Jack the Ripper: the Victims' Dignity Restored

 

Like so many other people since 1888, I have had an interest in the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Again, like so many others, I have read a number of books and watched no end of films and documentaries about what we saw as of prime interest: who was Jack the Ripper? Why did he kill five prostitutes in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888? Why was he never caught? The identity of Jack, and his motivation, have been of almost exclusive and obsessive interest for over a century. I even wrote about it myself back in October, 2012.

Halie Rubenhold's book comes as a welcome counterbalance to our preoccupation with who Jack was by investigating the lives of what are called the five "canonical" victims of Jack the Ripper (Ripperologists say there might be more). Rubenhold has meticulously examined all the documentary evidence available to the modern researcher, including the coroner's reports (three cannot be found) and a mass of newspaper articles. She does not include details of the victims' deaths, which are usually described in chilling detail in the popular books about the Ripper. I had always believed that all the victims were prostitutes. Rubenhold demonstrates that there is no evidence of prostitution for three of the victims; the press at the time simply attached that term to all women who lived in "common lodging houses" or slept rough on the streets. She says:

 "...on the nights they were killed, no-one came forward to state they had been solicited by Polly, Annie, Kate or Elizabeth".

The murders themselves, instead of being prostitute/client liaisons, might have happened simply because the victims were asleep, or helplessly drunk.

Frances Wilson, in The Guardian, says of the victims:

"Their lives are grimly similar: born into hardship, they moved from the briefest of childhoods into a cycle of childbearing, alcohol dependence, poverty, emotional despair and homelessness.

After reading the book, I totally concur in that verdict. Besides this, Rubenhold illustrates the invidious position of women - especially working class women - in Victorian society. Women were expected to be paragons of faithfulness and propriety. Any deviation from this norm was severely frowned upon; any woman who had sex before marriage, committed adultery, or drank too much, risked losing everything, while no such calamity awaited men. Besides this, there was the hazard of domestic violence, which was widely tolerated at the time. There were also the burdens of frequent pregnancy and the daily struggle to survive.  The five Ripper victims were victims of all these factors before they encountered the Ripper. Death at his hands for them could almost be described as a sort of merciless release.

Polly Nicholls, the first victim, endured four years of a violent relationship before she was driven from her family after her husband began an affair with the woman next door. Annie Chapman was married to a coach man with good prospects but, at a time when alcoholism was not recognised as an illness, became an alcoholic. This led to her marriage break-up and the road to Whitechapel.

The third victim. Elizabeth Stride, nee Gustafsdotter, came from Sweden where, as a young girl, she had contracted syphilis and become something of a social pariah. Coming to work in London as a domestic servant, she later married John Stride and, for a time, ran a coffee-shop. The failure of her ventures led to a descent into alcohol abuse, homelessness and her murder on September 30, 1888. Catherine Eddowes, who died on the same September night in Mitre Square, also had a history of wandering, together with domestic violence. When younger, she left her Wolverhampton home for Birmingham, then London. She lived with a "chapman" (an itinerant seller of tracts and ballads) who beat her frequently. After leaving him, she teamed up with one John Kelly. 500 mourners turned out for her funeral. The final - and most horribly mutilated - victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was something of an enigma. After her gruesome death, no relatives ever came forward, so it is uncertain whether we have her real name or not. She seems to have escaped back to London after being trafficked to Paris by an organised gang of pimps. She had previously worked in a brothel in a fashionable part of London, but it's now thought she went to Whitechapel to escape the traffickers. Sadly, she did not escape Jack the Ripper, who took her life on November 9th, 1888.

Reading this book was a salutary experience, and I shall not think of Jack's victims in the same way again. Rubenhold's aim was to restore their dignity as human beings, and in that she has succeeded. I cannot better this conclusion from Frances Wilson: 

"The Five is not simply about the women who were murdered in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888: it is for them. This is a powerful and a shaming book, but most shameful of all is that it took 130 years to write."

Brexit: The Human Cost

 

In the previous blog post, Rednev admirably sums up the hypocrisy of Leave campaigners and details the emerging economic costs of Brexit. I totally support him in this, as I endorse the views of the pro-EU groups who work tirelessly to highlight the negative impact of Brexit upon the fishing industry, on travel to Europe, the deteriorating situation in Northern Ireland and the worsening nightmare of traffic congestion near Dover. Brexit is an unfolding economic disaster, if present trends continue. I do hope things improve, but that will be no thanks to Brexit or any of the Brexiteers.

However, there is one negative effect of Brexit that cannot be improved upon, and that is the human cost. In my view, this cost already amounts to a disaster of huge proportions, dating back to the referendum campaign itself. I am sad to note that none of our leading politicians or media commentators recognise this, so I think it worth mentioning here. 

There are three broad categories to this disaster, the first of which is the rise in hate crime following the referendum. Home Office figures in 2019 bear this out. BBC Wales reported:

"North Wales Police reported 416 crimes in 2014, rising to 476 in 2016 and 858 in 2018.
Gwent Police reported a rise from 374 in 2015-16 to 651 in 2018-19
South Wales Police said there were 879 incidents in 2013-14, rising to 1,102 in 2014-15, 1,232 in in 2015-16 and 1,244 in 2017"

The human rights group, Rene Cassin, in a report submitted to the Home Affairs Select Committee commented: 

"We are concerned that reports of hate crime have risen almost by three-fifths since the aftermath of the EU referendum vote as recorded by True Vision.2 Complaints filed increased fivefold after the EU referendum, with 331 hate crime incidents reported to the site, compared with a weekly average of 63.3".

