S2 E6: "The Lady" of Gosfield Street

Around Piccadilly she's known as "The Lady" - a quiet, rather remote figure. Widow Margaret Lowe tries to keep herself to herself and stay out of trouble - but trouble is never far away.  The other residents of her building on Gosfield Street are used to hearing crashes and cries in the dead of night. Margaret sells sex in her flat, and with the coming of war that's an increasingly dangerous business. But when her clients turn violent, "The Lady" can't turn to the police and her neighbours seldom lift a finger to help.     One night the man she brings the up stairs to her door is... the Blackout Ripper.  Sources:   Laite, Julia. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885 - 1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Laite, Julia. The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice (London: Profile Books, 2021). Philips, Jock. ‘History of Immigration - Depression: 1885 - 1900’, Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Philips, Jock. ‘History of Immigration - The Great Migration: 1871 - 1885’, Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Philips, Jock. ‘History of Immigration - Migration: 1900 to 1914’, Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Om Podcasten

The streets of wartime London are pitch black and the darkness offers cover to a murderer every bit as terrible as Jack the Ripper. During one awful week in February 1942 he viciously attacks women night after night. But the victims of the so-called Blackout Ripper are now all but forgotten.   In this season of Bad Women, historian Hallie Rubenhold and criminologist Alice Fiennes share new details from the archives to tell the extraordinary and moving stories of the women who died and why their deaths were swept from view.     And don't miss season one of Bad Women about a cold case like no other. In the fall of 1888, five women were brutally murdered in the slums of London. But everything you think you know about Jack the Ripper and those murdered women is wrong. Hallie reconstructs the lives of the five victims - revealing the appalling treatment they faced as women in the 1880s, and completely overturning the accepted Ripper story.