Jack the Ripper Detective, portrayed in TV series, rests in a pauper's grave.

Canterbury-born detective Edmund Reid was at the centre of the infamous Jack the Ripper investigation, before moving to Herne Bay where he led an equally fascinating life. Now, after a century resting in a pauper’s grave, a campaign has been launched to give him the permanent headstone he deserves, wrote Jodie Nesling for Kent Online.

The real Reid

The detective is, of course, portrayed in the TV series, Ripper Street.


After his retirement from the force, he moved to Herne Bay, where life was certainly less macabre but nonetheless enthralling with a record-breaking ascent in a hot air balloon and a house he covered in murals - which later fell into the sea. He campaigned for a train link from Canterbury to Herne Bay, on sea erosion and lighting to building walls and bridges.

He was also part of the theatre on the pier and a member of the Whitstable Quoit Club.
So it seems unbefitting for a man who lived such a remarkable life that he should rest in a pauper’s grave with no headstone.

Now,  historian Amanda Harvey Purse is on a quest to install a permanent stone at his grave and has contacted Herne Bay Cemeterians to replace the temporary sign which can only be displayed on Heritage Open Days.

The TV Reid

“I wanted to visit him to pay my last respects to a man I felt I have got to know. However, when I went there for the first time, I got upset because he was laying in Herne Bay without a headstone, without a marker to symbolise all he was and had done, all that history was just lost in layers of grass and mud,” Amanda Harvey Post told the Kentish Gazette.

The detective  with links to the Ripper case  died at the age of 71 in 1916.