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Chris Scott

Inspector

Username: Chris



Post Number: 417

Registered: 4-2003

Posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2003 - 12:09 pm: Today I found a reference to David Lloyd George actually going on the a Ripper hunt with the police. This extract is from a biogrpahy by his son:

My Father, Lloyd George

Book by Earl Lloyd George; Crown Publishers, 1961



and the extract in question reads:



During his early months in London my father had an adventure of which I later was to receive a memorable account. The East End of London was being terrorised by the psychopath killer, Jack the Ripper, and with the same love of action which the young Winston Churchill showed some years later in the Sidney Street 'siege', father volunteered to join a police superintendent in a hunt for the murderer. He joined forces with other colleagues in Aldgate, and they set off to track the dark wilderness of one of the worst slum regions in the world virtually by torchlight--beyond Central London, the street lighting was almost non-existent.

'And did you find any trace of the Ripper? I asked him.

'I found something worse. Something that Dante's pen alone could describe. Within a hundred yards of sanity and civilisation, a million people lived in conditions that gave the Ripper's actions a character of mercy killings. The gin houses; the doss houses; the stinking alleys and the gruesome cellars; the rickety tenements; the disorderly houses and the thieves' dens. This was London, the capital of the greatest Empire the world has ever known, the centre of the richest country in the world. I set out to investigate a crime that night; I found evidence of ten thousand.'





Jeffrey Bloomfied

Inspector

Username: Mayerling



Post Number: 209

Registered: 2-2003

Posted on Friday, December 26, 2003 - 6:56 pm: Hi Chris,



I just noticed this little known event in L.G.'s career. It's an interesting thing that two rather unique individuals (Lloyd George and Bernard Shaw) observed the horrors of that autumn of terror from sideline positions, and actually saw the social horror outside the criminal horror.



Best wishes,



Jeff