Gabi Goes! Adventures of a JMU Student Abroad, Vol. 10

Day Fifteen and Day Sixteen: On the Trail of Jack the Ripper

Two little whores, shivering with fright,
Seek a cosy doorway in the middle of the night.
Jack’s knife flashes, then there’s but one,
And the last one’s the ripest for Jack’s idea of fun. -The Jack the Ripper Verses

It is 7:30 at Tower Hill Tube station and we are dogging the footsteps of Jack the Ripper, the rather grimy streets of Whitechapel serving as an appropriate backdrop. Our tour-guide, an man with enormous glasses and frizzy, mad scientist hair that introduced himself as ‘Steve’ walks with surprising speed through the streets of East End. It is near deserted. From far away, a siren sounds and a yellow ambulance drives screaming into the darkness. We pass through passageways where the only light is from modified gaslamps and over overpasses made of corroded brick.

This is where it all happened. Whitechapel. Saucy Jack. The Dear Boss letters.

This is the odd thing about being in London, which I have touched on before. In one sense, it has everything. I myself just attended a show in Covent Garden, on Welington Avenue near Drury Lane, and it is remarkable how the modern bustle of people causes you to forget how simply ancient some of this sights are. London has such an influence on the literary world. I remember picking up the Island of Dr Moreau and realising with a start that he just mentioned Tottenham Court Road, the very road I had just walked down, and that Lyceum Theatre where I had just seen a play was mentioned in a Sherlock Holmes story. Covent Gardens has much the same feel as it did in the old days. It is busy, in Theatreland, there are cars obeying their own erratic traffic laws, tourists, casual dress mixed with formal, men dressed as genteel penguins outside the Royal Opera House. I had decided, with the 30 pound allotment that I had been given from the program, to see The Lion King but had to contend with the fact that I was literally the only person interested in going. I figured out directions beforehand and left early, but got lost on High Holborn Street until I got fed up and stopped at a sports shop for directions. The effect of my wayward perambulations was that I arrived about three minutes to curtain. But I made it, program bunched up in my fist and out of breath.

I had arrived.

It was exciting, a break up of a day that had been rather uneventful (we had stopped by collector Tony Bradshaw’s house, and saw a few Bloomsbury pictures and questioned him about his home country of Malawi), but I was not entirely the biggest fan of the musical Lion King. Shadowland, the song where Nala has to leave her home pride, however, was just as good as I expected, but the musical in general was just a bit too disjointed to continually hold my interest. It is funny, I thought I would adore Lion Kingand dislike Les Miserables, but it turned out that it was the other way around. Probably because of Javert and his awesome coat of awesomeness. Seriously though. I wish I had a greatcoat. And that hat. One must love his hat.

But today, I had left Covent Gardens behind and was following Jack the Ripper. In some of the East End, once it had gotten dark and the city had fallen silent, it was almost as if we had fallen into a strange time warp that led us directly to the year 1888 into the slums and rookeries of East End London. We saw the sites where the bodies had been dumped, learned about the conspiracy theories of “The Final Solution” where the FreeMasons were involved, and I continuosly asked the tour guide questions.

Me: So the surgeon’s son. The main suspect. They fished his corpse out of the Thames. You said that they identified that he had a cheque for 50 pounds in his pocket. What are the chances that it would still be in his pocket? And would it not be illegible because of how water-logged it was? And how could we be certain that it was indeed a suicide.
Steve ….
Me: Also, how do you know that there were not several steps to the killing process? How do we know that the bodies were not tampered with after the killings, that the mutilations did not occur substantially after death?
Steve: What’s with all the questions, then? I never thought of that.
Me: …it was bothering me.
Steve: Bothering you? I would hate to be inside your head.

But it really was great fun, the tour. Jack, Mike, Robin and I stopped by the Prostitute’s Church ( named that in Jack the Ripper’s day because that was where the prostitutes would hang out to pick up Johns), learned about why East End was so much more poor than the West, picked up some souvenirs for the people back home on Oxford Street, admired graffiti, and took lots of photos of the Ten Bells Pub where the last of the Ripper’s victims was seen right before her death.
I shall take the tour guide’s words to heart: Happy hunting!
I wish I could come up with new insights into the case, it is a very interesting one.
Tower of London tomorrow and meeting up with writers from The Nation.