by Theo Aronson
21. Princess May of Teck at the time of her arranged match with Prince Eddy
22. An artist’s depiction of ‘a nation’s calamity’
23. Sir Alfred Gilbert’s monument to ‘a brave and blameless warrior’; the tomb of the languid and dissolute Prince Eddy, at Windsor
Sickert claims that ‘nearly three years elapsed between the first meeting of Prince Eddy and Annie Crook and their becoming lovers’.24 As Annie’s child must have been conceived in July 1884, this places their first meeting in the last months of 1881. This cannot be accurate. At that time Prince Eddy and Prince George were sailing in Far Eastern waters aboard the Bacchante. They did not reach home until August the following year. Contradicting himself, Joseph Sickert then puts Prince Eddy’s introduction to Walter Sickert – and subsequently Annie – ‘towards the end of 1883’.25 But in October that year, after those months of intensive tutoring in the Bachelors’ Cottage at Sandringham, the Prince went up to Cambridge.
Throughout 1884, the year in which Joseph Sickert claims that Prince Eddy and Annie Crook became lovers, the twenty-year-old Prince – slow-witted, unsophisticated, apathetic, immature – was up at Trinity College, under the eye, not only of Dalton, but of the possessive Jim Stephen. He was certainly not living la vie bohème in Fitzrovia. The one extended period during which he was not at university – the long summer vacation of 1884 – was spent at the University of Heidelberg, learning German. Annie’s child must have been conceived in mid-July 1884; Prince Eddy was at Heidelberg from mid-June until the third week of August.
Sickert’s theory – that a besotted Jim Stephen encouraged Prince Eddy’s love affair with Annie Crook in order to keep him out of the arms of other men – is far too tortuous. Why, then, did Stephen allow him to consort with the likes of Lord Ronald Gower and Oscar Browning?
Nowhere, apparently, is there any written, official evidence of a relationship between Prince Eddy and Annie Crook. On the birth certificate of the girl born to Annie Crook in the Marylebone workhouse on 18 April 1885, the space for the father’s name is left blank. This is hardly significant: on many a Victorian birth certificate, the space for the father’s name of an illegitimate child was left blank. Annie Crook, apparently illiterate, made a cross instead of signing her name. It is difficult to understand why Prince Eddy, who is alleged to have married Annie after the birth of her child, should not have ensured that the baby was born in more comfortable circumstances than in a workhouse.
Of a marriage certificate for Prince Eddy and Annie Crook there is no trace in the General Register Office. Sickert’s collaborator, Melvyn Fairclough, has an explanation for this. ‘Those in power’, he says, ‘can make sure the records say whatever they wish them to say – especially to save the throne.’26
Had the Prince’s marriage to a Roman Catholic become known, argues Sickert, he would automatically have forfeited his right to the throne. Whether or not Annie Crook was a Catholic is a matter of debate but, in any case, by the terms of the Royal Marriages Act, a prince, who was still under twenty-five and who had married without the Sovereign’s consent, would have been acting unlawfully. The marriage could simply have been declared illegal. Sickert’s protest, that this would have created an uproar, is untenable. It could have been done – as he claims everything else was done – in secret. But if, as his collaborator Fairclough implies, ‘those in power’ had destroyed the marriage certificate, then there was really no reason for any further action; certainly not the sort of action likely to create a public scandal. There was simply no written proof of any such marriage. Nor is there any reason to imagine that news of the marriage would have led to violent revolution and the overthrow of the throne.
The melodramatic manhandling of the lovers leading to their forced separation makes no sense whatsoever. Why did the authorities have to wait until Prince Eddy was visiting Walter Sickert’s studio to abduct him? Why did he have to be abducted at all? Surely the Prince of Wales could have called him to his study for a stern talking-to? How could the Prince from then on have been ‘confined to Court and supervised’? Throughout the period when the abduction and confinement is alleged to have taken place, Prince Eddy was at Aldershot, pursuing, in desultory fashion, his military career.