I know several victims of hate crime, and recognise what a disaster it is for them. Not that any prominent Leave politicians have ever recognised this.

This would be bad enough, but there have been unpleasant personal consequences in the social divisions over Brexit in wider society. The Independent commissioned an opinion poll, which found: 

"More than one in 20 Britons (6 per cent) say they have fallen out with or stopped speaking to a family member and almost one in 12 (8 per cent) with a friend because of rows over Brexit, according to a new survey... the polling suggested a stark generational divide over the issue, with 42 per cent of 18-24 year-olds and 28 per cent of 25-34 year-olds reporting heated arguments with other family members over the issue of EU withdrawal."

Even foreign commentators have written about this British trauma. The New York Times, in an article titled "Of Civil Wars and Family", said, in 2019: 

"Like the election of President Trump, the 2016 Brexit referendum vote crystallized divisions between cities and towns, young and old, the beneficiaries of globalization and those left behind...in the aftermath of the referendum, Relate, a counselling service, said that a fifth of the 300 relationship support practitioners surveyed had worked with clients who argued over Brexit."

Nor are these divisions likely to heal at any time soon. As the economic effects of Brexit worsen, those of us who voted Remain will justifiably speak out with forcefulness. How Leave voters and campaigners react should be interesting - some might even admit to having been wrong.

But there are two people for whom there will be no possible change in their situation: the two people who have died violent deaths following the start of the EU referendum campaign, before and after the actual vote. One, of course, was the much-loved Labour MP, Jo Cox, murdered by Thomas Mair, June 16, 2016. The other, lesser known death, was that of Duncan Keating in Ancoats, Manchester, June 25, 2016, two days after the EU referendum. Jo Cox was a passionate Remainer, while Duncan Keating had voted Leave. Thomas Mair was a fascist with a history of mental illness, but was triggered into action by the Leave campaign. As The Guardian says: 

"Brexit campaigners were claiming that a remain vote would result in “swarms” of immigrants entering the UK, that it could trigger mass sexual attacks. Just hours before the murder, Ukip unveiled its infamous “breaking point” anti-immigration poster. Mair came to regard Cox as one of “the collaborators”, a traitor to his race. The passionate defender of immigration and the remain campaign was a legitimate target in his eyes".

Duncan Keating was a 58-year old pensioner who had a violent argument about the referendum with a Remain-voting neighbour, 62-year old Graham Dunn. As the Manchester Evening News said:

"Brexiter Duncan Keating, 58, was hit with a parasol, thumped repeatedly, and threatened he would be set alight in an attack at a retirement complex just days after the (referendum) result."

Six hours after being beaten up, Keating was found dead from causes which the coroner ruled did not relate to his assault. Dunn, when taken to court, admitted assault and was jailed for four years and five months.

To conclude, I believe that, in human terms, Brexit already is a disaster. Economic harm can be mitigated; nothing can bring back the dead or truly eradicate the effects of racist violence. Leave politicians and campaigners will doubtless dismiss these matters as "collateral damage". It is up to the rest of us to condemn them for this and challenge them: in human terms, was Brexit worth it?

Jo Cox, M.P.

You never stopped moaning, so why should we?

I recently read in our local paper a Leaver declare how delighted he was that the UK had finally left the EU, thus finally implementing the will of the people. While it's wholly understandable why a Eurosceptic would be pleased just now, I consider that he is on shakier ground when he describes the outcome as 'the will of the people'. A democratic vote is essentially a snapshot of opinion at any given moment - it is not a mandate for all eternity, proved by the fact the 2016 EU vote was the second we have had on the subject. The 1975 referendum resulted in more than two thirds voting to remain. If referendum results are supposed to last forever, the second vote should never have been called, but as we have had two, there is no logical reason why at some future date we cannot have a third.

I have looked at the results of eleven opinion polls conducted since September 2020 and all reported a majority for Remain by margins of between 4% and 10%. While I tend to take opinion polls with a pinch of salt, such consistency is fairly unusual, suggesting that the will of the people may well have changed in the four and a half years since we voted. Before the final result was declared in 2016, Nigel Farage stated that if it turned out to be 52% Remain to 48% Leave, that would not be the end of the matter. Oddly enough, when the actual result came through at 51.9% Leave to 48.1% Remain, he moved the goalposts and declared the result was final.

Some Leavers demand that, after more than four years, we 'Remoaners' should accept the democratic result and just shut up, sometimes even suggesting that we should now 'get behind the vote' for the good of the country. This is a bit rich, seeing that Eurosceptics never stopped complaining about Europe in the entire 41 years between the two referenda.

Although my politics are profoundly different from our prime minister's, I genuinely would like his breezy optimism about the UK's future to be justified as I do not want to see our country go into decline. However I am not encouraged by the sight of huge lorry parks in Kent, our fish going rotten before it can be exported due to bureaucratic delays, many thousands of financial services jobs being relocated to EU capitals, or musicians booked to perform in Europe facing copious and expensive red tape. If our future is so rosy, why have some wealthy and vociferous Leave campaigners obtained passports from EU countries for themselves and their families and in many instances moved their own businesses abroad? What do they know that they're not telling us?

The whole referendum campaign was skewed by barefaced lies - such as £350 million per week for the NHS - and not all just from one side. Regrettably, the flood of distortions has yet to be stemmed, and problems arising from leaving the EU will hit us ordinary people on the ground the hardest, not the rich and powerful who have the means to cushion themselves. As the old music hall song says: "It's the poor what gets the blame, it's the rich what gets the pleasure".

I hope I'm wrong in seeing little benefit in leaving the EU, but I seriously doubt that I am.