A Class Apart 

The English are renowned for failing to learn other languages, preferring to shout even louder at uncomprehending foreigners. So why any of them would want to teach English language is something of a mystery.
It is a hereditary thing? An intuitive calling to a righteous and noble career? To do good, to nourish other minds? Or is it just a convenient way of being paid to see the planet before settling down to, well, more important things.
Whatever the motivation, English teachers form a sizeable community of expats here, although they are quite separate from Bangkok’s legions of company men and their families. But they remain the target of cynics, who, at dinner parties, delight in trotting out that exhausted cliche, “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.”
Funnily enough, many cynics are incapable of either. For that’s what a cynic does best; nothing.
But wait. This is Bangkok now, and for many teachers I know, the job if less of a calling and more of a means of survival. It might only turn into a calling after they’ve struggled through the toxic assault and crossed town in a sprightly four days, only to be paid the princely sum of Bt 250 an hour.
But there is also a class structure within the teaching community in Bangkok, and I am not so much concerned here with the career teacher employed by international schools or meaningful universities - both of which recruit the vast majority of their teachers overseas, and who require more qualifications and special expertise than a fighter pilot. No, I’m interested in the “underground” - that circuit of teaching that doesn’t officially exist in this city, but actually numbers something around 3,000 people - most of them men. Whatever its legal status, freelance, private teaching is a thriving, vital service that has nothing to do with school ties, bells, and assembly at 7 a.m. I know this because I was one.
Freelance teachers are an interesting species. Indeed, David Attenborough’s upcoming nature series, Teacher Spotting on the Great Sukhumvit Massif, is a fascinating study of this peculiar tribe:
“It was in places like this, millions of years ago, that TEFL man was first seen. Shy, nocturnal creatures, they like to drink copiously and dribble a lot. They tend to be tall, thin, pallid, and sweaty, and they carry briefcases and have a glazed look which suggests they’re lost in space but deep in therapy. They move uncertainly through the Bangkok throng, and can be seen planning lessons and muttering to themselves at bus stops, “I have a cat, you have a cat…”
So, for those of you who have just arrived in Bangkok and your TEFL certificate is beginning to smudge under your overheated armpit as you do the rounds of the language schools in Siam Square, let me offer a few tips, observations, and lies to remember.

LESSON 1
WHY BE A TEACHER IN BANGKOK IN THE FIRST PLACE FOR GOD’S SAKE?
Money? Doubtful.
Altruism? Possibly.
Sex? Quite likely.
The reasons are myriad, the outcome uncertain. Qualified or not, most teachers arrive here thinking a semi-colon is an intestinal problem - and nearly all leave believing it is. That’s usually all they have left.
Some people are passing through and use teaching as a means to dip into the culture and move on. But the vast majority of teachers who plan to stay awhile have to be wrung through the language school system to learn the ropes, pay the rent, and gain valuable experience at the coalface. As their contacts expand and their confidence grows, their livers start to buckle. Then they nick a couple of students from the company and voila - they’re in business.
And the true beauty about being a private teacher is that one is not bound by any curriculum. It’s loose, free, and comes under the vague heading of English Conversation.
And think about it; what other job could possibly take you into the very heart of Thai society - from the rich to the poor, from the hotels and the big boy companies, to the private home and the slum?
Answer? None.
Come. Let’s be honest. This is life, this is not a rehearsal. We want to thrive not survive. Which brings us to the subject of…

LESSON 2
THE ‘BAHTABILITY FACTOR’
It varies, but if, after a year, you’re still making less than Bt250 and hour, it’s time for a serious reality check. This is rice money, and I sincerely hope you’re not teaching “Business” English. If you aren’t making it, how the hell do you expect your students to?
There are private teachers out there making up to Bt1,000 an hour. I know some teachers who won’t get out of bed for less than Bt500. actually, I know some teachers who won’t get out of bed at all.
Greedy? Arrogant? I don’t think so. In this mad metropolis the first rule of survival for the private teacher-indeed for everyone- is to work smart, not hard.
So, depending, on qualifications, persistence, lying, and serious groveling, one’s monthly income can oscillate anywhere between Bt20,000 and Bt50,000 a month. If you’re making less than the former, get out of bed this minute! And if you’re making the latter, give me a call right now!

