After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Who was Jack the Ripper? The Prince (Suspect 1)

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Part 1/4. By investigating the men accused of being Jack the Ripper, we uncover dark truths about Victorian society - and our own. Why were these men, most of them almost certainly innocent, singled out as monsters?Today Anthony Delaney tells Maddy Pelling about how Prince Albert Victor, grandson to Queen Victoria, became suspected of being Jack the Ripper. It's a story of Victorian masculinity and how our twentieth century relationship with monarchy helped ferment baseless accusations.Written by Anthony Delaney. Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick and Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARKYou can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

In a 2019 interview with the writer Ellen Lavelle, historian Halle Rubenhold stated that the identity of Jack the Ripper was irrelevant. I'm not interested in who he is, she went on. And listen, why would she be? This came in the wake of Rubenhold's brilliant book, The Five, which examined the lives of the five canonical victims of the 19th century London Ripper. Rubenhold wished to shine a light on the lives of the women who were killed in the East End of London in 1888, rather than gorely focusing on the details of their deaths, as

so many accounts of Jack the Ripper by so-called Ripperologists have done. And she has a really good point. But as a historian of masculinity and manhood, I am actually interested in who he was. Or maybe I should be more precise and say, I'm interested in who they said he was, both at the time in the East End of London and now. Why might this interest me? Well, the reasons are twofold.

Firstly, we are certain, or we're as certain as we can be, that the person who we know as Jack the Ripper was a man. A man who violently ended the lives of multiple women. His masculinity, I think, is key to this violence, and we must not, therefore, shy away from asking what it was about Victorian masculinity in particular that so twisted his ideology of gender and of sex that he committed these crimes. This is vital, I think, because we are experiencing a very well-documented

epidemic of violence against women perpetrated by men in our own time. So I don't feel really that we have that we've earned the right to look away as men. Perhaps there are toxic elements of this Victorian masculinity that remain with us now that might in some way account for our contemporary iterations of violence. And surely they ought to be identified, explored, dissected, and expunged. Secondly, of the men that have been named as likely suspects, all but one is not Jack the Ripper.

And perhaps none of them are. If you Google the Ripper now, their names will instantly appear, and then they have been preserved for posterity in the same sentence as the most notorious serial killer perhaps of all time. Some of those names, true enough, are associated with other crimes, so therefore they've been linked to this. Others however have been accused because they were not English, or because they were poor, or because they struggled with mental health conditions. And I think much like Halle did with the female victims,

their reputations need a re-examination too, do they not? So in this After Dark limited series, Maddie and I will explore four of the canonical suspects linked to the murders of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Vibrant and valued 19th century lives snuffed out in the most violent and degrading way by the man they called the Whitechapel murderer. Leather Apron.

Or Jack the Ripper. The first suspect. Prince Albert Victor. Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, grandson to Queen Victoria, was Jack the Ripper. Or so the story goes. The only problem is, those who would tell this story cannot quite agree on what the story is. You see, the Prince was gay. Or was he? There were rumours of a police raid on a male brothel in 1889, certainly. The year after the Whitechapel murders.

One young man taken up in that raid supposedly named the prince as a client in order to secure his release. But to some, the fact that Albert Victor may have been sexually attracted to men, and remember we don't know that he was, was somehow enough to convince them that he could violently kill women as a result. An oddly intersecting Venn diagram of homophobia and misogyny. Others were not convinced he was same-sex attracted at all. He was the killer, they mused, but wasn't linked to male sex workers, but female sex workers. Dr Thomas Edmund Alexander Stowell was a physician, though not the prince. In fact, he was only

three when leather aprons stalked the East End. That, however, did not stop him from posthumously diagnosing the prince with syphilis and linking him with the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Stoll later retracted his assertions in a letter published after his death in November 1970, but they went on to form the basis for Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper The Final Solution, which fed significantly into these theories surrounding the Prince. Knight claimed that the Prince had contracted syphilis from a female sex worker in the West Indies. As a result of this, he had gone into a steady and violent medical decline. Now, delirious with rage and bent upon revenge, the prince stalked

