Philip Sugden

Philip Sugden was an English historian, best known for his comprehensive study of the Whitechapel murders, including the books The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, first published in 1994, and The Life and Times of Jack the Ripper (1996). He was the first academic historian to work on the case.The younger of twin boys, Philip Sugden was born on January 27, 1947 at Hull, where his father was a painter and decorator. Leaving Ainthorpe High School at the age of 16, he spent four years with the parks department of Hull city council before taking his A-levels at the Hull College of Commerce and gaining a place to read History at Hull University, graduating in 1972.He immediately embarked on his doctorate, but his dissertation on early Stuart maritime expansion remained unfinished, partly on account of his meticulous nature and repeated rewriting, and partly because his grant ran out. In 1976 he took a teaching job at Chenet School in Cannock, a former grammar school that was being transformed into a comprehensive, where he taught history, English and economics.Meanwhile, he had become enthralled by the Georgian period, and in particular crime in 18th-century London; and while there were many popular books covering rakes and highwaymen, Sugden was one of the first serious writers in the field, using his spare time to delve into contemporary records that had lain undisturbed for more than two centuries, many of them written in archaic legal Latin which he taught himself to decipher.Becoming disenchanted with teaching, he turned to full-time writing and researching in 1988. By then, on his brother’s urging, he had determined to write an honest and dependable book about Jack the Ripper, who had fascinated him since his school days. Nine years in the research and writing, his book was a critical and popular success, selling in excess of 100,000 copies.Sugden contributed several articles to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, including one on the 18th-century thief and prison-breaker Jack Sheppard and another on the Edwardian multiple bigamist George Joseph Smith, the so-called “Brides in the Bath” murderer.Two other books remained unfinished at the time of his death. One, A Cabinet of Curiosities, deals with historical mysteries ranging from the sea serpent reportedly sighted in the harbour at Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1817, to the riddle of the aviator Amy Johnson’s fatal flight in 1941. The other, Forbidden Hero — The Georgian Underworld of Jack Sheppard, is set amid the paupers, pimps, prostitutes, thieves and thief-takers of Hogarthian London.