Goulston Street: The Quest for Jack the Ripper

Product Information

PC Long had, in fact, walked past the same doorway at 2.20am, at more or less the same time that Daniel Halse had also passed through Goulston Street, and, like Halse, he had seen nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, he was emphatic that he would, most certainly, have noticed had the piece of apron been there then and he was, therefore, sure that it hadn't been. THE APRON'S SIGNIFICANCE

Goulston Street first appeared as a small passage in the 1730s, but within ten years had been widened and extended as far as Goulston Square, a former garden which sat half way between Wentworth and Whitechapel High Streets. The street was extended further north between 1800 and 1830, this part initially being called New Goulston Street. The ’New’ prefix was soon dropped.These remaining references do not seem to describe a large portion of apron, as might be expected, the smaller piece presumably being the portion found in Goulston St. But maybe we've presumed wrong. The anti-GSG person believes that the Ripper was an essentially illiterate suspect being who wouldn’t write the GSG, or at best, someone incapable of writing a message such as the GSG.

It may be realised therefore if the safety of the Jews in Whitechapel could be considered to be jeopardised 13 days after the murder by the question of the spelling of the word Jews, what might have happened to the Jews in that quarter had that writing been left intact. At the Wentworth Building, the Ripper’s neatly constructed message took 30 to 45 seconds to put together. An old article in Ripperologist that I put together discusses the mechanics of writing three or four different messages. The longest to perform, a legible and easily understood message, took 30-45 seconds on several attempts on my part. The second word, a persistent point of confusion in the graffiti, could still be misunderstood even after I had told people what I had just written. I feel strongly that the subsequent differences of opinion by the police in their transcription occurred precisely because it was the easiest word to misread. The police on the spot were as prone to making mistakes as anyone else and when faced with the task of transcription, simply made a mistake that people in the 21st Century still do. In addition, the two eyewitnesses with their slight differences in spelling probably make the other variations irrelevant. The others, like Anderson and Smith, were based on what the reporters or editors of their newspaper articles and memoirs wrote down. We don?t know for certain if it was a mistaken spelling by the editors or reporters and overlooked by Anderson and Smith either... or if it was as they thought they remembered it in the final analysis. The GSG was not the central idea of either Anderson’s article or Smith’s memoirs, which may have been a reason why it wasn’t treated with the focus being done here and in other debates about it.

In fact there had been no mention of Eddowes cut apron until the body was being stripped in Golden Lane mortuary, it may not have been obvious that she was wearing an apron until the body was at the mortuary. A Home Office minute sheet (30th October 1888) stated that the word Jews was spelt 'Jewes' as opposed to 'Juwes'. [6] Illustration of Sir Charles Warren inspecting the Goulston Street graffito. Published in The Illustrated Police News 20 October 1888

Since the available evidence suggests that the ripper asphyxiated his victims before carrying out his repellent mutilations, their hearts would have all but stopped beating by the time he cut their throats and thus he would have avoided the arterial spurt that would have resulted in him becoming heavily bloodstained when he cut the carotid artery. Author John Wilding pointed out that letters in the graffito can be rearranged to say "FG Abberline now hate MJ Druitt. He sent the woman to hell" as part of his theory implicating Druitt and J K Stephen in the murders [16]. If Long and Halse were correct in their assertion that the portion of apron hadn't been there at 2.20am, then the murderer had loitered in the area for anywhere between 35 minutes and an hour, during which time the police were fanning out into the area to search for him, and were stopping and questioning any man they met. After having been to the scene of the murder, I went on to the City Police Office and informed the Chief Superintendant of the reason why the writing had been obliterated.

Columbia Road Flower Market (Sundays)

Aldgate (Metropolitan, Circle);Aldgate East (Hammersmith & City, District);Bethnal Green Rail (London Overground);Whitechapel (District, Hammersmith & City, London Overground) Chrisp Street Market (Monday to Saturday) The answer to these questions will be known when we find the exact location of the graffiti, where was it written, on what portion of wall? Bethnal Green (Central); Shoreditch (London Overground) and Whitechapel (District, Hammersmith & City, London Overground). Parking

At the time, Whitechapel was home to a growing number of Jewish immigrants from all over Europe. They were viewed with suspicion because of their often socialist political views, as well as from plain old racial prejudice. A notorious murder case had recently taken place in the neighborhood perpetrated by a Jewish man named Israel Lipski, and his name had turned into a slur against Jewish people. Additionally, John Pizer, another Jewish man and an early Ripper suspect, was almost killed by an angry mob. Superintendent Thomas Arnold of H Division said: There is an array on offer from the bustling stalls here. You’ll find fresh fruit, exotic vegetables, spices, fashion, cultural wear and jewellery. Location The apron reveals just how much visible blood he did have on his person for, as he made his way through the streets, he would, undoubtedly, have had blood on his hands and on the blade of his knife and would have been anxious to wipe this away as soon as possible.The missing segment of the apron was found by PC Alfred Long as he patrolled his beat along Goulston Street at 2.55am that morning. This is true. The actions of Warren and the police were justified, because they saw things differently in 1888 concerning the GSG as a potential clue. Many people lament that the GSG was not photographed. Perhaps Warren felt that by simply transcribing it down on paper, they had ‘enough’ to work with. I hope they didn’t transcribe any other clues or messages as poorly as they did in this case! It might have also been equally frustrating to us, as well as to those in 1888, to try to interpret what the message meant even with a photograph. The only guarantee is that the actual sentence construction would no more have been a mystery. As with almost everything Ripper-related in the Whitechapel Murders, divisions even among those who agree that the GSG is valid are evident. A majority of people in the pro-GSG camp believe that this 12 word message blames the Jews of the East End for something: job displacement, Klezmer music blasting at 2am, socialists and anarchists, foreigners speaking a foreign language, different looking; the list goes on. In any event, it’s for something that they are blamed. Recently, Mr Robert House added another explanation, which was featured in the latest Ripperologist, issue 58. I recommend purchasing a copy of that issue and reading Mr House’s fine story on Aaron Kosminski for his views. Daniel Halse suggested a compromise whereby only the top line, - "The Juwes are" - would be erased. The probability is that the message was already there, possibly left over from the anti-Semitic unrest that had swept the area in the wake of the Leather Apron scare, and that it was a complete coincidence that the ripper had chosen that same doorway in which to clean himself up and leave behind his only clue.