the East End of London, taking revenge on its sex workers. We're familiar with the iconic image of the ripper in the black top hat. We can hear the clip of his shoes on the cobblestones as he preys on his victims. And Prince Albert Victor certainly was the type of man who would have worn such an item. It all fits. So what are the facts? How comfortably does fact and fiction sit side by side in this instance? And despite the inconstancies of these stories, was Prince Albert Victor Jack the Ripper. Hello and welcome to After Dark.

I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. Now, you will be familiar if you've listened to some of our podcast episodes previously that we have covered the topic of Jack the Ripper before. And it was an incredibly popular episode. So we decided we'd look at it again, but we really wanted to get a unique way into this. And one of the ways that we thought we could do that was by exploring ideas of masculinity and how masculinity plays into this.

And so that's the approach that we're going to be taking over this mini series. And you mentioned in the introduction there, Halle Rubenhold's fantastic book, The Five, and that's done so much to shift the conversation around the Jack the Ripper murders, the murders specifically of these five canonical dictums, these women whose names we gave at the beginning. And I think what Hallie's work has done has invited people to consider the societal context, the cultural context of this a lot more, but it's specifically looking at the women themselves and their lives. When we discussed doing these episodes, I think I was initially a little bit reticent. I was a little bit concerned that we were going to give airtime to

the Ripper himself, whoever he was, and those crimes and to focus on the details in a way that I think is distasteful and not necessarily relevant. It doesn't give us any real historical information. But we've been discussing this and I think your approach, Anthony, here of looking at the men who are accused of being the Ripper, whether in their own time or in the century and a half since. I think there is something in there. I do think there's a value in it in terms of thinking, as you say, about masculinity, about what it meant to be a man in Victorian England. Because of course that impacted, in the case of the victims, terribly so, the lives and the deaths of the women around these men. And

we don't want to detract from their lives, from their deaths, from the terrible hardship and misogyny that these women faced. But I think there is a case, as you set out at the beginning, for looking at where this male violence came from and that context and how masculinity in the 19th century could be toxic, but also looking at the other people who were accused who in all likelihood were not the Ripper himself. Why were they put forward by society as being the candidate for that? What was it about their identities, their performances of masculinity that made them stand out for people then and now. I think it's going to give us so much information about the 19th century, about the East End, but also about the royal

courts, about the newspaper, printing presses, and booksellers' offices, and taverns, pubs, coffee houses, cafes, life on the streets, the workhouse. We're going to see all of these things and more besides. And I think stepping into this world with this specific perspective actually is hopefully going to give us something fresh. So shall we get to them then? Shall we get to the first of the suspects? The first being of course, as we have said, Prince Albert Victor. He was born in 1864 at Frogmore, which we hear an awful lot about now in the media, but that's where he was born. That was the home of Harry and Meghan.

Yes. At the time of the Whitechapel murders, he was 24 years old. So if we're looking at building a profile, a lot of the witnesses would have said that the person that we now know as Jack the Ripper was older than early twenties, but certainly he is an adult at this time. He would have had the physical vigor in which to carry out some of these crimes. So he's 24 at this time. He's the grandson of the queen, as we said in the outset. So you know, he's in an elevated part of society.

Yeah. I mean, we've gone in with a royal candidate for this immediately and who could be more Victorian in the Victorian era than a member of Victoria's family, right? He's going to represent so much of masculinity in this period, but also royalty in this period of the upper class in this period. There's so much that I think he's going to give us away into the story. And he's expected to be king. He is second in line to the throne at this particular point in time. So he is, his father is the future Edward the seventh.

