The Jack the Ripper Location Photographs: Dutfield's Yard and the Whitby Collection (7 page)

(Courtesy Margaret Whitby-Green)

(Kodak Velox) Again, small flaws on the negative suggest this may be a later reprint but it was clearly taken at the same time as the image shot from the other direction.

The internet auction site eBay is a curious place. A seller may give a detailed description of an item and, because the very nature of transactions on eBay are usually long-distance, when the item arrives it is usually as expected but can also be considerably better or considerably worse. It is the nature of the beast. I have been buying and selling copious amounts of goods on eBay (at the time of writing about 10,000 transactions) since early 2004 and have, through hours of painstaking scanning of daily listings, managed to acquire some very unusual items related to criminology over the years; the handcuffs in which the first railway murderer Franz Müller was arrested, the original family photographs of John George Haigh (the acid bath murderer), an invoice signed by Dr Crippen and typed by Ethel Le Neve just before they fled the country and the final written statement from 1679 of Lawrence Hill, the day before he was executed at Tyburn for the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. I’ve also managed to acquire many rare books on Jack the Ripper by this method, as well as documents and postcards related to the East End of that time. However, in November 2007 I noted an eBay auction that was to become heralded by some as possibly the most important photographic discovery in the case for quarter of a century.

Larry Lingle was a child of the depressed 1930s in the Southern States of America. He lives out his retirement in Houston, Texas, having graduated with a History Masters and later running a gay bookshop. Today, he supplements a meagre income by selling original and unique photographs on eBay under the name ‘linglelobo’, an occupation he has been undertaking for over a decade. Most of his sales are images with an historic connection; either press syndicated professional shots from the first half of the twentieth century or vast amounts of early carte de visites from the time of the American Civil War. He also buys old photograph albums at auctions and sells the images within individually.

Thus it was that, at 2:09am GMT on 13 November 2007, Larry listed an auction with the banner heading ‘1890s PHOT SCENE OF INFAMOUS WHITECHAPEL MURDERS LONDON’. The auction listing read as follows : ‘Vintage, original silver gelatine photograph, 3.5” x 4.5”, of a street in the Whitechapel area of London in the 1890s, scene of the infamous series of murders of prostitutes, some of which at least were connected with Jack the Ripper. In very good condition.’ The image alongside it was small and not instantly recognisable as anywhere well-known in the Ripper case. Buildings were visible in the background and there were many people crowding around the camera, leaving a space in the middle to look down the street or alley in which they were standing. It just appeared to be yet another unidentifiable East End location.

Larry Lingle at home with his bassets
(Courtesy Larry Lingle)

Nevertheless, my interest piqued, I placed a single bid on the photograph at the opening price of $4.95 (the equivalent of £2.44 in 2007). When it closed overnight on the 20 November I had been the only bidder and thus became the owner of whatever the image was. I paid the nominal shipping sum and within two weeks a hardback envelope had arrived from Larry.

The picture within had clearly been formerly affixed to a photograph album because of the small amounts of rough, cream paper still adherent to the reverse. When seeing it for the first time, something instantly looked familiar but I could not equate it with the rest of the image. Something about the arrangement of the buildings in the background made me sure I had seen a location very much like it before. It looked like drawings I had seen from the period of Dutfield’s Yard, running at the side of 40 Berner Street – the site of the murder of Elizabeth Stride (presumably by Jack the Ripper) at approximately 1 am on 30 September 1888. At this point, however, I just thought it a coincidence and had decided that the sale of the image linking it to the Whitechapel Murders was nothing more than a sales pitch (some sellers on eBay put Jack the Ripper in the banner heading simply because the item they’re selling dates from 1888 and may not even have any connection to London, let alone the case). There were several reasons for doubt at this stage.

Mortuary photograph of Elizabeth Stride
(Courtesy Stewart P. Evans)

Some things did not match some of the line drawings from the time of the murders, reproduced in the likes of the gratuitous
Illustrated Police News
and
The Penny Illustrated Paper
. The staircase at the rear of the picture was not in the same place in which it was sometimes seen in illustrations. There was only one door on the right hand side of the buildings stretching away from the photographer, yet most of the sketches showed a series of doorways. Most oddly of all, this alleyway appeared to be far longer than one would expect Dutfield’s Yard to be.

Dating the Image
I could not really get a handle on the exact date of the photograph, so I contacted Dennis Weidner who is the webmaster of a US-based site dealing with boys’ historical clothing, as several boys were in the image and one was facing full-length into the camera. Dennis’s reply indicated that he felt the image dated to the late 1890s because of the mix of long and short trousers worn by the boys in the photograph. His knowledge on clothing styles is such that he knew shorter length trousers worn with stockings became fashionable in the UK during the final years of Victoria’s reign. However, he pointed out that one boy wearing a cap on the right, standing a few people down from the camera and looking away into the yard, was wearing long trousers. A much closer inspection of the image, however, revealed that this was actually a grown man (bearded!) with knarled hands that just happened to be quite short and was wearing a style of cap one would expect to see more often on a child. Thus, I concluded that no boys in the image were wearing full-length trousers. Likewise, the younger girls in the image are identifiable by their calf-length skirts, a fashion deemed unthinkable for adult women in such an age of prudery. Finally, Dennis suggested that amateur exterior photography was quite rare before the 1890s, although it was known to exist if the photographer was fairly affluent. It is likely that the matter would have rested at that point had I not continued corresponding with Larry Lingle.

Larry informed me that he still had the majority of the album from which the photograph had been extracted. Three photographs (one of an Italian street urchin, one of the site of the Guillotine in Paris and one of the actor Anton Lang) had already been sold to other buyers and it is now very unlikely these will ever be found. However, most of the album was still in his possession. Some of the pages had been torn out, awaiting auction listing, and these were no longer in any order. Several photos had been removed from their backing in the album. I arranged to purchase the rest of the album from Larry for a respectable but sensible sum and this was delivered in late December 2007.

Tower Bridge, from the album

Her Majesty’s Horseguard, from the album

Two things within the album instantly informed me that the Dutfield’s Yard image was taken between 1894 and 1901. Firstly, there is a photograph of Tower Bridge in use. The bridge was not opened until 1894. Secondly, there is a photograph of a Horseguard, identified by military historian Peter McClelland as being from The Royal Horseguards and 1st Dragoons (now better known as the Household Cavalry Regiment Mounted). Peter pointed out that the presence of a rifle would date this to the time of the Boer War and the type of sword scabbard just visible to the rider’s left was replaced in 1902. More telling was the fact that the owner of the photograph album had, in antiquity, written ‘Her Majesty’s Horseguards’ on the page, clearly dating the image to no later than 1901 with the death of Queen Victoria and the Royal line then continuing with King Edward VII. This album page has been lost, but Larry had written the wording on the back of the photograph pending auction listing.