One of the many things I didn't realise about the Jack the Ripper murders was that the weather in late summer of 1888 was not very good. Very similar in fact to the weather in the East End of London on Tuesday night, which is to say, very wet.
This was offered by our Ripper tour guide Dave as something of a consolation for the fact that by the time we had finished the tour on Tuesday evening all 30 of us were soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone: it was surely not as cold in August and September 1888.
The enduring appeal of the Jack the Ripper murders - perhaps revived by a recent television series - was illustrated by the fact that at least three tour parties were out in Spitalfields and Whitechapel in the relentless rain on Tuesday. I estimated that there were probably at least 80 people in total. On our tour there were Australians, New Zealanders, Americans and at least one German (struggling with an uncooperative red umbrella) showing that the appeal is international.
At the conclusion of the tour, Dave offered two theories about why the murders still hold a firm grip on the dark side of the public imagination. The first is that the time, the atmosphere and the grisly nature of the killings contribute to a "spook" factor that appeals to that odd part of some of us that likes to be scared. The alternative is that despite years of formal investigation, 120 years of amateur sleuthing and dozens of books and films on the subject, precisely nothing is known about the Ripper other than that he (or even she) is dead. The complete lack of physical evidence in the case, besides a strip of leather left in a doorway, has left a genuine mystery - perhaps the greatest unsolved crime mystery there is.
The fact that the case is so open has resulted, Dave reported, in no fewer than 200 people being suggested as suspect, and a cast range so diverse as to include a future, a Jewish slaughterman and a mad midwife.
Dave's tour was mercifully free of the conspiracy theories that rage around the Ripper. He guided us from Aldgate East tube station through the backstreets of Whitechapel via each of the accessible murder sites towards a final stop in Mitre Square in the shadow of the gherkin in the City, where the body of Catherine Eddowes was found. Along the way we saw some of the last remnants of Victorian London in the terraced houses of Fournier and Hanbury Streets. And in the gloomy darkness of those claustrophobic throughways it was just about possible to recover some of the eery atmosphere of late 19th century London, when the East End was an imporverished slum, a festering boil on the respectable face of the world's most important financial centre.
Quite what the people of the abyss - as the East End was labelled then, notably by Jack London in his excellent book of the same name - would make of three bedroom houses (where 20 or more of them might have slept then) in Fournier Street going for sums in excess of a million pounds, is anyone's guess.
But however much things might have changed there is a tangible air of desperation and danger around the modern East End.
In all it was £7 and 100 minutes well spent - despite the brush with hypothermia. Dave was informative and entertaining and the tour moved with purpose. He gave a decent historical overview of the social and economic conditions of the late Victorian East End.
In truth, I found that more interesting than the step by step account of the murders and so did not get as much from the tour as one conducted by the academic Bill Fishman, a man with a marvellous story-telling gift, that I went on in 1992 when I was a student at nearby Queen Mary College. Fishman's tour had a much broader remit, covering immigration and the politics of radicalism, but even he had a visible twinkle in the eye when passing known Ripper sites.
For anyone interested in that era I recommend Fishman's book East End 1888, to which Jack London's reportage account of life on the streets in The People of the Abyss is a perfect complement.
Fishman is now in his late 80s and so probably doesn't give tours any more, so as an alternative, particular if you are interested inthe Ripper, I can thoroughly recommend Dave.
