On Thursday, 30 August, l888, Polly Nichols, her hair already greying, her front teeth missing, was walking alone on Whitechapel Road, the long, wide street that is one of the main artories of the neighborhood.  Shortly after midnight, she was seen leaving a pub called the Frying Pan on Brick Lane. This establishment still stands on the spot and until a few years ago was little changed from the pub frequented by Polly.  Now, however, it has been converted into an Indian restaurant.
  When she later tried to retire for the night at the common lodgings house at l8 Thrawl Street,  she lacked the money for her doss.  Polly had probably already raised her bed money three or four times that day, but spent it on drink. It was a time and a place when money, once gotten, was immediately spent.  Food and drink was bought and consumed in present tense.  Polly asked the landlord to save her bed while she ventured outside to earn her night's rent.
  At approximately 3:40 a.m. Polly's body was found in Bucks Row with her skirt pulled up. When Constable Neil held up his lantern, he saw that Polly's throat had been cut.  Polly is attributed by most Ripperologists as a victim of Jack.

  Mary Kelly was the only one of the Jack the Ripper victims who, at age 25 , still flashed the relative bloom of youth.  We have little corroboration but Mary’s word for most of her background. She is thought to have been born in Limerick, spent her childhood in Wales and perhaps prostituted in Cardiff. She came to London when she was around 21, and allegedly, took work in a high class brothel in the West End.  In this venue, she might have traveled briefly in Paris with a gentleman.
  How, however, do you slide from a fancy West End brothel to the grist and grime of life in Whitechapel? Drink would do it; encroaching age; or perhaps a falling out with a benefactor. We know that by April 1887, Mary was living at Cooney’s Common Lodging House in Sprawl Street, and from then on, she and a friend, Joseph Barnett, hit a half-dozen or so Whitechapel residences, often being tossed out for non-payment of rent. There was much drunkenness, but it was hard to believe that this in itself would get anyone evicted. Who was sober there to notice!
  Mary Kelly was the only Ripper victim to have her own digs. She and Barnett rented a room at 13 Miller’s Court, which was really a backroom of 26 Dorsett Street.  One entered the courtyard by a narrow archway. A little more than a week before Mary was murdered, Barnett moved out. Two reasons were given: that Mary had returned to prostitution and she had invited another woman named Julia to stay with her.
  The chronology of Mary’s last night on earth, the night of Thursday, 8 November-Friday 9 November 1888, illustrates the busy-ness and constant foot traffic of Whitechapel at that time. Joe Barnett visited between 7:30 and 8:30PM. By 11:00PM, Mary was spotted, intoxicated, leaving her favorite watering hole, the Britannia, in the company of a young man with a moustache. By 11:45PM, a Mary Ann Cox saw her return home with a stout, shabby man who carried a quart pail of beer. At 1:00AM, the neighbors heard Mary burst forth in drunken song, “ On a violet from my mother’s grave…” At 2:00AM, George Hutchinson met Kelly in Commercial Street.  At 2:30AM, Sarah Lewis went to Miller’s Court and saw a man and a woman.  At 3:30AM, Mrs. Kennedy entered Miller’s Court to spend the night with her parents, and saw a respectably young man with a dark moustache talking with a woman.  Both were intoxicated. At 4:00AM, a Mrs. Prater, who lived in a room above Kelly, thought she heard a cry of “Murder!” and rolled over and went to sleep.
   Some witnesses even claimed to have spotted Mary at 8:00AM to 10:00AM the next morning, one of the unanswered mysteries of the case. At any rate, Mary’s landlord, McCarthy, sent Thomas Bowyer to Mary’s room at 10:45AM the next morning to collect some rent; and the sight that Bowyer saw when he looked through the window was one which we can all hope that we don’t have to witness this side of the grave. The whole surface of the abdomen was removed; skin was cut from the thighs; the breasts were cut off; the face was hacked beyond recognition (causing some “experts” to speculate that Kelly was not actually the victim); uterus and kidneys were pulled out, as were the liver and intestines.
  What manner of man? Although Mary Kelly’s death is considered a Ripper murder, showing a deranged murderer’s propensity for outdoing himself with worsening mutilations with each successive victim, some Ripperologists have reservations about Mary being a Ripper victim. Of all the victims, she was the only one killed indoors and she had recently broken up with her “significant other.”
 

  On Monday 6, August, 1888, Marth Tabram hit the streets of Whitechapel with a female friend, “Pearly Poll.” They picked up two guardsmen. Poll disappeared into Angel Alley, a narrow entrance off of Whitechapel High Street near the current site of the Aldgate East Underground Station.    
  The usual sex was a “knee Jerker”  -- a rather uncomfortable intercourse while leaning against the wall. Martha and her soldier went oup George Yard (today called Gunthorpe Street) for the same purpose. Gunthorpe Street, an extremely narrow passageway and one of the few existent Ripper sites where one can really get the feel of Whitechapel in 1888, runs along the side othe the White Hart Pub, a pub that was used by the Ripper victims.
  At 3:30AM, Alfred Crow, a driver, returned home to George Yard Building and noticed someone “sleeping” on the first landing. He paid sacant attention. At 4:50AM, another tenant John Reeves, came downstairs and found Martha’s body in a pool of blood.

 Ref: THE JACK THE RIPPER A TO Z by Begg, Fido, Skinner

  The White Hart Pub still stands on the site, with Gunthorpe Street, formerly George Yard, a narrow alley just to the right. For a short time, this pub was unaccountably renamed "Clutterbuck's" but I was overjoyed to see that, during my last visit to this pub, it had reverted back to its old name "White Hart." These names should never be changed!

Sadly, though, no one will be drinking at the Roebuck,Durwood and Brady Streets, another vintage Ripperland pub. The Roebuck was demolished a couple of years ago. Whenever I went into the Roebuck, whose barman looked old enough to practically remember 1888, I would spy a frail looking female drinker, sitting alone, who looked for all the world like she was waiting for--- for who knows what?
 

     Between the idea
     And the reality
     Between the motion
     And the act
     Falls the Shadow.
     (T.S. Eliot)