I said nothing.
Macnaghten continued, reflectively: ‘I was in court throughout Wilde’s trial. On the final day, as he was sentenced, he looked up from the dock and called out to the judge, “And I, my lord, am I to say nothing?” My heart was in my mouth, I can tell you. What might he not have said? Fortunately, Mr Justice Wills silenced him at once and sent him down to the cells.’
‘And in prison, of course, he could say nothing.’
‘And once released he was a ruined man – who went into exile, drifted around Europe and drank too much. Whatever he said then would not matter. No one would be listening.’
‘And what happened to Salazkin?’ I asked.
‘Salazkin and his circus left the country and never returned.’
‘Do we know anything more of him?’
‘I made some inquiries – discreetly, of course. From police contacts in France and Germany, I learned that while the circus continued to tour, Salazkin was no longer part of it. He appeared to have vanished into thin air – or at least to have returned to Russia. I heard nothing of him until much more recently – a few years ago, just after the end of the war. I was staying with a friend for the weekend – a former diplomat – and, leafing through his scrapbooks, I came across a newspaper cutting about the aftermath of the October Revolution in Russia. There were photographs of some of those who had been executed. One was named as Ivan Salazkin, Minister of Culture in the Russian Provisional Government of 1917. It was a small photograph, not distinct, but I think it was our man.’
‘So, Jack the Ripper died in 1917,’ I said. Macnaghten made no reply, but smiled. ‘And what of Kosminski and Ostrog?’ I asked.
‘Kosminski died in the lunatic asylum, just recently. According to Dr Rogerson he was a virtual vegetable at the end. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery in East Ham. Rogerson and I were the only people to attend the interment. There was nothing to be gained from trying to prosecute him and Ostrog, of course. They could have given no evidence of value. Salazkin was back in Russia and Wilde was in Reading Gaol.’
‘What of Ostrog?’
‘I believe he is dead, too, but I cannot be sure. Officially, “Michael Ostrog” died in the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum sometime in 1904, but that “Ostrog” was the substitute – the vagrant from underneath the arches in Pinchin Street, not the real man. When we left the Langham Hotel that night, we took the real Ostrog directly to the asylum. Dr Gabriel agreed to keep him as a secure patient for the rest of his natural life, but on condition that he could invent a new alias for him. As Gabriel said, Ostrog had lived his life under a string of aliases: one more would make no difference. I didn’t object, because Ostrog should have been inside the asylum in any event – he had been correctly committed there even if, initially, with Salazkin’s help, he had managed to evade his incarceration. And I could understand that Gabriel – a good man doing a difficult job – did not want it known that for years he had had a patient who had been locked up in error and whose identity was unknown. He advised me to forget all about Ostrog. He told me that our lunatic asylums are full of people who don’t know who they are or were. He said, rather amusingly, that at Surrey County hardly a month goes by without a new patient arriving claiming to be Jack the Ripper.’ He laughed. ‘Once all the lunatics wanted to be Napoleon. Now it seems it’s either Jack the Ripper or Sherlock Holmes.’
I liked Macnaghten. He was a decent man whose instincts were sound. I enquired after the report he had prepared on the Whitechapel murders – the one that Oscar and I had been privy to in draft. He told me that in the final report, submitted to his superiors, he had removed the names of Richard Mansfield and Walter Wellbeloved from his list of suspects, but other than that had let it stand as it was.
Most, but not all, of those who were in that room at the Langham Hotel on that memorable night in January 1894 are dead now.
Richard Mansfield died in New London, Connecticut, in 1907, aged just fifty. The New York Times said of him: ‘He was the greatest actor of his hour, and one of the greatest of all times.’ His last major success was in the title role of Ivan the Terrible.
Mina Mathers is still alive, the head of the occult order, the Alpha et Omega, which she runs from a magic shop near the British Library, with the assistance of her devoted acolyte Walter Wellbeloved, now in his mid-seventies and still mourning his beloved mermaid.
Tom Norman is still alive, too. It seems that he did not leave England as he had planned, but moved across London from Whitechapel to Croydon, where he married a music-hall artiste named Amy and together, in short order, they had six sons and four daughters. The last I heard of him, he had opened an exhibition in the seaside resort of Margate, with, as his star attraction, Phoebe the Strange Girl.
