolis, aggravated assaults tended by flesh wounds from knives are frequently met with. And men and women become accustomed to scenes of violence. And I think that that is fundamentally true because it is a center of street crime and of prostitution, and if you end up there, then you know that you have pretty much plumbed the bottom. So to quote Jerry White in his great study of London in the 19th century, successful thieves, like successful prostitutes, did not stay in Flower and Dean Street. And Flower and Dean street is the kind of. The epitome of the horrors of Spitalfields, if only because they would not long remain immune from the depredations of their fellows. However, having said that, it is important to emphasise that not everyone who is living in Spitalfields by any means is a career criminal or a career prostitute. Lots of people are there because they have nowhere else to go, because they are absolutely at the bottom.
- [20:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
So this brings us to the. To Jack the Ripper's victims, who'll be playing a very big part in this story. And right from the. From the start, there was a sense that the Victorian reading public, the people who were the first consumers of the Jack the Ripper melodrama, are much more interested in Jack the Ripper than they are in his victims. And actually, I guess a telling sign of this, you know, we're complicit in this as well so far because we haven't actually named any of the victims. We've talked a lot about Jack and of the context, but we haven't named, you know, Polly Nichols or Catherine Eddowes or Annie Chapman or whatever. And that's something that we will be trying to remedy in this series because we will. We'll also have a special bonus episode for our club members. I'm looking in more depth at three of the victims and their lives and what they tell us about the world of late Victorian England. And actually, Hallie Rubenhold, who's been on the show in the early days, she wrote a book called the Five, didn't she? In 2019, a prize winning book, which was a sort of group biography of the murdered women. And as she, you know, pointed out, you know, people wouldn't write books about their stories were it not for the way in which it ended. It's this kind of horror of their deaths that has made them, you know, if you, if you reel off the names of the victims, a lot of people will recognize them, but they won't know much about the victims. And probably what they do know may well be wrong because people tended to see them purely as prostitutes rather than as human beings with kind of backgrounds and inner lives of their own.
- [22:23]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I mean, that's why Halle's book was so revelatory and why it was deservedly prize winning. But I mean, as she acknowledges, they are only remembered because they all shared the same terrible fate. So she wrote, the courses their lives took mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age and yet were so singular in the way they ended up. And again, I think that is another comparison with Titanic, that it's the horror of their deaths that enable them to serve us as exemplars of a class of society that normally doesn't enter the history books. And the class of person who is being killed by Jack the Ripper, they are even more lost to poverty than those who are traveling in the steerage of Titanic. They are indigent, they are absolutely the bottom, and they are women. And it does give us an opportunity to, to kind of focus on the lives of people who, as I say, don't normally feature in, in our podcasts.
- [23:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
But when Victorians are reading about these women's lives, I mean, they're not terribly interested, I think, in the personal stories of the women. But they are interested in the background, aren't they, in the East End more generally? And I say they're obsessed by it, actually.
- [23:36]
Jack the Ripper (reading letter)
Yeah.
- [23:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Because I guess there's an excitement and a sort of weird glamour about somewhere that is. That has fallen so far from the standards of Victorian morality and Victorian prosperity.
- [23:48]
Tom Holland
Well, there's Whitechapel High street, which the slums kind of go off Whitechapel High street, but that street is the entertainment capital of working class London. So it's, it's full of taverns and music halls, and for people who, who kind of want to plunge into the back alleys, there's always the prospect of kind of illicit sex there. So it does attract people from across the East End, but also people from the West End as well, who want to go slumming, because what's dangerous is also exciting. And so the sight of young bloods going up east, you know, it is a common sight in Whitechapel. But it's not just, you know, Rakes and Roues who are to be seen in, in Whitechapel and kind of touring the warrens of Florendene street and Thrall street and so on. There are also of course, humanitarians and moralists. And there is definitely a sense at the end of the Victorian period when Britain is at its imperial apogee, that the East End is the dark shadow not just of London's greatness as an imperial capital, but, but of Britain's status as, you know, a great power. And it seems to embody something about a megalopolis, an industrial megalopolis that people find both disturbing and fascinating. I mean, London at this point I think is indisputably the capital not just of the British Empire, but of the world.
