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Chris Scott
Chief Inspector
Username: Chris
Post Number: 855
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, January 29, 2004 - 2:08 pm: |       |
I have found a rival account of the selling of the grapes to jack and have managed to find some details about the alleged witness.
Annie Tapper
From Tom Cullen: The Crimes and Times of Jack the Ripper.
"'I can see Jack the Ripper just as plain as I see you sitting there," excalimed Mrs. Annie Tapper, a short, stout Polish woman in her early eighties, whose iron grey hair was cut short and who wore glasses of the unbecoming National Health variety. We were seated in the kitchen of the council flat near the Cable Street docks, which Mrs. Tapper shares with her third husband. Mrs. tapper was a girl of nine when, she claims, she not only saw Jack the Ripper but waited upon him in a shop, selling him a bunch of grapes ('Almiras, I think they were called - those pale green ones.') which were reported to have been found still grasped in the hand of one of the murder victims. 'I'll tell you what he looked like as sure as this is Friday. He was tall and dark, foreign looking, I would say, with a black, pointed beard. I couldn't tell you the colour of his eyes for he kept looking down. But hewore a bobtail coat with striped trousers and he carried a Gladstone bag.' She paused, searched her memory for some overall impression. 'He looked like he was dressed up for wedding, only he didn't have a top hat.'"
Annie Tapper was slightly at fault about her age, assuming she served the Ripper in 1888 for at that time she would have been 12 years of age. Her maiden name was Annie Silberman and in the 1891 census she is listed as living at 51 Commercial Street with her family as follows:
Head:
Jacob Silberman aged 61 born Poland, Russia - Watchmaker
Wife:
Rose Silberman aged 35 born Poland
Children:
Annie aged 15 born Poland - Tailoress
Barnet aged 13 born Poland
Sophia aged 6 born Whitechapel
Goldie aged 4 born Whitechapel
Leah aged 1 born Whitechapel
Lodger:
Rose Frankell aged 20 born Whitechapel -Tailoress
None of the family members are listed in the 1881 census so must have moved to UK after that date. From the birthplaces of the children we can deduce they moved after 1878 (birth of Barnet) and before 1885 (birth of Sophia)
Any further details I will post here
Chris |
Natalie Severn
Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 243
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, January 29, 2004 - 4:21 pm: | |
A fascinating find Chris.awaiting more information[if available].many thanks for posting it.I wonder did she hear him speak? Also if she had an idea of his age?I"m wary because others saw a fellow with a black bag in the vicinity and at or near the time and he was traced by the police and found to have nothing more in it than some packets of cigarettes that as a commercial traveller he was entitled to have[I think I have rememered this correctly but I have forgotten the source so cant check it out
Anyway Thanks again Natalie. |
John Savage
Detective Sergeant
Username: Johnsavage
Post Number: 144
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 30, 2004 - 6:11 pm: | |
Hi Chris and Natalie
I think you may be taking this quote from Tom Cullen's book slightly out of context. Reading the preceeding paragraphs it would seem that Cullen quoted Mrs Tapper simply to show some of the confused memories of people alive at the time of the murders, who were still living when he wrote (1960's). I qote under the relevent passage precceding that above:
Hope this helps
John Savage |
John Savage
Detective Sergeant
Username: Johnsavage
Post Number: 146
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 30, 2004 - 6:23 pm: | |
Hi Again,
Second attempt to post that info.
The years have brought no abatement of interest in Jack the Ripper, as far as Londoners are concerned. In fact, he has become a figure of folklore, as I discovered when I wrote to three East London newspapers in the hopes that some of their readers might be able to shed light on the Ripper mystery. The response to this appeal was surprising in view of the fact that the murders occurred seventy six years ago. Most of those who replied were old age pensioners in their lat seventies and eighties (the oldest person I interviewed was ninety), but they remembered the events vividly either through witnessing them as children, or through listening to their parents talk.
Some of my informants were genuinely mistaken as to their facts. One old man, for example, got the Ripper murders mixed up with the Sidney Street Siege, which occurred in the same area at a much later date, and which was made memorable by the presence of young Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, who risked his neck to watch police shoot it out with two Lithuanian anarchists. But thanks to them I found that the Ripper is still very much alive, at least east of Aldgate. East End mothers still frighten their offspring with the bogey, “The Ripper will get you if you don’t watch out”. And the same offspring skip rope chanting, “Jack The Ripper/Stole a kipper/Hid it in his father’s slipper “. In Argyll the rhyme has to do with the Ripper “cutting his throat with Sunlight soap”.
The image of Jack the Ripper which East London retains, as I discovered from these interviews, is straight out of Victorian melodrama. He is the waxen-moustached villain of Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn, who was hissed by the parents of present day East Enders when he played the Paragon or the old Pavilion music hall in Whitechapel Road. “ I can see Jack the Ripper, just as plain as I see you sitting there,” exclaimed Mrs. Annie Tapper……….etc.
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annie tapper