Willie Wilde married his fiancée, Lily Lees, that January, as planned. Oscar did not attend the wedding. Oscar’s friend, the writer and caricaturist, Max Beerbohm, said of Willie: ‘Quel monstre! Dark, oily, suspect yet awfully like Oscar: he has Oscar’s coy, carnal smile & fatuous giggle, & not a little of Oscar’s esprit. But he is awful – a veritable tragedy of family-likeness.’ In July 1895, Willie and Lily had their only child, Dolly. Within four years, Willie was dead. He was aged forty-six. It was the drink that killed him.
‘Do you think Willie died happy?’ Oscar asked, when I saw him for the last time. This was in Paris, early in 1900. Before I could answer my friend’s question, he did so himself. (Towards the end, that was his style.) ‘Probably not,’ he said, ‘although perhaps he should have done. Giving a name to Jack the Ripper has turned a monster into a myth – and a myth that will last longer than any that I have created.’ He looked up from his glass of absinthe and smiled at me. His teeth were green and jagged, but there was a sweetness to his smile. ‘Now your Sherlock Holmes, Arthur, he will stand the test of time . . . What was there in the fog of London in those glory days of ours that enabled us to create these mythic figures? You conjured up Holmes – and Moriarty. People love a villain, don’t they? Bram created Dracula. Robert Louis Stevenson produced Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – though, for the life of me, I never could remember which of the two of them was the evil one.’ He laughed wheezily. ‘I had a letter not long ago from your young friend James Barrie. He’s writing a play about a boy who never grows up. I like the idea of that, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘Will you write the story of Jack the Ripper, Arthur? “It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes . . .” That was to be the opening line, remember?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
‘Oh do,’ he pressed me. ‘I told the story to another writer the other day – a Polish fellow I met here in Paris, shy but very charming. We had a pleasant evening, drinking together and exchanging stories. He said, with my permission, he might use parts of it one day.* Ours is a generation of myth-makers, Arthur – the last of a kind. You must write about Jack the Ripper, Arthur. Tell me you will.’
‘Jack the Ripper is not a myth,’ I said. ‘He was real.’
‘Yes,’ said Oscar. ‘And we knew him.’
For a few minutes, we talked about those January days and nights when we breakfasted together at the Langham and walked the streets of Whitechapel side by side – as Holmes and Watson might have done.
There was a question that I wanted to ask him, and I began to – but when I discovered that, until I reminded him, he had forgotten the names of Ostrog and Kosminski, I realised there was no point.
Besides, I knew the answer to my question. The last victim of Jack the Ripper, the girl who had been murdered on that fateful Saturday morning, the thirteenth of January 1894, was Olga – my Olga, my little Russian acrobat. At the time, Oscar told me that the victim had been beheaded because he could not bear to tell me the truth: he had seen her face. He knew that it was Olga.
Oscar told me, too, that when Salazkin had looked at the photograph of my children and had seen the delight the picture gave to Olga, he resented it. Olga was murdered because
of the delight she showed in knowing me. I shall not forget her. Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.
__________
* He did. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad was published in 1904.
Gyles Brandreth
Gyles Brandreth is the President of the Oscar Wilde Society, the editor of the Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (2008) and Beautiful and Impossible Things: Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde (2015), as well as the author of seven murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and their circle – one of whom was George R. Sims (1847 –1922), kinsman of the Empress Eugénie, journalist, playwright and social reformer, who wrote the ballads Billy’s dead and gone to glory and Christmas Day in the workhouse, and was the first journalist to claim to know the identity of ‘Jack the Ripper’. Gyles Brandreth’s great-grandmother was a first cousin of George R. Sims and the present volume owes its revelations to unpublished papers in the Sims archive.
Gyles Brandreth was born in 1948 in Germany, where his father, Charles Brandreth, was serving as a legal officer with the Allied Control Commission and counted among his colleagues H. Montgomery Hyde, who published the first full account of the trials of Oscar Wilde that year. In 1974, Gyles Brandreth produced The Trials of Oscar Wilde (with Tom Baker as Wilde) at the Oxford Theatre Festival and, in 2000, edited the transcripts of the trials for an audio production featuring Martin Jarvis.