- [25:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's the biggest city that's ever existed, 4 million people or so. I think possibly. I think that's actually an underestimate. I think, you know, if you go bigger, Greater London, you're looking at more like 6 million people. I mean it's a, it's an. To people at the time, it is a jaw dropping spectacle that the sprawl and the crowds and the excitement and the modernity of London, because it's the heart of the British Empire, it's the city of London. Is there the kind of financial nerve center of global capitalism, of shipping? It's still a port, it's a manufacturing city at the time. So there are lots of factories.
- [25:49]
Tom Holland
It's full of smoke and the smoke blends with the famous fog, the notorious fog. And I think because of this you have a sense that what happens in London matters for the entire world. And this is kind of partly propagated by the fact that London, as well as being the centre of everything else, is also the center of the world publishing industry. So the newspapers that are printed in London have a reach that perhaps the American media today would have globally. But it is also because people come to London from across the world to see what their own future is going to look like. It's a vision of the cities of the future. And so again, there is a sense that what happens in its darkest corners, you know, has a relevance for, for everyone pretty much, if you're on the.
- [26:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
Left, if you're a radical or a socialist or whatever. The spectacle of the poverty in London is a reminder of the iniquities of capitalism, but it's also the chance of, you know, a new dawn, isn't it? Because you're hoping that from this darkness some new light will come, that it will be the breeding ground for revolution and rebellion. Right. That's what Karl Marx and co think.
- [26:59]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And Karl Marx, of course, is a refugee in London and he is very familiar with the East End. He describes it as a pool of stagnant misery and desolation. But he sees in that pool of stagnant misery and desolation the prospect, as you say, of a brighter future, of a revolutionary utopia. And this, of course, for the vast majority of the Victorian middle classes is precisely, you know, what they most dread. The misery and the violence that they see as being incubated in places like Thrall street or Dorset street or whatever, that this will kind of spread and infect the entire city. The sense of it as a breeding ground for a kind of moral pestilence is a recurrent theme in the press of the time. So to quote the Times, we have long ago learned that organic refuse breeds pestilence. Can we doubt that neglected human refuse as inevitably breeds crime? That crime reproduces itself like germs in an infected atmosphere and becomes at each successive cultivation more deadly, more bestial and more absolutely unrestrained.
- [28:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
So this point about crime, I think is really important because in the 1880s there's a huge moral panic about crime. There'd been an economic downturn since 1973, since the panic of 1973. So there's a sense that even at its height, Britain, British establishment opinion is still very jittery. Jerry White, in his book on late 19th century London, he's got a brilliant section about crime and he says, you know, you might think it's an ordered safe city, but actually there are dozens of murders every year. There's a gun crime panic in 1887. So the year before these murders start, there were 18,000 missing people reported in London. So it's a place where you can fall through the cracks really quickly. But also, if you're one of the middle class people reading your copy of the Daily Telegraph, you're in a, you know, a sort of low level state of anxiety the whole time about precisely what is being bred out there in the East End and, you know, the criminals, the radicals, all of that kind of thing.
- [29:09]
Tom Holland
So 1887 is the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. So, you know, tremendous pomp and circumstance. But in that same year, there had been a massive focus for middle class panic in the place in London that is synonymous with, with British greatness namely Trafalgar Square, where Nelson's Column stands, because it had become a vast squatters camp, so the homeless had moved in and had set up kind of shacks and tents there. And this becomes a focus for middle class indignation. And there is pressure on the police to do something about it. And so on the 8th of November, Sir Charles Warren, the head of the Metropolitan Police, bans all public assemblies from gathering in Trafalgar Square. And on the 13th of November, there are kind of a series of rallies. So they are organized by socialists, by Irish nationalists. Karl Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx, is a speaker there. And they try to occupy Trafalgar Square and to hold it against the police. But the police are there in mass force. They've been supplemented by the Grenadier Guards, and they succeed in clearing Trafalgar Square. And this is commemorated as Bloody Sunday. You know, in due course, revolutionaries in Russia will kind of see it as one of the examples of how an advanced industrial economy might conceivably be overthrown by a proletarian revolution. It isn't. In this case, however, Trafalgar Square is held for the establishment and the homeless are cleared out from their. Their camps. And many of them end up heading to the only place really where they can hope to find shelter, which is the warren of streets off Whitechapel High Street.
