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Enter the sinister world of Jack the Ripper... A unique 1880's period which takes you into the dark world of fog, gas lamps, alehouse, prostitution and...MURDER...in JACK THE RIPPER'S LONDON! The Mysterious Monster of London's East End...
Between the months of August and November, 1888, the Whitechapel area of London played key witness to a series of horrific murders, which remain to this day unresolved.
The unknown assailant, formerly known as "Leather Apron", later to be referred as "Jack the Ripper", stalked the dimly lit, fog blanketed streets of the East End with a single, brutal ambition...MURDER MOST HORRID.
With malice aforethought, under cover of darkness he lurked within the shadows, awaiting his prey...."the street women" of Old London Town.
The despicable diary of death had begun..............are you up to learning more of the gory facts?....then read on....I dare you!
Riding the internet's magic carpet, I've made the intriguing discovery that my maternal grandfather, Arthur Locke, of fond memory, may just possibly have sold groceries to London's notorious mass murderer, Jack the Ripper, and perhaps to some of his victims.
Grandad Locke ran a grocer's shop at 56 Artillery Lane, Bishopsgate, which my younger sister and I often visited as small children nearly 80 years ago. I recall helping him scatter fresh sawdust on the floor before opening the shop in the early morning, and sweeping it up at closing time. Grandad always wore a striped apron, and so did I. He divided great blocks of butter and cheese with a wire cutter, and weighed out and bagged single pounds of sugar and flour from bulk stocks which arrived in hessian bags - a far fling from today's ready-packed supermarket products.
Customers remained seated in chairs in front of the counter, exchanging gossip, while Grandad made up their orders. They paid him with silver coins: crowns (five shillings), half-crowns, florins (two shillings), shillings (usually called bobs), sixpences (tanners), threepences (pronounced thrip-neez and called trays or trizzies), and copper pennies, half-pennies (pronounced hape-neez) and farthings (quarter-pennies). They carried their purchases home in wicker shopping baskets.
Living quarters were above the shop. Whenever Grandma wanted to talk to Grandad in the shop below, she would blow through a tube fitted with a whistle to attract his attention, then speak to him through the tube.
My trip back in time began when, in an idle moment, I asked that amazing search engine Google if it had any information about Artillery Lane. In a flash, it showed links to several relevant sites. To my astonishment, one of these displayed a small image of grandad's grocery, in a story about Jack the Ripper (of all unexpected subjects) and Victorian London.
Alongside it was a story, published in 1932, that said: "Among the picturesque features which remain in the neighbourhood and remind the passer-by of its days of prosperity is, notably, that of the beautiful shop front - a grocer's - of 56 Artillery Lane. As there are few frontages of the kind left to be seen in London, it is hoped that this attractive specimen will be long preserved. The large house to which it belongs contains much of architectural beauty, and it suggests that the original occupant must have been a cultured merchant."
A detailed search of Casebook's Jack the Ripper website www.casebook.org yielded a wealth of interesting information about the murderer's crimes and times. His series of grisly murders, between August and November 1888, was confined to a small area of the East End, in Whitechapel, Spitalfields, Aldgate, and the City of London - not far from Grandad's shop.
I found more about Artillery Lane on the City of London website: "Just large enough for a horse and carriage, this passage and the adjoining Parliament Court are typical of the many courts and alleyways of this part of London. At number 9A we see a rebuilt house of the type built by Nicholas Barbon after the fire of London... we see the far grander 56 and 58 Artillery Lane built in 1705 (remodelled 1750), showing how popular the area had become.
"Indeed, in the early18th century an address in Spitalfields was as grand as any in London. Number 56 is grade I listed and was built by the Jourdain family, successful silk merchants who had left France following religious persecution in the late 17th century. They and many other Huguenots settled in Spitalfields and consolidated the silk weaving industry here."
I found an interesting article by Arabella Youens in the UK weekly magazine Country Life. Arabella, who is news editor of its website, has kindly given me permission to quote the following extracts from her story: "Thirty years ago, Spitalfields was a run-down area on the outskirts of The Square Mile [City of London]. Nowadays voices of children playing echo through the streets on Saturday mornings and the spectacular Georgian architecture gleams once more.
"From 10 o'clock on Sunday mornings a certain area of east London swarms with thrifty shoppers and groups of straying tourists looking for dirt-cheap bargains while absorbing the continuous banter and shouts of barrow-boy traders and inhaling pungent smells of oriental cooking that permeate through the halls of Spitalfields market.
"A few of those courageous enough to venture beyond the confines of the market walls into the surrounding streets and alleyways might be forgiven for thinking they had stepped onto the set of the BBC's latest adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel.
"Roughly ten streets make up what is known today as Spitalfields. The name is derived from when the area was made up of fields around the St. Mary's hospital, 'St. Mary's Spital.' Many of the original early Georgian houses have been demolished or lost over the ravages of time but it is thanks to the work of the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust that any of it survives at all.
"By buying up houses on the brink of collapse, restoring them to their original state, and selling them on to release funds in order to make more purchases, the Trust has successfully returned a deserted and derelict wasteland to its former Georgian glory and, as a result, Spitalfields is once more one of the most desirable addresses in central London...
"Over the centuries, Spitalfields has acted as a type of border town attracting mainly populations of foreign immigrants; firstly the French Huguenots, secondly eastern European Jews and latterly Muslim Bengalis.
