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money as they could, ran the pubs as well. Seeing the Ten Bells in the
Johnny Depp film jumped out at me: I had passed it many times. Other pubs in the area date back at least as far as the Ten Bells, which is now a trendy haunt for City workers, but even more have
been demolished or closed and the building changed to become shops or cafes. There were, in the Ripper’s day, literally pubs on every street corner and more in between. Alcohol was as
important to the men and women at the very bottom of the poverty ladder as food and lodging. Getting drunk – and alcohol was cheap – was an easy way out of the misery of life, and the
pubs were a good source of trade for the prostitutes, who would trawl from one to another looking for punters. We know that at least some of the Ripper’s victims had imbibed a plentiful
amount of strong liquor before their deaths: I can only hope it helped to anaesthetize them a little from the savage attack he made on them.
    So what about the victims themselves?
    The first two murders in the sequence known as the Whitechapel Murders are generally thought not to be the work of Jack the Ripper. For years it has been debated as to whether they are his
handiwork, but most experts accept that, in fact, there are five Ripper deaths, and these two are not among them. I, for one, am not convinced: I think the second of the two may be his first
killing, even though it does not conform completely to his later pattern. Whoever was responsible for these murders, they were both violent, horrific deaths, and they sparked the fear and hysteria
which began to stalk through the East End, meaning that by the time of the five ‘official’ Ripper deaths the area was on high alert.
    They also shone a light on conditions for the very poor in the East End, stirring an underlying concern for the welfare of those who lived below the poverty line and raising urgent questions
about what should be done to sort out the problems: perhaps the only good legacy of the Ripper is that a society that had turned a blind eye to the horrors of poverty was forced to confront it.
    The victims of these first two murders both lived in the dark heart of the Spitalfields dosshouse district and died close by in mysterious and appalling circumstances. They were typical of the
type of women the Ripper would later choose to murder, so their stories are important.
    Between 4 and 5 a.m. on the morning of 3 April 1888, the day after a particularly wet and cold bank holiday Monday, Emma Smith stumbled into her lodging house at 18 George Street. She was in a
terrible state; her face was bloodied, one of her ears had been torn and was hanging off, and she was suffering excruciating pain from an injury to her abdomen. Shehad
hobbled back with her shawl stuffed between her legs to soak up the blood.
    She managed to tell Mary Russell, the deputy of the lodging house, that she had been set upon by a gang of three men who had assaulted her and robbed her of what little money she had. Even
though she did not describe her attackers, she did say that one of them looked to be about nineteen years of age. Mrs Russell, together with another lodger, Annie Lee, convinced Emma that she
needed to go to the London Hospital on Whitechapel Road. As they made their way there, with the two women supporting Emma, they passed down Brick Lane to Osborn Street. Emma pointed out the spot
where the attack occurred, by a cocoa and mustard factory at the corner of Wentworth Street and Brick Lane. It is a junction I had crossed many times as I walked along Brick Lane, oblivious to what
had happened there. Then, as now, the spot was hardly secluded: it was at a crossroads and at the time of the assault it would likely have been busy with people returning home after their bank
holiday celebrations.
    Emma, who was forty-five at the time, must have been a powerfully strong woman to have made it back to the lodging house and then on to the hospital. There she was