You have to feel sorry for Abberline. Fatherless, his first wife dying of consumption, vital evidence in another case lifted by the government. Even in Ripper Street, the BBC drama that should have celebrated his greatness, he is portrayed as an old stick-in-the-mud while his thunder is stolen by the noticeably hotter Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, played by Matthew Macfadyen.

According to writer Peter Thurgood that image couldn’t be further from the truth. Indeed, the way he tells it, Abberline sounds more like Inspector Morse than Inspector Knacker.

After joining the Metropolitan Police in 1863 he rapidly grasped the nature of the job. Stationed in Islington and living above the shop he was dismayed to discover that, like today, police strategy appeared to be: “Make yourself visible on the streets”.

Crime was rife but statistics were manipulated in favour of the police; he was horrified to witness a burglary being passed off as a ‘disturbance’ and the stolen jewellery recorded as ‘lost’.

Abberline swiftly formed the view that constables should make friends with the locals, who, at that time, harboured a deep mistrust of the police. He believed this would result in better tip-offs and he was right. Thanks to his diligence, visiting pubs and shops in plain clothes on his rare days off, he was able to arrest more suspects than anyone else in his division.

But how did Abberline know all this? To find out you have to return to his childhood in sleepy Blandford Forum, where he was born in 1843. His father was a local government official who died in 1859, leaving Abberline, his siblings and his mother in dire need of cash.

He apprenticed himself to a clock-maker but was so poorly paid that he couldn’t afford to go out. “Instead,” says Thurgood, “he spent most evenings, when he wasn’t too tired, reading Penny Dreadfuls which a neighbour would supply him with.” These gruesome stories must have excited his copper’s instinct because, at the age of 20, he set off for London for a life of solving crime.

And solve it he did. Abberline was put in charge of The Cleveland Street Scandal, which started with apparently thieving telegraph boys and resulted in the naming of a royal equerry and many others in a rent-boy scandal.

He also used his skills to penetrate the Fenian brotherhood of Irish republicans yet, for all his pains, was demoted and in the Cleveland job suffered the agony of his key piece of establishment-damning evidence ‘getting lost’ on its way to Downing Street.

But these disappointments could not compare to the tragedy of his first marriage to Martha Mackness. Shy around women, Abberline did fall for her but after eight idyllic weeks found himself standing over her grave after she was struck down with tuberculosis.

He flung himself into work, solving a legion of petty and tedious crimes until, in 1873, he was made Inspector and promoted to H Division, Whitechapel.

Long before anyone had heard of Jack the Ripper, Whitechapel was regarded as unfit for decent folk. “Apart from shopkeepers, no respectable person, man or woman, would walk through these streets, especially at night,” says Thurgood.

Abberline determined to tackle the problem and, says Thurgood: “Was probably one of the first police officers in Great Britain to instill amongst his officers what we call today a zero-tolerance policy.”

He had his work cut out, tackling gang warfare, violent beggars and finding himself a new wife, Emma Beament, who he met after she was mugged. He was moved to Scotland Yard but his time there didn’t last long. On September 1, 1888, he was seconded back to his old stamping ground to investigate the brutal murder of Mary Ann Nichols and was plunged into a maelstrom of investigation, press distortion and unhelpful intervention from his superiors.

We can only guess at the effect that witnessing the grotesque situation in which the Ripper had left his victims had on this shy Dorset man. Mutilation unseen before in its savagery was perpetrated on the corpses; they were disembowelled, slashed and arranged in specific poses. After viewing the body of final victim, Mary Jane Kelly, whose organs had been ripped out and placed around the bed, Abberline said: “It was like hell in there.”

By this time he was working until 5am, going home for a few hours and returning, summoned by telegraph, to interview more suspects or deal with vigilantes. He was bombarded with letters, false clues, lost and muddled evidence, and forced to employ the hopeless talents of bloodhounds Barnaby and Burgho, foisted on him by his superiors.

He did have his suspects, including one Montague John Druitt from Wimborne, and wife-poisoner Severin Klosowski. It was said Klosowski penned a confession before his hanging but the evidence did not come to light.

Abberline left the Met to work as a Pinkerton Detective in Monte Carlo before finally retiring, to 195 Holdenhurst Road in Bournemouth, in 1904. It was here he died in 1929 and by coincidence was buried in the same local cemetery as erstwhile Ripper suspect Montague Druitt.

Unlike Druitt, Abberline was not honoured with a gravestone because he had no close family to pay for one. This was rectified in 2001 but perhaps his greatest legacy is still with us; the compassion and careful consideration he brought to the art of policing.

  • Abberline The Man Who Hunted Jack The Ripper by Peter Thurgood, £16.99

This article is taken from Seven Days magazine, which appeares inside your Daily Echo every Saturday. See more at bournemouthecho.co.uk/sevendays