So this is legacy. This is inheritance. This is establishment. These are people who matter to the establishment, as I'm saying. He had inherited his mother's deafness. So he had a hearing impairment. He was able to hear to a certain extent, but he was certainly hearing impaired and he was known as Eddie to the family. Now, some of these details

are quite interesting because it tells us a lot about family and, you know, Victoria and family go hand in hand at this time. And we can all picture those images of her later on in life with surrounded by all of her children. I mean, she looks miserable in those images, but yes. Well, I think famously she wasn't thrilled about children, right? She sort of had eyes only for her husband. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wasn't exactly an ammage with the results of that. Yeah. So he adored his brother, the future George V, and they had a really intense and bonded relationship, which is kind of nice to hear, especially when we think about what's about to unfold. They became naval cadets together and they trained on

the ship Britannia in 1877. In 1883, Prince Albert Victor entered Trinity College, Cambridge, but university, Maddie, was not for him. Dare I say that's something that runs in the Royal Family. Absolutely, that's something that runs. One tutor had actually said, he hardly knows the meaning of the words to read. Sure, but I will say, this is the same of most undergraduates. I certainly didn't spend my undergraduate years solely reading, so we'll let him off the hook. First year, I don't think I did any reading at all, but like, you know,

he leaves, he doesn't stick it out, he goes, and then he joins the army. So he's moving around a little bit, trying to find his place. And obviously because he's so elite, the most elite of all the elite, he has those options available to him and he can switch and change and those options are there for him. He was noted once he entered the army, he hated it, absolutely despised. And he left very quickly, I think in 1891. Physical descriptions of Albert Victor, he's very striking. If you Google an image of him and we'll put some up on socials, he was described as having an unnaturally long neck, not my description, that's a contemporary

one, and also really long arms. And his father had nicknamed him collar and cuffs as a result. This family dynamic is so interesting within the context of what we are actually talking about, which is a wider crime spree that's happening in the East end of London. And then we are transported into these other stately homes, these palaces, literally. And we have people calling, callers and cuffs, and it's all very like, familial. So, I mean, you're painting this really intimate picture. Yes, this is the royal family, but this is someone who exists in a familial context with a very famous grandmother, but one who is very focused on domestic life and both

the image of it and that life in practice. He's got these nicknames, he's close to his family. This doesn't necessarily strike me as someone who's going to go on to be a serial killer. Stranger things have happened. I'm not saying it's not possible, but this doesn't seem like a particularly sinister or narratively predictable beginning to someone's life. Okay. Let's go straight into it then. And let's talk about where this comes from, where the idea that Prince Albert Victor could be Jack the Ripper comes from.

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palisade family. They could not be at further opposite ends of the spectrum of Victorian life. How are these spheres colliding? They don't. They don't collide. And as soon as you sit down and look at any type of evidence whatsoever, and I'll go through it now just to be really methodical about it, they do not line up. This man is not Jack the Ripper.

So spoiler, the spoiler bear with me on this because there will be some details here, but I think it's important to go through the details to just shut it down. Hit me with him. He is absolutely not Jack the Ripper. So Marianne Nichols is killed on the 31st of August, 1888. We know because of Royal Records, bear in mind when the Royal Family are moving around, they're constantly recorded. They're either recording themselves in their own diaries. the newspapers may be recording them. People know where the royal family are. It's always traceable. That continues today. He is staying at Danby Lodge in Yorkshire on that day. Because of course, that's one of the obvious things about the royal family

in this period, right? That their movements, much like the royal family today, were reported in the media, were heavily recorded. I, trace what most of Victoria's family was doing on any one day. Yes. At this time, well, even now, as you say, we could do. And we know that he's there, he's in Yorkshire from the 29th of August to the 7th of September. So that rules him out of having any involvement, him directly, because we'll come to something else that's a little bit grayer area, but gray area, but he that rules him out for the 31st of August. He did not kill Mary Ann Nichols. But there are other victims. There are other victims. Let's move to the to Annie Chapman, for instance. She is killed

