Motives for Druitt and Kosminski?

[Phil H]

that's one crazy city. I have less trouble finding the Sea of Tranquility.

I assume that you are used to neat modern cities with grid-iron plans and roughly equal sized blocks.

Sorry, London is 2,000 years old, maybe more, and the street plan reflects that. It is understandable, if you walk it and learn about its development.

After the Great fire of 1666, Sir Christopher Wren did dream of creating an Italianate city of planned roads, radiating from a plaza around a rebuilt St Paul's and with regularly placed piazettas and intersections, but ancient ownership rights defeated him.

Thus in part at least the area around the Tower of London is medieval in origin. Some street, for instance The Minories (mentioned in a JtR letter), is on the site of a medieval convent of the Minoresses. Whitechapel and Spitalfields were developed rather later C17th and C18th, but piecemeal. the writhing course of the River Thames also plays a part - with the commercial docks starting just east of the Tower.

the thing to look out for, to get a grasp on how it works, is to look for the arterial roads, Bishopsgate, Cheapside (both in the City) and Commercial Road and Street and Whitechapel High Street/Road. Those allow you to settle the position of the side streets.

Depending on the depth of your interest, a copy of one of the books on JtR's London then and now might help you picture it better.

Phil H

[Roy Corduroy]

Where is Goulston St., in relation to the synagogues?

Here is a map concerning victim Catherine Eddowes (thread) overlaid in Yellow - A Bevis Marks and B Great Synagogue.



1 City Police find her inebriated
2 detained at Bishopsgate Police Station
3 Mitre Square, site of murder
4 Apron piece found on Goulston

a 1940 map (here)

For some outstanding map work by Rob Clack of the immediate Mitre Square area go the Photo Archive section on your left.

Roy

[RivkahChaya]

I assume that you are used to neat modern cities with grid-iron plans and roughly equal sized blocks.

I'm an American. Although, I have been to London. I took a lot of cabs, and apparently over-tipped, because drivers kept asking if I knew that bronze-looking coin was a pound. Actually, I took the subway a lot too, and I did fine with the subway map.

When I have a map that has a list of streets, and tells me that Goulston is in J6 on the grid, or wherever, I'm fine. I just couldn't get oriented on the map upthread, and I really don't know where anything is. I've seen Whitechapel maps before, but having just been there the one brief time, following a tour guide, I really have no sense of what should be north or east of what. I can find the East End on a map of London.

Some day, we'll watch a TV show set in New York city together, and I'll point out all the mistakes, like how you can't get from Battery Park to Harlem in 5 minutes, or why there wouldn't be one homicide unit for all of Manhattan. There isn't technically any "East Village," either, no matter how often LA screenwriters put it into scripts.

Thank you SO much, Roy.

[Cogidubnus]

Refreshing honesty Rivkah...and I'm sure you know a helluva lot more about London than most of us right-ponders know about New York...so returning to the thread....

All the best

Dave

[RivkahChaya]

Refreshing honesty Rivkah...and I'm sure you know a helluva lot more about London than most of us right-ponders know about New York.

Sadly, I know more about London than most Americans, just from watching public TV imports.

No, Europe isn't a country, "Euro" isn't a language, and the capital of England isn't "Hogwarts."

"I don't understand...are the Olympics in London, or England? and what's the 'Yoo-Kay'? That sounds like a city in Japan." <--real quote overheard last month. You have no idea how much I wish I were making that up.

[RivkahChaya]

By the way, how much should you tip a London cab driver?

[lynn cates]

tips

Hello Rivkah.

"By the way, how much should you tip a London cab driver?"

It all depends. You aren't Scots, per chance? (heh-heh)

Cheers.
LC

[RivkahChaya]

Hello Rivkah.

"By the way, how much should you tip a London cab driver?"

It all depends. You aren't Scots, per chance? (heh-heh)

Cheers.
LC

Yeah, one of those Scottish Jews, the MacCabee clan.

You don't know how really funny that is, because my last name is "Maccaby," pronounced like "Maccabee" in the Hanukkah story. We're always getting it mispronounced, and mail addressed to MacCaby, MacAby, McCabby, and even McAbey. Some computer programs automatically capitalize a second "C" in a last name, so that I can't enter "Maccaby" without the program changing it to "MacCaby."

I'm sure I am entirely missing something. Is "tip" British slang for what we might call "percussion therapy"?

[Errata]

Yeah, one of those Scottish Jews, the MacCabee clan.

I'm a Scottish Jew. We are few, but we are... well we're just few.

[RivkahChaya]

I'm a Scottish Jew. We are few, but we are... well we're just few.

Here's some more for you, Errata, that the rest of you on the thread can skip: some of my father's family came from England in the 1880s. They had been in England for several generations, and spoke the Queen's English. They weren't poor, and didn't travel in steerage (second class). Most of them hung around New York for a while, but a few made thier way up to Massachusetts, where they began quietly going to the Episcopal church, started spelling their name a little differently, and just didn't talk much about the past.

Also, my grandmother's grandmother was a Southern Jew, and her family, umm, owned a bit of property. It's just as well, because she got disinherited for marrying an Irish Catholic, and a couple of years later, he got excommunicated for nun-napping. They moved to New York, and just in the nick of time, as I understand it-- something like 1856.