Gyles Brandreth was educated at the Lycée Français de Londres, at Betteshanger School in Kent, and at Bedales in Hampshire, where the school’s founder, J. H. Badley (1865–1967), provided him with a series of vivid personal accounts of Oscar Wilde’s conversational style. J. H. Badley knew the Wildes, and their son Cyril was a pupil at Bedales at the time of Oscar’s arrest. Like Montague John Druitt, Gyles Brandreth went to New College, Oxford (where he was a scholar, President of the Union and editor of the university magazine), and then embarked on a career as an author and journalist. His first book was a study of prison reform (Created in Captivity, 1972); his first biography was a portrait of the Victorian music-hall star Dan Leno (The Funniest Man on Earth, 1974). More recently, he has published a biography of Sir John Gielgud, an acclaimed diary of his years as an MP and government whip (Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries 1990–97) and two best-selling royal biographies: Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage and Charles & Camilla: Portrait of a Love Affair. His diaries covering the years 1959 to 2000 appeared under the title Something Sensational to Read in the Train – a phrase borrowed from The Importance of Being Earnest. He is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations and the author of two Sunday Times bestsellers: Word Play and The 7 Secrets of Happiness.
As an actor Gyles Brandreth has appeared in pantomime and Shakespeare, and as Lady Bracknell in a musical adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. As a broadcaster, he has presented numerous series for BBC Radio 4, including A Rhyme in Time, Sound Advice, Wordaholics and Whispers. He has featured on Desert Island Discs and is probably best known as a regular on Just a Minute (Radio 4) and a reporter on The One Show (BBC 1). A regular on the Channel 4 word-game Countdown, his television appearances have ranged from being the guest host of Have I Got News for You to being the subject of This Is Your Life. With Hinge & Bracket he scripted the TV series Dear Ladies; with Julian Slade he wrote a play about A. A. Milne (featuring the young Aled Jones as Christopher Robin); and with Susannah Pearse he has written a play about Lewis Carroll and the actress Isa Bowman. Gyles Brandreth is married to the writer and publisher Michèle Brown, and they have three children – a barrister, a writer and an environmental economist – and seven grandchildren.
Oscar Wilde died in a small, first-floor room at L’Hôtel d’Alsace, 13 rue des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, at approximately 1.45 p.m. on 30 November 1900. One hundred years later, at the same time, on the same date, in the same room, Gyles and Michèle Brandreth were among a small group who gathered to mark the centenary of his passing and to honour a most remarkable man, whose greatest play, according to Frank Harris, was his own life: ‘a five-act tragedy with Greek implications, and he was its most ardent spectator’. In 2010, Gyles Brandreth unveiled the plaque commemorating the first meeting of Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle at the Langham Hotel, London.
In 2015, at the Langham Hotel, Gyles Brandreth hosted a reception at which HRH the Duchess of Cornwall unveiled a bronze head of Oscar Wilde sculpted by the young English sculptor James Matthews. Before the unveiling, the actor Rupert Everett read from The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gyles Brandreth explained that everyone in the room had a connection with Oscar – some, like Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, obviously so; others, like the Duchess of Cornwall, less obviously.
In fact, the Duchess of Cornwall, born Camilla Shand, is the great-granddaughter of Alec Shand (1858–1936), whose intellectual legacy is his work as a pioneer in the field of social psychology. In 1914 he published The Foundations of Character, Being a Study of the Tendencies of the Emotions and Sentiments.
In her speech at the Langham Hotel in 2015, the Duchess of Cornwall began by quoting Wilde’s line, ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about’, adding that it is one of the few maxims of his that she is not sure she would entirely agree with. She then explained her family connection with Wilde: ‘My great-grandfather, Alec Shand, an intellectual who moved in both Bohemian and radical circles, was introduced by his sister, Bessie, to one of her friends, a beautiful, chestnut-haired, intellectually gifted woman named Constance Lloyd. They became secretly engaged, but, sadly, nobody knows why, or when, one of them broke it off. Constance went on to marry Oscar in 1887. The rest, as they say, is history.’ She added, with Wilde’s grandson in her line of sight: ‘Oscar Wilde said, “The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it”; but if this particular piece of history had been re-written, I know that two people in this room would not be here today!’
[Oscar Wilde 07] - Jack the Ripper: Case Closed Page 30