- [30:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
And Whitechapel has been changed, actually by three things. So one of them, which will come onto in the next couple of episodes, is immigration, specifically from the western part of the czarist empire, of the Russian empire, so Poland and Russia itself, and that's particularly Jewish immigration. So that's one thing that's changed. Whitechapel. There's also been a lot of slum clearance, hasn't there? So that people who have been basically decanted from the slums have ended up being pushed into the back alleys and dos houses of Spitalfields. So in the heart of Whitechapel, the other thing has been an attempt to crack down on brothels. So in 1885, an act to make further provision for the protection of women and girls. And that basically means that people have been kicked out of their establishments and they too are now sort of been packed into the East End. So it's a sort of. It's. It's a powder keg, Tom.
- [31:53]
Tom Holland
It is a powder keg, yes. Well, I mean, kind of this mood of seething desperation, I guess, in the streets, even worse than normal. And so when you have people crammed into terrible housing, I Suppose it's unsurprising that recorded incidents of crime have been going up throughout 1887 and then into 1888 to the degree that you might think that, you know, another murder wouldn't create any great stir. I mean, that's. That's not entirely true, because there is a particularly horrible murder that takes place in Whitechapel on the 7th of August, 1888, and locals are shocked because it's the body of a woman called Martha Tabram. And this body has been found crumpled on the landing of a block of tenement flats just off Whitechapel High Street. And Martha had been stabbed 39 times. And there's no clue as to who had done it. And the local press covered the case in considerable detail. So they say that Martha had been butchered, that her assailant had displayed a virulent savagery and so on. But the police are unable to have any clues as to who could have done it or why. And so on the 23rd of August, when the Coroner formally announced her cause of death, it was described as being willful murder against some person or persons unknown. So they don't know who did it. And that is a verdict that people will be hearing a lot over the weeks and months that are to follow.
- [33:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
And there's just the odd hint, isn't there, that this could be the beginning of something, particularly if you're in the newspaper industry, that could bear fruit. So the Illustrated Police News ran six pictures of the Martha Tabram murder on its front page. And the East London observer ran two columns about the crime. A unique and mysterious crime, it said, because, of course, as you say, violence is common, but it's unusual to have a case where of such savagery coupled with no clues.
- [33:54]
Tom Holland
Right.
- [33:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
With. No, it's not. It doesn't seem to be leading anywhere. I guess the one thing is that Martha Tabram is not the kind of victim to excite the attention of the press, because she's not. I mean, it sounds a horrible thing to say, but she's not terribly glamorous.
- [34:09]
Tom Holland
No. So she's 39, but she looked a lot older because she'd had a life on the streets. So one witness diplomatically described her as a woman who would rather have a glass of ale than a cup of tea. So I think she was probably an alcoholic. She seems to have made a living by kind of hawking trinkets that she kind of made or whatever. And perhaps she, you know, when absolutely desperate, she would sell her body for a few pennies. Unclear. So her fate is hideous, but she is not, as you say, the kind of person who would necessarily be remembered. She lacks the glamour of the kind of victim who would remain in the newspapers for week after week after week. And so it seems like her name will very quickly be forgotten as the weeks pass. But then, Dominic, just one week after the coroner has announced his verdict on her death at her inquest on 31 August, news breaks of another murder. And this is even more terrible. And it has happened just a short walk from where Martha had been found. And this time with this murder, people really will sit up and notice.
- [35:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Gosh. Well, come back after the break and we will explore the circumstances of this new crime.
- [35:36]
Tom Holland
This episode is brought to you by AT&T America's First Network is also its fastest and most reliable based on root.
