The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (26 page)

In 1987 it was the decision of Jack the Ripper managers Ernie and Yvonne Ostrowski to mark the centenary by selling T-shirts, postcards and even a blood-red drink called the ‘Ripper Tipple’ that sparked the backlash. These plans were immediately seized on by the group Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW), along with splinter group Action Against the Ripper Centenary (AARC), with members spending a great deal of time around Christmas 1987 collecting signatures for a petition to have the pub’s name changed. Despite the managers’ assurances that their ‘celebration’ was not intended to be tasteless, the campaigners found hefty support and, with pressure mounting, Truman’s (who owned the pub and who were only a year away from closing down) had the name changed back to its original Ten Bells, just before the anniversary of the first Ripper murders. Although the pub still continued to display and sell its memorabilia, the anti-Ripper lobbyists appeared to have won their first battle.

Naturally, most of the publicity would be reserved for the autumn of 1988, when landmark dates would be crossed and media attention would be at its height. It would become a struggle between those who saw the murders as historical events which needed to be put into context responsibly and those who saw them as a vile piece of history that had no place in the enlightened late twentieth century. In the middle were those who still believed in mythical Jack.

Deborah Cameron’s
Guardian
article, cited earlier, talked of the threat of sexualized murder in society:

The hopeless obsessive quest to unmask Jack the Ripper deflects our attention from what should be obvious: the extreme desires and fantasies which animate sexual killers are shared to some extent by a great many men, growing up as they do in a culture which promotes them, not least by its portrayal of murderers as heroes. If we want to do something about sexual murder, it’s the culture and its attitudes that need to change.

This was what the WAVAW and AARC wanted to make understood, and the Ripper centenary came along at the right time to push home the message. The AARC particularly received a high profile throughout 1988 and was featured repeatedly in the national and local press. They were extremely forthright in their condemnation of the whole media circus, admittedly to the point where they seemed to be ‘man-bashing’ at times. The proposed release of Screaming Lord Sutch’s ‘Jack the Ripper’ single in 1987, apparently to coincide with the centenary, sent Anne McMurdie, chief spokesperson for the ARRC, into a fit of rage, especially when it was discovered that a promotional video was to be shot in Whitechapel:

I am disgusted that Lord Sutch and his record company should even consider releasing something of such bad taste. It is simply endorsing male violence against women, further glorifying the Ripper who has become some sort of folk hero. As to filming it all on the original site, well that just shows no sensitivity at all to women. I am completely horrified and think it is sick. This is just men jumping on the bandwagon and trying to make money out of something that was an obscene event and should not be remembered fondly … We will do anything we can to have these, and all the books, posters and T-shirts also being produced by other money-grabbing men, banned.
¹²

A protest march against male violence and the Ripper centenary (planned for September 1988 and running from Bethnal Green to the Ten Bells) was promoted in the
East London Advertiser
, which promptly got into a contretemps with the AARC by publishing a twelve-part series on the Ripper crimes.
¹³
As a result of these prominent articles, the
Advertiser
came under fire from the protestors:

By printing the mortuary photograph of Polly Nichols and recounting explicit details of the mutilation she suffered, you are using the sexual murder of women to entertain and titillate your readership … when will journalists realise that they are contributing to the mass industry of glamorising a murderer?
¹⁴

The photograph in question was one of several of the victims that had been recently rediscovered, allowing the public to see for the first time the faces of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride, as well as a second crime-scene image of Mary Kelly. The decision to publish these new images in the local and national press was a controversial one. One reader made her opinion very clear in the
Hackney Gazette
:

I do not wish to see photographs of murdered women and cannot understand how their publication can be seen as anything but bad taste. Is it necessary to drag up 100-year-old male violence with such relish?
¹⁵

The
Gazette
’s response was predictably polite:

Our article neither glorified the crime nor dragged up male violence with relish – at least not on purpose. What the feature
attempted to do was publicise new evidence which coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Ripper murders.
¹⁶

The demonstration, organized by the AARC, took place on Saturday 24 September 1988 and attracted considerable publicity. The
Hackney Gazette
stated that ‘people who run guided tours of the murder scenes, writers who glorify the killings and people who think it’s just an interesting story were the targets’. The focus of the 300-strong march was the Ten Bells pub, which, despite having been forced to change its name earlier in the year, was still exhibiting its Ripper memorabilia inside. The local press displayed headlines such as ‘Women slam Ripper moneymakers’ and ‘Up in arms’.
¹⁷

The AARC still found itself challenging long-held attitudes to the Ripper in December when the White Chapel Theatre Company staged a musical about the murders at a venue in Whitechapel Road. Objecting to songs such as ‘The Ripper’s Going to Get You (If You Don’t Watch Out)’, the busy protesters held a demonstration outside the theatre, issuing leaflets to the cast and audience saying that such entertainment ‘adds glamour and mystique to these events. It serves to obscure the truth and is insulting’.
¹⁸

What protesters were saying was effectively true: such frivolous depictions did indeed convert brutal murder into pantomime and mere ‘harmless fun’. During the height of the centenary, East End prostitutes, who walked the same streets as their predecessors a hundred years before, claimed that some of their clients were requesting to be taken to the Ripper murder sites for sex. Despite finding these requests abhorrent, they duly capitalized on the situation and charged double. They did not mind having their photographs taken by tourists in return for money either!
¹⁹

Following the lead set by Madame Tussauds’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’ back in 1980, the London Dungeon in Tooley Street, by London Bridge, opened its ‘Jack the Ripper Experience’ in 1993. Whereas there had been no protests in the Tussaud’s case, this new, even gorier exhibit became the focus of attention for the Campaign Against Pornography (CAP), again demonstrating how times and attitudes had changed during the preceding decade. Their stance was identical to that of the WAVAW and AARC groups during the centenary, attacking the organizers of the exhibition for what they felt was the trivializing of sexual violence as entertainment and titillation. The London Dungeon’s marketing manager was hard pressed to come back with a convincing argument:

We have given careful consideration as to whether it should be a rose-tinted picture or a realistic one. We think we have done it in an unglamorous way. There’s obviously an element of entertainment, but we believe there are many lessons to be learned from such horrific crimes.
²⁰

‘Unglamorous’ it most certainly was, and the Dungeon’s graphic waxwork portrayals of the Ripper’s freshly killed victims made for a particularly disturbing spectacle. What didn’t help was the gift shop ‘Ripper Mania’, which sold T-shirts, mugs, hats and other merchandise emblazoned with a sinister man wielding a bloodstained knife. The snack bar was even named ‘Ripper’s Rapid Snacks’, serving the ‘Ripper steak sandwich’, providing further evidence to the dissenters that the London Dungeon had gone too far.

Such was the confusion of principles which presented themselves to anybody who wanted to dip their toes into the controversial world of Jack the Ripper. The protest groups
were attempting to change strongly ingrained ideas about violence against women, using these
particular
murders as a well-publicized fulcrum for raising awareness. But the creation of the mythical Jack had already preceded the centenary activities by many decades, and he was part of folklore as much as anything. Despite the few changes that resulted in their actions, groups like the AARC, WAVAW and Reclaim the Night would never be completely successful in their attempts to turn the world against the mythology of the Ripper. It would need to be something more considered and less ‘rapid-response’ to achieve that aim.

The ‘Jack the Ripper and the East End’ exhibition at the Museum in Docklands in 2008 reflected a welcome change in approach to the study of the Whitechapel murders which had been developing gradually since the centenary furore. For so long the Ripper story had been dominated by the media in increasingly outlandish movies, irresponsible populist journalism and the popular imagination of those who were merely content to soak up what that media spoon-fed them. The case of Jack the Ripper, as a subject, was bigger, more wide-ranging and more deserving of a proper evaluation than it had so far been allowed. Through the work of dedicated researchers, it had become a platform for studies into late Victorian social history, the history of law enforcement, immigration, culture and any number of related factors. It was the effect the murders had on these issues that made ‘Ripperology’ such an appealing area for research, something lost on the average tabloid-reader or movie-goer. And thus, in a world dominated by ‘amateur’ historians and crime enthusiasts, the Ripper came under the close scrutiny of academics, perhaps a little late in the game, but nonetheless giving the field a sheen of respectability that so many genuine authors had attempted to bestow upon it for decades.

The Jack the Ripper conferences in Britain and America had been bringing together like-minded enthusiasts from around the world since 1996, and London’s own ‘Cloak and Dagger Club’
²¹
had done likewise, both presenting guest speakers on a range of topics relating to the case. The internet, via
Casebook: Jack the Ripper
and other websites, had turned ‘Ripperology’ into a fast-paced research field which often threw new light on not just the case itself, but the events that were the cause and result of the murders. The world of academia duly took notice.
²²

The Museum in Docklands exhibition was therefore a product of that shift. Using artefacts from the Museum of London’s own collection as well as original documents from the National Archives and private collectors, it produced an extremely impartial overview of the period and the crimes themselves. As well as items which demonstrated factors in the lives of East End dwellers at the time, the exhibition included notable paraphernalia from the Ripper case – original police statements, Ripper letters (including the ‘Dear Boss’ letter) and objects belonging to key figures in the investigation. The Macnaghten memoranda and the Maybrick Diary were present, as was Walter Sickert’s painting
Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom
, but the exhibition did not push any suspects.

Here was a genuine attempt to put the murders into their historical context to the point of being described by one reviewer as ‘The History of the East End (by stealth)’, as well as an attempt to dispel the wider myths, fictions and misconceptions. A series of lectures was undertaken, featuring established Ripper authors as well as East End historians, writers and academics. All the Whitechapel murder victims were represented, from Emma Smith to Frances Coles, and the final exhibit, a separate area where visitors could view the mortuary
photographs through small windows (complete with warning), attempted at least to avoid the crass sensationalism of exhibits like the London Dungeon. Of course, on that score, there was a certain amount of protest from feminist groups; despite the unsensational, perhaps conciliatory nature of the project, it did not quite please everyone:

I’d rather I hadn’t looked at the cigarette card style, sepia photos of the victims that are displayed at the end of the exhibition. Each one is lined up along a starkly lit, white circular wall that forms a sort of round, mini-gallery. There is a warning on the outside, that some may find the crime scene photos disturbing. They certainly are images I could have done without putting into my head, and now they are an addition to all the other horrors that men inflict on women that I know far too much about. As I walked round the photos, with the name of each woman underneath, like some sort of ghoulish roll call, it felt like a memorial; an unfitting memorial. It made me think that perhaps we do need somewhere to remember our dead, to remember all our sisters fallen in a struggle that has been going on for far too long. But this place is not in a museum exhibition dedicated to one of their killers.

When I left, I felt rather sullied, and found myself wondering what I’d been part of.
²³

The book published to accompany the exhibition
²⁴
was a handsome, full-colour affair, featuring essays by a number of academics on different aspects of the case, a companion perhaps to
Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, Diversity
, a similar, less glossy offering from the previous year.
²⁵
Both took a fresh stance from an academic viewpoint, one that is instantly recognizable as being different from that of the conventional
‘Ripperologist’. In fact the Ripper exhibition tie-in book actually had very little about Jack the Ripper in it, preferring to concentrate on analysis of the more tangential subject matter that the Ripper case often throws up. Despite this, one thing was very telling; this may have been a robust and thoughtful look at the subject, but it still needed the man with the top hat in the fog on its cover to deliver the message.