LESSON 3
THE OFFICIAL ALTERNATIVE
During a job interview at a language school, when they’ve just offered you Bt150 and hour for three months while “on probation” (a cheap trick which can make you feel guilty having spent $2,500 on a TEFL course that actually qualifies you to be teacher), feel perfectly free to ask the interviewer what his qualifications are.
Then look and see if the carpets are nailed to the floor.
Oh, and don’t forget to ask him what the school is charging the student. If he tells you, he’s probably lying. If he refuses, then you know he is.
With these experiences you will quickly discover that language schools are neither altruistic nor charitable institutions. They are a business. Know your worth; it can get messy out there.

LESSON 4
GET TO KNOW YOUR STUDENTS
Evaluation is very important. To get the most out of a company’s staff, it’s important that the students are at the same level of understanding, ignorance, or both. To achieve this, a brief interview with each student will be very helpful in deciding which class level they should attend.
“What’s your name?”
“OK, fine. Where are you from?”
“I’m 17, nek month”
Yes. Right. Elementary, I think. Next?
I asked one stunningly beautiful Thai girl at a certain company that sells books if she spoke any English. She smiled and replied in the affirmative. My knees buckled. I asked her to give me an example of her command of the language. She only knew one sentence, but said it perfectly:
“The man over there will pay.”

LESSON 5
TEACHER TYPES AND TRAITS
You can always tell the health of a teacher by looking at his mouth. If it’s shut he’s dead. You can also spot them from two hundred metres away, and it’s usually the diet that gives them away; rice, Singha beer, and Swan’s Practical English Usage.
Type 1: They look awful. They’re always ill. They are on a mission. They actually study the curriculum, and I’ve heard that some even sleep with it. But like do-gooders who hit the go-go bars and recoil in horror, they always fail to notice the obvious; the students and whores aren’t the problem - and they certainly aren’t the solution. These teachers and academic. You meet them in bars and on buses. They talk to you with enthusiasm, you nod in agreement, and then nod off with boredom. If they have this effect on their own contemporaries, imagine the effect they have on their students.
Type 2: They hail from North Yorkshire and Southern Alabama. They come equipped with an extremity of accents that even their own mothers would have difficulty deciphering. Both sound as if they have just drunk either 15 pints of and they wonder why 30 of their students have fallen asleep and 17 never turned up at all.
Type 3: The Renaissance teacher. If language teaching is about anything, it’s, about communication. It’s both the medium and the message. The Renaissance teacher knows this instinctively. He may be pony-tailed, slightly eccentric, and have a library of past lives you wouldn’t want to show your mother, but nonetheless, he’s interesting and interested. He entertains as he teaches, and his teaching is entertaining.
He is aware that Thais are a fun-loving people, and that when he arrives for class, his students have already worked things on a whiteboard. So he throws the Cambridge Book of Mindnumbing Exercises over his shoulder and says with a grin,
“Let’s learn this thing together.”
The Renaissance teacher has both the props and the direction, but it’s his spontaneity that ignites the magic and inspires the student. Money is usually the furthest thing from his mind - and, more often, his wallet. Most of these independent characters are funny, self-effacing, and love what they are doing. They are wired differently. And thank God for that; this city needs them.

LESSON 6
CANCELLATION EXCUSES
In any culture cancellations are a hassle. In Thailand they are a riot. For the private teacher they are an alien virus that can strike at any time. The diary may look healthy at the beginning of the month. Sums are done on the back of beermats and envelopes. Things look peachy. You may even be able to make the rent. And then the phone rings.
“Me no come.” Click.
“Solly teacher of the colon. But come tomorrow.” Click. Teachers need their escape routes too.
“No..” Click.
“Can’t find you.” Click. (Never tried).
“In Penang.” Click.

LESSON 7
NIGHTMARE 1: THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR
“What was that again officer? Brian Smith did you say? His work permit? Ah, yes, terribly sorry. Accident you know. Didn’t see a thing, but I heard it was awful. He flew to Zimbabwe for brain surgery. No, he wasn’t flying the plane himself. Gosh! Is that the time?”

LESSON 8
NIGHTMARE 2: CAUGHT ON THE JOB
Being seen at 5.30 am outside the Thermae squashed in a tuk-tuk with four girls who are giggling in your ear. An expensive car pulls up alongside. A rear window winds down. It’s one of your female students. She is accompanying her parents to the local wat.
“Hello Teacher,” your pupil says brightly.
The parents say nothing. They don’t have to. Their expressions say it all; a facial cocktail of horror and disgust.
The girls wave. You cringe. And there’s absolutely nowhere to hide. Busted.
Hours later you wake up from a sweat-drenched nightmare. You go to the bathroom and look into the mirror, and your worst fears are confirmed. There is no reflection. You have lost face. All of it.