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
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Tom Holland
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- [39:31]
Scarcely has the horror and sensation caused by the discovery of the murdered woman in Whitechapel some short time ago had time to abate than another discovery is made, which for the brutality exercised on the victim is even more shocking and will no doubt create as great a sensation in the vicinity as its predecessor. The affair up to the present is enveloped in complete mystery and the police have as yet no evidence to trace the perpetrators of the horrible deed. So that was the Central News agency reporting on 31 August 1888, the news of what it headlined a horrible murder in Whitechapel. So Tom, take us through the story of this new murder.
- [40:21]
Tom Holland
Okay, so the body had been found by a delivery man, car man, as the Victorians call it, and he worked for Pickfords in Covent Garden and he'd been heading to work from Bethnal Green through Whitechapel, and he was off to Covent Garden in central London, and he found the body around 3:40am this was a guy called Charles Lechmere, and he was walking to work down Buck's Row, which is, I mean it's no longer called Bucks Row, but it's still there. You can still walk down the street, very narrow in Whitechapel. And as he's doing so, he sees this object lying beside the entrance to a stable yard and it is now, one of the entrances to Whitechapel tube station, but at the time it was what was called a yard crossing, so a kind of narrow alleyway leading off the main street into a stable yard. And so he stops, he goes to inspect it and he finds that it is the body of a woman. And he stands there irresolutely wondering what to do. And as he does so, he's joined by another carman, a guy called Robert Paul, who is also on his way to work. And one of the themes, I think, of this entire series will be the number of people who are either coming back or going to work. Throughout the night, the streets of Whitechapel are very, very busy. So they both approach the body, which is huddled in the shadows. It's still, you know, it's still nighttime. And they find that the woman is lying on her back. Her skirts have been hitched up over her hips. And Letchmere can't bring himself to touch the body, but Robert Paul does. And he finds that her skin is cold to the touch. But he presses his ear to her, to her mouth, and he fancies that he can hear her breathing. Now, both men are late for work, so they smooth down the woman's skirts and they head on their way. And a short distance on, they run into a policeman and they tell him what they found. And Letchmere says, she looks to me to be either dead or drunk, but for my part, I think she is dead. And so she is. She is very, very dead.
- [42:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
And they haven't noticed the details, I guess, because. What time did you say it was? It's 3:40 in the morning, so dawn is not yet broken, so it's dark. But when the police arrive and they, they do notice the details. And the details which are rehearsed at the inquest, are as they will be throughout this series. I mean, no surprise, they are really gruesome and really, really shocking, aren't they?
- [42:48]
Tom Holland
They are. So listeners should be warned. So the victim's throat had been cut almost from ear to ear. The abdomen had been savagely ripped open, exposing the intestines. The lining of the woman's stomach had been cut in several places. There were also, and I quote, the details of the inquest, two small stabs on private parts, apparently done with a strong bladed knife. And the surgeon who conducted the autopsy, a doctor called Reece Llewellyn, he said he confessed himself to be appalled by what he had been examining. I have seen many terrible cases, but never such a brutal affair as this.
- [43:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, and I think that's important to bring across right from the beginning. I mean, we don't want to wallow in the details of these crimes, but it is important to convey how horrific they are to explain what the public reaction is. You know, these are not murders like any other. I mean, there are stabbings are not uncommon in London in the 1880s. You know, there are dozens every year of people stabbed to death. But there is something uniquely savage and bestial about Jack the Ripper's murders.
- [43:58]
Tom Holland
Literally. Visceral.
- [44:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, visceral, exactly. So the obvious questions are, you know, why would you do such a thing?
- [44:07]
Who could do it? And actually, who's the woman? Like, who is the victim? Because it's very hard for them to identify who the victims are. So to start with the killer, they are completely bewildered right from the beginning, like, why would anyone do this in such a savage and bestial way? And also the fact that it's been done in streets down which people could be walking at any moment.
