Author guest post from Jonathan Tye.

On the evening of Friday 2^nd October 1885, a 31-year-old cigar maker named Edward Buckley made his way to one of the most notorious, violent, vice ridden streets in the East End of London, Devonshire Street. The long since vanished road in the heart of the St George in the East district of the East End was bad enough to be marked one of the blackest on the Charles Booth poverty map. The blackest street not just in name but also in nature for in the 1880’s Devonshire Street had no gas lighting at its northern end plunging it into unseeing darkness as night fell. As to whether Edward Buckley walked to his destination alone or with his victim that night, the evidence is unclear. However, upon arrival at 5 Devonshire Street, a well-known brothel, Buckley entered the room of a 25-year-old, ‘unfortunate’ named Frances Jones closed the door behind him and carried out a savage attack. Police Constable George Linney 37H on duty in the Commercial Road was called to the scene of the attack. Upon arrival he found the room covered in blood and Frances Jones laying on the bed with a severe cut to the side of her face, one of her eyes appeared to be bulging out but she was able to hand him the knife and stick with which she had been assaulted. A knife which, later described in evidence by Dr Thomas Openshaw as having inflicted a cut of about half an inch in depth and three inches in length extending to Frances’s left jaw. A cut which is a chilling foreshadow of a mutilation inflicted on another more familiar ‘unfortunate’, Catherine Eddowes fourth canonical victim of Jack the Ripper on 30^th September 1888 in Mitre Square. The stick handed to the constable had been used to attack Frances in her private parts, ‘places she could not show’ according to her words to the magistrate at the later trial. A chilling attack with another intriguing aspect as the very first victim in the Whitechapel Murders file of 1888, Emma Elizabeth Smith, usually dismissed as connected to the victims that followed was also to suffer and die by such a method. Emma Smith said she had been attacked by three men. The Jack the Ripper connections to this horrific savagery by Edward Buckley, do not end there. Devonshire Street had been the residence of another Whitechapel murder victim that of Elizabeth Stride first victim of the night of the ‘double event’, she lodged here with her lover more likely pimp or bully, Michael Kidney.

On the morning following the attack, Edward Buckley was arrested at his lodgings. He was found fully dressed hiding behind the door of the top room of number 14 Hanbury Street. From its window, indeed even from the street below one would have had a clear view of another address in Hanbury Street and a door to a yard that was often left open to be used by unfortunates or the homeless and in the early hours of 8^th September 1888, Jack the Ripper. 29 Hanbury Street scene of the murder of Annie Chapman, would have been very familiar to Edward Buckley as may have been Annie who was said to have often sold items in that very street.

Edward Buckley was not a cigar maker; it is unlikely that he had ever carried out an honest day’s work in his life. However, it was the profession of his father an Irish migrant to the east end named Daniel who had settled in the area in the 1840’s. Edward was a thug, a thief, a bully (a Victorian term for pimp) and a pick pocket, moreover he had attacked Frances Jones before and was to again. At around 9:00 pm on Tuesday 26^th August 1884, in a dark warehoused street named Sparricks Row he had been found standing over Frances after he had stabbed her in the abdomen. On this occasion, and indeed on another Frances disappeared before Edward could be brought to justice. However, in October 1885, he was finally imprisoned for a term of twelve months for the Devonshire Street attack.

Edward Buckley was not just an ill user and bully of unfortunates, along with other gang members and particularly his two brothers John and Thomas he terrorised the very streets which the Ripper was later to walk, the Whitechapel Road, Commercial Street and the Commercial Road. Here the Buckley’s robbed, pickpocketed and assaulted their way through the final decades of the 19^th century. In early 1882, Edward and Thomas were involved in a knife fight outside the Queens Head Public House at the corner of Fashion Street, the very location in which Elizabeth Stride spent some of the last hours of her life and where George Hutchinson allegedly watched Mary Kelly speak to a dark stranger in the hours before her murder. The serious knife wound Edward received to his abdomen and the resulting trauma and physical effects may have had a profound effect on his psychology and led to the violence upon Frances Jones that was to follow but did that extend beyond to the unfortunate victims of autumn 1888?

The Buckley’s operated in crowds, there was rich pickings to be had at the Bank Holiday festivals when the people of the east end flocked to events such as the Kempton Park races, and the Crystal Palace. Here the brothers mingled in the crowds and when the opportunity was right targeted their victims watch or wallet before melting away. Back on the streets of Whitechapel Edward knew the police beats intimately and knew how to silently disarm and rob an individual using the garrotting method. All these skills could be ascribed to the unknown killer of 1888. Where Edward Buckley walked, Jack the Ripper walked. Where the victims spent their daily lives, where they lodged, where they drank, so did Edward and his brothers. Edward served two terms of imprisonment following his attack of Frances Jones in 1885. He was released back onto the streets of Whitechapel in January 1888, in the early hours of the morning after the Easter Bank holiday Emma Smith said she was attacked by three men. Frances Jones disappears from the historical record after an attack by Edward Buckley in May 1888. What followed was the autumn of terror. It is for the reader to decide whether the footsteps of the man known to history as Jack the Ripper and Edward Buckley are one and the same.

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