Like many people (surprisingly, mostly women) one of my guilty pleasures is cosying up at home and watching a nice programme about serial killers. Fred & Rose? Yes please. Ian & Myra? Cor, yeah. Jeffrey, Ted, Peter, Harold, Ed. And of course all those with super cool names like Night Stalker, Monster of the Andes, and The Brooklyn Vampire. All the big boys of evil; a great evening of uncomfortable viewing. And of course – Jack the Ripper. The King. The Elvis of Murderers. (For years in my head a debonair gent with a top hat and nasty temper, incited to murder easy-access lowly whores to sate his violent mummy issues. Or thereabouts.)

While reading a clickbait article I’ve since forgotten, I realised I didn’t know how many women Jack the Ripper killed. I didn’t know their names, who they were, or if they were – drumroll – even prostitutes at all. I just knew that this wily brutal man had fascinated the world with his incomparable talent for evading escape, albeit in the pre-forensic landscape of Victorian London. Was he an angry pauper, a butcher, a lunatic, a charlatan yank, the queen’s doctor, or even her grandson and thus heir to the throne? Jack still had the knack, almost 150 years later, to keep an worldwide army of macabre enthusiasts on their toes.

No one play could ever give justice to the women who lived such heartbreakingly difficult lives and died such barbaric deaths. So, after almost a year of many drafts and beating myself up, I stopped trying. What good could I ever do these poor women? Which aspects of their five very different, wildly unique and fascinating lives should I even try to begin to boil down for a ninety minute portion of ‘entertainment’? Did I have the right to try?

Since I couldn’t write a five hour play, I decided the best I could do for them, aside from shining a light on them, showing them some love, and completely removing Jack the Ripper as the central character (a furious instinct from the start), was to try and do the best for women in general. Explore what has changed since Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate and Mary Jane’s murders in 1888 changed the world. With their deaths they gave us a villain to love – Jack – and we gave them nothing.

As I researched, I quickly grew weary of all the usual Ripper bilge. As I began ignoring the countless resources written largely by men, I even questioned whether I had picked a dud subject for a play. These male (self-proclaimed) experts were mostly old idiots who didn’t give a fig for the women. Amateur Sherlocks who got a hard on coming up with their bulletproof theories on the Ripper’s identity. I found myself sighing and rolling my eyes on a very regular basis. But it wasn’t boredom or ambivalence I was feeling, it was a frustration that would very quickly turn to full-bodied rage.

Then, inevitably, thank god, I found The Five by (ALL HAIL) historian Hallie Rubenhold and promptly stopped reading anything else written by a man about the bloody Ripper. Even the arch irony of Bruce Robinson (writer of the iconic Withnail & I) in his lengthy tome They All Love Jack was too harsh after the mammoth act of empathy I had just experienced in reading Hallie’s The Five. Because I knew now that I did not actually care about the Ripper at all; I cared about the women. I didn’t give a tiny rat’s turd about who Jack was. I wanted to know who Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate, and Mary Jane were. I couldn’t – and wouldn’t – read any more about them being prostitutes or fallen women or drunks or unfortunates or bad mothers or unrecognisable corpses. Even the ironic use of the word ‘whore’ coming from a cerebral man like Bruce , even if he was ejecting it in allyship to them, was just too much. Five pages and I was done with him too.

But how do you write a play about Jack the Ripper without making it about Jack the Ripper?

Around the same time I was also dipping my toe into the (dangerously addictive by the way) world of genealogy; going giddy over the new connections that exploded keenly in the staggering diagram of my family tree; just a few little clicks and there they were; the people that came before me. It was all there, I had just never looked. With a history of alcoholism and domestic abuse on one side, and military brand coldness, poor mental health and suicide on the other, I suppose it was always something of a daunting task to exhume the people who forwarded their DNA onto me.

I had always thought my dad’s side were largely Welsh and before that Austrian. But between those nationalities I discovered a whole stratum of London and Essex ancestors which wove coincidentally close around the Essex and London timeline of my mum’s relatives. I found my paternal great great great grandmother, Julia Hasler, and something about her kept me prodding around for more records more than any other mystery bud on the tree, quietly asking for me to invest my time and let them speak.

Julia had ten children, all of them illegitimate, and not many destined to survive beyond childhood. Julia survived for the most part by casual charring, one of the lowest forms of employment back, even for women. She spent her adult life in and out of workhouses, particularly during late pregnancy and early maternity, presumably seeking the only form of (cruelly basic) care that would be bestowed upon a woman of no means. Some of the babies never left the workhouse infirmary. In later life she found more secure employment in service at a house, a longterm companionship with William Yelland, her widowed employer, and later marriage. It seems William embraced the remaining children from Julia’s unmarried life as his own, and these children took his name out of respect (and probably to spare their mother’s unmarried blushes and give her a sense of dignity that had previously evaded her).

Something about Julia fascinated me. Her lostness amongst her (albeit struggling but nevertheless relatively stable) family. Perhaps I was drawn to her sheer daily battle to survive; some sense of retroactive grand-daughterly sisterhood spiking in me, hoping to be of some sort of ineffable post-humous comfort to her and what she went through to make it possible that I was ever born.

I wrote to a living link on the tree – a cousin in Canada, much older than me – and asked what he knew of Julia. He said he didn’t know much but after years of searching for her records, and talking to other genealogy experts, it was suspected it was highly likely that Julia spent phases of her life supplementing her charring work with casual prostitution, hence the illegitimate children, periods in workhouses, and black spots in her records. It was just so common for women to be forced to consider selling sex as a means of survival back then. I went back through her records with this in mind. As far as we can ever fill in the gaps, it made sense.

As my research into Jack the Ripper was underway at the same time I was deeply immersed in Victorian London, and couldn’t help but be struck by the similarities between Julia’s life and the women I was reading about. She was living in the same parts of the East End at the same time, and likely doing the same things to survive. Then it whacked me like a spade in the face. It could have been her. So easily she could have been one of the women who fell within the late night prowling ground of the man we call Jack. She could have by slim coincidence been one who got away; who slipped just shy of the same fate. Hundreds of women without a bed who walked and slept on the streets could have been. But knowing that one of your family was alive in 1888 in the very stomping ground of such evil, there to hear the news firsthand, to feel the terror in the streets, perhaps to pause her own industrious night-times until it was safe again, cast my empathy in a kind of warrior iron. I was not just ready to feel for these women, I was ready to fight.

Because what has changed since 1888? We are still told, if we walk home alone late at night (or any time, depending on where you live), that we are bloody stupid – for it is still so chillingly likely that something could happen to us while we dare to take that chance. Some women, like those in 1888, don’t have the means to secure their own safety. Some women have to work at night, some women can’t afford cabs. Some women aren’t housed. Some women haven’t got the option to choose safety.

Every night that we make it home safe, we are all the one who got away.

Every single woman on this planet – present and future – is a few sad circumstances, some bad luck, one night on the wrong street away from being Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate, or Mary Jane.

A play in their honour is a drop in the ocean of what they deserve. But these remarkable women will never leave me now – they are real heroines with permanent residence in my heart. I hope they’ll find that in others too.