- [44:25]
Tom Holland
Well, we talked about the sense of the killer being a ghoul or a phantom or a specter. And there is, from the beginning, something strange about his ability to inflict these terrible murders in a public place, even though it is a kind of, you know, a street in the middle of the night. So a policeman on his beat, he had walked down Buck's Row half an hour before Lechmere and Paul discovered the body. So that's. Well, that's ten past three in the morning. And he hadn't seen anything and no one had heard anything either. And there was a woman called Mrs. Emma Green, who lived directly above the scene of the murder, who. She said she was a light sleeper and had a scream been given, she would have heard it, you know, but. But not a peep. And there were watchmen too, nearby. They had heard nothing. So it's evident to the. To the inquest that the murderer must have slit his victim's throat before she'd been able to make a noise. So either he'd strangled her or clasped her mouth or whatever. He'd done his terrible work with incredible speed. And then, before Letchmere arrives, he must have kind of vanished into, presumably, the early morning traffic on Whitechapel Road and, you know, become part of the crowd.
- [45:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
And as you say, he must have been covered with blood. There's an awful. Must have been a lot of blood. And yet, you know, he hasn't gone. No, no one has spotted him. And that may be because he has a modus operandi that allows him to escape the Worst of the blood spattering from the body. Or it may be because as you said at the beginning, there are a lot of slaughterhouses and butcher shops and so on. And a man walking down the street in an apron, you know, in the dark with bloodstains will actually go relatively unnoticed.
- [46:10]
Tom Holland
I mean, just on that topic, we're not, we're not the. The rest is true crime. And my knowledge of details of autopsies is not great. But I gather that if someone is strangled and then the throat is cut, there is much less blood. I mean, of course there is blood, but, but I, I gather this as a detail and perhaps people with more medical knowledge than us can confirm that for us.
- [46:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
Tom, I can't believe you're being so, so hesitant.
- [46:34]
Tom Holland
Anyway, tell us about the victim, as you say. To begin with, the police are worried it's going to be difficult to identify her. She is examined by Dr. Llewellyn. In his report, he says that she's a woman of small stature, that she's middle aged, she has graying hair, she has a scar on her forehead. And he specifies one tooth deficient front of upper jaw. But that's nothing unusual. Lots of people in, you know, in Whitechapel have lost a tooth or two. She has very few possessions on her. A comb, a looking glass, a handkerchief. None of these give any hint as to her identity. And her clothing too is very anonymous. It's shabby, it's stained. The only exception is that she has a new bonnet. Dr. Llewellyn specifies it's made of black straw and it is trimmed with black velvet. So is that enough to identify her? Well, as it turns out, it is, because within only a few hours of her body being found, the police have a name, Polly. And their source is an elderly woman called Ellen Holland. So maybe an ancestor, who knows, I don't know. And Ellen had shared a room with Polly in a doss house on Thrall street, which is one of the kind of the notorious streets in the heart of Spitalfields. So that's one clue. They still don't have a surname. But this will come very shortly because when the police investigate Polly's petticoats, they find that they are stamped with the mark of a workhouse, and to be precise, the workhouse in Lambeth in South London. And they find an inmate of that workhouse who is brought to inspect Polly's corpse. And this person provides the police with Polly's real name, which is Mary Ann Nichols. And the police go and they find that Mary Ann Nichols, Polly has a father who's still alive and she has a husband. And the following day, on the 1st of September, Edward Walker, Polly's father, and William Nicholls, her husband, are brought to inspect her body. And William Nicholls, the husband, he gazes down at the corpse of his dead wife, horribly mutilated as it is, and he breaks down and he has to be comforted by the police inspector. And through his tears he stammers, I forgive you as you are. I forgive you on account of what you have been to me.
- [48:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, that's a very. It's a very Dickensian scene. And actually the whole story, as that unfolds, of Polly Nichols does have a kind of Dickensian arc to it, although a Dickensian arc in which, you know, they don't live happily ever after, but the heroine plunges into the abyss and never, ever recovers.