"A building that illustrates the neighbourhood's mixed racial history stands at the opposite end of Fournier Street from Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church. Huguenots built and used the building as the chapel until 1809, in 1897 it became a synagogue and since 1976 it has been used as a mosque.
"Bangladeshis moved into Spitalfields for the same reasons that the Jews did: at the end of the nineteenth century, Spitalfields was a rundown area offering cheap lodgings to immigrants with little or no capital.
"The prosperity of the area has always been susceptible to the rise and decline of primarily the silk industry and latterly the domestic rag trade. The once prosperous Huguenot silk weavers saw their incomes dive in the latter half of the eighteenth century after cheaper foreign imports arrived in the UK, and fashions changed accordingly. The area was later to flourish again with the arrival of Jews in East London that coincided with the invention of the Singer sewing machine and the instant rise of cheap, machine made clothes and boots.
"Spitalfields went into decline when successful Jewish families deserted the neighbourhood in search of the greener pastures of north London, after their fortunes had been secured in the rag trade. Behind them they left a vacuum of derelict or semi-derelict houses, often boarded up and on the point of collapse. Many of the buildings became victims of slum clearances in the 50s and 60s and were also threatened by the fluctuation fortunes of Spitalfields Market...
"Nowadays... a four-bedroom house costs upwards of £750,000... After the 'gap sites' had been filled in during the mid-nineties ... the area started to attract professionals with young families."
After reading Arabella Youen's fascinating article (above is only a condensed version), I asked her by email if she knew whether 56 Artillery Lane had escaped demolition by World War II bombs or post-war developers.
"I happen to walk down Artillery Lane most mornings on my way to work." she replied. "There are still lots of the old shop fronts in place so I'm pretty sure that no. 56 is still there, although I haven't checked myself. No more grocery stores though - they're mainly occupied by sandwich shops and barbers."
Images of England, working in partnership with more than 1500 volunteer photographers, is building a digital library of photographs of England's 370,000 Listed Buildings. Their communications officer, Alexandra Saxon, told me: "I can confirm that ... 56 Artillery Lane, Bishopsgate, does still exist and is a listed building. It has been photographed for the Images of England project but unfortunately did not pass our quality processes so it will not appear on the internet yet."
FAMILY FOOTNOTE
When I told my sister Sylvia (now 80 and living in Auckland, New Zealand) that she could see a picture of Grandad's grocery on the Web, she (like me) was deeply moved. Childhood memories flooded back.
"Through misty eyes and a lump in my throat," she told me by email, "I reached up to the latch on the iron gate and then peeped through the letter slot in the massive door to see if Grandma was coming down the stairs to open it...
"I also looked at the Victorian London and Spitalfields/Whitechapel pages, and saw 'St Botolph's church - the Prostitute's Church because they were not allowed to solicit standing still, so walked round and round it.'"
Our parents, William Shackle and Jessie Locke, were married at that church (officially known as St. Botolph's Without, as it was just outside the Wall of London) in 1917, during World War I. Father had been wounded by shrapnel while serving in the British Army on the Western Front, and Mother had met him while working as a volunteer nursing aide in a military hospital where he was convalescing. Members of both families agreed it was only fitting that a Locke should be united with a Shackle.
Sylvia added: "Those Jack the Ripper stories were from 1888, and as Mum was born in 1891, the grandparents were probably at the shop then. I never thought about Mum's childhood and don't think I ever heard her mention anything of the time before her Training College days, and then only of her adventurous cycle riding with girlfriends to Brighton. If she spent her single days in the East End area, no wonder she loved Epping Forest [near where we lived before emigrating Down Under in 1929] with its beautiful wildflowers."
I can't help thinking that Jack the Ripper and one or more of those luckless prostitutes that he murdered may have purchased their weekly groceries from Grandad.
Eric Shackle is now an 83 year old web author, and his writings have appeared all around the world. He has written a lovely and funny book, which he has published on the net for you to peruse. Hop over to Eric Shackle's eBook and have a read. A lovely way to pass that coffee break time, reading a well-written book.
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My trip back in time began when, in an idle moment, I asked that amazing search engine Google if it had any information about Artillery Lane. In a flash, it showed links to several relevant sites. To my astonishment, one of these displayed a small image of grandad's grocery, in a story about Jack the Ripper (of all unexpected subjects) and Victorian London. 
Alongside it was a story, published in 1932, that said: "Among the picturesque features which remain in the neighbourhood and remind the passer-by of its days of prosperity is, notably, that of the beautiful shop front - a grocer's - of 56 Artillery Lane. As there are few frontages of the kind left to be seen in London, it is hoped that this attractive specimen will be long preserved. The large house to which it belongs contains much of architectural beauty, and it suggests that the original occupant must have been a cultured merchant."
"I happen to walk down Artillery Lane most mornings on my way to work." she replied. "There are still lots of the old shop fronts in place so I'm pretty sure that no. 56 is still there, although I haven't checked myself. No more grocery stores though - they're mainly occupied by sandwich shops and barbers."
Our parents, William Shackle and Jessie Locke, were married at that church (officially known as St. Botolph's Without, as it was just outside the Wall of London) in 1917, during World War I. Father had been wounded by shrapnel while serving in the British Army on the Western Front, and Mother had met him while working as a volunteer nursing aide in a military hospital where he was convalescing. Members of both families agreed it was only fitting that a Locke should be united with a Shackle.