Philip Sugden

Philip Sugden (27 January 1947 – 26 April 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. He was the first academic historian to work on the case. 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.

Other work

Throughout his life, Sugden's interests were 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 Age of Discovery, crime in 18th-century London, the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Hannibal, popular music (particularly American punk rock) 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 the early 18th 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. It contains a lively portrait of life in East Yorkshire at that time.