- [49:17]
Tom Holland
Yeah, I think the kind of quality of a Dickens novel hangs over, as you say, completely hangs over her story. So Polly Nichols, let's call her that, she was born in 1845, just off Fleet street, which today, you know, it's so grand that very few people can afford to live there, very few people live there at all. But back then it was again a little bit like Spitalfields in 1888, a kind of warren of alleys and courtyards lined with dilapidated housing so verging on a rookery. But her parents, I mean, they're. They're poor, but they're certainly not indigent. So her father was a locksmith, her mother was a laundress, and they belong to the ranks, I guess, of what Victorians would have called the respectable poor. They have careers, as is very usual in this period. Polly loses a mother early on, so she dies of tb, but Edward Walker continues to provide for his family. And this is very Dickens. Polly steps into her mother's shoes, even though she's still just a young girl, and essentially takes over the maternal role. So looking after her father in the way that little Nell looks after her grandfather or Little Dorrit looks after her father, it's kind of very, you know, very reminiscent of that. And the tone of a morally improving Dickensian melodrama seems to continue when, at the age of 18, Polly meets a printer's machinist, because Fleet street, of course, is the centre of the. The press. And so that's exactly the kind of person that. That Polly might hope to meet, someone working in the. In the. For the newspapers. And this is the. This is her husband, William Nicholls, the guy who comes and SOBS over her mutilated corpse in due course. And they move out of Fleet street, they move to Walworth in South London. Polly's father goes with them, they start a family. Polly ends up having five children and it's a seeming model of domesticity. A mother, a father, you know, a grandfather, children. Very kind of like something out of Dickens. So then in 1880, Polly's by now 35, there is a spectacular bust up and Polly walks out on her husband, out on her five children. One of them's just very, very young, barely an infant, and she never returns. And that's her family broken up and.
- [51:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
The different accusations aren't there. And actually. So family breakdown is a theme of almost all the victim stories one way or another, the collapse of a relationship. But another theme is alcohol. I mean, in almost all of the cases, alcohol is a huge factor. And William later claimed that Polly had become an alcoholic, didn't he? And which may well have been true. Polly, it seems that she thought he'd begun an affair with a younger woman who'd been helping with childcare. That's right, isn't it? And both those things may have been true, that she, what, A, she was drinking and B, he was having an affair. And either way, what we will see again and again with the lives of these women is that something goes horribly wrong and you end up in a spiral. And in this world of late Victorian Britain, you know, no welfare state or not, one worthy of the name, once you're in the spiral, it is very, very hard to get out of it and to clamber back and basically, you know, it's like a game of Snakes and ladders and you're on a snake that is leading all the way to the bottom, that is, to Whitechapel.
- [52:43]
Tom Holland
I mean, there is a kind of welfare and anyone who's read Oliver Twist will know what that welfare is because it comes in the form of the workhouse. And from this point on, if Polly's story is Dickensian, it's in that Oliver Twist sense. She is plunging into a world of workhouses, of dos houses, of a kind of desperate struggle on the streets to survive. And she understandably, to cope with the horrors of this, she turns to drink more and more and her every attempt to kind of claw has her way back up to try and find a solid footing again kind of founders on the fact that she is becoming more and more of an alcoholic. And by December 1887, you know, she is homeless and she joins the ranks of the homeless in Trafalgar Square. But she's moved to Trafalgar Square a month after Bloody Sunday. So, you know, when the police had cleared Trafalgar Square. And so the police are in no mood to allow the homeless to reoccupy that public space. And so Polly is one of a number of women who are moved on by the police to a workhouse. And the police are kind of marching through the streets to. To be processed. But Polly and 10 other women manage to slip away and kind of melt into the side streets. And they return to Trafalgar Square. And there they are formally arrested. And by this point, Polly is drunk, and she's described by the arresting officer as having been the worst woman in the square. And this time they are unable to slip their police escort, and Polly and the other 10 women all end up back in the workhouse. By now we're into 1888. And Polly makes one last desperate attempt to kind of redeem herself from homelessness and alcoholism. And she has found a placement by the workhouse with a very religious couple in Wandsworth who are called the Cowderys. And it's an expression of their, I guess, their kind of their religion that they are willing to take a chance on an alcoholic from the workhouse as a kind of domestic servant in their house. And they encourage her to write to her father. And this is Polly's first communication with her father for at least a couple of years. And it sounds like things are okay. So Polly writes it is a grand place where she's staying with trees and gardens back and front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotalers and very religious, so I ought to get on. So she's got a room and there's no alcohol in the house. So if she was ever gonna have a chance.