And is it likely that Prince Eddy, who had apparently loved Annie enough to marry her, would have allowed her to live such a destitute life? Or that his mother, Princess Alexandra, renowned for her impulsive generosity, and who – claims Sickert – knew all about the marriage, would not have ensured, if only in secret, that her beloved Eddy’s ‘daughter’ Alice was well provided for?
Sickert says that Princess Alexandra once visited her ‘granddaughter’ Alice in hospital and gave her a diamond brooch. This brooch was subsequently stolen during a burglary. He also tells us that, a month before her death in 1925, Queen Alexandra sent Alice a black-lacquered metal box containing ‘a magnificent collection of jewels comprising a triple-row diamond-and-emerald necklace with matching earrings and bracelet; a single-row dark-red ruby-and-sapphire necklace with a central pear-drop, and matching earrings and bracelet; a single-row diamond necklace; a triple-row necklace and blue-and-red opals; a pair of diamond oval brooches, one framing a picture of the Duke of Clarence, the other a picture of Queen Alexandra and her father, Christian IX of Denmark; and, lastly, a pair of gold cuff-links which had belonged to Prince Eddy’. The lid of this treasure chest was decorated with two ‘A’s entwined, surmounted by a crown. ‘The initials are those of Alice and Alexandra.’27 Sickert does not say whether or not he still owns this priceless collection of jewels. This is surprising: the production of the jewels would prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the truth of his story.
His claim about the substitution of Alice’s son Charles for the dead Prince John hardly warrants serious consideration.
So much then, for Joseph Sickert’s story of Prince Eddy’s ‘secret marriage’. An amalgam of rumours, inferences, coincidences and contradictions, it is entirely lacking in any hard evidence. It could have been just another of those prince and peasant girl legends, so numerous in royal history, had it not been for the fact that Joseph Sickert cites the secret marriage as the motivation for the Jack the Ripper murders.
For Sickert’s story takes one on into that ‘autumn of terror’; that horrific series of crimes with which Prince Eddy’s name has been repeatedly linked.
PART THREE
JACK THE RIPPER
CHAPTER SEVEN
Royal Jack
From September to November 1888, London’s East End was terrorized by Jack the Ripper. Moving stealthily through the dark and fetid alleys of the Whitechapel district, he subjected at least five women to a horrifying death. His motivation was clearly sexual. All the women were prostitutes. Working at great speed, he would first strangle them (possibly from behind as they bent over in preparation for anal sex), slit their throats from left to right until their heads were all but severed, and then disembowel them in nightmarish fashion. With each murder the mutilations became more grisly. The victims, in the words of one shocked policeman, would be ‘ripped up like a pig in the market’, their entrails ‘flung in a heap’ about their necks.1 Sometimes the uterus and its appendages and the upper portion of the vagina would be removed. In the final murder – of Mary Kelly – her cheeks and forehead were skinned. Even hardened police officers would blanch at the sight of these savage mutilations.
Quite obviously, the murders were the work of a sexual psychopath. Despite being highly sexed, indeed sexually obsessed, he was probably incapable of normal sexual relations. His actions were a particularly ghastly form of defloration.
The identity of Jack the Ripper has never been conclusively established. At the time, and ever since, there has been no shortage of suggested candidates. They range from the probable to the ludicrous. He was said to be a large ape who bounded over walls and hid his bloody knife in the branches of nearby trees; although trees were hardly a feature of Victorian Whitechapel. He was a man
seeking revenge for having had his penis cut off. A sufferer from syphilis, he was using the stolen vaginas to ‘suck off the virus from his ulcers’. One theorist suggested that he was one of those ‘Hill tribesmen’ who ‘pay particular reverence to genital organs’ or, worse still, a white man, affected by sunstroke, who had adopted the tribesmen’s beastly customs.2 Others claimed that he was a social reformer, anxious to draw attention to the wretched conditions in the East End. Many imagined that he was a physician avenging himself on prostitutes for having given him a venereal disease. He was a Jewish slaughterman, a Polish hairdresser, a Russian doctor, a German imperialist trying to get his hands on ‘the Crown of England, the Colonies and India and the New World’.3 He was not a man at all: he was Jill the Ripper.
