When Did you Learn about Jack?! An Article...

[AmmanValleyJack]

Hi All, i was recently asked why and how I got into the Jack the Ripper story, about why I felt drawn to this mystery. As I keep a blog, I thought I would right about this; to give a quick breakdown it essentially began when my mother bought me a Patricia Cornwall book of all things. Although her thesis may have been misguided, it did inspire within me a hankering for all things Jack. 8 Years later, here I am still skulking through various message boards, books and areas of East London eager to know me. As my first post (despite long time readership) i thought as there is enough info on Jack and every thread possibly imagined is somewhere on this board, i wanted to find out what made each of you gravitate towards this story and how did you first hear about it.

to read further into my reasons my blog (as it appeared in Ripperologist this month) is accessible here

so crack on with your reasons....

[Rubyretro]

My earliest memory of the Ripper story is as a little girl, sitting with my mother
in front of a (black and white ?) telly and watching tv detectives Barlow (Stratford Johns ?) and Watts standing in front of a brick wall in some dark and murky alley. They were talking about the Goulston Street graffito in hushed and solemn tones, and it all seemed very scary and mysterious. I didn't really understand it, but I was very attracted by that half glimpsed world of Victorian England and the underbelly of London.

My mother was fascinated by History, and London, and she would chat to her father (my Grand Dad) about it : He drove a parcel van for British Rail in London, and he knew every back street and had many a cloak and dagger tale to recount if we went out in the car. My mother used to recall the smogs of her childhood, and the last gaslights in use, and children with skipping ropes stretched across the roads. I remember driving past blackened victorian tenements -London was being regenerated, but the past seemed still to lurk around it's shadowy corners.

The next time I met 'Jack' was when I was already a young woman, and I picked up Stephen Knight's book in a second hand book shop. I really wished that I hadn't !! I didn't really believe his convoluted story of Freemasons and Walter Sickert and the Duke of Clarence -but I was very disturbed by the photographs of Mary Kelly's body. As a child I had never realised exactly how Jack had mutilated his victims and I was utterly repulsed and horrified by the photos and indeed haunted by them. Infact, I refused to go anywhere near the East End of London, and certainly agreed with the women who wanted the name of the 'Jack the Ripper' pub changed back to it's original name and an end to the glorification of a serial killer of women.

I am a Johnny Depp fan though, and although 'From Hell' didn't attract me enough to go to the cinema, I did finish by watching the dvd. The film turned out to be the tripe that I had suspected, but I was interested by the 'making of' documentary which accompanied it, which had lots of information on the real facts behind the fiction. So when I spotted the 'From Hell' graffic novel on my library shelf I thought that it would be a good read for my teenage son both as a subject that might make him goulishly want to turn the pages despite a resistance to the written word, and that the liberal sprinkling of historical facts and dates might insidiously educate him.

I don't know if he really read it -but of course I ended up glued to it !

Hooked on my computer as I am, the next step was having to play with Google earth and then try and see photos of the places, taken at the time -
and you guessed it ! I ended up on Casebook !

So much information and so many details I must have done little else but read every little corner for a week -and how can anyone do that without forming their own opinion ?

All that remains is to wean myself off it now..

[Mitch Rowe]

I probably saw an episode of "In Search Of" back in the 70s when I was about 12 years old.

[protohistorian]

I remeber that episode! Probably my first one as well. Dave