Old Hands & Newbies

[Paddy Goose]

Be Honest

[sdreid]

Where's over 60?

[The Grave Maurice]

Apparently Stan could read when he was 2.

[perrymason]

Fair question....fair answer,..

Ive studied the Ripper Crimes for approximately 10% of the time the real experts here have....and thats 5-6 years.

Im 50, so little old to be called "newbie", but in terms of gastronomy....Im still being fed, and we have Wolfgang Pucks here.

Cheers

[Jeff Leahy]

I voted 6 to 10...although I've been interested since Barlow and Watts in the 70's....but voting over thirty years would make me sound very old, and I'm young and free and frollecksome and open minded apart from the fact thay I think kosminski did it

Pirate

[sdreid]

Hi Maurice,

I heard about it on the radio when I was 2 and my dad gave me further instruction. It depends on what you count as studying I guess.

[The Grave Maurice]

Point taken, Stan. Your Dad was obviously a clever guy.

[DVV]

When I was in my mother's womb, my mother used to tell me everything about the case. It made me calm, and I stopped kicking her whenever she developped her theories.
She was a cutbushian.
My father had different views, but my mum would never allow him to talk.
He had to wait until she slept, and then he started to whisper on her navel.
Years after, I understood that my dad had long solved the case.
And I recently sold his theory to Canucco.
He paid me well, so I will not tell you.

[Pippin Joan]

I read Tom Cullen's Autumn of Terror in 1968. I was a rather sheltered teenage girl, compared to today's standard and it terrified and fascinated me. We weren't exposed to images of graphic violence in those days. I was as appalled by the conditions of the East End as I was by the murders.

[Sara]

I've had a passing interest in the case over a great many years esp as friends in the early 1970s wrote on it, but I've only *really* studied it in the last 18 months or so, and only in real depth (still lots of areas uncovered) in the last few months

I'm not so much a crime nut as fascinated by the 'Mysteries of History' and I look on these things as intellectual puzzles to be solved. Poring over gory crime photos is definitely not my thing and makes me quite uncomfortable, esp 'in company' so to speak.

[Limehouse]

I grew up listening to adult whispers about 'Jack'. My mother's family had lived in the East End for centuries, but most moved out to the leafy London/Essex boundaries in the early 1900s. My father grew up in Dalston and moved out to Chingford in his teens. Everyone, it seemed, knew an old lady or 'bloke' (as they called them) who had a 'Jack' story.

I did not start reading about 'Jack' for myself until I bought The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow in the mid 1970s. At the time I was a teenager with a keen interest in social history. What most interested me about the topic was the social and political landscape within which the events occurred and the way in which my own cultural and social indentity was reflected in this landscape.

[Autolycus]

Definition of "studying"?

This is an interesting thread but I wonder if anyone else is struggling with the word “studying” in the question? By way of explanation…

Sometime in the ‘70s I was trying to sleep on a friend’s floor in North London. It was darned uncomfortable and my mind was buzzing because we’d just come back from seeing The Who in Edmonton. I took a book from the shelf and began reading it in the dim light coming from the corridor and the street lamp outside. The book, with illustrations, was Rumbelow’s Complete JTR and from then on I have been fascinated by the case and the mystery.

But “studying”? I suppose I’d say around 2 years. That’s when I discovered Casebook and realised there were a number of other armchair criminologists co-existing more-or-less happily with the real experts out there.

Regards.

[Mike Covell]

Although I was aware of the crimes when I was younger, and began collecting books on the case when I was in my teens, which was abiut 15 years ago, I didn't really start studying the case until about 3 years ago.

This was when I seriously began looking into all the alleged suspects that had links to the City of Hull, and when I began looking at Robert D'Onston Stephenson, his friends, family, and flirtations with religion and mysticism.

So I would say 3 years!

[sdreid]

When will we quit studying the case?

[Pippin Joan]

When will we quit studying the case?

With our last breaths...