‘Theories!’ Chief Inspector Abberline, in charge of the case, once sighed. ‘We were lost almost in theories; there were so many of them.’4 It is significant that out of this plethora of theories, Prince Eddy features in no less than five.
In Dr T.E.A. Stowell’s celebrated article on the identity of the Ripper, published in the Criminologist in November 1970, the suspect is clearly Prince Eddy. It is worth quoting Stowell’s description of the man whom he prefers not to name but to call ‘S’.
‘He was the heir to power and wealth. His family, for fifty years, had earned the love and admiration of large numbers of people by its devotion to public service to all classes, particularly the poor, but as well to industry and the workers. [By 1888 Queen Victoria had reigned for fifty years.] His grandmother, who outlived him, was very much the stern Victorian matriarch, widely and deeply respected. His father, to whose title he was heir, was a gay cosmopolitan and did much to improve the status of England internationally. His mother was an unusually beautiful woman with a gracious personal charm and was greatly beloved by all who knew her.
‘After the education traditional for an English aristocrat, at the age of a little over 16 years, “S” went for a cruise round the world with a number of high-spirited boys of approximately his age group.
‘He was, perhaps, too popular and gregarious for his own safety. It is recorded that he went to many gay parties ashore.
That established, Stowell develops the main thrust of his theory. He claims that for someone of his age, personality and prospects, ‘S’ was not sufficiently protected by those responsible for his welfare. He was exposed to far too many temptations. It was during his stay in the West Indies, at one of the ‘many shore parties’ which he was so recklessly allowed to attend, that the young man contracted syphilis. This led, eventually, to madness.
Six weeks after leaving the West Indies, maintains Stowell, ‘S’ was obliged to cancel an important public engagement in what was then one of Britain’s colonies. The excuse given was that he was suffering from ‘a trifling ailment’. Such a cancellation, he argues, was highly unusual, permissible only if the subject were in severe pain or suffering from some obvious physical disfigurement, like toothache or a rash.
‘This “trifling ailment” may well have been the appearance of the skin rash of secondary syphilis appearing six weeks after the primary infection acquired in the West Indies.’
Stowell doubted that this rash had been recognized for what it was or whether the patient had received any appropriate treatment. He believes that the syphilitic infection was simply allowed to develop unchecked.
The article then deals briefly with the young man’s return to Britain and his subsequent military career. In the army he was ‘successful, popular and happy’. The writer claims that ‘S’ was forced to resign his commission soon after the ‘raiding’ of Charles Hammond’s homosexual brothel in Cleveland Street.
Stowell describes, at some length, a photograph of his suspect. This is quite clearly the well-known portrait of Prince Eddy, widely reproduced at the time.
‘In this photograph he is seen by the riverside holding a fishing rod, wearing a tweed knickerbocker suit of perfect cut, not a fold misplaced and without a crease. On his head is a tweed cap set far too precisely, and he has a small moustache. He is wearing a 4 in. to 4½ in. stiff starched collar, and is showing two inches of shirt cuff at each wrist (I was told by my elders that he was given the nickname of “Collars and Cuffs”). This photograph of him is more suitable for a tailor’s showcase than for the river bank, but it must be remembered that this was the period of extravagance of the “aesthetes”, and also that the photographic plates of those days were slow, and subjects had to be “posed”.’
Stowell then goes on to detail his suspect’s reign of terror in the East End, his later life and his early death. This, allowing for minor errors on the part of an old man who did not pretend to be a historian, was quite obviously meant to be a pen-picture of Prince Eddy. It is, though, through his major errors that Stowell undermines his case for proving that the Prince was Jack the Ripper.
Stowell’s contention is that the Ripper murdered his victims during fits of insanity brought on by syphilis. He claims that Prince Eddy, or ‘S’, contracted the disease during ‘one of the many shore parties which he enjoyed in the West Indies on his world journey’. This is, to say the least, unlikely. Prince Eddy visited the West Indies only once, having just turned sixteen, in the course of his first cruise on the Bacchante. One cannot imagine the upright Mr Dalton allowing his precious charge – the backward and unworldly Prince Eddy – to attend what Dr Stowell calls the sort of ‘gay parties ashore’ at which he was likely to contract syphilis.
