Author: Richard Jones

The Jews Free School was established in 1732 as the Talmud Torah of the Great Synagogue of London, and served orphans of the community. In 1822, the School moved to Bell Lane, in Spitalfields, and, throughout the 19th […]

Although the Whitechapel Murders received a huge amount of newspaper coverage throughout the autumn of 1888, they were, of course, not the only crimes that took place in the East End of London. Indeed, violent crime was commonplace […]

Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram (1858 – 1946) was Bishop of London from 1901 to 1939. Prior to that, he had been a vicar in Bethnal Green, followed by a stint as the rural dean of Spitalfields. When, in April 1902, […]

If the Jack the Ripper murders did one thing, it was to attract the attention of the world’s media to the sheer sordidness of the area in which the crimes were carried out. Newspapers from across the globe […]

For me, one of the delights of studying the Victorian newspapers in search of information on the Jack the Ripper crimes is the opportunity to glimpse the everyday life of the people of the area at the time […]

There are Jack the Ripper suspects against whom the case is so tenuous as to border on the libellous, were that suspect still alive! One such suspect is the poet Francis Thompson (1859 -1907). Thompson’s poetry possesses a […]

In June, 1889, Dr Francis Tumblety, who the previous year had been arrested on suspicion of being Jack the Ripper, was arrested in New York, and charged with assaulting a man by the name of George Davis. It […]

A genuinely intriguing thing about the Jack the Ripper murders is that they generated a huge amount of interest, not just in Britain, but throughout the entire world. Indeed, as the murders increased in number and ferocity, newspapers […]

Gaining a clear understanding of the layout of the streets of Whitechapel, and the problems encountered by the police as they tried to hunt Jack the Ripper through the East End slums in 1888, can be something of […]

Well, summer is well and truly upon us and, as the year passes, it is time for the August 2019 Jack the Ripper history and true crime Quiz. If you are a regular quiz taker, then you won’t […]