A Ripping Yarn

A Ripping Yarn

Rod Beattie, Jack the Ripper – The Policeman (Pen & Sword, 2022)
London, 1888, a city gripped by the fear of a serial killer in its midst. A man who preyed on women in the poorest part of the city, Jack the Ripper. In over 130 years since, many suspects have been identified and mostly discarded. But Rod Beattie thinks he knows the answer to crime’s biggest mystery, a man completely overlooked but hiding in plain sight.
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Beattie immediately launches into his argument, which assumes that only a police officer could have committed these crimes. And he has one in mind: Bowden Endacott, a name familiar to those who have studied these murders. Beattie outlines Endacott’s troubled upbringing and his service in the Devon police before he joined the Metropolitan Police in London. Along with a modern FBI profile, the Cass case of 1887 provides the gallows for Beattie on which to hang Endacott. This was his arrest of an innocent Elizabeth Cass for prostitution and his subsequent trial for perjury that effectively ruined Endacott’s career despite his acquittal. His superiors assigned Endacott to guard duty at the British Museum where he remained for the rest of his career. But, argues Beattie, Endacott raged against prostitutes in his career stagnation, and he would have his revenge.
Martha Tabram, murdered in August 1888, was the Ripper’s first victim, according to Beattie, though it is not quite clear why he argues this. The first accepted victim of Jack the Ripper was Mary Ann Nichols, a friend of Tabram. Beattie narrates this crime, but without any evidence at all, places Endacott at the scene. After a brief discussion of ‘Leather Apron’, which seems to have no obvious bearing on Beattie’s thesis, he turns to the murder of Annie Chapman. As with the other murder descriptions, this is a routine retelling of a well-known story, but Beattie makes no attempt to place Endacott at this scene, though he does add a postscript of The Illustrated Police News story of a man seen changing his clothes that Beattie takes as evidence the police knew who the killer was, and Endacott fitted the description.
Elizabeth Stride was the next victim, but not of the Ripper, according to Beattie; Stride’s boyfriend ‘undoubtedly’ killed her. That does not prevent him from describing the details of this murder, though again, it has nothing to do with his thesis. Moving on to Catherine Eddowes, Beattie argues that she knew who the killer was, tried to blackmail him, and paid a terrible price. Endacott was the ‘strange man’ seen talking to Eddowes, Beattie argues, but the evidence, he suggests, shows that the policeman was not acting alone but with a doctor he knew. Finally, we come to Mary Jane Kelly so brutally savaged in her home. Beattie highlights a question at the inquest that apparently revealed the police had suspicions that the killer ‘was one of their own’, though he does not try to square that with his previous argument that the police already knew who it was. Beattie adds other victims to his list; two ‘trial runs’ before Martha Tabram, the second attributed to Endacott by Beattie; and two after Kelly, though Beattie makes no attempt to implicate Endacott in those crimes.
This is a somewhat baffling theory on the identity of Jack the Ripper. Beattie presents almost no evidence beyond the tangential that Endacott had anything to do with these murders. There is also too much supposition in establishing Endacott’s character as a potential Ripper. Added to that are some glaring contradictions, e.g., that only a policeman could be trusted (p2), yet in 1887, ‘the police were disliked and mistrusted by the populace’ (p13), and that the police knew who did the killings, but then they didn’t just a few pages later. If Beattie had provided some footnotes, that might have helped, but then again, with almost no concrete evidence submitted against Endacott, perhaps not. Unfortunately for Beattie, it will take more than 126 pages based on five books and some newspaper articles to convince the average Ripperologist to take this line of inquiry seriously, and I suspect that harsher critics than me will gleefully rip Beattie’s thesis to pieces.

‘I am Eunus!’

‘I am Eunus!’

Natale Barca, Rome’s Sicilian Slave Wars (Pen & Sword, 2020)
Most of us have heard of Spartacus who initiated a slave uprising against Rome and led them a merry dance until brutally suppressed. But as Natale Barca highlights, Spartacus was not the only slave to do so. Barca focuses on two rebellions on the island of Sicily during the Roman Republic, at least one of which caused greater problems to Rome than even the mighty Spartacus. This book is therefore the story of often heroic resistance against overwhelming odds even if it was ultimately futile, and it is one worth reading.
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Barca begins with the background of the Mediterranean slave trade, the prevalence of piracy in the region, and Roman army participation in acquiring the hundreds of thousands of slaves they needed to keep their economy churning. After touching on the peculiarities of Roman slavery, Barca works his way into the slave rebellions. Early efforts at mass slave resistance were episodic, but Barca acknowledges that the lack of evidence for rebellions does not preclude other rebellions taking place in the burgeoning empire. That brings him to Sicily.
Sicily provided the backdrop for the drama to follow, and Barca takes us on a tour of an island steeped in Hellenic history long before the Romans took full control in 212 BCE and turned it into Rome’s granary. Of course, that relied on slave labour, but the Romans treated their slaves in Sicily brutally and corruption was rife. Braca thus paints a picture of almost inevitable revolt. Enter Eunus, a self-proclaimed prophet and follower of Dionysus, god of the oppressed. He inspired a rebellion at Henna in 135, which initiated a monarchy across western Sicily with Eunus as its king, now named Antiochus. Barca describes this kingdom and its army, both established along Hellenistic lines.
Rome’s initial hubristic reaction, as a police action, failed miserably. The revolt spread, but not everywhere, and this time the Romans would send in the army. The first serious military interventions failed too, but Barca notes, Rome might lose battles, but not wars. And so it proved in 132 when the Romans took Henna and captured Eunus who died in captivity, evading the gruesome execution Rome had planned for him, though many of his followers did not prove so ‘fortunate’.
Fast forward to 104 BCE and a second major slave insurrection. This began for different reasons, though the background remained much the same, and the course of events proved similar too. The Romans under-reacted, were defeated, then found a way to win, which they finally did in 99 BCE. The epilogue for this rebellion was that one thousand survivors were sent to be killed by wild animals in Rome, but they committed suicide to a man instead. Barca concludes with some thought on why these revolts took place, before adding an appendix on Spartacus and a chronology of events.
This is a well-researched and well-written book about two slave uprisings that have stayed too long in the shadow of Spartacus’ more famous rebellion. Barca places these events into their local and broader contexts, illuminating the struggles of slaves under the thumb of a horrific regime. Some nods to Marxist theory are not very helpful, but they are understandable, and should be weighed against the glorification of Rome that is all too common in recent historiography. Military history students will enjoy this book too. Barca’s observation, that Rome might lose battles but not wars, applies all too well to Sicily’s slave wars, which, in the end, were valiant efforts but doomed almost from their inception.