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Hello, all.
In his 1910 autobiography From Constable To Commissioner, Henry Smith claimed that whoever scrawled the Goulston Street Graffito had been pursued to Dorset Street, and that a public sink was found which had bloody water in it, presumably from the killer stopping to wash his hands in it. This story seems not to have been reported anywhere prior to Smith's autobiography, and afterwards only once, in a 1912 edition of The People, which gives the tale as follows:
Much has been made of this piece of information, particularly by those who posit Joseph Barnett as the Ripper, given the closeness of the sink to Miller's Court and Mary Kelly's murder site. I can find no independent confirmation of this prior to 1910, however.
My concern is not the Dorset Street sink so much - and I suspect this story is apocryphal - but rather a thought it brought to mind. This particular occurrence aside, I am aware that indoor plumbing was something at least relatively rare in the East End at the time, and that public bathhouses were the more usual way of washing one's self, either that or communal washbasins in the doss houses. Obviously this would present a problem for a blood-splattered murderer; even if the victim being on the ground kept him from getting too bloody, his hands surely would be covered in it - and, if you take any of the letters at all to be genuine, most of them make mention of the writer having blood on his hands at the time of their writing.
So, presumably, a public bath would be out. I can imagine the Ripper washing his hands in a doss house washbin a little more easily, but it would still likely be hard to find the privacy for it; you may have forty or fifty lodgers in any one building at any one time, so it seems to me that the communal basin would most always be in demand.
Which suggests, to me, that a public sink like the one on Dorset Street (though not necessarily that one in particular - I am not a Barnettite) must have been available to the Ripper. Counterintuitively, he would have had more privacy washing his hands in an outside public sink, under the cover of darkness, than he would have in an indoors washbin, and certainly more than in a public bath, which would presumably have hours of operation and would always be in business when it was open.
How many such sinks were there in the vicinity of the murders? I find no others mentioned in the material, and I'm completely ignorant about such day-to-day affairs of the East End unfortunate. But I think that, wherever he lived, it was probably close to an outdoors sink. If someone had a list of all the sinks in the Whitechapel/Spitalfields area at the time - admittedly an unlikely proposition - you could probably narrow down the Ripper's dwellings pretty easily.
Was the one on Dorset Street a rarity? Was there one on every street? On every block? Were they connected to certain kinds of buildings?
Just as a hypothetical, say there were ten such sinks in the Whitechapel/Spitalfields area. I wonder if you couldn't run a geographical regression of them, eliminate the ones furthest from any crime scene, and then find the one closest to the epicenter of the murders? I suspect you'd find a doss house or a hostel there, and that your killer would probably live in it.
In his 1910 autobiography From Constable To Commissioner, Henry Smith claimed that whoever scrawled the Goulston Street Graffito had been pursued to Dorset Street, and that a public sink was found which had bloody water in it, presumably from the killer stopping to wash his hands in it. This story seems not to have been reported anywhere prior to Smith's autobiography, and afterwards only once, in a 1912 edition of The People, which gives the tale as follows:
The assassin had wiped his hands on the missing apron, and, it was further discovered, had, with remarkable audacity, washed his hands at a sink up a close in Dorset-st., only a few yards from the street...
My concern is not the Dorset Street sink so much - and I suspect this story is apocryphal - but rather a thought it brought to mind. This particular occurrence aside, I am aware that indoor plumbing was something at least relatively rare in the East End at the time, and that public bathhouses were the more usual way of washing one's self, either that or communal washbasins in the doss houses. Obviously this would present a problem for a blood-splattered murderer; even if the victim being on the ground kept him from getting too bloody, his hands surely would be covered in it - and, if you take any of the letters at all to be genuine, most of them make mention of the writer having blood on his hands at the time of their writing.
So, presumably, a public bath would be out. I can imagine the Ripper washing his hands in a doss house washbin a little more easily, but it would still likely be hard to find the privacy for it; you may have forty or fifty lodgers in any one building at any one time, so it seems to me that the communal basin would most always be in demand.
Which suggests, to me, that a public sink like the one on Dorset Street (though not necessarily that one in particular - I am not a Barnettite) must have been available to the Ripper. Counterintuitively, he would have had more privacy washing his hands in an outside public sink, under the cover of darkness, than he would have in an indoors washbin, and certainly more than in a public bath, which would presumably have hours of operation and would always be in business when it was open.
How many such sinks were there in the vicinity of the murders? I find no others mentioned in the material, and I'm completely ignorant about such day-to-day affairs of the East End unfortunate. But I think that, wherever he lived, it was probably close to an outdoors sink. If someone had a list of all the sinks in the Whitechapel/Spitalfields area at the time - admittedly an unlikely proposition - you could probably narrow down the Ripper's dwellings pretty easily.
Was the one on Dorset Street a rarity? Was there one on every street? On every block? Were they connected to certain kinds of buildings?
Just as a hypothetical, say there were ten such sinks in the Whitechapel/Spitalfields area. I wonder if you couldn't run a geographical regression of them, eliminate the ones furthest from any crime scene, and then find the one closest to the epicenter of the murders? I suspect you'd find a doss house or a hostel there, and that your killer would probably live in it.
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