on the eighth of September, 1888. We know that Prince Albert Victor is in the cavalry barrack at York and he remains there until the 10th of September at this time. I know those barracks really well. I'm sure you do actually. Yeah. Interesting. Didn't see any royal family. This is one of the things about history that you pass by these things and it happens in London and happens everywhere where you're literally living with history and you just pass by them. And those layers of history as well that places in your life mean certain things to you at certain times, but you might revisit them and realize that actually they have completely

different associations and different moments that in this case, you know, we're talking about one man being present. Think of all the lives that have passed through that building and every other, you know, there's so many moments of history that we're not aware of in the buildings that we know and love. Yeah. I'm sure as you're passing by that every day, you didn't realize this building has a link to the Jack the Ripper case. Yeah. That it's the alibi for one of the suspects. For the second victim. Yeah. So, okay. We can rule him out definitively from having

murdered Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman. Let's move on to Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, two women that were killed in a frenzy on the 30th of September, 1888. We know for a fact that Prince Albert Victor is in Scotland at this time. So we can imagine he's moving through Yorkshire up into Scotland. And we know this because Queen Victoria herself records him as being up in Scotland with the family at that particular time. So we can rule him out of that one. With my conspiracy hat on, I'm saying Victoria's in on it. You know what? Well, we'll come back to that. Put a pin in that because we're coming back to it. But it's true. People don't necessarily, yeah, it's like, oh, well, of course she would

say that. Of course she's kind of covering it up. But we'll discuss that in just a second. And then Mary Jane Kelly, who, when we did our previous episode in Jack the Ripper, we concentrated on Mary Jane mostly, just because it was the last case. She was killed on the 9th of November, 1888. And he is at a place that you're also familiar with, Sandringham in Norfolk. You make me sound like I hang out with the Royal Family. I know Norfolk. I don't know Sandringham, but I do know Norfolk. Norfolk coast is very nice. Yeah. Well, that's where he was. So we know for every single date that he is accounted

for, he has alibis for every single day. So it's incredible really that, I mean, look, this is not a downtrodden man. This is not an immigrant. This is not a poor person, as we will discuss in other cases. This is somebody who's very, very elite, but he is not Jack the Ripper. So when do these accusations surface them? Is it stole in the late 20th century making these claims? Is he the first person to do that? Because it just seems remarkable to me that this prince, this grandson of the queen, not that means of course that he hasn't committed a crime just because he's a member of the royal family, of course, but his whereabouts

are reported and documented every day. Why on earth would he come up as a suspect? What is that about? Well, this is conjecture, right? But I think it's worth conjecturing on power, distrust of power. And we can relate to this, not necessarily you and I, but we know what that feels like in our own time where there is talk about something is going on above us that we don't know about. And it's making me distrust what I can put my faith in. Power is against me. And so this is a 20th century development that Prince Albert Victor really comes

into focus here. And the reason it's happening then is because it feels like it's enough distance for people to go, well, they covered it up. There was a cover up. There was a conspiracy at the time. And this is why we haven't found him. This is why he wasn't brought to justice because they were blind to it in the 19th century. But now we know. And I suppose in the 20th century, when is the psychostation made in 1970, that there's a changing relationship with the royal family in those decades of the 20th century. And it's interesting that this case, this very infamous case, this kind of defining moment of the Victorian era in a lot of ways in sort of pop culture and

historical memory, that that is then used maybe as a way to reassess 20th century feelings about the Royals. And remember we have this thing now where we're fed that certain historical figures, and I'm speaking specifically about Queen Victoria now, were beloved because they become iconic, that they were untouchable in their own time, but actually for quite a significant chunk of time post the death of her husband, there was a lot of suspicion around Victoria. Why has she retreated? Why won't she come out of mourning? That's odd. We need to see her. If we're not seeing her, we can't trust her fully. So trust is already a problem.

