Whitechapel, London, the autumn of 1888. Through the midnight streets stalks a dark figure, wrapped in a long, checkered coat. As the secretive figure makes his way along Copenhagen Street, he attracts the attention of a group of young girls. Talk of “Jack” is in the air and strangers are viewed with suspicion. The terrified girls scatter, screaming, “Jack the Ripper, Jack the Ripper!” The figure moves silently on, through Kings Cross, toward Hampstead, sinking back into the shadows.
The story is intriguing. Had these girls actually come face to face with the notorious Jack? What’s curious about the encounter is that we actually know exactly who that figure in the checkered coat was – as he gleefully admitted to it. He was a man who would later come to be infamously connected to the crimes of the Ripper: the artist Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942). It’s a simple, if odd, story. It has a curious legacy and, directly or indirectly, has inspired several books, movies and even a graphic novel. Its very existence has even come to imply an admission of guilt on the part of its protagonist.
Recently, Sickert’s name has once again been linked with that of Jack the Ripper. Royal scandals, Freemasonry conspiracies and even his own paintings have been scrutinised for Dan Brown-style clues. But the true story of Sickert and the Ripper is just as remarkable and complicated as any conspiracy theory. It is a tale littered with strange coincidences, mistaken identities, unreliable narrators, and deliberate misdirection, a potent mix of myth, legend and hoax. It also illustrates how a simple anecdote can, in the right circumstances, develop into an urban legend.
Robert Emmons first mentioned the Copenhagen Street story in his book The Life and Opinions of Walter Richard Sickert (1941) and it was likely told by Sickert to the author directly.1 Having previously been employed as an actor, Sickert was a born performer, and his anecdotes were a favourite at his dinner parties at Mornington Crescent and Bathampton, and even at Winston Churchill’s Chartwell.
It was repeated over 30 years later in Denys Sutton’s biography (1976) with one curious change. Sutton claims it wasn’t the girls who exclaimed “Jack the Ripper”; rather it was Sickert who introduced himself as Jack, which prompted the girls to flee in terror. It’s a significant and damning alteration; an “odd story,” says Sutton, “quite in keeping with his theatrical nature.” Matthew Sturgis’s (2005) returned the story to Emmons’s original, but with the addition that
