Tanks and Jack the Ripper
A day trip to London
26 May 2006
As I had needed to go back to Ulster the previous day and Jean-Jacques was on a long weekend it seemed reasonable to make the most of our Eurotunnel ticket and take the chance to pop up to London for the day.
We knew that we didn't have much time and had settled on visiting the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, and the scenes of the Ripper murders in Whitechapel.
15 inch (380mm) Naval Guns
It is quite a while since I was in the Imperial War Museum and that time I was there purely to see the First World War exhibits.
I reckoned on being there for a couple of hours but in fact we must have stayed for a good four hours wandering round looking at everything.
As JJ has just finished a project on Stalingrad he was interested to see a Soviet T34 tank and some of the footage about Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.
I was rather surprised to find that although the Russians had taken Berlin, they had given the Nazi Eagle to a British soldier as a souvenir.
We looked at the D-Day landings (Jour-J in French) and visited the Blitz experience. It was all a bit difficult for JJ as his English is limited, and trying to understand these geezers who were talkin about their ouses bein ammered by alf ton bombs wasn't easy for him.
The Holocaust exhibition is quite good; short of the reality that we saw at Auschwitz but very informative nevertheless and they have a superb model of the train sidings and the selection process. It made us realise just how large the camp was.
The conflicts of later years made little of the idea that if 1914-1918 hadn't been, then 1939-1945 must have been the war to end all wars.
In Whitechapel
The French are as fascinated by Jack the Ripper as everyone else and like his brother Johnny, JJ wanted to take a wander round the sites of the famous murders.
JJ is a firm believer in the conspiracy theory. The police didn't catch Jack because they didn't want to. The fact that trying to cover up something like that for over a century is very difficult is of course neither here nor there.
We will probably never know who the murderer was as the evidence is no longer with us. That is of course what adds to our fascination with the man and his victims.
Having already done the tour once, I was aware that London has changed greatly since the hey days of Jack's murders.
Rather than seek out the sites in order as I had done with Johnny we made life simpler and did them in the order we came to them. Far less walking to do and as there is nothing really to see you aren't really missing out on anything.
We started in Mitre Square scene of the fourth murder and the only one within the jurisdiction of the City of London Police.
All Saint's church is still there of course and JJ was familiar with that from films. The Ten Bells Pub which featured in some of the murders was not well kept when Johnny and I had a drink there, and I didn't even cross the threshold this time.
Next morning, before catching our train home, we had the time to pop down to Rochester and that has still got just enough atmosphere to give an idea of what parts of London could have been like.
The following weekend was going to be the Dickens Festival and we explained to JJ that it was a pity that he wasn't going to be able to go and see the streets filled with costumed townsfolk.
As things would unfold though - we did get to go, so see below.
See also