- [55:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's like the bit where Oliver Twist is taken in by the kindly family or whatever. But unfortunately, this isn't a novel. And again, it doesn't work out right. She doesn't get on with them for.
- [55:34]
Tom Holland
Some reason, I think she wants drink, and there's no drink in the house. And so she absconds. And Mrs. Cowdery then wrote to the workhouse, this is how we know about it, saying that Polly had gone and that she had taken clothing with her worth just over three pounds. And that clothing, presumably, was the clothing that Mrs. Cowdery had provided to Polly. You know, her kind of work uniforms or dresses or whatever, which she probably.
- [55:59]
Dominic Sandbrook
Pawned for money for booze, right?
- [56:02]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And probably kept some money, you know, to Keep a roof over her head, because she ends up in a doss house on Thrall street in Spitalfields. And this is Wilmot's lodging house, which was named after a guy called George Wilmot who'd run it in the 1860s and 70s. And it is, I think, well known on the streets of Spitalfields as a place that accommodates all women. I imagine that the experiences that Polly has been having on the streets would make that something that she would really, you know, would be important to her. And so this is where she meets with Ellen Holland, because Ellen Holland is one of three women who is sharing a room in this doss house with Polly. And sometimes she and Ellen would save money by sharing a bed. And Ellen, you know, she told the police that she'd liked Polly, but unsurprisingly, had found her quiet and withdrawn and, to quote Ellen, as if some trouble was weighing upon her mind. And I would guess that there were many, many troubles.
- [57:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, those troubles get worse, don't they? Because she runs out of money. She burns through this money. So by the end of August, she's kicked out again. This would be a theme of a lot of the Ripper victims. They end up running out of money and being kicked out onto the streets. And somehow, you know, we can only speculate how, but there are some obvious possibilities. She gets the money for more drink, and also she finds a doss house on Flower and Dean Street, a very grim doss house. And actually, this question of how she gets the money, this is at the heart, in many ways, of the whole story of Jack the Ripper and his crimes and his victims. Because the thing that has hung over his victims from the very beginning, from the very first reports and from the inquests, is the notion that they were all prostitutes, right?
- [57:53]
Tom Holland
Yeah. And so Ellen Holland, at the inquest, was asked directly if Polly had been a prostitute. And she denied it and said she did not think the deceased was leading a fast life. In fact, she seemed very afraid of it. I think there are two things to say about this. The first is that Ellen had really liked Polly and was grief stricken by her death and so obviously would have been reluctant to speak ill of her. And the other thing is that Polly clearly clung to memories of her lost respectability. And so she would absolutely have dreaded becoming a fast woman, you know, a prostitute. She clearly preferred to take lodgings away from men. So that's why she was in Wilmot's lodging house. But I don't think that any of these things necessarily prove that she was never reduced by desperation to prostitution. And in fact, you might, you might almost say the opposite.
- [58:53]
And we certainly know that by the standards of the age, she was accounted a prostitute. And this was because one year after walking out on her husband, she'd been recorded in the census as living with another man. And this had enabled William Nicholl, her husband, to be legally absolved of the financial responsibilities that up until that point, he had had for her. So to quote Christine caught in her book London Fog, any female who was kept by a man for however long or short a period of her life without benefit of a marriage ceremony was categorized as a prostitute. And this is why in this period, working class women are always desperate to keep hold of their marriage certificates, because in a sense, it's the. It's a testimony to their respectability. Without it, there is always the risk that they will be labeled a prostitute, even though it's not in the sense that we would use it today, you know, as a professional sex worker. It is, it is a much more embracing term.
