Yorkshire Ripper’s ‘warped obsession’ with seaside town of Morecambe
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During the height of the Industrial Revolution the city’s textile workers would head en masse to the resort during the wakes week shutdown.
Specially chartered trains would transport tens of thousands of mill hands across the Lancashire-Yorkshire border for their traditional annual getaway.
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Hide AdThe bonds were such that Morecambe is still affectionately known as Bradford-upon-Sea long after the demise of the old mills which placed the northern town at the heart of the global wool trade.
Peter Sutcliffe’s family were typical of the Bradford families who looked forward to their fortnight of sun, sea and sand in Lancashire.
His grandfather Arthur was a regular visitor to Morecambe with a penchant for the resort’s ballrooms.
He kept a caravan across the bay at New Barns Farm, in Arnside, where he would entertain illicit affairs throughout his life.
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Hide AdHe passed his love for the Lancashire coastline on to his son John who would take his own children on regular trips to the coast.
When John retired he moved to Arnside where he lived out his final years.
Sutcliffe’s sister Anne and grandmother Renee would also uproot from Bradford to settle in Morecambe.
With family in town the killer – a long distance lorry driver – would turn off the M6 at Lancaster a couple of times a month during the 1970s to call by.
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Hide AdBut in his acclaimed book Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son author Gordon Burn revealed it was rare that Sutcliffe would not add another, more sinister, stop off to these family visits to the resort.
During the 1950s the former Whitehall Theatre at the western end of the promenade had been transformed into a waxworks exhibition in the style of the famous Tussauds attraction in Blackpool.
The serial killer returned to the attraction time and again where he would linger in the Museum of Anatomy with its grotesque displays of dismembered torsos and diseased body parts.
In the Chamber of Horrors he would pore over the exhibits recreating the macabre worlds of Dr Crippen, Ruth Ellis, Reginald Christie and Jack the Ripper.
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Hide AdBurn recalls one visit with another brother, Mick, during which they made the journey from Bradford to Morecambe at full pelt completing the drive in little over an hour.
It was just days after the Yorkshire Ripper had savagely attacked a doctor with a hammer and loop of rope in Headingley, mercifully she survived the vicious onslaught.
Thirteen other women would not be so fortunate.
Burns writes: “Once through the turnstiles, Peter only gave a cursory glance to Harold Wilson and Edward Heath in the downstairs gallery before ushering Mick with some urgency to towards ‘the Macabre torso room’.
“There, as his brother pored over the ancient exhibits with a more than usually ‘salacious’ grin on his face, it occurred to Mick for the first time that the purpose of these visits might be to show him the error of his ways.
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Hide Ad“‘He seemed to me to be enjoying what he was trying to show me. He gave me the shivers. I’ve never seen a grin like it, pointing out each detail of what happens to a man when it’s too late to control himself’.”