The Salvation Army’s response to the notorious Jack the Ripper

A depiction of a Salvation Army ‘Rescue’ lass speaking with some of the ‘lost jewels in the mire’ of London in the 1880s, who were supposed targets of Jack the Ripper.

 BY BARRY GITTINS

“The dark catalogue of heinous crimes that have been committed in London by ‘Jack the Ripper’ has caused a sensation throughout the civilised world,” thundered the Australian War Cry in 1889.

The article, entitled ‘The Whitechapel Atrocities’, was published in the wake of the murder of Mary Nichols (aged 43), Annie Chapman (47), Elizabeth Stride (44), Catherine Eddowes (46) and Mary Jane Kelly (25), dating from August to November 1888. (The Ripper may well have killed an additional six women, but the forensics and investigative techniques of the day did not allow for police to state that possibility with certainty.)

While Fleet Street’s reporters (from the relative safety of their offices in central London) had sensationally dubbed one of the world’s first serial killers as ‘Jack the Ripper’, it was The Salvation Army – which commenced in London’s East End, decades before the killing spree on those self-same streets – that was busy working with the Ripper’s potential victims.

In fact, the War Cry points out, in “the very streets where the hellish murders have been committed, our Rescue lasses can go about with safety, being respected by all for their godly and self-denying lives”.

An excerpt of the War Cry article in 1889.

The cruel murders were huge news, even for those almost obsessed with seeing that “things above” were being copied down below.

Of Jack’s cruelty, War Cry correspondent Captain E. Bartlett said that for “cold-blooded barbarism it has surpassed almost anything yet heard of ... The Salvation Army officers, and others who make it their business to seek the lost jewels in the mire of the blackest iniquity, know only too well the terrible hold the demons of drink, lust and other sins have upon the very vitals of the vast majority of people!”

Comparing Melbourne and Sydney, etc., with London, he cites “drinking, fighting, swearing, and sins more abominable still” as the background for the crimes occurring in these “cesspools of sin”.

What Captain Bartlett was intimating in his lurid prose (“sins more abominable still”) was the fact that the Ripper, so named because of the treatment of the victims’ bodies, which included the removal of organs from some victims, was believed to be targeting sex workers. Moreover, all but one of the victims were assumed to be soliciting for business when ‘Jack’ ended their lives.

One more recent volume by British historian Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, 2019) suggests that the portrayal of the slain women as prostitutes reflected the misogyny and class prejudices of the Victorian era.

Regardless of why those women were targeted, no victim deserved to be slain. The Salvation Army, as said, saw the victims as “lost jewels ... deluded ones” crying out to be rescued.

For what it’s worth, last year the London Economic reported that DNA evidence may have revealed the Ripper’s identity [click here ]. 

A bloodstained shawl said to belong to a victim was purchased at auction and subjected to forensic tests, showing DNA belonging to the woman and to a Ripper suspect, Polish barber Aaron Kosminski.

The Salvation Army often exercised its rights to the streets and public ministry and mission; the women murdered were “theirs” to reclaim from misery.

Jack the Ripper, for Salvationists, was almost an exemplar of “the most depraved ... of the wretched, despairing, almost infernal” creatures that needed to be saved, if possible, and guarded against to protect others.