LESSON 9
THE BENEFITS OF AN UNOFFICIAL PROFESSION
Let's put it this way. If you come to Thailand as backpacker, what do you really see? Who do you really meet?
You meet other backpackers. Often in brain-dead bars watching bad, loud, videos, You see temples and beaches and more backpackers. But do you touch the culture, and does it really get a chance to touch you?
Equally, if you’re sent here as an architect, an engineer, an adman, or an administrator, the chances are you will be housed, driven, and catered for. You may socialize at swish hotels in refined settings and get to meet important, corporate people, but it’s a sterile, hermetically-sealed existence. If your ambition is to truly immerse yourself into the very heartbeat of Bangkok, then nothing comes close to being a language teacher.
I have taught in private homes and public hospitals, huge companies and tiny offices. I’ve taught slum kids and hilltribe kids, and farmers sons and street vendors daughters. I have visited hundreds of Thai people in their own environment, to teach them this ridiculous language with its absurd rules and quirky meanings. I have glimpsed their realities, even though I will always be in the shadow of the meanings that forge them. I feel honoured and privileged to have taught these people, and immeasurably enriched by their warmth, shyness, and beauty.
And I’ve even been paid for it when I remembered to get out of bed.

By Roger Beaumont
  Available at Bookazine

Jack the Ripper (part 1)

