Author: Richard Jones

The song “If you want to know the time ask a policeman” was a hugely popular Victorian music hall song that was intended to be anything but flattering to the Metropolitan Police. The lyrics were written by Edward […]

Ask most people who the last victim of Jack the Ripper was, and the likely answer you would get would be that it was Mary Kelly – who murdered on the 9th of November, 1888, in Miller’s Court, off […]

One of the problems confronting the police as they tried to solve the mystery and locate the unknown miscreant responsible for the Jack the Ripper murders, was the complete lack of modern forensics. Indeed, it could be argued […]

The common lodging houses of the East End of London – and in particular of Spitalfields and Whitechapel – play an integral role in the story of the Jack the Ripper murders. With one exception – Mary Kelly […]

As we enter the third month of 2018 – yes two have passed already! – it’s time for another quiz on the Whitechapel murders and the history that surrounds them If you are an old hand at the […]

The “Dusthole” was one of the most notorious locations in Victorian London, possessed of a reputation so bad that even the police would not dare patrol it alone at night, and soldiers from the nearby barracks at Woolwich […]

In September, 1889, the discovery of a female torso beneath a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel, led to speculation that, not only had Jack the Ripper returned and struck again, but that he had also changed his […]

In September, 1888, Dr Forbes Winslow was being quoted extensively in the newspapers concerning the various theories he was putting forward about the type of person that the Whitechapel murderer might be, as well as concerning his possible […]

One of the many suggestions that were bandied around about ways in which the Victorian police might catch Jack the Ripper was to have men – some favoured police officers for the task, others favoured young pugilists – […]

By March, 1889, the Jack the Ripper murders in the East End of London seemed to have ceased, and the tension that had been so apparent in the district throughout the previous autumn, and over the Christmas period […]