A GRIM JUBILEE

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 39, 9 November 1938, Page 13

A GRIM JUBILEE

When “Jack The Ripper” Terrified Whitechapel

The closing days of September brought the fiftieth anniversary of one grimmest and most gruesome of all London mysteries, recalling at the same time a piece of official stupidity which went some way to justify the unkind things Sherlock Holmes was to say of the police a few years later, said a writer in the “Manchester Guardian” recently. "Jack the Ripper” became and was to remain for some time a name of terror in Whitechapel. It was on the night of September 29, 1888, that two women were murdered. The first was found dead at one o’clock on the morning of Sunday, September 30. in a back yard in Berners Street, Commercial Road: the second at twenty-five minutes to two by the entrance to Mitre Square. The police decided that both those murders must have been committed by a man who had begun to acquire notoriety as Jack the Ripper. But on this occasion, unlike the others on which he murdered horribly women of the unfortunate class, there was some chance of a clue. The murderer had cut off a piece of the victim’s apron in the Mitre Square case to wipe his knife on. and Hie piece was picked up a little later in a passage loading to a common lodging-house in Goulston Street. At daybreak some writing in chalk appeared on the wall of the house.

It might have Iwn supposed that it would have boon an elementary precaution to search the house and to have its inmates- exaiiiined. Nothing was done, and Sir Charles M arren. the Commissioner, ordered the writing to be “washed off.”