Philip Sugden

Philip Sugden (January 27, 1947 – found dead April 26, 2014) was an English historian, best known for his comprehensive study of Jack the Ripper case, 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.

Philip Sugden was born on January 27, 1947 in Kingston-upon-Hull, England, the younger of twin boys. Their father, John Henry Sugden (1914–1996), was a painter and decorator,whose seasonal trade made him vulnerable to spells of unemployment and short hours; their mother, Lily (née Cuthbertson, 1914–1981), eventually took part-time factory work to keep the boys at school.

Philip Sugden left school at the age of 16 and was employed by Humber Joiners and in the offices of the Hull Corporation Parks Department before completing his A-levels at the Hull College of Commerce. He graduated from the University of Hull in 1972.

In 1976, he took a teaching position at Chenet School in Cannock. But his first love remained research and writing, and he had become absorbed in the history of crime in the Georgian era. A detailed study of the London underworld of Jack Sheppard, a celebrated criminal of the early eighteenth-century, became a lifelong preoccupation.

In 1988, Sugden returned to Hull to concentrate upon full-time research and writing. His book The Complete History of Jack the Ripper was completed after nine years of research.

As John Sugden remarked in his preface to Amy's Last Flight (p. 4), his brother's "trademarks" were "the patient collection of relevant evidence, the even-handed and fearless evaluation of primary sources, and an inherent sympathy for those who had lived in other times and circumstances."

Although Philip Sugden respected some of those who had written about Jack the Ripper, he was scathing about the amount of fraudulent and slipshod writing. In an essay for Camille Wolff's Who Was Jack the Ripper? (p. 81) he wrote: "I'm afraid that I have no patience with the bogus Ripperology that has disgraced true crime writing in recent years. The formula has unfortunately become all too familiar. First choose who you want Jack the Ripper to be. Then plunder the books, the newspapers, and, if the budget will stretch to it, the Ripper files at the Public Record Office, for facts which can be bullied into investing your fantasy with a veneer of plausibility. If you can't find anything, no matter - invent it. I'm not saying that there aren't plenty of people out there, specialists and laymen, with a genuine interest in the Ripper case. Of course there are.And it was specifically for them that I wrote my Complete History".

Sugden's book did not set out to name Jack the Ripper, but to painstakingly reconstruct the crimes within the context of the London of 1888, and to establish as accurate a record as possible. Only with such a foundation was it possible to measure the various suspects, and in his book he found insufficient evidence to accuse any of those named by the police or subsequent enquirers. The strongest case, he believed, could be made against the Polish-born George Chapman, but he emphasized that even that was highly circumstantial. The book received both critical and popular success.

Throughout his life Sugden's interests had been wide-ranging and he spoke authoritatively about numerous subjects, including natural history (especially fishes and the conservation movement), American frontier history, piracy and privateering, the great age of geographical discovery, crime in eighteenth century London, the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Hannibal, popular music (particularly American punk) and French cinema. In all of these areas he found topics of consuming interest, to which he devoted close and painstaking research.

Two books were almost completed at the time of his death. A Cabinet of Curiosities contained several studies of controversial or unexplained events relating to history and natural history. One of the chapters, dealing with the death of the Hull aviator Amy Johnson, was published posthumously. Sugden's greatest work was, however, his study of the career of the English criminal Jack Sheppard and the London underworld of early eighteenth century. The research spanned forty years of Sugden's life, and was begun before historical crime became a fashionable subject among historians. He contributed an article on Sheppard to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and had almost completed The Georgian Underworld of Jack Sheppard at the time of his death. Its completion has been undertaken by his brother, John.

A work of a different and lighter kind, produced jointly with his brother, was a sprawling epistolary novel based on imaginary communities in contemporary Hull and Yorkshire.