FEW NAMES in history are as instantly recognisable as Jack the Ripper. The name invokes vivid images of Victorian London - noisy courts and alleys, gas lights and hansom cabs; swirling fog at night, prostitutes and criminals in a crowded and dangerous slum. And the silent, cape shrouded figure of death; a faceless prowler of the night armed with a long sharp knife and carrying a Gladstone bag.
More books have been written on “Jack” than all other serial killers combined. There are stories, songs, operas, movies and a never-ending stream of books published about this one Victorian criminal who was never caught. Why is this symbol of terror as popular today as he was in 1888 when he struck down five (or perhaps six) prostitutes in Whitechapel, a district of East London?
Because Jack the Ripper represents the classic “whodunit”. Not only is the case an enduring unsolved mystery that professional and amateur sleuths have tried to solve for over 116 years, but the story also has a terrifying, almost supernatural quality to it. The Ripper glides silently out of the fog, kills violently and quickly and then disappears without trace. He satisfies his blood lust with ever-increasing ferocity, culminating in the near destruction of his final victim, and then vanishes from London forever.
Here is Part 1 of Jack the Ripper: the murders. Part 2 (in July) will focus on the suspects.
The East End of London in Victorian times was a place outcast from the city both economically and socially. Around 900,000 people lived in this teaming slum. Here cattle and sheep would be herded through the streets of Whitechapel to the slaughterhouses nearby where they were bludgeoned, bleating with fear and pain. The streets were stained with blood and excrement. Rubbish and liquid sewage gave the area a horrible stench. Most of the inhabitants lived in tenement houses under deplorable conditions. More than half of the children born in the East End died before the age of five. Of those who survived these mean streets, many were mentally and physically handicapped.
Prostitution was one of the only reliable means through which a single woman or widow could maintain herself in those days, in spite of Queen Victoria’s smug assertion that prostitution did not exist in England. London police (who did not indulge in self-delusion because they were faced with the facts) estimated that in 1888 there were some 1,200 “Ladies of the Night” plying their dangerous trade in Whitechapel alone.
The Russian progroms of the early 1880’s and expulsion of Poles from Prussia accounted for a wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe into London. Many of these were Jewish and settled in large numbers in Whitechapel because of the low rents. For the most part, this Jewish settlement had a very beneficial effect on the area by improving the sanitary conditions. Still, Whitechapel was still an area known for its poverty and crime; a “no go” area for respectable Londoners at night. In the squalor of crowded tenements, narrow darkened slum streets and alleys, the Whitechapel serial killer had a perfect place for his bloody work.
Ripper experts are divided as to the exact number of victims of the deranged killer who became to be known as “Jack the Ripper”. If the number is six, then the first to die was Martha Tabram, aged 39, on 6 August 1888. She was found murdered in George Yard, stabbed 39 times on “body, neck and private parts with a knife or dagger,” according to Dr Timothy Killeen’s post-mortem report. The time of death was estimated to be about 2.30am. As her throat had not been slashed in the same manner of the later victims, many have discounted Martha as the first Ripper victim. According to her fellow worker, Mary Ann Connelly, known as “Pearly Poll”, they had been together with two soldiers a few hours before Martha’s murder. Police took Poll to check out the two soldiers at the Tower Garrison, and they were cleared of the crime.
If the Ripper in fact killed five prostitutes, then the first was Mary Ann (“Polly”) Nichols, aged 42. She was discovered just before 4am on Friday 31 August in Buck’s Row, severely mutilated and all but decapitated. Her neck had been slashed twice, strokes which had cut through her windpipe and esophagus. She had been killed where she was found, even though there was little blood on the ground. Most of the blood had soaked into her clothing. Her abdomen exhibited a long, deep jagged knife wound, along with several other cuts from the same instrument running downward.
Polly had been the daughter of a locksmith and married William Nichols, a printer’s machinist. They had five children. But Polly had a severe drinking problem, and their marriage collapsed under it. She had been living off her meager earnings as a Whitechapel tart, and still had an insatiable desire for gin, the ruin of the working classes in Victorian times.
The inspector in charge of the investigation was a police veteran named Frederick George Abberline, who had been on the force for 25 years, most of them in the Whitechapel area, which was probably the toughest beat in the entire city. As we shall learn later in Part 2 (the suspects), Abberline came to form his own theory as to the identity of the Whitechapel killer.
At the time of Polly’s death, the inhabitants of London’s Whitechapel area had already heard about a number of attacks on prostitutes in the neighbourhood. Whether or not one or more of these attacks was perpetrated by the man who later became known as Jack the Ripper is controversial, but to most people living in the slum, the crimes were linked.
A request was made to Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, for a reward to be offered for the discovery of the savage murderer. But Mr Matthews had no idea at this point what he was dealing with and declined to offer a reward, instead laying responsibility at the feet of the Metropolitan Police. In those days this force was operating almost completely in a knowledge vacuum with no modern forensic tools available. Fingerprinting, blood typing and other staples of forensic technique were not yet developed for police work in the detection of criminals. Even photography of victims was not a usual practice. There was no crime laboratory at London’s Scotland Yard until the 1930’s.
In 1888, the police were ignorant of sexual psychopaths. They had seen nothing like the Ripper crimes in England in their experience. And yet there was more horror to come.
The next Whitechapel whore to die violently was Annie Chapman, aged 47. Just after 6am on 8 September, her body was found quite close to her lodging house in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Yet, amazingly enough, even though the sun rose at 5.23am that morning, and so much traffic was present at that early hour, no one heard any suspicious disturbance or cries for help as “Dark Annie” as she was known, was brutally killed.
Dr George Bagster Phillips, veteran police surgeon, estimated that Annie Chapman had been dead approximately two hours, making the time of death around 4am. But witnesses had seen a very drunken Annie alive after 5am that morning, so this estimate is unreliable. The absence of any cry heard by residents of 29 Hanbury could be explained by the evidence that she was strangled into unconsciousness and then had her throat slashed with a very sharp knife. She had then been cut open and left with her intestines spilled out on the ground where she lay. Several vitals organs had been cut out and removed. Dr Phillips noted, “The throat was dissevered deeply. I noticed that the incision of the skin was jagged, and reached right round the neck.”
By the feet of the corpse, a small piece of cloth, a pocket comb and a small-tooth comb had been arranged neatly in order. The items all belonged to Dark Annie. Close by lay a leather apron such as those used by men working in Whitechapel's slaughterhouses. Coroner Wynne E Baxter agreed in his summation: “The body had not been dissected but the injuries have been made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge of the human body”. These were no meaningless cuts - as in the Tabram murder. Dr Phillips conjectured that the murder weapon was not a bayonet or the type of knife used by leather workers, but a narrow, thin knife with a blade between 6 and 8 inches long. He concluded, “The kind of knife used by slaughtermen and surgeons for amputations could have been such an instrument.”
Inspector Abberline was instructed to help with the Chapman murder in Spitalfields, a different jurisdiction. The lead inspector was Joseph Chandler of the Met. Police H Division. Both inspectors agreed that the man who killed Polly Nicholls had also killed Annie Chapman.