Back to your regularly scheduled thread.

[Stephen Thomas]

I'm a Scottish Jew. We are few, but we are... well we're just few.

I once heard that loads of Jews from Eastern Europe were dropped off in Aberdeen after being told they'd got to New York.

[lynn cates]

tip

Hello Rivkah. Thanks. Yes, your last name coincides with Judas Maccabeus, of great fame.

No, "tip" refers to an expenditure of money for services rendered--often over and above standard fees.

Cheers.
LC

[RivkahChaya]

Hello Rivkah. Thanks. Yes, your last name coincides with Judas Maccabeus, of great fame.

No, "tip" refers to an expenditure of money for services rendered--often over and above standard fees.

Cheers.
LC

So, then what was the joke about being Scottish?

I probably did overtip drivers a little; the standard NYC tip was 15-20%, and I tipped on the high end, because I had friends who drove cabs. I'd round it up, because I was taking much shorter trips than I'd ever take in NYC, and I felt weird tipping less than a pound, so I'd tip £1 for a £4 ride. Waiting for 20p change felt terribly cheap-- at the exchange rate at the time, it was about 33 cents. I would have rounded up in the US for that amount.

The thing is, in the US, unless I were buying a TV, or something, I wouldn't take what amounted to a $6 or 7 cab ride. In the 8 or so years I lived in Manhattan as an adult, I think I took a cab maybe five times.

Was that really a huge tip? In the US, it would be generous, but not unheard of, and I don't think would suggest "foreigner who doesn't understand the money."

[Errata]

I once heard that loads of Jews from Eastern Europe were dropped off in Aberdeen after being told they'd got to New York.

I can't speak to that, but there were a couple of boatloads of Jews who were dropped off in Aberdeen or thereabouts after actually going all the way to New York, but immigration restrictions on Jews and Irish had just sent in, so they were turned away, brought back, and dumped at the nearest port.

My mom's family is the Scottish side, but she was raised Catholic. But originally her family was English Jews, dairy workers if I recall. After getting thrown out of England, they moved to the Highlands of Scotland to sort of lay low. And there became a tradition of marrying spare Stuarts, though I'm not sure how that came about. They had a fair amount of success in convincing their spouses to convert, so the family stayed Jewish until the mid 17th century when a Catholic Stuart refused to convert, and the family became Catholic. After the American Revolution the family moved to South, where they became indentured servants in Louisiana and then poor share croppers, and my great grandparents became Baptist due to a lack of Catholic churches. And that's my grandfather's family. Still has a bastardization of the original English name which sounds Catholic but is actually merely geographic.

He married my grandmother, a half Scot half German woman (which happened through some weird anti Covenanter work and somehow stuck), who's family had also been Jewish in Germany until the uprising of raging antisemitism in the late 19th century, when they converted to Catholicism. And somehow everyone was so surprised when my mother married a Russian/Austrian/Scots Irish Jew.

My Dad's father is straight boring Austrian. My Dad's mother was straight boring Russian, until they escaped the Pale and my great great grandfather married a Scots/Irish Jew he hooked up with in London (Mary Jane Neumann, which I think is just a hilarious name). Whitechapel actually. They came to the States in 1912.

My family is one of those who sort of obliviously ends up in all these historical moments. I have an ancestor who came to the US during the civil war and accidentally joined the army instead of signing up for day labor, which was the guy on the other side of the dock, but he was evidently the victim of a vague gesture or something. He fought for the North, deserted during a battle and was presumed dead, was captured by the South, fought for them, deserted during another battle and was again presumed dead, and died in Ohio 30 years later. So he has three graves. I feel like we should tell someone that he's not actually in two of those graves, but I don't know who to tell.

[RivkahChaya]

He married my grandmother, a half Scot half German woman (which happened through some weird anti Covenanter work and somehow stuck), who's family had also been Jewish in Germany until the uprising of raging antisemitism in the late 19th century, when they converted to Catholicism. And somehow everyone was so surprised when my mother married a Russian/Austrian/Scots Irish Jew.

My Jewish, quarter-Irish grandmother was Esther Reyna Fitzpatrick. When she had a job, before she got married, her boss assumed she wasn't Jewish, and she never said anything about it. She took a bus to the second-closest kosher butcher on her way home, though, so her boss wouldn't see her going into the closest one, which was on the same block.

It was pretty silly, because lots of gentiles went to the kosher butcher. Some people believed the meat was cleaner (and for all I know, it was, because you can't cut off a spoiled part, and sell the rest as kosher), and there is a certain cut of meat on the thigh that is difficult to butcher, because the sciatic nerve has to be removed, so a lot of shecters just sell the whole cut to gentiles, cheaply, along with organ meats, and things you can't kasher. The butcher my mother went to always had a separate case labeled "dog meat," which is to say for dogs, and it would be meat that was found to have something wrong with it, so it couldn't be made kosher. A lot of non-Jews bought it, because there wasn't anything wrong with it, other than that it wasn't kosher, and it was cheaper than meat from the regular butcher, at least, according to my mother. I wouldn't know; I've been a vegetarian since I've been old enough to do my own shopping.