London Correspondence: Jack the Ripper & the Irish Press - reviewed by Adrian Morris

At the very beginning of Alan Sharp’s book, (pg11), he makes abundantly clear that; “Each writer has told the story his own way; some have told it well, others poorly”. Isn’t that the truth! Really, Sharp is readying us for the notion that his is not a conventional telling of the Jack the Ripper saga, he leaves that to others and names Sugden’s Complete History as one of the best. Alan Sharp instead looks at the Whitechapel murders from the point of view of the Irish population in 1888 - via her newspapers. Of course, Sharp also advises that his book tries to be as objective as possible, after all, this is the Irish question.

In 1888, in the wake of the destruction of the 1886 Home Rule Bill by the British parliament, there was no more a vexed question than Irish Home Rule. There was also no more a vexed newspaper frenzy than the Whitechapel murders. Alan Sharp’s book chronicles the seismic collision of these two worlds. For a time, Sharp proves, the Whitechapel murders were as relevant in the fields of Kerry as Home Rule would be in the streets of Westminster. The Irish Party - led by the brilliant Charles Stewart Parnell, had taken a tumble by 1888. The failure of the 1886 Home Rule Bill, (the Bill that should have been),  the turmoil caused by the repressive actions of the absentee landlords in using every trick in the book to evict Irish tenant farmers - and then replace them with Ulster Protestant farmers at more favourable rates, things did not look too good for the Irish Nationalists. Also, one must remember, the indigenous response to this was the Land League’s Plan of Campaign. The Plan of Campaign was to cause immense disruption to the British authorities in Ireland as its advocates resorted to boycotts and other forms of agrarian sedition. Though not supported by the moderate Irish Nationalist elites, including Parnell, it just served to show the internecine fractures in the Irish political movement. A fracturing the Fenians would try to exploit! A fracturing, in part, caused, and made more apparent by Arthur Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland.

Balfour, or ‘Bloody’ Balfour as he became known by the Irish, was the bête noire of every Irish Nationalist, for it was he, we learn, who passed the infamous 1887 Criminal Amendment Act that allowed total power of arrest of anybody in Ireland who the authorities thought suspicious. Obviously, it wasn’t long before the ramifications of this Act became apparent. Soon Irish M.P.s deemed unsavoury were arrest and imprisoned indefinitely - William O’Brien was one of these. The Act was so sweeping and punitive that an Irish M.P. was even arrested whilst in the chamber of the Commons! The arrest of O’Brien, and others would eventually lead to the clamour and agitation by radicals within Britain itself, agitation that would be the genesis of the march on Westminster in 1887 - that caused the violence of Bloody Sunday in Trafalgar Square.

One great area that Sharp’s book is really able to explore with a great deal of skill, for it is a complex affair, is the intense over-lapping rivalries that took place within the police and governmental offices based around the Irish Question and the hunt for the Fenian agitators. We hear how Monro’s Secret Bureau office came under intense pressure from the radical, and not so radical Irish press. The Irish Nationalist movement up to 1888 had not being doing well. The Secret Bureau had been making inroads into Fenian activities, the Parnellism and Crime articles in the Times newspaper - although forgeries, had caused tremendous pressure on Parnell. The Whitechapel murders, or at least the sensation that they had fostered, seemed like manna from heaven to the radicals and Nationalists. Soon, Sharp’s book shows, the press had a field day prodding and ridiculing the police’s perceived inability to catch the killer. It was a target too good to miss. The vitriol oozing forth from United Ireland or The Nation is as caustic as it is bracing. The Unionist papers, such as The Dublin Evening News would often criticise the investigation but castigate the Nationalist/Republican newspapers. All the time Sharp would point to the increased use of the telegraph system in enabling the stories in London being told on the streets of the Emerald Isle within a few short hours. So much so that after the ‘Double Event’ murders the tension and shock was felt as much in Dublin as it was in London.

As the book progresses to the final canonical murder of Mary Kelly, Sharp notices how the ardour of both Unionist and Nationalist journalists towards the Whitechapel murders, both as a story and a platform to attack, seemed to cool somewhat. Stories in the Irish press seem to be more inward looking and East End based. Maybe this was as a result of over-exposure and the growing interest of the Parnell Commissions.

Sharp’s book; London Correspondence: Jack the Ripper is an excellent work. It does rely on narrative lifted from the Irish newspapers at the time, and this can disrupt the narrative somewhat, but there is just no other way of doing it, and Sharp does it well. This is a vital part of the political history of the late 19th century, as much as the Whitechapel murders were a vital part of the social history of the late 19th century. Sharp has tapped into this most vital of areas and made it his own. This is one of the top ten books ever written on the Whitechapel murders. Don’t buy the other rubbish released recently and that infest the shelves of your local high street store - buy this one. Highly recommended.