The White Hart

On the corner of Whitechapel High Street and a narrow passage called Gunthorpe Street stands The White Hart, a pub with an uncomfortable amount of murder history packed into a very small area. A White Hart has existed on this site since at least 1721, long before Jack the Ripper turned Whitechapel into one of the most infamous crime scenes in the world. The present pub has changed over the centuries, but its location is the important part. One suspected serial killer worked beneath it, while only a few steps away a woman was stabbed 39 times during the summer when the Whitechapel murders began.

In 1888, Gunthorpe Street was called George Yard. Walk through the covered passage beside the pub and you are following the same route that led to George Yard Buildings, a block of cheap dwellings standing just behind The White Hart. Early on the morning of 7 August 1888, the body of Martha Tabram was discovered on a first-floor landing there. She had been stabbed 39 times.

Tabram had spent the previous evening drinking with another woman, Mary Ann Connelly, and two soldiers they had met during the Bank Holiday celebrations. At around 11:45 p.m. the women separated. Tabram went into George Yard with one of the soldiers. Several hours later she was dead. One resident actually passed her body at around 3:30 in the morning but, because the staircase was so dark and people sleeping in communal areas were hardly unusual, he assumed she was simply someone lying on the floor. It was not until another resident came downstairs shortly before five that anyone realised she had been murdered.

Whether Martha Tabram was killed by Jack the Ripper remains one of the many unresolved arguments surrounding the case. She is not included among the five women generally regarded as the canonical Ripper victims, largely because her injuries differed from the later murders. Yet the timing, location and extraordinary violence have kept her name in the discussion ever since. Her death occurred only three weeks before Mary Ann Nichols was murdered in Buck's Row, the killing that usually marks the beginning of the canonical Ripper series.

The White Hart's other connection is even stranger because this time we know the man involved really was a serial killer. Around 1890, a Polish immigrant named Seweryn Kłosowski worked first as an assistant and later apparently ran a barber's shop in the basement beneath the pub. He would eventually become better known under the very English name George Chapman.

Kłosowski had trained in medicine in Poland before moving to London and taking up work as a barber. He lived in the East End during the period surrounding the Whitechapel murders, which became important years later when police discovered what he was capable of. Between 1897 and 1902, Chapman poisoned three women with whom he was living – Mary Spink, Bessie Taylor and Maud Marsh. He used tartar emetic, an antimony compound that produced prolonged vomiting, abdominal pain and an agonising decline that could initially resemble natural illness.

The first two deaths attracted relatively little suspicion. It was only when Maud Marsh became seriously ill that her family and doctors began to question what was happening. After her death in October 1902, investigators discovered antimony in her body. The bodies of Mary Spink and Bessie Taylor were then exhumed, and poison was found in them as well. Chapman was convicted of Maud Marsh's murder and hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 7 April 1903.

Then came the inevitable question: had the police finally found Jack the Ripper?

One of the people who seriously considered the possibility was Frederick Abberline, the Scotland Yard detective who had played a major role in the original Ripper investigation. After Chapman's arrest became national news in 1903, the retired Abberline told the Pall Mall Gazette that he had been struck by similarities and coincidences between Chapman and the unidentified Whitechapel murderer. Later accounts even attribute the wonderfully dramatic line “You've got Jack the Ripper at last” to Abberline when Chapman was arrested, although the reliability of that particular story is questionable.

Chapman certainly makes an intriguing suspect. He was a genuine multiple murderer, had medical training, worked as a barber, lived in the right part of London and appears to have been in Whitechapel around the period of the murders. His workplace beneath The White Hart also placed him almost absurdly close to the site where Martha Tabram had been killed.

There is, however, a very large problem. Chapman's known murders looked nothing like Jack the Ripper's. The Ripper attacked women quickly with a knife and inflicted extensive mutilations. Chapman slowly poisoned women he knew, sometimes over a period of months. There is no evidence that police suspected him during the actual 1888 investigation, and researchers remain divided over exactly when he arrived at some of the addresses later associated with him. Being a serial killer in Whitechapel makes him interesting; it does not automatically make him Jack the Ripper.

The pub nevertheless embraces the connection. A plaque on the Gunthorpe Street side tells the story of Chapman and the Ripper mystery, while references to the murders can be found inside the pub. For a short period during the 1990s, the pub was renamed Clutterbuck's, but the White Hart name returned. Considering that it had already survived for centuries, abandoning it probably seemed unnecessary.

The White Hart has also accumulated the inevitable collection of ghost stories: unexplained noises, sudden cold spots and figures supposedly glimpsed in parts of the building. As usual with old London pubs, these stories become considerably more difficult to trace once you start asking exactly who saw what and when. In this case, ghosts are almost beside the point. The documented history is unsettling enough.

Stand outside the pub today and the geography of the story is still unusually easy to understand. The White Hart remains on Whitechapel High Street, the old entrance to George Yard still runs directly beside it, and somewhere beneath the pub a convicted serial killer once cut hair for customers. Only metres away, Martha Tabram was murdered with such violence that the coroner described the crime as almost beyond belief. Whether George Chapman was Jack the Ripper is probably a question that will never be answered. The uncomfortable fact is that The White Hart managed to find itself remarkably close to both of them.