Donald Rumbelow's Jack the Ripper Walk As it happens I went with Don on his Ripper Walk a little while back. It's something I've been meaning to do for a long time. And I can tell you from first hand experience - it's a terrific evening. He conducts that thing like a maestro. It's a gripping story...and his presentation of it is just spellbinding. I of course knew that his knowledge of the "autumn of terror" is unrivalled. What I didn't know was just how how gifted a performer he is. He's got perfect timing and wonderful timbre. Those are gifts. You can't teach those things. And talk about an embarrassment of riches - he's also very very funny from time to time. Comic relief that's hugely welcome given the tension - and that's the mot juste - generated by storytelling of that calibre ranging over that particular subject matter. Everybody in that group that night knew - not just intellectually but in their sub-cortex, in their "fear zone" - that "something wicked this way walked", as the Man of the Millennium put it back in 1606. As an ex-hard news journalist I've got the hide of a rhinoceros, but that was as close as I ever want to get thank you very much to what happened in Whitechapel 115 years ago. In short, guiding doesn't get any better than what Don does on that walk...being in those creepy little East End alleyways and hearing him recount what happened is like seeing a sensational photographic print come up in a darkroom. |
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