Author: Richard Jones

“O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!” So wrote Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759 – 1796), and, it has to be said, your average British Victorian was not without plenty […]

Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the East End of London became the focus of a huge amount of press coverage that highlighted the horrific living conditions in the district. This led to a huge movement […]

On Friday, 13th February, 1891, Frances Coles was found murdered in Swallow Gardens, in the East End of London, by Police Constable Ernest Thompson. This immediately led to speculation that, after an absence of several years, Jack the […]

In 1892, a ballet dancer by the name of Ada James was stabbed as she made her way through Buck’s Row, in Waterloo, South London. It should be stressed that this Buck’s Row was not the same one […]

The horrors of life for the poor and destitute in Victorian London were constantly being mentioned in the newspapers of the age. Reading the accounts of the hardships faced by those long ago residents can be both distressing […]

It is quite interesting to come across the names of the police officers who were associated with the Jack the Ripper case in connection with other cases that they worked on. In 1891, Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson’s […]

For many of those who ended up living in Spitalfields, life was, quite literally, a daily, and nightly, battle for survival. Those who could afford the necessary fourpence for a night’s accommodation, could find a bed in one […]

With the appearance in the Whitechapel murders of the “Dear Boss” letter, the perpetrator of the crimes became universally known as “Jack the Ripper”, and stories about sightings of him began turning up on an almost daily basis […]

The following article, consisting of excerpts from the memoirs of Ex-Chief Inspector, Tom Divall – who had, early on in his police career, been assigned to a beat as a constable in Whitechapel – appeared in The Gloucester […]

From almost the beginning of the Whitechapel murders, the newspapers were full of accounts from people who claimed to have met Jack the Ripper. Almost all of these accounts were disregarded by the police, amounting as they did […]