MURDER MOST FOUL No 22
£1.80 (incl. Postage, from: PO Box 735, London SE26 5N)
Review by Paul Daniel:
The current issue of this quarterly magazine is most definitely a compulsory purchase for anyone interested in the Whitechapel Murders of 1888. Apart from being brilliant value at £1.80 including postage, it devotes half of it's entire contents to the case - that's forty pages. There are four articles, many pictures (some not seen before, some familiar old favourites and some, peculiar and suspect), another suggested candidate for the Ripper crimes, and all presented in the rather sensationalist style typical of True Crime magazines. It is fascinating reading, and of course contains errors and misinformation, as one might expect. This in no way detracts from the pleasure to be got from these articles. The first is by Brian Marriner, an old hand at this kind of writing, who comes up with the possibility of George Hutchinson being the culprit. I have not been able to trace a Peabody Building on any of the corners of Wentworth Street and Commercial Street, and assume that, in describing Hutchinson's pad as "...the Victoria Homes, sometimes known as Peabody Buildings...", Marriner is referring to the Peabody Buildings (the first ever built) on the corner of Folgate Street (White Lion Street in 1888), and still standing today. And if Hutchinson's pad was those buildings, they were certainly not a doss house. An interesting, if not new, theory, with certain weaknesses, I feel.
The second article is a long synopsis of the case history. Most readers will know this information backwards by now, but it includes some fascinating pictures. Arguably the clearest reproduction of the famous George Yard Buildings photograph, some grotesque artist impressions of the victims, two pre- WWII pictures of Bucks Row that this reviewer has never seen before, some bizarre, and totally inaccurate, models of two of the murder sites, which I am told were made by William Stewart, and a picture of the side wall of 40 Berner Street, which may also be another model, otherwise could only have been taken during demolition of Dutfield's Yard for the building of the school which now stands in it's place.
Next comes Matthew Spicer's piece on Constable Ernest Thompson, alleging that he "...saw the Ripper..." but that is only to be believed if you consider Frances Coles (d. 13 Feb 1891) to be a Ripper victim. Most people do not. This includes a marvellous picture of Det Serg Leeson, looking uncannily like a Chicago gangster!
The last piece, by Bernard Brown, another police officer, is reprinted from the Police History Society Journal 1995, and presents a fascinating theory suggesting that the Ripper might have been a policeman and able to escape from his crime sites so swiftly by utilising his knowledge of the Underground Railway system, already well in place by 1888. But in putting forward this idea, he includes all the victims that research over the years has virtually eliminated.
It is plain that a lot of hard work, research and effort has gone into producing this issue of Murder Most Foul, and I advise everyone interested to snap up a copy or two quickly - before it becomes a collector's item.
This article first appeared in Issue 9 of Ripperologist, published by the Cloak & Dagger Club. |