Yeah. And I suppose as well, that speaks to the 19th century misogyny, right? That Victoria doesn't behave as a woman is expected to and as a monarch is expected to. As a monarch is expected to. As a monarch, I think more so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So it's, so I think this is where this is coalescing around Prince Albert Victor also because he's potentially a little wayward. He's potentially a little different. As we've said, there are maybe some learning difficulties. He certainly has a hearing impairment. There's an othering of him that's happening. We've seen that he's described as being physically odd.

He can't settle in life. He's not fulfilling the duties of what one would see. Victoria really worried about him as an heir. She was like, this isn't good. I don't know what he's doing. It doesn't fill me with confidence. But systematically, as I said, and as we've been through, we can rule him out. He didn't kill any of these women.

However, the conspiracy theory element of this morphs then, because we're not willing to let him off the hook that easily. Tell me more. Right, so we've established that Prince Albert Victor did not kill these women himself. But surely there was some connection with him and the murders. Maybe other people murdered on his behalf. After all, isn't it awfully convenient that he was never in London at the time of murder? Well, as it turned out, Albert had a deadly secret.

Albert was in love with a young Catholic girl who lived in Whitechapel. So in love were they that the mismatched pair had secretly gotten married. That might have been manageable. Royal marriages to Catholics had been managed before, but Albert's supposed wife had had a child by him too. Now the heir to the throne was at least partially Catholic, working class and from Whitechapel of all places.

This simply would not do. The Queen would not allow it. And so royal agents were dispatched, it was said, instructed to murder anyone who had any knowledge of this secret marriage or child. Except none of this is true. All of this is based on the remarkable, but wholly unsubstantiated claims by a man interviewed in the 1970s by Stephen Knight, who claimed that his grandmother was the girl who Albert got pregnant and that meant that he was one of the legitimate heirs to the British throne.

Stephen Knight's conceit was essentially that there was no Jack the Ripper at all, that it's why we've never found him. He never existed. Instead, the Whitechapel murders had been a collaboration between the royal family and the Freemasons. Who else? Who wished to secure the Protestant legitimacy of the British crown. Okay, I have- What do you have? Doubts? I have several points to make. Let's take this at face value for a minute and imagine that this is a true story. Where would Albert have met this young woman in Whitechapel?

The idea that she's Catholic and that she has had his child who therefore is now a partially Catholic heir to the throne. It's compelling. It would make a good film. It's probably been made into a film, hasn't it? I feel like it's- It's the basis of From Hell. Right. There we go. So it's cinematic. It's a great historical romp, let's say it's in a sort of sinister adventure story, but I can't see that this is the case. And then this idea that the queen would be in on this and would order, what did you say, Royal agents who are dispatched?

Who are they? Yeah. Question mark there. I mean, I'm not buying it at all. What I will say is I'm really interested actually in the human element of this story. And by that, I mean the person, the man who was interviewed by Stephen Knight in the seventies who claimed that his grandmother was this woman, this young woman from Whitechapel who Albert had secretly married and had a child with. Because I

find that fascinating. I am at the moment writing a book all about different hoaxes in the past. I'm very, very interested in people's motivations for coming forward with these kinds of stories and the different reasons why people might sometimes really believe the story that they're telling or they might not. They may want different things, fame or riches or whatever, from putting themselves forward and claiming these things. That's the interesting bit to me. I find that fascinating. And we know from history, we've spoken about this before on the podcast about people who have claimed to be members, long lost members of the royal family or members of the royal family who've been dismissed or cheated out of their inheritance or the crown or whatever it

is, you know, that happens. Family of them in Australia, right? Yeah, exactly. And we did the episode on the Duke of Cumberland's attempted assassination by his, by his valet. And in that story, there's a woman who comes forward and claims to be a long lost descendant, I think of George the third, that's fascinating to me. So there's always, I guess, people who are going to claim this. And it's quite the backstory. And I suppose it's guaranteed to get media attention and

