Author: Richard Jones

Mrs Frances  Power Cobbe (1822 – 1904) was a campaigning Victorian Irish writer who dedicated herself to many causes. She was, for example, an ardent social reformer who helped found homes for Workhouse girls. In 1875 she founded […]

The journalist George Sims (1847 – 1922) regularly reported on and commented on the Jack the Ripper murders and the police investigation into them. He also continued to comment and look into the crimes long after they had […]

There can be no doubt that London in the 1880’s was in the grip of an, all too familiar, gang problem. The so-called “fighting gangs of London” were, very much, a blight on Victorian society – so much […]

When studying newspaper accounts of the Jack the Ripper crimes – and, for that matter, of other crimes that took place in London during the 1880’s – one often comes across references to police procedure and how an […]

It is a well-known fact that two police forces investigated the Jack the Ripper crimes of 1888 – The Metropolitan Police (on whose territory the majority of the victims were murdered) and The City of London Police (on […]

On August 31st, 1888, Mary Nichols became the first victim of the killer who would become known as “Jack the Ripper.” The lack of motive, coupled with the sheer brutality of the mutilations inflicted on her body led […]

As I have mentioned in several previous blogs, the reputation of Whitechapel as an abyss of vice, villainy and poverty had been firmly established in the public consciousness long before the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888 drew […]

The Salvation Army was very active on the streets of the East End of London in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Their hostels provided some semblance of night time shelter for homeless drifters who found themselves […]

In his memoir I Caught Crippen, former Metropolitan Police detective Walter Dew (1863 – 1947) made the point that the area where the Whitechapel Murders occurred had long held a reputation for lawlessness. Dew had begun his career with […]

In 1903, a series of slashings of horses, cows and sheep, took place in the South Staffordshire village of Great Wyrley. In the October of that year, George Edalji (1876 – 1953) was arrested on suspicion of having […]