Newspapers did much to inflame the inherent fear and anger of the people of the East End, feeding on every rumour and story. Three savage murders left the normally busy streets of Whitechapel quiet by early evening and virtually deserted by night. In the blind fear-inspired rage of the locals, they looked for scapegoats and seized on the growing Jewish community as a target. A man named “Leather Apron” who savagely bullied local whores for cash, was known to be Jewish. He may even have been the murderer, they reasoned.
Some local merchants were quick to sense the growing anti-Semitic fever and took action to contain it. They formed the Mile End Vigilance Committee primarily composed of Jewish businessmen. This was probably the first organised “neighbourhood watch” in England rather than a vigilante group. Samuel Montagu, a Jewish Member of Parliament for Whitechapel, offered a reward for the capture of the Ripper, an action sanctioned by the Mile End Committee.
On 11 September, John Pizer, the infamous “Leather Apron” was arrested. But although he was a highly unpleasant character, he was obviously not the serial killer because he had firm alibis for all three murders. Pizer was released, but a number of others were picked up and questioned. Some were cranks and drunks, and others were clearly insane. The truth was that the Met. Police did not have a single reliable clue as to the identity of the silent killer who had terrorised East London.
At the end of September, he struck again, killing two women within 45 minutes. It was an attack of extraordinary daring. The butchered remains of Elizabeth Stride (45) were discovered in Dutfield Yard, off Berner Street at 1am on Sunday 30 September.
Like the other victims, her throat had been cut; almost severing the head from her body and her internal organs had been expertly removed. Police surgeons on the scene determined that she had died between 12.36 and 12.56am. Then, in Mitre Square, about a quarter of a mile away, another female corpse was discovered at 1.44 am. This was Katharine Eddowes (46). Police Constable Edward Watkins of the City Police, who found the body, reported: “I saw a woman lying on her back with her feet facing the square, her clothes up above her waist. I saw that her throat was cut and her bowels protruding. The stomach had been ripped open and she was lying in a pool of blood.”
Yet the night was not yet over. At 2.55am, Constable Alfred Long found a piece of bloody apron lying in the entrance to a building in Goulston Street. Just above the apron, written in white chalk on the black bricks of the archway was the wording: “The Juwes are The men that will not be Blamed for nothing.” The bloodstained apron came from Mrs Eddowes, and police believed that the writing was the killer’s. Whilst Inspector Abberline was preparing to have the writing photographed as vital evidence, Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Met. Police ordered it to be washed off. Abberline protested to no avail. Sir Charles later explained that he had made this controversial order to prevent a riot in Whitechapel. “I do not hesitate to say that if the writing had been left there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews (in Whitechapel), property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost,” he stated.
The Ripper managed to accomplish two horrific murders on 30 September without being seen by the police or anybody. Then, when the area was in a heightened state of alarm, swarming with police and vigilantes, he wrote in chalk on the Archway in Goulston Street. What he accomplished that night is nothing short of amazing.
Hundreds of letters allegedly from the murderer were sent to the police and news agencies, but most of these can be discounted as crank mail. Only three letters have been taken seriously by Ripper scholars. Two, in particular, which were written by the same individual, gave rise to the title “Jack the Ripper.” Before that time, the name had not been coined. The press of course seized on this dramatic name immediately.
A letter dated 25 September 1888 was addressed to The Boss, Central News Office. It read: “Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand job the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now? I love my work and want to start again. The next job I shall do I shall clip the lady’s ears off and send to the Police officers just for jolly, wouldn’t you? Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work and then give it out straight. My knife is so nice and sharp and I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck, Yours truly, Jack the Ripper.”
The editor treated this as a hoax and did not pass it on to the police for a couple of days. The night after the police received the letter; Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes were murdered. On Monday morning following the double killing, the Central News Agency received another letter postmarked 1 October 1888 in the same handwriting as the 25 September missive. The text: “I wasn’t coddling dear old Boss when I gave you the tip. You’ll hear about saucy Jack’s tomorrow - double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish her straight off. Had not time to get ears for police. Thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again. Truly, Jack the Ripper.”
The third important letter was sent on 16 October to George Lusk, head of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, and was in a package containing a portion of a kidney. Dr Thomas Openshaw later confirmed that it was a human adult kidney, preserved in spirits rather than formalin. The accompanying letter was not written by the author of the two earlier letters. Complete with misspellings, it read: “From hell. Mr Lusk, Sor, I send you half the kidney I took from one woman presarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knife that took it out if you only wate a while longer. Signed, Catch me when you can. Mishter Lusk.” Dr Openshaw confirmed that the kidney portion belonged to someone suffering from Bright’s Disease, which afflicted Kate Eddowes.
Things went quiet for the next five weeks. There were no Ripper murders throughout October, although the terrified citizens of Whitechapel remained on high alert. Then in November, the Ripper struck again. A young Irish girl by the name of Mary Kelly (23) rented a first floor room in Miller’s Court behind Dorset Street. She made money as a streetwalker to support her boyfriend/pimp Joe Barnett. On 7 November, they had a bitter argument, and Barnett packed his possessions and left. When her landlord called at 13 Miller’s Court on Friday 9 November to collect the rent, he received no response to his knock. He then reached inside a broken window and pulled aside the curtain. What he saw inside almost made him vomit.
Soon scores of police officers were at the scene, including Inspector Abberline and Dr George Bagster Phillips. They opened the door to a small, cluttered room with almost no furniture. Mary’s body, unbelievably mutilated, lay sprawled on the bed. The cause of death was the severance of the carotid artery in the throat. The horrendous mutilation of this Ripper victim had been done after her death, and it was the worst yet.
Dr Thomas Bond, another veteran police surgeon, reported: “Her face was gashed in all directions, the nose, cheeks, eyebrows and ears being partly removed. The lips were blanched and cut by several incisions running obliquely down to the chin. There were also numerous cuts extending irregularly across all of the features.”
As Dr Bond tried to reconstruct Mary’s desecrated corpse, he realised that her heart had been cut out and removed. Her breasts and many internal organs of her body had been cut away and placed by her body and around the room. Dr Bond estimated the time of the murder as between one or two o’clock in the morning, but this was very approximate. This time, the Ripper had killed his victim indoors, and had plenty of time to cut her body up to his own grisly satisfaction. Police surgeons concluded that as with all previous victims, Mary Kelly had been murdered with “a very sharp, strong knife about an inch in width and at least six inches long.”
Police did not know it then, but this was the last victim of Jack the Ripper.
(Research: Jack the Ripper, Crime Library.com. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden, and Most notorious serial killers by Marilyn Bardsley).
Next month (July 2004) - Part 2 of “Jack the Ripper”: The Suspects.