the attention of historians and all kinds of writers. If you have a connection to A, the Royal family in Queen Victoria and B, the Whitechapel murderers. I mean, I'm not buying it, but I do think that's a really fascinating element of this. Storytelling isn't it? Because we don't know all the facts, we fill in. That's where invention comes into it. But storytelling, and I think this is key to understanding Jack the Ripper generally, the case generally is that it's storytelling with very real and tangible and dangerous

consequences in our world. The Jack the Ripper story, because the way we tell it is a story now, it's mythology really, it's passed into this realm beyond the historical. And I'm not talking specifically about this incident, but the Jack the Ripper idea, yeah, the lore around it anyway, that it's passed into a different realm and there's such strong feeling and there's such animosity within the communities who investigate this. And we know it's well documented that when Halley's book came out, there was a backlash against her and awful misogyny. And I think more than any other story really in history that I can think of, the Jack the Ripper idea has these tangible effects on the world and they're very sinister and they're very damaging in a lot of ways and it's

storytelling yes but it's storytelling with consequences that we are still living through and reactions that we're still living through. Well, let's talk about, you mentioned misogyny there, let's talk about some of that, what we said in the beginning, what are these links to masculinity and Victorian masculinity in particular that might be playing a part in some of these crimes and how they relate specifically to Albert Victor. So what occurs to me instantly when we talk about Victorian masculinity, which is being really formulated from very much the beginning of Victoria's reign.

We get this much stronger idea of family because of Victoria's, how central family was to Victoria's reign. And therefore as the idea of family becomes more ingrained in Victorian society, the role of gender, each gender and sex becomes more ingrained too. And so what we get is this idealized housewife, devoted female on one side, and then the strong, masculine, powerful man. Yeah. I mean, let's not forget Albert, grandfather Albert, not the Prince. He, Victoria's husband, Albert, let's put him back into the picture.

Let's not forget him. But he, whilst Victoria herself cultivated this vision of a wife, a mother, on the one hand we have that version of her, but Albert himself is presenting in public as this industrious, intelligent, intellectually rigorous go-getter who organes the Great Exhibition. He's interested in commerce, he's interested in design, in ingenuity of all kinds. He himself is designing social housing and machines and he's fascinated by scientific advancement and all these different processes. And he helps Victoria in her work as well. She famously shares the work of being the Queen somewhat with her husband and they put their desks together and all of that. And that is an idea of masculinity at the head of a household. Okay,

in Victoria's case, he is placed in a subservient role to the queen, but he still presents as this ideal husband, this ideal father, and someone who is pushing his way forward in the world for the sake of his family. And that's an idea. You don't necessarily get that as much in the Georgian era. I think it's fair to say it's very Victorian thing. And zoom out then from that, where you get this idea of the idealized masculine body is really starting to formulate in the 19th century during Victoria's reign. It becomes far more muscular. It becomes far more robust. Ideas of violence, where they had been dying away in the 18th century now start to rise again in the 19th century. Well, not ideas of violence, but ideas of the physical

prowess that men can possess. Boxing matches, for instance. And picturing the strong man. Exactly. So it's that, that's becoming really to the forefront. Whereas in the 18th century, we had lean men with long legs and elegance and quite feminine actually and that was celebrated. Whereas in Victorian masculinity, we get this much harder. Something I think we can identify a little bit more within our own time where you are supposed to be this type of a man.

You have to be shut your mouth, don't feel, get out there and do some lifting and do some physical stuff. And that power that comes from that developed physicality then shows that you have ultimate authority in society, also that you have ultimate authority over women and that you can enact that authority through your physicality. And at the same time, it's like you've got this mirror image of the woman as being meek, as being little, as being literally corseted and bird-like and caged and limited and restricted. And you can't see past the bounds of your own bonnet and all of your clothes are meant to, and you know, for dress historians, I'm not saying that corsets were tied too tight, like we don't want to get into that, but you

