His first victim was probably Elizabeth Figg, a prostitute whose partially-clothed body was found next to the Thames in Dukes Meadows, Chiswick, in 1959. She had died of asphyxiation, but there was no sign of sexual violence. His next victim may have been Gwynneth Rees, whose body was dumped at a council refuse disposal site in Townmead Road, Mortlake, in 1963. What's certain is that the six prostitutes who were abducted, murdered and found dumped in various sites around West London between February 1964 and February 1965 were all victims of the same serial killer. Because seven of the victims were found partially clothed, the murderer was given the nickname Jack the Stripper, but the case eventually became known by the rather more prosaic and inaccurate title, the Hammersmith Nude Murders - only some of the dead women were abducted from, or found in, Hammersmith, and they weren't entirely naked. The murder hunt was the largest in British criminal history until then,...
Our road comes under the jurisdiction of Labour-run Ealing Council. A few weeks ago, we received a notice informing us of exciting, go-ahead, eco-friendly plans to allow a private company to set up a lockable bicycle rack parking storage thingy on the other side of our road - i.e. cyclists would sign up and be given a key so they could open the rack, wheel their bike into it, and lock it again. This would encourage cycling, and would mean locals who didn't have access to their gardens from a back alley wouldn't have to leave their bicycles in their front garden overnight, or attach them to lampposts, or be forced to wheel them through their terraced house to the back garden. There were a number of problems with this plan, namely:
Every country, race, religion and individual views the world through a multi-faceted and often self-contradictory prism of myth and legend (and if that doesn't get me into Pseud's Corner, nothing ever will). Not all myths and legends are untrue, of course, and not all myths and legends are harmful to those whose view of reality is coloured by them - but many are both false and harmful. I suspect many Europhiles of the Islington tendency would cite everything from Londoners battling heroically through the Blitz to the view of the British Empire as an almost unalloyed good which brought law and trade to those lucky enough to be colonised as partially responsible for British voters' "disastrous" decision to "leave Europe". In the US, left-wing historians have spent decades sneering at the myths which have made generations of Americans proud of their country.
We were recently at dinner with friends when, for some reason or other, the subject of British Jewish gangsters came up. One of the guests (an old school chum who happens to be half-Jewish - the other half's Cuban) was trying to remember the name of a spectacularly unpleasant razor-toting London thug of the '40s/'50s, and I supplied the name Jack Spot (actually Jack "Spot" Comer). Our host suggested adding Morris "Two Gun" Cohen to the list. For some reason, I could't stop laughing. Perhaps it's because there's something so cosily unthreatening about the name Morris Cohen - a doctor, accountant, academic, politician, black cabbie, okay, but it's just not the kind of name that lends itself to that type of swaggering, testosterone-charged sobriquet: it doesn't have the same ring as Israel "Ice pick Willie" Alderman, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, Abe "Kid Twist" Reles or Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. Mickey Cohen works fine as a gangster's name, so I suspect it's Morris that's the problem here.
