Another London Day

After braving our way through a crazy breakfast in the hostel and I honestly could have organized a hundred times better if they had just let me (I know, Scott, control issues....), we headed out to enjoy London. We tubed it down to London Bridge (the new one, not the one that fell down or the one that is in Arizona right now) and walked past Southwark Cathedral and the Golden Hinde (recreation of Sir Francis Drake's ship) to the Globe. There were no tickets left for today or tonight's King Lear so we got really swanky seats for tomorrow night. It will hopefully make up for not making it out to Stratford.

We then headed over to the Museum in Docklands. I had never been there before and it was actually quite fascinating, taking us through the entire history of the docklands area, from Roman times, Anglo-Saxon times, through Norman and Medieval times all the way up to the major changes that are happening right now through the shift from trade to offices in Canary Wharf. I was really impressed all the exhibits, especially a poignant one about the British slave trade because of sugar cane and one about the docks at war and how the docks were affected during the bombing of WWII.

The real reason that we went to the museum though was for the Jack the Ripper exhibit. The exhibit was incredibly revealing as to the nature of the Whitechapel area of London in the 1880s. There were many prostitutes in the area, mostly surrounding the border between the City of Westminster and the City of London, which is where all the banks were (and still are today). Whitechapel was the epitome of the slums, lots of immigrants, homeless people living on the streets, grisly markets, all only a few feet away from one of the richest areas of London. There were police on duty in the area but there were some streets that even the police would not walk down on their own- they wanted a partner with them. Usually though the crimes in Whitechapel weren't as deadly as murder- mostly it was petty theft and vagrancy.

So let me backtrack a little and talk about the information we learned on the Jack the Ripper tour. First of all, Jack had five major victims- all of them were prostitutes living in the Whitechapel area, all of them were living day to day, staying in lodging houses in the area, all in their 40s-50, losing their teeth, unhealthy, most not married but with numerous children. The only one who didn't fit this mold was the last victim. Jack's first victim was Polly Nichols who was last seen boasting about her new bonnet while going into a room with a gentlemen. When they found her body, they discovered that it had been slit from the throat all the way until it couldn't be slit anymore. Her intestines were all spilling out- it was incredibly gruesome. Now, there had been two other murders before this but they weren't really connected to Jack the Ripper. However, at the museum, there were all the witness reports and coroner's reports from these murdered women.

The next victim was Annie Chapman, who also was a mother of at least six kids. She was seen around the same pub that Polly Nichols had been found and her mutilation was quite similar to Polly's. It was around this time where the Metropolitan Police (in charge of the City of Westminster, where the East End is located) started to get letters written in red ink signed "Jack the Ripper". One of the amazing things about the exhibit was that there were a ton of first person documents, including several original "Jack" letters. Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman were both murdered within five days of each other and the police were trying to be ready for another attack but really had no way to track the murderer.

The third and fourth attacks came on the same day- September 7th, 1888. Elizabeth (Long Liz) Stride, a woman from Sweden who was forced back into prostitution upon the breakup of her marriage, was found first. The second one came a few hours later and shew as the only victim to be found in the City of London, not in the East End. This got the City Police involved, as well as the Metropolitan Police who were already involved. Catherine (Kate) Eddows was probably on her way back to Aldergate Church where most of the prostitutes hung out. She had actually been earlier that night arrested for being drunk in the streets and running around pretending to be a fire-truck. She was incredibly mutilated and bloodied- her body was still warm when she was found in Mitre Square. However, to make matters worse, a piece of her bloodied apron was found in the East End with a message. Painted in the area above where her body was found was the message "The Juwes are not the men who will not be blamed for nothing." (Spelled like it was found). There was an indication that it may have been written by a Mason and Charles Warren, the Chief of Police, was a Mason himself and immediately had the message erased.

That brings up another point about the difficulty of finding Jack the Ripper. Despite this being the era of Sherlock Holmes, the Police did not have the deductive reasoning the great (yet of course, fictional) detective used. Photographs were only taken of the body for identification purposes and usually crime scenes were cleaned up right away without searching for fingerprints (which didn't come for another 15 years or so) or any other sort of evidence. Additionally, the telegraph made it easier for news to spread and newspapers made matters worse themselves by interviewing witnesses on their own and coming up with their own theories.

The last Jack murder did not fully fit the pattern. Mary Kelly was twenty years old, had brought a friend home to stay with her and her common-law husband, got into a fight and was kicked out of the house. She was last seen with a few men saying "Seeing you in the morning" but obviously, she never was. She was the worst victim- the landlord of her lodgings looked into the window and saw a gruesome sight. Her body parts were strewn all over the room, her face was beaten, her hip bone had been taken out and put back in, it was incredibly gruesome.

And then, seemingly the Ripper murders ended. There were a few more murders in the area in the next five years but they were never really attributed to Jack. And now of course the problem becomes who was Jack? The police never found out although there were several suspects. One was the Duke of Clarence but he had syphilis and would have been too weak at the time to commit the murders. Another suspect was Dr. Neville Cream but he was hung before the last three murders. Also a man named Montague Druitt was suspected but it turned out that he was in prison in Canada at the time. New theories have arises since- some think it was a woman disguised as a man, someone thought it was artist Walter Sickert, there are plenty of theories yet we never know, which really makes the whole thing so much more interesting.

So there you have it, the Jack the Ripper story. Told from what we could remember from the tour and the museum.

After the Museum in Docklands, we went up to the Dominion Theatre to buy We Will Rock You tickets for tonight, then got ice cream and wandered around Covent Garden Market again. We're back at the hostel now and are heading out in a bit to enjoy some Queen music. It'll be great :)