IF YOU need a check on my True Crime series of stories, published in the Hua Hin Observer, here is a complete list to date:
April 2002 -The Green Bicycle case, 1921. May 2002 - The Craig/Bentley Case, 1952. June 2002 - The A6 Murder Case, 1961. July 2002 - Murder of the Earl of Errol, 1941. August 2002 - The O J Simpson murder trial, 1995. September 2002 - The Aileen Wuornos case, 1989. October 2002 - The Ronald Opus case, 1993. November 2002 - Madame X, 1929. December 2002 - The Spree Killer, 1984. January 2003 - Shootout at Smiths' Club, 1966. February 2003 - The Christine Dryland case, 1991. March 2003 - Poisoned Pie in Essex, 1982. April 2003 - The Heydrich assassination, 1943. May 2003 - The Diana Davidson Murder case, 1969. June 2003 - The death of Alkibiades, 404 BC. July 2003 - The headsman of Colmar, 1780. August 2003 - The Ruth Ellis case, 1955. September 2003 - The Mel Jones Murder case, 1975. October 2003 - The Bluebeard of the bath, 1915. November 2003 - Murder in a combat zone, 1966. December 2003 - The Barn Restaurant murder case, 1972. January 2004 - The assassination of JFK, 1963. February 2004 - Judge Falcone and the Mafia, 1992. March 2004 - Gilles de Rais/Bluebeard, 1404-1440. April 2004 - The hand in the sand case, 1885. May 2004 - The body in the bag, 1979.

...and you thought you had it tough

The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be.
Here are some facts about the 1500s:
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”
Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and off the roof. Hence the saying “It’s raining cats and dogs.”
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying “dirt poor.” The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying a “thresh hold.”
(Getting quite an education, aren’t you?)
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot.
They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, “Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.”
Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could “bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and “chew the fat.”
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or “upper crust.”
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a “wake.”
England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a “bone-house” and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the “graveyard shift”) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be “saved by the bell” or was considered a “dead ringer.”
And that’s the truth ... Now, whoever said that History was boring!!

Thanks to Charlie Reid for this one

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