know, everything's about limiting and about shaping and molding someone to a perfect form. Whereas men are being encouraged to expand themselves in all kinds of ways. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is why I think we can't look away from who the potential suspects, well, who the suspects are and who, well, it's not so much who Jack the Ripper is, but who the suspects are, why there are certain types of men. And just to kind of round up with this, I suppose Prince Albert Victor, I think is targeted because he is potentially powerful now, whether that's

physically or in terms of his position in society, but he has that power. But we know that he's not physically powerful. We know that he has, he's, he's othered and marginalized by, by his deafness, by his sort of strange physicality, by the fact that he doesn't finish university, he can't hack it in the army, that he is a bit of a failure according to this checklist of 19th century masculinity. Even though he's in a position and occupies a space in society where he should be all of those things. And for a lot of people, he does represent that, but the reality is far from that.

And that's why he comes into view because he is not meeting the ideal standards, but the ideal standards are skewed anyway. So everything is skewed in this masculine prism that we're creating for ourselves in the 19th century and very much that I still think we live with today. And people would argue with me on that, but I think we're living with the consequences, the echoes of this now and that idealized version of manhood. And I think when you miss the mark on that idealization, it turns into something insipid and violent and outcast. But the reason it does that is because the idealized version doesn't exist. And we've just been fed this idea that this is how to be a man, but it's created,

it's a fabrication. And so trying to live up to that fabrication is detrimental to both men and women. And there is no more feminist approach to doing this history, I think, than absolutely including men in that conversation because there's a reckoning that still needs to happen. Yeah, and holding them accountable as well, right? It's not about rehabilitating the men in this story or giving them a platform above the victims, but interrogating the ideas and ideals to which they were held at the time or from which they were excused, let's say, in a lot of cases and the consequences of that in the wider society and the deadly consequences for the victims themselves. And as a final point on Albert Victor, class, he could not be further removed

from the class status of these women. And it's that downward pressure, that downward power that keeps coming through. Before we end though, let's just talk about sex because there is this story that Albert is gay, that he's homosexual, that he's attracted to men and he's even mentioned in a real case, a raid on a male-only brothel in 1889. But then we've got him marrying a woman, having a child potentially in this later iteration of his story.

Not that those two things are mutually exclusive, of course, but there seems to be some ambiguity and question mark over his sexuality, and it seems to have been brought into his story as being relevant so many times. Do you see this as part of his, quote unquote, failure in terms of Victorian heterosexual masculinity? Where do you think this sits in relation to that? I think it's more about morality, Victorian morality, which of course feeds into sexual identity to whatever extent, but in either of those two iterations, he's failing to meet Victorian moral ideals, which of course are being really solidified during the reign of Victoria. And he is not living up to those ideals, be that in same sex attracted way or exploiting women in

the West Indies, whatever it is, he's not, he's not meeting that. If he's got syphilis, if he has been in male brothels, if he has father's children, because there's the other, so sex is very much present for him. Catholic children, no less. Sure look as a Catholic child, I can say. But yeah, no, like it absolutely is part of it. But I think the message overall is not necessarily that he was same sex attracted, not necessarily that he was using female sex workers, not necessarily that he had a Catholic child, that his sexual lusciousness potentially is not the standard expected in Victorian, in moral Victorian society.

Prince Albert Victor may have belonged to the most elite family in Britain at the time, but believe me when I tell you that Jack the Ripper was not some evil mastermind. He was simply a man. A despicable murderer who got lucky. But in this, the 21st century, the age of science and computational advances, is his luck about to run out. In the next installment of this limited series we examine how a crucial piece of new DNA evidence may, once and for all, have brought us closer to the man known as Jack the Ripper.

Thanks for listening to this episode of After Dark. Please spread the word about the show amongst family and friends. Now, if you are at all interested in this topic, in this time period in Victorian London and the crimes that were committed there, we have episodes on Jack the Ripper already up and we also have The Thames Torso Killer, which explores the story of another serial killer in 1888, the same year as the Whitechapel murders, and which has completely slipped from our cultural memory today.