Frederick Abberline

An illustration of Abberline from an 1888 newspaper

Frederick George Abberline (8 January 1843 in Blandford Forum, Dorset – 10 December 1929) was a Chief Inspector for the London Metropolitan Police and was a prominent police figure in the investigation into the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

Early life

Frederick Abberline was the son of Edward Abberline, a saddlemaker and Sheriff's Officer and Clerk of the Market, minor local government positions, and his wife Hannah (née Chinn). Edward Abberline died in 1849, and his widow opened a small shop and brought up her four children, Emily, Harriett, Edward and Frederick, alone.

Police career

Frederick was a clockmaker until he left home to go to London, where he enlisted in the Metropolitan Police on 5 January 1863, being appointed to N Division (Islington) with the Warrant Number 43519. PC Abberline so impressed his superiors that they promoted him to Sergeant two years later on 19 August 1865. On his promotion he moved to Y Division (Highgate). Throughout 1867 he investigated Fenian activities as a plain clothes officer. He was promoted to Inspector on 10 March 1873, and three days later, on 13 March transferred to H Division in Whitechapel. On 8 April 1878 Abberline was appointed Local Inspector in charge of H Division's CID.

On 26 February 1887 Abberline transferred to A Division (Whitehall), and then moved to CO Division (Central Office) at Scotland Yard on 19 November 1887, being promoted to Inspector First-Class on 9 February 1888 and to Chief Inspector on 22 December 1890. Following the murder of Mary Ann Nichols on 31 August 1888, Abberline was seconded back to Whitechapel due to his extensive experience in the area. He was placed in charge of the various detectives investigating the Ripper murders. Chief Inspector Walter Dew, then a detective constable in Whitechapel's H Division in 1888, knew Abberline and, while describing him as sounding and looking like a bank manager, also stated that his knowledge of the area made him one of the most important members of the Whitechapel murder investigation team.

Among the many suspects in the case, Abberline's primary suspect was Severin Antoniovich Klosowski, aka George Chapman.

Abberline was subsequently involved in the investigation of the Cleveland Street scandal in 1889. Chief Inspector Abberline retired from the police on 8 February 1892, having received 84 commendations and awards, and worked as a private enquiry agent, including three seasons at Monte Carlo, before taking over the European Agency of the famous Pinkerton National Detective Agency of America, for whom he worked for 12 years.

Personal life

Abberline was married twice: once in March 1868 to 25-year-old Martha Mackness, the daughter of a labourer, from Elton, Northamptonshire; she died of tuberculosis two months after the marriage. On 17 December 1876, a decade before the Ripper murders, Abberline married 32-year-old Emma Beament, the daughter of a merchant, from Hoxton New Town, Shoreditch. Although they had no children, there is no credible evidence that the couple were unhappy, and the marriage lasted until Frederick’s death over 50 years later. On his retirement from the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1904 Abberline retired to Bournemouth.

Frederick George Abberline died in 1929 aged 86 at his home, "Estcourt", 195 Holdenhurst Road, Bournemouth, and was buried in Bournemouth at Wimborne Road Cemetery. In 2007, following a campaign for Abberline's unmarked grave to be recognised, and with the approval of his surviving relatives, a black granite headstone, inscribed and donated by a local stonemason, was erected on the grave where Abberline and his second wife Emma are buried . A blue plaque commemorating Abberline was unveiled at 195 Holdenhurst Road (now divided into flats) on 29 September 2001.

Abberline in popular culture

Several fictional retellings of the events surrounding the Jack the Ripper murders have cast Abberline in a central role. The suggestion is often but erroneously made for the sake of drama that Abberline was unmarried and formed an attachment to one of the women connected to the events. The two most popular film depictions have also cast him as an addict, for which there is no known historical basis.

• Abberline was played by Michael Caine in a 1988 television film called Jack the Ripper. Here, the character was an aging alcoholic whose quest to solve the murder gives him the strength to give up drinking.

• A fictionalized Abberline was featured as a central figure in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell (1991–1999), and subsequently portrayed by Johnny Depp in the very liberal film adaptation of that work (2001). The graphic novel paints him as a sulky but sympathetic policeman, different from his peers only in his moralism and being overweight, and takes pains to include little-known details of his life such as his involvement with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The film's version of Abberline was portrayed as an intelligent detective who is ahead of his time in his deductive techniques. He is also portrayed as being clairvoyant, allowing the filmmakers to ascribe to Abberline the contributions of spiritualist and psychic Robert James Lees. Although Abberline is addicted to opium and absinthe, he is a decent man who ultimately goes on a crusade against very powerful governmental and upper-class figures to stop the grotesque murders of Jack the Ripper. In the film Abberline dies of an overdose in his late 30s; in reality, he died of natural causes aged 86.

• Abberline was played by Gordon Christie in the 1973 TV miniseries Jack the Ripper.

• In "The Ripper", an episode of the TV series The Collector, Abberline was played by Robert Wisden.

• Abberline appears as a character in several of the Inspector Lestrade novels by M. J. Trow. He is generally depicted as incompetent and obstructive. The first novel in the series, The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade (1985), ISBN 0333384474, deals with the aftermath of the Ripper case.

• Abberline was used as a model for the character "Fred Abberline" in Kuroshitsuji.

• A Scotland Yard inspector called Francis Aberline plays a key role in the 2010 horror thriller The Wolfman. Francis Aberline, played by Hugo Weaving, is a fictionalized Frederick Abberline, who comes to investigate the savage killings occurring in the fictional English village of Blackmoor. Lawrence Talbot, played by Benicio del Toro, makes a mocking reference to Aberline's investigation of the Ripper case. "Francis" was Frederick Abberline's real-life nickname.

• In the 2011 Doctor Who episode, "A Good Man Goes to War", a sword-wielding Silurian, Madamme Vastra, instructs her human servant, Jenny, in 1888 to send a telegram to Inspector Aberline, informing him that Jack the Ripper has claimed his last victim.

External links

• Brief profile from Casebook.org
• Casebook.org message board thread discussing the Abberline grave project
• Photograph of Abberline's grave with its granite headstone in situ