There is No Easy Way to Say This: Jack the Ripper

I spent the latter half of the day in Whitechapel.  Whitechapel is a VERY odd place.  They have taken great pains to keep a lot of the old West End’s hovels and cobbled roads intact for historic purposes, but a lot of the city was destroyed in WWII and has been rebuilt.  And the rebuild looks like downtown New York.  So, you have these little cobble stone alleys with old rundown apartment houses and saloons, mixed in (and I do mean within the same block) with these modern sky scrapers.  Very odd place indeed.

I started off with a tour of the Jack the Ripper museum.  I gave myself about 2 hours there, and it took me about 30 mins to go through it all.  It was a very interesting place (with reenactments and copies of police reports, letters from the killer, etc.).  Pretty dark stuff, but I knew what I was getting into.  What hit me the most was the mortuary room, where I think they did a very good job of immortalizing and respecting the victims, rather than making the Ripper seem like a hero or someone to idolize (in some sick way).

I then went on a Jack the Ripper tour, which I admit was a letdown in some ways, and also unbelievably extraordinary.  Our host (Johnny), was very entertaining and did a good job keeping us entertained during the 2 hour (yes, 2 HOUR) hike through Whitechapel, visiting all of the sites of the killings.  An interesting fact that I did not know:  There was (and still is) a separate London government and police force just outside of Whitechapel that is completely independent of the British Monarchy.  He joked “If the Queen were to come on my tour—and unfortunately she never has, but I keep hoping—the head of the London City government could come and escort her out of the city.”  Because there were actually two separate police forces investigating (depending on where the murder was committed), it made it even more difficult to catch the killer (even though all of the murders took place within a short walk of each other.

The reason why I was disappointed was that it was billed as a “Hologram tour” that let you see actors and actresses in holograms reenacting the incidents.  But since it is summer, it was never dark enough to actually use the technology, which was the only reason why I took the tour in the first place.  However, Johnny was a very entertaining tour guide and I had a great time.  I especially loved at the end, how he told us the most important thing to take away from the tour were the lives and tragedies of the victims themselves, repeating each of their names and showing each of their pictures again, instead of fantasizing about who the Ripper is.  He also explained a lot about the different detectives and how he respected Inspector Abberline the most (he also highly recommended the 1988 TV series starring Michael Cain as Abberline).  In the end, I was happy to have done it, and hope to check out that TV series (Johnny could be very convincing).

Jeff:  Aug 13^th, 2017