A NEWPORT hospital consultant researched the underbelly of 18th- century London for his new book. MIKE BUCKINGHAM reports.

He wasn't so much Jack the Ripper as Jack the Slight Nicker, but for years at the end of the 18th century he had London seething with fascinated outrage.

Of all the queer cases Jan Bondeson has tackled - and they don't come much queerer than the story of a Fijian mermaid - this is the one that comes closest to home.

Swedish-born Jan Bondeson lives in a large house in Stow Hill which used to belong to a local shipping magnate.

By day, he is a consultant rheumatologist with a particular interest in osteo-arthritis, working and teaching in Newport and Cardiff.

It is as night falls that he turns to his hobby, which is researching into the lives and times of cranks, freaks, perverts, murderers, obsessives and others so far out of the mainstream as to be invisible to the naked eye.

His latest book, The London Monster, Terror of the Streets in 1790, chronicles the life and crimes of a bizarre serial attacker who, between 1788 and 1790, assaulted more than 50 women, though none seriously.

The arrest of Rhynwick Williams was eventually effected, and the young Welshman was thrown into Newgate gaol.

"He was eloquently described thus: 'His un-natural and unaccountable propensities in maliciously cutting and stabbing females whenever he found them unprotected soon made him a terror to the metropolis. His behaviour was so revolting to the feelings, and carried with it such a Hellish appetite and dreadful consequences that the horror he spread is impossible to describe'," Dr Bondeson quotes from his book.

By the standards of the time - and certainly by the standards of our own time - the Monster's attacks do not seem extreme.

The book describes one of the attacks upon Jane Hurd, "a stout well-grown young woman," who had been sent out to buy some radishes when a man approached her with the words: "Now, who shall treat with a glass of gin first, you or I?" to which she replied: "Go along with you, you nasty fellow!" and pushed him away. He then cursed her and slashed out with a knife, whereupon she fled the scene. The blow cut her stays, and inflicted a two-inch- long wound.

A couple of days later the attacker asked a young woman to smell a small bouquet, within which was concealed a knife. As the woman stooped to smell it, he struck at her face.

"There is a fascination with things that are different," says the doctor. "I came across the Monster when I was looking at some scrapbooks in the British Library that had been the property of the sister of the president of the Royal Society of London.

"Not only was there a wealth of information, but I discovered that she took an active part in the vigilante efforts to catch the Monster."

The favoured method of attack - a stab to the bottom - prompted almost as much mirth and satire as genuine outrage, and also an opportunity for risqu cartoons.

Doctor Bondeson says: "We seem to need to have the abnormal to remind ourselves of our own normality.

"Hysteria plays a large part in the story of the London Monster, as it did later in the story of Jack the Ripper. In fact, some people do not believe there was a single Jack the Ripper."

Doctor Bondeson's first essay into the genre was The Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, published in 1997, followed two years later with The Feejee Mermaid. The Two-Headed Boy was published in 2000, Buried Alive the year after that, and now The Monster, almost 300 pages of prose which while scholarly, remains eminently readable.

Bondeson is a member of the Cloak and Dagger Club, the select band of writers who deal with the mysterious and the frankly macabre. And of his next book, he says: "Well. I am thinking of investigating the assassination of Olaf Palme, the Swedish prime minister who was shot in 1986, the murderer never having been discovered."

The London Monster. Terror on the Streets in 1790, is published by Tempus Publishing ( www.tempus-publishing.com) at £20.