Six weeks after this visit, continues Stowell, the Prince was forced to cancel an important public engagement in ‘one of our Colonies’ because of what was probably ‘the skin rash of secondary syphilis appearing six weeks after primary infection acquired in the West Indies’. In fact, six weeks after leaving the West Indies, Prince Eddy was not in ‘one of our Colonies’ but back home in England. That cancelled ‘important public appointment’ occurred, over a year later, in Australia. By the following day, the Prince was fully recovered.
In another part of his twelve-page article Stowell claims that the Prince’s murderous activities were known to the royal family after the second, and possibly even the first, Ripper murder and that soon after the third and fourth murders, which occurred on the same night, he was placed under restraint ‘in a private mental home in the Home Counties’. From here he escaped to commit, on 9 November, the fifth and final murder.
But it has since been established – by, if nothing else, a reading of the Court Circular – that Prince Eddy had alibis for most of the nights when the murders were committed. Even one alibi – assuming the murders were all committed by the same man – would be enough. On the night of the double murder, for instance, he was in Scotland; on the night of the final murder, 9 November, when Stowell would have us believe that the Prince had escaped from that ‘private mental home in the Home Counties’, he was at Sandringham, celebrating his father’s birthday. Immediately after these celebrations, far from being ‘again apprehended’, Prince Eddy set off on a visit to his grandfather, King Christian IX of Denmark.
After the Ripper murders, says Stowell, the Prince’s health gradually deteriorated. During a five months’ cruise ‘he probably suffered a relapse and was brought home quietly for further intensive treatment’. From then on ‘he was on the downward path from the manic stage of syphilis to the depression and dementia which in time must inevitably overtake him. We hear little more of him before his death a year or two later.’
In truth, during the three-year period between the Ripper murders and Prince Eddy’s death early in 1892, he not only carried out a full, minutely documented and highly publicized tour of India but, once back home, fulfilled a stream of public and private engagements. Far from hearing ‘little more’ of the Prince during the last years of his life, those years were some of his busiest and most thoroughly reported. Stowell’s claim – that his information about Prince Eddy’s syphilis and eventual death from ‘softening of the brain’ in a private mental home near Sandringham
– came from a study of the papers of the royal physician, Sir William Gull, cannot be true. Sir William Gull died in 1890, two years before Prince Eddy.
Gull had all along known that Prince Eddy was the Ripper, says Stowell. Indeed, the doctor had often been seen in Whitechapel on the night of a murder; he was probably there ‘for the purpose of certifying the murderer to be insane’. But who had seen him? And why did he need to go to Whitechapel to certify that Prince Eddy was insane? There is, in fact, no evidence whatsoever to back up the contention that Gull was in Whitechapel at the time of the murders.5
Even without all these glaring implausibilities in Stowell’s theory, the suggestion that Prince Eddy might have been Jack the Ripper is absurd. From the various descriptions of those who thought that they had seen the Ripper talking to his victims, there emerges a picture of a man in his mid-thirties, dark-haired, with a heavy moustache. He must have been, as a doctor carrying out two of the post-mortems put it, ‘a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring’.6 He would also have had to have been astute, quick-witted and fast-moving. In 1888 Prince Eddy was twenty-four: a good-natured, impractical and, above all, listless young man. Can one really imagine this ‘dawdly’ Prince strangling a woman, slitting her throat until it was almost severed from her head, expertly eviscerating her body, carrying off her uterus and disappearing, in a flash, through the maze of Whitechapel? Hardly.
But the story died hard. It was revived in a book by the American writer, Frank Spiering, entitled Prince Jack: the True Story of Jack the Ripper. His book, claims Spiering, is the unmasking of a ninety-year-long conspiracy of silence on the part of ‘Prime Ministers, members of Royalty and Scotland Yard officials in hiding the identity of the world’s most infamous mass-murderer’.7 His study (which is simply an elaboration of Stowell’s theory) is a reconstruction of what he felt had happened but was based, he asserts, on a reading of official and unofficial sources.