- [59:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, it's a really, really slippery term, this. And so I think the only honest answer is it's impossible for us to sort of pin this label definitively on people, even if we. We wanted to. In his book about London in the 19th century, Jerry White says quite explicitly, no one knows how many prostitutes there were in London. Estimates varied from 8,000 to 8,80,000 and sometimes more. All these numbers were clueless. Most were influenced by self interest. Even the definition of a prostitute was unclear. It's enlarged by some to include any woman living with a man out of wedlock, which is what you've just said. There were few objects of social inquiry that caused more muddle and dishonesty than the prostitute. In other words, it is an immensely amorphous label. The police themselves are actually quite honest about this. When they're talking to each other about it. They say, we don't. We don't really know what it means. And we don't really, you know, because we use different definitions. So there are some definitions that are. You're a prostitute if you've been convicted of prostitution. And there are others that are like, no, no, no, you're a prostitute if you're sleeping with men and you're not married. You know, a woman can resort to selling herself once or twice because she's desperate, because she's homeless, but it doesn't mean that she's a career prostitute, does it? And Polly Nichols clearly wasn't.
- [61:08]
Tom Holland
So the police have a phrase common prostitute, by which they mean a career prostitute. And it's evident that Polly was not that. But, you know, we just don't know, you know, to what desperate straits was she reduced by, by her poverty, by her homelessness, by her desperation. And certainly, you know, there would have been no lack of clients in Whitechapel because it's where laborers and dockers and slaughtermen and porters from across the whole East End habitually go to sex. So it would always have been an opportunity, we just can't say. But we certainly know that by the 30th of August she had somehow made enough money to buy her new bonnet, you know, the one that fashioned out of black straw and trimmed with black velvet that was described by the coroner. And she'd also had enough money to get incredibly drunk that evening in the Frying Pan, which was a notorious pub on the corner of Brick Lane and Thrall Street. And if you go there, you can still. It's a Chinese restaurant now, but the, the image of the Frying Pan is up there above, above the Chinese restaurant. And so she leaves the pub about half past midnight and she's skint again. And so she goes to Wilmot's lodging house to try and get a bed there and she's turned away and she tells the doorkeeper, I'll soon get my dos money. See what a jolly bonnet I've got now. And she goes back out and clearly she does manage somehow to get some money. And listeners can make up their own mind about how she does that. But she doesn't spend it on a bed. Instead she goes back to the frying pan and gets even more drunk and she leaves the Frying pan shortly before 2:30am and she heads southwards towards Whitechapel Road. And on the corner of the Whitechapel Road she. She runs into Ellen Holland. And Ellen Holland remembers that she was, you know, she was staggering, that she was so drunk that, that when Ellen stopped her, Polly slumped against the wall. And Ellen tried to persuade her to come with her back to, to Wilmot's, but Polly said, you know, I can't because I don't have the money, so I need to go and get money. I've had my lodging money three times today and I've spent it. It won't be long before I'll be back. And so Ellen says goodnight to Polly. She knows it's 2:30 because there's a church on the other side of the road. And she hears the chime striking. And Ellen watches Polly staggering eastwards along Whitechapel Road, which is in the direction of Buck's Row. And Ellen Holland is the last witness to have seen Polly alive, but not, of course, the last person to have seen her alive. And how that person, the murderer, came to be with her perhaps half an hour after she'd parted from Ellen beside the yard crossing on Buck's Row, we don't know. So there are various suggestions. Hallie's suggestion in the five is that Polly had found a kind of dark corner and had curled up there and had gone to sleep and he killed her while she was sleeping. I would say the kind of. The broad consensus is that she needed her dos money and she had gone there to have sex to earn the money that would enable her to join Ellen in the bed back in in on Thrall Street. Or maybe, maybe it was neither of those. Maybe it was just opportunism. Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know, a drunk, defenseless woman. We will never know for sure. But Dominic, there is one thing we can be certain of, and that is that the the murderous predator who Polly Nicholls had met with around 3.15am on 31 August 1888, that his reign of terror had only just begun.
- [64:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
Crikey, a chilling cliffhanger to end on there, Tom. So next time we will be back with the investigation of the murder of Polly Nichols and the next link in this terrible chain. Tom, thank you very much. Bye bye.
- [65:09]
Tom Holland
Bye bye.
- [65:20]
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